History in Dispute, Volume 21 - Revolutionary Russia, 1890-1930

HISTORY

ADVISORY BOARD

Robert Cowley Founding Editor, Military History Quarterly John Lewis Gaddis Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, Yale University James G. Hershberg Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University Michael Spirtas Center for National Policy and U.S.-CREST Janice Gross Stein Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto Marc Trachtenberg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania Fareed Zakaria Managing Editor, Foreign Affairs

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CONTENTS About the Series

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Acknowledgments

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Permissions Preface by Paul du Quenoy Chronology by Paul du Quenoy

Aristocracy: Was the nobility a dominant force in Russian society at the end of the nineteenth century? Yes. The Russian nobility was an adaptive elite that remained a pillar of the state until the Revolution of 1917. (Paul du Quenoy) No. The traditional role of the nobility eroded in the last half of the nineteenth century because of changes in social composition, legal status, and cultural attitudes. (Bradley Woodworth) Civil Society: Were the independent social institutions of Imperial Russia—including the media, professional associations, charitable groups, and artistic enterprises—contributing to the modernization of the country during the decades before 1917? Yes. A burgeoning Russian civil society was gradually creating a modern and democratic Russia during the last decade of tsarism. (Thomas Earl Porter) No. The development of Russian civil society was restricted by the tsarist autocracy and then destroyed by the Bolshevik regime, both of which considered independent social institutions a threat to government authority. (Louise McReynolds) Culture and Revolution: Was Russian cultural expression subsumed by politics during the revolutionary era? Yes. The Bolsheviks and other groups redefined culture as revolutionary political expression. (Catherine Blair) No. Russian culture generally evolved apart from politics in the revolutionary era. (Louise McReynolds) Diplomatic Goals in World War I: Did Imperial Russia have feasible diplomatic goals during World War I? Yes. Russia's goals—to control the Turkish Straits, to expand its borders southward, and to continue influence in the Balkans—were realizable. (Sean Foley) No. Russia entered World War I because of the swell of pan-Slavism; it had no well-formulated diplomatic goals. (Phil Giltner) Diplomatic Policy in the 1920s: Did the Soviet regime pursue an aggressive foreign policy in the 1920s? Yes. The Soviets actively promoted revolution abroad and used aggressive diplomacy to ensure the continued existence of their communist state. (John Soares)

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No. The Soviets drew back from confrontation in an attempt to build alliances that would ensure their survival and help them develop their economy. (Phil Giltner) Duma: Was the Duma a viable parliamentary institution? Yes. The Duma had many features of a modern parliament and was a central element in the evolution of a constitutional monarchy in Russia. (Brandon Schneider) No. The Duma's limited powers and fractious relations with the autocracy cast doubt on its relevance in the late Imperial era. (Paul du Quenoy) Early Soviet Economy: Was the New Economic Policy (NEP) effective in promoting recovery from war and revolution? Yes. NEP allowed industry, agriculture, and other economic sectors to make impressive recoveries. (York Norman) No. NEP fell short of restoring economic prosperity and failed to solve long-term problems. (Paul du Quenoy) Imperial and Soviet Continuities: Were there substantial continuities between Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union? Yes. The Soviet regime failed to alter meaningfully the authoritarianism of Imperial Russia. (Aristotle Kallis) No. The Soviet state was radically different from its predecessor; it monopolized political power and economic development, restricted civil liberties introduced before the Revolution, and instilled a reign of terror unthinkable in Imperial Russia. (Paul du Quenoy) International Terrorism: Did the Russian terrorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide the model for present-day terrorist groups? Yes. Beginning with the writings of Mikhail Bakunin in the late 1860s and The People's Will group, formed in 1879, Russians developed the system of centralized underground organizations composed of disaffected zealots bent on disruption of governments by public acts of random violence that has been imitated widely throughout the world since. (Sean Foley) No. Terrorism is too amorphous to be traced to a single source. The Russian model, developed from French Jacobins in the early 1790s, is only one of several types of terrorist activity employed by those seeking political-, social-, or religious-based revolution. (Jelena Budjevac) Literacy and Education: Did the Bolsheviks accelerate achievements in literacy and primary education in the Soviet Union? Yes. Soviet mass literacy and education programs were swift and impressive agents of modernization. (Kerry Foley) No. Soviet accomplishments in education and literacy were neither more impressive than similar developments in Western Europe nor dramatic improvements over what the tsarist government had achieved. (Kerry Foley) National Liberation Movements: Did the Russian Revolution have a strong influence on national liberation movements? Yes. National liberation movements took important lessons and received substantial support from the Soviet regime. (Sean Foley) No. National liberation movements generally rejected the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution and avoided Soviet influences. (Paul du Quenoy)

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1890-1930

Nationalities Policy: Was the Soviet nationalities policy instituted by Vladimir Lenin fair and balanced? Yes. The Soviets largely fulfilled Lenin's promises of national autonomy and nondiscrimination. (Vasilis Vourkoutiotis) No. The Soviets essentially reconstructed the tsarist empire and imposed de facto Great Russian rule. (Kerry Foley) New Economic Policy: Was Vladimir Lenin committed to maintaining the New Economic Policy (NEP)? Yes. Vladimir Lenin was firmly committed to NEP and would have pursued it over the long term. (Aristotle Kallis) No. Vladimir Lenin never saw NEP as more than a compromise to remain in power, and he would have eliminated it as soon as circumstances permitted. (York Norman)

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Paris Peace Settlement: Did the Russian Revolution have a meaningful influence on the Paris Peace Settlement? Yes. The fear of a pan-European Marxist revolution was a significant consideration at the Paris Peace Conference. (Phil Giltner) No. The immediate concern of obtaining an advantageous and lasting peace with Germany and its allies dominated the agenda at the Paris Peace Conference. (Paul du Quenoy) Provisional Government and World War I: Could the Provisional Government have survived if it had pulled Russia out of World War I? Yes. The hardships of war turned public opinion against the Provisional Government and precipitated its fall. (Phil Giltner) No. Even without the war, the Provisional Government would have been unable to maintain the broad range of political support it needed to stay in power and institute the reforms demanded by the Russian people. (Aristotle Kallis) Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: Did the tsarist government consider public opinion in formulating foreign policy? Yes. Public opinion heavily influenced government decisions on commercial and strategic issues in the late imperial era. (Paul du Quenoy) No. Imperial Russian diplomacy operated according to principles of realpolitik and was in the main divorced from public opinion. (York Norman) Red Terror: Could the Bolshevik regime have established its authority without using terror and coercion? Yes. Initially the Bolsheviks enjoyed widespread support for their policies of ending Russian participation in World War I and redistributing agricultural land. The reliance on terror came with Josef Stalin's rise to power. (John Pawl) No. Terror was crucial in ensuring loyalty and allegiance to the new regime. (Catherine Blair) Revolution from Above: Did Josef Stalin's "revolution from above" equal a "Soviet Thermidor"? Yes. After his rise to absolute power Stalin deliberately undermined the international Marxism of Lenin. (York Norman) No. Stalin's "revolution from above" was the natural outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution. (Paul du Quenoy)

HISTORY

IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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Revolution of 1905: Was Lenin right when he called the Revolution of 1905 a dress rehearsal for the Revolution of 1917? Yes. The Revolution of 1905 arose from many of the same issues and conflicts that came to the forefront in 1917. (Louise McReynolds) No. The Revolution of 1905 was the impetus for reform movements that had the potential to democratize Russia. (Thomas Earl Porter) Romanov Murders: Did Bolshevik leaders in Moscow order the execution of the Imperial Family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918? Yes. Local Bolshevik officials in Ekaterinburg repeatedly sought advice from Moscow about the tsar and his family. There is convincing circumstantial evidence that the locals acted on an order from Moscow. (Catherine Blair) No. Local Bolshevik officials in Ekaterinburg executed former tsar Nicholas II and his family on their own initiative in order to prevent the royals from being liberated by approaching White forces. (John Pawl) Russia and the Balkans: Did Russia abandon its traditional role as protector of Serbia and other Balkan states during the Revolutionary period? Yes. Russian's role in the Balkans was self-serving and rarely resulted in meaningful protection of the region's peoples and nations. (John Soares) No. Russia helped the Balkan states facilitate the independence of the region's peoples before the 1917 revolution and protected them later. (Jelena Budjevac) Russia in World War I: Was Russia a viable combatant in World War I? Yes. Russia dealt effectively with the requirements of waging a major war; the actions of the tsar's army on the Eastern Front prevented Germany from focusing all its energies on fighting Russia's allies in the West. (Thomas Earl Porter) No. The underdevelopment of Russian industry and transportation placed severe limitations on its military effectiveness. (Phil Giltner) Russian Revolution and Anti-Semitism: Was the Russian Revolution a catalyst for international anti-Semitism? Yes. The perception in the West that the Jews were to blame for Bolshevism was a major factor in promoting anti-Semitism during the twentieth century. (Aristotle Kallis) No. Anti-Semitism was widespread before 1917, and the events of that year were only incidental to its development. (Kerry Foley) Russian Working Class: Was the Russian working class united behind Vladimir Lenin in 1917? Yes. The Bolsheviks commanded the allegiance of a large majority of the working class. (John Pawl) No. Working-class support for the Bolsheviks has been overstated and often rested on a misunderstanding of what the Bolsheviks meant when they said they favored democracy. (Catherine Blair) Russo-Japanese War: Was Russia doomed to defeat in the Russo-Japanese War? Yes. Russia had inept military leaders who did not plan effectively and who improperly used the available military resources. (Phil Giltner)

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1890-1930

No. Russia had the resources to win the war; the Japanese sued for peace before the full might of Russian military forces could be brought to bear. (Paul du Quenoy) Social Class: Were social-class divisions in late Imperial Russia insurmountable? Yes. The social imbalance between the peasantry and urban working class on the one side and the aristocracy and the nascent middle class on the other was too great to be overcome by anything but revolution. (Bradley Woodworth) No. Class conflict was becoming moderated by economic growth and social change. (Louise McReynolds) Stolypin's Reforms: Did Stolypin's reforms in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 have the potential to solve the problems of rural Russia? Yes. Stolypin's reforms instilled an appreciation for private property, satisfied grievances, and began to displace outmoded peasant institutions. (Thomas Earl Porter) No. Stolypin's reforms were inadequate to bring about the necessary redistribution of land and transform the peasantry into productive and supportive subjects of the tsar. (Louise McReynolds) Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: Did the Bolsheviks cede permanent domination of the Russian periphery in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk? Yes. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk clearly gave Germany control over Eastern Europe, and only the German defeat in World War I kept Russia from permanently losing its buffer zone against invasion from the West. (Phil Giltner) No. Desperate to end Russian involvement in World War I, the Bolsheviks agreed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, confident that they would regain control of the ceded territory when the proletarian revolution spread to Germany. (Vasilis Vourkoutiotis) Tsarist Secret Police: Was the Okhrana, tsarist secret police, effective? Yes. The tsarist secret police fulfilled its mission by observing suspects, detaining conspirators, infiltrating revolutionary organizations, and gathering information. (Paul du Quenoy) No. The tsarist secret police failed to carry out its duties because of bureaucratic rivalry, frequent changes in leadership, poor morale, and inaccurate intelligence. (Catherine Blair) The Whites in the Civil War: Did the Whites have any chance of winning the Russian Civil War? Yes. The Whites were clearly superior on the battlefield, and with better leadership they could well have won the war. (Phil Giltner) No. Though White forces were superior as soldiers, they were outnumbered ten to one by the Reds. The White factions were hopelessly divided and failed to muster popular support. (Vasilis Vourkoutiotis) Witte and Industrialization: Were Sergei Witte's policies favoring industrialization and economic development successful? Yes. Witte's policies modernized the Russian economy and made Russia competitive internationally. (Bradley Woodworth)

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No. Wltte's policies created great urban instability and caused many problems for Russia's emerging economy. (Paul du Quenoy) Women's Rights: Did the Soviets support gender equity and women's rights? Yes. The Soviets viewed women as critical to the success of the state, and they ensured the fulfillment of women's rights and aspirations. (York Norman) No. The Soviets failed to establish meaningful equality for women, and many state directives contained fundamental gender biases. (Louise McReynolds) World War I Alliances: Was Russia's alignment with France and Great Britain a wise strategy? Yes. France and Britain were reliable counterweights to Germany and Austria-Hungary and shared Russia's interest in blocking the Germans' and Austrians' eastward expansion. (John Soares) No. Russia would have been better served politically and economically by aligning itself with Germany and Austria-Hungary, which could have helped, instead of hindered, Russian aims in the Balkans and were far better markets than France or Britain for Russian goods. (Lawrence A. Helm) World War I and the Revolutions of 1917: Did Russian defeats and shortages in World War I precipitate the revolutions of 1917? Yes. Without the traumas of World War I, the revolutions of 1917 would not have happened. (Louise McReynolds) No. Economic and social changes associated with attempts at modernization made revolution against the inflexible Russian autocracy inevitable, regardless of Russia's fate in the war. (Phil Giltner) Appendix Fundamental Laws of 1906 April Theses Lenin's Congress of Soviets Speech Soviet Constitution of 1918 Soviet Constitution of 1924 Trotskyism or Leninism? The Suppressed Testament of Lenin

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211 215

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239 245 248 255 258 266 278

References

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Contributors

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Index

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HISTORY

IN DISPUTE,

VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930

ABOUT THE SERIES

History in Dispute is an ongoing series designed to present, in an informative and lively pro-con format, different perspectives on major historical events drawn from all time periods and from all parts of the globe. The series was developed in response to requests from librarians and educators for a history-reference source that will help students hone essential critical-thinking skills while serving as a valuable research tool for class assignments. Individual volumes in the series concentrate on specific themes, eras, or subjects intended to correspond to the way history is studied at the academic level. For example, early volumes cover such topics as the Cold War, American Social and Political Movements, and World War II. Volume subtitles make it easy for users to identify contents at a glance and facilitate searching for specific subjects in library catalogues. Each volume of History in Dispute includes up to fifty entries, centered on the overall theme of that volume and chosen by an advisory board of historians for their relevance to the curriculum. Entries are arranged alphabetically by the name of the event or issue in its most common form. (Thus,

in Volume 1, the issue "Was detente a success?" is presented under the chapter heading "Detente.") Each entry begins with a brief statement of the opposing points of view on the topic, followed by a short essay summarizing the issue and outlining the controversy. At the heart of the entry, designed to engage students' interest while providing essential information, are the two or more lengthy essays, written specifically for this publication by experts in the field, each presenting one side of the dispute. In addition to this substantial prose explication, entries also include excerpts from primarysource documents, other useful information typeset in easy-to-locate shaded boxes, detailed entry bibliographies, and photographs or illustrations appropriate to the issue. Other features of History in Dispute volumes include: individual volume introductions by academic experts, tables of contents that identify both the issues and the controversies, chronologies of events, names and credentials of advisers, brief biographies of contributors, thorough volume bibliographies for more information on the topic, and a comprehensive subject index.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Anthony J. Scotti Jr., In-house editor. Philip B. Dematteis, Production manager. Kathy Lawler Merlette, Office manager. Carol A. Cheschi and Lesia C. Radford, Administrative support. Ann-Marie Holland, Accounting. Sally R. Evans, Copyediting supervisor. Phyllis A. Avant, Caryl Brown, Melissa D. Hinton, Philip I. Jones, Rebecca Mayo, Nadirah Rahimah Shabazz, and Nancy E. Smith, Copyediting staff. Zoe R. Cook, Series team leader, layout and graphics. Janet E. Hill, Layout and graphics supervisor. Sydney E. Hammock, Graphics and prepress. Mark J. McEwan and Dickson Monk, Photography editors. Amber L. Coker, Permissions editor.

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James F. Tidd Jr., Database manager. Joseph M. Bruccoli, Digital photographic copy work. Donald K. Starling, Systems manager. Kathleen M. Flanagan, Typesetting supervisor. Patricia Marie Flanagan and Pamela D. Norton, Typesetting staff. Dickson Monk, Library researcher. The staff of the Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina are unfailingly helpful: Tucker Taylor, Circulation department head, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina. John Brunswick, Interlibraryloan department head. Virginia W. Weathers, Reference department head. Brette Barclay, Marilee Birchfield, Paul Cammarata, Gary Geer, Michael Macan, Tom Marcil, and Sharon Verba, Reference librarians.

PERMISSIONS

ILLUSTRATIONS P. 2: Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, St. Petersburg P. 10: Associated Press, APA6955730 Pp. 19, 24, 30, 44, 54, 70, 152, 159, 167, 188, 210, 216, 225, 234, 260, 267, 279: Associated Press

P. 40: Associated Press, APA6981331 P. 59: © Hulton Deutsch Collection/CORBIS, HU018661 P. 76: © Bettmann/CORBIS, U1670856

P. 126: Associated Press, APA6872806 P. 132: Associated Press, APA1726052 P. 141: Associated Press, APA4935951 P. 146: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS, HU032482 P. 175: Associated Press, APA6851214 P. 181: Russian State Archive of Film and Photographic Documents, St. Petersburg P. 194: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS, HU031454

P. 83:©CORBIS,IH000455

P. 198: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS, HU056530

P. 90: Associated Press, APA5961466

P. 207: © Bettmann/CORBIS, BE064038

P. 98: © Hulton Deutsch Collection/CORBIS, HU003553 P. 102: © Hulton Deutsch Collection/CORBIS, HU028312 P. 112: Russian Museum, St. Petersburg P. 118: © Bettmann/CORBIS, BE043617

TEXT EXCERPTS Pp. 67-68: "Pages from a Diary," 2 January 1923, in Lenin's First Fight: Speeches and Writings, 1922-23, edited by George Fyson (New York: Pathfinder, 1995), pp. 203208. © 1995 Pathfinder Publishing, Inc. Reprinted with permission.

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PREFACE

History in Dispute, Volume 21: Revolutionary Russia, 1890-1930 takes as its subject one of the most important events in the history of the modern world. Reaching far beyond the two political revolutions that overturned Russian governments over the course of 1917, a proper understanding of that year's significance demands attention to broader, long-term processes of political conflict, social change, cultural development, ideological battles, economic transformation, diplomatic posturing, military fortunes, and virtually every other problem experienced by modern societies. Russia's attempts to engage these challenges in the forty-year period covered in this volume provided and continue to provide a host of lessons. They have inspired and repulsed, fascinated and disillusioned, drawn admiration and detraction, and, as the pages that follow will seek to show, stimulated dialogues and debates that remain heated nearly nine decades later. These processes made Russia into a veritable laboratory of modernization. Virtually every transformation at work in the world over the past hundred years, and in some cases for an even longer period, had some degree of precedence or reflection in the universe of Revolutionary Russia. Like much of the world over the past three centuries, between 1890 and 1930 Russia moved from a society that was predominantly rural and agrarian to one experiencing dizzying urbanization and industrialization. In that forty-year period it experienced almost all of the political forms known to the modern world, or at least the West: autocratic monarchy, limited constitutional monarchy, democratic republic, dictatorship, communist authoritarianism, and totalitarian one-party rule. It saw the birth, rise, and death of a civil society—that combination of media, cultural, associational, educational, and professional life that the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, a leading student of modernity, called the "public sphere." The revolutionary era stimulated tremendous strides in literacy and education. In 1897 Russia's literacy rate was not incomparable to that of seventeenth-century

Britain. By 1930 it nearly equaled that of almost every Western nation. The same period witnessed the rise and fall of a vibrant capitalist economy, one that compared to those of nineteenth-century Britain and Germany in its structures and to earlytwenty-first-century China and India in its ambitions. In philosophy and ideology as well, Revolutionary Russia formed both a crossroads and a prism of global developments over a longer term. Its thinkers seized the idealism of the European (and American) Romantics, the determinist imperatives of socialism and other "scientific" modes of thought, the fashionable mysticism of the fin de siécle world, a resurgence of Christianity adapted to address emerging problems in society, the democratic liberalism that was changing ideas of government throughout the world, and a "Eurasianism" that looked to Eastern philosophies for sources of regeneration. The traumas of 1917 and the long period of ideological conflict and (after 1945) superpower rivalry that followed have cast a long shadow over the twentieth-century world. Many developments in Revolutionary Russia found expression in emerging global contexts. Although several chapters in this volume debate the extent and importance of issues relevant to modern environments, we undoubtedly live in a world still challenged by the ramifications of the Russian Revolution. Russia itself, the world's largest country, its second-largest oil producer, a major regional power in Eurasia, the possessor of a vast nuclear arsenal, and home to a population of some 143 million at this writing, has been recovering from seven decades of communism and seeking to redefine its role and identity. Will what its current president, Vladimir Putin, calls "managed democracy" become a pluralistic, free-market system with independent civil institutions and a cooperative international outlook, or will authoritarian traditions doom Russia to greater state control and a more confrontational approach to foreign relations? Russia's grappling with similar conflicts between

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ideas and realities a century ago may be instructive through re-examination. What of the many concepts that flowed from 1917 and the surrounding decades? The last fifteen years have seen the near complete collapse of communism as a viable form of government and society. Even many of those states that continue to espouse it as their official ideology betray few commonalities with the beliefs and intentions of its original theorists and leaders. The Chinese Communist Party now allows businessmen to join its ranks. Cuba has ceased to be an atheist state and actively promotes its tourism industry. At the same time, the willingness to bring about political change through violence—an important and particularly virulent strand of Russia's communist experience—could hardly be more current to anyone who lived through the events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent "war on terrorism." Indeed, the anti-Western violence and political extremism emerging in the early-twenty-first-century Middle East seems in many ways to have been anticipated by Russia's difficult experience with modernization a century ago. Examining the contours of that process may be helpful in informing contemporary understandings of the modern world and its tribulations. That the Russian Revolution should both reflect wider issues of modernization and be reflected in them is a fundamental theme of this volume, and of the current Russian studies field in general. Whereas the last two generations of scholarship on modern Russia sought mainly to explain 1917—the assumption being that the year's events represented the inevitable outcome of a doomed prerevolutionary era—scholars have more recently explored the entire revolutionary period in terms of its potential for alternate paths. This endeavor demands that we ask challenging questions about Russia's people, culture, institutions, ideas, structures, ways of life, systems of government, interaction with the world, and how they changed over time. In selecting the subjects of debate for this volume, I have tried to include as broad a range of these topics as possible. Some are quite conventional. Several chapters discuss events and trends in politics, diplomacy, and military affairs, now less fashionable in the historical profession. Nevertheless, the opening of archives in Russia and elsewhere, new revelations about local government, research into mid-level decision making, emphases on instances of cooperation between state and social institutions, debates over the uses and effectiveness of state power in reform and modernization, and the simple realization that few if any Russians were thinking about politics with a foreknowledge of 1917 (or, for that matter, 1991) hav reinvigorated Revolutionary Russia's political history. Likewise, ongoing interest in and debates xvi

about the causes and effects of World War I, fresh perspectives on the Cold War and its origins, more-candid assessments of the challenges facing Soviet power in its early days, and attention to such "forgotten" conflicts as the Russo-Japanese War and their meanings have endowed diplomatic and military affairs with renewed cachet. The reader will find several chapters devoted to the field's lively debates in these areas. At the same time, I have done my best not to ignore newer and less charted foci of research, particularly in the nature of Russian society. The Russian studies field has moved far beyond old Soviet and Soviet-influenced discourses, which focused largely on workers and revolutionaries, to explore developments in culture and entertainment, gender relations, social changes, leisure, and other heretofore understudied subjects. Without abandoning more-traditional topics such as labor and radicalism, the pages that follow also feature actors, filmmakers, feminists, aristocrats, publishers, journalists, teachers, minorities, philosophers, and others who have been left out of more-conventional studies but whose experience adds much to our understanding of the revolutionary period. Obviously, none of these volumes could have appeared without their contributors, and it is they who deserve my greatest thanks. The study of Russian history has become much more diverse and dynamic in recent years, and the collection of scholarship presented here reflects the many interests of those currently working in the field, as well as some working outside of it or in comparative frameworks. The staff of Manly, Inc., deserves a great deal of credit for their expert editing skills. Like most scholars, I have preferred to use the Julian Calendar for dates preceding the Soviet regime's adoption of the Gregorian (Western) calendar on 1 February 1918. Some essays dealing with international affairs may occasionally use the Western calendar to discuss international events in which Russia participated but that are normally noted in Julian time. Until the change, Russia's official calendar ran twelve days behind Europe's in the nineteenth century, and thirteen in the twentieth. Transliterations from the Cyrillic alphabet follow a modified version of the system cur rently used by the Library of Congress. Wellknown names are spelled as they are customarily spelled in Western publications (for example, Kerensky instead of Kerenskii; Witte instead of Vitte), while less common ones are rendered more literally (for example, Malinovskii instead of Malinovsky; Ulianov instead of Ulyanov). We would be fortunate indeed if these were the only confusing things about Russia, which British statesman Winston Churchill famously called "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

-PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO 1890-1930

CHRONOLOGY

Note: Unless otherwise noted, all dates before 1 February 1918 follow the Julian Calendar, which was twelve days behind the Gregorian (Western) Calendar in the nineteenth century and thirteen days behind it in the twentieth century.

1890

Tsar Alexander III restricts local government (zemstvo) autonomy. (See Aristocracy, Nationalities Policies, and Social Class)

1891

Construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad begins; it is completed in 1916 and stretches from Moscow 5,778 miles east to Vladivostok. A massive famine begins in the Volga region, and approximately 500,000 people die.

1892

Sergei Witte, appointed minister of finance, implements an industrialization program. (See Witte and Industrialization) The Franco-Russian Alliance is concluded; the treaty is formally signed in January 1894.

1894

The government announces a monopoly on liquor production (in effect from 1 January 1896). 21 OCTOBER: Alexander III dies, and his eldest son, Nicholas II, becomes the new tsar of Russia.

1895

JANUARY: Nicholas II dismisses the idea of representative government as "senseless dreams." (See Duma and Imperial and Soviet Continuities) 7 DECEMBER: A young socialist labor organizer named Vladimir Lenin is arrested in St. Petersburg. After more than a year of

detention, he is exiled to Siberia for three years and then lives mostly abroad. (See Tsarist Secret Police)

1896

Textile workers strike. The Union for the Liberation of Labor, a Marxist group, is founded. 18 MAY: Celebrations surrounding the coronation of Nicholas II turn into tragedy when a stampede at Khodynka field outside Moscow results in 1,389 dead and some 1,300 injured.

1897 Russia adopts the gold standard. The first comprehensive census for the Russian Empire is conducted over the course of the year.

1898

1-3 MARCH: The Congress of the Russian Social Democratic and Workers' Party (RSDWP) is founded in Minsk; most of the leaders are quickly arrested. 12 AUGUST: Nicholas II proposes international peace and disarmament talks.

1899

FEBRUARY-MARCH: The first major strikes by university students occur. MAY-JULY: An international disarmament conference meets at The Hague in the Netherlands and adopts conventions on the rules of war and the peaceful resolution of international differences. (See Public Opinion and Foreign Policy)

1900

SUMMER: Russian troops participate in the multilateral suppression of the Boxer Rebel-

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lion in China; they occupy Manchuria until 1905.

1901

FEBRUARY: Minister of Education Nikolai Bogolepov is assassinated by a student radical. 4 MARCH: University student demonstrations on Kazan Square in St. Petersburg are dispersed by armed force. DECEMBER: The Socialist Party is founded.

Revolutionary

1902

2 APRIL: Interior Minister Dmitrii Sipiagin is assassinated.

1903

9 JANUARY: On "Bloody Sunday," government troops fire on worker demonstrators in St. Petersburg organized by Gapon's group; official figures claim 130 are killed and 299 are wounded. Strikes and unrest subsequently break out all over Russia. (See Revolution of 1905) FEBRUARY-MARCH: Russian forces suffer a defeat at Mukden in Manchuria. 18 MARCH: Universities are closed for the duration of the academic year. (See Civil Society) 8 MAY: Professional and labor unions form a central "Union of Unions" and advocate major political reform. 13-14 MAY: The Russian navy suffers a major defeat in the Tsushima Straits. (See RussoJapanese War)

4 APRIL: A pogrom against Jews starts in Kishinev; about 50 people are killed. (See Russian Revolution and Anti-Semitism)

JUNE: Major unrest rocks the Black Sea port of Odessa; sailors of the battleship Potemkin mutiny. (See Revolution of 1905)

JULY-AUGUST: The RSDWP splits into two factions: the Bolsheviks ("majority," led by Vladimir Lenin) and the Mensheviks ("minority," led by Iulii Martov).

23 AUGUST: The Treaty of Portsmouth ends the Russo-Japanese War. Russia recognizes Japanese dominance in Korea and agrees to turn over control of Port Arthur, the Liaotung Peninsula, and southern Sakhalin Island to Japan. Both Russia and Japan agree to restore Manchuria to China. (See Public Opinion and Foreign Policy and Russo-Japanese War)

22 JULY: The Union of Liberation, a liberal constitutionalist party, is founded. AUGUST: Witte is dismissed as the finance minister. (See Witte and Industrialization)

27 AUGUST: Administrative autonomy is restored to universities (it had been abrogated in 1884).

1904

27 JANUARY: Japanese naval forces attack the Russian base at Port Arthur in Manchuria, 20 SEPTEMBER: Moscow printers begin a beginning the Russo-Japanese War. (See strike; further strike activity spreads Russo-Japanese War) throughout Russia. 4 FEBRUARY: The government authorizes the 13 OCTOBER: The St. Petersburg Soviet (counSt. Petersburg Assembly of Factory Workcil) is formed from the capital's central strike ers, a non-Marxist labor group led by Father committee; it calls for a national general Georgii Gapon. (See Civil Society) strike. 15 JULY: Interior Minister Viacheslav Plehve is assassinated. AUGUST: Russian forces are defeated at Liaoyang in Manchuria. NOVEMBER-DECEMBER: The Liberation Union begins a campaign of public meetings disguised as "banquets." (See Civil Society) 12 DECEMBER: Nicholas II decrees a modest reform program. 20 DECEMBER: Port Arthur surrenders to the Japanese after a long siege.

1905

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

18 OCTOBER: The Union of Liberation becomes the Constitutional Democrat Party. DECEMBER: An armed uprising occurs in Moscow and is brutally suppressed by government troops; more than 1,000 people are killed.

1906

JANUARY: A major industrial strike in St. Petersburg involves some 100,000 workers.

xviii

17 OCTOBER: After several days of the general strike, Nicholas II promulgates the October Manifesto, promising civil rights and an elected legislature, the State Duma. Witte is named chairman of the Council of Ministers (premier). (See Duma and Revolution of 1905)

4 MARCH: Unions and professional associations are legalized. (See Civil Society)

VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930

16 APRIL: Witte resigns as premier and is replaced by Ivan Goremykin. (See Witte and Industrialization) 23 APRIL: Nicholas II promulgates the Fundamental Laws, establishing broad civil rights, defining government powers, and setting operational procedures for the Duma. 27 APRIL: The First Duma opens in the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg; its sessions are stormy, and little is accomplished. 8 JULY: The First Duma is dissolved; Petr Stolypin is appointed premier. AUGUST-NOVEMBER: Stolypin implements agrarian reforms by decree, enabling peasants to leave the traditional commune (mir) and establish independent farmsteads. About 25 percent of the peasants make the transition by 1914. (See Stolypin's Reforms)

1907 20 FEBRUARY: The Second Duma opens with a leftist majority, including more than 100 socialists; sessions continue to be stormy. 2 JUNE: The Second Duma is dissolved; electoral laws are rewritten to favor landowners and ethnic Russians at the expense of peasants, urban residents, and ethnic minorities. (See Duma) 31 AUGUST: Russia concludes an entente with Britain over outstanding issues in the colonial world. Tibet is made into a neutral zone, Russia recognizes British interests in Afghanistan, and Persia is partitioned into spheres of influence. (See Public Opinion and Foreign Policy) 7 NOVEMBER: The Third Duma opens with a majority favoring cooperation with the government; the session continues almost uninterrupted for all of its five-year term. (See Duma)

1908 SEPTEMBER: A diplomatic crisis develops over the Austro-Hungarian annexation of BosniaHerzegovina. Russian foreign minister Aleksandr Izvolsky is tricked into supporting Austrian ambitions in return for an empty promise of Russian access to the Turkish Straits. Russia is eventually forced to accept the annexation in the face of a German ultimatum. (See Public Opinion and Foreign Policy and Russia and the Balkans)

1909 27 APRIL: Nicholas II vetoes a bill to bring new naval construction under Duma oversight. HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

1910

SEPTEMBER: Izvolsky is dismissed as foreign minister; he is replaced by Sergei Sazonov. 7 NOVEMBER: The death of famous novelist Lev Tolstoi leads to national demonstrations. (See Culture and Revolution)

1911

14 MARCH: Local government (zemstpo) institutions are extended to Polish provinces. Stolypin uses decree powers to overcome State Council objections but alienates progovernment parties in the Duma by doing so, leading to his censure by the lower house. (See Stolypin's Reforms) 1 SEPTEMBER: Stolypin is shot in Kiev by a Socialist Revolutionary assassin; he dies four days later. 6 SEPTEMBER: Count Vladimir Kokovtsov is appointed premier.

1912

JANUARY: A final split of Bolshevik and Menshevik factions occurs; both claim leadership of the RSDWP. MARCH-APRIL: Unrest in the Lena gold mining region leads to strikes and then to a massacre of workers by government troops; more than 200 people are killed. (See Imperial and Soviet Continuities) SPRING: Most of the Bolshevik leadership in Russia are arrested by the secret police; one of the Bolshevik leaders, Lenin's close associate Roman Malinovskii, supplies information leading to their arrest. (See Tsarist Secret Police) OCTOBER 1912-AUGUST 1913: The First and Second Balkan Wars displace remaining Ottoman rule from almost all of southeastern Europe. Serbian ambitions are checked by Austrian and German demands and by ultimatums from Vienna and Berlin preventing Russia from intervening on Belgrade's behalf. Public opinion in Russia becomes more belligerent and pro-Serbian. (See Public Opinion and Foreign Policy and Russia and the Balkans) 1 NOVEMBER: The Fourth Duma opens. (See Duma)

1913

FEBRUARY-JULY: Celebrations occur for the tercentenary of Romanov rule in Russia. OCTOBER: After a two-year investigation and trial, Mendel Beilis is acquitted of the ritual murder of a Christian child; the case highlights official anti-Semitism and draws heavy VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930S

xix

Diplomatic Goals in World War I and World War I Alliances)

domestic and international criticism. (See Russian Revolution and Anti-Semitism) German general Liman von Sanders is appointed to the Ottoman Empire's army high command; Russia demands his withdrawal, but he is only demoted.

1914 20 JANUARY: Kokovtsov is dismissed and replaced by Goremykin. JANUARY-JULY: Russia experiences unprecedented strike activity. FEBRUARY: Petr Durnovo, a member of the State Council, circulates a memorandum warning that Russian involvement in a general European war will have many liabilities, offer few benefits, and portend social revolution. (See Russia in World War I) 28 JUNE (NEW STYLE): Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, is assassinated in Sarajevo. (See Russia and the Balkans) 23 JULY (NEW STYLE): Austria-Hungary responds to the assassination by demanding that Serbia meet conditions that would infringe on its national sovereignty. 25 JULY (NEW STYLE): Russia decides to support Serbia unequivocally in a war against Austria-Hungary. 28 JULY (NEW STYLE): Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia. 29-30 JULY (NEW STYLE): Russia begins military mobilization. At first it is a partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary, but then it becomes a general mobilization against Germany as well. 31 JULY (NEW STYLE): Germany demands that Russia cease mobilization within twelve hours; Russia refuses. 1 AUGUST (NEW STYLE): Germany declares war on Russia, beginning World War I. (See Russia in World War I) 6 AUGUST (NEW STYLE): Austria-Hungary declares war on Russia. MID AUGUST: Russian offensive operations begin in East Prussia and Galicia. 18 AUGUST: St. Petersburg is renamed Petrograd for nationalist reasons. 27-30 AUGUST (NEW STYLE): The Russians suffer a major defeat at Tannenberg; the subsequent battle at the Masurian Lakes is also costly for them. 5 SEPTEMBER (NEW STYLE): Russia, Britain, and France sign an alliance treaty promising not to conclude a separate peace. (See xx

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

2

NOVEMBER (NEW STYLE): Russia declares war on the Ottoman Empire.

1915 MARCH: The Western allies formally guarantee that Russia will receive the Turkish Straits after the war. The Russians win several battles against Austrian forces, but their advance falters by April. APRIL-SEPTEMBER: German armies conquer Russian Poland. JUNE-JULY: Duma members, out of session for nearly a year, form the Progressive Bloc to agitate for national government responsible to the legislature; about two-thirds of Duma members join. (See Duma and Public Opinion and Foreign Policy) 19 JULY: The Duma reconvenes and petitions the tsar for responsible ministerial government; several government ministers support them. 30 AUGUST: Nicholas II assumes personal command of the army over the advice of most of his ministers; he moves from the capital to a military headquarters at Mogilev. (See Russia in World War I) 3 SEPTEMBER: Nicholas II dissolves the Duma; several ministers who supported its demands for responsible government are subsequently dismissed.

1916 20 JANUARY: Goremykin is replaced as premier by Boris Stürmer. MAY-JUNE: The Russian Brusilov offensive makes some impressive early gains against Austrian positions in Galicia; it is eventually stopped by German forces. 1 NOVEMBER: A new Duma session opens, and most delegates are hostile to the government. Constitutional Democrat leader Pavel Miliukov implies treason in high places. (See Duma and Russia in World War I) 10 NOVEMBER: Stürmer is dismissed; the change fails to appease radical Duma members. 19 NOVEMBER: Aleksandr Trepov is appointed premier. 16-17 DECEMBER: The influential Siberian mystic Grigorii Rasputin is murdered by conservatives who fear his influence over the throne. 27 DECEMBER: Trepov is replaced by Prince Nikolai Golitsyn.

VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930

1917 FEBRUARY-MARCH: Massive demonstrations against the war occur in Petrograd. (See World War I and the Revolutions of 1917) 27 FEBRUARY: Most of Petrograd falls out of government control. 2 MARCH: Nicholas II, diverted from travel to Petrograd, abdicates for himself and his son in favor of his brother, Grand Duke Michael, who promptly rejects the crown. The Provisional Government is formed by Duma members and presided over by Prince Georgii L'vov. Meanwhile, a rival Petrograd Soviet forms and issues counterorders. (See Provisional Government and World War I) 3 APRIL: Lenin returns to Petrograd from foreign exile; he demands immediate transfer of power to Soviets. (See Russian Working Class) APRIL-MAY: A cabinet crisis develops and is caused by Constitutional Democrats supporting tsarist war aims; the moderate ministers of war and foreign affairs resign, and more socialists enter the government. JULY: A major Russian offensive against Austrian positions stalls quickly. 2-4 JULY: Massive demonstrations in Petrograd portend revolution against the Provisional Government. (See World War I and the Revolutions of 1917) 11 JULY: L'vov resigns and is replaced by Aleksandr Kerensky, a nominal socialist. (See Provisional Government and World War I) 18 JULY: General Lavr Kornilov is appointed army commander. 9 AUGUST: Kerensky sets elections to a national constituent assembly for 28 November. 22-30 AUGUST: Kornilov, possibly with Kerensky's connivance, leads troops toward the capital. As he approaches, he is declared a traitor. Revolutionary militants arm against him, and his putsch fizzles.

24-26 OCTOBER: Bolshevik forces seize government buildings in Petrograd, Kerensky flees, and Lenin declares a Soviet government, to be led by a Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) with himself as Chairman. 2 NOVEMBER: Moscow comes under Bolshevik control after brief fighting. 20 NOVEMBER: The Bolshevik government begins peace negotiations with Germany at Brest-Litovsk. (See Treaty of Brest-Litovsk) 25 NOVEMBER: Constituent Assembly elections are held, and the Bolsheviks gain only 24 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Socialist Revolutionary Party gains an absolute majority. 6 DECEMBER: Finland declares independence from Russia, and local communist forces are defeated in a subsequent civil war. 7 DECEMBER: The secret political police (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Sabotage, or Cheka) is founded. It will be renamed the GPU in 1922, the OGPU in 1923, the NKVD in 1934, and the KGB in 1954. (See Red Terror) 10 DECEMBER: Left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries enter Lenin's government. LATE DECEMBER: The Volunteer Army is formed and begins organized resistance against the Bolsheviks in southern Russia; revolts also flare up in Siberia. Opponents of Bolshevism become known as "Whites"; pro-Bolshevik forces are called "Reds." (See Whites in the Civil War)

1918

5-6 JANUARY: The Constituent Assembly meets in Petrograd but is dissolved by Red Guards after one day. Public demonstrations against the dissolution are dispersed by force. 15 JANUARY: The Bolshevik government formally founds the Red Army, to be led by Commissar of War Leon Trotsky. 20 JANUARY: Lenin decrees a separation of church and state.

31 AUGUST: Bolsheviks achieve a majority in the Petrograd Soviet; several other city Soviets are already under their control. (See Russian Working Class)

21 JANUARY: The Soviet government repudiates all tsarist debts.

1 SEPTEMBER: Kerensky declares Russia a republic.

22 JANUARY: Ukraine declares its independence from Russia.

5 SEPTEMBER: Bolsheviks win a majority in the Moscow Soviet.

FEBRUARY: Bolshevik forces crush the autonomous Central Asian government established in Kokand. The city is sacked, and 14,000 people are killed. (See Red Terror)

10 OCTOBER: Lenin advocates a seizure of power, and the Political Bureau (Politburo) of Bolshevik Central Committees is formed for quick executive actions.

1 FEBRUARY: The Bolshevik regime adopts the Gregorian (Western) Calendar.

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930S

xxi

16 FEBRUARY: Lithuania declares its independence from Russia. 23 FEBRUARY: The first mass draft for the Red Army occurs (23 February subsequently becomes a national holiday celebrating the Soviet army and, after 1991, "defenders of the Fatherland.") 24 FEBRUARY: Estonia declares its independence from Russia. 3 MARCH: The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ends Russia's participation in World War I. The Soviet government surrenders a vast amount of territory and resources to secure peace. (See Russia in World War I and Treaty of Brest-Litovsk)

SEPTEMBER: The Red Terror is officially launched after an assassination attempt against Lenin (30 August) and the killing of the Petrograd Cheka chief; tens of thousands die as a result. (See Red Terror) 21 OCTOBER: Mandatory registration of all citizens for labor occurs. (See Early Soviet Economy)

11 MARCH: The Russian capital is moved from Petrograd to Moscow.

11 NOVEMBER: Germany and the Western allies agree to an armistice, and the Germans are obliged to withdraw from the Eastern territories. The Soviet government renounces the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. (See Paris Peace Settlement and Treaty of Brest-Litovsk)

4 APRIL: Japanese interventionist forces arrive in the Russian Far East.

18 NOVEMBER: Latvia declares its independence from Russia.

13 APRIL: Kornilov is killed in battle against Bolshevik forces. General Anton Denikin becomes top White commander in southern Russia. (See Whites in the Civil War)

DECEMBER: French and British forces occupy strategic points along the Black Sea coast and in the Caucasus.

26 MAY: Georgia declares its independence from Russia.

1919

28 MAY: Armenia and Azerbaijan declare their independence from Russia.

FEBRUARY: A conflict breaks out between Soviet Russia and newly independent Poland.

29 MAY: A Sovnarkom decree makes Red Army service obligatory for all men between the ages of 18 and 40. (See Imperial and Soviet Continuities)

MARCH: The Communist International (Comintern) is founded. Bolshevik leader Grigorii Zinoviev is appointed its chairman. (See National Liberation Movements)

MAY-JUNE: The Soviet government decrees nationalization of industry and most economic enterprises; private property and inheritance rights are subsequently abrogated.

18-23 MARCH: The Eighth Party Congress establishes the Politburo as the de facto leading organ of government in Soviet Russia (it will remain so until 1990). The Bolsheviks adopt the name Russian Communist Party (the party's official name remains Russian Social Democratic and Workers7 Party [bolshevik] until 1952).

MAY-JULY: The Czech Legion, composed of Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war held in Russia, seizes much of Siberia from Bolshevik control in an attempt to depart for the Western Front. (See Whites in the Civil War) JUNE-SEPTEMBER: Allied military units arrive in northern Russia; they later organize anti-Bolshevik civil governments in and around the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. 1 JULY: The Western Siberian government is formed in Omsk; it comes under dictatorial control of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak on 18 November. 6-7 JULY: Socialist Revolutionaries rise against the Bolsheviks in Moscow and are brutally suppressed. (See Red Terror) 10 JULY: The first Soviet constitution is promulgated. xxii

16-17 JULY: Former Tsar Nicholas II and his family are murdered at Ekaterinburg. (See Romanov Murders)

HISTORY

25 MARCH: Lenin, Trotsky, Josef Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Nikolai Krestinsky are appointed to the Politburo. APRIL: French forces withdraw from southern Ukraine after naval mutinies. AUGUST: The Western Allies begin to withdraw interventionist forces from Russia; Japanese forces remain in the Far East until October 1922 and on Sakhalin Island until April 1925. OCTOBER: White forces come close to winning the Civil War. Denikin reaches Orel, 250 miles south of Moscow. Meanwhile, General Nikolai ludenich, marching from Estonia, reaches the outskirts of Petrograd before being turned back. (See Whites in the Civil War)

IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930

NOVEMBER-DECEMBER: Kolchak's regime in Siberia is defeated by partisans and the Red Army; Kolchak is captured and then executed on 7 February of the next year.

1920

JANUARY: The Central Asian khanate of Khiva falls to the Red Army. SPRING: The Poles invade Soviet territory; Red forces counterattack and invade Poland but are defeated outside Warsaw. APRIL: The Red Army seizes control of Azerbaijan. (See Nationalities Policies) 4 APRIL: Baron Petr Wrangel becomes commanderin-chief of the Volunteer Army; its operations are now largely confined to southern Ukraine and Crimea. 5 APRIL: Zinoviev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Mikhail Kalinin enter the Politburo as candidate (nonvoting) members (Zinoviev becomes a full member in March 1921; Bukharin in June 1924; and Kalinin in January 1926). AUGUST: The Red Army conquers the Central Asian khanate of Bukhara. All Russian possessions in Central Asia are now under Soviet control. (See Nationalities Policies) OCTOBER: A cease-fire takes effect in the Polish-Soviet War. 14

NOVEMBER: Wrangel departs from Crimea, after conducting an evacuation of his army and many refugees. White resistance is almost completely at an end. (See Whites in the Civil War)

DECEMBER: The Red Army occupies Armenia.

1921 A famine begins and claims an estimated 5 million lives; American aid prevents a larger catastrophe. (See Early Soviet Economy) FEBRUARY: Soviet forces invade Georgia, and all Russian possessions in the Caucasus are now under Soviet control. 2-17 MARCH: A revolt of sailors at Kronstadt naval base is brutally suppressed. 8-16

MARCH: The Tenth Party Congress meets in Petrograd and approves the New Economic Policy (NEP), allowing for a limited market economy. (See Early Soviet Economy and New Economic Policy)

16 MARCH: Britain concludes a formal trade agreement with Soviet Russia. 18 MARCH: The Treaty of Riga ends the PolishSoviet War. HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

6 JULY: The Red Army completes a campaign defeating White forces in Mongolia and establishes communist rule there (lasts until 1990). (See Nationalities Policies and Whites in the Civil War)

1922

APRIL: Soviet representatives take part in the Rapallo diplomatic conference, where they conclude a nonaggression treaty with Germany. 3 APRIL: Josef Stalin is appointed party general secretary, giving him immense power over personnel decisions. He holds office until his death on 5 March 1953. (See Imperial and Soviet Continuities and Revolution from Above) 24 MAY: Italy concludes a trade agreement with the Soviet Union. 30 DECEMBER: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) is formed.

1923

9 MARCH: Lenin is incapacitated after a series of strokes; Stalin's power grows.

1924

21 JANUARY: Lenin dies. 24 JANUARY: Petrograd is renamed Leningrad in honor of the deceased leader; the city's name reverts to St. Petersburg in September 1991. 27 JANUARY: Lenin is interred on display in a Red Square mausoleum; his corpse remains there. 31 JANUARY: A new Soviet Constitution is promulgated. FEBRUARY: The "Lenin enrollment" campaign to increase working-class party membership begins. (See Russian Working Class) 1 FEBRUARY: Britain's Labour government formally recognizes the Soviet Union. 8 AUGUST: Britain grants most-favored-nation status to the Soviet Union. 25 OCTOBER: A letter from Zinoviev to the Soviet ambassador to Britain urging revolution is published in the press just before national elections. Labour loses, and the succeeding Conservative government repudiates the August commercial treaty with the Soviet Union on 21 November. 28 OCTOBER: France recognizes the Soviet Union. DECEMBER: Stalin formally advocates a doctrine of "socialism in one country," instead of promoting world revolution. VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA,

1890-1930S

xxiii

1925

JANUARY: Trotsky is dismissed as war commissar. 20-21 JANUARY: Japan concludes a diplomatic agreement with the Soviet Union. Japan formally recognizes Moscow and withdraws its troops from Soviet territory (completed on 4 April) in exchange for economic concessions. 12 OCTOBER: Germany signs a commercial trade agreement with the Soviet Union.

1926

APRIL: Anti-Stalinist leaders Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev form the "United Opposition" in the Central Committee. (See Revolution from Above) 23 JULY: Zinoviev is removed from the Politburo. 23 OCTOBER: Trotsky and Kamenev are removed from the Politburo; Zinoviev is removed from the Comintern chairmanship and replaced by Bukharin.

1927

24 MAY: The British government severs diplomatic relations with Moscow over espionage allegations and underground agitation. NOVEMBER: Trotsky and Zinoviev are expelled from the Party (Zinoviev is executed in 1936; Trotsky is murdered in 1940).

xxiv

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

DECEMBER: Bolshevik "leftist" Kamenev is expelled from the Party; he is executed in 1936.

1928 16 JANUARY: Trotsky is exiled to Central Asia. MAY-JULY: The "purge" trials begin when dozens of engineers are tried for "sabotage" at Shakhty. 1 OCTOBER: The First Five Year Plan and crash industrialization officially begin; NEP comes to an end. (See Early Soviet Economy and New Economic Policy)

1929 31 JANUARY: Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Union. AUGUST: Stalin condemns the "right opposition." 17 NOVEMBER: Bukharin, a leading supporter of NEP, is removed from the Politburo; he is executed in 1938. 21 DECEMBER: Stalin's fiftieth birthday celebrations stimulate the growth of his "personality cult." (See Revolution from Above)

1930 5 JANUARY: A campaign of massive agricultural collectivization is officially launched. Virtually all Soviet agriculture is concentrated in state-run farms by 1932.

VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA,

1890-1930

ARISTOCRACY Was the nobility a dominant force in Russian society at the end of the nineteenth century? Viewpoint: Yes. The Russian nobility was an adaptive elite that remained a pillar of the state until the Revolution of 1917. Viewpoint: No. The traditional role of the nobility eroded in the last half of the nineteenth century because of changes in social composition, legal status, and cultural attitudes. Aristocracy has many meanings in modern contexts. Traditional views of Imperial Russia contextualize its aristocracy as a study in decline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The class of hereditary landowners that had long held sway over Russian political, social, and economic life seemed to be on the wane. Over time it owned less land, held fewer positions, and enjoyed less prominence than at any other time in its history. Together with the rise of new social groups that controlled more of Russia's wealth and civic prominence, the old-fashioned estate system seemed out of touch, and its pinnacle, the aristocracy, appeared to be in decline. Yet, as Imperial Russia is understood with greater acuity as a modernizing society, it appears that the aristocracy was no exception in this process. Even as it lost rural landholdings, it was gaining power by buying urban property, investing in commercial ventures, and commodifying its remaining lands. In politics, military affairs, and social institutions, it largely retained its dominance at a time when other European aristocracies were losing theirs. Indeed, a sizable percentage of aristocrats entered government service. In addition, the social ideals of the nobility attracted the rest of society to its culture and conventions. Nonnobles who followed noble career paths often reached middle age or retirement as nobles, a status they coveted and craved, and which conferred many advantages.

Viewpoint: Yes. The Russian nobility was an adaptive elite that remained a pillar of the state until the Revolution of 1917. Imperial Russia's aristocracy remained an important pillar of the state until 1917. Although new space was becoming available to the country's growing middle groups, educated population, and even members of its urban and rural lower classes,

the nobility continued to exercise great influence over Russia's political, social, economic, and cultural life. For most Russians, noble status remained a coveted mark of distinction, identified with success and opportunities for social advancement for one's self and one's family. Misconceptions about the Russian nobility and the general role of "class" in modern societies have led to the portrayal of national aristocracies as exclusive and virtually impenetrable strata sitting atop highly regimented societies. But in fact, the Russian aristocracy, like that of most

1

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other nations in modern times, formed a porous and open elite. Noble status in Russia was not exclusively tied to birth. From Peter the Great's establishment of the Table of Ranks in 1722 until the end of the Empire in 1917, it formally depended on merit demonstrated in state service. Peter's system allowed servitors in the military, bureaucracy, and imperial court to rise according to their abilities. His command that the old Muscovite nobility spend their lives in state service incorporated them into this system as well. The attainment of noble status, which offered social distinction, the prospect of high-level appointments, financial and other material rewards from the state, and further otherwise unattainable advantages, became a major incentive for those of nonnoble birth. In Peter's original system, anyone who reached the eighth rank (chin) of the Table's total of fourteen became a hereditary nobleman with all the rights and privileges of any other hereditary nobleman, no matter how ancient or dignified his lineage. In practice this system opened hereditary nobility to anyone who attained the rank of captain in the army, lieutenant commander in the navy, or the equivalent ranks at court and in the state 2

bureaucracy. Lower levels of the Table of Ranks conferred personal nobility, or noble status only for one's lifetime, though bearers of that distinction in effect enjoyed most of the social privileges of hereditary nobles (a notable exception being the right to own serfs). Even as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, an estimated one-third to one-half of the Russian nobility fell into the personal category. Together with first-generation hereditary noblemen, whom some personal nobles subsequently became, they formed a large portion of the elite who had acquired noble status through achievement rather than birth. In cities, moreover, state recognition for distinguished people created the nonnoble but nevertheless privileged category of "honored citizens," a designation also divided into hereditary and nonhereditary subgroups. Open to merchants, philanthropists, city officials, professionals, and other noted urban dwellers, it reinforced the values of a sociopolitical system that traded privilege and ascriptive status for state and public service. Rather than becoming more rigid over time, as many scholars have alleged, the Russian elite offered more opportunities for inclusion and

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

advancement in the late-imperial era than at any other time. Russia's surging urban population, partly facilitated by the abolition of serfdom in 1861, met a corresponding increase in educational, professional, business, and other statusaltering opportunities. The complexities of modern state administration and warfare translated into greater need and more open positions for bureaucrats and officers, the two principal areas that allowed ordinary Russians to achieve noble status. In a practical sense, therefore, a wider road to social promotion—and thus ennoblement—had to develop, for the existing stock of noblemen was numerically insufficient to fill the expanding administrative and officer corps. Many studies frame the declining proportions of officers and bureaucrats of noble birth as evidence of the elite's decline, but stating the case in these terms is misleading. In absolute terms at least as many, if not more, noblemen were entering state service as at any previous time. The changes merely indicated that more opportunities came into being for Russians of nonnoble birth, and that they were taking advantage of them. As the huge number of personal and first-generation hereditary nobles demonstrates, the most talented among them acquired noble status by advancing in their careers. Notwithstanding their nonnoble birth, inclusion in the elite conferred on them its privileges and inculcated them with its values. Even raising the standards of ennoblement did not stem this rising tide. Reforms in the 1840s and 1850s did increase Peter's original threshold for acquiring noble status. Reaching the rank of colonel in the army, captain in the navy, and an equivalent rank in the bureaucracy became necessary for acquiring hereditary nobility in the later era. Tellingly, these reforms were enacted precisely because elite Russians feared that their order faced major and debasing changes as a result of military and bureaucratic expansion. At the same time, the increasing need for officers of flag rank and upper-level administrators meant that more promotions were available. Colonels and captains are not altogether rare in modern armies and navies, and every officer who became one in late-imperial Russia, regardless of his origins, became a hereditary nobleman. The frequently cited statistic that officers of noble birth accounted for just above 50 percent of the total in 1900, compared with about 90 percent a few decades earlier, is thus not terribly dramatic. By identifying nobility solely with birth, it fails to reveal either the acquisition of hereditary noble status by every nonnoble who got promoted to the requisite rank or the fluid and meritocratic nature of the social system that allowed for it. Nor does this figure tell the whole story: among generals, admirals, cavalry commanders, elite guards regiHISTORY IN DISPUTE,

ment officers, and other prestigious categories, the percentage of birth nobles remained high almost until the end. Although the mass mobilization of World War I required an exponentially greater number of officers than even the much enlarged prewar army, the fundamental character of Russia's social system did not change before the collapse of the monarchy. Some 70 percent of officers were of peasant origin by 1917, but it bears repeating that those promoted to or above colonel, a category that included a number of World War I generals and several leading figures of the anti-Bolshevik White armies (which fought largely to preserve the social status quo of which they were a high-ranking part), legally became hereditary nobles with all the rights and privileges. The evolution of the state bureaucracy followed largely on the same lines. What appeared to be declining noble presence within it and attempts to deny nobility to occupants of its lower levels in fact acknowledged the power of social mobility through service. Relatively commonplace administrators were qualifying for nobility in greater numbers than ever before. The revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin's father, Ilia Ulianov, achieved hereditary noble status when he became a regional secondaryschool inspector. Even if an official did not rise high on the career ladder, exceptional accomplishment in a lower chin or 25 years of unblemished service entitled him to meritorious chivalric decorations that conferred noble status. Over time the second category, simply holding on in a bureaucratic job long enough and without receiving a reprimand, became a common route to nobility. Philanthropists, businessmen, and others who rendered less-traditional service to government and society were also recognized and ennobled by membership in these orders, or rewarded through membership in the privileged honored citizen category. Urban dwellers who qualified for such distinctions also became more diverse over time. Beginning in 1894, for example, music students graduated from the Conservatories of St. Petersburg and Moscow qualified for personal honored citizenship, a status previously extended to graduates of the Academy of Fine Arts. After 1902 male Conservatory graduates were formally taken into state service at the lowest chin of the Table of Ranks. As Russia's officer corps, bureaucracy, and active civil society expanded in size, so did the ranks of its nobility. Seymour Becker has estimated that as many as 1,500 people a year were becoming nobles in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a figure that doubtlessly increased as the service organs that conferred ennoblement grew further still in the early years of the twentieth century. Statistically that VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930

3

TABLE OF RANKS Tft/s table was created by Peter the Great in 1722 in an attempt to organize military and bureaucratic rankings in the Russian Empire:

Grade

Naval Rank

Army Rank

Civilian Rank

I

General-Admiral

Generalissimo/ Field Marshal

Chancellor or Active Privy Counselor

il

Admiral

General of Artillery, Cavalry, or Infantry

Active Privy Counselor

HI

Vice Admiral

Lieutenant General

Privy Counselor

IV

Rear Admiral

Major General

Active State Counselor

V

Captain-Commander

Brigadier

State Counselor

VI

First Captain

Colonel

Collegia! Counselor

vii

Second Captain

Lieutenant Colonel

Court Counselor

vm

Lieutenant-Captain of the Fleet; Third Captain of Artillery

Major

Collegial Assessor

IX

Lieutenant of the Fleet; Lieutenant-Captain of Artillery

Captain or Cavalry Captain

Titled Counselor

X

Lieutenant of Artillery

Staff Captain or Staff Cavalry Captain

Collegia! Secretary

XI

Secretary of the Senate

XII

Midshipman

Lieutenant

Gubernia Secretary

XIII

Artillery Constable

Sub-lieutenant

Registrar of the Senate

Guidon Bearer

Collegial Registrar

xtv

Source: Basil Dmytryshyn, ed, and trans,, Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700-1917 (Fart Worth, Tex,: Holt, ffinehart & Winston, 1990), pp, 19-21.

4

HISTORY

IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA,

1890-1930

worked out to an average of more than four individuals acquiring noble status each and every day. Acquiring the advantages and distinction of nobility was a remarkably serious aspiration for many Russians. In that sense aristocracy remained a pillar not only of the state but of the society that drew recognition, identity, and status from it. Declining landownership has long been taken as another and perhaps more obvious sign of the Russian nobility's decay. Raw data that show increasing numbers of landless nobles and greater sales of noble land belie two important facts, however. First, in contrast to earlier times, the large number of newly created service nobles were generally not given land grants by the government in the late-imperial period. Achieving noble status brought many other advantages, but the swelling ranks of the Russian nobility received privileges divorced from rural landownership. If a majority of nobles did not own property after 1900, it was because many of them and many of their families owed their status to service in the military or in urban administrative centers and had possessed no rural land to begin with. Second, in an industrializing society, wealth and landownership generally lose their traditional connections and, in some cases, become mutually exclusive. In any modernizing nation, which Russia was fast becoming, it became more profitable to own urban real estate, shares and stock options in corporations, and other liquid investments than agricultural property. This shift was especially popular when the agrarian land in question was of the relatively unproductive quality that dominated most of the Russian countryside. Selling noble property became particularly irresistible in the late nineteenth century, when the rural peasant population experienced massive growth, creating a scarcity of farmland, higher demand, and huge rural real estate price inflation. The abolition of serfdom in 1861 uniquely facilitated this process, for th peasants not only became eligible to purchase land for the first time, but created an eager market for it. Noble landowners sold off their estates not because they were forced to but because the monetary value of their land was much more productively invested in Russia's surging industrial sector, foreign commercial ventures, or government bonds. Unlike most Western old regimes, moreover, Russia's had no legal prohibitions or cultural taboos preventing nobles from becoming involved in business and industry. Many noblemen owned factories, invested in the stock market, traded goods and services, and engaged in other activities that proved the modern economy a legitimate option and simply made good financial sense. This dynamism also helped stimulate Russia's HISTORY

modernization and industrialization, a fact that partly explains why the government adopted few practical measures to prevent further sales of noble land. Commodifying agricultural property was thus no hard task, and several social factors helped it along. Many noble landowners, first of all, had little personal or family attachment to the lands they were selling. Estates granted as rewards for service in earlier times had typically been held for only two or three generations, and then more as a source of revenue than an ideal home. For political reasons, Russian rul ers had the habit of distributing estates and their resident serf populations to noble families who had no roots in the given region and thus no particular sympathy with its people or their concerns: no ties, in other words, that could decouple their loyalty from the state. Whether or not they became attached to their lands, nobles assiduously pursuing careers in the military or bureaucracy were forced to spend large parts of their adult lives away from them. Although sentimentality for the countryside and its pursuits undeniably existed and found expression in the works of Anton Chekhov and other writers, landowners who rarely or never visited their estates or found life on them remote, boring, and pointless were quite common. Indeed, banishment to one's estate in the distant provinces remained a common and unpleasant punishment for troublesome aristocrats living in urban areas right up until 1917. In another expression of Russia's modernization, much of its noble elite, if it had a choice, simply preferred to live in urban areas, especially St. Petersburg or Moscow, because they offered sophisticated cultural life, more excitement, and greater stimulation, in addition to opportunities for career advancement and social prestige. The concentration of nobles in St. Petersburg around 1900 was at least five times higher than in the country at large, probably not as the result of accident or desperation. Chekhov's three sisters may never have gotten to Moscow, but a huge number of real people in their class did. Russia's nobility is therefore best seen as an adaptive and modernizing elite rather than a decaying order ripe for destruction. Its status, never defined by birth alone, extended to newcomers who, regardless of whatever snobber they may have encountered in high society, enjoyed all the privileges and distinctions of nobility. As a social group defined by state service and promoted according to that service's hierarchy, nobility remained a pillar of the state.

IN DISPUTE, VOLUME

-PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

5

Viewpoint: No. The traditional role of the nobility eroded in the last half of the nineteenth century because of changes in social composition, legal status, and cultural attitudes. In the last half century of tsarist rule, the Russian aristocracy (dvorianstvo) lost its position of dominance in Russian society, the apex of which it had reached during the rule of Catherine the Great (1762-1796). The traditional privileges of the nobility over the peasantry were eliminated, and Russia began moving away from being a society of "estates" (sosloviia) and toward one defined by legal equality for individuals. The role that nobles once played as the partners of the autocracy was dismantled in the years immediately prior to the outbreak of World War I. The traditional power and primacy of the nobility came by providing the state with servitors and controlling the peasantry through the institution of serfdom. Before the immense changes that all of Russian society began experiencing in the second half of the nineteenth century, these two roles of the nobility were filled in tandem. Yet, in the last third of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, the nobility underwent huge changes in social composition, legal status, and perhaps most important, in mindset and culture. Indeed, several new groups emerged from within the nobility, including landless state servitors and a largely urbanized, professional intelligentsia. Consequently, the coherence of the nobility itself as a group was weakening. In the course of the Great Reforms of the 1860s, the nobility lost the exclusive right to be the state's representatives in the countryside, and by 1917 the nobility had few legal rights that others within the Russian population lacked. After 1862, noblemen no longer controlled the rural police, and with the 1864 introduction of the institution of local self-government known as the zemstpo (plural, zemstva), nonnobles were able to participate in the administration of local affairs. As a result of legal reform, also introduced in 1864, nobles no longer had special courts to hear cases but instead were subject to newly created all-estate courts. Finally, the reform of Russia's tax system between the 1860s and the 1880s moved Russia away from its traditional poll-tax system to one based on individual landownership and inheritance, consequently raising the nobility's tax burden. Russia's quickening modernization and strengthening civil society, particularly in the last two decades of the tsarist era, also contributed to the decline of importance of the nobility as a group. Indicative of the nobility's role in society 6

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

overall was its flagging influence in the zemstva. The state made efforts to buttress the position of the nobility in these bodies with the 1890 revision of the zemstvo statutes, but this intervention was resented among educated liberal nobles active in the zemstva for imposing increased state oversight. The critical stance of the zemstva toward the state was solidified in 1904 and 1905, when zemstva activists took a leading role in calling for civil rights and constitutional reform. Many of these people were nobles, motivated not by estate interests but rather by a desire for social and political reform that was shared by many nonnoble Russians with higher education or employment in the liberal professions. Arguably, the vitality of the aristocracy as a rural elite was also greatly weakened in the postreform period. First of all, fewer nobles held landed estates. In 1858 at least 80 percent of hereditary nobles (nobles whose children inherited noble status, as opposed to "personal" nobles, whose children did not inherit the status of their noble parents) received their income from landed estates; by 1905 this portion had fallen to 30 percent. There is disagreement among historians concerning the economic status of the landed nobility who remained in the countryside in the late-tsarist period. The Chekhovian image of these nobles as feckless and irresponsible in their use of their wealth has been called into question. Indeed, some nobles who sold their lands in turn purchased other agricultural properties or engaged in business enterprises that brought financial success. Yet, even revisionist accounts disputing the "decline of the nobility" agree that the Russian aristocracy in the last decade of tsarist rule was far from what it had been before the era of the Great Reforms. The central fact is that by the early twentieth century, Russian nobles as a corporate group were not as dominant either socially or economically in Russian society as they had been a half century earlier. The Russian state did not exert itself in support of the economic interests of the landed aristocracy in the late nineteenth century, instead encouraging industrial over agrarian development. As Russia's economy gradually became more modernized, economic opportunities increased for nonnobles, such as merchants and other members of the growing, and increasingly wealthy, bourgeoisie. Individual nobles entered the expanding industrial economy as entrepreneurs and businessmen, but they did so embracing not semifeudal orders of lords and peasants, but rather a capitalist economy with laws protecting the individual's drive for achievement. In Russia's new urbanized society, influence and social prominence were also open to nonnoble professionals, as well as to publishers, journalists,

V O L U M E 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y R U S S I A , 1 8 9 0 - 1 9 3 0

entertainers, and others who found niches in an increasingly commercial culture. With Nicholas IPs granting of broad civil rights and the creation of the State Duma, or parliament, in October 1905, aristocrats could openly participate in politics within legal parties, not merely through positions of state service. Nobles, however, were not unified politically. They were prominent in the leadership of two key parties competing in the first two Duma elections: the pro-reform, liberal Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) and the more conservative Union of October 17, or Octobrists. The new electoral law imposed illegally by Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin in June 1907 gave landowners and wealthy citizens (and consequently, noblemen) greater representation than other groups had; a a result, Octobrists, most of them landowning nobles, dominated in the Third Duma. Yet, the electoral majority Stolypin had gone to such lengths to achieve was internally weak and divided. Conservative nobles opposed Stolypin's aim to reform local government by widening electoral representation in the zemstva and increasing state oversight at the expense of local nobility. A conservative group known as the United Nobility, formed in 1906, together with other nobles within provincial and other local-level noble organizations, wielded pressure on the State Council and even Nicholas II himself in a successful effort in 1911 to scuttle key elements of Stolypin's reform agenda. Stolypin had seen in the zemstva a partner with the state rather than a competitor, and beginning with his tenure as prime minister the numbers of nonnoble educated professionals and specialists hired to work in the zemstva (the so-called Third Element), whose political views were generally radically democratic, expanded greatly. With further intensive growth of zemstvo initiatives during World War I, the role of the conservative nobility within most zemstva was completely eclipsed. Russia's increasingly professional bureaucracy also posed a threat to the traditional position of the aristocracy. At the turn of the twentieth century, the majority of those in the highest levels of the bureaucracy were still of noble background, but the portion of noblemen in the middle and lower ranks of the bureaucracy was falling. Moreover, even bureaucrats who officially were of the noble estate identified more as state servitors than as aristocrats. Already by 1897 the link between landownership and state service was all but completely severed. The fall in the number of army and naval officers who were noblemen was more dramatic. While in 1864 nearly nine out of ten officers were nobles, in 1900 only about 50 percent were nobles. The Russian aristocracy, politically diverse and inconstant in the last decade and a half of HISTORY

the tsarist era, could not act as a unified group to help bring about the changes needed to strengthen the social fabric of Russian society. If there was a dominant trend among nobles active in politics qua nobles, it was a steady move ever further to the Right. Opposed, on the one hand, to liberals (both nobles and nonnobles) demanding a democratic political order and deep-cutting land reform, and on the other, to a state bureaucracy composed of professional administrators committed to rationalizing and modernizing government, Russia's conservative nobles turned into a dead end as they sought allies among the most reactionary circles at the tsar's court. In the last half century of tsarist rule, Russia's nobles had failed to parlay their institutional advantages—especially the corporate provincial noble organizations inherited from the past and their original dominance in the zemstva—into the power to play a strong, stabilizing role in Russia's nascent political system. They were thus unable to help Russia avoid the social and political chaos that enveloped the country in 1917. -BRADLEY WOODWORTH, YALE UNIVERSITY

References Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Lute Imperial Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985). Terrence Emmons, "The Russian Nobility and Party Politics before the Revolution," in The Nobility in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited by Ivo Banac and Paul Bushkovitch (Ne Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies, 1983), pp. 177-220. Roberta T. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Boris Mironov, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000). Thomas Porter and William Gleason, "The Democratization of the Zemstvo," in Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia, edited by Mary Schaeffer Conroy (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998), pp. 228-242. Porter and Gleason, "The Zemstvo and the Transformation of Russian Society," in Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia, edited by Conroy (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998), pp. 60-87 Elise K. Wirtschafter, Social Identity in Imperial Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997).

I N D I S P U T E , V O L U M E 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y R U S S I A ,

1890-1930

7

CIVIL SOCIETY Were the independent social institutions of Imperial Russia—including the media, professional associations, charitable groups, and artistic enterprises— contributing to the modernization of the country during the decades before 1917? Viewpoint: Yes. A burgeoning Russian civil society was gradually creating a modern and democratic Russia during the last decade of tsarism. Viewpoint: No. The development of Russian civil society was restricted by the tsarist autocracy and then destroyed by the Bolshevik regime, both of which considered independent social institutions a threat to government authority.

A recent trend in the historiography of Imperial Russia has examined evidence of its capacity to sustain civil society. A term borrowed from the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who used it to describe the emergence of independent social and economic institutions in Western Europe, civil society can include such relatively modern innovations as the mass media, local government, business and industry, professional groups, voluntary associations, and other communities of citizenship that function beyond the purview of the central state. Many scholars of prerevolutionary Russia have found its civil society an apt and somewhat neglected area of study. Contrary to traditional scholarship, which emphasized evidence of social discontent as the cause behind the revolutions of 1917, newer studies have focused on positive evidence of modernization. They argue that—with emerging democratic institutions, a relatively free public sphere, and surging civic involvement in the economy and society—paths other than massive upheaval were open to Russia. Yet, others do not agree that Russia was developing a sufficiently modern society capable of avoiding revolution in the early twentieth century. They assert that an unswervingly autocratic government, gaping social inequality, deteriorating urban conditions, and other major problems derailed any potential for Russia to move toward modern functionality and left revolution as the only possible outcome.

8

Viewpoint: Yes. A burgeoning Russian civil society was gradually creating a modern and democratic Russia during the last decade of tsarism. Conventional wisdom has long held that authoritarian rule is intrinsic to Russia and that its people do not possess the public initiative, expertise in free enterprise, or experience in selfgovernment to limit government intervention in their political and economic life; thus, Russia is unable to overcome its historically underdeveloped sense of private property and civil liberties. European travelers' accounts—such as those of Adam Olearius in the seventeenth century and Astolphe, Marquis de Custine, in 1839—invariably asserted that, because the Russian people were born slaves, they were accustomed to, and actually appreciated, strong rulers. It has become almost prescribed for scholars to emphasize the arbitrariness that has characterized Russian political culture, at least as compared to Western political models. Russians themselves have often added weight to the argument that nearly insurmountable difficulties prevented the development of a civil society in Russia. The censor Aleksandr Nikitenko noted in the middle of the nineteenth century that "our qualities as responsible citizens have not yet been formed because we do not yet have the essential elements without which there can be only civic cohabitation but not civic virtue, namely public-spiritedness, a sense of legality, and honor." To be sure, the tsarist regime sought to dominate the economic and political life of Russia in a manner that would have been considered intolerable in the West. There is, however, considerable evidence suggesting that in the final decades of Imperial Russia, its educated society was becoming increasingly active and reformist and that a civil society was in the making. Whereas many previous studies of Imperial Russia were replete with learned expositions about the fragmented nature of that society, discounting even the possibility that a civil society could develop there, some historians are now exploring this model of theoretical analysis to counter "the unwarranted sense of historical inevitability" that has permeated scholarship in the field. This scholarship also serves to discredit simple and invidious comparisons between a backward Russia with an inert society and an idealized West that had tapped into the initiative and dynamism of its entrepreneurial classes. These scholars acknowledge that the tsarist government was still authoritarian on the eve of World War I, but they argue that a careful examination of social and political developments in the quarter century before the outHISTORY IN DISPUTE,

break of conflict allows for a more positive assessment of the role that autonomous civic groups might have played in the transformation of Russia from a servile to a civil society. There has been much debate among social scientists over the definition of the term civil society and to what extent its development in Russia might have coincided with that of a Russian middle class. Broadly defined, the term refers to a social structure in which there is an abundance of voluntary associations and one in which professional elements have developed organizations that are separate from the state. In his treatise Democracy in America (1835-1840), Alexis de Tocqueville noted that voluntary associations and independent institutions of local self-government promote the development of an open, or civil, society. Examining the development of civil society has proven useful as a means through which to investigate the processes of modernization. Voluntary associations exemplify the ideals of public service and philanthropy, while independent organs of local selfgovernment provide for citizen participation in governance. They are essential preconditions for the development of the public sphere, a term that the German philosopher Jiirgen Habermas used to describe the independent public activity that the middle class first undertook in the eighteenth century. Tocqueville also noted the close ties between the development of civil society and the public sphere: "Civil associations pave the way for political ones, but on the other hand, the art of political association singularly develops and improves this technique for civil purpose." Through intercourse with Europe, a civil society developed in Russia. Peter the Great's efforts to modernize Russia by grafting Western technology onto a fundamentally different system of governance sowed the seeds of social and political pluralism, exposing the Russian elite to the dynamic models of Western polities. Peter virtually created a Westernized elite, which then began to demand a larger role in the governance of Russia and an extension of its privileges. Europe had also struggled with the concept of citizen participation in governance; thus, the history of Imperial Russia should be viewed as being within the context of European history. In the Russian case the concepts of natural law posited by the French Enlightenment ultimately led to friction between a state that still held to an ethos like that of the "enlightened despots" of eighteenth-century Europe and an increasingly independent nobility and a nascent middle class. The conflict arose over the role that society should be allotted in the government's quest for public cooperation to resolve the social problems that inevitably arise in modernizing societies. The last tsars' programs of modernization called into existence a middle class that eventually VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

9

Late-eighteenth-century painting of Catherine the Great, who, as the enlightened despot of Russia, encouraged the growth of an educated elite while reducing much of the free peasantry to serfdom (Associated Press)

10

demanded an end to the restrictions imposed on it by the state. The regime continued to espouse outdated ideals and to extol the virtues of autocracy while pursuing the industrialization of the state; it remained wedded to the concept of a well-ordered police state and never accepted the political consequences of modernization. By the turn of the twentieth century, cities in European Russia were experiencing soaring rates of growth and social diversification, which implied the possibility of public identities similar to those of Western models. In 1912 the Moscow city directory listed about six hundred independent associations and private groups devoted to civic improvement. Writing about the proliferation of voluntary associations in Moscow on the eve of World War I, Joseph Bradley has concluded that these civic-minded, independent associations "contributed significantly to the formation of sensibilities commonly thought of as middle-class in Western Europe and North America." The educated men and women who participated in these associations took great pride in their professional qualifications, and they began to demand that responsibility for the common welfare be shared between the government and its citizens. While some scholars have asserted that a middle class did not exist in late Imperial Russia, many specialists (including Jo Ann Ruckman, Charles Ruud, Paul Gregory, and several Russian HISTORY

IN DISPUTE,

historians) have found evidence of an incipient Russian bourgeoisie with highly developed entrepreneurial skills, which was organized into social and civic groups and had a coherent vision for the transformation of Russia from a servile to a civil society. In addition, zemtsy, activists in the zemstva, organs of self-government (singular zemstvo), were calling for an increase in these organs' sphere of competence and the right to coordinate public activity. The nexus between these two societal groups were the nonnoble technical specialists employed by the zemstvo, to carry out the myriad tasks of local self-government. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the zemstva employed more than one hundred thousand of these specialistsincluding statisticians, agronomists, veterinarians, teachers, and doctors—who considered themselves to be engaged in public service, as opposed to the tsarist civil service. These professional men and women, whatever their social origins, did not think of themselves as being members of the soslovie (estate) system because the preemancipation system of social orders and their traditional assemblies no longer fit a rapidly changing Russia, with its emerging middle class and its many voluntary and professional associations in cultural, social, and economic spheres. Civil society provides for an interlocking network of nonpolitical relations among various groups that carry out economic, social, and political functions independently of the state. More important, the range and nature of these contacts were increasing in the years immediately prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. For example, the growing complexity of zemstvo programs, the creation of new zemstvo fields such as agronomy and statistical analysis, and the sheer volume of zemstvo business necessitated an increased reliance on the emerging class of specialists and increased contact and cooperation with their professional associations. The zemstvo created institutional space that afforded these specialists greater input and autonomy through various advisory congresses and conferences, councils, bureaus, and commissions whose opinions were heeded by elected zemstvo assemblies and their executive boards. The hundreds of z*mtfw-sponsored conferences that were convened to discuss technical, social, economic, and other issues during the prewar years were instrumental in fostering the public space for an emerging civil society in provincial Russia. This phenomenon was replicated in the cities of the empire and perhaps represented tsarist Russia's best hope for a modern democratic government and a thriving capitalist sector. In Moscow and several other industrial centers the various philanthropic organizations, members of municipal governments (many of whom came from the business community), and liberal industrialists committed themselves to urban and democratic reforms, and in some notable cases

V O L U M E 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y R U S S I A ,

1890-1930

individuals such as Pavel Riabushinskii and Aleksandr Guchkov became national political leaders between 1907 and 1917 On the eve of World War I, the political and social transformation of Russia was well under way. The existence of this process suggests that the possibility of middleclass leadership in a transition to a liberal constitutional democracy in Russia cannot be dismissed. World War I revealed still further the increasing irrelevance of the tsarist regime, as the Russian public stepped forward and demonstrated its vitality by assuming burdens such as refugee relief, care for the sick and wounded soldiers of the Russian army, and providing the army with weapons and munitions, a role that normally would have been the responsibility of the state. The thin crust of this pluralistic, democratic Russia, however, was burned away in the fires of war and social revolution. -THOMAS EARL PORTER, NORTH CAROLINA A&T STATE UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. The development of Russian civil society was restricted by the tsarist autocracy and then destroyed by the Bolshevik regime, both of which considered independent social institutions a threat to government authority. In seeking to explain the growth and stability of Western democracies, the German philosopher Jiirgen Habermas argued for the importance of a public sphere,, a space in which civil society can congregate to critique the government and otherwise engage in political activities. Habermas's sphere was both literal, as in public-spirited clubs and organizations, and figurative, as in public opinions that formed and circulated through mass media. In essence, Habermas borrowed from the Enlightenment emphasis on disinterested reason and science, in which informed discourse was considered critical to participatory democracy. The notion of this public sphere has since provided the basis for a paradigm used to explain the political transformation of a so-called developing society, a term appropriate to Russia before 1917. The appearance and growth of a public sphere anticipated the evolution of Russia into a Western-style electoral representative democracy. Since the activities of the eighteenth-century "enlightened despot" Catherine the Great, small public spheres began to form among the educated elite. Then, as a result the Great Reforms of the 1860s, many

institutions and mass-oriented media began to appear in the tsarist empire, opening the space that Habermas found crucial for allowing the civic-minded to engage in actions that had political resonance. The question, therefore, is not whether a civil society existed in Russia, but why it proved unable to confront the autocracy effectively. This question is especially vexing because actions taken in the public sphere proved pivotal to launching the Revolution of 1905 and resulted in the greater independence of civil society in the years that followed. Yet, civil society failed in 1917. The three most critical components of a public sphere—voluntary public-minded organizations, professional associations, and a mass-circulation press—could be found in relative abundance in Russia by the turn of the twentieth century. The Free Economic Society (FES), founded in 1765, was the prototype. Although it depended on material support from the government and required official approval for its charter, its members nonetheless enjoyed relative freedom to pursue their objective of "the increase and diffusion of useful knowledge." Improvements in Russian agriculture depended heavily on the research performed by its members, who prided themselves on their knowledge of science and sense of public duty. Moreover, after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the FES established an autonomous Literacy Committee, an important corollary to the government's growing commitment to public education. Another important learned society, the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, was founded in 1845 and—according to Joseph Bradley—"brought together scientists, scholars, and other reform-minded officials to study social and economic questions." The Russian Technical Society, founded in 1866 as part of the effort to industrialize Russia after its disastrous showing in the Crimean War (1853-1856), helped significantly to train a technical intelligentsia. Thousands of voluntary associations had sprouted up in Russia by the turn of the century, teaching valuable lessons of citizenship—that is, participation in nation building—to their members. However, these groups remained increasingly reluctant handmaidens to the state, because even though they were furthering so many of their own objectives, they were also fostering the state's goal of education and industrial modernization. As professions became organized in Imperial Russia, they were forced into an ambivalent relationship with the state, on which they depended for patronage and often employment. Theoretically, a profession is restricted to those who have mastered a specialized body of knowledge. Also, a professional must serve in the interests of the public; even those professionals who are privately employed must adhere to a code of ethics that imbues their actions with moral responsibility.

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930

11

NO REAL PROGRESS Alexander Kerensky, prime minister of the Provisional Government that was overthown by the Reds in 1917, made these observations on the impact of Bolshevism on Russian civil society:

Leninism represents the most complete political, social and economic reaction, unprecendented in the history of Europe. And like ail reaction, the dictatorship of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party is utterly incapable of any gradual, evolutionary and peaceful readjustment of its substance. To be sure, Russia has during the ten years returned from the complete economic paralysis of the period of integral Leninism (1918-20), styled shamefacedly by the Bolsheviki as "military communism," through the "Nep" to purely capitalist forms. But, this capitalism represents a most backward, primitive, avaricious and poorly productive order, based upon the most cruel exploitation of the workers and peasants. The experiment of the Bolshevist reaction has proved once more that no social or political progress is possible without recognition and affirmation of the rights of the individual to complete liberty of thought, of conscience and of expression. Social welfare, popular enlightenment, domestic order and international security will not be assured to the Russian people as long

Professions did not truly develop in Russia until after the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Athough there were many educated specialists—such as physicians, legal experts, and engineers-their corporate status was defined by the state they served. The government's postreform commitment to modernization increased its need for specialized knowledge, and those who had it began to chafe under the constraints that the state placed on their ambitions to re-create their roles according to the models of their Western European colleagues. Although they were permitted to circulate information through professional journals, for example, only physicians were permitted to hold congresses with any sort of regularity, a privilege they enjoyed because of their great value to an unhealthy empire. Professionals themselves were in part to blame for their lack of success in establishing an ethos that brought them together with patients or clients in the formation of a civic base. The frustrated elites placed so much emphasis on establishing their independence that they placed 12

as the Boisheviki continue to hold Russia in the grip of their party dictatorship. For no social order capable of guaranteeing to the people the blessings of work and freedom is possible in a country the people of which are deprived of fundamental human rights and civil liberties, of economic initiative and of the protection of law based and administrated on the principle of equality. Where "party expediency" gives way to social and national interest there can be no civilization and no real progress. To-day, after ten years of Bolshevik domination, Russia stands at the starting point of the circle of Leninism: terrorism and severe economic crisis. These are the results of acute, unnatural, artificial economic and political causes, collectively expressed in the nature and substance of dictatorship, which stifles the independent, creative life and activity of the people. In the struggle for liberation Russia must inevitably return to the road of popular, national, democratic construction, the road upon which the Russian people embarked— hesitatingly and with uncertain step—in March, 1917! Source; Alexander F. Kerensky, The Catastrophe: Kerensky's Own Story of the Russian Revolution (New York & London: Appteton, 1927), pp. 376-377,

the transformation of the state over the morenarrow concerns of their chosen specialties, substituting politics for professionalism. They rose to revolution in 1905 because, according to Harley D. Balzer, "for a few months they believed that radical professionals might displace professional radicals as the agents of change in Russian politics." This strategy might have been successful if professional associations had also been willing to relax their exclusionary policies and open themselves up to include the second tiers, the support staffs, such as nurses and orderlies, who though identified as "physicians' assistants," usually held primary medical responsibilities in villages where doctors were in dangerously short supply. In another example, psychiatrists spoke for universal suffrage in the larger political realm, but not for equality in decision making in their own institutions. Other professionals preferred to use the power of the state, still centralized and the primary source of research funds, to their advantage. Groups that collected at the fringe of professionalization because their knowledge is

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y R U S S I A , 1890-1930

not necessarily specialized—from schoolteachers to government bureaucrats—also sought the status and the autonomy associated with the free professions. They, however, lacked the ability to liberate themselves from the state, which undermined their political ambitions at the same time that it depended on their commitment to public service. The mass media, especially the commercialized mass-circulation press, had the smallest investment in the state. Government censorship kept certain topics—such as the desire for a Russian constitution—off-limits for editorial discussion, but newspapers provided information that encouraged readers to engage in the reasoned discourse that Habermas considered so important for a civil society. Russian readers, for example, suffered no shortage of news about the functioning of European parliaments and the inadequacies of local governments. The press played an especially important role in providing information about the wars Russia fought, reporting on the widespread discontent during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and military setbacks during World War I (1914-1918). In the days before the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, they even broadcast the impending coup. Journalists also sought professional status, to report the news rather than to act on it. Revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin showed a great sensitivity to the potential power of civil society, moving against it swiftly and surely after the Bolshevik seizure of power. One of the Bolsheviks' first actions was to close down the free press; it was relatively easy to send armed guards to newspaper offices. The culture of violence and terror that supported Bolshevik rule went a long way toward persuading many educated and idealistic people, the backbone of prerevolutionary civil society, to emigrate. Many others were later expelled by the regime. Against those who remained, the Bolsheviks began a far-reaching campaign of deprofessionalization. Dependent as their regime was on specialized knowledge and technical expertise, the Bolsheviks manipulated the structure that kept professionals invested in the state and implemented a model of statedominated professions that curtailed autonomous professional activity. The new regime was aided in this change initially by such relatively marginal professional groups as medical orderlies and primary-school teachers, who had always been prone to socialist positions and parties. Voluntary and charitable associations, which had undergone the same sort of politicization as the professions, found themselves equally vulnerable. Almost all were put out of business by the early 1920s, even those that dealt effectively with such pressing matters as organizing famine relief. As Joseph Bradley has pointed out, Russian civil HISTORY

society was "hijacked by the revolutionaries for the purposes of its own destruction." -LOUISE MCREYNOLDS, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAFI, MANOA

References Harley D. Balzer, ed., Russians Missing Middle Classes: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord, eds., Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from NineteenthCentury Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Joseph Bradley, "Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia," American Historical Review, 107 (October 2002): 1094-1123. Bradley, "Voluntary Associations, Civic Culture and Obshchestvennost3 in Moscow," in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, edited by Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 183-199. Mary Schaeffer Conroy, ed., Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia: Case Studies on Local Self-Government (the Zemstvos), State Duma Elections, the Tsarist Government, and the State Council Before and During World War I (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998). Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, eds., Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London & New York: Verso, 1988). Louise McReynolds, The News Under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a MassCirculation Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Thomas Porter and Scott Seregny, "The Zemstpo Reconsidered," in The Politics of Local Government in Russia, edited by Alfred Evans and Vladimir Gelman (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 19-44. Charles Timberlake, "The Zemstvo and the Development of a Russian Middle Class," in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 164-179.

IN DISPUTE, VOLUME

21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930

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CULTURE AND REVOLUTION Was Russian cultural expression subsumed by politics during the revolutionary era? Viewpoint: Yes. The Bolsheviks and other groups redefined culture as revolutionary political expression. Viewpoint: No. Russian culture generally evolved apart from politics in the revolutionary era. An old cliche about Russia holds that its culture and politics are and have always been (at least in modern times) inseparably bound. Lacking parliaments, civil institutions, civic freedoms, and pluralistic environments, Russians' sole opportunity to articulate political ideas was within the only realm where they enjoyed relative freedom, thought and creativity. Russian literature, the argument holds, was full of social ideas about peasants, women, democracy, socialism, reaction, conservatism, and all other sorts of matters that Russians could discuss but never do much about. Recent research challenges this assumption. Far from dominating the arts and creative life, politics seems to have developed, particularly in the late imperial era, in isolation from Russian cultural life. Plays, operas, ballets, and newer forms such as operetta, cabaret, vaudeville, film, and the circus were largely apolitical in content, geared toward audiences who either had little stake in the system or remained apathetic toward it or, if they cared about politics at all, preferred to keep it separate from entertainment. Theaters and cinemas were turning into places of diversion and relaxation. This chapter assesses the merits of both arguments.

Viewpoint: Yes. The Bolsheviks and other groups redefined culture as revolutionary political expression.

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In January 1917 Russians prayed for the health of Tsar Nicholas II during church services. During state ceremonies, they listened to verses praising tradition and sang God Save the Tsar before flags displaying two-headed eagles. They addressed their betters as "Sir" or "Madam" or "Your Honor." Less than a year later, Russians sent abusive letters to the former tsar and his family. Newspapers published whole columns

of poetry denigrating tradition. Public ceremonies were a sea of red banners, with nary an imperial eagle to be seen—and only a person careless of his or her own safety would claim to be someone else's better. Clearly, something had changed. Russians had begun to see the world differently. The spoken, written, and visual expressions of their ideas changed accordingly, both in 1917 and throughout the remaining years of Russia's "revolutionary era." Writing in 1919, poet Aleksei Gastev saw a new culture springing up around him: "Cascades of novel ideas gush forth amid the storms of war and revolution; and trains of new words wind their way through

the smoke, the blood, and the joy of the Revolution." These "new words" did not appear from thin air. Most traced their origins to prerevolutionary Russia. Furthermore, what journalist John Reed termed "petty conventional life"— the performances at the ballet, the novels available at the bookstore, and the daily routineremained unchanged for many people, and in many ways, for some time after the February Revolution, and even after October. Nevertheless, the February and October Revolutions and their aftermath influenced Russian culture in ways that are significant, far-reaching, and indisputable. To begin with, the revolution had a destructive effect on some aspects of Imperial Russian culture. Works of art disappeared into the hands of looters, while historic buildings perished in fires set by arsonists. The Soviet government closed down newspapers and theaters. Seeing the effects of the revolution, many Russians simply left the country. Historian Richard Stites has noted that this emigration included "cultural figures later destined to achieve fame in another country." Cultural changes reflected the needs and values of the new state. Epaulettes disappeared from military uniforms. Double-headed eagles, the symbols of the old regime, were taken down or covered up. So were portraits of Nicholas II—especially in Petrograd and Moscow. Schoolrooms in Saratov and elsewhere no longer displayed icons. One government decree abolished titles of nobility. Another proclaimed the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, which had long been in use elsewhere in Europe. Still others attempted, with little success at first, to eliminate traditional religious holidays. Even the alphabet was simplified. New symbols emerged to replace those the revolutionaries had discarded. Streets and squares received new names like Freedom or Revolution. You Fell Victim, the Marseillaise, and the Internationale replaced God Save the Tsar as the ceremonial songs of choice, to be replaced in their turn by the new Soviet anthem. A monument honoring Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was erected in Moscow, which replaced Petrograd as Russia's capital city. In many places, pictures of Marx, Lev Trotsky, and Vladimir Lenin took the place of icons or portraits of the tsar. After Lenin survived an assassination attempt in August 1918, Russians could purchase copies of his biography and see movies of him taking a walk. The "cult of Lenin" eventually grew ubiquitous throughout the Soviet Union. So would the celebration of new holidays, of which the most significant were May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution. On the first

anniversary of the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks began a new tradition by staging a massive parade in Red Square. Like Lenin's image, these parades became synonymous with Soviet power. Parades and other public ceremonies in the new era required copious amounts of red cloth. Russians had always loved the color red, but now it appeared everywhere as a symbol of revolution. During the February Revolution, soldiers tied pieces of red fabric to their weapons to show their support for antigovernment protests. Revolutionaries ripped the blue and white stripes off old flags to leave the red, and public ceremonies consumed innumerable yards of red bunting. Vasilii Pankratov, a commissar whose duties in late 1917 included opening the mail addressed to Nicholas II's family, recalled that Nicholas and Alexandra received a steady stream of abusive letters, "many . . . in revolutionary red envelopes with the revolutionary motto 'Long live the Russian Revolution.'" The first official symbol of the Bolshevik state was a red star containing a hammer and plough, later replaced by a hammer and sickle. An unembellished red star, in the words of Stites, "migrated to the new flag in 1918, to the Kremlin walls, to hundreds of posters and [book] covers, and to its later central place as the emblem of the Soviet military and of communist movements rising into ascendance." Stites notes that this central symbol of Soviet culture "had no prehistory in the Russian radical tradition," much less the mainstream of Imperial Russian culture. While Russians acquired new revolutionary role models, their daily language acquired new words. "The daughter of a friend of mine," recalled Reed, "came home one afternoon in hysterics because the woman street-car conductor had called her 'Comrade!'" Over the next few years, "comrade" became an acceptable way for any citizen to address another. Along with "commune," "Communist," "bagmen" (itinerant black-marketeers), "kulak" (a well-to-do peasant), and "commissar," it had entered the cultural mainstream. So did several words created as shorthand references to new institutions: kombedy (committees of the poor), Sovnarkom (Soviet of People's Commissars), and Proletkult (Proletarian Culture). Bolsheviks also looked to the French Revolution for cultural inspiration. The government decreed that Russians should address each other as "citizens," just as the French revolutionaries had. Committees of soldiers and sailors took as their slogan "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." According to historian Donald J. Raleigh, "V. lustinskii and other local futurist artists [in Saratov Province] depicted the heroic

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

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TAY DAY, 1918 The Streets Lubyanka Square was swamped in red. The countless silk, velvet and other banners, embroidered with sequins and glass beads were quite dazzling to the eye. One focus of attention was the metal workers vehicle, draped in red material and bearing a huge globe with a portrait of Marx on it. The vehicles of the workers' collective were also striking. On one a band played, while the other was covered in greenery and flowers arranged in the shape of an arch. Another wonderful spectacle was the Sokolniki District lorry, decked out from top to bottom in flowers. Invalids walked on crutches behind the maimed soldiers' lorry. Next came the machine-gunners, on foot with their guns loaded on horses. They were followed by the Alexandrovsky College Training School. A detachment of sailors, smartly dressed in black, marched past, followed by firemen and then a float displaying emblems of agricultural work. Children paraded past all holding little red flags.,.. Detachment after detachment of the army of labor, the army of Revolution Speeches were given and a series of meetings held on Skobelev Square in front of the Moscow Soviet. The column of the stage workers' trade union was particularly interesting; on the front lorry, beneath a poster reading Tree Worker," representatives of the most important kinds of labor stood at their machines; on the second lorry was a band, and behind it an allegorical group depicting Russia heralding peace to all peoples. There were performers in the costumes of all nationalities, a peasant woman with a sheaf of rye in her arms, boys holding rakes and sickles, and nearby the courageous figures of soldiers holding red banners. And above them all stood Russia with a palm sprig in her hands. in front of the Moscow Soviet, the participants in these pictures sang the "Internationale," the "Marseillaise" and other revolutionary songs to the accompaniment of the band.

Red Square The Kremlin wall was hung with flags from Nikolsky Gate to Spassky Gate. An obelisk, draped in red and black canvases, tow-

16

ered above the communal grave of victims of the October Revolution. A rostrum was erected nearer Spassky Gate, on which stood the members of the Central Executive Committee and representatives of the Moscow Soviet. The Place of Execution (Lobnoye Mesto) was covered in black canvas and an enormous crimson flag fluttered on top. The columns of people streamed endlessly along the wall, past the communal grave and the rostrum, the bands and banners at the head of each column. As they passed the grave, they lowered their banners and the band played solemnly....

Other Districts In the Presnya District, which is mainly inhabited by workers, the people generally responded very enthusiastically to this proletarian festival, and the small houses were painted red and covered with workers slogans, summoning people to fight for the happiness of all. ... Ail the railway stations were beautifully decorated: Alexandrov Station looked grand, Ryazansky Station, still under construction, was colorful, and Nikolaev Station was rigidly austere in accordance with its style. The decoration of the Yaroslavl Station was particularly splendid with the words "Peace and the brotherhood of the peoples!" printed in large white letters on a red background right above the entrance. A long red banner with the inscription: "Long live the Third International!" hung on the pediment. A vast red sheet with the inscription: "Long live the Soviet Federative Republic!" was wrapped round the station's tower. The festivities continued on the streets and in the theaters of Moscow until late in the evening,... The lights on the House of Soviets and the House of Unions shone bright against the darkness. The fountain on Theater Square looked most effective, bedecked with garlands of electric lights. Source: "May Day Celebrations," Izvesttya, no. 88, 3 May 1918, in Street Art of the Revolution: Festivals and Celebrations in Russia 1918-33, edited by Vladimir Tolstoy and others (New York: Vendome, 1990).

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930

aspects of revolutionary victories with allegorical or neoclassical figures influenced by the French Revolution, or with images of the sun." Although revolutionary art rarely depicted women before 1920, artists did sometimes bor row from neoclassical art, in which women por trayed abstract concepts like "freedom" and "history." Russian folk art slowly became a stronger influence in the visual arts because the government considered it easier for viewers to understand and identify with. Traditional designs and motifs conveyed new, revolutionary message Politically oriented art came to be known as agit (short for the Russian word for "agitation"), as it was supposed to excite its audience and provoke revolutionary sentiments. Artists created cyfit-plays, &/^Y-songs, atjit-fi\ms, and thousands of ^/fz£-posters, all of which traveled the country on ^V-trains. New organizations encouraged agit and other examples of "proper" revolutionary culture. The Zhenotdel (Women's Section) cam paigned for women's rights, particularly those related to sex and marriage. The Komsomol (Communist Youth) brought youths into the revolutionary fold. On a local level, governmental bodies encouraged workers to join newly established art, music, and theater groups. Most influential of all was Proletkult. In Stites's words, "Proletkult became a genuine mass movement during the Civil War, reaching a peak estimated at half a million participants in 1919, with thirty-four journals and about 300 organizations." Significantly, governmental organizations not only encouraged "proletarian" and "revolutionary" culture but also actively suppressed cultural activities of which they disapproved. Some banned, or tried to ban, the production of works seen as "bourgeois." Others, like the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets, decided that artists needed proletarian supervision to ensure that they produced works suitable for working-class viewing. What sort of messages did revolutionary organizations consider suitable for citizens of the new state? Class conflict was a key theme. In 1917, Wilhelm Liebknecht's pamphlet Spiders and Flies, which contrasted fat capitalist spiders with impoverished worker flies, sold more than a million copies. Ironically, a Bolshevik Party led by intellectual men and women also encouraged the production of works that mocked the educated class. In addition, Bolshevik culture particularly emphasized the need for military struggle. Life was seen as a battle against the many foreign and domestic enemies who opposed the coming of the new, revolutionary world. Mark D Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev write HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

that one scholar later analyzed revolutionaries' speeches and found them "filled with images of the avenger of the oppressed, images of iron and blood, rapacious beasts, hydras, hydras with millions of tentacles, and enormous fires spread over the earth by whirlwinds." The many public funerals of revolutionary "martyrs"— another new addition to Russian culture in use at least since those of the liberal academic Prince Sergei Trubetskoi and the murdered Bolshevik activist Nikolai Bauman in 1905—provided excellent opportunities for these speeches. Images of struggle also made their way into "high" literature. The most famous example is Aleksandr Blok's poem The Twelve, about Red Army soldiers who personify the rejection of the old and are compared to the biblical Twelve Apostles. Dozens of poems by less-distinguished writers, many of whom were members of the lower classes, appeared in revolutionary newspapers. Like V. Aleksandrovsky' Sowing, which appeared in Pravda in 1918, the poems urged readers to "Chop apart/ The old world! / In the heat / Of universal combat / And in the red gleam of fires/ Be/ Merciless!" For decades after the revolution, Soviet literature and movies would feature plots involving heroic Soviet citizens who defeated various "enemies of the people." In poems with titles like Liberty Bright, Destiny Red, and Dawn Has Broken, revolutionaries pictured the world they would achieve through struggle. In this world, all men and women were free and equal. Reason reigned supreme. Vladimir Kirillov's To the Proletariat (1918) claimed that "Reason" was the proletariat's new faith. Similarly, The ABC's of Communism (1919), an instant best-seller written by Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, not only summarized Marxism and the Marxist view of history, but also described the coming Soviet state as one in which machines and scientific calculations ensured that every citizen found a career and enjoyed adequate food and housing. In 1920 Evgenii Zamiatin's We took this revolutionary vision to a dystopian extreme, depicting a society in which individuals no longer had names, only numbers. By 1921 the revolution had altered Russian culture immensely. Its effects could be seen everywhere: in public and private spaces, in official ceremonies, in literature and the arts, in social mores, and in the mind-set of a growing number of citizens. The revolution presaged the explosion of Soviet culture that would occur in the next decade. More ominously, it presaged the government's assumption of control over the cultural sphere. -CATHERINE BLAIR, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY V O L U M E 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y R U S S I A ,

1890-1930

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Viewpoint: No. Russian culture generally evolved apart from politics in the revolutionary era. One of Russia's most popular newspaper columnists, Vlas Doroshevich, wrote a comical article about his desire to run for election to the post-1905 Parliament, the Duma, as a representative from the Sandwich Islands (as Hawai'i was then called). Basing his competency for office on his consumption of sandwiches, Doroshevich tapped into the general disregard that the majority of his fellow citizens had for their legislature. Although much more serious and sober political themes engaged Russian culture, it cannot be argued that they represented a dominant or even popular trend. This apathy was even present among the workers whom many of its producers claimed to represent, and remained present throughout 1917 and the turbulent years that followed. The evidence suggests that most Russians showed no inclination to use culture as a vehicle for identifying with the politics espoused by parties across the spectrum, from conservatives to revolutionary Marxists. Doroshevich, a prominent figure in popular commercial culture, was not simply satirizing the Duma; he was dismissing it. First, it must be stated that late-imperial Russia was a pluralistic society, and it is therefore necessary to write in terms of multiple "cultures" rather than assume that there was only one to which all Russians had to adhere. Rapid industrialization and urbanization produced both a viable bourgeoisie and a working class that, although disadvantaged by comparison, nonetheless developed fundamental literacy skills and enjoyed entrance into a modern commercial economy. Beyond both of them stood the intelligentsia, a powerful force in the nineteenth century, but now forced by the emergence of these two newer groups to face competition over directing Russian culture into the future. Examined separately, each reflected the aspirations of its group-audience, and despite overlap, they were also playing off of each other in order to create distinctive identities. Significantly, none engaged in the polemics served up by the various political parties, whether their members sat in the Duma or in prison. Of the three groups, the intelligentsia held the highest profile because of its historical role in politics, when luminaries such as Vissarion Belinsky, a prominent literary critic, had used the writings of Nikolai Gogol and other satirists to assert the political role of culture in the 1840s. By the turn of the century, however, a new gener-

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HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

ation of intellectuals eschewed the activist role bequeathed to them by their forebears and fell into a movement that celebrated art for its own sake instead of asking how it might be utilized for political purposes. Nineteenth-century realism, with its underlying mission of exposing social inequities and injustices, gave way to the self-indulgence of symbolism, which its critics dismissed as "decadence," and later to acmeism, which professedly pursued beauty for its own sake. Both symbolism and acmeism were intentionally elitist, structured by their natures to be inaccessible to a broad audience. Modernism, the most internationally influential cultural movement of the era, of which symbolism was a notable part, concerned itself primarily with language and subjective experience rather than with objective activities and political statements. Although Russia's most famous modernist novel, Andrei Bely's Petersburg (1913-1922), is set against the backdrop of a terrorist political assassination, the author was choosing sides in a battle about literary expression, not politics. In this way high culture became divorced from politics. For both its producers and consumers, it took on a purely artistic character, which at its deepest explored social change as a series of spiritual and aesthetic debates and eschewed politics. The rising bourgeoisie can be credited in part with chasing the intelligentsia into their self-imposed exile. Self-critical as well as celebratory, this group made commerce a part of culture in ways that it was not a part of politics. Such authors as Aleksandr Ostrovsky, Petr Boborykin, and Aleksandr Amfiteatrov presented merchants and other "bourgeois" types as positive characters in plays whose popularity with audiences endured until well after 1917, when those figures and the values they represent had become officially taboo. That the reputations of these writers did not survive them may well attest to the intellectuals' charges that they did not engage in "the eternal questions." Yet, their popularity in their own times reflected a diversification and sophistication developing among Russian readers and theatergoers. The fictional middle classes evolved alongside their factual counterparts, from objects of the radicals' ridicule to characters who expressed their sense of social responsibility through hard work in the economic sphere and in the building of civic institutions. They used their disposable incomes to commercialize entertainment, party in nightclubs, sing along with phonographs, dine in restaurants, and attend vaudeville, cabaret, and operetta. Wealthy merchants and industrialists financed many of the leading artists, artistic journals, and theatrical enterprises of the era. Only during the Revolution of 1905 did political figures appear in staged satires, but by and large they disappeared

VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930

after political events receded from having a serious impact on daily lives. The middle classes could, however, engage in issues that should have been politicized. In fact they borrowed the social critique of realism and repackaged it in melodrama. The novelist Anastasiia Verbitskaia kept the "woman question," including sexual relations, at the forefront of her enormously successful novels. With a popularity that rivaled Leo Tolstoy's, she sent her heroine Mania Eltsova through five novels to find the eponymous Keys to Happiness (1909), which would unlock the door to personal emancipation. Mikhail Artsybashev brought decadence down to the bourgeoisie with his Sanin (1907), the scandalous life of an egotistical hedonist whose exploits raised doubts about the future of Russian youth, wandering without direction. Middlebrow realists Leonid Andreev and Alexander Kuprin framed social criticism in a masculine bravado not unlike that of their American contemporary Jack London, who was also popular in Russia and remained so in Soviet times. The lower classes, especially workers, benefited from both the commercialization of culture and the attentions of social reformers who had replaced the intelligentsia in the mission to use culture as a political medium for transforming "peasants into Russians." These changes guaranteed them a mix of bandit tales and detective stories, as well as classic works by writers such as Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. Inexpensive pulp fiction and serialized novels in daily newspapers challenged the intelligentsia tradition that literature for the masses must be didactic, as readers learned to exercise their imaginations in order to locate themselves in the exciting vistas opening up before them. Tempered as this new individualism was by classical authors, readers from the lower classes also learned moral lessons from literature that helped them to deal with their inequitable position at the bottom rung of the social ladder. Although political radicals liked to think of theater as a means of revolutionary propaganda, their audiences rarely reacted to it in a positive or embracing way. Before, during, and after 1917, most Russians wanted to be entertained by melodrama, suspense, humor, human relations, and other apolitical themes. This preference can be measured by box-office receipts, which made the best works in these genres into hits that kept commercial theaters in business. On the other hand, overtly political plays and works with socially transformative themes were usually critical and popular failures. Even Maksim Gor'ky's famous The Lower Depths, by far his most successful play, became popular for its characters and HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

had no clear political message. This apolitical nature of Russia's stage culture touched off a major debate within radical circles. Ultimately, those who argued in favor of theater as an instrument of social change were marginalized and superseded by pedagogues who looked to theater as an institution that could at best raise the culture awareness of the lower classes and possibly interest them in education. Although some of the former remained active in the Soviet avant-garde, it was the latter whose ideas dominated everyday cultural life after 1917. The repertoires of "serious" theaters barely changed as a result of the revolutions of 1917, and audiences continued to take in Chekhov, Ostrovsky, William Shakespeare, and other classic authors in the same way as they had in tsarist times. Even a cursory analysis of revolutionary Russia's most original artifact of culture, motion pictures, demonstrates culture taking the lead over political institutions. Although the Bolsheviks would later use the medium to advertise and propagandize their ideology, prerevolutionary Russia's blossoming film industry was dominated by adventure stories, seduction plots, exoticism, and in general everything but political messages. In trying to come to terms with the VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930

Soviet workers in Bogorodsk removing holy icons from a local church being converted into a club, March 1930 (Associated Press)

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new medium, government and other national political leaders found themselves confused and on the defensive, unsure whether to control the content or protect the industry from foreign competition. The movies, in the meanwhile, flickered on without paying heed to the politicians. The Soviet government's takeover of film after 1917 did give moviemakers with radical agendas advantages in production and financing, but even such lionized movies as Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) failed before the demanding audiences of the Soviet 1920s. Although the prerevolutionary domestic film industry that had catered to their tastes was gone, they eagerly sought its replacement in foreign, and especially American, movies that featured the same themes for the commercialized audiences of another society. -LOUISE MCREYNOLDS, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAFI, MANOA

Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 (New York: Viking, 1996). Figes and Boris Kolonitsky, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Constructing Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution: 1881-1940 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919). Mark D. Steinberg and others, eds., Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2001).

References Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Bonnell, "The Representation of Women in Early Soviet Political Art," Russian Review, 50 (July 1991): 267-288. Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev, eds., The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995). Rjchard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Stephen White, The Bolshevik Poster (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1988).

VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930

DIPLOMATIC GOALS IN WORLD WAR I Did Imperial Russia have feasible diplomatic goals during World War I? Viewpoint: Yes. Russia's goals—to control the Turkish Straits, to expand its borders southward, and to continue influence in the Balkans—were realizable. Viewpoint: No. Russia entered World War I because of the swell of pan-Slavism; it had no well-formulated diplomatic goals.

Like all the combatant powers at the onset of World War I, Russia expected to prevail in the conflict and developed comprehensive and far-reaching war aims. Many of these goals were long-standing. Since the eighteenth century, Russia had been trying to seize the Turkish Straits, its only access to the Mediterranean Sea and rich southern trade routes. Russian interests in Central Europe had moved from defending its western borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to expanding into Polish territory in the eighteenth and attempting to create a hegemony over the Balkans in the nineteenth. Russia's ambitions in the Balkans were its primary reason for going to war in 1914, but it continued to press for its other aims as well. Russia wanted to secure the Turkish Straits, expand territorially in Asia Minor, increase its ethnically Polish territories at the expense of Germany and Austria-Hungary, secure territorial expansion for its Serbian client state, replace Austrian control of Bohemia with an independent kingdom under the rule of a Russian prince, and restore the independence of several lesser German states subsumed within the German Empire after 1871. To many students of Russian history, these aims were outrageous and unrealistic. Russia's principal goal—the acquisition of the Turkish Straits— had long been opposed by western Europe, especially by its prewar Entente partners and World War I allies, Britain and France. Gaining their acquiescence was a major challenge. Russian aims in Central Europe were intended to dismember Russia's main enemies, Germany and Austria-Hungary. But given the battlefield performance of the Russian army, these goals soon seemed impractical. Other scholars, however, have argued that Russia's war aims, however ambitious, were not out of character with those of the other combatant powers. Germany looked toward broad hegemony over much of Russia's western borderlands, the Balkans, and the Middle East. The Germans also aspired to substantial territorial annexations in France, domination of Belgium and Luxembourg, major acquisitions in the colonial world, and huge financial indemnities. France wanted to recover territory it lost to the Germans in 1871, and it sought a partition of Germany. Austria-Hungary wanted the major role in the Balkans that forces of nationalism and domestic political problems had long denied it. The United States wanted the dissolution of the German and Austro-Hungarian monarchies and a fundamental reformulation of international relations. None of these powers, not even the victorious ones, got all

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they wanted. But neither the scope of their ambition nor the length of their lists of goals cast doubt on the feasibility of their aims.

Viewpoint: Yes. Russia's goals—to control the Turkish Straits, to expand its borders southward, and to continue influence in the Balkans—were realizable. For decades, historians of Russia have agreed that its diplomatic goals during World War I were unrealistic and inconsistent with its military capabilities and strategic interests. These scholars point out that the Russian Empire was woefully unprepared in 1914 to prosecute a modern and sustained war against the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria) and that Russia was unable to convince its chief allies, the Entente Powers Britain and France, to accept Russian diplomatic objectives. While the Russian army suffered staggering battlefield losses, its allies refused to accept many Russian ideas for a postwar settlement, such as ceding the Austrian ports on the Adriatic Sea to Russia's Balkan client state, Serbia, or establishing Russian-led states in Central Europe on the territories of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. By 1917 the pressures of Russian failures were so great that the Russian Imperial government—considered one of the strongest and most autocratic regimes in Europe—fell in days to a popular revolution. For many historians the collapse of the Russian Empire provides the clearest testimony to the futility of its diplomatic aims during World War I. At the same time, however, Russian diplomats were able to achieve several important diplomatic breakthroughs during the war, and their record of failures was often not appreciably worse than that of either their American or European counterparts. Even Kaiser Wilhelm II and President Woodrow Wilson, who headed the most powerful countries participating in the war, Germany and the United States, fell far short of reaching their diplomatic goals during the conflict or in the peace that followed. Nor were Austro-Hungarian, German, or Ottoman diplomats any better than Russian diplomats at pursuing strategies that ensured the survival of their governments, all of which collapsed by the end of the war or shortly thereafter. Russian diplomatic, military, and domestic policies during World War I were closely related but hardly identical. Russia's diplomatic victories often coincided with crushing battle22

HISTORY

IN DISPUTE,

field reverses, while Russian diplomacy seems to have been weakest when Russian military power seemed strongest. The failure of the Russian government to supply the army, feed its population, or build a viable domestic support base—key issues in the 1917 revolutions—was hardly the fault of Russian foreign policy. Rather than asserting that foreign policy undermined the domestic position of the Russian Imperial government, it could be argued that Russian domestic policies created the circumstances under which it was impossible for the government to fulfill its diplomatic goals abroad. Russia's diplomatic aims during World War I were often based on the prevailing assumptions of a pre-1914 European political landscape; wars were expected to be short, and extended wars among great powers seemed unimaginable. While some astute observers noted that new technologies and tactics might change the methods and duration of warfare, their views were ignored by most Europeans, who had not experienced a war involving all the great powers simultaneously for nearly a cen tury. Within the pre-1914 context, the size of a state's army and the number of males eligible for military service were seen as far greater barometers of state power than the factors that later defined military strength, such as industrial and agricultural production or the ability to provision armies for long periods. When the diplomatic goals of Imperial Russia during World War I are viewed from the pre-1914 perspective, they appear realizable and consistent with those of the other powers participating in the conflict. Russia, after all, had by far the largest population of any European power and therefore the largest number of potential military recruits. Throughout the war, Russian diplomats adhered to a conservative diplomatic strategy in keeping with traditional Russian goals and commitments, which differed from the highly ambitious plans of other great powers. Above all, Russia wanted to seize the Turkish Straits and positions in the Mediterranean. Achieving these objectives would solve two of the most vexing problems that had faced the Russian Empire throughout the nineteenth century: its dearth of warm-water ports that could be used year-round and its lack of unimpaired routes to the Mediterranean Sea. Here Russian diplomacy was strikingly successful. Although Britain and France had opposed the Russians' gaining access to the Bosporus and the Dar-

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dandles throughout the nineteenth century, Paris and London agreed in the spring of 1915 to Russia's postwar acquisition of them, the city of Constantinople, and the adjacent littoral—a major policy change for Britain in particular. In the Dardanelles Campaign of 19151916, the British attempted to seize Gallipoli and open the straits to Russian shipping. By contrast, on no fewer than four occasions in the previous century, Britain had lent military, diplomatic, and financial support to the Ottoman Empire to block Russian access to the straits. As recently as 1908, Britain and France had rejected an international understanding under which the straits would be opened to Russian warships in exchange for Russian recognition of the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Furthermore, Britain and France had agreed to cede the straits to Russia after the Germans inflicted heavy losses on the Russian army in 1914-1915 at Tannenberg and Masurian Lakes and captured 225,000 Russian soldiers. While the 1914-1915 negotiations over the entry of Italy into the war as a member of the Entente alliance—which blocked the Russian client Serbia from gaining Adriatic ports that the Russians wanted to use as naval bases—left Russian diplomats nervous about the Allies' commitment to the postwar agreement, the Russians could be confident that they had won an historic concession. Even if the Allies reneged on the straits agreement, the Russians were confident that they would receive just compensation. This confidence was boosted in 1915, after the Russian army rapidly seized Ottoman territories in eastern Anatolia stretching from the Black Sea coast to the Caucasus, an action that fulfilled a long-term Russian strategic objective to extend the Russian borders southward. In addition, as Britain and France suffered in the stalemate on the Western Front, they became increasingly desperate to keep the Eastern Front against Germany open. As a result, Russian officials seemed certain of gaining additional concessions and firmer guarantees from these Allies in the postwar period. In addition to seeking attainment of long-term goals, the Russians also had new political aims that arose from the changing relationships among the great powers in the decade before 1914. Russian diplomacy in World War I also aimed to reassert the empire's power in the Balkans and Europe in general. Russian prestige had been weakened by the reversals of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 and the Balkan crises of 1908 and 1912-1913. In these episodes Russia had been

MEMORANDUM OF THE RUSSIAN FOREIGN OFFICE On February 19 (March 4), 1915, the Minister of Foreign Affairs handed to French and British Ambassadors a Memorandum which set forth the desire to add the following territories to Russia as the result of the present war: The town of Constantinople, the western coast of the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmora, and the Dardanelles; Southern Thrace, as far as the Enos-Media line; the coast of Asia Minor between the Bosphorus and the River Sakaria, and a point on the Gulf of Ismid to be defined later; the islands in the Sea of Marmora, and the Islands of Imbros and Tenedos, The special rights of France and England in the above territories were to remain inviolate. Both the French and British Governments express their readiness to agree to our wishes, provided the war is won, and provided a number of claims made by France and England, both in the Ottoman Empire, and in other places, are satisfied. "As far as Turkey is concerned, these claims are as follows:— "1. Constantinople is to be recognized as a free port for the transit of goods [coming from Russia, and not going] to Russia, and a free passage is to be given through the Straits to merchant ships. "2. The rights of England and France in Asiatic Turkey to be defined by special agreement between France and England and Russia are recognized. "3. The sacred Mahomedan places are to be protected, and Arabia is to be under an indepent Mahomedan soverign. "The neutral zone in Persia established by the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 is to be included in the English sphere of influence/' Source; The Secret Treatises and Understandings, edited by F. Seymour Cocks (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1918), pp. 10-20.

forced to back down—often by the threat of war from Germany—and accept international settlements that confirmed the position of Austria-Hungary in the Balkans, limited Serbian power, and gave no compensation to Russia. These settlements were a humiliation for Russia, which saw the Balkans as its natural sphere of influence and Serbia as a client state. Given these events, Russia's decision to mobilize its forces against Germany and Austria-Hungary during the Balkan crisis of 1914 fulfilled twin diplomatic objectives. First, the

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Military reservists and family members in St. Petersburg during World War I (Associated Press)

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mobilization demonstrated that Russia was an important power in the Balkans whose interests could not be ignored. Second, the mobilization showed that Russia was willing to use all means to defend the interests of its friends. Any Russian policy short of mobilization would have demonstrated that Russia was not a great power in Europe-an outcome entirely unacceptable to the Russian government and important segments of society. There is little doubt that Russian diplomacy in World War I rested on its army-the largest and most powerful in Europe in 1914, with 1.3 million troops in uniform and 5 million reservists. French war planners saw Russia as an important check on German power, forcing the German army to fight on two fronts simultaneously, and not just against France as had been the case in the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War. While Germany had been much wealthier than Russia for decades, Russian industrialization and construction of railway lines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (often financed by French banks) had allowed Russia to reduce the gap between the two states and become the fifth-

largest industrialized nation in the world. Shortly before the start of the war, Russia maintained an annual defense budget nearly equal to that of Germany. Despite heavy losses and the frequent inferiority of their weapons to those of the Germans, Russian soldiers fought tenaciously and forced the Germans to maintain a second and expensive front in the East for most of the war. While Russian military power may not have been equal to that of Germany, it was far greater than that of either of the other European great powers it fought in World War I: the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. Those two empires governed heterogeneous territories marked by religious, ethnic, and linguistic divisions. Important communities in both empires-such as Armenians, Orthodox Christians, and Balkan Slavs-looked to Russia as their patron and aided the Russian army whenever possible. As Paul Kennedy notes, Austria-Hungary was so beset by ethnic division that it had to issue the orders to mobilize its army for World War I in fifteen languages. Neither Austria-Hungary nor the Ottoman Empire was strong enough to attack

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

another European great power without the full support of Germany. The diplomatic position of Imperial Russia in World War I was perhaps even stronger than the government's military position. After 1907 St. Petersburg could count on the support of two of the strongest nations in Europe, France and Britain. France invested millions of francs in Russia before 1914 and also provided the Russian government with a diplomatic bridge to its most bitter great-power rival, Great Britain. In 1907 Britain and Russia reached an agreement by which they resolved a host of long-running disputes from one end of Eurasia to the other. This agreement, and a conciliatory arrangement with Japan in the same year, permitted Russia to focus on Europe during World War I and not to worry about Russian interests in distant non-European regions. Russia was never forced to balance colonial and continental interests, a constant problem for Britain, France, and Germany. Russia's freedom to focus on Europe illustrates the principal difference between its diplomatic goals and those of the other great powers. While Russia—along with Austria-Hungary— used wartime conditions to advance traditional diplomatic goals in regions close to Europe, the other powers (Britain, France, Germany, and the United States) pursued diplomatic objectives in Europe and extra-European regions vigorously. For these countries, World War I was a global war in which control of important trade routes, natural resources, and strategic territories and waterways was at stake worldwide. U.S. and German diplomatic goals were by far the most ambitious because both nations sought to change not only which countries controlled the world's political-economic system, but also the rules under which the system was administered. Although the United States won the war in military terms, President Wilson's vision for a new international system based on American liberal principles was not fully implemented after the war, and key parts of the Versailles Treaty that ended the war directly contradicted Wilson's plans. Similarly, Britain and France failed to meet their goal of decisively defeating Germany, and in less than a generation they had to contend with a revitalized Germany aiming to avenge its losses in World War I with a second global war. When one compares Russia's diplomatic aims in World War I with those of the United States and the other European powers, they appear reasonable—even when one takes into account the greater financial and industrial capabilities of the United States, Germany, and Britain in relation to Russia in 1914. Russians did not aim to conquer the global political-economic HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

system, achieve "their place in the sun," or reframe international political and economic norms. Russian diplomats stuck to the goals that guided their predecessors' actions for centuries: direct maritime access to the Mediterranean, expansion of Russia's borders southward, and continuation of Russian influence in the Balkans. Thanks to careful diplomacy, Russia stood to attain many of its diplomatic aims, especially control over the straits, at the end of the war. French and British acceptance of Russian postwar control over the straits points to a larger truth about Russian diplomacy during World War I: military defeats and revolutions do not prove that Russian foreign policy was unrealistic. Those events resulted from the intersection of a constellation of factors, most of which were related to domestic or military problems outside the purview of Russian diplomats. If the Russian government had better managed these nondiplomatic factors, Russian diplomacy would have made even greater gains. Imperial Russian foreign policy set realizable goals and was consistent with those of the other powers that fought in World War I. -SEAN FOLEY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Russia entered World War I because of the swell of pan-Slavism; it had no well-formulated diplomatic goals. Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenthcentury Prussian theorist of war and diplomacy, succinctly explained the purpose of war: "war is the continuation of politics by other means." States go to war when they cannot achieve their political goals by negotiation or when they perceive the cost of war to be lower than the price they might pay as a result of negotiations. A state might, for example, want another state to disarm but find that the negotiations for that result would be so cumbersome and fraught with compromise—and the results so uncertain—that a quick and easy war might be desirable in comparison. War is supposed to be the result of careful political and diplomatic calculations; only when the cost of not fighting is higher than the cost of fighting should states go to war. World War I is an excellent historical example of how politics and war can become disconnected. The diplomacy of Russia and the other belligerents was ruinously out of tune with the VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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realities of power politics. Russia entered the war for the most frivolous and what proved to be the most unavoidable reasons. The Bosnian crisis of 1908, in which Austria-Hungary— backed by the military might of Germanyannexed Bosnia, had embarrassed the tsar's regime. This event came on the heels of Russia's humiliation in the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War and was followed by Austro-German diplomatic checks on the expansion of Russia's ally and client, Serbia, in the Balkan Wars of 19121913. The tsarist government felt that it could not afford another blow to its prestige. Thus, in June 1914, when Serbia provoked Austria-Hungary by responding to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in a manner the Austrians found unsatisfactory, the political tides of pan-Slavism drew Nicholas II and his government into a major contest of power, and he felt he could not afford to lose face. As a result, Russia entered the war with no preconceived aims, except to uphold the prestige of the realm. In World War I, Russia could have gained domestic prestige only by meeting the challenges posed by its allies and enemies, not by pursuing its own goals. Austria-Hungary and Germany could and did dictate the terms of battle. Allowing one's enemies to do so is not an auspicious way to conduct a war. Nor is it a good policy to allow strategy to be dictated by one's allies. No alliance is guaranteed. Russia's common interest with France and Britain was a mutual fear of Germany, but Russian antagonism toward Germany was not a permanent condition. In fact, for centuries, Prussia/Germany and Russia had more in common with one another than Russia had in common with France and Britain. Russia, Prussia, and Austria had divided Poland in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century Russia and Prussia/Germany had cooperated in stabilizing eastern Europe against revolution and other challenges to the status quo. In fact, the Russians and Germans had not fought one another since the Seven Years' War of 17561763. In 1914 Russia's strategy ought to have been to uphold stability in the region and to avoid being drawn into a major conflict in which it had no direct interests apart from prestige. Instead, Russia found itself defending Serbia, which had little utility as an ally, and overlooking its profound differences with France, a vigorous democracy whose citizenry was hostile to the tsarist regime and its values. In return, France could offer Russia nothing but financial credits. Russia entered the war as the result of flawed strategy and bankrupt diplomacy. Russia could still have salvaged the situation if it had declared its honor served by coming to Serbia's aid and then quickly secured a 26

HISTORY

separate unilateral peace with the Central Powers. Yet, in September 1914, Russia signed th London Declaration, in which the Allies pledged not to agree to a separate peace. Russia signed this document because the tsar and his ministers believed that the honor of the regime depended on showing its good faith to its allies. The price Russia paid for showing good faith was revolution in 1917. In keeping with diplomatic tradition, France and Britain made pledges to Russia in return for its contributions to the war effort. In a series of negotiations that lasted from the beginning of the war until almost the collapse of the Russian Provisional Government in November 1917, Russia was promised Constantinople, the Turkish Straits, and defensive positions in the Aegean Sea. Russia also had plans to annex some of Germany's Polish lands and encourage the partitioning of Germany and Austria-Hungary into core states that would be neutral or favorable to Russia. One rather fanciful plan called for a Romanov prince to adopt Catholicism and become king of an independent Bohemia. Their willingness to cede Constantinople and the Turkish Straits to Russia was a measure of the Western Allies' desperation. After all, they had engaged in more than a century of diplomacy and fought the Crimean War (1853-1856) to prevent Russians from making these strategic gains. But at the same time many in the West, and even some skeptical members of the tsarist government, doubted that it would be easy for Russia to secure these gains after the war, especially after the Western Allies began military operations to seize the straits on their own in early 1915. Even by then, Russia's dismal performance in the war against Germany indicated that any postwar gains would come solely as the result of the victory of the Western Allies. Russia was sacrificing millions of its men and fatally undermining its regime for empty promises. It was a bad strategy. Having fared so poorly at the old diplomacy in 1914-1917, Russia did not do much better in the "New Diplomacy" associated with President Woodrow Wilson, who moved the United States toward war with Germany with the promise of a new liberal democratic international order where nationalities could live in peace, harmony, and—most important—independence. These conditions essentially were a rec ipe for the dismantling of the Russian Empire, nearly half of which was non-Russian. After the tsar's abdication in March 1917, his successors were no more willing than he to countenance this radical change. Indeed, the Provisional Government retained the tsarist regime's annexationist war aims, particularly with regard to the Turkish Straits. Sharing those aims and remaining committed to the war, the Provisional Government compromised its prestige

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among the war-weary Russian population, contributing to its own downfall just months after the tsar's. Russia's final exit from the war in March 1918 left it without a trace of what its leaders had aspired to gain four years earlier and actually cost it a massive amount of territory— virtually everything it had acquired on its western frontier since the mid seventeenth century. Russia's strategy and diplomacy in World War I were a disaster from the outset. The tsar entered the war to defend no vital national interest, and once in the war he failed to secure his goals. He fought on the side that in fact was antagonistic to his political and dynastic interests. He surrendered the strategic initiative not only to his allies, but even worse, to his adversaries. From his putative allies, he accepted empty promises and pledges of material support that rarely showed up. His successors did little better. Perhaps Clausewitz's admonitions might apply to Russia in World War I in this way: those who fail to follow the rules of statecraft will be crushed by the realities of power. Nicholas II did, and he was. -PHILGILTNER, ALBANY ACADEMY

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

References Paul du Quenoy, "With Allies Like These, Who Needs Enemies?: Russia and the Problem of Italian Entry into World War I," Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes, 45 (September/December 2003): 409-440. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). D. C. B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983). David MacLaren McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). C. Jay Smith, The Russian Struggle for Power, 1914-1917: A Study of Russian Foreign Policy during the First World War (New York: Philosophical Society, 1956). A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954).

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DIPLOMATIC POLICY IN THE 1920s Did the Soviet regime pursue an aggressive foreign policy in the 1920s? Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets actively promoted revolution abroad and used aggressive diplomacy to ensure the continued existence of their communist state. Viewpoint: No. The Soviets drew back from confrontation in an attempt to build alliances that would ensure their survival and help them develop their economy. With the end of the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks found themselves masters of their land. How the first communist government would relate to the rest of the world remained a mystery, however. Prerevolutionary theorists and ideologues—including the new state's leader Vladimir Lenin—believed that a successful revolution in Russia would galvanize the proletarians of the world to emulate the Bolsheviks and spread communism worldwide. Western leaders feared a Red victory in the Civil War for precisely that reason. As internal stability returned to Russia, its intentions remained a mystery to the rest of the world, and they are still a subject of debate among historians. Views articulated at the time—and reinforced during the Cold War that followed World War II—carried Bolshevik ideology to its logical conclusion. Through subterfuge, espionage, terrorism, agitation, early attempts at direct conquest, and general duplicity, the Kremlin seemed to be encouraging socialist rebellion in Europe, nationalist independence movements in the colonial world, and another major war among the capitalist great powers that would further international communist revolution. A rival interpretation holds, however, that the Soviet Union quickly encountered all the challenges and dilemmas that defined a normal state in the conventional arena of international politics. In this view, goals such as stimulating Western investment in the flagging Soviet economy, promoting trade agreements to facilitate development, seeking a firm alliance with isolated post-World War I Germany, participating in the international community, and maintaining the standard diplomatic contacts and institutions to make such goals possible far exceeded even the most committed ideologue's interest in overturning the world order.

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tial loss but one Lenin deemed necessary to retain power.

Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets actively promoted revolution abroad and used aggressive diplomacy to ensure the continued existence of their communist state. In order to understand Soviet diplomacy in the 1920s, it is essential to remember that the communist regime in Moscow was committed not just to maintaining its power in Russia but also to spreading revolution throughout Europe and eventually the world. Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership aimed not only to alter the political structure of nations but also to restructure them socially and economically as well. In order to pursue such lofty ambitions, however, it was necessary first and foremost to ensure the survival of the communist experiment in Russia. After initial efforts to help revolution sweep across Europe in 1919 and the early 1920s came to naught, Russian revolutionaries began to seek normal diplomatic relations with established nations in order to gain the legitimacy and economic benefits they needed to survive. Many commentators have described these actions as cautious. At the same time, however, the Soviets continued to take advantage of the opportunities they saw to try to promote revolution. They began setting in place international structures, such as the Communist International (Comintern), that they expected to facilitate revolution in the future. What is most noteworthy about Soviet foreign policy in the 1920s is how boldly the Bolsheviks sought to promote revolution despite their relative weakness and the difficulties they were facing at home. Soviet diplomacy during the 1920s looks cautious to many scholars because the Bolsheviks' reactions to several setbacks look like the policies of a nation fighting for survival. This apparent cautiousness began with Soviet Russia's withdrawal from World War I in March 1918. Lenin realized that the Provisional Government fell because it could not deliver the peace desired by the Russian people and that peace was necessary before any government could begin restructuring the country. After various diplomatic stall tactics failed to dampen German enthusiasm for its plans to destroy Russia, the Bolsheviks took their country out of World War I by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, accepting the terms of a defeated nation. The Bolshevik regime made major economic concessions to Germany, and it parted with Ukraine, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania). With this territory went one-third of the Russian population, a substanHISTORY

As it turned out, however, Germany's acceptance of an armistice to end World War I on 11 November 1918 effectively negated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Soviets had renounced two days earlier. In the winter of 1918-1919 the Bolsheviks attempted unsuccessfully to reassert Russian control over Finland and the Baltic States. A coup attempt in Finland failed, as did the Baltic invasions. Still, it was noteworthy that the Communists were taking risks, trying to reassert control over these newly independent nations even as a civil war raged on Russian soil. The Russian Civil War was another factor restraining Bolshevik activities. Anticommunist Whites battled the Bolshevik Reds for control of Russia, forcing the Bolsheviks to focus on ensuring victory at home. The outcome of the war was complicated by the intervention in Russia of troops from fifteen nations. They were deployed in numbers too small and geographically too distant from important fields of battle to make much of an impact on the outcome of the war, but their presence threatened greater and more effective intervention by Britain, France, the United States, and Japan, among others. This intervention contributed to later Soviet concerns about "capitalist encirclement," the idea that the capitalist nations surrounded the Soviet Union and would try to choke off and destroy it from the outside. While the Bolsheviks were focused on keeping control of Russia in the face of civil war and Allied intervention, initially promising developments in other European countries led nowhere. Communist regimes took power but fell quickly in Bavaria and Hungary in 1919. Early victories in the Russo-Polish War of 1920 fueled hopes that Warsaw would soon be the capital of a Polish Soviet Socialist Republic, but the resurgence of Polish fortunes on the battlefield ended that hope. In Germany various uprisings and coup plots accomplished nothing. Diplomatically, the Soviets felt they had suffered setbacks with the Dawes Plan of 1924 and the Locarno Pact in 1925. The former provided Western assistance to Germany, and rescheduled the World War I reparations debt that previously had been a source of conflict between the Germans and the victorious allies. The latter committed the Germans to preserving the boundaries of Western Europe and gave the Germans a stake in maintaining the status quo there. Together, the Dawes Plan and the Locarno Pact sharply reduced the possibilities for Soviet-German cooperation. Despite these events, however, the Soviets under both Lenin and his successor, Josef Stalin, pursued the most aggressive foreign policies possible. Regardless of their outcomes, the Bolshe-

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Company of Soviet infantry, many of whom are boys, December 1923 (Associated Press)

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viks did seek to expand their revolution to Poland and Germany. They tried simultaneously to encourage the overthrow of the German government and to work with the Germans to overthrow the European order established by the Treaty of Versailles (1919). They also established the Comintern in 1919 for the purposes of establishing firm Soviet control over communist parties in foreign countries and ensuring that any successful communist revolutions would place pro-Moscow parties in power. The audacity of the Soviets was readily apparent in their conduct during the Russo-Polish War of 1920. Although the war began with a Polish attack on Russia in April 1920, the Russians had begun planning operations against Poland in January 1920. Richard Pipes and other historians have argued that had the Poles not attacked first, the Soviets might have initiated hostilities themselves. By July the Red Army had blunted the initial Polish advance and turned the tide on the battlefield. At this point the British foreign secretary, George, Lord Curzon, offered a plan for an armistice with a border drawn in accordance with the "ethnographic frontier" between Russia and Poland. Lenin rejected this offer, opting instead to prosecute a war that he hoped would lead to the establishment of a Soviet Poland and put the Red Army on the frontier of Germany. Poland was crucial not only because

conquering it would move the revolution farther west, but also because it was a symbol of the Versailles system; that is, an independent Poland was not just a reminder of Wilsonian devotion to national self-determination, it was a crucial piece of the international system that the British and French had designed to contain both Germany and Russia. Placing the Red Army in Poland, on the frontier of Germany, Lenin hoped, would help to facilitate revolution in that crucial industrial nation. This goal was part of Lenin's expansive image of revolutionary possibilities in Europe in 1920. He expected that the Poles would greet the Red Army as liberators and that the revolution would expand from there. In his correspondence, Lenin described plans for the spread of the revolution not only to Poland but also to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Italy. Lenin, however, had misjudged the situation in Poland. The Poles did not rise up against the ruling class and greet the Red Army as liberators. Instead, they rallied in defense of their homeland as overextended Russian forces drew near. When peace came with the Treaty of Riga in March 1921, Poland emerged with portions of Byelorussia and Ukraine. The Soviets had failed to spread revolution throughout central and eastern Europe as they had expected, but not from the lack of aggressive policy decisions.

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

Soviet efforts to bring the revolution to Germany also failed. Germany was crucial in Bolshevik diplomacy for several reasons. It was the largest and most populous European nation west of Russia. German industrial capacity was prodigious. The record of German armies in wars against Denmark, Austria, and France between 1864 and 1871 had been overwhelming. Even while saddled with relatively ineffective allies in World War I, the Germans had enough military might to come close to victory over the combined power of Britain, France, and Russia. Per haps most noteworthy for the Bolsheviks was Germany's status as an outlaw power. After Germany was defeated by the Allies in World War I, the peace treaty declared the Germans responsible for the war. They were required to pay reparations and accept limitations on their military. Germany, like the Bolsheviks, had been ostracized by the Great Powers. Because they were both outsiders in the new international system, Bolshevik Russia and Weimar Germany had grounds for working together. Yet, at the same time that Moscow wanted to work with Berlin to undermine the Versailles system, the Bolsheviks were also attempting to undermine the Weimar government of Germany, as part of their plan for communist world domination. On several occasions Bolshevik agents tried to encourage uprisings in Germany that ultimately failed or were aborted. In 1919, 1921, and 1923 leftists or Communists attempted to take power in Germany and failed. Despite these activities, it was logical that the Germans and the Soviets would work together. The Treaty of Rapallo (1922) united the governments of two historically powerful European nations in adamant opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. In their dealings, the Germans and Russians worked to subvert the limitations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty and at the same to permit the Soviets to acquire military hardware to which they otherwise would not have had access. The Soviets permitted on Soviet soil the training of German forces and the establishment of German-run manufacturing plants prohibited by the Versailles Treaty. The Soviets took some of the production from these plants, significantly improving the military hardware at their disposal, while at the same time the German armaments industry remained intact despite Versailles prohibitions. Soviet diplomacy during the Ruhr crisis of 1923 also showed the Communist commitment to aggressive foreign policies. The Germans had refused to make reparations payments required by the Treaty of Versailles. In accordance with its provisions, the French and Belgians occupied German territory to extract the reparations directly, triggering a European crisis. The HISTORY

IN DISPUTE,

Soviet approach was to threaten war against Poland if the Poles joined a European coalition and attacked Germany. The British were cool to the idea of fighting Germany again, and their diplomacy undermined the French. Meanwhile, the Soviets were playing the role of provocateur, attempting to weaken the Allies and undermine their commitment to the Versailles system. More important to their efforts to spread revolution, the Bolsheviks established the Comintern. This organization of communist-party representatives from around the world was ostensibly an independent organization that had chosen to establish its headquarters in Moscow. In reality it was subservient to the Soviet government. Member parties were required to agree to Lenin's Twenty-One Conditions, which were adopted at the Second Comintern Congress in 1920. These conditions required subservience to Moscow, including the maintenance of "parallel illegal organizations" to be used when the time came for a decisive challenge to the social order in their respective countries. Moscow tightened its controls on the foreign parties, demanding even greater subservience, at the Fifth Comintern Congress in 1924. Another component of Soviet diplomacy during the 1920s was the courtship of nationalliberation movements in emerging nations. Especially in China and India, but also in Iran and Turkey, the Soviets moved to weaken historic Western prominence by encouraging anti-imperialist forces—even when they were not communist. The Soviets were determined to weaken the hold of Britain, France, and other imperial nations on their colonies, and were quite content to abandon communists in those colonies when anticommunist forces were the strongest possible anti-imperialists. The Soviets thus sought to promote their long-term aim of expanding Communism with the short-term device of weakening the advanced industrial nations by undermining their colonies. Many obstacles had confronted the Bolsheviks after 1918: the small numbers in their own ranks, the vast size of the nation they governed, the hostility they engendered both inside and outside Russia, the civil war they endured, and the territory they were forced to sacrifice under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. They had to bypass all these roadblocks to solidify their control of the nation they expected to be the starting point of world revolution. Overcoming such obstacles entailed some minimization of risks diplomatically. Yet, despite some apparent caution, they pursued an aggressive, if not always successful foreign policy, attempting to sovietize Poland, spread the revolution farther into western and southern Europe, reclaim control of Finland and VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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lenin's twenty-oty-onene

CONDITIONS

In 1920, the year after Soviet Russia established the Communist Internationai (Comintern) to bring together communist parties from around the world, Vladimir Lenin issued twenty-one rules requiring the subservience of other parties to Russian control. These conditions for membership included:

1. The general propaganda and agitation should bear a really Communist character, and should correspond to the programme and decisions of the Third International. The entire party press should be edited by reliable Communists who have proved their loyalty to the cause of the Proletarian revolution.... 2. Every organization desiring to join the Communist International shall be required to remove from all the responsible posts in the labor movement... all reformists and followers of the "centre," and to have them replaced by Communists, even at the cost of replacing at the beginning "experienced" men by rank-and-file working men, 3. The class struggle in almost every country of Europe and America is entering the phase of civil war. Under such conditions the Communists can have no confidence in bourgeois laws. They should create everywhere a parallel illegal apparatus, which at the decisive moment should do its duty to the party.... In every country where in consequence of martial law or of other exceptional laws, the Communists are unable to carry on their work lawfully, a combination of lawful and unlawful work is absolutely necessary.... 6. Every party desirous of affiliating with the Third International should renounce not only avowed social patriotism, but also the falsehood and hypocrisy of social pacifism; it should systematically demonstrate to the workers that without a revolutionary overthrow of capitalIsm no international arbitration, no talk of disarmament, no democratic reorganization of the League of Nations' will be capable of saving mankind from new Imperialist wars.,,, 12. All parties belonging to the Communist International should be formed on the basis of the principle of democratic centralism. At the present time of acute civil war the Communist Party will be able fully to do its duty only when it is organized in a sufficiently thorough way, when it posses an iron discipline, and when the party centre enjoys the confidence of the members of the party, who are to endow this centre with complete power, authority and ample rights..., 14. Each party desirous of affiliating with the Communist International should be obliged to render every possible assistance to the Soviet Republics in their Struggles against all counter-revolutionary forces. Source: "Leninism Discipline in the Comintern,"in A Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to Collapse, edited by Robert V. Daniels (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 32-34.

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the Baltic States, encourage uprisings in Germany, undermine the Versailles system, control international Communism through the Comintern, and destabilize foreign interests in the colonial world. Taken together, these actions show that the Soviets, though sometimes cautious for tactical reasons, were nonetheless aggressive in pursuing their aim of communist expansion. -JOHN SCARES, CINCINNATI, OHIO

Viewpoint: No. The Soviets drew back from confrontation in an attempt to build alliances that would ensure their survival and help them develop their economy. After winning the Russian Civil War, the Soviets needed time to work on building their socialist Utopia. The Civil War and the Bolshevik policy of War Communism had left the country and its economy in ruins. One of the necessary conditions for rebuilding the country was minimizing the risk of foreign intervention-as fifteen nations had done during the Civil War-as well as foreign diplomatic and economic pressure. The Soviets also hoped that the Soviet Union could get some help from abroad in the form of investment, development, and trade agreements. In the early 1920s the Soviet Union adopted the policy that Josef Stalin later described with the slogan "socialism in one country." In other words, the Soviet Union was choosing to postpone an international communist revolution in favor of peaceful coexistence with the admittedly suspicious West. In 1917-1920, immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, this policy would have seemed unlikely. In these years Russia seemed determined to spread the revolution abroad. The Communist International (Comintern) was established in March 1919, with the expressed purpose of pursuing this goal. Once the Civil War was won in 1920, however, the Soviets turned to the question of how to reconcile the demands of being a revolutionary regime and securing that revolution. At the Ninth Party Congress meeting in September 1920, the Politburo voted against using the Red Army to support foreign revolutions. The unsuccessful attempt to export revolution to Poland earlier that year almost certainly played a role in this decision as did the combined devastation of World War I and the Civil War, and it was clear to Vladimir Lenin that Soviet Russia could not thrive in a state of economic independence from

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930

the rest of the world. By the end of 1920, Lenin was no longer speaking publicly of an impending world revolution. Rather, he was saying that he expected it to happen eventually. In March 1921, at the Tenth Party Congress, Lenin announced the New Economic Policy (NEP), a series of measures intended to stimulate development by restoring a limited market economy in Russia. At the same time, Russia began seeking out treaties to normalize relations with its neighbors and the rest of the world, as well as trade agreements with the leading industrial powers, including the archimperialist, archcapitalist power Great Britain. By 1924 normal diplomatic relations had been established with a host of previously hostile nations. Although the United States did not establish formal relations until 1933, American private investment was warmly welcomed by Lenin's regime. The Soviet Union, in short, was actively seeking membership in the international state system. European diplomacy in the 1920s has been derisively called the "diplomacy of casinos," as the secret diplomacy of the prewar era was replaced with a series of ad hoc multilateral conferences held at resort locations across the Continent. One of the greatest of these was the Genoa Economic Conference of April-May 1922, attended by thirty-four national delegations and forty-two heads of government. The main purpose of this conference was engineering the economic reconstruction of Europe after the catastrophe of World War I. Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain invited the Soviets, assuming that extending a cooperative hand for rebuilding Russia would have a salutary effect on Anglo-Soviet relations. This invitation was perhaps based on a rather superficial and inaccurate view that the Bolsheviks were moving away from their ideological roots and would become better international citizens because of the move. There was no such change in Soviet Russia, but the Soviets, desperate for help, still accepted the invitation. In preparation for the conference, the Soviet Commissariat of Foreign Affairs expended a tremendous amount of effort to produce information to prove the need for foreign aid. Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgii Chicherin let the West know that he intended to attend the conference with abundant goodwill, and from the outset he expressed the desire to work with the West in building a peaceful and cooperative world order. As perhaps a further sign of the Soviets' willingness to adopt Western rules of international behavior, Chicherin addressed the Genoa Conference in (apparently only marginally comprehensible) French, still the international language of diplomacy. It has repeatedly been claimed that the Soviets sought to spread the Bolshevik Revolution to HISTORY

Germany, Britain, and China in the 1920s, but it must be understood that in that decade, Soviet policy making was not as monolithic as it became by 1929, when Stalin consolidated his power. The 1920s were in fact a period when, at least by later standards, Soviet policy making was open to input from various sources. Accordingly, even though Chicherin was delivering one message as commissar of foreign affairs, the Comintern was acting independently, meddling in the Chinese Civil War and the domestic politics of Germany and Britain. Chicherin strenuously opposed such actions of the Comintern as diversions from the primary Soviet foreign-policy objective: the defense, con solidation, and preservation of the revolution in the Soviet Union. The Comintern's failed attempt to spark a revolution in Germany in 1923 con vinced the Politburo that the policy of cooperation—which had been agreed on in government circles in 1920-1921—was the correct policy. No further attempts at triggering revolution in the West were made. During this period the Soviet Union saw Germany as its key partner in foreign affairs. In the Rapallo Agreement of 1922, the two countries agreed to cooperate in various areas, including trade and military exchanges. The backbone of Soviet policy toward Germany, this treaty was more a Soviet accommodation to the international state system of the West than it was an attempt to subvert it. The Germans, in particular, were especially sensitive to the question of the Bolsheviks' role in promoting revolution, having had several communist uprisings in 1918-1919. This issue became a sore point for Germany again in 1923, when France occupied the Ruhr, triggering more unrest in Germany. With Lenin incapacitated by strokes suffered in 1922-1923, the Politburo—under the influence of Lev Trotsky, showing his firebrand tendencies—voted to support the impending German revolution. Ignorant of the actual conditions in Germany, the Soviets shipped money and weapons to Germany to arm a communist army. The uprising was quickly suppressed by German local police. Despite such actions on the part of the Soviets, Germany's status as a pariah in the post-World War I world led it to cooperate with the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, distrust of the Soviet Union in the West was reinforced by the notorious "Zinoviev Letter." Cited in the Daily Mail,, this letter helped swing the 1924 British elections in favor of the anticommunist Conservatives, who defeated the first British Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald. One of many purportedly written by Comintern leader Grigorii Zinoviev to British Communists, this letter was used as proof that the Labour government was soft on communism. Among other things, the letter encouraged members of the British Commu-

IN DISPUTE, VOLUME

21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930

33

nist Party to form revolutionary cells in the police and army, in anticipation of the pending revolution. While it is true that Zinoviev was in contact with British Communists, most scholars have concluded that the "Zinoviev Letter" was a forgery and did not reflect true Soviet policies or intentions. Soviet policy in regard to China was more focused on gaining support in an area that was trying to establish order than it was on attempting to subvert a stable regime. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911-1912, a protracted state of warlordism settled into an uneasy peace under the nominal government of the nationalist, anticommunist Kuomintang. The Soviets supported the Kuomintang—not the Chinese communists—militarily and financially. In 1926 the Politburo voted not to promote a revolution in China, continuing to support the Kuomintang even as it planned to destroy the Chinese communist movement. China, however, played a far smaller part in Moscow's foreign-policy goals than that played by Europe. In Europe, the second half of the 1920s was colored by the Locarno Pact and the ascendancy of the League of Nations. In 1925 the Western European powers and Germany met at the Swiss resort town of Locarno, where they agreed to recognize existing frontiers in the region and negotiated the entry of Germany into the League of Nations the following year. The pact did not include a guarantee of Germany's existing eastern boundaries as a tacit nod toward Germany's desire to correct its frontiers in Eastern Europe. In Moscow, Stalin saw this omission as particularly sinister. Chicherin's official statement concluding that the West had no interest in toppling communism, however, is far more indicative of Soviet policy at that time. From 1920 to 1929, Soviet diplomacy was neither as monolithic nor as subversive as later Cold War interpretations described it. In Moscow, various schools of thought competed for control. The one individual who had the most strongly developed interest in foreign affairs was Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin, who consistently propounded a policy of peaceful co-

34

HISTORY

existence with the West. While there were occasional lapses when Moscow saw apparent opportunities to promote revolution abroad, the aggregate path of Russian foreign policy during the decade followed the conclusion reached by Lenin's government in 1920-1921, when they decided that the Soviet Union could not afford to destabilize the international state system or individual states. Even in China, the one place where the Soviets had an extended presence, they pursued a policy aimed at promoting stability in a region of chaos. The claim that the Soviets attempted to spread world revolution bears only a fleeting relationship to the facts. -PHIL GILTNER, ALBANY ACADEMY

References Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, translated by Phyllis B. Carlos (New York: Summit, 1986). Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). R. Craig Nation, Black Earth, Red Star: A History of Soviet Security Policy 1917-1991 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923, revised edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993). Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1973, second edition (New York: Praeger, 1974). Stephen White, The Origins of Detente: The Genoa Conference and Soviet-Western Relations, 1921-1922 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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1890-1930

DUMA Was the Duma a viable parliamentary institution? Viewpoint: Yes. The Duma had many features of a modern parliament and was a central element in the evolution of a constitutional monarchy in Russia. Viewpoint: No. The Duma's limited powers and fractious relations with the autocracy cast doubt on its relevance in the late Imperial era.

Until 1906 Russia had no elected representative institution for the whole country. Created as the result of Tsar Nicholas ll's promise to allow for one in the October Manifesto of 1905, the Gosudarstvennaya Duma (State Assembly) represented great democratic hopes to many Russians. Positive and negative views of the Duma abound. Its supporters argue that the Duma was developing real political parties, legislative experience, and national political platforms that suggested movement toward true democracy. Although imperfect, it was not all that different from other parliamentary institutions emerging in the early twentieth century. Russia's path to modernization (without major political upheaval) could have followed on its early successes. Yet, pessimists look at the Duma as a source of fractious relations with the Russian autocracy. Wrenched from the tsar in a tense political and social situation, the Duma was never seen by the regime as anything more than a stopgap, to be derailed as soon as possible after 1905. Its early sessions were short-lived, ended prematurely after controversial debates that did not suit the regime. Its electoral rules were illegally rewritten in 1907, and many of its controversial early members were arrested or otherwise sanctioned. Even at the end of the empire, the regime still would not recognize it as a barometer of popular opinion or a vehicle for managing popular aspirations.

Viewpoint: Yes. The Duma had many features of a modern parliament and was a central element in the evolution of a constitutional monarchy in Russia. In evaluating the Russian Duma and its role in the evolution of a constitutional monarchy, it is important to remember that during this time (1905-1917), the concept of oneperson, one-vote was not in existence anywhere. In the United States,

women did not yet have the right to vote, and senators were appointed by state legislatures until 1914. The British House of Commons was not elected by universal manhood suffrage (or female suffrage) until 1918, and the House of Lords held veto power over all Commons legislation until 1911. France had universal manhood suffrage but did not enfranchise women until 1945. When democratically elected parliaments appeared in Russia, they came with the hopes and ideals of the French Revolution, which suggested immediate change for the country. Unfor-

35

tunately, in reality, reform progressed much more slowly. The creation of an elected parliament in Russia, the Duma, was just one of a series of reforms enacted after the revolution of 1905. Thus, any analysis of the success or failure of the Duma has to be seen in the broader context of institutional reform, which also included the reform of the State Council and the Council of Ministers. The State Council was one-half elected, although the elections were by interest groups. The other half was appointed by the tsar. The Council of Ministers was reorganized so that, for the first time in Russian history, a chief minister would preside over it. The first premier, Count Sergei Witte, was a leading reformer and architect of the 18 October 1905 manifesto that abrogated some of the monarchy's prerogatives. It is important to note that Tsar Nicholas II accepted the new institutional structure and, after approving these reforms, did nothing to undo them during the rest of his tenure. There would always be a Duma with its various powers, which included reviewing and approving the national budget. The role of the tsar did not change significantly with the decree of reforms. He was and remained Autocrat of All the Russias. This title was enshrined in the opening of the Fundamental Laws. Critics of the tsar and the reforms often point to this autocracy and Article 87, which permitted the tsar to enact by decree any law while the Duma and the State Council were not in session, as evidence that the reforms were only nominal. Furthermore, the tsar disbanded the first two Dumas (April-July 1906 and February June 1907) because he was unable to work with them and, using Article 87, rewrote the election laws so that the Third Duma (November 1907June 1912) was more to his liking. In an additional limitation the Duma and State Council were forbidden from discussing the military or foreign affairs, which closed off from their review a large portion of the state budget. Yet, despite these limitations, real progress toward limiting the powers of the Russian tsar was being made. The Duma and State Council had control over significant portions of the budget and could discuss anything in chamber. Press coverage of all the actions and discussions of the Duma and the State Council was widespread and free from tsarist interference and state censorship. In all of the legislation considered by these bodies, there were extensive and intensive debates. There were many opinions and no real parties, only factions, which limited the ability of a single group to gain a majority to push legislation opposed by the tsar. There were serious problems between the tsar and the Duma, but much of the early tension had to do with how 36

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

the first two Dumas approached the tsar. Their goal was to wrest power from the tsar. The tsar also saw them as direct challengers to his authority. In contrast, the Third Duma, and to a lesser extent the Fourth Duma (November 1912March 1917), focused on developing and implementing policy. That was a much more mature way of broadening power and influence; instead of demanding it, they proved that they were capable of governing through legislative actions and debates. The sessions of the Third and Fourth Dumas were filled with serious debates about the direction of the empire and passed many policy initiatives. One bill eliminated many of the rights of the Grand Duchy of Finland, and another restructured voting rights in the western zones of the empire in order to extend elected local government there. Although the State Council rejected it, the tsar approved it under Article 87. The 1908 decision to fund the expensive construction of the Amur Railroad, a route to Vladivostok that avoided Chinese territory, and attempts to create a Naval General Staff revealed that the elected representatives of the Russian people were really interested in improving and strengthening the empire together with the tsar and not always in opposition to him. In all of these works, direct challenge to the tsar was limited. Instead, Russia's parliamentarians worked through legislation that slowly shaped the empire. The focus of much of the legislation that the Duma considered dealt with social issues. The goals were to improve the situation of all Russians and to keep the economy growing. Premier Petr Stolypin's land reforms, finally approved in 1910, altered the lifestyle of Russian peasants by eliminating the redistribution of land in peasant communes and replacing it with private, hereditary property. Another major bill, passed in 1908, called for the implementation of universal, compulsory, elementary education. A final act of the Third Duma was to pass an insurance act for sick and injured workers in June 1912, in an attempt to limit rising labor unrest. World War I was an important turning point in the role of the Duma and the State Council, despite the fact that they rarely sat in full session. The tsar was afraid (and rightly so) that debates would not just be limited to the immediate challenges faced by the government and could easily turn into an attack on the monarchy and its handling of the war effort. The tsar also saw that Duma support was essential in galvanizing patriotism at the outbreak of the war. As war approached in 1914, the tsar, the ministers, and the court were much less confrontational with the Duma. In times of trouble, sessions of the Duma and State Council were called in an attempt to gain public support for

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1890-1930

THE MANIFESTO CALLING THE FIRST DUMA The empire of Russia is formed and strengthened by the indestructible union of the Tsar with the people and the people with the Tsar. This concord and union of the Tsar and the people is the great moral force which has created Russia in the course of centuries by protecting her from ail misfortunes and ali attacks, and has constituted up to the present time a pledge of unity, independence, integrity, material well-being, and intellectual development in the present and in the future. In our manifesto of February 26,1903, we summoned all faithful sons of the fatherland in order to perfect, through mutual understanding, the organization of the State, founding it securely on public order and private welfare. We devoted ourselves to the task of coordinating local elective bodies [zemstvos] with the central authorities, and removing the disagreements existing between them, which so disturbed the normal course of the national life, Autocratic Tsars, our ancestors, have had this aim constantly in view, and the time has now come to follow out their good intentions and to summon elected representatives from the whole of Russia to take a constant and active part in the elaboration of laws, adding for this purpose to the higher State institutions a special consultative body intrusted with the preliminary elaboration and discussion of measures and with the examination of the State Budget, It is for this reason that, while preserving the fundamental law regarding autocratic power, we have deemed it well to form a Gosoudarstvennaia Duma (i.e. State Council) and to approve regulations for elections to this Duma, extending these laws to the whole territory of the empire, with such exceptions only as may be considered necessary in the case of some regions in which special conditions obtain.... We have ordered the Minister of the interior to submit immediately for our approbation regulations for elections to the Duma, so that deputies from fifty governments, and the mili-

tary province of the Don, may be able to assemble not later than the middle of January, 1906. We reserve to ourselves exclusively the care of perfecting the organization of the Gosoudarsivennaia Duma, and when the course of events has demonstrated the necessity of changes corresponding to the needs of the times and the welfare of the empire, we shall not fail to give the matter our attention at the proper moment. We are convinced that those who are elected by the confidence of the whole people, and who are called upon to take part in the legislative work of the government, will show themselves in the eyes of all Russia worthy of the imperial trust in virtue of which they have been invited to cooperate in this great work; and that in perfect harmony with the other institutions and authorities of the State, established by us, they will contribute profitably and zealously to our labors for the well-being of our common mother, Russia, and for the strengthening of the unity, security, and greatness of the empire, as well as for the tranquillity and prosperity of the people. In invoking the blessing of the Lord on the labors of the new assembly which we are establishing, and with unshakable confidence in the grace of God and in the assurance of the great historical destinies reserved by Divine Providence for our beloved fatherland, we firmly hope that Russia, with the help of God Almighty, and with the combined efforts of ail her sons, will emerge triumphant from the trying ordeals through which she is now passing, and will renew her strength in the greatness and glory of her history extending over a thousand years. Given at Peterhof on the nineteenth day of August, in the year of grace 1905, and the eleventh year of our reign. NICHOLAS Source: James H. Robinson and Charles Beard, eds.f Readings in Modem European History, volume 2 (Boston: Ginn, 1908), pp. 375-377.

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37

reforms. One example is the creation of the War-Industry Committees following the military defeats of 1915. Despite limited sessions, the Duma, and to a lesser extent the State Council, gained power and influence over Russia's policies during the war by adapting to the changing situation and using their positions as the empire's only representative bodies. The leadership of the Duma met regularly (often weekly) throughout the war to coordinate all activity of its representatives. Some Duma members were assigned as liaisons to local government organs and war-relief committees. Members of the Duma and State Council, however, held real power during the war as members of the various government committees, especially the War-Industries Committees. Together, they often made up 40 percent of committee membership and could effectively control their policies. One example followed the decision by the Special Commission for Defense to take over the operations of the Putilov factory. The Duma and State Council members on the commission gained the ability to decide how to distribute state armament contracts over the opposition of the technocrats in the established bureaucracy. In this way and others, the elected representatives of the Russian people could influence the course of the war and try to improve the empire's chances to succeed. The debates did not disappear; they merely shifted from the floor of the Duma and the State Council to the committee room. The Duma's central role in the government of the Russian Empire came to fruition in the February Revolution of 1917. Although the tsar had formally disbanded the Duma and State Council prior to his abdication, the Duma was the only body that had the authority, legitimacy, and connections to form the Provisional Government and govern Russia. The Duma had been and continued to be an active participant in shaping the policies of the Russian state. -BRANDON SCHNEIDER, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. The Duma's limited powers and fractious relations with the autocracy cast doubt on its relevance in the late Imperial era. The State Duma never developed into a viable parliamentary institution. Created from the fires of the revolution of 1905, its genesis lay in the weakened Russian autocracy's fear during a 38

time of mass unrest, fear that gave way to renewed confidence and a deep reluctance to follow through with reform as stability returned to the empire. Far from mollifying the tsar's political opponents, the concession of an elected legislature with limited powers merely emboldened them to continue challenging his power and gave them a new platform from which to make radical demands. Neither the Right nor the Left approached the Duma as a place for measured debate, realistic compromise, or constructive dialogue to solve Russia's ills. The autocracy viewed it at worst as a den of revolution, at best as a refractory instrument of its will, and most of the time as an annoyance. Much of the opposition perceived it either as a half measure that would only be brought to perfection by another and more successful revolution or as a transient stopgap that would ultimately prove incapable of preventing massive social and political transformation. Tsar Nicholas II plainly did not want to share power with an elected legislature. He believed that his power came to him directly from God and that his main responsibility on the throne was to preserve that authority intact in order to pass it on to his son. His scenario of power was not inclined toward modernization, political or otherwise, and his ideal period of Russian history was the seventeenth century, when the autocracy he so desired to protect took form. His favorite predecessor was Peter the Great's father, Tsar Alexei I, who preserved much of Muscovy's traditional heritage. Not insignificantly, Nicholas II named his only son and heir Alexei, deliberately in honor of his pre-Petrine predecessor. Such symbolism belied the political realities of the late imperial era. In 1895, only ten years before he consented to the creation of the Duma, Nicholas II had dismissed a local government (zemstvo) petition for national representative institutions as "senseless dreams." Even as late as December 1904, when he consented to a mild reform program, the tsar still maintained that "under no circumstances will I ever agree to a representative form of government." Nicholas IPs concession of the Duma put him in an awkward position. His October Manifesto, promulgated at the height of a national general strike that paralyzed the empire and portended massive upheaval in the autumn of 1905, failed to retain an important place in his thinking. The Fundamental Laws of February 1906, which spelled out how the Duma was to be elected and function, exposed great efforts on the part of the autocracy to limit its powers. First, the body's powers of legislative initiative were limited. It could vote for the most part only on bills submitted to it by the government.

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Its decisions were then subject to the veto of the State Council, an upper chamber dominated by appointed placemen of the tsar and corporate representatives of mostly conservative institutions, such as the Orthodox Church. The tsar held supreme veto power. Second, the Duma enjoyed only limited powers over a huge portion of Russia's budget, including the court, which controlled a substantial part of Russia's landed property, government administration, and state expenses. Third, the Duma had no say over foreign policy, police and internal-security affairs, ministerial appointments, or military command, all of which remained in the tsar's hands. Fourth, the tsar reserved the right to dissolve the Duma at will for any reason at any time during its standard five-year sessions. When the Duma was not in session, Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws gave him the further prerogative of implementing any type of legislation by emergency decree. Even with these major limitations, the autocracy still imposed onerous restrictions on the Duma's suffrage, which heavily favored rural areas over cities and landowners over peasants. The legislature, in other words, was intended for domination by social elements that the autocracy felt to be sympathetic but nevertheless did not trust with an important amount of state authority. Despite the electoral restrictions, a large segment of the first deputies elected to the Duma actively opposed the autocracy and remained fundamentally unsatisfied with the tsar's concessions. Rather than look to the legislature as an institution that might aid Russia's evolution into a more democratic polity or ameliorate some of the worst features of tsarism, they instead called for its immediate transformation into a parliament of a type that would at the time have been one of the world's most liberal. Expressed in shrill tones, the Duma's first address to the throne was little more than a repetition of many of the demands made by political radicals in the turbulent autumn of 1905, refined with specific responses to new features of the political order. A majority of its delegates wanted universal manhood suffrage unencumbered by the restrictions of the Fundamental Laws, full control over ministerial appointments, the abolition of the State Council, and radical land reform, either with or without financial compensation to owners. To a great degree it was a case of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The civic unrest of 1905, largely channeled into organized opposition by many of the same liberal and radical intellectuals who now sat in the Duma, had led to the creation of a national public platform in which they could discuss virtually any topic with impunity. Their status as Duma members HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

protected them from arrest, a sanction they all had potentially faced—and which more than a few had suffered—just a year earlier. The liberalization of censorship laws, academic and journalistic expression, and public associational life all ensured that Duma debates and discussions would circulate freely and influence public opinion. Yet, like many revolutionary leaders, they failed to adapt to the new and more mundane conditions of parliamentarism. Indeed, many leading liberals declined Premier Sergei Witte's late-1905 offer of ministerial portfolios—an honest attempt to include them in Russia's government—because their principles would not allow them to work with conservative ministers. The challenge that the Duma presented to the autocracy was nearly as uncooperative as the autocracy's disdain for the Duma. The opening of the Duma itself symbolized the uneasiness with which each side regarded the other. A famous photograph shows its members and the tsar's courtiers glaring at each other across the throne room of the Winter Palace, where the Duma delegates were received with a polite speech that said nothing about reform. The Duma's first legislative session, from April to July 1906, was a true disaster. It lasted for only seventy-two days out of the projected five years set down in the Fundamental Laws. Its practical legislative work effected little change. The first two bills submitted for the Duma's consideration by the government provided for the creation of a new laundry facility and greenhouse. The chamber's radical rhetoric solved no problems and merely provoked the tsar, suspicious of its intentions even before it began meeting, to dissolve it. To protest this measure, more than one hundred Duma members fled to the comparative safety of Russian-ruled Finland to draft a resolution of protest. The government's unproductive response was to arrest them all upon their return and then judicially bar them from sitting in the Duma thereafter. New elections were duly held, but the Second Duma, which met only from February to June 1907, was in many ways more disappointing than the first. Breaking with their initial decision to boycott the legislative body, Russia's socialist parties—the Social Democrats (whose Bolshevik and Menshevik factions sat separately) and the Socialist Revolutionariesfielded electoral candidates and together won more than one hundred seats. Yet, instead of using their success to advocate reform in the manner of Western revisionist socialists, they determined to use their access to a national political forum only to try to revolutionize the masses with propaganda and discredit the existVOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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Siberian monk and court favorite Grigorii Rasputin, murdered by Duma member Vladimir Purishkevich and other extreme conservatives

in 1916 (Associated Press)

ing political system by obstructing meaningful legislation. Neither goal did much to further the Duma's image as an evolving parliament or soften the government's attitude toward it. By early summer the tsarist secret police discovered evidence of a plot in which several socialist deputies were encouraging representatives of military units stationed in St. Petersburg to foment rebellion. Petr Stolypin, who had become pre mier a year earlier, presented the full Duma with this evidence and demanded that the suspect deputies be stripped of their legal immunity to face prosecution. The legislature hesitated, and the government used the affair to dissolve the Duma again. 40

Yet, simply holding new elections with public knowledge of the scandal was not enough for the autocracy, some elements of which even wanted to use the crisis to abolish the Duma altogether. In a technically legal move that nevertheless violated the spirit of the Fundamental Laws, the tsar dramatically changed the legislature's electoral procedure to make it even more favorable to conservative landowners and more heavily weighted in favor of ethnic Russians and Orthodox Christians at the expense of ethnic and religious minorities. It was not quite the blatant coup d'etat that contemporary critics and some historians have claimed, but it showed as little inclination on

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the part of the government to work honestly with elected representatives of the Russian people as the Duma radicals displayed to work constructively with the government. Despite his reformist program, Stolypin did not prove to be the greatest advocate of Duma authority. He had no qualms, for example, about using state funds to bribe the press and pliable Duma members to support his agenda. Nor did he rely on the legislature's imprimatur for his most important reform, which allowed for the breakup of the traditional communal form of peasant land tenure. Instead he passed it under Article 87 in late 1906. Not even the alteration of the electoral law secured a compliant legislature, however. Although a large majority of the Third Duma's delegates were reactionaries, conservatives, or moderate supporters of the new political order established by the Fundamental Laws (leading them to be called "Octobrists," after the October Manifesto), they were hardly the "parliament of lords and lackeys" that disenfranchised radicals vilified. The Third Duma (November 1907-June 1912) met almost uninterruptedl for its full five-year session and conducted a much more serious program of legislative work than its predecessors. Yet, on a fundament level it failed to establish a durable relationship with the government. During discussions of a naval construction bill in 1908-1909, its leadership directly challenged the tsar's authority over the military by insisting that control of the naval budget be vested in the responsible ministry rather than the court. The tsar deeply resented this intrusion into his prerogatives and secured the bill's passage in the State Council. While the Duma had attempted to leverage a matter of national defense to alter the political foundations of the country, the autocracy stepped on the legislature's budgetary prerogatives. Neither measure engendered mutual trust. In 1910-1911 a bill to extend elected local government into the Russian Empire's predominantly Polish western provinces passed the Duma and enjoyed Stolypin's support but failed in the upper chamber. The premier's solution was to convince the tsar to dissolve both legislative bodies for three days so that he could implement the bill on his own under Article 87. This step brought Stolypin considerable ire from outmaneuvered conservatives (and from the tsar himself, who felt humiliated by the process), but it also convinced many Duma members that they, a majority of whom had supported the bill after all, were regarded as unnecessary and irrelevant in major affairs of state. The Octobrist Party, which had supported the government since the Third Duma's opening, moved into opposition and denied HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

Stolypin the majority support he would have needed to work effectively in the future. The frustrated premier remained ineffectual for the rest of his tenure, which was ended by an assassin's bullet in September 1911. The Fourth Duma, elected in November 1912 and sitting until March 1917, closely resembled the political complexion of the Third, but the outbreak of World War I in 191 led it to offer its own dissolution as a means of ensuring national unity. This step in itself reveals how deep the divide between Duma and autocracy really was—the Duma leaders appeared to believe that Russia's war effort would have been hindered by a legislative body functioning under their own leadership—but the spirit of the gesture was short-lived. A year of serious military setbacks and mounting domestic problems led to the Duma's recall for a six-week session in July 1915. At that time its leadership, many of whom had been involved in various independent organizations created to aid the war effort, strongly renewed their calls for a ministerial government responsible to the nation. About two-thirds of the Duma members joined the so-called Progressive Bloc to work for that goal. Even most of the tsar's own ministers endorsed their effort, but Nicholas II steadfastly refused to see any benefit in entrusting his people's elected representatives with greater power. In November he allowed the limited Duma session to end and did not recall it for another year. In the months that followed, he fired most of the ministers who had supported the Duma's calls for national representative government. The last Duma session in late 1916 again revealed how unbridgeable the gap between it and the autocracy truly was. The hints at cooperation earlier in wartime had vanished, and from its first day of meetings the Duma became little more than a soapbox for revolution. Aleksandr Kerensky, a nominally socialist delegate who later became a Provisional Government minister and premier, called for the dismissal of all the tsar's ministers. The Constitutional Democrat Party leader Pavel Miliukov delivered a litany of government policies and decisions he found objectionable and paused after each item to ask whether they resulted from stupidity or treason. Such confrontational rhetoric both further weakened the Duma's standing in government eyes and, in Miliukov's case, suggested to the public—falsely—that the country's leaders were traitors deliberately sabotaging its war effort and plotting defeat. Miliukov subsequently admitted that he knew the latter to be untrue at the time of his speech, but his dishonest statements nevertheless inflamed popular opinion. VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

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Surprisingly, however, the government responded with concessions. Not only did Nicholas II decline to dissolve the rebellious session, but he also gestured toward fulfilling radical demands by dismissing his despised chief minister, Boris Sturmer, and replacing him with Aleksandr Trepov, who had a reputation as a conciliatory moderate. Trepov's first speech emphasized his willingness to work with the Duma to solve problems in a meaningful way. Rather than celebrate or try to build constructively on this victory, however, the Duma merely demanded further concessions. In early December the Menshevik delegates walked out of the body. The remaining radicals heaped abuse on Trepov and renewed their calls for sweeping dismissals. Kerensky incited the people of Russia to civil disobedience. Vladimir Purishkevich, a right-wing deputy, denounced leading officials whom he accused of selling out Russian interests to the Germans. Shortly thereafter he participated in the assassination of the influential Siberian mystic Grigorii Rasputin, a favorite of the empress. These incidents only antagonized the regime and ensured that further calls for representative government were ignored. Even as late as February 1917, when urban unrest in Petrograd threatened Nicholas II's position on the throne, he could still make fun of "that fat fellow [Duma president Mikhail] Rodzianko" who "has again written me all sorts of nonsense, which I shan't even bother to answer," when Rodzianko urged him to respond to the disorder in the capital by naming a cabinet responsible to the Duma. The tsar remained cemented in his convictions when similar advice came to him from his last chief minister, Prince Nikolai Golitsyn, who claimed to speak on behalf of the entire cabinet, and from members of his own family, several of whom were already to talking to Duma leaders about the future of Russia. Ultimately the unrest was not tamed, Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, and more than three centuries of Romanov rule came to an end. The results may not have been different if Nicholas II had followed the advice that reached him in his final days on the throne, but both the Duma's antagonism and his own stubbornness in a time of

42

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IN DISPUTE,

major crisis indicated that cooperation between government and legislature was a lost cause. -PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

References Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2001). Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1992). Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1988). Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 19071914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Alexandra Korros, A Reluctant Parliament: Stolypin, Nationalism, and the Politics of the Russian Imperial State Council, 1906-1911 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). D. C. B. Li even, Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). W. Bruce Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War (New York: Dial, 1983). R. B. McKean, The Russian Constitutional Monarchy, 1907-17 (London: Historical Association, 1977). Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, volume 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

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EARLY SOVIET ECONOMY Was the New Economic Policy (NEP) effective in promoting recovery from war and revolution? Viewpoint: Yes. NEP allowed industry, agriculture, and other economic sectors to make impressive recoveries. Viewpoint: No. NEP fell short of restoring economic prosperity and failed to solve long-term problems. In the wake of the carnage and chaos caused by revolution and civil war, the Bolsheviks took control of Russia and looked toward economic reform to foster national recovery. Approved by the Tenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1921, the New Economic Policy (NEP) allowed for a light private industry, a free service sector, limited consumer industry, and free domestic trade in agricultural products. The idea behind NEP was to promote economic recovery so that Russia's evolution to socialism and communism could rest on firm material foundations. This chapter evaluates NEP's successes and failures. Many scholars suggest that its reforms ushered in a time of prosperity that matched the popular mood of the Soviet 1920s. NEP businesses flourished, pre-1914 industrial production levels were restored, and grain grew in bounteous harvests. Yet, on the other hand, recovery appeared limited, state economic controls continued and hindered growth, markets were small and unstable, and supreme state authority loomed over economic freedom.

Viewpoint: Yes. NEP allowed industry, agriculture, and other economic sectors to make impressive recoveries. The New Economic Policy (NEP) was a key factor in the Bolshevik leaders' success in consolidating Soviet rule after years of war, civil conflict, and economic chaos. Faced with broad dissatisfaction in most of the countryside and among many of those urban elements who had managed to survive the earlier terror of War Communism (the policy of seizing surplus product from the existing rural and urban "bourgeoisie" and placing most economic activity under dictatorial state control), the leaders

of the new Soviet regime were forced to make substantial revisions to their policies. The March 1921 NEP proposals of Vladimir Lenin and economic theorist Nikolai Bukharin reinstated the rights of citizens engaged in agriculture, handicrafts, light industry, and the service sector to work according to market principles. This situation helped to pave the way for domestic quiet, productive labor, and a stable currency, all of which were keystones of economic success that had been lacking during the previous years. The leadership further hoped that these developments would stimulate increased foreign trade, particularly of grain to foreign markets. Finally, Lenin and the Bolsheviks ceased propaganda against entrepreneurs as "speculators" and "class enemies" who would exploit

43

Malnourished child sharing a bed with a dead companion, February 1922, a year after NEP was introduced (Associated Press)

44

Russia. Although the regime continued to maintain tight state controls over heavy industry, foreign trade, transport, and utilities, the NEP reforms were all popularly received, and support for the Soviet regime increased. Most importantly, the Soviet economy was able to make substantial gains in light industry, agriculture, and other economic sectors to levels that equaled or surpassed Russia's development prior to World War I. Despite the views of Bukharin and other leaders who believed that NEP needed to continue its economic and public-relations successes for the foreseeable future, most Soviet leaders came to believe that the groundwork had been set for heavy industrialization. The underlying factor proving NEP's success was recovery from an economy totally devastated by World War I, the Civil War, and War Communism. In 1913 the Russian peasantry had produced approximately 80 million tons of excess grain, which fed them, supplied burgeoning urban communities, and was available for export. By 1920 agricultural production was nearly halved, as Moscow and Petrograd starved and nearly all ties to outside markets were cut. Industrial production suffered even greater losses, falling in 1920 to just 20 percent of the 1913 levels. The steel, coal, and textile industries

were among the heaviest hit, falling in some cases to barely 5 percent of their pre-World War I levels. Key to this dramatic decline was the loss or destruction of more than two-thirds of Russia's coal reserves, electrical supply, and rail transport, as well as the absence of an effective monetary economy. The Soviet leadership had no choice but to deal with the political ramifications of this eco nomic crisis. Although the Bolsheviks had just won the Civil War, their earlier policies of seizing surplus grain through requisitions, which were often violent, had alienated much of Russia's peasantry. Lenin grew acutely aware of the Communist Party's impending political isolation: "the peasants will say: cy°u are splendid fellows; you defended our country. That is why we obeyed you. But if you cannot run the show, get out!'" Lenin and Bukharin, the architects of NEP, felt that it was especially crucial to reach out to those peasants who were able to produce grain and other agricultural products beyond their own immediate needs. Most were happy with the Bolsheviks' legitimizing their seizure of gentry, church, and dynastic lands in 1917. Yet, they still needed to be convinced that their standard of living would improve under a communist regime that had treated them badly thereafter. Lenin

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was convinced that this support could only develop after the peasantry's material life improved. Examples of these improvements included providing the farmers with electricity and modern farm equipment, in addition to a laissez-faire approach that allowed the most productive to enrich themselves through hard work and judicious trade. The key lesson from this reconnection between the state and the peasant was, as Lenin grudgingly acknowledged, that Russian society had to develop a modern capitalist economy before the state could launch a full-fledged proletarian revolution and achieve pure communism. Vital to this task was a practical education in capitalist economic principles and management techniques for individual party members, themselves unprepared for administering Russia. The Bolsheviks, however, could reassure themselves that their encouragement of capitalism was limited. Indeed, NEP kept most of the Soviet Union's productive and foreign trade capacity—the "commanding heights" of the economy, as Lenin called them—under strict state control. The government also leased workshops and small factories to private parties, thus ensuring its control over their long-term futures. Its plan was to wait until the rural and urban sectors were ready for productive state control. By 1923 the Soviet agrarian economy had improved substantially. Its grain harvest still lagged at approximately 70 percent of its 1913 levels, but the available surplus prevented starvation and represented a substantial improvement over the poor 1920 harvests. Although Soviet industrial production did not recover as quickly, producing an unhealthy gap between agrarian products and available industrial goods, continued encouragement and further reform eventually helped it as well. By 1926 industrial production had recovered to its 1913 levels. Among basic industries, including steel, coal, and textiles—all of which had virtually stopped producing by 1920 and were now operated by the state—the production figures were higher than they had ever been. They, along with stateoperated utilities (also not part of NEP's privatizations and semiprivatizations) benefited from relaxed government attitudes toward employing "bourgeois specialists"—technicians, engineers, and other well-qualified experts trained before the revolution. Nevertheless, there was a growing sense of frustration among the Soviet leadership that they were not industrializing the country at a sufficient pace. Leaders such as Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, Lev Trotsky, and, later, Josef Stalin argued that NEP simply encouraged personal consumption at the expense of the Soviet Union's modernization. This consumption, in their opinion, demoralized the masses and HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

would inevitably lead to the return of exploitative economic and social conditions. They were aided by mass opinion in the rank and file of the Communist Party, which began to feel that government economic policies had betrayed the revolution and its ideals. From this dilemma arose the solution of seizing surplus agricultural product to finance the development of the Soviet Union's heavy industries. Achieving this end rested on putting all private lands under state control and organizing rural communities into state-directed collective farms, each of which would act as a kind of "rural factory." The extension of state control would not only consolidate Soviet power in the countryside but would also resolve the issues of "class conflict" and moral degeneration that supposedly had developed during the NEP years. Once Stalin effectively secured power in the late 1920s, he soon embraced collectivization and in 1928 embarked on Russia's first Five Year Plan, an ambitious program of industrial development. From this point onward, the Soviet state largely ended the limited concessions of NEP, the measures of which had restored enough economic prosperity for the government to look into other avenues of development and modernization without having to worry about its survival. Lenin and Bukharin's calls for the Bolsheviks to lead a "limited retreat" in the face of popular disapproval had bought the necessary time. But after Lenin's death in 1924 and with Stalin's establishment of firm control over the leadership and decision-making organs of the Communist Party, a new course could credibly be undertaken. Despite the modesty of its aims, NEP had succeeded in securing Soviet power long enough for this transformation to become practical. It also laid the foundations of a totalitarian state that would one day become one of the world's two leading powers. -YORK NORMAN, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. NEP fell short of restoring economic prosperity and failed to solve long-term problems. The New Economic Policy (NEP), approved by the Tenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1921, failed to address the needs of the Russian people and their economic life in a manner that offered long-term stability, success, and prosperity. Although it restored a limited market economy, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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45

PRAVDA ON THE GRAIN PROBLEM

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

which did lead to growth and recovery in some sectors, the overall economic picture remained distorted and unstable. To begin with, only the lightest and arguably least significant sectors of the Soviet Union's urban economy returned to private hands. NEP's privatization laws limited privately owned "factories" to workshops of fewer than ten employees in cases where steam power was not used and fewer than five employees when it was. Growth in craft industries, artisanal production, and small-scale manufacture did occur, but the shops that engaged in these activities did not add greatly to Russia's industrial output. The 46

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

great industrial enterprises built in the decades before the revolution—an impressive body of productive capacity—remained firmly under state ownership and the control of party-appointed administrators who usually had no idea about the economics of production or industrial management. Technical experts remained in place, but the administrative talent and entrepreneurial initiative that had made urban factory life blossom in the decades before 1917 were gone forever. Many studies cite the Soviet economy's restoration of 1913 industrial production levels by 1926 as a major achievement, but its practical

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“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

Source: "On the Grain Front, "Pravda, 2 June 1928, in Josef Stalin, Problems of Leninism (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976).

implications are suspect. First, it should be stated that the Soviet government typically lied about its achievements in almost every field of endeavor, including not only economics but also education, health care, science, technology, infrastructural development, housing, the arts, and so on. Statistics about industrial production, which was almost entirely in state hands even during the NEP era, and for which no other authoritative figures are available, were thus among the easiest to manipulate. Second, even if heavy industry experienced substantial growth in the 1920s, its product did not necessarily translate into quality or practicality. The absence of a free

or semifree market in heavy industry, in which consumers could choose among competing products according to price, quality, and suitability, meant that state-run concerns could (and did) produce low-grade material and poorly engineered products without the consequence of losing ground to competitors. While the utility and longevity of Soviet industrial products were limited, they nevertheless factored into official economic statistics. Third, even if the 1926 statistic were true, the suggestion that the NEP economy was a success because it took only five years to reach 1913 production levels is deceptive. Departing from the convention of using the last

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

47

year before World War I as a benchmark of growth offers more instructive points of comparison, for Imperial Russia's economy expanded dramatically during the conflict. Its overall growth rate in 1916 was 21.5 percent higher than it had been three years earlier. Russian businessmen founded an average of 379 new companies per year during the war years, compared to 241 in 1913, an increase of 64 percent. The Soviet economy in 1926 would thus still have been measurably smaller and weaker than the tsarist economy of ten years earlier. In 1913, moreover, Russia had faced serious labor unrest in connection with government repression carried out in the Lena mining region the previous year, trouble that kept its productive capacity underutilized and economic prowess understated. Yet, although organized labor activity had been legal at that time and at all other times between 1906 and 1917, it was thoroughly repressed by the Soviet regime. During the revolutionary era and subsequent civil war, strikes and other forms of insubordination among workers were punished with violent repression, as were incidental hindrances to labor performance such as absence, inefficiency, and even lateness. Communist Party leaders and rank-and-file members who advocated greater rights for workers (the so-called Workers' Opposition) were forced to recant their views or face punishment. Even with firm state control and near-total compliance among the industrial workforce, however, the Soviets were still incapable of surpassing the prewar production levels of the tsarist economy—to say nothing of its higher wartime figures that did not enjoy those advantages. In addition to the small workshops permitted to function in the 1920s, the rest of the private urban economy revolved around consumer and service industries that made life a bit more comfortable but did little to add to national wealth. The Soviet 1920s offered restaurants, retail shops, personal services, and some privately operated entertainment venues, but despite the "vulgar" displays and conspicuous consumption of the so-called Nepmen, their contribution to national economic growth and stability overall was negligible. Indeed, the return of "bourgeois indulgences" and those who enjoyed them only angered many ardent supporters of the revolution, who began to agitate for economic policies that were purer in the Marxist sense. The economic effects of NEP were even less impressive in the countryside. Although peasant communes were permitted to sell grain, their production levels remained low relative to prerevolutionary yields. Small plots, communal tenure, and the middlemen who dealt in grain failed to replace the large surpluses produced by gentry 48

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

estates and the prosperous private farmsteads established between 1906 and 1914. The seizure of these lands and their incorporation or reincorporation into communes added only marginal acreage to the individual small farms that dominated the Soviet countryside, which for the most part only continued to produce at the subsistence level. The division of livestock, farm machinery, and other agricultural capital formerly possessed by the expropriated gentry and prosperous peasant farmers diminished the contributions that they could make when concentrated and coordinated by one owner. Morespecialized rural industries such as dairy and cattle farming, mills and distilleries, curing and rendering, and processing and foresting lost their organization and receded in importance. The peasants had the right to profit domestically from the sale of their produce during NEP, but the government exacted heavy taxes from those revenues. Moreover, even before NEP came to an end, the state resorted to price controls on grain because the industrial sector remained too poor to balance agriculture and correct the internal trade imbalance that had developed between the two economic sectors. Russia's traditional dependence on profitable grain exports compromised peasant interests to an even greater degree since both wholesale commerce and foreign trade remained nationalized by the Soviet regime. Only one buyer—the state—purchased goods for export, likewise at an artificially controlled price, and received the greatest benefit from the profits. In these circumstances the Russian countryside, once the breadbasket of Europe, not only failed to reach its 1913 production levels during NEP, but in fact also lagged behind them until the 1960s. The Soviet Union ended its days as a net importer of food. NEP also failed to provide the sense of long-term psychological stability necessary for real economic recovery. Framed as an "economic Brest-Litovsk," in reference to the extremely harsh and, as the Soviet regime hoped, shortlived and expedient peace treaty concluded with Germany in March 1918, the policy was envisioned as a temporary compromise with market forces that the political leadership openly detested. No Soviet leader ever departed from the party's firm conviction that socialism and communism were Russia's inevitable fate and radiant future. For the rest of the population, part and parcel of the Soviet 1920s was a sense of the ephemeral. Intelligent people looking at the government's official ideology and frank statements of its future goals could not reconcile them with the realities of their lives or expect that the obvious discord between the ruling philosophy and market economics could last long. Few thus planned their

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businesses for a long-term future. In a real disincentive to market initiative, the government, regardless of what commercial activities it legalized, never allowed the restoration of private property ownership in town or country. Urban light manufacturing and service industries inhabited government-owned buildings on a leasing basis that could be cancelled at any time. All agricultural land had been formally nationalized in 1917, a measure that was never reversed. Independent peasant use of that land was tolerated and encouraged by the regime during NEP, but no individual farmer could rightly claim to own the property he worked. Nor, despite their historic role in Russian rural life, could peasant communes claim legal ownership of farmland. Everyone participating in the NEP economy who was not a complete fool knew that the government could end its concessions at a stroke, as indeed Josef Stalin did in the late 1920s, and replace it with the same command economy that they had experienced during the revolutionary and civil war eras. The end came quickly in any case. Sensing that just enough stability had been restored to the country by the time he consolidated power in the late 1920s, Stalin moved quickly to replace the limited market economy and uncontrolled peasantry with command economics and agricultural collectivization. Clearly neither he, his acolytes, nor his predecessors who failed to install a permanent, viable program of economic recovery were convinced of the market's long-term virtues, nor were those who had known and expected that the state would one day crack down on economic freedom. Stalin enjoyed the support of a rising generation of Soviet communists who believed in the superiority of command economics, shed no tears for NEP, and anticipated a Utopian future. In reality it was their children's generation who, seeing the stagnation of the late Soviet economy, embraced reforms that were strikingly similar to those of 1921. A limited market economy emerged in the late 1980s, while the government continued to control what Lenin had called its "commanding heights." Yet, rather than create a new breathing space for the regime's orthodox communists to

maintain and consolidate power, the economic aspects of this "restructuring" (perestroika) and the nation's simultaneous political liberalization (glasnost) merely produced fevered demands for further reform. These upheavals led in short order to the Soviet Union's complete collapse and to the discrediting of its founding ideology. The economic results were aggressive market reforms (sometimes described as "shock therapy"), rapid privatization in virtually every sector of the economy, and the quick adoption of a burgeoning capitalist system. These developments did not occur without problems, disappointments, injustices, and the occasional threat of backslide into state control. However, they have produced a steadily growing economy, a rising middle class, and the return of many important industries—including heavy manufacturing, mining, oil and natural gas, travel and tourism, book publishing, and entertainment, among many others—to private hands for the first time since the tsarist era. At this writing, less than fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been transformed from a moribund superpower into one of the world's leading emerging markets. It now stands as the second-largest oil exporter, and Moscow is home to more billionaires than any other city in the world. -PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

References A. M. Ball, Russia's Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Vladimir Brovkin, Russia After Lenin (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917-1991 (London & New York: Penguin, 1992). Ronald G. Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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IMPERIAL AND SOVIET CONTINUITIES Were there substantial continuities between Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union? Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviet regime failed to alter meaningfully the authoritarianism of Imperial Russia. Viewpoint: No. The Soviet state was radically different from its predecessor; it monopolized political power and economic development, restricted civil liberties introduced before the Revolution, and instilled a reign of terror unthinkable in Imperial Russia. A leading argument about Russia, famously defended by the prominent scholar Richard Pipes, maintains that despite the revolutionary change the country experienced in 1917, little changed in practice in Russia's government and society. In both Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, he suggests, the state was run by a managerial elite that favored autocratic philosophies and opposed independent initiative and institutions functioning within society. Both states kept up a secret police, a militarized society, government leadership in the economy, a rigid social structure, and other items that suggest more continuity than change. The counterargument holds that the revolution did in fact bring fundamental reorganization in its wake. Tsarist institutions were destroyed or radically transformed. Old elites were marginalized and ostracized. The tolerance that appears more and more to characterize the latter decades of the old regime gave way to inflexible persecution and rigid nationalization. Entrepreneurial initiative gave way to state economic controls. Increasing civil liberties were replaced by a wholesale deprivation of freedom.

Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviet regime failed to alter meaningfully the authoritarianism of Imperial Russia.

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Within the course of just nine months Russia witnessed two—not one—fundamental historical transitions: the first occurred in February 1917, when the centuries-old imperial system crumbled as a result of popular demonstrations; the second followed in October, when the Bolshevik Party assumed control of Petrograd and put an end to the short life of the Provisional Govern-

ment. This dual transition—from absolutist rule to an initially popular liberal regime and finally to the "rule of the proletariat"—had been predicated on multiple and fundamental discontinuities; in fact, the notion of a "revolution" used on both occasions alluded to the desire of those involved to draw a definite line and shed the historical weight of the past with a view to building anew the foundations of modern Russia. How is it then possible to talk of "substantial continuities" between two regimes that were separated not by one but by two cataclysmic revolutions? In theory, the Bolshevik regime heralded the era of "proletarian revolution," whereby rule would

be exercised by the leadership in the name of the people, revoking traditional privileges, promoting socio-economic justice, and putting an end to the imperialist aspirations of the tsarist system. Its mandate appeared to emanate from the Soviets themselves, in the cities and the countryside alike, feeding from the unpopularity of the Provisional Government or simply the unwillingness of many citizens to defend its liberal institutions against a further revolutionary or counterrevolutionary assault. The slogan that Vladimir Lenin and the party leadership had used throughout 1917—"bread, land, peace"—resonated with the desires of the majority of the population and had been instrumental in turning the tide in favor of the Bolsheviks during the summer, when the obstinacy and paranoia of Aleksandr Kerensky alienated him from the majority of the population. It might be that the proclamation of Bolshevik rule at the end of October 1917 was not greeted with enthusiasm by the majority of the Russian population—in fact, the battle for assuming control of this vast country continued in some parts for months before descending into the abyss of the Civil War. It was also the case the even inside the ranks of the Bolshevik Party there were voices (Lev Kamenev and initially even Leon Trotsky) urging against a premature "revolutionary" assumption of power, stressing that Russia's historic social and political backwardness would distort any attempt to establish a genuine communist system and lead the hopes of the proletariat astray. What mattered in the political vacuum of October 1917 was political astuteness, determination to act, overcoming reservations, and galvanizing popular support. In this crucial respect Lenin proved the indisputable master of the situation with a momentum that eventually forced the party to act—in the name of defending the gains of the February revolution against "counterrevolution" and fulfilling the Marxist prophesy of an inevitable historical transition to proletarian rule. What happened in reality was an altogether different matter, however. The popular, countrywide "revolution" that was meant to sweep away the last vestiges of the imperial and "bourgeois" past never took place; at best, the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks became possible on the basis of a relatively small popular mobilization in Petrograd and on widespread apathy across the country vis-a-vis the Provisional Government's collapse. Even in cities where Bolsheviks held proper majorities in Soviets, their authority was more often than not combined with a commitment to work with the other like-minded political forces of the revolutionary movement (for example, left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries) and ensured a representative model of Soviet rule. Until early January 1918 Lenin kept up the

FORMER TSARIST OFFICERS Leon Trotsky issued this decree in regards to former tsarist officers willing to serve in the Red Army:

13 October 1918 From: Kozlov In view of changed circumstances, a certain section of the officer class is displaying its readiness to work in the service of the Soviets. On this I propose the following; in those cases where there are no direct, serious charges against the arrested officers, that the question be put to them: do they agree to serve the Red Army and the Red Fleet. That, in the event of an affirmative answer, they be put at my disposal. That, at the same time, their family position be ascertained and they be warned that, in the event of treachery or desertion to the enemy's camp on their part their families will be arrested, and that a signature to this effect be obtained from them. By this means we shall lighten the load on the prisons and obtain military specialists, of whom there is great need. Please communicate instructions accordingly to all the commissions under your orders. Chairman of the Military Revolutionary Council, Trotsky Source: Martin McCauley> ed., The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State 1917-1921: Documents (London: Macm///a/i, 1975), p. 150.

appearance that his regime would defend the truly representative institutions that it had inherited. The decision to allow democratic elections for the new Constituent Assembly in late November 1917 was instrumental in allaying initial fears of a Bolshevik dictatorship, but above all it purchased invaluable time for the leaders of the new regime at a time of insecurity and lack of clear direction. The result of the elections, in which the Bolsheviks failed to get more than one-quarter of the popular vote, must have convinced them that it all came down to a simple choice: either rule of the party against the wishes of the majority or acceptance of the popular verdict and loss of political power. Again, appearances were kept: the Assembly met on 6 January 1918, despite the Bolsheviks' hostility and intimidation, and debated proposed legislation until the early hours of the next morning, when it adjourned. The following morning the delegates found that the assembly had been terminated by the Bolshevik rulers. The decree stated that: The Right Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties are in fact carrying on outside the Constituent Assembly a most desperate

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struggle against Soviet power, calling openly in their press for its overthrow and describing as arbitrary and unlawful the crushing of the resistance of the exploiters by the forces of the working classes, which is essential in the interests of emancipation from exploitation. . . . It is obvious that under such circumstances the remaining part of the Constituent Assembly could only serve as a screen for the struggle of the counter-revolutionaries to overthrow Soviet power.

The fate of the Constituent Assembly reflected once again the familiar pathology of parliamentary institutions in Russia since the Revolution of 1905. Although even then the tsar had allowed the Duma to convene and continue its deliberations for some time—no doubt, under pressure from the revolutionary movement and fearful of the consequences of an immediate revolution—he had embarked on attempts to subvert its political power. Its first two sessions were denied any real effect and quickly dissolved when the debates became too contentious. Much of Russia's governance was dictated through emergency decrees when the Duma was not in session. In 1907 the Duma's election laws were arbitrarily rewritten to strengthen conservative representation, which dominated the body until 1917. Even during the nine months of the Provisional Government, the Duma was gradually edged out of the political forefront by the cabinet and its main rival, the Petrograd Soviet. In this respect the Bolshevik decision to dissolve the Constituent Assembly was a further chapter in the long history of autocratic concentration of power at the expense of representative institutions; the only difference was that this time it also signaled the end of this constitutional experiment in Russia. It is not difficult to identify further similarities—not just between the Imperial and Bolshevik periods, but also with regard to the interregnum of February-October 1917. The Provisional Government had witnessed the rise of Kerensky as its indisputable star before watching his transformation into an autocratic figure, intent on salvaging his own authority at all costs. Lenin had been equally eager to use his personal authority to impose a single political strategy on the Bolshevik party and then seize full control of the whole socialist movement. The so-called cult of personality, so evident in the popular attitudes toward the Tsar personally (even at the height of agitation against the regime in February 1917), was kept alive during the period of the Provisional Government through Kerensky's megalomania and was delivered largely intact to Lenin before reaching unprecedented heights during the Stalinist period. Many have attributed this striking vulnerability of Russian political structures to autocratic distortion as the long-term legacy of centuries of tsarist rule. For others this same 52

pathology has been regarded as a largely essential, if unpalatable, feature necessitated by the sheer extent (and geography) of the country and the impossibility of managing it through a Western-style liberal system. Be that as it may, this was a formula that suited Lenin and the Bolsheviks well. The manipulation of "counterrevolutionary fear" by Lenin, Kerensky, and the tsar alike provided the alibi for striking a lethal blow to the embryonic and largely immature Russian liberal democracy. Nicholas II had used the argument of "conspiracy" against the regime in order to justify the coup against the 1907 Duma. Kerensky manipulated the "July Days," a supposed socialist coup attempt, and the "Kornilov affair," an ostensible military coup, in the summer of 1917 to strike blows against the allegedly sacrosanct legacy of the February Revolution, violently persecuting the Bolsheviks and turning against some rightist groups that had antagonized him. Lenin duly took his turn in invoking the principle of "revolutionary defense" to justify an otherwise authoritarian initiative. In December 1917 a new organization had been set up with the title "All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Fighting CounterRevolution and Sabotage"—but known in its acronymic form, Cheka. The new organization was headed by the brutal Feliks Dzerzhinsky and was instrumental in launching the Red Terror during the Civil War. Its activities were the basis for the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and the activities of its eventual successor, the Committee of State Security, or KGB. But the Cheka merely reconceptualized the tsarist-era Security Service, the Okhrana, against the regime's political opponents. The Cheka's first operational manual was literally the Okhrana's manual with the cover torn off. As for the majority of the Russian population, the transition from tsarist rule to the Provisional Government and then to the "dictatorship of the proletariat" under the Bolsheviks produced little short-term change in their material conditions and social status. Apart from the illusion of popular political participation through the Soviet movement—an illusion that rapidly eroded after October 1917 and was crushed completely under the emergency situation of the Civil War—the life of the vast majority of the population in the Soviet Union continued to oscillate between marginal survival and hardship. Lenin's economic experiments, first with War Communism and then with the New Economic Policy (NEP), did result in shifts in the balance of power between industrial proletariat and peasantry (besides, of course, ruthlessly targeting the "bourgeoisie") but overall had little impact in material terms.

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As in the final stages of the tsarist regime, when the bulk of economic activity was driven by disproportionate state intervention, socialist management differed little in this crucial respect. While economic indices started showing some improvement in the 1920s and, at least in terms of industrialization, received a huge boost through Stalin's sequence of Five-Year Plans, which began in 1928, an unmistakably authoritarian streak rooted in the traditions of the imperial period did survive the transition and compromised the alleged transformation of socio-economic structures in Russia. Large projects in industry and large-scale trade were managed and financed by institutions of government rather than private individuals or corporations. A final and perhaps more symbolic continuity referred to the so-called nationalities question in Russia. In a vast country made up of a mosaic of groups with different languages, ethnicities, and religions, which had lived under the yoke of Russian imperial chauvinism, Lenin's discourse of respect for and independence from the various national groups proved to be one of the most significant factors underpinning initial support for the Bolshevik Party—especially since the Provisional Government had stubbornly refused to address such concerns. The appointment of Josef Stalin as Commissar for Nationalities, the military conquest of Ukraine, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, and the attempted reconquest of Poland and Finland presaged the implementation of a far more authoritarian policy of coercion that would become the trademark of Stalinist rule in the 1930s. By the time that Stalin won the leadership battle, the nationalities question had been practically settled in favor of his intransigent line of autonomization (a euphemism for a higher degree of centralization and bureaucratization at the expense of the original policy of acknowledging the right of the republics up to the point of secession). Extensive purges of local authorities and violent suppression of resistance set the tone of the 1930s, starting with the strategic and troublesome case of Ukraine. On the basis of this evidence it is, therefore, essential to qualify any claim about continuities and discontinuities between Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Despite their fundamentally different discourses and ideological foundations, the Bolshevik regime failed in practice to eliminate or in many meaningful ways alter the deep-seated authoritarian legacies of the Imperial period. This was partly the result of failures to translate its theory into reality, perhaps compromised by the extraordinary circumstances of the Civil War and absence of HISTORY

support from other countries; but it was at least equally the consequence of a deliberate policy, barely disguised by the alibi of defense against counterrevolution. While driven by different ideological and political strategies, Lenin and, in particular, Stalin recast some of the previous regime's most authoritarian and repressive mechanisms with a new populist veneer. And while it would be a case of ahistorical reductionism to claim that the Imperial and Bolshevik regimes were similar, it is fair to say that the reality of Bolshevik rule ended up as a far more substantial deviation from socialist doctrine and the party's own initial pronouncements than from the realities of the Old Regime it was supposed to have overthrown with the October Revolution. -ARISTOTLE KALLIS, LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. The Soviet state was radically different from its predecessor; it monopolized political power and economic development, restricted civil liberties introduced before the Revolution, and instilled a reign of terror unthinkable in Imperial Russia. The Soviet Union differed radically from its tsarist predecessor. Attempts to place the world's first socialist state in a longer, evolutionary continuum have irrationally and unfairly ascribed to Russia a "special path" of unending tyranny at home and relentless aggression abroad. Linking the commissars with the tsarists and the Soviet Union with the empire has seduced more than a few historians and analysts into the delusion that throughout its history Russia has posed a constant threat to the West and stood for the rejection of its values. Largely a product of Cold War Sovietology, this construct to a degree continues to inform Western attitudes toward post-Soviet Russia in the twenty-first century. Some more-recent studies have favored the continuity argument as a means of explaining Russia's modernization. Examining the flow of economic, social, and urban development from the late-imperial period into the Soviet era has supplied more than a few scholars with neat hypotheses that the "break" of the Bolshevik Revolution was actually more of an accelerator, which swept away stubborn bar-

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Painting showing tsarist soldiers shooting unarmed demonstrators at the palace square in St. Petersburg on "Bloody Sunday," 9 January 1905 (Associated Press)

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riers to development and brought Russia into modernity. Regardless of the political purposes that lay behind these schools of thought, the plain fact is that the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were vastly different entities. The former, destroyed by the traumas of World War I, was replaced by the latter, forged by a Civil War in which it destroyed as much of the old order and as much of Russia's emerging democratic order as possible to ensure its own survival and legitimacy. This immense process of destruction unfolded as the practical result of an ideological battle. The Russian Empire was essentially a conservative state, dedicated in many ways to preserving its monarchical form of government, its society's traditional social structure, and the primacy of its official faith, Orthodox Christianity. The Empire's conservatism never ruled out the possibility of reform, however. The abolition of serfdom, the beginnings of elected local government, and other major administrative adjustments of the 1860s proved that even an authoritarian monarchy was capable of initiating meaningful change. Its innovative sponsorship of Russia's rapidly emerging capitalist economy and increasing tolerance of its growing civil society fostered this development. The creation of a representative legislature (the State Duma) and other concessions granted in the wake of the Revolu-

tion of 1905 strongly suggested that democratization lay on the Empire's horizon. The crises accompanying Russia's illstarred involvement in World War I derailed this path. After a short democratic interlude, which sought to preserve some features (especially social and economic) of tsarist Russia, the Bolshevik regime worked diligently to abolish all traces of the pre-1917 order. In politics this meant the complete monopolization of state power and public discourse by the Bolshevik (Communist) Party. The practicalities of Soviet life and the Soviet Union's constitutions of 1936 and 1977 enshrined and sanctified its leading role to the exclusion of other ideas and groups. Opposition in any form was banned, be it monarchist, liberal, anarchist, non-Bolshevik socialist, or, later, even nonStalinist Bolshevik. Actual and suspected dissidents in all of these categories were persecuted, exiled, imprisoned, and killed. In economics, apart from the short-lived and rather limited New Economic Policy of the mid 1920s, Soviet rule meant state monopolization of all production, distribution, resources, and labor. In society communism effected the elimination or marginalization of tsarist-era elites, official favoritism for the industrial working class, severe restrictions on religious practice and belief, and the complete subordination of culture, media, and associational life to the government via the Communist Party.

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None of these gray features of the Soviet Union had prerevolutionary analogues. In the political realm Imperial Russia had a variety of legal political parties, many of which openly opposed the regime or important aspects and policies of it. Some of them were organized and experienced enough to assume authority when it collapsed. Radicals who committed violent crimes may have been prosecuted for them, but wholesale persecution of law-abiding opponents or dissenters was virtually nonexistent. Unlike in Soviet times, they did not fill a vast concentration-camp network, occupy the attention of hundreds of thousands of secret police officials, or die unnaturally in large numbers. Elected local government, almost immediately destroyed by the Bolsheviks, functioned freely and accumulated greater and greater power as time went on. The independent judiciary created in 1864 continued until the Bolsheviks abolished it. One of its crucial features, the right to trial by jury, only reappeared in Russia in 2003. Although the tsarist government helped facilitate economic development by creating banks, negotiating loans from abroad, stimulating industry, and so on, these activities hardly made it distinguishable from any other modernizing state. Nothing in the tsarist approach to economics even hinted at the complete government control that characterized Soviet economics. To the contrary, private entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia blossomed in every field—from manufacturing to banking to entertainment to tourism to publishing—and developed into a robust modern economy and dynamic consumer market. The only "continuities" that proponents of the modernization theory can identify were either extraordinary or superficial. One tsarist minister of agriculture, for example, sanctioned the requisitioning of agricultural produce during World War I. Yet, despite the foreshadowing, this isolated measure hardly equaled or prefigured the vast and murderous requisitioning and collectivization campaigns carried out by the Soviet state. Similarly, tsarist government loans to heavy-manufacturing co cerns had little in common with Josef Stalin's comprehensive, brutal, and breakneck-paced industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Certainly there was no equivalent in late-tsarist Russia to Stalin's abuse of tens of millions of people as forced labor. Seeing the population itself as a resource to be exploited for economic gain was uniquely totalitarian. Tsarist society also differed in major ways from what replaced it. As was the case in other modernizing nations, the empire's rapid urbanization, industrialization, and consumerHISTORY

IN DISPUTE,

ization went a long way toward making traditional hierarchies irrelevant. The new phenomena of wealthy peasant businessmen, impoverished noblemen adopting professional careers, urban lower- and middle-class types who fit no traditional mold, and similar chutes growing around the old social ladder led to a significant expansion in pluralism, civic identity, professional consciousness, common ground that transcended social class, and other mentalities that Russia shared with modernizing societies in Europe and North America. Apart from some old-fashioned rhetoric and a small number of pointless attempts to buck up the gentry, the tsarist government adjusted to these changes. The Soviet regime showed no such adaptability, however. Indeed, its long-held official policies of persecution and discrimination against people and descendants of people who belonged to "privileged" prerevolutionary groups, so-called former people, showed that its concern for old-regime social classifications departed markedly from the tsarist's in seriousness and far exceeded it in rigidity. So, too, did Soviet treatment of Russia's enormous peasant majority, which had been freed from serfdom by the tsarist government, permitted to move freely about the country, allowed to accept nonagricultural work, and empowered to establish private farmsteads on land traditionally held by local communes. Soviet policy effectively re-enserfed this population by forcing it into state-managed collective farms and, after 1932, forbidding it to travel around the country without state permission. Other facets of society also reflected more differences than similarities. The relative independence that cultural life, media, and civil society enjoyed before 1917 was quickly stamped out after the revolution. The commercial business culture that supported them naturally disappeared as the result of communist economic policy, but the political strictures of Soviet rule also did away with the free press, independent labor unions, academic freedom, commercial entertainment, freedom of movement, private charity, independent youth and leisure activities, and, to a more limited albeit quite serious degree, religious life. The contribution of these diverse features to Imperial Russia's modernization and the new public spaces they created were thus abandoned for firm state control and doctrinaire Communist Party guidance. While tsarist society was developing largely on its own, independent of the political authority, Soviet society was characterized by the political authority's domination of its development. VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930

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The governments of both tsarist and Soviet Russia faced challenges to their development, concerns about domestic stability, competition from other powers, and threats to their international status and security requirements. Yet, all states have these concerns, and it is only natural that two (or three, if one includes the post-Soviet Russian Federation) different systems of government existing in roughly the same peculiar geographic space should have to deal with them in a way that suggests comparison and the application of lessons from the past. Ultimately, however, the continuities between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were far less remarkable than their extreme differences. -PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

References Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (Oxford: Polity Press/Blackwell, 1990).

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Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin, 1997). Leonard D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin's Russia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976). John Gooding, Rulers and Subjects: Government and People in Russia, 1801-1991 (London: Arnold, 1996). Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923, revised edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993); Leonard Bertram Schapiro, The Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917-1922 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955); Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM Did the Russian terrorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provide the model for present-day terrorist groups? Viewpoint: Yes. Beginning with the writings of Mikhail Bakunin in the late 1860s and The People's Will group, formed in 1879, Russians developed the system of centralized underground organizations composed of disaffected zealots bent on disruption of governments by public acts of random violence that has been imitated widely throughout the world since. Viewpoint: No. Terrorism is too amorphous to be traced to a single source. The Russian model, developed from French Jacobins of the early 1790s, is only one of several types of terrorist activity employed by those seeking political-, social-, or religious-based revolution. Since 11 September 2001 the specter of terrorism has pushed study of the phenomenon into the forefront of modem life. This chapter assesses its Russian roots. For many scholars the methods, strategies, and objectives of twenty-first-century terrorists descend in a direct line from the violent revolutionary movements that plagued Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The expectation that the unpredictable use of lethal force would create major political change; organization into clandestine cells and other underground formations; and reliance on simple technologies all had Russian precedents and more or less direct linkages. At the same time, however, terrorism and its uses can be said to be as old as modernity itself. The word terrorism dated to the era of the French Revolution. That event's profound and self-conscious influence on the Russian revolutionary tradition should not, in some scholars' opinion, escape proper studies of terrorism and its evolution.

Viewpoint:

Yes. Beginning with the writings of Mikhail Bakunin in the late 1860s and The People's Will group, formed in 1879, Russians developed the system of centralized underground organizations composed of disaffected zealots bent on disruption of governments by public acts of random violence that has been imitated widely throughout the world since. Terrorism has been among the most widely discussed yet least

understood subjects of the past thirty years. Countless books, articles, plays, novels, and films have described the manifestations of terrorism in regions as varied as North America, Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Since the late 1970s, terrorism has become increasingly identified with religious extremists, Muslims, or Middle Eastern societies. The public perception in the United States and Western Europe that Muslims and Arabs are terrorists crystallized following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Far less well known are the modern origins of terrorist groups and the people who most influ-

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enced the strategy and tactics employed by modern terrorists and terrorist organizations: the Russian revolutionary terrorists of the mid to late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. These revolutionaries pioneered the systematization of revolutionary conspiracy and the forms of organization, methodologies of violence, and mass dissemination of information that have been utilized by countless modern terrorist organizations as dissimilar in their goals as the Irish Republican Army, the Amur River Society, Al-Qaeda, and the Tamil Tigers. Russian revolutionary terrorists developed the preeminent model by which a modern revolutionary organization kills in the name of a cause, and they are central to any discussion of the strategy and tactics of modern terrorist groups. As Walter Laqueur observes in A History of Terrorism (2001), although terrorism has appeared in a variety of guises throughout human history, terrorism in most cases was one of many strategies employed by combatants, and it was often a secondary strategy. The terms terrorism and terrorist are relatively recent additions to the English lexicon and were derived from the term that Maximilien Robespierre and other Jacobins used to describe themselves during the French Revolution. Among the earliest examples of the word in English was Edmund Burke's 1795 remarks on the "thousands of hell hounds called terrorists who [are] let loose o the people" of France. Yet, the terrorists that Burke describes openly worked for an authoritarian state en masse and were different in several ways from modern terrorists, who operate in small, clandestine groups and often shun public association with state or government leaders. The "model" for modern terrorists arose among a group of people who lived far from France geographically but who shared the revolutionary fervor of Paris in the 1790s and Robespierre's attachment to Enlightenment ideals: the revolutionary anarchists of late-tsarist Russia. Among the most important of these figures was Mikhail Bakunin, who was regarded as the leading figure in the history of terrorism at the turn of the twentieth century. A scion of the Russian nobility, Bakunin renounced his heritage and publicly advocated revolution throughout Europe. While committed to secular and Enlightenment ideals, Bakunin infused a profound sense of messianic spirit into modern revolutionary ideas. Even more importantly, Bakunin, with Sergei Nechaev, authored Catechism of a Revolutionist, a guidebook for revolutionary activists using violence, in Switzerland in 1869. Composed of twenty-six commands, Catechism of a Revolutionist specifies that members of 58

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a conspiracy must be organized into cells and must carry out all orders unquestioningly. It also specifies that adherents sacrifice their morality, family ties, and, if necessary, their lives for revolutionary goals. Adherents are to lead as normal lives as possible in order to conceal their identity and their goal of destroying a corrupt society. (This command is reminiscent of the participants in the March 2004 Madrid attack, all of whom were fully assimilated into Spanish society and had no previous criminal records, and of the 11 September terrorists, some of whom lived relatively average lives in southern Florida.) Catechism of a Revolutionist was the first attempt to organize revolutionary conspiracies and to develop a universally applicable model for organizing a select group of individuals to kill in the name of a cause. The influence of Catechism of a Revolutionist on the modern world cannot be overstated since it has been imitated and adopted by groups of all political persuasions in all corners of the globe. Indeed, the term cell appears almost as frequently in contemporary discussions of terrorism as the terms fundamentalist or Islam. If Bakunin and Nechaev provided the guiding principles and modes of organization for modern terrorists, then Nikolai Chernyshevsky provided the model of personal behavior. Two of the characters of his novel What is to be Done?, Vera Pavlova and Rakhmetev, became the role models for a modern revolutionary: disciplined, fanatical, thoroughly ascetic, and uncorrupted personalities devoted to a higher revolutionary cause—no matter the personal or social consequences. First published in 1863, the book was a best-seller in Russia and was translated into most European languages and rapidly disseminated throughout Europe and North America by radical activists. One hundred and fifty years after Chernyshevsky wrote his novel, many leading terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, consciously cultivate a public persona that is strikingly reminiscent of the characters described by Chernyshevsky. In all of his vid eos, bin Laden appears in unpretentious clothes and settings devoid of all luxuries, both of which are meant to accentuate his ascetic and pious nature and devotion to his cause. (These images are especially powerful in light of his elite upbringing in Saudi Arabia.) The first organization in Russia to systematically employ the ideas of Bakunin, Nechaev, and Chernyshevsky was the People's Will (Narodnaia Volia), started in 1879. The People's Will was a militant, centralized, and secret underground organization divided into cells. Composed of at most several hundred members, the organization adhered to a strict hierarchy of command. Although the organization failed to

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achieve its principal goals of overthrowing the Russian imperial government, it did succeed in assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and inspiring future revolutionaries. Most importantly, it pioneered methods of political assassinations and violence using the new and relatively simple bomb technology of the late nineteenth century. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it is striking that bombing techniques little different from those of the People's Will remain the killing method of choice for most modern terrorists, even after the advent of many other methods of killing such as the airplane or weapons of mass destruction. The earliest inheritors of the organizational and methodological approaches of the People's Will were Russian: the Socialist Revolutionary Party, founded by People's Will survivors. Yet, the ideas of the People's Will, what became known as the "Russian model" of terrorism, spread rapidly throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas by way of popular books, novels, and newspaper articles. Leading novelists, such as Joseph Conrad and Henry James, wrote stories in which Russian terrorists were central figures. Both Italians and Spaniards, whose societies in many ways resembled that of Russia, eagerly adopted Bakunin's ideas and those of his Russian successors. They employed these ideas in the burgeoning trade-union movements of Europe and brought them to Italian expatriate communities in the Middle East and North Africa, Central Europe, North America, and Latin America. Ironically, the Russian government, which the Russian terrorist model had originally been meant to overthrow, permitted Balkan and Armenian terrorist groups opposed to Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian rule to operate on Russian soil. One of those groups, Serbia's Union or Death (commonly known as the Black Hand), committed the most significant terrorist attack of the twentieth century: the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, an act that led directly to World War I. Terrorism in Europe, however, did not end with the assassination of Francis Ferdinand. Germany's leftist Bewegung 2. Juni (June 2nd Movement) committed many acts of violence in postwar West Germany, treated Catechism of a Revolutionist as scripture, and published Bakunin's writings. The Red Brigades in Italy, which perpetrated thousands of attacks against targets in Italy between 1969 and 1980, utilized tech niques pioneered by Bakunin and Nechaev. Similarly, the Irish Republican Army and the Basque terrorist groups in Spain and France saw military strategies based on the Russian model as the most effective way to expel a perceived occupying power from their home regions. HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

These organizations were infamous for their expertise in planning political assassinations: the Irish Republican Army killed dozens of British officials, Queen Elizabeth IPs cousin Lord Mountbatten in 1979, and nearly Prime Minis ter Margaret Thatcher and her entire cabinet in 1984. Here one can see similarities to the tactics and objectives of the People's Will in tsarist Russia. Groups utilizing the "Russian model" had an even larger impact on societies outside of Europe in Asia and Latin America. In Japan the ultranationalist Amur River Society assassinated moderate Japanese politicians and anyone else who resisted Japanese control of Manchuria and East Asia. The society's founder, Uchida Ryohei, studied in St. Petersburg, knew Russian, and had contacts in the Russian revolutionary community in the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Indian nationalists dedicated to ending British rule in South Asia formed secret societies modeled on the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and, like Ryohei, sought the guidance of Russian terrorists in bomb making and robbing banks. Indian terrorists also encouraged women to participate in assassinations in order to create an Indian record of female heroism equal to that of Russian terrorist women such V O L U M E 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y R U S S I A ,

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Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), regarded as the father of modern anarchism (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ CORBIS, HU018661)

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CATECHISM OF A REVOLUTIONIST The following guidelines for revolutionaries were written in 1869 by Mikhail Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev:

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

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“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

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“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

Source: Michael Confino, ed., Daughter of a Revolutionary: Natalie Herzen and the BakuninNechayev Circle, translated by Hilary Sternberg and Lydia Bott (London: Alcove, 1974), pp. 224230.

as Vera Figner and Sofiia Perovskaya, who participated in the plot against Alexander II, and Vera Zasulich, who attempted to murder the governor-general of St. Petersburg. (Women terrorists would later be used with deadly effectiveness by Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers.) Twentieth-century Latin American insurgents, such as the followers of Peru's Shining Path, blended the ideas of Bakunin and Nechaev with those of leading twentieth-century revolutionaries: Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro. The influence of the Russian model on Latin America's leftist revolutionaries was so extensive that their leading figure, Che Guevara, was often referred to by Soviet intellectuals as a "new Bakunin." The Russian model had perhaps its most enduring impact among the peoples of the Middle East and Muslim world. As Donald M. Reid acutely observes, though politically motivated killings had occurred throughout Islamic history (the term assassin comes from Arabic), terrorist attacks and murders were reasonably rare 62

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in Muslim societies in the centuries preceding 1900. Political murders were generally related to palace coups or plots in which the murderer knew his victim personally. That all changed in 1910 when Ibrahim Nasif al-Wardani, who belonged to the secret Society of Fraternal Solidarity, shot and killed Egyptian prime minister Butrus Ghali. Over the next forty years, secular nationalists and Muslim activists targeted dozens of British and Egyptian officials, including the Egyptian sultan and President Gamel Abdel Nasser. Throughout the same time period, Algerian nationalists employed the Russian model with devastating effectiveness to pressure the French to evacuate Algeria and the rest of North Africa. The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film documenting Algeria's nationalist rebels, remains the premier movie on modern terrorism and the best methods to combat it. Similarly, Jewish groups in 1930s and 1940s Palestine (many of whom had roots in Russia and Eastern Europe) and, later, Palestinians, used the Rus-

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sian model to promote their community's national aspirations. Even Egyptian nationalists, who opposed Zionism and the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, privately admired a Palestinian-based Jewish terrorist group's 1944 assassination in Egypt of Lord Moyne, Britain's resident minister for the Middle East. While many of the groups that initially used the Russian model in the Middle East were secular nationalists, groups promoting an agenda of religious reform and stricter adherence to Islam increasingly turned to modern terrorism as a way to reach their aims from the mid twentieth century forward. Among the first organizations to employ the model was the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, founded by Hasan al-Bana in 1929. By the late 1930s, the Brotherhood had developed a secret military wing meant to promote its agenda of Islamic revival and eliminate opponents. Al-Bana and his fellow adherent to the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, also synthesized new interpretations of Jihad, Jahaliyyah, and other aspects of Islamic thought into an ideology of liberation from the domination of Western power and the authoritarian governments of Muslim states. This ideology spread rapidly in the Muslim world following Qutb's death, and it inspired the Jihadi movements of the last three decades. In this framework, the Russian model, originally designed to combat a totalitarian regime, was the natural choice of Al-Qaeda and other like-minded organizations to advance their goals and interests. A century and a half after Bakunin, Nechaev, Chernyshevsky, and adherents of the People's Will developed the Russian model of terrorism it is still much a part of the modern world. In every part of the globe, select groups of individuals have seen fit to use the model as a way to forward their political agendas through violence—even if that meant murdering thousands of innocent people. In 1914 an organization using the Russian model sparked World War I by assassinating Francis Ferdinand. Nearly a century later Al-Qaeda used the model to produce the largest mass murder in U.S. history and one of the defining moments of the twenty-first century. Still, the influence of revolutionary Russian terrorists on the strategy and tactics of modern terrorism was perhaps best described by a Russian. As Steven G. Marks notes in How Russia Shaped the Modern World (2003), a former colonel in the division of the Soviet Red Army responsible for training terrorists in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War stated in 1996 that "the methods of and ideology of training terrorists . . . have remained substantially unchanged." -SEAN FOLEY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Terrorism is too amorphous to be traced to a single source. The Russian model, developed from French Jacobins of the early 1790s, is only one of several types of terrorist activity employed by those seeking political-, social-, or religious-based revolution. Ever since the destruction of the World Trade Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, the world continues to shudder, confronted with the tragic Madrid train bombing in March 2004 and the atrocious hostage situation at the school in Beslan, Russia, in September 2004, among other attacks. Terrorism may be the order of the day, but the world has witnessed this morbidly horrific drama before. Though frequently plagiarized by many, from anarchists to Bolsheviks, the original authors of what we identify today as modern terrorism were of eighteenth-century France. The word terror is derived from the Latin terrere meaning to tremble, but the word as we know it was not in ordinary Western use until its French equivalents, terrorisme, terroriste, terroriser, developed in the 1790s. The first written evidence of terrorism appeared in the 1798 supplement of the Dictionnaire de VAcademic franchise as "systeme regime de In terreur" The Jacobins utilized these terms as positive references to themselves. After the collapse of their regime in July 1794, this word acquired a negative connotation, and terrorism was defined as attempts to further ideas using coercion. The terms were coined to describe a new phenomenon—the Great Terror or Reign of Terror (17921794) of the French Revolution. Perhaps initially lacking in complexity, the idea of the Terror became ideologically and politically advanced and evolved, creating exemplary slogans and practices for future generations to quote and ape. The French Revolution gave birth to the foremost model for Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin and future generations of terrorists to imitate. Modern international terrorism owes its greatest influence to the likes of Maximilien Robespierre and Louis-Antoine-Leon de Saint-Just, not to their ideological descendants Mikhail Bakunin, Sergei Nechaev, Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. The Terror was the first time mass murder for purposes of state was organized and codified. It was also the first time such atrocities were committed in the name of a political philosophy. Harvard historian Crane Brinton defines the French Great Terror as the "interaction between a social environment and men consciously attempting to alter the environment." This political approach to ideology is the philosophical bedrock

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from which most terrorists, ranging from the anarchists to various Marxist organizations, would launch their "movements."

more than forty people. El Ansar has fewer than two hundred. Action Organization for the Liberation of Palestine is less than three hundred.

The systematized violence of the Terror created an unprecedented fear on a scale never known before; this effect is the quintessential concept of modern terrorism. Violence was advocated, human life held no value, and determined men could make a revolution. The Revolution made regicide all the rage. The tyrant as well as the whole establishment supporting the tyrant had to be eliminated. For his pamphlet's motto, Nikolai Morozov, one of the first theoreticians of Russian terrorism, cited Saint-Just and Robespierre's notion that it was perfectly justifiable to execute a tyrant without any legal complications. Saint-Just was the archetypal terrorist believing that terror alone would achieve his ends and not the virtue of the Republic. This sentiment would later be echoed by Bakunin, who wrote in his Catechism of PL Revolutionist (1869) that change for the better was impossible without violence. Marx espoused that since capitalism was inherently cruel the only salvation was the establishment of communism by the rising proletariat and a "smashing" of the bourgeoisie. Adolf Hitler used the same Manichaean arguments to justify his state terrorism. The Jacobin Bertrand Barrere said, "let's make terror the order of the day." Another Jacobin declared, "let us be brigands for the good of our people." Everyone from Lenin and Trotsky to Yasser Arafat and Che Guevara, to name a few, repeated this idea of terror for the benefit of the masses.

The virus of violent purges in the name of utopia generated by the French Terror infected Russia, Europe, and the United States. The doctrine of systematic terrorism implemented by Russian populists, anarchists, Irish nationalists, Armenians, and others was adopted from Robespierre. Engels told Lopatin, the Russian emigre, "Russia is the France of this century." Nechaev was a Jacobin in the style of Robespierre. Many terrorist organizations that claim to be inspired by Marx or Lenin would be disappointed to know that their true muse was La, Terreur. In addition to violence, popular insurrection was a slogan born of the French Revolution, influencing not only terrorists in Russia, but also in the Balkans, which lacked any tradition of urban revolutionary insurrection against absolutism. And even if Marx and Lenin made an impact on such organizations as the German Red Army Faction, the original source of inspiration is known. Without the men of the Terror, Marx and Engels would not have been possible. Lenin praised the Jacobins, and in 1918 the young Soviet fleet named its largest battleships Marat and Danton.

Although the Terror was politically fueled and attacked religion and the church, it was laced with pseudotheological flavor. This so-called religious faith, according to Robespierre, justified terrorism. This religious zeal was used to rationalize any act in terrorists' favor. The Jacobins employed devotional language, references to righteousness and martyrdom, compared their opponents to sinners and agents of the devil, and insisted on pseudoreligious symbols and rituals. Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, and the Shining Path, among others, all adopted the rhetoric of pseudotheological fanaticism while hailing atheism and condemning religion, as did terrorists afterward. Even the organization of the Jacobins, who were a small, elite group, was mimicked by future generations of terrorists. A cult of personality was developed around Robespierre until he almost assumed a deity-like status, even referred to as "The Incorruptible." Most terrorist organizations are centrifugal and small in number. In the United States, sixteen groups advocate revolutionary change through violence. Numbers do not exceed fifty. The Italian Red Brigade numbered from four hundred to ten thousand. In Germany the Baader-Meinhof Gang consisted of approximately one hundred. The Japanese Red Army had no 64

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IN DISPUTE,

Bakunin, often cited as the man who wrote "the handbook" of terrorism, spread the idea of using violence to overthrow established order. He met with political thinkers and philosophers to formulate radical anarchism, stating that "the passion for destruction is also a creative passion." This statement reflected a standard many terrorists would attempt to match. In March 1881 the Russian "populist" terrorist organization People's Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II. In 1901 an anarchist killed U.S. president William McKinley. Other anarchist victims around the turn of the century included King Umberto I of Italy, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and President Sadi Carnot of France. Although international terrorism evolved, its development can still be connected to the Terror. Many embraced its choice of victims in addition to its methods. Soviet state terrorism was created by Lenin and continued and expanded by Stalin. They created a network of secret police, informants, executioners, and prisons just like Robespierre. No one was safe. Stalin adopted Georges-Jacques Danton's tactic of random, arbitrary violence to create a constant state of fear. High officials were purged and tortured just as they were guillotined during the Revolution. French revolutionaries shaped the development of modern terrorism, but recent "apocalyptic" or "catastrophic" terrorism is a drastic departure from the traditional concept. Motives, character, and aims have changed. There is almost no ideological blueprint for the future, such as the ambiguous concept espoused by Russian anarchists

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of empowering "the people." Most terrorists are ignorant of the original source of their ideals and methods. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the main thrust of the French Terror brand of terrorism was reversed, and religion, not politics, has become the driving force behind terror. Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni Muslim organization, and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese religious cult that used chemical weapons on a Tokyo subway in 1995, all employ a combination of fear and religion. Terrorists motivated by religion rather than politics are not concerned about alienating people from supporting their cause. Destruction and chaos are the goals rather than political development, such as the creation of a republic or communism. Not only is religious fanaticism new on the international scene, it is the predominant form of terrorism today. According to Amir Taheri in his Holy Terror: The Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism (1987), Islam "cannot conceive of either coexistence or political compromise. To the exponents of Holy Terror, Islam must either dominate or be dominated." Bin Laden's fatwa reports "the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it." Again, based on religion, killing is viewed as both purifying and saving. Globalization has provided motive and ability for terrorism. The deterioration of the power of the state resulting from globalization renders state sponsorship no longer necessary; terrorists can "shop around." For example, Albanians in New York funded the KLA in Kosovo. Iran funded training camps in Sudan, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad received support from Iran and Syria.

the availability of technology are all novel characteristics of international terrorism. -JELENA BUDJEVAC, WASHINGTON, D.C.

References Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution, revised edition (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952). Barry Davies, Terrorism: Inside A World Phenomenon (London: Virgin, 2003). Lawrence Zelic Freedman and Yonah Alexander, Perspectives on Terrorism (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1983). Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001). Laqueur and Yonah Alexander, eds., The Terrorism Reader: A Historical Anthology, revised edition (New York: NAL Penguin, 1987). Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003). Matthew J. Morgan, "The Origins of the New Terrorism," Parameters: U.S. Army War College, 34 (Spring 2004): 29-42. Albert Parry, Terrorism: From Robespierre to Arafat (New York: Vanguard, 1976). Donald M. Reid, "Political Assassination in Egypt, 1910-1954," International Journal of African Historical Studies, 15, no. 4 (1982): 625-651. Leon Steinmetz, "Bolsheviks of the Bastille," National Review, 41 (14 July 1989): 39.

Terrorist organizations have also undergone a metamorphosis from hierarchical, vertical structures to more horizontal, less command-driven groups. This development allows for agility. Like a constantly mutating virus, such a structure is more attractive to new recruits and difficult to discover and eliminate. This feature has been Al-Qaeda's main strength.

Amir Taheri, Holy Terror: The Inside Story of Islamic Terrorism (London: Hutchinson, 1987).

Technology has also provided for an even greater departure from traditional terrorism. The availability of powerful weapons, such as biological and chemical weapons, as well as communications and information technology has altered the manner in which terrorists operate, ranging from propaganda to logistics.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, "Reflections on Terror," National Review, 41 (14 July 1989): 38-40.

So today's terrorism resembles neither the French nor the Russian model. The increase in religious fanaticism, the use of terrorism to achieve death and destruction as opposed to some sort of political goal, the statelessness and independence of terrorists, their nonhierarchical structure, and

HISTORY

Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in NineteenthCentury Russia, translated by Francis Haskell (New York: Knopf, 1960).

"Wave Upon Wave," Canada and the World Backgrounder, 67 (January 2002): 4-7. Michel Wieviorka, The Making of Terrorism, translated by David Gordon White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Paul Wilkinson, Political Terrorism (London & New York: Macmillan, 1974).

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LITERACY AND EDUCATION Did the Bolsheviks accelerate achievements in literacy and primary education in the Soviet Union? Viewpoint: Yes. Soviet mass literacy and education programs were swift and impressive agents of modernization. Viewpoint: No. Soviet accomplishments in education and literacy were neither more impressive than similar developments in Western Europe nor dramatic improvements over what the tsarist government had achieved. The Bolsheviks came to power promoting the idea of mass literacy to lead the Soviet Union into a period of prosperity and world leadership. Vladimir Lenin's famous formula "electrification and literacy equals communism" was expressed in a vast national effort to educate peasants, workers, and other illiterates to the point where they could read. By 1930, the Soviets claimed, this goal had been achieved. Many scholars of the Soviet Union laud this accomplishment as a major and impressive achievement. With 45 percent literacy in 1917, Russia became a fully literate society under firm communist leadership. This fact, they argue, speaks strongly to the Soviet state's ability to modernize, and represents a positive contribution to society. Critics of this view, however, eagerly point out that the tsarist state had a workable plan to bring about universal literacy and primary education by 1922, that is, had revolution not intervened. Since the number of literate people doubled in the period 1900 to 1914 alone, and since education spending increased by greater amounts in every year after 1907, it does not seem improbable that the existing prerevolutionary society would have achieved at least as much as the Bolsheviks. Other modernizing societies in Western Europe, moreover, also achieved near-universal literacy around the same time without communism.

Viewpoint: Yes. Soviet mass literacy and education programs were swift and impressive agents of modernization.

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Many scholars point to the tsarist legacy of educational expansion and proclaim that Soviet achievements in literacy and education were unexceptional. Their reasoning stems from their belief that the Soviets merely benefited from the building momentum toward a comprehensive public-school system set in motion

during the tsarist era. They contend that had tsarist rule continued, nearuniversal literacy and schooling would have occurred anyway, and maybe even sooner. In declaring Soviet achievements in literacy and primary education unexceptional, however, these scholars fail to consider that education was neither widespread nor comprehensive before 1917. They also ignore big differences between the governments of the tsarist and the Soviet eras—the role of education in each, and whose interests the government was protecting. It is important to remember that while many children in the Rus-

URGENT SPADEWORK In the following document, Vladimir Lenin addresses the need to shore up literacy among the masses:

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

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“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

Source: "Pages from a Diary,"2 January 1923, in Lenin's Final Fight: Speeches and Writings, 192223, edited by George Fyson (New York: Pathfinder, 1995), pp. 203-208.

sian Empire's cities were receiving an education, children in rural areas, especially peasants, were far less likely to attend school during the tsarist era. Only a small percentage of peasant children, most of them from the more prosperous families, even completed primary school. A 1911 study of zemstvo schools in thirty-four provinces of Russia found that only one-third of the students graduated, with the rest dropping out of school after only two or three years. Given that in many cases only the prosperous peasants or nobility received more than a few years of education in the Russian Empire, the Soviet achieve68

ment of universal education for all citizens regardless of their class is even more remarkable. For those children who were lucky enough to receive an education in tsarist times, the subjects covered were in no way comprehensive. Schools were good at teaching the ability to read, but not how to learn through reading. Most educated peasants still spoke in local dialects instead of proper Russian. That can hardly be considered literacy, for the students lacked the basic ability to write what they heard or could only read by sounding out letters. Math classes consisted of the four basic functions, simple and compound

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numbers, and fractions. When we compare these achievements with Soviet near-universal literacy, which enabled students to reach far beyond just the ability to read a text aloud, and to reach high achievements in advanced math and the sciences, Soviet accomplishments are certainly exceptional. Soviet leaders always considered education to be an extremely important indicator of progress. They believed that literacy, in particular, proved the new regime a modern state and protector of the proletariat, or workers. A literate and educated general populace was needed in order to modernize and industrialize the country, important goals for the Soviet state. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that educational advances were an important part of state planning and spurred Soviet economic and technological progress. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, 37.9 percent of the male population above seven years old was literate and only 12.5 percent of the female population was literate. These low literacy rates dropped further in the turbulence caused by the Russian Civil War and in the famines, epidemics, and disorganization that followed from it. These same factors also caused a decrease in the general educational level in the country. Beginning in 1922 Soviet authorities started implementing a far-reaching, large-scale educational program with the goals of universal education and eliminating illiteracy among adults. By 1938 the government had established a network of four-year elementary schools covering the Soviet Union, and seven-year schools for children in urban areas. In addition, whereas before 1914 there were almost no kindergartens in Russia, the Soviets rapidly developed preschool education, including kindergarten, as part of their national program. Education at these schools was traditional, and strict discipline was enforced. Soviet schools were especially strong in mathematics and the hard sciences but also stressed language, literature, and history, a big change from the tsarist schools, which taught only the fundamentals of reading and arithmetic. In an attempt to help illiterate adults, the Bolsheviks launched an ambitious campaign between 1923 and 1927 called "Down with Illiteracy of Society," which depended on volunteers. Members of the Bolshevik youth organization, the Komsomol, were especially enthusiastic participants. One of its campaign posters said, "Literacy is the path to communism," and used the classical symbol of Pegasus, the winged horse, as a distributor of knowledge. The general census of December 1926 underscored the success of this campaign. For the first time in Russian history the majority of the population could read

and write: 65.4 percent of males and 36.7 percent of females (above the age of seven years). By the 1939 census, 81.1 percent of Soviet citizens (age ten and above) were literate, and by the 1960s literacy was common to almost all of the Soviet Union's citizens. The most rapid increase occurred in the first ten years after the revolution, a remarkable feat for the Soviet Union. Without the shift brought on by the Bolshevik Revolution, which made education of the masses essential to the government's goals and ushered in a government protecting the interests of the workers and not just the elites, it would have been impossible to achieve near-universal education and literacy, as the Soviets did. Even die-hard opponents of the former Soviet Union acknowledge that the Soviet state's universal, primary education for all children was exceptional. From the villages to the outposts to the largest cities, all Soviet children learned to read and write. A large portion of them even went on to higher education. It is one thing to provide a limited education to select areas and classes of a country, as the tsarist regime did, but a far different and more exceptional thing to educate the masses in depth in multiple disciplines as the Soviets did. The numbers speak for themselves. -KERRY FOLEY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Soviet accomplishments in education and literacy were neither more impressive than similar developments in Western Europe nor dramatic improvements over what the tsarist government had achieved. Many scholars look at Soviet statistics about primary education and literacy—the large number of schools established and the near-total elimination of illiteracy during Soviet rule—and declare that Soviet achievements in education were exceptional. They get so caught up in the statistics that they do not look beyond the numbers, however. This mistake is crucial because much important information lurks beyond the official numbers. Soviet education profited from the tsarist educational legacy. The tsars presided over an educational system that was characterized by high standards, serious academic character, and strict discipline. The period 1870-1914 was a time of remarkable expansion of basic schooling, with the ultimate goal of establish-

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Soviet officials teaching peasants and workers how to read and write, October 1920 (Associated Press)

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ing public schools throughout the Empire by 1922. In 1872 the Russian government started investigating compulsory primary education and dramatically increased funding for it. In 1908 the government passed legislation on compulsory attendance for primary education. By 1914, three-quarters of all school-age children were receiving basic education in a 150- to 160-day school year. School curricula went beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic to cover history, geography, natural science, and sometimes work in a trade. Tsarist-era students were in school in the last decades before 1917, but how developed were their skills and were they retained? A survey between 1895 and 1900 showed that many former students not only retained their ability to read but also improved the speed and comprehension of their reading after they completed school. They retained their basic math skills as well, for out of all of the skills they learned in school, math skills were the most used in their everyday life. It is reasonable to think that given more time to implement its educational plans, tsarist Russia would have succeeded in its plan to bring about universal primary education and literacy by the 1920s. The high esteem and rigorous approach to education held over into Soviet times. Many of the best prerevolutionary pedagogical theo-

rists, educators, and scholars remained in Russia after the revolution and imparted their seriousness and discipline to generations of Soviet students. The Soviet government merely brought to fruition educational plans that had been conceived and partially implemented in the tsarist period. Another problem with conceiving of Soviet educational achievements as exceptional is that the statistics used to prove their success simply cannot be trusted at face value. The Soviets were so intent on proving that theirs was a modern, progressive state that they had every incentive to inflate the statistics on education, just as they did with statistics on public health and industrial output. Even if one were to believe the statistics, the Soviet educational system was not as impressive as they suggest. Russia's Civil War, its revolution, famine, and disorganization after the Soviets came to power, resulted in a decline of the literacy rate and lowered the educational level. Only in the middle of the 1920s did the country start to make advances again in these areas. Several authorities agree that had the public-education system inaugurated by Alexander II in the 1860s been able to progress naturally, Russia would have had universal education by the 1930s, even without the Soviet literacy campaign. The educational system also developed

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slowly as the result of the ill effects of World War II, with prewar educational levels restored only in 1950. Even those figures were not too impressive. In 1939 about one-third of urban children and only 10 percent of rural children were in eight- to ten-year schools. This fact highlights an important point about Soviet education—the inequality between urban and rural areas that diminished the impressiveness of the Soviets' achievements in relation to the tsarist-era figures. While the Soviets established many preschools throughout the country, their expansion was held back by the fact that the campaign against illiteracy absorbed much of the resources of the educational authorities. Even with widespread primary schools in the Soviet Union, the quality of education students received at the schools was lacking. Soviet schools emphasized memorization and recitation at the expense of critical thinking and problem solving. The reason for this is better understood when one understands that Soviet authorities saw literacy and education as means of propaganda, through which its citizens could be molded to meet Bolshevik ideals and become obedient citizens and laborers with the technical skills to help modernize the country. Education had to teach students to follow communist ideology and the directives of the regime, not question or interpret the content of what the regime was saying to them. Although the Soviets finally achieved near-universal education by the 1960s, its students did not learn much. Many Soviet students were barely literate, had not mastered basic math skills, and did not have many of the skills they could use in labor. Factory managers and universities complained about the younger generation's lack of preparation for higher education and the workforce. Even in the case of basic literacy, after several years of expensive and expansive campaigns, the census of 1926 showed that only 51 percent of Soviet citizens over age ten years were literate. Compared to the 45 percent literacy rate in 1917, the expensive and resource-laden literacy campaign and the increasing numbers of children in school only marginally increased the literacy rate. Why then, did the campaign fail even though it had so many resources? First, in order to increase the overall literacy rate, it was necessary to

lower the illiteracy rate in the countryside. That was to be far harder than increasing urban literacy, which was already at 64 percent for males and 42 percent for females by 1897. The poor control that Bolsheviks had over the countryside before Josef Stalin's agricultural collectivization programs began in the late 1920s complicated this task. Their lack of authority in rural areas left many schools outside the control of central educational authorities. The literacy campaign's supporters in the countryside, mainly rural teachers, had many other burdens, low wages, and little time. The People's Commissariat of Enlightenment, the national organ in charge of education, had inadequate funds. The increase in basic literacy before World War II was noteworthy, but it took too long to be considered exceptional. While official statistics show that the Soviet educational system was exceptional, one needs to look beyond the numbers. The Soviets merely built on the increasing momentum of tsarist-era plans for a public-school system and the infrastructure needed to implement them. The tsars did a lot of the hard work, including raising the literacy rate to 45 percent by 1917 and establishing a network of schools that gave at least a basic education to threequarters of school-age children by 1914. These initial steps were far more difficult than simply continuing the momentum, as the Soviets did. Illiteracy would likely have disappeared without the revolution and the Soviet regime. -KERRY FOLEY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

References Charles E. Clark, Uprooting Otherness: The Literacy Campaign in NEP-Era Russia (Selins-

grove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2000). R. W. Davies, Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998).

Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 18611914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

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NATIONAL LIBERATION MOVEMENTS Did the Russian Revolution have a strong influence on national liberation movements? Viewpoint: Yes. National liberation movements took important lessons and received substantial support from the Soviet regime. Viewpoint: No. National liberation movements generally rejected the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution and avoided Soviet influences. An important characteristic of the Bolshevik leadership was its determination to export revolution to the entire world. Seeing Europe's colonies and economic spheres of interest as vulnerable targets, Bolshevik strategy strongly favored the backing of national liberation movements fighting against them. Usually noncommunist in political complexion, these movements sought to dislodge imperial control and restore fully sovereign national rule. The Bolsheviks viewed this development as an opportunity for communist forces to gain respectability and a place in national governments, which could later be moved along a pro-Soviet path. The degree to which the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded in influencing national liberation movements is the subject of this chapter. Some scholars see profound similarities, including tactics, the development of tightly ordered revolutionary parties, violence, and the adoption of state economic planning as evidence of undeniable Russian, and communist, influence. Other scholars disagree. In many cases national liberation movements simply wanted to attract as much foreign support as they could from any quarter, and would gladly bend, distort, or lie about their interest in the Soviet Union and its values to extract such support. More often than not, these groups formed anticommunist governments that spurned the Soviet Union, its ideology, and their supporters among their own populations, and moved out on their own, either pursuing a neutral path in the Cold War or gravitating toward the United States.

Viewpoint: Yes. National liberation movements took important lessons and received substantial support from the Soviet regime.

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There were few twentiethcentury events of greater magnitude for national liberation movements than the October 1917 Revolution in Russia and the emergence of the Bolshevik government

in the Soviet Union. The Soviet regime portrayed itself as the world's chief opponent of colonialism and the champion of colonized peoples and their movements of national liberation. Throughout the twentieth century, the Soviet Union extended financial, political, and military assistance to national liberation movements. The Soviet Union also provided many national liberation movements with ideological responses to the West's claim to universality and progress and served as a reference point for political legitimization,

state building, and national self-assertion. Often this process involved replicating certain parts or whole aspects of the Soviet system—even in social and cultural circumstances far removed from those of the Soviet Union. From the moment that the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, they inherited a variety of international positions and interests that had little in common with Marxism. Vladimir Lenin and his associates worked to distance themselves from the Imperial Russian government by repudiating treaties and debts and by publishing secret diplomatic documents. In perhaps one of the most dramatic gestures of change, Lenin renounced all imperialist treaties and called for the liberation of all of the world's colonies. The Soviet Union then provided substantial assistance to the nationalist forces of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in his war with Greece and its Western allies for control of the territory that would become the Turkish Republic. Similarly, Moscow supported the nationalist movement of Sun Yat-sen in China, the Kuomintang, by sending hundreds of military advisers and weapons to fight his rivals throughout the 1920s and by declining to offer unconditional support to the nascent Chinese Communist Party, which it instructed to work with the Nationalists. The Soviet regime also surrendered virtually all of the concessions and extraterritorial rights in China won by the Imperial Russian government. These actions, in turn, benefited the Kuomintang: the British, to draw China away from the Soviet Union, agreed to abandon some of their concessions in some Chinese cities, while the Chinese communists were left vulnerable to the bloody repression carried out upon them by the Nationalists in Shanghai in 1927. While Soviet support for nationalist movements in Anatolia and China marked a significant departure from the foreign policies of Imperial Russia, the Soviet regime's support of national liberation movements followed a Russian tradition of exporting revolutionary ideas and methods of violence. As Steven G. Marks outlines in How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (2003), Segein Nechaev, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and other radical Russian leftists pioneered the guiding principles and chief modes of organization and military resistance for national liberation movements—cells (small, secret groups forming the nucleus of political activity), terrorism, and other forms of politicized violence. Marks argues that this approach to political organization and resistance was so closely associated with Russians that it became known as the "Russian model." He also writes that the model rapidly spread throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas by way of popular books, novels, and

newspaper articles. In addition, the Russian model was especially conducive to the objectives of national liberation movements, many of which operated in societies comparable to those of Imperial Russia, with strong autocratic states and vast peasant populations. Beginning in the late 1910s and 1920s, the Soviet regime built on this legacy directly by providing education in military tactics and techniques of political organization and mass resistance to the future Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and many other individuals who would hold leadership positions in national liberation movements. Through the structure of the Third International, or Comintern, Moscow hoped to use these leaders to bring all socialists, communists, and nationalists into the Soviet orbit. Among the earliest success for this policy was China in the 1920s. The Kuomintang declared the Russian and Chinese Revolutions to be two aspects of the same worldwide movement of liberation. In addition, the Soviet regime dispatched native-born and Russian agents (often posing as diplomats) to assist nationalist liberation movements along with Communist parties in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Although direct Soviet assistance to nationalist movements decreased substantially in the late 1920s and 1930s when Soviet leader Josef Stalin pursued a policy of "building socialism in one country" (the strictly national appropriation of a messianic and universal Marxist ideology), the Soviet regime exerted more influence on national liberation movements than it had in the 1920s by the sheer fact of its existence. Before 1917, one could question if anything could be learned from Russia and characterize socialism as visionary or impractical. By the late 1920s the Soviet Union appeared to be a viable alternative to free enterprise, capitalism, and democracy. In the space of just a few years, the Soviet regime attained feats in industrial production, electrification, literacy, and other tangible facets of modernization that had taken decades to achieve in Europe. The Soviet experience also showed that it was possible for an agricultural society—like many of those that would spawn national liberation movements—to modernize without falling under the influence of either foreign capital or guidance. Equally important, Soviet success served to radicalize the general character of many nationalist liberation movements. The Bolshevik regime's ability to overcome almost any impediment through militarized organization appealed to nationalists hostile to any compromise with the colonialists. They were also attracted to Soviet Marxism's rejection of European liberalism, the ideological tool used by many of those calling

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a requuestt foror aidT A former tsarist sphere of Influence, Outer Mongolia became the first satellite state of the Soviet Union. In 1921 Soviet authorities helped install In power Sukhe Bator of the Mongolian People's Party. The following is a portion of Bator's appeal to Moscow for help, making clear the dependence of the Mongolian communists on Soviet backing:

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

Source; Robert V. Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism and the World; From Revolution to Collapse (Hanover, N.H. & London: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 38-39.

for accommodation with colonial governments, such as Ferhat Abbas in Algeria. This process of radicalization was so pronounced in Vietnam that the Communist Party became the dominant party in the Vietnamese nationalist movement, the Viet Minh. Even Rashid Rida, who passionately advocated the political unification of all Muslim peoples, noted the merits of Marxism as an anticolonialist and anticapitalist movement. Moscow's relations with national liberation movements did not reach fruition until the 1940s when the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany in World War II and emerged as a global 74

superpower, second in influence only to the United States. The rise of Soviet power coincided with a surge in national liberation movements and the Cold War, in which Washington and Moscow fiercely competed for global influence and power. Among the earliest areas of conflict in the Cold War was the Middle East. Throughout the 1940s, the Soviet Union supported the claims of Iranian Azeris and Kurds to independent states and only relented in the face of Iranian oil concessions and overwhelming diplomatic pressure from the United States and Great Britain in favor of the Iranian government. Washington's decision to be the first state to extend diplomatic recognition to Israel, an event that all but guaranteed the Jewish state's independence and entrance into the international community, in part reflected Cold War tensions. Washington feared that if the United States were not the first state to recognize Israeli independence, Moscow would have more influence among Israelis since many Jews were sympathetic to socialism, and the Soviet regime had enjoyed close ties for many years with the Zionist movement. The Soviet Union's interaction with national liberation movements accelerated in the early 1950s with the death of Stalin and the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev as the principal Soviet leader. While Stalin placed little value on the extra-European world, Khrushchev believed that there were many valuable opportunities for Soviet foreign policy in the colonies and newly independent states of Asia and Africa. Khrushchev's approach was validated by the Suez Crisis in 1956. Moscow's opposition to the Anglo-French military intervention in Egypt and its threat to use nuclear weapons on London and Paris if they did not withdraw raised Soviet prestige to unprecedented heights in the colonized world. Its actions in the crisis more than made up for any negative fallout resulting from the Soviet Union's decision to topple by force the reform-minded Communist government in Hungary at literally the same time. Buoyed by his success at Suez, Khrushchev grew bolder and even pursued opportunities in Washington's traditional sphere of influence, the Western Hemisphere. In 1959, Fidel Castro led a national liberation movement that brought a Soviet-inspired government to power in the island nation of Cuba, just ninety miles south of Florida. Although Khrushchev lost his position as premier in 1964, subsequent Soviet leaders continued his approach of supporting national liberation and like-minded movements in the extra-European world. While the Soviet policy in the extra-European world faced competition from communist China following the

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Sino-Soviet split, Soviet leaders were secure in the fact that they had significantly more resources to deploy abroad than their colleagues in China or the other socialist states outside of the Soviet orbit, such as Yugoslavia. Moscow's most effective partnership during the post-Khrushchev period was with those of Southeast Asia, which created new governments modeled on the Soviet Union in the mid 1970s in a (unified) Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Strikingly, these movements defeated a sustained U.S. campaign to check Communist expansion in the region and support an independent South Vietnamese government that included the deployment of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, airmen, and sailors to the region and the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars. Moscow's policies—or even the potential of a Soviet presence—were similarly successful in Africa and other regions in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout this period, Washington often pressed its European allies to abandon their colonial holdings quickly to avoid the radicalization of nationalist liberation movements in favor of individuals supporting Marxism and the Soviet Union. In the one notable exception to this U.S. policy, the Soviet Union, along with Cuba, provided significant assistance to the national liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola. When the Portuguese government eventually agreed to grant independence to the two African colonies in 1974, both emerged as socialist governments with institutions that mirrored those of the Soviet Union. The success of these two independent and Marxist nation-states marked a significant foreign-policy victory for Moscow and helped to consolidate communist gains in Ethiopia and other parts of Africa in the 1970s. Although the Soviet gains in Africa and Asia in the 1970s appeared impressive, they represented the high-water mark of Soviet relations with national liberation movements and influence with the Third World generally. Bolstered by the revenues from high oil prices, American reverses in Southeast Asia, and its attainment of strategic nuclear parity with Washington, Moscow pursued a much more ambitious foreign policy in the 1970s than it had before or since. In the final decade of the existence of the Soviet Union, however, a combination of factors limited Moscow's ability to assist the remaining national liberation movements: Moscow's preoccupation with Afghanistan following its 1979 invasion of the country; the precipitous decline in Soviet state revenues following the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1980s; and the Reagan administration's decision to fund an enormous rearmament program in the United HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

States. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary in 1985, Soviet leaders were already focusing primarily on internal economic reforms, reducing military budgets, and finding better ways to cooperate with the United States and Western Europe. Within this new framework, support of national liberation was a significantly less important Soviet priority than it had been previously. The Soviet Union was an important partner and inspiration for national liberation movements in the twentieth century. From its inception in 1917, the Soviet regime vociferously opposed colonialism and, from time to time, provided military assistance and training to the leaders of national liberation movements and their followers throughout the world. Soviet instructors were well positioned to provide technical training and assistance to national liberation movements since Russians had pioneered their most common methods of resistance. The existence of the Soviet Union—first as a seemingly successful modern socialist society and then as a power in global affairs—gave many leaders of national liberation movements faith that they could defeat colonial powers as well as not have to choose between independence and modernizing their societies. Here the fact that Russia before 1917 was predominantly agricultural and autocratic was especially important because it mirrored the conditions of many of the world's colonized societies before independence. Ultimately, there is little question that the process of decolonization would have taken substantially longer and evolved in entirely different ways had the Soviet regime not come to power in 1917. -SEAN FOLEY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. National liberation movements generally rejected the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution and avoided Soviet influences. The influence of the Bolshevik Revolution on national liberation movements has been greatly exaggerated. In fact, few Third World leaders took great inspiration from Vladimir Lenin, his ideology, or the ideas of other leading Russian revolutionaries. They generally avoided the communization of their societies, appeals to socialist doctrine, or the use of terror as a central instrument of government. Few accepted unilateral or unconditional Soviet military and economic support VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who was installed with Russian assistance as generalissimo of the Republic of China in 1923 (Bettmann/CORBIS, U1670856)

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for their endeavors. Although there were many cases of cooperation between the Soviets and national independence or anticolonial parties, these relationships were usually marriages of convenience, designed to extract whatever aid the Soviets could supply and then ended with their displacement. The classic example of this pattern was China. As a weak republic embroiled in a long civil war that was ongoing in 1917, China, an historic target of Russian imperialist ambitions, presented a clear target for Soviet influence. The outcome, however, was disappointing for the Soviet Union. Following strict Marxism, Lenin and his associates decided that it was best to support "bourgeois" nationalists, who would usher in a democratic government that would prepare the country for what they believed would be its inevitable historical leap to socialism and communism. In China this meant supporting the Kuomintang, the Nationalist forces of Sun Yat-sen and his successor, Chiang Kai-shek. Both were anticommunists, but this inconvenient fact failed to preclude either the extension or the acceptance of Soviet support. Indeed, the Chinese communists, founded in 1921, were instructed to

cooperate with them. Yet, this approach resulted in disaster. Despite his earlier commitment to combine with the communists to eject foreign forces and tame domestic warlords, Chiang turned on the communists as soon as it became convenient. This happened in 1927, when he used communist support to take the strategic port of Shanghai, but then rounded up and killed tens of thousands of communist fighters and activists. The devastation of this move consigned Chinese communism to the margins of the country's political life until World War II and left permanent scars on the Sino-Soviet relationship, fissures that flared into a major diplomatic rift and serious adversarial relationship during the Cold War. For the moment, it defeated the Leninist strategy of getting communists into positions from which they could influence national government. Chiang won the day, having used Soviet support for his own ends, and then completely jettisoned any continuing basis of Soviet influence. The other great anticolonial battle of the 1920s and 1930s, in India, also represented a failure of Soviet policy. The Indian Congress Party, the main independence movement,

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philosophically rejected the tactics and ideology of Soviet communism. Its leader, Mohandas Gandhi, insisted on nonviolent resistance, the absolute opposite of the violent coercion and revolutionary terrorism that Russian revolutionaries had made all their own. His adoption of pacifism came from a much different Russian source, the thought and writings of Count Lev Tolstoi. Gandhi's associate Jawaharlal Nehru traveled to the Soviet Union in 1927 to inspect its modernization, but returned aghast at the inefficiency of the state economic planning and strict social and political controls he witnessed. "The human costs are unpayable," he concluded. Although India adopted a mixed economy after it gained independence twenty years later, it studiously avoided political terror (leaving aside its military operations against India's semi-independent princely states and the horrors of the transfer of Muslim population to Pakistan) or command economics. Under Nehru's leadership, India's economy, though afflicted with problems of underdevelopment, came to resemble the "mixed economy" advocated by the British Labour Party, which he also had a chance to observe personally. His successor, Indira Gandhi, continued this approach. Although India sought good relations with the Soviet Union and received economic assistance from it, its main diplomatic commitment was to the Non-Aligned Movement, an international organization of nearly one hundred mostly Third World states that sought balanced relations with both superpowers, a general climate of international peace, formal guarantees of mutual nonaggression, and nuclear disarmament. In trade and other arrangements, India dealt with both the United States and the Soviet Union in the hope of gaining advantages from open relationships with both superpowers. This strategy was generally followed by other former colonies as they emerged as independent nations. Ghana, for example, tried to balance between the superpowers in the same way as India but, finding the Soviets lackluster trading partners, deposed its socialist leader Kwame Nkrumah and sought closer ties with the United States and its European allies. Despite serious challenges from military rule, it has gestured toward adopting the political pluralism common in the West. Guinea, which quickly fell into an authoritarian dictatorship after winning independence in 1958, allowed the Soviets to build an impressive airport at Conakry, but then refused to allow them to use it as a base to supply Cuba in the year leading up to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. Indonesia's postindependence government accepted Soviet aid in the 1950s and 1960s and cooperated with its domestic com-

munist movement, but in 1965 a military coup deposed its ruler, slaughtered nearly a half million people identified as communists, and drew closer to the United States. Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser took Soviet diplomatic support during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and material aid thereafter, but all the while persecuted his country's domestic communist movement. In 1972 President Anwar Sadat ordered Soviet technical and military advisers to leave the country. Thereafter he and his successor, Hosni Mubarak, moved toward close relations with the United States, rapprochement with the American major regional ally, Israel, pro-private-sector economic policies, and, albeit in a limited fashion, political pluralism. Revolutionary and national independence movements in Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, and many other countries also accepted Soviet aid, but wasted no time in following the pattern of turning on communist movements within their own borders and on the Soviets internationally once they achieved their goals. Algeria became a military dictatorship, while Morocco remained a monarchy. Iraq destroyed its communist movement and adopted a dictatorship of anticommunist elites that more closely resembled European fascist regimes. Iran turned into an Islamic theocracy with no tolerance for communism or the flexing of Soviet power in the Middle East. Direct emulation of the Soviet Union was a rare event in the Third World, and Moscow took notice. When Nikita Khrushchev, a major proponent of exporting the Soviet model of revolution and development, was removed from power in October 1964, his critics accused him of wasting Soviet resources and prestige on Third World nations that did not repay their debts with geopolitical loyalty, strategic assistance, or the adoption of communism. "The capitalists laugh at us, and they are right to laugh," one of Khrushchev's main accusers lamented of the poor results of Soviet aid to the Third World. Even when the direct adoption of the Soviet model occurred, as it did in Cuba after 1959 and Nicaragua after 1979, it came as the result of a communist core imposing itself on initially, and largely, noncommunist democratic movements and displacing the moderate elements from an effective role. Cuba's communist dictator, Fidel Castro, began his political career as a lawyer and aspiring parliamentarian who claimed to admire Jeffersonian democracy and only publicly declared his commitment to Marxism in late 1961, nearly three years after coming to power. Legitimately democratic Cuban leaders worked with him in the early phases of his political career, but suffered

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after he consolidated power. Likewise, most leaders of Nicaragua's anti-authoritarian Sandinista National Liberation Front were democrats who suffered at the hands of the communist minority that initially aligned itself with them but ended up in control of the army and police. In these cases only force and coercion could bring the principles of the Bolshevik Revolution to movements of national liberation, most of which took great pains to avoid them. -PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

Bruce A. Elleman, Diplomacy and Deception: The Secret History of Sino-Soviet Diplomatic Rela-

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

Zaki Laidi, ed., The Third World and the Soviet Union (London: Zaki, 1988). Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Bruce D. Porter, The USSR in Third World Conflicts: Soviet Arms and Diplomacy in Local Wars, 1945-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Alvin Z. Rubenstein, Moscow's Third World Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

References

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tions, 1917-1927 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).

Arthur Benjamin Stein, India and the Soviet Union: The Nehru Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

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NATIONALITIES POLICY Was the Soviet nationalities policy instituted by Vladimir Lenin fair and balanced? Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets largely fulfilled Lenin's promises of national autonomy and nondiscrimination. Viewpoint: No. The Soviets essentially reconstructed the tsarist empire and imposed de facto Great Russian rule. The Soviet Union inherited the Russian Empire's multiethnic character. Composing just over half the population, ethnic Russians shared the world's first socialist state with more than 100 minorities, some numbering in the millions, and others numbering in the low thousands. Some, such as the Poles, were Westernized and urbanized. Others, such as the peoples of the Caucasus and Siberia, lived in small villages and tribal-based societies. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews all inhabited Russia and had needs that presented challenges to any state. This chapter evaluates the Soviet nationalities policy. Following on Terry Martin's recent book, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (2001), the first essay argues that the Bolshevik regime was by and large an improvement for minorities. Cultural and linguistic rights were affirmed at levels undreamed of under the tsars, while minorities could expect recruitment into the Communist Party and the organs of state, that is, into the ruling elite, which had previously been almost monolithically Russian. An older and opposing argument holds, however, that changes in nationalities policy were superficial. In the end the political, social, and cultural lives of the peoples of the Soviet Union were dominated by a mostly ethnic Russian Communist Party and bureaucracy. Religious rights, often a major feature defining nationalities, were nonexistent. Resistance from members of certain nationalities was punished with punitive expeditions, genocidal campaigns, deportations, and other forms of collective sanction. Minorities advocating autonomy or independence in anything more than the most literal sense permitted by the state usually disappeared. Nationalities policy in the U.S.S.R., in other words, was hardly fair or balanced.

Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets largely fulfilled Lenin's promises of national autonomy and nondiscrimination. One of the basic ideological premises of the Soviet communists was that nationalism had been a tool

of the capitalist imperialist classes, used to create and then exploit artificial tensions between the workers of different states, and thus prevent them from seeing their natural interests in bonding together against the exploiting class. World War I seemed to prove beyond a doubt the inability of only lukewarm disciples of Karl Marx to read the master's works: when it came time to vote for war

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credits, the German socialists lined up dutifully behind the kaiser, and no significant opposition was heard from organized labor in Britain, France, the United States, or even Russia in the early years of war. Even when the utter devastation of modern warfare became clear to all, communist, anarchist, and radical socialist agitators who questioned the governments' lines were likely to face not only state persecution for treasonable activities, but also ostracism from workers themselves. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 offered an opportunity to try to erase the detrimental uses to which ethnic nationalism had been put in the past, while still allowing for the celebration of cultural differences. And although changes in policy occurred as time went on, Soviet nationalities policy can be said to be largely fair, fulfilling reasonable demands for autonomy and working toward the elimination of discrimination. The Russian Empire was a multiethnic empire. Although dominated by Great Russians, the number of nationalities that fell under the tsar's protection was staggering by today's standards. The Russian Empire included well over one hundred distinct nationalities speaking more than 150 languages and dialects. The Soviet state inherited all the headaches of the empire: wars that had bubbled in the Caucasus for decades; disgruntled Central Asian populations that had risen against the tsar as recently as 1916; separatist Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Baltic nationalism in the country's western borderlands; restive indigenous populations in the Far East; and so on. The collapse of tsarist authority in 1917 had only reinforced tendencies toward autonomy and independence among the empire's minority nationalities. In keeping with the principle of pure equality among the workers of the world, the Bolshevik leaders adopted a policy, articulated by no less a personage than Vladimir Lenin himself, of complete equality of all ethnicities and languages within the new state. Although as a matter of practicality Russian was to be used as a lingua franca, the idea that the average citizen of the state had the right to work and be educated about his responsibilities to the revolution in his own language was considered fundamental. Under Lenin's leadership the Soviet state reversed the Russian Empire's oppressive cultural and linguistic policies and opened education, literary culture, local administration, and media to local languages in the place of Russian. The failure of the revolution to make headway against nationalist tendencies outside of Russia was first demonstrated by the inability of Russian soldiers to infect their German foes with awareness of the shortsightedness of their officers' exhortations, and the red tide of revolution 80

failed to move westward. The Russian Civil War (1917-1921) and the Soviet-Polish War (19201921) naturally meant that the situation was too unstable for the Bolsheviks to develop an effective policy, but it is a sign of their dedication to Lenin's vision of a discrimination-free workers' paradise that these events did not prevent the creation of a system of staggered autonomy that attempted to balance the needs of the state with the rights of the nationalities. The creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself was, at least on paper, a case in point. The union's fifteen constituent republics were officially independent states that had voluntarily entered the Soviet Union, and could theoretically withdraw from the arrangement, an action they all took in 1991. In Soviet times they were largely left alone to deal with educational and cultural matters. There were also, however, autonomous republics within these (sixteen of which were located in the Russian republic alone), which maintained significant economic and cultural rights. One need only look to the Muslim character of Tatarstan within contemporary Russia, as well as the ability of the region to control oil revenues, to see that the foundations laid in the 1920s did not crumble along with communism. Eight autonomous districts and ten autonomous subdistricts were created in recognition of their populations' ethnic and cultural differences from the usually Russian majority surrounding them but were more limited in scope to local cultural preservation measures. For the most part, these units provided a structural framework that ensured at the very least that consideration of national differences in the new workers' state would be taken into account in the creation of policy. Major universities and institutes, both in the historic capitals of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and provincial cities, all reflected the regime's commitment to the preservation of cultural identity, with the creation of specialized study centers, museums, and linguistics departments to preserve and promote ethnic harmony. The main claims against the assertion that the Soviet Union promoted national reconciliation in a meaningful way usually center around the activities of Josef Stalin, who had been commissar of nationalities before rising to become general secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union's unchallenged leader. The most common examples of ethnic injustice are the Ukrainian famine, and the resettlement and persecution of whole ethnic groups during World War II. It is debatable, however, whether the famine specifically targeted the Ukrainians because they were Ukrainians. Many have argued that Stalin's agricultural policies, however murderously misguided, were aimed more at

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLES OF RUSSIA BY THE COUNCIL 5 OF THE PEOPLES COMMISSARS 15 November 1917 The October Revolution of workers and peasants began under the common banner of emancipation. The peasants are emancipated from landowner rule, for there is no landed proprietorship any longer—it has been abolished. The soldiers and sailors are emancipated from the power of autocratic generals, for generals will henceforth be elected and removable. The workers are emancipated from the whims and tyranny of capitalists, for workers' control over factories and mills will henceforth be established. All that is living and viable is emancipated from the hated bondage, There remain only the peoples of Russia, who have been and are suffering from oppression and arbitrary rule, whose emancipation should be started immediately, and whose liberation should be conducted resolutely and irrevocably,... This reprehensible policy of lie and distrust, petty persecution and provocation must be done away with, From now on it shall be replaced by an open and honest policy leading to the complete mutual confidence of the peoples of Russia. Only this confidence can lead to a sincere and firm alliance of the peoples of Russia. Only thanks to this alliance can the workers and peasants of the peoples of Russia be welded into a single revolutionary force capable of holding out against any encroachments on the part of the imperialist-annexationist bourgeoisie.

"kulaks," an elastically defined group of potential opponents among the peasantry, than at an ethnic group. His motivation in allowing the famine in the Ukraine to occur was to fight forces of opposition to his economic plans. Claims of wartime persecution of various ethnic minorities are also easy to place in context without in any way underemphasizing the misery and horrors suffered by the affected groups. Ultimately, in wartime, countries round up innocents to protect against potential fifth columnists. American citizens of Japanese origin,

Proceeding from these premises, the First Congress of Soviets in June of this year proclaimed the right of the peoples of Russia to free self-determination. in October of this year the Second Congress of Soviets reaffirmed this inalienable right of the peoples of Russia more resolutely and definitely. Carrying out the will of these Congresses, the Council of People's Commissars has resolved to base its activity in the matter of the nationalities of Russia on the following principles; 1. EQUALITY AND SOVEREIGNTY OF THE PEOPLES OF RUSSIA. 2. THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLES OF RUSSIA TO FREE SELF-DETERMINATION, UP TO SECESSION AND FORMATION OF AN INDEPENDENT STATE. 3. ABOLITION OF ALL AND ANY NATIONAL AND NATIONAL-RELIGIOUS PRIVILEGES AND RESTRICTIONS. 4. FREE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL MINORITIES AND ETHNIC GROUPS INHABITING RUSSIA. Concrete decrees stemming herefrom will be worked out immediately after the establishment of the Commission for the Affairs of Nationalities, In the name of the Russian Republic, People's Commissar for Nationalities Affairs, JOSEPH DZHUGASHVILISTALIN. Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, V. ULYANOV (LENIN). Source: Martin McCstutey, ed, TNe Russian Revolution and the Soviet State 1917-1921: Documents (London: Macmitlan, 197S), pp. 191-193.

children among them, were sent to internment camps during the same time, for similar reasons, only in their case it was their Japanese roots that provided the pretext for the assault on their rights. Likewise, Britain and France interned German and Austrian citizens upon the outbreak of World War II even though many of them were ethnic, political, or religious refugees from the Nazi regime. One cannot compare the practical manifestation of the Soviet approach to what happened in these countries, where most of those interned survived, but the principle

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81

remains the same: an ethnic group was identified as a potential threat to national security, and its individual members were made to suffer for it. These wartime decisions were aberrations, and not reflective of peacetime policies. The Soviet Union was not a workers' paradise. It was a dictatorship in which millions were killed or suffered horribly. This cannot and should never be forgotten. Simply castigating everything done there as misguided, however, is an oversimplification made possible only by post-Cold War arrogance. In creating a system of autonomy for ethnic and national divergences, in instituting procedural changes to the study of these groups for their cultural and linguistic preservation at every level, it is clear that the Soviet nationalities policy, while not perfect, was in fact reasonably successful in promoting diversity. -VASILIS VOURKOUTIOTIS, UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

Viewpoint: No. The Soviets essentially reconstructed the tsarist empire and imposed de facto Great Russian rule. When the Soviet state emerged from civil war as the successor state of the Russian Empire, it seemed as if the era of ethnic Great Russian rule had come to an end. Soviet leaders promoted a new system of national republics that differed greatly from the imperial model, in which a Russian core governed a largely non-Russian periphery that had been conquered. Under the new system non-Russian regions voluntarily joined the Russian core in a "federation of sovereign and equal states." While on paper the Soviet Union's nationalities policy may have been fair and balanced, in practice it promisecl one thing and delivered another, giving it more continuity with tsarist Russia than change. Despite its rhetoric of equality, the Soviet government continued tsarist Russia's practice of unequal treatment of minorities, with the core of ethnic Russians ruling over the non-Russian periphery, and with many of the other nations and nationalities, numbering more than a hundred, relegated to a lesser status. The Soviet Union was simply the old tsarist empire given new life by communist ideology. The Russian Empire treated its minorities unequally while trying to keep its large and diverse empire intact. As it expanded, the Russian Empire faced a strategic problem; it had to

82

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

govern non-Orthodox Christian and non-Russianspeaking populations. The Russian response was to grant non-Russian populations limited autonomy and to try to assimilate them. Alexander III, whom some scholars call the first nationalist tsar, marked a specific change in the Russian Empire's nationalities policy. Whereas previous tsars had used Russification in selected areas for specific purposes, such as in Ukraine to suppress emerging nationalism and in Poland after the rebellions of 1830-1831 and 1863, Alexander III made Russification a general policy. During his reign, Russification extended to the Georgians and Armenians and even to the Finns, who had been loyal to the Russians. Alexander III also put increased religious pressure on non-Orthodox peoples. His government maintained restrictions on where Jews, considered a nationality in Russia, could live, established discriminatory quotas against Jewish students in institutions of higher learning, encouraged Jewish emigration, and turned a blind eye to deadly pogroms against their communities. Under Nicholas II, Alexander Ill's son, religious persecution continued, with Jews' rights further restricted as they were forbidden to acquire real estate (except in the "Jewish Pale"), pogroms continued, land and funds of the Armenian church were confiscated, and other non-Orthodox denominations were harassed. These are but a few of the many injustices committed against the Russian Empire's minority nationalities. Officially, one big difference between the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union was the claim that the Soviet Union was a "federation of sovereign and equal states." Proponents of the true equality of the nationalities argue that fifteen national republics made up the Soviet Union and that this was more autonomy than nationalities had during the Russian Empire. They fail to consider that the boundaries of many republics and autonomous regions did not coincide with the ethnic populations that they were meant to represent or that the republics diluted the power of specific ethnic groups by dividing their populations or merging them with other rival ethnic groups. Perhaps the best two examples are the cases of the Chechen-Ingush autonomous republic and the Karachay-Cherkess autonomous oblast (formed in 1956). Josef Stalin's deportation of nationalities to other regions of the Soviet Union exacerbated the impact of these policies. Outside of some local cultural policies, the republics were not truly sovereign; this was a sham to try to keep the newly reconstituted Soviet empire whole. Installing local leaders loyal to the central government and Communist Party perpetuated the guise. All important decisions and policies were handed down from Moscow, leaving the local governments with no political or economic independence, autonomy, or, in most cases, initiative. Moscow directly con-

VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

trolled matters as important as economic plans, education, resource distribution, and political policy. Yet, even the cultural autonomy was not real. After Great Russian nationalism began to be more accepted in the Soviet Union, the central government in Moscow said that Great Russians and the Russian language were the binding element of the diverse country, thereby elevating the Russians above the Soviet Union's other nationalities. In order to keep the Soviet Union unified, during World War II and the postwar period, many peoples of the Soviet Union were forced to change their languages' alphabets from Latin or Arabic to Cyrillic. At the same time, to further the effort to make a Soviet man, the Russian language began to be reemphasized in schools. These language policies marked a deterioration of the non-Russians' cultural autonomy, since indigenous languages had previously been used in education and other public spaces. The first indication that the Soviet Union was not a "federation of sovereign and equal states" as it claimed to be, was the manner by which many of its national republics were incorporated into the Soviet Union. The incorporation of Georgia into Soviet Russia in 1921 was especially brutal, a direct military conquest undertaken by the Red Army after Moscow had signed a treaty guaranteeing Georgia's sovereignty. A year earlier the Red Army had attempted to conquer Poland, which had recovered its independence from the Russian, German, and Austrian Empires. Conquest was also the only means of installing Soviet rule in the Ukraine, Central Asia, and other parts of the Caucasus. In 1939 eastern Poland was incorporated into the Soviet Union as part of a secret agreement with Nazi Germany; in 1940 the same agreement allowed the Soviets to annex the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, while independent Soviet initiative reasserted control of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, territories that had become part of Romania after World War I. These regions were fully communized; thousands were killed; their upper and middle classes disappeared; their native institutions were completely abolished; and huge numbers of Russian colonists settled in them. The practice of deporting and executing nationalities occurred in other areas and underscored that the Soviet government did not trust many non-Russian nationalities and did not treat them in the same way as the Russians were treated. In the 1930s and 1940s the Soviet government deported seven entire ethnic groups, whom Aleksandr Nekrich named the "punished peoples," from their homelands to Central Asia and Siberia. Deportees, including everyone from the designated nationality—even the elderly, sick, disabled, women, and those fighting for the

Soviet Union in World War II—were surrounded by NKVD (the KGB forerunner) troops and given little time to gather their belongings. They were taken to waiting railroad cars where they were transported to remote parts of Central Asia, taken off of the trains, and left to survive on their own. Large numbers, in some cases as many as half, died during the trip, and even more died of hunger or disease after their deportation. The rationale, in the cases in which one was given, for the relocation of the punished peoples was that the particular nationalities targeted had betrayed the Soviet Union during World War II and could not be trusted. Even if one could rationalize such a brutal policy, this justification is suspect since most of the punished peoples had loyally defended the Soviet Union and many of them had died defending their country during the German invasion. Furthermore, the deportations occurred after the Germans had already retreated from the areas in which the punished peoples lived, or had never even reached them in the first place. Instead, Stalin used fear and collective guilt to brand whole nationalities as collaborators for the crimes of the

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

Alexander III, who implemented a strict policy of Russification in the empire while tsar in the late nineteenth century (CORBIS, IH000455)

83

few (or none), even though other nationalities, including the Great Russians, also had collaborators but escaped punishment. In Stalin's eyes, pitting one nationality against others helped him sow fear throughout the Soviet Union, thereby discouraging people from devoting themselves to the Soviet cause with anything other than complete loyalty. The hypocritical nature of the Soviet nationalities policy was underscored by the deportation of the punished peoples and the official reaction to it. In February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev gave a "secret" anti-Stalin speech, in which he exonerated five of the seven "punished peoples" and allowed them to return to their homelands. If the Soviet Union had been serious about the equality of its nationalities, later rulers would have allowed all of the nationalities of the punished peoples to return home, and provided a public apology and some compensation to the "punished peoples." Because of this inadequate reaction, to this day, many deportees and their descendants suffer from their deportation, and many of the nationalities have not been allowed to return to their ancestral homelands. For some, returning to their homelands would have been impossible since a number of autonomous republics were disbanded after World War II for sympathizing or helping the Germans and their populations were transported to the outlying periphery of the Soviet Union. In addition to deporting non-Russian nationalities, the Soviet government also used man-made famines to punish certain nationalities. In 19321933, Stalin orchestrated the mass starvation of Ukrainians. He did this by setting their grain quotas far higher than was feasible, confiscating all of the food from the farmers, and then not allowing aid into Ukraine to help those starving. As millions of Ukrainians starved, armed and well-fed Soviet guards stood watch in fields to ensure that nobody stole any grain or other farm products, which were decreed state property. Penalties for stealing grain were extremely harsh; those guilty of committing crimes, even if they were starving, were to be shot or, in extenuating circumstances, imprisoned for at least ten years and their property confiscated. At the same time, Communist Party officials ate well. Villages that could not meet the unrealistic quotas were not allowed to receive city products, which sent the price of scarce food skyrocketing. Stalin's reaction to the famine was to pretend that it did not exist and allow millions of Ukrainians to starve to death. That local and republic governments were powerless to stop devastating economic and political policies imposed on the periphery by the center, such as the Ukrainian famine and the deportation of the punished peoples, further strengthens the argument that the constituent 84

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

republics of the Soviet Union were neither free nor sovereign states and were not treated equally. Despite Russians' dominant position in the Soviet Union, the Russian republic was in a paradoxical position. When Lenin conceptualized the Soviet Union, he worried that "Great Russian chauvinism" would threaten the unity of the country, so he put in place safeguards that he thought would hold Russian nationalism in check. On the one hand, Russians were the dominant national group in the U.S.S.R. and were disproportionately represented in party and state institutions. On the other hand, the Russian Republic within the U.S.S.R. was the only republic without a separate Communist party organization, a separate Academy of Sciences, and its own trade union council, Komsomol, or KGB. The effects of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union's unfair nationalities policies exist well after the fall of Communism. In the periphery of the Soviet Union there has been a backlash against ethnic Russians, with a movement toward indigenous people in power. The backlash has been so big that several million ethnic Russians have left the fourteen non-Russian former republics for a better life elsewhere, with many returning to Russia, while those that remain face discrimination. Official policy toward other minorities is also discriminatory. For years, Russians with darker skin, such as Chechens, have faced increased and often violent scrutiny when trying to enter big cities and have been looked upon as terrorists. The ongoing discrimination in Russia against non-Orthodox religious communities is a legacy of the enormous gap between Soviet rhetoric and policy regarding minority populations. While Soviet officials sought to distance themselves from their tsarist predecessors by proclaiming the equality of all Soviet citizens, their treatment of non-Russian populations differed little from that of previous Russian governments. Soviet authorities regularly killed, deported, and starved hundreds of thousands of non-Russians—often using tenuous arguments to justify their actions. These facts call into question any assertion that the Soviet nationalities policy was fair and balanced. Even Soviet historians recognized this fact: they rewrote Soviet history to show that the incorporation of the republics into the Soviet Union was a voluntary and positive experience for everyone. Today one has to ask: if the nationalities were treated so well by the Soviet Union, why did they insist on leaving the Soviet Union? Why are many in these nations strongly resisting Russian attempts to regain influence in the affairs of their newly independent states?

VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

-KERRY FOLEY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY 1890-1930

References Edward Allworth, ed., Ethnic Russia, in the USSR: The Dilemma of Dominance (New York: Pergamon, 1980). Jeremy R. Azrael, ed., Soviet Nationality Policies and Practices (New York: Praeger, 1978). Robert Conquest, ed., Soviet Nationalities Policy in Practice (New York: Praeger, 1967). Human Rights Watch, "Punished Peoples'" of the Soviet Union: The Continuing Legacy of Stalin's Deportations (New York: Human Rights Watch Report, 1991). David M. Kotz and Fred Weir, Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System (New York: Routledge, 1977).

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution: Estonia,, Latvia., Lithuania and the Path to Independence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). Nicholas Riasanovsky and Mark Steinberg, A History of Russia, seventh edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and Policy toward the Nationalities in the Soviet Union: From Totalitarian Dictatorship to Post-Stalinist Society (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1991).

VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930

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NEW ECONOMIC POLICY Was Vladimir Lenin committed to maintaining the New Economic Policy (NEP)? (Viewpoint: Yes. Vladimir Lenin was firmly committed to NEP and would have pursued it over the long term. Viewpoint: No. Vladimir Lenin never saw NEP as more than a compromise to remain in power, and he would have eliminated it as soon as circumstances permitted. One of the largest debates in the early history of the Soviet state focuses on Vladimir Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) and its prospects for continuity. Since Lenin died in 1924, it is impossible to know whether it would have gone forward. Within a few years of his death, his successor Josef Stalin ended it, eliminated the limited private economy for which it allowed, and brought all important management decisions into state hands. Many believe that this transition was not predetermined, that Lenin would never have countenanced the ending of his policy so soon and so brutally. Lenin himself said NEP should be "serious and for a long time." Changing course so quickly, at a time when the Soviet leadership admitted that it needed additional economic development, was inconsistent with Lenin's goal of creating a solid economic basis for socialism and, eventually, communism. Yet, to others, NEP was always doomed. Lenin also referred to NEP as "an economic Brest-Litovsk," a reference to the peace treaty that extricated Russia from World War I, the onerous terms of which were expected to be done away with promptly by world revolution. Employing market incentives, allowing private trade, and permitting private economic relations were abhorrent to orthodox Bolshevik ideology. Such a philosophical compromise could not have endured for long. By ending it, Stalin merely followed on what Lenin would have done in the same circumstances.

Viewpoint: Yes. Vladimir Lenin was firmly committed to NEP and would have pursued it over the long term.

86

In the crucial Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik Party that took place in Moscow during the second week of March 1921 Vladimir Lenin introduced a program of sweeping economic reforms that became known as the New Economic Policy (NEP). In

his address to the party he did not hesitate to draw a sharp line between the policies of the first three postrevolutionary years and the future of the Soviet Union, stating that There is no doubt that in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population consists of small agricultural producers, a socialist revolution can be carried out only through the implementation of a whole series of special transitional measures which would be superfluous in highly developed capitalist countries where wage-workers in indus-

try and agriculture make up the vast majority. . . . We know that so long as there is no revolution in other countries, only agreement with the peasantry can save the socialist revolution in Russia. And that is how it must be I stated, frankly, at all meetings and in the entire press. We know that this agreement between the working class and the peasantry is not solid—to put it mildly, without entering the word "mildly" in the minutes—but, speaking plainly it is very much worse. . . . The state of affairs that has prevailed so far cannot be continued any longer.

Effectively, NEP entailed the introduction of market-like monetary measures, particularly in the crucial domain of grain production. Its historic significance lay in the way that it signified an abrupt abandonment of aggressive grain requisitioning strategies (prodmzvyorstka) that had been introduced during the Civil War and formed the backbone of the "war communism" strategy. While control of the economy would remain within the remit of central state planning, NEP marked a tactical shift toward the denationalization of small- and medium-scale industry and toward a degree of private ownership—both of which had been severely attacked during the preceding three years. From that point onward peasants would be taxed in kind at quotas that were set substantially lower than in the war communism period, allowing them to dispose of their excess produce in a mixed economic environment with some market functions (for example, competition and profit). This new system also necessitated the relaxation of investment rules in the country and the moderate encouragement of private economic activity both in the countryside and the urban centers. In hindsight, the departure from war communism could not have been any more dramatic or fundamental. The historical context in which Lenin's decision to launch NEP took place sheds crucial light on the political and economic motives behind this dramatic change of course. By 1921 the revolution had succeeded in annihilating domestic opposition after the painful Civil War and thus stabilized the Bolshevik regime's political grip over the country. This victory, however, had been achieved at a huge cost: domestic production had collapsed; the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that the new Bolshevik government signed with Germany in 1918 had deprived the country of one-quarter of its agricultural land and, even when it was largely recovered, dislocated economic production for years to come; harvest yield had shrunk to about 60 percent of the pre-war figure; and cultivated land had contracted to below 70 percent of the 1913 levels. Production of key industrial commodities, such as steel and iron, virtually collapsed, as did the currency's exchange rate with the dollar and other hard currencies. Finally, famine, epidemics, HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

material destruction, and the loss of millions of lives as a result of the infighting had reduced not just the economy but also society to a state of a breakdown. Against this backdrop a series of revolts against Bolshevik rule broke out and continued to cast a shadow upon Lenin's regime: first the Tambov rebellion (1919) and, from 1920 onward, a wave of strikes and revolts, culminating in the general strike of Petrograd in late February and the Kronstadt rebellion in March 1921 (that is, during the session of the Tenth Party Congress). This wave of popular discontent reflected in the most categorical manner the growing disaffection of large sections of the population with the new regime—not just those that were commonly viewed as "enemies" but erstwhile solid supporters, such as the sailors in Kronstadt (previously considered a bastion of Bolshevism). Within the Bolshevik Party itself a doctrinal debate raged between those who supported a tactical adaptation of the Marxist doctrine to the historical and contemporary circumstances of Russia, on the one hand, and members of the so-called workers' opposition within the Bolshevik Party on the other. Lenin's preface to the introduction of NEP targeted those on the Left who remained convinced that war communism was the only ideologically orthodox, albeit harsh and painful, solution to Russia's underdevelopment. Among them, Evgenii Preobrazhensky championed the cause of a continuing aggressive policy against the independent peasants in favor of the interests of the industrial proletariat. Other prominent members of the party, such as Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev, saw in Lenin's rationale behind NEP the irreversible abandonment of the project of "world revolution," as well as a painful concession to the forces of capitalism that the decisions of 1917-1920 were intended to lay to rest, at least in Russia. Lenin was aware of ideological opposition to the logic of NEP. That is probably why he chose to wait until the final stages of the Party Congress (when many delegates had already departed—some of them to fight off the Kronstadt rebellion—and those remaining had been exhausted after days of long, drawn-out debates) to announce his decisions. In spite of widespread reservations shared by many, the speech caused little reaction among the delegates and thus paved the way for the introduction of the policy immediately afterward. In order to dispel any impression of ideological opportunism, Lenin expended considerable energy in his speech to stress that "NEP is for serious and [will be pursued] for a long time . . . possibly over a decade." Even this unequivocal statement, however, did not suffice to clarify the foundations of the ideological debate that had authorized, first, war V O L U M E 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y R U S S I A ,

1890-1930

87

INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION IN RUSSIA FOR 1913 AND 1921 1913

1921

Gross output of all industry (index)

100

31

Large-scale industry (index)

100

21

Coal (million tons)

29

9

OH (million tons)

9.2

3,8

Electricity (milliard kwhs)

2039

520

Pig iron (million tons)

4.2

0.1

Steel (million tons)

4.3

0.2

Bricks (millions)

2.1

0.01

Sugar (million tons)

1.3

0.05

Railway tonnage carried (millions)

132.4

39.4

Agricultural production (index)

100

60

Imports (1913 rubles)

1374

208

Exports (1913 rubles)

520

20

Source: Atec Nove, An Economic History of the U,S.S.R. (London: Allen Lane, 1969), p. 68.

communism and, after a spectacular U-turn, NEP, within the course of less than four years. This debate actually went back to the prerevolutionary period, when Lenin was still formulating his personal doctrine for socialism in an unlikely country such as Russia. Given Karl Marx's generally negative attitude to the peasantry as a revolutionary force and his historical prerequisite of a two-stage revolution (first a liberal, followed by the proletarian one), Georgii Plekhanov (known as the founder and father of Russian socialism) had insisted on the country's backwardness and lack of preparedness for a genuine socialist revolution. Lev Trotsky agreed with the fundamental notion that the peasantry was ill equipped and ill suited for a socialist revolution, but at the same time questioned Plekhanov's insistence on a long period of "bourgeois" domination as a necessary precondition for the production of those norms that would ensure an effective proletarian emanClpation ' Lenin had shown his capacity for political flexibility since the early years of his career in the Russian revolutionary movement. Just after the turn of the century he was breaking new ground when he called for a "socialist democracy" that would unite proletariat and peasantry into a single alliance for the construction of a socialist 88

state. Lenin drew a clear distinction between the advanced capitalist West and backward Russia but also extended this distinction to the nature and attitudes of the peasantry in each context, Drawing from Friedrich Engel's analysis of "small peasantry," Lenin suggested that the bulk of the Russian peasant class had already been transformed into a proletarian reservoir during the "revolutionary" period of 1905-1917 He also stressed that the incorporation of small peasants into the revolutionary front did not amount at that point to "the building of socialist society, but it is all that is necessary and sufficient for this building." Given the exceptional circumstances in Russia, Lenin advocated that the transition from the "bourgeois" to the "proletarian" revolution (a transition that, according to orthodox Marxism, would have to be long) had to be contracted to a period of a few months-namely, between the February and the October 1917 watersheds. Thus, he suggested a different formula of historical evolution for socialism in Russia that was based on the idea of an "uninterrupted revolution." Yet, Lenin's decision to launch war communism and NEP within the course of less than half a decade raises complex questions about his overall ideological consistency and makes the

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process of deciphering his long-term intentions extremely difficult. Clearly, the introduction of war communism came first; what is more, it was more concurrent with the overall Marxist doctrine than the mixed economic system envisaged by NEP. In so many ways the two political platforms espoused diametrical views about the future of the Soviet state and the relations between the proletariat and the peasantry. Therefore, a logical interpretation would consider one of the two as a temporary, opportunistic diversion from an otherwise intended path represented by the other policy. War communism, however, was a radical step that was launched without necessary preparations in order to address the complications resulting from the debilitating Civil War that followed the October Revolution. It was abandoned in early 1921 primarily because it was considered a costly failure for the Bolshevik project, although it was also widely believed that it did help in consolidating the new regime's initially precarious power base. The justification for NEP was equally aligned to specific historical (long-term) and situational (short-term) circumstances in an admission that the situation created by the 1918-1921 period was no longer sustainable. Despite Lenin's declaration that the change of course represented by NEP was much more than a temporary diversion, its partly capitalist nature was something that many party members—steeped in the ideological self-congratulation derived from war communism—could hardly stomach. The timing and method of Lenin's announcement of the new policy indicated that he was aware of opposition and of the extent of revision that his novel strategy involved. Yet, he remained obstinate in his determination to proceed with a radical shakeup of socio-economic relations in the Soviet Union—a trademark of his personality that had seen him through multiple adaptations of and additions to the Marxist doctrine (such as "imperialism," his views on the role of the peasantry and of the state, and so on). The background to the introduction of NEP demonstrated Lenin's unequivocal alertness to contextual forces, as well as his ability to maintain an open dialogue between ideological consistency and shrewd political pragmatism. When it came to both war communism and NEP he prioritized the future of the revolutionary regime over any other ideological or political consideration. As conditions continued to change rapidly in the course of the first postrevolutionary years, so did his prescriptions about the future course of the Bolshevik state in its transition to a genuine socialist system. In this respect, NEP was indeed a compromise and a highly pragmatic strategic decision, but not necessarily more so than the timing and HISTORY

manner of the introduction of war communism. It was indeed a temporary measure, but not more so than any other political strategy when it came to the advancement of a much more significant long-term case—the consolidation of Bolshevik power and the transformation of Russia/ Soviet Union into a successful socialist state. Lenin was as convinced at the time of the necessity for the extraordinary measures involved in war communism as he was, a few years later, of the inexorable benefits of the mixed system envisaged by NEP. It is conceivable that a different set of circumstances would have led him into a different path had his health not let him down—for example, abandoning NEP a few years after its introduction and launching a new system of socio-economic management. Yet, there is little evidence to suggest that NEP was a temporary diversion from the kind of strategy that was tried (and proved wanting) with war communism. His commitment to the new course was steadfast within the context of a particular set of conditions, some of which had been the unsolicited consequences of the manner in which the regime had ruled in 1918-1921. With the improvements in all economic indices that followed the implementation of NEP within a short period of time it is plausible to assume that the basic guidelines of the policy would have remained in place in the longer term, even if it did not mean in any way a permanent, unbending alignment of the Bolshevik regime with it. Much continued to depend on external developments (such as the future of the "world revolution" and the relations of the Soviet Union with the rest of the world), and Lenin—had he stayed at the helm of the Soviet Union—was the sort of leader who could combine ideological substance with tactical flexibility, grasping historic opportunities and steering the course of his country into the uncharted waters of socialist revolution with unquestionable authority and political pragmatism. -ARISTOTLE KALLIS, LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Vladimir Lenin never saw NEP as more than a compromise to remain in power, and he would have eliminated it as soon as circumstances permitted. Sometimes revolutions have to grasp at straws, or so Vladimir Lenin must have thought in 1921. Having led the Soviet state out of a

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Vladimir Lenin, chairman of the Council of the Peoples' Commissars and designer of the New Economic Policy (Associated Press)

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bloody civil war, Lenin was forced to grapple with an economic crisis that once again threatened his regime with extinction. Devastated by seven years of warfare, agricultural and industrial production had reached a virtual standstill. The peasantry had risen in arms against the Red Army's forceful requisitions, and Moscow and Petrograd were often on the brink of starvation. Lenin and the party leadership understood that they needed to rebuild the economy, and at least one leader, Nikolai Bukharin, believed that the answer was to liberalize the economy, freeing up grain prices and allowing peasants and smaller merchants to sell their produce without fear of expropriation. Lenin at first embraced this New Economic Policy (NEP) as a necessary evil, but after a short while understood that the experiment would ultimately lead to failure. Lenin and the leadership grew leery of NEP's future. Had he not died in January 1924, he would have eliminated the policy and changed course. Only Lenin's death and his successors' needs for political expediency extended NEP until 1928. In 1921 Lenin understood Soviet Russia's economic crisis as he had understood its military crisis in 1918. The solution to Russia's ill-fated war against Germany was his acceptance of the

punitive peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which surrendered a vast amount of Russian territory to independent states under German protection and vast economic concessions to the Germans directly. Expecting that European or world revolution would quickly reverse these losses, Lenin justified what was in no way a good diplomatic solution. Three years later he looked the same way at concessions to the market economy and groups that would benefit from its reintroduction. Like the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, it was expected to buy the Bolsheviks the precious time they needed to consolidate power. Indeed, Lenin even talked about NEP as "an economic BrestLitovsk," while he and other leaders referred to the new economic order as a "breathing space." Soon, Lenin reckoned, he would be able to change course and fulfill his ultimate and overwhelming commitment to building a socialist society. In Bolshevik ideology that meant nothing less than complete state control of the economy. Even in his concessions to the market, neither Lenin nor any other committed Bolshevik would concede control over heavy industry, utilities, transportation, and the state's ultimate right to reclaim the land and shops of the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie when (and not if) it became nec-

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essary. In every important sense those were the "commanding heights" from which the new offensive would be launched. Many have mistakenly argued that Lenin fundamentally changed his ideology to one embracing economic liberalism when he stated that NEP was intended to be "serious and for a long time." One needs to remember, first of all, that Lenin was arguing with those Bolsheviks who were hesitant to take up even limited liberalization, wishing instead to remain committed to the earlier policies of strict state control. His position was thus overstated in this sound bite and bore little relation to the realities of his leadership. Lenin indeed had a keen sense of contingency as part of his economic policy. He made the following comment on NEP as a new stage in Russia's revolutionary development: "state capitalism is a completely unexpected and unforeseen type of capitalism." Yet, he also made clear that the dictatorship of the proletariat's reassertion of full economic control was only a matter of time. Lenin did not commit himself to an exact time line for this process but may not have had a fixed idea. As an extremely pragmatic political leader, he was accustomed to acting tactically when the situation demanded it and to reversing his positions on short notice. Discussing the future of NEP, he once said that it might last anywhere from five weeks to ten years. Lenin came to realize that NEP had to end sooner than he had originally thought. "The state," he admitted, "has not operated the way we wanted . . . it is directed where some lawless, God knows whence-derived speculator or private capitalist directs it." It is clear from this statement that Lenin believed that continuing NEP would be injudicious. By 1922, the peasants and small merchants, having achieved limited freedom from the state, sought even more as they clamored for the lifting of tax burdens. Farmers sought to hire more day laborers, signaling in Lenin's eyes the renewal of economic exploitation in the countryside. Equally alarming to Lenin was the emergence in cities of "NEPmen," successful businessmen who used their wealth in an ostentatious manner. The increases in gambling, prostitution, luxury markets, and general conspicuous consumption were thought to be corrupting influences on Bolshevik morality and the ruling party's radical commitment to social justice. Shortly before his death, Lenin strongly signaled that he favored NEP's definitive end: "We can now see clearly the situation that has developed in our country and can say with complete firmness that we can now stop the retreat that we began and are already stopping it. Enough." He did not live long enough to act on this conviction, but his successors encountered a new series of crises, caused in part by NEP's failures. NEP HISTORY

IN DISPUTE,

helped the rural economy to recover, but the industrial economy had failed to keep up and suffered from a lack of basic capital and infrastructure. Those rare commodities that industry produced fetched so high a price on the market that few peasants could afford them. Increasingly, Soviet leaders such as Lev Trotsky, Evgenii Preobrazhenskii, and, ultimately, Josef Stalin would argue that only state intervention could resolve such a crisis. Stalin, however, temporarily remained committed to NEP, as he needed the support of Bukharin and other "rightists" in the party to defeat his more serious rivals at the time: Trotsky and others who shared his private reservations about the limited private economy. Stalin's persecution of his enemies, who also happened to be among NEP's critics, led him to form a temporary alliance with Bukharin to defeat them. That meant that the NEP experiment could continue for the short term even though Stalin did not necessarily favor it. By 1927, growing concerns about NEP's problems and the reluctance of wealthy peasants to sell their goods to urban markets became nearly intolerable. Once Stalin had secured solid leadership he could call upon the party to end economic liberalization. In the years that followed, it was his temporary "rightist" allies who suffered demotions and purges. The bottom line was that Stalin and his supporters believed state regulation necessary to ensure all economic resources would be directed toward developing heavy industry, the focal point of Lenin's plan for the development and communization of the Soviet Union. NEP might have been seen as necessary to recoup wartime losses, but over time its economic costs became too high and its ideological compromises too untenable. The one success of NEP, increased grain production, enabled the rural economy to undergo a fundamental transformation as early as 1925. By 1928, Stalin finally committed himself to a major new economic offensive that would transform the fundamental divide between Russia's rural and urban economies. The results were the collectivization of agriculture, a measure that definitively established state control in the countryside, and the use of its productivity to finance ambitious industrialization. It is likely that had Lenin lived he would have lauded the pursuit of these goals. -YORK NORMAN, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

References A. M. Ball, Russia's Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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Vladimir Brovkin, Russia After Lenin (New York: Routledge, 1998). R. W. Davies, Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Sheila Fitzpatrick and others, eds., Russia, in the Em ofNEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

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Roger W. Pethybridge, One Step Backwards, Two Steps Forward: Soviet Society and Politics in the New Economic Policy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Richard Sakwa, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (London & New York: Routledge, 1999).

Silvana Malle, The Economic Organisation of War Communism, 1918-1921 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational Change, 19171923 (London & New York: Macmillan, 1979).

Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917-1991 (London & New York: Penguin, 1992).

R. G. Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

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PARIS PEACE SETTLEMENT Did the Russian Revolution have a meaningful influence on the Paris Peace Settlement? Viewpoint: Yes. The fear of a pan-European Marxist revolution was a significant consideration at the Paris Peace Conference. Viewpoint: No. The immediate concern of obtaining an advantageous and lasting peace with Germany and its allies dominated the agenda at the Paris Peace Conference.

World War I officially ended in Paris and its palatial suburbs, in a series of treaties signed between 1919 and 1923. Formally ending hostilities fell against the backdrop of dramatic events in Russia, which experienced its continuing revolution and civil war in those years. This chapter assesses whether Russian developments had any meaningful impact on what was happening at the close of the "war to end all wars." One argument maintains that this influence was profound. Allied policymakers plainly could not ignore the challenges of the Bolshevik Revolution. Its determination to export revolution to Europe, revisit the earlier peace settlement between Russia and Germany, and create other obstacles for European diplomacy demanded their attention, as did the appearance of representatives of anti-Bolshevik White forces, who successfully agitated for military, financial, and material support in their battle against the Reds. Forming a new world order demanded careful consideration of the nascent Soviet state and its emerging role in the new international order. Yet, on the other hand, the war, which had been fought largely to contain an aggressive Germany, ended in a way that largely sought to determine it and its allies' place in postwar Europe. All of the major treaties and provisions aimed at securing permanent Allied hegemony in Europe. The most important way to do this was to force Germany to surrender its aspirations and capabilities to disrupt the new order. In this context, Russian affairs appeared peripheral. The Allies declared official neutrality in Russia's Civil War, and Allied support for the Whites was given on an informal basis, designed more to promote Russia's reentry into the war against Germany than anything else.

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Viewpoint: Yes. The fear of a pan-European Marxist revolution was a significant consideration at the Paris Peace Conference. On 11 November 1918, when the guns on the Western Front fell silent, Europe was in tatters. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was falling to pieces as its peoples tried to reconcile nationalism with that ancient empire's multiethnic legacy. Germany's other major ally, the Ottoman Empire, was undergoing a similar dissolution. Germany itself erupted in revolution: Kiel, Wilhelmshaven, Berlin, and scores of other major cities saw soldiers', sailors', and workers' rebellions. Revolt in the vanquished countries alone would perhaps have been acceptable to the Allies, but the context in which these uprisings unfolded was a great cause for alarm: the Bolshevik Revolution had occurred a year before, and its outcome was completely uncertain as the Russian Civil War continued to play out. With Germany collapsing, its substantial military presence in Eastern Europe was bound to disappear, creating the opportunity for even more political chaos. The armistice that ended the fighting on the Western Front itself aimed to hedge against this possibility. Article XII actually called for the Germans to remain in Russian territory until the Allies could ensure peace and order in the area, in other words, until they could ensure the Bolsheviks were not drawn into the vacuum. It is difficult to overstate the general sense that the war had unleashed a catastrophic revolution, and that it was directed by Moscow. There was no way that the Allies would put this concern aside. After all, the Bolshevik credo was an assault on the values of capitalist liberal democracy, which defined the worldview of Britain, France, Italy, and the United States. Whether they wore their ideology on their sleeves, as U.S. president Woodrow Wilson did, or not, like French premier Georges Clemenceau, the question of the day was not just what to do with Germany. In many ways that was easier, because previous experience had shown how to deal with a defeated great power. The unfolding drama in Russia, however, was much more troubling, and made only worse by the Allies' inability to determine who was actually in charge there. No government, of course, wishes to lose power or to see chaos erupt, but this fear was everywhere in 1918-1919. Practically everyone outside Russia used the words revolutionary, Bolshevik, subversive, and communist interchangeably. They came up repeatedly in public statements and private conversation and denoted dread.

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What they referred to was an ideologically coherent movement that meant to upend the existing order and replace it with a Marxist order. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was seen as the first of a series of revolutions. October, November, and December 1918 brought a series of explicitly Marxist or Marxist-inspired revolts across Germany. Even though the armistice went into effect on 11 November, Europe had still not calmed down when the principals opened talks in Paris in January 1919. During the first two weeks of the conference, Russia, not Germany, was the single most discussed topic. The "Bolshevik menace" was not simmering down. As the conference opened, Berlin witnessed a paramilitary force— the Freikorps-crush'mg an attempted coup by the German Communist Party and its militants, the "Spartacists." The rebels may not have been directed by or even made up of Russia's revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin's followers (indeed, one German communist leader, Rosa Luxemburg, had been a member of the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic and Labor Party), but one should not expect that the statesmen gathering in Paris would have known that. The Freikorps would, with their blessing, head off to the Russian borderlands, where Bolsheviks remained embroiled in the civil war that persisted more than another year. Communism remained a consistent problem during the conference, as Moscow wavered between demonstrating good-faith membership in the community of nations and actively encouraging subversion. The first Soviet emissary to Berlin, sent after the Russo-German peace settlement of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, was Adolf loffe, a career revolutionary. It was easy to conclude that Moscow's relationship with the wider world was increasingly hostile and subversive when Lenin established the Communist International (Comintern) in March 1919. Negotiations in Paris continued until the signing of the various peace treaties, including the Versailles Treaty concluded with Germany. During the five months of talks among the Allies about the treaty's provisions, Germany experienced yet another Marxist rebellion in traditionally conservative Bavaria. Hungarian communists led by Bela Kun also established a communist regime in 1919. Only a civil war and Romanian intervention ended it. In short, the fear of a spreading, pan-European Marxist or Bolshevik revolution was palpable at the Paris Peace Conference and was frequently and openly discussed. American secretary of state Robert Lansing spoke of the pressure to act against communism as early as 22 January, when he warned that the "flames of bolshevism [would] eat their way into Central Europe and threaten the destruction of the social order."

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AN APPEAL TO THE TOILING MASSES The Bolsheviks issued the following proclamation in response to the Allied powers' sending troops and money to aid White forces during the Russian Civil War:

Workers! Like a vicious dog let off the leash, the entire capitalist press of your countries is howling for the "intervention" of your Governments in Russian affairs, shrieking, "now or never!" But even at this moment, when these hirelings of your exploiters have dropped their masks and are clamoring for an attack on the workers and peasants of Russia—even at this moment they lie unscrupulously, and shamelessly deceive you. For while threatening "intervention" in Russian affairs, they are already conducting military operations against workers' and peasants' Russia. On the Murmansk Railway which they have seized the Anglo-French bandits are already shooting Soviet workers. In the region of the Urals they are breaking up the workers' Soviets and shooting their representatives, using for this purpose the Czech-Slovak troops, which are maintained at the expense of the French people and commanded by French officers. Complying with the orders of your Governments, they are cutting off the Russian people from their food supplies, in order to force the workers and peasants to put their necks once more into the halter of the Paris and London Stock Exchanges, The present open attack of Franco-English capital on the workers of Russia is only the culmination of eight months' long underground struggle against Soviet Russia. From the first day of the October revolution, from the moment when the workers and peasants of Russia declared that they would no longer shed either their own or other people's blood for the sake of Russian or foreign capital, from the first day that they overthrew their exploiters and appealed to you to follow their example, to put an end to the universal slaughter, to put an end to exploitation—from that moment your exploiters vowed that they would destroy this country. . ..

But when they saw that all their attempts were unsuccessful, when it became clear that hired bandits were an insufficient force, they decided to sacrifice you too, and they are now openly attacking Russia, flinging the workers and peasants of France and England into the firing line,... To conceal the true nature of this crusade against the Russian workers' revolution your capitalists tell you that it is being undertaken not against the Russian revolution, but against German imperialism, to which they claim we have sold ourselves, * . . We are convinced that should we retort to every blow of the rapacious "Allies" by two blows, you would regard our action not only as legitimate defense, but also as the defense of your own interests, for the salvation of the Russian revolution is the common interest of the proletariat of all countries. We are certain that every measure taken against those who on Russian territory hatch plots against the Russian revolution will meet with your sincere sympathy, for these plots are directed against you as well as against us. Driven to fight Allied capitalism, which wishes to add new fetters to those fastened on us by German imperialism, we turn to you with the call: Long live the solidarity of the workers of the world! Long live the solidarity of the proletariat of France, England, America, and Italy, with the Russian proletariat! Down with the bandits of international imperialism, long live the international revolution! Long live peace between the nations! Source: "Appeal of the Council of People's Commissars to the Toiling Masses of England, America, France, Italy and Japan on Allied Intervention in Russia, August 1,1B1B^in Soviet Documents on Foreign Policy, volume 1, edited by Jane Degras (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 88-92.

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Similar fears hovered over the British and French delegations. The "Big Four," the conference's main leaders Wilson, Clemenceau, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and Italian premier Vittorio Orlando, were all motivated by a fear of communism spreading from Russia into Central Europe, and ultimately to their own countries. What to do about its spread, however, was not so clear. After four years of war, there was little interest in direct intervention in Russia, which lessened the scope of any probable Allied response to Lloyd George's January 1919 rhetorical call for intervention. The British, for their part, were actively involved, providing armor, aircraft, money, munitions, advisers, and troops to help the White forces under Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak in Siberia and General Anton Denikin in South Russia. They also maintained a substantial number of troops who conducted offensive operations around the ports of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the north, ostensibly to prevent Allied supplies sent to the prerevolutionary Russian governments from falling into German hands. Throughout 1919 the British made some striking operational contributions to the anti-Bolshevik White Armies, even launching naval attacks on the Bolsheviks in the Baltic. This intervention was driven largely by a handful of ministers in Lloyd George's cabinet, the most notable and vigorous of which was Secretary of War Winston Churchill, who called for the "Bolshevik baby" to be "strangled in its crib." Various steps were taken either to normalize Soviet Russia's position in the world or get it to participate in the peace conference, but the unsettled nature of conditions in Russia rendered attempts at diplomacy or forcing a settlement in the Russian Civil War fruitless. Even in the most promising cases, such as the proposal for talks on the Island of Prinkipo, they were naive and pathetic. In the end, the peace conference's lasting action on the Bolsheviks was a muddle. Among the Allies, there were generally two visions of the peace, one the liberal "New Diplomacy," the other a more traditional balance-ofpower approach. The English-speaking powers generally tended toward the former, while Clemenceau tended toward the latter, with Orlando tending more to weigh in only on matters more directly affecting Italy. Wilson and Lloyd George tended to see World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution as a product of the world's injustices, and the new order they were drawing up at the conference was aimed at eliminating them altogether or at least making them more manageable. In the new circumstances, they hoped, Bolshevism would wither away as the matter of a few crazed malcontents. Wilson warned that if one wished to avoid the destruction of govern-

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ments by the peoples of the world, it was necessary and critical to approve the League of Nations, an international body established to govern international relations. This sentiment underlay both Wilson's determination to see the Treaty of Versailles ratified by the American Senate and to see the United States join the League. In his famous Fontainebleau memorandum, Lloyd George held the treaty out as "an alternative to Bolshevism because it [would] commend itself to all reasonable opinion as a fair settlement of the European problem." Clemenceau had as little faith in the magic of liberal democratic values to stave off Bolshevism as he had in their ability to contain Germany. Just as he demanded and got the disarmament of Germany, the creation of demilitarized zones in its border areas, and long-term Allied occupation of some of its strategic areas, so too did he demand real, concrete steps against the spread of Bolshevism. Versailles forced the Germans to renounce their gains at Brest-Litovsk, but Russia's losses were not returned to Russia. These territories were caught in the intersection between Wilson's calls for self-determination and Clemenceau's expectations for the re-creation of its old security alliances. Despite Wilson's lofty visions, Eastern Europe did not offer obvious boundaries for nation-states, and negotiations were protracted. Making matters worse was the fighting between these new countries, as they let the force of arms decide boundaries. In the end, a principle from the Congress of Vienna was resurrected. A buffer zone, now called a "sanitary corridor," or cordon sanitaire, would stretch from the Arctic Circle to the Black Sea to include the new states of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. All these adjustments were made with an eye toward their effectiveness in isolating Soviet Russia from Europe. More directly affecting the situation in Russia, the Allies resolved to continue their naval blockade of the Soviet Union until further notice, and it would not be lifted until 1920. The Peace of Paris did not produce a single treaty or agreement to address the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War. Given the shadow the Bolsheviks had cast over Europe and the number of communist rebellions that flared up in the year and a half since the Bolshevik takeover, however, the question of what to do about communism and communist insurrection always stood out in deliberations. Directly, the negotiations created a buffer zone to contain the spread of the "communist virus," and the blockade against the Bolsheviks was upheld. The powers also maintained their own uncoordinated military presence in Russia until the Civil War seemed to be winding down. Wilson's "New Diplomacy," enthusiasti-

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cally supported by Lloyd George and less enthusiastically by Clemenceau, also aimed at rooting out the general causes of Bolshevism by presenting a more appealing and hopeful alternative for world diplomacy than subversion and revolution. -PHIL GILTNER, ALBANY ACADEMY

Viewpoint: No. The immediate concern of obtaining an advantageous and lasting peace with Germany and its allies dominated the agenda at the Paris Peace Conference. Russia's premature departure from World War I, facilitated by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, assured its exclusion from the general peace settlement negotiated in Paris. The failure of Russia's war effort, the collapse of first its monarchy and then of the Provisional Government that replaced it, and the ensuing rise of militant communism left both the new Soviet state and its domestic opponents on the margins of European diplomacy. First and foremost, the Soviet regime effectively removed itself from the affairs of the great powers. Officially regarding World War I as an objectionable imperialist war fought among Europe's elites at the expense of its victimized lower classes, Bolshevik ideology had little time for the formalities of a traditional peace settlement. A significant component of early Soviet ideology, and its primary source of domestic appeal, focused on securing an immediate end to the war without territorial annexations or financial indemnities. The Soviet regime's prompt repudiation of all tsarist and Provisional Government debt, wholesale nationalization of foreign business interests, and speedy publicizing of all secret diplomatic documents served as both symbolic and practical rejections of the prevailing order. Since the treaties under negotiation in Paris involved redefining international boundaries, transferring territory from losers to victors, assessing financial and other reparations, and similar Old World diplomatic conventions, the peace conference represented the values that the Bolsheviks had led their revolution to subvert. Indeed, the Bolshevik Party's prophetic line was that the nations of Europe, like Russia before them, were destined to fall to socialist revolution amid the traumas of war. This contention was central to Vladimir Lenin's argument in favor of "prematurely" (in the orthodox Marxist sense) seizing power in October 1917 and informed the

world of his belief that the old "bourgeois" pattern of international politics would become obsolete. Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik leader first charged with foreign affairs, candidly expressed his belief that his purpose was to remove Russia from World War I as quickly as possible, urge the rest of the world to rise up in revolution, and then, as he put it, "shut up shop." Dissolving the traditional organs responsible for conducting foreign policy in this way represented the Utopian communist belief that revolution would ultimately lead to the dissolution of the state. Although the Soviet Union would later strive for acceptance as a "normal" member of the community of nations and seek a place as an accepted great power, its early incarnation did little to make it an actor of great consequence in the World War I peace. Anti-Bolshevik forces also had a difficult time making the Russian Revolution a major issue in the World War I peace settlement. Various White leaders actively cultivated relationships with foreign governments—including those of the major World War I allies—but the practical results were dismal. Few Western politicians cultivated a serious interest in Russian domestic politics after 1917 and focused more or less solely on Russia's capacity to continue or, after Brest-Litovsk, to resume fighting the Germans. Particularly in Britain and France, furthermore, many Left-wing intellectuals and politicians, some of whom entered national government for the first time during World War I, looked favorably on the Soviet "experiment" and were unsympathetic to using massive military intervention to end it. Less idealistic but more pragmatic figures, including most Allied military leaders and the moderate politicians they advised, agreed that their nations' taxed armed forces and war-weary populations would combine with Russia's geographic vastness in presenting insurmountable challenges to crushing the Bolshevik regime. Although fifteen nations sent troops to Russia in the so-called intervention, their presence had little to do with the Paris Peace Conference. Indeed, most of their forces arrived in mid 1918, while war still raged in Europe. Their activities were for the most part limited to guarding recently arrived supplies, ostensibly to protect them from advancing German forces, and posed little real threat to the Soviet regime. Significantly, the only language pertaining to Russia in the November 1918 armistice agreement that ended the war on the Western Front called for the Germans to withdraw their forces from the Eastern territories under their control. In other words, intervention in the Russian Civil War was defined by Western Allies' wartime conceptions of military necessity. By the time the Paris Peace Conference opened in January 1919, intervention was already on the wane.

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Boris Savinkov, one of the White leaders who represented the discredited Russian Provisional Government at the Paris Peace Conference (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ CORBIS, HU003553)

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Responding to mutinies among soldiers and sailors who no longer wished to serve after the armistice—events that only augmented concerns about using exhausted Western armies to fight Bolshevism—France withdrew its forces from the Black Sea region in April of that year. British units that had entered the Caucasus and Central Asia pulled out shortly thereafter. Although American and Japanese forces remained in place, those powers' aims had little to do with the outcome of Russia's Civil War. Japan intervened with the sole purpose of establishing strategic control over Russia's unstable Far East, while an American detachment was deployed there to monitor Japanese ambitions. In any case, all intervening nations but Japan withdrew by 1920, and domestic and diplomatic pressure eventually forced it to reduce and then eliminate its presence as well. No mandate for international forces in Russia, no policy for their employment, and no guidelines for their operations were ever set down in Paris. Some individual powers, especially Britain, supplied the anti-Bolshevik White Russian forces with arms, military materiel, and training, but no nation, nor any organ of the Paris Peace Conference, ever offered formal diplomatic recognition to the White representatives who attended the HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

conference and attempted to influence the general peace settlement to their advantage. The only public statements on the Russian Civil War issued from Paris were carefully worded declarations of neutrality. The White Russian delegation itself—representatives of the emigre Russian Political Conference—did not present an impressive picture. A collection of notables representing the loosely affiliated White governments of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak and General Anton Denikin, the Political Conference consisted mainly of figures from the discredited Provisional Government. One of its leaders, the socialist revolutionary Boris Savinkov, had made his name before 1917 as a terrorist assassin, hardly a figure to inspire confidence among staid Western diplomats. The Political Conference's delegates to the peace talks included Sergei Sazonov, a former tsarist foreign minister who had spent much of his tenure frustrating Allied diplomats, and, as chairman, the ineffectual Provisional Government premier, Prince Georgii L'vov. Neither man elicited much sympathy. According to one account, when L'vov met with U.S. president Woodrow Wilson in November 1918, he received only fifteen minutes of pleasantries and not even a promise of help. After the prince's departure, Wilson is said to have commented only on the fullness of his beard. Although the members of the delegation successfully lobbied for British military aid, their overall presence turned out to be more of a curiosity or an annoyance, views that commonly came to be held of most Russian emigre political organizations and, indeed, of Russian emigres in general. Russia was ignored because the protocols decided in Paris were resolutely about Germany, its wartime partners, and their future in a Europe dominated by the victorious Allies. This focus was natural since the Allied coalition had barely prevailed in the bloodiest war in human history up to that time and deeply feared a renewed German challenge. The peace treaty signed at Versailles in July 1919 deprived Germany of significant border territories, its colonies, and its capacity for offensive military operations. Germany also had to accept full responsibility for the war and promise to render heavy reparations payments, the precise amount of which was left open to be determined later. Subsequent treaties with Austria, Hungary (the Empire having been dissolved and peace made with its two largest constituent states), Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire, were all similar in tone and effect. The Allies wanted to punish their wartime adversaries, receive almost unrealistically generous compensation for their losses, and ensure that their enemies could pose no threat to the new order for the foreseeable future.

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Clearly, most Allied governments developed an antipathy to Bolshevism, regardless of whatever initial interest or hope some of their leftist members may have expressed. Yet, this antipathy developed outside the context of the World War I peace settlement. Britain continued its private support for Kolchak until it became apparent that he had no chance of winning. The French, despite their earlier difficulties, sent a military mission to Poland in 1920 to help prevent its conquest by the Red Army. Even some of the armistice provisions requiring Germany to withdraw its forces from Russian territory were informally reversed in order to safeguard the independence of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia from the Soviets. As time went on, moreover, it became apparent that the international order fashioned in Paris in 1919 could accommodate the Soviet state. Informal commercial agreements were signed between the Soviet regime and representatives of Allied powers shortly after the Civil War ended, the Soviets accepted tremendous American famine relief in 1921-1922, and the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with most Western nations followed shortly thereafter.

In the early phases of their revolution, the Bolsheviks were averse to participating in the normal practice of foreign relations. For several years after 1917, nearly all of their actions indicated that they neither wanted nor expected to function in the prevailing international order but wished to remain outside of it and undermine its foundations. Whatever the Allies thought about communism, in 1918-1919 they realized that their main priority lay in securing, or rather imposing, what they hoped would be a highly advantageous and durable peace with Germany and its allies. The unfolding Russian Revolution and Civil War were problems that few Western leaders understood in any detail and for which even fewer could offer a practical solution capable of attracting far-reaching or long-lasting support. The question of what was to be done about Bolshevism remained absent from the Paris Peace Conference.

The Soviets themselves quickly abandoned their dreams of world revolution for the more realistic doctrine of "socialism in one country" and—at least formally—solicited favorable trade and diplomatic relationships with the West. In the case of Germany, which also initially faced isolation after World War I, relations developed into a de facto alliance and included substantial military cooperation. As the Soviet Union sought a "normal" place in the world, even the style of its diplomacy betrayed an affinity for traditional forms. The People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs not only failed to vanish, as Trotsky had predicted, but grew into a powerful and important instrument of Soviet policy. After World War II it, along with the other People's Commissariats, became a ministry again. Young Soviet diplomats were herded into finishing schools to learn etiquette, table manners, and ballroom dancing, among other Western niceties.

Manfred F. Boemeke and others, eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Tears (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

HISTORY

-PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

References

Ferdinand Czernin, Versailles, 1919: The Forces, Events, and Personalities that Shaped the Treaty (New York: Putnam, 1964). Howard J. Elcock, Portrait of a Decision: The Council of Four and the Treaty of Versailles (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972). George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961). Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918-1933 (New York: Macmillan, 2003). John M. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).

IN DISPUTE, VOLUME

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PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT AND WORLD WAR I Could the Provisional Government have survived if it had pulled Russia out of World War I? Viewpoint: Yes. The hardships of war turned public opinion against the Provisional Government and precipitated its fall. Viewpoint: No. Even without the war, the Provisional Government would have been unable to maintain the broad range of political support it needed to stay in power and institute the reforms demanded by the Russian people. The reasons for the collapse of the Provisional Government in November 1917 and its replacement by Bolshevik rule are the subject of a contentious debate among historians of revolutionary Russia. After the fall of the tsarist government in March of that year, the largely self-appointed Provisional Government took temporary charge of national affairs, expressing its commitment to the full democratization of Russia and implementing important reforms in justice and civil liberties. It also continued Russian involvement in World War I. Like its tsarist predecessor, however, the Provisional Government could not mobilize the troops, gather the resources, or marshal the people's resolve to prevail against Germany and its allies. By late 1917 the Provisional Government had lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of the Russian people and was easily replaced by a communist regime that promised to end Russian participation in the conflict. For some historians of the Russian Revolution, the failure of the Provisional Government to take Russia out of the war was fatal to its survival. The continuing war exacerbated urban living conditions, sacrificed Russian men for what was widely seen as the imperialist goals of the Old Regime, and increased the popularity of the government's radical, antiwar opponents. These factors compromised the Provisional Government to the point where few could foresee any greater benefit from it than they could from the prospect of Bolshevik rule. For other scholars, however, withdrawing Russian troops from the war in 1917 would have had little effect on the fate of the Provisional Government. They point out that this move would not have addressed other major issues— such as land redistribution, political reform, and social change—that also helped to propel the Bolsheviks to power.

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Viewpoint: Yes. The hardships of war turned public opinion against the Provisional Government and precipitated its fall. The collapse of the tsar's regime from the strains of World War I was surprising to many commentators; the imperial government was centuries old and had weathered many potentially lethal crises before. Since the stress of waging war was tremendous enough to topple the tsar, then it should be no surprise that it could bring about the collapse of a new government groping to find its way. Faced with major battlefield defeats, dangerously strained supply lines and infrastructure, and the occupation of huge expanses of Russian territory by German and Austro-Hungarian armies, the Provisional Government made a major mistake when it decided to continue the war against the Central Powers, providing the opportunity for the Bolsheviks to seize power in November 1917. When Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917, it was entirely possible that the Provisional Government would survive. The Bolsheviks were only a tiny faction in Russian political life. Most of their leaders were in exile, and they had virtually no support among the Russian people. Moreover, according to orthodox Marxists (including many Bolsheviks), the conditions for a socialist revolution were not evident in Russia. For centuries the Russian government had been essentially a somewhat modernized version of a medieval warrior state. Despite important reforms and improvements during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the modernization of Russia remained incomplete when World War I began in 1914. Its underdevelopment in comparison to the major powers of Europe hurt Russia in World War I; yet, by 1917, all the combatants were suffering from the strains of waging war. In the previous year, battles at Verdun (February-July 1916) and the Somme (July-November 1916) on the Western Front had each claimed around a million lives. In the spring and summer of 1917, the rank-and-file soldiers in the French army staged a series of mutinies, refusing to go on the offensive. Austria, with a new emperor after the death of Franz Josef in November 1916, was constrained politically and militarily to follow Germany even as its empire was falling into disarray. Germany was sliding into military dictatorship and chronic economic deprivation; in late 1916 its military

leaders planned to draft much of the civilian population for war-related labor. Seen in this context, it is not so shocking that the war could cause the collapse of the tsarist government and its provisional successor. During the first two years of the war, Russia had had some military successes, including notable victories over Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The demands of waging war drained the Russian economy and revealed the limitations of the Russian production and transportation systems. The human cost alone was substantial. Over the course of the entire war, Russia mobilized 12 million men, of whom some 1.7 million were killed and 4.9 million were wounded. This army was more a collection of men than an army in the modern sense. All the combatants in World War I suffered shortages and supply problems, but the Russian army was provided equipment, armaments, and supplies at especially low levels. It was not uncommon for Russian soldiers to be sent to the front without weapons, having been told to arm themselves with the rifles of the fallen. In 1915 one-third of the Russian infantry went into action without rifles. Munitions were seriously lacking. By April 1915 field artillery units could fire just two rounds per day. Many of these shortfalls were partly alleviated by imports from Britain and France, but their delivery had to come via Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the remote north or Vladivostok on the even more distant Pacific. Because the British and French were experiencing shortages of their own, the supplies they sent to Russia never approximated the quality or quantities pledged, let alone what the Russians needed. In 1916 the Russian general staff estimated that fewer than half its orders for supplies from the Allies had been met. Some orders were filled with worn-out or obsolete equipment. American munitions and financing, which played a leading role in supplying Britain and France, were not made available to Russia. Even if the Allies had fully met their obligations to the Russians, these imports still would not have met all Russia's needs. The antiquated Russian economy and transportation infrastructure were incapable of supplying all the urban centers and rural towns of Russia. The collapse of the monarchy in March 1917 was directly precipitated by food riots in the capital, which were a response to bread shortages and occurred without any political organization. What Russia needed above all was an end to the strains of war and time to rebuild and recover from the damage already done. The country had no other option for the preservation of domestic order.

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Aleksandr Kerensky (standing in the car), minister of war of the Russian Provisional Government, saluting troops during an inspection, circa summer 1917 (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS, HU028312)

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Probably the single worst decision the Provisional Government could have made in spring 1917 was to remain committed to the war. In 1917, as in 1915 and 1916, no belligerent would have been able to claim a decisive military victory. At the urging of its suffering Western Allies, the Russian Provisional Government maintained what pressure it could on the Germans in the East, despite the unpopularity of the war. Indeed, in May 1917, when the Provisional Government revealed that it intended to follow through in pursuing the principal tsarist war aims-the annexation of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits-the public outcry was so intense that the moderate ministers of foreign affairs and war, Pavel Miliukov and Aleksandr Guchkov, were forced to resign. Despite public opposition, their remaining colleagues ordered a major attack against German positions in July. The offensive was a catastrophe and destroyed any hope that the Provisional Government would survive. The Russian attack opened in Galicia on 1 July and made some progress, capturing eighteen thousand AustroHungarian troops. The Russian Eighth Army, under General Lavr Kornilov, advanced about fifteen miles, a development so significant that

it alarmed the German command and provoked a German shift southward. By the third week of the offensive, however, German troops were counterdeployed, and all Russian movement came to a halt, leaving the Russians with some fifty-eight thousand casualties. Although relatively mild by World War I standards, these losses were particularly costly because these troops had had the highest morale, competence, and reliability in the Russian Army. The defeat proved to many that the Provisional Government was as incapable of fighting a modern war as its tsarist predecessor had been. After this loss, rank-and-file Russian troops began refusing to attack, a problem that worsened as troops involved in the first three weeks of the campaign were replaced with radicalized troops from the Petrograd garrison. The German counterattack was devastating. On 22 July three German machine-gun companies (at most five hundred men) routed two whole Russian divisions (about thirty thousand men). By 23 July the Russian Army had ceased to resist in any meaningful manner, and the Germans could advance essentially at will. The history of the Russian Army over the next several months was one of steady disintegration, as hundreds of thousands of troops-brutalized by combat-

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deserted. They left the front and returned to their homes, usually taking their weapons and radical politics with them. The July Offensive had a devastating effect on Russian domestic affairs. The wave of desertions left Russia vulnerable to German advances, and the inevitable peace settlement was likely to be harsh. The disaffected officer corps, much of which was victimized by deserters and other radicalized troops, largely turned against the Provisional Government and its democratic ideology. Appointed army commander in chief in late July, Kornilov was prepared to lead military units into the capital in August. Although he probably did not intend to depose the Provisional Government, as many alleged at the time and later, the plan simultaneously discredited one of the greatest Russian commanders and energized other officers to advocate a military solution to the growing social turmoil. The radicalized urban populations became ever more alienated and more willing to follow the extreme politics of the Bolsheviks. The arming of many Petrograd workers to resist Kornilov (in a battle that did not take place) strengthened the radicals, and their zeal to defend democracy increased their prestige. Originally a mix of more-moderate socialists, the urban Soviets of workers' deputies became increasingly Bolshevik in composition and leadership. In September the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, as well as those of several other important cities, came under Bolshevik control. The peasants also became increasingly bold and rebellious, partly as a consequence of radicalized soldiers returning from the front to their native villages and partly because of the general collapse of government authority in the provinces. Between the July Offensive and October 1917, peasants seized three times as many estates as they had in the four months following the tsar's abdication in March. The diversion of the Provisional Government's attention to the fight against the Germans combined with the collapse of the Russian Army to create the conditions that the Bolsheviks exploited to seize power in November. Because the Provisional Government felt honor bound to carry on the war it had inherited from the tsar, it squandered its opportunity to preserve itself by addressing Russia's crying domestic needs. While the government focused on war, the Bolshevik slogan of "peace, land, and bread" resonated across Russia. The Provisional Government failed to see that its first priority was its own survival at home. Instead of serving Russia, it chose to serve the tsar's legacy and impaled itself on his foreign policy. -PHILGILTNER, ALBANY ACADEMY HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

Viewpoint: No. Even without the war, the Provisional Government would have been unable to maintain the broad range of political support it needed to stay in power and institute the reforms demanded by the Russian people. The Provisional Government that stepped into the political vacuum caused by the February 1917 Revolution and the collapse of imperial rule had few chances of surviving in the deeply polarized environment of post-tsarist Russia. The most inauspicious omen of its eventual downfall was the adjective provisional in its name (or in a closer translation of the original Russian, temporary). Chosen to denote the time horizon of the new government, the word at the same time undermined the new government's legitimacy. There were several crucial issues and decisions that rendered the Provisional Government highly vulnerable and eventually unsustainable. The decision to continue the war against the Central Powers was only one ingredient in an overall self-defeating formula. Amid the intoxicating sense of freedom resulting from the collapse of tsarism, the new regime instituted reforms hastily and without an overall plan. It did not make history on the terms of its choosing, but its leaders made choices (and blunders) that seriously compromised the prospects of the Provisional Government. Neither the deteriorating fortunes of the Russian military nor the increasing popularity of the Bolsheviks—with their slogan of "peace, land, and bread"—suffices on its own to explain why another revolution had to take place only eight months after the first. Removing one of these factors might indeed have produced fundamentally different historical results. Monocausal interpretations are often hard to resist, but they oversimplify complex historical forces. To claim that the Provisional Government could have survived by leaving the alliance against the Central Powers and ending its participation in the war would make sense only if the main reason for that government's loss of popularity, delegitimization, and eventual downfall lay on the military front. Clearly the situation was far more complex. The Provisional Government assumed power on a wave of popular exaltation and optimism about Russia's future. Its rising star, Aleksandr Kerensky, remained phenomenally popular until well into the summer of 1917, in spite of a growing disillusionment with the regime's capacity to solve the everyday problems that continued to plague the country—a dissatisfaction that intensified in the aftermath of abortive military initiaVOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

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tives and domestic political divisions. With the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March and the assumption of power by the new cabinet under Prince Georgii Lvov, there was widespread optimism that the new republican system, based on the participation of a wide range of bourgeois political forces and the tentative toleration of the Soviets, would accelerate the pace of domestic reform and deliver on promises of social justice. After an auspicious start in March—when the government established a series of civil rights unprecedented in Russian history and granted amnesty to all political prisoners of the old regime—the situation was complicated by the strange state of dualism in the political structures of the new regime. In late February 1917 Soviets (which had first appeared in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution as the model for the selforganization of the proletariat) were established across the country. The Petrograd soviet became the most significant and powerful representative of the soviet movement, emerging as a crucial political player in the new postrevolutionary balance of power. Countrywide coordination of the Soviets was thus located in the capital, in close geographic and political proximity to the other two significant centers of power: the Duma (parliament) and the Provisional Government itself. The Soviets extended an initial vote of confidence to Lvov's cabinet in return for the implementation of a program of radical socioeconomic reform, which included the election of a Constituent Assembly by universal secret ballot, full amnesty for political prisoners, freedom of speech and strikes, abolition of class restrictions, creation of a national militia force to replace the hated tsarist police, and free elections for municipalities. While some of these demands were met immediately, other reforms remained largely on paper or were delayed. By late March the first cracks in the allegedly united front of the government and the Soviets had started to appear. The issue of participation in the war produced divisions that ran through the whole political spectrum of postrevolutionary Russia. Even the Bolsheviks were initially unwilling to commit themselves to a definite, immediate exit strategy. Within the government, some moderate voices wanted to continue the war while rejecting the imperialist agenda of annexing Constantinople and the Turkish Straits. Inside Lvov's cabinet, however, more-extreme militaristic views were also highly influential, seeking the restoration of the country's wounded prestige on the battlefield. It took the government until the beginning of May to clarify its position; it favored a just peace and national self-determination; yet, it was also poised to fight the Central Powers in order to recover the losses of the previous three years. By May, however, the domestic political sit104

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uation had changed dramatically. Minister of Foreign Affairs Pavel Miliukov had taken the initiative to inform the Entente powers that Russia would continue the war and honor the imperial war aims at a time that soviet agitation for an early exit was growing by the day. "Order Number One" of the Soviets had already been issued, encouraging the creation of soldiers' councils in every military unit and a more-democratic system of decision-making in the armed forces. Miliukov's initiative led to a wave of demonstrations against the government in early May 1917, dealing the first blow to its legitimacy. A new cabinet—still under Lvov but without the discredited Miliukov and other moderates who supported his position—was formed. This cabinet embarked on an increasingly desperate damage-limitation exercise. Trying to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, it vowed to continue fighting while paying lip service to peace and social justice. The promotion of Kerensky and several prominent, moderate soviet leaders was a huge boost of legitimacy for the government, as it could claim success in terms of promoting a genuine political unity. As war minister, Kerensky used his popularity to order a new offensive against the Central Powers and to institute measures to restore discipline in the armed forces. He embarked on a tour of the frontline troops, gave many passionate speeches, and attempted to reverse the increasingly radicalized mood among soldiers. His decision, however, to install commissars to supervise the soldier councils caused further agitation within the units and afforded new space for soviet (and Bolshevik) agitation against the government. The disastrous results of the June offensive and the devastation wrought by the German counterattack intensified degenerative tendencies within the army and enhanced the appeal of the Bolshevik call for immediate peace. At this point, Lvov's strategy of avoiding harsh measures against the Soviets and their representatives in the army came under intense criticism from the moreconservative forces of the new political establishment and the army high command itself. It was rapidly becoming evident that the initial unity between the government and the Soviets was ideologically untenable and about to implode. Kerensky was still the only person who could uphold the vision of unity between government and people, using his dual identity as prominent member of the Petrograd soviet and high-profile minister of the Provisional Government. In early July a largely spontaneous wave of popular discontent in the capital led to violent clashes. The government made scapegoats of the most radical elements of the soviet movement— namely, the Bolsheviks. In the aftermath of these July Days the whole party was outlawed, and its leadership was forced once again to go under-

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ground, with Vladimir Lenin leaving the country for Finland. Unwilling to authorize direct measures and violent remedies, Lvov resigned; he was replaced as prime minister by Kerensky, a move that appeared to be the optimal solution to the crisis of legitimacy. Kerensky was still a highly respected soviet member and was considered a reliable government minister. Trying to hold a meaningful middle ground between the increasing militancy of the Bolsheviks and the equally growing reactionary conservatism of the rightist forces pleased nobody, however, and eventually deprived Kerensky and his cabinet of their legitimacy. As the Bolshevik leadership became identified with an antiwar strategy, Kerensky's government was weakened and left largely defenseless inside the walls of the Winter Palace. In a desperate attempt to retain some of the revolutionary legacy of his regime, he turned against the new army commander in chief, General Lavr Kornilov (whom he had appointed), accusing him of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy to overthrow the Provisional Government. The scheme—albeit successful in the sense that the general was arrested—backfired. It strengthened the resolve of rightist forces to oppose Kerensky—or, at least, not to defend him. On the Left, even the removal of Kornilov was not enough to convince radical soviet elements that Kerensky's increasingly "imperial" style of rule was not a prelude to a personal dictatorship. The role of the Left in organizing defensive forces against a potential military coup strengthened its resolve, and it armed many of its sympathizers. The survival of the Provisional Government had become inextricably tied to Kerensky's political fate, and discrediting Kerensky, which reached its height in early autumn, presaged the end of the government. The differences between Left and Right with regard to war had become unbridgeable. The militancy of workers and soldiers across the country— and particularly in Petrograd—was escalating and by no means under control, even by the more radical Bolshevik leadership. A loss of initiative plagued Kerensky's cabinet during the summer and the autumn of 1917, delivering the Provisional Government to the wrath of rightist and leftist opposition forces alike. The continuation of the war turned soldiers, peasants, and workers against the government and divided the political forces of the post-February national unity. While the commitment to continue the war was undoubtedly a disastrous investment for the leaders of the Provisional Government, a complete withdrawal may not have been an option for Kerensky and his government. Evidently, there was no real consensus on the issue of Russia's continued participation in, or withdrawal from, the war. The compromise formula of continuing in view of

KERENSKY'S ORDERS TO THE ARMY On 20 June 1917 Minister of WarAteksandr Kerensky ordered a new Russian offensive against the Germans on the Eastern Front, attempting at the same time to convince the troops that continuing to fight was in the best interest of alt the Russian people:

Russia, having thrown off the chains of slavery, has firmly resolved to defend, at all costs, its rights, honor, and freedom. Believing In the brotherhood of mankind, the Russian democracy appealed most earnestly to all the belligerent countries to stop the war and conclude a peace honorable to all. In answer to our fraternal appeal, the enemy has called on us to play the traitor. Austria and Germany have offered us a separate peace and tried to hoodwink us by fraternization, while they threw ail their forces against our allies, with the idea that after destroying them, they would turn on us. Now that he is convinced that Russia is not going to be fooled, the enemy threatens us and is concentrating his forces on our front, Warners, our country is in danger! Liberty and revolution are threatened. The time has come for the army to do its duty. Your Supreme Commander [General Brusilov], beloved through victory, is convinced that each day of delay merely helps the enemy, and that only by an immediate and determined blow can we disrupt his plans, Therefore, in full realization of my great responsibility to the country, and in the name of its free people and its Provisional Government, I call upon the armies, strengthened by the vigor and spirit of revolution, to take the offensive. Let not the enemy celebrate prematurely his victory over us! Let all nations know that when we talk of peace, it is not because we are weak! Let ail know that liberty has increased our might Officers and soldiers! Know that ail Russia gives you its blessing on your undertaking, in the name of liberty, the glorious future of the country, and an enduring and honorable peace. Forward! Source: 'Kerensky's Order for the Offensive," in The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents, 3 volumes, edited by Robert Paul Browder and Ateksandr Kerensky (Stanford, CaL: Stanford University Press, 1981), //; 942.

achieving a just peace was good enough so long as radical leftist elements did not begin agitating in favor of complete, immediate withdrawal. This position remained marginally effective until the beginning of the summer. From that point onward, however, the political framework shifted. Becoming increasingly polarized, the prowar and antiwar camps demanded a clear choice. The unwillingness of the Provisional Government to favor either side's solution—and thus burn the bridges to the opposing camp—was perhaps laudable in the context of seeking maximum consen-

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sus; but it was also shortsighted and fundamentally unsustainable. Russia, which Lenin had called the "freest country in the world," had unleashed suppressed forces that were irreconcilable. Differences of opinion with regard to the war issue were not simply a matter of Left versus Right. They split political parties, state institutions, and the government down the middle. No consensus could ever be achieved. Had Kerensky decided to withdraw, he would have still faced the wrath of the rightist forces—and a coup that would have overthrown his government even earlier than the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917. For Kerensky's Provisional Government to have survived simply through withdrawal from the war, it would have had to take firm action against monarchists, rightists, and the moderates who favored continuing war in order to secure a just peace. The exact opposite is also plausible; the government could have continued to pursue the imperial war aims if it had been able to crush the militancy of the Bolsheviks and the increasing interventionism of the Soviets. Either scenario was fundamentally incongruous with the rationale of the Provisional Government, violating the national unity that Lvov and Kerensky were so intent on maintaining—if only on the level of appearances—and that even moderate leaders of the soviet (Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, and some Bolsheviks) were unwilling to sacrifice until the final hours before the Bolshevik takeover. Any repressive action would have to have been taken immediately after the overthrow of the monarchy and would, in any case, have resulted in a situation of near civil war. In the crucial transitional period of March-April 1917, however, the exhilaration caused by the February Revolution— as well as the hesitation of radical leftist leaders to come out clearly in favor of an immediate withdrawal from the war—thwarted this prospect. By the time definite lines were drawn and the political abyss that separated the forces of the February revolutionary bloc was exposed, compromise and national unity were no longer meaningful political options. In the end, the Provisional Government existed as an awkward interregnum, sustained by the positive momentum that had been unleashed in February 1917 and prolonged only because the new political forces were initially unsure of what they wanted to achieve and how. Few people saw the Provisional Government as anything more than an interlude that afforded time for reorganization; almost nobody (apart from Kerensky) was seriously committed to it as a stable solution in the long term. The tactical short-term restraint of rightist forces, the disorganization inside the ranks of the Bolsheviks, and the dogmatic inflexibility of the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (who, having taken Karl Marx's doctrine 106

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literally, were willing to accept a period of bourgeois rule as the "second stage" of revolution before the final empowerment of the proletariat) afforded the Provisional Government a political space largely by default. Mistakes and miscalculations aside (and they were many), Kerensky could not have averted the polarization that undermined his legitimacy and that of his cabinet. The issue of war was significant in itself, but it constituted a secondary phenomenon, not a cause, of the government's collapse. The survival of the Provisional Government in the extraordinary circumstances of post-tsarist Russia necessitated a showdown, a taking of sides, and an eventual jettisoning of the initial formula of consensus. Only a different government—freed from the burden of maintaining national unity and from the indecisiveness of Lvov and Kerensky—might have been able to sustain its existence. And even if it had withdrawn Russian troops from the war, its survival would have been by no means guaranteed. -ARISTOTLE KALLIS, LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

References Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London: Arnold, 1990). Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (New York: Viking, 1997). John Gooding, Rulers and Subjects: Government and People in Russia, 1801-1991 (London: Arnold, 1996). Louise Erwin Heenan, Russian Democracy's Fatal Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917 (New York: Praeger, 1987). W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). Richard Luckett, The White Generals. An Account of the White Movement and the Russian Civil War (New York: Viking, 1971). S. P. Melgunov, The Bolshevik Seizure of Power, translated by James S. Beaver, edited by Sergei G. Pushkarev with Boris S. Pushkarev (Santa Barbara, Cal.: ABC-Clio, 1972). Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990). Robert Service, The Russian Revolution 19001927 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1986). Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army, 2 volumes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, 1987).

VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

PUBLIC OPINION AND FOREIGN POLICY Did the tsarist government consider public opinion in formulating foreign policy? Viewpoint: Yes. Public opinion heavily influenced government decisions on commercial and strategic issues in the late imperial era. Viewpoint: No. Imperial Russian diplomacy operated according to principles of realpolitik and was in the main divorced from public opinion. Much ink has been spilled in assessing the importance of public opinion in foreign policy. In the context of Imperial Russia, public opinion long appeared to be irrelevant. An elitist state run by remote and unaccountable (to all but the tsar) officials paid little attention to public opinion with regard to foreign policy and almost any other subject. Policy was made on the basis of interests and their evaluation, often flawed, by high-ranking servitors of the state. Some recent research, however, suggests that the interaction of public opinion and government policy was more closely linked than has previously been thought. As in many other areas, public opinion—expressed in speeches, addresses, newspaper columns, meetings, journals, and professional associations—was taken seriously by the government. It measured popular moods and attitudes, presented the government with options and choices, and even threatened it with consequences. In the case of crafting foreign policy, Russia was trapped in an attempt to balance its interests with the views of its population, which, in a modern context, was becoming more dynamic and diverse.

Viewpoint: Yes. Public opinion heavily influenced government decisions on commercial and strategic issues in the late imperial era.

ambitions in the late-imperial era. Consideration of public opinion often caused the tsarist government to make critical tactical and strategic errors, mistakes that its leaders often identified as such. That they nevertheless acted against their better judgment in these cases only testifies to the power of public opinion in the late-imperial era.

Public opinion often played a vital role in crafting tsarist foreign policy. Although Imperial Russia's major diplomatic goals—furthering the Empire's power and influence along its Eurasian periphery and pursuing commercial and strategic positions in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Asiaremained relatively consistent over time, public opinion shaped many of the decisions taken to further these

The most significant origins of independent commentary on foreign affairs arose with the Slavophile and Pan-Slavist movements in the mid nineteenth century. Slavophiles sought to explain the nature of Russian state and society by idealizing what they saw as their distinctive features and contrasting them with characteristics of other cultures, particularly those of the West. To these thinkers, Russia's overwhelm-

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ingly rural population and reliance on communal institutions defined its national identity. Many of this philosophy's proponents were suspicious of actions and ideas that had altered Russia's uniqueness in the past. Existing institutions of the Russian state—including its autocratic monarchy, stratified society, powerful bureaucracy, and other products of Peter the Great's Westernizing reforms—figured among their targets. Yet, it was the specter of newer foreign influences, ones that had not yet reached Russia, that drove their opinions on international relations. Fears of statist and hierarchical forms of Western Christianity (especially Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism), European philosophical trends toward "scientific" determinism (especially Marxism), economic philosophies favoring competitive individualism and urban values (especially capitalism), and systems of government defined by impersonal and, in their view, socially divisive institutions (especially parliamentary democracy) all colored their opinions of who should be Russia's friends and enemies. As this environment of distrust and vulnerability evolved in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Slavophiles' major bugbear became Germany. Especially after national unification in 1871, the new German Empire embodied virtually all of the Western influences that they found so objectionable. Its rulers either controlled or sought to subdue its religious establishments. Two of its most important living philosophers were Karl Marx and his associate Friedrich Engels. Its economy was moving rapidly toward commercial capitalism and its attendant urbanization and industrialization. Its government included important roles for parliaments and constitutions at both the national and member-state levels. Neither earlier German expansion to the east at the expense of Slavic peoples nor the prominent role of Germans in Russia's recent Westernization and bureaucratization escaped their notice. It would be difficult to exaggerate the prevalence of these views among those who forged Russian public opinion. A significant portion of the intelligentsia, including the country's two most outstanding and influential men of letters, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, subscribed to at least some of them. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who infamously called parliamentary democracy "the great lie of our time," tutored both Alexander III (ruled 1881-1894) and his son and successor Nicholas II (ruled 1894-1917) and served as the chief state official in charge of religious matters from 1880 to 1905. By the turn of the twentieth century, many rising figures in Russia's relatively new publishing, journalism, and opinion-making industries, many of whom had social origins in the peasantry so idealized by the original Slavophiles, had little difficulty subscribing to their ideals. As Russia developed a commercial, mass-circulation 108

daily press and saw its population's literacy rates and educational achievements rise dramatically, views of foreign affairs formed by Slavophile ideology became more common and articulate. Although not all informed Russians attached an aggressive or nationalistic dimension to their political philosophy, an important number did. These "Pan-Slavists" not only shared the Slavophiles' belief in the uniqueness of Russia's social and cultural conditions, but also endowed its national characteristics with a powerful sense of moral and philosophical superiority. In addition to everything else they found loathsome about the West, its late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century slide toward social crisis, ethical abstraction, and cultural decadence exacerbated their prejudices. Along with its strong nationalist ideals, Pan-Slavism held that all Slavic peoples shared cultural and political interests and depended on the protection and leadership that Russia could provide as the most powerful Slavic nation. Assigning this role to their country led them to urge state and society toward supporting Slavic causes in Europe, whether or not it was in Russia's pragmatic strategic interests. Their insistence on this priority led to catastrophes that the Russian Empire would have done well to avoid. The Balkans, where Russia had intervened to protect Orthodox Christian populations in the past and had long pursued major strategic and economic goals, proved to be the cauldron that boiled Pan-Slavist passions. For proponents of the Pan-Slavist perspective, any failure on Russia's part to come to the aid of its fellow Slavs would compromise its important role in world affairs. They vociferously argued that the Empire would, in such a case, lose influence among the Slavic peoples, suffer diminished prestige among the great powers of Europe, and even find itself confronted with domestic challenges to its legitimacy. Since the Pan-Slavists themselves controlled many organs of public discourse, the last of those consequences presented a thinly veiled threat. If the government failed to conduct its foreign policy in a manner that suited their ideological dictates, it stood to lose authority in its interaction with Russia's rapidly growing civil society. Although the government was becoming more ambivalent to involvement in European conflicts, which were almost always costly and unsuccessful adventures for Russia in the nineteenth century, many of its responsible officials felt that they had to gesture toward society's demands or face domestic crisis. At a time when the state was battling revolutionary movements, attempting to reform itself without major upheaval, and struggling to survive as a major power despite its relative underdevelopment, it could hardly admit weakness or willfully ignore the sensibilities of a large segment of its educated population,

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: R E V O L U T I O N A R Y RUSSIA, 1890-1930

much of which presented those sensibilities as fervent support for the existing government. Russia's war with the Ottoman Empire in 1877-1878, begun to protect Serbian and Bulgarian rebels in their struggle against Turkish rule, was largely driven by influential journalists and publishers who reported on atrocities against the Slavic populations and by opinionated Russians who wanted their nation to help Christian Slavs best Muslim overlords. A long-term problem with this construction of Russia's role, however, lay in its sponsorship of national liberation movements fighting an established power, Muslim though it may have been. Often harboring democratic aspirations, Balkan proponents of independence and new nationhood presented a direct challenge to the European status quo, from which the Russian Empire had itself benefited to a great degree. Espousing a community of Slavic peoples was one matter, but encouraging open rebellion by ethnic nationalists both threatened Russia's multiethnic neighbors, Germany and Austria-Hungary, which also ruled over large Slavic populations, and stirred ethnic discontent among the Russian Empire's subject peoples. While St. Petersburg had to confront a whole new generation of minority nationalists at home, including many who ultimately would lead their peoples to independence, it also fired the antagonism of its Germanic neighbors. German and Austrian reactions to the results of Russia's policy in the Balkans contributed to a growing diplomatic rift. The Congress of Berlin, a diplomatic conference convoked by European statesmen to revise the initial peace treaty ending the 1877-1878 war, dramatically scaled back the territorial ambitions of the Balkan Slavs. This result disappointed them, embarrassed the Russians, and fueled the increasing virulence of anti-German sentiment in both the Balkans and Russia. The consequences of the soured Russo-German relationship led steadily toward the alienation of the two countries in the 1880s, the rupture of their traditional alliance arrangements by 1890, and to Russia's conclusion of a counteralliance with France, Germany's principal enemy, in 1892. From a geopolitical realist's perspective, these developments created serious problems for St. Petersburg. Russia's support for Balkan nationalism represented an abandonment of one of the critical values that had fostered the Empire's traditionally close relationships with Germany and Austria-Hungary and had assured a general European peace since the early nineteenth century. In the place of that cooperative atmosphere, Russia emerged as the architect of unrest in southeastern Europe and the principal opponent of Austria, which remained in a close alliance with Germany. Russia's estrangement from Berlin led first to the closure of its largest foreign capital market (an absolute necessity for its loan-based modernization pro-

IMPERIAL RESCRIPT From every corner of our native land addresses are reaching me which testify to the great eagerness of the Russian people to devote their energies to providing supplies for the army. From this unanimous expression of the nation, I derive an unshakable confidence in a bright future. The prolonged war demands ever fresh exertions. But in the increasing difficulties and in the inevitable vicissitudes of war the resolution becomes more firm and more rooted in our hearts to prosecute the war, with God's help, to the complete triumph of the Russian arms, The enemy must be crushed. Till then, there can be no peace. With a firm belief !n the inexhaustible strength of Russia, I expect of the Government and of public institutions, of Russian industry* and of ail the loyal sons of our native land, without distinction of opinion and position, harmonious, wholehearted cooperation for the needs of our valiant army Upon this national task, from now the only task, must be concentrated ail the thoughts of a united and, consequently, unconquerable Russia. Having created, for dealing with the problems of the army supply, a Special Commission made up in part of members of the legislative institutions and representatives of industry, 1 find it also necessary to hasten the time of the summoning of the legislative institutions themselves, so that we may hear the voice of Russia, I have, therefore, decided that the State Council and State Duma should resume their work not later than August of the present year, and I ask the Council of Ministers to work out, under my direction, the legislative bills called for by the exigencies of war. The original is signed in His imperial Majesty's own hand: NICHOLAS Headquarters, June 27,1915 Source: France Alfred Go/efer, ed», Documents of Russian History, 1914-1917, translated by Emanuel Amnsberg (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), pp, 722-?23,

gram) and then to its alliance with France, a republic that had little affinity for Russia philosophically, shared none of its political or social values, and valued it only as a military counterweight to Germany. Since its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, France had, furthermore, stood in a position of military inferiority relative to Germany. Yet, the power of Pan-Slavism in influencing foreign policy led the Russian government to forfeit its sensible, established alliance with the stronger of the two continental powers in favor of a new and untested relationship with the weaker.

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Both German and Russian political elites realized the folly of this outcome. Germany had no desire to fight a war on two fronts, the certain result if it went to war with France and Russia in combination. Nor did the Germans want to go to war to protect Austrian interests in the Balkans. Russia, too, had every strategic reason to restore favorable relations with Germany, its most powerful neighbor, Europe's greatest military power, and, despite the cultural differences that inflamed Russian Slavophiles, a conservative constitutional monarchy ruled by relatives of the Romanovs. In July 1905, as Russia was in the last throes of its unsuccessful war with Japan and in the midst of a domestic revolution, Kaiser Wilhelm II personally offered Nicholas II a renewed alliance relationship. The tsar eagerly accepted. Despite the strategic sense that this proposal made, Russia's foreign minister, Count Vladimir Lamzdorf, was terrified by the probable public reaction, which he expected to be extremely critical of the government's willingness to ally with the hated Germans, and immediately sought to undo the agreement. This turnabout has frequently been presented as a case of professional diplomacy prevailing over monarchical whim, but in fact it had more to do with the foreign minister's fear of the consequences of negative public reaction than sound strategy. Such fears permanently closed the door to any Russo-German rapprochement. Russia's choice to continue on as a strategic opponent of the Germanic powers only caused its great-power status to drop further. In 1908 Lamzdorf s inept successor, Count Aleksandr Izvolsky, was duped by his Austrian counterpart into accepting Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina—a province coveted by Russia's Slavic client state Serbia—in exchange for an empty promise to secure Russian access to the Turkish Straits. Bosnia-Herzegovina was duly annexed, but the Austrians then did nothing to promote Russia's interests in the Straits. The failure provoked a public outcry strong enough to cause Izvolsky's dismissal. In effect he had supported Vienna's annexation of a province partly inhabited by Orthodox Christians and greatly desired by Serbia in exchange for nothing. Enraged Russian publicists used the episode to demand heightened commitment to Serbia and other Slavic nations in the future. Russia's ineffectual diplomatic role in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which again saw Serbian territorial ambitions checked by AustroHungarian pressure, this time with ominous German backing, provoked further outcries about the failure of the Empire to defend its brother Slavic peoples and respect the sentiments of its own population. The advent of an elected legislature (Duma) after 1905 did little to soften public criticism in the wake of these crises. Already at odds with the gov110

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ernment over constitutional and other domestic issues, foreign-policy failures merely added fuel to the fire. Even politically liberal Duma members—to say nothing of its conservative delegates—despaired of the decline in Russia's international influence and appealed to it to argue that they, as the elected representatives of the people, should share in determining the Empire's foreign policy. When the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne in Sarajevo in June 1914 presented Europe with a pancontinental crisis, Russian public opinion virtually demanded that the government defend Serbia from Austrian aggression. Many argued that if Russia failed yet again to play a meaningful role in supporting its Balkan client, the Empire would slip from the ranks of the great powers and become an irrelevant force in world politics, possibly even a victim of other great powers who sensed its weakness. Unlike more-rational figures in government, including Petr Durnovo, a high official who in February 1914 wrote an influential memorandum reasoning that Russia stood nothing to gain and much to lose from involvement in a future pan-European war, the press showed great enthusiasm for exactly that type of conflict when it broke out a few months later. Almost until World War I finally brought about Russia's revolutionary collapse three disastrous years later, its reporters, editorialists, and opinion makers churned out the view that Russia was fighting for a noble cause alongside admirable allies who had its best interests at heart. Even after the collapse of the monarchy in March 1917, much of Russia's elite public opinion still favored continuing the war as a matter of national honor and advocated the pursuit of tsarist territorial ambitions. These ambitions at least temporarily died out with the decay of the Provisional Government and its final overthrow by Bolshevik coup d'etat in October. However, it was the fervor of such opinions that had led the Russian Empire into its fatal crisis to begin with. -PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

Viewpoint: No. Imperial Russian diplomacy operated according to principles of realpolitik and was in the main divorced from public opinion. The outbreak of war in August 1914 was the tragic consequence of the fundamental disconnect between Imperial Russian foreign policy and its people. Not taking into account the lessons of 1904-1905, when Russia's first Far Eastern colonial experiment resulted in defeat abroad and rev-

IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

olution at home, Russia continued to pursue an aggressive and reckless policy of military buildup and imperial expansion in the Balkans. Support for these efforts could be found among military and political elites, and some elements of the emerging middle class. Yet, war hysteria blinded the imperial government to its limited ability to expand vis-a-vis its European rivals. This error in judgment rested on the belief that industrial development and political reform had transformed Russia into a first-rate European power within ten years. In reality, however, industrialization and the establishment of quasi-parliamentary institutions like the Duma and the Council of Ministers failed to bridge the social gap that, after three years of needless war, led to the downfall of the regime. One of the main arguments that the Russians could wage a successful war in 1914 was that its economy had substantially improved since 1905. Indeed, Russia's industry was growing faster than that of any other European power at that time, as the rapid expansion of its railway system and increases in coal, pig iron, steel, and cotton production indicated. However, these figures were still less than 25 percent of Germany's, Europe's leading industrial producer. In effect, these numbers meant that Russia was at best a second-tier economy that would take decades to tap competitively into its vast human and material resources. The most immediate consequence of Russia's industrialization prior to 1914 was the rapid expansion of an urban industrial class. This urban proletariat had already demonstrated its strength during the 1905 revolution, when it had formed the mainstay of the radical Bolshevik and Menshevik factions, whose Marxist ideology advocated the abolition of the "feudal" Romanov dynasty. The growth of an urban working class should have easily alerted the Russian state to a renewed danger if a general European war broke out. The tsar's main attempt to quell broad dissatisfaction with the regime was the establishment of the Duma, where in theory the people's representatives would join him and his officials to formulate policies. In reality, however, this was a parliament in name only. The tsar and his cabinet were completely independent from this body; moreover the tsar could dissolve its sessions at will. While he was restrained to a limited extent in budgetary matters, he retained full authority over all foreign policy and military matters. Although this new power structure afforded greater participation by those elites who were allowed to participate as a "loyal opposition," which led in turn to Russia's yellow press support of expansionist ventures, it was vulnerable to accusations of being a sham democracy. The tsar and his government should have been well aware of the fact that those hostile to the regime, namely

St. Petersburg and Moscow's expanded urban classes, could use another wartime crisis to revolt against the new regime. Similarly, Russia failed to reexamine its expansionist foreign policy, which continued to be viewed as integral to the country's path to modernity. The Russians sought to carve out their own sphere of influence in the Far East. This mission was viewed as vital, for Russia had faced a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War of 18531856 and no longer could compete with the British, the world's premier naval power. Russia's defeat by the Japanese in 1904-1905 should have alerted Russia's expansionist enthusiasts that this mission had to be abandoned. Instead, Russian diplomats revived the Russian imperial dream of beating the other European powers to Constantinople, the one great prize that could lead to Russia's becoming the ruler of the eastern Mediterranean. This pursuit was seen as urgent given a growing German presence among the Young Turk government, and, more importantly, the Habsburg Empire's own expansion into the Balkans, traditionally viewed as Russia's sphere of influence. Central to this renewed drive into the Balkans was Russia's continued bitterness against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Russians harbored a grudge against Vienna since the Habsburgs declared neutrality when the Crimean War broke out. No one could forget that Austria's abandonment of their autocratic alliance came only five years after Nicholas I's armies saved the monarchy in the wake of the 1848-1849 Revolution. Austrian ambitions against the Serbs and wider ambitions in the Balkans did not help. Russia believed this "betrayal" justified the new policy of supporting South Slavic nationalism, a serious threat to the Habsburg regime. The Austrians' occupation of Bosnia in 1878 and its later annexation of the province in 1908 were major blows to this policy. The Russians saw these measures as an attempt to subjugate Serbia by preventing the "liberation" of Serbs still inside the remaining Ottoman holdings. According to Russian diplomatic circles, it was simply another humiliation. The Russians' response was to initiate an anti-Habsburg alliance in the Balkans. This alliance was capstoned by the Serbian-Bulgarian treaty of 1911, which they hoped would allow Serbia to expand without fear of interference from Bulgaria, a client state of the Habsburgs and Germans since 1885. This diplomatic initiative resulted in a series of secretive talks among the Balkan States, which quickly led to an alliance against the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe. In 1912 Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and Montenegro declared war on the Turks and successfully seized almost all remaining

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While almost all of the warring parties believed the coming war would be about as short as the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, it was a gamble about which the tsar and leading Russian military and political officials had been forewarned. Petr Durnovo, the Russian interior minister, warned on the basis of hard empirical evidence that Russia's delicate social balance could not withstand another long-drawn-out conflict. The result, he asserted, would be a social revolution that likely would lead to the end of the regime itself.

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Instead of heeding this warning, the tsarist regime mobilized its troops and fully participated in triggering World War I. The government had fulfilled its stated obligations encouraged by the delusion that its war against Austria was a popular one at home. In time, however, Russia's inability to fight effectively against Austria and Germany led to years of war, which alienated virtually all of Russia's society and led to the demise of the old regime. -YORK NORMAN, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

References Helene Carrere d'Encausse, Nicholas II: The Interrupted Transition (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000). Ottoman possessions in Europe. That did not resolve the "Eastern Question," as Bulgaria soon began a second war with Serbia, Greece, and the Ottomans over disputed territories in Macedonia and Thrace. These disputes heightened nationalist fervor among the Serbs, who looked once again at Bosnia and Austria-Hungary's Croatian territories to fulfill their Russian-sanctioned dream of a greater Serbia. The Russians failed once again to grasp the long-term significance of Serbia's complicity in the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. While the Russian press and military and political elites rallied in favor of mobilizing in support of Serbia, which was now threatened with war after the Austrians discovered that the Serbian interior ministry had armed and sent the assassins, the Russian government did not take into account the grave internal threat another war would bring. The Russian strategic planners believed that the Austrians would either back down from their threat of war or be overwhelmed in short order by the combined might of Britain, France, and themselves.

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IN DISPUTE, VOLUME

Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 19071914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, N.Y. & London: Cornell University Press, 1995). Dominic C. B. Lieven, Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994). Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983). David MacLaren McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Robert H. McNeal, ed., Russia in Transition, 1905-1914: Evolution or Revolution"? (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970). C. Jay Smith, The Russian Struggle for Power, 1914-1917: A Study of Russian Foreign Policy during the First World War (New York: Philosophical Society, 1956).

21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930

RED TERROR Could the Bolshevik regime have established its authority without using terror and coercion? Viewpoint: Yes. Initially the Bolsheviks enjoyed widespread support for their policies of ending Russian participation in World War I and redistributing agricultural land. The reliance on terror came with Josef Stalin's rise to power. Viewpoint: No. Terror was crucial in ensuring loyalty and allegiance to the new regime. Recent work on communism, including Stephane Courtois's The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1999), makes a strong case that terror was the only real means of ensuring stability and security for communist governments. In the Russian case, emigres and other opponents of the Soviet regime have long repeated this argument. Terror, enforced by a secret police, concentration camps, arbitrary killings, and other coercive practices and institutions, helped ensure Bolshevik power. Other historians disagree, however. Terror may have been present, but many other factors seem to have played a role in stabilizing Bolshevik rule. Russia's vast peasant population, for example, received more or less unobstructed ownership of its own land and land it was allowed to seize. In the absence of Bolshevik rule, this practice would have been brought into question. Workers liked Bolshevik rule because it offered what they wanted: control of employment terms and conditions and the promise of a better life. Even some upper-class Russians favored Bolshevism because they saw it philosophically as Russia's choice, and the best and most effective means of continuing projects of reform and modernization that were beginning under tsarist rule. Terror, in this view, was unnecessary in capturing the loyalties of these many large and important groups.

Viewpoint:

Yes. Initially the Bolsheviks enjoyed widespread support for their policies of ending Russian participation in World War I and redistributing agricultural land. The reliance on terror came with Josef Stalin's rise to power. Emigre memory, passionate political opposition, and Cold War

politics all combined to argue that the Bolshevik regime would have been incapable of surviving in the absence of terror. Without a secret police, concentration camps, and a general environment of fear, the argument follows, communism could never have conquered Russia or lasted for more than seven decades as its dominant ideology. One should recognize, however, that many other factors played a role in establishing popular support for Bolshevism and that political terror, awful and arbitrary though it may have been, was neither the regime's sole pillar nor the only motivator for its people.

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The immediate circumstances of the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 reveal much about terror's rather minor role. The seizures of Petrograd and many other urban centers (Moscow being a notable exception) turned out to be virtually bloodless. At the direction of the Bolshevik Party, important offices, administrative buildings, and centers of communication were simply taken over by groups loyal to the party and to the popular Soviet movement. Few were willing to defend the Provisional Government, which had become discredited in the eyes of most of the population, and urban life continued in an almost surreal fashion even as the takeovers were taking place. Theaters performed, trams ran, restaurants served, and people largely went about their business. Violent opposition remained isolated and lacked real organization in most parts of the country for at least several months. Even the creation of the vaunted Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, did not occur until a whole six weeks after the Petrograd coup, and neither its numbers nor its powers became strong for some time thereafter.

olution, which many Russians felt to be under threat from antidemocratic forces. This was dishonest posturing, but the public statements of Vladimir Lenin and his associates all indicated that their purpose was to invest power in the soviet (council) institutions that had been elected in Petrograd and all over Russia over the course of 1917, a measure that many non-Bolsheviks had long advocated in any case. Significantly, the coup was timed to coincide with a meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, a national body to which Lenin presented his party's actions as a fait accompli. To increase his democratic credentials, Lenin also announced that his government would hold previously planned elections for a national Constituent Assembly. These duly took place in late November 1917, and, despite cases of electoral fraud, they returned a decisive non-Bolshevik majority. Although the Assembly was dissolved shortly after it began meeting in January 1918, its election was in a general sense Russia's first truly democratic poll, and, however incongruously, it took place under a Bolshevik government that claimed to accept its mandate.

What accounted for this rather peaceful regime change? Passivity was certainly a key cause. Few Russians saw much of a future for the Provisional Government. It had failed to extricate the country from World War I, a conflict that had led with an almost equally small amount of resistance to the collapse of tsarism in February 1917. Its moderate leaders had been compromised—and forced from government—for secretly continuing to support tsarist war aims, which most of the population vilified. It had not settled outstanding questions about the nature of property rights, land reform, or social relations, burning issues that had already begun to tear the fabric of the country and that many Russians were beginning to decide on their own, in a way that complemented socialist ideology. Its approach to the future government of Russia had been indecisive and, apart from Premier Aleksandr Kerensky's weak proclamation of a republic in September 1917: noncommittal. Kerensky's adoption of military bearings, questionable relationship with the army commander in chief Lavr Kornilov (who led what many believed to have been a military coup plot in August 1917), and alleged idolization of Napoleon Bonaparte convinced many that he was intent on establishing a dictatorship.

Despite their attempts to establish democratic credentials, the Bolsheviks' seizure of power was quickly rejected by many members of the All-Russian Soviet Congress and by the leaders of most other political parties. Some saw through Bolshevik rhetoric, while others, including even some members of the Bolshevik leadership, thought a rushed seizure of power to be incompatible with orthodox Marxism and thus, or otherwise, doomed to failure. Yet, the Bolsheviks did not need to cow these opponents with terror for the simple reason that they largely absented themselves from national political leadership out of principle. Lev Trotsky, a prominent Bolshevik and organizer of the Petrograd coup, could tell the rival Menshevik Party's leadership to "go where you belong—the dustbin of history" with such drama because they were literally walking out of the Soviet Congress as he pronounced the words. To the Russian public, the Bolsheviks held the lion's share of government responsibility not because a small number of hotheads had imposed their will on the land by force, but because many inexperienced politicians lacked the will to respond effectively to the new political climate and its challenges.

These points answer many questions about the nature of the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks did not need to rely on terror in the early weeks of their rule because they posed, dishonestly yet credibly, as defenders of democracy. At least in official pronouncements, their seizure of power was not a unilateral coup but a preemptive measure to safeguard the existing democratic rev114

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In certain cases, however, some political groupings proved willing to work with the new government. The Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), the main governing party, although initially Bolshevik-dominated, soon came to include members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, who opposed some Bolshevik policies, and whose party won an absolute majority in the democratic Constituent Assembly elections. In Russia's provinces many urban local

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governments and Soviets emerged with coalitions that included Mensheviks, anarchists, and nonparty representatives, in addition to Socialist Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks. In frontier areas, especially the Caucasus and Central Asia, elites who had been loyal to the Provisional Government and even the tsarist regime supported Bolshevism because they viewed it mainly as an ethnic Russian movement that would ensure continuing Russian dominance. Beyond governing political bodies, a significant number of people who had held responsible administrative positions before the coup placed themselves and their services at the Bolsheviks' disposal. Innumerable clerks, engineers, technicians, and other lower-level officials followed this course, but so, too, did some relatively important people. General Aleksei Brusilov, Russia's only real military hero from World War I, accepted a senior position in the new Red Army because he believed that the Bolsheviks represented the will of the Russian people and that his loyalties should remain with them. Many officers, including two tsarist war ministers, Aleksei Polivanov and Dmitrii Shuvaev, and other prominent generals, followed his lead. Vladimir Teliakovsky, the longtime director of the Imperial Theaters who continued in office for more than two months under the Provisional Government, reentered state theater administration under the Bolsheviks and ran the former imperial theaters' managerial department until he retired with a pension in 1923. Baron Rolf von Ungern-Sternberg, the tsarist and Provisional Government's minister to Portugal, placed himself at the Bolsheviks' disposal despite being safely in Lisbon. So, too, did Count Aleksei Ignatiev, the Russian military representative in Paris, who aided Lenin and began a distinguished career as a Red Army general upon his return to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. These figures, and others like them, did not need coercion to stay on the job for new masters, whom they saw as their country's only credible leaders. The most popular sources of Bolshevik popularity, however, were two simple promises: ending the war and sanctifying the wholesale redistribution of agricultural land. With the simple slogan "Peace, Land, and Bread," the country's most pressing concerns found easy and appealing answers in Bolshevik rhetoric. Pledging to extricate Russia from the war, Lenin immediately negotiated an armistice with Germany and began formal peace talks. Although his government was put off by the Germans' harsh initial terms and attempted to stall in the hope that revolution would overtake Germany, too, it did sign a treaty formally ending Russia's war at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. In addition to freeing millions of soldiers who no longer wanted to fight, the peace treaty's popularity can be judged

BIRTH OF THE CHEKA This decree was issued by the Sovnarkorn, responsible for the general administrative affairs of the state, ft had the authority to establish taws when congress was not in session:

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE EXTRAORDINARY COMMISSION TO FIGHT COUNTER-REVOLUTION Decree of the Sovnarkom, December 20,1917 The Commission is to be named the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission and is to be attached to the Soviet of People's Commissars. [This commission] is to make war on counter-revolution and sabotage.... The duties of the Commission will be: 1.

To persecute and break up all acts of counter-revolution and sabotage all over Russia, no matter what their origin.

2.

To bring before the Revolutionary Tribunal all counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs and to work out a plan for fighting them.

3.

To make preliminary investigation only—enough to break up [the counter-revolutionary act]. The Commission is to be divided into sections: (a) the information [section], (b) the organizational section (in charge of organizing the fight against counter-revolution all over Russia) with branches, and (c) the fighting section,

The Commission will be formed tomorrow.... The Commission is to watch the press, saboteurs, strikers, and the Right Social-Revolutionaries. Measures [to be taken against these counter-revolutionaries are] confiscation, confinement, deprivation of [food] cards, publication of the names of the enemies of the people, etc. Source: University of Durham Web Page .

by the failure of its exceedingly punitive effects to provoke major unrest, despite some serious contention in the ranks of the Bolshevik leadership itself. Brest-Litovsk cost Russia a huge swath of its border territories, many of its most important resources, and some sixty million people, yet no palpable opposition threatened to topple the government that had signed it. Getting out of the war—no matter the price—was a major asset to Bolshevism. So, too, was Lenin's first domestic measure—a decree that formally "socialized" agricultural land, but recognized the right of local peasant communes to control, distribute, and farm it for productive use. To the 80 percent of Russia's population who still lived in the country, the Bolsheviks offered what many of them had wanted for

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generations: government sanction for the uncompensated seizure of property belonging to the gentry, monarchy, Orthodox Church, and the more recently emerged private peasant farmers who had departed from their communes. In many places, especially the overcrowded rural regions of central Russia (where, together with urban areas, the Bolsheviks found their greatest support), this merely affirmed what many peasants had already done by carving up estates on their own initiative, and gave them the right to continue doing so. Lenin's decree was also a literal adoption of the popular Socialist Revolutionary Party's agricultural platform, further suggesting that one-party rule was not a top priority. Alternatives to the Bolshevik government, the organized White forces and governments that began to appear in 1918, for the most part promised to reverse the redistribution of land, restore seized property to its original owners, and punish those who had carried out the confiscations. Moreconciliatory approaches were rare until late in the Civil War and then too ineffectual or complicated to make much difference. White commanders, moreover, often acted with extreme brutality when they entered territory that had been under Red control, responding to the excesses of Bolshevik terror only with more and often equally brutal terror. Needless to say, many peasants who stood to suffer from the Whites supported the Bolsheviks without having to be terrorized. In Siberia alone more than one hundred thousand partisans took up arms against the various White governments that aspired to control the region. Violent grain confiscations, peasant uprisings against Bolshevik authorities (often tellingly phrased as demonstrations of support for "Bolsheviks" as opposed to "communists," despite the interchangeability of those terms after 1917), and the horrible collectivization campaigns of the 1930s did take place, but many farmers at first looked upon the Bolshevik regime as the best guarantor of their liberty and prosperity. Workers and other members of the urban lower class also looked positively on the Bolshevik regime and its promises. If they had not, the Bolshevik takeovers in most Russian cities would have been neither easy nor bloodless. At least theoretically the Bolsheviks promised the proletarians ownership and management of the means of production—that is, control over their places of work and the power to end exploitative conditions and the monopolization of profits by owners and managers. This was accompanied by a sweeping redistribution of housing space and luxury items in favor of the lower classes at the expense of the upper, preferential treatment for workers in employment and educational opportunities, and the abolition of prerevolutionary social hierarchies and distinctions. Never having experienced the practical difficulties of the new 116

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arrangements or how they would reshape the Bolshevik approach to government—brutal as it turned out to be in many cases—few workers believed they would be worse off under the new system. Their proletarian identities, early support for the new regime, and, for a rapidly expanding number, Communist Party membership, ensured that many would rise to positions of responsibility and status of which they could never have dreamed under the old regime. Indeed, party membership skyrocketed from a skeletal 23,600 in February 1917 to 730,000 four years later and peaked at nearly 20 million in the 1980s. Bolshevik and pro-Bolshevik workers could and did become factory managers, policemen, Red Army officers, diplomats, journalists, local government officials, ministers, and, in the cases of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, leaders of the Soviet Union. Once again, terror did not have pride of place in determining their convictions. -JOHN PAWL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Viewpoint: No. Terror was crucial in ensuring loyalty and allegiance to the new regime. The Bolshevik government attempted to attract and maintain popular support using a variety of methods. It labored, for example, to fulfill its promise of "Peace, Land, and Bread." It also offered its supporters opportunities to achieve positions of power and influence. In many cases, however, these enticements would have proved insufficient had it not been for the government's primary means of ensuring loyalty: terror. Both the central government and Bolshevik governments in outlying areas relied on terror to eliminate enemies and ensure loyalty (or outward loyalty, at least) to their regime. The Bolsheviks did not stumble into their policy of terror and coercion by accident; they assumed it eagerly. They expected the Russian populace to turn against the "bourgeoisie," the "kulaks," and other "enemies of the people." When the populace moved too slowly, the government created an organization, the Cheka, to "liquidate" disloyalty. By the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks had carried out widespread and systematic campaigns of terror against their political rivals, the press, the bourgeoisie, speculators, peasants, workers, and even the soldiers and sailors whose support had been crucial in bringing the Bolsheviks to power.

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From the beginning, leading Bolshevik leaders stated openly, repeatedly, and unapologetically that they planned to govern through terror. "The state is an instrument of coercion," Vladimir Lenin asserted in a speech in November 1917, and the Bolsheviks would use the state "to organize violence in the name of the interests of the workers." Early the next year he wrote an article suggesting that the proletariat should try various methods "of accounting and controlling the rich, the rogues and the idlers":

The Cheka, however, was not the government's only means of coercion. For example, December 1917 saw the establishment of Revolutionary Tribunals with the power to try saboteurs, hoarders, and other lawbreakers. Those convicted could lose their property, civil rights, freedom, and (beginning in mid 1918) their lives. The Bolsheviks also used the press to reinforce citizens' loyalty. The pages of the newspaper Izvestiia were continually filled with reports of the Cheka's activities and with columns encouraging readers to take action against "enemies of the people."

In one place half a score of rich, a dozen crooks, half a dozen workers who shirk their work . . . will be put in prison. In another place they will be put to cleaning latrines. . . . In a fourth place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot.

The new government began by repressing its political opponents and the newspapers sympathetic to them. One of its first acts was to issue a decree legitimizing the closure of any newspapers that opposed the Bolsheviks or misstated "facts." Then, on 28 November 1917, the Council of People's Commissars declared all members of the Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) Party "enemies of the people." Leggett notes that Lenin and his party thus "introduced [this term] . . . into the Russian legal and political vocabulary." When the democratically elected Constituent Assembly convened in January 1918, the Bolsheviks walked out of the first session. Claiming that the guards were tired, they arbitrarily brought the session to a halt the following morning. The Assembly would never meet again. A public demonstration protesting its dissolution was fired upon by Cheka troops. In the following months the Bolsheviks expelled Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries from governing organs, arrested them, closed down their presses, and accorded their parties a semilegal status at best. They thus coerced citizens into supporting the government by removing all other political choices.

Leon Trotsky, taking the French Revolution as a guide, asserted early on that "terror will assume very violent forms . . . the guillotine, and not merely the gaol, will be ready for our enemies." In June 1918 Felix Dzerzhinsky, the chief of the Cheka, openly asserted that "we stand for organised terror—this should be frankly stated—terror being absolutely indispensable in current revolutionary conditions." To this end, the Bolshevik government created the Cheka in December 1917, only six weeks after it had first taken power. The Council of People's Commissars, the central organ of government, passed a resolution giving the Cheka—whose full title eventually became The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation, Sabotage, and Misuse ofAuthority-the power "to suppress and liquidate all attempts and acts of counterrevolution and sabotage throughout Russia, from whatever quarter." The resolution defined counterrevolution broadly: "The Commission will devote prime attention to the press, to sabotage, to the Kadets, Right SRs, saboteurs and strikers." Possible punishments for such individuals included "confiscation [of property], expulsion from domicile, [and] deprivation of ration cards." In February 1918 the Cheka received the power to carry out immediate trials and executions. Two months later official Cheka detachments had begun to replace the informal security police already working throughout Bolshevik territory. Eventually, the Cheka was not only seeking out and punishing "enemies of the people" but also running concentration camps where these "enemies" could labor for the benefit of the new state. Historian George Leggett has estimated that by mid 1921, the Cheka "amounted to some 250,000 men"— all working to frighten "counterrevolutionaries" into submission. HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

As Bolshevik leaders had promised, members of the nobility and middle class also learned to fear the new regime. City governments and Cheka detachments in Kiev, Odessa, Saratov, and elsewhere took prominent citizens hostage. In some places the Cheka executed the hostages. More often, the government demanded ransoms for their release. When the government overlooked potential victims, private citizens were often happy to turn them in. Historian Donald J. Raleigh quotes as typical a letter of 1921 in which a Saratov citizen wrote, "To the staff member on duty. Comrade! I request that you send a militia officer to search the private apartments of speculators. . . . I request that you requisition their clothing, which is bourgeois." The well-to-do were not the governments' only targets, however. The Bolsheviks suppressed strikes by arresting workers, confiscating VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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Feliz Dzerzhinsky, head of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Cheka), 1922 (Bettmann/CORBIS, BE043617)

their ration cards, and sometimes executing their leaders. A list of demands compiled by workers at a metallurgical plant conveys the extent of government repression: We demand that threats with pistols against workers at the meetings be abolished, and that arrests be abolished too, and that there be freedom of speech and assembly, so that there be a true power of Soviets of peasants' and workers' deputies, and not of the Chekas. . . . We demand an abolition to the taking away of food and flour from the hungry workers, their wives and children, and an abolition to imposing fines on those peasants who sell [foodstuffs] and who deliver [food to cities]. . . . We demand an abolition of the death penalty without trial and investigation. There must be justice.

It seems unlikely that these workers had their demands met. Far from empowering workers with freedom of speech and assembly, the Bolsheviks severely restricted their freedom. In April 1919 the government decreed that employees could no longer leave one job for another unless they had their employers' permission. Offenders could be sent to labor camps. 118

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The peasantry came in for its own share of repression. In 1918 the government established grain quotas. Any peasant who possessed more grain than the decree allowed and who failed to surrender the excess to the government—free of charge—was an "enemy of the people." He could forfeit all property and receive a jail sentence of ten years. The Bolsheviks sent out armed detachments, which eventually encompassed more than 100,000 individuals, to collect the grain. As Trotsky put it, "Civil war has to be waged for grain. We the Soviets are going into battle!" In response, many localities revolted. The Cheka and the Red Army repressed these revolts ruthlessly. The government responded with force to signs of dissent or independence in any locality. An uprising in the city of laroslavl in July 1918 ended with the execution of more than four hundred antigovernment protesters. When Saratov's leaders proved too independent, Moscow replaced them. According to Raleigh, "Their departure . . . ushered in a new period for Saratov as it became run like an armed camp by outsiders who had few ties if any locally." Saratov was but one of many areas to experience martial law during the first years of Bolshevik rule. The government found Ukrainians especially intransigent. In January 1919 the Central Committee concluded that "it is necessary to conduct mass terror against rich Cossacks by exterminating them to the last man." Lenin later claimed that foreign intervention in Russia forced the government to use terror. Other writers pointed to a failed assassination attempt on Lenin in August 1918 as the real impetus for a Red Terror. Yet, as has been shown, the Bolsheviks advocated and implemented the use of terror well before these events. In February 1918 the Cheka actually announced that its previous actions had been too lenient, and that it was instituting a new policy of "annihilating mercilessly on the scene of their crime all counter-revolutionaries, spies, speculators, thugs, hooligans, saboteurs and other parasites." The "merciless" repression against all classes of people in all parts of the country left prisoners and corpses in its wake. Between January 1918 and June 1919 the Cheka arrested more than 80,000 persons and executed, at the least, 8,300 individuals without trial. Those numbers do not include the executions of persons tried by Revolutionary Tribunals and other governmental organs. By October 1922 approximately 60,000 individuals labored in 132 prison camps throughout Russia—and this number, too, leaves out the individuals imprisoned elsewhere. Numbers on this scale could not be the fault of a few

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corrupt or overzealous officials. Nor were they the work of a government that used force reluctantly. They came about because the Bolshevik government had a consistent and clear-cut policy of using terror to stay in power. Soviet historians noted, correctly, that the Bolsheviks' opponents in the Civil War also used violence and terror. Unlike their opponents, these historians argued, the Bolsheviks were justified in using terror because they were destroying an unjust society and creating a new and better one to replace it. The merits of this argument are left to the reader to determine. The Bolsheviks' attempts to force the populace into loyalty eventually alienated many who had previously supported them. In late February 1921, strikes in Moscow and Petrograd spread to the Kronstadt naval base, whose sailors had been the Bolsheviks' champions in 1917. A committee of sailors produced a document detailing their complaints: For three years the toilers of Soviet Russia have suffered in the torture chambers of the Chekas. Everywhere the Communist has wielded power over the peasant. A new Communist slavery has been created. The peasant has been transformed into a serf in the Soviet economy, the worker has become a mere employee in the state factories. The workers' intelligentsia has been eliminated. Those who tried to protest have been tortured by the Chekas. Those who continued to give trouble have been dealt with more expeditiously—they were shot. The air has become unbreathable. The whole of Soviet Russia has been turned into an immense penal servitude prison.

Unfortunately for the Soviet government, the sailors' rhetoric had more than a whiff of truth to it. Unfortunately for the sailors, their protests did not soften the hearts of Soviet leaders. In mid March, after a fierce battle that left thousands dead, Kronstadt was taken by Soviet forces. Most of the sailors who survived the battle were shot or sent to labor camps. -CATHERINE BLAIR, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

References Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Stephane Courtois and others, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996). Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 19171932 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Lennard D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin's Russia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976). Diane Koenker and William Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). George Leggett, The Cheka, Lenin's Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-devolution and Sabotage (December 1917 to February 1922) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). S. P. Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia (Westport, Conn.: Hyperion, 1975). Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1995). Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: International, 1934). Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York & London: Norton, 1975). Rex Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE Did Josef Stalin's "revolution from above" equal a "Soviet Thermidor"? Viewpoint: Yes. After his rise to absolute power Stalin deliberately undermined the international Marxism of Lenin. Viewpoint: No. Stalin's "revolution from above" was the natural outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The rise of Josef Stalin to supreme power in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s has been described as a revolutionary development in its own right. Many critics use the term Thermidor, referring to the period of reaction that followed the most radical phase of the French Revolution of 1789 to describe it. Stalin, in this view, ended a promising movement toward a socialist society and replaced it with a monolithic personal dictatorship. This dictatorship came with a crackdown on independent economic activity, social freedom, and experimental art and literature. Other scholars reject this view. Historians such as the late Martin E. Malia long saw the Stalin "revolution" merely as the natural product of Leninism and the ideology of the Bolshevik Revolution. The goals and aspirations of 1917 took a slight detour for necessity's sake in the 1920s, but the return of command economics and social upheaval, and the imposition of state norms on every important aspect of civil life, merely fulfilled the original intentions of the revolutionary leaders.

Viewpoint: Yes. After his rise to absolute power Stalin deliberately undermined the international Marxism of Lenin.

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Josef Stalin's rise to power and subsequent "revolution from above" marked a profound deviation from Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks' original aims in ruling Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 Although the Bolshevik Party had been led by Lenin since its formation in 1903, internal debate among its leadership remained critical to the party's successes up until Lenin suffered a series of strokes that permanently incapaci-

tated him in March 1923. Lenin and most of his cohorts were committed to the concept of world revolution, the idea that the Bolsheviks' ultimate success depended on the spread of Russia's communist revolution to the more advanced West, in particular its most industrialized powers, Germany and Britain. Lenin's leadership also viewed its seizure of power as somewhat haphazard, given the fact that Russia was an agrarian country whose industrial base had just begun to develop in the final decades of tsarism. Stalin's seizure of power signaled the end of both internal political debate and the commitment to international revolution abroad. In its place Stalin systematically constructed a totalitarian state with a religious mythos and terrorist methods

that Lenin and his partners never would have dreamed of. Lenin had made the mistake of appointing Stalin to a series of posts that controlled most of the party and government bureaucracy. In addition to being a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee and executive Politburo, Stalin was the commissar of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, which audited the entire government administration and state economic control mechanism. Even more powerful was his assignment, effective from April 1922, as the party's general secretary, an office that held primary responsibility for all of the party's administrative decisions, and that gave him access to all personnel files. Finally, Stalin was the Politburo liaison officer to the Organization Bureau (Orgburo), which was in charge of the party's personnel assignments, and to the Central Control Commission, which was in charge of enforcing party morality. In essence, Lenin gave Stalin virtually unchecked control over the party bureaucracy in the misplaced belief that he would never abuse this power. Yet, even before Lenin's death, Stalin used his positions to build up his own independent power base. In particular, Stalin benefited from the vast numbers of new party members and government officials recruited during the first years of the regime. They were naturally grateful to Stalin for his patronage, and would prove invaluable when Stalin openly sought the leadership after Lenin's death. Lenin realized in his last days that Stalin had come dangerously close to usurping the leadership. He and other prominent leaders of the party, namely Lev Trotsky, Grigorii Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev, began to plan Stalin's removal so that the leadership would continue in a collective manner. Many feared Stalin's lack of theoretical education and international awareness would set the party, nation, and revolution adrift. These fears translated into reality after Lenin sickened over the course of 1923 and died in January 1924. Stalin acted quickly to disrupt effective debate about economic reform and the Bolsheviks' political realities, and used his powers to quell doubts about his own abilities. Lenin had left a political testament in which he attacked Stalin's flaws and strongly suggested that his associates remove him from power. Yet, Stalin, in exchange for an empty promise of showing restraint in the leadership battle, persuaded his rivals to keep the document secret; its contents were only revealed in 1957. No one thus knew Lenin's true opinions of Stalin until several years after his own death. Outside of this measure and packing the party and its leading organs with loyal supporters, he underlined the need for party unity and feigned his own desire for intellectual guidHISTORY

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ance. These debates usually were between the charismatic Trotsky, eclectic economic theoreticians such as Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, skilled agitators such as Zinoviev, and devoted stalwarts such as Kamenev. Stalin effectively drove wedges between these leaders. He first formed a triumvirate with Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1923, in order to prevent Trotsky from establishing his own leadership. Once he had forced Trotsky to resign as commissar of war, in favor of a less threatening successor, Stalin maneuvered against his former partners and accused them of unorthodoxy. He then teamed up with Bukharin and his supporters on the Politburo to pursue their agenda. Once Stalin had established a majority of yes-men on the Politburo and Central Committee, he had no hesitation in disposing of Bukharin and his allies. From that point onward, he used the call for orthodoxy to brand all of his defeated rivals heretical. By 1928, former leaders had to either surrender any pretense to real power or be sent into exile. Stalin had thus destroyed the Leninist concept of collective leadership and established his own unquestioned personal rule over party and state. Another key to Stalin's success was his development of a cult of personality. The establishment of a leadership myth among the masses took time and effort to develop, but Stalin began this process immediately after Lenin's death. Stalin carefully cultivated the idea of Lenin as the great father of the Russian nation whom everyone else should emulate. He used Trotsky's absence from Lenin's funeral—the result of a logistical problem with the railroads that Stalin himself caused—to show him to be someone who had lost touch with Lenin's mission to the people. Indeed, Stalin also played on anti-Semitic sentiments by inferring that Trotsky's "cosmopolitism" led to his ambivalence toward Lenin's Russia. Instead, Stalin, always portraying himself as the faithful follower of Lenin, claimed to have the wisdom and humility to understand the path Lenin had first trod. He made every propaganda and bureaucratic effort to ensure that the masses accepted Leninist orthodoxy as a modernized version of their older Christian faith. Once Stalin had eliminated his opposition, he claimed his own place in the sun. Now it was Stalin, the successor of Lenin, who led the Russian flock. To question his will was to betray the system itself. From then on, Stalin's personal mythos would be indistinguishable from many other dictators of that era, particularly that of Adolf Hitler. Stalin also made a decisive break with Marxism when he abandoned any pretense of international working-class solidarity in favor of a retooled Russian nationalism. His diversion from this goal began in his first days as the Soviet commissar for nationalities. Georgian by birth, Stalin VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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grew to deny his own heritage in favor of a "Russianness" that many had denied him. While he had gained much experience as a party agitator in the Caucasus and later trained with Lenin and Bukharin to become a party leader in the nationalities field, Stalin held the view that Russia should not grant independence to the other "nations" that it had traditionally subjugated. Rather, the Bolsheviks should retain ultimate control over these provinces for the good of the state and revolution. Measures of independence and autonomy were only to be given if the power of the Russian state was not harmed. Stalin's betrayal of international Marxism became even clearer in the mid 1920s, when he developed the idea of "socialism in one country." According to Stalin, Russia's development as a socialist nation was not dependent on successful revolution abroad. Russia could develop autonomously without interacting with the rest of the world. This shift meant that future economic and political policy would be contemplated primarily in national terms. Stalin's later conduct during and after World War II would confirm his nationalist approach. He felt no qualms about betraying socialist causes if it served the interests of the Soviet Union and his regime. This strategy could most clearly be seen in his 1939 pact with Hitler to divide Eastern Europe into separate zones of interest. Infamously, he showed good faith by sending a trainload of exiled German communists to Hitler—and, he expected, certain death. To Lenin, such compromises would have been unconscionable. Stalin's rule was also characterized by his systematic terrorizing of Russia. It first came in the form of his collectivization of agriculture, which began in 1928, immediately after his break with Bukharin and the establishment of one-man rule. While the collectivization of agriculture had been proposed much earlier by Bolshevik thinkers such as Preobrazhensky and Trotsky, none had advocated forcing the entire rural population to participate at gunpoint. Stalin alone resorted to starving those who would resist the command to give up their family property. He ordered millions of such "reactionaries" to be murdered, deported, or allowed to die with that excuse. In the end Stalin could be assured that he had established total control over society, regardless of whether he had followed Lenin's original commitment to social and economic progress. Stalin perfected his means of terror after 1934, when he began to purge the party itself. Not only would he demonstrate his personal power by merely subjugating his rivals, but now he acted to eliminate any potential opposition by literally killing it. By 1938 almost all of the 1917 leadership of the Bolshevik Party was executed after a series of show trials in which they had been 122

forced to confess their guilt. Stalin then killed most of his military high command, believing that the military could lead a coup against him, as well as millions of ordinary people who were thought to pose some threat to the regime, however abstract. Stalin strived to eliminate any potentially independent social or political force. Political debate, once a high Bolshevik ideal, was dead. Stalin's rise to power represented a deliberate and systematic break from Lenin's original vision of interparty democracy and international socialist revolution. Stalin successfully betrayed these aims, and instead formed a totalitarian state virtually identical with the non-Marxist dictatorships of his time, many of whom learned from him. -YORK NORMAN, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Stalin's "revolution from above" was the natural outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution. Presenting Stalinism as a "Thermidor" (a reference to the period that ended the most radical phase of the French Revolution of 1789) that destroyed the initial "promise" of the Bolshevik Revolution is a fundamentally misleading statement. In every important way Josef Stalin's rule merely perpetuated the mentalities, institutions, goals, and crimes that Vladimir Lenin and his acolytes favored before and immediately after 1917. Stalinism represented the natural continuity of everything that came to power in October 1917, and its appearance represented neither a separate revolution nor a betrayal of Bolshevik ideals. Stalin built upon virtually everything Lenin initiated. Under his rule the systematic persecution of society, independent civic life, religious belief, free expression, and political oppositioneven opposition from other socialists and within the Bolshevik Party itself—continued without check. Stalinism may have made these features of Soviet life worse or magnified their scale, but both the ideological principles and the machinery needed to make them possible grew out of Leninism and, indeed, classical Marxism. In economic matters the full state ownership and management imposed uniformly after 1928 had firm Leninist roots. Agricultural collectivization, grain requisitions, total state economic management, and sweeping nationalization were fundamental features of the Civil War economy put into place by the Bolsheviks and espoused by their theoreticians as the proper way of organizing society and the economy. Stalin's decision to put these ideas

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WE SHALL FULFIL YOUR BEHEST WITH HONOR! After the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Josef Statin made the following speech in which he promised to continue the work of his predecessor:

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into practice again in the late 1920s was neither radical nor original: he implemented policies that the party had long favored and had begun to implement earlier. Although the turbulence of the first years after the 1917 coup d'etat had caused Lenin to make some concessions to market economics and moderate some of his positions, neither he nor anyone else in the leadership lost the long-term view of the state and party leading a fully communized society into the future. Stalin's resumption of the early postrevolutionary course meant only that the position of the Soviet government had improved enough for him to do it without provoking lethal opposition. Indeed, Lenin's willingness to bend his party's ideological principles to help it retain power was another legacy readily adopted by Stalin. His industrialization drive, which aimed to make the Soviet Union into a major modern power, departed from strict Marxist principles in its introduction of material incentives for managers, productive workers, and the state and party administrators who oversaw them. Like Lenin, Stalin believed that if adopting these principles assisted in the achievement of the party's ultimate goals, then doing so was the correct course. Pragmatism in international relations provided another example of the similarity in the two leadership styles. Lenin's major foreign-policy

goals upon taking power were to end the ongoing war with Germany and then, after the cessation of general hostilities, engage it as a strategic partner. In the first case he was willing to reach a traditional peace agreement with a conservative monarchy. In the second he allied his regime, the world's first communist state, with an anticommunist democracy (as Germany had become in November 1918) governed by the same "bourgeois" elements against whom his philosophy commanded him to revolt. The Soviet-German relationship of the 1920s even came to include military cooperation. Neither step was consistent with the purest Bolshevik ideological principles, but both benefited the Soviet strategic position and were thus thought good for the party. Stalin, far from bringing about a "revolution" in Soviet diplomacy,applied the same principle to the situations he encountered while in power. In the mid 1930s, perceiving a threat from the rise of Nazism, he pursued international collective security, again bringing the Soviets into alignment with "bourgeois" governments for pragmatic reasons. When he found the results of this policy less effective than he had hoped, he turned to rapprochement with Adolf Hitler's Germany, an even more rabidly anticommunist power. In 1939 the two ideological foes signed a nonaggression pact and secret diplomatic protocol, which divided Eastern

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Four Bolshevik leaders in Moscow in June 1925: Josef Stalin, Alexei Rykov, Lev Kamenev, and Gregory Zinoviev (left to right). After Stalin established himself as dictator, he had his three associates executed (Associated Press).

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Europe between them. In 1941 Stalin negotiated a similar nonaggression pact with Japan, another conservative anticommunist power. After Hitler violated the Nazi-Soviet pact by invading the U.S.S.R. later that year, Stalin immediately embraced the United States and Britain—both of which had intervened against the Soviet cause during the Russian Civil War—as military allies and strategic partners. Again, from a purely ideological perspective, none of these measures reflected the stated ideological views inherent in Bolshevism. Stalin, however, continued Lenin's policy of setting aside ideological dictates to promote the ultimate objective shared by both leaders: gaining the most advantageous international position for the Soviet Union. What of the cultural experimentation of the 1920s? Although the New Economic Policy (NEP) era allowed for more permissiveness, Stalin's suppression of independent thought, trends in modern art, movement toward sexual equality, international cultural contacts, and experimental literary and theatrical forms were not at all out of character with earlier phases of Soviet rule. Many Bolshevik officials suspected these forms of counterrevolutionary tendencies and despised them for their "decadence" and inaccessibility to the masses

long before Stalin came to power. Indeed, even before 1917 the Bolshevik Party had undergone a sort of internal "culture war," in which exponents of combining new trends in culture with the socialist movement for the most part lost to those who favored such traditional cultural forms as classical literature and music, realism in theater and painting, and hierarchical and disciplined approaches to education. Although the immediate postrevolutionary era allowed for some experimentation in these fields, Lenin, like Stalin after him, remained a convinced cultural conservative. Stalin repressed experimental cultural life more thoroughly in the 1930s, but the repression already at work under Lenin persuaded many members of Russia's creative intelligentsia, including many of those who had initially sympathized with the revolution, to leave the country. That they chose to do so while Lenin was still in charge says a great deal about how they regarded Soviet cultural policy, no matter who was in the Kremlin. Lenin's regime forced still more, including hundreds of the best minds in Russian history, philosophy, science, and letters, to leave the country. Others, such as the poet Nikolai Gumilev, were killed under his regime. Although Stalin vastly amplified the persecution of dissident, nontradi-

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tional, and minority intellectual and cultural figures, precedent for such repressions had been well established in the years immediately after 1917 Stalin's promotion of working-class youth to positions of favor, power, and responsibility at the expense of the surviving prerevolutionary elites also had firm Leninist roots. Why else had the revolution been made, if not in favor of the Russian proletariat? Discrimination against the old regime's so-called former people remained a consistent policy of the Soviet state from its beginning. Their disenfranchisement and the establishment of the leading role of the proletariat were a routine rhetorical flourish immediately after the revolution and were officially enshrined in the Soviet Constitution of 1918. Stalin allowed it to continue, particularly in education and the recruitment of Communist Party members, but the Soviet Union's social transformation was neither his original idea nor anything other than familiar to the whole Soviet experience and desirable from the Bolshevik perspective. Stalin's rule was not the "Thermidor" of the Russian Revolution. He used his time in power to consolidate his own authority, but that authority rested on claims that the Bolsheviks had been making since their emergence as a major faction of the Social Democratic movement in 1903. Stalin's rhetoric was anticipated throughout the revolutionary era by that of Lenin, who appointed him to high office in the first place, and by many other Bolshevik leaders, including some who later became his leading opponents. Only their dishonesty could lead them to call his ideas counterrevo-

lutionary or claim that they represented a betrayal of the ideals for which they had all fought in 1917. -PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

References Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 19171932 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Fitzpatrick, ed., Stalinism: New Directions (London & New York: Routledge, 2000). Martin E. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994). Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York: Norton, 1990). Adam Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking, 1973). Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Prima, 1996).

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REVOLUTION OF 1905 Was Lenin right when he called the Revolution of 1905 a dress rehearsal for the Revolution of 1917? Viewpoint: Yes. The Revolution of 1905 arose from many of the same issues and conflicts that came to the forefront in 1917. Viewpoint: No. The Revolution of 1905 was the impetus for reform movements that had the potential to democratize Russia. Three years after his party's successful coup d'etat in 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin referred to the Revolution of 1905 as a "dress rehearsal" for the events of 1917. In 1905, Russian society was torn asunder by the Bloody Sunday (22 January) shootings of unarmed workers demonstrating for a redress of their grievances and by a costly and unsuccessful war with Japan. In the midst of rising urban and rural lawlessness, strikes, and civil unrest came calls for a constitutional state with guaranteed civil rights and representative institutions. Although the tsarist government weathered the crisis of 1905, partly by granting civil liberties and some representative rights in October 1905, Lenin, like many other observers then and now, believed that the central problems remained unsolved and made the events of 1917 inevitable. In 1917, as in 1905, Russia was in the process of losing a war; dissidents were calling for greater democratic and civil rights; the urban and rural masses were causing unrest; and revolutionaries were plotting to destroy the state and society. Yet, other scholars believe that the reforms of 1905 had the potential to bring about social and political changes other than those experienced in 1917. In 1905 the government did concede an impressive array of civil rights, and its creation of a legislative body, the State Duma, paved the way for greater democratization. Outside government, cultural life, professional organizations, local administration, the business world, and other institutions of civil society seem to have made much progress toward creating a Russian concept of participatory citizenship—a development that had more in common with Western European and American models of development than with socialist revolution.

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Viewpoint: Yes. The Revolution of 1905 arose from many of the same issues and conflicts that came to the forefront in 1917. Vladimir Lenin asserted that the events of 1905 should be interpreted as a "dress rehearsal" for what happened in 1917, denying the possibility that Russian politics could have evolved according to the paradigm of electoral representative governments established in Western democracies. Lenin believed that revolution would result in a proletarian democracy, that is, a government formed by and for the working class. In a dress rehearsal, the characters are in place and know their lines, but they need one final opportunity to work out problems in the performance before the play opens. In the case of Russia, twelve years passed between dress rehearsal and opening night, but in their 1917 performance the players were able to overcome mistakes made during the dress rehearsal. In both 1905 and 1917, the play was divided into three acts: unsuccessful war, the heightening of political consciousness across all social strata, and revolution. Although historians have pointed to fundamental differences in the reasoning behind the declarations of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and World War I a decade later, the social, political, and economic results were similar. In both cases Russia entered a war that it was technologically unable to fight. A government that cannot win a war and suffers homefront instability as a consequence loses the confidence of its populace. Although public responses to the outbreaks of both wars have important similarities, historians have tended to focus on the differences. That is, the Russians were considerably more positive about fighting Germany in 1914 than they were about going to war against Japan in 1904. In both instances, however, some Russians quickly took advantage of wartime circumstances to open a political struggle against the autocracy. While the tsar hoped to be able to inspire patriotic support for his regime, leaders from across the political spectrum who desired some form of constitutionalism used prosecution of the war for their own purposes. In 1904 they followed a model set up during the French Revolution of 1848, the so-called banquet campaign, in which they skirted laws against public political conferences by meeting at ostensibly professional or social gatherings to discuss political goals and strategies.

The outcome was a liberal-democratic Union of Liberation, which had joined with other such groups under the umbrella of the Union of Unions by October 1905. Local-government groups, the zemstva (singular zemstvo), used the crisis atmosphere to expand their public and administrative roles. Better prepared in 1914 than in 19041905, these same groups organized locally and nationally, taking a major role in provisioning troops and other aspects of regulating supplies for a country at war. In 1914 they also had a more public forum, the State Duma, in which to debate politics. Some politicians who earlier had led in the banquet campaigns were in the so-called Progressive Bloc of the State Duma. Workers and peasants also found political voices because of their critical roles in producing necessary supplies and provisioning the troops. Workers had been launching strikes since 1903, and following the massacre of peaceful demonstrators in January 1905, they intensified their efforts to win political and economic concessions. The declaration of war in August 1914 brought a temporary lull to the strike movement, which had been building since another attack on unarmed demonstrators, this time at the Lena Goldfields in 1912. Strikes began to occur more frequently in 1915; the number of strikers doubled to nearly one million in the next year, labor unrest reaching the boiling point on the 1917 anniversary of Bloody Sunday (22 January 1905). Peasants had never ceased their demands for more arable land, even after those who appropriated it for themselves had been put down by force in 1905. They renewed their disturbances en masse even before the outbreak of war; as a result, much of European Russia was under martial law in 1913. When given even highly restricted opportunities to vote, the peasants cast their ballots with socialist parties who supported their single political plank: land redistribution. Another dissatisfied segment of the Russian population was the military. In the 19041905 conflict with Japan, as many as one-third of active army units rebelled to protest poor conditions, bad leadership, and the apparent senselessness of a remote war they did not understand against an enemy most had never heard of. Between 1914 and 1917 Russian soldiers lost millions of their comrades in what was widely seen as a doomed war against Germany; they, as well as their wives and widows, demonstrated their dissatisfaction by rioting. From this volatile climate logically came revolution. Lenin overstated the extent to which the Revolution of 1905 and the popular demonstrations of February-March 1917 were "bourgeois" revolutions (following Marxist his-

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torical logic), but the initial ostensible victors in both incidents were those groups that most resembled Western-style politicians seeking electoral representation. Both revolutionary events ended with a weakened tsar. Nicholas II seemed to recover his balance after 1905, but the autocracy was irrevocably damaged, and his abdication in 1917 was the consequence of twelve years of political dissent. Against this background on each occasion, an alternative political institution took shape. In 1905 the bourgeoisie established an electoral, quasi-representative State Duma, and in 1917 members of that body, including many who had been politically active since 1905 and earlier, assumed positions in a Provisional Government. In both 1905 and 1917, the lower classes congregated in Soviets, or representative councils. Although the Soviets were dispersed in 1905, in 1917 they secured enough legitimacy that the Provisional Government was forced to recognize them; then Bolsheviks seized power in their name. The events of 1917 are clearly linked to those of 1905. At this point, however, it is critical to look closely at the implications of Lenin's dictum that the liberals' political activities between 1905 and 1917 were not preparing Russia for a Western-style democracy and that instead the workers were preparing to seize power. If Soviet historians were myopic in their conviction that the Bolshevik Revolution was inevitable, then Western historians proved equally guilty of altering the facts to fit their own preconceived notions. The strongest argument levied by Western scholars is that all Russian classes joined together in 1905 with the common purpose of defeating the autocracy. In this reading of history, the liberals revealed their fatal flaw in their failure to unite with the lower classes in 1917. This interpretation grants heroic status to the Union of Unions in 1905 for its inclusiveness, while it ignores the willingness with which liberal elements turned their backs as the tsarist government began its armed assault on workers who were still striking in December 1905 and on rebellious peasants—after the tsar's celebrated October Manifesto promised a constitution. The exploited Russian majority—workers, peasants, and soldiers—had greater ambitions than just a State Duma that did not represent their most basic interests. Lenin correctly summarized the atrocities of December 1905 as "a decisive turn in Russian domestic politics toward the most extreme reaction." Lenin created an epilogue to the 1917 performance. The proletarian democracy sought by the national Soviets, who convened in Petrograd in October 1917 in order to hammer out political details, was perverted by the Bolshe130

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viks' armed seizure of the Soviets' power, a coup ironically carried out in their name. A dictatorship by the proletariat became a dictatorship of the proletariat. The peasants, again, had to pay the most severe price. -LOUISE MCREYNOLDS, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIT, MANOA

Viewpoint: No. The Revolution of 1905 was the impetus for reform movements that had the potential to democratize Russia. The events of 1917 in Russia loom so large and are so significant that it is difficult for scholars to evaluate other developments of the period except in the context of the ultimate demise of the tsarist regime. All too often, scholars of late Imperial Russia have concentrated solely on seeking the underlying reasons for the collapse of its monarchy. It seems, moreover, that many historians and social scientists have uncritically accepted Lenin's felicitous dictum that the Russian Revolution of 1905 was but the dress rehearsal for the complete upheaval of 1917. Accordingly, much attention has been paid to the dramatic increase in the size of the labor movement during the period 1905-1914, as well as to the general upsurge in strikes and other labor actions that gripped Russia after 1905. These same scholars conveniently ignore the implications of government legalization of the unions and that—as in prewar Great Britain and the United States—the majority of the Russian strikes were primarily economic in nature, not political. They also downplay the significance of the wave of reform and change that swept through both town and countryside during 1905-1914. Perhaps the most impressive and promising development in Russian social and political life during 1905-1914 was the increasing activism of the zemstvo (local government, plural zemstva). The zemstvo, instituted in 1864, was originally envisioned as just a link in the administrative chain stretching from St. Petersburg to the countryside, which would allow the state bureaucracy to retain control but assign specific functions to be administered on the local level, but the zemstvy (elected deputies of the zemstvo) had soon come to understand that the massive problems besetting Russia could not be resolved without the active participation of society. To that end these activists had formed the General Zemstvo Organiza-

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LENIN'S DRESS REHEARSAL In this address, published in May 1919, Lenin introduced the idea of the Revolution of 1905 as a "dress rehearsal" for the proletarian revolution:

How is it that one of the most backward countries of Europe was the first country to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to organise a Soviet republic? We shall hardly be wrong if we say that it is this contradiction between the backwardness of Russia and the "leap" she has made over bourgeois democracy to the highest form of democracy, to Soviet, or proletarian, democracy—it is this contradiction that has been one of the reasons (apart from the dead weight of opportunist habits and philistine prejudices that burdened the majority of the socialist leaders) why people in the West have had particular difficulty or have been slow in understanding the role of the Soviets. The working people all over the world have instinctively grasped the significance of the Soviets as an instrument in the proletarian struggle and as a form of the proletarian state. But the "leaders", corrupted by opportunism, still continue to worship bourgeois democracy, which they call "democracy" in general. Is it surprising that the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat has brought out primarily the "contradiction" between the backwardness of Russia and her "leap" over bourgeois democracy? It would have been surprising had history granted us the establishment of a new form of democracy without a number of contradictions. If any Marxist, or any person, indeed, who has a general knowledge of modern science, were asked whether it is likely that the transition of the different capitalist countries to the dictatorship of the proletariat will take place in an identical or harmoniously proportionate way, his answer would undoubtedly be in the negative. There never has been and never could be even, harmonious, or proportionate development in the capitalist world. Each country has developed more strongly first one, then another aspect or feature or group of features of capitalism and of the working-class movement. The process of development has been uneven.... World history is leading unswervingly towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, but is doing so by paths that are anything but smooth, simple and straight.... ... Leadership in the revolutionary proletarian International has passed for a time—for a short time, it goes without saying—to the Russians, just as at various periods of the nineteenth century it was in the hands of the British, then of the French, then of the Germans.

I have had occasion more than once to say that it was easier for the Russians than for the advanced countries to begin the great proletarian revolution, but that it will be more difficult for them to continue it and carry it to final victory, in the sense of the complete organisation of a socialist society. It was easier for us to begin, firstly, because the unusual—for twentieth-century Europe—political backwardness of the tsarist monarchy gave unusual strength to the revolutionary onslaught of the masses. Secondly, Russia's backwardness merged in a peculiar way the proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie with the peasant revolution against the landowners. That is what we started from in October 1917, and we would not have achieved victory so easily then if we had not As long ago as 1856, Mane spoke, in reference to Prussia, of the possibility of a peculiar combination of proletarian revolution and peasant war. From the beginning of 1905 the Bolsheviks advocated the idea of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Thirdly, the 1905 revolution contributed enormously to the political education of the worker and peasant masses, because it familiarised their vanguard with "the last word" of socialism in the West and also because of the revolutionary action of the masses. Without such a "dress rehearsal" as we had in 1905, the revolutions of 1917—both the bourgeois, February revolution, and the proletarian, October revolution—would have been impossible. Fourthly, Russia's geographical conditions permitted her to hold out longer than other countries could have done against the superior military strength of the capitalist, advanced countries. Fifthly, the specific attitude of the proletariat towards the peasantry facilitated the transition from the bourgeois revolution to the socialist revolution, made it easier for the urban proletarians to influence the semi-proletarian, poorer sections of the rural working people. Sixthly, long schooling in strike action and the experience of the European mass working-class movement facilitated the emergence—in a profound and rapidly intensifying revolutionary situation—of such a unique form of proletarian revolutionary organisation as the Soviets. „ , „ Soviet, or proletarian, democracy was born in Russia The proletarian and peasant Soviet Republic has proved to be the first stable socialist republic in the world. As a new type of state it cannot die Source; V, /, Lenin, "The Third International and Its Place in History,"in hi$Collected Works, fourth edition, 45 volumes, edited by George Hatma (Moscow: Progressive Publishers, 19CKM970J, pp. 307-311.

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tation of peasant resettlement in Siberia. Stolypin's attempt to break up the peasant communes, collective entities invested with the rights and responsibilities of peasant landownership, and to create a satisfied and prosperous peasantry with individual ownership of consolidated plots, has received a lot of attention. Of equal importance was his effort to ease the alleged "land shortage" by resettling peasants east of the Urals. The government's migration budget rose from 2.5 million rubles in 1905 to 13 million by 1908. The 1909 appropriation for this purpose exceeded 23 million, and the sums continued to rise until the outbreak of World War I; the draft budget for 1914 was 30,229,000, a sixfold increase over 1906. Zemstvo activists used some of these funds to establish medical-alimentary units along the Trans-Siberian railroad from Irkutsk to the Far East, as well as along the Amur River. They also sent teams of doctors into the newly established settlements to treat the peasants for various diseases. Huge sums were spent on road construction, hydrotechnical works, and communications infrastructure. Other funds were loaned directly to the settlers, who numbered precisely 3,417,502 in the period 1906-1913. Of this group, only 615,891 eventually returned to European Russia.

Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, in his military uniform, circa 1905 (Associated Press)

tion (Obshchezemskaia organizatsiia) in order to coordinate relief efforts for the tsar's sick and wounded soldiers during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The exhausted regime had been forced to allow the organization to operate, and after the cessation of hostilities the union voted to continue its philanthropic efforts in European Russia despite the ban on such joint endeavors imposed by the Zemstvo Statute, the founding legislation of the local bodies. The activists believed that eventually the regime would be compelled to permit independent public initiative to meet the needs of the people in a rapidly changing Russia. Petr Stolypin, the last great statesman of Imperial Russia, who served as prime minister from 1906 until his assassination in 1911, largely agreed with these sentiments. During the decade of its existence (19041914) the General Zemstvo Organization played a crucial role in famine relief for the hard-pressed Russian peasantry. Repeated crop failures produced not only famine, but also outbreaks of diphtheria, typhus, and cholera. Stolypin encouraged the union to play a crucial role not only in food provisioning and related philanthropic endeavors, but also in the facili-

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Even more remarkable was the dramatic increase in zemstvo activities at all levels after 1905. This growing activism flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which contends that educated society was demoralized and marginalized and unable to play a constructive role in Russian public life, especially after the so-called zemstvo reaction set in after the Revolution of 1905. The seizure of the zemstva by conservatives in the wake of this cataclysm has, of course, been amply discussed in the scholarly literature. Special emphasis has been placed on the broad array of programs that were immediately slashed or shut down in 1905-1907. The fact that conservatives dominated the zemstvo after 1905 has repeatedly been cited as evidence that local self-government groups could not possibly have fulfilled their mission as agents for change in the countryside. This assumption, in turn, has led many historians to conclude that Imperial Russia was doomed and that the 1917 Revolution was inevitable. The problem with this standard view, however, is that it stops in 1907, the year in which the main study of the zemstvo ends. Yet, as the historical record from 1908 to 1914 shows, the conservative nobles almost immediately realized that slashing the programs administered by the zemstva would undermine their own political influence and eliminate their ability to shape events in the countryside. Indeed, after 1907 they began to reassemble programs they

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had cut and implemented a wide-ranging program for educational reform that was even more impressive than the one implemented by their liberal forebears. Zemstvo expenditures on schools increased dramatically between 1907 and 1914, especially accelerating during the immediate prewar years. In 1913 total zemstvo budgets increased by nearly 40 million rubles over the previous year; of this increase nearly 42 percent (16.5 million) went to education. State grants to local zemstva also increased from the quite negligible sum of 2 million rubles in 1907 to more than 40 million rubles in 1913, a more than twentyfold increase that accounted for 16 percent of the total zemstvo budget in forty provinces. By 1912 most zemstva had also begun negotiations with the Ministry of Education to participate in a national plan to achieve universal schooling. In August 1911 the government permitted three hundred delegates from local zemstva, teachers, and educators to assemble in Moscow. Although most of the delegates were conservative, this congress passed a series of resolutions that were surprisingly progressive: expansion of adult-education programs, broadening the curriculum of rural schools, and rejecting curricula that emphasized vocational training for peasants rather than a general, secular education. In keeping with Stolypin's prescription for transforming Russia from a servile to a civil society, the zemstvo schools would serve as "bearers of culture" to inculcate in the peasantry the norms of civil society. Conservative nobles jealously guarded their primacy in the countryside and defeated many of Stolypin's proposals to democratize the zemstva. The premier's plans to democratize the elections to the existing, county-level zemstvo and to establish the small zemstvo unit at the most basic level of the peasants' volost', or canton (which no amount of legerdemain could have prevented the peasantry from dominating), were blocked by rightist forces on the local level and nationally in the State Council. A local zemstvo would have empowered peasants and quite likely made good on the asyet-unrealized promise of civic equality for them. Stolypin did, however, manage to restore the peasants' right to select their own representatives to the zemstva, and the granting of internal passports brought them into full citizenship. The peasants' exposure to local politics soon led them to play a more assertive role in zemstvo sessions. Despite the failure of zemstvo reform, these peasant deputies often made common cause with other underrepresented elements of society (such as urban property holders) to lobby for expansion of programs benefiting peasants. Moreover, these peasant deputies voted to increase zemstvo taxes to sup-

port education, agronomy, and medicine. In so doing, they were responding to thousands of petitions presented by peasant communes, further proof that the peasantry had learned the art of political pressure and had begun to make use of Russia's burgeoning public sphere to make their interests and concerns known. In other words, despite the failure to democratize local government, zemstvo programs touched ever widening circles of peasants, and within the village there were elements pressing for wider participation and inclusion in local government. Though the tsarist government on the eve of World War I was still authoritarian, there had been many promising developments in Russian social and political spheres. Peasants worked alongside their former masters in local government and had their own representatives in the national legislature, the State Duma. Together they worked on projects of mutual concern and slowly learned the skills of self-organization necessary to put forward claims in the public sphere—essential preconditions for the development of a civil society. The growing complexity of zemstvo programs resulted in the increased reliance on an emerging middle class of trained professionals whose numbers grew steadily in the prewar years. The myriad conferences, congresses, and commissions that convened to discuss technical, social, economic, and other issues, were also instrumental in fostering public space for an emerging civil society in provincial Russia. The energy with which these public servants tackled the problems of a modernizing Russia gives further evidence that Russian society on the eve of World War I was not—as it is often depicted—demoralized, marginalized, and unable to play a constructive role in the regeneration of the Russian polity; nor was revolutionary upheaval inevitable. -THOMAS EARL PORTER, NORTH CAROLINA A&T STATE UNIVERSITY

References Anonymous, "Historical Transactions: Dress Rehearsal for 1917," in Russia in Transition, 1905-1914: Evolution or Revolution? edited by Robert H. McNeal (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), pp. 19-23. Oskar Anweiler, "The Opening of New Possibilities," in Russia in Transition, 1905-1914: Evolution or Revolution? pp. 10-18. Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2001).

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Ascher, Russia in Disarray, volume 1 of The Revolution of 1905, 2 volumes (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1988, 1992). Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). Mary Schaeffer Conroy, ed., Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia: Case Studies on Local Self-Government (the Zemstvos), State Duma Elections, the Tsarist Government, and the State Council Before and During World War I (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998). Helene Carrere d'Encausse, Nicholas II: The Interrupted Transition (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000).

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Dominic C. B. Lieven, Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994). Nicolai N. Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An Interpretation of Political Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990). Thomas Porter and Scott Seregny, "The Zemstvo Reconsidered," in The Politics of Local Government in Russia, edited by Alfred Evans and Vladimir Gelman (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 19-44.

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ROMANOV MURDERS Did Bolshevik leaders in Moscow order the execution of the Imperial Family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918? Viewpoint: Yes. Local Bolshevik officials in Ekaterinburg repeatedly sought advice from Moscow about the tsar and his family. There is convincing circumstantial evidence that the locals acted on an order from Moscow. Viewpoint: No. Local Bolshevik officials in Ekaterinburg executed former tsar Nicholas II and his family on their own initiative in order to prevent the royals from being liberated by approaching White forces. On the night of 16-17 July 1918, the former tsar Nicholas II, his family, and their servants were executed by Bolshevik forces in the Ural city of Ekaterinburg. Since the former tsar's abdication in March 1917, their fortunes had been uncertain. The royal family had been under house arrest in different parts of Russia at various times, and little attention had been paid to them. Their ultimate fate remained a mystery until 1991 when their remains were finally identified. The exact circumstances of their deaths are known in some detail, but responsibility has been relatively difficult to assign. Many scholars blame the Soviet government. Militantly antitsarist, the Bolsheviks had every ideological and political reason to want the Romanovs dead. A living former tsar was an alternative to their rule and a live banner for opponents to rally around. On the other hand, no direct evidence implicates the government in Moscow. Only hearsay suggests that the murder was carried out on Vladimir Lenin's orders, and the Ural Soviet forces seem to have behaved independently in many areas, including the murder of the Romanovs, as White forces closed in on them.

Viewpoint: Yes. Local Bolshevik officials in Ekaterinburg repeatedly sought advice from Moscow about the tsar and his family. There is convincing circumstantial evidence that the locals acted on an order from Moscow. On 18 July 1918 members of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets in Moscow discussed the execution of the former tsar and his family, which had taken place in the Ural

city Ekaterinburg a day and a half earlier. The Soviet representatives eventually adopted a resolution to "recognize that the Ural Regional Soviet's decision was correct." According to Pmvda,, the Ural Regional Soviet had concluded that execution was the best way to keep the Romanov family from falling into the hands of counterrevolutionary forces in and around Ekaterinburg. Both the government resolution and the Pmvda report led readers to believe that local leaders in Ekaterinburg had executed only the former tsar Nicholas II, not the entire imperial family, and that they had acted under the pressure of events without prior approval from the central gov-

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ernment in Moscow (the government would only later acknowledge that Nicholas's entire family had perished with him). For the next seven decades, Soviet history textbooks presented this version of events—the official version—as the truth. In fact, the Moscow government almost certainly knew and approved of the planned executions ahead of time. It was ignorant only of the details—the exact time the executions would take place, the method to be used, and the means by which the bodies would be removed. To the dismay of historians, however, no "smoking gun" has emerged to prove this complicity. If Vladimir Lenin's government left any such evidence behind, it has not yet been found. Only the accumulation of circumstantial evidence points to Moscow's involvement. First of all, the Moscow leadership left the Romanovs in Ekaterinburg even though it knew that Bolsheviks there wanted to see the Romanovs executed. Nicholas II and his family had been confined to the former governor's residence in Tobol'sk from August 1917 until April 1918, when the central government ordered that they be moved under the supervision of Vasilii lakovlev. Some historians have conjectured that lakovlev had secret orders to transport the Romanovs to Moscow, either for a public trial or as the first step toward their exile. The destination announced in public, however, was Ekaterinburg. During the journey from Tobol'sk to Ekaterinburg, lakovlev corresponded via telegraph with lakov Sverdlov, the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets. On 27 April, lakovlev reported that local forces had made an unsuccessful attempt "to destroy the baggage"—that is, Nicholas, Empress Aleksandra, and Grand Duchess Maria, the family members he was then escorting personally (the others were moving separately). Claiming that "all the Ekaterinburg detachments are striving toward the single goal of destroying the baggage," he suggested that the train be diverted. Ordered to continue on his original course, he replied on 29 April with a telegram that reiterated his misgivings: Without question I submit to all orders from the center. But I consider it my duty to warn the Council of People's Commissars once more that the danger is entirely well founded, which both [the towns of] Tiumen and Omsk can confirm. . . . Thus, we warn you one last time and free ourselves from any moral responsibility for the future consequences. One can question lakovlev's reliability as a source. He may have been exaggerating the immediate danger to the Romanovs for reasons of his own. The events of July 1918 proved his warnings to be accurate, however. Furthermore, 136

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it seems unlikely that the Bolshevik government would entrust lakovlev with such an important mission only to dismiss out of hand the reports he sent. The Moscow leadership thus deliberately placed the Romanovs in an extremely dangerous position, in an area of the country whose local government was only waiting for a good excuse to execute them. Nor did the central government show any urgency in determining the imperial family's ultimate fate. It was not until mid May that the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets began discussing the Romanovs again. Sverdlov and the other leaders seem to have taken up the problem only after they heard that the Ural government was holding its own discussions on the topic. Lev Trotsky wanted to subject Nicholas to a public trial. Trotsky later wrote that Lenin also favored this idea but worried that it would take too much time to organize. At any rate, they seem to have let the matter drop there; if the Politburo made any final decision, it left no record of it. It appears that Moscow was content to let the Ural government take the lead in dealing with the family. It could be argued that the Moscow government actually had no control over the Ural government's decision. The Bolsheviks were still consolidating their power in the face of significant opposition. Even if they could afford to send a detachment to enter the Urals and retrieve the imperial family by force, they could not afford to antagonize their local allies. Circumstances suggest, however, that Moscow was well aware of what the Ural government was planning and that it maintained some influence in the area. A member of the Ural Regional Soviet's presidium, Filipp Goloshchekin, came to Moscow in July to discuss the defense of the region against counterrevolutionaries. He must also have discussed the Romanov family. Pavel Bykov, the chairman of the Ural Regional Soviet, claimed that Goloshchekin sought Moscow's approval for the family's execution but that the central government still preferred the idea of a trial, possibly one staged in Ekaterinburg. This evidence indicates, first, that the Ural government felt reluctant to act without Moscow's consent and, second, that Moscow once again heard of the Ural government's desire to execute the Romanovs. In addition, as Mark Steinberg and Vladimir Khrustalev have argued, it leaves open "the possibility . . . that a contingency plan was discussed." The central government, while withholding its approval for an immediate execution, may have agreed that one could take place if circumstances changed. On the afternoon of 16 July, hours before the executions, Goloshchekin and another Ural Bolshevik sent the following telegram to Petrograd: "Let Moscow know that for military rea-

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THE LIQUIDATION takov lurovsky, the Bolshevik functionary responsible for guarding the former tsar Nicholas It and his family, left this description of their execution and burial:

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

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“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

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“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

Source: "Yurovsky's Account of the Murders" .

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sons the trial agreed upon with Filipp [Goloshchekin] cannot be put off; we cannot wait. If your opinions differ, then immediately notify without delay." Many investigators, including Edvard Radzinsky, have argued that the word "trial" is code for "execution." The central government had received one last opportunity to avert the Romanovs' deaths. Nor is the telegram the only piece of evidence pointing to Moscow's involvement in the events of 16 July. Several individuals came forward in later years to add their memories to the historical record. Bykov wrote that Moscow gave up its idea of a trial and agreed to the executions when it feared that the White forces approaching Ekaterinburg might free the imperial family. In 1920, lakov lurovsky, who supervised the executions, wrote that "a telegram was received from Perm in code containing the order to exterminate the Romanovs." Was this telegram from members of the local government, or was lurovsky remembering an order from Moscow? In the 1960s, a former Kremlin guard claimed that he carried Lenin's confirmation of the executions to the telegraph office. Was he lying to make himself look important, or was he describing a telegram that was later destroyed? Many historians have relied on the testimony of Trotsky, who wrote that he found out about the executions from Sverdlov. Sverdlov told him that the Moscow leadership had made the decision: "Ilyich [Lenin] believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult circumstances." Like Bykov and the Kremlin guard, Trotsky might be lying, or he might have misremembered how events took place. As the amount of testimony mounts up, however, the likelihood increases that at least some of it is correct. Why, then, did the central government choose not to acknowledge its role publicly? By waiting until after the fact to give its official approval—and by initially publicizing only Nicholas's death—Moscow insulated itself from any potential backlash. If foreign governments or segments of the Russian population were too vehement in their disapproval, Bolshevik leaders could claim that they had not known of the executions beforehand and had planned to hold a trial. They may also have reasoned, as investigator Radzinsky has hypothesized, that a local Ural government with royal blood on its hands was "left with only two options—victory over the Whites or death. This must have served to close the ranks of the doomed town's defenders." At the same time, the impression remained that the Ural government took its orders from Moscow, and that the executions were in accord with Moscow's wishes. 140

The Ural leaders who decided to execute the Romanovs, and the guards who carried out the executions, were by no means puppets in the hands of the central government. They showed a great deal of eagerness and initiative. The executions might have been delayed for months, or might never have taken place, if they had not assumed such an active role in deciding the Romanovs' fate. At the same time, the central government must share responsibility for the local government's actions. When the Bolshevik leaders had the Romanovs transported to Ekaterinburg, when they postponed their deliberations on the family's fate, when they talked with Goloshchekin, and when they replied to that final telegram—or failed to reply—they made themselves accessories to murder. -CATHERINE BLAIR, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Local Bolshevik officials in Ekaterinburg executed former tsar Nicholas II and his family on their own initiative in order to prevent the royals from being liberated by approaching White forces. Responsibility for the murder of the imperial family in Ekaterinburg in July 1918 cannot irrefutably be laid at the door of the Bolshevik Party or its leaders in Moscow. No direct evidence has ever surfaced to prove that the Romanovs' execution by firing squad was premeditated, planned out, or spontaneously ordered by the revolutionary government in the Kremlin. No documentary record has emerged to connect Vladimir Lenin to the deaths, and the archives have not yet revealed any palpable evidence of such a connection. The murders were most likely the result of impromptu action on the part of local officials who adhered to the Bolshevik Party and imagined that they were doing the right thing by killing the former tsar, his family, and their retainers. Only hearsay suggests the opposite. lakov Sverdlov, the titular head of the Soviet state in its early days, allegedly told Lev Trotsky, another prominent Bolshevik leader, that Lenin had ordered the deaths and implied the leader's full responsibility. But this allegation only surfaced in a 1935 entry in Trotsky's bitter and undeniably biased diary, written six years after he had been sent into exile by Josef Stalin and seventeen years after the murders in Ekaterin-

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Undated photograph of the imperial family: Princess Olga, Princess Maria, Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Aleksandra, Princess Anastasia, Prince Aleksei, and Princess Tatiana (left to right), all of whom were murdered in July 1918 (Associated Press)

burg. His claim hardly stands as conclusive evidence, for it leaves open the possibilities that Sverdlov lied to Trotsky, that Trotsky's diary entry lied about Sverdlov, that either man or both men were mistaken about the facts, that Trotsky's memory was inaccurate after such a long and traumatic period of time, or any number of other unknown factors. There are few established facts. The Romanovs were held in Ekaterinburg under the authority of the regional soviet for the Ural province. They were thus not directly under the control of the central authorities in Moscow. In 1918, despite their claims to orthodox Marxism, unbending discipline, and absolute obedience, most provincial committees of the Bolshevik Party, which controlled the Ural Soviet, were not under strict central control. Their leaders had an idea of what was "correct" in Bolshevik terms, but direct oversight and

centralized supervision from Moscow were features of the Soviet future. Indeed, the lack of central control in the early months of Soviet rule and the confusion to which it led were major stimulants for tighter centralization and greater rigidity in later times. We know, furthermore, that Lenin and the Council of People's Commissars, the country's formal government in 1918, were informed of the tsar's murder, but not of the family's, after it happened, and that following a brief silence, their legislative work continued. Clearly, they were either unimpressed or had other things to think about and work on. In any case, when a formal telegram arrived from Ekaterinburg to inform them of the murder, its vague language led the central government to telegraph back to the Urals for a fuller statement about the family's fate, which was duly produced. Had Lenin or his close associates ordered their death, why

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would they have sent a telegram to ask their provincial subordinates what they had done? Richard Pipes and other historians have framed the rationale for this odd exchange as part of an elaborate dissimulation to absolve Moscow of responsibility. Yet, since the central government probably never intended for its official correspondence to be revealed publicly, this argument falls short. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the execution happened just a few days before hastily approaching anti-Bolshevik White forces, led by the Czech Legion, marched into Ekaterinburg. The former tsar and his family could actually hear the sound of White artillery shells exploding from their place of imprisonment in the days before they were killed, and rumors of plans to rescue them were common currency. This situation strongly suggests that the Bolshevik forces in the city, which faced defeat and probable capture, executed the family as an expedient measure. Such brutality was not out of character for Bolshevik authorities in exposed areas; they routinely killed prisoners in their charge rather than evacuate them into the interior or leave them behind to be liberated. Other evidence substantiates the conclusion that the Ural Soviet authorities acted on their own initiative. Nothing in the rhetoric or actions of the Soviet regime indicated that its leaders wanted to kill the former tsar, at least not immediately or in secret. Indeed, Nicholas II and his family had been under government house arrest in their first place of exile, the Siberian city of Tobol'sk, from August 1917 until their transfer to Ekaterinburg in April 1918. They were unmolested all winter, even as other political opponents of the regime were killed, arrested by the secret police, and subjected to terrible violence. If the Bolsheviks wanted the Romanovs dead, why did they not kill them immediately after taking power in November 1917, murder them in Tobol'sk at some time in the several months after the coup that established their rule, or bother to move them to Ekaterinburg and house them there for another three months before executing them? The coincidence of the White advance in July 1918 and the panic it caused among local Soviet authorities in Ekaterinburg is too great to be ignored. Practical alternatives to the fate of the Romanovs also existed and were present in the Soviet regime's thinking. Trotsky, for one, dreamed of prosecuting the former tsar in a nationally publicized trial. He later claimed that Lenin supported this decision but added that in the feverish early months of 1918 the government had no time to reach a formal decision on the subject. As many victims of the Soviet state found out, however, spectacular 142

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public trials fit in well with the Bolshevik goals of exposing the old regime's flaws and misdeeds and using the dispensation of revolutionary justice as a tool to advertise the new regime's values and ideology. A live tsar to be put on trial, regardless of his ultimate fate, was a much better asset to the Bolsheviks than a murdered tsar, whose death could, and did, create some popular resentment and international disapproval. As for the family, killing them served little purpose. Indeed, the government in Moscow so feared negative public and international opinion that it long denied that anyone other than the former tsar had been killed. Just having signed a punitive peace treaty with Germany in March 1918, Moscow was ill advised to jeopardize good or at least neutral relations with its powerful erstwhile adversary by murdering the German-born Empress Aleksandra and her children, of whom the youngest was Kaiser Wilhelm II's godson, Tsarevich Aleksei. A fourteenyear-old hemophiliac whose claim to the throne had been renounced on his behalf at the time of Nicholas II's abdication, he posed no political threat to the regime. Neither did Nicholas and Aleksandra's four daughters, whose rights of succession were superseded by those of every male member of the Romanov dynasty. For years after the murder, the Soviets officially maintained the fiction that the family was still alive somewhere. Foreign Affairs Commissar Georgii Chicherin claimed in 1922 that the tsar's daughters were living in the United States! Formal acknowledgment that all had died in Ekaterinburg only came in 1926. Moreover, without any real public support for monarchism, the Romanovs posed no political threat to Bolshevism comparable to that of the liberals, right-wing military formations, and opposition socialists—the principal elements composing the White forces. Unlike those groups, a majority of other members of the dynasty survived their time in Bolshevik hands, including the former tsar's mother, sisters, niece, and most of his cousins and in-laws. They were, if not treated exactly well, free from mortal harm and permitted to emigrate. Those who were killed around the same time as the imperial family, including Nicholas IPs brother Grand Duke Michael, shot at Perm, and a group of other relatives detained and murdered at Alapaevsk—neither place far from Ekaterinburgwere also caught near the rapidly fluctuating civil war front line and were probably done away with to keep them out of the hands of White armed forces. Four additional Romanov grand dukes were shot in Petrograd in 1919, but their executions were at the height of the Red Terror and unconnected to the prior murders.

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Exactly two-thirds of the Romanov family members alive in 1917, thirty-four out of fifty-one individuals, including several males with viable pretensions to the throne, survived the revolution to live in exile with their families, some of whose members continue to keep up a claim. The deaths of the Romanovs in Ekaterinburg was most likely an unplanned and unpremeditated outcome of revolution and civil war. -JOHN PAWL, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Greg King, The Fate of the Romanovs (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2003). George Leggett, The Cheka, Lenin's Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (December 1917 to February 1922) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Robert K. Massie, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (New York: Random House, 1995). Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1995).

References Victor Alexandrov, The End of the Romanovs (London: Hutchinson, 1966). Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996).

Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II, translated by Marian Schwartz (New York: Doubleday, 1992). Mark D. Steinberg and Vladimir M. Khrustalev, eds., The Fall of the Romanovs: Political Dreams and Personal Struggles in a Time of Revolution (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995).

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RUSSIA AND THE BALKANS Did Russia abandon its traditional role as protector of Serbia and other Balkan states during the Revolutionary period? Viewpoint: Yes. Russia's role in the Balkans was self-serving and rarely resulted in meaningful protection of the region's peoples and nations. Viewpoint: No. Russia helped the Balkan states facilitate the independence of the region's peoples before the 1917 revolution and protected them later. Russia's protective role of the Balkans has been a long-lasting cliche of European politics. Bound to their larger neighbor by Orthodox Christianity, Slavic roots, and a common heritage of opposition to the Muslim Turks, the Balkan peoples, many have argued, found earnest and reliable protectors in their Russian neighbors. Russia faithfully supported their revolts against the Ottoman Empire, crafted diplomacy to safeguard their interests, and intervened directly to help them achieve independence from Muslim rule. Russia in this view was noble, helpful, and beneficent. Other scholars have questioned Russia's motivations in the Balkans. Despite the fraternal rhetoric, many have suggested that Russia wanted to grab as much Balkan territory for itself as possible, a policy designed to help deliver the Turkish Straits and access to the Mediterranean Sea for Russian warships and commerce. "Helping" the Balkans largely meant Russian attempts to control emerging Balkan nations, all of which experienced some kind of Russian interference in their internal affairs shortly after they achieved independence. Most of the Balkan states and peoples rejected these heavyhanded maneuvers, did their best to expel Russian influence, and, in some cases, aligned themselves with Russia's opponents.

Viewpoint: Yes. Russia's role in the Balkans was self-serving and rarely resulted in meaningful protection of the region's peoples and nations.

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As the largest and most powerful Slavic nation, Russia often presented itself as the guardian of the Slavic peoples in the Balkans. Russian rulers dating at least to Peter the Great sought to play such a role. In 1774 Russia won treaty rights giving it formal diplomatic status as the protector of the Ottoman Empire's

Orthodox Christian subjects. The Russian people, ranging from the Imperial family to common peasants, often made clear through their actions that they were concerned about the suffering of their fellow Slavs under the rule of foreign empires. Still, official Russian policies often failed to match the Pan-Slavic rhetoric of those who sought closer ties with other Slavic nations. However much they might sympathize with Slavs ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs or Ottoman Turks, Russia's rulers were reluctant to undermine the prerogatives of autocrats because of what that precedent could mean to their control of the various ethnic groups within the

Russian Empire. Despite the fondest hopes of the most fervent Pan-Slavs, Russia's role in the Balkans was generally exaggerated and rarely resulted in meaningful protection of the region's peoples and nations. Russia's most assertive pro-Slav policies often were the result of internal Russian dynamics, particularly between 1853 and 1914. In this period Russia suffered humiliating defeats in two major wars, various diplomatic embarrassments, and growing instability at home. These problems, rather than the needs of the Balkan Slavs, drove Russian policy. The humiliating defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856) left the Russians isolated among the great powers of Europe. The quest for a redemptive national mission, and suitable allies, turned Russia toward the Balkans. The Russians suffered another major humiliation in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), enduring the special disgrace of losing to an Asian nation previously thought inferior to the European powers. This ended Russian imperial enthusiasm for ventures in the Far East and redirected Russian attention toward the Balkans. When the Russians focused on the Balkans, though, their policies were driven by Russian motives and interests and were hindered by Russian weaknesses and limitations. Especially during the most noteworthy crises in the Balkans in the 1870s and again during the 1910s, Russia failed to provide much help to the Balkan Slavs. The Crimean War was a major turning point for Russian foreign policy. Russia was badly defeated by Britain and France and diplomatically isolated. Even Austria, which had been a Russian ally, had lent its support to the victorious coalition. Defeat and abandonment left Russia distrustful of Western Europeans. In the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the Crimean War, Russia withdrew its forces from Moldavia and Wallachia (present-day Romania) and surrendered the mouth of the Danube River and part of Bessarabia. Russia also relinquished its diplomatic status as protector of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Most embarrassing, it gave up the right to establish forts or maintain a navy in the Black Sea, even on Russian territory. In response to national humiliation and diplomatic isolation, it became popular among Russian thinkers to see Slavic civilization as highly advanced and Orthodox Christianity as the true faith. It followed, then, that Russia should reinvigorate its mission of protecting the Slavs and Orthodox Christians from the less advanced societies of Western Europe. In order to play this role and boost its prestige, it was essential for Russia to fill a leadership role among other Slavic peoples. While the Poles and sometimes the Czechs were excepted from the list of Slavic peoples subject to Russia's interest because they HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

were not Orthodox Christians, there were many Slavic peoples in the Balkans who were of interest to the Russians. The Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bulgarians received Russian interest and attention. Even the Greeks and Romanians, Orthodox but not Slavic, also fell into the category of peoples the Russians sometimes sought to protect. Many proponents of an enlarged Russian role in the Balkans envisioned the Russians eventually leading a federation of its peoples, or the replacement of Ottoman suzerainty with Russian. Yet, the key, at least to Russian Pan-Slavists, was for Russia to be in charge. Russian interest in the Balkans became crucial during the crisis of 1875-1878. The crisis began when Christian peasants living in Muslimgoverned Bosnia-Herzegovina began rebelling. In the spring of 1876 the Bulgarians also began to rebel. The ill-fated uprisings were brutally put down by Ottoman forces. In June the Serbs went to war against the Ottomans. Although Russia was unprepared to enter the war at that time, there was ample popular support for the Serbs in Russia. A distinguished Russian general led the Serb forces, who received additional support from about five thousand Russian volunteers who served in the Serbian army. Financial support also came from individual Russians. Even poor Russian peasants rushed off to enlist, or donated kopeks to support the Serb forces. Despite this unofficial support from Russia, the Serbs were badly mauled by the Turks. The great powers of Europe tried and failed to resolve the situation, and in April 1877 the Russians formally declared war. At first glance this might appear as a triumph of Pan-Slavic policy. After the Russians provided private economic, military, and moral support for the Balkan Serbs in their showdown with the Ottoman Turks, including Pyotr Tchaikovsky's composition of the Marche Slave (1876), Russia fought and defeated the Turks on the behalf of the Slavic people. The reality, however, was more disappointing. The Balkan nations had conflicting territorial aims. The preliminary peace agreement, the Treaty of San Stefano, never went into effect as the great powers of Europe convened the Congress of Berlin to redraw the boundaries. The revised peace, the Treaty of Berlin, left virtually all the Slavs displeased with Russia. The Serbs were unhappy that the Russians did so little to further Serbian territorial ambitions vis-a-vis Romania, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire, which retained control of a large swath of Balkan territory. Bulgarians were unhappy that Russia failed to convince the great powers to deliver the full terms of the San Stefano settlement, which would have united all Bulgarians in one large state. Instead, they were forced to accept a smaller Bulgaria that VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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Damaged artillery piece in an abandoned trench during the Second Balkan War of 1913 when Russia's ally Serbia made significant territorial gains at the expense of Bulgaria (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ CORBIS, HU032482)

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excluded many ethnic Bulgarians. Bosnia's Christians were left under nominal Ottoman rule and Austro-Hungarian administrative rule. This dissatisfaction complicated future Russian efforts in the Balkans. While some Bulgarians were highly Russophilic, others resented what they saw as frequent, unwarranted Russian interference in Bulgarian internal affairs. Mounting frustration led to the fall of Russia's handpicked ruler of Bulgaria, Prince Alexander of Battenberg, and to the dismissal of his Russian advisers. The country's next ruler, Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, had a pro-German and pro-Austrian orientation and in 1915 led Bulgaria into World War I on their side. The Serbs, meanwhile, grew so frustrated with Russia that they began seeking closer ties with the AustroHungarian Empire. Austria-Hungary, trying to prevent strife with the Serbs that later contributed to the outbreak of World War I, encouraged the Serbs' pro-Austrian tendencies, which endured until a coup d'etat installed a rival, pro-Russian dynasty in 1903. Conflict between the Bulgarians and the Serbs was a frequent feature of Balkan diplomacy between 1878 and 1915, and the Russians frequently failed to medi-

ate effectively despite their pretensions to influence in the Balkans. The Russians again had difficulty during a major period of crisis in the Balkans in the early twentieth century. Despite its efforts to win the friendship of Serbia, Austria-Hungary continued to experience difficulties. The Serbs living outside the empire contributed significantly to the problem. Some wanted to see the creation of a greater Serbia in which all ethnic Serbs were united in one country. Others preferred to see a united kingdom of South Slavs, such as the Yugoslavia created after World War I. Both views were unofficially endorsed by the Serbian government after 1903. For their part, the Austrians could not abide any solution predicated upon the creation of ethnically or linguistically unified nation-states. In attempting to deal with these pressures, Austria-Hungary in October 1908 formally annexed the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina, without any meaningful response from Russia. This caused an uproar, even among Russians who thought their government should have done more to prevent the annexation. Yet, Russia had no international support and was forced to back down. Russia appeared ineffective again

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just four years later in the First Balkan War. A Serb-Bulgarian mutual assistance treaty signed in March 1912 paved the way for an attack on the Ottoman Empire by Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro. The Balkan nations defeated the Turks and made considerable territorial gains in the peace. Just as had been the case in 1878, however, the great powers of Europe again stepped in and imposed a different settlement, less favorable to the Balkan Slavs. Again the Russians were isolated and unwilling to fight, and the great powers were able to trim the gains the Balkan nations had been expecting from their war against the Ottoman Empire. Conflict again came to the Balkans the very next year. Lingering Bulgarian-Serb tension and a desire finally to achieve the frontiers of the San Stefano peace led the Bulgarians to launch an unwise attack on Serbia. Not only were the Bulgarians defeated, but Greece, Romania, and the Ottoman Empire also joined the attack. The two victories in 1912 and 1913 left Serbia with about twice the size and population it had previously. The Bulgarians, meanwhile, were unhappy with the Serbs and still yearned to recapture the San Stefano boundaries. This would shape the involvement of both nations in World War I, which grew out of the crisis that followed the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914. Austrian leaders held the government of Serbia accountable, figuring that the assassination plot could not have been carried out without government knowledge. The failure to find a diplomatic resolution to this crisis led to Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia. The Russian government realized that it had to fight in defense of Serbia if Russia were to maintain any prestige and influence in Europe. Bulgaria remained neutral at first, wooed by both the Allies and the Central Powers. The Central Powers were able to offer Bulgaria greater incentives, and in 1915 it looked to the government in Sofia like the Central Powers would win. Thus, the Bulgarians entered the war on the opposite side of the Russians and Serbs. Russian efforts to serve as the mentor and proctor of Balkan Slav nations were in tatters. What is most noteworthy about Russian policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was how little the Russians were able to do for Balkan Slavs. With the Ottoman Empire in decay, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire finding it ever more difficult to maintain peace among the various peoples in its multiethnic empire, the Russians were unable to produce policies that would lead to steady gains for the Balkan Slavs or that would produce peace among their Slavic clients. Russian power was inadequate to protect the gains of Balkan nations in the war of 1877-1878, to prevent the Austrian

IMPERIAL MANIFESTO August 2, 1914 By the Grace of God, We, Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of all Russia, Tsar of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, etc., etc,, etc., proclaim to all Our loyal subjects: Following her historical traditions, Russia, united in faith and blood with the Slav nations, has never regarded their fate with indifference. The unanimous fraternal sentiments of the Russian people for the Slavs have been aroused to special intensity in the past few days, when Austria-Hungary presented to Serbia demands which she foresaw would be unacceptable to a Sovereign State, Having disregarded the conciliatory and peaceable reply of the Serbian Government, and having declined Russia's well-intentioned mediation, Austria hastened to launch an armed attack in a bombardment of unprotected Belgrade. Compelled, by the force of circumstances thus created, to adopt the necessary measures of precaution, We commanded that the army and the navy be put on a war footing, but, at the same time, holding the blood and the treasure of Our subjects dear, We made every effort to obtain a peaceable issue of the negotiations that had been started. In the midst of friendly communications, Austria's Ally, Germany, contrary to our trust in century-old relations of neighborliness, and paying no heed to Our assurances that the measures We had adopted implied no hostile aims whatever, insisted upon their immediate abandonment, and, meeting with a rejection of this demand, suddenly declared war on Russia, We have now to intercede not only for a related country, unjustly attacked, but also to safeguard the honor, dignity, and integrity of Russia, and her position among the Great Powers. We firmly believe that all Our loyal subjects will rally self-sacrrficingly and with one accord to the defense of the Russian soil. At this hour of threatening danger, let domestic strife be forgotten. Let the union between the Tsar and His people be stronger than ever, and let Russia, rising like one man, repel the insolent assault of the enemy. With a profound faith in the justice of Our cause, and trusting humbly in Almighty Providence, We invoke prayerfully the Divine blessing for Holy Russia and our valiant troops. Given at Saint Petersburg, on the second day of August, in the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fourteen, and the twentieth year of Our reign. NICHOLAS Source: Frank A, Go/cfe/; &d., Documents of Russian History, 1914-1917, translated by Emanuel Aronsberg (Gloucester, Mass,: Peter Smith, f964J, pp, 29-30,

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annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, to protect the Balkan nations' gains in the First Balkan War, or to prevent the Second Balkan War (1913). Despite Pan-Slavist rhetoric, Russian policies brought little benefit to the Balkan Slavs in their region's most noteworthy crises. JOHN SOARES, CINCINNATI

Viewpoint: No. Russia helped the Balkan states facilitate the independence of the region's peoples before the 1917 revolution and protected them later. In 1999 Russian paratroopers raced from Bosnia to Kosovo to secure the Slatina airport in Pristina mere hours before NATO deployment, thereby claiming a role in the future political development of the region. Serbs were not surprised the next day as the media broadcast American and Western officials, who only the night before had celebrated their success in undercutting the Russians from their historic sphere of interest, sputtering in disbelief as they realized that the Russians had unexpectedly outmaneuvered them and were now a presence with which the Westerners would have to contend. Russia, the historical guardian of the Balkans, had returned and was keeping a watchful eye over its ward. None of this should have come as much of a surprise given the past history between Russia and Serbia as well as with other states on the Balkan Peninsula. Russia's status as traditional protector of the region was based on faith, common culture, and honor. Russia facilitated the liberation and independence of these states and came to their aid in later times through the use of political pressure or military intervention as well as guidance at pivotal points. Russia paid dearly for aiding and protecting these Balkan peoples and their fledgling states. It frequently acted contrary to its interests, often complicating relations with other states, and incurred incredible costs that hampered its own internal development and evolution. The unique kinship felt by Russians toward their fellow Orthodox Slavs was reflected in the hyperbole of the Tsarist declarations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and echoed by Russian elites. There was no doubt that the Russians supported those Orthodox Slavs who they fervently believed were suffering under the domination of the Muslim Ottoman and Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empires. This frater148

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nal Slavic Orthodox sentiment would become interwoven with Russian national consciousness as well as with Russian foreign policy. The seeds of this sentiment were sown by Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century. In 1774 Catherine's military success brought about the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji, which gave Russia the right to defend all Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. Russia thus became the dominant power in the Black Sea, the supreme champion of Eastern Christians, and the main opponent of the Ottoman Empire. Concerns about the welfare of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire would continue to be a driving force in Russian foreign relations, providing the justification for Russian declarations of war in 1788,1806,1828,1853, and 1877. Even other powers recognized the religious bonds, as well as Slavic cultural ties in certain cases, connecting Russia to the Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, and Greeks. Britain continued to prop up the ailing "Sick Man of Europe" in a variety of manners, such as insisting that the Turks pass reforms to ease the situation of their Balkan populations, in an attempt to oppose Russia's influence and appeal to those subjugated by the Ottomans in the region. The most significant, tangible form of aid Russia offered to these people, and eventually to their states, arrived in the form of Russian troops. Even the perceived threat or mere hint of Russian military involvement was often enough to benefit the Balkan Orthodox Christians. Obviously, more concrete was actual Russian military intervention. This is not to say that Russia was always reliable in its support or that its soldiers were at the constant disposal of the Balkan peoples, nor that Russia was never guided by its own agenda or the need for self-preservation. During the Napoleonic wars, Russia abandoned Serbia to bear the wrath of the Turks after the failure of the first Serbian insurrection in 1804. Bogged down in an unsuccessful war against Napoleonic France followed by an uneasy peace and then a French invasion of Russia itself, it simply lacked the resources. Once France was defeated, however, Russia was free to focus on other matters, including the plight of its Orthodox brethren. Russia's successful campaign of 1828-1829 and the resulting Treaty of Adrianople forced the sultan to grant Serbia autonomy under Russian protection, affirm Greek independence, and acquiesce to Russian occupation of Moldavia and Wallachia, the core entities of the future independent Romania. The Crimean War (1853-1856) ended in a tremendous defeat for Russia, but with respect to the Balkans, the most severe blow was that the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji was undone and that Russia lost the legal right to meddle in Ottoman

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internal affairs. A collective international guarantee replaced Russia's protection of the Balkan Christians. Russia, however, was persistent. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, touched off by the suppression of anti-Ottoman riots in Serbia and Bulgaria, resulted in a Russian victory. Although the initial peace, the Treaty of San Stefano, was revised at the Congress of Berlin, the spoils from the war were noteworthy. Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania became independent states. Russia was recognized as dominant in Bulgaria, where it reorganized the government. By the time World War I broke out in 1914, Russia's wars with the Ottoman Empire had yielded five new independent states: Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and Bulgaria. The argument that Russia was guided chiefly by self-interest can easily be dismissed by a cursory examination of the colossal cost, whether in terms of human life, diplomacy, or economics, resulting from the many wars Russia waged leading up to World War I. The toll in human terms ran up to 40,000 in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828-1829, 450,000 in the Crimean War, 120,000 in 1877-1878, and several million in World War I. The financial damage was almost as staggering. For example, the Russian national debt increased nearly fivefold, from 108 million rubles in 1853 to 533 million in 1856. Rather than developing its own economy and industry and therefore addressing internal social issues, Russia devoted incredible resources, both human and financial, to these wars. Russia not only compromised itself in terms of blood and treasure but also in ideology as well. A longtime supporter of autocratic government in Europe, Russia, which had vociferously condemned underground movements and national independence programs, stood by Serbia's side in 1914, despite the fact that a conspiracy accomplished an assassination of an heir to a European throne to further national independence. Again, Russia's sense of duty and responsibility toward its Balkan cousins would cost it greatly. Involvement in World War I set the stage for collapse of the Romanov monarchy and the Bolshevik Revolution, the outcome of which was a seven-decade sentence of communism. Even decades of the Cold War could not completely eradicate the relationship between Russia and its Balkan siblings. En route to Sarajevo in the 1990s, Russian soldiers passing through were greeted by cheering Bosnian Serbs who had lined the streets. In reaction to the NATO bombing campaign in 1999, an unparalleled political consensus in Russia swelled against the NATO intervention as an unjust act of aggression and violation of sovereignty. The ancient concerns of honor, duty, and fraternity were restored. Russia reclaimed its position and responsibility as HISTORY

a great power and protector of the Balkan states. Vyacheslav Kostikov, Boris Yeltsin's spokesman, stated that Russia had "returned to the sources of its historical policy and role in the Balkans and defended the Serbs, who are close in faith, culture, and national spirit" (Laird 19). JELENA BUDJEVAC, WASHINGTON, D.C.

References Nadia Alexandrova Arbatova, "European Security after the Kosovo Crisis: The Role of Russia," Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 1 (May 2001): 64-79. E. J. Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Richard C. Hall, Bulgaria's Road to the First World War (Boulder, Colo.: Eastern European Monographs, 1996). Charles Jelavich and Barbara Jelavich, The Balkans (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965). Laurie Laird, "Shared History," Europe, 337 (June 1994): 19. A. L. Macfie, The Eastern Question 1774-1923 (London: Longman, 1989). David MacKenzie, Serbs and Russians (Boulder, Colo.: Eastern European Monographs, 1996). Gordon M artel, The Origins of the First World War (Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Longman, 2003). David McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Jelena Milojkovic-Djuric, Panslavism and National Identity in Russia and the Balkans (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Philip E. Moseley, Russian Diplomacy and the Opening of the Easter Question in 1838 and 1839 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934). Andrew Rossos, Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalries and Russian Foreign Policy 19081914 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1981). B. H. Sumner, Russia and the Balkans 1870-1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937). Astrid Tuminez, Russian Nationalism Since 1856: Ideology and the Making of Foreign Policy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

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RUSSIA IN WORLD WAR I Was Russia a viable combatant in World War I?

Viewpoint: Yes. Russia dealt effectively with the requirements of waging a major war; the actions of the tsar's army on the Eastern Front prevented Germany from focusing all its energies on fighting Russia's allies in the West. Viewpoint: No. The underdevelopment of Russian industry and transportation placed severe limitations on its military effectiveness.

Russia was one of the biggest losers in World War I. Its victories were few and fleeting, while its defeats were tremendous and lasting. Germany occupied much of the most productive Russian territory. During the first year of the war alone, Russia suffered four million casualties. In 1917 social, political, and economic strains associated with the conflict caused the collapse of two systems of government in succession and ushered in a massive social revolution. A third system of government, the Bolshevik regime, took power in November 1917 and extricated the nation from the war, but with massive territorial losses, by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Given these facts, it would seem that Russia was not a viable World War I combatant. After all, it lost the war while its government and society crumbled, to be replaced with a communist dictatorship. Comparative perspectives suggest that there was much more to the story, however. Russia was not the only empire that fell during the period. The war also caused the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires and created serious social and political strains in France, Italy, Serbia, Greece, and other combatant powers, while discontent grew in the British Empire. Recent revisionist scholarship suggests that Russia and its developing civil institutions—such as local government, industrial organizations, and charitable enterprises—may have played a noteworthy and laudable role in supporting the Russian war effort. This chapter assesses their strengths and shortcomings.

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Viewpoint: Yes. Russia dealt effectively with the requirements of waging a major war; the actions of the tsar's army on the Eastern Front prevented Germany from focusing all its energies on fighting Russia's allies in the West. Modern wars have been not only harbingers of social, political, and economic change, but often instruments of modernization. Norman Stone, for example, has described World War I not "as a vast rundown of most accounts, but as a crisis of growth, a modernization crisis in thin disguise." The experience of Russia during the conflict serves as proof of this observation; its increasingly civic-minded entrepreneurial and professional class responded to the opportunities presented by the conflict and assumed many burdens that normally would have been the responsibility of the state in time of war. More important, the prewar breaking down of the peasantry's isolation from the broader national community was given new impetus during the war years. Thus, instead of derailing Russia's evolution toward a liberal constitutional order, World War I accelerated that trend. Only the unexpected duration of the conflict and the dismal failure of the Provisional Government facilitated the social disintegration and anarchy that made the Bolshevik coup possible. Many historical studies tend to focus only on the developments that led to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. All too often, positive accounts of Russian contribution to the Allies' cause are glossed over, perhaps because in so many ways the fighting was directly and decisively related to the collapse of the monarchy in 1917. The reader should keep in mind, however, that three other empires—the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires—were also unable to survive World War I, while two other imperial powers—Britain and Franceemerged victorious but found themselves on a downward trajectory that ended with the loss of colonies after World War II. It might be better to examine how a supposedly polarized Russia stood up so well to the stresses and strains of total warfare for nearly three years. To be sure, the increasing irrelevance of the tsarist regime was laid bare during World War I, but the Russian public responded heroically to the crises that the conflict engendered and demonstrated its viability by taking over the responsibilities of providing medical services for the tsar's soldiers and even supplying munitions, food, and clothing to the army. A civilian medical corps was organized

virtually overnight, and doctors, nurses, and paramedics were sent to the front. These organizations evacuated the sick and wounded to fully equipped hospitals in the rear and operated fiftyone railroad trains that moved more than four million soldiers away from the front lines. Voluntary organizations—which included the All-Russian Zemstvo Union, the All-Russian Union of Towns, and the War Industries Committee—assumed government functions and instituted a wide range of welfare programs, including rehabilitation for disabled veterans and job training and employment for refugees. They also staffed laboratories, dispatched vaccination and disinfection units to fight epidemics, and established laundries and bathhouses. The unions operated a small fleet of river barges, started factories to produce tannin for making shoes of leather from their own cattle farms, and set up garages and machine shops to outfit and repair their motor pools. Altogether, there were several hundred thousand men and women working heroically to aid in the war effort, a response that equaled patriotic home-front mobilization throughout Europe. This phenomenon has been a seriously neglected aspect of the Russian wartime experience. Although refugees accounted for 5 percent of Russia's total wartime population and thus outnumbered the industrial working class by a margin of two to one, a comprehensive study of the phenomenon was not undertaken until 1999. The significance of the crucial cohort of professionals that tended to the needs of refugees and accomplished many other tasks cannot be underestimated. Until 1906 national professional associations had been proscribed by law, and even after that time the government was wary about allowing them to become too powerful. During World War I, however, in order to conduct business—whether staffing hospitals, outfitting trains, or organizing evacuations from front to rear—the associations met in ad hoc congresses with thousands of other technical experts to explore issues of mutual concern. These meetings paralleled those that took place in the countryside in prewar Russia. The government was understandably alarmed and well aware that this practical wartime work would lead inevitably to the postwar modernization of Russian social and political relations. Minister of the Interior Nikolai Maklakov warned that, unless constrained, the many voluntary organizations in Russia were "preparing themselves for work on the reconstruction of public life which must come, they feel, at the conclusion of the war." Historian Richard Pipes has described these activities as "the symptoms of a silent revolution" and observed that "in the midst of the war a new Russia was taking shape." Historian Orlando Figes has rightly noted that

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German soldiers inspecting dead Russians entangled in barbed wire on the Eastern Front, circa 1915 (Associated Press)

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by 1916 the Russian public's war effort had "grown into a huge national infrastructure, a state within a state," and that "the revolution had its roots in the wartime activities of the voluntary organizations." The government could not have shut down these organizations without an inexcusable increase in human misery. Educated Russians responded as they did to the problems engendered by the war because they believed that the power of Russia rested on the mobilization of all Russian society. Like the other major combatants in World War I, Russia had to become a "nation at arms," requiring a deep commitment on the part of all Russians. Many scholars have posited that Russian peasants, unlike their urban counterparts, were unfamiliar with the concept of the nation and thus lacked a commitment to the war effort. A recent study of patriotic culture has asserted that the use of "external motifs" (such as stereotypical depictions of the kaiser and the Germans) in propaganda geared for peasant audiences demonstrate the chasm between town and country because the urbanized and educated portions of Russian society were propagandized with "internal motifs" such as the ideas of the Russian nation or fighting alongside the Western democracies against German militarism. This theory is overstated; the consistent and conscientious efforts of educated society to implement univer-

sal schooling (and thus acculturation of peasants to the concept of citizenship)—efforts that were clearly accelerating prior to the war—held important implications for peasant integration with the rest of Russian society and the development of a civic identity within the peasant class. Until recently this aspect of peasant education has been little explored. To be sure, the development of mass education had only just begun to take hold in Russia when it entered World War I. But as Scott Seregny has shown, the peasantry was intensely interested in the conflict from its beginning, and the war piqued its interest in the outside world. Simple geography lessons made the peasant village more aware of the outside world and reinforced the concept of nation to them. The spread of newspapers, as well as maps throughout rural Russia, fed the peasantry's immense hunger for information about the history behind the conflict and the fascinating new technology of modern warfare, such as airplanes, dirigibles, machine guns, and submarines. This demand led to a pronounced growth in rural public libraries, lectures, and adult-literacy classes. Peasant soldiers at the front wrote letters urging their wives to send their children to school. As a result, by the fall of 1916, schools run by the zemstvo (rural local self-government) were besieged with applicants. The impetus of the war for peasant educa-

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tion and the concomitant expansion of available programs and information suggests that the war accelerated the development of a national consciousness, a crucial factor on which all major combatants relied. One must also bear in mind that the Russian military contributions to the conflict were not negligible. Its army's operations tied down large numbers of German troops who would otherwise have been sent to the Western Front (and were sent there after the Bolshevik government concluded a separate peace settlement at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918). The unexpectedly rapid mobilization of Russian troops and their sudden advance into East Prussia in August 1914—both achievements of a viable, modern military—forced the Germans to divert two full army corps from the West to contain the challenge. This action probably saved Paris from quick capture and France from speedy defeat, the fundamental goal of the German strategy for winning a two-front war, and helped to prevent a decisive German breakthrough on the Western Front for most of the war. Indeed, the Germans were not able to achieve this goal until their spring 1918 offensive, mounted with the legions of troops available after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. On other fronts, Russian armies inflicted regular defeats on the forces of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, the two principal allies of Germany, and forced the Germans to make substantial commitments of troops and supplies to shore up their defensive efforts. Even after two and a half years of brutal conflict, the Russian army held together for another six months after the fall of the Romanov dynasty in March 1917. Ultimately, the gap between the wish of the peasantry for peace and that of the patriotic middle and elite classes for victory resulted in a stalemate over the single most important issue facing the Provisional Government that replaced the monarchy: war or peace. The Provisional Government saw itself as an interim, temporary government that lacked the legitimacy to make any far-reaching decisions about Russia's future. The long delays in holding national elections for an effective government (largely because Russian liberals thought the masses were not ready for democracy and would make the wrong decisions on the important issues of the day), however, paved the way for the Bolshevik takeover. This lack of faith in the political maturity of the people led to anarchy, chaos, and ruin. Further evidence that the basic elements of a democratic society were, in fact, beginning to flower can be seen in the zemstvo elections held in fall 1917—before the Bolshevik coup (and six months after the collapse of the tsarist regime)— and those for the Constituent Assembly in November of the same year. Some scholars have HISTORY

asserted that the turnouts for the zemstvo elections were low and thus show the intransigence and isolation of the peasantry from the political life of the nation. But considering that the zemstvo elections were held at harvesttime and that women (who were eligible to vote for the first time) generally stayed away from the polls, turnouts were remarkably high, ranging from 40 to 50 percent. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, nearly forty-five million citizens expressed their will through the ballot box. Great multitudes of free people were taking an interest in the leadership of their country and in its political future. The evidence clearly suggests that Russian social and political development during World War I should be reassessed. One should also not overlook the fact that Russian military actions on the Eastern Front made a substantial contribution to Allied victory in the conflict. -THOMAS EARL PORTER NORTH CAROLINA A&T STATE UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. The underdevelopment of Russian industry and transportation placed severe limitations on its military effectiveness. World War I was the first total war of the industrial era. Fielding huge conscript armies, combatant nations were driven to produce tremendous quantities of munitions and armaments, as well as commodities such as food, clothing, and paper. Germany held off its many enemies for more than four years not because of military brilliance or because it had the largest army but because it was thoroughly industrialized and well managed. At the other end of the spectrum, Russia collapsed because it was poorly managed and much less industrialized. The collapse of Russia was surprising to some Europeans. Yet, on the eve of World War I, other observers had been uncertain about how Russia would perform in the event of a general war. Since the Napoleonic wars, Europe had been fascinated with the size of Russian armies. After their success against Napoleon in 1812, however, the Russians' larger wars in the intervening years were not nearly so impressive. The Crimean War (18531856) and the Russo-Japanese War (19041905) tarnished the reputation of the tsar's armies. After the Crimean War, Russia turned inward and focused on catching up with the West. Beginning in the last quarter of the nine-

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LENIN'S CALL FOR PEACE After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Vladimir Lenin spoke before the Second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers'and Soldiers' Deputies, calling for immediate negotiations to end World War I. Part of Lenin's speech is included below. Although Lenin called for concluding a peace agreement without annexations or indemnities, in its Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany (March 1918), Russia lost Ukraine, its Polish and Baltic territories, and Finland.

The Workers' and Peasants' Government, created by the revolution of October 24-25, and drawing its strength from the Soviets of Workers*, Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies, proposes to ail warring peoples and their governments to begin at once negotiations leading to a just democratic peace. A just and democratic peace for which the great majority of wearied, tormented and warexhausted toilers and labouring classes of all belligerent countries are thirsting, a peace which the Russian workers and peasants have so loudly and insistently demanded since the overthrow of the Tsar's monarchy, such a peace the government considers to be an immediate peace without annexations (i.e., without the seizure of foreign territory and the forcible annexation of foreign nationalities) and without indemnities. The Russian Government proposes to all warring peoples that this kind of peace be concluded at once; it also expresses its readiness to take immediately, without the least delay, all decisive steps pending the final confirmation of all the terms of such a peace by the plenipotentiary assemblies of ail countries and ail nations. By annexation or seizure of foreign territory the government, in accordance with the legal concepts of democracy in general and of the working class in particular, understands any incorporation of a small and weak nationality by a large and powerful state without a clear, definite and voluntary expression of agreement and desire by the weak nationality, regardless of the time when such forcible incorporation took place, regardless also of how developed or how backward is the nation forcibly attached or forcibly detained within the frontiers of the [larger] state, and, finally, regardless of whether or not this large nation is located in Europe or in distant lands beyond the seas. If any nation whatsoever is detained by force within the boundaries of a certain state, and if [that nation], contrary to its expressed desire whether such desire is made manifest in the press, national assemblies, party relations, or rn protests and uprisings against national oppression, is not given the right to determine the form of its state life by free voting and completely free from the presence of the troops of the annexing or stronger state and without the least desire, then the dominance of that nation

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by the stronger state is annexation, i.e., seizure by force and violence. The government considers that to continue this war simply to decide how to divide the weak nationalities among the powerful and rich nations which had seized them would be the greatest crime against humanity, and it solemnly announces its readiness to sign at once the terms of peace which will end this war on the indicated conditions, equally just for ail nationalities without exception. At the same time the government declares that it does not regard the conditions of peace mentioned above as an ultimatum; that is, it is ready to consider any other conditions, insisting, however, that such be proposed by any of the belligerents as soon as possible, and that they be expressed in the clearest terms, without ambiguity or secrecy.... In making these peace proposals to the government and peoples of all warring countries, the Provisional Government of Workers and Peasants of Russia appeals particularly to the class-conscious workers of the three most advanced nations of mankind, who are also the largest states participating in the present war—England, France and Germany. The workers of these countries have rendered the greatest possible service to the cause of progress and socialism by the great example of the Chartist movement in England, several revolutions of universal historic significance accomplished by the French proletariat, and, finally, the heroic struggle against the Law of Exceptions in Germany, a struggle which was prolonged, dogged and disciplined, which could be held up as an example for the workers of the whole world, and which aimed at the creation of proletarian mass organisations in Germany. All these examples of proletarian heroism and historic achievement serve us as a guarantee that the workers of these three countries will understand the tasks which lie before them by way of liberating humanity from the horrors of war and its consequences, and that by their resolute, unselfishly energetic efforts in various directions these workers wilt help us to bring to a successful end the cause of peace, and, together with this, the cause of the liberation of the toiling and exploited masses from all forms of slavery and all exploitation. The Workers' and Peasants' Government created by the revolution of November 6-7 and drawing its strength from the Soviets of Workers, Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies must begin peace negotiations at once. Our appeal must be directed to the governments as well as to the peoples.,.. Source: The World War I Document Archive .

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teenth century, centrally directed efforts at industrialization, modernization, and reform made some inroads into traditional Russian society. The war revealed that pessimistic forecasts about Russian performance were accurate. The Russian army was relatively well led on the operational and tactical levels. Nevertheless, none of Russia's important successes were against Germany, its most powerful adversary. Rather they were against the notoriously inept Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman armies. The successes in the field also carried a price. Russia sent large peasant armies of some 12 million men to the field in the war; 1,700,000 of them were killed, and a huge number of the others were wounded and captured. Russia failed on the materiel level. It was unable to equip many of its troops at all, much less equip and supply them well. In 1915 one-third of the infantry force had no rifles. This rate ran even lower in some individual units. One general commanding a corps of seven divisions reported that only 12,000 of his men were armed. Shortages in shells were such that German artillery could—at least on one reported occasion—outfire the Russians by a factor of thirty to one. Russian gunners were ordered to fire no more than three artillery shells per day. Nor did Russian output compare favorably to that of its allies, despite a boom in Russian armaments production in 1915. For most of the war, Russia's output of munitions was merely a fraction of theirs. As Louise Erwin Heenan has documented, in 1916 Russia produced 7 heavy and 45 light artillery shells per one thousand soldiers, while France manufactured 38 and 137, and Britain made 83 and 170. Russia was also unable to produce the same quantities of equipment as its Western allies. The French and the British were able to field, per kilometer of front, 6 times the heavy artillery, 5 times the field artillery, and 4.5 times the number of machine guns. While the Russian ordnance corps was ill supplied, the quartermasters were hardly better off. Soldiers lacked boots and winter clothes, and many died from exposure and disease. That Russia should not have been able to produce as much military hardware as its allies should not be surprising if one considers its general level of economic development. In the words of the standard economic history of World War I, Russian industry was "a foreign body in a gigantic agrarian economy." Direct comparison of overall industrial output is not easy, but it has been possible for Brian R. Mitchell to compare outputs of key industrial goods in 1913: HISTORY

Total metric tons/tons per capita (in millions) Iron Ore Pig Iron Country Coal 9.5/0.08 4.6/0.04 Russia 36.0/0.29 16.2/0.4 10.4/0.26 Britain 292.0/7.17 28.6/0.44 16.7/0.26 Germany 177.2/2.73 21.9/0.56 5.2/0.13 40.8/1.04 France Country Russia Britain Germany France

Total Population (m) 126.3 (1897) 40.7 (1911) 64.9 (1910) 39.1 (1910)

Steel 4.9/0.04 77/0.19 17.6/0.27 4.6/0.12

Even before the outbreak of war, Russia was far behind its European allies in the production of coal, iron, and steel, not only on a per capita basis but even on an absolute basis. In a war that required sustained industrial effort, the situation was not promising for Russia. Russia's industrial capacity was hardly helped by the dismantling of its industrial facilities in the western areas of the country for relocation eastward, beyond the reach of the approaching German and Austrian armies. Many of these plants were damaged, abandoned, or never efficiently reassembled. Much of what was left behind was permanently lost as the industrial western borderlands of the Russian Empire fell to the Germans by late 1915. Despite such inauspicious circumstances, the Russian economy did make some gains in output in specific industrial categories, most visibly in the production of military goods. The number of workers in the Petrograd armaments industry doubled to approximately 400,000, while the output of weapons and armaments increased by 923 percent, to 397,000 tons, between 1913 and 1916. These increases, however, did not even come close to covering the Russians' military needs. Peter Gatrell and Mark Harrison have charted the general trend in Russian industrial production during World War I as a percentage of the prewar output: All Military Goods 100

Civilian Goods 100

115

101

225

102

229

88

222

61

1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 (Jan.-Sept.)

Like all the other belligerents, Russia made progress in production of armaments while experiencing a drop in the output of consumer goods. Though Russia was an agrarian giant, its food supply was especially affected, largely because its underdeveloped transportation networks were grievously strained by military needs. Wartime harvests were only 10 percent lower than prewar levels, a drop more than adequately

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covered by newly available food that would have been exported before the war. Yet, domestic transportation problems eventually led to chronic and critical shortages of foodstuffs in the cities. In February and March 1917 this problem triggered strikes in Petrograd, which became the birthplace of the two revolutions that occurred in that year. Once the war started, Russia was largely cut off from the outside world. Limited imports and exports were able to pass through the remote ports of Arkhangelsk, Murmansk, and Vladivostok, but their overstretched facilities were dominated by wartime materiel, especially from Britain and France. These shipments, however, were never of the quality and quantity necessary to overcome Russia's deficiencies. Overall, Russian foreign trade dropped by more than 90 percent after the declaration of war. That the "breadbasket of Europe" should have faltered in delivering adequate food supplies to its own people was indicative of its general condition in the war. The Russians' failure to manage food transportation and distribution was another side of its inability to manage industrial production and transportation. Germany, Britain, France, and the United States deliberately and quickly established government rationalization of economic activity, but Russia failed to produce a comparable system. Although Russia could grow the food it needed to feed its armies and its cities, the mismanagement of its war economy resulted in chronic and worsening food shortages in the cities and in the fielding of armies without adequate armaments, supplies, or ammunition. Although Russia had the raw materials to develop into the munitions, equipment, and supplies it needed to field a large army, in 1914 it was not able to meet the challenges of a modern industrial war. It is hardly surprising that Russia failed to demonstrate the managerial and administrative expertise needed to convert its tremendous resources into battlefield effectiveness. This lack of organization had not proved especially crucial in early-nineteenth-century wars against the Ottomans, but when faced with industrialized enemies in 1914—or for that matter in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)—the gaps were too large to cover. In its wars of the nineteenth century—the century in which Europe became industrialized—Russia did well against underdeveloped nations and indigenous peoples on its frontiers, but it fared poorly against countries that were more industrialized. Industrialization includes more than the ability to produce steel; it 156

requires sound management as well. In 1914 Russia was still unable to manage its war effort. Although some of its troops fought with valor, the country was unable to support the army well enough to ensure that it would survive or, as the Provisional Government found out, even remain loyal. In the end the strains of the war proved too hard—not on the battlefield but behind the front lines. -PHILGILTNER, ALBANY ACADEMY

References Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (New York: Viking, 1997). Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russian During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Gatrell and Mark Harrison, "The Russian and Soviet Economies in Two World Wars: A Comparative View," Economic History Review, new series 46, no. 3 (1993): 425452. Gerd Hardach, The First World War, 1914-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Louise Erwin Heenan, Russian Democracy's Fatal Blunder: The Summer Offensive of 1917 (New York: Praeger, 1987). Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, N.Y. & London: Cornell University Press, 1995). Brian R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe 1750-2000, fifth edition (Houndmills, U.K. & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990). Thomas Porter and Scott Seregny, "The Zemstvo Reconsidered," in The Politics of Local Government in Russia, edited by Alfred Evans and Vladimir Gelman (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 19-44. Seregny, "Zemstvos, Peasants, and Citizenship: The Russian Adult Education Movement and World War I," Slavic Review, 59, no. 2 (2000): 290-315. Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (London: Macmillan, 1975).

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RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND ANTI-SEMITISM Was the Russian Revolution a catalyst for international anti-Semitism? Viewpoint: Yes. The perception in the West that the Jews were to blame for Bolshevism was a major factor in promoting anti-Semitism during the twentieth century. Viewpoint: No. Anti-Semitism was widespread before 1917, and the events of that year were only incidental to its development. The twentieth century was one of history's worst for European Jews. The Nazi Holocaust killed as many as two-thirds of them, while other incidents of prejudice and persecution caused harm to more still. Many historians look to the roots of these evils in the legacies of the Russian Revolution. In addition to producing many pogroms on Russian soil, the association of Jews with communism and its excesses appears to have catalyzed many Europeans into virulent anti-Semitism. Rumors about Jewish domination in communist circles, Jewish plots at the root of revolution, and other mostly false accusations propelled the machinery of anti-Semitism forward into the Holocaust. Yet, as others have long pointed out, modern anti-Semitism had much older roots. Anti-Semitic attitudes and political formations had long existed in Europe. Social Darwinist and other eugenic thought, current in Europe after about 1870, cast Jews as outsiders. Some philosophers and other less intelligent, hateful people identified Jews with excess, capitalism, socialism, and the evils that all of these different factors created. Adolf Hitler himself became an anti-Semite long before the Revolution, which, it appears, may not have been necessary to encourage anti-Semitism.

Viewpoint: Yes. The perception in the West that the Jews were to blame for Bolshevism was a major factor in promoting anti-Semitism during the twentieth century. The October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, associated with anything negative in the eyes of much of the Western world, proved easy to use to fortify wider, long-standing anti-Semitic prejudices, particularly in Europe. Anti-Semitism had its own painful ideological, social, and political ancestry in history, often generat-

ing violent outbursts, such as in latenineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russia and in France during the 1890s. The notion, however, of a world Jewish conspiracy received a substantial ideological and political boost from the events of 1917 in Russia. Many Jewish intellectuals and activists in the Bolshevik movement played a crucial role in the takeover. Leon Trotsky reorganized and headed the Red Army during the critical period between the revolution and the conclusion of the Civil War; Yakov Sverdlov was chosen as head of the Soviet government; Grigori Zinoviev headed the Communist International (Comintern), the main political vehicle for internationalizing the socialist revolu-

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tion; Lev Kamenev was a significant party ideologue; and Maksim Litvinov was put in charge of foreign affairs in the 1930s. If one looked for Jews in the composition of the early Politburos of the Soviet Union (as many obviously did, in order to substantiate their arguments), then one would find that they represented at least a sizable group, often a majority. It did not matter to them that many of those early Bolsheviks (Kamenev, Zinoviev, and so on) were ruthlessly purged by Josef Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, or that the name of the once formidable Trotsky became synonymous with counterrevolution and betrayal under Stalin's rule. In many ways the changing ideological contours of modern anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were confirmed by this new political association. For almost two millennia, the Jew had been viewed as the fundamental antithesis of Christian identities across Europe. After the French Revolution the steady erosion of religion's significance in terms of identity building produced increasingly more secular variants of anti-Semitic prejudices. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Jew—however legally emancipated—was increasingly pushed into a social limbo fueled by nationalist passions. His allegiance to the sacrosanct nation was questioned on the basis of his inverse status as guest without state. The parallel emergence of Zionism as an international force (starting with the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 and with repeated meetings on an almost yearly basis afterward) coincided with the strengthening of a perception that Jews across the world, emboldened by the advent of legal emancipation, had consciously become hostile aliens within their countries of residence while remaining effectively stateless. This statelessness and internationalism (whether real or arbitrarily ascribed, embraced, or forced) also facilitated the irrational association of Jews with an array of disparate faceless international forces, such as greedy capitalism, freemasonry, and eventually socialism. Above all, it nurtured a further association of Jews with an underground revolutionary project. This view first emerged during the French Revolution— when the almost immediate legal emancipation of the Jews offered the counterrevolutionary forces the alibi for blaming Jews and Freemasons for the overthrow of the ancien regime. After they assumed a prominent role in the socialist movement in the nineteenth century, Jews became a new type of contestant Other, omnipresent and omnipotent, supported by an extremely powerful international apparatus of revolutionary plotting. The publication of the notorious Protocols of the Elders ofZion, in 1897 in Russia and after 1905 across the world, came at a crucial historical juncture, after the heightening of nationalist passions across Europe, the Russian defeat in the war 158

HISTORY

against Japan in 1905, and the successes of socialist parties in many countries. The Russian situation in particular was especially vulnerable to this new discourse, as military humiliation was followed by a revolution that shook the imperial foundations and shocked loyal tsarist/nationalist circles. For them, the Protocols (published in revised editions in 1905 and 1906) supplied firsthand ideological evidence of the alleged revolutionary plans of the much-maligned Russian Jews. As socialism was becoming an obsession of conservative, nationalist, and even liberal constituencies, the conjunction of anti-Semitism, anti-socialism, and fear of revolution had already been accomplished on the conceptual level before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917—not just in Russia but in Europe as a whole. Imagining a revolution is altogether different from experiencing it, however. The success of the Bolshevik takeover in October 1917 provided facile ideological ammunition to already embedded fears and prejudices, laying them on the doorstep of many Europeans. The internationalist dimension of socialism, its blatant rejection of allegiance to the nation, and the slogan of transnational class solidarity supplied a traceable dimension of alleged credibility to the previously abstract, cliched discourses of an "international Jewish conspiracy." As socialist movements in each country felt emboldened by the success of the Bolshevik enterprise and sought to spread the gospel of revolution even within months of the events in Russia, fear gave way to mass panic and paranoia. In such a state of confusion and fear the traditional function of scapegoating traditionally channeled at the Jews combined with a far more up-to-date bias, producing a new platform for explaining away current grievances and reshaping perceptions of the past. It is no coincidence that the Protocols was extensively manipulated by the Whites in the Russian Civil War in order to garner support across Europe. What was even more interesting, however, was the muddling of the distinction between Jews and socialists on many occasions. The interviews with early members of the German Nazi Party collected by Theodore Abel reveal many examples of ideological confusion, transcending previously antithetical concepts, such as socialism and capitalism. Poignantly, while a large majority of those interviewed claimed that they despised the Jews and explained their membership in the Nazi Party on the basis of the latter's espousal of an unequivocally anti-Semitic platform, their stated reasons as to why they experienced such an intense hatred of the Jews had little to do with traditional concepts of anti-Semitism. Instead, they invoked arguments about the Jews' alleged responsibility for Germany's defeat in 1918, for the Spartacist Revolution (headed by the Jewish activists/politicians Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg), and the

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humiliating conditions of the Versailles Treaty (1919). It somehow made more sense now that famous socialist politicians and activists, such as Karl Marx, Eduard Bernstein (father of revisionist socialism), Bela Kun (the leader of the short-lived communist regime in Hungary in 1918-1919), and Leon Blum (French prime minister and leader of a "Popular Front" against fascism), were allegedly linked by their shared Jewish heritage. Later on, especially after the worldwide Depression of the early 1930s, the Jew was accused of being behind a plutocratic conspiracy, as well as pulling the strings of the communist world revolution. Such arguments constituted highly credible articulations of a cumulative fear—this point was exactly where traditional anti-Semitic prejudices intersected with the latest exorcisms of other international forces, providing a catchall, easily usable, and internalized platform for displacing responsibility. By the time the Jew had become a propaganda term linked to socialism, freemasonry, antinationalism, and plutocracy, another fundamental transformation of secular anti-Semitism was already under way on the intellectual level. The new cycle of secularizing anti-Semitic prejudices that had started with the French Revolution combined with modern, pseudoscientific notions of racial value to produce a platform of biological jusHISTORY

tification for the preexisting hatred of the Jew. Again, this combination had already been under way by the time the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and was by no means the direct derivation of the October Revolution's success. However, it did provide virulent anti-Semites with a new reservoir of propaganda ammunition, depicting the feared advance of communism as world revolution as an onslaught of allegedly inferior racial stock against Europe. During World War II, Nazi propaganda discourses presented the struggle against the Soviet Union as a crusade against the biologically detrimental "hordes of Untermenschen (subhumans)" and an extension of a similar campaign for bolstering the Aryan stock that had been initiated within the Third Reich since 1933. It is no coincidence that Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941) coincided with the unleashing of the final, lethal stage of an extermination war against the Jews across Europe. The argument about the alleged defense of Europe from racially and culturally inferior peoples widened the imaginary gap between native Europeans and alien elements within their societies or in the large expanses of Russia. Even when Nazi Germany was facing a desperate defensive war against the advancing Red Army and the Allies in 19431945, the war against international Jewry was

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Russian mob tormenting a Jewish woman during a pogrom, circa 1910 (Associated Press)

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given first priority, to the point that invaluable resources were diverted from the front to assist the transport of a few hundred Jews from such remote places as the Greek island of Rhodes to the death camps of the General Government of Poland. In an almost metaphysical way, many within the Nazi Party strongly believed that the military situation could be resolved once the Jew had been totally eliminated. By 1945 there was effectively no distinction between Bolsheviks, Russian soldiers, Western Allies, and Jews in the discourse of Nazi propaganda. In his last address to the German people on 24 February 1945, Adolf Hitler spoke about the grave danger that faced the eastern territories of the Reich owing to the advance of the Red Army: "Several areas in the eastern part of Germany now experience bolshevism. The crimes committed against our women and children and men by this Jewish plague are the most terrible fate ever conceived by human beings." It is perhaps tempting to treat the Nazi anti-Semitic tirades as an exceptional discourse that was by no means shared across the Continent during the interwar period. Yet, the position of the Third Reich, the powers of persuasion and coercion that it possessed over a huge part of the European Continent, and the fact that it acted as a model for kindred movements/parties/regimes in terms of persecuting Jews, socialists, and other "undesirables" does not warrant such a relativization. From Poland to Greece, and from Turkey to Latvia and Rumania, the Jew was recast after the Bolshevik Revolution as the ultimate antithesis of national values, as the incarnation of international revolution and conspiracy, and as the abstract force behind every threat to the survival of the national community. For all these associations the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution offered a dimension of tangibility, linking international developments to domestic grievances, supplying measurable credibility to previously cliched, nebulous claims. In this crucial respect anti-Semitism was indeed a substantial factor prior to 1917, with its own prehistory and momentum; perhaps it would have continued unabated in the interwar period, nurturing similar biological and ideological obsessions, saturating ultranationalist discourses, regardless of the events in Russia. The momentum, however, that the Bolshevik Revolution supplied to anti-Semitic prejudices and stereotypes, the way in which it encouraged and ostensibly confirmed the conspiracy of the Jew and Bolshevism, as well as the manner in which it facilitated the production of a meganarrative of vilified internationalism and placed Jews at the helm of a global conspiracy that had allegedly gained its first crucial foothold in Russia, cannot be dismissed as incidental developments. To do so would fundamentally distort our understanding of how a mind-boggling arbitrary

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association of Jews with Bolshevism and plutocracy, with the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, with revolution and big business, and with threatening international power and allegedly racially inferior stock could be disseminated as discourse and become internalized by large sections of the European population. -ARISTOTLE KALLIS, LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Anti-Semitism was widespread before 1917, and the events of that year were only incidental to its development. Many people argue that the Russian Revolution was a catalyst for anti-Semitism. They point to political violence associated with revolutionary movements, perceptions of Jewish involvement in them, and growing European and world anti-Semitism after 1917. While anti-Semitism did exist during and after the Russian Revolution, it is inaccurate to say that the revolution itself stimulated the development of anti-Semitism, for anti-Semitism was already alive and well before the Russian Revolution. It had been present in Russian and European culture for centuries. The Holocaust and other problems faced by Jews in the twentieth century have much deeper roots than Russia's social and political upheaval. Jews were almost never welcomed in Russia. Ivan IV (reigned 1531-1584) refused to allow Jews either to reside in or enter his realm because he thought they "bring about great evil." This attitude was far from uncommon in medieval Europe (most West European countries expelled their Jewish populations between 1250 and 1500 and persecuted them thereafter), but Ivan's ban on Jews proved problematic when new areas with large Jewish populations were incorporated into the Russian Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many of his successors adopted antiJewish decrees, including forced conversions, expulsions, and limitations on residency and movement. During the late-imperial era the tsarist government continued to regulate where Jews could live, to restrict Jewish access to higher education, and to turn a blind eye to deadly pogroms against Jewish communities. As Russia developed a capitalist economy, the perceived overrepresentation of Jews in commerce, banking, and credit led to their popular association with the excesses of capitalism, a development that added rising social prejudice to official government suspicion. Their perceived overrepresentation in the ranks of revo-

HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

lutionary groups and opposition political parties paradoxically led to their association with the excesses of socialism. Although some Russian Jewish community leaders advocated a policy of working constructively with government and society within existing frameworks toward greater toleration and rights, a policy that their counterparts in other countries adopted and that offered some hope of success, many Jews remained disenchanted with their treatment and voted with their feet. About a million emigrated from the Russian Empire to Europe and North America between 1880 and 1910. Much of this emigration was caused by pogroms that broke out after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, an event that many Russians blamed on Jews, and by later pogroms. Other Jews joined the Zionist movement, which called for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, while others still embraced revolutionary ideologies. Some elements of the Russian elite responded to these developments by advocating policies to liberalize or abolish anti-Jewish laws, but the government remained firm in upholding most of them. In the 1880s the official government position toward the Jewish population included the encouragement of emigration and assimilation. A plan to extend full civic equality to Jews after the Revolution of 1905 failed, as did a 1911 plan in the State Duma, Russia's limited legislature, to lift their residency restrictions. The Beilis Affair of 1911-1913, in which a Kievan Jew was falsely accused of having committed the ritual murder of a Christian child, displayed an even greater degree of official anti-Semitism. The state organs responsible for justice, encouraged by the tsar himself, tampered with the trial, pressured the jury, and openly and gratuitously favored the prosecution's case even though they knew the defendant to be innocent. The defendant was acquitted despite these efforts, but the regime and its minions continued to insist on his guilt until 1917. The infamous Protocols of the Elders ofZion, a fraudulent document reporting a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, first appeared in its entirety in Russia in an edition published by the tsarist secret police in the 1890s. The simple chronology shows that none of these quite serious incidents depended on the Russian Revolution. Nor, by and large, did the development of anti-Semitism outside Russia's borders. The arrival of poor and culturally different Russian and Eastern European Jews in Western Europe and North America played a crucial role in rising anti-Semitism and led directly to attempts to limit or prevent such immigration. As early as 1886—more than four decades before the Russian Revolution—the anti-Semitic French publicist Edouard Drumont wrote a rabidly anti-Jewish tract that sold a million copies. Eight years later Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French

PROTOCOL NO. 1 The following is an excerpt from the Protocols of the Eiders of Zion, a fraudulent document that appeared in the late nineteenth century and reported a Jewish plan for global domination:

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

Source: Protocols of the Elders of Zion, translated by V, E. Marsden (London: Britons Publishing Society, 1921).

army, was falsely convicted of treason and kept in prison for years after it was discovered that the principal evidence in his trial was forged. Only a national scandal led to his exoneration. Adolf Hitler professed to have become an anti-Semite in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a metropolis already rife with anti-Semitic attitudes and expression when he arrived. Although Hitler later identified Jews with the Bolshevik Revolution and communism in general, he and many of his followers were already committed anti-Semites long before 1917. As he pursued national power in Germany, more-

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over, he just as often and virulently identified Jews with capitalism. The nineteenth-century emergence of eugenics and other social Darwinist theories that promoted "scientific" ideas of racial inequality fueled the flames of what was increasingly—but nevertheless long before 1917—becoming a racial brand of anti-Semitism. Even The Protocols of the Elders of' Zion, despite its primary identification with the tsarist secret police who published it, originated in the nineteenth-century writings of a disgruntled German civil servant and found currency in Europe long before its appearance in Russia. With the Bolsheviks' rise to power in 1917, there was hope that anti-Semitism in Russia would end. Vladimir Lenin attempted to break away from Russia's traditional anti-Semitism and the European milieu in which it had developed. He spoke publicly against it and tried his best to identify its consequences with his regime's opponents. He also explained anti-Semitism in Marxist terms, calling it an "attempt to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants from the exploiters toward the Jews," arguing that it was a method that the old regime used to disguise economic tensions. Yet, despite the official abolition of discrimination and the encouragement of Jewish culture, these early hopes were dashed. Red forces were at times as likely as White forces to carry out pogroms. Like any other religion in the Soviet Union, Judaism was subject to official persecution. Although some Jews had played a prominent role in the revolutionary movement and held some responsible positions in the Soviet government, the rise of Josef Stalin prevented their long-term emancipation. Over time Jews were also subject to discrimination in the Communist Party, state apparatus, security organizations, diplomatic corps, and military. Disproportionately large numbers of Jewish officials, party members, and cultural figuresincluding virtually all of the Jews prominent in the Bolshevik Party in 1917—died in the purges of the 1930s. After World War II virulent anti-Semitism reared its head again. More prominent Soviet Jewish leaders and cultural figures were killed by the state, and evidence suggests that Stalin, before his death in 1953, planned to conduct further anti-Semitic purges and deport the Soviet Union's Jewish population to Siberia. Stalin's death prevented a Soviet Holocaust, but anti-Semitism nevertheless persisted in Soviet institutions. In the 1960s almost half of the Soviet officials were of peasant origin, making it likely that many of them had learned negative Jewish stereotypes in prerevolutionary childhood. Official anti-Semitism continued to be an integral part of Soviet society. Although Moscow had recognized the State of Israel as part of a plan to co-opt the Zionist movement, it sided consistently and aggressively with Israel's Arab opponents. Soviet 162

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and Eastern bloc military and diplomatic support flowed to Egypt and Syria, the new Jewish state's most threatening adversaries. Jews occupied virtually no important state or party positions after World War II. Between 1967 and 1986 the Soviet state conducted an official anti-Jewish propaganda campaign. Tsarist-era quotas on the numbers of Jews allowed to enroll in higher education were reinstated. According to the famous physicist and political dissident Andrei Sakharov, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev (ruled 1964-1982) once asked the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences how long it would be before Jews were excluded from that institution and received a calm answer of about twenty years. These facts were terrible, but their roots lay in the anti-Semitism of Russia's prerevolutionary past, an era that had much in common with Western societies affected by anti-Semitism long before 1917. Unlike many of those societies, however, the Soviet Union did not allow for the openness or social tolerance that enabled the rest of the world's strides against anti-Semitism. Rising racism and xenophobia in post-Soviet Russia only continue this pattern today. -KERRY FOLEY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

References Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz, eds., Anti-Semitism in Times of Crisis (New York: New York University Press, 1991). Zvi Y. Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980). Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe 1870-2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Nicholas Riasanovsky and Mark Steinberg, A History of Russia, seventh edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

RUSSIAN WORKING CLASS Was the Russian working class united behind Vladimir Lenin in 1917? Viewpoint: Yes. The Bolsheviks commanded the allegiance of a large majority of the working class. Viewpoint: No. Working-class support for the Bolsheviks has been overstated and often rested on a misunderstanding of what the Bolsheviks meant when they said they favored democracy. This chapter evaluates the validity of the claim made by the Soviet regime and its sympathizers that the Bolshevik Revolution enjoyed the nearly unanimous support of Russia's workers. On the one hand, worker support for Bolshevism seems self-evident. Workers wanted an end to World War I, the defense of the more democratic revolution of February 1917, control of their factories, higher standards of living, and opportunities for social and education advancement. Honestly or not, the Bolsheviks made many promises and offered the greatest degree of credibility in these areas. Their opponents did not, or talked about postponing their resolution to a future time. Workers, guided by their interests, supported the Bolsheviks in a manner demonstrated by Bolshevik majorities in Soviets, by mass voluntarism for the Red Guards, Red Army, and new bureaucracy, and by other actions taken in defense of the revolution. Opponents are quick to point out the nuances of the real situation. Many workers in fact supported the Bolsheviks on false premises and switched their allegiance to moderate socialists and other anti-Bolshevik forces as soon as they realized the truth. Many workers never supported the Bolsheviks at all and rued the high-handed treatment they received from Soviet government officials. Unanimous worker support was thus never guaranteed.

Viewpoint: Yes. The Bolsheviks commanded the allegiance of a large majority of the working class. The Bolsheviks enjoyed the overwhelming majority of worker support in 1917 because they posed, honestly or not, as defenders of democracy and the most genuine embodiment of the revolution that had deposed the tsarist government in March 1917. At least in official pronouncements, their seizure of power was not a unilateral coup but a preemptive measure to safeguard the

accomplished democratic revolution. History revealed that this claim was untrue, but the public statements of Vladimir Lenin and his associates all indicated that their purpose was to invest power in the soviet (council) institutions that had been elected by workers in Petrograd and all over Russia over the course of 1917, a measure that many workers had advocated for months and that few other political parties were prepared to back. Bolshevik rhetoric responded meaningfully to most other worker demands. Every measurable indicator of worker political sentiment strongly favored Bolshevism in the revolutionary year.

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The first major case of unrest after the collapse of the monarchy, protests launched upon the revelation in April 1917 that the Provisional Government was continuing to pursue imperialist aims in World War I, indicated that one major and wellpublicized plank in the Bolshevik platform—ending Russia's participation in the conflict—enjoyed mass support. As a result of the demonstrations, the responsible ministers were forced from government, and the Provisional Government's cabinet became more radical in composition. A second massive public demonstration in early July, touched off by news that military units would be transferred from Petrograd to the front for the first time since the collapse of the monarchy, brought an estimated four to five hundred thousand workers and soldiers into the streets of the capital. Once again they called for an end to Russia's participation in World War I, but added to their demands the abolition of the "bourgeois" Provisional Government and the creation of a workers' state governed by the Soviets. The Bolsheviks played hesitant roles in these events as they unfolded, but their leaders could see that huge numbers of the capital's workers shared what were essentially their own political goals. Although the unrest abated without forcing major political change, some Bolshevik leaders advocated using the turmoil to seize power, while others were emboldened to create a military organization within the ranks of the party. This military organization became a lasting feature throughout 1917 and rose in stature in late August, when suspicious troop movements suggested that the army commander in chief, General Lavr Kornilov, was moving to crush radical movements in Petrograd. The Bolsheviks portrayed the situation, rightly or wrongly, as an attempt by reactionary military units to crush supporters of the revolution. They mobilized thousands of their rank-and-file party members to resist it. In the process they emerged in public view as Kornilov's most resolute opponents and the revolution's most fervent defenders. They also managed to cast public doubt on the Provisional Government and its leader, Aleksandr Kerensky, who, rumor suggested, was either secretly in league with Kornilov or too weak and indecisive to stop him on his own. The collapse of the "Kornilov Affair" greatly improved the Bolsheviks' credentials and stimulated a further rise in their support among the urban masses. The Menshevik memoirist Nikolai Sukhanov recalled that "after the Kornilov revolt Bolshevism began blossoming luxuriantly and put forth deep roots." More than a few of those roots were among Russia's workers. In addition to what was happening in the streets of Petrograd, formal membership in the Bolshevik Party, a more precise barometer of its popularity, rose dramatically, registering a far greater rate of increase over the course of 1917 than that of any other political group. Between February and 164

August its ranks grew more than tenfold, from 23,600 to more than 250,000. By the eve of the October coup d'etat, the party's membership had surged to an estimated 350,000. While these figures still did not account for all or even a majority of Russian workers, it is important to bear in mind that party membership was selective, restricted, and defined not by passive sympathies, as membership in modern mass political parties usually is, but by active commitment and work. Less active supporters among Russia's workers nevertheless made themselves known. Many urban Soviets, dominated for the most part by Menshevik and Socialist Revolutionary delegates for the first several months after February 1917, came firmly under Bolshevik control by late summer. The Petrograd soviet, the most prominent organization of its kind in Russia, the first to be founded, and one of the few legitimized by a legacy in the Revolution of 1905, came under the control of a Bolshevik majority on 31 August—almost two months before the coup—when it passed a motion condemning the Provisional Government and repeating earlier calls for national soviet power. Shortly thereafter the Bolsheviks were elected to a majority of seats on its executive committee; their prominent leader Leon Trotsky became its chairman. Earlier in August, the Bolsheviks had already taken control of the Soviets of IvanovoVoznesensk, Ekaterinburg, Samara, Tsaritsyn, Riga, Saratov, and other important industrial centers. The party won another significant majority in the Moscow soviet on 5 September and then added further victories in the Soviets of Kiev, Kazan, Nikolaev, and Baku. Bolshevik successes in other representative urban institutions were also impressive. Later in September they won an absolute majority of seats on the Moscow city council (duma), while in Petrograd municipal elections held just before the Kornilov Affair delivered to them one-third of the capital's city-council seats. Petrograd's Central Bureau of Factory Committees, a body specifically representative of the city's industrial workers, had come under Bolshevik control as early as May 1917, as had the worker committees of most of the capital's largest factories. In national politics, the Bolsheviks won another absolute majority of seats— 390 out of 650—in the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which assembled in Petrograd at the time of the October coup. Although not perfect, these institutions were the most representative bodies functioning in urban Russia at the time, and none of the Bolsheviks' successes in them would have been possible without tremendous support from Russian workers. Elections to the Constituent Assembly—the democratically elected body intended to determine Russia's political future—further revealed worker support for Bolshevism. Held a month after the

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WORKERS' CONTROL Vladimir Lenin issued this decree in late 1917 in an attempt to reconcile Russian economic needs with communist ideals:

27 November 1917 1. In order to provide planned regulation of the national economy, workers1 control over the manufacture, purchase, sale and storage of pro* duce and raw materials and over the financial activity of enterprise is introduced in all industrial, commercial, banking, agricultural, cooperative and other enterprises, which employ hired labor or give work to be done at home. 2. Worker's control is exercised by all the workers of the given enterprise through their elected bodies, such as factory committees, shop stewards' councils, etc., whose members include representatives of the officer employees and the technical personnel. 3. In every city, guberniya and industrial district a focal workers' control council is set up which, being an agency of the Soviet of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, is composed of representatives of trade unions, factory and office workers' committees, and workers* co-operatives. 4. Pending the convocation of the congress of workers' control councils, an AllRussia Workers' Control Council is instituted in Petrograd, with the following representation: five members from the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies; five from the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of Peasants' Deputies; five from the All-Russia Council of Trade Unions; two from the All-Russia Workers' Co-operative Center; five from the All-Russia Bureau of Factory Committees; five from the Ail-Russia Union of Engineers and Technicians; two from the All-Russia Union of Agronomists; one from every all-Russia union of workers having less than 100,000 members; two from every all-Russia union of workers having more than 100,000 workers; two from the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions. 5. The supreme bodies of workers' control establish inspection commissions of specialists (technicians, bookkeepers, etc.) which are dispatched, either on the initiative of these bodies or at the insistence of lower workers' control bodies, to inspect the financial and technical activities of an enterprise, 6. The workers' control bodies have the right to supervise production, establish output quotas and take measures to ascertain production costs. 7. The workers' control bodies have the right of access to the entire business correspondence of an enterprise, concealment of

the same by the owners is punishable by a court of law. Commercial secrecy is abolished. The owners are obliged to present to workers* control bodies all books and accounts for both the current and previous fiscal years, 8. Decisions of workers' control bodies are binding upon the owners of enterprises and may be revoked only by higher workers' control bodies. 9. The entrepreneur or the enterprise management has three days within which to appeal to a higher workers' control body against decisions of lower bodies of workers' control. 10. At all enterprises the owners and the representatives of the wage and salary earners elected to exercise workers' control are declared answerable to the state for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline and for the protection of property. Those guilty of concealment of materials, products and orders, improper keeping of accounts and other such malpractices are held criminally responsible. 11. The district (as in Paragraph 3) workers' control councils settle all disputes and conflicts between lower control bodies, handle owner's complaints, issue instructions comfortably with the specificity of production, the local conditions and the decisions and instructions of the AllRussia Workers' Control Council, and supervise the activity of the lower control bodies. 12. The All-Russia Workers* Control Council works out general plans of workers' control, issues instructions and ordinances, regulates relationships between district workers' control councils, and serves as the highest instance for all matters pertaining to workers' control, 13. The All-Russia Workers' Control Council co-ordinates the activity of workers' control bodies with that of all other institutions concerned with the organization of the national economy. Instructions on the relationships between the AH-Russia Workers' Control Council and other institutions organizing and regulating the national economy will be issued separately. 14. All laws and circulars hampering the activity of the factory and other committees and councils of wage and salary earners are repealed. In the name of the Government of the Russian Republic, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars,

VL.ULANOV (LENIN) Source: Martin McCautey, ed., The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State, 1917-1921: Documents (London: Macmittan, 1975), pp. 233-235,

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October coup but generally in accordance with democratic procedures set down earlier, Russia's voters gave the Bolsheviks 24 percent of the national poll. It was clearly a defeat, but in raw statistical terms their share of the vote exceeded the size of the country's urban population, which only accounted for 20 percent of the total. Some peasants, intellectuals, and other nonworkers voted for the Bolsheviks, and some urbanites voted against them, but most of the party's 10 million ballots came from workers or from enlisted military personnel stationed in or near urban areas. In Petrograd, Moscow, and other industrial centers, the Bolsheviks again won absolute majorities of the vote. Even without systematized coercion, undisputed domination of the state, ironclad control of the armed forces, and other characteristics of their future government, the Bolsheviks could thus honestly claim widespread working-class support in 1917. In yet another testament to their success, rival left-wing parties saw their support among Russia's workers evaporate over the course of the revolutionary year. In the same Moscow city-council elections that catapulted the Bolsheviks to majority control, the Menshevik Party, the Bolsheviks' only serious competitor within the Russian Marxist movement, received a paltry 4 percent of the vote. The Socialist Revolutionaries, who had held a majority of their seats since June, won only 14 percent. Bolshevik control of the Soviets also tended to be quite strong. In Saratov, for example, Bolsheviks accounted for 75 percent of the Soviet's executive committee when they took control in August. Although they decisively lost the Constituent Assembly elections to the Socialist Revolutionaries, who took over 50 percent of the national vote, their rivals' support came almost exclusively from Russia's vast peasant population. A substantial faction within the Socialist Revolutionary Party, based mostly in urban constituencies where workers were prevalent, campaigned on a platform that approved of the Bolshevik coup, moreover. Some of the party's leaders joined Lenin's government, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), in December 1917. The Mensheviks, who never built a substantial rural organization or following, took just 3 percent of the Constituent Assembly vote. What made the Bolsheviks so appealing to workers in Russia's electoral politics? Their advocacy of virtually the same political goals held dear by most Russian workers went a long way toward attracting their support. Along with much of the rest of Russia's population, workers wanted an end to World War I, a new political order dominated by egalitarian democracy and led by the Soviets, managerial control of their factories and working conditions, and the defeat of individuals, forces, and political programs that they perceived to be inimi166

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

cal to those goals. Lenin unambiguously favored Russia's withdrawal from the war and began to negotiate for an armistice and peace treaty with Germany shortly after taking power. He and other Bolshevik leaders at least claimed that they wanted to endow the Soviets with supreme political authority, end social and economic hierarchies, and establish worker control of production. By opposing Kornilov, Kerensky, political parties that did not advocate transferring power to the Soviets, and later the antirevolutionary White armies and interventionist foreign nations, they showed themselves to be enthusiastic defenders of the revolution. Many Russian workers came to rue the ruthlessness and cruelty of the Bolshevik regime as it evolved into an authoritarian police state. Many suffered from its repressive policies and institutions, violations of fundamental democratic rights, and deep betrayals of their ideals. Yet, in 1917 these sad outcomes were impossible to predict. Most workers liked what they saw in Bolshevism, and the Bolsheviks could honestly claim their support. -JOHN PAWL, WASHINGTON, B.C.

Viewpoint: No. Working-class support for the Bolsheviks has been overstated and often rested on a misunderstanding of what the Bolsheviks meant when they said they favored democracy. In his Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), the American journalist John Reed depicted the October Revolution as a triumph for Petrograd workers, who supported the Bolshevik Party "almost unanimously." Many historians have agreed with Reed and written that the Bolsheviks in 1917 were, as they depicted themselves to be, the party of the working class. On the other hand, a sizable contingent of academics has insisted that the Bolsheviks lacked a popular mandate and that their "workers' revolution" was really an illegal coup. Although this debate may never be settled to everyone's satisfaction, the evidence currently available indicates that Russian workers were far from being "united behind Lenin." The Bolsheviks did enjoy a great deal of working-class support by October 1917. Most of their supporters, however, did not support a one-party government such as that created in October. In addition, some workers actively opposed the Bolsheviks. Conditions in Russia certainly favored the party's growth. As 1917 wore on, Russia's economic and military situation deteriorated. The Provisional Government became associated with

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failure, and so did the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who favored cooperation with the Provisional Government. While some Russians responded to the setbacks by becoming more conservative, others turned radical. The Bolsheviks' uncompromising stances against the war, for soviet power, and in favor of "worker control" of the economy proved attractive to many wage earners. The most radical tended to be workers who had lived in urban areas for a long time and who were highly skilled and educated; Petrograd factory workers in particular were among the Bolsheviks' strongest adherents. Workers helped the Bolsheviks gain majorities in city Soviets in Petrograd, Moscow, and elsewhere in the wake of General Lavr Kornilov's failed coup. They also pushed the party's membership rolls as high as 350,000 by October. Workers did not support the Bolsheviks unconditionally, however. They believed in the Bolshevik campaign slogan "All Power to the Soviets." In an article summarizing historical research on industrial workers, Robert Service writes: A. F. Butenko's collation of answers to a questionnaire issued at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies revealed that workers, when they voted for Bolsheviks in the autumn, were voting for 'soviet power' rather than a Bolshevikdominated political system. Alexander Rabinowitch's account of Petrograd politics

has confirmed this finding in relation to the country's capital. Thus, any backing the Bolshevik leaders gained before October did not extend to a one-party revolution at odds with their rhetoric. On 16 October, Aleksandr Shliapnikov warned the Bolshevik Central Committee that "a Bolshevik uprising is not popular" among Petrograd workers, "and rumors of this even produce panic."

Painting depicting comradeship and solidarity between Red Guard soldiers, 1917 (Associated Press)

More importantly, workers could not be "united behind Lenin" because they themselves were not a single, monolithic body. Bolshevik writers dealt with the working class's diversity by trying to define it out of existence. Calling the most radical factory laborers members of the "true" working class, they dismissed other workers as either "lacking in social consciousness" (if they were factory workers who still had ties to the countryside, for instance) or "bourgeois" (if they were better educated or well-to-do government employees, for instance). Their politically motivated restrictions on the definition of "worker" persisted for decades in Soviet histories and still affect both Russian and non-Russian views of the Revolution. In fact, the views of Russian working class displayed a considerable amount of variety in 1917. In the providence of Saratov alone, workers labored in such disparate industries as food preparation, woodworking, metallurgy, and printing; they also processed consumer goods, leather and fur, stone,

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chemicals, and textiles. Different industries and different positions within an industry required different levels of skill and training. And those were only the factory jobs. Outside the factories, there were railway workers, postal workers, telegraph workers, builders, miners, shop assistants, pharmacists, electricians, plumbers, and janitors. The central and local governments employed clerks, accountants, and other bureaucrats. Well-to- do citizens employed domestic servants. Russia's working class included men and women, residents of big cities and inhabitants of smaller towns and villages, longtime urbanites and new arrivals from the countryside. Workers' differing employment, skill levels, geographic locations, and personal backgrounds all affected their political leanings. In addition, a few persuasive or powerful workers within a factory or shop could often exert a controlling influence over political opinion within the factory. Thus, one should not be surprised to find that opinions on the Bolsheviks varied from place to place and person to person. In June 1917, for example, while Pravda published a pro-Bolshevik resolution from workers at a Petrograd metal and machine factory, employees of a textile factory in Moscow drew up a resolution expressing distrust of the Bolsheviks. Workers in the town of Kuznetsk favored the Socialist Revolutionaries. In elections to the Constituent Assembly, held after the Bolsheviks took power, workers chose Bolsheviks over other parties, but the vote was far from unanimous. Bolsheviks received less than a third of the civilian votes cast in the city of Saratov, for example. Historian Donald J. Raleigh has found that soldiers' votes, not workers', were the Bolsheviks' main support in Saratov province—and most soldiers had peasant rather than working-class origins. Large numbers of workers protested against the Bolshevik Revolution. On 15 November 1917, employees at the Baltic Shipbuilding Works in Petrograd approved a resolution stating that the "seizure of [government] power by a single political party would be an incorrect step." (The resolution added that other parties were not justified in boycotting the Congress of Soviets after such a seizure "has been accomplished and become fact.") A day earlier, employees of the Kushnerev Printing Works in Moscow had passed a resolution condemning the fact that '"All power to the Soviets' has for all intents and purposes been transformed into the power of the Bolsheviks" and demanding that the Bolsheviks "recognize the Constituent Assembly, as soon as it convenes, as the sole spokesman for the people's will, and until then that we put an immediate halt to all those violations of the law whose indignant witnesses we have been." The Kushnerev workers were not an anomaly; most printers throughout Russia preferred the Mensheviks to the Bolsheviks. 168

Some workers expressed their disapproval of the Bolsheviks' actions by threatening to strike. On 29 October/11 November, Vikzhel, the railway workers' union, announced that railway operations would cease unless the Bolsheviks formed a coalition government including the other socialist parties. "Hundreds of factories, garrisons, Front and Fleet assemblies sent petitions to Smolny [Bolshevik headquarters in Petrograd] in support of the Vikzhel plan," historian Orlando Figes notes. "The workers in Moscow and other provincial cities . . . also expressed strong support." Other workers went beyond threats to actions. According to Raleigh, The belief that Bolshevik power would collapse or that the party would be forced to broaden the ruling coalition encouraged many Saratovites to go out on strike or otherwise subvert the functioning of the administrative machinery in the weeks following the Revolution. A strike originating in Petrograd that spread to Saratov's postal and telegraph workers made information hard to come by, while bank officials diverted much-needed funds from the soviet.

Similar situations existed in other cities. Government employees proved particularly unwilling to cooperate with the Bolsheviks. They walked out of their offices, locked doors, hid documents, and refused to release state funds. Eventually, the Union of Unions of Employees of Government Institutions organized its workers' resistance to the new government. Its strike continued into January 1918, when the new Bolshevik police force, the Cheka, suppressed it. The idea that the working class stood "united behind Lenin" may have been the party line during the Soviet era, but the evidence does not support it. Like the rest of the citizenry, Russian workers divided on the question of how their country should be governed. Before October, they split their support among several political parties. Among those who voted Bolshevik, many did so to show support for the Soviets, not to champion a one-party revolution. After October, workers voted against the Bolsheviks in elections to the Constituent Assembly, composed resolutions protesting the revolution, and went on strike. Some of these protesters grew reconciled to Bolshevik government as the months wore on. Other workers continued their resistance, which contributed to the development of the civil war. -CATHERINE BLAIR, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

References Vladimir N. Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Move-

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ments in Russia, 1918-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Robert V. Daniels, ed. and trans., A Documentary History of Communism in Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (Hanover, N.H. & London: University Press of New England, 1993). Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin, 1996). Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 19171932 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (December 1917 to February 1922) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July 1918 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984). Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The Revolution of 1917 in Petrq0rad (New York: Norton, 1978). Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within, second edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919).

Daniel H. Kaiser, ed., The Workers' Revolution in Russia, 1917: The View from Below (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Robert Service, ed., Society and Politics in the Russian Revolution (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992).

Diane P. Koenker and William G. Rosenberg, Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR Was Russia doomed to defeat in the Russo-Japanese War?

Viewpoint: Yes. Russia had inept military leaders who did not plan effectively and who improperly used the available military resources. Viewpoint: No. Russia had the resources to win the war; the Japanese sued for peace before the full might of Russian military forces could be brought to bear. Russia fared poorly in its war with Japan in 1904-1905. It lost its forward positions in Manchuria, much of its fleet, and some three hundred thousand casualties. A product of Russian imperial expansion in northwest Asia, the conflict grew out of its ambitions, which clashed with those of the Japanese. Japan wanted Korea, a free hand in southern Manchuria, and general regional hegemony. The Russians had almost exactly the same goals. Japan offered a diplomatic settlement, which the Russians turned down. Faced with no peaceful solution, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on Russian positions in the Far East in January 1904. Given Russia's dismal battlefield performance, many historians doubt it had any chance of winning. Having completed an impressive modernization program, the Japanese army stood strong and competitive, able to marshal qualitatively superior forces against a much larger opponent and inflict significant defeats. Russia's domestic crisis of 1905 further hindered its ability to field effective forces and hope for a turn in fortunes. On the other hand, Japan's early victories came at a tremendous price in blood and money. Its own domestic situation became unstable as the conflict went on. Russia's transportation facilities were improving, and, despite the empire's problems and weaknesses, it stood poised to move hundreds of thousands of fresh troops onto Asian battlefields, forces the Japanese could not match with their much smaller population and military. The conciliatory peace treaty negotiated in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905 was signed because the Japanese knew they lacked the wherewithal to defeat Russia in a longer war.

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Viewpoint: Yes. Russia had inept military leaders who did not plan effectively and who improperly used the available military resources. The Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 shocked the world. For two hundred years, Europe and the West had been habitually dominating the "less advanced" peoples of the world. Americans had swept aside the Native Americans, Africa was carved up, India was controlled by the British through a combination of diplomacy, guile, and warfare, Southeast Asia was seized by the French, and the world's largest and oldest political entity, the Chinese Empire, had been humiliated in the Opium Wars and abjectly split into "spheres of influence" by the West. For Russia, the largest of the great powers, to be defeated by a smaller Asian country such as Japan was inconceivable. Characteristically for such historical "surprises," however, there were plenty of warning signs. Despite their ultimate victories, Westerners had been defeated by non-Westerners on several other rather dramatic occasions. The American Indian wars gave U.S. troops their share of reverses, and the Ethiopians handed out a sound drubbing to the Italians in 1896. Nor was Afghanistan a walkover for the British: their first invasion in 1839 ended in a total disaster, which one lone soldier of the British Indian Army survived. The contest between Russia and Japan in 1904-1905 was much more evenly matched than the casual observer might have thought. A glimpse at the map might suggest that Russia, geographically the largest country in the world then and now, should have had no trouble defeating Japan. Even in terms of raw population numbers, the difference in size should have given the Russians a tremendous advantage: they outnumbered the Japanese by 136 million to 45 million, or about three to one. The Russian army numbered about 2 million active troops while the Japanese standing army was about 400,000. In a simple contest of numbers, the war should have been over before it began. Yet, these factors alone were poor indicators. Russia's military was largely deployed in the west and south in anticipation of conflicts with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Britain, leaving only 150,000 men in the East. Russia's huge minority populations demanded that its soldiers be stretched rather thinly across huge territories stretching from Poland to Korea. Concentrating troops in the Far East, where they would logically need to be to fight Japan, imposed a huge burden upon the Trans-Siberian railway, a singleHISTORY IN DISPUTE,

track line that remained unfinished until 1916. In 1904 it still had a gap of several hundred miles over difficult terrain. Even its finished segments were not run along the standards of professionalism and punctuality seen in Western Europe, the United States, or, for that matter, Japan. Moving troops and supplies to the Far East was a dicey proposition under the best conditions. Siberia's sparse population and tiny productive capacity, however, made it difficult for Russia to have done better. Russia's estate-based society also weakened its military and naval forces. Though reforms in the empire had made it possible for men of ability to rise in Russia's military, they had not yet risen to a position of dominance. Russia strongly resisted the European trend in military professionalization, and the Russians failed to adopt the German practice of having an officer of real competence shadow the noble titular head of military formations. While there were indeed some nobles of quality who reached positions of authority, there was no guarantee that those in command would be competent. When it came time to fight the Japanese, Russian generals and admirals often displayed dangerous incompetence or lack of initiative, unfortunate qualities that could have been avoided if their positions had been more open to talent. Several opportunities to attack exposed Japanese formations or to track Japanese maneuvers on land passed unexploited. The Russian navy lost all of its engagements due to plain incompetence, haste, and a lack of discipline and practice. After the Baltic Fleet finally arrived at Tsushima Straits in time for its utter destruction in May 1905, the war was decided. The outcome of the Russo-Japanese War, unlike the other wars the West had fought against non-Western peoples, was not determined by technological differences. By and large the two sides were evenly matched on this count. Despite Russia's logistical difficulties, the two opponents' numbers were evenly matched and the quality of their equipment largely equivalent. This equivalence reveals the real core of the difference between Japan and Russia. While Russia labored slowly to reform itself, Japan saw the writing on the wall and took the plunge to modernize as fast as possible. It is an interesting parallel that the two most radical decisions Japan took in the course of the last five hundred years were based upon its observations of what the West was doing to the world. Japan's decision in 1630 to cut off the outside world was based upon what the Spanish had done to subjugate the Philippines. By the time Tokyo (Edo) was compelled to open to the world in 1853, it had seen what the British had done to China and decided simply that it was best to be part of the VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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WHY THE RUSSIANS LOST IN THE RECENT WAR This article appeared in an American military periodical in August 1906 and examined the reasons for the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese War:

The news that Admiral Rojestvensky, on his trial by courts martial, has pleaded guilty of surrendering a warship in the battle of the sea of Japan, following as it does the trial of Admiral Nebogatoff for the surrender of a division of the fleet and the conviction and punishment of General Stoessel for the surrender of Port Arthur, raises two questions: First, whether these commanders have been justly condemned; and secondly, whether the Russians proved themselves formidable opponents in respect either of generalship or of soldiership during the far eastern war. Let us look first at the cases of Rojestvensky and Nebogatoff. The latest student of the war from the naval point of view, Mr. F. T Jane, though a fervent admirer of the Japanese, admits that while the Baltic Fleet was hastily organized and poorly officered, it kept station well enough to excite remark when it reached Singapore, and in several other matters was found to be superior to what had been expected. The credit for some approach to efficiency is given entirely to Admiral Rojestvensky, whose abilities, owing to his ultimate defeat in the Tsushima Straits, have not, in Mr. Jane's opinion, been property recognized. How did it happen that Rojestvensky chose the inside route for Vladisvostok through the Sea of Japan and on the eve of Togo's attack made the mistake of forming his vessels in two battle lines? It appears that Rojestvensky's scouts had sighted what they took to be the main Japanese fleet off Formosa, and there is no doubt that the Baltic Fleet when it entered the Straits of Tsushima believed the bulk of the Japanese navy to be behind it and the way to Vladivostok to be barred only by a certain number of torpedo craft and cruisers, through which in the fog it had a lair chance of passing unobserved. Mr. Jane holds that Rojestvensky's formation in two battle lines was a sound enough one, in view of attacks from small craft only, while on the other hand it was so obviously and hopelessly bad against a battle fleet attack that it seems of itself conclusive evidence that Rojestvensky never expected to meet Togo when he did. What the Russians assert is probably true, that the sudden discovery that they were faced with a fleet action overwhelmed them completely. Even so they were able during the following night to act sufficiently in unison to beat off two torpedo attacks, and the wonder is that

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they held together so long, not that they scattered so soon, Once scattered, their destruction was easy and inevitable. Yet it is to be noted that even at the end only the four ships composing the division commanded by Nebogatoff and the destroyer Bedovy, on which Rojestvensky's party had taken refuge, were sufficiently demoralized to surrender. Rojestvensky, though he pointed out that at the time he was dazed and out of his head, has acknowledged to the court martial that he took no measures to avert the surrender of the Bedovy, and Nebogatoff on his trial pleaded that if he had continued fighting he would only have caused a sacrifice of life. This was doubtless true, but Mr. Jane concurs with many naval officers in thinking the degradation inflicted on Nebogatoff by the Russian admiralty is justified by expediency not only because the Japanese in similar circumstances would never have surrendered, but also because the Russians in the same war and even the same battle had set a better example. The Oushakoff, for instance, refused to surrender, and sank still firing. In an earlier fight near the same spot the Rurik had chosen a similar fate. The deaths of those who went down in the Rurik and the Oushakoff were by no means fruitless, but on the contrary were almost as useful to the Russian navy of the future as if they had occurred in the hour of victory. Mr. Jane reminds us that if the principle of justified surrender should be admitted it would prove impracticable to draw the line. He looks, therefore, upon the merciless degradation of Nebogatoff and his captains by the Russian admiralty as perhaps its one strong action during the war. With that action is compared the course of the Chinese authorities, who executed every man left alive after the surrender of Wei-hai-Wei in the Chino-Japanese war, and the Carthaginian practice of crucifying a defeated leader. It will be remembered that the British navy received a similar warning against incapacity when Admiral Byng was put to death for his defeat off Minorca. It is certain that the orders of the Russian admiralty were very clear. They were that in the face of defeat a captain was to destroy his ship. This had been done by the captains of the Variag and Korietz and it had been done, though not very thoroughly, by the naval officers when general Stoessel surrendered Port Arthur, it was done by most of the captains of the ill-starred Baltic fleet, and ought to have been done by Nebogatoff and Rojestvensky, though in the letter's case there may have been extenuating circumstances.

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As for Stoessel, who figured as a hero in and outside of Russia while as yet the facts were imperfectly known, it was established before the court martial when he came to be tried that, although the garrison in Port Arthur was exposed to a murderous plunging fire after the Japanese had gained possession of the surrounding heights, yet the fortress was still supplied with enough food and munitions of war to resist for months. Not only on this account was Stoessel justly sentenced, but in view of the grave consequences attributable to the surrender. A force comprising almost a hundred thousand Japanese veterans was thus set free to take part in the operations around Mukden against the main Russian army Who will attempt to measure what this accession of strength may have meant to the Japanese when the fact is recalled that, even as it was, the Russians, though thrice beaten on the field, were never routed? Our conclusion is that in the military operations of which Manchuria was the the* ater the Russians were not signally outgeneraled by the Japanese, otherwise their losses must have been much greater than were actually experienced. As for the sup-

world of technological and industrial power. Accordingly, feudalism was abolished with a stroke, and Japan adopted the best practices of the modern world, no matter where they might be found. Paris was seen as the most beautiful and desirable city in the world, and therefore municipal administration was learned from the French. The Germans, sweeping to European domination by the time of national unification in 1871, had the most modern and powerful state, so their constitution and army were copied in toto. The British had the world's foremost navy, and it was also copied. Railway experts, engineers, machine makers, teachers, military officers, and naval officers were hired and brought to Japan in the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s the Japanese turned to sending their best and brightest youths around the world to learn how the West did things and then put that knowledge into practice at home. Western-style universities and factories were built. Individuals adopted western fashions in dress and entertainments. They did this with elan and discipline in part because the Japanese had experienced notable levels of urbanization, but also because

posed superiority of the Japanese in naval strategy, Mr. Jane, for his part, concedes that Rojestvensky's formation in Tsushima Straits, in view that he expected only a torpedo attack, was not a bad formation at all, and that It is hard to conceive that Togo, with Rojestvensky's general orders and with the special problems to be solved by the latter, would have done anything materially different up to the hour of battle. Nevertheless, we can not conceive of Togo as losing the ensuing fight, because every individual officer and every individual seaman would have died rather than forfeit victory. This brings us to the capital reason for the success of the Japanese. The Russians were not so much outgeneraled as they were outfought, and they were outfought because they were lukewarm and not wrought to desperation as they had been in the Crimea and in resistance to Napoleon's invasion; whereas every Japanese soldier and sailor believed, as was indeed the truth, that his country's fate was at stake and that his personal conduct might decide the issue. Source; The Army and Navy Register, 11 August W06.

Japan's philosophical ethos was modeled after Bushido, the code of the Samurai, emphasizing self-discipline, loyalty, and work. The Japanese became one of the most modern countries in the world in the space of a generation. It remains one of the most remarkable examples of deliberate social transformation in human history. By the time they went to war with the Russians in February 1904, the Japanese were aided by a confluence of good strategy, geography, and the ineptitude of their opponents. Japan had a limited strategy in the war, namely to expel the Russians from Manchuria and force them to recognize Japan's domination and rights in that area as well as in Korea. Only the Russian mission's skill at the Portsmouth peace negotiations in 1905 kept Japan from a total strategic success, as it was able to withhold recognition of Japanese prominence in Manchuria. In the field, the Japanese succeeded in most engagements. Benefiting from a home base much closer to the field of action, the Japanese needed only to lay siege to a handful of relatively small Russian outposts, the largest of which was the naval base at Port Arthur. Military technology being what it was at

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the time, the siege of Port Arthur was mostly a problem of engineering (trench digging) combined with the skillful application of artillery, two areas in which Japan, going through a modernizing wave of technological adoption, was well suited. Despite a heroic defense, the base surrendered in December 1904. The coup de grace of Russia's poor performance, however, must remain the dismal performance of its Baltic Fleet. Indeed, it was so poorly trained that as it passed the Dogger Bank, close to the British Isles, its fully intoxicated officers opened fire upon a number of British fishing boats in the fanciful belief that they were Japanese torpedo boats. That Britain was a noncombatant ally of Japan did nothing to help the Russians in the circumstances. The logistics of the voyage suffered from a characteristic lack of thorough planning and discipline in execution, and the squadron arrived in the Tsushima Straits in only a marginally operational state after an inordinately long voyage. The British-trained commander of the Japanese Fleet, Admiral Togo, dispatched most of the Baltic Fleet to the bottom of the sea in a few hours, leaving only a handful of Russian ships left floating. Military history teaches that victory does not always go to the larger power. If there is a rough equivalence in the level of technology, then the outcomes of war depend on many other factors. Geographical realities play their part, but it is hard to underestimate the role played by the human mind. The mind creates strategies, social structures, and the discipline, education, and training that result in solid leadership. These factors can combine to provide victory. In 19041905 Japan was essentially a more conscientiously modern country than Russia and was therefore poised for victory even before the first shots were fired. -PHILGILTNER, ALBANY ACADEMY

Viewpoint: No. Russia had the resources to win the war; the Japanese sued for peace before the full might of Russian military forces could be brought to bear. Russia could have defeated Japan in the war the two countries began in 1904. Although Japanese forces secured early tactical victories, they lacked the will, resources, and manpower reserves to emerge victorious in a drawn-out conflict and could not have hoped to best Russia had the war 174

continued much beyond its twenty-month duration. The peace treaty signed by the two powers under American auspices at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905 merely put a short stop to what would almost certainly have resulted in a Russian victory. The terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth indicated that the Japanese did not expect a positive outcome to a prolonged war. In the first place, to secure American mediation they had to agree to a private diplomatic protocol that acknowledged American supremacy in the Philippines, a step they were unlikely to have taken in the absence of desperation. Although the terms of the peace did not represent a complete return to the status quo ante bellum, Russia suffered relatively little. Both Russia and Japan agreed to withdraw from the mineral-rich province of Manchuria, something Russia had promised to do at the end of the multipower intervention against China's Boxer Rebellion but refused to effect in practice. Sovereignty over Manchuria was restored to the Chinese Empire, though Japan was granted strategic leasing rights in its southern region. Russia also surrendered the southern two-fifths of Sakhalin Island. Japan gained supremacy in Korea, but despite some minor Russian challenges this had been an accomplished fact before the war. Japan thus failed to achieve most of its initial goals. It abandoned its ambition to seize Manchuria, the greatest prize in the region, and failed to take all of Sakhalin, which Japan had formally claimed between 1845 and 1875. Japan also foreswore claims to a financial indemnity from its adversary, a virtual given for any victorious power in the prevailing international system. Japan's settlement on these terms was unpopular domestically. Having promised much more for its people's sacrifices, the government faced major riots when the Treaty of Portsmouth became public. Martial law had to be imposed through the autumn of 1905, the offices of the only newspaper favorable to the treaty were burned, one thousand civilians were killed or injured, and strong anti-American sentiment, which found fatal expression in December 1941, began to take root. Deep dissatisfaction also led directly to the collapse of Prime Minister Katsura Taro's cabinet just a few months later. Russia's treaty negotiator, Sergei Witte, a figure associated with political reform and economic modernization, was hailed as a diplomatic genius for extricating Russia from the war with minimal losses, but credit was not necessarily due to his bargaining skills. Japan settled the conflict on easy terms because it simply could not continue fighting. The history of the conflict on the Japanese side, frequently neglected by historians of Russia, was no happy one. By the time

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the peace treaty was signed, Japan faced, in addition to rising domestic unrest, an empty treasury and nearly 200,000 battlefield casualties. Popular opinion had turned dramatically against this costly war, which forced Japan to negotiate three foreign loans totaling a staggering 52 million pounds sterling. Although antigovernment demonstrations worsened after the signing of the peace treaty, in wartime they loomed almost as large as those that began to paralyze Russia during its domestic political crisis of 1905. Japan thus tottered on the brink of a crisis. Although Japanese casualty figures equaled only about two-thirds of those inflicted on Russian forces, they nevertheless augured ill for Japan's long-term war effort. Russia, with a population of 136 million and a correspondingly enormous number of men eligible for military service, could absorb its losses, which approached 300,000 by the end of the conflict, just as it had in earlier conflicts and would in later ones in which it emerged victorious. For Japan, with about one-third Russia's population (45 million) and one-fifth the number of men under arms— 400,000 versus Russia's 2 million—the losses meant that half of its mobilized troops were out of commission. These included high proportions of first-rank professional soldiers and the most

reliable reserves. Further military action would have had to rely almost exclusively on Japan's second- and third-rank recruits, who were vastly outnumbered by Russia's much larger pool of troops. Even without further mobilization, once the battle losses were deducted from standing strengths, Russia's forces outnumbered Japan's by more than eight to one—1.7 million to 200,000. Japan did win impressive naval victories over the Russians, but maritime prowess could not translate into a decisive advantage on land. Although Russia had not been able to concentrate all of its forces in the Far East in the early phases of the war, they were beginning to appear as the conflict came to its end. Indeed, part of the reason why they had not been deployed earlier was that the standing Russian forces in the Far East had already outnumbered the Japanese, and the high command did not see the need for more troops from other regions. Improvements in ground transportation to the Far East made the flow of troops and supplies much easier and more routine over time. By the conclusion of the peace treaty, the Trans-Siberian railway, despite being unfinished, was moving men and materiel across Eurasia at four times the prewar rate. Had the war continued for a few

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Russian soldiers manning trenches on a hillside in southern Manchuria, 1904 (Associated Press)

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more months, Russia's numerical advantages in men and supply would have overwhelmed the Japanese, and the latter's negotiators knew it when they gave up their most important objectives in the peace talks. In battles, moreover, the Japanese victories were never easy. Most depended on costly frontal assaults and lasted for weeks or even months. At the Yellow Sea naval base of Port Arthur, the Russians put up a fierce defense against strong numerical odds. The siege lasted for nearly a year before the Japanese could force a decision, and then at a cost of nearly twice the total number of Russian casualties. Major land battles at Liaoyang and Mukden each cost the Japanese tens of thousands of casualties, admittedly smaller than the Russian figures, but serious nevertheless. Given the Japanese public's opposition to the war, the conflict's drain on Japanese finances, and the exhaustion of Japan's best troops, it would be correct to describe these victories as Pyrrhic. At no point did the Japanese cross the Russian border, nor did they achieve the strategic victory of destroying or driving out the main body of Russian forces in Manchuria. Indeed, after the battle of Mukden in February-March 1905, the Japanese high command decided that it could not afford to undertake offensive operations in the spring campaign season, and no important land engagements took place before the conclusion of peace in August. The Russians, in the meantime, fell back on fortified positions at the strategic city of Harbin and collected reinforcements for which Japan's draft-age population had no answer. Japan long remembered its serious difficulties challenging Russia in 1904-1905 and its disappointing gains in the Treaty of Portsmouth. Faced with the strategic choice of attacking Russia again in the 1930s and 1940s or of moving against China and European and American possessions in the Pacific, its leaders chose the latter course. Tellingly, many of the strategic planners who influenced that decision had been junior officers stung by their tribulations a generation earlier. -PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

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References Richard M. Connaughton, The War of the Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear: A Military History of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5 (London & New York: Routledge, 1991). Michael J. F. McCarthy, The Coming Power: A Contemporary History of the Far East, 18981905 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905). David M. McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Bruce Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Ian H. Nish, The Origins of the Russo-Japanese War (London & New York: Longman, 1985). Shumpei Okamoto, The Japanese Oligarchy and the Russo-Japanese War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001). Francis R. Sedgwick, The Campaign in Manchuria 1904 to 1905: Second Period-The Decisive Battles, 22nd Aug. to 17th Oct. 1904 (London: George Allen, 1912). David Walder, The Short Victorious War: The Russo-Japanese Conflict, 1904-5 (London: Hutchinson, 1973). J. N. Westwood, The Illustrated History of the Russo-Japanese War (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973). Westwood, Russia against Japan, 1904-1905. A New Look at the Russo-Japanese War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). John A. White, The Diplomacy of the Russo-Japanese War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).

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SOCIAL CLASS Were social-class divisions in late Imperial Russia insurmountable? Viewpoint: Yes. The social imbalance between the peasantry and urban working class on the one side and the aristocracy and the nascent middle class on the other was too great to be overcome by anything but revolution. Viewpoint: No. Class conflict was becoming moderated by economic growth and social change. A traditional explanation for the success of the Bolshevik coup in November 1917 is the polarization of Russian society during the last decades of the empire. As Russia underwent rapid industrialization and urbanization—with the growth of a capital-controlling middle class and the proliferation of poor industrial workers—the traditional agrarian economy of Russia and the organization of its society into sosloviia (estates) was breaking down and becoming replaced with an unstable capitalist system. For some scholars, the classical Marxist paradigm of a radicalized proletariat seizing power from an oppressive bourgeoisie has best explained the Russian Revolution. According to this argument, no social conciliation was possible, and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was inevitable. Much recent research, however, places this so-called inevitability in doubt. The rise of Russian civil society—a combination of private organizations, local government, professional groups, and commercial culture— accompanied the rapid economic growth in the empire. Concepts of citizenship and civic consciousness were in many cases transcending artificial divisions of class, while ideas of nation, consumerism, and individualism were developing widely in Russia, just as they were in other rapidly industrializing countries. Without the traumas of World War I, Russia might not have had a revolution.

Viewpoint: Yes. The social imbalance between the peasantry and urban working class on the one side and the aristocracy and the nascent middle class on the other was too great to be overcome by anything but revolution. The social imbalances Russia faced developed over a long period of time, and the tsarist state, which

jealously sought for itself the prerogative of initiating or discouraging social change, did not begin soon enough to help in building a social structure that could respond adequately to the challenges of modernization. By the early twentieth century Russia lacked social stability in its towns and cities, whose populations were rapidly growing and whose economies were undergoing widespread industrialization. In the countryside rising social unrest rooted in class-based anger was made clearly manifest in disturbances after 1900, especially during

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the Revolution of 1905. No resolution to these problems was forthcoming in the final years of tsarist government, making Russia ripe for revolution in 1917. Throughout its history, the Russian population was overwhelmingly agrarian. Even in the late tsarist period, about 80 percent of the population consisted of peasants. Serfdom was abolished only in 1861 as part of the Great Reforms of the 1860s and early 1870s. Even after emancipation, the peasantry of European Russia remained tied by law, custom, and necessity to the village commune. Life for the povertystricken Russian peasants was brutal, and the marginal rises in income they experienced in the early twentieth century still left them far poorer than farmers in Western Europe. In addition, notions of social improvement and accumulating wealth through increased efficiency remained foreign to most peasants. The connections between Russian peasantry and the growing urban working class were strong because of the migration of peasants to urban areas after emancipation. In 1897, 44 percent of the Russian urban population was made up of persons officially of the peasant soslovie (estate), particularly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the peasant portions of the population were 69 and 70 percent, respectively. While many peasants were able to find a place in the urban workplace, these new workers were not fully assimilated into life in the city. Many worked in the city only for stretches of time, returning periodically to their villages, where they had family members, land, and responsibilities. Large numbers of urban workers lived in crowded, unsanitary barracks. In these conditions, social dislocation and various forms of asocial activity, such as alcoholism and criminality, were common. In 1914 fully twothirds of industrial workers maintained ties to the countryside, a situation that impeded the development of a confident urban working class that prized stability as a condition for its success. The small Russian middle class had received a boost from the Great Reforms, which created new forums for civic activity. These reforms included the creation of an independent judiciary and local assemblies in 1864, as well as elected city councils and city administrations in 1870. During the 1860s and 1870s voluntary activity spread in the form of associations and charities. Associational life continued to grow in Russia to the end of the tsarist era, and the small Russian merchant class experienced impressive cultural growth in the late nineteenth century. 178

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Unfortunately, however, the tsarist state saw the civic activity of the middle class as a possible threat and took steps to limit it. In 1892 the government introduced a new Municipal Statute that raised the property-ownership threshold for participation in city elections. Through this counterreform the Russian state sought to decrease city councils' fields of activity and to increase government oversight of urban affairs. The middle class in the late tsarist period and the nascent Russian civil society needed more time and a less suspicious state for their efforts to bear fruit. Moreover, their activities did not adequately counterbalance the problems inherent in the isolated urban working class. The tsarist state was aware of the revolutionary potential of Russian urban workers, who had no legal means for voicing grievances. Between 1901 and 1903, the head of the Moscow secret police, Sergei Zubatov, established police-supervised workers' organizations, whose purpose was to funnel worker dissatisfaction toward demands for strictly economic, not political, reform. The police soon lost control of these organizations, which engaged in strikes in 1903 and were then shut down by the state. On 22 January 1905 a procession of peaceful St. Petersburg workers led by the activistpriest Georgii Gapon sought to present Tsar Nicholas II with a petition requesting that he act to ease their onerous working conditions and allow mild political reform. Tsarist troops shot at these workers, causing many deaths and casualties. The event, soon known as Bloody Sunday, was the trigger for the Revolution of 1905. The violence and unrest in the countryside and in urban areas of Russia in 1905 made evident the depth of the dissatisfaction felt by millions of peasants and townspeople, poor and better-off alike. Soviets (councils) of workers were formed in urban areas, and in October 1905 the workers' councils organized a general strike in St. Petersburg, which forced Nicholas to grant civil rights and a legislative assembly. Yet, the vast differences in outlook and lifestyle between Russian urbanized peasants and poor workers, on the one hand, and educated urbanites, on the other hand, remained. These deep social cleavages were laid bare by liberals' reaction to Nicholas IPs October Manifesto. Politically engaged zemstvo members and professionals flocked to the newly formed party of Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). Satisfied with the government's concession of allowing an elected parliament, the State Duma, liberals abandoned the workers' movement. Thus, liberals did not support the workers of the Presnia district of Moscow, who, upset at the arrest of

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soviet leaders in St. Petersburg, took up arms and erected barricades in December 1905, as in the Paris Commune of 1871. The state responded with troops and artillery, killing more than one thousand people. Unrest in the countryside continued in some regions into 1907, with peasants destroying manor houses and property, directing their anger at the occupiers of land the peasants felt was rightfully theirs. As in Moscow, the state ended the violence not through addressing protestors' concerns but through the use of further violence and punitive expeditions. In the wake of the events of 1905-1907, the state took steps it hoped would eventually result in modernization of the Russian agricultural sector. Premier Petr Stolypin's agrarian reform was aimed at destroying the peasant commune, the institution most closely associated with the backward peasant class. Peasants in the Russian heartland, however, were on the whole extremely reluctant to hold land on their own, separate from the commune. Most commonly, the commune was abandoned only by the few wealthiest peasants and the poorest, who sought to sell their holdings in hopes of establishing a better life elsewhere. Other important reforms proposed by Stolypin were vigorously opposed at the other end of the Russian social-class spectrum. Stolypin had planned to democratize local government through the extension of zemstvo authority to all classes, not just the peasantry. But an important preliminary part of his reform—the extension of the zemstvo to the western provinces of Russia—was defeated in 1911 by conservative landholders in the Duma. Greatly suspicious of change within the Russian system of government, Nicholas II failed to support his own prime minister, though he did consent to the implementation of the bill after Stolypin threatened to resign. Without the support of the autocrats for reform, the Russian ruling class showed itself unable to take decisive action to avoid the explosion of fury from below that occurred in 1917. With little progress being made in relations among Russian social groups, the intense pressures caused by World War I further weakened the fabric of society, making it all too vulnerable to revolution. The outburst of patriotism across all Russian social classes that marked the outbreak of war in August 1914 faded fast. Riots broke out in late February 1917 among the working class of Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been renamed in 1914), beginning as expressions of anger and frustration from people suffering under wartime deprivation. When the hundreds of thousands of workers on strike in March were joined by sol-

NICHOLAS ITS OCTOBER MANIFESTO The Revolution of 1905 forced Tsar Nicholas II to make concessions allowing Russian society some voice in their government On 17 October 1906 he issued a manifesto titled "On the Improvement of Order in the State":

The disturbances and unrest in St Petersburg, Moscow and in many other parts of our Empire have filled Our heart with great and profound sorrow. The welfare of the Russian Sovereign and His people is inseparable and national sorrow is His too. The present disturbances could give rise to national instability and present a threat to the unity of Our State. The oath which We took as Tsar compels Us to use all Our strength, intelligence, and power to put a speedy end to this unrest which is so dangerous for the State. The relevant authorities have been ordered to take measures to deal with direct outbreaks of disorder and violence and to protect people who only want to go about their daily business in peace. However, in view of the need to speedily implement earlier measures to pacify the country, we have decided that the work of the government must be unified. We have therefore ordered the government to take the following measures in fulfilment of our unbending will: Fundamental civil freedoms will be granted to the population, including real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association. Participation in the Duma will be granted to those classes of the population which are at present deprived of voting powers, insofar as is possible in the short period before the convocation of the Duma, and this will lead to the development of a universal franchise. There will be no delay to the Duma elect already being organized. It is established as an unshakeable rule that no law can come into force without its approval by the State Duma and representatives of the people will be given the opportunity to take real part in the supervision of the legality of government bodies. We call on all true sons of Russia to remember the homeland, to help put a stop to this unprecedented unrest and, together with this, to devote all their strength to the restoration of peace to their native land. Source: Russian History Homepage, Department of Slavonic Studies, University of Durham .

diers, who were also unhappy about the war, the autocracy was doomed. Geoffrey Hosking has pointed out that the tsarist regime had two successors: the representatives of the urban, educated class in the Provisional Government and the representatives of the common folk, the narod, in the workers' Soviets and in soldier and peasant committees. When the Petrograd soviet tried to achieve a working alliance with the Provi-

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sional Government, it weakened its ties with those it represented—the radicalized narodthus leaving the field open for Bolshevik appeals to the narod and for the Bolshevik seizure of power in October. In his poem "The Twelve," Russian symbolist poet and prophet of the revolution, Aleksandr Blok, expressed the exultation felt by Petrograd's lower classes in the fall of 1917. Twelve Red Army soldiers march through the streets of the city, wreaking destruction as they go, as if destroying the world that was old Russia: To the woe of all the bourgeois We'll set the world aflame and blow it high We'll set the world aflame in bloodSo help us God! -BRADLEY WOODWORTH, YALE UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Class conflict was becoming moderated by economic growth and social change. Until the end of the old regime in 1917, subjects of the Russian tsar were legally categorized according to a feudal system of estates, called sosloviia. Although some people may have held on with pride to their status as dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry), and while the category of krestianin (peasant) provided an adequate description of the majority of the provincial population, in practice much of the estate-based system had given way by the early twentieth century to a functioning system of classes, in the modern West European sense. The vocabulary used to characterize classes, borrowed directly from the West, however, was often misleading. The term worker had a Russian equivalent, mbochii, and referred to factory workers, many of whom developed a politicized identity connected with this designation. The term for the bourgeoisie, burzhui, arrived more as a pejorative reference to cultural taste and did not carry the weight of the Western "burgher" class or of the petit bourgeois substratum of shopkeepers and independent tradesmen. Instead, the old estate categories of kupechestvo (merchantry) and meshchanstvo (urban dwellers) held sway. Kftpitalist (capitalist) became a term of opprobrium during the Russian social revolution, referring—not altogether inappropriately—to men of wealth and power, but not necessarily to all those who

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would have been considered bourgeois in the West. The Western terms appeared regularly in satires that Russians wrote about themselves, especially in vaudevilles and comic routines, but they were abstractions in daily life. Professionals—including intellectuals, doctors, lawyers, professors, agronomists, and other educated middle elements—gathered into the Russian self-styled soslovie, the "intelligentsia." Although they disdained class labels, they positioned themselves politically alongside middleclass moderates in the West: they wanted civil rights and rule of law, while they sometimes distrusted the lower classes and preferred to assume the right to speak in what they believed to be the best interests of their social inferiors. It is necessary to move beyond the words and explore individual lives. For example, the two most successful Russian publishing magnates came from opposite ends of the soslovie spectrum: I. D. Sytin was born a peasant, while A. S. Suvorin was born into the nobility. Few Russians were as enterprising as this pair, who were on opposite ends of the political spectrum. The conservative Suvorin, however, editorialized consistently against deferring to someone on the basis of birth rather than work and accomplishments. Sytin, the wealthier of the two, did not care about social categories. What set both men apart from everyone else was their entrepreneurial spirit. They understood the logic that lay behind the Great Reforms, which emancipated the serfs within a network of legal and social changes that were fundamentally about transforming Russia into a modern industrial state. A perceptive eyewitness to the Industrial Revolution, the German communist philosopher Karl Marx had brought attention to the reality that changes made in economic structures have reciprocal impacts on social relations. If few other Russians shared the combined energies and ambitions of Sytin and Suvorin, millions nonetheless set about taking advantage of opportunities on a smaller scale to turn themselves into something new, into individuals whose livelihoods, ambitions, and ways of life were fundamentally different from the old regime's estate paradigm. This chance to develop a private life and partake in the burgeoning new public one determined social change, regardless of the applied terminology. Economic historians have thoroughly examined the explosive growth of the tsarist economy in the last three decades before World War I. The annual rate of economic growth averaged almost 6 percent; production of such fundamental industrial materials as coal and pig iron quadrupled; and the consumption of cotton tripled. A rising national-banking sys-

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tern was complemented with mutual-credit societies that made capital available for large and small investments. The length of the Russian national railways doubled. Urbanization grew rapidly along with industrialization, and the populations of St. Petersburg and Moscow doubled to more than two million each between 1900 and 1917. Literacy rates in both cities hovered around 70 percent, surpassing 80 percent among males. Literacy in the country at large doubled from 20 percent in 1897 to 40 percent in 1917. Although Russia's economy still lagged far behind those of its Western neighbors, which had already undergone the Industrial Revolution, the Russian gross national prod-

uct, like that of its neighbors, almost doubled between 1897 and 1913. Along with these developments came the evolution of different functions for participants in the Russian economy, from workers on factory floors to bankers assessing investments to shopkeepers keeping consumer goods in circulation. While economic historians celebrate this growth, social historians, who assess the effects of industrialization on people's lives, have taken a less sanguine view. They have tended to stress the inequities between the haves and the have-nots, with population figures weighted heavily in favor of the have-nots. Few legal restraints kept factory owners from exploiting workers, and slums festered as a

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result of inefficient city governments and unregulated urban conditions. When unions were illegal, workers had no course of nonviolent redress for their grievances. After unions were legalized in 1906, those that were organized proved ineffective, and many others were denied recognition by the government. The growing number of strikes between the government's violent repression of nonviolent strikers at the Lena goldfields in April 1912 and the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 has been interpreted to mean that differences between workers and the middle classes had grown irreconcilable. Economic and social historians could reconcile some of their differences by comparing early-twentieth-century Russia to other nations at the same stage of modernization. By its nature, industrialization creates social classes because it generates new resources, including jobs, and sparks competition over them. Conflict becomes inevitable but is not insurmountable. Many of the characters created by Charles Dickens illustrate the horrors experienced by the people most vulnerable to the inequities of the first stages of the Industrial Revolution. In the first years of the twentieth century, American workers averaged more than three thousand strikes per year. In industrialized Western countries the intrinsic conflict became integrated into the political structure, and the continuing competition over resources has been constantly renegotiated through the electoral process. As long as Russia remained an autocracy, the various groups had limited opportunities to negotiate political, as opposed to strictly economic, settlements. Strong evidence, however, suggests that Tsar Nicholas II was going to be forced to continue relaxing the autocratic grip on Russian society that he had been made to lessen in 1905. The assault on the unarmed workers had repelled liberals and moderate conservatives. They criticized the prevailing state of governmental affairs and expressed the desire to assume a greater role in decision making about policies that affected the public at large. The increase in the strike movement just before the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 seems likely to have been connected to the deftness with which local civic groups organized war-industries committees, thus participating directly in a political activity of overwhelming significance. The workers and the bourgeoisie might not have resolved their differences over industrialization, but they might have recognized the need for political settlements in which all interests would have to be represented. If professionals distrusted the instinct of the masses, 182

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they still believed in promoting basic equalities that would give them an entrance into the political system and a stake in its long-term stability: they argued for enfranchising all social strata as a means of giving everyone a fundamental interest in maintaining what would be a new government. The rapid expansion of credit unions in agricultural regions of the country made plain that the most durable holdovers from the estate system, the landowning nobility and the peasants, were making extensive use of the capitalist medium of credit to find a way to cross the most basic divide between them, the ownership of arable land. In the last decades of tsarism, noble landownership sharply declined in favor of the peasantry, not because the nobility was a decaying group with no other choice than to sell its estates but because many landowners realized that they could convert their rural real estate into profitable urban investment capital. Characterizing the Bolshevik Revolution as a "workers' and peasants' revolution" exposes the paradoxes inherent in the hybrid Russian system of class and soslovim. At first, this designation seems entirely appropriate, as the Bolsheviks took power in the name of workers and peasants and made both groups the initial beneficiaries of political and economic policies. But during the revolution the term worker lost its functional, economic, and Marxist bearing, assuming in its place an estate-based understanding of inherited privilege and becoming the name of something like a caste. Workers and their offspring benefited from official policies of favoritism and frequently rose to elite positions that usually carried material rewards and other privileges associated with the burzhui of the old regime. The peasants, after their initial land grab, found themselves for all practical purposes re-enserfed by a Soviet regime that forcibly collectivized their land and limited their mobility out of agriculture. The remaining members of the noble and merchant estates, as well as those belonging to the Church, were actively discriminated against by the new regime on the basis of their or their families' prerevolutionary estate membership. The Bolshevik Revolution thus returned most Russians to the feudal past, when estate membership defined social station. It destroyed a functioning class system that—characterized as it is everywhere by competition over resources and influence—had allowed Russians mobility and greater opportunities for self-expression and diversity, befitting an identifiably modern state. -LOUISE MCREYNOLDS, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I, MANOA

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References Seymour Becker, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985). Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, eds., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Olga Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy Before 1914 (London: Macmillan, 1976). Gregory Freeze, "The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History," American Historical Review, 91 (February 1986): 11-36. Leopold Haimson, "The Problem of Political and Social Stability in Urban Russia on the

Eve of the War and Revolution' Revisited," Slavic Review, 59 (Winter 2000): 848-875. Haimson, "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917," Slavic Review, 23 (December 1964): 619-642; 24 (March 1965): 1-22. Geoffrey A. Hosking, Russia and the Russians: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001). Boris Mironov with Ben Eklof, A Social History of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917, 2 volumes (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000). Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881-1917 (London & New York: Longman, 1983).

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STOLYPIN'S REFORMS Did Stolypin's reforms in the wake of the Revolution of 1905 have the potential to solve the problems of rural Russia? Viewpoint: Yes. Stolypin's reforms Instilled an appreciation for private property, satisfied grievances, and began to displace outmoded peasant institutions. Viewpoint: No. Stolypin's reforms were inadequate to bring about the necessary redistribution of land and transform the peasantry into productive and supportive subjects of the tsar.

The appointment of Petr Arkadevich Stolypin as premier of the Russian Empire in 1906 brought with it the promise of reform. Although Stolypin became infamous for his use of political repression to stabilize Russian society in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905, he also implemented major initiatives intended to deepen that stabilization. Chief among these reforms was a measure that allowed peasants to depart from the traditional mir (commune), the institution to which most of them had belonged for centuries, and create their own private farms. Meant to instill values of proprietorship and private property, this legislation was intended to give Russian peasants a stake in the preservation of the established order. Hoping to attract people of initiative and responsibility, Stolypin characterized the measure as "a wager on the strong." By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, millions of peasants had embraced his idea and left the commune. Millions of others left overcrowded central Russia for new lives in Siberia, where, in another reform, the state made lands available to colonists. Because Stolypin's assassination in 1911 was followed shortly thereafter by war and revolution, it is impossible to assess the long-term effects of his reforms. Since large numbers of peasants left the commune and formed private farmsteads after 1906, some observers believe the reform was successful; millions of people were dissatisfied with the communal way of life and set out on their own. Yet, as others point out, the majority of Russian peasants did not establish private farms in the period between the implementation of the reforms and 1914. Moreover, when central authority collapsed in 1917, the communal form of land tenure reemerged. The question of whether Stolypin's reforms could have averted revolution and successfully addressed the problems of rural Russia remains central to considerations of the era.

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Viewpoint: Yes. Stolypin's reforms instilled an appreciation for private property, satisfied grievances, and began to displace outmoded peasant institutions. Petr Arkadevich Stolypin, the last great statesman of Imperial Russia, served as premier from 1906 until his assassination in 1911. During that half decade he put forward an ambitious agenda of reforms designed to help the peasantry develop the citizenship skills they needed to become integrated fully into Russia's incipient civil society in accordance with the original intentions of the Great Reforms of 1861, which had abolished serfdom and attempted to establish procedures by which they could become landowners. He thought that this goal could be accomplished only if the zemstvo (rural local self-government, plural zemstva) and municipal administrations cooperated closely with the national government. Stolypin believed that government "supervision over the activity of public agencies must be confined predominantly to the observation of the legality of these agencies' activities." For their part, the zemtsy (elected deputies of the zemstvo) hoped to serve in the role of kul'turtreger (culture bearers) and convert the zemstvo into an engine of rural progress and a school for the civic education of the isolated and largely illiterate peasantry. The zemstva could thus assist Stolypin in the gradual closure of the cultural and psychological gulf between the two Russias: the masses, who still existed in a state of legal segregation, and educated and privileged society. Stolypin was aware of the tsarist regime's limited social underpinnings and familiar with the zemstva from his tenure as governor of Grodno and Saratov provinces. He envisioned a new social and civic order in the countryside. Along with the creation of a new peasant stratum of individual farmers (conservative and free from the dysfunctional rural commune), Stolypin supported a program of broader peasant enfranchisement in local government. His reforms included democratization of elections to the existing uezd (county) zemstva, the reduction of noble influence by replacing the county gentry marshal with an appointed official, and the establishment of all-estate local government at the most basic local level, the peasants' volosf (canton) zemstvo. While no liberal, Stolypin shared the zemtsy's belief that only such fundamental reform of local government could provide vital connections between the village and the state and make Russian peasants into conserHISTORY IN DISPUTE,

vative citizens who would support the changing state order. He believed that the volosf zemstvo, in particular, would empower peasants and quite likely bring about the as-yet-unrealized promise of civic equality for the peasantry. Implicit in this viewpoint was the understanding that such an overhaul of local government would come at the expense of the landholding nobility's traditional dominance. At the same time, Stolypin's government was sympathetic to the idea of slowly expanding the zemstva into the borderlands, areas of the empire where there were few nobles (and hence where peasants would largely control any new lands) or where the nobility was largely non-Russian (as was the case in the Polish provinces of the empire, for example). As proponents of zemstvo expansion had long argued, the economic and cultural backwardness of Siberia, the Caucasus, and the western provinces (even compared to the Russian heartland) could partly be explained by the absence of elected local governments. In addition to bringing improved health care, better roads, and schools to these regions, zemstvo expansion also promised to foster the integration of the empire, although such prospects ran against the grain of unsystematic efforts at Russification (the attempt by the last two tsars to stifle the emerging national consciousness of Russia's ethnic minorities by discriminating against their religions and languages) and involved risks related to turning over local self-government to non-elite or non-Russian hands. Of equal importance was Stolypin's effort to ease the peasant's so-called land shortage by facilitating their resettlement in Siberia. In fact, Russian peasants had more land per capita than other European counterparts; their economic distress was largely the result of their inefficient cultivation techniques and the paralyzing influence of the commune. Their perception of disadvantage, whether grounded in reality or not, was a powerful undercurrent in the countryside that Stolypin knew had to be defused. The tsarist government had formerly discouraged peasant migration to preserve a supply of cheap labor for the nobility, but the overpopulation of the European provinces made it, in Stolypin's words, essential "to relieve the congestion of some provinces in Russia." The plan for resettling peasants in Siberia and the Far East was part of Stolypin's attempt to bring the peasantry into the modern era in both the political and economic sense. He hoped to create a class of rural property holders east and west of the Urals. As with his attempt to break up the commune and replace it with a class of smallholders who would presumably be loyal to the throne, Stolypin did not devise the plan himself. He was the one who forcefully and tenaciously promoted it. VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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AGRARIAN REFORM Petr Arkadevich Stolypin's ptan to help Russian peasant private landowners was outlined in the Ukaz of 9 November 1906, which included the following provisions:

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

Source: John Slatter, Russian History Home Page .

All Stolypin's reforms (especially that of local government) were connected to other projects designed to break down peasant particularism and make peasants into citizens—most notably dismantling the rural commune and achieving universal schooling. During the period of 1906-1911, peasant-oriented zemstvo activity expanded most dramatically since these institutions had been established during the era of the Great Reforms. Zemstvo budgets had unprece186

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dented and steady increases as a result of the expansion of existing programs and the creation of new fields of activity such as agronomy and adult education. State grants increased from 2 million rubles in 1907 to more than 40 million rubles by 1913. The largest share of these grants went to schools (22.7 million in 1913), amounting to about one-quarter of zemstvo spending on education. Zemstvo spending grew at an even faster rate than state subsidies during this time period. By 1914 zemstvo spending on education surpassed spending on medicine for the first time. Peasants began to pressure the government for more schools and assistance. Despite the undemocratic franchise the zemstvo still embodied the all-estate principle and the public interest at large, factors that marked their transformation into legitimate organs of popular expression. New procedures adopted by decree on 5 October 1906 restored direct peasant voting in zemstvo elections and deprived provincial governors of the right to select peasant zemstvo deputies from lists of candidates chosen by peasant voters, a scheme that had often ensured the installation of peasant officials who were dependent on tutelage from the bureaucracy. An emerging cohort of younger peasants, many of whom were products of the zemstvo schools, played a more assertive role in zemstvo sessions. In other words, despite Stolypin's failure to gain noble acquiescence to the introduction of the canton all-estate zemstvo (which no amount of noble gerrymandering could have prevented the peasants from dominating), the zemstvo touched ever-widening circles of peasants, and within the village there were elements (though still a minority) pressing for wider participation and inclusion in local government. After Stolypin's death, key agencies such as the Ministries of Internal Affairs and Education largely abandoned their support for reform, defending the legal resegregation of peasants and advocating the reassertion of autocratic policies. The nobles, however, had come to realize that such policies would undercut their own influence and ability to shape events in the countryside. The renewed activism of the zemstva (which was paradoxical given their political turn to the Right after the Revolution of 1905) led to a pattern of conflict that resembled in many respects the clashes with the state that had taken place during the previous decade when the zemstvn had been led by liberals. The zemtsy were thrust into conflict with the state at all levels, and they made common cause with the technical specialists whom they had hired to run the many zemstvo programs. The conferences held by these professionals—convened to discuss technical, social, economic, and other issues in the years

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before World War I—fostered the public space for an emerging civil society that included independent and active organs of local self-government. Stolypin knew that the changes he sought would have to be effected gradually. He stated that in twenty years one would no longer recognize Russia, and that assertion proved to be correct, though not in the way he anticipated. He also said that his reforms could not be stopped even by cannon, and in that respect he was proven wrong. By the outbreak of World War I, millions of peasants had migrated to Siberia and established their own farms free of noble interference. In addition, half the peasant households in European Russia had asked to participate in the consolidation of contiguous farmsteads outside the influence of the commune. In 1914 the tsarist government was prepared to make substantial changes in fiscal policy in order to accelerate the peasant resettlement program and the consolidation of plots into so-called Americanstyle farms. Literacy rates doubled between 1897 and 1917, and peasant participation in local selfgovernment was steadily increasing. Perhaps the answer to the question of whether Stolypin's heroic efforts could have successfully transformed Russia into a modern polity can be found in this quotation from the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin: "It would be empty and stupid democratic phrasemongering to say that the success of the Stolypin agrarian policy in Russia is 'impossible.' It is possible!" -THOMAS EARL PORTER, NORTH CAROLINA A&T STATE UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Stolypin's reforms were inadequate to bring about the necessary redistribution of land and transform the peasantry into productive and supportive subjects of the tsar. Premier Petr Arkadevich Stolypin wagered in vain on "the sober and the strong" because he was essentially betting against the strength of Russian cultural traditions. He looked to the West, where centuries of internal developments had favored private property and paved the way for the development of a bourgeoisie that successfully transformed an agrarian economy into an industrial economy. Historical patterns of Russian landownership differed so substantially from those of the industrialized democracies of HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

the West that Stolypin's reforms, though revolutionary and farsighted, were necessarily stillborn. Having risen to political prominence as governor of the agricultural province of Saratov, Stolypin understood keenly the extent to which Russian peasantry was economically inefficient. Although he attracted the tsar's attention because of his use of force against peasants who took part in the Revolution of 1905, he made it clear as premier that he had acted decisively to defend private property, not to oppress the peasants further. On the contrary, at the heart of his reforms lay the desire to turn the peasants into individual property owners who—because they would then feel invested in the system—would respect the need for law and order. As Stolypin wrote, "private peasant ownership is a guarantee of order, because each small owner represents the nucleus on which rests the stability of the state." In this sense, Stolypin's plans were as ambitious as the emancipation of the serfs had been in 1861: both sets of reforms were designed to incorporate the peasantry into the empire as productive and supportive subjects, if not quite citizens, of the autocracy. Like the Great Reformers before him, however, Stolypin could not devise a satisfactory set of means to achieve his ends. He attempted to tackle two problems simultaneously because of their intrinsic connection: hierarchical social relations and unproductive agriculture. As a result of the first reforms in the 1860s, the obshchina (village assembly of male elders) was entrusted with the responsibility of making the payment to the state for the lands procured from the emancipation, which left about two-thirds of Russian farmland in peasant hands. This role gave the obshchinn tremendous power over all members of the village commune because it made decisions about the portion of the collective payment for which each family was responsible. Keeping this system in place perpetuated the practice of cultivating land in disaggregated strips, which were worked by different families on a rotating basis. By canceling the collective redemption payments and making it legally possible for individuals to consolidate strips and withdraw from communal land tenure, Stolypin launched a frontal assault on the social institution that had held the overwhelming majority of the population together for hundreds of years. Undermining the authority of the obshchina, however, was not tantamount to destroying it. From the first debates about how to implement the emancipation, it had been mired in a controversy that had cultural as well as political implications. Political groups as disparate as the right-wing Slavophiles and left-wing socialists endowed the commune with a primordial peasant sense of democracy; both saw it not only as RusVOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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Farmers transporting grain during World War I, when only 20 percent of the peasants claimed personal ownership of their land (Associated Press)

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sia's past but as an ideal model for its future. In contrast, Russians oriented toward change according to Western models of industrialization and modernization saw the commune as a bulwark of tradition against change and progress. When the government decided to make the communes rather than the individual peasant households responsible for paying for lands received in the terms of the emancipation, it gave the obshchino, increased authority. For Stolypin's reforms to achieve the goal that he had set for them, he would have had to break up the commune by legislative fiat. He had denounced the institution as "a rotten anachronism that thrived only thanks to the artificial, unsound sentimentalism of the last half century." Despite implementing measures to undermine the power of communes, Stolypin was unprepared to go to the extreme of legally dissolving the communes forever. He thus left a situation in the countryside whereby they could assert themselves either negatively, by using force or intimidation against members who wanted to leave, or positively, by continuing to borrow collectively from the state for the purchase of new lands. Both variants happened, and the patriarchal hierarchy remained in place. The other plank in Stolypin's reforms, improving agricultural productivity, also faced an historical political impediment: taking land from the gentry to give to the peasantry. Rural unrest during the Revolution of 1905 had taught many HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

landowners the lessons that their predecessors had failed to learn from centuries of peasant rebellions, and many were eager to sell portions, or all, of their estates to the government, via the Peasant Land Bank, for repurchase by the peasants. Also looking to profit from rapidly rising land prices, the already brisk sale of noble land increased dramatically after 1905. In the first year of Stolypin's reforms, the Peasant Bank purchased almost 183 million acres from noble landowners for redistribution to peasants. Additionally, Stolypin opened up for peasant colonization state-owned lands in the frontiers of Western Siberia, where the communal structure was not embedded. He also increased funds available through the Peasant Bank for the loans necessary to expand and improve cultivated territories. Initially, more than a million peasant households responded positively to Stolypin's initiatives: 508,000 households petitioned to leave their communes in 1908, and 580,000 in the next year. But after this initial enthusiasm, the numbers began to decline. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, only 20 percent of the peasantry claimed personal ownership of their property, and just 14 percent of peasant-owned agricultural land was no longer held communally. Although they purchased new lands, peasants were dissatisfied with the obligation to pay for land that they had traditionally farmed as serfs or hired laborers; they usually considered the land to be theirs by

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right. As for Stolypin's dream of creating independent, enclosed farmsteads (as opposed to the disaggregated farming strips)—homes to "the capable, industrious peasant, the salt of the Russian earth"—less than 11 percent of peasant lands had been consolidated in this way by 1916. The so-called Stolypin trains, transporting potential colonizers to the East, had already begun to run less frequently by 1910, when a crop failure in Siberia prompted 20 percent of that year's colonizers to reboard the trains heading back to their homes in the West. Though some have blamed peasant inertia for these poor results and ennobled the commune as an essential form of Russian egalitarianism, much of the failure was the fault of the government. It lacked the will to break up the communes once and for all or to implement a compulsory redistribution of noble land (as, for example, Britain was doing around the same time with government-sponsored financial compensation for the landowners). The government also failed to provide such fundamental necessities as surveyors to oversee the consolidation of strips. Tellingly, in his attempt to implant the roots of economic liberalism, Stolypin used the illiberal political tactics that autocracy allowed him. Instead of taking his plans to the deliberative legislative body, the State Duma, which began meeting in April 1906, he implemented his reforms by using a loophole clause in the Russian quasi constitution, Article 87, which allowed the tsar to promulgate laws when the Duma was not in session. The high-handedness of this measure did not endear Stolypin to the elected reformers, many of whom advocated more-radical measures. This contradiction exposes Stolypin's fundamental failure: he wanted to change the mentality of others, but not his own. -LOUISE MCREYNOLDS, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAFI, MANOA

References Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2001). Richard Hennessy, The Agrarian Question in Russia 1905-1907: The Inception of the Stolypin Reform (Giessen: Wilhelm Schmitz, 1977). David Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861-1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987). Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906-1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin's Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Thomas Porter and Scott Seregny, "The Zemstvo Reconsidered," in The Politics of Local Government in Russia, edited by Alfred Evans and Vladimir Gelman (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 19-44. Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Peter Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998). George Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: Agrarian Reform in Russia, 1861-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). Aleksandr V. Zenkovskii, Stolypin: Russia's Last Great Reformer (Princeton: Kingston Press, 1986).

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TREATY OF BREST-LITOVSK Did the Bolsheviks cede permanent domination of the Russian periphery in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk? Viewpoint: Yes. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk clearly gave Germany control over Eastern Europe, and only the German defeat in World War I kept Russia from permanently losing its buffer zone against invasion from the West. Viewpoint: No. Desperate to end Russian involvement in World War I, the Bolsheviks agreed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, confident that they would regain control of the ceded territory when the proletarian revolution spread to Germany. On 3 March 1918, the Bolshevik government of Russia signed one of the most punitive peace treaties in history. Having come to power the previous November with a promise to extricate the country from the destruction of World War I, revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin was prepared to accept even the most Draconian peace conditions to quell popular discontent, an objective crucial to the survival of his regime. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Soviet Russia pledged to give up vast Russian territories inhabited by nearly 60 million people and containing much of the Russian Empire's industry, farmland, and resources. These territories included modern Finland, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Georgia—borderlands once (and later) thought vital to Russian security. Germany was obliged to remove its troops from the East after the general World War I armistice, signed in November 1918, and the terms of Brest-Litovsk became irrelevant. This chapter debates what this massive renunciation of territory would have meant for the future of Eastern Europe if Germany had won the war. A common interpretation has held that the Germans would have established permanent hegemony over what had once been the periphery of the Russian Empire, with puppet governments facilitating German strategic and economic exploitation of the region. Another body of thought maintains that the Germans' purpose was to create a buffer zone, a belt of border states to isolate the Soviets from the heart of Europe. Scholars who hold this view argue that, instead of operating as German puppets, many of the new regimes in these states pursued ambitious national policies designed to institutionalize ethnic identities and assert their independence from outside control.

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Viewpoint: Yes. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsky clearly gave Germany control over Eastern Europe, and only the German defeat in World War I kept Russia from permanently losing its buffer zone against invasion from the West. World War I dragged on for more than four years not because the military situation produced a constantly shifting drama, but because the Western Allies could not accept the German occupation of Belgium and parts of France and because Germany would not surrender these gains. Initially, the Germans refused because their possession was in keeping with their visions of elevating the international stature of Germany. As the war dragged on, the Germans saw these and other gains as compensation for their losses in the war and as a way of paying off the debt they had piled up. When the Russian Imperial government and its army collapsed in 1917, the Germans saw the potential for more material gain in the East. By 1918, Germany had clearly decided on a policy of permanent domination of Eastern Europe at the expense of Russia. The March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the peace settlement between Germany and Soviet Russia, is a clear indication of Berlin's desire to rule over the region indefinitely. This conclusion can be backed by evidence that stretches back into the nineteenth century. Lacking a substantial colonial empire like Britain or France and having created a nation-state only in 1871, many Germans felt dogged by a sort of inferiority complex. Despite an international mania for all things German and unequaled economic and industrial growth in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, many Germans still thought their country did not yet have its proper place in the international community. With a dwindling number of available overseas possessions, many of the so-called geopoliticians of Germany envisioned a European empire dominated by their nation. A substantial obstacle to this vision, however, was the colossus to the East, the Russian Empire. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, many leading Germans—including Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, traditionally considered a moderate—saw the war as a means to usher in the era of a new German Empire. Scholars, statesmen, intellectuals, and Kaiser Wilhelm II called for the reduction of Russia to its seventeenth-century status, when its borders were hundreds of miles further east and its ability to threaten Europe was negligible. The human, material, and financial costs of World War I quickly ballooned far beyond what HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

anyone had expected. The political contours of the war changed dramatically. The German parliament, the Reichstag, voted in July 1917 in favor of a compromise peace and reconciliation among the warring nations. This peace resolution included a particularly revealing provision: it called for the establishment of a parliamentary democracy in Germany. Before the end of World War I, Germany was only a limited democracy. While there were indeed free and open elections, those elected to parliament had little power, and the kaiser alone had the authority to choose and dismiss governments and ministers. After the peace resolution of July 1917, however, Germany did not become more democratic. The head of the German Army High Command, General Paul von Hindenburg, and his chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, called for—and got—the dismissal of BethmannHollweg in favor of someone agreeable to conservatives and the military. This change was the culmination of the unofficial but clear wartime transition of Germany from a monarchical authoritarian state to a military dictatorship. While the German civilian leadership—in particular Foreign Minister Richard von Kuhlmann— came to realize that a compromise or negotiated peace would be the best outcome for Germany, Ludendorff, who professed a negligible understanding of politics, saw the war in terms of total victory or total defeat. This conflict yielded different responses to the collapse of tsarist Russia in 1917. Kuhlmann believed that Germany should withdraw from Eastern Europe and let the area sort itself out; in this way Germany and Austria could move the resources used fighting the Russians to the Western Front. Ludendorff, however, wanted Germany to hold whatever territory it could take in the East and establish a broad zone of unchallenged hegemonic dominance. As Ludendorff had essentially taken over the German government by the beginning of 1918, his vision prevailed. Thus, on the opening day of the Western Offensive, 21 March 1918, Germany still had one million men in the East. Ludendorff s rise to power had profound effects on the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. On seizing power in November 1917, Vladimir Lenin called for an armistice and negotiations to end the fighting with Germany. Negotiations opened in December 1917 at Brest-Litovsk and were finalized in March 1918. Germany's position, although negotiated by Kuhlmann, was completely under Ludendorff's direction: Russia was to be cut back roughly to the western frontiers it had before the Great Northern War (1700-1721). The Germans envisioned a chain of client monarchies stretching from the Caucasus to the Arctic Circle under the leadership of the German emperor. Germany itself would gain some strips of territory in the Polish realm of the Russian VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

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TREATY OF BREST-LITOVSK Article I. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, for the one part, and Russia, for the other part, declare that the state of war between them has ceased. They are resolved to live henceforth in peace and amity with one another. Article II. The contracting parties will refrain from any agitation or propaganda against the Government or the public and military institutions of the other party. In so far as this obligation devolves upon Russia, it holds good also for the territories occupied by the Powers of the Quadruple Alliance.

Article III. The territories lying to the west of the line agreed upon by the contracting parties which formerly belonged to Russia, will no longer be subject to Russian sovereignty; the line agreed upon is traced on the map submitted as an essential part of this treaty of peace. The exact fixation of the line will be established by a Russo-German commission. No obligations whatever toward Russia shall devolve upon the territories referred to, arising from the fact that they formerly belonged to Russia. Russia refrains from all interference in the internal relations of these territories. Germany and Austria-Hungary purpose to determine the future status of these territories in agreement with their population. Article IV. As soon as a general peace is concluded and Russian demobilization is carried out completely Germany will evacuate the territory lying to the east of the line designated in paragraph 1 of Article HI, in so far as Article IV does not determine otherwise. Russia will do all within her power to insure the immediate evacuation of the provinces of eastern Anatolia and their lawful return to Turkey. The districts of Erdehan, Kars, and Batum will likewise and without delay be cleared of the Russian troops. Russia will not interfere in the reorganization of the national and international relations of these districts, but leave it to the population of these districts, to carry out this reorganization in agreement with the neighboring States, especially with Turkey.

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Article V. Russia will, without delay, carry out the full demobilization of her army inclusive of those units recently organized by the present Government. Furthermore, Russia will either bring her warships into Russian ports and there detain them until the day of the conclusion of a general peace, or disarm them forthwith. Warships of the States which continue in the state of war with the Powers of the Quadruple Alliance, in so far as they are within Russian sovereignty, will be treated as Russian warships. The barred zone in the Arctic Ocean continues as such until the conclusion of a general peace. In the Baltic sea, and, as far as Russian power extends within the Black sea, removal of the mines will be proceeded with at once. Merchant navigation within these maritime regions is free and will be resumed at once. Mixed commissions will be organized to formulate the more detailed regulations, especially to inform merchant ships with regard to restricted lanes. The navigation lanes are always to be kept free from floating mines. Article VI. Russia obligates herself to conclude peace at once with the Ukrainian People's Republic and to recognize the treaty of peace between that State and the Powers of the Quadruple Alliance. The Ukrainian territory will, without delay, be cleared of Russian troops and the Russian Red Guard, Russia is to put an end to all agitation or propaganda against the Government or the public institutions of the Ukrainian People's Republic. Esthonia and Livonia will likewise, without delay, be cleared of Russian troops and the Russian Red Guard. The eastern boundary of Esthonia runs, in general along the river Narwa. The eastern boundary of Livonia crosses, in general, lakes Peipus and Pskow, to the southwestern corner of the latter, then across Lake Luban in the direction of Livenhof on the Dvina, Esthonia and Livonia will be occupied by a German police force until security is insured by proper national institutions and until public order has been established. Russia will liberate at once all arrested or deported inhabitants of Esthonia and Livonia, and insures the safe return of all deported Esthonians and Livonians.

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Finland and the Aaland Islands will immediately be cleared of Russian troops and the Russian Red Guard, and the Finnish ports of the Russian fleet and of the Russian naval forces, So long as the ice prevents the transfer of warships into Russian ports, only limited forces will remain on board the warships, Russia is to put an end to all agitation or propaganda against the Government or the public institutions of Finland. The fortresses built on the Aaland Islands are to be removed as soon as possible. As regards the permanent non-fortification of these islands as well as their further treatment in respect to military technical navigation matters, a special agreement is to be concluded between Germany, Finland, Russia, and Sweden; there exists an understanding to the effect that, upon Germany's desire, still other countries bordering upon the Baltic Sea would be consulted in this matter. Article VIL In view of the fact that Persia and Afghanistan are free and Independent States, the contracting parties obligate themselves to respect the political and economic independence and the territorial integrity of these states. Article VIII. The prisoners of war of both parties will be released to return to their homeland, The settlement of the questions connected therewith will be effected through the special treaties provided for in Article XII. Article IX, The contracting parties mutually renounce compensation for their war expenses, i.e., of the public expenditures for the conduct of the war, as well as compensation for war losses, i.e., such losses as were caused [by] them and their nationals within the war zones by military measures, inclusive of ail requisitions effected in enemy country. Article X Diplomatic and consular relations between the contracting parties will be resumed immediately upon the ratification of the treaty of peace. As regards the reciprocal admission of consuls, separate agreements are reserved.

Article XI. As regards the economic relations between the Powers of the Quadruple Alliance and Russia the regulations contained in Appendices II™V are determinative..,. Article XII, The reestablishment of public and private legal relations, the exchange of war prisoners and interned citizens, the question of amnesty as well as the question anent the treatment of merchant ships which have come into the power of the opponent, will be regulated in separate treaties with Russia which form an essential part of the general treaty of peace, and, as far as possible, go into force simultaneously with the latter. Article XIII. In the interpretation of this treaty, the German and Russian texts are authoritative for the relations between Germany and Russia; the German, the Hungarian, and Russian texts for the relations between AustriaHungry and Russia; the Bulgarian and Russian texts for the relations between Bulgaria and Russia; and the Turkish and Russian texts for the relations between Turkey and Russia. Article XIV. The present treaty of peace will be ratified. The documents of ratification shall, as soon as possible, be exchanged in Berlin. The Russian Government obligates itself, upon the desire of one of the powers of the Quadruple Alliance, to execute the exchange of the documents of ratification within a period of two weeks. Unless otherwise provided for in its articles, in its annexes, or in the additional treaties, the treaty of peace enters into force at the moment of its ratification. In testimony whereof the Plenipotentiaries have signed this treaty with their own hand. Executed in quintuplicate at Brest-Litovsk, 3 March, 1918. Source: "The Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk," World War I Document Archive .

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Military officers and government officials of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at Brest-Litovsk, March

1918 (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ CORBIS, HU031454)

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Empire. Even allies of Germany were on its list of targets. In February 1918 the German High Command demanded that the Austrians hand over the Dumbrowa coalfields, which they had seized earlier. At Brest-Litovosk, the Germans presented demand after demand, while the Soviet delegates watched the Russian Empire fall to pieces. Civil war broke out in Finland, which had declared its independence from Russia in December 1917, and the Germans assisted the new Finnish leader, Carl Mannerheim. A month before the final BrestLitovsk settlement with Russia, the Germans recognized and drew up a peace treaty with the weak, democratic Ukrainian government, which had declared independence from Russia in January 1918. In February 1918 the frustrated chief Soviet negotiator, Foreign Affairs Commissar Lev Trotsky, declared a policy of "neither peace nor war." This pronouncement triggered further German military advances. At the end of the month Lenin recognized the inevitable and declared that Russia had to acquiesce and hope that in the long run a pan-European revolution of the proletariat would reverse Soviet losses. The Soviets surrendered Poland, Finland, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and the territory of the modern Baltic StatesLithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—a huge swath of land inhabited by nearly 60 million people. Vast quantities of Russian industrial and agricultural resources came under direct German control, and the economic provisions of the treaty demanded that Russia turn over in perpetuity huge quanti-

ties of agricultural produce and raw materials. Another clause forced the Soviets to reverse all nationalizations of German business and investment in Russia since 1914. Ludendorff's vision of a German-dominated Eastern Europe was vague. The German Foreign Ministry may have had a concrete plan, but it was marginalized by the German High Command, so its vision had little impact. Ludendorff was left to make his own improvisations. He made unilateral decisions, and the civilians in the government learned of developments—including the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk—only after the fact. Ludendorff s control extended beyond the purely military and strategic. As he and the German ruling elite began planning for the establishment of German-controlled dominions in Eastern Europe, they sketched out substantial and serious long-term commitments for the region. In some cases, there would be royal ties between the constituent states of Germany (which had retained their traditional monarchs after 1871) and the client monarchies of the East. Wilhelm Karl, Duke of Urach, in the Kingdom of Wiirttemberg, campaigned for and briefly held the new throne of Lithuania, while Prince Friedrich Karl of Hesse wanted to become the king of Finland and was elected to its throne by the Finnish Diet in October 1918. A German prince was chosen to hold modern Latvia and Estonia as a fiefdom of Wilhelm II, while Emperor Karl of Austria wanted to

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make a relative, Archduke Wilhelm, king of Ukraine. In Ukraine, the original government, the Rada, though kept in power by the German Army, proved insufficiently subservient and was quickly replaced by a new puppet, a former tsarist general, Pavlo Skoropadsky. Skoropadsky worked with five hundred thousand German troops under the command of Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, who had been managing the German war economy since 1916. Ludendorff also supported the White (tsarist) Finns against the Bolsheviks, in hopes of developing a long-term strategic alliance that could dominate the eastern Baltic and help to stop the spread of Bolshevism. There is little doubt that under Ludendorff s direction, the Germans had a grand vision of creating a dominion over Eastern Europe. Monarchist ties would bind the satellites of Eastern Europe to the ruling houses of Germany, while military and economic cooperation in the newly created states would create the basis for long-term cooperation and, many hoped, economic exploitation. Just as the relationship between Berlin and Vienna was unequal, the relationships forged with the new states of Eastern Europe were going to be dominated by Germany. While the German Foreign Ministry envisioned leaving Eastern Europe to sort out its own problems, these civilian government officials lacked influence by the end of 1917, and adopting their policy was out of the question. If Germany had won the war, there is little indication that civilian control over the state would have been reinstated. The Treaty of BrestLitovsk gave Germany monarchical, militaristic dominion over Eastern Europe, and only the collapse of the German Empire in the fall of 1918 kept it from enduring. -PHILGILTNER, ALBANY ACADEMY

Viewpoint: No. Desperate to end Russian involvement in World War I, the Bolsheviks agreed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, confident that they would regain control of the ceded territory when the proletarian revolution spread to Germany. Soviet intentions during the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk underwent several changes. What had brought the tsar's reign to an end was not the Russian masses' commitment to Marxism but their dissatisfaction over the continued involvement of Russia in World War I. CapitalHISTORY IN DISPUTE,

izing on the failure of the Provisional Government to withdraw from the conflict, the Bolsheviks staged a successful coup in November 1917 by promising to end Russian participation. Had they not been able to deliver on their promise—or at least to appear to be making a serious attempt—the Bolsheviks too would likely have been overthrown by whoever next promised to end the suffering of Russians on the battlefields and in the cities, where the war had created food shortages. In beginning to negotiate an armistice with Germany in mid December 1917, the Soviets delivered on their most important promise to the masses. Negotiating a treaty seemed almost an anticlimax to many Russians. Initially, at least, the Soviets treated the entire process with the enthusiastic optimism that their revolution had lit a flame certain to spread rapidly over the rest of Europe. Thus, they believed they could accept any terms for the sake of expediency because Germany was soon to be governed by fellow communists who would offer the Soviets more-favorable terms. Their confidence in this belief was evident in the behavior of the main Soviet negotiators. Lev Trotsky, a brilliant theoretician and tactician, brought up obscure points made by Karl Marx in debate with his German counterparts, carrying out the conversations almost as effortlessly in German as in Russian. His able assistant, Karl Radek, a radical journalist who was also fluent in several languages, including German, enjoyed taunting the German officers seated across the table by occasionally blowing smoke from his pipe into their faces. Nothing in their demeanor, or in their selection of topics to pursue on any given day, indicated that Trotsky and Radek sought a carefully constructed and lasting peace. Their entire purpose was to buy time until German workers rose up in their own proletarian revolution. The demand of the Soviet negotiators for "peace without annexations or indemnities" was less a realistic stance than a declaration of principles for posterity. Trotsky was under no illusions that such a position could be acceptable to the German side without a major political upheaval. When Trotsky responded to continued German demands for territory by breaking off the peace talks in February 1918, it was not to resume fighting but to declare a unilateral end to hostilities. This move was met with some incredulity by the Soviet leadership and by the Germans. One of the German negotiators called Trotsky's declaration "unheard of!" Many Bolsheviks rightly feared the Germans would resume hostilities, which they did in due course and met with almost no opposition. Trotsky's reply to the German territorial demands provides the key to understanding the VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

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Soviets' underlying principle: they had entered the talks to demonstrate the Germans' greed to their own public and thereby garner support from the German proletariat. It is not surprising that the Germans seized most of the Baltic States and Ukraine, further weakening the Soviets' negotiating position. Furthermore, the failure of any worker protests in Germany and Austria-Hungary caused the Soviets to rethink their policy. The terms they accepted on 3 March 1918 were worse than those offered earlier, but signing the treaty had the salutary effect of ending the war— the Bolsheviks' originally stated aim. The formal end to the participation in the imperialist global conflict came at a staggering price. Giving up Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine, and the Caucasus left the Soviet government with a significantly smaller country than the Russian Empire, not only in geographic area but also in terms of population, industry, and arable land. The Soviets' willingness to accept such a loss demonstrated their desperation at the military situation and their expectation that such losses would be temporary. The government of the lost territories was to be placed under German-supported monarchs and other military rulers, though the Menshevik regime of Georgia survived until the Soviet reconquest. They were not ceded directly to Germany and its allies. That the new thrones of Finland, Lithuania, and Latvia were to come from German ruling houses was not unusual; throughout the Balkans one could find many examples of monarchs with different ethnicities than their subjects, including the German kings of Romania and Bulgaria. Furthermore, these states seemed bent on charting their own independent courses, not on accepting German control. The value of this buffer zone became apparent once it disappeared later in 1918, when the Allies negated the Treaty of BrestLitovsk and began to get more involved in the Russian Civil War. The most important aftereffect of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the respite it gave the Bolsheviks, fulfilling their promise to end the war and protecting them from foreign influence as they attempted to pacify their opposition at home and consolidate their revolution. Many Russians were angry that the Bolsheviks had given away so much territory, which could conceivably have been used as a base for forces hostile to the communist regime. Yet, any peace was better than a complete military defeat, which would certainly have occurred if the war had continued and which would have ended communist control in Russia. 196

Many of the fourteen articles in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk crystallized the Soviets' goals. Article II committed the parties to cease engaging in propaganda or subversion against each other. Article III absolved Russia of any obligations (that is, reparations claims) that might come from the lost territories. In Article IX each side renounced all war claims against the other (though a war indemnity was later renegotiated to Germany's advantage in August 1918). Article X gave legitimacy to the Soviet regime by establishing diplomatic relations between it and Germany. Russia did lose more territory than it would have if the Bolsheviks had negotiated in good faith earlier in the process. From the Bolshevik point of view at the time, however, the loss of territory was a temporary setback that would be soon rectified by global revolution. Thus, the terms were not as bad as they could have been, given the military situation. Peace had been achieved. Furthermore, the spirit of cooperation between the Soviet Union and Germany and their respect for one another's spheres of influence—which began with the treaty—were later revived at Rapallo (1922), Berlin (1926), and even, to a certain extent, with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. -VASILIS VOURKOUTIOTIS, UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

References Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967). Holger H. Her wig, "German Policy in the Eastern Baltic Sea in 1918: Expansion or Anti-Bolshevik Crusade?" Slavic Review, 32 (June 1973): 339-357 V. I. Lenin, The Revolutionary Phrase "LeftCommunist" Mistakes on the Brest Peace: Articles and Speeches (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965). Judah L. Magnes, Russia and Germany at Brest-Litovsk: A Documentary History of the Peace Negotiations (New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1919). Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, From Liberty to Brest-Litovsk: The First Tear of the Russian Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1919). John Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1938).

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TSARIST SECRET POLICE Was the Okhrana, tsarist secret police, effective? Viewpoint: Yes. The tsarist secret police fulfilled its mission by observing suspects, detaining conspirators, infiltrating revolutionary organizations, and gathering information. Viewpoint: No. The tsarist secret police failed to carry out its duties because of bureaucratic rivalry, frequent changes in leadership, poor morale, and inaccurate intelligence. This chapter debates the effectiveness of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. As an authoritarian government, the tsarist state employed political police to monitor opinion, investigate revolutionary groups, follow suspicious and disloyal suspects, and generally prop up the regime through police work. The more conventional view of the secret police is that it was grossly inefficient. Unable to stop the revolution of 1917 or seize the leading revolutionary figures who led it, it appears the epitome of ineptitude. In the sense that it could not stop the revolution, it failed. Yet, on the other hand, the tsarist secret police was so limited in function and power—itself an attribute of declining autocracy in Imperial Russia—that it was not designed to stop revolution. In any event, it successfully broke up or destroyed conspiratorial circles, arrested revolutionary leaders, forced political opponents into long periods of foreign exile, and infiltrated underground groups operating within Russia. The major traumas of 1917, moreover, took place after the Okhrana's abolition by the Provisional Government.

Viewpoint: Yes. The tsarist secret police fulfilled its mission by observing suspects, detaining conspirators, infiltrating revolutionary organizations, and gathering information. The success of revolution in 1917 has suggested that the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, was ineffective and incompetent. Could an effective secret police have allowed the proliferation of revolutionary movements, the persistence of labor unrest, the collapse of the monarchy in March

1917, or the Bolshevik takeover later in the year? The implicit argument here, however, ignores a fundamental fact about the secret police: its mission was never designed to penetrate society to the point where it could forestall massive social revolution, or to be so pervasive and wide-ranging in its powers. It was, in short, not much of a precursor to the vast secret police apparatus founded by the Bolsheviks after the revolution. To begin with, no police force as small as the Okhrana, even one devoted to politics, could have stopped the revolutionary transformation of Russia in 1917. Much of that collapse was due to the strains and tribulations of World War I, something the secret police could obvi-

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Communist leader Gregory Zinoviev, who claimed that the Okhrana had successfully infiltrated all party cells operating in Russia before the 1917 revolution (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ CORBIS, HU056530)

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ously do nothing about. It could not stop military personnel from becoming disaffected, its job was not to keep the domestic infrastructure running much more smoothly than it did and needed to, and it had no control at all over the generals and politicians who urged Nicholas II to abdicate in favor of the Provisional Government in 1917. Since the Provisional Government promptly abolished the Okhrana and other tsarist security organs, they were obviously not there to stem the revolutionary tide or the growth of revolutionary parties that swept over the country later that year. Blaming it for failing to stop Bolshevik victory is like blaming an open field for not stopping a forest fire. The Okhrana enjoyed some extraordinary successes in its limited mission. It dutifully collected information on the regime's political opponents, insofar as was permitted by the laws of the Russian Empire, and disrupted most of the Empire's revolutionary operations. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, it quickly rounded up the dozens of conspirators who helped facilitate and carry out the plot. Virtually all were in jail within two years. Over the course of the 1880s its double agents successfully penetrated the People's Will, the Black Partition, and all other important revolutionary formations, virtually destroying them as meanHISTORY IN DISPUTE,

ingful influences in Russian political life. Almost every important Russian radical spent time in prison or exile. As research has revealed, the Okhrana also closely monitored their activities both outside of Russia and in its prisons. In 1898 agents quickly arrested the delegates to the first meeting of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP), the Empire's main Marxist formation, almost immediately after they convened in Minsk, and effectively drove the Party's activities beyond Russia's borders for most of the next twenty years. Even the Minsk meeting had only limited significance, for Vladimir Lenin, lulii Martov, and several other prominent socialists were already in prison or Siberian exile when it took place, the victims of Okhrana dragnets. All of the RSDWP's important meetings before 1917, including the vital congress of 1903, at which the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions were formed, had to be held in Western Europe, while its domestic political activities remained clandestine, incoherent, and subject to near-constant harassment. Gregory Zinoviev, an important party leader, maintained that the Okhrana successfully infiltrated every local cell functioning in Russia. Many of its leaders served as double agents. Controversial evidence suggests that this category included Josef Djugashvili, who, under the alias Josef Stalin, led the Soviet Union for thirty years after Lenin's death. It also included Lenin's top lieutenant in Russia, Roman Malinovsky, who began working as a paid agent for the Okhrana in 1910. Promoted to the Bolshevik Central Committee after he started informing on his colleagues and named leader of the Bolshevik faction in the State Duma in 1912, he regularly betrayed the Social Democrats' goals, structures, plans, and meeting places. So successful were his operations that a formal party inquiry into rumors about his activities concluded that he was not an agent. It was only after the revolution that Malinovsky's work with the secret police became known. According to the historian George Leggett, the Okhrana knew about Bolshevik activities in such great detail that its internal documents form the most complete record of the party's early history. Okhrana penetration of other sources of revolutionary opposition never ceased to be pronounced. In the last decades of tsarist government, it employed some twenty-six thousand informers, usually at a monthly rate of 100 rubles, or about four times the wage of an average industrial worker. The Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party, a rival revolutionary organization of the Social Democrats, suffered because Yevno Azef, one of its founding leaders and the chief of its "fighting organization," a militant group that carried out assassinations and other revolu-

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tionary violence, was himself an Okhrana agent and had been since 1893, eight years before the founding of the SR Party. On two separate occasions before he was unmasked, Azef betrayed the entire apparatus under his command. Russia's growing labor movement was another target for police infiltration. In the early twentieth century, under the leadership of Sergei Zubatov, himself a former revolutionary and police informant, the Okhrana established strong influence over several labor unions, which the police tried with mixed success to lure away from the revolutionary movement. Although some workers involved in these organizations participated in strikes, thus provoking Zubatov's official disgrace, the idea of reconciliation with the prevailing order lived on in the workers' movement. This development led to the ill-fated 9 January 1905 workers' march in Saint Petersburg, led by the Zubatovite priest Georgii Gapon. In a moment of confusion Russian army units fired on the march, but since the command to fire came from its commanders, the blame can hardly be put on the police, who were indirectly responsible for stimulating labor organization. The marchers were in any case singing hymns, reciting prayers, and bearing portraits of the tsar, hardly indications of the Okhrana's complete failure to co-opt their movement or transform its goals from intractable opposition to loyal appeals. During the national civil unrest that followed in 1905, moreover, the Okhrana penetrated every independent labor organization of political significance, collected voluminous information on disloyal subjects (systematizing them in a national database in 1906), and handily suppressed revolutionary institutions. These activities included the prompt arrest of most members of the Saint Petersburg soviet, a body elected among the city's factory workers in 1905, including its two chairman, Leon Trotsky and Georgii Khrustalev-Nosar, and the penetration and dissolution of several other radical organizations. Although 1917 did not go nearly as well for the government, the absence of the tsarist secret police was certainly no asset. Indeed, before blaming the Okhrana for the collapse of the regime, it is more useful to note the powers it did not have. It could not arbitrarily assassinate opponents of the tsarist government at home or abroad. Its powers of arrest were rather limited. It had no judicial functions, and prosecutions made on the basis of its arrests or information gathering received due legal process in independent courts. Although there were violations of these limits, it fundamentally lacked the power, personnel, independence, or

unaccountability that made the Soviet secret police murderous and unchallengeable. When the Okhrana focused on what it could doobserve suspects, detain conspirators, infiltrate revolutionary organizations, gather information, and so on—it did well. -PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

Viewpoint: No. The tsarist secret police failed to carry out its duties because of bureaucratic rivalry, frequent changes in leadership, poor morale, and inaccurate intelligence. After Tsar Alexander II's assassination in 1881, the Russian government reorganized its police department and added a new section of secret police. This new section, which became known as the Okhrana, was charged with ensuring the security of the state. It prosecuted—and, more importantly, attempted to prevent—crimes such as committing violence against state officials, smuggling arms, inciting strikes and rebellions against the state, and disseminating illegal revolutionary literature. The police had the power to follow suspected revolutionaries, open mail, conduct unrestricted searches, and keep individuals under arrest for up to two weeks, even when they were only suspected of planning a crime. Jonathan Daly, George Leggett, and Iain Lauchlan are among the scholars who argue that the secret police succeeded in its duties because it had greatly weakened Russia's most significant revolutionary parties by 1917. Proponents of the opposing viewpoint embrace what Lauchlan calls the "Okhrana myth": that the police department's accomplishments came "at the expense of the moral credibility of the tsarist regime," and that its activities undermined popular support for the government it was supposed to be defending. The revolutionaries and Soviet writers who propagated this view obviously had an interest in undermining the imperial government's reputation, but the historical evidence has also convinced more-objective observers. In the final analysis, the latter viewpoint, the "Okhrana myth," is closer to the truth. Both sides agree that the Okhrana's effectiveness waxed and waned in the years leading up to the revolution. Historian Donald J. Raleigh notes that the police generally enjoyed the upper hand over the revolutionaries in 1907-1910,1914, and 1916, whereas in 1905-1907, 1910-1912, 1915, and 1917, revolutionaries controlled the flow of events. To judge

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AGENTS PROVOCATEURS A$ the following personal reminiscence written in 1953 reveals, Vladimir Zenzinov, a member of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, delighted in the seizure of the hated local police headquarters thirty-six years earlier:

i was far more interested In liquidating the Police Department, the Okhrana, [and] the organization of provocateurs who were in the service of the police and who were still, perhaps, to be found in our ranks. It was precisely this interest that led me to an encounter on this day or this night [February 28]—we could not tell the difference between day and night during this period; this whole period seemed to be one dazzling, radiant, triumphant day to us!—with M. Gorky and his friend, Tikhonov, the editor of Letopisi [Chronicles]. At night I went with the two of them in one of the requisitioned automobiles to the Department of the Okhrana on Kronverskii Prospekt There I found that the wails were already ripped, the windows broken, the doors torn down. It was with difficulty that I recognized the familiar staircase along which I was at one time led as a prisoner, and I barely managed to find the office of Von Kotten, Chief of the Okhrana, in which he tried to interrogate me during my last arrest in the year 1910. We devoted particular attention to collecting the documents, I suspect that during our searches M. Gorky was motivated not only by political but by literary aims as well; on my part, however, I intended as quickly as possible to disentangle the wily network which by acts of provocation could damage, for a long time to come, the cause of revolution and emancipation. We actually succeeded in discovering several flats used by the Okhrana for conspiratorial purposes and made the rounds of them during the same night. Butstrange thing!—all of them were already opened and raided. These nests were being burned out, destroyed by the people independently, and they were discovered, for the most part, by directions [given] by the very same plain-clothes men and policemen, Light and open air was certain death to all these shady characters. On the basis of the papers we found in the Okhrana and the Police Department, we succeeded in identifying several dozen agents provocateurs who were active in revolutionary parties and were in the service of the Police Department. Several days later their names were published in all the newspapers—the first list contained names of 18 persons, not one of whom was suspected until that time. Among them I remember the name of one prominent Bolshevik—Chernomazov, one of the editors of Pravda. Even before the [list] was published, they were all arrested at the same time and sent to prison (I do not know their fate). This operation was prepared and carried out by several persons, among them the Menshevik Internationalist, Grinevich ... I, too, participated in this work of disinfection. Source: Robert P. Bfowder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents, Volume 1 (Stanford, Cat,; Stanford University Press, 19G1), pp. 215-216.

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the Okhrana's overall success, it is necessary to weigh its moments of success against its moments of failure. As one might guess from the number of years in which the police could only react to the revolutionary movement's activities, the failures ultimately outweigh the successes. On the positive side, the police managed to gather and organize vast amounts of information on individual revolutionaries and the organizations those individuals participated in. They excelled at breaking the revolutionaries' codes. Using the information gathered from secret agents, informants, and intercepted mail, the police foiled several would-be assassins, captured smuggled weapons shipments, confiscated illegal printing presses and literature, and generally disrupted revolutionary activities. They arrested thousands of Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats. As a result, many revolutionary leaders fled abroad and lost much of their influence over events in Russia, while some of the demoralized revolutionaries who remained imagined spies lurking around every corner. Nicholas II might have benefited from paying closer attention to police reports, which warned in 1914 that war posed a grave danger to the state, and in early 1917 that the country was close to revolution. As the police themselves recognized, however, they failed in their primary duty: to prevent terrorist actions against the state. In December 1904, A. A. Lopukhin, then director of police, warned of trouble ahead: "For the past three years," he wrote in a memorandum, "six terrorist plots have been exposed, approximately seventy underground presses have been seized, numerous antigovernment circles have been smashed, yet the movement itself and its most dangerous, terrorist elements continue to grow intensively." Over the next six years, "terrorist" attacks killed more than 2,000; some historians place the number as high as 9,000. Sheila Fitzpatrick found that "in 1908, a comparatively quiet year, 1,800 officials were killed and 2,083 were wounded in politically motivated attacks." Among the most prominent victims of assassination were three ministers of the interior (D. S. Sipiagin in 1902, V. K. Plehve in 1904, and P. A. Stolypin, who also held the post of premier, in 1911), a minister of education (N. P. Bogolepov, 1901), and a grand duke (Sergei Aleksandrovich, 1905). The role of terror in the revolutionary movement did eventually decline, but as Maureen Perrie has argued, this shift most likely occurred because other tactics began to prove more useful, not because the police were able to discover and prevent more attacks. This ineffectiveness continued even though the police focused mainly on stopping terrorism. In fact, the Okhrana's continual surveillance of political groups that had a history of violence may have further limited its effectiveness. It sometimes

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overlooked the activists whose attempts to revolutionize groups of workers and peasants were nonviolent but illegal. It also missed signs of impending trouble among the workers themselves; one internal memo complained that the massive and disruptive strikes of 1912 had taken the police completely by surprise. Why did the secret police so often fail in its duties? For one thing, the police allowed the conflicts that pervaded the imperial bureaucracy to distract them from their work. Instead of cooperating, the regular police (known as the Corps of Gendarmes) and the secret police hid information from each other and impeded each other's investigations. Within the secret police, the top staff changed frequently, partly because of the department's lack of success in stemming the revolutionary tide and partly because of shifting rivalries at court. As a new director tried to tear down his predecessor's work, investigation and analysis gave way to paper shuffling and a flurry of orders that the next director would immediately rescind. Many lower-ranking officers also began to place ambition before duty. Some actually encouraged revolutionary activity so that they could later take credit for stopping it. Others, knowing that advancement could depend on finding and pleasing a patron, took every opportunity to show their blind loyalty. Furthermore, while revolutionaries responded to a changing political climate with changing tactics, the Okhrana stuck to techniques more tried than true. It continued to rely on informants for much of its information even when the informants had little to offer them. One informant, who drew a salary from the police for almost two years, filed only a few reports and spent his time working to buy arms for revolutionaries. The police were aware of his activities but kept paying him in the hopes that he would tell them something important. Police chiefs were always complaining that their work was underfunded; yet, they continued to waste money on unhelpful informants. Occasionally, in their attempts to glean information from revolutionaries pretending to be informants, they ended up revealing more about their own work than they had intended to. Indeed, revolutionaries sometimes succeeded in infiltrating the police department. More importantly, the Okhrana's approach to stopping antigovernment activities was closer to carpet bombing than to surgical strikes. The police used mass arrests, long prison terms, and occasional death sentences to destroy revolutionary organizations and frighten potential revolutionaries into good behavior. Such harsh tactics hardened the resolve of committed revolutionaries, who began to portray themselves as martyrs persecuted by an unjust state. The experience of arrest and imprisonment pushed some less-committed individuals more firmly into the revolutionary

camp. Moreover, the Okhrana's choice of tactics increased the general population's hostility toward the government it represented and was supposed to protect. The secret police's most controversial tactic was its use of provocation. Department protocol discouraged agents from "so-called provocation—i.e. taking part in criminal actions or leading other people to do this while playing a secondary role." At the same time, though, agents were "not to refrain from playing an active role in party work in order to secure their position" within the revolutionary groups they had infiltrated. In practice, agents often participated in illegal activities. Their involvement extended from publishing illegal literature (with department funds) to plotting assassinations. The Okhrana's most famous agent, Yevno Azev, worked within the Socialist Revolutionary Party for years. Historians have long thought that he had a significant role in at least three successful assassinations and one unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Nicholas II. Anna Geifman has argued that Azev was less involved in terrorism and more faithful to his Okhrana employers than previously believed. Nevertheless, his hands were not entirely clean. In employing agents like Azev, the police knowingly participated in deception and encouraged illegal activity. The fact that they did so in order to prevent future illegal activities did not excuse them in the eyes of society. Even the government itself viewed the secret police as dishonest and possibly corrupt. It was no wonder that the police usually suffered from poor morale. Some police officials eventually defected to the revolutionaries, bringing with them classified documents and the names of active secret agents. They left the Okhrana with an even greater image problem and with another distraction from its work. In the long run, the Okhrana's participation in revolutionary activities, instead of weakening the revolutionary movement, may have made things much worse for the monarchy and the state. It attempted to redirect the labor movement by organizing legal unions, and one of their agents led union members in a protest that sparked the 1905 revolution. It succeeded in placing an agent, Roman Malinovsky, in the Fourth Duma, and he made dozens of speeches that provided good publicity for the Social Democratic Party. They secretly promoted a split in the Social Democratic Party, and the split strengthened its Bolshevik faction, which eventually oversaw the final destruction of the old order. Of course, even a perfect police force would not have been able to prevent the

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spread of revolutionary ideas completely. The huge expanse of the Russian Empire provided too many places for revolutionaries to hide, and the social hierarchy protected high-ranking liberals who encouraged dissent. Furthermore, the police could not create respect for a government that seemed to be doing all it could to lose the respect of the public. As this essay has shown, however, the tsarist secret police were far from perfect. The Okhrana's bureaucratic culture and questionable tactics contributed to its overall failure to prevent thousands of terrorist attacks and other crimes against the state. Its use of provocation in particular not only antagonized the general public but also directly aided the revolutionary cause. The first rule of medicine is to avoid harming the patient one is supposed to protect. Similarly, the first rule of police work ought to be to avoid harming the state one is supposed to protect. By this standard, the tsarist secret police failed utterly. -CATHERINE BLAIR, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Anna Geifman, Entangled in Terror: The Azef Affair and the Russian Revolution (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2000). Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Iain Lauchlan, Russian Hide-and-Seek: The Tsarist Secret Police in St. Petersburg, 1906-1914 (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2002). George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (December 1917 to February 1922) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). Donald J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia's Civil War: Politics, Society, and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 1917-1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov, Fontanka 16: The Tsars' Secret Police (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999).

References

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Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution 19171932 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

Bruce F. Adams, "Review of Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov, Fontanka 16: The Tsars* Secret Police" Slavic Review, 59 (Autumn 2000): 670-671.

Nurit Schleifman, Undercover Agents in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The SR Party, 1902-1914 (London: Macmillan, 1988).

Jonathan W. Daly, Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia 1866-1905 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998).

Frederic S. Zuckerman, The Tsarist Secret Police Abroad: Policing Europe in a Modernising World (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003).

Daly, The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906-1917 (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004).

Zuckerman, The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

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THE WHITES IN THE CIVIL WAR Did the Whites have any chance of winning the Russian Civil War? Viewpoint: Yes. The Whites were clearly superior on the battlefield, and with better leadership they could well have won the war. Viewpoint: No. Though White forces were superior as soldiers, they were outnumbered ten to one by the Reds. The White factions were hopelessly divided and failed to muster popular support. The Bolshevik coup of October 1917 produced determined opponents. The rise of a radical socialist regime confronted the elites of the old order, challenging their role in government and society, as well as their existence. Within only a few weeks, organized armed opposition began to take form, plunging Russia into a civil war that the Bolsheviks eventually won. Known collectively as the "Whites," from the traditional color of the flag of the monarchy, disparate groups formed armies, solicited support from foreign governments, and attempted to mobilize the population against "Red" Bolshevik rule. Led by experienced officers and often facing undisciplined, ragtag opponents, the Whites appeared at several points to have a chance of winning. Some scholars believe that if certain controllable factors had been handled differently, a White victory might have been possible. White forces did, after all, come close to capturing both Moscow and Petrograd—centers of Red power—in 1919. Yet, the Whites were geographically separated, unable to secure the support of the overwhelming peasant population of Russia, incapable of gaining long-term and active foreign support, and unwilling to work with the independence-minded nationalities of the Russian Empire. These factors have led many scholars to conclude that the Whites were doomed to defeat by their better-organized and more-confident Red opponents.

Viewpoint: Yes. The Whites were clearly superior on the battlefield, and with better leadership they could well have won the war. As the U.S. loss to North Vietnam in 1975 and the Soviet Union defeat by Afghan rebels in 1989 proved, victory does not always go to the side with the bigger army and more resources. While no army can win if it is not adequately equipped,

plenty of well-equipped armies have lost wars. Victory depends, above all, on proper leadership and political direction. The outcome of the Russian Civil War was uncertain from the time of the Bolshevik coup in October 1917 until its last months in winter 1920-1921. The White armies had the human expertise and the material resources to achieve victory. As frequently happens in conflict, however, human errors and luck determined the outcome. The Whites had a decent chance of winning the Russian Civil War until the end of 1919. By New Year's Day

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1920, however, there was little realistic hope of success. Like the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Civil War was fought by relatively small factions, while the vast Russian masses remained relatively passive. Never was there a question of which side was more representative of the aspirations of the Russian people. The Civil War was essentially a war over which Russia would succeed Imperial Russia. The Bolsheviks had a clear vision of a Marxist dictatorship, whereas the Whites issued amorphous calls to hand Russia over to a Constituent Assembly or talked about a vague authoritarian regime. While the Whites envisioned assuming dictatorial powers briefly and then handing power over to the Constituent Assembly, they failed to adopt the policies that were necessary to ensure the success of this plan. In particular, they did not establish complete political and logistical control over the territories nominally under their command. In southern Russia, under the leadership of General Anton Denikin, and in Siberia, under the leadership of Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, the White Armies did not establish regular control over broad territories that they expected to use as geographic bases for their leadership. This lapse had especially serious consequences for Kolchak, whose authority melted away in the vast recesses of Siberia. Both leaders failed to control their subordinates. The ensuing corruption and disorganization helped to undermine the value of the Whites' territories, neither of which produced as much material or human resources as it could have. The result was serious operational and supply problems, which accelerated the collapse of both fronts in the latter half of 1919. Their inability to create a useful power base in the White-held territories of southern Russia and Siberia made the Whites dependent on foreign assistance. One source of such assistance was the Czech Legion, without whose efforts there would have been no hope at all for the Whites in Siberia. The Czech Legion comprised about thirty-five thousand Czechs and Slovaks who had been mustered by the tsarist army from the ranks of Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war to fight against the Habsburgs. Finding itself stranded in Russia at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, the Czech Legion had no home to return to until the end of World War I in November 1918, for the Habsburgs were still in power. The Legion fought and held territory in Russia, with the ultimate goal of reaching the Pacific and then sailing to Europe to fight on the Western Front. They held the extremely significant Trans-Siberian Railroad, the only modern link between the Pacific coast and the Russian heartland. Another source of foreign aid was the Imperial German Army, which sent a division 204

under General Count Riidiger von der Goltz to help a tsarist general, Baron Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, in his successful fight to establish an independent Finland in 1917-1918. The British beachheads at Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, in northern Russia, established during World War I to help supply the tsar's war effort, were converted into bases to threaten the Bolsheviks. Other Western Allies also decided to intervene in the Civil War. By the end of 1918 some fifteen allied nations had developed a stake in Russia. While their motivations varied, there was the possibility of real support for the Whites. For example, in addition to sending ammunition and funding, the British provided the Whites in Siberia and southern Russia with aircraft and armor and—most important—the manpower to operate them in the field. They also sent so-called advisers, who functioned as infantry alongside White troops. Because it held the Baltic and Black Seas, the British Royal Navy was able (with French help in the Black Sea) to serve as a floating artillery base and transportation unit for the Whites operating in the region, and in 1919 British naval units attacked the Bolshevik-controlled Russian fleet at its main port, Kronstadt. Foreign assistance meant little, however, because the White leadership did not have the political and strategic vision to put it to good use. Not only did Kolchak and Denikin lack solid control over the territories they held, but they also were unable to develop trust and the coordination of efforts they needed to operate with a unified strategy. Most notable was their failure to link the territories they held. After Denikin's seizure of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, now Volgograd) in June 1919, he should have attacked eastward to link up with Kolchak's Siberian territories, as his subordinate (and successor) General Baron Pyotr Wrangel argued. Instead, however, Denikin was fixated on seizing the industrial Donets basin with an eye on marching north on Moscow. Had Denikin linked up with Kolchak, the Whites would have controlled a continuous strip of territory stretching from the western boundaries of Russia to the Pacific, which would have been a much stronger basis for an attack on Moscow and the rest of the Red heartland. In any event, Denikin forces succeeded in reaching Orel, within 250 miles of Moscow, before the offensive stalled, while Kolchak's forces approached Kazan, a long distance away from both Denikin and his headquarters at Omsk. When it came to attacking, the White Armies were more effective than the Bolsheviks. From the outset, the Whites were essentially a military movement. While legend has it that the Russian military was inept and therefore collapsed during World War I, the truth is much

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DENIKIN'S PROCLAMATION This decree was issued dy General Anton Denikin, leader of White forces In southern Russia:

In connection with my order No, 175 of this year, I order the Special Conference to adopt as the basis of its activity the following positions: 1. United, Great, Indivisible Russia. Defense of the faith. Establishment of order. Reconstruction of the productive forces of the country and the national economy. Raising labor productivity, 2. Struggle with bolshevism to the end. 3. Military dictatorship. Reject ail pressure from political parties. Punish ail opposition to authority, both from the right and from the left, The question of the form of rule is a matter for the future. The Russian people will establish supreme authority without pressure and without it being imposed. Unity with the people.... 4. Foreign policy: only a national Russian policy. Without paying attention to the vacillations which sometimes arise on the Russian question among our Allies, side with them. Because another combination is morally inadmissable and unrealizable in practice 5. All forces and all resources for the army, for the struggle and for victory..,. 6. Internal policy: Manifestation of solicitude for the population without distinction. Continue work on the agrarian and labor law in the spirit of my declaration; also the law of the zemstvo. Assist social organizations

more complex. Like Prussia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, tsarist Russia was in essence "an army with a state behind it." During World War I, the Russian state was unable to support its army, but the tsar's armed forces nevertheless had some excellent leadership. Although it was heavily dominated by the aristocracy, the Russian Imperial Army could and did promote officers based on their talent. Denikin was of peasant origin, as was one of the greatest Russian generals of the war, Lavr Kornilov, who had risen from the ranks to be a low-ranking officer before leaving the army to become a provincial clerk. Returning to active service during World War I, he became a division commander and a celebrated military hero after escaping

whose purpose is the development of the national economy and the amelioration of economic conditions (co-operatives, trade unions, etc.).... 7. Restore the morale of the front and the military rear by the work of specially appointed generals with wide powers, by field courts martial and by the use of extreme repressive measures. Violently purge counter-intelligence and the criminal investigation department, put into them legally trained (refugee) personnel. 8. Strengthen the ruble, improve transport and production chiefly for state defense 9. The temporary militarization of water transport to use it fully for the war; not destroying, however, the commercial industrial machine. 10. Alleviate the position of the bureaucracy and the families of officials at the front by partial transfer to allowances in kind (through the efforts of the Board of Provisions and the Department of Military Supplies).... 11. Propaganda is to serve exclusively the direct purpose of popularizing the ideas being advanced by authority, the unmasking of the essence of bolshevism, the raising of popular self-consciousness and will for the struggle with anarchy. Taganrog, 14 December 1919 Source: Martin McCauley, ed.t The Russian Revolution and the Soviet State 1917-1921: Documents (London; Macmillan, 1975), pp. 173-175.

from Austro-Hungarian captivity. In JulyAugust 1917 he served the Provisional Government as army commander in chief. Kornilov's last and greatest military exploit was the creation of the White Army in southern Russia from just four thousand poorly armed and demoralized anti-Bolshevik troops who gathered there in early 1918. His death in battle in April 1918 deprived the Whites of his talents. Other exceptional officers included Mannerheim, who, despite having been an aide-de-camp and shooting companion of the tsar, led Finnish troops in their successful war of independence against the Russians, and Wrangel, who demonstrated uncanny battlefield prowess in the Civil War, including the capture of Tsaritsyn in June 1918.

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On a purely operational level, the Whites repeatedly outclassed the Red Army and frequently demolished larger Red formations. The battlefield history of the war includes case after case of the Whites' incredible bravery and determination in the face of overwhelming odds. In comparison to the Whites, the Reds had few outstanding military talents and used terror as a recruiting tactic, which did not help to create imaginative and inspiring leadership in the Red Army. Indeed, one of their major ways of drafting military expertise was to press tsarist officers into service while holding their families hostage. Unfortunately for the White armies, operational proficiency did not translate into clear political or strategic vision. This shortcoming was especially pronounced in Denikin. Not only did he fail to link up with Kolchak, but he did not institute a viable government in territories under his control. He also resisted accepting aid from the nationalities of the Russian Empire and from powerful foreign allies—a failing in which he was not alone. Only Wrangel eventually showed the willingness to establish an anti-Bolshevik alliance, with the Poles, but in 1920, when it was too late and the Whites held just the Crimea. Denikin and the other White generals stubbornly held to the position that they were fighting for the restoration of Imperial Russian territory. At the same time they believed themselves still bound to continue the war against Germany, even after the Bolsheviks concluded the separate peace at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 and even though the Germans happily supported Mannerheim, the strongly anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian leader Pavlo Skoropadsky (another former tsarist general and aide-decamp of Tsar Nicholas II), the separatist governments of the Baltic States, the Menshevik regime that came to power in Georgia, and the Don Cossacks. It would have been far wiser for the ethnic Russian Whites to create a coalition of formerly subject nationalities under White Russian leadership. Had they formed a working "army of nations" made up of Polish, Finnish, Baltic, Ukrainian, Cossack, and Caucasian troops, it would have been easy to crush the Red Army. There was no shortage of victories over the Reds by various armies—ludenich's combined Estonian and White Russian army even seized the suburbs of Petrograd in October 1919—but the Whites never attempted a coordinated strategy to strangle the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States secured their independence by defeating Red campaigns against them, while Ukraine, the Cossack hosts, and the new states of the Caucasus region had to be conquered by the Reds in sustained fighting. In the Russian Civil War, material circumstances did offer the Red Army some advantages.

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IN DISPUTE,

The Red Army held a single territory and thus had valuable interior lines of communication, which enabled the Reds to marshal and deploy troops and resources faster than their opponents. But the Reds lacked the professional leadership of the Whites. The Whites, however, failed because of human errors of imagination and judgment. Without solid rule over the territories they held, they were not only unable to exploit those territories effectively, but they also appeared weak to foreign observers, whose aid was essential for the White cause. A second serious problem was the Whites' failure to create a politically or geographically unified entity, both of which were clearly in their grasp. Finally, they refused to use emergent anti-Bolshevik nationalism or German support to their own advantage. It is entirely possible that with different individuals in key positions of power, things would have worked out differently for the Whites. Kornilov, for example, was known to have been especially impressed with Wrangel's abilities. Had he not been killed, he and Wrangel together might have provided a formidable combination of excellent leadership and vision; such a turn might well have produced remarkably different results. -PHILGILTNER, ALBANY ACADEMY

Viewpoint: No. Though White forces were superior as soldiers, they were outnumbered ten to one by the Reds. The White factions were hopelessly divided and failed to muster popular support. Many factors contributed to the failure of the Whites to win the Russian Civil War. While they were indeed supported by the Allies of World War I, the Whites were outnumbered almost ten to one by the Red Army. Less ruthless than their enemies, the Whites were too divided among themselves and had little popular support. Their forces were dispersed into too many parts to form an effective whole, and they had nothing to offer Russian workers or peasants in return for their support. Approximately 80 percent of peasants conscripted into the White Armies ended up deserting. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March 1918, the new Bolshevik government of Russia gave up huge portions of the tsar's empire to German control, galvanizing into action many Russians who were already unhappy with the Bolsheviks. The upper echelons of the tsar's

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officer corps, already opposed to socialist government, were enraged at seeing large parts of their country handed over to the enemy as a result of Bolshevik diplomatic mismanagement. The only factor the Whites had in their favor initially was the inexperience of their foe; the Red Army had not yet been established, and at this stage there was no indication that the Bolsheviks could mount an effective military defense against a determined foe. It was one thing to take to barricades and parade in the streets, but another to fight against trained officers and men. One of the most cohesive groups in the White forces was the Czech Legion, made up of former prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army. An effective military force, they romped across Siberia and the Urals more or less at will in the early stages of the conflict. The three main White Russian Armies were led by General Anton Denikin in the south, General Nikolai ludenich in the northwest, and Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak in the east. Their initial successes in making advances toward Moscow and Petrograd in 1919 seemed proof of their professional superiority to the Reds. In fact, these armies were merely taking advantage of fortunate circumstances; the bulk of Red forces were preoccupied with the Polish War and had not yet been reorganized in a thorough way by the Bolshevik war commissar, Lev Trotsky. The initial decision of the Allied forces to offer direct aid to the White forces also seemed to give them the advantage over their opponents. Yet, the White forces were not, generally speaking, the trained professional group of former tsarist soldiers that many outside Russia imagined them to be. While the leadership was undoubtedly professional, conscripts formed an integral (indeed, the most essential) part of the troops.

Especially in a civil war, military successes, when not coupled with an alternative political message to captivate the masses, can be difficult to maintain over time. The leaders of the three White forces never effectively cooperated with each other because they were too caught up in personal rivalries and differences of opinion over the shape of a future, post-Bolshevik Russia. While struggling, often unsuccessfully, to maintain an outwardly positive face for the Allies, the Whites also had little to offer the Russian people. Many (but not all) of the White officers were from the upper classes and opposed all but the most limited agricultural land reform—the issue that, in addition to Russian withdrawal from World War I, the Bolsheviks had used to gain the support of the vast Russian peasant class. The White movement never offered a clear or compelling reason why any peasant should be willing to fight and perhaps die for a cause that would return land to the gentry. The White military leaders were unaccustomed to dealing with social and political questions, so it is perhaps understandable that they were never able to agree to a coherent policy of land reform; yet, this issue was the thing that mattered most to the peasantry. Peasants were also alienated by the Whites' initial desire to resume the war against Germany. Even after the defeat of Germany by the remaining Allies, this policy permanently labeled the White leadership as truly out of touch with the needs and desires of common Russians. The peasants' discontent over the demands placed on them by the Bolsheviks manifested itself in a series of peasant rebellions, not in their support for the White cause, with which they had no sympathy. Furthermore, though the Bolsheviks' policy of War Communism—which included conscription and forced labor—was

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White Russian troops on horseback, Siberia, 1919 (Bettmann/CORBIS, BE064038)

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unpopular with the peasant class, they welcomed the Reds' promise of land reform. The Whites also used harsh measures, including official terror, but offered its peasant soldiers only a return to the past. This difference between the two sides may well explain the high desertion rates in the White forces, with the deserters often ending up in the Red Army. The Czech Legion was effective in its efforts for the Whites' cause, but a force of its size could last for only a limited time while more or less living off the land, without supply links to the remainder of the forces. Furthermore, they were more like mercenaries than an integral component of the White cause. The main goal of the Czech Legion had nothing to do with Russia; the Czechs wanted to fight their way out of Russia and secure transportation to the Western Front, where they hoped to fight with the Allies for the independence of their homeland. The one major factor that might have given the Whites some hope for success—the intervention of the Allied powers—turned out to be inadequate. While Winston Churchill was indeed calling for the Bolshevik infant to be strangled in its cradle, his enthusiasm for continuing to fight after the end of World War I was a minority position. Having just suffered the horrors of years of modern trench warfare, the people of the Allied nations had no desire to see their governments become embroiled in yet another military conflict. Consequently, the Allies' involvement in the Russian Civil War was limited. While American troops were providing aid to the Whites, President Woodrow Wilson was attempting (halfheartedly and with no success) to mediate between the warring parties. It was clear to all, especially to the Bolshevik leadership, that the Allied will to remain involved was diminishing with each passing day and that victory was not in sight. For the Whites, the combination of weakness of command, unpopularity, and lack of critical support from abroad became most evident in the final phase of the Civil War. General Baron Pyotr Wrangel, who had gathered the remnants of Denikin's armies, had to fortify his position in the Crimea. Without any hope that aid would come from elsewhere, he concentrated his efforts on evacuating survivors and refugees to safe havens. They were taken under Allied protection to Constantinople, where they began new and often unpleasant lives as emigres. Ukraine, in

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which territory the Crimea lay, should have provided fertile ground for developing a peasant or nationalist base to combat the Red Army, which was primarily composed of Great Russians (that is, individuals from Russia proper, as opposed to Ukrainians, so-called Little Russians), Belorussians, or any of the other nationalities living within the boundaries of the old tsarist empire. But again the White forces demonstrated an inability to offer a political outlet for the people they were trying to enlist. Seeing no real hope for land reform by the Whites, Ukrainian peasants backed either the Reds or the forces of the anarchist Nestor Makhno. Denikin and Wrangel also opposed giving autonomy to nationalities, even when Pavlo Skoropadsky, a conservative tsarist general sympathetic to the Whites' cause, led the briefly independent nation-state of Ukraine in 1918. These uncompromising attitudes on the national question frustrated the Whites' attempts to gain support from the minorities of the Russian Empire. The failure of the White forces during the Russian Civil War was almost guaranteed from the beginning of the conflict. -VASILIS VOURKOUTIOTIS, UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

References Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (New York: Viking, 1997). W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). Richard Luckett, The White Generals. An Account of the White Movement and the Russian Civil War (New York: Viking, 1971). Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987). Robert Service, The Russian Revolution 19001927 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1986). Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Carl Watts, "The Russian Civil War: Did the Reds Win or the Whites Lose the War?" Modern History Review, 11 (2000): 6.

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WITTE AND INDUSTRIALIZATION Were Sergei Witte's policies favoring industrialization and economic development successful? Viewpoint: Yes. Witte's policies modernized the Russian economy and made Russia competitive internationally. Viewpoint: No. Witte's policies created great urban instability and caused many problems for Russia's emerging economy. Count Sergei lul'evich Witte oversaw Russia's transition economy from 1892 to 1903. As finance minister, Witte pushed for greater exports, ambitious industrialization, and large foreign loans. He hoped to modernize Russia and make it competitive with other great powers. These policies by and large continued after Witte was dismissed in 1903 and were expanded by Witte when he returned to government as premier in 1905-1906, and by his successors. Most accounts laud Witte's ingenuity and ambition. By financing industrialization and securing foreign capital, Witte played a major role in facilitating Russia's development. The country enjoyed impressive economic growth, a healthy pace of industrialization, and other aspects of modernization that would not have been possible in other circumstances. Witte remains a hero to those who believe that, if only he had been entrusted with more leadership, Russia would have been better off. Witte, however, does have some detractors. By borrowing abroad, Witte based Russia's development on the stability of foreign capital markets and thus left the economy vulnerable to foreign security requirements. Industrial and infrastructure development, focused on heavy industry and large-scale enterprise, created unevenness in the Russian economy. Even as it expanded to greater heights, the Russian economy created divisions, difficulties, and other problems in Russia's modernizing society, problems that strongly contributed to revolution in 1917.

Viewpoint: Yes. Witte's policies modernized the Russian economy and made Russia competitive internationally. One of late-tsarist Russia's most talented and ambitious civil servants, Count Sergei lul'evich Witte was the central architect of the country's economic policy in the years leading up

to the 1905 Revolution. A railroad executive, Witte headed Russia's Ministry of Finance (1892-1903), the government organ that played the most important role in industrial development and nonagricultural economic policy. Keys to the "Witte system" were the expansion of Russia's railway network and the securing of foreign investment for industry. During his tenure as finance minister, Russia's industrial

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First Council of Soviet Workers' Deputies at Ivanovo Uoznesensk, a large textile center near Moscow, May 1905 (Associated Press)

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economy grew more rapidly than at any other time in the prerevolutionary period. Witte's priority was to restore and cement Russia's position as a great European power, and it was to this end that he pushed so vigorously for rapid industrial growth. Witte was highly influenced by the arguments for state-driven industrialization advanced by the German economist Friedrich List. For Russia to overcome problems associated with its relatively low income levels and concentrations of capital, the state would need to play an active role in furthering industrial development through engaging in building projects (such as the railway system) and in ensuring the availability of finance. The transformation of Russia's railways from short lines owned primarily by private companies to an extensive, state-owned network was begun and furthered by Witte's predecessors in the finance ministry from peasant emancipation to the early 1890s: M. Kh. Reutern, N. Kh. Bunge, and Ivan Vyshnegradskii. However, it was under Witte's direction that the most significant progress was made in both expanding and modernizing Russia's railway system, his area of immediate expertise after all, vital for meeting demands for large amounts of industrial materials throughout the growing economy. During his tenure Russia's railways grew from less than thirty-three thousand kilometers to more than fifty-eight thousand kilometers of track, more extensive in length than the railroads in either France or Germany, and by 1901 all railroads were state-owned. HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

Witte's securing of capital for industrial growth was remarkable given Russia's relatively low revenues and investment capital. Foreign loans thus became central to capital accumulation. Between 1897 and 1901, 20 percent of investment within Russia was financed with funds from abroad, mostly from France and Russia's principal diplomatic and military ally after 1892, Belgium. The introduction of the gold standard for the ruble in 1897 also made investments in Russia more stable and attractive than before. With the aid of Witte's policies, Russian industrial production made huge advances. Growth rates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were high, comparing favorably to those of the United States, Germany, and Japan at the time, and closely resembling those experienced by China, South Korea, and other dynamic Asian economies in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. The favorable comparisons that can be made between Russia's prewar industrial economy and those of West European countries were due in large part to the advances made under Witte. In 1913 Russia's total national income was nearly equal to that of Great Britain, and its industrial economic output was similar in size to that of France. Russia's steel production in 1913 exceeded France's (4.9 to 4.7 million metric tons), and its coal and iron production were not far behind. Russia's industrial output was still considerably lower than that of Britain and Germany, but much ground had been gained over Russia's lagging economy of the 1850s and 1860s.

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Domestic opponents of the influx of foreign capital who had connections in the imperial court attempted, ultimately successfully, to turn Tsar Nicholas II against his powerful finance minister. In a memorandum to the emperor, however, Witte defended the inflow of foreign capital. The productivity of Russian agriculture could not be raised fast enough to produce the capital needed for industrialization, Witte told Nicholas, and foreign investment forced greater efficiency upon domestic Russian producers. Witte was aware of problems that his system caused, to which his answer was continued use of borrowed foreign capital, steep protectionist tariffs and other duties, and direct excise taxes, including a lucrative state liquor monopoly that came into force in 1896. With criticism of Witte's policies mounting, Nicholas II cashiered Witte in 1903. Yet, the redoubtable finance minister soon returned to the highest levels of Russian politics. In the summer of 1905 he negotiated a reasonable peace treaty to end Russia's disastrous war with Japan. In October of the same year, he became Russia's first premier—a head of government distinct from the imperial family—after convincing Nicholas II of the need to grant Russians civil rights and an elected legislature in order to preserve the monarchy in the face of intensifying revolution. This quasi-constitutional order, which offered representative government and hope for future democratization, largely developed from Witte's initiatives. In the 1950s Harvard economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron proposed a model to explain the path of industrialization in relatively poor agrarian countries such as tsarist Russia. Gerschenkron argued that relative economic backwardness induces such societies to make substitutions for missing preconditions necessary for industrial growth and that the state plays a crucial role in providing the preconditions. According to this theory, in Russia it was the Ministry of Finance, both under Witte and his immediate predecessors, that filled the breaches through actions favoring heavy industry: building railways, installing high tariffs, purchasing domestic goods, and securing foreign investment capital. These measures were taken by the state in the face of a weak labor market, as peasant emancipation had failed to release adequate numbers of individuals to work in industry. Building on Gerschenkron's work, a consensus among economic historians holds that the Russian state was crucial in the securing of foreign loans to finance the country's industrial growth. The notion of "economic modernization" is one that cannot be uniformly defined, and thus it is difficult to arrive at a universally agreedupon assessment of the influence of any single actor in Russia's economic development. Be that

as it may, for the period from peasant emancipation to the first complete year before World War I (1861 to 1913), the proportion of Russia's national income provided by industry rose from 23.5 to 32 percent, while income from agriculture fell from 57 to 51 percent. Russia's overall economic output doubled between 1890 and 1900. Sergei Witte, as finance minister for much of this era, was the key figure in this progress and transformation. -BRADLEY WOODWORTH, YALE UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Witte's policies created great urban instability and caused many problems for Russia's emerging economy. Historians usually praise Count Sergei lul'evich Witte's role in the political and economic history of tsarist Russia. His tenure as minister of finance (1892-1903), negotiation of a favorable peace treaty in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and role in promoting a constitutional political order after the Revolution of 1905 are all frequently cited as progressive developments and led to his accrual of his countrymen's honor and respect. Yet, Witte had flaws. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his plans for Russia's economic development, which, though ambitious and in some ways successful, exacerbated existing problems and created new ones. Their long-term implications for the country's economic and social stability were serious. Observing the problems with Witte's approach to development is not to deny that Russia needed major reform. Its defeat by Western powers in the Crimean War (1853-1856), lack of industrial development, poor infrastructure, and enserfed rural population left it much weaker than its competitors, and everyone recognized that fact. What one should realize, however, is that bridging this gap was not Witte's original idea. The abolition of serfdom and other meaningful administrative and judicial reforms carried out in the 1860s predated Witte's ministerial appointment by nearly thirty years. The initiative most closely associated with him, ambitious railroad expansion (Witte was a career bureaucrat in the railroad department of the Ministry of Finance before his appointment as minister of communications in 1892 and minister of finance later that year), had begun a dozen years before he reached high office.

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Between 1880 and 1890 his predecessors oversaw the doubling in size of Russia's railroad network. Witte continued this development by more than trebling its size in the last decade of the nineteenth century, but he could hardly claim the idea as his own. Railroad development was an undeniable benefit, but several other existing policies continued and expanded by Witte were not so beneficent. In an effort to stimulate Russia's domestic economic growth, the Russian government had encouraged increased exports of wheat and other agricultural products, as well as high tariffs and other protectionist measures to limit competitive foreign imports. Witte's immediate predecessor as minister of finance, Ivan Vyshnegradskii, had pushed this policy to an extreme in the late 1880s and bore some responsibility for the famine that broke out in 1891-1892. That human catastrophe, which brought about his replacement by Witte, exposed the lack of wisdom behind the export policy, which failed to establish a surplus of food to compensate for even a season or two of poor harvests. Witte, however, continued to place high pressure on agricultural exports. Like his predecessors, he also maintained high tariff walls against foreign imports to preserve a favorable trade balance. These measures had been and remained problematic because Russia's major trading partners both placed retaliatory tariffs on Russian grain and found their finished industrial exports much less competitive in Russia. In this vicious circle Russia's agricultural sector lost ground in international markets to North and South American produce, which could be shipped to Europe more cheaply and easily via new transport and refrigeration technologies, while Russia as a whole lost out on cheap and efficient opportunities to modernize its productive capacities. The adoption of the gold standard at Witte's urging in 1897 made currency exchange more rigid and denied Russia the prospect of using a flexibly valued currency to its advantage in international trade. The first major consequence was that agricultural exports, though greater and greater in volume, were insufficient to finance Russia's industrial development. As a result, Witte had to take on massive foreign loans. Once again, he was not thinking originally. His predecessors had also looked to international finance to aid Russia's development. What made Witte peculiar, however, was that he could rely only on particular sources of foreign investment. Germany, identifying a strong Russia as a threat, had closed its capital markets to traditionally generous Russian borrowing in the late 1880s. Britain, which at least until 1900 continued to see Russia as its most serious international competitor, was also 212

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reluctant to help it develop and preferred to invest in its own colonial empire, its economic condominium in Latin America, and the safer and less threatening United States. The United States directed most of its investment into domestic development and remained a debtor nation until World War I. Its suspicion of Russian intentions in Asia and dislike of Russia's poor treatment of Jews and other minorities added to its reluctance to finance Witte's modernization program. The finance minister was thus forced to rely on the support of the world's only other major financial power, France, which strategic circumstances had made Russia's ally from 1892. Witte's reliance on French finance posed several challenges. Poorer than the three other potential creditors, France could offer only far smaller amounts than what might otherwise have been obtained. Although French banks held about 40 percent of Russia's public debt by 1900, their investment capital's absolute value was limited and could only be applied to select projects. While it would have been more prudent to spread French investment evenly, a policy that greater funds would have facilitated, most loans were spent in a piecemeal way that created unevenness in Russia's economic development. As Norman Stone and many other economic and military historians have pointed out, it was this unevenness in growth, rather than "backwardness" in the country's general economic situation, that bedeviled Russia's effort in World War I and harmed its prerevolutionary urban stability. Worse, if France suffered a major fiscal crisis or reconfigured its strategic policy in a way that left it at odds with Russia, its loans would have disappeared, and no other power would have likely emerged as Russia's banker. When World War I broke out in 1914, this was exactly what happened. The French economy faced major challenges, and its own war effort quickly consumed investment capital that would otherwise have been loaned to Russia. The same was true of Belgium, the impressive banking sector of which had also financed some of Russia's development but found itself in the fight of its life when the Germans invaded. Britain and the United States extended some wartime credits, but despite the obvious advantage of supporting a strong Russia to battle Germany, they were usually small in amount, late in payment, and unfavorable in terms. This problem did not arise while Witte was in government, but its emergence during World War I exposed the tenuous foundations upon which he had based his development program. By 1917 it led to catastrophe. Further, just as Britain, Germany, and the United States had strategic reasons to avoid

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major sponsorship of Russian development; France embraced it largely out of strategic imperative. After its sound defeat by Germany in 1870-1871, France suffered two decades of diplomatic isolation knowing that it could never defeat Germany on its own should there be a rematch. Germany's ill-advised decision to abandon its strategic relationship with Russia after 1890, however, left the latter open to a new alliance partner. Looking at the situation geographically, the French logically identified Russia as a second front that would divert German military resources in the event of war. After the two countries concluded a mutual defensive alliance in 1892, financing Russia's development, and by extension its military effectiveness, became a major French policy. Yet, this objective only proved a liability for Russia's economy. As time went on and the French grew increasingly wary of German power, they began to place more onerous strategic conditions on their loan packages. With each passing year these conditions privileged projects of military significance—such as railroad construction in the Russian Empire's western borderlands to facilitate faster Russian troop mobilization—over more broadly useful development in other regions and economic sectors. In addition to exacerbating the Russian economy's unevenness, the situation deprived civilian, consumer, and industrial projects of funds. As the Russians discovered in 1914, many of these needs were equal or more important than the specifically military projects demanded by the French, many of which were in any case made irrelevant by German advances in the first year of World War I. Yet, Witte's decision to depend on French finance left Russia with no other choice.

TALENTED BUT DISLIKED Anns Alexandrovna Vyrubova, a lady-in-waiting for the empress of Russia, accompanied the royal family on their yacht Polar Star fora cruise in Finnish waters following the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1005, It was while onboard the vessel that she met Count Sergei lut'evich Witte and recorded these observations:

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

Prioritizing foreign loans as a development tool slammed the door on several valid and much less risky domestic sources of revenue. A major flaw in Witte's program rested in his ambivalence toward rural modernization. Happy though he was to encourage grain exports, he did remarkably little to modernize Russian farming. Although Russia possessed some of the world's richest farmland, most of its rural population produced at only slightly more than the subsistence level. This situation had roots in the country's traditional communal form of land tenure and in a rapid increase in the rural population over the course of the nineteenth century, but nothing in Witte's program allowed for the improvements necessary to alleviate the situation. The only major government institution that gestured in that direction, the Peasant Land Bank, existed to facilitate the repayment of peasant dues left over from emancipation and the purchase of gentry land for peasant use. Consumer credit, other forms of small-scale finance, and general government support for rural devel-

Source: Anna Alexandrovna Vyrubova, Memories of the Russian Court (1923) .

opment—all common in the West at the timepassed Russia by. Foreign corporations trying to sell farm machinery consistently reported dismal sales and uncooperative attitudes. In 1911 only 166 tractors were tilling the vast fields of European Russia, compared to 14,000 in the United States. Witte's failure to close this gap weakened his overall program. More efficient farming and greater agricultural production would have created greater surpluses for export. Increased exports would have helped balance Russia's trade deficit and reduce its reliance on high tariffs. Bigger export revenues would have allowed for domestic development without the need to resort to borrowing abroad. Yet, all of these positive achievements had to begin with measures that Witte neglected to take. It is also worth mentioning that despite his great influence, Witte was unable to implement legislation that would allow peasants to leave their communes and set up private farmsteads like those common in Western Europe. Offering modern values of private property, individual profit, and freedom from intrusive institutions of communal life, these measures were advocated by Russia's leading economists during his time in office, but were only implemented by a later premier, Petr Stolypin, in 1906. Modernizing the Russian government's domestic revenue collection was another lost cause under Witte's leadership. Although he tried to rationalize and standardize Russia's system of taxation and tax collection (partly by bringing it under his Ministry's control in 1899),

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the more innovative approaches found among Russia's competitors were sorely lacking. Most state revenue continued to come from direct taxes—excise duties on imports and certain essential commodities. In 1894 Witte extended this system to include a government monopoly on liquor. However, these measures were insufficient to fund the needs of a modern state. Witte's tinkering with the efficiency of collecting the extant direct taxes did marginally increase revenues, but it embittered peasants and the growing ranks of the urban poor, who felt squeezed and realized the economic truth that direct taxes, which normally assess the same amount or percentage from everyone paying, were regressive and thus fell disproportionately on them. The state liquor monopoly was an even stranger development. Eventually accounting for about one-third of the government's revenue, it cast a long moral shadow since Russia's official cultural, social, and religious institutions formally opposed drinking and decried the abuses of alcoholism. Good subjects, in other words, were paradoxically discouraged from engaging in an activity that furnished the state with much of its revenue. The liquor monopoly also turned into another case of state dependence on an unstable source of income. When conflict broke out in 1914, the government banned vodka sales as counterproductive to the war effort, thus at a stroke cutting off much of its own revenue. The comprehensive indirect taxation systems (mainly taxes on income) prudently adopted by West European nations and the United States before World War I made no inroads into Russia until the pressures of war forced it to consider a national income tax in 1916. Although Russia experienced steady economic growth before and indeed even during World War I, Witte's eleven-year tenure as minister of finance left it with many problems. The Empire's reliance on foreign capital was inefficient and surrendered an important amount of

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decision-making power to the strategic needs of another nation. Its agricultural sector remained underdeveloped, underutilized as a source of revenue, and yet nevertheless discontented socially and politically. Its taxation system failed to access its growing urban financial resources and left it ill prepared to pay the costs of operating a modern state. The fault for these problems lay with an incomplete process of modernization, much of which was directed by Sergei Witte. -PAUL DU QUENOY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO

References Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy, 1850-1917 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986). Paul R. Gregory, "Russian Industrialization and Economic Growth," Jahrbiicher fur Geschichte Osteuropas2$ (1977): 200-218. Gregory, Russian National Income, 1885-1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Theodore H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1963). Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881-1917 (London & New York: Longman, 1983). Nicolas Spulber, Russia's Economic Transitions: From Late Tsarist to the New Millennium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (London: Penguin, 1998).

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WOMEN'S RIGHTS Did the Soviets support gender equity and women's rights? Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets viewed women as critical to the success of the state, and they ensured the fulfillment of women's rights and aspirations. Viewpoint: No. The Soviets failed to establish meaningful equality for women, and many state directives contained fundamental gender biases.

The meaning of the Bolshevik Revolution for Russian women has long been a disputed question. Coming to power promising full sexual equality and an end to oppressive gender-biased social institutions, the Bolsheviks stood at least in theory for women's liberation. Many scholars see fruit born of this promise. Divorce, abortion, equal employment opportunities, and several other "modern" demands from women quickly allowed for greater female participation in government and society. Yet, despite the rhetoric and legislation, many observers do not see great meaning for women in the Bolshevik Revolution. Old sexual prejudices remained intact. Professions that became female-dominated, such as medicine, quickly dropped in status. Women continued to suffer discrimination, limits on traditional roles, and other problems that made them disillusioned with the Bolsheviks. Most Russian feminists, adhering to liberal views, fled Soviet Russia, while others bemoaned continuing abuse and denounced the lack of improvement in their gender's status.

Viewpoint: Yes. The Soviets viewed women as critical to the success of the state, and they ensured the fulfillment of women's rights and aspirations.

industrialization. Although women played less of a role in the Bolshevik political leadership, they received new freedoms that the authorities either implemented immediately or were committed to implementing within a realistic time frame. Soviet governance also created valuable new space for women's participation in politics and society at large.

The Russian Revolution was undoubtedly a great leap forward for female Russian citizens. Although the Bolshevik government was more fundamentally committed to a program of liberating the working class, women's rights enjoyed an unprecedented place in the new regime's political program and philosophy. Women were seen as critical to Soviet success during the revolution, Civil War, and drive toward

Historians have universally acknowledged the Soviets' almost immediate passage of key legislation aimed at improving the Russian women's social plight. The establishment of rights to maternity leave, the eight-hour workday, legalized abortion, state-supported day care, higher education, and easy divorce offered at least in principle to establish a near parity between the genders. While the

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Female students working on engine parts at the Stalingrad air club, May 1936 (Associated Press)

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translation of these intentions into reality took many years, if not decades, the delays are largely excusable. The Bolsheviks' struggle to survive in the Civil War that immediately followed their seizure of power forced them to put military and other immediate needs before living up to their long-term political program. Nevertheless, they were fully cognizant of women as a key human resource in their struggles. Women broadly participated in the Revolution and Civil War as militants, soldiers, police officials, and workers. This participation has been noted by Alexandra Kollontai, the major feminist leader among the Bolsheviks, who stated in 1920 that "the future historian will undoubtedly note that the one of the characteristics of our revolution was that women workers and peasants played not—as in the French Revolution— a passive role, but an active, important role." Indeed, women participants in the Russian Civil War numbered approximately seventy-four thousand; nearly two thousand were killed, and fiftyfive were awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Women also were almost immediately allowed full and free access to the new regime's educational opportunities. This change resulted in the rapid erasure of the literacy gap between the sexes and in a vast increase in women's participation in top academic programs, including medical HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

schools and programs of study in the hard sciences and engineering. Women numbered half of medical students by 1926 and half of Soviet doctors within a decade thereafter, an achievement that would have been quite impossible before 1917. The access to education that this first generation received endured throughout the next seventy years of the regime's history and continues in post-Soviet Russia today. Assessing the degree of women's participation at a political level is a complicated issue. Historians have rightfully pointed out that women were a small minority among the party's upper echelons at the time of the revolution and remained a minority of party members throughout the history of the Soviet Union. For example, only three women had been members of the highest committees within the party before the revolution, and afterward women were outnumbered fifty to one in the ranks of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. No woman entered the Politburo, the Soviet Union's highest administrative body, until 1956. Only one major political leader, Kollontai, was unhesitatingly devoted to women's issues. Although she was appointed to the high post of commissar of public welfare in the first Bolshevik government, her later association with the Workers' Opposition group, whose syn-

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dicalism challenged the unity and discipline of the party, caused her demotion to ambassador to Sweden and Norway. Other prominent female figures within the party, including Vladimir Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, played down women's issues in favor of the Bolsheviks' immediate needs. One may qualify these factors, however, by noting that before 1917 few governments had granted women full rights of political participation. Lenin, moreover, allowed Kollontai to establish a separate women's section of the party (zhenotdel) to mobilize efforts to resolve outstanding grievances during the first thirteen years of Bolshevik rule. Indeed, as Richard Stites has noted, the zhenotdel, as part of the ruling party, was uniquely successful in implementing reform. Its work was carried out not only by a permanently staffed institutional headquarters in Moscow and regular publications, including Rabotnitsa, (The Female Worker), but also by propaganda campaigns throughout the Soviet Union. They were noted in particular for their work in liberating Muslim women under Soviet rule from the discrimination and social problems they encountered in their traditional societies. Historians have also been critical of the Soviet commitment to women's rights during the era of the New Economic Policy (NEP). They have pointed to the inability of the zhenotdel to secure gender equality at a time when the Bolsheviks sought support from hitherto unsympathetic segments of Soviet society, which to a degree included traditionally minded women. Admittedly, discrimination and harassment in the workplace and at home continued under Soviet government. Yet, one might properly wonder at the degree to which these attitudes were left over from the pervasive paternalism of prerevolutionary society. One also may call attention to women's suffering from new social crises during the NEP era, caused in part by ambiguities in the new law code. Prostitution, which remained semilegal, flourished in urban areas, permitting a great degree of exploitation. However, having the rights to divorce their spouses easily, use birth control, have resort to legal abortion, collect alimony payments and other forms of social support, and pursue higher education on a mass scale dramatically improved compared to prerevolutionary conditions, which allowed for virtually none of these. Indeed, the divorce rate in early Soviet Russia was fully 26 times higher than in prerevolutionary Russia. Stalin's first Five Year Plan, the ambitious program of industrial development launched in 1928, further helped ameliorate gender inequity by employing women as a critical human resource. Women again were mobilized to revitalize the urban economy, becoming a substantial proportion of the large-scale industrial workforce, a sector hitherto reserved for males. The total portion of

working women increased from 28.6 to 35.5 percent between 1928 and 1933. In most light industries, including printing, textiles, and shoe production, women came to make up a majority of workers. Greater employment prospects increased their financial, social, and professional independence. Women's rights improved greatly after the Bolshevik Revolution. There may have been problems in terms of equal political participation within the party, and some social ills and stigmas persisted. Nevertheless, one cannot deny that women played an increasingly active role in society. With the help of the zhenotdel and a first generation of liberated women, the female half of the population was able to enter both the higher professions and the industrial workforce. This accomplishment compares favorably with that of many highly developed economies of that time, which were still reluctant to employ or enfranchise half of their critical human resources. -YORK NORMAN, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. The Soviets failed to establish meaningful equality for women, and many state directives contained fundamental gender biases. The initial flurry of decrees emanating from the nascent Bolshevik government made Soviet women not simply the most emancipated but, moreover, those endowed with the most farreaching political rights of any nation in the world. Several powerful women, including Vladimir Lenin's own wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, were respected members of the Bolshevik Party. In 1919 the regime went so far as to organize a separate Women's Department of the Central Committee Secretariat (zhenotdel), which included local branches within party committees throughout the country. Yet, the party itself, because it held the primacy of class over that of sex as a social category, failed to understand that many of its directives contained fundamental gender biases because they refused to distinguish on paper between the two sexes, in direct contrast with what was happening in practice. Tsarist Russia had a rich tradition of female participation in its radical revolutionary movement, but a weak feminist movement. Feminism, because it emphasized female suffrage at the turn of the century—in Russia and everywhere else—was deemed "bourgeois" in Russia, and its articulate, politicized women were far more likely to be social-

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OUR TASKS The female Bolshevik leader Alexandra Kotlantai wrote the following essay in 1917 on the need for women to help build a new Russia:

“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

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“This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions”

Source: Alexandra Kollontai, "Our Tasks, * Rabotnitsa (The Female Worker), Petrograd, 1917, Nos. 1-2, pp. 3-4, in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kotlontai, translated by Alix Holt (London: Allison & Busby, 1977).

ists than suffragettes. Their primary source for theorizing about the distinctive needs of women was Friedrich Engels's writings, which stressed the need to liberate women from domestic confinement. The emancipation of women was subsumed under the greater goal of bringing the working class to power, as evidenced by the first Bolshevik publication for a specifically female audience, Rabotnitsa (The Female Worker), which appeared in 1913. Its editor, Inessa Armand, who would also be the first head of the zhenotdel, commented in the first issue that "women workers do not have special demands separate from general proletarian demands." Yet, they did. Driven into the labor force in unprecedented numbers during World War I, women were also likely to have less education and fewer skills than their male counterparts. Moreover, they were met with suspicion for this cultural backwardness, which included a greater tendency than men to remain followers of the Orthodox Church and culturally conservative. However, Lenin, who repeated on many occasions that women were "a brake in all previous revolutions," also reiterated that the success of the revolution depended upon the conversion of women to communism. In 1918, even before the outbreak of full-scale civil war, the nascent Bolshevik regime increased the rights of women dramatically by guaranteeing

their equality with men in everything from property ownership to pay. Moreover, the early legislation addressed critical issues of the family that had worked more against wives than husbands in the past, facilitating the process for divorce and allowing either spouse to move separately. Women were also singled out for their unique responsibilities of childbearing; they were guaranteed paid maternity leave and in 1920 became the first women in the world to have access to legal abortions. Peasant women could not only work the land alongside men, but they could also participate in decisionmaking processes of the village assemblies according to the Land Code of 1922. The party hoped that legislating sexual equality would raise the political consciousness of the female population and make it an active participant in the arduous struggle to build the state. Female members were often pressed into service, though, for qualities that were considered intrinsically female. For example, they were recruited into antiprofiteering detachments during the Civil War because of their "tender hearts and sharp eyes." As Elizabeth Wood has illustrated, women were perpetually recruited through patriarchal images in which the party or state replaced the male authorities to which they had been subservient in the prerevolutionary era. In addition, the kinds of jobs into which they were being placed reflected the

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sexism of old: inspecting kindergartens rather than factories, for instance. The first glass ceiling was being put in place. The end of the Civil War in 1921 resulted in the demobilization of approximately three million soldiers, and, as in other societies demobilizing from the era of World War I, brought with it the obvious need to reintegrate these men into the workforce. A country devastated by seven years of war and revolution, moreover, required radical measures to reorganize its economy for peacetime production. Lenin's response to this situation was to implement the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), which called for a return to limited market forces to stimulate recovery and produce an economic equilibrium. Therefore, when factory managers were told to make productivity paramount, they were implicitly given the authority to jettison more idealistic social practices. When delegates to the Tenth Party Congress, which approved NEP in March 1921, proposed that the women's departments be subsumed within the party's agitation sections, they inspired many local committee bosses to liquidate their women's sections, over protests from some Soviet leaders. According to Bolshevik philosophy, genuine liberation would be realized through female participation in both the labor force and the public sphere. NEP, though, was forcing the closure of both of these avenues to women. The paper legislation did not undermine the structural realities that prevented women from achieving any truly functional equality. NEP was sometimes known in workers' circles as the "new exploitation of the proletariat." Women may have thought of it as the "(re)newed exploitation of the pregnant." Their rights to paid maternity leave dissuaded managers from hiring them, citing the costs of both the necessary health care and the lost time at the job. As employment rose among men, it declined among women, despite legislation in 1922 against job discrimination on the basis of sex. The prominent Bolshevik women's leader Alexandra Kollontai, who had replaced the deceased Armand at the Union-level zhenotdel, joined leaders of the Central Council of Trade Unions to protest aspects of NEP that undermined proletarian democracy. She found herself accused of engaging in "feminist deviation" and, after being forced to recant her views, was exiled to Norway as a member of a nonessential trade delegation. Her replacement from 1922, Sofiia Smidovich, was not only a political moderate but also a cultural conservative. An Old Bolshevik, Smidovich was also old-fashioned. Not only did she wish to keep women subsumed under the proletariat as a general concept, but she also gave voice to those who objected to what they saw as excessive liberalism in family policies. Zhenotdel lost so much influence that its disbandment in

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1930 was merely a formality. Female membership in the party never surpassed 10 percent, and the masculinist culture embraced by Joseph Stalin and those he enrolled as head of the Organization Bureau excluded women from higher positions in the party and state apparatuses. Long before Western feminists championed the idea that "the personal is the political," Soviet women learned that individual freedom was best pursued in private life. Perhaps the most poignant example of the cultural distance between emancipation by decree and by individual choice can be seen in the movie Bed and Sofa, produced in 1926, before socialist realism began to restrict the agenda expressed though popular culture. The heroine begins as the prototype of the new woman, sharing her bed with her husband while his friend sleeps on the sofa in their overcrowded Moscow apartment. Then, she reverses the sleeping arrangements. When she finds herself pregnant, not knowing which of her partners is the father, the two men insist that she have an abortion. She goes to the clinic, the existence of which was portrayed as an indicator of social progress. Ultimately, though, the heroine cannot go through with the procedure and returns to her village to have her baby without the prospective fathers. It was not the Soviet government that gave her meaningful equality, because she still found herself pressured by men to make decisions convenient for themselves. As centuries of women before her had done, she recovered what personal freedoms she could for herself by evading the state and its male emissaries. -LOUISE MCREYNOLDS, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAFI, MANOA

References Dorothy Atkinson and others, eds., Women in Russia (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1977). Wendy Z. Goldman, Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin's Russia (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

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WORLD WAR I ALLIANCES Was Russia's alignment with France and Great Britain a wise strategy?

Viewpoint: Yes. France and Britain were reliable counterweights to Germany and Austria-Hungary and shared Russia's interest in blocking the Germans' and Austrians' eastward expansion. Viewpoint: No. Russia would have been better served politically and economically by aligning itself with Germany and Austria-Hungary, which could have helped, instead of hindered, Russian aims in the Balkans and were far better markets than France or Britain for Russian goods.

Russia's pre-World War I alliance with France, in effect since 1892, and its looser alignment with Britain, effective after 1907, were cornerstones of early-twentieth-century European and world diplomacy. Sharing an interest in countering German power, the three nations established a relationship that prefigured the Allied camp in World War I. Indeed, some historians believe that the alliances set in place before 1914 were fundamental causes of the conflict, which was created—according to conventional European diplomatic history—by a belligerent Germany that threatened the interests of most other great powers. This chapter assesses the wisdom of the Russian commitment to its World War I allies. While it shared France and Britain's resistance to expanding German power, Russia does not appear to have served its long-term interests by taking part in the war. After all, Russia was one of the major losers, and its alliance with France played an important role in dragging it into the conflict. Before 1914, Russia had cordial relations with Germany, and German diplomatic goals posed almost no threat to Russian interests. The Russian government shared the conservative social and political values of its wartime opponents far more than it shared the democratic values of its allies, and the implications of the war for Russia's long-term domestic stability were inauspicious. Some revisionist scholars therefore see few benefits for the empire in the diplomatic constellation of prewar Europe.

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France, and Britain served the needs of the Russian Empire.

Viewpoint: Yes. France and Britain were reliable counterweights to Germany and Austria-Hungary and shared Russia's interest in blocking the Germans' and Austrians' eastward expansion. In the years leading up to World War I, the Russian Empire faced two major threats to its interests and security: Germany's imperial push toward the Middle East and the AustroHungarian Empire's expansion at the expense of Russia's clients in the Balkans. The decline of Russian influence in southeastern Europe would have aided the German drive toward the Middle East, added a new competitor to Russian ambitions in the region, and threatened Russian interests in the Black Sea littoral. Failing to support its Balkan clients against AustriaHungary would have tarnished Russia's image in the world as a powerful and reliable ally and damaged its government's domestic prestige. These consequences would have greatly reduced Russia's ability to function as a great power. In order to counter these threats, it was logical and sensible for the Russians to look to France and later Britain as allies. Not only were France and Britain logical allies, but they also had economic, political, and military strengths that made them useful counterweights to Germany and Austria-Hungary. France was a large, populous nation, industrially advanced, economically strong, and able to field a large, powerful army. Together Russia and France could threaten Germany with a two-front war. In addition to these tangible factors, the French in the years leading up to World War I were still aching to avenge their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 18701871. The French wanted to reclaim the Alsace-Lorraine region, which they had lost to Germany in the peace settlement at the end of that war. The British, although slower to respond to events on the Continent, were nonetheless concerned about German efforts to dominate Europe, a development that they viewed as a direct threat to their security. Britain was also an economically powerful nation, backed by the resources of a vast empire. After 1898, ambitious German naval efforts posed a direct threat to the British Empire, and— despite rivalries between Russia and Britain in the regions along the southern borders of the Russian Empire—building closer ties with Britain was a logical move for Russia. In short, the Triple Entente alliance of Russia, 222

Any reckoning of Russia's diplomatic position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must consider the role of Germany. Under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's leadership, Germany had forged a united country in 1864-1871. Bismarck had won impressive military victories in wars against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (18701871); challenged France's position as the preeminent European power; and altered the European status quo. He then established Germany as a status-quo power. Realizing that the large, populous, militarily powerful nation posed a new threat to established European powers, Bismarck shrewdly pursued diplomacy designed to reassure most of his European neighbors of his commitment to stability and to prevent the French from establishing any alliance that could threaten Germany. Bismarck understood that aggressive policies would invite other European powers to unite in hostility against Germany. He also realized that Germany's location in central Europe made it vulnerable to war on multiple fronts, which greatly worried German military leaders. Calculating how best to preserve Germany's position in the new European configuration of powers, Bismarck became a champion of conservative diplomacy and the status quo. The cautious nature of German diplomacy changed when Wilhelm II succeeded to the German throne in 1888. Disdainful of what he felt to be Bismarck's patronizing treatment, Wilhelm, who was much younger than his chancellor, decided to embark on a "New Course" in German policy. The young emperor sacked Bismarck in 1890, replacing the superior statesman with men of inferior ability who spent the next twenty-five years provoking crises, antagonizing neighbors, and threatening to disrupt the balance of power in Europe, even as Germany was becoming more isolated diplomatically. Wilhelm withdrew from a secret defensive agreement with Russia; cast a covetous eye toward the Middle East; acquired colonies in Africa and the Pacific; provoked or heightened crises over the French occupation of Morocco; and tried to intimidate other powers into accepting alliances on German terms. From the Russian standpoint, Germany's increasing aggressiveness in the years after 1890 was particularly problematic because of its interest in spreading power and influence into the Middle East, a step that brought it into conflict with Russian interests in the Balkans and the Black Sea littoral. Although Rus-

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sian claims that they were protectors of the Slavs were overblown and self-serving, considerable Russian effort had been committed to the independence of Orthodox Christian South Slavs, who were agitating for autonomy within, or independence from, Germany's closest ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A successful German push toward the Middle East would undermine the interests of the South Slavs and Russia's credibility as a regional power. German influence over the Ottoman Empire—as evidenced by German military missions and economic investment in the years before 1914—could have given them control over the strategic straits linking the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. Black Sea commerce was far too important to Russia for them to permit German control over this vital sea artery. With Germany and Austria posing the major threat to Russia, it was logical for the Russians to seek closer ties with France and Britain. Having been hostile to one another for years, these two nations had been brought closer together in response to the inept policies of Wilhelm II and his ministers. The British and French had considerable strengths to offer Russia in an alliance. In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, there were understandable doubts about France's future as a great power. The Germans had defeated France rapidly, and then imposed a peace treaty designed to slow French resurgence. One of the main tools Bismarck used in his attempt to slow the pace of French recovery was the required repayment of war indemnities, but—contrary to expectations—the French used their ample capital reserves to pay them early. They then spent significant sums to expand and modernize their army, and by 1900 their army was larger than that of Germany. Angry about their territorial losses in the Franco-Prussian War, motivated to meet the new German threat, and capable of combining with Russia to confront the Germans with a two-front war, the French were suitable allies for the Russians. In 1892 the two nations concluded a military alliance. The British also had much to commend them as friends of Russia even though—owing to their historic desire for the freedom to maneuver diplomatically—they were reluctant to enter into binding alliance commitments. Despite their desire to refrain from continental entanglements, the British had long known the dangers they would face if Europe were dominated by a single power. With Germany moving in precisely that direction, the British developed a vested interest in acting to prevent such an occurrence, and they were able to

THE FRANCO-RUSSIAN ALLIANCE On 18 August 1892 Russia and France signed a secret agreement pledging to defend one another against the forces of the Triple Alliance, then comprising Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, This agreement, which eventually obligated Russia to fight in World War I on the side of France and Great Britain, included the following provisions:

1, If France is attacked by Germany, or by ftaly supported by Germany, Russia shall employ all her available forces to attack Germany. If Russia is attacked by Germany, or by Austria supported by Germany, France shall employ all her available forces to attack Germany. 2, In case the forces of the Triple Alliance, or of any one of the Powers belonging to it, should be mobilized, France and Russia, at the first news of this event and without previous agreement being necessary, shall mobilize immediately and simultaneously the whole of their forces, and shall transport them as far as possible to their frontiers. 3, The available forces to be employed against Germany shall... engage to the full with such speed that Germany will have to fight simultaneously on the East and on the West.... 5. France and Russia shall not conclude peace separately. 6. The present Convention shall have the same duration as the Triple Alliance. 7. All the clauses enumerated above shall be kept absolutely secret. Source: The World War I Document Archive .

bring considerable commercial and naval power to bear in such an effort. To work closely with the British required an historic change of course in Russian policy. For decades the Russians and British had been potential rivals all along the vast perimeter of the Russian Empire, from the Mediterranean to China. New realities changed the nature of Anglo-Russian relations, however. Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 forced Russia to moderate its expansion in the Far East, the region where it had been the most active since its conquest of Central Asia in the 1880s. By 1907 the threat posed by Germany had become much more serious than disputes with the British over Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet, or other Asian borderlands. The British and the Russians negotiated a broad settlement of all outstanding colonial issues.

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The British brought much to their relationship with Russia. Great Britain was an economic powerhouse. In 1900 Britain produced more coal than the continental powers combined and as much iron as Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary combined. Only Germany produced more steel than Britain. Even though relative British economic power was declining, the British retained the manpower reserves and resources of their global empire. The British also maintained an impressive navy. After 1889, realizing that maritime power was the key to their empire, the British governed naval expenditures according to the "Two-Power Standard," which required them to maintain a navy larger than the next two largest navies combined. By 1910, Britain was spending as much on its navy as Germany, France, and Russia together. Given the challenges the Russians were facing from Austria in the Balkans and Germany in the Near East, they needed friends elsewhere in Europe. France brought a strong economy and army, hostility to Germany, and the ability to join the Russians in trapping the Germans in a two-front war. The British were committed to resisting German domination of continental Europe. Together, the three allies furnished strengths that could help the Russians preserve their position as a great power. It made perfect sense for the diplomats of the Russian Empire to build close connections with the British and the French. -JOHN SCARES, CINCINNATI, OHIO

Viewpoint: No. Russia would have been better served politically and economically by aligning itself with Germany and Austria-Hungary, which could have helped, instead of hindered, Russian aims in the Balkans and were far better markets than France or Britain for Russian goods. Many scholars contend that the entangling alliances of the nineteenth century paved the road to World War I, dragging unwilling adversaries into an inevitable conflict. This argument is often used to describe how Great Britain was pulled into another Franco-German conflict or how Germany was forced to support AustriaHungary in another Balkan War. Perhaps the most lamentable consequence of the alliance system was the disintegration of Russia and its

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subsequent descent into chaos, civil war, and communist oppression. The fall of the tsar was a direct consequence of the Russians' unfortunate and ill-conceived alliances with Britain and France, who ultimately proved to be unreliable allies. In retrospect, Russia would have been better served by a different choice of strategic partners. As Europe tottered on the brink of war in 1914, several governments reconsidered their political commitments. Italy and Romania, for example, extricated themselves from alliances with Germany and Austria-Hungary, first declaring neutrality and then entering the war on the side of the Entente (Britain, France, and Russia). Bulgaria reneged on its 1902 treaty with Russia and entered the war on the side of the Central Powers. Russian policy makers, however, opted to stay the course in their alliances with Britain and France. The reasons for these alliances were many and complex. Nineteenth-century Europe attempted to achieve a balance of power in which the strengths and weaknesses of one state or group of states were compensated for, or matched by, those of another or others. Each alliance member brought something different to the table. In the Entente alliance of Britain, France, and Russia, Britain was the true superpower, with a global empire protected by the world's most powerful navy. Though France also had a far-flung empire, it was primarily a land power, with a three-hundred-year-old tradition of military dominance in Europe. Russia was also a great land power; it occupied about one-sixth of the world's land area, stretching almost halfway around the globe from western Poland to Alaska. This great physical size was of primary concern to Britain, as Russia bordered and exerted its influence in many areas where the British Empire sought domination. Russian spheres of influence rarely conflicted with French interests, however. This last point is important to keep in mind when judging the wisdom of Russia's alliances. While relations between Russia and France had improved steadily after Germany became a threat to both nations, relations with Britain had not. After an alliance during the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), Russia and Britain clashed over spheres of influence in Persia and the Middle East, along the frontier of British-occupied India and Afghanistan, and in northern China. Starting with the Crimean War of 1853-1856, British policy for the rest of the century was largely Russophobic, characterized by racist bombast from British propaganda writers such as Rudyard Kipling, who portrayed the Russians as Oriental savages, a threat to civilized Europe. As

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with France, it was mainly fear of Imperial Germany that pushed Britain into a reluctant understanding with Russia. The rapid buildup of the German navy after 1898, aggressive German colonization of what little territory remained unclaimed in Africa, vocal support by the German emperor for the anti-British Boer rebels in South Africa, and other incidents led to the Anglo-Russian Alliance of 1907, which quickly became the Triple Entente. Britain and France had specific interests, or war aims, that would be met more easily through alliance with Russia. However, Russian interests were not equally well served by such an alliance; indeed, they were largely hindered by it. For Britain and France, alliance with Russia was a tactical necessity in order to wage war against Germany; it did not harm

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

their interests elsewhere. For Russia, the antiGerman defensive posture was the only advantage to the Triple Entente, and it came at the price of economic and political concessions in Asia, the Near East, and even internally. Militarily, the alliance would have been beneficial only if France and Britain had been able to stop Germany from attacking Russia. Russia was in no condition to launch an offensive, let alone sustain a prolonged conflict on foreign soil. As it happened, France and Britain sat in trenches behind barbed wire on the Western Front for four years of stalemate, leaving Russia to stand alone against the Central Powers in the East. The Entente's Balkan allies of Serbia and Romania were overwhelmed, and eventually Russia was defeated. Economically, commitment to the Entente cut Russia off from its natural markets, which

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Imperial court reviewing troops, circa 1914. Known as the "Russian Steamroller" to its British and French allies, the imperial army was the largest military force in the world at the time (Associated Press).

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were largely in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and places further afield that could only be reached by routes under German or Austrian control. Russia's industrial revolution was in its infancy. Russian goods could not compete in French and British markets, and the alliance created an unnatural isolation from its neighbors that hurt Russian modernization efforts. In turn, this situation led to increased frustration among the lower classes, who experienced all the horrors of early industrialization but did not see the emergence of a prosperous urban middle class. Russia's neighbors could exploit its social unrest on many fronts. The Germans and Austrians took advantage of the tensions between the Russians and the Poles, two-thirds of whom were subjects of the tsar. Germany sent the firebrand Vladimir Lenin and other Russian revolutionaries back to Russia in the wellknown sealed railcar during the war. Although Britain had long harbored the contagion of communism by sheltering Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and other dissidents, Germany introduced it into a weakened, war-torn host, allowing it to spread and oppress half the world for three generations. The Revolution of 1917 drove Russia out of World War I, while leading to the murder of its imperial family and slaughter of millions more Russians. Russian interests abroad suffered as a result of its alliance with France and Britain as well. Assured of German backing against the Russians, the Austrians annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, expanding further into the Balkans. A major element of Russian foreign policy was the protection and eventual liberation of Christians living in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, particularly in the Orthodox Christian lands of the Balkans. Millions of Orthodox Serbs lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina and had enjoyed the protection of the Russian tsar, even though they were nominally ruled by the Turkish sultan. Austria-Hungary had opposed nearly every national struggle for independence from Turkey: from the Greeks in the 1820s through Bulgaria in the early twentieth century. (Significantly, Britain opposed these independence movements too, preferring to deal with a central Turkish authority rather than a host of smaller states.) This opposition brought Austria into conflict with Russia. Russia's isolation as a result of its alliances severely limited its ability to act on behalf of the smaller nations on its periphery. In addition to its annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Austria was able to impose major tariffs and political limitations on Serbia and Romania, particularly in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913; 226

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moreover, the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in 1914, full of impossible demands, precipitated World War I. Elsewhere on the Russian borders, the Turks, who were also German allies, felt free to continue their depredations against Christians with much less fear of Russian reprisal. During World War I, the Turks butchered millions of Orthodox Armenians in the first modern genocide. Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Greek Christians in the Ottoman Empire were also persecuted, and millions of them were forced from their homes. Because of its alliances, Russia had to fight elsewhere against the combined armies of Germany and Austria and could do nothing to intervene. Because of the Entente, Russia became the primary target of its three largest neighbors (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire), while France and Britain could rest easier knowing that Russian blood would be spilled for their protection. As for Russia's potential war aims, France and Britain had little interest in seeing them fulfilled and could not be relied on for support. Britain did not use its immense naval power to aid Russia in any significant way during the war, and the vaunted French army did little to hamper German efforts on the Eastern Front. Even the addition of the United States to the Entente in 1917 could not push the Western Front over the German border. Worse yet, American war aims spelled the death of tsarist Russia, as President Woodrow Wilson made it public that he favored a kind of "national self-determination," geared to break up the Austrian Empire by giving independence to the various nationalities within its borders. The Russian Empire was also made up of disparate nationalities, and the proposal of the newest ally hindered Russian war efforts. Finally, once the Russian Civil War began, France, Britain, the United States, and twelve other nations invaded Russia, in an effort to control events there and keep Russian food, military supplies, and especially manpower directed toward their war. Ultimately, it was not an advantageous arrangement for the Russians. While it is difficult to predict with certainty, it is possible to imagine a different outcome had Russia followed another course and not pursued an alliance with distant powers that had little interest in Russian goals. Britain especially had had strong anti-Russian policies for many decades and consistently intruded in traditionally Russian spheres of influence. Russian aims could have been achieved through cooperation with her neighbors without the Entente Powers, either informally or

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through a series of mutually beneficial arrangements or even military alliances.

dragged Russia into unnecessary conflicts and harmed its true interests.

Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia all had roughly the same kind of government: a monarchy that ruled over disparate territories and peoples. Each had a strong and influential military tradition and an agrarian ruling class, and each was experimenting with social reform, state-sponsored economic growth, and limited representative government. The political values they shared had long coincided to keep the peace among them throughout the nineteenth century. One concrete example was their mutual interest in the socalled Polish Question. The three states had partitioned Poland more than a century earlier, and any lasting solution for the Poles had to involve all three states working together. There are many other possible scenarios as well, all of which support the basic premise that alignment with France and Britain

-LAWRENCE A. HELM, WASHINGTON, D.C.

HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

References D. C. B. Li even, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983). Gordon Martel, The Origins of the First World War, third edition (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2003). David McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia: 1900-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). Astrid Tuminez, Russian Nationalism Since 1856: Ideology and the Making of Foreign Policy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

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WORLD WAR I AND THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1917 Did Russian defeats and shortages in World War I precipitate the revolutions of 1917? Viewpoint: Yes. Without the traumas of World War I, the revolutions of 1917 would not have happened. Viewpoint: No. Economic and social changes associated with attempts at modernization made revolution against the inflexible Russian autocracy inevitable, regardless of Russia's fate in the war. Whether Russia could have avoided revolutionary upheaval by staying out of World War I remains one of the most tantalizing questions of twentiethcentury history. As Russia suffered one defeat after another in the field and severe shortages of food and crucial supplies, its soldiers and civilians became disaffected. The capital and institutions of state fell from the control of the tsarist system, and the Provisional Government that replaced it lasted less than a year. Many problems associated with the revolutionary upheaval of 1917—including massive inflation, dwindling food supplies, strained infrastructure, distracted government, and long-term commitment to unpopular foreign interests—were intimately related to the war. Many historians believe that, in their absence, the total collapse of state and society seems to have been unlikely. Nevertheless, many other historians contend that the war only exacerbated long-term problems in Russian society that could have had no solution other than massive upheaval. In their view, although the war coincided with— or, as some suggest, hastened—the boiling point of these problems in 1917, the war did not make a crucial difference in creating revolution.

Viewpoint: Yes. Without the traumas of World War I, the revolutions of 1917 would not have happened.

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Arthur Mendel set the parameters in 1969 for the historiographical debate about the effects of World War I on the Russian revolutions of 1917 when he divided historians into two camps: the "optimists," who believed that tsarist Russia was moving toward a Western-style liberal democracy when it was derailed by the pressures of World War I (19141918); and the "pessimists," who

argued that Russia was on the brink of socialist revolution when the war broke out in August 1914 and that the momentary surge of national unity just postponed the inevitable. Although the debate today eschews such terminology—which is freighted with Cold War-era value judgments about what would have been best for Russia—it is clear from contemporary discussions of the political direction of post-Soviet Russia that these sentiments still persist. It is necessary to recognize that, unlike Russian involvement in a war with Japan in 1904-1905, Russian participation in 1914 was all but unavoidable. Russian foreign policy throughout the nineteenth century

had kept it at war with the Ottoman Empire because Russia wanted to expand its interests in the Near East and protect the Orthodox Christian Slavs from the Muslim Turks. The Russian domestic policy of rapid industrialization had enmeshed the Russian and French economies to such an extent that the two countries shared one another's national interests. Despite a well-known memorandum from State Councillor Petr Durnovo to Tsar Nicholas II, in which Durnovo presciently predicted a military defeat resulting in social revolution, it would have been wholly unexpected for the tsar not to have gone to war against Germany and its allies. The fact that a wide swath of political opinion—from the moderate socialists to the conservatives in the State Duma—supported the war underscores the argument that participation in it cannot be dismissed as autocratic folly. Nor can the initial public support be interpreted as sunshine patriotism, vulnerable to the disaffection that accompanies military defeat. It was the unforeseen nature of World War I—its stalemate along the trenches and the subsequent problems that each of the belligerent powers had in articulating the aims of a war that cost each of them a generation of young men—that shaped the Russian revolutions of 1917. The initial burst of enthusiasm among Russians for taking on their historical nemesis, the hated "Hun," came from all elements of society, which is not the same as saying that it was universal. The largely peasant population of Russia had more at stake in the harvest than in fighting the Germans, for example, and not all workers were ready to end a strike movement that had been gaining intensity throughout the summer of 1914. The initial burst of patriotism masked the reality that the tsar and most of his subjects held substantively different objectives in fighting this war. The prolongation of the war not only exposed the differences, but also exacerbated them, forcing the tsar to abdicate in March 1917, after the success of the first of the two 1917 revolutions; this revolution would have transpired more peaceably had Russian politics been allowed to mature on their own without the strains of war. The second revolution, launched by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks in October 1917, resulted directly from the inability of the successive, hastily cobbled together, provisional governments to prosecute the war effectively or to respond to public opinion about it. From late in the seventeenth century, when Peter the Great (ruled 1682-1725) had committed his empire to westernization, Russia had continually looked out through the "window on the West" that Peter had opened in Saint Petersburg for developmental models. Peter brought to Russia the technology necessary for industrialization, and by the end of the eighteenth century Catherine the Great HISTORY IN DISPUTE,

(ruled 1729-1796) had imported principles from the Enlightenment. Defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856) had forced Alexander II (ruled 18551881) to inaugurate a wholesale reform of society and the economy, and he turned westward for examples. Although one could argue that none of these rulers was willing to concede his autocratic prerogatives, one must also recognize that the autocratic principle was eroded with each step. When Nicholas II was forced by the Revolution of 1905 to grant the Russian people a constitution, even though he maintained the privilege of superseding it, he nonetheless took that next step forward by allowing electoral representation. A wiser man than he would have conceded more and resigned himself to reigning as a constitutional monarch, but Nicholas never lost his faith that autocracy was the best form of government for Russia. Even most of the conservative parties in the Duma, however, after having experienced the power of legislating firsthand, had turned against the tsar before the outbreak of the war. Russians were preparing to govern themselves. Self-government in the form adopted by representative, electoral democracies has depended on the presence of several infrastructural factors. Foremost, it requires that a society be pluralist, with political parties developing as institutions that represent different interest groups. As a result of the policies of rapid industrialization, Russia had diversified, and its urban areas were legitimately pluralistic. A second important factor is the ability to organize into political parties that represent the conflicting interests of the various groups. Following the Revolution of 1905, a plethora of political parties sprouted, as one pundit put it, "like mushrooms after a rain." It took two years and two failed Dumas for the Russians to work through some of the problems inherent in organizing a party from scratch. The Western-oriented Kadets, for example, had to learn that compromise is integral to representative politics. Although the Third Duma—the first truly successful one—was weighted heavily in favor of property owners and therefore cannot be considered democratically representative, Russia was imitating patterns established by the development of parliamentary institutions in the West. The third factor is that political parties must have a philosophical understanding that, though they represent specific interests, those interests must nonetheless have a sense of working for the greater good of the public, broadly defined to include all groups. Russia had a firmly developed tradition of public consciousness, best exemplified at one extreme by Catherine the Great's enlightened despotism, and at the other by the intelligentsia, which was intent on integrating the Russian masses into a cultural whole. It can be argued that the Third Duma was more mature than the electorate, as the Octobrist VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA,

1890-1930

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DURNOVO'S WARNING In February 1914 State Councillor Petr Durnovo sent Tsar Nicholas II a memorandum outlining what he saw as the consequences of Russian involvement in a war against Germany. It included the following points:

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HISTORY IN DISPUTE, VOLUME 21: REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA, 1890-1930

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Source: Sources for Russian History