At the links below you will find my introduction to the Icelandic socialists' 1921 book on the Russian Revolution and then the book's sources, preface and introduction. The translation is mine and I would really appreciate any comments.
Byltingin í Rússlandí,
Sources, Preface and Introduction
Reaction and Progress
Russia
had been backward for a long time. This was mostly due to its
geography. At a time when there was less trade between states and travel was
more difficult, western European culture reached Russia
later than most of the rest of Europe. Great changes were happening in the working
life of Western Europe—the industrial century was gathering steam but the east
remained the same. Russia
continued to be a rural country.
There were also few of the movements for freedom that there had been in Western Europe
late in the 18th century. It was quite unlike other countries in Europe. The great change was caused by the Napoleonic
wars at the beginning of the 19th century.
In 1812 Russia
was famously the chief bulwark in mainland Europe
against Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution. The war didn’t end until Russia and many other states sent troops to France to take control of Paris—the
revolutionary city that reactionaries feared as much then as they fear Moscow now.
Many parts of Western Europe were occupied
by Russian soldiers then but nowhere more than Paris. They had severely criticised the great
French Revolution and its headquarters,
but it was one of the Russian officers named Pestel who said, ‘We were all
against the French Revolution, I more than most, but because of what we’ve seen
here we can tell there’s a lot going for it’.
Russian soldiers realised how much they had
missed and longed to bring new ideas from Western Europe and especially France to Russia. There the greatest obstacle
to progress was the Tsar and the bureaucracy who took care that the ideas of
the French Revolution did not get a foothold in the country, as well as the
unfree and utterly impoverished serfs.
The soldiers were not deterred and set up secret
societies to develop plans. At first they intended to get peaceful reform but
gradually realised the power of the Tsar stood in the way.
They meant to found a democratic republic
but Pestel, one of the leaders, went further. He said it would not be enough to
just have a change of government, what was needed was to turn land over to
common ownership— to get rid of serfdom.
They saw their chance in December 1825 when
Nicholas I came to the throne and there was an uprising in the Moscow. But it was ill prepared, misfired
badly and the revenge of the government was terrible.
Five of the most interesting, thoughtful
people in Russia,
including Pestel, were condemned to die. Many more were sent to lifelong
slavery in Siberia.
The new Tsar announced that
he considered it his business to ‘protect Russia from the western European
disease’ of movements for liberty. Apparently he wanted to protect
more than Russia from the
‘sickness’ judging by his dealings in Hungary, the Balkans and more
widely. Soon all the conservatives across Europe
looked on Nicholas I with awe.
In Russia the worst reaction ruled and
the government stood opposed to modernity. At the same time it wanted to lay
railway tracks across the country. As one of his advisors put it, “We want to
gradually release the culture of the age”.
The government banned the publishing of the
books it felt could in any way spread ideas of freedom and much needed
development. The university was similarly controlled but
it was difficult for the government to keep students in same mental bondage as
everyone else. Moscow
University, a centre of Western European culture, was particularly difficult to control.
The social lives of the students were rich
with debates about politics and other topical subjects. Quickly they split
into two main groups. One of them wanted to lay the best foundations of the
country on all that was national and peculiarly Russian. They concluded
that very little had been learnt from Western Europe before the days of Peter
the Great and that it had been downhill ever since!
The other group argued that it was nonsense
to turn back to the past, when Russians themselves would bring current western culture to the country . This group had a really tough time of it
because of the reality of Nicholas I’s oppressive rule. Many young and
thoughtful Russians emigrated hoping to get on without the Russian regime
over their heads.
One of the most remarkable of these was
Alexander Herzen, the Rousseau of the Russian revolutionaries. He was a true
revolutionary. He had experienced the bureaucracy that held the country in
chains with treachery and violence. He also knew Russian peasants were simple,
peaceful and stoic. Their conditions were little better than slavery, they
were oppressed by the landlords and the state. The landowners could load them
with various obligations and taxes and force them to be their house
servants.
The peasants were technically free to leave
and work for another landowner. But peasants who dared to put up opposition
could be punished by being sent into slavery in Siberia
or into the army for many years.
How could the peasantry be helped?
Herzen was convinced that the answers could be found in Western Europe. The West was freedom. He went straight to Western Europe to see the revolutions of
1848 but was bitterly disappointed. What Western European freedom hid was that the
only ones who benefited were those that had money as their god. They used the
working class to slave for them, indifferent to their freedom or conditions
which is its parallel.
Herzen was horrified to see the end result
of the French Revolution when the rich allowed the workers to be killed in the
streets of Paris
in June 1848—precisely the people who had led the Revolution but were cheated
of its fruits. Now he turned his back on the bourgeoisie. How could you possibly look for freedom from the kind of people
who would allow money to be put before all else? He now became a
revolutionary socialist with all his might and declared that socialism is the
future.
The time would come when the socialists
would have to do battle with the liberals and Herzen was gladdened by thought
of the future revolution that would rip up the basis of national unity, which
held down progress and would clean all humanity. The more bloody the revolution, the
more victims, the greater the success.
When Alexander II came to the throne in
1855 many people looked to the new regime with high hopes. Herzen was in London and published a
paper in Russian called The Time, in which he attacked everything old and
outdated and demanded great reform. The paper was much too liberal for the
censor to allow it to be read in Russia but nevertheless it was
distributed in secret and was very influential.
Most Russian progressives thought that they
could pressurise the Tsar into reform and it seemed at first as though
Alexander II too had his heart set on helping his people. By far the most
important thing he did was the order in 1861 that abolished serfdom. The peasants were to get their personal
freedom and escape the control of the landowners. What’s more their communes—the
mir—would be given the chance to buy some land to share out between the
peasants to use—not to own outright.
Nobody doubted that the Tsar had made this
decision in good faith but it was not as successful as it could have been. The
peasants were very unhappy at having to buy access to the earth they had always
considered to be theirs not the nobility’s.
Besides, the communes got so little land that
it was not nearly enough for the peasants. From then on they were sunk in
poverty. Alexander was still popular amongst Russian reformers and they were
optimistic about future reforms. That optimism disappeared after the 1863 Polish
uprising.
At the same time Herzen’s influence waned
in Russia.
He had sincerely discussed the Polish question but without success and was
deeply upset. Of the Tsar he said, “You would have been numbered among the
great, Alexander Nikolaevitch if you had died when you freed the serfs”.
But Herzen didn’t panic—he said about the
coming revolution, “Russians will never be content with a half-finished job.
They will not topple the rule of a monarch to have him replaced with another
power in the same spirit”. And that
prediction has come true.
Reaction now covered the country like a
nightmare. Ethnic minorities were repressed and there was complete suppression of Poland after
the uprising. Then the regime got rid of anyone associated with reform and
replaced them with the most reactionary.
Now domestic policy looked back to the
old days but foreign policy was new. The Greater Slav policy intended to gather
all Slav countries under Russia’s
hegemony. The chief proponent of this idea was a newspaper editor Katkov in Moscow. The idea lived a
long time and will raise its ugly head later in this history.
These were terrible times for Russian
progressives but they did not despair. No amount of repression could hold
down the forces that were working to takeover Russia. These years saw the rise of the Nihilism
movement. Worldwide no movement has ever been so blackened. The Nihilists were
trailblazers who wanted to reorganise and cleanse all of society—the state,
religion, marriage and property rights. They were very influential, wanting to
cut all the fetters of body and spirit, to begin to release people from the
darkness of ignorance and prejudice.
Many Nihilists were intellectuals
and very sincere. There are very few movements that have been embraced
with such enthusiasm by the young. Most of them were very young, educated in Mid or Western Europe where they came into
contact with socialism and Marxism and the politics of Bakunin. Bakunin was very
influential but most influential was the workers revolution, the 1871 Paris Commune.
The Russian authorities looked askance at
this youth movement from the beginning as was to be expected and wanted to
prevent young people from going abroad to university in Western
Europe, where they could drink in revolutionary ideas. So in 1873
to counter the pernicious growth of these ideas all Russian students were
called home to remove them from revolutionary influences.
These young, thoughtful people came
home and brought the ideas with them. Their battle-cry became, “To the
people” to spread new ideas. They went out to the countryside to work in
ordinary jobs as labourers, cobblers, doctors and nurses. They wore peasant
clothing and did all they could to blend in but they were a different
class from the peasants which spoiled their wonderful work.
The movement included some who became
famous later, Peter Tchaikovsky and Peter Lavrov. But the most famous of all
was Kropotkin. Kropotkin had been to Switzerland and
met Bakunin, that daring revolutionary who sacrificed his whole life to tear
down the existing state structures. He was always foremost in the group
where the fight was hardest against old and new wrongs. He never stopped
and let nothing discourage him.
 |
Kropotkin
|
Kropotkin was very proud of the anarchist programme and was its chief proponent after the death of Bakunin. Until 1880 he concentrated above all on revolutionary activities. After that he focused almost exclusively on the writing for which he became world famous. In his writings he tirelessly urged that it was not the struggle but co-operation and empathy that had to be strongest for mankind’s progress.
The Nihilists' activities were entirely peaceful at first but the authorities gave them no way to spread their
ideas. They were continually hounded by the police and by 1876 a crowd of
educated Russians who had been ordered home by the authorities in 1873, were in
jail.
The Nihilists were forced to change tactics
and from then on became a political movement against the monarchy and the
bureaucracy. They were highly organised and elected an
executive committee to direct their activities. They now planned to assassinate
the most reactionary officials in the hope that this would terrify the
authorities and force them to reform. For this the Nihilists have been most
harshly judged with some good reason. However it should be remembered that
they didn’t use terror tactics until the authorities forced them with
their scandalous injustice for which they must bear some responsibility—people have rarely taken this into account when they have judged the
Nihilists.
Their first big operation was in February 1878
when Vera Zasulich killed the chief of Petrograd
police Trepov because
he beat political prisoners. Democratic sympathies all supported Vera and
people were jubilant when the jury acquitted her. Vera then escaped to Switzerland.
Various other operations were now
tried and when the Nihilists realised the authorities were not letting up they
condemned the Tsar Alexander II to death. Two failed attempts were made on his
life.
It seemed that the Tsar had had enough. He
appointed Loris-Melikov as minister who was considered liberal and who
created a draft constitution for the country. But it was too late, before it
was publicised Alexander II was killed by Nihilist bomb on 13 March
1881.
Generally people were absolutely terrified
when they heard the news of the Tsar’s murder. It seemed that the
Nihilists had lost the sympathy that many people had for them. It also appeared
that they themselves were not as united as they had been and of
course this was the most dangerous time for them. Some had strongly
opposed the use of terrorism but others thought it would influence the new Tsar
Alexander III to really change how he governed.
The executive committee published a letter
to Alexander III ten days after the murder, which challenged him to summon
a representative assembly and said that in return they would quit terrorism.
But all such requests were unsuccessful.
The new Tsar was as bloody as the old, and
because of this the blood of his son, the last Tsar and his family
has been shed. It was a debt repaid. It was impossible to see the Tsar and
the people working together for the good of the nation.
Alexander III made it his mission to hunt
down the Nihilists and arrest them. The movement was repressed in a few years
but only temporarily because, ‘ideas could not be repressed with
bullets’.
You can imagine, after all this, that the Tsar had no intention of reforming the government. Quite the contrary, he
considered his business to preserve the monarchy as it had been of old. So
he sacked Loris-Melikov and the other liberal ministers and replaced them
with reactionaries. Of these, Pobedonostsev was the most influential and notorious.
Public criticism of the repression of Finns, Poles and other
oppressed peoples especially the Jews became impossible. The result was
that there were very few in active opposition to the authorities except mostly
young students, often of the upper class.
There still wasn’t a large working class in
the cities and peasants were reluctant to get involved. For this reason,
Plekhanov, one of the first leaders of Russian socialism said quite rightly
that a revolution in Russia
would only win when the working class that was forming in the cities made it
happen.
Until 1861 Russia had been almost entirely
agricultural with little more than cottage industries. There were huge changes
after the serfs were freed. Big property owners who sold land to the
communes got the money to begin large scale urban industrial
development.
Industries sprang up
incredibly quickly and scattered through the country. In the later years
of Alexander III’s reign, the Russian authorities did their best to strengthen
these businesses. Count Witte who was one of the most influential men in
government from 1892 to 1903 was the life and soul of the authorities’
efforts to industrialise Russia.
It is true that he was very successful. So Russia developed in the same way as
other places, as industrial development took hold, cities grew rapidly and with
them the working class.
There was a great deal of opposition
to Witte’s work, particularly from those who feared riots and revolution and
saw the changes as strengthening dissidents and opposition to the
monarchy. Plehve was one of the most notorious and reactionary of
Nicholas II’s ministers and for these reasons he fought Witte hardest.
Plehve was right—the monarchy was most endangered by the workers movement as
became clear later. Russian progressives saw this too but their response to
the workers movement was to welcome it as much as Plehve and other
conservatives feared it.
Originally industry in Russia was
organised so that those who worked were both workers and peasants, but as the
factories developed those in them became solely workers. Once begun, the Russian
proletariat in cities grew by leaps and bounds. In 1887 there were about 1
million industrial workers, but thirty years later in 1917 when the revolution
began there were nearly ten million.
The life of Russian workers was rotten from
the beginning; the factory accommodation was terrible, working hours were
extremely long and wages very low. The proletariat had little protection from
the speculators who had gradually got their iron claws into the Russian nation.
It was not easy to improve any of their conditions, whether they turned to the
employers or to the authorities they had little success. Workers found neither
mercy nor justice at their hands. They could only rely on themselves.
It was also not easy to organise amongst
workers themselves because the authorities were determined to repress any
independent movement amongst ordinary people trying to improve their
conditions. The authorities perfectly understood that the days of oppressive
power were numbered when the workers became economically and spiritually
independent, which is why they feared trade unions. It was a good thing
for workers that many open minded, thoughtful and educated people paid attention to their interests.
Some of the old Nihilists had
been in Switzerland since 1880.
Amongst them was the previously mentioned Plekhanov. He was now committed
to socialism and had published a newspaper in the West called The Liberation of
Labour. It wasn't long before he and some of his friends founded a workers
party that took up their socialist programme and followed Marxist
principles.
Russian workers, who had to deal with both
the injustice of the state and the repression of the capitalists, seized Marxism.
They found it obvious that the division into capitalists and proletariat that
Marx talked about was exactly what was happening in Russia. The authorities, the
bureaucracy and employers were the capitalists, they were the oppressors.
The workers were the proletariat, they were the oppressed. What could they
do but take power for themselves by revolution?
In the following years socialists
multiplied in Russia.
In 1896 Russian socialists for the first time took part in an international
socialist meeting. Two years later the Russian Socialist party was
founded. The policies of the party were Marxist and rested their hopes for the
future on the growing urban proletariat. Not all Russian reformers joined the party.
For instance the Jews in western Russia had founded their own party—though
it was also socialist. Eventually a new party emerged from the old Nihilist
organisation in 1901, the Socialist Revolutionaries. They differed from the
Socialist party in that they did all they could to arouse the peasantry to rise
up against the authorities and thought that revolution was only possible
if the peasantry backed it.
 |
| Karl Marx |
All of these parties competed to spread
their message. The Socialist party was particularly successful until it was well known
and had members in all large towns throughout Russia. This was the
party that split suddenly at a meeting in 1903.
The dispute was over how they organised. A
minority wanted to work with the Russian bourgeoisie - well off people - and
try to come to agreements with them for reforms a little at a time. Those who
held this position at the meeting were later named mensheviks (the minority).
Their policies in the main gradually became those of the German socialists. The
majority wanted to stick to Marxism and refused all compromise and all
political deals with the bourgeoisie that could delay the victory of the
workers or betray them. The working class can never win otherwise than with
revolution. The main proponent of this policy at the meeting was Lenin, who
later became so famous.
It was at this meeting that for the first
time Lenin had the decisive influence on the work of the Russian
socialists. Those that agreed with him in this matter called themselves bolsheviks
(the majority) and are the much discussed bolsheviks that by their theory and
practice are now dividing the world into two parties that stand facing each
other with drawn swords.
By this time Nicholas II, last Tsar of the
Romanov dynasty, had been in power for nine years. It can honestly be said of
him that he was utterly unfit to be in such a difficult position. So he
could not be expected to cope well. Nicholas was not endowed with great
intellect. So much so that one of his teachers of military tactics went so far
as to say that because of Nicholas' stupidity it would impossible for him to be
of any use in military service anywhere. He was a dreamer, fickle and
superstitious. As well as being the tool of cunning and partisan politicians. It
would sit with a reputation for instability, to read about all the scandals of
his years as ruler of Russia
and not least about the Tsar's courtiers.
But of course Nicholas was never the actual
ruler of the country. His advisors, who were extremely hostile to reform, were
allowed so much free rein that they were either killed or otherwise cut down
for their actions. The patience of the people was exhausted and ordinary people
had armed themselves with weapons from which the reactionaries could not
protect themselves. These weapons were the trade unions and the socialist
movement.
From the beginning strikes were one of the
ways that workers could get their demands met. It has been rarely mentioned
but really they had begun decisively before 1896 when a general strike happened
in Petrograd. More than forty thousand workers took part
demanding that working hours be shortened so that their conditions weren’t so
unbearable. It was a peaceful strike but the workers stood together and would
in no way back down.
The economics minister Witte, then the most
influential man in government, planned to use the army to force the workers
back to work, but he couldn’t get permission.
Then the government saw an opportunity to defuse the workers with a
decision to limit the working day to 11 hours.
But the matter was not finished and in 1898
the government again allowed unlimited overtime. This meant that they were back
in the same corner with the workers feeling betrayed. Strikes broke out again
across the country, all of them about shortening the working day. In the face
of this movement the authorities didn’t dare do anything but make promises.
These were again betrayed and the working day continued to be twelve, fourteen
or even fifteen hours a day.
The government had no other tactics as the
workers' organisations were too strong. The authorities needed a way to get some
control of the trade unions. Most of all it feared that the unions could turn
into an uprising. To prevent this government spies became workers leaders and
part of their job was to prevent the unions turning against the government.
Union activities carried on and many strikes happened. Time and again these
government spies were arrested but also released again, which was misunderstood
at first. This tactic of the authorities was called Zubatovism after one of the
secret policemen in Moscow.
It cannot be denied that by this method the
authorities were able to delay workers’ ability to take power. But progress
continued because the strikes strengthened organisation and solidarity between
workers, as the government learned later on.
But it wouldn’t be true to say that this
was the worst of it. The authorities got the spies to find out who in the
unions were the most serious, who most likely to lead and were the best politically
developed. They were later arrested and convicted and so the unions lost many
of their best men. Some were executed and some sent to Siberia.
It is hardly possible to imagine the
repressive power that was so hostile to all progress and has now been destroyed.
Throughout Russia
government hirelings had their hands round the throats of the most worthy people
in the country. These disappeared into secret courts and were never heard of
again or not until they had spent many years of exile and slavery in Siberia.
There’s no good in describing such inhumanity
except that it shows the growth of the organisation that was one of the props
of the tradition of humiliating others, where life is like death.
In these years when it’s true to say that
no one was safe in Russia,
there was still one man against whom the authorities never dared use violence
because of the respect he was held in both at home and abroad. This man was
Tolstoy, despite his having always strongly opposed the government’s inhuman behaviour.
In 1902 he wrote a letter to Nicholas in
which he described the countrywide anarchy and challenged him not to allow this
to continue any longer. He specifically pointed out to the Tsar how much progress
there could be for the country if the land were in common ownership and that
the peasantry wanted nothing more badly than this.
 |
| Leo Tolstoy |
Tolstoy was not a revolutionary and he
thought that all this could happen peacefully. He focused on justice and
brotherhood and thought that he could awaken a sense of justice, as well as
opposition to injustice and ignorance. Otherwise Tolstoy’s life story was
unlike that of most other Russians sharing a similar spirit as Tolstoy during
the Tsar’s reign. He looked out over life’s tumult and took little direct part
in public political activity. He
expressed his theory of brotherhood beautifully in his letter to bring them round
to this way of thinking not just in Russia but in all nations. It has
served more rage and passion than the other most important predecessors of the
Russian revolution and few of them escaped their match with the Tsar, as well as Tolstoy did.
I have described the conditions in Russia before
and after the turn of the century. Although everything was in complete chaos at
home, it did not stop the authorities from wanting to expand Russia’s sphere of influence
especially in east Asia. Against their efforts were many thorns in their flesh
there but none more so than Japan.
Eventually Russia
started a war there in February 1904. All the failures that Russians met with
in this war happened because of the weakness of the authorities and the
treachery and corruption of the bureaucracy and others who ruled in Russia.
The resentment of ordinary people at home
over the war and the actions of the government was boundless. This righteous
anger turned first and foremost against those in power. Riots and protests
broke out with students and workers in the cities leading the way. Many were
killed, amongst them Plehve the Home Secretary, who had been one of the most
conservative. This seriously worried the authorities who were unwilling to
face that this could happen again. This is why the government called together
a representative assembly (semstvo) that could propose government reform.
In December 1904 this meeting agreed almost
unanimously to request that the government give the country a fairly liberal
constitution. Particularly emphasized in the submission was the idea that the
people should have a share in their own government. This was to happen with the
founding of a parliament chosen by free elections across the country. The
government dragged its feet over this proposal and promised other small
reforms. But it couldn’t stop this great rumbling of the people.
On Sunday 22 January 1905, one of the
workers leaders in Petrograd, the priest Gapon, went with a vast crowd of
unarmed workers to the Winter
Palace to hand in a
petition for a constitution on behalf of the people. The result of this was
horrific because before the crowd could reach the forum it was scattered by
troops and more than three thousand people died. The events of that day,
‘Bloody Sunday’ as it became known, lit a bonfire in the capital city. Riots
and strikes grew daily and spread like wildfire across the country. Two months
later bloody street battles were fought in all the largest cities across Russia.
The government didn’t blink and decided to
try to undermine the revolution. In August 1905 it announced that a
representative assembly to be chosen by popular vote would be created soon. But
the catch was that the right to vote for this ‘great assembly’ was so
restricted that workers were generally excluded. Of course people weren’t satisfied with
such crumbs and riots broke out again. In October a general strike broke out in
Moscow and
quickly spread across the country. The railways, all cargo and industry ground
to a halt and the government was left with only one choice. On 30 October a representative assembly, the Duma,
was announced chosen by universal suffrage. People had very high hopes of this Duma
and the high tide of unrest across the country ebbed.
But it wasn’t the government’s plan that
this assembly should hold any power. From its inception the government was
determined to use it as a touchstone of the national mood in response to its actions. Reaction
reasserted itself in Russia.
At the first meeting of the Duma in May 1906 the Cadet party was in the majority. Parliamentary rule as part of the Cadets' policies as was common across Europe. (The name is formed
from the c and d of constitutional democrats)
The Socialist party took no part in the
first election but workers and peasants took 107 representatives out of 524.
Though the authorities didn’t like it, the assembly became very pliant and cracked
almost immediately. It was then that Stolypin, the energetic tough-minded
reactionary became prime minister. The authorities had found the man who wasn’t
afraid to use violence against the assembly. When the new election was over and
the socialists had 132 people, Stolypin did not hesitate to send the newly
elected assembly home.
So that the authorities would not have to
fear the next election turning out like the last, it violated the constitution and
produced new electoral law that lowered the number of parliamentary representatives
from 524 to 442. Then finally the authorities achieved a Duma that was
conservative enough to throw out most of the socialists. There were just 28 in
this third Duma.
Now the authorities were happy and used this
to improve their own situation. They committed every kind of violence to avenge
themselves against all those who had been foremost in the revolutionary
movement of 1904 and 1905. They came down particularly hard on the socialists. Many of
their leaders were arrested and condemned to exile in Siberia.
Others managed to escape, of whom Lenin was one. The Socialist party went
through a very difficult time over the next few years as the authorities did
everything in their power to hold them down.
Just like the old days, the secret police
sent their spies into the socialist groups to corrupt them. But these men, the bolsheviks,
seem to have a remarkable attitude to comradeship. At least they do in this famous
story, that Lenin joked about when he arrived in 1917, that on the whole, running
your mouth off to these people had benefitted the bolsheviks more than the
secret police.
What is not said is that in the decade
before the revolution, when the third Duma came together, the real change was
that the Duma helped the authorities ending with new elections in 1912. The Duma
carried on mechanically producing whatever the authorities wanted. The most
remarkable thing it did in these years was doubtless the agricultural law which
was passed in 1910. This law was Stolypin’s work and abolished the customary
communes of the peasants. But the law gave the more affluent peasants a much
stronger footing than the poor and because of this was very much resisted. The
socialists said that this was an obvious opportunity to create followers of the
proletariat in the countryside and were proved right.
In these years the Russian authorities followed
the example of companies in central and western Europe where the capitalist
system had been developing longest, so the Russian socialists were hardly likely
to agree with the bourgeoisie on their ways of working.
Whilst the bureaucracy embedded itself in
power with violence in the Duma and country, the Tsar Nicholas II sat doing
very little in his palace. He was a pawn in the hands of his bureaucrats and
other adventurers. This especially was good reason to be one of the foxes that
used the ignorant Tsar to advance themselves. Rasputin was such a man. He is a fine
example of how corruption permeated Russian political life, the nobility and
the court in Petrograd in the last chapters of
the Tsar’s rule.
Rasputin was the son of a peasant from
Tobolsk in Siberia. In his youth he had lived
in drunkenness and a great deal of scandal had followed him. He had crawled
from these sorry adulteries to become a monk and tell people’s fortunes. He was
bright and was able to ingratiate himself because he was cunning and persuasive.
Besides this he was handsome, tall and manly with dreamy eyes that had a
peculiar influence on all the women he met.
In fortune telling he particularly
concentrated on women so he always had remarkable success with women wherever
he went. He took to healing and all kinds of quackery which aroused even more
attention and the admiration of weak souls. By all these methods he propelled himself
forwards from the lowliest position to the capital Petrograd
itself. There he quickly encountered myriad ladies who developed the greatest
affection for him. He held various prayer meetings or sat with them in great
parties. However Rasputin most delighted in being in the bath with them for
hours.
With the support of these noblewomen he was
introduced to the Tsar and his family. This, it appeared to Rasputin, would be
child’s play. He knew it wouldn’t be difficult to get a hold over the royal
couple who were so fickle and superstitious. But their relationship with him gave them
little honour in the eyes of the public.
The joke went that Rasputin was with the Tsarina more than was strictly necessary but the Tsar appeared not to be able
to exist without him, until Rasputin had considerable influence over the
government for the decade that he was the royal couples' priest. Finally this
raised so much public scandal that the Duma couldn’t ignore it any longer.
In 1912 one member of the Duma furiously attacked
Rasputin and demanded that he be removed from all influence over government. So
Rasputin was ejected from the court—against the Tsar’s wishes—because Rasputin had
predicted that the royal family would come to harm in his absence. When the
heir to the throne became ill shortly after his departure, the Tsarina insisted
that Rasputin be called back to court and so he was. She was convinced because
the heir got better quickly afterwards and so Rasputin’s influence was even
greater than it had been before.
He himself made no bones about how much
power he had in Russia
and became famous for his work. But he didn’t publicise his political business.
He was a kind of shadow leader and many people felt his power roughly.
As you can imagine Rasputin had many
enemies, the liberal politicians in particular were extremely unhappy about his
influence. Eventually he was murdered shortly after New Year in 1917, when it
was not possible to get rid of him any other way. Many considered the country
to be all the purer for it.
The Rasputin scandal showed quite clearly
how the Tsar’s government was waning and how much was vanity. But this was not the
middle of the 19th century—the Tsar was stripped of all real power.
Nicholas II was sleepwalking to oblivion—he had lost any grip on the reins of
power. Pure vandals ruled everything in Russia then as was commonly and thoroughly
discussed.
The Tsar was an onlooker without power or
influence as the bureaucrat class and the richest nobility had snatched all
power for themselves. This group of
people pushed an expansionist, militaristic strategy in their own interests.
They were to blame for the war with Japan and they were also partly
responsible for the outbreak of the world war. Russia’s politics of
‘Balkanisation’ had often particularly been a source of trouble and so it
continued to be.
The Tsar controlled little or nothing of Russia’s preparation
for war in July 1914 rather it was the bureaucrats and capitalists that ruled
him. Sukhomlinov the minister of war, who didn’t hesitate to lie to the Tsar,
saying that Russia
had stopped its war preparations so that it could attempt a compromise with the
Germans, was chief amongst them.
They started the war by tricking the Tsar.
By deceiving the nation they hoped after the war, to win a victory. Not a
victory for the Russian nation but rather a victory for the bureaucrats’ and
the rich nobility.
Nobody is saying the Russian people wanted
war, they are a peaceful people. But they were drawn in by unscrupulous
bureaucrats and capitalists. They were fooled into spilling their own blood for
the financial interests of others. When the people finally saw through this
treachery, they were not slow at grasping the tools that they saw could rid
them of the war and the forces that had created it.
Those tools were revolution.
End of chapter one.
Fyodor Trepov was not actually killed and
retired soon after.
