The Russian Revolution (4 page)

The society

The Russian Empire covered a vast expanse of territory, stretching from Poland in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, extending into the Arctic north, and reaching the Black Sea and the borders of Turkey and Afghanistan in the south. The hub of the Empire, European Russia (including some of the area that is now Ukraine) had a population of 92 million in 1897, with the total population of the Empire recorded by that year's census at 126 million.' But even European Russia and the relatively advanced western regions of the Empire remained largely rural and non-urbanized. There were a handful of big urban industrial centres, most of them the product of recent and rapid expansion: St Petersburg, the imperial capital, renamed Petrograd during the First World War and Leningrad in 1924; Moscow, the old and (from 1918) future capital; Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa, together with the new mining and metallurgical centres of the Donbass, in what is now Ukraine; Warsaw, Lodz, and Riga in the west; Rostov and the oil city of Baku in the South. But most Russian provincial towns were still sleepy backwaters at the beginning of the twentieth century-local administrative centres with a small merchant population, a few schools, a peasant market, and perhaps a railway station.

In the villages, much of the traditional way of life remained. The peasants still held their land in communal tenure, dividing the village fields into narrow strips which were tilled separately by the various peasant households; and in many villages, the mir (village council) would still periodically redistribute the strips so that each household had an equal share. Wooden ploughs were in common use, modern farming techniques were unknown in the villages, and peasant agriculture was not much above subsistence level. The peasants' huts were clustered together along the village street, peasants slept on the stove and kept their animals with them in the house, and the old patriarchal structure of the peasant family survived. The peasants were not much more than a generation away from serfdom: a peasant who was sixty at the turn of the century was already a young adult at the time of the Emancipation of 186 1.

Of course the Emancipation had changed peasant life, but it had been framed with great caution so as to minimize the change and spread it over time. Before Emancipation, the peasants worked their strips of the village land, and they also worked the masters' land or paid him the equivalent of their labour in money. After the Emancipation, they continued to work their own land, and sometimes worked for hire on their former masters' land, while making `redemption' payments to the state to offset the lump sums that had been given the landowners as immediate compensation. The redemption payments were scheduled to last for forty-nine years (although in fact the state cancelled them a few years early), and the village community was collectively responsible for the debts of all members. This meant that individual peasants were still bound to the village, though they were bound by the debt and the mir's collective responsibility instead of by serfdom. The terms of the Emancipation were intended to prevent a mass influx of peasants into the towns and the creation of a landless proletariat which would represent a danger to public order. They also had the effect of reinforcing the mir and the old system of communal land tenure, and making it almost impossible for peasants to consolidate their strips, expand or improve their holdings, or make the transition to independent small-farming.

While permanent departure from the villages was difficult in the post-Emancipation decades, it was easy to leave the villages temporarily to work for hire in agriculture, construction, or mining, or in the towns. In fact such work was a necessity for many peasant families: the money was needed for taxes and redemption payments. The peasants who worked as seasonal labourers (otkhodniki) were often away for many months of the year, leaving their families to till their land in the villages. If the journeys were long-as in the case of peasants from central Russian villages who went to work in the Donbass mines-the otkhodniki might return only for the harvest and perhaps the spring sowing. The practice of departing for seasonal work was long-established, especially in the less fertile areas of European Russia where the landlords had exacted payment in money rather than labour from their serfs. But it was becoming increasingly common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, partly because more work was available in the towns. In the years immediately before the First World War, about nine million peasants took out passports for seasonal work outside their native village each year, and of these almost half were working outside agriculture. 2

With one in every two peasant households in European Russia including a family member who left the village for work-and a higher proportion in the Petersburg and Central Industrial Regions and the western provinces-the impression that old Russia survived almost unchanged in the villages may well have been deceptive. Many peasants were in fact living with one foot in the traditional village world and the other in the quite different world of the modern industrial town. The degree to which peasants remained within the traditional world varied not only according to geographical location but also according to age and sex. The young were more likely to go away to work, and in addition the young men came in contact with a more modern world when they were called up for army service. Women and the aged were more likely to know only the village and the old peasant way of life. These differences in peasant experience showed up strikingly in the literacy figures of the 1897 census. The young were very much more literate than the old, men were more literate than women, and literacy was higher in the less fertile areas of European Russia-that is, the areas where seasonal migration was most common-than in the fertile Black Earth region.3

The urban working class was still very close to the peasantry. The number of permanent industrial workers (somewhat over three million in 1914) was smaller than the number of peasants who left the villages for non-agricultural seasonal work each year, and in fact it was almost impossible to make a hard-and-fast distinction between permanent urban-dwelling workers and peasants who worked most of the year in the towns. Even among the permanent workers, many retained land in the village and had left their wives and children living there; other workers lived in villages themselves (a pattern that was particularly common in the Moscow area) and commuted on a daily or weekly basis to the factory. Only in St Petersburg had a large proportion of the industrial labour force severed all connection with the countryside.

The main reason for the close interconnection between the urban working class and the peasantry was that Russia's rapid industrialization was a very recent phenomenon. It was not until the t89os- more than half a century after Britain-that Russia experienced large-scale growth of industry and expansion of towns. Even then, the creation of a permanent urban working class was inhibited by the terms of the peasants' Emancipation in the i86os, which kept them tied to the villages. First-generation workers, predominantly from the peasantry, formed a large part of the Russian working class; and few were more than second-generation workers and urban dwellers. Although Soviet historians claim that more than 50 per cent of industrial workers on the eve of the First World War were at least second-generation, this calculation clearly includes workers and peasant otkhodniki whose fathers had been otkhodniki.

Despite these characteristics of underdevelopment, Russian industry was in some respects quite advanced by the time of the First World War. The modern industrial sector was small, but unusually highly concentrated, both geographically (notably in the regions centred on Petersburg and Moscow and the Ukrainian Donbass) and in terms of the size of the industrial plants. As Gerschenkron has pointed out, comparative backwardness had its own advantages: industrializing late, with the aid of large-scale foreign investment and energetic state involvement, Russia was able to skip over some of the early stages, borrow relatively advanced technology and move quickly towards large-scale modern production.' Enterprises like the famous Putilov metalworking and machine-building plant in Petersburg and the largely foreign-owned metallurgical plants of the Donbass employed many thousands of workers.

According to Marxist theory, a highly concentrated industrial proletariat under conditions of advanced capitalist production is likely to be revolutionary, whereas a pre-modern working class that retains strong ties to the peasantry is not. Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics for a Marxist diagnosing its revolutionary potential. Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 189os to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revolutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic. In the 1905 Revolution, the workers of St Petersburg and Moscow organized their own revolutionary institutions, the soviets, and continued the struggle after the Tsar's constitutional concessions in October and the collapse of the middle-class liberals' drive against the autocracy. In the summer of 1914, the workers' strike movement in Petersburg and elsewhere assumed such threatening dimensions that some observers thought that the government could not take the risk of declaring a general mobilization for war.

The strength of working-class revolutionary sentiment in Russia may be explained in a number of different ways. In the first place, limited economic protest against employers-what Lenin called trade unionism-was very difficult under Russian conditions. The government had a large stake in Russia's native industry and in the protection of foreign investment, and state authorities were quick to provide troops when strikes against private enterprise showed signs of getting out of hand. That meant that even economic strikes (protests over wages and conditions) were likely to turn political; and the widespread resentment of Russian workers against foreign managers and technical personnel had a similar effect. Although it was Lenin, a Russian Marxist, who said that by its own efforts the working class could develop only a `trade-union consciousness' rather than a revolutionary one, Russia's own experience (in contrast to that of Western Europe) did not bear him out.

In the second place, the peasant component of Russia's working class probably made it more revolutionary rather than less. Russian peasants were not innately conservative small proprietors like, for example, their French counterparts. The Russian peasantry's tradition of violent, anarchic rebellion against landowners and officials, exemplified in the great Pugachev revolt of the 1770s, was manifest once again in the peasant uprisings of 1905 and 19o6: the Emancipation of 1861 had not permanently quietened the peasants' spirit of revolt because they did not regard it as a just or adequate emancipation and, increasingly land-hungry, asserted their right to the land that had been withheld. Moreover, the peasants who migrated to towns and became workers were often young, freed from family constraints but still unused to the discipline of the factory, and bearing the resentments and frustrations that go with dislocation and incomplete assimilation to an unfamiliar environment.' To some extent, the Russian working class was revolutionary just because it had not had time to acquire the `trade-union consciousness' of which Lenin wrote-to become a settled industrial proletariat, capable of protecting its interests by non-revolutionary means, and understanding the opportunities for upward mobility that modern urban societies offer those with some education and skills.

However, the `modern' characteristics of Russian society, even in the urban sector and the upper educated strata, were still very incomplete. It was often said that Russia had no middle class; and indeed its business and commercial class remained comparatively weak, though professions, associations, and other signs of an emerging civil society could be discerned.' Despite increasing professionalization of the state bureaucracy, its upper ranks remained dominated by the nobility, traditionally the state's service class. Service prerogatives were all the more important to the nobility because of its economic decline as a landowning group after the abolition of serfdom: only a minority of noble landowners had successfully made the transition to capitalist, market-oriented agriculture.

The schizoid nature of Russian society in the early twentieth century is well illustrated by the bewildering variety of selfidentifications offered by subscribers to the city directories of St Petersburg, the largest and most modern of Russia's cities. Some subscribers kept to the traditional forms and identified themselves by social estate and rank ('hereditary noble', `merchant of the First Guild', `honoured citizen', `State Counsellor'). Others clearly belonged to the new world, and described themselves in terms of profession and type of employment ('stockbroker', 'mechanical engineer', `company director', or, as representative of Russia's achievements in female emancipation, `woman doctor'). A third group consisted of persons who were uncertain which world they belonged to, identifying themselves by estate in one year's directory and by profession in the next, or even giving both identifications at once, like the subscriber who listed himself quaintly as `nobleman, dentist'.'

In less formal contexts, educated Russians would often describe themselves as members of the intelligentsia. Sociologically, this was a very slippery concept, but in broad terms the word `intelligentsia' described a Westernized educated elite, alienated from the rest of Russian society by its education and from Russia's autocratic regime by its radical ideology. However, the Russian intelligentsia did not see itself as an elite, but rather as a classless group united by moral concern for the betterment of society, the capacity for `critical thought', and, in particular, a critical, semi-oppositionist attitude to the regime. The term came into common use around the middle of the nineteenth century, but the genesis of the concept may be found in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when the nobility was released from the obligation of compulsory service to the state, and some of its members, educated but finding their education under-utilized, developed an alternative ethos of obligation to `serve the people'.' Ideally (though not altogether in practice), intelligentsia membership and bureaucratic service were incompatible. The Russian revolutionary movement of the second half of the nineteenth century, characterized by small-scale conspiratorial organization to fight the autocracy and thus liberate the people, was largely a product of the intelligentsia's radical ideology and political disaffection.