Up until 1917 Flashcards
Populists/Narodniks, People’s Will
Term ‘populist’ or ‘Narodnik’ ties together the opposition groups such as Land and Liberty and The People’s will. The term originates from those who ‘went to the people’ in the late 1800s.
They tended to be radical young intellectuals who believed that they could enter the Mirs and encourage the villagers to change the way that they farmed and lived. . Some felt that they owed the peasants for the years of subjugation by their ancestors. This was largely unsuccessful with the villagers suspicious of modernisation. The populists did begin to gain more success in the cities when the number of industrial workers increased. They became the intellectual consciousness behind the anger of the working classes.
The method used by most populists to try and change the regime was terrorism. The notorious People’s Will or ‘Narodnaya Volya’, formed from the Land and Liberty opposition group was one of Russia’s most successful terrorist organisations. After the assassination of Alexander II however, the secret police became increasingly successful in penetrating the organisation at the highest levels and the number of terrorists dwindled, only to remerge under the new guise of Socialist Revolutionaries with the disappointment of the new Tsar Nicholas II in the late 1890s.
Emancipation- reasons, impact, limitations
The emancipation of the surfs was carried out by the ‘Tsar Liberator’, Alexander II, who believed that serfdom was holding back Russia from modernising. This was made clear by the dreadful defeat of the Crimean war form 1854-56, which makes the Tsar realise that compared to his western competitors, Russia was very backwards. He feared that if Russia wasn’t reformed from above, then it would be reformed from below. The change came about in 1861 with the Tsar’s Great Emancipation Statute which freed privately owned surfs, allowing them to marry whomever they wished, own property, trade freely amongst other things.
Whilst this appeared to be successful on paper, the limitations of emancipation were great:
-One of the greatest limitations was that land owners were compensated through redemption dues paid by the peasants for 49 years with interest of 6% -only then would they legally own their land. The peasants were still very much tied to the land.
The impact for Alexander II was assassination in 1881 by terrorists. Despite his reforming mind-set, it could be said that he opened up the floodgates of reform just enough that everything was opened up to discussion, bring to mind De Tocqueville’s famous words ‘’The most dangerous time for a bad government is when it starts to reform itself’
Reform hadn’t gone far enough in the eyes of many🙁
Russian Marxism
Its’ important to note that Marx hadn’t tailored his revolutionary ideas for Russia, but instead focused his belief in communism on the most developed, industrialised, western countries such as Britain and Belgium.
Marx, and his Russian followers believed that the class system causes conflict and along with Engels, Marx defined five major epochs of what he thought to be a predictable course of history: primitive communism, the ancient epoch, feudal society, capitalist society, and Communist society.
Marx’s scientific reasoning made Marxism particularly popular, and the popularity of it began to grow in Russia amongst the intellectuals around the 1860s and was spearheaded by energetic revolutionary characters such as Lenin, Martov and Trotsky. After the famine of 1891-1892, Marxism attracted more support from intellectuals who didn’t see a future in a purely peasant revolution.
The first Marxist group, Liberation of Labour, was set up in 1883 by Plekhanov who opposed terrorist tactics. From then on, young intellectuals worked to publish pamphlets and spread their ideas.
After the founding of the RSDLP in 1898, a schism formed when party membership was discussed, eventually forming Martov’s Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks.
Lenin’s view of revolution
Lenin believed that Russia was inherently unstable and that revolution was imminent. Unlike the Mensheviks, he thought that a gradualist approach to revolution was too slow and that if the Bolsheviks were dedicated enough, then they could lead a small proletariat into power. He didn’t want bourgeois moralism to get in the way of revolution.
This meant that for Lenin, the bourgeois and proletariat revolutions that Marx clearly distinguished between would have to be combined. Lenin was persuaded by Trotsky to change his view of how revolution would be accomplished however, and soon realises that the ‘timid bourgeoisie’ wasn’t big enough to lead the proletariat into revolution and that the revolution would have to consist of peasants and the proletariat working together.
The aim of Lenin’s party wasn’t to educate the workers to appreciate their role in the future but to prepare for revolution where the party would act as the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’ and seize power on behalf of the future generations of workers.
Lenin’s view of how revolution would take place would be altered over time. With the February revolution, he realised the potential of the Soviet in bringing the proletariat together when only a month before, he was despondent, thinking that a revolution would never happen in his lifetime.
1905
1905 was a year of culminating tension and anger, resulting in the 1905 revolution. The main reason for the revolution was the events that took place on Bloody Sunday with the death of 200 people on account of the army who were involved in a peaceful protest led by Father Gapon to call on the Tsar to relieve the suffering of the workers. However, there had been growing discontent for a number of reasons such as the utter humiliation of Russia during the war with Japan.
Perhaps the greatest outcome of that year was the loss of prestige and reverence for the Tsar. Strikes swept across Russia and the workers and peasants were united in their uprisings, surprising the likes of Trotsky who went to view the uprisings as a great success and a ‘dress rehearsal’ for future revolution.
The Tsar was unable to appease the uprisings with concessions- In June of that year, a Union of Peasants was set up to match those for the workers in the cities.
The violence intensified, especially against the gentry whose land and houses were burnt away.
In October, there was a general strike, resulting in workers setting up their own soviets that would come as a blessing for the Bolsheviks in time to come. The strike eventually united the Tsar’s opponents from all classes, forcing him to eventually announce the October Manifesto, filled with promises for freedom and voting rights which would divide the opposition by buying off some of the liberals, soon to be the Octobrists.
Stolypin
1906, Nicholas appoints minister of interior, Stolypin, as PM.
He was a ruthless administrator who conducted a vigorous campaign against terrorists and revolutionaries. -So many were arrested and executed on account of him that the hangman’s noose was nicknamed the ‘Stolypin necktie’.
Believing that careful reform would be required to save Tsarism he brought in a number of reforms despite waves of terrorist activity that threatened his and his family’s lives.
Stolypin tries to get the peasants on board with the Tsarist regime by giving them a vested interest in it. He did this through his land reforms. -By making more land available to the peasants, through the Peasants’ Land Bank and by allowing peasants to leave the mir by imperial decree, he allowed the peasants to become more entrepreneurial. He hoped by this that a conservative layer of rural support would be made by creating ‘kulaks’, rich peasants.
Despite the limitations of the Duma, Stolypin did manage to bring about reforms within it, such as educational reforms, almost doubling the number of primary schools between 1905 and 1914 as well as welfare reforms, almost doubling the Zemstva expenditure on health, poor relief and agricultural advice.
Whilst Stolypin’s changes appeared to be reformative and beneficial for the Tsarist regime, they did however create a number of problems: -The divide between rich peasants and poor peasants grew, with some poorer peasants owning virtually no land, the Tsar also had an uneasy relationship with Stolypin, making one question who was really behind his assassination in 1911.
Witte
Witte, the Tsar’s first PM, like Stolypin tried to make changes to the Tsarist regime in order to prop it up.
By advising the Tsar to make concessions such as with the October Manifesto, he managed, at least in the short term, to bring the liberals on side with the Tsar.
However, also similarly to Stolypin, the reforms were not wholly successful. Witte’s push for industrialisation may have been quite economically successful with an 8% growth rate by 1900 but resulted in many peasants moving into slums and living in dangerous conditions. This contributes to urban unrest and revolutionary tension.
With the creation of the new government as a result of the October Manifesto, Witte tried to include an array of political colours so that opposition would be reduced, however, the demands of the liberals to create a constituent assembly with powers to re-write the constitution led to reaction on behalf of the Tsar and the government was soon filled with traditional officials.
Witte arrested the entire St Petersburg Soviet after the calls for new strikes after the creation of the October Manifesto and Trotsky was to face execution- This served to further emphasise the hostility between the Tsar and the radicals and presented them as sort of political martyrs when they were locked up in forbidding prisons such as the Peter and Paul Fortress.
Russification
The attempt of Tsar Alexander III and Nicholas II to suppress any manifestations of national culture and consciousness rather than allowing each nationality some form of autonomy.
Was first a policy taken up by Alexander II, namely in the Polish rebellion of 1863 where Polish dissidents took up arms with their scythes to tackle the Russian army. It was seen as the beginning of Polish nationalism and was violently crushed by Russian forces.
Nationalism was crushed in much the same way then as it would be many years later with Stalin by only teaching Russian in Polish and then also Ukrainian schools. In 1876, all books written in Ukrainian or as the Ukrainian Minister of the Interior, Valuev, called it, ‘little Russian dialect’ were ordered to be removed from schools. Russians were moved into the Ukraine to dilute nationalism.
The policy of Russification wasn’t just subject to nationality but also religion. Jews were sought out ruthlessly by Alexander III and Nicholas II, most notoriously in 1903 in Kishinev where 47 Jews were killed. Under Nicholas II, the pre-fascist group, the Black Hundred would become useful in fulfilling the Tsar’s need for scapegoats by carrying out pogroms against Jews.
Seen as essential by Tsars- part of the ‘autocracy, nationality and orthodoxy’ that Nicholas I promised to keep in Russia.
