Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Autocracy remained unchanged, however: as she left the courtroom, Zasulich was re-arrested. Furthermore, when Interior Minister Valuev proposed having elected zemstvo representatives in the State Council, the empire’s highest advisory chamber, Alexander replied that he opposed a constitution, not because it would restrict his authority, but because it would lead to the dissolution of Russia. The recent Polish rising greatly troubled him; he feared giving non-Russian elites a serious voice in the empire’s highest institutions.

A changing society

The effect of the reforms was to create a much more changeable and differentiated society. With the construction of railways (culminating in the Trans-Siberian, completed in 1903), communications improved greatly. Heavy industry, hitherto largely military, branched out into other fields, and consumer manufacture developed rapidly. Because of Russia’s weak currency, though, its faltering rule of law, and its cumbersome procedure for setting up joint-stock companies, much industry was owned by foreigners. Russia was threatened with becoming economically colonized, like China or the Ottoman Empire.

The way was now open for peasants to become literate, to diversify their economy, to work in the towns, on the railways and rivers, to serve in the army, and then return to civilian life. A whole new class of professional people emerged (nearly all men), trained in higher or technical educational institutions, and working for the state, the zemstvos

, or the armed forces as doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants, and administrators. New newspapers and journals appeared, each trying to appeal to a broad and growing educated public; no longer was serious discussion confined to small circles of intellectuals. Public opinion (obshchestvennost) took shape for the first time as a force independent of direct state tutelage. Its members were now able to participate in local government and in the organization of their own professions, but they were still excluded from politics at the centre, nor could they be confident of the rule of law or the security of civil rights. The more frustrated and strident among them constituted a new sociocultural stratum, divorced from both state and people, the intelligentsia – a new concept which Russia gave to the world.

The result was a paradoxical state of affairs. Civil society and the state were both growing stronger simultaneously, but as opponents, not as partners. The state depended for its conduct of local affairs largely on the Ministry of the Interior and on the provincial governors and police officials subordinate to it. Those officials had a wide range of ill-defined duties: it has been estimated that each provincial governor had an average of 300 to 400 official papers to deal with every day. Unable to cope with the flood, he tended to rely on personal links to trusted subordinates, to senior officials in St Petersburg, and on his right of personal report to the Emperor. District police chiefs faced the same situation in miniature, with the governor as their highest reference point, and exercised their responsibilities with minimal regard for strict legality, since they knew that administrative instructions always had priority.

The 1860s reforms made the political system even less coherent. The provincial and district zemstvos had no institutional links either upwards, to the government, nor sideways to provincial governors and district police chiefs, nor downwards, to the purely peasant volost. The chairman of each zemstvo

, the noble marshal, would of course get to know these officials personally and negotiate some kind of modus vivendi. But he too had a plethora of functions, and no staff to support him; moreover, he was unpaid. It is not surprising that local affairs were managed by improvisation and personal contacts.

From 1881, after the assassination of Alexander II (see below, p. 82), states of emergency were introduced to give governors and police chiefs expanded powers: they could suspend law courts and newspapers, prohibit meetings and impose administrative exile, to deal with whatever they identified as posing a threat to orderly government. In the attempt to plug some of the gaps in the ‘power vertical’, a local noble was appointed as ‘land commandant’ with a wide range of powers over volosti and village communes. The political police was strengthened but was never large enough to deal with the growing opposition; nor were its links with society strong enough to enable it to gather information readily about really menacing threats to security.