Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) was the shape of an icon, but placed in a void where the iconic image should have been. It substituted for church dogma a realm of pure potentiality, opening the way in his view to an ideal cosmos where creative possibilities were endless. He followed it up with a whole series of paintings consisting of simple geometrical forms pierced by lines, planes, or other simple shapes. He chose the term ‘Suprematism’ for his kind of art. ‘I have conquered the lining of the heavenly. . . . Sail forth! The white free chasm, infinity is before us!’

Thus, before 1917, Russia’s art forms portended radical change even more all-embracing than was envisaged by modernists in other European countries.

8. The vacant icon: Malevich’s Black Square

Socialism

The intelligentsia had its own views of ‘Russia’. Alienated from the state, many of them idealized the narod (people), even though their links with it were tenuous; hence they became known as narodniki. They adopted some Slavophile views, but gave them a much sharper anti-state orientation. The essence of Russia, they declared, lay in its peasant communes, with their democratic self-government, mutual aid, and periodic redistribution of assets. The peasants should now be given all the land, and Russia should become a federation of such communes, with minimal coordination and control from the centre. Endowed with ‘land and freedom’, the peasants’ spirit of equality and resource-sharing would generate social harmony and release the productive forces of the people.

How, though, should this situation be brought about? Some socialists believed the first priority was to bring their ideas to the peasants, ‘going to the people’, like Christian missionaries in darkest Africa, to live among them and awaken them to the political significance of their own communal practices. Under this impetus, in 1873–4 several hundred young people, many of them students, abandoned their studies, learned a trade such as cobblery or joinery, donned rustic clothing, and set out for the villages. Some were heartened by what they experienced, but many of them felt out of place and misunderstood. They were, moreover, conspicuous figures in the rural milieu, and many of them were arrested, imprisoned, sometimes for years, then tried and sentenced for ‘sedition’.

Other socialists thought such self-sacrifice futile: it was necessary first to fight the autocratic state, since while it existed, no progress could be made. During the 1870s, an organization calling itself Narodnaia volia

(People’s Will or People’s Freedom) carried out a series of assassinations of senior officials. In March 1881, they succeeded in their ultimate goal, and murdered Alexander II himself as he was proceeding in his carriage through the streets of St Petersburg.

After his death, police repression dispersed the surviving members of the organization, but it revived in the late 1890s, now as the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs). It reacted to the growth of an industrial working class by postulating that the artel would play in the towns the same role as the commune in the countryside, as a forum for revolutionary activity. Workers and peasants would act together to overthrow the Tsarist regime.

By now, the SRs had a rival, in the form of a socialist party which was not interested in the peasant community, but proclaimed that Russia’s revolutionary future lay in the hands of the urban working class. Inspired by the theories of Marx, the Social Democrats (SDs) asserted that capitalism, as it came from Europe to Russia, would create an alienated proletariat which would ultimately rise and seize power. The party split at an early stage. One faction, the Mensheviks, believed in a mass working-class party which would form a parliamentary opposition during the ‘bourgeois’ stage of history. The other, the Bolsheviks, believed that parliaments were a sham, and advocated a small party of ‘professional revolutionaries’ which would lead the workers in a decisive uprising to prevent the bourgeoisie ever taking power. Vladimir Lenin, their leader, took over the narodnik notion that the peasants were a potentially revolutionary class. Given appropriate leadership, he asserted, they would join the workers and enable them to defeat the bourgeoisie.

9. Patriarch Alexii sanctifies the monument to Tsar Alexander II, erected only after the fall of the Soviet Union

The 1905 revolution