The Russian Revolution

Fact is a poor story teller. It starts a story at haphazard, generally long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion … a story needs a supporting skeleton. The skeleton of a story is of course its plot. Now a plot has certain characteristics that you cannot get away from. It has a beginning, a middle and an end.… This means that story should begin at a certain point and end at a certain point.¹

The historian does not have the luxury of reshaping events to fit the skeleton of a plot, which means that the story he tells can have neither a clear beginning nor a definite end. It must begin at haphazard and tail off, unfinished.

When did the Russian Revolution begin? Peter Struve, a leading liberal publicist at the turn of the century, surveying the wreckage of Imperial Russia, concluded that it had been preordained as early as 1730, when Empress Anne reneged on the promise to abide by a set of constitutional limitations that the aristocracy had forced upon her as a condition of giving her the throne. A case can also be made that the Revolution began in 1825 with the abortive Decembrist Revolt. Certainly in the 1870s Russia had a full-fledged revolutionary movement: the men who led the 1917 Revolution looked to the radicals of the 1870s as forerunners.

If, however, one wishes to identify events that not merely foreshadowed 1917 but led directly to it, then the choice has to fall on the disorders that broke out at Russian universities in February 1899. Although they were soon quelled by the usual combination of concessions and repression, these disorders set in motion a movement of protest against the autocracy that did not abate until the revolutionary upheaval of 1905–6. This First Revolution was also eventually crushed but at a price of major political concessions that fatally weakened the Russian monarchy. To the extent that historical events have a beginning, the beginning of the Russian Revolution may well have been the general university strike of February 1899.

And a haphazard beginning it was. Since the 1860s Russian institutions of higher learning had been the principal center of opposition to the tsarist regime: revolutionaries were, for the most part, either university students or university dropouts. At the turn of the century, Russia had ten universities as well as a number of specialized schools which taught religion, law, medicine, and engineering. They had a total enrollment of 35,000. The student body came overwhelmingly from the lower classes. In 1911, the largest contingent was made up of sons of priests, followed by sons of bureaucrats and peasants: hereditary nobles constituted less than 10 percent, equal to the number of Jews.² The Imperial Government needed an educated elite and promoted higher education, but it wished, unrealistically, to confine education strictly to professional and vocational training. Such a policy satisfied the majority of students, who, even if critical of the regime, did not want politics to interfere with their studies: this is known from surveys taken in the revolutionary year of 1905. But whenever the authorities overreacted to the radical minority, which they usually did, the students closed ranks.

In 1884, in the course of the “counterreforms,” which followed the assassination of Alexander II, the government revised the liberal University Statute issued twenty-one years earlier. The new regulations deprived the universities of a great deal of autonomy and placed them under the direct supervision of the Ministry of Education. Their faculties could no longer elect rectors. Disciplinary authority over the students was entrusted to an outsider, a state inspector, who had police functions. Student organizations were declared illegal, even in the form of zemliachestva

, associations formed by students from the same province to provide mutual assistance. Students were understandably unhappy with the new regulations. Their unhappiness was aggravated by the appointment in 1897 as Minister of Education of N. P. Bogolepov, a professor of Roman law, the first academic to hold the post but a dry and unsympathetic conservative whom they dubbed “Stone Guest.” Still, the 1880s and 1890s were a period of relative calm at the institutions of higher learning.

The event which shattered this calm was trifling. St. Petersburg University traditionally celebrated on February 8 the anniversary of its founding.*

2. Nicholas II and family shortly before outbreak of World War I. By his side, Alexandra Fedorovna. The daughters, from left to right: Marie, Tatiana, Olga, and Anastasia. In front, Tsarevich Alexis.