Russia in the nineteenth century

The extent of the country
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Russia was geographically the world’s most extensive country and its empire was expanding. From 1809 Russia controlled Finland and in 1815 the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was subsumed into Russia. In 1800 Georgia was annexed. In 1859 the rest of the Caucasus was conquered and the Chechen hero Imam Shamil (right) captured. In 1860 the Amur and Maritime provinces were acquired from China and Turkestan from Persia in 1875. Turkmenistan was annexed in 1881. The Pacific port of Vladivostok was founded in 1860. The only territory lost was Alaska, which was sold to the United States in 1867 for $8 million.


Below is a map of the Russian Empire in 1914.


The economy
This vast area was sparsely populated with only two major cities, St Petersburg the capital, and Moscow but the population grew from 68 million in 1850 to 124 million in 1897 and nearly 170 million in 1914 (compare with just under 143 million in 2006).

Agriculture remained primitive with the three-field system still the norm, though Russia was exporting grain to pay for the manufactures she needed. The Russian iron-smelting industry dated from the eighteenth century. The second major industry was cotton-spinning

Repression
Russia was officially an autocracy headed by a tsar who ruled by divine right. There was no tradition of opposition or protest. Alexander I (1801-25) was for a while greeted as a reforming tsar. He founded a state school system, granted a constitution to Poland, abolished torture and lessened censorship. But towards the end of his reign he revoked many of his reforms.

He was succeeded by his younger brother, Nicholas I (1825-55), who savagely put down the Decembrist and Polish uprisings. He increased the powers of the police and tightened censorship, though he also alleviated some of the conditions of the serfs by prohibiting their sale without land. It was he who described Turkey as ‘the sick man’. He died in the middle of the Crimean War.

Reform

Alexander II (1855-81), photographed above with his wife, the Empress Maria, and his son, the future Alexander III, succeeded his father during the war. His reign witnessed wide-ranging attempts to modernize and reform Russia.

In 1856 he resolved to emancipate the serfs, telling the nobility of Moscow in March 1856,

‘it is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below’.

The main work of reform was carried out in the ministry of the interior, where the most able officials, headed by the deputy minister Nikolay Milyutin, were resolved to get the best possible terms for the peasants. But the bulk of the landowning class was determined, if it could not prevent abolition of serfdom, to give the freed peasants as little as possible. The settlement, proclaimed on Feb. 19 (March 3, New Style), 1861, was a compromise. Peasants were freed from servile status, and a procedure was laid down by which they could become owners of land. The government paid the landowners compensation and recovered the cost in annual ‘redemption payments’ from the peasants.

In many respects, the terms were unfavourable. In the north, where land was poor, the landowners were compensated not only for the loss of their serfs and also for the loss of the share that they had previously enjoyed of the peasants’ earnings from non-agricultural labour. In the south, where land was more valuable, the plots given to the peasants were very small, often less than they had had for their own use when they were serfs. Emancipation was a huge reform but at the same time it fell short of the hopes of the idealists.

Further important reforms followed the emancipation. A new system of local elected assemblies (zemstvos) was introduced in 1864. The zemstvos were empowered to levy taxes and to spend their funds on schools, public health, roads, and other social services, but their scope was limited by the fact that they also had to spend money on some of the tasks of the central government.

In 1864 Russia also received a system of law courts based on European models, with irremovable judges and a proper system of courts of appeal. Justices of the peace were instituted for minor offenses; they were elected by the county zemstvos. A properly organized, modern legal profession now arose.

During the first years of Alexander II's reign there was some demand from a liberal section of the nobility for representative government at the national level. The tsar and his bureaucrats refused to consider this: there was to be no challenge to the principle of autocracy. The decision against a national assembly deprived Russia of the possibility of public political education such as that which existed, for example, in contemporary Prussia, and it deprived the government of the services of hundreds of talented men.

Foreign policy
Alexander II’s foreign policy was a continuation of his father’s, with the advance into Asia proceeding. After Austria’s refusal to help Russia in the Crimean War relations were very strained. However the friendship seemed restored when Bismarck secured the foundation of the Three Emperors’ League (Dreikaiserbund) in 1873.

The Russo-Turkish War
Twenty years after defeat in the Crimea, Russia was back in the Balkans. The opening was provided by three simultaneous revolts in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria. In May 1876 following the murder of 136 Turkish officials in Bulgaria over 20,000 Christians were massacred by Ottoman soldiers in what became known as the Bulgarian Horrors. This inspired a furious pamphlet from the British politician W. E. Gladstone, who demanded that the Turks depart ‘bag and baggage’ from the provinces they had profaned. Tsar Alexander II felt he had to protect the Christians of the Balkans.

The new sultan, Abdul Hamid II promised a constitution. Nevertheless in April 1877 the Russians invaded Ottoman territory on the Danube and in Armenia. By January 1878, in spite of stiff Turkish resistance, they had reached Constantinople. The Turks were forced to accept the Treaty of San Stefano which created an independent ‘Big Bulgaria’ which would clearly be under heavy Russian influence.

The terms of the treaty alarmed Britain, where there was an outbreak of ‘jingoism’, and Austria. In response the Congress of Berlin was called, with Bismarck as ‘honest broker’ to revise the treaty and curtail Russian ambitions. It was the last occasion when the great met to settle their differences. The treaty’s terms were:

Bosnia and Herzegovina were handed over to Austrian occupation.
Bulgaria was split in three.
The independence of Serbia, Montenegro and Romania was recognized.
In a secret agreement with Turkey Britain was allowed to occupy Cyprus.

The Congress postponed war for a generation but helped to create the tensions that led to the First World War. Russia was humiliated and the aspirations of the Balkan peoples were not fully realized. The Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina was to be a hugely significant event.

More repression
Alexander’s reforms aroused fierce opposition from conservatives and revolutionaries while the suppression of the Polish revolt in 1863 alienated liberals. In 1866 there was an unsuccessful attempt on his life which led to a clamp down on reforms. On 1 March 1881 Alexander was assassinated by  a terrorist group called the People’s Will. You can hear a discussion of this on Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time'. All the main leaders of the group were caught by the police, and five of them were hanged.

The magnificently restored Church of the Spilt Blood stands on the site of Alexander's assassination.

His son, Alexander III (1881-94) was a reactionary, devoted to autocracy, Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church, who undid his father’s policies. The universities lost their autonomy, the independence of the courts was sapped and the zemstvos were remodelled and lost many of their powers. This reactionary policy was continued by his son Nicholas II 1894-1917).

The census of 1897 revealed that there were over 100,000 policemen and 50,000 men in the security gendarmerie, deploying a formidable range of spies and informers. In 1880 there were 8,000 people in ‘administrative exile’ in Siberia.

All religious minorities came under attack, but the Jews most of all. In 1880 about 4 million of them lived in the Pale, the tract of Poland and western Russia to which they were confined by law. 700.000 more were driven into it in the next ten years. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century 2 million Jews left Russia. A series of pogroms between 1903 and 1906 left 2,000 Jews dead and increased the number of emigrants.

In 1891 Leah and Moses Baline left for the United States with their three year old son Israel Isadore. He became very famous!

Industrial growth
In 1892 Sergei Witte became Finance Minister. Believing that ‘a great power cannot wait’ he abandoned liberal economics for direct state intervention in order to prime the country’s industrialization. Between 1894 and 1902 two thirds of government expenditure went into economic development. Russia’s industrial production increased dramatically becoming the fifth largest in the world by 1914. The government encouraged private banks and its decision to adopt the gold standard kept the economy stable.

In 1891 construction began on the 5,000 mile long Trans-Siberian Railway. This enabled Russia to export cheap grain to the west.

Much of the money for investment came from abroad. In 1900 one third of the capital of private industry in Russia was in foreign hands. By 1914 French investors held 80 % of government debt securities. The British invested most heavily in mining and new oilfields.

In spite of this, most Russians grew poorer. There was a famine in 1891-2 followed by a series of crop failures. There was widespread discontent in the countryside and in the industrialized areas. And with no indigenous liberal tradition in Russia many of the disaffected intelligentsia turned to extreme parties like the Marxist Social Democrats.

Nicholas II
Nicholas succeeded his father in April 1894. In November he married the German princess Alix of Hesse (Tsarina Alexandra Fyodorovna). His reign was a disaster for himself and for Russia.
In 1904 she gave birth to a male heir after four daughters.
The painting depicts Nicholas in 1914 after the outbreak of war. He is represented as a military hero and the defender of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Dumas
In January 1904 Russia went to war with Japan. The most dramatic event of the war the Battle of Tsushima, 27 May–28 May 1905 when the Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo, numerically inferior but with superior speed and firing range, shelled the Russian fleet mercilessly, destroying all eight of its battleships.


The news of the fall of Port Arthur in January 1905 led to a strike in St Petersburg, which in turn led to a petition to the tsar asking for political as well as economic reform. On 9 January the security forces opened fire on a peaceful crowd, killing 130 people. The result of ‘Bloody Sunday’ (photographed above) was a series of riots and strikes which forced Nicholas into concessions. On Witte’s advice he issued on 17 October a manifesto announcing a Duma (Parliament) the extension of the franchise and the granting of real civil liberties. Witte became Chairman of the Council of Ministers. A constitution was issued on 23 April, providing for two chambers, but it came from the tsar who retained ‘supreme autocratic power’. Witte was kept on until he had secured a huge international loan to bail out the government and then dismissed before the Duma.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Dumas were a disappointment. The first two were dissolved by the tsar because he saw them as too radical. After the 1907 electoral reform the third Duma, elected in Novermber 1907, was largely made up of members of the upper classes and radical influences in the Duma had almost entirely been removed. The fourth Duma was in session at the outbreak of war.

Whatever their limitations, however, the Dumas introduced the idea of constitutional and representative government. Russia was less repressive and more economically advanced in 1914 than in 1800.