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A Companion to the Russian Revolution
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A Companion to the Russian
Revolution
Edited by

Daniel Orlovsky
This edition first published 2020
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Names: Orlovsky, Daniel T., 1947– editor.
Title: A companion to the Russian Revolution / edited by Daniel Orlovsky.
Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. | Series: Blackwell companions to history | Includes bibliographical references
and index. | Summary: “The long term causes of the Russian revolution reach deeply into the history of Tsarist Russia. The
powerful Tsarist state was confronted by economic and social change as it sought to maintain its position as a great imperial
power. The abolition of serfdom in the 1860s brought fundamental changes to Russian society, while urbanisation accelerated
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Subjects: LCSH: Soviet Union–History–Revolution, 1917–1921.
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 Contents

Notes on Contributors ix
Editor’s Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: The Russian Revolution at 100 1
Daniel Orlovsky

Part I Signs, Near and Far 5

1 Long‐Term Causes of the Russian Revolution 7
Peter Waldron
2 The First Russian Revolution, 1890–1914 17
Frank Wcislo
3 Russia at War: War as Revolution, Revolution as War 31
Christopher J. Read
4 Support for the Regime and Right-Wing Reform Plans, Late 1916–Early 1917 43
Mikhail N. Loukianov

Part II The February Revolution 51

5 The Duma Committee, the Provisional Government, and the Birth of ‘Triple Power’ in the
February Revolution53
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
6 The Practice of Power in 1917 69
Ian D. Thatcher
7 The Duma Revolution 77
A.B. Nikolaev
8 Dynamics of Violence, 1914–17 85
V.P. Buldakov
9 Russian Political Parties in the Russian Revolution of 1917–18 95
Lutz Häfner and Hannu Immonen
10 Workers’ Control and the ‘Workers’ Constitution,’ the Fabzavkoms and Trade Unions in 1917 105
Nikolai V. Mikhailov
11 Peasant Dreams and Aspirations in the Russian Revolution 125
Aaron Retish
vi contents

12 Liberalism 137
Stephen F. Williams
13 Military Revolution and War Experience 149
Laurie Stoff
14 Freedom and Culture: The Role of the Russian Artistic and Literary World in 1917 163
Ben Hellman and Tomi Huttunen
15 Political Tradition, Revolutionary Symbols, and the Language of the 1917 Revolution 173
Boris Kolonitskii
16 Counter‐Revolution and the Tsarist Elite 187
Matthew Rendle
17 Revolution in the Borderlands: The Case
of Central Asia in a Comparative Perspective 197
Marco Buttino
18 The Nationality Question: Finnish Activism and the Russian Revolution, 1899–1919 211
Aleksi Mainio
19 Finland in 1917 221
Hannu Immonen
20 Part I: War and the ‘Russian’ Revolutions 229
Mark von Hagen
20 Part II: Revolution as War: The Western Borderlands Post‐October 247
Mark von Hagen
21 1917 in the Provinces 263
Sarah Badcock
22 Religion and Revolution: The Russian Orthodox Church Transformed 277
Gregory L. Freeze
23 Gender and the Russian Revolution 287
Elizabeth White
24 Revolution and Foreign Policy 297
Michael Hughes
25 Law, Empire, and Revolution 307
William E. Pomeranz

Part III October and Civil Wars 317

26 The Bolsheviks and Their Message in 1917 319
Lars T. Lih
27 A Soviet Government? 331
Geoffrey Swain
28 The Political Economy of War Communism 341
Erik C. Landis
29 The Civil Wars 357
Jonathan D. Smele
30 Early Soviet Culture: Education, Science, and Proletkult 369
Murray Frame
31 The Jews in the Revolution 377
Michael C. Hickey
 contents vii

32 Prospects for Transformation in the Early 1920s 389

Tracy McDonald
33 Revolution and Memory 399
Frederick C. Corney
34 Archiving Russia’s Revolutions 413
William G. Rosenberg

Bibliography423
Index445
 Notes on Contributors
Sarah Badcock is Professor of Modern History at the
University of Nottingham. Her research focuses on Russia
in the late Imperial and revolutionary periods. She is inter-
ested in comparative perspectives on questions of punish-
ment, free and unfree labor, penal cultures, and visual
history. She has published a number of books including A
Prison without Walls? Eastern Siberian Exile in the Last Years
of Tsarism (2016). Her research on ordinary people’s experi-
ences of the Russian revolution was published as Politics and
the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History
(2007). Badcock’s interest in regional perspectives on the
Russian revolutions culminated in the co‐edited volume
Russian Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22: Book
1. Russia’s Revolution in Regional Perspective (2015).
Vladimir Prokhorovich Buldakov is a Senior Research
Fellow at the Institute of Russian History and for many
years was head of the sector on the study of the October
Revolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He is
the author of many works on the Russian Revolution includ-
ing Krasnaia smuta: Priroda i posledstviia revoliutsionnogo
nasiliia (Moscow 1997), Voina, porodivshaia revoliutsiiu.
Rossiia, 1914–1917 (with Leonteva T.G., Moscow 2015),
and Khaos i etnos. Etnicheskie konflikty v Rossii. 1917–1918
gody. Usloviia vozniknoveniia. Khronika. Kommentarii
(Moscow 2010).
Marco Buttino is member of the Global History Laboratory
of the University of Turin and until 2017 was Professor of
Modern History at the same university. He has written on
various aspects of the social history of the USSR and Central
Asia. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal
Quaderni Storici and of the international board of different
historical journals. Among his publications are: Revolyutsiya
naoborot. Moscow, 2008 (Italian edition Naples 2003);
Samarcanda, storie in una città dal 1945 ad oggi, Roma,
Viella, 2015 (soon to appear in English).
Frederick C. Corney is Professor of European and Russian
History at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, USA,
where he is also Chair of the Department of History. He
specializes in the history of Russia, particularly the revolu-
tionary period through the 1920s, and in the sub‐disciplines
of cultural and collective memory. He has published a mon-
ograph, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the
Bolshevik Revolution, and has edited, introduced, and trans-
lated a volume of writings from the 1920s entitled Trotsky’s
Challenge: The ‘Literary Discussion’ and the Fight for the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Murray Frame is a Reader in History at the University of
Dundee, Scotland. His publications include Russian Culture
in War and Revolution 1914–22 (co‐editor), 2 vols (2014),
School for Citizens: Theatre and Civil Society in Imperial
Russia (2006), and The St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres:
Stage and State in Revolutionary Russia, 1900–1920 (2000).
He is currently working on a history of the militia during
the Russian Civil War.
Gregory L. Freeze is the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield
Professor of History at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA,
USA. His primary interests are religious and social history in
modern Russia. He has written numerous articles and books
and is currently working on a volume entitled Bolsheviks and
Believers, 1917–1941, as well as two multi‐year projects
funded by the Russian Science Foundation.
Lutz Häfner received a PhD in modern East European his-
tory from Hamburg University in 1992. He has taught East
European history at the Universities of Bielefeld, Leipzig,
and Gießen and is currently working as Senior Researcher in
Göttingen. His publications include Society as Local Event:
The Volga Cities Kazan and Saratov, 1870–1914 (Böhlau,
2004). A book on food consumption and adulteration of
food products in Tsarist Russia is also in progress.
x notes on contributors
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is Research Professor of Modern Russian
and Soviet History Emeritus at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, USA. He has had multiple books published such
as The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917 (1981), revised edi-
tion The February Revolution, Petrograd, 1917: The End of the
Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (2017), and
Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan
(2005) for which he won the Robert Ferrell Award from the
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His most
recent book is Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution
(2017).
Ben Hellman, PhD, Docent, is Associate Professor
Emeritus of Russian Literature at the University of Helsinki.
Main publications: Meetings and Clashes: Articles on Russian
Literature (Helsinki 2009); Fairy Tales and True Stories: The
History of Russian Literature for Children and Young People
(Brill 2013); Hemma hos Tolstoj. Nordiska möten i liv och
dikt (Stockholm 2017); Poets of Hope and Despair: The
Russian Symbolists in War and Revolution (second ed., Brill
2018).
Michael C. Hickey is Professor of Russian History at the
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, USA. His main
areas of interest are the Revolution in Smolensk and Jews
in the Revolutionary era, and he has written several essays
on this topic. His book, Competing Voices from the Russian
Revolution, won the 2012 American Library Association’s
RUSA Award as one of the year’s Outstanding Reference
Sources.
Michael Hughes is Professor of Modern History at
Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of numerous
monographs on Russian history and Anglo‐Russian rela-
tions including Inside the Enigma: British Officials in Russia
1900–1939 (1997); Diplomacy before the Russian Revolution:
Britain, Russia and the Old Diplomacy, 1894–1917 (2000);
and Beyond Holy Russia: The Life and Times of Stephen
Graham (2014).
Tomi Huttunen is Professor of Russian Literature and
Culture at the University of Helsinki. He specializes and has
published widely on the Finnish translation history of Russian
literature, on historical avant‐garde, semiotics of culture,
Russian rock poetry, and contemporary literature.
Hannu Immonen is Research Fellow Emeritus at the
Academy of Finland. His current research interests focus on
the issues of Russian and Finnish military history during
1870–1905. His publications include: The Agrarian
Program of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1900–
1914 (Helsinki 1988); Mechty o novoi Rossii. Viktor Chernov
(1873–1952) (St. Petersburg: izd‐vo Evropeiskogo univer-
siteta v St. Petersburg, 2015); and articles on the history of
post‐1800 Finland.
Boris Ivanovich Kolonitskii is Professor at the European
University of St. Petersburg and Senior Research Fellow at
the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian
Academy of Sciences. He is a well‐known scholar of
the Russian Revolution and the author of Comrade Kerensky,
Erotica, Symbols in the Russian Revolution; his
article ‘Antibourgeois Propaganda and Antibourgeois
­
Consciousness in 1917’ in The Russian Review is often cited
in publications on Russian history. Kolonitsky is a member
of the editorial board of Kritika as well as a member of the
editorial board of the international project ‘Russia’s Great
War and Revolution, 1914–1922: The Centennial
Reappraisal.’
Erik C. Landis is Senior Lecturer in Modern European
History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. He is the author
of Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the
Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh 2008), as well as essays and
articles on various aspects of the Russian Revolution and
Civil War.
Lars T. Lih lives and works in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
His recent book publications include Lenin Rediscovered
(2006) and Lenin (2011). Lately he has been researching
for a study of the Bolshevik outlook in 1917. At present,
he is preparing a collection of his articles under the title
Deferred Dreams.
Mikhail N. Loukianov is Professor in the Faculty of
History and Political Science at Perm State University,
Russia. He is the author of Rossiiskii konservatizm i reforma,
1907–1914 (Stuttgart 2006) and a number of articles,
including ‘Conservatives and “Renewed Russia” 1907–
1914,’ Slavic Review 61, no 4 (Winter 2002): 762–86,
‘The First World War and the Polarization of the Russian
Right, July 1914–February 1917,’ Slavic Review 75, no 4
(Winter 2016): 872–95, and ‘Russian Conservatives and the
Great War’ in Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution,
1914–22, Book 4: The Struggle for the State, ed. by P.
Waldron, C. Read, A. Lindenmeyr (Bloomington 2018),
pp. 23–60.
Aleksi Mainio is a historian at the University of Helsinki,
Finland. He has specialized in the early twentieth-century
history of Finland and Russia.
Tracy McDonald is an associate professor of history at
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She is the
author of Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside under
Soviet Rule, 1921–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2011) and winner of the 2012 Reginald Zelnik Prize
for an outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern
Europe, or Eurasia in the field of history. She is co‐editor
with Daniel Vandersommers of the article collection Zoo
Studies: A New Humanities (Toronto and Montreal: McGill‐
 notes on contributors
Queens University Press, 2019) which includes her chapter
‘Sculpting Dinah with the Blunt Tools of the Historian.’
Nikolay Vasilyevich Mikhailov, born in 1956 in Leningrad
(now St. Petersburg), graduated from the historical faculty
of Leningrad State University (1978). In 1980–87 he
worked as a guide and researcher at the State Museum of
History of Leningrad. He was Candidate of Historical
Sciences (1995), and has been senior researcher at the St.
Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of
Sciences (RAS) from 1999 to the present. Research interests
include history of the social, labor, and revolutionary move-
ment in Russia in the late nineteenth to early twentieth
centuries, local history, and St. Petersburg studies.
Andrei Borisovich Nikolaev is Professor and Head of the
Department of Russian History, Herzen State Pedagogical
University of Russia, St. Petersburg. He is a specialist in
the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917. His main
scientific works include: Revoliutsiia i vlast’: IV
Gosudarsevennaia duma 27 fevralia–3 marta 1917 goda (St.
Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo RGPU im. A.I. Herzen, 2005);
K.F. Luchivka‐Nesluhovskij – pervyj polkovnik Fevral’skoj
revoljucii. Journal of Modern Russian History and
Historiography. 7 (2014): 64–98.
Daniel Orlovsky was born in Chicago and educated at
Harvard (AB, AM, PhD). He studied Russian at the
Defense Language Institute, Monterey, CA while in the
US Marine Corps. At Southern Methodist University since
1976, he served as Department Chair (1986–97) and
Director of the SMU in Oxford summer school at
University College, Oxford (1994–present). He has been
Visiting Professor of History at UC Berkeley, Stanford,
and the University of Texas at Austin and continues to
make frequent research trips to Russia and Helsinki,
Finland. His research interests include the Russian
Provisional Government, bureaucracy, the role of white‐
collar workers/lower middle strata in Russian and Soviet
history, and the intersection of institutions, society, and
politics across the divide of the Russian Revolution.
William E. Pomeranz is Deputy Director of the Wilson
Center’s Kennan Institute, Washington DC, USA. He
previously practiced international law in the United States as
well as in Moscow, Russia. His research interests focus on
Russian legal history and present‐day Russian commercial
and constitutional law. He is the author of Law and the
Russian State: Russia’s Legal Evolution from Peter the
Great to Vladimir Putin (2019). He also has appeared and
provided commentary on numerous media outlets.
Christopher J. Read is Professor of Twentieth‐Century
European History at the University of Warwick. His
research has focused on both the history of the Russian
xi
intelligentsia and the social history of the Russian
Revolution. He has published several books including
Religion, Revolution and the Russian Intelligentsia
(1979); Culture and Power in Revolutionary Russia
1914–1926 (1990); From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian
People and Their Revolution (1996); War and Revolution
in Russia: 1914–22 – The Collapse of Tsarism and the
Establishment of Soviet Power (2013); and Stalin: From
the Caucasus to the Kremlin (2017). He is also a Fellow
of the Royal Historical Society.
Matthew Rendle is Senior Lecturer in History at the
University of Exeter. He has published numerous articles
on various aspects of revolutionary Russia and is the author
of Defenders of the Motherland: The Tsarist Elite in
Revolutionary Russia (Oxford University Press, 2010) and
The State versus the People: Revolutionary Justice in Russia’s
Civil War (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2020).
He is also the co‐editor of the journal Revolutionary
Russia, and a series editor for the BASEES/Routledge
Series on Russian and East European Studies.
Aaron Retish is Associate Professor of Russian History at
Wayne State University, USA. He authored Russia’s Peasants
in Revolution and Civil War: Citizenship, Identity, and the
Creation of the Soviet State, 1914–1922 as well as articles on
law and the courts in the revolutionary era. He co‐edits
Revolutionary Russia and serves on the Board of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
William G. Rosenberg is Professor of History Emeritus at
the University of Michigan, USA and Associated Scholar of
the St. Petersburg Institute of History, RAN. He also serves
as Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees of the European
University at St. Petersburg. In addition to his work in mod-
ern Russian and Soviet history, he is the author (with Francis
X. Blouin) of Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in
History and the Archives which received the W.G. Leland
Award from the Society of American Archivists.
Jonathan D. Smele is Senior Lecturer in Modern European
History at Queen Mary University of London, UK. His
areas of interest are the Russian revolutions and civil wars.
He is a member of the Study Group on the Russian
Revolution and edited its journal, Revolutionary Russia,
from 2002 to 2012. His most recent books are The ‘Russian’
Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years That Shook the World
(2015) and Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars,
1916–1926.
Laurie Stoff is Principal Lecturer and Honors Faculty
Fellow at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College,
USA. She specializes in Russian, East European, and wom-
en’s and gender history. Her main research interest is on how
gender and war intersect for Russian women during World
xii notes on contributors
War 1. She has written They Fought for the Motherland:
Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War 1 and the Revolution
(2006) and Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War: More
Than Binding Men’s Wounds (2015). For the latter, she was
awarded the Best Book in Slavic Studies by the Southern
Conference of Slavic Studies and the Smith Award for Best
Book in European History by the Southern Historical
Association. She is also lead editor for a volume entitled
Military Experience which explores the experiences of differ-
ent participants in the war.
Geoffrey Swain is Emeritus Professor of Central and East
European Studies at the University of Glasgow. He focused
his research on the history of Russia and Eastern Europe
during the twentieth century. He has written numerous
works on the history of Eastern Europe including Eastern
Europe since 1945 (2018) and A Short History of the Russian
Revolution (2017).
Ian D. Thatcher is Professor and Research Director of
History at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. His research
focuses on the history of Russian social democracy, the
1917 Revolution, and the history of the Soviet Union. He
is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the
Higher Education Academy, and a member of the Study
Group on the Russian Revolution and of the Association
for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
The late Mark von Hagen was Professor of History and
Global Studies at Arizona State University, USA. Earlier, he
served as Director of the Harriman Institute and Professor
of History at Columbia University. A leading scholar in the
rebirth and redefinition of the study of the Russian Empire
and its borderlands, especially Ukraine, he wrote Soldiers in
the Proletarian Dictatorship: The Red Army and the Soviet
Socialist State, 1917–1930 and War in a European
Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia
and Ukraine, 1914–1918. In 2008, he was elected President
of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic
Studies and served on the editorial board of Slavic Review,
Ab Imperio, and Kritika.
Peter Waldron is Professor of History at the University of
East Anglia, UK. His books include Radical Russia: Art,
Culture and Revolution (Sainsbury Centre, 2017); Russia of
the Tsars (Thames & Hudson, 2011); Governing Tsarist
Russia (Palgrave, 2007); Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin
and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (N. Illinois University
Press, 1998); and The End of Imperial Russia, 1855–1917
(Palgrave, 1997).
Frank Wcislo is Associate Professor of History and Russian
Studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA. He is
the author of Reforming Rural Russia: State, Local Society,
and National Politics, 1855–1914 (1990 and 2014) and
Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergie Witte,
1849–1915 (2011). He was a member of the editorial board
for the publication project of the Witte Memoirs (2003) by
the St. Petersburg Institute of History.
Elizabeth White is Senior Lecturer in History at the
University of the West of England, UK. Her research focuses
on modern Russian and European social and cultural his-
tory. She is the author of The Socialist Alternative to Bolshevik
Russia: The Socialist Revolutionary Party, 1921–39 (2010)
and A Modern History of Russian Childhood (2020) as well
as numerous articles on the history of Russian childhood,
refugees, and ­humanitarianism.
Stephen F. Williams is a judge on the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Before that he taught at the
University of Colorado Law School from 1969 to 1986.
In addition to his career in law, Williams has studied
Russian history. Among his works on the subject are The
Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian
Revolution (2017) and Liberal Reform in an Illiberal
Regime: The Creation of Private Property in Russia, 1906–
1915 (2006).
 Editor’s Acknowledgments

My greatest debt is to the successive generations of scholars who have done so much to clarify and reinterpret this most dif-
ficult historical phenomenon, the Russian Revolution. A subject never offering easy answers, the Revolution more often than
not inspires a despairing humility, perhaps reflected in the essays here presented. I give deep thanks also to the contributors
whose patience and support throughout the unimaginably long process of publication are more than I deserved. I am deeply
sorry to note the recent death of one of our dear friends and contributors, Mark von Hagen.
Special thanks to several close friends among Revolution scholars, Bill Rosenberg, Boris Kolonitskii, Chris Read and
Toshi Hasegawa, who shared so many global venues and projects, and who so generously asked questions and offered
wisdom over the Centennial years. Finally, my gratitude to Jennifer Manias, of John Wiley, the Publisher, whose crucial
intervention brought this project to completion.
 Introduction
The Russian Revolution at 100
Daniel Orlovsky
The Centennial of the Russian Revolution has resulted in
the publication of books, conferences, events, and projects
around the globe. The essays collected here provide original
views of both the historiography and the state of current
research on key components of the Revolutionary experi-
ence. Though the focus is on 1917 itself, for reasons dis-
cussed below, the volume offers substantial coverage of the
Revolution as a longer-term process embracing not only the
years of the Great War and Civil War, but also the longer-
term origins as well as the extension of the Revolution
proper into the era of New Economic Policy (NEP). We
cover in detail such themes as the borderlands and prov-
inces, gender, popular and high culture, religion, law, ide-
ologies and parties, social movements, the military, foreign
policy, symbols, and discourse. In addition questions of
memory and commemoration of the Revolution are taken
up as well as what we might term the ‘afterlife’ of the
Revolution or its capacity to continue to influence events, to
serve as a model, to provide a script for the overthrow of
authoritarian regimes and/or the creation of new ones.
There was much interest in how the Centennial would be
celebrated in Russia and what would be the attitude of ‘offi-
cial’ Russia or the Putin regime. The government chose to
downplay the anniversary, preferring to set up a commission
in late 2016 with the idea of building a monument of recon-
ciliation of Reds and Whites in the Civil War in The Crimea.
Official discourse pointed instead to the dangers of
Revolution, the idea of reconciliation of the opposing forces
in the Revolution and Civil War, and criticism of violence.
Preservation of a strong Russian state was another primary
goal. This went along with a reopening of memory on
World War I, Russian sacrifices there and a pointed attack on
Lenin for stoking the violence of the Civil War.
In 1996 November 7 became the Day of Reconciliation
and Concord and in 2004 ceased to be a public holiday and
A Companion to the Russian Revolution, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Orlovsky.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
was replaced by the Day of People’s Unity celebrating the
end of the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth cen-
tury. Even more recently in 2018, the anniversary celebrated
the defense of Moscow in 1941.
The official consensus viewed 1917 as a misguided
attempt to alter the course of Russian history and
‘Gosudarstvennost’ (sanctity of the state). This was preceded
by an earlier commission to combat falsification of history
and promotion of a vague unity of historical development
and reference to the tragedy of social schism represented by
1917 and the Civil War. Much of this was articulated in a
series of interventions by the Minister of Culture V.
Medinskii. Legacies were both positive and negative; grand
Soviet achievements as well as the violence and repression of
the Soviet era. Official Russia drew a line under it and pro-
posed to move on, building a wall of sorrow but proposing
no further prosecution in the court of history (Ryan, 2018).
Still, there remained the question of popular responses to
the Centennial, responses that were difficult for the state to
control, and the actual position of the academic community
in Russia and beyond.
New Scripts, Themes, Narratives
The question of periodization: Recent scholarship has
shifted focus away from 1917 itself (both February and
October) to a more elongated time period that emphasizes
Revolution as process. The time period varies, 1914–22,
1905–21, 1890–1928, and in the conception of one of our
contributors, J. Smele, 1916–26. In Smele’s creative vision
there was no Revolution at all, rather a protracted series of
overlapping civil wars. Here the emphasis is on 1917,
though the volume takes the longer‐term process seriously
and devotes many chapters to both short‐ and longer‐term
2 Daniel Orlovsky
causes and outcomes of the 1917 Revolutions. 1917 was
unique in the history of the Revolution as process, the
explosion which produced the discourses of Revolution and
Counter‐Revolution and the Revolution itself as historical
actor. The undertheorized Civil War and immediate after-
math of 1917 are also crucial as a Revolution phase II,
where Revolution continues in the role of actor and the
themes of 1917 are played out, power and social and cul-
tural transformation, not to mention the fate of Empire and
the multiple revolutions of the borderlands. Here we try to
reverse that tendency to bury or lose 1917, the uniqueness
of the Revolution in the longer time period embracing the
First World War and the Civil War or even more distant
dates, or to erase from the docket not just 1917 but
Revolution completely, preferring instead to call the whole
long era one of multiple revolutions (see here von Hagen
and Buttino especially) or Civil Wars.
This introduction focuses on several of the main take­
aways (new scripts, themes, narratives) from the Centennial
reset or reexamination in place of a complete summary of
the volume contents. I review some of these in no particu-
lar order. The new work transcends older categories such
as party, class, dual power, and the triumphalist narratives
both Soviet and Bolshevik. There is an exciting new research
area I call Microhistory (different from the first wave of
studies of Revolution in the provinces – Hickey, Retish,
Penter, Badcock, Raleigh, for example). Here we see the
actual daily workings of the infrastructure, Peter Holquist’s
parastatal complex both as background to 1917, the state of
power relations in given localities on the eve of Revolution,
and precisely how these power relationships developed
during 1917 and after. This work is based on new, deep
local archival materials. But more importantly, it focuses
squarely on primary institutions, cooperatives, town
dumas, Soviets, other associations in their contested space,
and discourses of power, for example, that previously
remained less thoroughly examined in the literature. These
very new microhistories (Dickins 2017; Schrader, 2018,
2019, for example) integrate the social and occupational
with political and institutional infrastructure. And there
are the vastly important areas of culture and religion (see
here especially the essays by Hellman and Huttunen,
Frame, and on religion by Freeze), central to any realistic
or theoretical discussion of revolutionary transformation.
The Revival or revaluation of February as centerpiece of
the Revolution are reflected in such diverse authors as
Solzhenitsyn, Lyandres, Hasegawa, Dukes, and Nikolaev.
This includes questions of political antecedents and power
struggles that shaped the first Provisional Government and
the major role of the Duma both in February Days and in
ongoing events. We have witnessed the recovery and high-
lighting of February as the ‘real revolution’ – or as a
Revolution in its own right not just as a ‘second’ Russian
Revolution (the first being 1905) and a mere prelude to
October. There is a need here especially to counter the
Soviet dominant October narrative which feminized and
minimized February (with the brilliant exceptions of
Burdzhalov, Startsev, and a few others).
Here, Waldron and Wcislo provide the deep and more
immediate background to the 1917 events. T. Hasegawa
reviews the February Days, bringing into focus the conflicts
over power based on the most recent scholarship. A.B.
Nikolaev makes the case for ongoing Duma influence and
direct participation in the February Revolution. We cover
the creation of Dual power and critique of that model
(Hasegawa and Thatcher) to include many powers, absence
of power, an ongoing struggle for authority and legitimacy.
Solzhenitsyn presents an interesting case. Writing on the
90th anniversary of the Revolution in 2007 he too elevates
February over October with the publication of his ‘reflec-
tions’ which provide his own summary of his views distilled
from his recently translated and published novel March, 1917
(part of the long historical fictional project, The Red Wheel).
Among Solzhenitsyn’s worthy interventions are his
notion of the Revolution as a force field that seized minds.
Although much has been made of the author’s blame of
liberals, westernizers, intellectuals for February, a careful
reading reveals plenty of criticism of Nicholas II, the mili-
tary, members of the royal family (including Mikhail,
directly accused of illegally and morally ending the monar-
chy), and especially of state authority, which failed abjectly.
Solzhenitzyn’s portrait supports our notion of the
Revolution itself as an active force in history. He also
argues that the Provisional Government paved the way for
the Bolsheviks by appearing at once as a dictatorship more
powerful than the Tsar and as a destroyer of legitimate and
necessary authority by undermining the Ministry of
Internal Affairs, the police, and local administration. He of
course judges as immoral the arrest of the Tsar, who he
argues did not similarly treat his political opponents. In the
end, he follows the argument of Boris Kolonitskii that loss
of love and the Tsar’s nerve (read weakness) carried great
responsibility for the February Revolution.
Semion Lyandres’s publication of the only recently recov-
ered oral testimonies of revolutionary actors provides fur-
ther new insight into the revolutionary process. Here we
learn definitively that plots to overthrow the monarchy
existed and were actually put into play just prior to February.
We learn of the role of Captain D.V. Kossikovskii who
moved a cavalry unit to Petrograd prior to the February 27
soldiers’ uprising, then moved it out on March 1 to the
strategic position along the path the Imperial train was to
pass. And on February 27, Nekrasov, Guchkov, and
Tereshchenko attempted to establish a temporary dictator-
ship under General Manikovskii.
Rodzianko and Miliukov knew of and supported plots to
remove Nicholas and this sheds light on the Duma
Committee’s decision to seek abdication. Finally, Rodzianko’s
opposition to Mikhail taking the throne on March 3 was not
a reversal of his previous position to preserve the monarchy,
 INTRODUCTION: THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AT 100
but consistent with his position to seek political power by
elevating the prestige of the Duma. Lyandres in a series of
works has outlined in detail the role as plotter of Prince
L’vov and the three‐way struggle for power between
Miliukov, Rodzianko, and L’vov (going back into 1916),
having profound results during the February Days.
Now it is common among even Russian scholars to
compare February to more recent and even present-day
examples – Iran, Portugal, the color Revolutions in the
­ 1917 is portrayed as a myth). A broad‐based democratic
Middle East, Ukraine, Central Asia, as well as Yeltsin against
the parliament in 1991 and 1993. We move away from the
idea of October’s inevitability and more toward February as
either a violent, explosive, unpredictable process or an
unfinished or open-ended democratic Revolution, one that
may have needed illiberal measures (as in 1993) to intro-
duce liberalism. This also requires rethinking the Constituent
Assembly experience.
Prominent in the new view of the revolution is what
might be termed the Buldakov syndrome, or the rejection
of explanations based upon linear development, progress,
parties, and leaders. Buldakov in his many works, including
his contribution to this volume, substitutes the archaic,
emotions, ochlocracy (a favorite term), the crowd, atavistic
cultural factors, and the like for the traditional analytic
categories. Buldakov wants to study the Revolution (and
not just February, but October and the Civil War) not from
the top or bottom but from inside, hence his rejection of
rational elements and the politics we have studied for one
hundred years, but the archaic passions around ‘incompre-
hensible power.’ He rejects the idea of alternatives as an
object of study.
Along these lines and opening new fresh approaches are
the study of rumors (Kolonitskii), especially the idea that
rumors created new active facts or ‘truths’ and realities,
some of what we label today as fake news. Rumor, often
fueled by emotion and violence, played a large role in the
collapse of the Old Regime, the post February process, and
the Bolshevik seizure of power. The establishment of a
leader cult with far-reaching implications in the Soviet
period was also a product of February, most notably in the
example of A.F. Kerenskii. This is revealed in the magisterial
work of B.I. Kolonitskii. Add to this the work of W.G.
Rosenberg on the build‐up of mass emotions among sol-
diers in particular who felt acutely the terror of war and
deficits of economic and political justice in the Revolutionary
process. T. Hasegawa in a more recent work in the microhis-
tory vein chronicles the growth of crime (anarchy, violence)
after February and links the Provisional Government’s fail-
ures to cope with it as a key factor in its power deficit and
eventual demise. This criminal activity, as in other policy
areas, would require Bolshevik responses and institutional
solutions.
There is new emphasis on what I call the Endgame of
1917, or renewed study of September and October,
the alternative particularly of an all socialist government
3
as articulated by the Mensheviks Martov and Dan, but
supported by a broad element of professionals, white col-
lar workers, and others on the left and left center in 1917.
This was viewed as a non‐Soviet solution to the power
question. Soviets were class institutions and hence unsuit-
able for a state building project. Plus, they had demon-
strated administrative incompetence (the notion that they
were taking over the country administratively already in
state building project based upon the proletariat plus
white collar plus professionals was required. Another
aspect of the new Endgame vision is deeper study of the
so‐called ‘failed’ institutions of September and October
1917, the Democratic Conference and the Council of the
Republic (or Pre‐Parliament). Here we find more myth
breaking on such subjects as the meaning and viability of
coalition and serious policy discussions and proposals for
the all socialist/democratic project. Also in play is
renewed interest in the Military Revolutionary
Committee, the primary mechanism of the power sei-
zure. This helps balance our vastly augmented knowledge
of the February Days with some equivalent for October
that is not a complete buy-in to the triumphal Bolshevik
October narrative.
Then there is the question of global causality and impact
and longer-term views, including the era of violence (both
from the right and the left) immediately after 1917 and fas-
cism, all borrowing heavily from the Bolsheviks. US capital-
ism and globalism evolved in opposition to Communism
and vice versa, each system defining itself as the polar oppo-
site of the ‘other,’ while absorbing or mimicking key traits
of its opponent. This pattern provided a script for modern
politics and later for Revolutions modeled on both February
and October as may be seen in both Cold War competition
in Europe and the Third World, including 1968, Ostpolitik,
Czechoslovakia (Velvet), detente and Helsinki, Poland,
1991 and 1993, and in post‐Soviet/Cold War color
Revolutions in such far-flung places as post‐Soviet space and
the Middle East.
The Russian Revolution was a model for taking and main-
taining power in its October and, less frequently cited or
understood, February scripts. This went beyond ideology to
include visceral feelings of extreme injustice (sometimes
calling forth pre‐modern analogs) or programs of national
liberation.
Another approach is to internationalize the Revolution
both in terms of broad influences leading up to 1917
(­pamphlets for example) and raising institutional and his-
torical comparisons and attempts to build public opinion, or
create one in favor of republican models and the like.
Further, the state intervention/modernity school sees the
Revolution and outcomes as a variant of global patterns, and
holds to this even while adding in extreme ideologically
motivated violence. The global nexus remains key to 1917,
1991, and to Putin’s regime today.
4 Daniel Orlovsky

These explanations are structural and not deterministic,
multi‐causal, based on global crises and forces. These more
than events on the ground dictated 1917 just as they do
today (Rendle, 2017).
There is the issue of influence. Can we say that the Russian
Revolution has left a permanent mark on global history as
we might say of the French or American Revolution?
To deny this despite the failure of the Soviet experiment
seems triumphalist and overdetermined. Despite the absence
of direct analogies in the recent or contemporary ‘revolu-
tions’ there is the renewed hope of liberation promised by
the memories and models of both February and October,
especially the former in relation to the toppling of authori-
tarian regimes.
 Part I

Signs, Near and Far

 Chapter One
Long‐Term Causes of the Russian Revolution
Peter Waldron
At the beginning of March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated
and the Romanov dynasty’s 300‐year rule over Russia came to
an abrupt end. Less than eight months later, the Bolshevik
party brusquely swept away the Provisional Government that
had replaced the autocracy and began the process of establish-
ing the world’s first socialist state. The political cataclysms that
transformed Russia in 1917 illuminate significant issues about
the ways in which revolutions occur, although the interpreta-
tion that the Soviet state placed on 1917 over the following
decades complicated understanding of the revolutions. The
victors of 1917 – Lenin and his successors – argued that their
triumph was inevitable and that the history of Russia was a
single process leading to the Bolshevik seizure of power in the
October revolution. The Soviet interpretation of Russian his-
tory concentrated on identifying every component cause of
revolution and subjecting it to intense and detailed analysis.
This approach to history did not allow that Russia had differ-
ent possibilities for its development, but instead forced a sin-
gle, linear explanation of the past onto circumstances that
were complex and often uncertain. Soviet historians read his-
tory backward, seeing the October revolution as the inevita-
ble consequence of centuries of historical development. For
most of the twentieth century, this conceptual framework also
helped to shape the understanding of Russian history outside
the Soviet Union. The political antagonisms between the
USSR and the western world polarized discussion of the
Russian revolution, with history often becoming a function of
politics. The Marxist–Leninist prism through which the USSR
understood its own history produced a reaction in the west,
and it was only in the last decades of the century – as the Soviet
Union declined and fractured – that more nuanced views of
the Russian revolution came to the fore (Suny 2006, 43–54).
Soviet historians minutely dissected every hint of revolt in
the Russian past, alert to the slightest expressions of discon-
tent that could demonstrate the deep roots of the October
A Companion to the Russian Revolution, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Orlovsky.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
revolution. Russia’s social structures were analyzed in great
detail to provide evidence of the long‐held commitment of
peasants and working people to the overthrow of the Tsarist
state. The Soviet state had to reconcile Marxist political
ideas, with their focus on the primacy of an industrial work-
ing class in making revolution, with Russia’s overwhelm-
ingly agrarian society. Lenin himself had performed complex
ideological maneuvers to explain how a socialist revolution
could take place in the least industrialized of the European
great powers, and the Soviet Union recognized that it was
continually striving toward the achievement of the utopia
of full communism (Harding 1981, 110–34). Marx’s expla-
nation of human history argued that economic change lay at
the base of the historical process and that politics was a func-
tion of economic change and part of the superstructure of
society. For a regime that was so intensely political as the
Soviet Union, politics played a surprisingly subordinate role
in explaining the causes of revolution. The Bolshevik party
stood as the vanguard of the working class and of the revo-
lutionary process, but the political regime that Lenin and his
party overthrew in 1917 was, for them, doomed to certain
failure by the inevitability of economic upheaval and could
do nothing to rescue itself. Tsarism – and its pale replace-
ment in the Provisional Government – was fated to collapse.
The Soviet explanation of revolutionary change was thus
peculiarly one‐dimensional: the inevitability of the collapse
of Tsarism was mirrored by the certainty of proletarian
victory. The problems in this explanation of revolution were
manifold, not least in its unsophisticated assessment of the
nature of the Tsarist state.
A central question in explaining the success of revolution
in 1917 is to understand why the mighty autocratic
Romanov regime collapsed with such speed, leaving the way
open for authority to disintegrate during the spring and
summer of 1917. The nineteenth-century Russian state was
8 Peter Waldron
recognized as being the most powerful in Europe, and the
grip that successive monarchs maintained on their empire
was acknowledged as being ruthless and brutal. Russia’s
borders had witnessed sustained expansion during the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries, as the growing power of the
Romanov regime enabled its armies to expand in northern
Europe, to take control of great swathes of Central Asia, and
to consolidate its position in the Far East. The Russian army
was the largest in Europe and its military might was feared
by the other Great Powers, even though Russia had suffered
a humiliating defeat in the Crimean war in the 1850s. In
February 1917, however, military commanders lost their
grip on the garrison of Petrograd and with troops mutiny-
ing, the regime was unable to maintain control of its capital
city. Within 72 hours of mutiny breaking out, Nicholas II
signed his abdication decree (Hasegawa 1981, 487–507).
The experience of war since summer 1914 offers some
explanation for the rapid downfall of the Tsarist regime, but
the roots of revolution run much deeper and the eventual
fragility of the imperial Russian state had more profound
structural origins. Pressure from sections of Russian society
provides some explanation for the revolutionary upheavals
of 1917, but the state itself was vulnerable to assault by that
point. The nature of revolutionary change – wherever it
occurs – is confused and uncertain. No actor in the revolu-
tionary process has any knowledge of how the historical
events in which they are participating will turn out and,
indeed, people may not see themselves as being part of a
revolution. In 1917, when mass media were in their infancy
and when communication in Russia was slow and rudimen-
tary, actors in the drama were themselves often unaware of
the wider context of their actions. The Soviet state imposed
a single and simplistic narrative of change upon all of Russian
history before 1917, minimizing the part played in the his-
torical process by contingency, and reduced the significance
of individual actions in bringing about social and political
change. The passage of time allows us to identify patterns in
the past and to see perspectives that were not open to those
people who participated in the events of 1917 themselves.
But the random event – the stray bullet or the misunder-
stood conversation – still plays a part in the shaping of the
present and, thus, the past. Applying a corrective to the
dominant historical narratives of the Russian revolution
should not blind us to the ways in which individual actions
have steered events in unthought‐of directions.
The Russian state had its origins in the Muscovite prince-
dom that proved able to subdue the other city states of the
Russian heartland. Kazan, Novgorod, and Yaroslavl were all
overwhelmed by the power of Moscow during the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Muscovite Grand
Dukes gradually emerged as the pre‐eminent Russian power.
Moscow had geographical advantages at the center of the
Russian lands, while its rulers were ambitious and prepared
to wage war to advance their cause. The forests and slow‐
moving rivers of central Russia did not provide formidable
obstacles to determined troops and the lack of significant
natural features, together with the weakness of Moscow’s
rivals, made Muscovite expansion easy. The geography of
Russia, with its gentle undulations and the absence of any
significant hills or impassable rivers, had allowed the
Mongols to seize control of large areas of the Russian lands
during the thirteenth century and, after their suzerainty had
been overthrown, Russia’s geography presented few chal-
lenges to an expansionist princedom. Territorial expansion
became a persistent characteristic of the Muscovite and
Russian states, and over the coming centuries it was able to
grow with ease, taking control of the great expanses of the
Siberian landmass, conquering the Caucasus, and seizing
much of Central Asia. The defeat of Sweden by Peter the
Great at the start of the eighteenth century transformed
Russia into a great European power far removed from its
origins in the Muscovite principality. Imperial power became
a vital feature of the Russian state and maintaining and
expanding the empire required very significant military and
financial resources (Lieven 2000, 268–71). The priority of
the Russian state was to sustain its imperial and international
position: Russian wealth and prestige increasingly derived
from its vast empire and the state configured itself to focus
on this.
This was a difficult task for the Russian regime. By the
mid‐eighteenth century Russia covered more territory than
any other state on the globe, yet it remained sparsely popu-
lated. The severe climate that affected much of Russia meant
that Russian agriculture was precarious and the livelihood
that Russia’s farmers extracted from the land was unpredict-
able (Moon 1999, 120–33). Raw materials formed the bulk
of Russian trade with the wider world, with timber and furs
playing especially important roles. Industrialization came
late to the Russian empire, only really taking a hold of the
economy in the closing decade of the nineteenth century
(Crisp 1976, 5–54). The state’s potential for raising revenue
from its population was therefore limited. The weakness of
Russia’s economy, together with the empire’s sparse popula-
tion, presented significant challenges in levying taxation.
Until late in the nineteenth century, the Russian state relied
heavily on indirect taxation to sustain itself. This was easier
to collect than direct taxes, but rendered the state vulnera-
ble to the vagaries of demand by the Russian population.
The regime had to be rigorous and determined in order to
sustain its revenues and this required significant coercive
power. The Russian regime depended on its army, both to
maintain its empire and its international standing among the
great powers, but also to ensure that it could keep rebellion
in check at home. In 1881 Russia’s army comprised 844,000
men and the annual process of conscription required sig-
nificant resources to provide a regular supply of men to
fight. It was only in 1874 that the state felt able to move
away from a system of conscription for 25 years to service
for 6 years in the regular army, followed by a period in the
reserves (Fuller 2006, 542–6). Ensuring a steady supply of
 Long‐Term Causes of the Russian Revolution
men and money to maintain the Russian state’s imperial and
international ambitions provided the mainsprings for a
political structure that possessed the authority to impose its
will across Russian society.
The autocratic regime that developed in Russia from the
sixteenth century concentrated its authority in a single
­person – the monarch – and ensured that all power derived
from the ruler. Russia had no form of national legislative
assembly until 1906, and political parties were prohibited
until 1905. Until the last decade of the regime’s existence,
law was made by the monarch and there was no formal sys-
tem of checks and balances to constrain the power of the
sovereign. Monarchs who alienated Russia’s noble elite
could be deposed – as with Peter III in 1762 – or
­assassinated – Paul I was strangled in his own bedroom in
1801 – but Russian monarchs were essentially immune to
broad popular influence. In these circumstances, the bureau-
cracy that administered Russia was able to acquire substan-
tial autonomy and its overwhelmingly conservative ethos
sustained the apparatus of autocracy. The currents of politi-
cal thought unleashed by the Enlightenment found no prac-
tical outlet in Russia where, although Catherine II debated
politics with her closest associates, she never seriously con-
templated applying the principles of government by consent
to Russia (de Madariaga 1981, 139–83). The French revo-
lution of 1789 merely confirmed to Russia’s rulers that they
were correct in maintaining the principles of autocracy and
refusing to make any concessions to popular opinion. The
revolts and revolutions that convulsed western and central
Europe during the nineteenth century reinforced the
Russian regime’s commitment to autocracy, serving as a
warning to Russia’s conservative ideologues of the course
events could take if Russia proceeded down the path of
modernization. The Russian state imposed severe restric-
tions on its people: books and newspapers were censored,
associations and meetings were subject to firm control by
the government, and it was difficult for ordinary Russian
subjects to gain any sort of redress against the state (Waldron
2007, 117–35). Even after the legal reforms of the 1860s,
when trial by jury and an independent judiciary were intro-
duced, the state found ways to hedge the new system around
with restrictions and to maintain its arbitrary methods of
government. Russian provincial officials possessed very con-
siderable powers over the population under their control,
reflecting the authority of the monarch, and ordinary
Russians could easily be subjected to ‘administrative justice’
without any possibility of access to the court system.
The Russian autocracy’s instinct was to impose its author-
ity on its population as vigorously as it could, but the limita-
tions of its own bureaucratic capacity meant that there were
restrictions on its power. The great expanses of the expand-
ing Russian empire made communication difficult between
St. Petersburg and the provinces, while the state was eventu-
ally unable to remain immune from pressure to allow some
form of popular participation in the government of Russia’s
9
cities and provinces. The autocratic state had relied on its
nobility to maintain order in the countryside and had
allowed the gentry to form their own local corporate bodies,
with each provincial and district noble assembly headed by
an elected marshal of the nobility. The autonomy of these
noble organizations was limited, since the Russian nobility
were well aware that their authority was dependent on the
favor of the monarch and were unwilling to jeopardize their
privileged position by antagonizing the regime. In the
1860s, however, Tsar Alexander II established formal,
elected local government bodies, albeit on a very restricted
franchise. Russia’s towns and cities gained municipal coun-
cils, while their equivalent – zemstva – were set up in the
provinces and districts of most of European Russia. These
organizations were the preserve of the Russian social elite,
but they introduced the concept of elected representation
into the Russian state and, while the deeply conservative
Alexander III tried to limit their authority, the principle of
autocracy had been breached (Petrov 1994, 197–211).
Russia’s monarchs, however, remained convinced of the
necessity of autocratic rule for Russia. Successive Tsars
believed that they had been ordained to their position by
God and that they had a duty to pass on their domains to
their heirs undamaged and intact. As the tide of European
political thinking turned against absolutism during the
eighteenth century, Russia’s monarchs understood that it
was no longer sufficient simply to justify their rule by an
appeal to the importance of maintaining the status quo. The
Romanovs developed an intellectual rationale for their auto-
cratic regime, arguing that Russia could only be governed
by an absolute monarchy. The nature of the Russian lands,
they asserted, with their sparse population and harsh cli-
mate, made it difficult to maintain any sort of stable political
regime and thus only a system which could exercise untram-
meled power could sustain itself in the physical conditions
of Russia. Russia’s rulers also argued that the Russian people
were by nature anarchic and thus needed to be governed
firmly and without any concession to popular sentiment. In
1730, V.N. Tatishchev – a protégé of Peter the Great – argued
that ‘great and spacious states with many envious neighbors
could not be ruled by aristocracy or democracy, particularly
where the people is insufficiently enlightened by education
and keeps the law through terror, and not from good con-
duct, or knowledge of good and evil. Spain, France, Russia,
and since olden days Turkey, Persia, India, China are great
states, and cannot be governed otherwise than by autocracy’
(Dukes 2015, 29). The Russian regime combined its justifi-
cation of autocratic power with its support for the Orthodox
Church, using the church’s apparatus and clergy to proclaim
the message of obedience to the state and the necessity of
submitting to lawful authority. These views were formally
articulated during the 1830s by Count Sergei Uvarov, the
Minister of Education, and his ideas of ‘Official Nationality’
acted as the lodestone for the Russian regime until his
downfall in 1917.
10 Peter Waldron
At the same time, Russia’s monarchs sought to identify
themselves with the Russian population and to demonstrate
that, despite the social gulf that existed between the sover-
eign and ordinary Russians, the Russian people could be
confident that the Tsar had their best interests at heart.
Russia’s monarchs cultivated a patriarchal image, represent-
ing themselves as the ‘little father’ of their people, and this
helped to engender a popular monarchism among many
Russians (Field 1989, 1–26). The Tsar was viewed as a figure
who stood above the day to day activities of government,
and this helped the autocratic regime to succeed in sustain-
ing its credibility among the state’s populace. The monarchy
was able to disassociate itself from the often harsh and arbi-
trary actions of government officials and to maintain an
unexpected degree of loyalty from much of the Russian pop-
ulation who continued to revere the ‘little father’ of the sov-
ereign. This image of the monarch, connected to the people
of the empire by religion and nationhood, was able to give
the Russian state a degree of stability and to reduce the likeli-
hood of revolt (Wortman 2000, 525–7). At the same time,
however, it suggested a stagnant and deeply conservative
society, based on an unchanging polity.
The ambivalent relationship between Russia and the rest
of the world presented the state with significant challenges.
Formal contact with western Europe had begun during the
sixteenth century, as both merchants and formal envoys
found their way to Moscow from abroad. The riches of
Russia’s natural environment were a powerful magnet for
stimulating trade with Europe, with fur and timber proving
especially lucrative. Over the following century Russia grad-
ually expanded its power on its western borders, aided by
the decline of Poland–Lithuania. The turning point in
Russian attitudes to the west came with the reign of Peter I
at the end of the seventeenth century. Peter believed that
Russia could become both a military and economic power
in Europe and he was prepared to take practical steps to
achieve this. The young Tsar traveled to western Europe,
spending almost a year in Britain and the Netherlands in the
late 1690s, and returned to Russia filled with ideas about
how Russia could learn from western industry and technol-
ogy. Peter created a Russian navy from scratch, and military
and naval men from the west were instrumental in improv-
ing Russia’s armed forces. At the same time, the Tsar was
well aware that military power required an industrial base to
produce the weaponry and equipment needed by modern
armies and navies, and he sought to improve Russia’s weak
industrial base by encouraging the development of indus-
tries that could contribute particularly to military needs.
Peter’s outlook was revolutionary: he was convinced that
Russia could only prosper if it followed western m­ odels – and
this required cultural change from Russians themselves. In a
symbolic move, Peter ordered his nobles to shave off their
beards and thus cast off one of the external features that dif-
ferentiated Russian men from their western contemporaries.
Peter himself was clean‐shaven and it was only in 1881 that
a bearded monarch – Alexander III – again occupied the
Russian throne.
Peter was determined to put his developments to practical
use and Russia went to war with Sweden in the first decade
of the eighteenth century, delivering a severe drubbing to
the forces of Charles XII at the battle of Poltava in 1709 and
establishing Russia as a significant power in northern Europe
(Hughes 2008, 55–81). The legacy of Peter the Great
haunted the Tsarist state for the rest of its existence and
introduced a profound ambivalence into Russia’s identity.
While Peter had lauded European economic and military
models of development, the way in which Europe’s political
structures were changing during the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries discomforted the Russian regime. The rev-
olutionary cataclysm that destroyed the French monarchy
after 1789 and the waves of revolt and revolution that swept
across much of Europe in the century after the French revo-
lution were, for many Russians, proof that Russia should
stand apart from European models of development and,
instead, rely on its own traditions and heritage to advance.
The rationale for monarchs and the governing elite to stand
against the growing tide of republicanism and democracy
was obvious, and for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries Russia was ruled by monarchs who were deter-
mined to stand firm against the tide of modern social and
political ideas and movements that were transforming much
of Europe. Nicholas I gained the soubriquet of the ‘gen-
darme of Europe’ for his resistance to rebellion and his will-
ingness to put down revolt, and it was only Alexander II
who was prepared to make real reforms to Russian society
during the 1860s. The ‘Great Reforms’ that were imple-
mented during the 1860s and 1870s introduced an ambiva-
lence into Russian government and society. New local
government and judicial institutions were able to operate
with a significant degree of autonomy from the regime, and
the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 struck at one of the
foundations of the Russian state, yet the autocracy itself
remained convinced of its own virtues and utility for Russia.
An appeal to Russian tradition was also part of the ideas of
radical politicians during the nineteenth century. The early
Marxists, such as Georgii Plekhanov, who argued against the
conservative Romanov regime did want to promote indus-
trial revolution along western lines and to reshape Russian
society to reflect the contours of the states in the west. Many
Russians, however, argued for the exceptional nature of
Russia and believed that social and economic change should
be based on Russia’s own tradition as an agrarian society and
economy. The Russian Populists that emerged during the
second half of the nineteenth century represented appar-
ently contradictory opinions. They were fiercely opposed to
the oppressive Tsarist regime and believed that revolution
was needed to overthrow the Romanov autocracy, but the
vision that the Populists advanced for the new society that
would supplant the Tsarist order was for a peasant‐based
socialism, rather than for full‐blown industrial revolution on
 Long‐Term Causes of the Russian Revolution
the British or German model (Venturi 1960, 33–5). The
legacy of Peter the Great found its expression in many dif-
ferent parts of Russian society and thinking. Educated
Russians spoke French and were proud of their knowledge
of European ideas and culture, while the Tsarist state
attempted to censor books and journals imported from
Europe that contained writing that they believed would
threaten the Russian regime. Successive Russian monarchs
wanted Russia to play a part on the European stage as a
great power, and tried to emulate the military prowess of
their European neighbors, but – until 1905 – they were
never prepared to acknowledge the aspirations of their peo-
ple for some form of political representation. The Slavophile
currents of thought that stressed Russia’s uniqueness and its
separate identity were in conflict with the Petrine legacy that
saw Russia’s destiny as closely bound up with the European
model of social and economic development. At times, the
Russian state appeared to accept the need to follow Europe:
Alexander II’s decision to emancipate Russia’s serfs in the
1860s was significantly motivated by the desire to escape the
stigma of ‘backwardness’ that serfdom symbolized, in com-
parison to the societies of western Europe (Moon 2001,
56–69). In the 1890s, the economic policy pursued by
Sergei Witte, the ambitious Minister of Finance, involved
attracting foreign investment and foreign business to Russia,
tying the Russian economy into the international economic
system (Wcislo 2011, 153–69). In 1894 a formal political
alliance with republican France, the antithesis of the auto-
cratic Russian monarchy, appeared to cement Russia’s inte-
gration into the mainstream of European thinking. But the
Russian regime drew the line at domestic political change.
In 1905, when revolt seized hold of Russia, Nicholas II had
to be forced into making political reforms and, as soon as
order was restored, his regime sought to claw back the con-
cessions it had made and to reimpose traditional autocratic
government (Ascher 1992, 337–58).
This fundamental ambivalence about Russian identity and
Russia’s relationship with the wider world provided fracture
lines that divided both the state and wider society. The fierce
debates about the path of Russian development were not
simply reflected in abstract discussion, but had a direct
impact on the lives of ordinary Russians. The Tsarist state
recognized the dangers to its own existence that were posed
by the outside world: the popular revolts that had convulsed
Europe in the wake of the French revolution of 1789
appeared to be a warning of the dangers that came with
modernization and the Russian state consistently tried to
limit the influence of outside ideas on its population.
Publications were censored and there were significant
restrictions on the establishment of associations and groups
and on holding any sort of public meeting. The Russian
regime limited the civil rights of its people, believing that
the interests of the state took precedence over individual
liberty (Butler 1989, 1–12). When rebellion did break out,
the regime was ruthless in suppressing it: the Pugachev
11
revolt in the 1770s ended with the execution of its leader
and severe reprisals against the rebellion’s participants. After
the Decembrist revolt in 1825, its five leaders were hanged
and others sent to exile in Siberia for long periods. In 1905
and 1906 squadrons of cossack troops were sent into the
countryside to put down revolts with great force.
The state was, however, unable to prevent ideas percolat-
ing across the Russian border and it could not isolate Russia
from wider currents of thought, any more than it could stop
Russians becoming aware of events taking place in the wider
world. While Catherine II tried to restrict discussion of the
ideas of the Enlightenment to a small number of the Russian
social elite, growing literacy and the pressure for a better
educated society made it impossible to prevent a wider dis-
semination of ideas across Russian society. The moves
toward westernization that Peter the Great had promoted
came to a stuttering halt later in the eighteenth century as
Russia’s social structures remained unreformed, with serf-
dom fashioning the rural world for both the peasants and
nobility. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, a
growing middle class and a developing urban working class
were both becoming infused with ideas from outside Russia.
Political liberalism and ideas about constitutional govern-
ment began to permeate the Russian educated population,
while the nascent working class was fertile ground for
Marxism. The complexity of the relationship between Russia
and Europe produced paradoxical results: economic mod-
ernization was essential if Russia was to continue to be a
great military power, but the social consequences of indus-
trial change were unwelcome to the Russian state. Liberal
ideas about constitutional government and popular repre-
sentation appealed to many of the prosperous Russian busi-
ness and professional classes, but the intransigence of the
Tsarist regime stimulated frustration among these groups
and prompted some of them to adopt more radical political
positions. Even during the First World War, when Russia
was faced with its most severe crisis, the Tsarist state was
deeply reluctant to allow voluntary and professional groups
real access to power. As the war went on, the regime was
almost more fearful of the domestic political threat posed by
liberal political groups than of the German troops that were
marching across its territory.
The cleavages in Russian society ran deep. The great
majority of the Russian population were peasant farmers,
living an often precarious existence. The extremities of the
Russian climate made for a short growing season and this,
together with poor soils in much of northern and eastern
Russia, made agriculture a risky business. Until the 1860s,
most Russian peasants were serfs and the property of either
noble landlords or the state itself. Serfdom had a pernicious
influence on Russian society, since it deprived the serfs
themselves of any rights as individuals and allowed serf own-
ers to treat their serfs simply as items of property. While
there were examples of nobles who treated their serfs well,
for many Russians the experience was one of great poverty
12 Peter Waldron
and grinding humiliation (Hoch 1968, 160–86). Serfdom
provided the state with a method of maintaining order in
the countryside, without having itself to go to the expense
and complexity of maintaining a police force and army in
every part of Russia, since the noble serf owners performed
the function themselves. By the middle of the nineteenth
century, however, serfdom was deeply controversial since it
was identified as the touchstone for Russia’s perceived back-
wardness in comparison to western Europe. ‘Serfdom,’
wrote the liberal Konstantin Kavelin, ‘is the stumbling‐block
to all success and development in Russia’ and the mere exist-
ence of serfdom symbolized the intellectual and cultural
gulf that separated Russia from the other great powers,
while it was also argued that serfdom inhibited the growth
of the Russian economy and prevented both agrarian inno-
vation and the development of a free labor market that
would contribute to industrial growth (Kavelin 1898, 33).
The decision to emancipate the serfs was taken in the wake
of Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war, but the discussions
inside the government about the way in which it should be
implemented reveal the continuing fears harbored by many
of Russia’s elite about the consequences of making such a
radical reform. Powerful arguments were advanced that the
serfs should be freed, but not provided with land to work
on: noble interests, it was argued, should take precedence.
The prospect of a landless rural proletariat, however, wor-
ried Russia’s rulers deeply and they were prepared to over-
ride noble objections so that the eventual 1861 emancipation
settlement that freed the serfs did allow for them to receive
an allotment of land (Emmons 1968, 209–11). This even-
tual settlement was not, however, wholly favorable to the
peasantry. The state could not itself afford to compensate
the nobility for the land which was transferred to the newly
freed peasantry, and thus the peasants themselves were sad-
dled with making annual redemption payments for their
land for a period of 49 years. This burden was deeply
resented by Russia’s peasant farmers and it ensured that they
maintained a simmering discontent about the way in which
emancipation had been enacted for decades after 1861. The
land question lay at the heart of Russian politics and it rep-
resented the greatest area of discord between the regime
and its rural population.
Making the transition from serfdom was difficult both for
the former serfs and for their owners. Many Russian farmers
believed that they had been given short shrift when land was
distributed to them as part of the emancipation settlement,
and they found it a demanding task to farm efficiently. This
was not helped by the persistence of the traditional com-
munal structures of Russian agriculture: the collective ethos
that dominated the countryside provided advantages to
peasant farmers by allowing self‐regulation of the basic ele-
ments of their lives through the village commune, but it did
bind peasants to collective decisions about farming and con-
strained innovation. Russian farmers found ways of adapting
to the communal system and Russian agriculture did develop
after emancipation (Leonard 2011, 132–40). During the
second part of the nineteenth century, there was a slow pro-
cess of differentiation among Russian peasant farmers, as
some were able to buy or rent additional land while other
farmers were forced out of agriculture and had to seek other
sources of work and income. Russian agriculture was under
pressure as the population grew and more Russians moved
to work in cities, meaning that, even with improved tech-
nology, farmers had to work hard to produce enough grain
to feed the empire. It took only episodes of poor weather to
disrupt an already finely balanced agricultural system and, as
in the Volga region in the early 1890s, produce famine
(Wheatcroft 1991, 130–6). Russia’s noble landowners also
found the process of adapting to a world without serfdom
to be difficult and disruptive. Without the free labor of serfs,
many estate owners discovered that farming was an unre-
warding business and in the decades after 1861 the nobility
gradually divested itself of landholdings, so that by 1900
they held only 60 percent of their pre‐emancipation land.
Russia’s nobility too had to search for new ways to earn a
living: some chose to enter Russia’s growing professions
while others tried the new world of industry or business. For
some nobles, however, the changing rural world was diffi-
cult to adapt to, and the purposeless lives that Chekhov
depicted in his plays were not uncommon on decaying
noble estates across the Russian countryside. The loss of
economic power by the nobility in the rural world was
accompanied by a loosening of the social and political
­control that they had been able to exert over the peasant
population. Although Alexander III instituted land
­
­captains – minor rural officials – in 1889 to try to reassert
authority in the countryside, these men were never able to
acquire the same power as the landed nobility and were
widely despised by the peasantry (Pearson 1989, 204–9).
The changes wrought by emancipation were slow to develop
and the tens of millions of people living in the Russian coun-
tryside found their lives changing gradually and at an une-
ven pace in the second half of the nineteenth century. But
for a population that was accustomed to stability, the
changes to both the economic and social structures of the
rural world were disruptive and far‐reaching.
The process of rural change was accompanied by concen-
trated and rapid urbanization in Russia. The need to main-
tain a powerful army and navy was a consistent priority for
the Russian state, but in the 1890s Sergei Witte, the ambi-
tious Minister of Finance, argued that the continuing weak-
ness of the agrarian sector made it imperative for Russia to
embark on a much more concerted program of industri-
alization and his macroeconomic policy was designed to
promote rapid industrial revolution. There had been persis-
tent migration – often seasonal – from countryside to city
since the 1860s as emancipated peasant men sought work to
enhance their incomes. This process accelerated in the last
decade of the nineteenth century, and Russia’s largest cities
expanded very quickly (Bradley 1985, 133–41). By 1900
 Long‐Term Causes of the Russian Revolution
Moscow and St. Petersburg both had populations of more
than one million and were among the ten largest cities in
Europe, while Warsaw, Odessa, Lodz, and Riga each had
populations of more than 250,000. Much of the focus in
the late nineteenth century was on mining and metallurgical
industries, as Russia sought to construct an industrial base,
and this helped to concentrate Russia’s developing working
class in large industrial enterprises. The social impact of
industrialization in Russia mirrored the experience of other
newly industrializing societies: living conditions for the
new urban population of Russia were frequently hard and
unpleasant. Wages were low and factory owners expected
their workers to work long hours in what were often
unhealthy and dangerous environments. Housing conditions
were cramped and insanitary, as Russia’s cities could not
cope with the large numbers of new migrants from the coun-
tryside. Few Russian cities had satisfactory sewage systems by
the end of the nineteenth century and outbreaks of infec-
tious disease were common, with cholera claiming the lives
of more than 100,000 people across the empire in 1910.
The process of urbanization and industrialization was
deeply disruptive to existing social structures: economic
necessity forced many men to leave their familiar village
environments and their families and threw them into the
difficult world of industrial labor with its uncertainties and
very different rhythms from farming life. Russia’s late indus-
trialization, however, gave a different character to its devel-
oping working class. By the late nineteenth century, socialist
ideas had been clearly articulated and were a significant ele-
ment in provoking discontent across Europe. The new
Russian working class was able to take immediate advantage
of ideas that provided them with an intellectual rationale for
opposing a political regime that they saw as oppressive and
responsible for the harsh lives that they endured. The first
explicitly Marxist Russian political group was formed cov-
ertly in 1883 and socialist parties were able to gain adher-
ents among the working populations of Russia’s biggest
cities. The imperial capital, St. Petersburg, contained a very
large population of working people, many of whom were
employed in the demanding shipbuilding, armaments, and
metallurgical industries and they proved to be especially
enthusiastic recruits to the labor movement (Bonnell 1983,
73–103). The ‘many‐thousand human swarm shuffling in
the morning to the many‐chimneyed factories’ that Andrei
Bely described in his novel Petersburg was to pose a potent
threat to the empire’s social elite in its capital city (Bely
1978, 11).
St. Petersburg and Russia’s other large cities were also the
focus for a growing and diverse middle class. The develop-
ment of Russian business, along with the gradual exodus of
gentry from the countryside, brought about significant
growth in the professions and commerce. The law, banking,
medicine, and teaching all became important during the
second half of the nineteenth century and attracted well‐­
qualified people who had benefitted from Russia’s improving
13
education system to their ranks. Some of these professional
groups were concentrated in Russia’s biggest cities, but
many people also worked in the countryside and in small
towns. The zemstva and city councils all employed substan-
tial numbers of professional people including agronomists,
teachers, and medical assistants who were in regular contact
with Russia’s farmers (Timberlake 1991, 169–77). Education
was also being very gradually extended across Russia and the
first national census taken in 1897 showed that just over 20
percent of the population was literate. This, however, con-
cealed very wide differences between groups of Russians;
young men living in the cities had the highest rates of liter-
acy, while rural women were the least likely to be able to
read and write (Brooks 1985, 4–22). Change was coming to
Russian society as elements of Russia’s huge population
were becoming independent and were acquiring an auton-
omy from the state. These new groups introduced an
instability to Russian society: the traditional social structures
dominated by an elite of landed nobility and tens of millions
of peasant farmers were being subverted as the rural world
underwent profound change in the wake of emancipation
and industry and business came to play a more important
part in Russia. The push for rapid industrial growth sup-
ported by Witte during the 1890s was instrumental in accel-
erating the rate of change in Russian society. Traditional
structures were, however, often resistant to change and the
Russian nobility found its political position given reinforce-
ment in the deeply conservative atmosphere that permeated
the autocracy after 1881.
The multi‐national empire that Russia had acquired was
vulnerable to the nationalist ideas that developed in Europe
during the nineteenth century. War had given Russia posses-
sions in Europe, and in Central Asia Russia’s troops met
with only limited resistance as they pushed forward the
empire’s boundaries during the 1860s and 1870s.
While imperial growth gave Russia considerable prestige,
greater economic strength and increased its status as a Great
Power, Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Estonians, and many others
came to resent rule from St. Petersburg and became increas-
ingly fractious subjects of the Tsar. The ethnic, linguistic,
and religious diversity of the empire provided a formidable
set of problems for its rulers (Kappeler 2001, 329–41).
The Russian regime barely succeeded in establishing firm
control over the Caucasus, and it faced continual difficulties
as it tried to turn its national minorities into loyal subjects.
During the 1880s and 1890s, Alexander III’s regime sought
to ‘Russify’ the empire’s nationalities by attempting to
impose the Russian language and the Orthodox religion
across the empire, but the state was never able to construct
a single imperial identity that was accepted by a majority of
its subjects. Russia’s borderlands in both Europe and Asia
were continual sources of discontent and the multi‐national
empire was not immune from the nationalist stresses that
were consuming Europe as modernization advanced.
Russia’s imperial tensions were exacerbated by a foreign
14 Peter Waldron
policy that involved Russia in costly wars. Both Peter the
Great and Catherine the Great had been able to expand
Russia’s power through war, and Alexander I was part of the
alliance that put an end to Napoleon’s power, but Russia
proved unable to sustain its international military success.
Defeats in the Crimea in the 1850s and by Japan in 1904–5
showed the fragility of Russian military and imperial power
(Schimmelpennick van der Oye 2006, 559–69).
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia was
recognizably modernizing. The evident success of western
states, both militarily and in their wider economic accom-
plishments, was undeniable. Russia’s rulers understood that
they had to match their rivals’ industrial might if they were
to be able to sustain their position among the Great Powers.
Economic progress could not, however, be divorced from
social change and some of the Tsarist state’s political elite
questioned whether the social consequences of industriali-
zation were worth the economic advantages that it brought.
The dilemma that had been bequeathed to Russia by Peter
the Great continued to resonate: by 1900 it was clear that,
for Russia’s western competitors, an unavoidable conse-
quence of industrial power was pressure from their evolving
societies for political change. The Tsarist state, however, was
determined to resist every call for political reform. Alexander
II’s forays into reform in the 1860s were regarded by his
successors as deeply unwise and Russia’s two final
Tsars – Alexander III and Nicholas II – were adamant that
economic change need not be accompanied by any reduc-
tion in their autocratic power. The traditional Russian estab-
lishment attempted to draw distinctions between elements
of Peter the Great’s legacy: while they wanted to maintain
Russian military might, they did not believe that political
modernization was an inevitable concomitant of the eco-
nomic progress needed to sustain Russian power. The
Russian state refused to countenance any form of popular
engagement in national government, repeatedly rejecting
calls from zemstvo and city council members for their politi-
cal experience to be utilized on a national scale. Russia’s
provincial and city politicians were far from being outspo-
ken radicals: most of them had deep roots in the noble social
elite of the empire and had an innate understanding of the
dynamics of Russian society. Their loyalty to the Tsarist
regime was, however, increasingly tested as Alexander III
and Nicholas II both rejected even the mildest calls for
political reform.
At the same time, the web of social relationships that
had sustained stability across the empire was gradually
loosening, as Russia’s farmers emerged from the con-
straints of serfdom and Russia’s great cities absorbed mil-
lions of migrants from the countryside. The bonds that
had bound Russians to their masters – whether in the vil-
lages or in far-away St. Petersburg – were disintegrating
and were not being replaced with new structures to ensure
the continuing political loyalty of its subjects. State and
people were gradually being pulled apart from each other,
and the regime’s efforts to enhance its authority by its
emphasis on history and tradition proved to be ineffec-
tive. During the Romanov tercentenary celebrations in
1913 the image of the Tsar as the historical embodiment
of Russia reinforced the idea of the regime as archaic and
anachronistic. The authority of the Tsarist state became
increasingly brittle during the nineteenth century: censor-
ship, emergency powers, and the arbitrary exercise of
authority became the hallmarks of the Romanov regime.
The apparent power of the Russian state was increasingly,
however, simply a veneer. The roots of the much‐feared
apparatus of Tsarist oppression in Russian society were
withering, while the state itself was encouraging a process
of economic and social change that was giving birth to
new and vocal challenges to authority. The last Romanovs
believed that they need not engage with the modern
world. Their continued assertion that Russia could stand
immune from wider currents of ideas and could sustain a
conservative nationalism in the face of modernity was to
prove fatal. The Russian state’s carapace of authoritarian
rule had increasingly little substance to it.
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Times of Sergei Witte, 1849–1915. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Wheatcroft, Stephen G. 1991. ‘Crises and the Condition of the
Peasantry in Late Imperial Russia.’ In Peasant Economy, Culture
and Politics of European Russia, 1800–1921, edited by Esther
Kingston‐Mann and Timothy Mixter, 128–72. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Wortman, Richard S. 2000. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in
Russian Monarchy, vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
 Chapter Two
The First Russian Revolution, 1890–1914
Frank Wcislo
Many contemporaries of the 1917 revolution had lived
through and still remembered the searing tumult that had
convulsed the empire during the years 1905–7. Tectonic
shifts in society, economy, and culture; war and military
defeat undermining monarchical legitimacy; institutional
restructuring of government and politics; and social
upheaval sweeping all classes of the imperial population:
some in 1917 certainly wondered whether history was
repeating itself. Especially given the role historians accord to
the experiential knowledge of memory, what they often call
the first Russian revolution and date to the years 1905–7
requires a chronology of greater duration to understand its
causes and consequences. The generational experience of
1890–1914, the political, socio‐economic, and cultural
transformations it witnessed, and the revolutionary upheaval
of 1905–7 around which it pivoted assumes historiographi-
cal significance in the literature of Russian history because
together these events did constitute the prehistory, and thus
fundamentally the experience, of the larger revolutionary
crisis that began with the onset of the Great War in 1914.1
The State and the Parties
The Russian Empire was a unitary state, welded together
through a dynastic monarchy and administered by a minis-
terial‐bureaucratic police state of some 900,0000 civil serv-
ants.2 Formally, the Russian sovereign was an autocrat with
unlimited powers. In political fact, his state stoutly repudi-
ated the very idea of popular sovereignty, and the elected
parliamentary institutions that throughout Europe gave it
some form of voice. The Russian state can be regarded, as
many historians of the era did, as an independent historical
actor not only impacting but also giving reality to the ideas
of polity and national economy that shaped the public
A Companion to the Russian Revolution, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Orlovsky.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
­ iscourse and cultural identities of the day.3 Its interests as
d
the new century dawned were varied, interconnected, and
often worked at cross‐purposes with each other. They can
be grouped together under three, generally acknowledged
rubrics.
First, following the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and
especially from the 1880s onward, the imperial state abetted
a sweeping program of industrial modernization to bolster
its own power. Through its fiscal, financial, monetary, and
regulatory mechanisms, the state ‘sponsored’ – invested in,
subsidized, and sometimes directly owned and operated – an
expanding corporate‐state industrial infrastructure, espe-
cially concentrated in railroads, road and water transporta-
tion, banking and finance, technical education, domestic
and international commerce, and heavy industry. Buttressed
by the conversion of the ruble currency to the gold standard
in 1896, such expansive state involvement attracted, as it
was designed to do, foreign capital investment in the
empire’s rich natural resources and cheap labor, which fur-
ther enhanced Russian ‘commercial‐industrial develop-
ment.’ It also created a financial co‐dependency between
republican France, the most represented among the
European powers in tsarist capital markets, and the Russian
Empire, its military ally since 1896.4
Encouraging industrial capitalism, however, subjected the
state to its risks, and this accentuated a second imperative:
the assurance of public order and popular welfare through-
out a realm subject to rapid and unpredictable socio‐­
economic transformation. As historians have documented
copiously, new classes characteristic of the age, and tradi-
tional elites challenged by it, were changing the cultural and
socio‐economic landscapes of urban and rural life in the
long nineteenth century. An expanding industrial working
class of more than 2 million people, and small professional,
technical, and artistic ‘middling classes,’ were transforming
18 Frank Wcislo
the empire’s expanding large cities and provincial towns,
where new discourses of cultural and political experimenta-
tion made themselves heard, in arenas as disparate as the
theater, the professional association, the mass‐market news-
paper, the university lecture hall, and the illegal factory
strike meeting.5 The state used its administrative and fiscal
organs to regulate, utilize, police, and spy upon these devel-
opments. Industrial modernity manifested itself in the coun-
tryside as well. The demographic revolution that doubled
the size of the empire’s population in the second half of the
nineteenth century, and the growing commercialization and
capitalization of a labor‐intensive, conflict‐ridden rural capi-
talism, signaled this shift. So too did the post‐emancipation
decline of the hereditary landowning nobility (dvorianstvo).
An elite whose wealth was rooted in agricultural land had
seen its ranks sell over two‐thirds of their 1861 acreage by
1914. Still retaining title to some 40 percent of all arable
land in European Russia, however, it remained a powerful
economic and cultural agrarian presence. Its landed estates
supplied local peasantries surrounding them rentable land,
opportunities for labor and cash income, and what nobles at
least considered their enlightened and benevolent patron-
age. Especially from the 1880s onward, the nobility’s social
and political standing as ‘the first estate (soslovie) of the
realm’ provided a focus for conservative critics of industrial
modernity. They termed the preservation of an agrarian
society resting on hierarchy, decorum, public order, and
their private property to be an interest of state. The state
serviced this definition of order and welfare as well.
Concentrated in provincial capitals and county (uezd) seats,
its domestic administrative organs obliged a segregated
structure of local peasant self‐administration (soslovnaia
obosoblennost’ krest’ian) to patrol the myriad public, fiscal,
criminal regulations governing their villages, as well as the
communal arable and redemption debt that had been set-
tled upon them to finance the 1861 emancipation. Behind
these structures stood the power of standing army garrisons,
and the so‐called Extraordinary Statutes, which since 1882
had provided the state legal means to suspend the rule of
law in favor of administrative and military fiat.6
In an age of European imperialism and the challenges
nationalism posed to it, the third concern of the tsarist state
was its international standing as a European great power.
Encompassing a Eurasian population fractured into ethnic,
linguistic, and confessional communities, the Russian
Empire (rossisskaia imperiia) was a unitary state with institu-
tional pillars that favored Russian ethnic hegemony. An offi-
cial imperial nationalism assigned Russian ethnicity primacy,
manifested in the person and rituals of monarchy, bureau-
cratic and military elites, the language of government and
culture, the Russian Orthodox state religion, and even the
presumed natural commonality, some argued, that under
Russian leadership existed among all Slavic peoples. Some in
government and society even included in these cultural
assumptions the expanding individual wealth being created
by Russian industrial capitalism. Empire, and imperial
wealth, they argued, could counter the alluring visions of
sovereignty and citizenship that nationalism offered the
large non‐Russian communities of the empire. A majority
view, however, saw the ‘borderlands’ as sources of instabil-
ity, because rival states could foment nationalist sentiments
among minority communities in order to subvert internal
order. Such was Germany in Poland, Lithuania, and the
Baltic provinces, or Austria‐Hungary in Ukraine, or the
Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus and Central Asia. The
predominant government response to such perceived chal-
lenges was ‘russification,’ a set of administrative, cultural,
linguistic, and police policies designed to accelerate the cul-
tural assimilation of national minorities into Russian impe-
rial culture. Those ethnic minorities affected by it as often
regarded this as chauvinistic nationalism run amuck.
Increasingly so from the 1880s onward, the police state
discriminated against displays of national culture in lan-
guage, religion, literature and the arts, education, and espe-
cially politics.7
Such was the state. As to the parties, the same subterra-
nean societal transformations were impacting, in places cre-
ating, an imperial civic politics. Historians often overplay
the image of a largely agrarian Russia, its population barely
two generations removed from serfdom and still divided
into semi‐medieval official estates (sosloviia) and other legal
categories (sostoianiia) that ascribed social standing and
political obligation. These were important markers of iden-
tity, to be sure, but late imperial society, at the same time,
was an increasingly modern, Victorian world whose topog-
raphy objectively suggested emerging new political realities.
The political ideologies spawned by the French
Revolution – liberalism, socialism, nationalism, populism,
and conservatism – always had influenced Russian intellec-
tual thought, but all of them, given that they ultimately
were explanatory and predictive of the unresolved societal
transformation the empire then was experiencing, did so
decisively in the two decades prior to 1905. When, as was
the case in the Russian Empire, public advocacy of popular
sovereignty was still subject to censorship, a parliamentary
or national politics could not develop in a normative f­ ashion.
What evolved instead was a proto‐politics. Constituencies,
parties, and leaders all were nascent; the lines dividing one
ideology from another inchoate; and the tactics to mobilize
organizations and movements behind any one ideological
perspective fluid and opportunistic. Typically, historians
trace the emergence of three proto‐political variants – social
democratic, populist, and liberal – before and immediately
after the turn of the century. All were influenced by pan‐
European ideologies. All three sought to appeal broadly
across the perceived interests of classes and groups, while
targeting a core of the population in whose name each
spoke – workers for social democrats, peasants and ‘toiling
masses’ for socialist‐revolutionaries, and propertied citizens
for liberals. Critical to each was the impact of the traditions
 The First Russian Revolution, 1890–1914
of the nineteenth‐century Russian intelligentsia upon the
formation of leadership cadres, who found in the encounter
with predictive social science, especially Marxist political
economy, teleological paradigms that made inevitable a
truly public, mass, imperial civic life powerful enough even-
tually to displace the hegemony of the autocratic state. All
three, not coincidentally, saw the underground newspaper
as a crucial tactical and strategic instrument of political lead-
ership, organization, and mobilization.8
Of the three, chronologically the first to emerge was a
genuine European socialist party, betokening Marxism’s sig-
nificant influence in Russian intellectual life by the turn of
the century. The Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party
(RSDRP) formed initially in 1898 at a secret party congress
in Minsk. The leading adherents of Russian socialism made
their home in this party – Georgii Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod,
Iulii Martov, Vladimir (Lenin) Ulianov, Alexander Potresov,
and Vera Zasulich. By 1904, its party platform called for a
democratic republic created by a constituent assembly
elected on the basis of the so‐called ‘four‐tail’ suffrage of
universal, equal, direct, and secret elections for all men and
women, aged 20 or older. It advocated the abolition of all
estates (sosloviia), the equality of all citizens, an array of per-
sonal freedoms (person, dwelling, religion, speech, press,
assembly, union, and strike), and the secularization of civic
life via the separation of church and state. Its legislative
goals addressed the perceived needs of the empire’s majority
population of working classes and peasantry: a progressive
income tax; comprehensive workplace legislation that
included an eight‐hour day and forty‐two-hour week; the
elimination and compensation of redemption payments;
and the confiscation and sale to ‘land‐hungry’ peasants of
church, state, and crown lands. The right of national self‐
determination was guaranteed, however vaguely, to all
nations in the empire.9
What of socialism, an ideology that profoundly influenced
both European and Russian intellectual life in this era? Its
ideological tenets, rooted in Marx’s sociological systems‐
analysis of industrial capitalism, rendered Russia the least
likely European country to become socialist, given her still
relatively small industrial economy and working classes.
Even more problematic was the combination of autocratic
state, which blockaded any hint of a parliamentary politics,
with an historically weak bourgeoisie, which was presumably
at best indifferent to the political interests of labor, depend-
ent upon state largesse, and thus as likely to abort as birth
the fully democratic parliamentary republic that was social-
ism’s essential precondition. Russia plainly was not England,
France, or even semi‐parliamentary Germany. How in
Russia could socialists be the leaders of an empire‐wide
political opposition to autocracy powerful enough to over-
throw it? All agreed to a tactical sleight of hand and argued
that revolution in Russia was a two‐stage process, the first of
which necessarily destroyed tsarist absolutism and inaugu-
rated the era of a democratic republic that would open a
19
second stage of building socialism. Both contemporaries
and historians have noted the voluntarism at the heart of
Russian social democracy. To accelerate, even force the flow
of history was an assumption that allowed the party to build
a party program resting on a working-class, socialist politics
as the mobilizing center of an all‐nation civic movement
against autocracy, the ‘hegemony of the proletariat in the
bourgeoisie revolution’ as the slogan had it. How quickly
the second stage of building a socialist polity would come to
fruition – and whether this would be achieved by evolution-
ary or revolutionary means – famously split the party at its II
Congress in Brussels in 1903.
Lenin, then a 33-year-old Marxist radical only recently
escaped from Siberian exile, had authored his well‐known
polemic, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our
Movement, the previous year. In it, he vituperated against
the reformist, ‘trade‐unionist,’ and parliamentary social
democracy of Germany, which he viewed as incompatible
with conditions of tsarist police oppression, a weak Russian
capitalist class compromised by its incestuous relationships
with the state, and the dissipated revolutionary conscious-
ness of Russian workers motivated solely in such conditions
by localized concerns for wages and shop‐floor conditions.
Such particularism, Lenin adroitly understood, made any
kind of empire‐wide political opposition difficult, much less
a labor movement powerful and uncompromising enough
to mobilize both the class and the all‐nation movement it
would spark. Only a centralized, underground, profes-
sional organization – Lenin’s revolutionary party – could
impart to such workers a revolutionary working‐class
­consciousness, in which the interests of the class, and the
intellectuals who constructed their views of it, were already
inextricably intertwined. Lenin maligned what would
become an ever louder critique of his position, namely that
the drive to impose consciousness from above rather than
encourage it from below through the very local interests
and organizations he sought to overcome dangerously
mimicked the absolutism he strove to overthrow.
Nevertheless, at the 1903 party congress, indicatively
enough on the question of the composition of the editorial
board of the party’s newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), Lenin
used rules of order to induce his majority opponents to
walk out of the proceedings and then declared his minority
position to be the majority. Thus was first born a distinc-
tion in the RSDRP between revolutionary Bolsheviks
(Majorityites) and evolutionary Mensheviks (Minorityites)
that eventually spawned two very different ideological
visions of Russian social democracy.10
The second proto‐party developed from populism,
Russia’s oldest nineteenth‐century intellectual tradition.
Intellectual historians have detailed the emergence of a
radical populist ideology in the half‐century before and
after the 1861 abolition of serfdom. It was rooted in the
belief, first developed by Slavophile thinkers, that the peas-
ant land commune was an indigenous foundation for
20 Frank Wcislo
Russian historical development different from that of the
west. If achieving freedom from autocracy through the
peasant village was the end, however, the long search for
means to achieve it was complex and multi‐faceted. One
constituent element was youthful student radicalism, the
high tide of which came in the summer of 1874. Summoned
by Peter Lavrov to embrace their moral obligations as edu-
cated men and women and literally ‘go to the people,’ stu-
dent youth responded and appeared in peasant villages to
share and enlighten that life and its values. More than 250
of these urban strangers were arrested. A second strand
feeding this politics was revolutionary terrorism, which,
much like the state it attacked, regarded violence as a polit-
ical instrument, albeit one that would rouse rather than
suppress the masses. Its most dramatic act, and failure, was
the assassination of the Tsar‐Liberator Alexander II by an
underground organization of at most hundreds called The
People’s Will. A third key factor emerged from the history
of the zemstvo institutions established after 1864. They
employed professionals to construct and manage the rural
infrastructure that the law charged these organs to oversee
in ‘local public welfare and economy’ – an infrastructure of
local transportation, communication, medical care, primary
education, agronomy, land surveying, statistical study, and
commercial‐industrial development. Given their proximity
to everyday rural life and the notorious corruption of local
officialdom, this so‐called ‘third element’ – a small but
growing constituency of educated, provincial middle-class
professionals – combined socialist and liberal political sym-
pathies, technical expertise, and practical work to build per-
sonal and public networks bridging differences of class and
culture outside the purview of local bureaucracy. Lastly, a
rich vein of published social science, journalism, and gov-
ernment literature, known collectively as ‘legal populism,’
by 1900 had confronted the intellectual challenges of a
Marxism predicting the inevitable disintegration of a
communal peasantry. It advanced a full‐blown critique of
the urbanizing and industrializing national economy
that offered alternative strategies to advance Russian
development via state investment in rural socio‐economic
transformation.11
By 1901, these individual strands had coalesced into the
Party of Socialist‐Revolutionaries (PSR). Its underground
newspaper, Revolutionary Russia, was edited by Viktor
Chernov. Like its chief radical rival, the RSDRP, the PSR
also foresaw the overthrow of autocracy, mass democratic
elections to a constituent assembly, and the democratic
republic with full civil and social rights it would establish. It
espoused the tactics of both electoral politics and revolu-
tionary violence to achieve its objectives. It recalibrated ‘the
peasant people’ into ‘all toilers (trudiashchiesia),’ a category
that reached across Russia’s mass population to include
potentially within its ranks anyone who labored – not only
peasants and industrial workers, but rural salaried profes-
sionals, students, intellectuals who worked with their minds,
and ultimately all who were not ‘exploiters.’ This broad
appeal allowed the party’s leadership to envision itself sum-
moning to political life a grand popular coalition, ‘the
democracy (demokratiia),’ and the nascent nation it would
become. Such great amorphousness was, especially at the
turn of the century, an enormous and empowering strength,
but also a great weakness, since, at its core, the PSR remained
a rural and peasant party. Its very identity was tied to its
program of radical land reform, a restructuring of rural
property relations based on the ability to labor and the
‘municipalization’ of private property. Here was envisioned
a localized nationalization of all rural property, and its redis-
tribution by organs of local self‐government through ‘labor
norms’ guaranteeing all toilers, including former landlords,
land sufficient to sustain their labor capacity and needs.
Radical land reform that expanded arable available to peas-
ants was the foundation of the PSR program, as was the
republic that would implement it. The appeal of this argu-
ment could be seen in all four elections to the State Duma
after 1906, as well as the 1917 elections to the Constituent
Assembly.12
Finally, the third proto‐party was a public coalition that
gravitated toward liberalism.13 As elsewhere on the conti-
nent, Russian liberals viewed political modernity through a
set of interlocking core beliefs: the bedrock of private
property; the sanctity of personal liberty and civil rights;
and the necessity of the rule of law to achieve them. Class,
gender, and race circumscribed all these absolutes, as
nineteenth‐century hierarchical sensibilities demanded.
Russian liberalism’s exceptionalism, however, was to be
found in its origins from two constituencies that elsewhere
on the continent more often were opponents than allies:
hereditary noble landowners and the emerging professional
classes of the era’s industrializing economy. Historians
have explained this peculiar juxtaposition by emphasizing
the evolution of the zemstvo from the 1860s. Some 450
territorial organs of elected self‐administration created
throughout the provinces and districts of European Russia,
the zemstvos were state organs of self‐­ administration,
charged by imperial law to fund and manage local public
infrastructure. An assembly of delegates, constituted
through indirect elections that privileged noble landown-
ers and artificially constrained the representation of major-
ity peasant populations and townspeople, nevertheless
allowed many educated Russians to see in the zemstvo the
foundations of a civic life beyond the boundaries of the
autocratic state. As contemporary discourse had it, the edi-
fice only lacked ‘a roof ’ to crown the structure – a
­euphemism for parliamentary institutions. Portions of the
post‐emancipation imperial nobility, especially those who
adapted their estate agriculture economically to new
­market conditions, refocused their family traditions of civil
and military service to the crown into presumed civic lead-
ership of the village communities that populated the coun-
tryside around them.
 The First Russian Revolution, 1890–1914
That work in turn brought them into contact with the
second important social reservoir of an emergent political
liberalism: an expanding stratum of urban and rural profes-
sionals. Scholars emphasize how education, technocratic
knowledge, and professionalism combined to fuel growing
intolerance of tsarist officials, who not only regulated pro-
fessional corporate life, but also bore responsibility, in the
eyes of these self‐same professionals, for the low levels of
wealth, welfare, literacy, and life expectancy afflicting
national life. Zemstvo professional employees again were
key. Given their membership in urban professional networks
and organizations, as well as their own populist and socialist
sensibilities, zemstvo employees facilitated information
exchange between liberal nobles and urban professionals
generally – and provided pathways by which liberal, social-
ist, and populist critiques all could intermingle and their
advocates perceive shared interests and potential program-
matic unity. An emerging consensus agreed that a wall of
absolutist bureaucratic officialdom separated the tsar from
the voices of the people, and that therefore the precondition
of a more stable civic polity was political reform that created
representative parliamentary institutions with some form of
legislative power. Such a diffuse social alliance created the
grounds for liberals to envision themselves the leadership of
a societal opposition to autocracy. If opposition to absolut-
ism unified, however, then nationalism just as frequently
fractured a liberal politics caught between an imperial crown
that conveyed international prestige and the impact of
russification policies in every region provoking ethno‐­
­ and operate a rail line cutting across northern Manchuria to
nationalist political impulses.
Liberalism’s key proto‐political organizations were, of
necessity until 1905–6, private or overtly illegal. They con-
stituted a congeries of discussion circles, informal con-
gresses, illegal newspapers, lectures and banquets, and
professional cum political unions. A key benchmark
emerged in 1899, when politically minded nobles began
meeting privately in Moscow in the Beseda (Conversation)
Circle. Over the next five years, it became a forum that
honed an anti‐bureaucratic and, for some, overtly consti-
tutionalist orientation. Beseda provided leadership to infor-
mal national zemstvo congresses, which the law prohibited
as exceeding the provincial mandates of these institutions.
The first of these, which met in May 1902, discussed both
local issues and constitutional change. Some of Russia’s
great noble families were to be found in these
ranks – Dolgorukov, Shakhovskoi, L’vov, Sheremetev,
Stakhovich, Shipov, Trubetskoi, and others.14 In June
1902, Peter Struve – urban public intellectual, former legal
Marxist publicist, and Russian nationalist ­liberal – from
German exile began publishing the newspaper
Osvobozhdenie (Liberation). Its inaugural issue proclaimed
that ‘the all‐nation cause is the cultural and political libera-
tion of Russia.’ Liberation’s editorial line appealed broadly
to the interests of ‘the nation’ – ­constitutional limitations
of bureaucratic a­bsolutism and monarchy so ill‐defined
21
they appealed to moderate nobles and radical urban pro-
fessionals alike; social welfare legislation to protect labor;
rural land reforms of the land commune that flirted with
forced expropriation of property to satisfy peasant ‘land
hunger’; and the international stature empire brought to
Russia’s future. Within the year, the newspaper had
spawned an overtly illegal Union of Liberation, which pro-
vided an incubator for those zemstvo nobles and urban
professionals that increasingly looked to some form of
constitutional settlement to achieve Russia’s political lib-
eration – whether monarchical or republican still remained
the subject of debate. By then, however, the empire was at
war with Japan – and war was becoming an antechamber to
revolution.
War and Revolution, 1904–1906
Russian imperial penetration of the Far East had its own
complicated history, but the construction of the Trans‐
Siberian Railroad in the 1890s began a decisive and ulti-
mately disastrous chapter of that longer story, principally
because it provided first contact with another latecomer to
the game of modernization and power, the Empire of Japan.
Shortening the length and controlling the mounting cost of
the transcontinental project led Sergei Witte by 1895–96 to
force from a weakened China a concession to a Russian state‐
corporate enterprise, the Chinese Eastern Railway, to build
the Pacific coast at Vladivostok. Where commercial and
industrial power went in this age of European imperialism
military might was sure to follow, and by 1898 Russia had
laid claim to the Kwantung Peninsula, stationed its new
Pacific Naval Squadron at the fortified anchorage of Port
Arthur, and set about the commercial exploitation of timber
and mining interests in the region. By 1900, in response to
the Boxer Rebellion or Yihetuan Movement, Russian troops
had occupied forward positions in Manchuria to defend the
empire’s new strategic position in the Far East. When war
came in February 1904, initiated by a surprise Japanese naval
attack upon Port Arthur, the technological acumen and mil-
itary prowess of the enemy shocked Russian public opinion,
which, woefully ignorant of the foe, easily had lapsed into
the racist jingoism stereotypical of European ruling elites
when they looked to Asia. Mobilized from European garri-
sons and dispatched via the single rail of a trans‐Siberian rail-
road that did not yet connect around Lake Baikal, the
imperial army pursued a military strategy dictated by defense,
retreat, and concentration of forces for counterattack. Naval
and land defeats followed one after another over 1904, cul-
minating that December in the surrender, after a heroic
resistance, of Port Arthur. Across the ideological spectrum,
Russian political opinion makers used military defeat vari-
ously to discredit even further bureaucratic absolutism, chal-
lenge unrestricted autocracy explicitly, and highlight the
22 Frank Wcislo
need for popular representation to contain or bolster the
authority of the monarch.15
In the imperial system, that question ultimately was the
central issue of Romanov family politics as well. The still
youthful but obstinate and blinkered sovereign, Nicholas II,
as well as his wife Alix of Hesse, the favored granddaughter
of Queen Victoria and now empress Alexandra Fedorovna,
believed that the form of their sovereignty, unlimited autoc-
racy, was a divinely ordained family inheritance that father,
and mother, were bound to pass to their infant son, the
hemophiliac Aleksei, born in August 1904. A suspicion of
popular representation was a deeply embedded trope of late
imperial elite political culture, the product in part, Richard
Wortman has suggested, of the Romanovs’ own Danish and
German ethnic origins. They were strangers in a strange
land – and since 1902 a country affected by peasant, indus-
trial labor, and urban unrest had seemed ever more unrec-
ognizable to their traditional eyes. In summer 1904, a
conjuncture of royal personality, growing public ferment,
and military stalemate exploded, literally, when the SR ter-
rorist Sazonov assassinated Minister of Internal Affairs
Vyacheslav von Plehve, whom Nicholas had appointed two
years earlier to restore order and undertake ameliorative
administrative reforms. An ever uncertain Nicholas in
response swerved to the left, and appointed Prince P.D.
Sviatopolk‐Mirsky, a career official of impeccable familial,
educational, and professional qualifications, who had culti-
vated a liberal public image as governor‐general of the Baltic
provinces. Mirsky began promoting long overdue institu-
tional, economic, and fiscal domestic reforms that moderate
monarchists and liberals alike viewed as the uncompleted
legacy of the reign of Alexander II. Although in a form that
posed no overt challenge to the tsar, he even let it be known
that he favored some form of representative institution
elected from the zemstvos and municipalities to advise the
ministerial government on this legislation.16
Such was the pace of events, however, that this proposal
lagged far behind a public discourse that was turning overtly
constitutional and even proto‐republican. Clearly testing
the limits of his intentions, leading zemstvo oppositionists
in November had informed Sviatopolk‐Mirsky that yet
another semi‐public zemstvo congress would convene in
St. Petersburg, with or without his approval. It met, and
proceded to offer two variants of constitutional settlements,
both of which went far beyond anything Mirsky was con-
templating. One, the more moderate, advocated an elected
parliamentary institution based on a limited franchise that
privileged urban capital and rural noble property over peas-
ant and plebian majorities. The body’s legislative powers
were only consultative, and thus did not directly challenge
the monarch’s ‘unlimited’ autocratic prerogative. Eventually
this faction of opinion, led by the likes of Moscow zemstvo
activist Dmitrii Shipov, the zemstvso noble liberal tribune
A.D. Golitsyn of Kharkhov, and A.I. Guchkov, from a
Moscow merchant family, found its home in the ranks of the
Union of 17 October. Unlike these future Octobrists, the
more radical position was occupied by what would become
the Constitutional Democratic Party, or Kadets. It brought
together urban professionals like Struve and Miliukov with
zemstvo liberals like Vasilii Maklakov to ‘demand’ – that
word itself dissonant in the language of the noble servitor
class – a legislative assembly possessing the legal authority to
sanction law and elected on a broad democratic (and male)
franchise. A minority already was viewing this legislature as
the basis for a constitutional convention to create a republic.
As if in parallel universes, an imperial edict of December 12,
1904, which Mirsky had managed to win from a hesitating
sovereign, promised government reforms of Russia’s admin-
istrative and economic infrastructure, but failed to make any
mention of representative institutions. Originally included
but removed at the instigation primarily of Sergei Witte,
that omission led Mirky to resign his post in protest. Within
two months his successor A.D. Bulygin found himself back
at the same crossroads, but this time, with the February
1905 Bulygin Rescript, the ministerial state promised to
begin the process necessary to elect and convene a State
Duma, albeit with restricted franchise and only consultative
powers.17 In that interim, however, a political earthquake
had occurred.
Port Arthur already had surrendered when, on the first
Sunday of the new year, January 9, crowds of workers
streamed from suburban industrial districts toward the
city’s financial, aristocratic, and governmental center and its
citadel, the Winter Palace. Living through the third year
of industrial depression, they bore petitions with more
than 135,000 signatures representing ‘the working men of
St. Petersburg, our wives and children, and our parents,
helpless, aged men and women … in quest of justice and
protection.’ Led by the Orthodox priest Georgii Gapon,
himself involved with government‐sponsored labor associa-
tions organized to coopt just such protest, multiple proces-
sions blended the potent symbolism of banners bearing the
semi‐divine visage of the reigning emperor with socialist‐
and populist‐inspired political demands. The list both repre-
sented the evolving ideological platform of leftist politics
and served as a barometer of popular, working-class opinion.
Demands for individual civil rights, equality before the law,
universal state‐funded education, and separation of church
and state intermingled with ending indirect taxation, insti-
tuting a progressive income tax, canceling all remaining
redemption debts on peasant allotment land, protecting the
rights of labor to organize, instituting the eight‐hour day,
and ensuring a level playing field in ‘the struggle between
labor and capital.’ Buried within the text was a demand for
a parliament with ministerial responsibility ‘to the nation.’18
Through what even the government later admitted to be
official malfeasance in allowing the disaster to occur, that
Sunday morning infantry at roadblocks guarding the Neva
River bridges and boulevards leading from the industrial
districts fired upon defenseless men, women, and children,
 The First Russian Revolution, 1890–1914
leaving more than two hundred dead and forever inscribing
the sobriquet ‘Bloody Sunday’ of January 9, 1905 into
Russian political culture. The revolutionary year of 1905
had arrived.
Industrial Russia exploded. In the next six months, offi-
cial government statistics reported almost two thousand
industrial strikes, exceeding the number that had been
reported over the previous decade. By the end of 1905,
nearly 14,000 industrial strikes involving 2.8 million strik-
ers, half of which were characterized as ‘political,’ had
occurred. Working‐class activism and violence outpaced the
expectations of socialist parties, and brought a new social
force into a public domain and civic discourse that them-
selves were being transformed by a national press ignoring
the restraints of censorship.19 Unrest in Polish, Baltic, and
Caucasus territories of the empire heralded nationalist pro-
test as well, and even in the countryside the first stirrings of
peasant disorder made themselves felt. The broadly based
political opposition to autocracy that proto‐politicians had
imagined, and rumblings of social disorder in the mass pop-
ulation beneath it they had not, were manifesting them-
selves throughout the empire. With the defeat of Russia’s
Manchurian army at Mukden in March 1905 sapping still
further the legitimacy of the central government, the rela-
tionship between military power and domestic order, which
haunts Russian history, was in full play. New mobilized
reserve regiments sent to fight in the Far East decreased the
military power that ultimately supported the state’s ability
to maintain law and order at home. May brought cata-
strophic defeat in the Straits of Tsushima southeast of Japan,
where the Japanese Home Fleet destroyed the bulk of the
Russian high seas fleet, which had been dispatched with
great fanfare some eight months earlier from its home base
in the Baltic Sea to sail halfway around the world to its
doom. These defeats only further enflamed a domestic poli-
tics that by June saw even provincial marshals of nobility
expressing their view that some form of popular representa-
tion allowing the crown to hear the voice of the people had
become imperative. Defeat also precipitated peace negotia-
tions, brokered by the American president Theodore
Roosevelt, and sent Sergei Witte to America, where he suc-
cessfully negotiated with his Japanese counterparts the
Treaty of Portsmouth, ending both the war and Russian
imperial dreams of hegemony in the Far East.
An astute practitioner and observer of late imperial poli-
tics, Sergei Witte, for all his hyperbole, left in his handwrit-
ten memoirs an arresting glimpse into what he called ‘the
troubles’ cresting across Russia by September 1905. It was
also, approximately, the same argument he made to Nicholas
II when he returned to St. Petersburg from the United
States. He remembered finding ‘Russia in total upheaval,
with the revolution breaking out of the underground into
the open.’ The government ‘had lost the initiative (sila
deistviia)’ as officials ceased to act or contradicted each
other, ensuring that ‘the authority of the existing regime
23
and its supreme standard bearer was trampled entirely.’
Albeit from the perspective of a Victorian‐era monarchist,
he described the birthing of a modern politics and, amidst
it, the wholesale isolation of the tsarist state. Rebellion
(smuta) ‘grew not by the day but by the hour, a revolution
(revoliutsiia), that leapt out onto the streets ever more
­ominously,’ Witte wrote, that ‘was enticing all classes of
the population.’ The entire upperclass, he recalled later of
the high aristocracy and nobility, was ‘dissatisfied and embit-
tered.’ University and even high school youth rejected all
authority, and much of the professoriate proclaimed
‘enough, everything has to be overturned.’ Liberal opposi-
tionists in zemstvos and municipal town councils, increas-
ingly unified in what had come to be known as the ‘liberation
movement,’ were concluding ‘salvation lay only in a consti-
tution.’ The ‘commercial‐industrial class’ lent moral and
financial support to such opposition. ‘Workers’ entirely had
fallen under the influence of ‘revolutionaries of all sorts.’
‘All non‐Russian subjects … some 35 per cent of the entire
population’ saw authority weakening and concluded the
time had come to realize ‘their dreams and desires’ – Poles
for autonomy, Jews for equal rights, and other ethnic
minorities for ‘the elimination of those restrictions in
which they were living their lives.’ Peasants were beginning
to seize property and act against unjust law. ‘Petty officials
(chinovniki) … stood against the regime they served.’ The
army was ‘agitated by all the disgraceful failures of the war,’
and now, with peace, by the desire to return home. ‘One
could say without any exaggeration,’ Witte concluded, ‘that
all Russia had been swept up in the troubles and that the
general slogan was a cry from the soul: “To live like this any
longer is impossible,” in other words – the existing regime
had to come to an end.’20
Witte also attempted a resolution of the crisis, navigating
between the alternatives of repression, advocated by some
of the tsar’s advisers including possibly his wife, and institu-
tional and constitutional reform significant enough to
assuage the opposition now in evidence across the empire.
Witte pressed Nicholas to take what the statesman deemed
the two steps that could save his crown. He would renounce
the unlimited character of his autocratic birthright by shar-
ing power with ‘representatives of his people’ in a State
Duma, and he would agree to the creation of a unified min-
isterial cabinet and prime minister to oversee that effort. A
delicate minuet ensued over the next weeks, as the tsar,
believing the one demanded the abandonment of his patri-
mony and the other the tutelage of a minister he scorned,
wavered around both proposals. With an industrial strike
that had paralyzed the imperial railroad network halting
transportation and telegraphy, and an ensuing general strike
seizing the St. Petersburg municipality and its industrial
districts for almost a week, Nicholas finally acceded to
Witte’s demands. The Imperial Manifesto of October 17,
1905, the so‐called October Manifesto, was effectively a
royal promise, in which Nicholas II guaranteed individual
24 Frank Wcislo
civil and religious rights, the immediate convocation of a
State Duma elected by all classes of the population, and
its constitutional right to propose and sanction law.
While thus preserving the integrity of the monarchy by
sponsoring constitutional change, Nicholas also charged
Witte – appointed to be the new chairman of the Council
of Ministers, a de facto prime minister of a ‘united govern-
ment’ – to effect fundamental civil and economic reforms
of the state that would restore its legitimacy, prestige, and
power. Over the next six months, with a burst of unparal-
leled legislative activity, the ministerial state produced stat-
utes governing the powers of the State Duma (budget;
taxation; initiation of laws; interpellation of ministerial
behavior), the structures and purview of a reformed
Imperial State Council as an upper house, and new
Fundamental Laws of the Empire reserving to the crown
and its ministers supervision of foreign affairs, the armed
forces, and government appointment, as well as providing
the sovereign a legislative veto and the right to rule by
decree. Under Witte’s leadership, it also brokered a six‐
million franc loan from a consortium of French bankers
that restored imperial finances battered by war and revolu-
tion, and prepared a legislative program, including land
reform, for the new Duma to consider. Finally, following
Russia’s first national elections, a First State Duma of more
than 450 deputies, representing as the manifesto promised
all (male) classes of the population, convened in April 1906,
the first of what became four dumas to sit in the Tauride
Palace through 1917. By coopting moderates who valued a
reformist monarchy from what had become an all‐nation
opposition, Witte had promised his ever vacillating imperial
master, all these measures taken together would divide a
united opposition, allow the government to regain legiti-
macy, and restore public order. In fact, it produced almost
entirely the opposite result.21
Although conservative commentators termed it anarchy
and upheaval, a process of social revolution, where the very
bases of social power between superior and subordinate
were called into question, unrolled across the empire from
the late autumn into the winter and spring of 1906. Symbolic
of popular rebellion in the face of government weakness was
the month‐long existence in December of the St. Petersburg
Soviet (Council) of Worker’s Deputies, whose socialist lead-
ership and working-class constituencies, harkening back to
the Paris Commune of 1871, became the model for its suc-
cessor in 1917 Petrograd. Armed rebellion roiled Moscow
in December, and required the dispatch of the Semenovsky
Imperial Guards to bombard street barricades and the
Kremlin itself in order to repress it. By March 1906, almost
70 percent of the empire’s administrative territories were
ruled under extraordinary emergency statutes that sus-
pended civil law. Marooned in the Far East and all along the
Trans‐Siberian Railroad since peace had been concluded in
summer 1905, the army finally began returning to its
European Russian garrisons that winter, but mutinies on the
Black Sea battleship Potemkin and, most scandalously, by a
regiment of the Preobrazhensky Guards made its loyalty
suspect. In what became the essential difference between
1905 and 1917, however, the military remained a pillar of
autocracy. It pacified Moscow, and ‘punitive expeditions’ to
the Trans‐Siberian railroad route, the Baltic provinces, and
the Caucasus restored order with brute force. The so‐called
borderlands of the empire had been ablaze – in agrarian
regions of the Baltic provinces, where Latvian, Belorussian,
Estonian, Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish, Ukrainian, and
Russian populations confronted owners of private agricul-
tural estates, mainly Baltic German, Polish, and Russian.
Similar histories with different actors and scenarios played
themselves out in Poland, the Caucasus, in Armenia and
Azerbaidzhan, among the Muslim populations of the steppe
and central Asia, and, especially, on the empire’s oldest colo-
nial frontier, that which separated ‘census society (tsensovoe
obshchestvo)’ from the Russian peasantry.22
Here guidelines must suffice. During the two agricul-
tural cycles of 1905–7, disorder in the peasant countryside
echoed events in the cities. Unrest was widespread; half of
all European Russian rural districts reported some form of
public disturbance, violence, or overt political action dur-
ing 1905. A discourse of freedom in the cities found its
analog in peasant talk of volya, license to act without an
overseer of any kind. The panoply of disobedience that
ensued turned a spotlight on the pressure points of local
agricultural share‐cropping and labor markets, in which
peasants negotiated the terms of their livelihoods with
local, often noble, and rent‐dependent landed estates. Rent
strikes, illegal grazing and wood‐cutting, wage disputes,
dereliction of duty or service, hooliganism, pogrom, armed
violence, terrorism, and criminality all were present in a dis-
play of Bakhtinian collective action. Many villages returned
to the terms of the emancipation settlement and aimed to
reclaim, from a distance of two or three generations, lands
‘cut off’ by former serf lords in the 1860s, as law then
allowed but village custom had delegitimated. This unrest
especially struck a deadly blow against the seigneurial
regime that, having survived emancipation, even had
adapted to a more capital‐intensive and market‐oriented
agriculture. During ninety days in the winter of 1905–6,
the ‘red cockerel’ burned; 1000 estates across the old agrar-
ian heartland of central Russia and the mid‐lower Volga
River valley reported incidents of arson. With the local
authorities overwhelmed or inert, marauding peasant vil-
lagers, sometimes organized and led by priests, registered
almost 32 million rubles of property damage during that
period. In other cases, even as order was maintained and
local nobles approached the first duma elections through
an indirect voting system that privileged their propertied
wealth, they witnessed ‘their’ local peasants ignore them
and hand their vote instead to candidates who were peas-
ants themselves or to others, primarily Kadets, who also
were willing to promise radical land reform that would
 The First Russian Revolution, 1890–1914
increase village landed arable through forced expropriation
of privately owned land.23
Thus, in spring‐summer 1906, as the First Duma con-
vened, the revolution that Witte had promised to quiet, if
anything, had intensified. Confronted by the jacquerie that
had swept across the rural private property economy that
winter and early spring, provincial noble landowners – a
key constituency of both liberalism and an emergent
monarchical‐rightist conservatism – recoiled, uncertain how
to proceed. Some turned to the national organization of the
United Nobility, which landowning nobles founded in 1906
in an attempt to move beyond their apolitical traditions of
service as the first estate of the realm and, through informal
pathways that historically tied them to the crown, assert
instead their newly discovered conservative and monarchical
interests as a landowning class. Others, especially Russians in
the western boundary lands of Ukraine and Belorussia,
moved toward assertions of Russian nationalist sentiments
that led by 1908 to the broad appeal of the Nationalist Party
among such landowners. The zemstvso continued to com-
mand the attention of many, and expanded in the last pre-
war decade, especially in the Russian drive for universal
primary education after 1908. Known under the sobriquet
‘Black Hundreds,’ organizations like the Union of Russian
People and the Union of the Archangel Michael, patronized
by the Romanovs, fed Russian far right, nationalist senti-
ment as well as a proto‐fascist politics that appealed to
monarchical symbols, anti‐Semitism, and urban mob vio-
lence. As Witte had intended, however, the old liberal core
of the liberation movement had splintered. A minority of
Octobrists remained moderate constitutional monarchists.
The majority constitutional democrats, the Kadets, were
more republican than their Octobrist cousins, but like them
were never able to escape entirely either a gnawing unease
about the depths of social antagonism revealed in 1905–6 or
the traditions of a political culture where crown, empire,
and private property reified the imperial dominion. All three
together assured Kadet professionals and landowners in the
realm of politics, and, as Laura Engelstein has shown, in
private life as well.24
Constitutional Monarchy and the Old Regime
before 1914
A plurality of votes in the first Duma elections went to the
Constitutional Democrats. SRs and SDs boycotted the elec-
tions altogether as a mark of protest against the very idea of
compromise with the regime. Contributing to the Kadet
victory was the party’s support of radical land reform, at
whose center was the state’s exercise of eminent domain
over private property to create additional land allotments
for peasants deemed to be suffering ‘land hunger.’ The core
of the first assembly, however, was a bloc of over 200 peas-
ant deputies, who caucused as the Trudovik circle. Here a
25
cacophony of peasant voices insistently raised the question
of a radical land reform based on SR principles – forced
expropriation; the establishment of land allotments tied to
measurements of labor (trud) and need; and a productive,
just rural property structure. Protected by parliamentary
immunity, those voices filled the columns of a mass media
press discovering the allure of political reporting. The First
Duma’s stenographic record repeatedly underscored how
peasant deputies saw themselves representing the opinions
of the villages that had dispatched them. Moreover, as this
discourse was disseminated across the country, reports of
rural disorder not coincidentally again grew more frequent.
For three months, the Duma assembly hall echoed with calls
for amnesty of political prisoners, investigation of ministerial
malfeasance, and above all forced expropriation of private
property. I.L. Goremykin had replaced Witte at the head of
the government, and, if he lacked his predecessor’s political
skill, he much more dutifully served his royal master.
Desirous of order, Nicholas II confronted instead continu-
ing tumult on the left, and a din of rightist voices urging
him to reassert autocratic power and even abrogate the
October Manifesto itself. Loyal to his promise, the tsar
instead prorogued the First Duma in July and called for new
elections, as the law allowed. The apex of liberal radicalism
came in response, when Kadet parliamentary leaders
departed for Vyborg in Finland and from there called upon
the population to boycott taxes and military recruitment in
protest. No response was heard and the government banned
every signee, including Paul Miliukov, from electoral office
for five years.25
Pyotr Arkaadeevich Stolypin, who had become Minister of
Internal Affairs in April, replaced Goremykin as chairman of
the Council of Ministers that July. He would serve in these
offices until his death, at the hands of an assassin, in
September 1911. His tenure was a decisive, final stage in the
history of the 1905 revolution, as it was a prelude to the even
more decisive war and revolution that were to follow, 1914–
1918.26 A scion of the provincial noble landholding nobility,
Stolypin had been both a marshal of nobility and a governor
in the provinces. There, he too had experienced proto‐
politics – the melange of patronage, influence, corruption,
administrative writ, and public ritual that upheld the legiti-
macy of imperial sovereignty.27 He also knew the rage and
whimsy of the revolutionary crowd, which he physically had
confronted in both the villages and city streets of Saratov
province at the height of the 1905 disorders, action which
brought him to the attention of Nicholas II and led to his
appointment, when he was just 44 years old, only six years
Nicholas’s senior. To his rightist critics he appeared a liberal
reformer, while liberals and leftists saw him as a conservative
statist reformer defending traditional autocracy. Others,
including Lenin, pointed to 1851 France and Louis Napoleon
Bonaparte, who ruled Second Empire France via peasant
plebiscite and a ‘bonapartist’ style of authoritarian politics, to
emphasize how the Stolypin ministry balanced among the
26 Frank Wcislo
constituencies of imperial politics in a way that allowed gov-
ernment and crown relative freedom of action in the new,
post‐October political environment. Perceiving that 1905
fundamentally had altered the terms of imperial civic life,
Stolypin governed, when possible, by law, and ruled, as
events required, via guile and arbitrary force. Ultimately a
harbinger of modern Russian political authoritarianism,
Stolypin sought through action to revitalize authority and
thereby strengthen a polity in which the state remained pre-
dominant. It was one characterized by what his ofisioz news-
paper, Russia, called a ‘consciousness of statehood
(gosudarstvennost’),’ a realm of politics that was contingent
upon private property, law, public order, and the reformed
monarchical state that preserved them.28 Remarking to the
tsar in winter 1907 that ‘reform at a time of revolution’ was
necessary to address ‘the shortcomings of the domestic
order’ that had caused it, Stolypin urged the sovereign to
‘stand bravely in the forefront of reform’ and act. To do oth-
erwise, he exclaimed, was to admit ‘that the ruling authority
is powerless.’29
Stolypin was acknowledging the new political realities his
government confronted when he allowed the second Duma
elections in early winter 1907 to proceed on the basis of the
electoral system that had produced the first. Not hesitating
to use state violence in a law‐and‐order crackdown from
summer 1906 onward, the premier created the sobriquet
‘Stolypin necktie’ that peppered contemporary public
allusions to the noose used by military field courts martial
following armed pacification of rebellious locales between
1906 and 1909. He also utilized the secret police, provincial
officialdom, parish clergy, and generous financing of the
national press to influence the outcome of the electoral cam-
paign. The results were, however, even more radical than
those of the First Duma. Both Social Democrats and Socialist
Revolutionaries joined this electoral campaign, and, together
with another heavy complement of peasant deputies, gave
the Duma an even more pronounced leftward tilt than that
of its predecessor. Nevertheless, the government presented
the Duma an array of important legislative projects for its
consideration, including parliamentary approval of the land
reforms it had issued via decree in November. A deliberate
alternative to projects of forced expropriation, those meas-
ures aimed to break up the peasant land commune, which
after the disorders of 1905–6 even the most stalwart monar-
chical conservatives deemed to be a source of radical social-
ism in the countryside. The Duma majority’s refusal to
abandon the idea that peasant landholding was to be
expanded, not reconstructed, and the continuing prospect of
rural unrest that it presaged, proved, Stolypin held, that it
was ‘incapable of practical work.’ Thus did Stolypin dramati-
cally highlight the limits of the constitutional monarchy that
he championed. Falsely charging social‐democratic Duma
deputies with sedition, the government on June 3, 1907
legally prorogued the assembly and scheduled new elections,
but illegally published a new electoral law, in clear violation
of its own Fundamental Laws of 1906. The new law was
designed to augment the representation of landed property
and capital, decrease the representation of leftist‐­sympathizing
nationalist minority parties, and repress the mass politics that
had fueled the radical populist orientation of the first two
assemblies. What resulted historians call ‘the third of June
system’. It used the executive power of the state and the
gerrymandered majorities of Octobrists, Nationalists, and
­
rightist agrarians from the provincial hereditary nobility the
June 3 electoral law had produced to achieve the parliamen-
tary stability that Stolypin deemed a prerequisite of political
order. The Third Duma would be the first to live out its full
five‐year appointment. In Stolypin’s eyes, political order, in
turn, would buy the tsarist state the political breathing space
necessary for structural reforms to be promulgated and take
root.30
The key to this long‐term process was the reformist initia-
tives that his ministry sponsored in rural Russia. Uppermost
were those governing the communal arable granted to vil-
lages at the time of emancipation. The edict of November 9,
1906, and subsequent laws and regulations implementing
it, was a sweeping attempt to reconstruct the traditional pat-
terns of land use within the repartitional, three‐field, strip
system of peasant communal agriculture. A reform that was
the culmination of state attempts since the abolition of serf-
dom to increase the productivity and social stability of
Russia’s majority population, what became known as the
Stolypin land reform encouraged individual peasant house-
holds to exit the land commune and assume legal title to
their land, reorganize these holdings, and consolidate their
plots into individual household farms. The reform also cre-
ated a national structure of land reorganization committees
responsible for this technocratic reconstruction of village
land use patterns. It entailed land surveys, notarized regis-
tration of peasant allotment land, reorganization and con-
solidation of communal arable, pasturage, and forests, and
finally the so‐called ‘khutorization’ of village lands into
peasant smallholdings. Of the empire’s 15 million peasant
households, 15 percent by 1914 had assumed title to their
land, often still scattered as strips among the traditional
three fields of village communal agriculture. Of these, some
1.3 million households (10.5%) had consolidated their strip
holdings into a single farmstead (8–10% of all peasant‐
farmed land). In support of this effort, state budgetary
investment generally shifted away from urban industry
toward the rural village. The government increased financial
support of internal migration and resettlement, chiefly to
Siberia, and expanded investment in primary education five‐
fold, with an aim toward a universal fifth‐grade education by
1925. Although six times less than state investment in mili-
tary priorities, more than one million rubles annually was
invested in agricultural infrastructure (agronomy, veterinary
science, livestock breeding, consumer and producer coop-
eratives), and these did not include funds channeled into
rural public life via land reorganization committees, the
 The First Russian Revolution, 1890–1914
State and Peasant Land Banks and their provincial filials, as
well as the webs of imperial commercial‐industrial life they
financed.31 Together, these measures constituted what was
called Stolypin’s ‘wager on the strong,’ a future class of new,
conservative, and monarchical Russian peasant smallholders
possessing a consciousness of statehood that defended pri-
vate property, law, and public order.
That wager in the near term, however, rested upon the
hereditary landowning nobility. Leopold Haimson des­cribed
the political power that the third of June system invested in
some ‘thirty thousand families,’ whose hereditary agricul-
tural estates were of an acreage that provided them their
franchise to vote, and participate in the formal institutions
of local and imperial politics. Their voices were thus numer-
ous, influential, and at key junctures compelling, not only
in the State Duma, but also throughout the power struc-
tures of the imperial state – the dynastic house and imperial
court; the State Council; provincial and county institutions
of zemstvo self‐administration; gubernatorial administra-
tive and judicial government in the provinces; the officer
corps; and higher‐ranking officials of the central ministries.
They also, especially after the collective trauma of urban
and rural rebellion in 1905–6, were risk averse to the
substantive institutional change envisioned by the Stolypin
ministry. A series of public confrontations between the
government and elements of the political right punctuated
his tenure. Campaigns within provincial assemblies of the
nobility organized by the United Nobility protested Stolypin’s
toleration of the Second Duma in winter‐spring 1907, and
certainly encouraged the state coup d’état of June 3. Noble
representatives of the provincial zemstvos, summoned to
the Council on Local Economy in 1908, opposed the min-
istry’s efforts to modernize and modestly democratize
local rural administration and self‐administration. During
the so‐called Naval Staff crisis of 1908–9, rightists in the
State Council, primarily drawn from former senior officials
and the nobility, charged that Stolypin’s Duma ally, the
Octobrists, were usurping the crown’s prerogative when
they used the Duma’s legal power of the budget to influ-
ence staffing the naval ministry’s high command. Those
same State Council rightists created a second parliamentary
imbroglio in March 1911, the western zemstvo crisis. They
opposed a Duma bill introducing zemstvo institutions
into western Ukraine and Belorussia, targeting in par-
ticular Stolypin’s efforts to privilege nationality over estate
(soslovie) criteria to ensure electoral representation of
Russian noble landowning interests in these institutions, a
key agenda item for the Nationalists whose support in the
Duma he was courting. Stolypin resolved this confronta-
tion by proroguing the Duma and State Council for a week
and passing the bill via article 87. With that action not only
did he eviscerate the last beliefs in Stolypin’s constitutional-
ist intentions among Kadets and especially Octobrists, but
he also lost the support of Nicholas II, who effectively
abandoned his premier and sided with the State Council
27
right against his own government’s project – and then was
forced by his premier to pass the measure via patently
unconstitutional edict.32
Six months later in September 1911 Stolypin was dead,
shot at point‐blank range in the Kiev Opera House by an
assassin with never fully explained connections to the secret
police. A year later the government prepared to celebrate
with great pomp and pageantry the tercentenary (1613–1913)
of the House of Romanov. Within three years, the empire
already would be awash in the first wave of casualties stem-
ming from the Great War. These last years of peace thus
have become a way marker in modern Russian history,
where historians regard the historical crossroads that, unbe-
knownst to contemporaries, the Russian Empire had reached
before the maelstrom of war and revolution revisited.
Inevitably, the question is asked: Was tsarist Russia becom-
ing more or less stable – socially, culturally, politically – on
the eve of the First World War? Was it evolving toward more
‘normalized,’ ‘European,’ or ‘western’ forms of political,
social, and cultural life… or was it becoming increasingly
unstable and susceptible to renewed crisis? The historiogra-
phy has come to view this as a debate between optimists and
pessimists.
Optimists argue that state modernization before and after
1905 had been successful. State investment in industrial
infrastructure had produced a self‐sustaining industrial
economy, which now attracted capital investment from
around the world and grew domestic credit markets as well.
Although still authoritarian and monarchical, imperial poli-
tics also had been modernized. Despite the upheavals of
1906–7, the State Duma after 1907 became a permanent
fixture of political life. By all accounts rendered subordinate
to the state, the Duma nevertheless spawned and attracted
political parties, which themselves extended through party
organizations into local populations, albeit in general
weakly. Aristocratic Russian anglophiles of the era even
managed at times to pass over the unpopularity of the
reigning sovereign and still somehow imagine the Russian
Empire becoming an English‐style constitutional monarchy.
Although given their brevity results can only be taken as
suggestive, the Stolypin land reforms seemed to have set
rural Russia on the road toward greater economic produc-
tivity and educational accomplishment, the twin pillars of
social stability in any polity. Harvests were bountiful, indus-
try expanded, and population continued to boom in the last
prewar years. All of this occurred even as the state rearmed
and expanded its military, its railroad network, and, impacted
by a global industrial upsurge beginning in 1909, its indus-
trial wealth. That wealth in turn heralded commercial,
industrial, and financial classes whose capital investments in
economy and culture manifested themselves variously – in
the Progressist Party, advocating by 1914 the political inter-
ests of commercial‐industrial Russia; the revival of zemstvso
budgetary expenditures in the last years of peace; or the
growth of patriotic sentiment and literacy in the ranks of the
28 Frank Wcislo
imperial army. These all can be seen as a thickening of the
middling classes that added additional evidence to the opti-
mist’s argument in favor of that greater stability that impe-
rial Russia was building on its new foundations in the
summer of 1914.33
In general terms, this picture is accurate, although by
itself an incomplete and inadequate appraisal of late imperial
politics and society. So‐called pessimists, always more con-
cerned with the fault lines of an imperial polity that after two
and a half years of war would become, after all, an ancien
régime, emphasize three factors that must be added to, and
weighed against, the optimist interpretation. First, the
dynastic monarchy, in the person of Nicholas II and his
wife the empress Alexandra Fedorovna, was increasingly
immersed in an authoritarian universe of its own making, a
recrudescence of early modern Muscovy in the modern
twentieth century. Theirs was a world where autocratic priv-
ilege, hierarchical and ascriptive social order, and an inbred
distaste, if not antipathy, for the Petersburg bureaucratic
and political worlds intermingled. Famously, the royal family
preferred the seclusion of Tsarskoe Selo, a fairyland palace
estate in the capital’s suburbs, complete with faux‐Muscovite
kremlins, to the ritualized lives they were forced to lead in
St. Petersburg. Their withdrawal was a physical marker of
the psychological distance that separated them from the task
of governing imposed by the new political universe created
by the October Manifesto. All too often historians discount
personality when they assess causation. In the case of
Nicholas and Alexandra this is a serious misunderstanding.
In the mind of Nicholas II especially, historians surmise, the
further time moved him from the traumatic events of 1905,
and the more he and his wife found themselves instead
amidst the peace and relative social stability of the prewar
years, the more the key political concession of the October
Manifesto – his hereditary prerogative of unrestricted auto-
cratic authority – became a memory to be ignored or rein-
terpreted through their own monarchical and authoritarian
world view.
Second, the sovereigns were not alone, but the apex of an
autocratic elite political culture that also remained a curious
amalgam of tradition and innovation. Taken together, the
royal family, the imperial court, church hierarchs, high gov-
ernment and business officials, the landed aristocracy and pro-
vincial nobility, and the imperial officer corps were an
intermarried and socially networked socio‐political elite exist-
ing, as contemporaries had it, ‘at the heights, na verkhu’ – of
concentrated political power, social standing, and personal-
ized influence. They were the beneficiaries of the modern
world that the nineteenth century had created, but at the same
time suspicious of, if not hostile to, the emergent political val-
ues of private property, individual rights, urban wealth, semi‐
constitutional politics, and imperial nationalism that Russian
liberalism and socialism variously had come to espouse, and
even bureaucratic reformers like Witte and Stolypin had striven
to accommodate. What might be considered an alternative
political culture, optimists argue, grew ever more resilient and
influential on the eve of the Great War. Yet, the ability
and ­willingness of the autocratic elite to guard the status quo,
and often do so by asserting a constructed and chimerical past
to justify it, even as liberals and socialists scorned the latter and
sought to alter the former, caused growing distrust, frustra-
tion, and antagonism within the structures of power on the
eve of the war. This vertical fault line between two contradic-
tory but vibrant political cultures was a source of systemic
instability, which the conditions of the First World War
would deepen and widen.34
Third, a second, horizontal fault line separated this
imperial world, which the state and the parties together
shared, from the mass population of the empire.
Throughout the nineteenth century, contemporaries had
spoken of the gulf (propast’) that divided an educated,
Europeanized Russian society (obshchestvo) from its major-
ity, largely semi‐literate, seemingly inert peasant popula-
tion (narod). The rebellions that exploded throughout
the Russian Empire in 1905 politicized this cultural con-
struct. A Russia inhabited by peasants, rural toilers, indus-
trial workers, lower urban classes, and varied ethno‐national
communities had engaged in unprecedented collective
action from below against their superiors on high – ­officials,
noble landlords, factory owners, urban bourgeoisie, the
police, and even the army. At its core, such action had
challenged the social power of the established hierarchies
that rendered these populations subordinate.35 Directed
against large swaths of the imperial population in 1906–7,
administrative and military suppression had restored and
bolstered these structures, but not resolved the underly-
ing societal tensions that had caused them to totter. That
memory, and the sobering, often disillusioning lessons
drawn from this emergence of mass politics during Russia’s
first twentieth‐century revolution, shadowed the empire’s
elites – none more so than its new liberal and moderate
socialist politicians, defenders of both private property
and popular well‐being.
To be sure, in the aftermath of the greatest rural uprisings
to have occurred in Russia since the legendary time of
Pugachev in the eighteenth century – another trope buried
deeply in the cultural memories of educated Russians – rural
Russia on the eve of the war was quiescent. Despite growing
wealth and a new stratum of smallholding peasants, the
village nevertheless remained fundamentally communal,
and impenetrable; two‐thirds of all peasant households held
almost 80 percent of peasant arable in communal tenure on
the eve of the war. Their actions in 1917 would be decisive.
In urban Russia, the story was quite different.36 There, the
industrial expansion initiated in 1909 was accompanied by
new, rapid growth in the size of the national labor force,
which reached 2.4 million by 1914, an increase in six years
of some 30 percent. Such intense social change by its very
nature was destabilizing. In the Russian case, however, two
other factors made it even more so. One was the experiential
 The First Russian Revolution, 1890–1914
knowledge of radical labor militancy acquired in 1905–7
that was retained within established working‐class cultures
of large industrial cities and towns, which filtered and inter-
preted the contending political discourses of urban civic life
for old and new workers alike. The second factor was
renewed labor unrest in Russia, ignited in spring 1912 by
the Lena Goldfields massacre in northeastern Siberia, where
army troops fired upon striking miners and left over two
hundred of them dead. Within the month, over a quarter
million workers had gone on strike across the country in
protest. The parallels to Bloody Sunday were eerily familiar.
A period of labor action ensued that grew stronger in
1913–14 and, before the outbreak of hostilities in August
1914 saw it ebb, enveloped more than 1.3 million workers
in over 3500 strikes. The Factory Inspectorate of the
Ministry of Trade and Industry, whose estimates were con-
servative but objective, remarked the high incidence of
‘political’ strikes throughout the period, a notation that
included a range of data, from mention of the dynasty
through celebration of socialist holidays and demands to
restructure the administrative organization of the factory
shop floor. Industrial workers in elections to the Fourth
State Duma in autumn 1912 – through indirect elections
that segregated representation of this working-class popula-
tion to a handful of separate Duma seats – voted in six of
nine instances for Bolshevik members of the RSDLP (b),
the most radical political alternative on the imperial political
spectrum at the time. Imperial Russian workers remained an
urban core of disaffection, and dysfunction, whose influence
through a variety of pathways could emanate into the coun-
tryside, as it had in 1905–6.
Optimism or pessimism is ultimately an individual choice,
although the weight of the evidence inclines this author
toward the latter. Perhaps it is better, however, to consider
that both perspectives are necessary to appreciate fully the
impact of the remembered experience of Russia’s first
twentieth‐century revolution. By way of conclusion, con-
sider two, quite different images characteristic of Russia in
summer 1914, as Europe was descending toward a war that
would constitute the end‐time of an epoch. When French
President Poincairé visited St. Petersburg that July, wide-
spread strikes gripped the capital’s outlying industrial dis-
tricts. Initially sparked by police brutality toward strikers at
the city’s largest foundry, the Putilov Works, who them-
selves had downed tools in solidarity with an ongoing strike
in the Baku oilfields, 110,000 of the city’s workers for
almost two weeks were swept up in work stoppages, hooli-
ganism, and what became pitched street battles with
mounted Cossack troops, who blockaded the Neva River
bridges to prevent demonstrators from reaching the city
center. Contrast that image of rebellion and violence with a
second of hierarchy and order, which appeared just as the
strikes were receding. On the day Russia declared war hun-
dreds of thousands of Petersburgers streamed to the apex
of imperial power, Palace Square, and sang ‘God Save the
29
Tsar’ when Nicholas appeared on the balcony of the Winter
Palace. Many hundreds of thousands more across the
empire proceeded peacefully to the mobilization stations
of their military units, as ordered and trained to do. Those
two arresting final images – of rebellion and hierarchy –
­capture, in freeze frame, the unstable ­transitional character
of the late imperial polity and the contradictory experiential
memories it contained as the Russian Empire went to war
in August 1914.
Notes
1 Iulii Martov, et al. Obshchestvennoe dvizheniia v Rossii v nachale
XX‐veka, Vol. 1–4, St. Petersburg: Tipografia t‐va ‘Obshche­
stvennaia pol’za,’ 1909–14; Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of
1905, 2 vols, Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1992; Richard Pipes,
The Russian Revolution, New York: Vintage, 1991; David
McDonald (ed.) and Leopold Haimson, Russia’s Revolutionary
Experience, 1905–1917: Two Essays, New York: Columbia U.
Press, 2005; B.V. Anan’ich, R.Sh. Ganelin, V.S. Diakin, et al.,
Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii 1895–1917, Leningrad: Nauka,
1984; Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the
Russian Revolution, New York: Viking, 1996.
2 P.A. Zaionchkovskii, Pravitel’stvennyi apparat samderzhavnoi
Rossii v xix v., Moscow: Mysl’, 1978.
3 Yanni Kotsonis, States of Obligation: Taxes and Citizenship in
the Russian Empire and Early Soviet Republic, Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2014; N.L. Rubinshtein, Russkaia
Istoriografiia, Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1941.
4 F.W. Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei
Witte, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 4; Paul Gregory,
Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from
Emancipation to the First Five‐Year Plan, Princeton: Princeton U.
Press, 1994; Jennifer Siegel, For Peace and Money: French and
British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars, Oxford:
Oxford Studies in International History, 2015.
5 Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization and
Revolution 1881–1917, Harlow: Longman, 1983; Heather
Hogan, Forging Revolution: Metalworkers, Managers, and the
State in St. Petersburg, 1890–1914, Bloomington: Indiana U.
Press, 1993; Joseph Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist
Russia: Science, Patriotism, and Civil Society, Cambridge:
Harvard U. Press, 2009; Esther Kingston‐Mann and Timothy
Mixter (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of
European Russia, 1800–1922, Princeton: Princeton U. Press,
1991; Wcislo, Tales, chs. 1–4.
6 Roberta Thompson Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in
Russia: Gentry and Government, Princeton: Princeton U.
Press, 1993; Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime,
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974; F.W. Wcislo,
Reforming Rural Russia, Princeton: Princeton U. Press,
1990, chs. 1–3; Leopold Haimson (ed.), The Politics of Rural
Russia, Bloomington: Indiana U. Press, 1979; Daniel
Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal
Affairs in Russia, 1802–1881, Cambridge: Harvard U. Press,
1981; Jonathan Daly, The Watchful State: Security Police and
Opposition in Russia, 1906–1917, De Kalb: NIU Press, 2004.
30 Frank Wcislo
7 Andreas Kappelar, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History,
Harlow: Longman, 2001; Wcislo, Tales, ch 4.
8 Leopold Haimson, ‘The Parties and the State: The Evolution of
Political Attitudes’ in Michael Cherniavsky (ed.), The Structures of
Russian History, London: Random House, 1970; Isaiah Berlin,
Russian Thinkers, London: Viking, 1978; Terence Emmons,
The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections
in Russia, Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1983.
9 Basil Dmytryshyn, Imperial Russia: A Source Book, 1700–
1917, New York: HRW, 1967, ‘Programs of Political Parties.’
10 Leopold Haimson, Russian Marxists and the Origins of
Bolshevism, Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1966; Haimson
with Ziva Galili y Garcia and Richard Wortman, Making of
Three Russian Revolutionaries: Voices from the Menshevik Past,
Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1987.
11 Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist
and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia, New
York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1960; Martin Malia, Alexander
Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism 1812–1855,
Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1961; Daniel Field, Rebels in
the Name of the Tsar, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; Cathy
Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in the
Nineteenth Century, Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1993.
12 Dmytryshyn, ‘Programs of Political Parties’; Haimson, Russian
Marxists.
13 Haimson, ‘The Parties and the State’; Melissa Kirschke
Stockdale, Paul Miliukov and the Quest for a Liberal Russia,
Ithaca: Cornell U. Press, 1996; Shmuel Galai, The Liberation
Movement in Russia 1900–1905, Cambridge: Cambridge U.
Press, 1973; B. Veselovskii, ‘Dvizhenie zemlevladel’tsev,’ N.
Cherevanin, ‘Dvizhenie intelligentsii,’ and A. Ermanskii,
‘Krupnaia burzhuaziia do 1905 goda,’ Martov et al., I, 230–
414; Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich (eds.), The
Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self‐Government,
Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1982.
14 Terence Emmons, ‘The Beseda Circle, 1899–1905,’ Slavic
Review 32 (3), Sep. 1973: 461–90.
15 Wcislo, Tales, chs. 4–5.
16 Wcislo, Reforming, ch. 4.
17 Andrew Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II
and the 1905 Revolution, Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1990.
18 ‘The St. Petersburg Workmen’s Petition to the Tsar, January
9, 1905’ in James Cracaft, Major Problems in the History of
Imperial Russia, Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1994, 600–2.
19 Leopold Haimson, ‘The Problem of Social Stability in Urban
Russia, 1905–1914’ in Cherniavsky (ed.), Structures, 377;
Gerald Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labor, Society, and
Revolution, Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1989.
20 Wcislo, Tales, 216–17 [Zapiski, Biarritz, Sept. 1907, pp. 201–
3/120 ob‐121].
21 Wcislo, Tales, ch. 5; Verner, chs. 7–8; David McDonald,
United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900–1914,
Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1992; B.V. Anan’ich and R.
Sh. Ganelin, Sergei Iul’evich Vitte i ego vremia, St. Petersburg:
Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999, 231–346.
22 Kappelar, The Russian Empire, ch. 9; Wcislo, Reforming
Rural Russia, ch. 5; Martov, Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie, vol. 3,
kniga 5, ‘Partii.’
23 Wcislo, Reforming, ch. 5; Columbia University Proseminar on
the Prehistory of the Russian Revolution, personal mss,
Peasantry, Spring 1976; Timothy Mixter, ‘Of Grandfather
Beaters and Fat‐Heeled Pacifists: Perceptions of Agricultural
Labor and Hiring Market Disturbances in Saratov, 1872–
1905,’ Russian History, 7, no. 1–2 (1980): 139–68.
24 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for
Modernity in fin‐de‐Siecle Russia, Ithaca: Cornell U. Press,
1994; Wcislo, Reforming, chs. 5–6.
25 Wcislo, Reforming, ch. 5; Gosudartsvennaia Duma,
Stengraficheskie otchety Gosudarstvennoi Dumy pervogo sozyva,
St. Petersburg, 1906.
26 Peter Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the
Politics of Renewal in Russia, London: UCL, 1998; Abraham
Ascher, P.A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial
Russia, Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 2001.
27 Richard Robbins, The Tsar’s Viceroys: Russian Provincial
Governors in the Last Years of the Empire, Ithaca: Cornell U.
Press, 1987.
28 Wcislo, Reforming, pp. 197–242.
29 Wcislo, Reforming, ch. 6; Valentin S. Diakin, Samoderzhavie,
burzhuaziia i dvoriantstvo v 1907–1911 gg., Leningrad:
Nauka, 1978; Waldron, Between Two Revolutions; Ascher, P.A.
Stolypin.
30 Wcislo, Reforming, chs. 6–7.
31 Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization and
Revolution, Harlow: Longman, 1983, 241–4; David A.J.
Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861–1906: The
Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms, Dekalb: Northern Illinois
U. Press, 1987; Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia,
1906–1917, Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1998.
32 Manning, Crisis, chs. 11–14; Robert Edelman, ‘The Elections
to the Third Duma: The Roots of the Nationalist Party’ in
Haimson, Politics, 94–122; Wcislo, Reforming, chs. 7–8.
33 Peter Bark, ‘Memoirs,’ Columbia University Bakhmetieff
Archive, BAR Petr L’vovich Bark Box 1: Cataloged Materials;
Susan McCaffrey and Michael Melancon, Russia in the
European Context, 1789–1914: A Member of the Family,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; S.S. Oldenburg, Last
Tsar, 4 vols., Gulf Breeze: AIP, 1977.
34 Haimson, ‘The Parties and the State.’
35 William G. Rosenberg, ‘Identities, Power, and Social
Interaction in Revolutionary Russia,’ Slavic Review 47, no 1
(Spring 1988): 21–8.
36 Haimson, ‘The Problem of Social Stability,’ pp. 346–59;
Hogan, Forging Revolution, ch. 10.
 Chapter Three
Russia at War: War as Revolution, Revolution as War
Christopher J. Read
In 1964–65 Leopold Haimson wrote a two‐part article imply­
ing that, contrary to most assumptions, the onset of war in
1914 might have postponed rather than caused the 1917
revolution in Russia (Haimson 1964/5). Haimson takes
some of his inspiration from the point of view attributed to
Soviet historians of the period which he summarizes thus:
At first, the new revolutionary upsurge built up only very
slowly, and it was only in April‐May, 1912, in the wake of the
Lena goldfields massacre, that it really began to gather
momentum. From this moment on, however, the revolution­
ary wave is seen as mounting with such dramatic swiftness
that by the summer of 1914 the country was ripe for the
decisive revolutionary overturn for which the Bolsheviks had
been preparing since the summer of 1913. In this scheme,
obviously, the war is not viewed as contributing decisively to
the unleashing of the revolutionary storm. On the contrary,
it is held that by facilitating the suppression of Bolshevik
Party organizations and arousing, however briefly, ‘chauvin­
istic’ sentiments among the still unconscious elements in the
laboring masses, its outbreak temporarily retarded the inevi­
table outcome. It was only in late 1915 that the revolution­
ary movement resumed the surge which two years later finally
overwhelmed the old order. (Haimson 1964, 620)
Haimson himself does not subscribe directly to this but
the division between his view and the ‘Soviet’ view is nar­
row. He, in fact, adds an additional dimension to the revo­
lutionary crisis of 1911–14 which he discerns in the growing
alienation and combativeness of the intelligentsia and other
parts of Russia’s elite before defining his own position as
follows:
it may perhaps not be difficult to outline a set of hypotheti­
cal circumstances under which Russia might have under­
gone – even in the absence of the specific additional strains
induced by the war, though maybe under the immediate
A Companion to the Russian Revolution, First Edition. Edited by Daniel Orlovsky.
© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
stimulus of some other, purely domestic crisis – the kind of
radical overturn on which Lenin was already gambling by
late 1913‐early 1914 and which Russia actually experienced
with the October Revolution. However, I would rest my
case on somewhat more modest, and more solid, grounds:
on the prosaic, but often ignored, proposition that the char­
acter, although not necessarily the gravity, of the political
and social crisis evident in urban Russia by the eve of the war
is more reminiscent of the revolutionary processes that we
shall see at work during Russia’s second revolution than of
those that had unfolded in Russia’s first … 1914 is, if only
approximately, a half‐way station between 1905 and 1917.
What the war years would do was not to conceive, but to
accelerate substantially, the two broad processes of polariza­
tion that had already been at work in Russian national life
during the immediate prewar period. (Haimson 1965, 17)
So fierce was the debate that, by 1969, another pioneer of
the topic, Arthur Mendel, was able to propose the existence
of two distinct historical schools. One was ‘pessimistic’ about
the autocracy’s chances of long‐term survival after the 1905
revolution, the other ‘optimistic’ (Mendel 1969). The latter
believed that the war of 1914 drove Russia from a course of
evolutionary development toward a liberal, constitutional,
and capitalist future. In other words, a rapidly developing
Russia would have joined the pre‐1914 ‘advanced’ nations
such as the United States, France, Britain, Germany, and a
fast‐developing Japan in the family of democratic or democ­
ratizing powers. In Haimson’s words:
most [western historians] are drawn to the conclusion that
in the absence of war this crisis [of 1911–14] could and
would have been resolved without deep convulsions,
through the more or less peaceful realization by the liberal
elements of Russian society of their long‐standing demand
for genuine Western parliamentary institutions. (Haimson
1964, 621)
32 Christopher J. Read
The ‘optimists’ had a second flowering in the changing
intellectual environment of the 1970s and 1980s and a
somewhat moderated ‘pessimist’ school scoffed at the
notion of a liberalizing tsarism, something hardly any con­
temporaries expected (Read 2002). By the millennium the
debate appeared to have run its course. The pessimists
tended to have the upper hand. However, the most recent
historiography has reverted to putting the war back into a
prominent position in the causation of the revolution. The
debate is very complex. On one side, very few ‘pessimists’
had directly supported the contention that the war actually
postponed the revolution. On the other, the chief weakness
of the ‘optimist’ case – the implacable opposition to conced­
ing any of his powers of a still relatively young Nicholas II
who might have had twenty‐five or more years of autocratic
governing ahead of him in 1914 – became increasingly obvi­
ous. The propositions at stake became less sharp. No one
doubted the interlinking of war and revolution; the debate
moved on to slightly different premises. On one side, the
war tended to be seen as a catalyst for revolution; that is it
helped create the conditions for the outbreak of a revolution
that was entwined with longer-term causes and deep prob­
lems within Russian society, while the ‘new optimists’ sug­
gested that without the war there would have been no
revolution, which assumes Russia did not have fracture lines
making a revolution likely. Such a counterfactual cannot be
proved or disproved by the historian but, as in this case, it
can stimulate a valuable and penetrating debate (McReynolds
and Giltner 2007).
The discussion itself was not new and its origins go back
to Lenin and from him to official Soviet historiography.
Lenin’s views evolved. At the beginning of the war he
argued that
We must, however, say that if there is anything that, under
certain conditions, can delay the downfall of tsarism, any­
thing that can help tsarism in its struggle against the whole
of Russia’s democracy, then that is the present war, which
has placed the purses of the British, the French and the
Russian bourgeois at the disposal of tsarism, to further the
latter’s reactionary aims. (Lenin 1914, Sept‐Oct)
As the war continued, so Lenin began to adapt his views.
Even in the article just quoted, he urged socialists to seize
the revolutionary opportunities presented by the war and,
specifically, to turn it into a European civil war. However,
three and a half years later, as the February revolution
emerged, Lenin observed that despite the ‘present, grave‐
like stillness … Europe is pregnant with revolution’ (Lenin
1917, January). A few days later Lenin, along with other
Russian exiles in Switzerland, was swept away by the news of
the sudden collapse of tsarism. In one of his first responses
he repeated the birth metaphor, describing it as ‘The
first revolution engendered by the imperialist war … but
certainly not the last’ (Lenin 1917, March, 1). In striking
contrast to his earlier analysis, which saw the war delaying
the revolution, he was now unequivocal. The ‘abrupt turn’
was no ‘miracle’ but arose from ‘a combination of factors of
world‐wide importance’ which required ‘a great, mighty
and all‐powerful “stage manager” … This all‐powerful
“stage‐manager”, this mighty accelerator was the imperialist
war’ (ibid. 2). This comment precedes by almost six years
Trotsky’s renowned remark that war is ‘a great locomotive
of history’ (Trotsky 1922), made, perhaps unexpectedly, in
comments about the USA and a possible war with Japan. As
we have seen, Haimson had picked up Lenin’s metaphors of
birth and acceleration to describe the effect of the war.
To summarize, views ranging from ‘without war there
would have been no revolution’ to ‘the war postponed the
revolution’ have been put forward. Many commentators
have argued the war catalyzed/speeded up/accelerated the
revolution. Can we clarify this heated debate by examining
the unfolding of the revolution in the context of the war and
see what more recent historiography has proposed?
Russia Goes to War: The War Comes to Russia
The first few weeks of the war give some credence to the
view that the risk of political upheaval was much reduced.
The nation, shocked as much as anything else, rallied to the
national cause. Recruiting offices were overwhelmed and
more young men turned up than expected. Drunken brawls
were recorded in many places but they seem to have had
little political significance (Sanborn 2003). The number of
recorded strikes fell dramatically. A total of 3534 strikes
were recorded for 1914 of which barely 100 took place in
the last five months when war had been declared. The initial
successes of Russian arms fed the patriotic mood but those
successes were short‐lived. Two Russian armies were
defeated and destroyed. Retreat began to bring a whole raft
of problems from military panic to massive numbers of refu­
gees. Generals lost their heads. One fortress commander
deserted his post and, as reported laconically to the Council
of Ministers, ‘moved so far under the protection of our
spaces that he cannot be found anywhere’ (Cherniavsky
1967, 76). By August 1915 the situation was coming to a
head. At a meeting of the Council of Ministers on August 6
the Minister of War, A.A. Polivanov, presented, in the words
of the Council’s secretary, ‘a picture of military defeat and
disorganization sadder than anything that had existed ear­
lier’ (Cherniavsky 1967, 75).
The military disaster had many components. From our
perspective of looking at how the war intertwined with rev­
olution a number are of great significance. The retreats had
set off anti‐semitic pogroms near the front, fueled by false
accusations that Jews were German spies. Attempts at a
scorched earth policy and repeated food requisitioning laid
waste to wide areas of the immediate military rear area
which was under army control. Appallingly organized forced
 Russia at War: War as Revolution, Revolution as War
deportations from the Baltic States plus an endless chain of
refugees produced, in the striking title of the pioneering
book on the subject, ‘a whole empire walking’ (Gatrell
1999). For another recent historian this was the moment
when ‘the front came home’ (Sanborn 2016). The flow of
refugees created multiple problems. First, the Jewish prob­
lem came to the fore. The Finance Minister, horrified at
the pogroms promoted by some of the generals, accused
General Ianushkevich of visiting the Jews ‘with violence
and injuries unthinkable in any civilized state.’ As Finance
Minister he had another motive. The pogroms were causing
so much opposition among Russia’s allies and financiers that
‘Either we make concessions to the Jews and re‐establish
our credit or … A third way out … I cannot see’ (Cherniavsky
1967, 68). With very little opposition the government
ended the confinement of most Jews to the Pale of
Settlement in the western borderlands and allowed them to
live in towns across Russia. The deportations created anger
among Latvians and Lithuanians in particular and the disas­
ters as a whole had what has been called an ‘unsettling’
effect – ‘Violent migrations progressively unsettled the
Russian Empire, unhinging society and emboldening the
state that helped direct and manage them’ (Sanborn 2005,
292). Among the effects were riots and strikes against the
flood of newcomers. There was also a serious outbreak of
anti‐Germanism centered on Moscow in May 1915 which
led to looting of shops with proprietors with German names
and attacks on what were thought to be, usually from the
name once more, German‐owned factories and businesses
(Lohr 2003, Chapter 2). Strike figures were rising alarm­
ingly after the late 1914 breathing space. In June 1915
there were 164 strikes in larger factories. The home front
was getting out of control and the government was getting
increasingly aggressive in dealing with it. Militarily and
socially Russia was beginning to disintegrate. In the midst of
the chaos Nicholas decided to remove his still popular uncle,
the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, from his post as
Commander‐in‐Chief of the army. In the tsar’s view only a
more senior royal could replace a Grand Duke which meant
Nicholas took on the role himself. His decision may have
been a noble one but, for himself and the dynasty, it was
disastrous. It deepened a major crisis and set the scene for
the final seventeen months of Romanov rule.
From the August Crisis to the February Revolution
The political impact of the Tsar’s surprise decision was felt in
two areas – among his ‘cabinet,’ the Council of Ministers, that
is, and in the Duma, Russia’s quasi‐parliament. The decision
had profound effects in both. Why? First of all, it was a very
delicate moment when Russia appeared to be on the verge of
unraveling militarily and, perhaps, socially. Russians feared for
the survival of their country. Beyond that the two bodies
reacted to different consequences of Nicholas’s decision.
33
From the point of view of the ministers, the civilian
government, the most damaging aspect was that they had
not been involved in the decision. The tsar had kept it secret
from the country and from his supposed advisors whom he
personally appointed to their posts. To ignore them over
such a major decision was a clear sign of either a lack of
confidence in them or that the tsar had not even thought
about consulting them. Either way the signs were ominous.
It was only by chance that the Minister of War, Polivanov,
who had been informed of the decision, felt compelled to
break his oath of silence and blurted out the news at a meet­
ing of the Council on August 6 (19), 1915. Immediately a
confused and noisy set of outbursts, with many of the min­
isters talking at once, broke out. Secretary Iakhontov
described it evocatively: ‘These revelations of the Minister
of War evoked the greatest excitement in the Council.
Everyone spoke at once, and there was such a crossfire of
conversations that it was impossible to catch individual
statements. One could see to what degree the majority were
shaken by the news they had heard – the latest stunning
blow in the midst of military misfortunes and internal com­
plications that were being suffered’ (Cherniavsky 1967, 76).
The ministers were horrified and tried to figure out ways of
preventing the tsar from implementing the decision. The
elderly Prime Minister, Goremykin, a die‐hard loyalist to the
tsar and the only other minister to have been informed (nei­
ther had been consulted), assured the Council that the tsar
was determined and, as they all knew, his character was such
that opposition would only drive him to defend his decision
more stubbornly. Nonetheless, the majority of ministers
resolved to make an attempt to dissuade Nicholas from his
chosen course of action. They held a Council meeting over
which Nicholas presided and, as they wrote afterward in a
collective letter of August 8 (21), ‘we laid before you our
unanimous appeal that Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich not
be removed from participation in the supreme command of
the army.’ Several major ministers including Sazonov, the
Foreign Minister, and Bark, the Minister of Finance, signed
but others, notably Goremykin and Polivanov, did not out
of a sense of duty to the tsar even though they deplored his
decision. The letter said the tsar’s course of action ‘threatens
Russia, yourself and the dynasty with serious consequences’
(Vernadsky and Pushkarev 1972, 845). In cabinet they had
elucidated the main consequence as attaching the dynasty
too closely to the failing war effort. If the war got worse the
tsar would be even more widely blamed.
However, it may be that what was unspoken, or at least
glossed over, were the more powerful reasons. The collective
letter mentions that the decision has caused ‘radical differ­
ences of opinion’ between the signatories and the Prime
Minister and that ‘such a situation as this, intolerable at any
time, is fatal in these days’ (ibid.). Linked to this the ministers
had, in the confused discussion of August 6 (19), been wor­
ried that the decision would ‘greatly complicate the internal
situation’ (Cherniavsky 1967, 78. Words of Shcherbatov,
34 Christopher J. Read
Minister of Internal Affairs) and came ‘at an absolutely
unsuitable moment’ (Cherniavsky 1967, 80. Words of
Krivoshein, Minister of Agriculture). In addition to the mili­
tary situation, the internal political situation was at the top of
their concerns. They had already expressed fear that the tsar’s
decision would be attributed to ‘the influence of the notori­
ous Rasputin’ so that ‘revolutionary and antigovernment
agitators will not pass up such a convenient opportunity’
(ibid.). But the government’s enemies were not just in the
street: ‘There are rumours in the Duma about this influence,
and I fear that a scandal might result’ (ibid. 80–1). The Duma
was suspected, correctly, by the ministers of trying inces­
santly to encroach on the government’s duties. The crisis
had thrown up a whole host of new claimants to power,
claims wrapped up in the declared desire to participate more
actively in the war effort through a growing number of vol­
untary organizations and direct action linking lower levels of
local government into increasingly powerful organizations
such as the Union of Towns. In fact, in August the ministers
expressed great concern that, although its intentions were
patriotic, the Moscow City Council was calling, among other
things, for a government having the confidence of the coun­
try. This caused another heated outburst of conversational
crossfire in the Council when it was reported on August 19
(September 1). Goremykin said they need ‘a proper rebuff’
and Shcherbatov called for ‘decisive measures’ to assert the
Council’s prerogatives – ‘either there is a government or
there isn’t … One can see that Moscow will be followed by
other towns and the Emperor will be literally swamped by
hundreds of petitions,’ he said (Cherniavsky 1967, 137–8).
In his summary of the continuing discussion Iakhontov
wrote that the ministers were of the view that the Duma ‘is
twisting itself from a legislative institution virtually into a
constituent assembly’ and that such developments ‘are trans­
forming the Duma into a platform for agitation.’ Given that
‘the military are losing their heads at the front’ (Cherniavsky
1967, 122. Words of Goremykin on August 16 (29)), that
the tsar had shown that ‘there is no confidence in the Council
[of Ministers]’ (Cherniavsky 1967, 84. Words of Iakhontov
summarizing the August 6 (19) meeting), and the Duma and
local governments were trying to encroach on the ministers’
functions, it is clear the Council’s real concern was for their
own power and position. As Krivoshein put it, the situation
was rapidly developing to a point which would ‘allow of only
two solutions: either a strong military dictatorship, if one can
find a suitable person, or reconciliation with the public’
(Cherniavsky 1967, 142, August 19/September 1).
Such gloom was all too justified. Most of the ministers
who had signed the collective letter were dismissed. Nicholas
spent more time at the front. The prestige of the Council
fell throughout 1916 under the influences of rapid changes
of ministers (35 in the last seventeen months) and related
rumours that a German‐oriented tsarina and Rasputin were
controlling the government. The Russian Empire had
become, even in the absence of a ‘suitable person,’ a de
facto military dictatorship with the civilian government
increasingly reduced to being their errand boy. It was not
just the desire for power that had driven the ministers in
their last fight against such developments. Their scathingly
low opinion of the generals’ competence especially in gov­
ernment was all too accurate and the ensuing fears for the
future of Empire and dynasty were only too well grounded.
The August crisis had, in effect, brought civilian govern­
ment in the empire to an end. As we have seen, one of the
actors promoting this had been the Duma, not to mention
a growing host of local government and voluntary organiza­
tions. The crisis brought a sea change in this sphere also. By
and large, without being too definitive about it, these
groups represented different parts of the propertied and
educated elites. Many Duma politicians were middle-class
industrialists, bankers, financiers, lawyers, and academics.
There was a sprinkling of landowners as well and a higher
chamber, the State Council, in which they and the aristoc­
racy were dominant. The Duma had only existed since
1906. The Fourth Duma had been elected in 1912 on an
indirect franchise favoring exactly these classes with some,
but by no means proportional to their numbers, representa­
tion of peasants, workers, and the lower middle classes such
as clerks, artisans, and so on. The Duma’s powers were
sketchy and could be readily circumvented by the tsar but it
was, nonetheless, important if relatively powerless. It was its
perceived powerlessness which galvanized its members into
action. Russia, they thought, was going to hell in a hand­
cart. Terms such as ‘chaos,’ ‘anarchy,’ ‘the abyss’ peppered
debates and resolutions. In a striking phrase, Krivoshein had
described them as acting ‘under a cloak of patriotic anxiety’
(Cherniavsky 1967, 118). The fear, as Krivoshein hinted,
was not entirely altruistic. It was not just for ‘Russia’ and the
dynasty that they feared, it was for themselves. The increas­
ingly complex situation was threatening the social status and
property of all of them. This extreme pressure caused the
usual political miracle. In a joint exercise of self‐protection
many branches of the elite came together. Nationalists, con­
servatives, and liberals put aside differences in order to fight
for a greater say in policy and policy making. They were
even joined by some moderate socialists who shared the
view that a greater degree of accountability in government,
and perhaps even a smidgen of real democracy, would be
good for the left as well. The unifying conviction among
these groups was that they should be allowed to join in
more actively in the war effort and use their own talents and
approaches to defend the country from invasion and from
revolution. They no longer trusted the autocracy to do
these things for them. Many of them had felt the same way
in 1905 but had felt the October Manifesto had given them
just such a say in politics. By 1915 they had become disil­
lusioned. Local government and organizations in what
might be thought of as Russia’s developing civil society,
from organizations of landowners to volunteer fund raisers
and actual volunteers to help out in hospitals and to shelter
Another random document with
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 PLATE XXIX

1. Old men introducing a dance during an initiation ceremony,

Kukata tribe.

2. Circumcision ceremony, Kukata tribe.

 “Beyond themselves with excitement, they lay hands upon the lad
and lift him upon the back of two or three of the men who are
stooping in readiness to receive him.”

Primitive as the natives of Australia are in the scale of humanity,

so they appear to us, from a psychological point of view, as but mere
children. Being intensely emotional, they are easily moved by rage or
grief; they are of a quick temper and the best of friends fall out over
the most trivial matter; but in the majority of cases the storm lasts but
a very short time and then the friendship is as thick as ever.
Happiness seems the essence of their existence, and indeed none
but an aboriginal could, or would, keep on smiling under the terrible
bondage which our vaunted civilization has imposed upon him.
Among the members composing a tribe, one finds a diversification
of character and talent much the same as builds up a modern
community—it includes orators, warriors, artists, and clowns.
Unauthorized though the action might be, it is not an uncommon
occurrence for a man to place himself in a conspicuous position in
camp and hold forth on matters of current interest to an enthusiastic
and, at times, spell-bound audience; the man of skill and courage
becomes the hero of the hour when the tribe goes to war; whilst
talents in tune or colour are called upon whenever the occasion
demands something out of the common. Some of the men have the
reputation of being the jesters; their antics and jokes keep the camp
in roars of laughter. Under the last-named category also come the
mentally defective and half-witted persons; they are generally
followed around by a band of mischievous children, who enjoy, with
shameless glee, all the absurd pranks of the imbecile.
 CHAPTER XXVI
INITIATION

No person exempt from initiation rites—Piercing the septum of nose—Tooth

rapping—Children trained to become hardy—Fire-walking—Body scars—
Different patterns described—Sky-shying—Circumcision—Convalescence
and return to camp—Deserters drastically dealt with—The sacred
“Wanningi”—Biting the initiate’s scalp—Subincision—Operation
simultaneously performed upon old men—Sacred pole erected at ceremonial
site—Initiation ceremonies without mutilation—Mythical origin of mutilation—
Female initiation—Enchantment of breast—“Smoking” ceremony—Mutilation
of female.

Throughout Australia it is required of a person, before he reaches

adolescence, to pass through certain rites and ceremonies, without
which he would not be considered mature and would not be allowed
the privileges enjoyed by the rest of the adult community. This rule
applies to both sexes, and is particularly stringent in the case of the
male; we refer to a series of mutilations, which are committed by the
elders upon the persons of the rising generation at regular stages of
their lives, and always accompanied by pompous, secret, and
demonstrative ceremonial. These functions naturally vary in different
parts of so large an area as is included in the continent of Australia,
but, nevertheless, the differences are not so considerable that one
could not consider the transactions collectively under the heading of
one and the same chapter.
Broadly speaking, the first, and at the same time the least
important, ceremony is the piercing of the lower fleshy portion of the
septum of the nose. This is performed at a rather early age in the
north and south, whilst in central Australia it does not take place until
the child has reached maturity. The Larrekiya pinch a hole through
the flesh with their finger-nails when the child is still in arms. Central
tribes use a sharply-pointed bone or the blade of a spear. The child
is laid flat upon its back and its head placed between the thighs of
the operator, who is kneeling on the ground. The child is assured
that what is about to be done to it will not hurt, and that, when it is
over, its body will develop quickly and become strong. Then the
operator seizes the columna with the index finger and thumb of his
left hand and pulls it well below the nostrils. With the sharpened
piece of bone or blade he holds in his right hand, he perforates the
tissue beneath the cartilage with a decisive drive, then quickly
withdraws the instrument again. The father, or if the father be dead,
the father’s brother, usually performs the operation upon a boy,
whilst the mother (or mother’s sister) attends to a daughter. For
some time after the operation, the perforation is kept open by means
of a short rod, which is frequently turned about. Among some of the
central Australian tribes, this rite is becoming obsolete; the Aluridja
and Arunndta, for instance, do not nowadays insist upon the
perforation being made at all, and, if it is, then only late in youth. It is
at the option of a man to perforate the septum of the gin he takes to
himself; if he does so, it is more for vanity sake, thinking that she is
better able to decorate herself for corroborees, than with the idea of
making her grow robust and womanly.
Next in the ritual sequence comes the tooth-rapping ceremony.
This, too, is or was practised practically over the whole of the
continent, and is in parts of great importance, ranking with certain
tribes as one of the initiation steps. The ceremony extends over
weeks and ends with the knocking out of one or two of the novice’s
incisors. Generally a number of lads or girls undergo the ordeal
together; but in the case of the girls no particularly great fuss is
made. At times a number of adjoining tribes agree among
themselves to hold a monster ceremony conjointly, at which all the
youths of correct age are dealt with. Such is a really big occasion in
tribal affairs, and many weeks are spent in an endeavour to make
the event as successful and as impressive as possible. The decision
is made at one of the council meetings of the old men, who, having
announced the matter to a general assembly, make arrangements to
send invitations to any friendly tribes living around them. In the
Northern Kimberleys of Western Australia, a pair of men is selected
for conveying each invitation to its destination; they are elaborately
painted up and are allowed to wear only a forehead band and a
pubic tassel; each carries a message-stick and a bull-roarer of a
design which is to figure prominently during the ceremony. The stick
and the bull-roarer are to be given to one of the old men of the tribe
they are going to. When these messengers arrive at their
destination, the nature of their visit is immediately recognized. The
old man receives the stick and bull-roarer and hands them to one of
his fellow-councillors whose crest or “kobong” corresponds to that
embodied in the carvings on the bull-roarer; and, in return, the
messengers are given similar pieces to take back to the sender. The
date for the commencement of the ceremony is fixed about a month
in advance, the half moon being favoured; the trysting place is upon
the originator’s ground at a place where water and food will be
sufficient to supply a great number in attendance throughout the
proceedings. In the meantime the ground is cleared and prepared;
as in most of their initiation ceremonies, this consists of two large,
circular spaces connected by a straight, wide pathway.
While this is being done, the boys are tended by some old men,
who keep them at a distance and daily talk to them on matters
dealing with manhood’s duties, chivalry, courage, and the social
position of women. In addition, they are taught some of the principal
songs in which they will be required to join during the subsequent
ceremonies in order to please the old men.
By this time it has become quite clear to the women that
something extraordinary is about to happen. Indirectly they are made
aware of the fact that a tooth-rapping ceremony stands near; and
then for the first time music is heard; the women commence chanting
periodically to the boys’ teeth, which they thereby hope to loosen in
their sockets.
At this stage a bull-roarer is frequently sounded at night by one or
more old men, who walk quietly away from camp and conceal
themselves in the bush. At the sound of these, the women are
overwhelmed with awe and cover their faces with their hands and
quiver hysterically. This is the dawn of that period in a young man’s
life at which his social status undergoes a complete change; it is the
introduction to the series of initiation ceremonies which will ultimately
qualify him for acceptance into the inner circle of men who have a
voice in the control of tribal affairs. But more than this: it is also the
beginning of that time in his life when he must learn to sever himself
from his associations with the women and camp apart from his
mother, sisters, and other near female relatives. As a matter of fact,
this event places him on the threshold of a new life which unfolds to
him the secret of the sexes. The sexual significance of the ceremony
is clearly indicated through the circumstance that both male and
female bull-roarers are sounded during the proceedings, a liberty
which is only permitted on rare occasions.
About two days before the expected arrival of the invited tribes,
rehearsals are held by the local men. A body of the performers
suddenly appears upon the scene, coming from the cover of the
forest; they are all richly decorated with red ochre and white pipe-
clay, and run in a compact line up to the cleared space. As they
approach the spot, they stamp the ground vigorously and hit their
hands together. They halt at one of the circular spaces, and, whilst
they continue to stamp and beat time with their hands, some of the
oldest among them spring along the track to the opposite space and
go through all sorts of mysterious acting, which include tricks of
sorcery designed to exhort the men and expel any evil spirits from
the ground. The act is repeated every day until the guests arrive, and
then it is also produced at night. The actors, who have profited by
the rehearsals, are now seen at their best, and the visitors first look
on in appreciative bewilderment; at a later stage, they join in and
their own sorcerers display their tricks as well. This function lasts
long into the night, and, should more visitors arrive, it might be
repeated all over again for the late-comers’ special benefit. During
these demonstrations, the women sit some distance off with their
backs turned to the men and keep up their monotonous tune.
The next few days may be spent in convivial sing-songs and food-
procuring expeditions, whilst the principal performers busy
themselves cutting twigs and leaves from the surrounding trees, with
which they completely cover the cleared ground, so that not a track
remains visible in the sand. The object of this somewhat tedious
process is precautionary, namely, to deny any prowling spirit the
opportunity of ascertaining the identity of the persons who have
taken part in the ceremony. They fear that, if this information were
obtained, the boys would be molested and their teeth stuck tightly
into bone of the gums.
When at last the eventful night arrives, a number of the older men
decorate their bodies profusely with vegetable down and ochre. The
boys’ bodies are smeared with red ochre, over which certain designs
are drawn in symmetrical fashion, and embodying a number of
circles and dashes. The men endeavour to make themselves as
awe-inspiring as possible by concealing as much of their normal
appearance as they can. They keep aloof from the novices until
immediately before the ceremony.
The fires glaring fiercely, the boys are led to the cleared space and
told to keep their eyes closed. Upon a given signal, several of the
decorated men rush from the darkness, pounce upon the novices,
and throw them to the ground. Each man seizes one of them and
kneeling behind him places the lad’s head upon his lap. The initiate
offers no resistance and allows his eyes to be covered by the old
man’s hands. Whilst some weird chants are being rendered, the
operators appear upon the scene, each carrying a short cylindrical
stick and a stone in his hands. These men are not decorated and are
near relatives of the boys undergoing the ritual. With much dancing
and gesticulating, they draw near to the boys, and, as each of the
men kneeling behind raises the head of a candidate, one of the
operators steps forward and looks into the boy’s mouth as it is being
forced open by the assistant. Presently he selects his mark and with
his finger-nail presses back the gum from one of the youngster’s
incisors. Then he places the point of his stick against the tooth and
gives it a sharp blow with the stone he is carrying in his other hand.
As a rule the boy does not whimper, but occasionally one may give
way and cry with pain. This is immediately resented and forbidden by
the old men, who declare that he has been too much in the company
of the women and girls.
The stick is re-applied and another blow imparted to the tooth; and
the process is repeated until the tooth loosens and falls out. All
novices are treated similarly in rotation.
 Whilst the elders are continuing their dancing, the boys are taken
back to camp by their initiated male relatives, where they are
presented with a pubic tassel, a dog-tail necklace, or other article
which is strictly peculiar to such as have undergone the ordeal at the
correct time. The boys are again given instructions in all sorts of
matter becoming of a man, among which discipline and loyalty
towards their elders and tribes-people in general are of first
importance. The seriousness of the ceremony then relaxes
somewhat, and songs and dances are produced to inspire and
amuse the boys; the performance rarely concludes before daylight.
In central Australia the operation is nowadays performed without
much ceremony and usually in daylight. Among the Wongapitcha it is
known as “Antjuarra.” The novice lies on his back and rests his head
against the operator’s thighs, while a number of men sit around in a
semi-circle (Plate XXVII). The operator forces the gum away from
the tooth with his finger nails and endeavours to loosen the root in its
socket with a small, pointed wallaby bone he calls “marinba.” Then
he applies the bevelled point of a short, stout rod (“tjutanga”) and
strikes it with a stone (“puli”). The percussion produces a loud
resonant note, at which all present cry “Tirr!” After four or five
whacks with the stone, the tooth falls from its socket. It is picked up
by the operator and shown to the audience, who respond by
exclaiming “Ah” or “Yau.”
The Wongapitcha and western Aluridja remove the left central
incisor; only the eastern groups of the Arunndta still practise the rite.
One of the chief concerns of an aboriginal father is to make his
son fearless and capable of enduring hardship. In all his dealings
with his children, he endeavours to avoid favouring and pampering
any of them once they have passed out of infancy; but the boys in
particular are constantly urged to suppress pain and to make it their
special task to under-rate the deprivation of comfort no matter what
circumstances might arise. In the same way the boys are trained to
be brave; they are told not to be under any apprehension of danger
except when it is known to be prompted by the treachery of the evil
spirit or by the wrath of the spirit-ancestors of the tribe. With this
principle ever before them, most of the initiation ceremonies have
been evolved on similar lines. The Kukata even make it compulsory
for the novices to walk through a blazing fire, an act they refer to as
“merliadda.” Other central tribes make the young men lie temporarily
upon branches they place over a smouldering fire.

PLATE XXX

Circumcision of a Wogait boy.

“With his left hand the surgeon seizes the prepuse, whilst a veritable reverberation
of short-sounded ‘i, i’s’ meets him from the mouths of all present, and as he draws
it well forward a number of hacks severs it.”

It is largely during the term of initiation, from early childhood to

adolescence, that every individual, boy or girl, receives a number of
cuts in different parts of the body, which, when they heal, leave
permanent and elevated scars. After the incision is made, ashes,
ochre, and grease are usually rubbed into the wound to make it
granulate to excess and so produce an artificial keloid. The reasons
for making these scars are threefold: spartan, cosmetic, and tribal.
The operation is performed with a stone-knife or flint-chip. In
addition, a punctate scar is produced by twirling a fire-making stick
until it becomes nearly red-hot, then quickly holding the point against
the skin. The process is repeated time after time, each time selecting
a new point on the skin, until a chain-pattern results. The latter type
of scar is more commonly found on women than on men, and is
much adopted by the coastal tribes of the Northern Territory.
It would be futile even to attempt a scheme of classification of the
different tribal markings. In some districts, only one or two are made;
in others, the better part of the body is covered. As a general rule,
the men display a greater number than the women; the latter often
only have one or two horizontal cuts across the chest or abdomen, at
times, indeed, only a single prominent scar connecting the breasts.
Generally speaking, the central Australian tribes do not cicatricize
their bodies nearly as much as the northern. The Yantowannta,
Ngameni, and other Cooper Creek natives leave the chest clean
above the breasts, but cut a few horizontal lines immediately below
them on the abdomen; the Dieri add one or two short irregular marks
above; at Durham Downs the women have a number of short
horizontal lines on each breast. Among the Aluridja, Arunndta, and
Arrabonna, one notices principally short horizontal lines across chest
and abdomen, with, occasionally, a few vertical bars, less than an
inch in length, around the shoulders; a number of the small circular
fire-marks are also as a rule noticeable on the forearms of the
Arunndta. On the north coast a great variety of marks may be
studied. The tribes east and west of Port Darwin have very
prominent scars horizontally across chest and abdomen, short
vertical bars around the shoulders, sloping bands composed of
either parallel vertical cuts or fire-whisk scars, passing from the
central point between the breasts upwards to the shoulder on one or
both sides, and occasionally a vertical band, consisting of two
parallel rows of fire-whisk scars, on one side of the abdomen just
beside the navel. An additional pattern is a sagging band across the
chest from shoulder to shoulder, consisting of about twenty short
vertical cuts.
It must not be supposed that these marks are all regularly
observed upon every individual one meets. On the contrary, it is very
rare to see a person with all the scars referred to, some having only
one or two horizontal lines across the chest or abdomen like the
central tribes.
The Melville and Bathurst Islanders imitate the frond of the zamia
palm (Cycas media) by cutting a series of V-shaped figures, one
within the other, in a vertical row, upon one or both sides of the back,
and on the upper and outer surfaces of the arms and thighs.
Horizontal lines are cut across the chest, as above described, and
here and there a person also has a horizontal band on his forehead,
immediately over the eyes, consisting of from eight to twelve short
vertical cuts.
The Cambridge Gulf natives, both male and female, cut numerous
lines (“gummanda”) horizontally across the chest, abdomen,
buttocks, and thighs, and long vertical lines down the upper arms,
whilst on the back, occasionally, a “waist-band” or “naualla,”
consisting of numerous short vertical nicks, is added, together with
about ten vertical cuts on each calf (Plate XVI, 2). The gins have one
or two vertical bands of punctate scars between the breasts.
The Worora at Port George IV further decorate the whole of the
back with alternating groups of horizontal and vertical lines, those on
the shoulder blade being particularly prominent.
The central tribes have embodied in the curriculum of initiation
tests a sky-shying act, called “Algerrigiowumma” by the Arunndta,
during which the novice is tossed high into the air by a number of
older men. The ceremony is somewhat as follows. By agreement, a
crowd of men and women assemble at night upon a cleared piece of
ground near the camp-fires. After a few songs and ordinary dances,
whose object seems to be more to create an atmosphere than that
they have any definite significance from an initiation point of view,
the whole congregation draws up in one or two lines and settles
down to a peculiar dance, shuffling sideways from one edge of the
cleared space to the other and back again. As they move they
mumble a verse of coarse guttural words which ends in hissing notes
resembling the panting of a vicious animal. At this moment two or
three men spring from behind and seize the unsuspecting novice.
Rushing towards the expectant crowd, they swing him high above
their shoulders and throw him among the outstretched arms of the
crowd. There he is seized by a dozen or more of the most powerful
men, who toss him high up towards the sky. During his flight through
the air the position of the boy is usually horizontal. When he returns
again by gravitation, he is caught and once more projected
skywards; and the same process is repeated time after time. He may
then be released, but if the crowd again begin to dance and sing, he
will in all probability have to submit to a repetition. The ceremony
amounts to a formal handing over of the boy by the women to the
care of the men.
Of momentous importance is the initiation ceremony which
includes the circumcision of the novice; it is the first occasion upon
which the truth of growing manhood is definitely made clear to the
boy. The Aluridja refer to the ceremony as “Arrarra”; it extends over a
period of several days, during which wild dances and songs are
produced. For weeks before the novices are zealously guarded by
certain of the old men and kept away from the mixed camp. No
women are tolerated within a wide radius of the spot at which the
ritual event is to be celebrated; and throughout the vigil the boys
remain out of sight of their female relatives and are allowed to
converse with none but their guardians. The boys’ diet is restricted to
only a few very ordinary items, amounting to a mere sustenance;
anything they are able to obtain by assiduous hunting is required to
be handed to the men in charge. After having listened to the songs
of the men officiating in the ceremony, the boys are allowed on the
second or third night to attend in person. They are given to
understand that what they are about to see is never to be explained
to any of the women or juniors. The performance must be regarded
as sacred and most secret; and they must realize that, although
invisible, there are many ghost-ancestors present who are following
every item of the ceremony with proud appreciation. At such a stage
the performers are awe-inspiring spectacles, being richly decorated
with white and red down and wearing the cross-shaped “Wanningi”
in their hair (Plate XLIII, 2).
A great fire is burning at the edge of a cleared space, around
which a number of men are sitting and singing and beating the
ground with sticks. To the listener the strains sound respectful, if not
worshipful; in the Aluridja they run somewhat like: “Imbinana alla’m
binana,” repeated almost indefinitely. In the glaring light it is noticed
that the ground is cleared of the original grass and growth, but is
covered with a layer of leaves of the red gum tree which abounds
along the watercourses. Upon this matting of leaves the dancers are
moving to and fro, madly stamping the ground. Then, as they
quicken their pace, each places the point of his beard into his mouth
and tries to look as ferocious as possible. The lead is taken by one
who is carrying a short hooked stick in front of him. In single file
these men encircle the chorus, the leader touching all present with
his crook and shrieking “Arr, arr, aah!”

PLATE XXXI
 Melville Islander.

Full-face and profile. Note prognathism combined with “negative” chin.

The novice (or novices, as the case may be) is now taken away
from the wild scene and again given to understand that henceforth
he is not to leave the company of the men, and that he must do as
those in authority bid him. He is taken to another fire some distance
off and covered with red ochre from head to foot; his hair is tied back
with human hair-string; then he is led back to the principal group of
performers.
When he re-appears, the dancers rush around in the manner
described above, crying “Arr, arr, aah!” with husky voices, first more
or less confusedly, but gradually in a more defined line which
gradually closes upon the youth. Beyond themselves with
excitement, they lay hands upon the lad and lift him upon the backs
of two or three of the men who are stooping in readiness to receive
him. As he is carried onwards, the other performers, and some of the
chorus as well, cluster around the panic-stricken boy, each of them
taking hold of some part of his body and helping to make the mass of
humanity as confused as possible (Plate XXIX, 2). Thus they tour
around the cirque and pull up near to the fire. Two or three of the
number now throw themselves beneath the carriers, who, in their
turn, immediately pile themselves upon them. The boy is pulled back
on to this human operating table full length, and another man
immediately jumps on to his chest; others hold him securely by his
arms and legs. All the time the men keep up their cries of “Arr!” and
from different places around the fire the booming, humming, and
shrieking notes of bull-roarers rise above the din.
The moment the latter unearthly sounds are heard at a Kukata
ceremony, the men respond with an uproarious slogan sounding like:
“Wubbi, wubbi, wubbi, wau!” This imitates the noise of the bull-
roarer, which is supposed to be the voice of the presiding spirit. A
perceptible wave of solemnity pervades the atmosphere at this
moment, not only in the immediate surroundings of the ceremonial
fire, but wherever the piercing chorus strikes the ears of camping
groups, who may at the time be many miles away. Women and
children shudder with fright and bury their faces in their hands. The
initiated men, however, act differently. Where there is only one in
camp, he rushes to the fireside and snatches a burning stick which
he tosses high into the air. When there are several present, they
rush out together into the darkness and unitedly echo the “Wubbi,
wubbi, wubbi, wau!”
The boy’s mouth is gagged with a ball of hair-string, which serves
the double purpose of stifling his voice, should he attempt to cry, and
of giving him something to bite his teeth into when he is in pain.
The men at the lower end now force his legs asunder and press
them downwards over the side of the bodies below. As this is
happening, the operator walks into the space between the thighs,
with his beard between his lips and his eyes rolling in their sockets.
He carries a knife in his hand—usually a fair-sized freshly broken
splinter of quartzite, chalcedony, flint, or quartz, with or without a
handpiece of resin—and immediately proceeds to operate. The
Wongapitcha at this stage stun the boy by clubbing his head. With
his left hand the surgeon seizes the prepuse, whilst a veritable
reverberation of short-sounded “i, i’s” meets him from the mouths of
all present, and as he draws it well forward a number of hacks
severs it (Plate XXX). The Dieri make use of a short, smooth,
cylindro-conical stone, over the rounded point of which the operator
stretches the skin, and so pushes back the glans before he cuts.
Among the Kukata the circumcision ceremonial is referred to as
“Gibberi.” During its period, cicatrices are made on the arms, but the
characteristic transverse cuts on the back are reserved for the
following rite, which goes by the name of “Winyeru.” The prepuse is
resected with a stone knife known as “tjulu,” and immediately
destroyed by throwing it into the fire.
As the surgeon’s hand leaves the boy’s body with the detached
skin clutched between two fingers, the act is greeted all round with
an appreciative exclamation sounding like “A ha, a hm.” The Aluridja
refer to the skin as “banki,” and bury it shortly after the operation.
The boy, who by this time is usually semi-comatous, is sat up, and
the blood which is streaming from him is collected in a piece of bark
previously laid beneath him. The Wogait and other northern tribes
subsequently dress the wound with paperbark, clay, emu fat, and hot
ashes, to stanch the bleeding. When the boy recovers from the
shock, he is presented with a spear and spear-thrower, and often a
shield as well.
The patient is then taken into the bush to convalesce; and during
this period his diet is under strict observation. After about three
weeks he has more or less recovered and returns with the men to
the main camp, wearing a fur-tassel which covers his pubes. His
mother and other near female relatives on the mother’s side, when
they behold him, walk towards him sobbing, tearing hair from their
scalps and otherwise hurting their bodies as indication of their
sympathy for the painful ordeal he has so bravely undergone whilst
aspiring towards the status of manhood.
Cases have repeatedly come under my notice in latter years
where a circumcision candidate has attempted to evade the
operation by travelling away from his tribe and residing indefinitely
with some other party, native or European, having no jurisdiction
over him. It is usually only a matter of time and he will be ambushed
by men of his own tribe and taken back to camp. The operation is
then immediately performed, and is made extraordinarily drastic as a
punishment. The skin is stretched forward under considerable
tension and severed with a stone knife. In several specimens which
are in my possession, the external sheath was cut so high up that a
number of pubic hairs were removed with it.
This ceremony in its essential features is much the same among
all tribes which circumcise, although there are slight variations in the
method of building up the human operating table. In the Wogait tribe,
for instance, the boy is thrown on his back over the legs of four men
who sit in pairs, face to face, with their limbs alternately placed so
that the feet of one are against a thigh of another.
We have already referred to the ceremonial object known as the
“wanningi,” which is produced during this ceremony. This is always
constructed specially for the occasion and is destroyed again
immediately after; under no circumstances are the women and
children allowed to see it, for if they did blindness or some paralysing
affliction would strike them for their disobedience. In its simplest
form, the “wanningi” consists of a cross, from the centre of which a
long twine of fur is wound spirally outwards, from arm to arm, and
fastened with a single turn round each arm in succession. The object
is either stuck into the hair as referred to, or carried in the hand by
the functionaries during the final stage of the ceremony. In the
northern Kimberleys a similar structure is used which is carried at the
end of a spear or long stick behind the back of the performer. The
“wanningi” is supposed to become inspired by a spirit guardian the
moment the object is completed and prevents the boy from suffering
too great a loss of blood. It is shown to the boy just prior to the
operation and its sacred nature is explained to him.
The partially matriculated man now remains in camp for a while,
but is kept under the strictest surveillance and aloof from the
opposite sex. He continues to go out on daily excursions with certain
of the older men and has to recompense those who took an active
part in his initiation with the lion-share of his hunting bag, many items
of which he is himself still forbidden to partake of.
Not many weeks pass by peacefully, however, before the
excitement starts afresh. An old man, usually the senior among the
initiate’s group-relatives, quite spontaneously lays hands on the
unsuspecting neophyte, by clutching him between his arms, and
bites him on the head. Then he releases him again and darts away
like one possessed. Others take the cue and act similarly. Several
men participate in this painful but well-intentioned ceremonial, and
they may repeat the performance from three to six times in
succession. The youth tries to make light of the injury done him but
often cannot altogether suppress crying with agony. The blood pours
freely from the numerous wounds in his scalp. He will in all
probability have to undergo this painful ordeal on two or three
different occasions.
There is yet another big test to be passed by the man-in-the-
making before he is finally admitted by the controlling council to
mature membership. And this is again accompanied by an additional
mutilation of his person, which is commonly referred to as the “mika
operation.” With few exceptions it is performed by most of the central
and north-western tribes and in much the same manner.
The ceremony does not take place until some time after the young
man has thoroughly recovered from the effects of his previous
sufferings. It follows, in many instances, as the natural climax to a
lengthy religious demonstration during which a series of sacred
songs and dances has been produced. Needless to say the
proceedings are inaugurated at a spot remote from the general
camping ground, and preference is given to a moonlight night. No
woman or child is tolerated near, and the novice is told that he must
regard his presence among the old men as a decided favour.
Ordinary songs are rendered for a while which are designed to
fecundate the mother-stocks of their game supplies; then follow
more dramatic incantations which are believed not only to attract
certain spirit-ancestors to the spot but also inspirit the sacred but
ordinarily inanimate tjuringas which are lying before the celebrants at
the fireside. The excitement grows and with it the men wax
enthusiastic. It is decided to operate upon one or more young men
who happen to be available; and now everybody seems beyond
himself with frenetical animation. The suggestion is received with
applause. No secret is made about the matter; and the nomination is
made in public. The atmosphere is so tense with hysterical
veneration that the mere mention of a likely function enjoining the
spilling of blood is received with enthusiasm and general
appreciation. Arrangements are made forthwith.
Three or four men who are to be intimately concerned in the affair
dodge into the darkness of the bush and return a short time later
besmeared with ochre and pipeclay, and decorated with eagle-
hawk’s down. As they approach the fire, they stamp the ground with
their feet and balance their arms in a horizontal position. Thus they
encircle the fire two or three times and, in doing so, make a peculiar
hissing noise like that produced when wood is being cut. All the time
the other men are beating time to the movements of the performers
by smacking their hands against their buttocks.
Presently the dull, humming sound of a bullroarer breaks upon the
performers’ ears. At this, all men throw up their arms above their
heads and yell, while the notes of the bullroarer reach a higher pitch.
A jumble of wild, vociferating men ensues. The novice stands in their
midst. The bullroarer’s noise is stopped, and with it the voices of the
men die away. Only the painted performers continue to stamp and
again make the peculiar hissing noise as they move around the fire.
By this time a number of men have placed themselves behind the
novice who is made to stare into the brightest portion of the fire and
told not to move his eyes from the spot.
Upon a significant nod or other signal from the leading performer,
some of the men at the back of the youth lie upon the ground, while
others place themselves on top of them again. The moment this has
happened, the youth is tripped backwards over them by some who
have been standing at his side, and by them he is also held down
and gagged.
The leading performer now moves straight towards the victim and
in his hand one notices he is carrying a stone cutting knife. His
attendants spring to each side of him and hold the young man’s legs
apart. Now the leading man, who has been ordained with the
surgical duties, follows the ancient practice of the “gruesome rite” by
splitting the urethra for a distance of about an inch down its length.
The withdrawal of the surgeon from the scene meets with the
approval of all participants and eye-witnesses; and this fact is made
known by the combined exclamations of “A, A, Yah!”
The young man is promptly pulled up from the improvised living
table and his gag removed. He is ordered to sit over a wooden
receptacle, usually a shield but occasionally a food-carrier, in which
the blood pouring from the wound is allowed to collect. In a crude but
hearty manner, more by action than by word, he is congratulated.
Now he is a man, a real man, and he is at liberty to join in the
discussions of the rest of the men and to ask any pertinent questions
relating to the affairs of his tribe.
During this time the commotion around the camp-fire continues
without abatement. The excited throng, spurred on by what has
preceded, seems to have become intoxicated by the sight of blood.
The men who lay beneath the initiate during the operation figure
prominently among them and display the clots and congealed
patches of blood which cover considerable portions of their naked
bodies. This provokes an appetite for seeing more and ere long one
of the senior men, who has been initiated some time ago, volunteers
to have the subincision of his urethra extended. He of his own free
will calls upon an old man to perform on him and, when the nominee
steps forward, he submits to the torture without flinching. Others
follow his example. There is no doubt that the brave demonstration
of masculine fearlessness stimulates the newly initiated member
who is sitting aside and recovering from the shock which the trying
ordeal has given his system.
The Kukata men at this stage, knowing that the candidate has now
successfully passed the second great initiation rite, known as
“Winyeru,” and is henceforth to be allowed to mix with the women,
betray extreme sensual excitement. And it is whilst they are in that
state that some of the oldest men approach them, carrying spears,
with the points of which they extend the previous slit in the urethra by
a further short distance. It is only natural that the blood which follows
the cut is squirted in considerable quantity. The custom is to allow it
to do so until the excitement abates, and then to stop the bleeding by
holding a fire-stick near the wound. After submitting themselves to
such treatment on numerous successive occasions, it could only be
expected that the whole external length of the urethra is eventually
slit. The old men maintain that thereby their carnal powers are
increased, and for that reason their forefathers introduced the
corresponding female operation.
The after-treatment of the patient is much the same as described
in connection with the circumcision ceremony. When eventually the
newly made “man” returns to the main camp, a great sensation is
caused among the women who wail as if there had been a
bereavement, and cut deep gashes into different parts of their
bodies.
Many of the northern coastal tribes, such as the Wordaman of the
Wickham and Victoria Rivers, erect a sacred pole at the site of the
enactment of some of their religious and initiation ceremonies. This
pole is called “Djundagalla” and stands six or seven feet high. It is