“Mutiny amid Repression: Russian Soldiers in the Revolution of 1905–1906”
II. Enemies Domestic: Russia Moves toward Revolution
A Brief Socio-Military History of Nineteenth-Century Russia
Cultural dualism was a persistent feature of Russian society, and so of its army, but Russia was scarcely unchanging. And naturally, shifts in the contours of Russian society affected the army—not just its organization, the treatment of soldiers, and the sources of regimental income, but also the use to which regiments were put. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, all of the major currents in Russian society—peasant unrest, the growth of the factory proletariat, pogroms, student disorders, the emergence of a mass revolutionary movement—pressed against the army.
It had always been one of the army’s functions to contain civilian discontent, from the early eighteenth century deployment of the new Petrine regiments against anti-Petrine rebellions, through the campaigns against the Pugachev rebellion in the 1770s and the Polish insurrections of 1830-31 and 1863, to the use of small detachments to suppress minor but chronic peasant disturbances and occasional major plague and cholera riots. Through the 1860s most disorders involved serfs. Crop failures, the reorganization of land use and labor services by serf owners, rumors of emancipation, rumors that a newly enthroned Tsar would curb the gentry, real changes in peasant legislation that peasants took to be justification for their resistance to the exactions of gentry and officials—almost everything that impinged on the peasantry provoked disorders at one time or another. Certainly peasants had ample reason to rebel, and in the first half of the nineteenth century the number of minor peasant (mostly serf) disorders rose from decade to decade. Yet whatever their cause, they did not pose a threat to the established order, partly because they rarely involved more than a brief confrontation with the authorities, partly because troops were generously employed—in roughly 50 percent of all disturbances from the 1820s through the 1840s—to overawe the serfs.1
A more serious wave of serf disorders involving mass flight to the Crimea struck during and immediately after the Crimean War. Unrest was spurred by rumors, first, that service in the militia would earn emancipation, and then that serfs repopulating the Crimea would be freed. Though troops brought the runaways under control, these disorders contributed to the government’s decision to emancipate the serfs even in the face of stiff gentry resistance. Talk of impending emancipation triggered hundreds of disorders, and troops were again called out against the serfs—245 times between 1857 and 1860—but the continued unrest impelled the government to hasten emancipation and increase the amount of land alloted to liberated serfs. The most serious wave of peasant unrest, however, came after the announcement of emancipation in March 1861, because the terms grievously betrayed the serfs’ expectation that they would receive free of charge all the land they had previously worked. Rumors abounded that the gentry had suppressed the true terms of emancipation, and in the confusion over the very complex legislation and in the wish to believe that the Tsar had granted them “true liberty,” there were in the first five months of 1861 in excess of 1,340 disorders (rising to over 1,800 by the end of the year), with troops called out 718 times. Occasionally, troops fired on mutinous peasants, as at Bezdna in Kazan Province, where on April 12, 1861, between fifty-five and seventy peasants died.2
Peasant unrest receded quickly after 1861, the incidence of agrarian disorders oscillating around fifty per year (about the same as in the last decade before the Crimean War) from the late 1860s through the end of the century.3 Most incidents stemmed from the peasants’ conviction that they had the right to use gentry-owned forests and fields to which they had previously had access (attempts to survey and properly demark gentry estates often triggered deliberate mass infringements of property rights). The establishment of new administrative institutions also touched off peasant disorders, as for instance when the introduction of “land captains”—local nobles appointed beginning in 1889 to tighten fiscal and administrative control over peasants—triggered rumors that serfdom was being reestablished, and that flogging machines were being employed against recalcitrant peasants.4 Local officials were usually able to persuade peasants to meet their fiscal obligations and respect property rights (at least for the time being), but when exhortation failed officials routinely summoned troops to the villages in about 20 percent of all peasant disorders. Almost without exception the mere presence of a detachment or even the news that soldiers were approaching brought peasants to their knees.5
The incidence of peasant unrest was no more threatening, and the incidence of military suppression lower, than before the Crimean War, but the context in which peasant disorders occurred was very different. Between Emancipation and the close of the nineteenth century, steady expansion of the market for agricultural goods and of opportunities for earnings outside the village triggered a 40-percent increase in agricultural productivity, sustained a 46-percent increase in population, and left 50 percent of the peasantry dependent upon off-farm income for at least part of their livelihood. Peasants did not believe that these changes, or the flood of cheap manufactured goods into the villages, left them better off. Instinctively, they came to believe that the way to maintain the equilibrium of village society was to acquire more land, especially the gentry’s land, much of which they were already renting or otherwise working. In the 1870s, rumors of an impending “black repartition” (chernyi peredel, the redistribution of all land to the peasants) began to circulate for the first time. As the nineteenth century ended, the conviction that all land—not just their pre-Emancipation holdings— belonged to peasants by right and tradition had taken firm hold in the villages, and within a few years this newly minted tradition would find expression in widespread peasant rebellion. It was characteristic of peasant dependence on the urban world that the rumors originated in the city, which was simultaneously creating the conditions that suggested to peasants the need for black repartition.6
The city was the center of the commercial and industrial development that from the 1860s on so unsettled rural Russia, though much industry was in fact plunked down in rural areas to take advantage of cheap peasant labor. Following the Crimean War, the Tsarist government encouraged industrial development, first by facilitating the expansion of credit facilities and the construction of railroads, at the end of the nineteenth century by purposefully employing railroad construction to stimulate heavy industry and by aggressively promoting foreign investment. And these measures were effective. Between 1860 and 1883 the output of industry grew by a healthy 5½ percent annually, the growth rate rising to a robust 8 percent annual average in the 1890s.7 As industry grew, so did the number of workers in factories, mines, and the railroads—from around 850,000 in the 1860s to almost 3,700,000 in 1900— and the number of strikes. Virtually nonexistent through the 1860s, strikes became ordinary if not very frequent occurrences (20 to 40 a year) in the 1870s and 1880s, and exploded during the industrial boom of the 1890s: over 100 per year by 1895, over 200 per year by 1898.8
The volatility of the industrial proletariat imposed a new responsibility on the army. Since strikes were illegal and occasionally involved the destruction of property (rather more often management fear of such violence), troops were regularly called in to maintain or restore order— in about 20 percent of all industrial strikes.9 As the number of strikes increased, the burden of containing civilian discontent rose dramatically. In the first half of the 1890s, the army intervened against workers an average of fourteen times per year; in the second half of the decade, the annual average reached fifty-two. By the last half of the 1890s, the army was intervening against all types of civil disorders an average of 147 times annually, deploying for this purpose sixteen infantry and sixteen cavalry and cossack regiments every year.10
As with peasant disorders, the mere presence of troops at a factory usually sufficed to prevent violence and often broke the back of a strike. But the level of violence was markedly higher at factories than in villages: industrial conflicts accounted for five of the six incidents in the 1890s in which soldiers suffered more than ten injuries (usually bruises). Of course, workers sustained far more casualties than soldiers. In the Donets Basin factory settlement of Iuzovka, to take the worst example, a cossack squadron in August 1892 opened fire on a mob of 5,000 people, killing between fifty and two hundred (the squadron commander set the dead at sixty, wounded at one hundred).11
Industrial development meant not only that the army had ever more frequently to intervene in civilian conflicts, it also occasioned minor adjustments in deployment. The cossack squadron that massacred workers in Iuzovka in 1892 had been garrisoned there permanently in 1888 after a wave of strikes, and its only duty was to police the mines and settlements; a second squadron arrived in 1898, after another round of strikes. In a few other cases as well, military units were redeployed to control workers; the 226th Bobruisk reserve battalion was moved to Tsaritsyn after a strike in 1899, for instance.12 Generally, however, the Ministry of War resisted the pleas of civilian officials and industrialists who called for the redeployment of the army to control civilians. The Ministry rejected a plan in the 1880s to redeploy units in the Jewish Pale to forestall pogroms (though the army nevertheless intervened—not always in a timely manner—against pogroms), an 1896 suggestion from the Moscow military district to garrison two cossack squadrons in the factory settlements of Vladimir Province, and requests from civilian officials in 1899 and 1900 to beef up the permanent garrisons in the Donets Basin. The Ministry of War regularly claimed that garrisoning was based on strategic principles, that it had no units to spare for permanent control of workers, and that factory and mine owners should raise their own police force.13
The Ministry of War was quite properly reluctant to divert troops for strike-and riot-control, and military district commanders were probably correct to rail (as they did every year from the mid-1890s) against civilians for summoning troops without cause and for not appreciating the true functions of the army. Yet the generals did recognize, however grudgingly, that the army had necessarily to help contain and suppress civilian discontent. The staff of the Moscow military district, at least, resolved to gather intelligence on the enemy. As it noted in a request to the Governor of Vladimir Province in 1898, “In view of the fact that the troops of the district are often required to assist civil authorities on the occasion of disorders at factories, the staff of the district has begun to collect information on the latter,” specifically on their number, size, and location.14 Instead of a routine inconvenience, the suppression of civil disorder had become by the close of the century one of the major preoccupations of the Tsarist army.
A high level of social unrest became a prominent feature of Russian society in the 1890s. In the opening years of the twentieth century, peasant disorders and industrial strikes began to threaten the established order. Not only did disorders multiply, they became politicized: the revolutionary movement of the intelligentsia finally made contact with the masses, and this, too, added to the army’s burdens. The reasons for the rise of revolutionary sentiment are easy to identify: students and other members of educated Russia knew how retrograde the Tsarist autocracy was by nineteenth-century European standards (the point of reference for European Russians); they believed, for good reason, that the autocracy would not reform itself out of existence and that significant change in the political system and in social legislation could come only through revolution; they were well aware of the miserable condition of the peasants and the nascent industrial proletariat; and with every passing decade the ranks of students and professionals expanded, thus broadening the base for the recruitment of revolutionaries. A relatively small but determined revolutionary movement in the 1860s and 1870s culminated in the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. When Tsarism survived the Tsar and peasants failed to follow the radicals’ example, the revolutionary movement went into a decade-long recession, but with the emergence of popular unrest in the 1890s it revived. By 1900, a Marxist Russian Social Democratic Workers Party and a peasant-socialist Socialist Revolutionary Party (which for the time being focused on workers, whom Socialist Revolutionaries viewed as peasants in all but job) were beginning to take shape. As of that point, however, the revolutionary movement was largely confined to educated Russia: revolutionaries were peripherally involved in some strikes, they helped in some instances to focus otherwise diffuse discontent, but very few workers considered themselves part of a revolutionary movement, and even militant workers were notoriously hostile to the intelligentsia. The cultural barrier that separated peasant and European Russians had its analogue in the cities.
Almost accidentally, university students and the army catalyzed the juncture between workers and revolutionaries. The student movement—harassment of conservative professors, demonstrations in honor of tenants of the radical pantheon—blossomed in the 1890s in tandem with the revolutionary movement, and the army was called on to tame unruly students. In July 1899 the government adopted “Provisional Rules” under which students could be sentenced to service in the army, the humiliation attendant upon being treated as a peasant being much the most punitive aspect of this measure so far as students were concerned. Minister of War Kuropatkin liked the rules no better than students, protested against turning the army into a penal institution, and worried that student agitators might spread sedition in the army, but Tsar Nicholas held firm. In any case, the “Provisional Rules” merely antagonized students further. In 1900 a series of incidents at Kiev University culminated in the arrest with the aid of military force of hundreds of students, and the sentencing of 183 of them to terms of one to five years as privates. This triggered yet more protests, one in St. Petersburg resulting in the dispatch of twenty-eight more students to the army, and to confrontations between students and troops that stretched out over the next several years.15
It soon became apparent that the army was no place to send rebellious students, not because students had a baneful effect on soldiers but because cultural norms overrode Imperial edict. Kuropatkin visited the Petersburg students just before their train pulled out, and though he told them that they must obey orders, he gave them the right—this gesture indicating how hard it was to think of students in the role of peasant soldiers—to complain directly to him if they were maltreated. A circular from the staff of the Kiev military district urged that the treatment of students be aimed at rehabilitation rather than punishment. Noncoms were not to indulge in “methods and expressions insulting for an educated person,” and the students were not to be detailed to work “inappropriate for a cultured person: such work as cleaning out latrines, scrubbing barracks floors, sweeping the streets in front of barracks, etc.” Furthermore, advised the circular, students were to be provided underwear, bedlinen and other items that ordinary conscripts had to obtain for themselves. Officers spontaneously invited the students to tea and conversation in off-duty hours. The Tsar himself had a change of heart and pardoned the student soldiers in June 1901.16
For the army, the most important consequence of the student disorders was not its unwanted role as a correctional institution but the fact that the student demonstrations brought workers out of the factories: to the army’s duty to contain unrest in village, mill, and university was added in 1901 the task of controlling the streets. In some cities, as in Kharkov (December 1901), workers rushed spontaneously to aid students being manhandled by cossacks. Elsewhere, revolutionaries, themselves galvanized by the student movement, instigated joint worker-student demonstrations, or worker demonstrations pure and simple. May Day 1901 saw a number of political strikes and demonstrations (as opposed to the conspiratorial meetings in the woods of previous years), and these were repeated in 1902; troops—cossacks especially—were called upon to clear the streets.17
Workers became more militant in their own bastions as well. Excited by the dramatic street violence of the preceding months, in May 1901 Russian workers for the first time erected barricades—at the Obukhov steel mill outside St. Petersburg—in an effort to repulse police and soldiers (at the Obukhov mill, actually, police and a detachment of sailors; the infantry arrived late). In Batum in March 1902, 2,000 workers surrounded the jail and demanded the release of 300 of their comrades who had been arrested for striking; at least eighteen workers died when soldiers opened fire. In Rostov-on-Don in November 1902, 3,000 workers in the railroad shops went on strike, asked for and received the support of other workers in the city (in all, 10,000 Rostov workers struck), and in one confrontation with the army showered cossacks with stones: the cossacks sustained ten injuries, but they killed six workers and wounded an indeterminate number of others.18 Accompanied by bloodshed or not, the number of strikes rose, from around 200 in 1900 to between 300 and 400 in 1901 and again in 1902, with a corresponding rise in the demand for troops for factory patrol. By 1902, some garrisons kept companies on standing alert for crowd control and had drawn up detailed instructions on the disposition of troops in the event of major disorders.19
By 1902, it was no longer just workers who were threatening established authority, but peasants as well. Peasants in the Ukraine, the Volga provinces of Saratov and Tambov, and elsewhere in the south—in almost one-third of the provinces in European Russia all told—rebelled en masse for the first time since the emancipation. Peasants in the affected regions had specific if variable grievances—crop failures in some provinces, conflicts between gentry landlords and hired hands and renters in others—but these problems were not notably more acute than they had been before. Almost certainly peasant activism was a response to the growth of the workers’ movement in the immediately preceding years and to increasing contact with revolutionary agitation, at least indirectly; few revolutionaries were in the villages, but they left stacks of pamphlets on the roadside, and seasonal workers brought more home. In the Ukraine, peasants cited revolutionary pamphlets to support rumors that the Tsar had authorized a “black repartition,” and they even believed in a few cases that the troops sent against them had been charged with overseeing land redistribution. News of the Ukrainian disorders contributed to unrest in the Volga region, and peasants there drove out landlords and burned their mansions so they could not return. Five regiments—more than a division—marched against peasants in the two Ukrainian provinces of Poltava and Chernigov alone. As in the past the presence of troops usually cowed peasants into submission, but there was some shooting.20
Peasants continued unusually restive in 1903, though the number of peasant disorders fell. In that year, workers presented the major challenge to the regime. The tone was set in Ufa (in the Urals) in March, when 2,600 workers from the railroad shops and iron mill struck against the introduction of new workers’ registration booklets. Arrests led to demonstrations, window smashing, shooting at police, and a virtual siege of the residence of the mine inspector. On orders of the governor, soldiers fired on the mob: three volleys killed 45 (or 69), wounded 83 (or over 250). In early July, workers in the oil fields and railroad shops of Baku struck, and for a few days public service workers virtually shut down the city. Similar “general strikes” rippled through the Caucasus and Ukraine over the next two months: Elizavetgrad, Odessa, Tiflis, Batum, Nikolaev, and Kiev in July, Ekaterinoslav and Kerch in August. By the end of the year, roughly 300,000 workers had taken part in 1,382 strikes (counting separately all the factories, mines, and depots involved in the general strikes). Revolutionaries seldom instigated either the general or local strikes in 1903; indeed, some strikes in 1903 (as in 1902) were carried out by workers in unions that the police had set up to divert workers from politics. But these workers had seized on the possibility of legal organization to press their demands on management, and revolutionaries were able to give many strikes a political coloration once they were underway.21
The surge of worker and peasant disorders placed an enormous strain on the army. Soldiers marched to the aid of civil authorities 117 times in 1900, 271 times in 1901, 522 times in 1902, 427 times in 1903. Although not every case of military assistance to civil authorities involved action against workers and peasants (the military also chased bandits and preserved order at fairs), in 1903 75 percent of the incidents involved action against workers (179 cases) and “civil disorders” (143 cases) and these accounted for 89 percent of the infantry and 86 percent of the cavalry deployed against civilians; in all, the equivalent of 73 infantry and 47 cavalry and cossack regiments, representing one-third of the infantry and two-thirds of the cavalry available in European Russia, took part.22
The incessant civilian demands for military assistance appalled the War Ministry and generals in the field and, especially after 1902, they sought to deflect civilian requests for troops. Yet as Minister of War Kuropatkin conceded in 1903, the employment of the army “to maintain the domestic tranquility of Russia” was now second in importance only to the army’s mission to defend Russia’s territorial integrity against the Triple Alliance. Protection of Russia’s southern and eastern flanks was distinctly secondary to those two principal missions.23 By 1903 operations against civilians were being planned in much the same way as operations against foreign powers. The Ministry of Interior drew up forecasts of its requirements for troops during the forthcoming summer campaign, and the Ministry of War endeavored to supply the necessary manpower. Kuropatkin noted in his diary on January 19, 1903:
[Minister of Interior] Pieve . . . fears serious agrarian disorders in Poltava Province, also in Voronezh and, in part, Saratov Provinces. In addition, he declares it imperative to station some unit in Viatka. I showed Pieve the report already prepared on the transfer of the 2nd Composite Cossack Division to Poltava Province . . . I then promised to recommend that Viatka be occupied by a battalion.24
Even the language of military campaigns—”the occupation of Viatka” (zaniatie Viatki)—had crept into discussion of the army’s role vis-à-vis civilian society.
The generals’ principal lament was that police duties distracted soldiers from training, but they complained as well about the way in which troops were used—too frequently without resort to force, so that mobs no longer dreaded the appearance of troops. There was merit to this charge: how else explain the behavior of workers in Ufa and Batum who ignored warnings to disperse, or in Rostov who stoned cossacks? The generals were also concerned about the potential demoralization of the troops involved in crowd control. As Kuropatkin had reported to the Tsar in 1900: “Dispatching troops to aid the civil authorities has a very harmful influence on them if they are required to use arms or if, to avoid bloodshed, the troops are forced to retreat under the pressure of the crowd.”25 That covered almost all the options—demoralization, in Kuropatkin’s view, was an ineluctable consequence of military operations against civilians.
No doubt Kuropatkin’s judgment was correct, though the only concrete evidence of demoralization was a certain unpredictability in the soldiers’ aim. If they were hemmed in and felt physically threatened, soldiers might loose terrible fire on civilians. Yet in some cases soldiers chose not to do so. One official confided to his diary in 1902:
A Gendarme general says that one cannot rely unconditionally on the troops. During the disorders in Kolpino, 76 bullets were fired at the crowd (almost point-blank) and no more than 3 found their mark. It seems that the government can still count on the army, but the fact adduced by the gendarme can set one to thinking.26
Other official information on the ratio of cartridges expended to casualties inflicted also suggests that soldiers occasionally shot over the heads of civilians, and lends credence to the many unofficial reports of the same. One from Kiev in 1903 had it that a soldier, berated by a worker for the fact that soldiers had fired, replied: “And did we really shoot? . . . What sort of shooting was that. Just think, if we had wanted, we could have smashed the entire mob with one volley. . . . The majority didn’t shoot at the mob. Is there really so little room for bullets above them?” (In the incident in question, two volleys by two infantry battalions and two cossack squadrons produced two or four dead, twenty-seven wounded.)27 Orders issued to troops before they sallied forth stressed that under no circumstances were they to talk to civilians and that, when firing, they were not to shoot in the air, which suggests that officers feared soldiers would do just that.28 By and large, however, soldiers obeyed orders. Prior to 1905 there was no instance in which they failed to disperse mobs of workers or peasants when told to do so.
Kuropatkin repeatedly implored civilian ministers to adopt policies that would reduce civilian discontent so that troops would be needed less often.29 Kuroptakin’s was the voice of common sense, but his concern was misdirected. The fundamental problem facing the army and the regime was not the distraction of soldiers from other duties, or incipient demoralization in the ranks, but that the wholesale application of military force against civilians had failed to achieve its purpose: it had not checked the growth of the revolutionary, worker, and peasant movements, or their convergence toward a genuine revolutionary crisis. If the army could not forestall revolution, what could? The army had intervened in fully one-fifth of agrarian and factory disorders even before the massive unrest of 1902 and 1903. Peasants, even workers, may not have been able to imagine Russia without a Tsar, but only the routine application of military force prevented them from destroying the social and political order over which he presided. There had never been a peasant consensus in favor of serfdom, never more than glum resignation to the post-emancipation agrarian and factory orders. Naked force—not the abstract force of political theory but force regularly and visibly applied— alone held the Tsarist state together. Overwhelm the army, or eliminate it from the political equation, and the state would disintegrate.
That the Tsar’s throne rested on bayonets was a truism to Russia’s revolutionaries, so naturally they sought to neutralize the army. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, radical officers established a substantial Military-Revolutionary Organization that at its peak had up to 200 members and aspired to lead at least a part of the army against the regime. Revolutionaries did not then believe that they could recruit soldiers, or that they needed to so long as soldiers obeyed their radical officers.30 Revolutionaries exhibited no interest even in officers during the 1890s, but the street demonstrations of 1901 kindled new enthusiasm for agitation in the barracks, this time among soldiers as well as officers. A brief note in the first issue of the Socialist Revolutionaries’ Vestnik russkoi revoliutsii in 1901 observed that revolutionary work in the army, heretofore nonexistent, was necessary because of the army’s role in suppressing strikes and agrarian disorders. The Social Democrats’ Iskra, in a lead article “On Demonstrations” in January 1902, advised revolutionaries to inform soldiers beforehand that demonstrators meant them no harm, and through 1902 and 1903 the SR and SD leaderships periodically appealed to local organizations to address more propaganda to the army.31
Revolutionaries on the spot were quite capable of assessing the situation for themselves. The Ministry of Interior’s Department of Police reported that efforts to revolutionize the army picked up noticeably in 1902, and in the same year Minister of War Kuropatkin informed his military district commanders that “attempts by political agitators to disseminate propaganda in the armed forces, a comparatively rare phenomenon earlier, have recently become more frequent and are so insolent that it is necessary to turn special attention to them.”32 By 1903, most revolutionary organizations were at least distributing an occasional leaflet in the garrisons, though they directed roughly half of their output toward officers. Indeed, when revolutionaries considered how to organize their prospective following in the army they fell back on the only model at hand: a centralized military organization that could at the decisive moment turn substantial bodies of troops against the regime. And in 1903, SDs and SRs were fascinated by an apparently reborn, but chimerical, officers’ Military Revolutionary Organization.33
Properly enough, revolutionary leaflets asked soldiers only to turn their weapons away from civilians. The role suggested in the pamphlet-length stories for soldiers was equally modest: with few exceptions, model revolutionary soldiers did little more than read revolutionary leaflets and fire over the heads of demonstrators.34 Indeed, in 1902 and 1903 the pamphlets revolutionaries most frequently distributed in the army were Leo Tolstoy’s anti-militarist writings: Soldatskaia pamiatka (“The Soldier’s Handbook”), Ofitserskaia pamiatka (“The Officer’s Handbook”), and Pis’mo k fel’dfebeliu (“Letter to a Sergeant Major”). In addition to stressing the biblical injunctions against killing and swearing oaths, Tolstoy made the same points as revolutionaries: soldiers were being led against peasants and workers for the greater profit of gentry and capitalists, yet soldiers were themselves flesh and blood of the people.35
Judging from a somewhat atypical case—that of the “Alshanskii group” in the Ekaterinoslav Grenadier regiment in Moscow—soldiers were willing to give these appeals a sympathetic hearing. Though Alshanskii’s story changed from time to time, the truth of the matter seems to have been about as follows.36 The son of a civil servant, Aleksandr Alshanskii was drafted in 1899 and, through his fiancée, fell in with revolutionary students in Moscow in 1901. Under their influence, he concluded (as he said after his arrest) “that a political revolution in Russia, needed to improve the life of the lower classes, was impossible so long as the troops did not pass over to the side of the discontented.”37 With the help of his fiancée and the students, Alshanskii began propagandizing among the Ekaterinoslav Grenadiers. He distributed literature and read some aloud (the indictment mentions Iskra and Tolstoy’s Pis’mo k fel’dfebeliu), and he urged soldiers not to shoot civilians. The five soldiers arrested with him early in 1902 declared themselves Social Democrats at the trial (reflecting the incomplete differentiation among revolutionaries at the time, Alshanskii declared himself an SD during the investigation, but a Socialist Revolutionary at the trial), and many others—including some NCOs—admitted listening to him without reporting his subversive activity.
But there were few Alshanskiis, and randomly distributed leaflets not reenforced orally were unlikely to elicit a response. The best chance revolutionaries had to penetrate the army was through the draft. Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries undertook campaigns among draftees in 1902—holding special meetings and printing special leaflets for them, organizing demonstrations of their conscripted supporters as they marched away—and they repeated these campaigns in subsequent years. The Bund, which had proportionately the largest following and to whom the possibility of infiltrating the army with conscripts presented itself earliest, began these activities on a small scale as early as 1899.38 In a special leaflet of 1902, the Central Committee of the Bund told Jewish draftees:
Conscripts, as you go off to serve the Tsar, don’t forget those whom you are leaving behind. You are spreading out through all Russia. Take our ideas, our thoughts, the idea of freedom, with you everywhere. Explain to your comrades how they should behave when they are sent against workers, peasants and other “rioters.” One soldier can do nothing, but many can be of great benefit to the struggle for liberation.39
With or without special campaigns among draftees, as the revolutionary movement mushroomed in the early years of the twentieth century the armed forces called up increasing numbers of men, mostly workers, who had been exposed to revolutionary agitation. When revolutionary conscripts met, they formed circles, sought contact with civilian organizations, and engaged in reading and distributing illegal literature until circumstances (arrest, discharge, loss of civilian contacts) intervened. Not all such groups managed to locate civilian revolutionaries: a group of SD soldiers that formed in Alexandropol (Armenia) in 1902 spent three years looking for civilian contacts before settling on an Armenian revolutionary organization.40 By far the largest of the groups of conscript revolutionaries formed in the Black Sea Fleet, where in 1902 draftees organized revolutionary circles, and in 1903 made contact with SD and SR civilians. By late 1903 300—and a year later perhaps as many as 800—sailors regularly attended revolutionary discussion circles.41 There were similarly active, though smaller, sailor circles in Kronstadt, but the level of revolutionary activity in the navy was exceptional. The navy drafted for the skills needed to run modern warships and so drew on the groups most exposed to the revolutionary movement in civilian society; 15 percent of sailors had worked in factories (as against 2 percent of soldiers), while 70 percent of the naval conscripts of 1902-1904 were literate (as against 53 percent of the army’s conscripts in the same years).42 Not counting the sailors’ circles in Sevastopol and Kronstadt, in 1903 SDs had contact with six or so soldier circles, SRs with at least four.43 No doubt these figures are low by a factor of two or three, but the surviving evidence suggests the order of magnitude: measured against the million men under arms, the revolutionary soldier groups were insignificant.
Revolutionaries had an interest in winning military support, but they were unimaginative in reaching for it. It was, admittedly, difficult to penetrate military enclaves, or to find appropriate tasks for soldier converts to revolution, but the real problem was that civilian revolutionaries were out of touch with the soldier’s world. By contrast, the workers outside Moscow who in 1903 persuaded soldiers engaged in railway construction to join in a strike found soldiers both physically and psychologically accessible.44 The revolutionaries’ want of initiative derived at root from a lack of urgent interest. Concern with the army had been thrust on them in 1901, but despite assertions of the need to neutralize the army, and the distribution of the occasional proclamation to officers and soldiers, the army bulked low in revolutionary thinking. Judging by the contents of the revolutionary press, their interest in the empire’s thirty thousand students in institutions of higher education outweighed their interest in the one million soldiers by a ratio of 4 to 1.45
That is not especially surprising. The revolutionary movement was just past infancy; students were making a visible contribution to it, soldiers not. And all revolutionaries thought of the revolution as fundamentally civilian. Moreover, as of 1903 few believed revolution was in the offing. They had debated at considerable length the role of different social groups in the revolution, but had yet to give much thought to the mechanism by which autocracy was to be overthrown. The more optimistic (or naive) among them asserted that overwhelming numbers, stiffened by armed combat groups, could smother the army in the cities, and that small groups could wage successful partisan operations (“agrarian terror”) in the countryside.46 Russian revolutionaries had not as yet confronted Engels’s well-known dictum that insurrection could not succeed against modern military technology. They seemed to hope—as had Engels—that by the time the appointed day arrived the problem of the army would somehow have taken care of itself.47
Military authorities took revolutionary propaganda in the army far more seriously than did revolutionaries themselves. In January 1902 the Ministry of War ordered surveillance of all politically suspect conscripts, and in the same year Kuropatkin ordered that a count be kept of courts-martial for illegal political activity. The statistics demonstrated, if anything, that the level of seditious activity in the barracks was low: the great majority of the trials were for illegal activity prior to conscription (40 of 49 political courts-martial in 1902, 102 of 152 in 1903, 65 of 97 in the first half of 1904).48 Nevertheless, the number of politically unreliable soldiers was increasing, and in January 1903 Kuropatkin suggested that military authorites inform the political police whenever they noticed anything suspicious, and that they subject soldiers, especially Jews, to close surveillance and frequent searches. Local commanders issued similar instructions, as did the Naval Ministry. During 1903, too, there were high-level military conferences on the problem of revolutionary subversion. The recommended countermeasures boiled down to the obvious: isolate soldiers from civilians, search the soldiers’ effects frequently, see to it that officers involve themselves closely with their men.49
These measures did not stem the seepage of revolution into the armed forces, if only because the draft of sedition-minded civilians increased annually. Yet prior to 1905, neither revolutionary propaganda nor revolutionary soldiers even began to threaten the integrity of the army. The harbinger of the future was that the obvious remedies against subversion were incompatible with the structure of the army: exhortation could not reduce the distance between officers and men, large parties of soldiers were annually immersed in the civilian economy. The character of Tsarist military society, not sporadic leaflets or the handful of revolutionary soldier groups, rendered the army vulnerable to revolution.
The Russo-Japanese War and the Rebellion of Polite Society
“One may ask: does the government have friends? And one answers with complete assurance: no. Who would be the friends of fools and oafs, robbers and thieves?”50 So wrote Aleksei Suvorin, a conservative publisher who sat on government commissions, in his diary on November 16, 1904. By late 1904, the government of Nicholas II had few friends even among those whose every instinct was loyalist, and the dry rot of disaffection and irresolution had spread within the government machine itself. The combination of mounting popular discontent and the desertion of the regime by its presumed friends was the classic prescription for revolution.
The emergence of political opposition to the government within polite society coincided with the revival of the revolutionary movement and the beginnings of serious working-class disorders in the 1890s. Professionals and liberal nobles took heart from the ferment: they were no longer hopelessly isolated, and they began to call, at first discretely and then more boldly, for the introduction of some sort of constitutional order in Russia. Not initially very substantial, the liberal movement swelled as the mass discontent of the opening years of the twentieth century created the impression that the government was losing control and might yield to liberal pressure. By 1903 the liberal movement had coalesced into a Union of Liberation, which operated semi-clandestinely inside Russia and supported a newspaper published abroad that articulated the liberal political program. The regime’s clumsy efforts to suppress liberal opposition, its campaign to circumscribe the activities even of the zemstvos (organs of local government whose rights were already severely limited) controlled by the nobility, and its style—the Tsar’s vacillation in matters of policy, his wife’s mysticism and weakness for miracle workers, the prominence of a motley crowd of favorites at court—weakened the regime’s hold on the loyalty of conservatives like Suvorin and even the flower of the aristocracy. There was no great public outrage when SRs assassinated Minister of Education Bogolepov in 1901, indifference when they assassinated Minister of Interior Sipiagin in 1902, general approval when they assassinated Minister of Interior Pleve in 1904.51
Characteristically, palace irregulars helped embroil Russia in the war with Japan. More importantly, they were widely credited (the retired Guards officer Bezobrazov and his Yalu timber concession especially) with causing the war. In fact, in their pursuit of spheres of influence in Manchuria and Korea, Japan and Russia had been on a collision course for some time, and Russia had gradually (with some rapidity in 1903) built up her military forces in the Far East. The major consequence of the intrusion of Bezobrazov and others of his ilk in Russia’s Far Eastern policy was that policy became muddled: the ministers (War, Foreign Affairs, Finance) principally concerned were no longer in control and could not make the concessions that they hoped would at least postpone the conflict. Through violations of international agreements (e.g., governing the withdrawal of the troops that had entered Manchuria during the Boxer Rebellion), a frankly racist contempt for the interests and military capacities of the Japanese, and confusion and indecision in policy formation, Russia gave every appearance of negotiating only to cover a military buildup. Japan resolved to fight before the military balance shifted against her, and attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur on the night of January 26-27/February 8-9, 1904.52
The Russian army fought the war incompetently, though the Japanese must be given credit for sound strategy. They opened by attempting to eliminate or at least bottle up the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in order to achieve control of the sea. Because their strategy was premised on control of the sea, they worried more about the ill-assorted fleet sent from the Baltic to its doom at Tsushima than about any other Russian operation, and the same worry impelled the Japanese to accept enormous casualties to capture Port Arthur. With full control over the sea lanes, the Japanese could pour men into Manchuria unimpeded. They sought a decisive battle before Russia could move east in force, but they badly overestimated the time it would take the Russians to bring troops from Europe by rail, and in all the major engagements the Russians had a numerical advantage, sometimes by almost 2 to 1. However, the peacetime routine had bred inefficiency deep into the Russian army. At the outset of the war Russian regiments attacked as though on maneuvers, in close order with bands playing. For the first half year or so the Russians fired in volleys, doing more harm to their ears than to the enemy. They worried incessantly about encirclement and broke off engagements timorously at the first setback. The Japanese won a series of increasingly bloody and lengthy battles that culminated in late February and early March 1905 at Mukden, where approximately 600,000 men suffered in excess of 130,000 casualties. The Japanese had hoped that Mukden would be the decisive battle of the war—Port Arthur had fallen, so with troops rushed north they were for a change not significantly inferior in numbers—but the Russians, though routed, escaped encirclement. The balance of manpower then swung decisively in Russia’s favor. By the end of the war there were over 950,000 Russians in Manchuria, under 400,000 Japanese. While there was little likelihood that Russian generals could take advantage of their strength, the Japanese could not push so huge a mass of soldiers around, and they had no more men of their own to put in the field.53 It was Russia’s domestic weakness that eventually assured Japan the victory that her army had not quite been able to secure.
The Japanese attack appeared at first to have restored social harmony to Russia: there were spontaneous patriotic demonstrations in the capital, the nobles in the zemstvos forgot their antipathy to the central bureaucracy and pledged full support to the national cause, even worker and peasant disorders sank to the lowest level since the 1890s. Yet the surge of loyalism was brief and weak: indifference was the most common reaction to the war. When defeats ever more humiliating shattered the illusion of Russia’s innate superiority, and when the regime continued to veto zemstvo elections and even thwarted zemstvo efforts to assist the army in the field, contempt for the regime swelled to unprecedented proportions in polite society. The liberals’ Union of Liberation concluded by April 1904 that chauvinism had yielded to disdain, and that the war offered an opportunity to mobilize public opinion and wrest a constitution from the regime. In the summer and fall liberals worked to achieve some degree of coordination with the revolutionary parties, and in October 1904 met in Paris with representatives of the SRs and six parties of the subject peoples (only the SDs boycotted the conference) to plan a petition campaign against the regime.54
The strength of the opposition even in time of war and the rejoicing that followed Pleve’s assassination in July shook the regime’s selfassurance. After some hesitation, Nicholas appointed as his new Minister of Interior a man of liberal inclinations, Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii. Sviatopolk-Mirskii began his tenure by proclaiming that his policy would be based on trust, which was manifested concretely in the extension rather than contraction of zemstvo rights, the removal of the civil ban and exile imposed on prominent liberals, and the relaxation of censorship. He permitted representatives of the zemstvos to hold an unofficial congress—which under the prodding of the Union of Liberation called for an elected legislature. In November and December resolutions demanding political reform of a more or less parliamentary character were adopted by provincial zemstvo assemblies where the Union of Liberation was not in control, in the ordinarily quite conservative provincial assemblies of nobles, and even by the Marshals of nobility, who were specifically charged by the government with preventing the zemstvos from concerning themselves with politics. In November and December, too, the Union of Liberation organized approximately 80 political banquets—attended in the main by professionals but including civil servants and a scattering of officers as well—that adopted constitutionalist resolutions.55 In a word, Sviatopolk-Mirskii’s liberal gestures touched off a crisis. As Tocqueville had observed long before, the moment of gravest danger for a conservative regime is when it begins to reform. In Russia in late 1904, the regime’s unwonted liberalism signalled its loss of self-assurance and encouraged the belief that more pressure would produce more reform, perhaps even some variety of representative government.
The regime’s ardor for reform cooled abruptly. His resolve stiffened by conservative advisors and relatives, the Tsar on December 9 publicly rebuked and stripped of court rank a prominent marshal of the nobility who had dared to forward a petition for a representative assembly, and on December 14 the government pronounced the zemstvo congress and other political meetings—as well as newspaper coverage of them— illegal, and warned that participants, especially civil servants, would be punished. Sandwiched between these two reaffirmations of autocracy was an Imperial Edict of December 12 announcing reforms deemed sufficient to satisfy the public: the rule of law would be upheld, the rights of zemstvos broadened, censorship loosened, religious disabilities lightened.56
Even more dangerous to a conservative government than reform is inconsistency. As the regime—internally divided, disoriented, and demoralized by the contempt in which it was held by liberals and conservatives alike—vacillated between reform and repression, defeatism and the expression of subversive sentiments became fashionable (which is not to say that such sentiments were not justified). The temper of public opinion in late December 1904 can be judged from an extraordinary political banquet attended by over 800 persons “representing the cream of the literary and other professions of St. Petersburg and the provinces” on December 14.
The speech of the evening was delivered by Professor Lutugin [of the St. Petersburg Mining Institute]. . . . The war, he declared, was their own crime, because they had not protested against the adventurous policy of the Russian Government. The majority of the professors lectured in the Universities about Russia’s interests in the Far East, and none of them informed the youth of the country that the Russian Government was always playing the role of an international gendarme, perpetuating the police traditions of obsolete European States. They never told the students that Russia was the last hope of the reactionary elements in Europe. As to the Emperor’s manifestoes, he described them as insolent and tactless.
This daring pronouncement was greeted with the wildest enthusiasm, the ladies waving their handkerchiefs and the men climbing on the tables and cheering.57
By late 1904, the goverment had not only lost the respect of polite society, it no longer inspired fear. Lutugin’s was not yet the voice of revolution, but his audience was primed.
The army could not win the battles in Manchuria that might have dampened the rebellion of polite society, and the succession of defeats gravely weakened the garrison units in Europe, the regime’s sole defense against popular rebellion. As the war dragged on, the army called up almost 1,200,000 reserves in nine separate mobilizations of European corps and divisions. The reserves caused the army problems almost immediately: between the time they arrived at the mobilization depots and their inscription on unit rosters, they were involved in 123 serious disorders, 107 of them during the mobilizations of September, October, and December 1904. The disturbances ranged from simple “mob disorders” to full scale riots, small-scale pogroms, looting, attacks on police and military authorities, refusals to board troop trains, and the destruction of railway property along the line to Manchuria. In 1904, regular troops were called out 67 times against rioting reserves, only 62 times to control civilian disorders, and by the end of 1904 cadre units were being drawn up to protect railway stations in Siberia when troop trains rolled in.58
The succession of defeats quite likely contributed to the disorders, as did a confusing system of exemptions from the call-up, but the principal cause was chaos at the mobilization depots. As the Tsarist regime had not seriously prepared for the war that its imperialist policy provoked, so it had no machinery to handle the huge numbers of reserves mobilized to fight the war. There was insufficient equipment and food for them, no provisions whatsoever for the families that accompanied the men to the depots. Reserves were held in limbo for weeks, then dispatched over-hastily into the army, the whole system working by fits and starts. The families hung around until their men pulled out, and reserves beat up officers who tried to prevent the men from visiting their wives except, say, on Sundays. There was no lack of incidents to set off major brawls.59
Not only was the army swollen with restive reserves, the use of the European garrisons to feed the army in Manchuria badly disorganized the units remaining in Europe. The 100-odd depot battalions formed in Europe during the war had a permanent skeleton of 140 enlisted men and a revolving complement of 1,000 reserves who were sent to the front as fast as the Transsiberian Railway could handle them. The depot battalions were assemblages of men in uniform, not military units with the cohesion of settled organization and long mutual association, but the line regiments in Europe were in little better shape. Up to 90 percent and more of the cadre personnel and up to 70 percent of their regular officers (mostly subalterns) were transferred to units in Manchuria and to regiments formed during the war.60 Unhappy reserves replaced cadre troops in the garrison units, but there were far too few reserve officers to replace the missing regulars. In some regiments only one regular officer was left for every two companies, and reserve officers—former “volunteers” who had served brief terms in the ranks—were not the sort to exercise firm control over their men. A regular officer wrote later:
“Our ensigns [of the reserve], who had nothing in common with military service and viewed it as an extremely distasteful burden, were especially uninterested in the inner world of the soldier. And, after the greater part of the regular officers had been posted to the Far East, only company commanders and ensigns remained in the regiments; there were almost no other officers.61
The army was none too cohesive even in time of peace, and the Russo-Japanese war placed enormous strain on the weakest element of the military organism, the link between officers and men. This was more important than the fact that the reserves’ anger carried over into 1905, or that reserves—older and more worldly wise than cadre troops— provided in 1905 the initial conduit through which civilian discontent penetrated the barracks.62 In 1905, regulars would prove as prone as reserves to run roughshod over their officers when confusion and disorganization provided the opportunity.
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