Conclusion: Russian Society Viewed through Russian Mutiny

Once upon a time a young professor recited, in the conventional manner, the Tale of the 1905 Revolution. Industrial growth produced a large and restive working class and disrupted peasant society. The stirring of the lower classes revived the revolutionary movement and encouraged the nascent middle class, another product of Russia’s socioeconomic development, to press its own claims on the regime. The regime could not manage the tension that its developmental policies generated, and its incompetence in stumbling into and then conducting war with Japan brought together all of the disparate strands of rebellion and triggered revolution. Departing somewhat from convention in order to underscore the seriousness of the revolution, the teller added that a goodly portion of the army mutinied as well. Discomfited, the audience murmured, and one of the listeners broke the thread of the narrative by asking how, in that case, the Tsarist regime survived until 1917. The teller paused. The motifs from Russian history that he had woven into his story—the disruptive effects of economic growth, the incompatibility of a static political system and a changing society—did not provide grounding for an answer. Nonetheless, he responded: the soldiers’ behavior depended upon their perceptions of authority, and those perceptions changed as rapidly as the flux of events. The explanation, taken from a different tale, was utterly unconvincing.

The conventional socioeconomic analysis of Russian history is not wrong, but it does not explain the behavior of Russian soldiers in 1905 and 1906. Soldiers suppressed civilians, sometimes ferociously, from January through October 1905, mutinied from late October through early December, shot civilians again in December; they mutinied from May through July 1906, abruptly ceased to mutiny in late July. The same soldiers behaved in radically different ways in rapid succesion—two complete cycles of rebellion and submission in ten months. No changes in their own immediate situation can account for this, and the events that so dramatically and rapidly altered their behavior had in only one case an immediate bearing on the army. They were not even much alike. The October general strike, October Manifesto, and ensuing breakdown of civil government were incomparably more traumatic than the meeting of the Duma, which caused excitement but no urban upheaval. The regime’s show of force and the resulting insurrections in late 1905 put considerable pressure on soldiers, the very ungeneral strike of July 1906 threatened no one. All that these events had in common was the construction that soldiers put on them: they contained, for soldiers, unambiguous messages about the authority of the Tsarist regime. When they believed the regime’s writ had expired, soldiers mutinied. When they believed the regime’s authority to be intact, they repressed civilians. Neither hardship, nor ill-treatment at the hands of officers, nor class consciousness goaded soldiers into rebellion; those motivations became operative only when the psychological impediment to rebellion had been removed. Repression did not check mutiny so long as soldiers disbelieved in the authority of the regime, and was not necessary when soldiers no longer detected a break in the web of authority around them.

The sudden and repeated reversals of behavior that the soldiers’ sensitivity to emblems of authority produced were not unique: the soldiers’ revolution of 1905 and 1906 was a special case of Russian peasant rebellion. It is widely recognized that from at least the seventeenth century through the post-Emancipation agrarian disorders, Russian peasants rebelled when they believed that the Tsar—pretend or genuine—stood with them, and that they created myths to legitimize rebellion whenever there was a noticeable perturbation in the flow of power. Though unremarked, peasant rebellion followed an identical pattern in 1905 and 1906. Peasants did not rebel, in 1905 or earlier, because of crop failure, or onerous taxation, or even because urban commercial networks disrupted the village economy, though these conditions may have increased peasant receptivity to rumors and myths. Poverty and oppression were omnipresent in the villages; peasants seldom rebelled. They rebelled in 1905 when the explosion in urban Russia manifestly shook the regime, and in 1906 when the Duma appeared to provide an authority that countervailed the regime’s. Peasants ceased to rebel when they concluded that the regime had bested its enemies. Peasant and soldier rebellion thus traced nearly identical courses in 1905 and 1906. Unlike soldiers, however, peasants were not required to repress other peasants once their rebellion was over; the alteration in their behavior was, therefore, not so dramatic. The soldiers’ rebellion also began and ended suddenly, without the months of slowly ascending and descending incidence of disorders characteristic of peasant rebellion. Soldiers had far more at stake than peasants in properly interpreting the signals bearing on the regime’s authority. What is remarkable is that, like peasants, they lost their inhibitions and fear of reprisals so completely in brief bursts of rebellion.

That psychology of obedience and revolt was rooted in the most basic social and cultural structures of Russian society. Submissiveness was the psychological complement to the environmental and social arrangements that constricted peasant society. Personal experience and collective wisdom taught peasants that they might maneuver around, deceive, or propitiate, but never escape the powerful men who controlled their lives. And peasants were constantly reminded of their helplessness: at the slightest sign of resistance to officials or gentry, soldiers descended on the villages. Submission did not foster among Russian peasants bonds of identity with their overlords. They prized myths and legends of a world without gentry and officials. Moreover, the gulf that must naturally divide those who wield power, however limited, from those who are utterly dependent was made wider by the cultural differences between peasants, whose beliefs and customs looked back to prePetrine Russia, and the educated who, however much they remained Russians, took their cultural cues from Europe. The natural repulsion between peasant and official societies was nearly as strong as the bond that held them together.

Repulsion overcame submission when peasants convinced themselves that they had the backing of the Tsar or some other agency more powerful than the bearers of power around them. When they saw the system of controls break down, peasants resurrected the latent myth of the good Tsar who blessed their rebellion. Rebellion was the more determined because sanctioned from on high; it was to the same extent vulnerable, because the sanction could be disconfirmed. But rebellion always lurked just beneath the surface of Russian society, and when it came it was profoundly centrifugal: peasants wished not to improve their standing in society, but to escape from the alien society of gentry and officials. Russian society in rebellion moved rapidly toward collapse, as it did after October 17, 1905, and as it was on the way to doing in June and July 1906. After February 1917, there was no force to check disintegration, and Russian society collapsed catastrophically.

The polarity of peasant and European Russias was the dominant characteristic of Russian society, but it was not absolute. There were some small intermediate strata, of which by the early twentieth century factory workers were one and, in a different way, merchants another. But if these groups shaded the socio-cultural division, they did not efface it, or provide a bond between the two Russias. When the two Russias clashed, groups in the middle were either pulverized or pulled into the orbit of one Russia or the other.

The gulf between traditional and European Russias loomed just as wide from the European side. Liberals and revolutionaries were fully aware of the peasants’ latent potential for rebellion against the instituitions of official society. Liberals recoiled in fear, because they understood that peasant rebellion threatened to destroy their world; but what they took to be anarchy was in the peasants’ view an orderly society in which the culture of gentlemen had no place. Revolutionaries contemplated peasant rebellion with hope, but without much understanding. One of the themes of this study has been the failure of revolutionaries to comprehend what drove soldiers and peasants to rebel. That has not been meant as belittlement, or even criticism, any more than one belittles peasants by pointing out the limitations of the peasant mentality. Here and there, in fact, one catches a glimmer of comprehension among revolutionaries—in the recognition by the spokesman for the Petersburg SR military organization, for instance, that there was something unique about the psychology that underlay soldier rebellion. But most of what revolutionaries had to say about soldiers and peasants was either wrong or beside the point. Revolutionaries did get a lot right—the regime’s dependence on armed force for its existence, the naivete of the belief that reform could be obtained without violence, the liberals’ ultimate fear of the aspirations of peasants and workers. They understood their own society well. They did not understand peasant Russia.

It is of course easier to discern the great fault lines in a society from a distance than when standing on top of them, but revolutionaries did not so much fail to see, as see them through mental constructs nearly as imperfect as those of peasants. Revolutionaries placed peasants in hierarchies (the village bourgeoisie versus the village proletariat) and continua (the laboring peasantry together with other laboring classes) that they believed to be universal. They outfitted peasants with bourgeois, petit bourgeois, or socialist goals that might, with detailed codicils, have been plausible but did not immediately provide an accurate gauge of what peasants were about. The obscuring veil that this terminology produced darkened completely when revolutionaries divided the world into the “conscious” and the “unconscious.” The esoteric meaning of those words had a respectable lineage in Western revolutionary theory, but applied to Russia coincided disconcertingly with the view official Russia took of the inferior classes: the revolutionary’s unconscious peasant or proletarian was the nobleman’s and officer’s childlike peasant and soldier. The presumption that the unconscious peasant could be led into conscious adulthood rested on the assumption that there was only one appropriate way to see the world. Reasonable or not, that assumption made it difficult to fathom the thoughts and behavior of the “unconscious.” But the thinking of peasants and of social groups closely linked to the peasantry was no more obscure to the revolutionaries than it was to liberals, or officers, or bureaucrats, or any other group of European Russians.

The practical results of mutual incomprehension appeared during the revolution. Revolutionaries, rational calculators that they were, attempted to determine the optimal combination of variables that would warrant calling for a general strike or insurrection. Their equations were internally consistent but at best proved irrelevant, as in October 1905, and at worst yielded seriously misleading solutions, as in July 1906. Calculations premised on the assumption that (just for example) soldiers and peasants would share the view that there was advantage in delaying rebellion until the proletariat had taken to the streets, or the harvest taken in, could not provide useful guidelines for revolution in Russian society. The very assumption that revolution was calculable, that there was a best time for rebellion and that proper selection would maximize the chance for success, ran directly counter to the peasant assumption that authority could not be challenged, and that rebellion was possible only when constraining authority had been eliminated. The peasant conception of the social order of course made no sense at all to revolutionaries, and they could not abandon their own more sophisticated analysis just because peasants and soldiers read apocalyptic significance into mundane events. Revolutionaries, who had many variables to consider, hesitated to act—in October and December 1905, in July 1906. Peasants and soldiers did not hesitate once they believed the one condition for rebellion had been met. The rational calculus betrayed revolutionaries. It very nearly betrayed the regime as well: the difficulty of finding the proper set of rational responses to the dangers besetting them paralyzed officials, and the regime’s indecisiveness was one of the prerequisites for peasant and soldier rebellion.

The soldiers’ revolution of 1905 and 1906 thus illuminates, in a small but crucial way, the discord at the heart of Russian society. Revolutionaries and soldiers lived in different worlds, had incompatible assumptions about the structure of the social order, and attributed to their unique visions transcendent truth. When soldiers and revolutionaries acted on their different assumptions at the same time, they produced neither harmony nor counterpoint, but dissonance. Yet disconfirming evidence did not shake the soldiers’ or revolutionaries beliefs, because those beliefs were solidly grounded in their own particular social experiences. Mutually incomprehending, soldiers and revolutionaries were bound into a single society not through a network of social or cultural linkages, but by force alone. That force depended, ultimately, on the soldiers’ inability to conceive of openly challenging the powers that be. Peasants as soldiers repressed themselves, and peasant submissiveness lent the Russian empire an appearance of extreme durability. When the psychological constraint on rebellion disappeared, however, there was nothing left to hold Russian society together. The soldiers’ extreme volatility in 1905 and 1906 showed how fragile the barrier between stability and decomposition really was.