PREFACE

Most of the contributions to this volume were originally conceived, over a decade ago, in the setting of a Columbia University graduate seminar that was devoted to an examination of various aspects of Russian politics between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Even at this early stage of their work, the participants were animated by a common concern: to relate the evolution of “high politics” in the capital—within the government, at the Court, in the State Duma and State Council, as well as the interaction between the state power and the spokesmen for various political parties and factions represented in Russia’s national representative institutions—to the movement of political attitudes among the various constituencies in the Russian body politic that these spokesmen of “opinion” represented or purported to represent. As our work progressed, we became increasingly aware of two common sets of problems and themes that confronted us in our study of various aspects of Russian political life during these years.

The first and most evident of these was the extent and tenaciousness of the grip that a remarkably small and homogeneous group of Russian society—the thirty-odd thousand families of the landowning nobility, whose rule of the Russian countryside had been restored after the Revolution of 1905—held over the political process right up to the Revolution of 1917, and especially during the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. Wherever we looked in our explorations of Russian politics during these years—at the heated debates of the various projects of local reforms submitted to the review of the Council of Local Economy of the Ministry of Internal Affairs during Stolypin’s tenure; at the stresses and strains of the politics of the State Duma and State Council, and their periodic and increasingly frequent surfacing in such celebrated affairs as the Western Zemstvo crisis; at the submerged conflicts and, eventually, the open splits, which by the eve of the war divided all the liberal and moderate parties and parliamentary groups, including those of the moderate right, as an atmosphere of almost total paralysis descended on Russia’s legislative chambers—we ultimately found, in the shaping and unfolding of these crises, the decisive imprint and ultimate constraint imposed by the political attitudes and behavior of the thirty thousand families that dominated the Russian countryside, and through it Russian political life as a whole.

But the second and perhaps more novel common theme that our explorations suggested stemmed from the sense that underlying the rigidity of political life under the political system redefined after the coup d’état of June 1907 was the growing psychological distance—indeed the growing chasm—between the political cultures that were still prevalent in the Russian countryside, among the many millions of the communal peasantry but also among the pomeshchiki who lorded over them, and the more modern political cultures that were now so rapidly emerging among the lower as well as the upper strata of urban, commercial, industrial Russia. It was in these differences in political cultures, and the differences in perception for which they made—not only of political parties and their programs but ultimately of the very nature of political representation and of the political process—that we finally sought the explanation for the political obliviousness of the Russian countryside to the growing clamor for change that was heard in urban Russia. By the same token, it was also in these contrasts of political cultures, and not merely in the mechanics of political power, as redefined under the System of Third of June, that we sought the key to an understanding of the torturous character of the prewar political crisis and of the dynamics of the second Russian pre-Revolution as a whole.

The papers originally contributed in this 1968 seminar eventually matured into doctoral dissertations, some of which are shortly to appear in print as individual monographs. But because of the common problems and issues that our work continued to address, we found it useful to reconvene, following the completion of these studies—this time in the setting of one of the Russian Institute’s Advanced Seminars—to seek to integrate in one volume some of the major findings that we had reached.

It will be obvious to the reader that, because of the nature of the individual studies that most of us had pursued over the last decade, the volume we were eventually able to put together is necessarily unbalanced. Most of our contributors, including Dr. Geoffrey Hosking of the University of Essex, who agreed to join our collective effort, have been mainly concerned with the politics of the landed nobility, whose domination of Russian politics was considerably enhanced, throughout the period under our purview, by the political passivity and seeming malleability of the peasants over whom they ruled and managed to control. The factors that made for the political passivity of most Russian peasants during these years (in contrast, at least at first sight, to the assertiveness that these peasants displayed in 1905–1907 and in 1917) are discussed in Eugene Vinogradoff’s essay, as well as in my own concluding observations. But we are the first to recognize that this phenomenon and, more generally, the immensely difficult subject of the evolution of the Russian peasantry’s political culture in the early twentieth century, deserve far closer and more systematic attention than we have been able to devote to them in this volume. It is our hope that notwithstanding the formidable methodological and substantive problems involved, we, as well as other scholars, may be able to study this subject in greater depth in the years to come, but we also hope that even our stab at its exploration in this volume may prove of some interest.

The acknowledgments that we need to make for what we have managed to achieve are far more than pro forma. One of the early readers of this volume noted that whatever merits he distinguished in its contributions were in part a tribute to the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and to the value of the archival research in the Soviet Union by young, as well as older, American scholars, which IREX has done so much to encourage under the terms of our cultural exchange agreements. I heartily concur with this sentiment, but also wish to express our profound gratitude to those sotrudniki in Soviet historical archives (especially at TSGAOR and TSGIA) who were helpful to us in the exploration of the archival sources on which almost all the contributions to this volume partly or largely rest. At TSGIA, I particularly wish to thank Serafima Grigoreva Sakharova for her consistent and devoted attention over the last decade, and at the Chief Archival Administration and TSGAOR, Mikhail Iakoblevich Kapran, Boris Ivanovich Kaptelev, and their respective staffs. I also want to thank those of our Soviet colleagues who, in one way or another, guided our initial steps through the labyrinth of the archives we examined, and indeed often directed our attention to some of the major problems that we explored in these sources. Most particularly, I wish to thank Professor E. D. Chermenskii of the Historical Faculty of the University of Moscow and Dr. V. S. Diakin of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Leningrad, both of whom pioneered in their own right in the study of Russian political and social developments between 1905 and 1917, for their generous help and counsel during the years of our work in the Soviet Union. Neither of them is likely to concur with all of our interpretations and conclusions, but I hope that the angle of vision that we have brought to bear—from a different cultural and historical perspective—on some of the very sources that they have studied with such care in their own work may prove of more than passing interest to them.

In the United States, we wish to thank the staff of the Russian Institute at Columbia, and in particular Mr. John Hanselman, who did so much to keep our Advanced Seminar going through the two years of discussions and repeated revisions of manuscript, which eventuated in the completion of this book. I personally owe more than passing thanks to Eugene Vinogradoff and Roberta Manning, who kept track of some of this editorial work during the periods I had to spend away from the United States. Roberta Manning’s large imprint on this volume is suggested by the number of papers that she contributed individually as well as in collaboration with other contributors. But I also wish to thank her, Joann Haimson, and my colleagues and friends Terence Emmons, Alexander Erlich, Andrzej Kaminski, Marc Raeff, and Reginald Zelnik for their helpful substantive criticisms and editorial suggestions about my own contributions to this volume. My debt to them is all the greater for their willingness to read unwieldy and almost indigestible first drafts and to suggest ways to achieve in the final copy greater economy and intelligibility. I also wish to thank the Indiana University Press and look forward to further association with them in the publication, through the Russian Institute Series, of studies of other aspects of Russian political and social history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Finally, I want to express my appreciation to my dear friends Alexander and Helene Bennigsen, and the whole Bennigsen clan —including Sibelle and Vatan—for so graciously putting up with me during the completion of my work on this volume.

LEOPOLD H. HAIMSON

New York—Les Codouls, 1978