Читать книгу The Russian Revolution: History in an Hour - Rupert Colley - Страница 7

Nicholas II: The Last Tsar

Russia in the early twentieth century was a mesh of nationalities and ethnicities – Ukrainian, Georgian, Finnish, Baltic, Armenian, German, and Polish among others. According to the Russian census of 1897, Russians themselves only constituted 44 per cent of the Tsar’s sprawling empire. This was far from a happy conglomeration of nationhood, and the Tsar needed all the mechanisms of State control to maintain command of his subjects.

Imperial Russia

Determined to follow in his father’s footsteps and rule by autocratic means, Nicholas misread the underlying discontent within the empire as the malign influence of the Jew, rather than as genuine grievance. Organizations such as the pro-tsarist Black Hundreds instituted pogroms against the Jews; their communities were forced to settle in the Western reaches of the empire, the Pale of Settlement, where their movements were curtailed.

Nicholas II, c. 1900

Sergei Witte, Russia’s minister of finance and, after 1905, Russia’s first prime minister, was convinced that if Russia was to hold its own against the great European powers, it needed to industrialize. He financed Russia’s industrial and economic progress through large foreign loans, burdening Russia with foreign debt, and heavy indirect taxation. This particularly affected the peasants, as rents rose and grain prices fell; in some areas the effect was devastating – such as the famine in central Volga in 1898–99.

Socialists

In 1898, amidst this turmoil, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RDSRP) emerged as the leading advocates of Marxism and revolution. In 1902 its newest member, Vladimir Lenin, published his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? in which he firmly allied the Party to the interests of the working classes. Only the Party truly understood the needs of the workers, more so than the workers themselves, who, left to their own devices, were concerned only with narrow ambitions, such as improved pay and conditions. It was down to a party of professional revolutionaries, fighting on their behalf, the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’, to bring about wholesale revolution.

Declared illegal, in 1903 the RDSRP had to hold its Second Congress in London where its members quarrelled to the point the Party split into two factions – Bolshevik and Menshevik. (Bolshevik translates as the majority faction, the Mensheviks being the minority; confusingly, the Mensheviks were the majority faction until 1917.) Both factions agreed that the three-century-old Romanov dynasty had to go, but whereas Lenin and the Bolsheviks advocated a core of professional revolutionaries under centralized leadership who would lead workers into revolution, the Mensheviks proposed a more gradual approach. Come the revolution, the Bolsheviks would immediately transfer power to the urban working classes, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Mensheviks followed the more traditional Marxist thinking that Russia had first to develop as a capitalist economy before being ready to undergo a ‘transition to socialism’, requiring them to work with the Duma. Opposing both, another new party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, believed the route to revolution lay not with the urban working classes but the peasants.

Russo–Japanese War

Russia’s territorial aims in the East risked bringing it into conflict with the ambitions of Japan. On 8 February 1904, the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Russian ships based at Port Arthur in Manchuria. The resultant war was a disaster for Russia, the supposedly military superpower. The annihilation of the Russian navy in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and southern Japan in May 1905 caused great shock in Russia; the defeat attributed directly to the Tsar. His land armies fared no better. If the Tsar hoped the war would divert attention from unrest at home and stir the patriotic breasts of his subjects, he was much mistaken.