Cronies or Capitalists? the Russian Bourgeoisie and the Bourgeois Revolution from 1850 to 1917 [New ed.] 1443805629, 9781443805629

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Cronies or Capitalists?

Cronies or Capitalists? The Russian Bourgeoisie and the Bourgeois Revolution from 1850 to 1917

By

David Lockwood

Cronies or Capitalists? The Russian Bourgeoisie and the Bourgeois Revolution from 1850 to 1917, by David Lockwood This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by David Lockwood All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0562-9, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0562-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One............................................................................................... 15 The Russian Revolution and the Russian Bourgeoisie Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 51 War, Revolution and Premature Insurrection Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 77 The Russian Bourgeoisie after 1905 Chapter Four............................................................................................ 111 State Failure: Russia and the Great War Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 153 A Bourgeois Republic? Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 185 Undignified Exit Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 207 Triumph of the State – Diversion of the Bourgeois Revolution Conclusion............................................................................................... 241 Bibliography............................................................................................ 247 Index........................................................................................................ 277

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to record my intellectual debt to Nigel Harris in establishing the theoretical foundations of this book. I would also like to thank my wife Sue and my son Karl, Graham Willett, my parents and my colleagues at Flinders University for their abiding support.

INTRODUCTION

On the night of 25 October 2003, black-uniformed Russian security forces surrounded and stormed a privately chartered aircraft in the city of Novosibirsk. The object of their attentions aboard the plane was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the major shareholder in the giant Yukos oil firm, and reputedly Russia’s richest private citizen. Seven charges were laid against Khodorkovsky of massive theft and tax evasion. He was taken to a Moscow prison, where he joined Platon Lebedev, his business partner who had been arrested the previous July. There they remained until their trial in 2005. Found guilty, they were each sentenced to nine years in gaol (later reduced to eight). Khodorkovsky’s arrest was only the most spectacular aspect of a concerted government campaign against Yukos that continued until the company was destroyed in December 2004. The Russian authorities let it be known that all large private companies were under scrutiny and it was even hinted that the privatisation process that brought those companies into existence might itself be reviewed. The ironic thing about the persecution of Khodorkovsky and his company by the state was that it was the state that had originally brought him, and those like him, into existence. In the twilight years of the Soviet Union, the Gorbachev regime launched a number of desperate schemes to steer the economy away from the abyss into which it was heading. One of these was a series of controlled forays into the market economy. The Soviet experience under Gorbachev had shown that, no matter how much the economy was modernised, or how much technology was grafted onto it, or how much it was shifted from military to consumer spending–while it remained under state control, it would not produce the efficiencies or the intensive growth that free markets seemed to generate. The Soviet system was designed to produce administrators, not entrepreneurs. A solution might be–on a small scale and in a quite unofficial way–to manufacture some. At the top of the Soviet elite, this was seen as a controlled experiment in defence of the overall system. Further down, the motives may have been more venal. In

2

Introduction

fact, opinion is divided to this day as to which was the more important motive. Some argue that it was a genuine attempt to start controlled pockets of capitalism. Others contend that it resulted from the Soviet elite preparing their (and Russia’s) exit from “socialism”–swapping Party power for private property.1 The scheme may well have been transformed in some cases from the former to the latter as the situation became more desperate. Either way, “controlled” Soviet capitalism was soon out of the control of its Soviet sponsors.2 The official communist youth organisation, the Komsomol, because it theoretically contained the Soviet Union’s best and brightest, was chosen by the reformers as a suitable testing ground for the experiment. By the late Soviet period, the organisation was in the doldrums. Moscow had stopped enforcing binding enrolment targets and membership numbers had plummeted. The departing members took their dues with them and therefore the Komsomol bureaucracy had to find other ways of making money. The fact that local Komsomol units had been made “selffinancing” (allowed to manage their own money) in 1987, plus the discreet green light from elements of the Soviet leadership practically drove the remaining young Komsomol enthusiasts into business. Small enterprises in commercial and technical services, travel and youth employment emerged under Komsomol auspices. These were soon followed by cafes, discos and the establishment of “Centres for Scientific-Technical Creativity of Youth” (NTTMs).3 By 1991, four thousand successful enterprises were operating under Komsomol auspices.4 Some of the erstwhile komsomoletsy had shrugged off those auspices and moved on to bigger ventures. Such a one was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who had been deputy chief of the Komsomol at the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology in Moscow. In 1987 he set up an NTTM in the Institute. But after that he moved very rapidly out of the Komsomol orbit and into huge business operations that revolved around buying up state credits and turning them into hard currency. He established his own bank, Bank Menatep, in late 1988. Other emerging businessmen came from other backgrounds. Boris Berezovsky came from the Soviet scientific elite. Aleksandr Smolensky worked in the Moscow construction industry. They were not the nomenklatura of the Soviet state moving smoothly from a position of power based on the Party to one based on property. They were people

Cronies or Capitalists?

3

who, being at the right place at the right time, were able to take advantage of the Soviet economy’s cautious openings to the market and move considerably beyond them. After the Soviet collapse, they were helped in their endeavours by the active encouragement of the post-Soviet Yeltsin administration. There was, at this time, a general sense of urgency about transferring stateowned assets into private hands, since it was believed that such a transfer would constitute a guarantee against a revival of the communist system. Privatisation of the economy proceeded along two tracks. For the corner shops, obsolete factories, small workshops and food retail outlets, it was a fairly transparent process. All citizens were issued with privatisation “vouchers” (worth 10,000 rubles) that they could use to buy shares in privatised businesses at privatisation auctions. For the big, viable and profitable assets (mostly in the natural resource area) however, it was a different story. Deals were done between the government and emerging businessmen (especially those lucky enough to have set up banks) and the assets were “sold” quickly, quietly and efficiently – at a fraction of their real value. Some fifteen major businessmen, or “oligarchs”, had emerged, mainly in the financial sector. Between 1995 and 1998, their power–both economic and political–rose steadily. As their power increased, that of the Russian state declined. The decline had begun in the twilight years of the Soviet regime as the republics and regions asserted their autonomy, tax revenues dwindled and disorder spilled into the streets. The coercive elements of the state (including the armed forces and the KGB) found themselves short of funds and recruits.5 In the post-Soviet era, the Russian state faltered as it attempted to face the full blast of world market forces let loose upon the economy and still retain some kind of political authority. The oligarchs recruited their own security forces and went to war with each other, while the state looked helplessly on. Furthermore, the attempt to integrate the economy into the world market lessened the state’s ability to control the economy. Reaction against the centralised Soviet model gave rise to a suspicion of state activities in general. And regional interests continued to assert themselvesinterests that had been encouraged by the leaders of the Russian republic as a weapon in their struggle against the Soviet Union.

4

Introduction

For perhaps the first time since Ivan IV, the Russian state was critically weakened. In order to achieve the only kind of stability that was possible in the 1990s, the state became dependent on the oligarchs. That dependence was illustrated by the “loans-for-shares” scheme in mid1995. By this stage, the state was facing an acute revenue crisis. The “voucher” stage of privatisation had been completed in a ramshackle sort of way. This left the state still holding substantial economic assets. The Yeltsin team decided that the oligarchs should be invited to lend the government a large sum of money (in the end about US$2 billion). Security for the loan would be major shareholdings in leading industrial companies. If (as seemed very likely) the government defaulted on the loans, the oligarchs would be allowed to sell the shares-to themselves, at cut-price rates. They would then have gained control of important industrial assets at a significant discount. The deal was made even more alluring to capital by allowing the oligarchs’ banks that held the shares to organise the eventual share auctions, eliminating bids that competed with their own. Bids from foreign investors were ruled out from the start. The scheme was approved by presidential decree at the end of August 1995.6 It was through this scheme that Khodorkovsky took control of Yukos. Bank Menatep made its contribution to Yeltsin’s administration, held the shares, organised the auction, refused other bids and accepted its own-which was not the highest. Kryshtanovskaya & White argue that loans-for-shares was “a Rubicon separating two stages in the formation of the business elite.” Up to then, the oligarchs exercised great political influence but, as financiers, played no great role in the real economy. Once the scheme had gone through, they disposed of real economic power-which strengthened them in relation to the state.7 By 1996 however, that power was under threat-not from the state, but from the Russian people. Bitterly disappointed by the results of the Soviet collapse, they approached the presidential elections in that year in vengeful mood. It seemed entirely possible that Yeltsin would be defeated by Gennadi Zyuganov, the Communist Party candidate. The interests of Yeltsin’s administration and capital converged. The new Russian state could not countenance relinquishing power to a man and a party widely seen as representative of the old Soviet order (even in a much-diluted form). The oligarchs genuinely feared that a Communist Party victory would result in the loss of their assets through renationalisation-and would

Cronies or Capitalists?

5

certainly bring to a halt the unfinished business of loans-for-shares. In spring 1996, Yeltsin met five of the oligarchs (Berezovsky, Gusinsky, Khodorkovsky, Potanin and Fridman). “The Communists will hang us from the lampposts,” they told him. It was agreed that Russian business would swing its considerable resources and expertise behind Yeltsin’s campaign.8 Yeltsin eventually won the election. Berezovsky pointed out: It is no secret that Russian businessmen played the decisive role in President Yeltsin’s victory. It was a battle for our blood interests.9

The oligarchs were now at the height of their power. Politically dominant and economically robust, they towered over a weakened state and its ailing leader. Yeltsin wrote later that the election had transformed “financial capital” into “political capital”. The oligarchs then “tried to run the country behind the backs of the politicians.” Their influence on government and society had become harmful.10 Nevertheless, the government seemed unable to reassert its authority. As late as the summer of 1998, the prime minister (Sergei Kiriyenko) was meeting with “major Russian businessmen” and appealing for help.11 Had the Russian bourgeoisie remained primarily as financiers, the August 1998 financial crisis (in which Russia defaulted on her international debts) could have severely weakened it. A number of the original oligarchs were eliminated. But those with strength in the real economy survived. In fact, “the role of major businessmen in society tended to increase still further.”12 That group continued to include Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The Russian capitalists now felt pressure from another source. The real economy which they had entered revolved largely around natural resources. The big money was in exports and therefore the new Russian bourgeoisie had to engage with the world market. The world market demanded law, regulation, commercial competition and transparency.13 Khodorkoovsky and Yukos were in the vanguard responding to this pressure. Yukos’ Deputy Director of Corporate Finance (Sergei Drobizhev) said in March 2001: We realised in the winter of 1999-2000 that unless we took specific steps to address the market’s concern about our corporate governance, our stock would continue to be punished. At this point, we set out to create a true

6

Introduction global public company with full transparency and western-style investor relations.14

To that end, the Yukos Board of Directors passed a resolution on “Good Corporate Governance” in June 2000. The company adopted international accounting standards, started issuing three-monthly financial statements, paid dividends to its share-holders and brought a whole team of foreign directors onto its supervisory board. Yukos negotiated a merger with the Sibneft oil company which would have been the largest deal in Russian corporate history and would have created one of the biggest oil companies in the world. The company was also involved in joint-venture negotiations with the US firms ExxonMobil and Chevron-Texas.15 Khodorkovsky and other Russian business leaders wanted to be able to take independent economic decisions, based on the criterion of profit rather than the strategic interests of the state. He attacked state interference in the economy-especially its monopoly over oil pipelines and their routes, as well as the preservation of state control of the Gazprom and Rozneft companies.16 He called for more democracy-a parliamentary instead of a presidential republic. To that end, he donated funds to the liberal Yabloko party and to the Union of Right Forces, crossing the dangerous line into active political involvement. He announced that he would quit business at the age of forty five to pursue “other interests”. As if in preparation for this, Khodorkovsky took various initiatives that could be seen as an attempt to speed up the development of civil society in Russia. He established Internet centres in schools, took over the Moscow State Humanities University, supported the New Civilisation youth organisation and established the Open Russia charity foundation.17 None of this was simply altruism. Khodorkovsky said in an interview in June 2002: Of course to some extent our struggle for business ethics is of a mercenary character. Yes, we do profit from that … I will repeat though that today in general the whole society benefits from our position.18

Khodorkovsky’s policies in Yukos demonstrated what Russian business had to do in order to pursue capitalist objectives. They also put the advanced elements of the bourgeoisie on a collision course with the state.

Cronies or Capitalists?

7

Though briskly transformed, radically weakened and a shadow of its former Soviet self, the Russian state was by no means down and out. The historic need for a strong state in Russia had not been swept aside by the excesses of untrammelled capitalism. Questions of internal order, social stability, border protection and defence parity forced the state to reassert its central position in Russian society-and in so doing to push back the power of capital. The state saw its chance after the financial crisis of 1998. It was widely expected that the oligarchs would be badly damaged by the financial collapse.19 The Russian government unleashed a number of official investigations into the oligarchs’ dealings.20 Yeltsin wrote later that, by early 1999: A new era was emerging in Russia, the era of economic repression when economic regulations were used to intimidate and control people. It had begun gradually, unnoticed. But now it was already acquiring the status of a state ideology.21

But the process gained momentum with the arrival of Yeltsin’s successor. Vladimir Putin was an ex-KGB officer and a former (pre- and post-Soviet) administrator in St Petersburg. He became prime minister in 1999 and took over from Yeltsin as president at the beginning of 2000. With his background and outlook, he was a promising candidate to restore state power.22 Putin represented the sections of the Soviet state that had lost out in its collapse and the subsequent redistribution-the KGB (which had considered itself not only the guardian but also the elite of the Soviet system), members of other Soviet security services, as well as serving and retired personnel from the upper ranks of the armed forces. These people were known as siloviki-those from the silovye struktury, the “force structures”.23 Over the next few years, he and his supporters installed siloviki into positions of power. Kryshtanovskaya and White argue that Putin was determined “to place the tasks of national government within a militarysecurity framework”, and that he used the siloviki to do it. Furthermore: … a change in quantity must necessarily lead to a change in quality. In this respect the authoritarian methods that are inherent in military structures might be transferred to society as a whole.24

8

Introduction

At the centre of the project was a strong and centralised state. That state should reassert its interests in the economy, if necessary taking control of its “strategic” elements. Society should serve the state; elements unwilling to do so should be curbed. All this was necessary to raise Russia up once again as a Great Power in Europe.25 The new president, asked in September 2003 about democracy, replied: “If by democracy one means the dissolution of the state, then we do not need such democracy.”26 A Kommersant’ editorial commented later, “The new system … is designed to revive the state’s domination in all spheres of life”.27 Conflict with the bourgeoisie was inevitable. The Putin administration was clearly keen to take strategic sectors of the economy back under the state’s protective (and directive) wing. Russian mineral resources should belong to Russian companies, said its Minister of Natural Resources, Yuri Trutnev. “I would not mind if a certain number of our companies returned to the bosom of the state. This would be a normal patriotic move.”28 Putin himself lectured the Federal Assembly in April 2005 on the need for state control over “certain infrastructure facilities and companies in the defence and mineral extraction business that have strategic importance for the country’s future.”29 Business, on the other hand had quite a different view of where the “national interest” lay-and it was primarily with them. Berezovsky had said in December 1996 (just after Yeltsin’s re-election): I think that if something is advantageous to capital, it goes without saying that it is advantageous to the nation.30

Just before his arrest, Khodorkovsky declared “It’s clear that a politician and a businessman have completely different purposes.” The state, he said, wants to reproduce and spread its power, while business (and the people) want “a highly effective economy.”31 With an acute sense of this difference, Putin went into action against business shortly after assuming power. A series of police investigations into Russian companies began: tax evasion at Lukoil and Sibneft; privatisation irregularities at Norilsk Nickel; illegal share sales to foreigners at Unified Energy Systems. Valdimir Gusinsky’s media empire (sections of which ran critical coverage of the administration) was taken apart. Berezovsky felt himself to be next in line and fled the country.32 Putin stated in March 2000 that “those people who fuse, or help [the] fusion of power and capital-oligarchs of that kind will not exist as a

Cronies or Capitalists?

9

class.”33 He met with representatives of business on 29 July 2000 for over two hours. The press release issued afterwards began reassuringly: The President said that the authorities would not review the outcome of privatizations. At the same time, it was unacceptable for competing companies to use state structures and law enforcement agencies to achieve their goals.34

Thus business was warned to keep away from the structures of the state, including its political structures-a warning that Khodorkovsky, in the pursuit of his business interests, felt forced to ignore. His arrest, as a demonstration of the resurgent power of the state, was almost inevitable. From this brief introduction, three themes emerge. Firstly, the continual reappearance of a strong state in Russia. In the late twentieth century, the Soviet state was brought down. It was geographically and administratively shattered. Yet a mere ten years later, the state re-emerged with enough force to make Russia’s mighty business empires tremble and to subordinate the seemingly anarchic political process to itself. This book concentrates on the overthrow of the preSoviet state, the Tsarist autocracy. That was replaced first by republican and then by Soviet government. Yet both of these carried within them the seeds of the strong state, which emerged in a virulent Soviet form over the next few years. The strong state in Russia then seems to march on, even when its outward forms are destroyed. Secondly, the state summoning up its own nemesis, in the shape of the bourgeoisie. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Russian bourgeoisie emerged in the interstices of the Soviet system, called into being, sometimes by the opportunities afforded by perestroika, sometimes directly by Soviet officials. It was at first a reluctant and then a desperate attempt to unleash forces that might help preserve the existing power structure. In the mid to late nineteenth century, the Tsarist regime needed industrial development to fulfil its military obligations as a great power in Europe. Incapable of the initiative and zeal needed for industrial advance itself, it was forced to allow the development of a bourgeoisie. In both cases the state was aware that in helping to create a bourgeoisie, it was creating a potential rival to itself. Thirdly, the inevitability of conflict between the bourgeoisie and the state. In late Soviet times, the bourgeoisie had to fight to exist. After the

10

Introduction

collapse, it aggressively pushed back state power in order to strengthen itself. When the state put business back in its place, elements of the bourgeoisie could not just accept a new subservience-to survive and grow, future challenges to state power were and are inevitable.35 In the nineteenth century, every advance of the bourgeoisie meant a step back for the autocracy-until it could step back no further. The conflict ended in the destruction of the autocracy-but then the emergence of a new state and the destruction of the bourgeoisie. These themes lead to a number of questions: Why does the strong state keep coming back, regardless of the changes in economy and society? Why, in apparent defiance of its own security, does the state sanction actions that create a bourgeoisie? Why does the bourgeoisie, similarly reckless for its own safety, feel forced into conflict with the state? In the following pages, I shall attempt to examine the themes and answer the questions using a particular set of theoretical tools that will be explained in the first chapter. This is not a work of archival discovery. Most of the inner workings of Russia’s great bourgeois families were thrown open for inspection by a Soviet government only too willing to expose their inner secrets to the light of day. It is a work of reinterpretation which seeks to put forward an alternative view of events before and after 1917. The first chapter explores the nature of the bourgeois revolution and that of the state. Chapters Two and Three consider the crises of the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 revolution and their effect on the bourgeoisie: a major reconsideration by the progressive bourgeoisie of the bourgeois revolution in Russia and how it might be achieved. Chapter Four examines the effects of the Great War, which both strengthened state power and gave birth to the Provisional Government-a new state that had been formed within the shell of the old. Chapter Six details the final demise of the bourgeoisie when confronted with Soviet power. The last chapter reinserts the Russian events into the European history of the period and outlines the effect on the bourgeois revolution in Europe and the world.

Cronies or Capitalists?

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Notes 1

For the former view, see D.E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 100, 104; for the latter O. Kryshtanovskaya, & S. White, “The rise of the Russian business elite.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 38, 3 (September 2005): 296; C. Belton, “Khodorkovsky’s High Stakes Gamble.” Moscow Times, 16 May 2005; P. Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 75. 2 See Anton Surikov’s comments in Belton, “High Stakes,” Moscow Times, 16 May 2005. As Fortescue points out, if the scheme was designed to create a front for continuing nomenklatura power, “then it would appear that the front men did the dirty on their patrons and sponsors … there is no evidence that they [the nomenklatura] have or ever had real power behind the scenes.” S. Fortescue, Russia’s Oil Barons and Metal Magnates: Oligarchs and the State in Transition (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006), 36. 3 S.L. Solnick, Stealing the State: control and collapse in Soviet institutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 111-115; Hoffman, Oligarchs, 104-5. For a contemporary official view of the NTTMs see T. Vasil’eva, Soviet Youth: Creativity and Initiative, (Moscow: Novosti Press, 1988), who tells us that “they enable young people to find an outlet for their creative ambitions.” (n.p.) 4 Solick, Stealing the State, 116. 5 O. Kryshtanovskaya, & S. White. “Putin’s Milotocracy,” Post-Soviet Affairs 19, 4 (October-December 2003):290. 6 M.S. Salter, & J.N. Rosenbaum, Field Study: OAO Yukos Oil Company (Harvard: Harvard Business Publishing, 2001), 4-5. See also Hoffman, Oligarchs, chapter 12; Klebnikov, Godfather, 200. 7 Kryshtanovskaya & White, Russian business elite, 297. 8 In his account of this meeting, Yeltsin is at pains to assure the reader that this was “my first-ever meeting with representatives of the major banks and media groups” and that “The meeting took place at their initiative.” B.N. Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, trans. C.A. Fitzpatrick (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 20-21. 9 Interview with Berezovsky, n.d. in Klebnikov, Godfather, 218. 10 Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 91-94. 11 “At this meeting they agreed to form a sort of economic council attached to the government in which all the heads of the major banks and companies would participate.” Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 172. 12 Kryshtanovskaya & White, Russian business elite, 302. See also Fortescue, Oil Barons, 9. 13 Salter & Rosenbaum tell us that “for equity analysts covering Russian stocks, the quality of a company’s corporate governance was a top priority.” So the burning question facing companies like Yukos was: “what additional corporate governance measures needed to be taken in order to receive a higher valuation by the capital market?” (Salter & Rosenbaum, Yukos Oil Company, 1-2.

12

Introduction

14 Interview with Drobizhev, 6 March 2001 in Salter & Rosenbaum, Yukos Oil Company, 9. See also Khodorkovsky’s comment on the same page. 15 A. Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia (London: Granta Books, 2004), 209-212. 16 C. Belton, “The Friends and Foes of a Rising Oilman.” Moscow Times, 27 May 2005. 17 Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia, 213-214. 18 Natalya Gevorkyan, “Mikhail Khodorkovskii: Rokfelleru bylo namnogo tyazhelee”, Kommersant’, 1 June 2005, www.kommersant.ru/doc.html?docId=582013. 19 Fortescue, Oil Barons, 9. 20 Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia, 176. 21 Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, 231. Yeltsin writes very much as though this offensive was entirely beyond his control. He cheerfully admits that under Russian law, prosecutors could issue a warrant for the arrest of any businessman “as long as there is the political need to do so.” By spring 1999, as arrests, searches and confiscations involved an increasing number of banks and companies, “the Russian business community was seized with a fear of people in uniform.” (Midnight Diaries, 232.) 22 To that end, it certainly strengthened Putin’s position–and may well have been no accident-that his rise took place against the background of the Moscow apartment bombings in September 1999, allegedly the work of “Chechen terrorists”. 23 For definitions, see I. Bremmer & S. Charap, “The Siloviki in Putin’s Russia: Who They Are and What They Want,” Washington Quarterly 30, 1 (Winter 200607): 86; S.W. Rivera, & D.W. Rivera, “The Russian Elite under Putin: Militocratic or Bourgeois?” Post-Soviet Affairs 22 (2) (2006): 126. 24 Kryshtanovskaya & White argue that this process was not just “a few generals” moving into politics, but “a wholesale migration” of siloviki into various elite groups (O. Kryshtanovskaya & S. White. “Putin’s Milotocracy,” Post-Soviet Affairs 19, 4 (October-December 2003): 303). For contrary views on siloviki influence see B. Renz, “Putin’s Milotocracy? An Alternative Interpretation of Siloviki in Contemporary Russian Politics,” Europe-Asia Studies 58, 6 (September 2006); Rivera & Rivera, Elite under Putin. 25 See Bremmer & Charap, Siloviki, 89; Kryshtanovskaya, O. & S. White, “Inside the Putin Court: A Research Note,” Europe-Asia Studies 57, 7 (November 2005): 1073. 26 Quoted in Peter Baker & Susan B. Glasser, “Putin Foes see Erosion of Liberties,” Washington Post, 26 September 2003, AO1. 27 Kirill Rogov, “My nash, my staryi, my postroim,” Kommersant’, 30 December 2005, www.kommersant.ru/doc.html?docId=639687. 28 Trutnev quoted by Irina Rybal’chenko, “My shutkami na rabote ne zanimaemsya,” Vlast’ 21 February 2005, www.kommersant.ru/doc.html?docId=548960. See also Den’gi, number 9, 7 March 2005.

Cronies or Capitalists?

29

13

Nikolai Vardul’ & Dmitrii Kamyshev, “Op-pozitsiya,” Kommersant, 26 April 2005, www.kommersant.ru/doc.html?docId=573453. 30 Interview with Berezovsky in December 1996 in Hoffman, Oligarchs, 360. He had said a year earlier: “All over the world, government helps business. More than that, capital controls the government, though here in Russia that is still ahead.” (Interview in Kommersant’, 5 October 1995 in Klebnikov, Godfather, 195. 31 Mikhail Khodorkovsky, “The Rich are Duty Bound to Fight,” Moskovskie Novosti 2 July 2004, www.khodorkovsky-info/docs/mn_7-2-04.pdf. 32 Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia, 191. 33 In Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, volume 52, number 12, 7. 34 Andrew Jack, Inside Putin’s Russia, 193. 35 On the possibility of capital rising again, see Rivera & Rivera, Elite under Putin, 130-131, 141; Kryshtanovskaya & White, Russian Business Elite, 306.

CHAPTER ONE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RUSSIAN BOURGEOISIE

This book examines the history of late Tsarist Russia, culminating in the revolutions of 1917. It uses the analytical tools provided by orthodox Marxism–the Marxism of Marx and Engels, of Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov and the Russian Mensheviks. The book is based on an orthodox version of historical materialism. It proceeds from the assumption that the level of development of the productive forces provides the basis for the existence of a particular set of production relations (the economic structure), which in turn gives rise to a legal and political superstructure.1 The economic structure exists because it has the ability to advance productive power–that is, to promote the tendency of the productive forces to develop. On the relationship between forces and relations of production, Marx wrote that “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production …”. The latter restrict (or “fetter”) the development of the former.2 Historical advance then, is a continuing process of productive force development, production relation fettering, and eventual change in the latter forced through by the former. This kind of change affects the nature of social classes and their relationship to each other. Specifically, it affects which class will be dominant within a set of production relations. Why then is this a book about the Russian bourgeoisie? And in what sense was the Russian revolution ‘bourgeois’? Marxists long assumed that capitalism proper–mature, market (rather than state) dominated capitalism–is manifested, led and shaped by the bourgeoisie. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels go to some lengths to demonstrate that, following the destruction of feudalism, it was

16

Chapter One

the bourgeoisie that (eventually) created new relations of production, after the old ones had been cast aside by the developing productive forces.3 However, the development of the forces of production cannot arrange the elements of the future economic structure in advance. Its forward movement can destroy the relations of production that stood in its way, but as a blind, unconscious force, it cannot ensure that the elements it unleashes are necessarily those that can (in an immediate sense) create new relations of production, conducive to further development. Creation is the realm of the conscious–of classes and class struggle. It may not immediately proceed from the act of destruction. The destruction of dysfunctional production relations may not simultaneously produce a class that can create new ones. While the basic economic ground may have been laid in the old society for the emergence of a new class–up to and including the destruction of the old production relations–it may not fully emerge before a rather messy transition period. The historical experience of the emergence of the bourgeoisie is a case in point. A study of bourgeois revolutions before the one in Russia, of both the “classical” variety (England, America, France) and those “from above” (German and Italian unification, the Meiji Restoration)4 reveals three things. Firstly, the foundations of the bourgeois revolution and for a capitalist economy were not laid by the bourgeoisie itself. In fact, it may have been the case that prior to the revolution a bourgeoisie proper does not exist at all. Secondly, bourgeois revolutions were not made–led or fought for–directly by the bourgeoisie. And thirdly, it followed from these two points that a victorious bourgeois revolution may not immediately result in a society dominated by the bourgeoisie. Let us examine these features more closely. The conditions for the bourgeois revolutions in Europe were generally created by states in pursuit of military advantage, unaware of what they were creating.5 The emergence of the first shoots of capitalism was a byproduct of the need of states “to maximise both their military investments and the efficiency of these investments”.6 Engels argues that in late fifteenth century Europe, far from the putative bourgeoisie putting in the essential groundwork, it was the centralising monarchies (with urban support) that broke the power of the feudal nobility and established national states “within which … modern bourgeois society came to development …”.7 At the time of the English revolution, a capitalist class

The Russian Revolution and the Russian Bourgeoisie

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was only just beginning to emerge from the bigger farmers (who produced for the market) and the greater craftsmen (who employed wage labour).8 That class had a long way to go, even after 1640 and 1688. Engels believed that it was not until the Industrial Revolution that “a class of large manufacturing capitalists” was created.9 Bourgeois revolutions were not the work of the bourgeoisie, in terms of either leadership or foot-soldiery.10 It has been suggested that this has been because of the fractured nature of the bourgeois class, and because bourgeois revolutions are political transformations which establish production relations conducive to capitalist development and therefore do not necessitate “the self conscious action of the capitalist class.”11 One of the earliest observers of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, asserted that it was the work of “moneyed men, merchants, principal tradesmen and men of letters”.12 From what we know of the leadership of the revolution, only the last category would seem to be justified. While the revolutionary stage was occupied by the Jacobin and Cordelier petit-bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the sans-culottes on the other, the moneyed men and merchants adopted a relatively low profile. A more recent historian, Lynn Hunt, nevertheless supports Burke’s contention. The revolutionary officials, she says, were “the owners of the means of production”: merchants, professionals, artisans and landed peasants.13 For our purpose (the question of actual bourgeois leadership), only merchants matter here; the other groups are only potentially bourgeois at most. But Hunt’s own study reveals that merchants, at the national level of leadership, were a declining force–declining more rapidly as the revolution’s radical petitbourgeois leaders stormed ahead.14 As for those who made bourgeois revolutions in a physical sense, the bourgeoisie itself had again been noteworthy for its absence. In the English Revolution, Engels says, “The middle class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought it out.”15 This divergence between those who (eventually) benefited from the revolution and those who did its work led to what Callinicos calls “a gap between the intentions of the revolutionary actors and the objective consequences of their struggles.”16 That gap was evident in both the urban and rural settings of the English Revolution. Christopher Hill tells us that the rank and file of the New Model Army and the Levellers were “far indeed … from fighting to make a world safe for capitalist firms and merchants to make profits in”, and that they protested vociferously “when they realised that such a world was in fact coming into existence.”17

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Not only was the bourgeoisie not fully formed before the bourgeois revolution, and not in its vanguard, it may not emerge immediately in its wake. It had taken the bourgeoisie a considerable historical period to develop. For Marx and Engels, it was “the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.”18 In the English Revolution, according to Manning, the emerging bourgeoisie was not strong enough to assume power. When the old order was overthrown, it could only be replaced by military rule.19 Engels describes “the long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism” in Britain as proceeding from the Reformation, through Calvinism and the English Revolution, encompassing the ‘Glorious Revolution’, inspired by the French Revolution, right up to the 1832 Reform Act–a period of some three hundred years.20 Bourgeois revolutions then, were not dependent on the existence of a fully formed bourgeoisie; they were not made by the bourgeoisie; and generally they did not present the bourgeoisie with (anything like) exclusive power. They were “not … revolutions consciously made by capitalists, but … revolutions which promote capitalism.”21 So if, in late nineteenth century Russia, an embryonic bourgeoisie was only just beginning to emerge, if it were only dimly conscious of itself as a class and if it showed no interest in political rule–we would still, in Marxist terms, be justified in discussing a “bourgeois revolution” in Russia. But by the late nineteenth century, Russia had moved beyond such qualifications. As this book will seek to show, Russia had a bourgeoisie that was prepared to move against the fetters of Tsarism–and elements of that bourgeoisie were acutely conscious of their role in future Russian development.

Marxism and Russia Until the First World War, Marxists were generally agreed that the coming revolution in Russia would be one in which the productive forces (which needed capitalist production relations in order to advance further) would come into conflict with the Tsarist economic structure. Tsarism would be destroyed and Russian capitalism would be created. In other words, it would be a bourgeois revolution. Such an analysis had an impeccable Marxist pedigree.

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Marx argued that, for a social order to be destroyed (for the production relations to be changed), the level of development of the productive forces which had brought it into being had to be prevented, by that social order, from rising any higher. The future production relations ‘matured within the framework of the old society.’22 Thus “the means of production and exchange, on whose foundations the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society.”23 If the production relations are to continue to develop, a capitalist economic structure is necessary: “free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted to it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class”.24 Capitalism requires a certain level of development of the productive forces to come into existence.25 Marx therefore listed the “modern bourgeois mode of production” following feudalism in his broad outline of “epochs marking progress in the economic development of society.”26 The level of development of the productive forces is sufficient to sustain a particular kind of economic structure. The latter is dependent on the former. The productive forces of late Tsarist Russia had developed to the point where they strained against the economic structure. For further development, capitalism was required–it could not be avoided. Society, wrote Marx in 1867, “can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development.”27 Engels tells us, with Russia in mind: … it is an historical impossibility that a lower stage of economic development should solve the enigmas and conflicts which did not arise, and could not arise until a far higher stage.28

Furthermore, an economic structure would not be removed “before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed.”29 Feudalism had had to run its course before it could be replaced by capitalism. Likewise, capitalism has to develop the productive forces to a high level before socialism is possible.30 The productive forces that existed under feudalism could not develop to a level that would sustain socialism because the existing economic structure would restrain them from doing so. They could only develop to a level suitable for the beginnings of capitalism. Further development required a capitalist economic structure. Attempts to “speed up” the historical process by the premature overthrow of capitalist production relations or the establishment of “socialist” ones

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on an underdeveloped economic base were condemned by Marx and Engels as a departure from the premises of historical materialism. In 1850 they criticised their erstwhile comrades in the German Communist League for seeing the revolution “not as the product of the realities of the situation but as a result of an effort of will.”31 They regarded it as fortunate that their “party” could not yet come to power, since “If … the proletariat overthrows the political rule of the bourgeoisie, its victory will only be temporary, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself …”.32 Such a victory, Engels warned, could end in disaster: The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government at a time when society is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures which that domination implies … he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe … He who is put in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.33

On Russia, however, Marx and Engels were, at one stage, prepared to concede that, in a very specific set of historical circumstances, society might have a chance of avoiding “all the vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.”34 This was due to the survival of common property in the Russian countryside. The likelihood of such an escape depended partly on events in Russia and partly on developments in Western Europe. It could only occur if the Tsarist regime discontinued its programme of industrialisation– otherwise, as industry developed, communal property would weaken and eventually disappear. In the meantime, only: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.35

By 1894, in his “Afterword (On Social Relations in Russia)”, Engels was prepared to rule the possibility out. Russian could not skip capitalism and “convert Russian peasant communism straight into modern socialist common ownership of the means of production”. Nor could it appropriate the productive forces of capitalism “as social property and a socialist tool” before capitalism was established. Rapid industrial development was bringing about the disintegration of communal property: “To lament this fact is now futile.”36

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Marx and Engels’ most able pupil in Russia, Georgi Plekhanov, starting out from the same premises, went into political battle with the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)–those who had raised the question of Russia sliding past capitalism–in the late 1890s. “What does the future hold out for Russia?” he asked: It seemed to us that first and foremost it held out the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the beginning of the political and economic emancipation of the working class.37

The nature of the Tsarist regime necessitated capitalism and ruled out socialism. The overthrow of the regime and the establishment of socialism were, wrote Plekhanov, “fundamentally different matters”.38 In addition, the Russian working class–let alone the peasantry–was not sufficiently conscious to achieve socialism at that stage.39 Were the working class to “seize power”, a “disgraceful fiasco” would ensue. It would be confronted in short order by its inherent weaknesses, the hostility of the urban and rural bourgeoisie, popular resistance and Russia’s own lack of development.40 At the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (the scene of the Menshevik/Bolshevik split) the bourgeois nature of the coming Russian revolution was so taken for granted that it was not even raised in discussion. The Party Programme (adopted in that year and unchanged until 1919) declared “as its immediate political task the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic.”41 Karl Kautsky, the foremost exponent of Marxism after the death of its two founders, took up the question of Russia during the 1905 revolution. The Russian revolution would not initiate a new mode of production–it would sweep away the political obstacles that prevented capitalism from attaining its full development. The most important thing that the revolution would yield up was “democracy, initially still on the basis of the present society.”42 Kautsky argued that, in backward Russia, while the bourgeoisie was weak, the working class was very strong. The revolution against Tsarism therefore would be led by the urban working class. However, “the effects … could only be bourgeois”–not least because of the huge peasantry, for which a bourgeois-democratic agrarian revolution was needed.43

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Since the leadership of the bourgeois revolution fell to the working class, it might temporarily become the dominant social force. Such a situation should be used to establish as strong as possible a position for working class power within capitalism. The happiest result of a Russian revolution for Marxists, Kautsky believed, would be an extremely democratic political system and a functioning capitalist economy.44 Meanwhile, the Mensheviks, meeting in Geneva from April to May in 1905, reiterated the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolution and declared themselves against either sharing power with the bourgeoisie or seizing power themselves. They were to be a party of extreme revolutionary opposition in a capitalist democracy.45 The Menshevik leader Pavel Axelrod told the (newly fused) Party Congress a year later that, since “Social relations in Russia have not yet matured beyond the point of bourgeois revolution”, it was not the Party’s task to overthrow the bourgeoisie in Russia, but to destroy the social and political system that prevented the bourgeois from becoming the dominant class. He concluded: “history impels workers and revolutionaries more and more strongly towards bourgeois revolutionism, making them involuntary political servants of the bourgeoisie …”.46 I think then it is safe to assert that pre-1914 Marxists, on the basis of Marx’s method and through their own analysis, expected a bourgeois revolution in Russia which would both consolidate and develop a capitalist economy. I will leave the last word on this to Engels, writing in 1874, once again with Russia in mind: The revolution that modern socialism strives to achieve … requires not only a proletariat to carry [it] out … but also a bourgeoisie in whose hands the social productive forces have developed so far that they permit the final destruction of class distinctions …But the productive forces have reached this level of development only in the hands of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, therefore, in this respect also is just as necessary a precondition for the socialist revolution as is the proletariat itself.47

This book therefore concentrates in part on the political history of the Russian bourgeoisie in order to discover whether the expectations of that analysis could have been fulfilled. It will also focus on the relationship of the bourgeoisie to the Russian state. For although the Russian bourgeoisie played a major role in the bourgeois revolution, it will become evident that elements of the state played a part as well. The Tsarist state unwillingly

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nurtured the bourgeoisie for reasons of state power. Parts of the state aided the bourgeoisie in the destruction of Russia’s autocratic fetters. It was here that the classical Marxists made two fundamental errors in their analysis of Russia. The first was to fail to recognise the autonomous role of the state during the course of the Russian bourgeois revolution. The second was (after an initial over-estimation) a radical underestimation of the role of the Russian bourgeoisie. The first of these errors concerns the Marxist view of the state, to which I shall now turn.

Marxism and the State How is it possible, given the premises of classical Marxism, for the state to play an “autonomous role”–when, as part of the superstructure, its features are assumed to be determined by the production relations? Is the state part of the superstructure?48 For Marx, it clearly was; his description of the superstructure as “legal and political” confirms it. The overwhelming majority of Marxists accept this.49 Cohen places the state in the superstructure–even though he appears somewhat unsure as to where the latter begins and ends.50 But an immediate difficulty arises here, because there is no sense in which a particular economic structure erects the state as a suitable superstructure for the continuation and development of that economic system. The state in capitalism, for example, does not arise with the capitalist system; it predates it. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels is not describing a state specific to capitalism, but the rise of a state in general, as a product of the struggle between classes–which, of course, precedes capitalism by a lengthy historical period. I will argue that it is more useful (and more historically accurate) to regard the state as part of the relations of production–part of the economic base– rather than a superstructural consequence of it. Cohen says that “The economic structure of a society is the whole set of its production relations.” He continues, “The economic structure is not a way of producing, but a framework of power in which producing occurs.”51 Any examination of class societies up to mature (globalised) capitalism can only conclude that the state is a part of that set, part of that framework. There exists in the base a number of production relations52 (one of which

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is the state) making up the economic structure of society and providing the basis of the legal and political superstructure. The state is, to be sure, a peculiar part of the base, since for most of the history of class society, it is a pre-existing institution. The fact that it continues to exist must mean that it plays some significant part in the forward development of the productive forces–of which more below. Because most Marxists place the state in the superstructure, they are able to argue that the nature of the state is explained by the relations of production. Thus, feudal relations produce a feudal state, capitalist relations a capitalist one and so on. Yet, as we have seen, the state does not emerge as a reflection of certain sets of production relations. It has, historically, been a part of those relations and, prior to the maturity of capitalism, has played a large part in shaping the superstructure itself.53 What are the origins of this persistent production relation? Engels argued that the economic development of primitive communities eventually produced classes and, specifically, a ruling class that gave rise to the state as a means of perpetuating its rule. Karl Kautsky, however, rejected this account, arguing that class and state emerged simultaneously. This happened for two reasons, both closely connected with war. In the first place, war provided slaves (who were the first labourers not to work for themselves) and booty (which allowed particular individuals and families to accumulate wealth). Secondly, wars were extended to become wars of permanent conquest, forcing the vanquished population into a subordinate position under the victors. For Kautsky: … the division into classes appears … through the union of two polities into one, of which one becomes the dominant exploiting class … the coercive apparatus imposed on the vanquished by the victors develops into the state.54

The simultaneous emergence of an economically dominant ruling class and the state in Kautsky’s account implies a close relationship between the two. For Kautsky, the state was not a special body that existed to serve the ruling class–it was the ruling class. The state’s purpose was not to enable the economic exploitation of one class by another–it carried out the exploitation itself. The state was, at one and the same time, a ruling and exploiting body.55 The early state dominates the economic structure.

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States at first emerge primarily as territorial units. Engels wrote that “the state, first, divides its subjects according to territory … This organisation of citizens according to locality is a feature common to all states ...”.56 It therefore rapidly (if not simultaneously) becomes a military unit as well. The young state needs its own military forces to protect its territory, its trade, and to compete with other emerging states.57 According to Otto Hintze: All state organisation was originally military organization, organization for war … Larger groups of people united in the more solid structure of the state, primarily for defensive and offensive purposes.58

The state brings with it all of this historical baggage–a territorial basis, a war-making capacity and a drive to competition deriving from its existence in a system of similar states. As a production relation, states can dominate economic structures. In economic structures that are dominated by the state production relation, it is the state’s baggage that tends to dominate the societies in question. These features did not come to an end as the state developed, nor with the advent of capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, Engels could write: “The army has become the main purpose of the state, and an end in itself; the peoples are there only to provide soldiers and feed them …”.59 A consequence of this feature is that much of the state’s activity has been external to its national territory–military competition with other states for territory, resources and power.60 “War made the state,” writes Charles Tilly, “and the state made war.”61 The state then, should not be seen as a part of historical materialism’s superstructure. It emerges simultaneously as a military body and as a ruling class. As such it is an important (and at times dominant) part of the relations of production. We can call on Marx for some help with this assertion. The state, he writes in Capital, is “the concentrated and organised force of society.” He continues: “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.”62 As we shall see, military competition compels states to release the potential development of the productive forces. Were they not to do so, they would become a fetter on the further development of the forces of production. Marx asserts that, at particular times, production relations will exist that “are appropriate to a given stage in the development of [humanity’s] material forces of production.”63 The level of development of the

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productive forces gives rise to an economic structure that will continue their development. Forms of society (which are organised around economic structures) rise or fall according to whether they advance or hold back the growth of productive power. In this sense, the productive forces determine; they are the moving force.64 However, Cohen points out: … Marx never denied, and sometimes asserted that superstructures hold foundations together, and that relations of production control the development of the productive forces. Yet he held that the character of the superstructure is explained by the nature of the base, and that the latter is explained by the nature of the productive forces.65

How are these two explanatory directions (forces determining relations, relations developing forces) to be reconciled? Only, says Cohen, by a functional explanation, of the form: “e occurred because the situation was such that an event like e would cause an event like f” (i.e. this set of productions relations exists because the situation is such that the existence of such production relations will cause the development of the productive forces).66 Only such an explanation, says Cohen, “preserves consistency between the explanatory primacy of the productive forces over the economic structure and the massive control of the latter over the former …”.67 Taking the relationship between the productive forces and the production relations from the side of the forces, those forces “tend to develop throughout history”. This is because humans are rational beings in an historical situation of scarcity and, when able to improve that situation, they will do so.68 However. alleviating scarcity in general, or lessening their own labour, or developing the forces of production may well not be their deliberate intention. Improvements to production may have come about for any number of reasons. In a more or less accidental process, changes that lead to improved productivity (less scarcity, less labour) tend to be retained.69 Thus the productive forces develop. This process is not uniform in economic structures. Various ruling classes may try various means to improve their position–an increase in coercive methods of extracting revenue from their subjects, for example. But means that improve productivity will, in the long run, prove more efficient and will therefore eclipse those that do not.70 In this way, the tendency of the productive forces to develop will continue.

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Cohen and Kymlicka point out that “it does not follow that productive power grows without social relational assistance, nor even that social relations cannot be … the immediate source of the development of the forces.”71 This brings us to the relationship from the other side, that of the relations of production. Production relations can and do develop the productive forces. That is their function; it is why they are as they are, and it is why they persist in a certain form. This is the case whatever the original intent of production relations in bringing about improvements in the forces of production, which they often do regardless of the effects that those improvements will eventually have on the economic structure. It is a very common historical situation (and one that we will recognise in Russia) that economic structures will attempt to develop the productive forces while at the same time preserving the relations of production beyond their functional “use by” date. Sets of production relations (economic structures) have in fact set in train developments in the productive forces which eventually have threatened their own existence. In addition to the (fairly constant) tendency of the productive forces to develop as a consequence of the reaction of rationality to scarcity, there can exist relations of production that boost the development of the productive forces for reasons of their own and therefore remain relations of production as a consequence of this effect. One of the most important of these has been the state.72 The fact that the state performs this role can account for its lengthy persistence as a production relation (initially dominant, becoming less so with the development of the capital relation). In tribe, community and nation, the state struggles to survive through competition and conquest. It is in the state’s interests to change production relations (or allow them to be changed) in order to increase productive power. The state, in order to defend itself against other states, provides or encourages an economic structure which is beneficial to the development of the productive forces – since, in so doing, it creates the wherewithal for its own survival.73 The fundamental interest of the state in the development of the productive forces (when that interest emerged) was in the potential that development provided for improved means of military power. For a time, the surplus necessary for this improvement could be obtained simply by increasing the state’s coercive power in order to extract more from its population. But eventually, turning the screws on the state’s unfortunate inhabitants was not sufficient. Yet the state was driven on by the necessity to compete militarily with other states–some of which may, through the magic of the

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transformation of production relations, have leapt ahead. The further development of the productive forces, manifested in the state’s need for improved war-making capacities, demanded changes in the relations of production.74 The competition between states, and the military needs that it engendered, created beneficial conditions for the emergence of capitalism.75 The state, however, did not set out to “create” capitalism. Its emergence was a byproduct of the need of states to make the best use of their military investments. Instead of simply seizing the wealth of the emerging capitalist classes, states found it more effective to protect property rights and to tax property owners. In establishing its supremacy over a national territory, the state at the same time marked out and defended a national market. It should be remembered though, that the two production relations, state and capital, always had different motives for the national capitalisms that they combined, in some places, to create. The state promotes accumulation in order to strengthen its power, to enhance (and perhaps expand) its control over territory and thus to compete with other states. Capital does so in order to reproduce and expand the capitalist mode of production. In nurturing the first flowerings of capitalism, in order to enhance its warmaking capacity, the pre-capitalist state rears a potential threat to the set of state-dominated production relations. It endeavours to promote the development of the productive forces while at the same time preserving that set. The extent to which that domination is preserved, or weakened, or eventually destroyed is a measure of the success of the bourgeois revolution.

The State in Russia It is generally accepted that the centralised Tsarist state was very strong relative to other sections of Russian society, and that those sections–the bourgeoisie included–were correspondingly weak.76 Russian society, from the Tsars to the Soviets, has been dominated by the state–that is to say, throughout this period the state was the dominant production relation. The Tsarist state strove to inhibit the emergence of a bourgeoisie (as an independent economic and political force) before 1917. The Soviet state all but eliminated what there was of one afterwards.

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A number of factors contributed to the emergence of the state as the dominant production relation in Russia. Among them, we should consider Russia’s location–peripheral to the dynamic economies of western Europe. We should also bear in mind its size and the problems that that created for centralised government.77 We should also remember that when land became overcrowded, the early Russians tended to pick up and push into ‘unoccupied’ (or at least less occupied) land. There was no struggle over land, and no pressure to improve its productivity–just an expanding replication by the new settlers of the production techniques and social organisation they had left behind. This lack of development not only produced a low level of economy, but also enabled the state to maintain its position.78 But no factor was more important in the development of the Russian state than the military dangers that surrounded it.79 One of the earliest of these was the invasion of Russia by the armies of the Golden Horde and the imposition of their rule over the Russian princedoms from about the middle of the thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth century. Eventually, the Grand Principality of Muscovy became the main agent of the Mongols in Russia. It came to closely resemble the Mongols in its aggressive militarism, its centralisation and its militarised bureaucracy. And it was Muscovy, having learned its lessons from the Mongols, that eventually turned its back on the Golden Horde and extended its own rule to all of Russia. Now, as far as Marx was concerned, this was the origin of the Russian autocratic state. The bloody mire of Mongolian slavery [he wrote] forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy … It is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slavery that Muscovy was nursed and grew up.80

Plekhanov however tended to reject this idea of the Mongolisation of Muscovy (he regarded such an alleged infusion of Tatar ideas as somewhat idealist). Instead, he argued that even before the invasion of the Horde there had been an onslaught by nomadic tribes into south-eastern Russia and around Central Asia. This had led to a major shift in the population to the north (from around the second half of the twelfth century). This was bad for trade (since it disrupted trade links with Europe) and bad for agriculture (because of the climate). Yet despite these disadvantages, both before and after the Mongol invasion, the Russian

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princes were forced to meet the cost of resisting military threats. Raids by nomadic tribes were followed by the Mongols, and they in turn were followed by the Lithuanians, the Poles and the Swedes. The only form of surplus available to maintain the Russian state’s defence was that produced by the peasants. “In order to ensure the fulfilment of these demands”, says Plekhanov, “it was necessary [for the state] to increase the extent of its direct power over the rural population.” And this could only be achieved by draconian measures. The state took unto itself the right to all landed property. The peasants were deprived not only of property in land, but of property in their own selves – that is to say, serfdom. Gradually, the entire population was transformed into servants of the state.81 Marx and Engels had a name for this sort of system – a system in which the state dominated. They called it (having first identified it in places like China, India and Persia) “oriental despotism” (and sometimes the “Asiatic Mode of Production”).82 Such a system arose not because it was oriental, but firstly as a result of the need (in terms of the development of the productive forces) for the state to undertake centrally-directed public works on a large scale (in the East, particularly systems of irrigation). Secondly due to the dispersal of the population into an agglomeration of villages, “each with its own distinct organisation and each forming its own small world.”83 Clearly, while the second factor was clear in Russia, the first (irrigation systems) was not. This is why Marx argued that oriental despotism in Russia was copied from the Mongols–who had learned their lessons in statecraft from the Chinese.84 As we have seen, this explanation was not good enough for Plekhanov, who argued that there was an essential difference between the oriental despotisms of Asia and that in Russia. Whereas the former arose from the need to lay down conditions of production (irrigation, flood control etc), the latter arose from the need of the state to defend itself against its enemies. Given the low level of Russian economic development, the attempt to keep pace with its European rivals-to construct a competitive military machine on the basis of a backward economy-led to the creation of an oriental despotism of a specifically Russian type.85 One further element in the Marxist version of oriental despotism should be noted. These societies, it was argued, were essentially static. While the

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state continued to provide the conditions for production, and while village society plodded along in its own self-contained way, there were created no social forces, no social dynamic, to bring about change. State servitude was “a powerful hindrance to the further economic and cultural progress of Greater Russia”, because it was “inimical to the emergence of [a] potentially dynamic class from within itself.”86 Classes (or “estates”) were created by the Tsarist state on the basis of the different forms of service which they could perform for it.87 As such they were all, from the landed nobility downwards, weak in the face of and dependent on the state.88 Tsarism prevented the emergence of economically based classes.89 In these circumstances, the only way that change would come about would be from outside.90 Humanity passed over to higher forms of cultural development only when a favourable grouping of circumstances shattered the equilibrium of these barbaric regimes, where economic movement disrupted the eternal slumber of the barbarians.91

The favourable grouping of shattering circumstances was, in Russia’s case, the proximity of her European rivals and her military competition with them. It was that, and particularly the experience of military defeat, which pushed Russian oriental despotism to develop – and eventually to unleash the forces that would destroy it.92 Tsarist society was dominated by the state production relation and as a result was militarily oriented, centralised and authoritarian. Since Marxists saw the Russian state not as a production relation but as a superstructural emanation of a basically pre-capitalist economic structure, they underestimated its autonomous role. They were surprised when the Russian state, instead of coming under the influence of advancing capitalism after 1905 and 1917, instead emerged again as a force in its own right.

The Emergence of the Russian Bourgeoisie The second error of the pre-1914 Marxists was evident in their opinion that the Russian bourgeoisie was weak, vacillating, unconscious of its own interests and deeply entwined with the autocracy. They were not alone in these views. Such a judgement was and is the stock in trade of both Soviet and contemporary historians (to whom I shall return in chapter 5). But this judgement was misplaced.

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Peter the Great (ruling from 1682 to 1725) is generally credited with the beginnings of an industrial system in Russia. As Plekhanov points out, “it was not economic needs but those of a political nature, the requirements of the State, which induced that man of genius to take revolutionary measures.”93 War with Sweden, and the threat of war with Turkey and Persia, necessitated the creation of modern armed forces, which in turn necessitated the creation of industries to supply them.94 Trotsky says that from the end of the seventeenth century, “the State strove with all its power to accelerate the country’s natural development … Capitalism seemed to be an offspring of the State.”95 But this observation was somewhat premature, because what Peter and his successors created was not capitalism. The industries were set up and owned by the state. Since the state allowed no free labour, there was no free labour to work in them– the “workers” were serfs. “Peter”, wrote Plekhanov, “only added European extremities to a body which nevertheless remained Asiatic.”96 In fact, while under Peter the ruling elite can be said to have been westernised, the peasantry was further “easternised”, with the burdens of service to the state and the landowners becoming ever more onerous.97 This situation changed in the middle of the nineteenth century for three reasons. Firstly, successful defence–i.e. successful warfare–now meant industrialised warfare and therefore modern industry. From the moment warfare became a branch of the grande industrie [i.e. heavy industry that could produce up-to-date armaments] … la grande industrie, without which all these things cannot be made, became a political necessity. All these things cannot be had without a highly developed metal manufacture. And that manufacture cannot be had without a corresponding development in all other branches of manufacture …98

Secondly, Russia’s Great Power rivals were forging ahead in this direction: While we rested on the laurels we had gathered during the Napoleonic wars, and placed all out hopes in the Asiatic patience of our soldiers and the valour of Russian bayonets, the foremost peoples of Europe managed to avail themselves of all the most up-to-date achievements in technology. Willy-nilly we had to shake ourselves up too.99

Thirdly came the concrete demonstration of Russia’s failing military abilities in 1856, with its devastating defeat in the Crimean war at the

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hands of the British and the French. Engels also pointed out that the Tsarist autocracy could not have failed to notice the defeat of the Confederacy in the American Civil War–another example of “the hopeless struggle of a nation, with primitive forms of production, against nations with modern production.”100 The only road forward for the Tsarist state was an attempt at rapid industrialisation. The army needed railways: “But railways mean capitalist industry and the revolutionising of primitive agriculture”.101 So industrialisation was accompanied by the abolition of serfdom and the “breeding [of] a Russian capitalist class … the new development of the bourgeoisie was artificially forced as in a hot-house”.102 I think we should note in passing that, by the early twentieth century, this was the usual form of the Bourgeois Revolution. Engels described it as part of “the new age of revolution from above”.103 The state’s revolution from above, pursued for military ends, is a much more common historical phenomenon than revolutions of the English, French or American type. States are, of course, generally either unconscious of the forces that they are unleashing, or confident of their ability to control them.104 The bourgeoisie emerges into the evolving production relations laid down by the state in its revolution from above, and in developing those relations enters into a long struggle with that state. Thus it was in Russia. The Tsarist state endeavoured to maintain a vice-like grip on state and economic power, even as bourgeois society began to develop around it. The state became “the largest entrepreneur, the largest banker, the monopoly owner of the railways and of liquor retail shops”105 and “over time state involvement in Russia increased rather than decreased.”106 Naturally enough, the state made a special effort to preserve its ownership and control of defence production.107 The late nineteenth century burst of state-sponsored industrialisation had the effect of nurturing a bourgeoisie, as Engels put it, under glass. The origins of this bourgeoisie were unusual. They came primarily not from the existing merchants of the nineteenth century and before, or from the urban artisans, but from two other sources. The first of these was the “trading peasantry”. In the nineteenth century there was considerable pressure on the large landowners to provide more revenue to the state and to enhance their own lifestyle, as befitted a modernising elite. To meet their increasing expenses, the landowners shifted the obligations of their serfs from service to payment in kind or cash. This released thousands of

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peasants from their ties to the land and many entered into trade, commerce, workshops and small factories. Those who made a reasonable attempt at this were able to buy their freedom, and the most successful of these became merchants and manufacturers.108 The second source of the early bourgeoisie was sections of the tsarist nobility itself, which, through their influence at the heart of the autocracy, the Tsarist court, were able to dominate emerging industries.109 By the end of the eighteenth century, the “noble industrialists” produced over 80% of the pig iron and copper, and nearly half of the cloth in Russia.110 The position of the bourgeoisie was inhibited by the vigorous attempts of the Tsarist state to maintain control over it. This was both a general attitude of the government and the specific policy of its ministries. Merchants and manufacturers were restricted by state decree in what they could do and where they could do it. They were heavily taxed and if they raised a complaint, their industry could be threatened with state takeover.111 The Ministry of Transport (the leading personnel in which were, by the late nineteenth century, for the most part engineers) was contemptuous of private enterprise and favoured state-built and operated railways. The Ministries of Finance and Trade & Industry kept merchants and manufacturers under close surveillance and control.112 The chairmen of the annual congresses of various industries were appointed by their respective Ministries, and the agendas closely supervised by them.113 In March 1906 (after the 1905 revolution) national associations of industrialists were forbidden by law.114 The Ministry of Agriculture protected cottage industry against merchants and manufacturers, while the Ministry of Internal Affairs blamed the bourgeoisie as much as the workers for labour disputes.115 While at times during the nineteenth century the bourgeoisie resented the heavy hand of the state, it needs to be said that at other times it felt quite comfortable with it. State orders provided much of its business. State protection helped ensure that it did not collapse in the face of foreign competition.116 Despite these weaknesses, contemporary Marxists were remarkably optimistic about the prospects of the Russian bourgeoisie with respect to Tsarism. Engels wrote in 1894 that the protection afforded to Russian industry by the state was a victory for the bourgeoisie over Tsarism. He said “in these circumstances the fledgling Russian bourgeoisie has the state completely in its power. In all economic matters of importance the

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state must do its bidding.”117 Trotsky maintained that absolutism had already been “smashed” by capitalism by 1905.118 These estimates were wildly over done and bear the mark of an attempt to pour Russia into the mould of developed European capitalism before it was sufficiently developed for the pouring to be successful. Plekhanov supplied a more nuanced analysis, recognising that the Russian bourgeoisie was as yet in a transitional stage. Our bourgeoisie … has developed lungs which require the fresh air of political self-government but at the same time its gills, with which it still breathes in the troubled water of decaying absolutism, have not yet completely atrophied.119

Nevertheless, a certain optimism in the prospects of the Russian bourgeoisie–and in its revolution–was not altogether misplaced. The mere fact that the state attempted to maintain control over the processes of the bourgeois revolution–to industrialise while suppressing the class effects of industrialisation–produced potential conflict with what was now a visible and developing bourgeoisie.120 One issue over which conflict arose was the extent of the state sector of the economy.121 In competitive terms, this remained a thorn in the side of the bourgeoisie to the very end. More broadly, the bourgeoisie expressed a desire to exercise influence over economic policy as a whole–to transform the economy from a political tool of the state into a market-directed profitmaking mechanism.122 There is a considerable literature, and a considerable debate, on the extent to which Russia had become a “market economy” (which I take to mean fully-fledged capitalism) by the eve of the war in 1914.123 I am inclined to agree with Davies on this, that “... the available evidence does not show that the role of the state in industrialisation was declining on the eve of the first world war”. He continues: The outbreak of world war represented a quantative rather than a qualitative break in the process of tsarist industrial development. The war magnified–in a grotesque and costly manner–the existing influence of armaments on the pre-revolutionary economy.124

The Tsarist state continued its promotion of industrial development for military needs right up to its destruction in 1917.125 In doing so, it had conjured up the forces of the bourgeois revolution, but it also constituted the main obstacle to that revolution’s completion. And without it, fully-

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fledged capitalism could not come into being. Gattrell therefore is correct to say that conflict between the Tsarist state and the bourgeoisie was “a function of the struggle between different structures of production relations (non-capitalist and capitalist) rather than of the contradictions generated by capitalism.”126 In the absence of a bourgeois revolution, capitalism had not yet arrived. From the desire for influence over economic policy flowed the demand for the security in which to carry it out–that is, the rule of law and political freedoms.127 The leading lights of the Russian bourgeoisie were divided between the major cities of St Petersburg and Moscow. Capital in St Petersburg was older. It was concentrated in the machine and metals industries, heavily integrated with financial institutions, with strong international ties. The Petersburg bourgeoisie was not especially politically active. In the administrative and military capital of the Empire, the businessmen of St Petersburg were dwarfed by the court, the nobility and the bureaucracy.128 The leading sector of the bourgeoisie, newly emerging as a class “for itself”, was the cotton industry.129 It was the only industry primarily financed by domestic capital and its industrialists had taken full advantage of the state’s (mostly unintentional) aid: railway expansion (lowering the transportation costs from raw cotton producing areas), Stolypin’s reforms (providing a workforce of landless peasants), and tariff protection.130 And the centre of cotton production was Moscow, where most of the cotton magnates lived. Despite tariff protection, the Moscow industrialists were relatively independent of the Tsarist state, relying neither on state contracts (in contrast to the heavy industry of St Petersburg) nor state subsidies.131 While the older generation of Moscow businessmen was prepared to accept the autocracy’s strictures to stay out of politics, the new generation (emerging from the 1890s) was not. In fact, this new generation led the bourgeois opposition to Tsarism–on the basis of an ideology that placed industry rather than autocracy at the centre of Russia’s future.132 The Moscow industrialists were regarded as the vanguard of the Russian bourgeoisie not only in their own locality, but by industrialists in the Central Industrial Region as a whole, in the south-east and eastern regions and in Siberia.133 The Moscow capitalists wanted to take charge of Russia economic development. They fought against the Tsarist bureaucracy and against

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foreign control. They especially wanted railway construction to be taken away from government and foreigners and given over to Russian private enterprise. All very self-seeking no doubt, but despite that venality, they came to represent something approaching a Russian “national interest”. In the late 1860s for example, they organised to prevent the state-owned Nikolaevskii Railway (running between Moscow and St Petersburg) from being sold to the Grande Société of France. They strongly supported the construction of a southern railway (between Moscow and Ukraine)–not only to ensure that the coal and iron of the Donets Basin could be transported to the industries of the north, but also to prevent another Crimean defeat and to tie Ukraine securely to the empire.134 In the years preceding the 1905 revolution, a group of younger leaders emerged within the Moscow capitalists (Konovalov and Ryabushinskii for example) who rejected what they regarded as the conservatism of their elders and openly identified with liberal causes in opposition to the autocracy. In November 1904, a number of them participated in the Moscow zemstvo congress and supported resolutions aimed at political reform. At the end of that month, those of them with seats in the Moscow city duma called for the inviolability of the individual, freedom of speech, assembly, of the press and religion, and more power for local governments. They also expressed (albeit in somewhat vague terms) support for republican government.135 The further development of the productive forces in Russia, whether in the interests of defence or profit, strained against the restrictions placed upon it by the Tsarist autocracy. The Tsarist state’s view of industrialisation as a purely military objective, its wastefulness and conspicuous consumption, its suspicion and fear of the bourgeoisie and the urban working class leading to its suppression of individual liberty and free labour, its attachment to an antiquated system of land ownership–all of these things meant that a state which had at one time accelerated the development of the productive forces was fast becoming an obstacle to that development. The historical strength of the Tsarist state, and its determination to preserve an economic structure that it dominated, meant that the Russian bourgeoisie grew up in tough (and toughening) circumstances. In order to advance its own interests it had, by the end of the nineteenth century, to be conscious both of itself as a class and of its political interests. It had to be involved in politics (both in state institutions and outside them) to attempt to ensure that its interests were provided for. On the eve of the 1905

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revolution, the Russian bourgeoisie was in many ways one of the most conscious and coherent (prior to a bourgeois revolution) that the world had ever seen–certainly a great deal more so than the embryonic bourgeoisies in England, France or Japan before the bourgeois revolutions there.

Notes 1

See Karl Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970 [1859]). My account of historical materialism owes a great deal to G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 2 Marx, Preface, 21. 3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966 [1848]), 37-40. A number of non-Marxist scholars have agreed (though phrasing the phenomenon somewhat differently); see for example W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 51; Nathaniel Leff, “Entrepreneurship and Economic Development: the problem revisited,” Journal of Economic Literature (17 March 1979): 47. 4 The distinction is made by Alex Callinicos, “Bourgeois Revolutions and Historical Materialism,” International Socialism Number 43 (1989): 116. 5 “According to Marx’s views all history up to now, in the case of big events, has come about unconsciously, that is, the events and their further consequences have not been intended.” (Engels to Sombart, 11 March 1895, quoted in W.H. Shaw, Marx’s Theory of History (London: Hutchinson, 1978), 78. 6 Robert Brenner, “The Social Basis of Economic Development,” in John Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 32. 7 Frederick Engels, “Introduction to The Dialectics of Nature,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, 338. 8 Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (London: Bookmarks, 1991), 230. 9 Frederick Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 389. 10 This, said Engels, appeared to be “one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society”, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 385. 11 The first argument is made by Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, (London: NLB, 1973), 183; the second in Callinicos, Bourgeois Revolutions, 116,122,126,127. 12 R.A. Smith, Burke on Revolution (New York: 1968), 190. 13 L. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 177. 14 Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, 151. Merchant representation in the legislature had declined to 4% by the time of the Directory, from a high-point of only 14% in the revolution’s early years.

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15 Engels, Utopian and Scientific, p.384. Plekhanov wrote: “Naturally, the representatives of that class do not come out into the streets, put up barricades or publish underground leaflets … the bourgeoisie in general do not like such ‘hazardous’ means. Only in very rare cases were they the first to raise the banner of revolt even in Western Europe: for the greater part they merely undermined the hated system little by little and reaped fruits from the victory of the people who ‘fought against their enemies’ enemies’.” (G.V. Plekhanov, “Our Differences” in Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,1977 [1884]), 215). Kautsky commented in 1906: “… this class lives from the exploitation of the strength of others. It has never made a revolution, but always exploited them. It has always left the making of revolution, the fighting and its perils to the mass of the people.” (Karl Kautsky, Revolutions, Past and Present (1906), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/kautsly/1906/xx/revolutions.htm. 16 Callinicos/Bourgeois Revolutions, p.126. 17 Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1974), 280. Further, Engels points out that while the yeomanry did the fighting, their victories were the beginning of their ruin: “A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost disappeared.” (Engels, Utopian and Scientific, 385) 18 Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 37. See also Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1973 [1846]), 82. 19 Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 230 & 424. 20 Engels, Utopian and Scientific, 384-5. Even after all that, he described the English bourgeoisie as “deeply penetrated by a sense of their own social inferiority” (so much so, that they maintained “an ornamental caste of drones to represent the nation worthily at all state functions”, 391). 21 Callinicos, Bourgeois Revolutions, p.124. 22 Marx, Preface (1859), 21. 23 Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 47. In the Russian case, according to Petr Zaionchkovskii, “It should be noted … that the capitalist system had been taking shape within the old feudal order.” Petr Zaionchkovsky, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, ed. and trans. Susan Wobst. (Florida: Academic International Press, 1978), 228. 24 Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 48. 25 According to Cohen, this is “the level to which [the productive forces] are brought by small-scale industry and agriculture [within] dissolving feudalism and transitional post-feudal society …” (Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 198). 26 Karl Marx, Preface (1859), 21. 27 Karl Marx, “Preface” to first German edition of Capital (1867), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1. 28 Frederick Engels, “Afterword” (On Social Relations in Russia) (1894), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/01/russia.htm.

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Karl Marx, Preface (1859), 21. Cohen comments: “… what a weak capitalism by itself makes possible is potentially reversible subversion of the capitalist system, not construction of socialism: the anti-capitalist revolution can be premature and can therefore fail of its socialist object. What makes a successful revolution possible is sufficiently developed productive forces.” Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 203. 31 Karl Marx, “Meeting of the Central Authority, September 15 1850” in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 10, 1849-51 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 626. 32 Karl Marx, “Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality”, Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 6, 1845-48 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 319; see also “Meeting of the Central Authority, September 15 1850”, 628. 33 Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 115. In Russia, Engels argued, a premature insurrection “would drive the possessing classes back into the arms of the [Tsarist] government.” (On Social Relations in Russia (1875), (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93-10-17.htm 1874/refugeeliterature/ch05.htm.) 34 Karl Marx to the Editor of Otyechestvennye Zapiski (November 1877), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm. 35 Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, “Preface” to the Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto (21 January 1882), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communistmanifesto/preface.htm# preface-1882. This was echoed by Engels in “On Social Relations in Russia”: “This, however, can only happen if, before the complete break-up of communal ownership, a proletarian revolution is successfully carried out in Western Europe …”. The idea of Russia being fast-tracked through historical stages, despite Marx’s qualifications and Engels’ later misgivings, was taken up by Kautsky and by the Mensheviks in 1905, before being transformed by Leon Trotsky into a Theory (that of permanent revolution). 36 Frederick Engels, Afterword (On Social Relations in Russia), 1894. 37 Plekhanov, “Our Differences”, 282. 38 Georgi Plekhanov, “Socialism and the Political Struggle”, Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977 [1884]), 104. 39 “The objective social conditions of production have not yet matured, and that is why the producers themselves have not yet either the striving or the ability for such organisation: our peasantry can yet neither understand not fulfil this task.” (Plekhanov, “Socialism and the Political Struggle”, 97-8). 40 Plekhanov, “Our Differences”, 334. 41 Solomon Schwarz, The Russian Revolution of 1905 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 6; Robert H. McNeal, ed., Resolutions and Decisions of the CPSU, Volume 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 42. 42 Karl Kautsky, “The Peasants and the Russian Revolution” (1905) in Massimo Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938 (London: Verso 1990), 103. 30

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41

Kautsky in Salvadori, Karl Kautsky, 101-102. Kautsky in Salvadori, Karl Kautsky, 102-103. 45 See “Dokumenty pervoi obshcherusskoi konferentsii partiinykh rabotnikov v Zheneve” in Mensheviki: Dokumenty i Materialy 1903-fevral’ 1917 gg., (Moscow: Rosspen, 1996), 118-119, 123-124. 46 Axelrod in Abraham Ascher, The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution (New York: Cornell University Press, 1976), 60. 47 Engels, On Social Relations in Russia (1874). 48 An earlier version of this argument appeared in D. Lockwood, The Destruction of the Soviet Union: a study in globalization (Houndmills: MacMillan, 2000), Chapter One. 49 Colin Barker is an exception. He writes: “… the capitalist state is not something above and separate from the relations of capitalist production but is itself directly part of those relations.” (Colin Barker, “A Note on the Theory of Capitalist States”, in The State Debate, ed. Simon Clarke (London: Macmillan, 1991), 207. 50 G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 216; G.A. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 7 & 9. 51 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 63 & 79. 52 “The sum total of relations of production in a given society is said to constitute the economic structure of that society …”. (G.A. Cohen, “Forces and Relations of Production” in Marx: A Hundred Years On, ed. Betty Matthews (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983), 114. 53 As Charles Tilly points out, “No doubt if the merchants and burghers of the thirteenth or fourteenth century had laid out a political master plan for Europe, it would not have included nation states.” ( Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State Making,” in The Formation of Nation States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 30. 54 Karl Kautsky, The Materialist Conception of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988 [1927]), 274. 55 Kautsky, Materialist Conception, 286; see also David Laibman, “Modes of Production and Theories of Transition,” Science and Society, 48 3 (1984): 272. 56 Frederick Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970 [1884]), 576. 57 Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969 [1894]), 179. 58 Felix Gilbert, ed., The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 181. See also Alex Callinicos, Making History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 163. 59 Engels, Anti-Duhring, 204. 60 See Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1979), 21; Hintze, Essays, 160; Kautsky, Materialist Conception, 291. 61 Tilly, Reflections, 42. 44

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62 Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978 [1887]), 703 (emphasis added). 63 Marx, Preface (1859), 20. 64 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 160-2, 278-9. 65 Cohen, Forces and Relations, 116. 66 Cohen, Forces and Relations, 8. 67 Cohen, Forces and Relations, 120. See also Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 228; G.A. Cohen, “Functional Explanation: Reply to Elster,” Political Studies, 28 (1) (1980): 129-130. 68 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 150, 153. 69 G.A. Cohen and Will Kymlicka, “Human Nature and Social Change in the Marxist Conception of History,” The Journal of Philosophy, 85 4 (1988): 175 &178. 70 Cohen, History, Labour & Freedom, 26-7. 71 Cohen and Kymlicka, Human Nature, 177. 72 Both Cohen and Bertram tentatively approach this idea, but since neither of them accepts the state as a production relation, they do not reach it. See Cohen, History, Labour & Freedom, 28-9; Christopher Bertram, “International Competition in Historical Materialism”, New Left Review 183, (1990): 126-8. 73 Cohen hints at this, remarking that “improving societies [those with conducive production relations] are likely, through conquest and other forms of influence, to establish hegemony over laggards …” (Cohen, History, Labour & Freedom, 27). See also Torrance on production relations arising “From the basic defensive requirements of reproducing the productive forces …” (John Torrance, “Reproduction and Development: a Case for a ‘Darwinian’ Mechanism in Marx’s Theory of History”, Political Studies, 33, (1985): 394-5); and Bertram on the effect of military advances in England on the development of the productive forces in France (Bertram, International Competition, 122). 74 So obvious was this in the Russian case that even Soviet historians had to admit it. In a meeting with Italian historians in 1968, A.D. Lyublinskaya stated that “… Russia precisely presents the interesting case where the state power … got somewhat ahead of the economy and prepared important organizational and administrative measures which rendered possible the origin of new, capitalist relations…”. A. Ya. Avrekh agreed and added: “The fundamental reason for this getting ahead [operezhenie] is the necessity to survive in the neighbourhood of advanced Western-European countries…”. Cited in A. Gerschenkron, “Soviet Marxism and Absolutism”, Slavic Review 30 (4) (December 1971): 858. 75 See Hintze, Essays, 427; Nigel Harris, National Liberation (London: IB Tauris, 1990), 272. Marx draws attention to “… the power of the State … to hasten, hothouse fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition.” (Marx, Capital I, 703.) 76 Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London: Penguin, 1990), especially chapter 8. It should perhaps be pointed out here that Soviet historians (particularly in the 1920s and 1930s) are often unreliable on this aspect of Russian history because they were all under pressure to portray Russia’s past either as a

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carbon copy or Western Europe or as something completely unique and glorious. The former version was required in order to justify a “socialist” revolution in such a backward country (by proving that Russia was, in fact, an outpost of advanced capitalism). The alternative analysis (Russia as unique) was useful for nationalistic purposes, and in order to demonstrate (by contrast) the miracles of rapid development that “socialism” could bring about. Thus after 1905, Lenin (intent on a “socialist” revolution in Russia) “minimized and obscured Russia’s Asiatic heritage” (Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978 [1957]), 393). Note also the difference between Trotsky’s two versions of an article on Russian historical development: the first published in 1906 stressing the determining role of the state, in contrast to Western Europe (chapter 1 in L.D. Trotsky, 1905 (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1972 [1906]); the second in 1919 maintaining that between the history of Russia and Western Europe, “there is no contrast here” (chapter 1 in L.D. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970 [1919]), 39). The differences are also evident in the earlier and later theories of the leading Soviet historian from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, M.N. Pokrovskii. The earlier (until 1931) maintained that Russia had had a lengthy period of capitalist development (in attempting to reply to the Marxist critique of the Mensheviks). The later (from 1931 onwards) stressed the backwardness of the past in order to emphasise the enormous progress of collectivisation and industrialisation (see P.H. Aron, “M.N. Pokrovskii and the Impact of the First Five Year Plan on Soviet Historiography,” in Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honour of GT Robinson, ed. J.S. Curtiss (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 289-96). Likewise, Soviet historians’ portrayal of the bourgeoisie was fraught with difficulty, since they felt obliged to portray it as weak and underdeveloped (“the handmaiden of Tsarism” etc) so as to justify its immediate overthrow, yet on the other hand not too weak and underdeveloped – otherwise Russia would not have been ready for a bourgeois revolution, let alone a socialist one. See for example, N,N. Yakovlev on the Moscow Duma (Vooruzheniye vosstaniya v dekabrye 1905 g. (Moscow: Gosizpollit, 1957), 86). 77 Graeme Gill, “Russian state-building and the problems of geopolitics”, Archives européennes de sociologie, 37 (1) (1996): 79. 78 Plekhanov in M. Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 160. 79 See Hellie, Structure, 3; Trotsky, 1905, 4; Trotsky, Permanent Revolution, 42. 80 Karl Marx, Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century and the Story of the Life of Lord Palmerston (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969 [1853 & 1857]), 111 & 121. 81 Plekhanov in Sawer, Asiatic Mode, 163-7; S.H. Baron, “Plekhanov’s Russia: the impact of the West upon an ‘oriental’ society”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 19 (3) (1958): 394-5; R. Hellie, “Warfare, Changing Military Technology and the Evolution of Muscovite Society” in Tools of War, ed. J.A. Lynne (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 80-82. Mousnier writes that “The tsar laid obligations to the state upon his subjects … with the aim of maintaining and

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increasing the power and authority of the state.” (R. Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia and China (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), 164-5). Marshall Poe maintains that “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the history of Muscovite stratification is the history of the government’s attempts to raise competitive armies and to mobilize resources in society to support them.” (Marshall Poe, “The Consequences of the Military Revolution in Muscovy: a comparative perspective”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38 (1996): 613-614.) See also Charles Tilly on “States following the coercionintensive path” (Tilly, Coercion, Capitalism, 187); Stefan Hedlund on Muscovy as “a warrior state rather than a trading state” (“Can They Go Back and Fix It?”, Acta Slavica Iaponica, XX (2003): 60. 82 For their identification of Russia as an oriental despotism, see Karl Marx, The Emancipation Question, 1858, Marxists Internet Archive (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1858/12-31.htm); Marx to Engels, 7 November 1868 (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68-1107.htm); Marx to Zasulich (First Draft), March 1881 (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm); Frederick Engels, On Social Relations in Russia (1874); Engels to Danielson, 22 September 1892(www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1892/letters/92-09-22), 24 February 1893(www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93-02-24.htm), 17 October 1893(www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93-10-17.htm); Afterword (1894). 83 Marx to Engels, 14 June 1853, Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/letters/53-06-14.htm. 84 K.A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: a comparative study of total power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 492. 85 Mousnier comments in this context on “the disproportion between the state’s needs and its resources” (R. Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, 163); see also T.H.Von Laue, “Of the Crises in the Russian Polity”, in Essays in Russian and Soviet History in honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, ed. J.S. Curtiss (Leiden:EJ Brill, 1963), 304. Chester Dunning writes: “… the constant threat of Tatar attacks and slave raids contributed to the militarization of Russian society and the development of extreme social stratification by the end of the sixteenth century.” (Chester Dunning, “Does Jack Goldstone’s Model of Early Modern State Crises apply to Russia?”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 39 (1997): 578). The peasant commune (the Russian version of the “agglomeration of villages”), which Marx had argued was the basis of oriental despotism in Russia, was for Plekhanov its product: a method of squeezing the maximum output from the peasantry (Plekhanov in Baron, Plekhanov’s Russia, 392-6). 86 Plekhanov in Sawer, Asiatic Mode, 169-170. According to Dunning, “serfdom also ossified the economy.” (Dunning, Early Modern State Crises, 577). Fuhrmann concludes “that serfdom was the main barrier to extensive capitalist development in Russia during this period” (J.T. Fuhrmann, The Origins of Capitalism in Russia (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 258.

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87 V.O. Kluchevsky, A History of Russia, Volume III (New York: Russell and Russell, 1960), 52-3. According to Poe, “In every sector of society … the court imposed classificatory systems that designated the type of service to be performed by members of the groups in question.” (Poe, Consequences of the Military Revolution, 613.) See also Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, 163. 88 Trotsky, 1905, 7, 45; Gill, State Building, 83-6. 89 See Gill, State Building, 89. Mousnier adds, “Without the state, this society [Russia at the end of the sixteenth century] would perhaps have become, of itself, a society of classes, with disparities based on men’s [sic] different relationships to the means of production … But the state was there, and the tsar strove with all his might to emphasise this … as a society not of classes but of orders, existing for the good of the state.” (Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, 164). 90 See for example Marx on the progressive aspects of British intervention in India: Karl Marx, “The Future Results of the British Rule in India” in On Colonialism by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, not dated [1853)]), 83-90. 91 Plekhanov in Baron, Plekhanov’s Russia, 400. 92 “Obviously a society has a right to be backward … Reality, of course–in Russia’s case, the Tatars, Sweden, potentially England and Germany and the USA–will not allow a country to be backward, and still preserve its sovereignty.” (Hellie, Structure, 10.) 93 G.V.Plekhanov, “Essays on the History of Materialism” in Selected Philosophical Works Volume Two by G.V. Plekhanov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976 [1896]), 174. See also Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1966), 17; Hedlund, Can They Fix It?, 72. Gerschenkron elsewhere colourfully remarks on Peter’s efforts: “And the state was neither the state of the gentry nor the state of the bourgeoisie; it was the state’s state, pursuing the interests of the state.” (Gerschenkron, Soviet Marxism and Absolutism, 866. 94 “The rise of the Demidovs as industrial entrepreneurs stemmed directly from Peter the Great’s campaign to dominate the Baltic … The Demidovs’ achievements … cannot be understood outside Peter the Great’s commitment to transform Russia into an advanced European military state.” (H.D. Hudson, The Rise of the Demidov Family and the Russian Iron Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Newtonville: Oriental Research Partners, 1986), 115.) Furthermore, such industries had to be Russian, since a policy of military imports would have made the Empire dependent “upon maintaining good relations with the most advanced nations of Western Europe … it would have been intolerable for a large and ambitious nation such as Russia to place such a fundamental aspect of its security in the hands of forces outside its borders and far from its control.” (J.T. Fuhrmann, The Origins of Capitalism in Russia (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 173.) 95 Trotsky, Permanent Revolution, 41. 96 Even if “the new extremities exercised an enormous influence on the nature of the old body.” (Plekhanov in Baron, Plekhanov’s Russia, 400); see also P.A.

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Zaionchkovsky, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, ed. and trans. Susan Wobst, (Florida: Academic International Press, 1978), 23. In his account of the Demidov industrial family, Hudson says that “The Demidovs’ close association with the Russian state determined that their industrial activity would assume certain specific socio-economic characteristics of the Petrine military-autocratic state: in particular, reliance on forced labour.” (Hudson, The Rise of the Demidov Family, 116.) 97 Plekhanov in Sawer, Asiatic Mode, 171. See also Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, 18. 98 Engels to Danielson, 22 September 1892. 99 G.V. Plekhanov, “A New Champion of the Autocracy” in Selected Philosophical Works Volume Two by G.V. Plekhanov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976 [1889]), 396. 100 Engels to Danielson, 22 September 1892. See also Zaionchkovsky on the Crimean defeat revealing “the depravity of the state system as a whole” in Abolition, 41 and 228. 101 Engels, Afterword. B.V. Anan’ich confirms: “The government’s basic goal was the strengthening of autocratic power in Russia. But to achieve this goal, the government was forced to support industrial enterprises, banks, and railroad construction; and in this way, promote the development of capitalistic relations.” (B.V. Anan’ich, “The Economic Policy of the Tsarist Government and Enterprise in Russia”, in Entrepreneurship in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. G. Guroff & F.V. Carstensen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 139). 102 Engels in Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 1: The State and Bureaucracy, Book Two (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 579. See also Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness, 131. There is little doubt that the abolition of serfdom was primarily a military priority (see Hellie, Structure, 6; A.J. Rieber, “Raison d’état: Military,” in Emancipation of the Russian Serfs, ed. Terence Emmons (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970, 72-80)-rather than a response to a threatened serf revolt, as argued by Soviet historians (e.g. Zaionchkovsky, Abolition, 1 and 228. 103 Engels, Afterword. 104 “At all events, I am sure the conservative people who have introduced capitalism into Russia, will be one day terribly astonished at the consequences of their own doings”. Engels to Danielson, 22 September 1892. See also Engels, Afterword. 105 Trotsky, 1905, 10. 106 Gill, State building, 88. See also Anan’ich, Economic Policy of the Tsarist Government, 127. 107 P. Gatrell, Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 62. 108 A.J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 45-6; S. Thompstone, “Ludwig Knoop, ‘The Arkwright of Russia,’” Textile History (XV (1), 1984): 53.

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109 For instance, the Saltykov, Apraksin, Vyazemskii, Odoevskii, Gagarin and Petro-Solovev families. 110 Rieber, Merchants, 41. 111 Pipes, Old Regime, 206-7. 112 Rieber, Merchants, 417-8. 113 J. Walkin, The Rise of Democracy in Pre-revolutionary Russia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), 141; Anan’ich, Economic Policy of the Tsarist Government, 135. 114 Walkin, Rise of Democracy, 143. 115 Rieber, Merchants, 418. See Gerschenkron on industrialisation as a “threat to political stability” (Economic Backwardness, 130). 116 Plekhanov remarked that “the Russian capitalists have a weakness for such intervention so long as it is manifested in protective tariffs, subsidies, guarantees, etc …” (Our Differences, 214). Cotton manufacturers, for example, successfully appealed to the Ministry of Finance to raise duties on imported sewing thread and cotton yarn in 1887, 1891, 1894 and 1897 (Dong-Woon Kim, “J&P Coats in Tsarist Russia, 1889-1917,” Business History Review 69 (4) 1995: 471-2. See also: A.N. Bokhanov, Delovaya Elita Rossii 1914 g. (Moscow: Institut rossiskoi istorii, RAN, 1994), 18; P.V. Volobuev, Proletariat i burzhuaziya Rossii v 1917 godu (Moscow: Mysl’, 1964), 52; A.N. Bokhanov, Krupnaya Burzhuaziya Rossii konets XIX v. – 1914 g. (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), 260. However, it should be pointed out that the regime imposed tariffs primarily as a revenue raising measure rather than an attempt to protect Russian industries (see From Tsarism to the N.E.P. ed. R.W. Davies (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990), 149; P.R. Gregory, Before Command (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 60, 82). 117 Engels, Afterword. 118 Trotsky, 1905, 9. 119 Plekhanov, Our Differences, 215. Plekhanov, like many orthodox Marxists, was fond of evolutionary analogies. 120 Davies estimates their numbers (including partners and family members) as 1 million in 1881, 1.5 million in 1900 and 2 million in 1913 (Davies, From Tsarism to the N.E.P., 32). Engels remarks on the “glaring contradiction” between Tsarist despotism and “the rapidly developing bourgeoisie of the capital” (On Social Relations in Russia). Plekhanov wrote: “… the same capitalism which at first hides under the ‘cloak of an autocrat’ gradually comes into contradiction with the interests of absolute monarchy and stands in opposition, in its own way of course, moderately and in an orderly fashion.” (Our Differences, 212) See also V.S. Dyakin, Russkaya Burzhuaziya i Tsarizm v godu pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914-1917) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1967), 18-19; Gattrell, Government, Industry 326; J.S. Ruckman, “The Business Elite of Moscow” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 1975), 386-8. 121 On the regime’s commitment to the state sector, see Gattrell, Government, Industry 325.

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P.A. Berlin, Russkaya Burzhuaziya v staroe i novoe vremya (Moscow: Kniga, 1922), 167; Ruckman, Business Elite, 3. That the State regarded the economy as a political tool is in little doubt. N. Kh. Bunge, for example, Minister of Finance in the late 1880s, believed that “The state should aid private enterprise only when actual state interests, not the interests of the private economy, require it.” (Anan’ich, Economic Policy of the Tsarist Government, 129) On the other hand, Plekhanov notes the petitions from various bourgeois institutions requesting that no financial measures be taken by the government without consulting the representatives of capital (Our Differences, 215). He wrote: “Businessmen who formerly could not take a step without direction from the government now demand that the Government shall follow their directions.” (New Champion of the Autocracy, 397) 123 See for example Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective and W.W. Rostow, “The Early Phases of Industrialization in Russia” in The Economics of Take-off into Sustained Growth, ed. W.W. Rostow (London: Macmillan 1963). 124 RW Davies (ed.), From Tsarism to the N.E.P., 147 & 150. 125 Gerschenkron comments, “from the point of view of the industrial development of the country, war, revolution or the threat thereof may reasonably be seen as extraneous phenomena.” (Economic Backwardness, 141.) 126 Gattrell, Government, Industry 328. 127 Engels had argued that oriental despotism was “incompatible with a capitalistic economy … The first basic condition of bourgeois acquisition is lacking: the security of the person and the property of the trader.” (Engels in Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, 383) Plekhanov added: “Is not the ‘sluggish development’ of Russian industry determined by the influence of contemporary political oppression? Free institutions are a necessary condition for capitalism at a certain stage of its development.” (Our Differences, 211) For that development to continue, the autocratic system had to be replaced by the “organised and legal participation of the industrial class in the administration of the country.” (215) 128 Ruckman, Business Elite, 9. 129 Volobuev, Proletariat i burzhuaziya, 45-7. Employing hired labour, the cotton industry “began to evolve on capitalist principles even prior to the abolition of serfdom.” (Zaionchkovsky, Abolition, 24) The industry had been the first to apply modern manufacturing methods in Russia, after Britain lifted a ban on the export of textile machinery in 1842. Cotton had become the largest industrial employer by 1830 and the largest industrial producer by 1860 (Dong-Woon Kim, J&P Coats, 467). 130 L.H. Siegelbaum, “Moscow Industrialists and the War-Industries Committees during World War 1”, Russian History/Histoire Russe V Part 1 (1978): 65-66. 131 Ruckman, Business Elite, 282. 132 Ruckman, Business Elite, 365, 379-384. Some of the relevant industrial family names here are Ryabushinskii, Tretyakov, Morozov and Konovalov. 133 Ruckman, Business Elite, 5. West remarks that “when entrepreneurial Russia at last found its modern political voice it would speak in Muscovite accents.”

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J.L.West, ‘Visions of Russia’s Entrepreneurial Future: Pavel Riabushinsky’s Utopian Capitalism’ in Merchant Moscow: images of Russia’s vanished bourgeoisie, ed. J.L.West and I.A. Petrov (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 162. 134 Rieber, Merchants, 178, 186-9. In the Nikolaevskii Railway affair, Rieber notes the contrast between the national interest (“patriotic motives”) represented by the Moscow capitalists and “the financial considerations that were uppermost in the minds of both the tsar and his finance minister” (Merchants, 188). 135 Seigelbaum, War Industries Committees, 66; Ruckman, Business Elite, 412.

CHAPTER TWO WAR, REVOLUTION AND PREMATURE INSURRECTION

In 1874, Frederick Engels wrote that a revolution in Russia (to overthrow the autocratic superstructure, bring it into line with the newly emerging production relations and thus further the development of the productive forces), “started [perhaps] by the upper classes of the capital [or] perhaps even by the government itself” and carried forward by the peasants was fast approaching. But he warned: Only two events could still delay it: a successful war against Turkey or Austria, for which money and firm alliances are necessary, or–a premature attempt at insurrection, which would drive the possessing classes back into the arms of the government.1

He turned out to be at least half right. In fact, the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905 preceded the 1905 Revolution, which ended with an unsuccessful insurrection in Moscow. But the premature insurrection of 1905 did not “drive the possessing classes back into the arms of the government”–quite the contrary. Let’s stay for a moment with the curious suggestion by Engels in 1874 that a revolution in Russia could be started “perhaps even by the government itself”. What could he have meant by this? One of the ways in which the tendency of the productive forces to develop manifests itself, and struggles against social conditions that would inhibit it (short of revolution), is through the creation of splits in ruling classes. A wing emerges that is capable of creating conditions conducive to productive forces development, in opposition to those elements that cannot. Engels recognised that in the late nineteenth century, under the militarily imposed strain of becoming an industrialised power, the ruling class in Russia had begun to split apart. On the one hand, there stood the autocracy, with the Tsar, the imperial family and the court at its head, and

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the landed nobility as its major support base. The autocracy clung to its priorities: an essentially military state with essentially military aims. But on the other, there was emerging, among the less ennobled and more economically active sections of the ruling class, the idea of a new kind of state: modern and efficient, though not necessarily democratic and equally devoted to preserving its own power. Indications of this emergence could be seen from the time of serf emancipation under Alexander II onwards. But the development of this strand of ruling class thinking came into clear view with the appointment of Sergei Witte as Finance Minister in 1893. Many of Witte’s ideas derived from the German liberal and nationalist Friedrich List (who had died in 1846). List had theorised the fear that Germany would be left behind in the European race for economic advancement, and, were that to be the case, she might be defeated by the other European powers. National pride and even survival dictated that she had to catch up–and here, industry (and especially heavy industry) was the key. In one of his relatively few comments on the situation in Russia, he specifically targeted the autocracy as an obstacle to industrial development–unless it enacted industry-friendly reforms.2

The Developmental State What List and Witte were advocating was an early version of what we know today as the “developmental state”-a particular method of late industrialisation that became much more common (though not always successful) after the Second World War, and that achieved success in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. The developmental state has been described by one development economist as existing where “the state plays a central role as a guiding force for national economic development, possessing a conception of the national economic interest and acting to implement that conception by means of pervasive intervention in economy and society.”3 Chalmers Johnson relates that in late-industrialising states, the state itself, through directive planning, determined “what industries ought to exist and what industries are no longer needed”.4 At about the same time that Witte was taking tentative steps in this direction, the project was actually being implemented through the Meiji restoration in Japan from 1868 onwards.5 Given the importance of the concept of the developmental state for the bourgeois revolution in Russia (and indeed for the world), it is worth

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delineating some of its features that later historical experience have made known to us. Had they but realised it, knowledge of these features might have strengthened the bourgeoisie (not to mention the Marxist left) in the face of the state and warned them of what was to come. Firstly, the developmental state had its origins in the state’s need for defence-or, to put it more pointedly, in its preparations for war. In Japan, the Meiji Restorationists’ aim was to safeguard the nation against western imperialism and develop it as a Great Power. For this, centralisation and industrialisation were vital, as was the destruction of feudalism. The Meijiera goal of fukoku-kyokei (rich country, strong military) neatly encapsulated their programme.6 In Korea, initial industrial development took place through the directives of a Japanese imperial state preparing for war. After the Korean War, it was South Korea’s parlous military position with regard to the North that drove the state to mobilise the necessary resources for the construction of defence industry.7 The developmental state then, was originally designed with a war economy in mind (even though its most successful examples were eventually seduced into replacing military autarky with a drive for exports).8 Secondly, its military origins meant that “development” in the developmental state was a product of the autonomous state itself. It was not an exercise in building capitalism, or increasing profits, or helping capitalists. In fact, the state made sure that capital was subordinated to itthat the “national interest” came before profit. As Johnson puts it, “in the developmental state economic interests are explicitly subordinated to political objectives.”9 When states unleashed industrialisation, they unwittingly and unwillingly nurtured the beginnings of capitalism. This was a by-product of what was in essence a militarily-motivated exercise. When states co-operated with capital, the alliance was a state-dominated one. Finally, the developmental state was unlikely-at least in its “war economy” phase-to be democratic. To fulfil its mission it needed to be centralised, directive and autonomous. It therefore needed to maintain other, rival social forces in a state of weakness and to suppress them should they break out.10 The parallels with Russia are easy to identify. After a mid- to latenineteenth century burst of state-encouraged industrialisation, the Tsarist state drew back, dismayed at its own creation-and especially at the

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emergence of the hostile twins, capital and industrial labour. But if Russia were to defend itself, industrialisation and with it the beginnings of capitalism had to continue. If the autocracy could not see this, then a new breed of developmental statists within the elite could. Witte was one of them. Within the general framework of List’s ideas, Witte implemented a series of policies designed to speed up Russia’s industrialisation under state auspices. He advocated public works undertaken by the state, most especially the construction of railways (beginning with the Trans-Siberian Railway), the knock-on effects of which would stimulate industrial advance. Witte was convinced that the construction of industry was the foundation for the progress of all other aspects of the empire–including the military aspect. This was a dramatic reversal of the traditional priorities of the Tsarist state. He once remarked to a Dutch journalist, “My motto is: trade and industry always in the front, the army always in the rear.”11 By 1895, under his influence, the economic ministries, together with debt servicing, accounted for 55% of budget appropriations. The Army and Navy had been reduced to 22.5%, while the rest (which included the Ministry of the Interior and its police operations, education and the imperial household) were also at 22.5%.12 Witte maintained “an energetic and resolute protectionism” in order to nurture Russian industries and bring them up to export standards.13 He encouraged the development of private enterprise in areas deemed appropriate by the state. And he encouraged foreign investment as “the chief means for Russia in her present economic condition to speed up the accumulation of native capital”.14 He was also in favour of radical agrarian reform, endorsing the development of both capitalist farming and capitalist farmers.15 The purpose of Witte’s Developmental State was not a military-inspired attempt at total state control and economic autarky.16 That was the project of the Tsarist autocracy proper–and would be the project of the future Soviet state. Witte recognised the necessity of private capital, foreign investment and connection with international markets. On the other hand, Witte’s scheme was not motivated by profit. It was not, primarily, a project to construct capitalism in Russia. Witte was intent on advancing the power and influence of the Russian state–as a Great Power in Europe, as an influential power in the Middle East and Asia, and as a military power capable of defence against its potential enemies.17 The basis of that advance was industrialisation. As he told the Tsar in 1900:

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Your Majesty’s humble servant fears that the slow growth of Russian industry could make it more difficult for your Majesty to fulfil the great political tasks that await you, that the continuing industrial captivity [plenenie] of the Russian people will sap its political strength, and that insufficient economic development could engender both political and cultural backwardness.18

The common interests of the autocracy and the developmental statists in the advancement of Russia brought them together for a period. But soon the latter began to see the former as an obstacle to that advancement. As Von Laue puts it, “For the sake of rapid industrialization, Witte was driven into an ever-widening circle of reforms … It even presumed on the prerogatives of autocracy.”19 The autocracy increasingly believed that his encouragement of industry’s dangerous classes (industrialists and workers) as well as his encouragement of foreign investment, threatened their interests. His proposals on agriculture threatened both the peasant commune and, more importantly in this context, the landed nobility, the autocracy’s social mainstay.20 Thus the split in Russia’s ruling class emerged. Witte and the developmental statists were eventually opposed by the forces of the autocracy and brought down by them. Not, however, before the split had played itself out in the area of foreign policy, and specifically over Russian imperialism in the Far East.

Two Imperialisms Russian imperialism under the Tsars never really advanced beyond the imperialism of ancient empires. Even by the late nineteenth century, it was not based on Russia’s economic strength or superiority to the economies it attempted to take over. It was more of an ongoing contiguous land grab motivated by what were believed to be military and strategic gains at the expense of rival European powers. In addition, imperial prowess (it was felt in autocratic circles) enhanced the position of the Tsar and drew attention away from the domestic failings of the autocratic system. With motives like these, it is not surprising that Tsarist policy had a somewhat aimless quality about it. As the empire expanded into Central Asia (primarily to annoy the British), the Minister of the Interior noted in July 1865: “General Chernyaev has taken Tashkent and nobody knows why …”.21 We do know that the last Tsar was a strong supporter of this kind of international manoeuvring and had an expansive view of his own role in the scheme of things. Nicholas II wrote to his sister in November 1899, at the start of the Boer War:

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Chapter Two My dear, you know I am not proud, but I do like knowing that it lies solely with me in the last resort to change the course of the war in Africa.22

The priorities of Tsarist imperialism were demonstrated in the RussoTurkish War of 1877-1878. Despite the strong opposition even of Government ministers, the autocracy (under Alexander II) went to war regardless. Russia’s gains against Turkey were turned back under British, Austrian and German pressure at the Congress of Berlin. Domestically, the war was an economic disaster and greatly weakened the early attempts at state-led industrialisation.23 Witte’s view of imperialism was altogether more modern, more inspired with potential commercial opportunities and less militaristic. “Militarism,” he wrote, (clearly with his enemies from the landed nobility and in the armed forces in mind) “creates a class interested in war and thus promotes the likelihood of war”–and war, Witte believed, Russia could not afford.24 Witte however was no pacifist. He was keen for Russia to become a modern imperialist metropolis in her own right. Again, this was mainly a strategic aim, “to guard [Russia’s] neighbouring Eastern lands which lie in her sphere of influence against the excessive political and colonial claims of the other powers.”25 This mission, however, was to be carried out not by military conquest but by “peaceful penetration”–in the first instance, by the extension of railways (especially the Trans Siberian), followed by the inevitable opening up of markets and the extension of Russian influence around them. Witte therefore tended to oppose schemes of military adventure and to propose ones that advanced the State’s interests through trade and commerce instead.26 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the late industrialising counties of Russia and Japan turned their attention to prospects of imperial expansion in China and Korea. They were both convinced that a carve-up of China by the European powers was imminent and therefore they were both determined to establish their own interests in Manchuria and Korea before this happened. The likelihood of conflict between Russia and Japan in the area was consequently great. Witte maintained his commitment to the peaceful penetration of Manchuria through the Trans Siberian Railway and its offshoots, cemented in place by agreements with the Chinese government, leading to economic and strategic domination of North East Asia. Knowing full well that the Tsar had little interest in this kind of incremental, trade-based advance, Witte was inclined to “sex-up” his reports on the subject to the autocrat

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with references to Russia’s historic mission, defence of Christian civilisation and against the Asian hordes, the spread of the Russian spirit and so on.27 Witte’s scheme in fact achieved considerable success. By 1900, the Chinese Eastern Railway (the Russian-controlled eastern branch of the Trans Siberian) ran through Manchuria, across to Vladivostok and down to Port Arthur. Along the railway, there were numerous Russian railway workers’ settlements and the Finance Ministry’s private army, the armed railway police, patrolled the line. Harbin, in which the railway had its headquarters, had become a Russian city. Russia, therefore, dominated Manchurian trade and ran the most effective military force in the area.28 For Witte, that was probably enough for the time being. But not for the autocracy, and especially not for the commanders of its armed forces. For them, the invisible lines of economic markets were never going to be a substitute for tangible military lines–and the physical control of territory that they implied. They wanted to seize Port Arthur and as much of the Liaodong Peninsula as they could get hold of. Witte vigorously opposed the scheme, warning (at least in his memoirs, which were written some time later) that “this fatal step will have disastrous results.”29 But in response to the seizure of the port of Qingdao by Germany in November 1897, the Russians took Port Arthur a month later. The outbreak of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 gave all of the imperialist powers the chance to increase their military presence in China–and Russia was no exception. After 1900, all of Manchuria was occupied by Russian regular troops, a move that Witte once again opposed. After a trip to the Russian Far East and Manchuria in 1902, he continued to advocate the expansion of Russian interests, by “securing our influence in the Far East by peaceful means exclusively”. He also urged the avoidance at all costs of what now seemed a likely war with Japan.30 But it was clear that the developmental statist approach to the expansion of Russia’s interests in Asia was in decline. Apart from anything else, the Russian military presence in Manchuria gave the Ministry of War and the commanders in chief a direct voice in Far Eastern policy.31 Even had this not been the case, the developmental statist version of imperialism would eventually have faced a contradiction. Peaceful penetration in China and Korea could not have been prolonged indefinitely without infringing on the interests of the other Great Powers. The policy created a sphere of very significant influence contiguous to Russia’s border–and Witte wanted to go further than this by protecting the economy that was being established

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in Manchuria. The scheme depended on the acquiescence of the Chinese government and the non-interference of other powers. Neither was forthcoming. Eventually, to pursue even the Russian state’s economic interests beyond Russia’s borders, it would have to have been converted into a traditional type of military imperialism: conquest, annexation, colonialism and so on.32 Witte’s system would have faced a choice: whether to abandon the economic road for a military one, or vice versa – which would probably have meant abandoning Manchuria.33 In the event, it was not Witte or his supporters who made the choice.

Military Manoeuvres The autocracy reasserted itself against the developmental statists, beginning with the seizure of Port Arthur and the military occupation of Manchuria. Thereafter, Far Eastern policy slipped from the grasp of the Minister of Finance and, with the direct support and encouragement of the Tsar, fell into the hands of a clique of adventurers, politicians and military men under the leadership of A. M. Bezobrazov.34 Bezobrazov’s views on the Far East were fairly straightforward and traditional. Russia’s interests in Manchuria needed defending. To this end, Korea should be annexed as well as Manchuria, to act as a defensive shield against Japan. This should all be done sooner rather than later, and if war with Japan ensued, then so be it.35 Not being in command of an army themselves, he and his supporters pursued these objectives by setting up a series of companies that seized areas of territory in northern Korea ostensibly to pursue timber concessions–but which in reality were meant to be the prelude to Russian military expansion in the area.36 White comments that “The company was to be so organized and managed that it would not be forced to concern itself about dividends, but rather was to concentrate on serving the Imperial interests.”37 The Japanese were not fooled by this kind of manoeuvring. The Japanese ambassador to Beijing reported to his government that the timber concessions were a “pretext” for what was really “the base of operations against Japan in Korea.”38 Witte was elevated out of power (into the position of chairman of the council of ministers) in August 1903. The autocracy, willingly accepting the advice of the Bezobrazov clique, began pursuing a policy of full-scale military imperialism in the Far East. There was no evacuation of troops from Manchuria. The Tsar ordered his commander in the area to increase Russia’s military presence “to the level of our politico-economic tasks, giving a demonstration visible to all of our determination to defend our

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rights … in Manchuria.”39 Bezobrazov was made a state secretary and given authority over the newly created “Viceroy of the Far East”. The man appointed to this position was Admiral Alekseev, who regarded war with Japan as inevitable and “the sooner the better”. The Minister of the Interior, Plehve, another Bezobrazov ally, told the State Council that “the Far Eastern problems must be solved by bayonets, not diplomatic pens.”40 With the autocracy back in control, there was really no possibility of a negotiated settlement with Japan, and when negotiations were held in mid1903 they soon fell apart. The Japanese suggested that they should predominate in Korea, while the Russians should do the same in Manchuria. The Russians did not deign to reply, so confident of victory that they believed the Japanese would be mad to undertake military operations. But undertake them they did on 26 January 1904, when they attacked and besieged Port Arthur, having sunk a good deal of the Russian naval squadron that was supposed to defend it.

The Bourgeoisie and the Russo-Japanese War Where stood the Russian bourgeoisie at this point? It has probably been sufficiently emphasised that for neither wing of the ruling class was Russian imperialism primarily a money making project. Russia’s industrialists were as aware of this as anyone, especially since when Russia went to war it seemed to harm their interests rather than advance them. When expansion into Central Asia began, they seem to have been mildly diverted by the possibilities of expanding cotton production (until that time dependent for raw materials on American imports), as well as railways and trade in the area. However, as Geyer points out, “it is equally clear that the capture of Turkistan did not stem from any expansionist strategy on the part of the capitalist captains of commerce and industry.”41 The Russian bourgeoisie was equally unimpressed with the war against Turkey in 1877-8. They were, however, a little more enthusiastic about their prospects in the Far East. In the 1880s, the Society for the Furtherance of Russian Industry and Trade believed that the future of Russian manufacturing lay in Asia and suggested the annexation of Manchuria and perhaps Korea as well.42 Russian industry backed the construction of the Trans Siberian Railway, Despite these happy prospects, there was no immediate commercial sense in Far Eastern expansion. Between 1897 and 1902, Government expenditure on the Far East was enormous, while revenue from tariffs and freight in the area covered only a tenth of it. Even by 1900, Russian exports to China were three times

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smaller than her imports, while as a textiles market China was three times less important than Persia.43 An editorial in The Anglo-Russian (printed in England to promote commerce and friendly relations between England and Russia) stated: They [Russia] have no commercial markets in Manchuria or on Korea worth mentioning. After more than 300 years commercial intercourse with China, Russian exports to that country in 1900 did not even amount to £700,000, compared with more than six millions British exports. These £700,000 are the Russian exports to the whole Chinese Empire; those to Korea and Manchuria only, are so insignificant that they are not even mentioned in Russian official annuals from which the above figure is taken. The myth of Russia’s need of a Far Eastern market for her exports must thus be dismissed as a real cause for her aggression.44

From 1900 to 1903, Russia was afflicted by an industrial slump. Economic crisis and social unrest turned the bourgeoisie decisively against expansionist policies in the Far East. The newspaper Promyshlenny Mir (which expressed the views of textile manufacturers and southern metallurgists) advised that “an active foreign policy must be abandoned and all attention concentrated on problems of the internal market.”45 It can be imagined then in what frame of mind the bourgeoisie approached the war with Japan. For a very short period, the war enjoyed a certain popularity. This rapidly dissipated in direct proportion to the mounting catastrophe in Manchuria. When the war began, Russia’s three million troops faced a Japanese force of roughly half that size. Within a month the Japanese, while laying siege to Port Arthur, were pushing northwards having successfully landed in southern Manchuria. Within eighteen months, 200,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded. In December 1904, Port Arthur surrendered. And in May 1905, the Japanese sank the Russian fleet that had sailed around from the Baltic Sea to confront them. Each new disaster was followed by an upsurge in anti-government feeling. Comparing the situation to the crisis engendered by the Crimean war, Plekhanov commented, “If the Sevastopol defeat pulled up by its root the system of Nicholas I, then the Port Arthur debacle promises to shake to its foundations the regime of Nicholas II.”46 The Bloody Sunday petition itself demanded, under the section “Measures to alleviate the poverty of

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the people”, the “termination of the war in accordance with popular demand”.47 The bourgeoisie joined this chorus of disapproval. In general, the war set back the economic recovery that had started in 1903. While some industries, like metals and leather, reaped the rewards of increased state orders, the textile industry declined. Its workforce was depleted, its markets shrank and the Trans Siberian Railway was reserved for military use (for which, incidentally, it proved inadequate).48 An Italian visitor, Luigi Villari, noted that business ‘always regarded the war as a curse, and the policy which led up to it as criminal folly, for it has proved disastrous to trade and manufactures’.49 At the time of the battle of Mukden in early 1905, representatives of the oil and other heavy industries gathered in Moscow and called on the government to make peace even if it meant losing the city of Vladivostok and the island of Sakhalin.50 But the most important effect of Russia’s defeat in this war was that it convinced influential sections of Russian society that the autocracy was no longer capable of defending the Russian state. Lenin put this most forcefully after the fall of Port Arthur: The military might of autocratic Russia has proved to be a sham. Tsarism has proved to be a hindrance to the organisation of up-to-date efficient warfare, that very business to which tsarism dedicated itself so whole heartedly, of which it was so proud, and for which it offered such colossal sacrifices in defiance to all opposition on the part of the people. A whited sepulchre is what tsarism has proved to be in the field of external defence, which was its favourite speciality, so to say.51

With the departure of Witte and the developmental statists, autocratic policy-making degenerated into a competition between rival cliques and factions for the ear of the “personal ruler”. As defeats and bodies piled up, the military wanted to fight on, while the Tsar wanted to open secret negotiations with the Japanese. As Gurko (the Assistant Minister of the Interior) pointed out, the war “threw into the revolutionary camp many persons sincerely concerned over the fate of their native land; and it not only gave impetus to the revolutionary movement, but even lent it a noble, patriotic character.”52 The purpose of the legal and political superstructure is to defend the dominant production relations, which in turn remain in existence in order to promote the development of the productive forces. In Russia by 1905,

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this hierarchy was beginning to break down. The autocracy was now seen to be a liability not only in terms of the further development of the productive forces (manifested in its unwillingness to unfetter industrialisation), but also in terms of the Russian state’s very survival (manifested in its inability to defend Russia during the Russo-Japanese war). This was now clear to both the bourgeoisie, and to a part of the state itself.

The Bourgeoisie in 1905 The revolution of 1905 began with the Bloody Sunday demonstration in January and reached its height in the October general strike. The bourgeoisie, and in particular the younger generation of the Moscow bourgeoisie, saw its chance and proceeded to take it–leading the progressive bourgeoisie in support of the movement against autocracy. After Bloody Sunday, they demanded political representation for all classes. In late January, a meeting of some two hundred factory and mill owners from Moscow and the Moscow region blamed the violence on “the absence in Russia of a firm law and the ubiquitous and stultifying tutelage of the bureaucracy.” They demanded civil liberties, some kind of representative government and the removal of the state from the factories.53 The bourgeoisie’s support for the movement was not, it should be said, altogether altruistic. The workers’ struggle for political reform (rather than economic reform, about which the industrialists tended to be much more wary) was thought to divert attention away from economic grievances, while at the same time it challenged the state’s “tutelage” over industry. In March, the Moscow Stock Exchange Committee presided over a meeting of industrialists that again urged political reform, while agreeing on the limits to be set on concessions to the rising workers’ movement.54 The bourgeoisie was not homogenous in its progressive stance. In July, an All-Russian Congress of Industrialists in Moscow was denounced by its older-generation chairman for overstepping the mark in its opposition to the autocracy and consequently shut down by the authorities. The rump congress (which included the Moscow industrialists, Konovalov, Vishnyakov, Chetverikov and Guzhon) then met in the home of Ryabushinskii and issued a demand for a Duma based on universal suffrage.55 Some members of the bourgeoisie went a good deal further in their support for the movement than issuing declarations and demands. A number of important Moscow businessmen made substantial financial donations to

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the Social Democrats (both wings) and the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs).56 During the general strike from October, many employers promised to continue paying the strikers’ wages. Moscow industrialists organised breakfast meetings at the Hotel Metropol to collect money for the striking workers, while some set up canteens for the strikers’ children. The more radical political representatives of the bourgeoisie in the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) were actually involved in the organisation of the strike.57 As the strike continued, differences within the Moscow bourgeoisie again emerged. The older generation called for a state of emergency to suppress the disorder. The new generation agreed that violence should be suppressed, but pointed out that “such measures will not achieve their purpose if, together with them, reforms are not given.” They demanded a guarantee against “any possibility of returning to the old system which has led Russia to its present ruin.”58 In general, expressions of sympathy from the business community were more frequent than demands for repression.59 The support of the bourgeoisie for a bourgeois revolution (and every European Marxist, with the possible exceptions of Parvus and Trotsky regarded it as such) was not, perhaps, surprising. Plekhanov advised the workers and the bourgeoisie to “March separately, [but] strike together.”60 The situation changed however, with the Soviet campaign for an eight hour day and the subsequent attempt at an armed seizure of power by sections of the working class in Moscow.

The Eight Hour Day and the Moscow Uprising The eight hours campaign began spontaneously after the October general strike, with workers in St Petersburg simply walking off the job at the conclusion of eight hours’ work. It was discussed and endorsed by the St Petersburg Soviet at the end of October. Its significance lay in the fact that it was recognised as a specifically anti-capitalist–rather than antiTsarist–demand. After the Soviet had voted: A deputy in one of the back rows called out: “you haven’t finished off absolutism, yet you’re beginning to fight the capitalists.” His remark is drowned in the general atmosphere of enthusiasm. No one pays any attention.61

The campaign, and the November general strike that was initiated partly in its support, was a failure. In part this was due to the decrease in demand for heavy industry brought about by the end of the Russo-

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Japanese war. This meant that those industrialists struck by the campaign were able to shut down their factories.62 But it also failed due to the lack of support for the demand outside the urban industrial working class.63 The Soviet was forced to call off the campaign (“temporarily”) on 12 November. The bourgeoisie was further alienated by the Moscow uprising. This took place in December 1905 – well after the urban movement had peaked. Its aims, as proclaimed by the Moscow Soviet on 6 December, were to overthrow the Tsarist government, convene a democratically elected Constituent Assembly and found a democratic republic. The uprising itself, however, was little more than a series of street fights between poorly armed bands of workers and government forces that stood little or no chance of success. Nevertheless, the idea of an insurrection seemed to enjoy mass support and indeed enthusiasm from the Muscovite working class. The Moscow Soviet, as well as the workers’ parties, felt under pressure from their constituencies to call a general strike, leading to an insurrection– otherwise, it was reported, the workers would take action on their own.64 The workers had been considerably provoked by the government, not only in suppressing strikes, but allowing the murderous activities of the Black Hundreds and, from late November, arresting first the president and then the entire membership of the St Petersburg Soviet. The general strike began on the night of 7-8 December. Some 100,000 workers walked off the job, soon to be followed by others as their factories shut down. The Moscow Soviet however did relatively little about turning the strike into an insurrection, which was the original plan.65 Once again, it was government actions that pushed the movement along. On 8 December, police and dragoons surrounded a mass meeting in the Akvarium theatre and arrested the participants. On the following day, they bombarded a meeting of the SRs with artillery. After that, as Lenin put it: “Temper rises. The unorganised street crowds, quite spontaneously and hesitatingly, set up the first barricades.”66 This was followed by ten days of sporadic street fighting. Within a few days. the participation of Moscow’s workers in the uprising began to fade. By 13 December, Zemlyachka (a female Bolshevik activist who had warned against the uprising) reported to the Bolshevik leadership, “Masses of workers are beginning to get tired, they are bored with nothing

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to do [!], they are starting to leave for the countryside.” Consequently, the barricades that had been erected were now neglected. One participant reported that “one could detect a certain hostility towards militiamen among the general public”–and some members of that public had to be forcibly prevented from taking the barricades down.67 Probably the final blow to the insurrection was its evident isolation in Moscow–which came as a surprise to the Bolshevik party worker, Lyadov, who discovered when sent to St Petersburg for instructions that not even a strike was in progress there.68 The Mensheviks decided on 13 December that both the strike and the armed struggle should cease. The Bolsheviks reached the same conclusion on 16 December. An appeal to this effect was issued in the name of the Soviet Executive Committee on 18 December.69 After this the uprising was suppressed with a good deal of bloodshed. Its effects were immediate. The liberal opposition, where it did not collapse, became at best cautious in its political outlook, and at worst conservative. The reforming prime minister, Sergius Witte, who had managed to persuade a reluctant Tsar to initiate political reform in October, wrote later that he lost all influence over a reinvigorated autocrat after the successful crushing of the Moscow insurrection.70 Generalised and bloody repression was let loose upon the land. As far as the Moscow bourgeoisie was concerned, there was much in the stated aims of the Soviet with which they could agree. However, they were generally unsympathetic to armed actions that stood little chance of success, especially when those actions degenerated into isolated exercises in partisan warfare. Nor were they prepared to support what was, to all intents and purposes, a project of the Bolshevik party, which made little attempt to conceal its disdain for the bourgeoisie and all its works (despite maintaining, for the moment, the bourgeois nature of the revolution of 1905).71 Did the Moscow insurrection “drive the possessing classes back into the arms of the government,” as Engels had predicted? Certainly, this was the view of the Bolsheviks and of Trotsky–a view that was consistently repeated by Soviet historians after 1917.72 The position of the bourgeoisie–the position it had taken in 1905 and the position it would take in the next revolution–was one of the issues that would divide Russian Social Democracy, and that would give real substance to the split

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between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The views of the Russian Marxists on the role of the bourgeoisie in 1905 reflected their underestimation of the bourgeois class. Lenin, speaking for the Bolsheviks, had written off the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary ally more or less from the start. In September 1905 he declared that “The bourgeoisie does not, and, because of its class position cannot want revolution. It merely wants to strike a bargain with the monarchy against the revolutionary people.”73 Here Lenin was quite deliberately equating ‘revolution’ with ‘insurrection’, and on that basis he was easily able to dispense with the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary credentials. He did so even more violently after December when the bourgeoisie declined to endorse the Moscow uprising. The Bolsheviks never conceded that the insurrection was premature, regarding both the uprising and its defeat as a rather bracing exercise in working class character development.74 Trotsky agreed, claiming that once it became clear that the autocracy had to be overthrown rather than shaken up, the bourgeoisie “backed away” from revolution. After this “sharp break of the bourgeoisie with the people”, the bourgeoisie became “more conservative and suspicious”, and was therefore incapable of bringing about the bourgeois revolution.75 It was, of course, but a short step from these conclusions to dispensing with the Marxist concept of the bourgeois revolution altogether–a step that Trotsky took at the time, and that Lenin took in 1917. Indeed, the Bolshevik attitude to the 1905 events, and their analysis of the Moscow insurrection, contain other significant indications of future Bolshevik positions, which were connected with their dismissal of the bourgeoisie. In the first place, the revolution (which European Marxists had to this point regarded as an affair of the masses, culminating in some kind of political general strike, connected both with a mass movement in the streets, significant representation in Parliament and considerable sympathy in the armed forces’ rank and file) became for the Bolsheviks an essentially military affair. The general strike, declared Lenin, was “out of date” and “inadequate” because it “could no longer take the government unawares”. It had to be replaced by “the highest form of struggle–an uprising”, the success of which would depend largely on “the tactics of guerrilla warfare … mobile and exceedingly small units”.76

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Once underway, military objectives called for military methods. By their very nature, these precluded mass participation and democratic forms of organisation. Martov had warned the Menshevik party congress earlier in 1905 that “The Social Democratic party … is not able to prepare an uprising, if it remains on the ground of its programme, if it is not to become a party of conspirators.”77 But as the Moscow events slipped from a general strike into an armed uprising, this is precisely what happened. The body that called the December general strike and indicated that an uprising would follow–the Moscow Soviet–was a late development in the course of the revolution. Its first meeting was not held until 21 or 22 November 1905.78 Its fourth meeting, on 6 December, which decided on the strike, was also its last. Thereafter, it simply ceased to function. Neither the Soviet, nor its Executive Committee directed the strike, let alone the uprising, which meant that democratic representation of the participants during the events was sadly lacking. The Bolsheviks instructed workers not to hold mass meetings or demonstrations (because they were too easy a military target), and instead to operate as best they could in small, localised fighting groups.79 From this point onwards, the military priorities of guerrilla warfare took precedence over political considerations. Secondly, the revolution was increasingly equated with a civil war. “It is absolutely natural and inevitable,” wrote Lenin in September 1906, “that the uprising should assume the higher and more complex form of a prolonged civil war embracing the whole country, i.e., an armed struggle between two sections of the people.” Furthermore, this civil war would be “a desperate bloody war of extermination”.80 For Lenin, clearly the more violence involved, the “higher” the form of struggle. This again was in marked contrast to the European Marxist consensus that the revolution would be a mass phenomenon (in countries where the working class was the majority), carried out, for the most part, peacefully. The Menshevik view was that the insurrection had not substantially altered the position of the Russian bourgeoisie, though it was not in the least surprising that its politics had moved to the right and into the institutions set up by Tsarism in the aftermath of the Moscow events.81 Plekhanov took particular exception to the alienation of the bourgeoisie and declared afterwards: It was not difficult to foresee this situation [the isolation of the workers from the bourgeoisie]. Therefore it was not necessary to take up arms. People say: “the workers compelled Social Democracy to support them”.

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Chapter Two But if this was so, the uprisings were spontaneous rather than conscious … You will perhaps reply that I want to put a brake on the movement. I shall not deny this. Why not apply a brake? The function of a brake does not always deserve censure.82

By the end of 1905, he and the Mensheviks in general feared that the extreme radicalisation of the urban working class during 1905 was paralysing the bourgeoisie and creating the potential for further premature seizures of power–and, indeed, attempts at “socialism”.83 It is true enough that after the October general strike, the employers organised themselves to resist further economic demands and fought the eight hours campaign with lockouts. It is also true that they regarded the Moscow insurrection with distaste and even fear. But opposing a major economic demand like the eight hour day and objecting to the armed insurrection of a working class minority did not mean that the Russian bourgeoisie had become “counter revolutionary” (in the sense of opposing a bourgeois revolution), nor did it imply a whole-hearted endorsement of the vigorous Tsarist repression that was to follow. The bourgeoisie, with Moscow at its head, remained opposed to the Tsarist autocracy, and that opposition did not fade in the years following the 1905 revolution. During 1905 and beyond, bourgeois political opposition flourished. In the heat of the revolution, after the Tsar’s concessionary October Manifesto, the political organizations of the bourgeoisie were fiercely polarised. On the right stood the Octobrists, defending the positions of the Manifesto and opposing any further change. On the left emerged the Kadets, demanding a “constitutional and parliamentary monarchy”. The Kadets supported the October general strike (and even the eight hour day), and condemned the post-Moscow repression.84 As the situation developed, the bourgeois political scene became more nuanced and we will follow the development of bourgeois political organisation in the next chapter. The Moscow capitalists continued to press for political rights for workers, for the right to form trade unions and the right to strike, precisely in order to avoid the violence that had been displayed in late 190585–a position in radical opposition to the even more repressive regime now being put in place by Tsarism. Industrially too, the bourgeoisie continued to organise. The All-Russian Association of Industry and Trade was formed in 1906, independently of

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state interests, and it attempted the often difficult task of uniting the commercial and industrial interests of Moscow, St Petersburg, southern Russia and Poland. In a further effort to avoid violence, the Association took up questions of popular welfare. At its Congress in November 1906, the right to strike and to form trade unions was unanimously agreed to. Other conferences of industrialists were held, from 1906 onwards that adopted an increasingly anti-autocratic tone.86 Thus the retreat of the bourgeoisie away from opposition and back towards Tsarism was neither complete nor, where it occurred, permanent. In fact, the retreat of even the most conservative sections of the bourgeoisie to the coat tails of the autocracy could only be temporary, since the interests of Tsar and capitalist were being forced apart by economic development.87 The outlook of the progressive bourgeoisie in the aftermath of 1905 is perhaps best summarised by a correspondent from Utro Rossii, the Ryabushinskii/Progressist newspaper: It is impossible any longer for both the nobleman and the bourgeois to remain on the shoulders of the narod, and one of them is going to have to get off … The sooner that the bourgeois becomes the sole master of the situation, the easier it will be for the narod to live …88

Notes 1

F. Engels, “On Social Relations in Russia” (1875). Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1874/refugee-literature/ch05.htm 2 Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy, (New York: AM Kelly, 1966 [1885]), on industry, 73 & 124; on Russia, 334. 3 Gordon White, Riding the Tiger: the politics of economic reform in post-Mao China (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993), 5. 4 Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: the Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 19 5 The Japanese were apparently influenced by the example of Prussia (A. Kohli, “Where Do High-Growth Political Economies Come From? The Japanese Lineage of Korea’s ‘Developmental State’,” in The Developmental State, ed. M. WooCumings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 101. On the other hand, it is unlikely that at this stage Russia’s “developmental statists” took much notice of the Japanese transformation-though they would be forced to in the war with Japan that was to come. In the aftermath, the Moscow bourgeoisie was certainly impressed by Japanese methods and Japanese militarism: see V.P Ryabushinskii, “Predoslovie”

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in Velikaya Rossiya: sbornik statei po voennym i obshchestvennym voprosam, volume two, ed. V.P. Ryabushinskii (Moscow: n.p. 1912). 6 Johnson, MITI, 20; Kohli, Japanese lineage, 108. 7 The eventual military dictator, Park Chung Hee-whose early career had involved him in the Japanese government’s attempts to industrialise Manchuria-constantly emphasised the need for self-reliance and strong military forces: Park Chung Hee, Our Nation’s Path: Ideology of Social Reconstruction (Seoul: Hollym Corporation, 1970 [1962]), 120 & 165. 8 For how this happened, see David Lockwood, The Destruction of the Soviet Union (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), chapter 9. 9 Johnson, MITI, 24. See General Park on keeping “the appalling power of mammoth enterprise” in check: Park Chung Hee, Our Nation’s Path, 217-218. 10 Johnson labels even the pre- and post-militarist phases in Japan as systems of “soft authoritarianism”: C. Johnson, “Political Institutions and Economic Performance: The Government-Business Relationship in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan,” in The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism, ed. F.C. Deyo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 143. 11 B.H. Sumner, “Tsardom and Imperialism in the Far East and Middle East, 18801914,” Proceedings of the British Academy XXVII (1941): 34. In his memoirs, Witte recounts his conflict with the military over the location of railways: “Military considerations, with which his Majesty often naturally sided, prevented me from building the lines most productive economically …” (S. Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte (New York: Howard Ferig, 1967 [1921]), 75. 12 T.H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 100. 13 Witte cited in Laue, Witte & Industrialization, 71. For Witte’s inspiration see List, National System, 127 & 131-2. 14 Witte cited in Laue, Witte & Industrialization, 81. 15 These suggestions were made to the Tsar in a letter in 1898. See Laue, Witte & Industrialization, 174-5. 16 It should be noted that the developmental states in Taiwan and South Korea had their origins in this kind of scheme. 17 However, as Geyer points out, “The Finance Minister was of course inclined to measure Russia’s backwardness in terms of production and capital reserves rather than cruiser tonnages, numbers of automatic weapons and military strength.” (D. Geyer, Russian Imperialism: the interaction of domestic and foreign policy, 18601914, (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), 204). See also A. Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, Volume 1: Russia in Disarray, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 19. 18 Witte in Geyer, Imperialism, 204-5. 19 Laue, Witte & Industrialization, 164. 20 Witte described the landed nobility as “a mass of degenerate humanity, which recognizes nothing but the gratification of its selfish interests and lusts … at the expense of the taxpayer generally, that is, chiefly the peasantry.” (Witte, Memoirs, 209-210.)

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Cited in Geyer, Imperialism, 89. Sumner, Tsardom & Imperialism, 29-30 23 Geyer, Imperialism, 70-76; Laue, Witte & Industrialization, 17. 24 Witte in Laue, Witte & Industrialization, 191. 25 Witte cited in Laue, Witte & Industrialization, 189. 26 In 1897, unable to convince Nicholas II of the inadvisability of a scheme to seize the northern entrance of the Bosphorus from Turkey, Witte leaked the plan to the British government which reinforced its fleet in the Mediterranean, forcing the autocrat and his advisers to abandon it (Laue, Witte & Industrialization, 149). 27 See J.N. Westwood, Russia against Japan, 1904-05: a new look at the RussoJapanese War, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 5; Geyer,Imperialism, 189. 28 Westwood, Russia against Japan, 7-8. 29 Witte, Memoirs, 101. See also J.N. Westwood, Russia against Japan, 1904-05: a new look at the Russo-Japanese War (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 18. 30 Witte, Memoirs, 118. 31 Witte, Memoirs, 111. 32 See Geyer, Imperialism, 196, 205; Westwood, Russia vs Japan, 13. 33 Just as the Developmental States in Taiwan and Korea had to choose between continuing with the aim of military autarky (with the object, in the former, of retaking the mainland, and in the latter of resisting future invasions) or concentrating on what was proving to be an extremely successful export-oriented economic strategy. 34 Witte, Memoirs, 118-9. See also Sumner, Tsardom and Imperialism, 35; J.L.H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 149; J.A. White, The Diplomacy of the Russo-Japanese War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 42. 35 White, Diplomacy, 39; Westwood, Russia vs Japan, 10. 36 Witte, Memoirs, 116-7, 120. Bezobrazov said that his model in this exercise was a certain Luderlitz, a German merchant who acquired a large piece of land in Africa in 1883 that was subsequently taken over by the German government and became the nucleus of German West Africa. (White, Diplomacy, 34.) 37 White, Diplomacy, 40. Westwood agrees that “although some profit was expected from woodcutting, the main object was not commercial.” (Russia against Japan, 14.) 38 Cited in White, Diplomacy, 45. 39 Cited in Laue/Witte & Industrialization, 248. 40 Alekseev in Westwood, Russia against Japan, 19; Plehve in Witte, Memoirs, 120. See also Sumner, Tsardom and Imperialism, 36. 41 Geyer, Imperialism, 90-2. 42 Sumner, Tsardom & Imperialism, 37-8. 43 Geyer, Imperialism, 209; Sumner, Tsardom & Imperialism, 41. 44 The Anglo-Russian, VII (9) March 1904, 800. 22

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Sumner, Tsardom & Imperialism, 39. The Anglo-Russian commented: “… outside Government circles and the military classes, the large majority of thinking Russians are absolutely averse to Russia’s actually going to war with Japan, and in the case of such war taking place are heartily anxious to see Russia suffer a complete defeat.” (The Anglo-Russian, VII (8), February 1904, 789). 46 Plekhanov in S.H. Baron, “Plekhanov and the Revolution of 1905,” in Essays in Russian and Soviet History in honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, ed. J.S. Curtiss (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1965), 136. Witte commented later that “the [Russo-Japanese] war … completely sapped the system’s vitality and laid bare its utter rottenness before the eyes of Russia and of the world generally …” (Witte, Memoirs, 250). 47 S. Harcrave, First Blood: the Russian Revolution of 1905 (London: Bodley Head, 1965), 288. However neither the petition nor the 1905 revolution were primarily aimed at the war. Rather, the war was seen as resulting from the corrupt autocratic system. As the US embassy in St Petersburg reported after Tsushima, “Rather significant [:] no universal cry for peace but for immediate assembly of representation.” (Cited in Ascher, 1905 I, 182.) 48 Harcrave, First Blood, 41-2; Ascher, 1905 I, 53. 49 Luigi Villar, Russia under the Great Shadow (London, 1905), cited in J.S. Ruckman, “The Business Elite of Moscow: a social inquiry” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 1975), 411. 50 Sumner, Tsardom & Imperialism, 42. 51 V.I. Lenin, “The Fall of Port Arthur” (1 February 1905), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/jan/14.htm. In the course of the war, Russia lost virtually all its battleships and cruisers and one fifth of its destroyers (P. Gatrell, Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 19001914: the last argument of tsarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 71. 52 Gurko, V.I. Features and Figures of the Past: government and opinion in the reign of Nicholas II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1939), 253. 53 See Ruckman, Business Elite, 3, 288, 413, 418-25; Gattrell, Government, Industry, 81; L. Engelstein, “Moscow in the 1905 Revolution: a study in class conflict and political organization” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1976), 90-1; A.J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 2, 264-5; J. Walkin, The Rise of Democracy in Pre-revolutionary Russia: political and social institutions under the last three Tsars, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1963), 97. Witte said that “The merchants and captains of industry, the rich looked forward to a constitutional monarchy of the bourgeois type and dreamed of the leadership of capital and of a mighty race of Russian Rothschilds.” (Witte, Memoirs, 266). 54 Gattrell, Government, Industry, 78-9; Engelstein, Moscow in 1905, 91. Witte described Moscow as “the nest of opposition”. He wrote, “More than bureaucratic St Petersburg, Moscow was the laboratory of radical political and social ideas.” (Witte, Memoirs, 278)

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55 V.Yu. Karnishin, comp., Partii rossiiskikh promyshlennikov i predprinimatelei: dokumenty i materialy 1905-1906 gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 7; Ruckman, Business Elite, 414; Engelstein, Moscow in 1905, 93. 56 Among them were S. Morozov, A.D. Tsurupa, A. P. Ryabushinskii – and the directors of the Russian Insurance Society who apparently raised several million rubles for the purchase and distribution of arms (J.L. Sanders, The Moscow Uprising of December, 1905: a background study (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1987), 137-5; Witte, Memoirs, 279). Dan says that “it was only thanks to the generous monetary support of the biggest Russian capitalist, Sabbas Morozov, that Lenin could maintain cadres of underground organizers …” (T. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism (New York: Schocken Books, 1970).) 57 H.D. Mehlinger, & J.M. Thompson, Count Witte and the Tsarist Court in the 1905 Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 86, 139, 146; Ascher, 1905 I, 217. 58 Engelstein, Moscow in 1905, 187-8; Ascher, 1905 I, 222; Mehlinger & Thompson, Count Witte and 1905, 26. 59 Ascher, 1905 I, 222. 60 See his article of that title (“Vroz’ idti, vmeste bit’!,” February 1905) in Mensheviki. Dokumenty I Materialy 1903-fevral’ 1917 gg., (Moscow: Rosspen, 1996), 94-100. 61 Istoriya Soveta rabochikh deputatov v gorode Sankt Peterburga (St Petersburg 1907) in Keep, Rise, 237. See also W.S. Woytinsky [Voitinskii], Stormy Passage: a personal history through two Russian revolutions to democracy and freedom, 1905-1960 (New York: Vanguard Press, 1961), 51. Ascher reports that the voice belonged to Viktor Chernov, leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Ascher,1905 I, 279) – displaying, on this occasion, rather more Marxism than his Social Democratic rivals. 62 It is estimated that 110,000 workers were locked out by 14 November 1905. See E.D. Chermenskii, Burzhuaziya i tsarizm v pervoi russkoi revolyutsii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1970), 179. 63 Voitinskii [Woytinsky], a Bolshevik activist at the time, wrote later that after the November general strike, “The St Petersburg Soviet ceased to be the center of attraction for progressive forces of the nation.” (Woytinsky, Stormy Passage, 60) Martov, the Menshevik leader, wrote some years afterwards that it would have been better to defeat “one enemy first [i.e. Tsarism], and then begin the struggle against another one [the bourgeoisie].” (Martov in Ascher, 1905 I, 282) On the decision to end the eight hours campaign see A.L Sidorova, et al. eds. Vysshi pod’em revolyutsii 1905-1907 gg: Vooruzhenniye Noyabr’-Dekabr’ 1905 goda (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1955), 391-2. 64 M. Lyadov, Iz Zhizni partii v 1903-1907 godov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1956), 131-3. 65 Much to Lenin’s displeasure. In “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising”, he states that neither the workers’ parties (including, presumably, his own), the trades unions, nor the Soviet were prepared for an uprising and they did nothing to bring

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it about (V.I. Lenin “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising” (Proletary, 2, 29 August 1906), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/august/29.htm). See also Sanders, Moscow Uprising, 750-1. 66 Lenin, Lessons of the Moscow Uprising. 67 Zemlyachka in Lyadov, Iz Zhizni, 146; on the barricades see Keep, Rise, 254-5. 68 Lyadov, Iz Zhizni, 147-9. 69 N.N Yakovlev, Vooruzheniye vosstaniya v dekabrye 1905 g. (Moscow: Gosizpollit, 1957), 201; Sidorova, Vysshii Pod’em, 712-3. Various Soviet historians allege that the Mensheviks wanted to call a halt much earlier – for example, A.V. Pyaskovskii, Revolyutsiya 1905-1907 gg. v Rossii (Moscow: Nauk, 1966), 201. 70 O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London: Pimlico, 1997), 201. 71 For bourgeois opposition to the Moscow insurrection, see Chermenskii, Burzhuaziya i Tsarizm, 208-10. 72 See for example V. Ya. Laverychev, Po tu storonu barrikad (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo-Mysl’, 1967), 284; Pyaskovskii, Revolyutsiya, 163. Curiously, it was also the view of Sergei Witte, who wrote later that the bourgeoisie “backed out of the game of liberalism and … returned to the fold of autocracy” – not so much through fear of the masses (the Bolshevik argument) but because the revolution did not sufficiently further their interests (Witte, Memoirs, 280). 73 V.I. Lenin, “What our liberal bourgeois want, and what they fear” (Proletary, number 16, 14 September 1905), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/wks/1905/sep/14.htm. 74 Considerable doubt has been cast on the enthusiasm of the Moscow working class as a whole for the uprising. Sanders concludes that only a minority of them took part in the decision and even that participation “was not always marked by enthusiasm or even approval for what was being embarked upon.” (Sanders, Moscow Uprising, 742-752.) Among the railway workers, even after they had endorsed the decision (according to Kokhmanskii in 1906), “The mood of all was morose, gloomy: All were aware that they were submitting to bitter necessity and were going to inevitable destruction.” The leading Socialist Revolutionary, Zenzinov, wrote later that when the decision was taken, “in the depth of our hearts, we were all convinced of the inevitability of defeat.” (Kokhmanskii in Sanders, Moscow Uprising, 745; Zenzinov in Keep, Rise, 250.) 75 L.D. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 1979 [1932-3]), 34-35. 76 Lenin, Lessons of the Moscow Uprising. The Bolshevik leadership had been more or less obsessed with an armed uprising since the beginning of the revolution. For them, all other methods of struggle (strikes, demonstrations and so on) were secondary to its organization. “The guiding tactical premise of the Bolsheviks of that time was that the Russian revolution ‘hinged on an uprising’ … anything that could retard its coming in any way must be put aside …” (S. Somov [I.A. Peskin], a Menshevik activist, in Solomon Schwarz, The Russian Revolution of 1905

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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 121-2. So obsessed were the Bolsheviks with an uprising that they had warned against the October general strike lest it eclipse the uprising idea (Schwarz, Russian Revolution, 138). See also T. Cliff, Lenin, Volume 1: Building the Party (London: Pluto Press, 1975), 185; Sanders, Moscow Uprising, 47 & 49; Keep, Rise, 242-3; Ascher, 1905 I, 308). The Mensheviks too were in favour of the idea, contrary to subsequent attempts by Soviet historians to deny this. For Menshevik support see Sanders, Moscow Uprising, 73; Keep, Rise, 249-50. On accusations against the Mensheviks, see for example, Lyadov, Iz zhizni, 135. 77 Martov in S.V. Tyutyukin, Pervaya Rossiiskaya Revolyutsiya i GV Plekanov (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 185. Axelrod warned the fourth (unified) congress of the party in April-May 1906 that if the party concentrated on “elaborate terrorist plans and mass uprisings”, it would soon be filled with “members who had the right personal qualities for such activities”–not necessarily with socialists. (Axelrod in A. Ascher, The Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1976), 61. 78 Pyaskovskii, Revolyutsiya, 196. 79 See the “Advice to Insurgent Workers” from the military wing of the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik party in Sidorova, Vysshii Pod’em, 665-666. 80 V.I. Lenin, “Guerrilla Warfare” (September 1906), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1906/sep/30.htm and “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising.” A further indication for the future might be seen in Lenin’s attitude to those on the left who opposed armed insurrection: “those who do not prepare for it, must be ruthlessly dismissed from the ranks of the supporters of the revolution, sent packing to its enemies, to the traitors or cowards …” (“Lessons of the Moscow Uprising”). There was, however, nothing especially new in this kind of Bolshevik polemic. 81 Plekhanov commented, “Every social class always tries to make use … of the political institutions grown in the soil of the old social order, and comes into conflict with them only when it arrives at a sufficient degree of its own maturity.” (Tyutyukin, Pervaya, 94) 82 Plekhanov in Keep, Rise, 266. 83 See Baron, Plekhanov in 1905, 143. 84 Pyaskovskii, Revolyutsiya, 165. 85 L.H. Siegelbaum, “Moscow Industrialists and the War-Industries Committees during World War 1,” Russian History/Histoire Russe, V Part 1 (1978): 68; R. Portal, “Muscovite Industrialists: the cotton sector (1861-1914),” in Russian Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin, ed. W.L. Blackwell (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), 195. 86 S.P. McCaffrey, The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874-1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 185-196; Walkin, Rise of Democracy, 143; P.A. Berlin, Russkaya Burzhuaziya v staroe i novoe vremya (Moscow: Kniga, 1922), 301.

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87 “If, for the time being, the bourgeoisie continues to put up with the despotic autocracy of the Tsar and his officials, it is only because this autocracy … offers it more guarantees than would changes even of a bourgeois liberal nature, whose consequences no one could foresee, given the present internal situation in Russia.” (F. Engels, ‘Afterword’ (1894), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/01/russia.htm). 88 Cited in Ruckman, Business Elite, 86.

CHAPTER THREE THE RUSSIAN BOURGEOISIE AFTER 1905

For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society …1

By 1905, the Tsarist autocracy had become an impediment to Russian progress in two important ways. Firstly, the 1905 revolution had revealed the inability of the Tsarist regime to cope with the results of an industrialising economy: its capitalists, its workers, the conditions of both and the relationship between the two. It had also thrown the vexed question of land ownership into sharp relief. Secondly, Russia’s defeat in her war with Japan had demonstrated that the autocracy’s forays into foreign policy (the aggressive push into Manchuria) were foolhardy to say the least–and its ability to follow through on its foreign policy and defend the Russian state was non-existent.2 The Tsarist state had become not only an obstacle to the development of the productive forces, but even a danger to their survival. It would therefore in the near future be swept aside to make way for a new set of production relations that would allow and encourage productive force development. But could not the regime have reformed itself? Two begrudging attempts at reform issued from the turmoil of 1905. The first tentatively approached the issue of political reform. It was announced in the Tsar’s October Manifesto. Its most important feature was the convocation of the State Duma. The Tsar acceded to this under the influence of Witte, who by 1905 was prepared to concede that the interests of the autocracy and the nation might not always be in lock-step. In a private memorandum of October 1905 he told the Tsar, “The government should openly and sincerely strive for the good of the state, and not for the preservation of one or another of its forms.”3 But preservation of the autocratic form, disturbed as little as possible by political reform, was precisely what Nicholas had in mind. The Duma (of which there were four increasingly unrepresentative versions between 1906 and 1917) was therefore progressively weakened by the

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regime. The state coup of 3 June 1907 virtually handed over the assembly to Tsarism’s social base, the landed nobility. Tsarism seemed to have a strong ally in this process in the person of Petr Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 to 1911. Through his vigorous repression of the revolutionary movement from 1906 to 1907, Stolypin greatly encouraged the autocracy in the belief that it could be safeguarded without bothering with any real political reform at all. Stolypin regarded the Duma throughout as a large, elected (by smaller and smaller sections of the population) think-tank. It could carry out research for the government, and give advice to it and the Tsar–but it could on no account censure, much less oppose, them. However, even Stolypin could see that reform–mainly of a social and economic kind–was necessary. He mistakenly believed that such reforms were compatible with the maintenance of the autocratic regime. While by no means a democrat, he realised that “the population had to be reconciled to the regime by being persuaded that it did act for the benefit of the people whom it governed.”4 The only way to persuade the people of that however, would have been for the autocracy and the landed nobility to preside over a system that did benefit the people. And this they would not do, since it would seriously undermine their own position. In fact, due largely to Stolypin’s efforts, the Tsar felt more and more confident in opposing reform between 1906 and 1914. By 1911 (when Stolypin was killed by an assassin’s bullet) he was opposing his prime minister’s ideas on reform as well (we shall return to the question of Stolypin as a reformer later in this chapter). The second attempt at reform was also Stolypin’s brainchild, and concerned the now critical question of agriculture. Despite the agricultural sector’s domination of economic activity, its backward nature and its low level of productivity hindered Russian development.5 Stolypin’s reform revolved around the abolition of the peasant commune (which periodically allocated strips of land to its members) and the transformation of at least a large part of the peasantry into independent farmers.6 Stolypin saw this as vital for all other reform efforts. He told the Duma in November 1907: … all improvement in local management, law and administration will remain but superficial and will not take root so long as an improvement of the condition of the fundamental class of the State, the agrarian population,

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shall not be attained … [This] shall lay the cornerstone on which shall be firmly reared the reformed structure of the Russian State.7

The reform was issued as an imperial edict in November 1906, rejected by the second Duma (which wanted to abolish the large estates), but ratified by the third in June 1910. Had Stolypin’s reform been allowed to run its course, what would have been its effect? Lenin’s view was clear: But can it be said that it is reactionary in the economic sense? … Not at all … There can be no doubt that it follows the line of capitalist evolution, facilitates and pushes forward that evolution, hastens the expropriation of the peasantry, the break-up of the village commune and the creation of a peasant bourgeoisie.8

However, it is unlikely that it would have produced such a bourgeoisie. A bourgeoisie already existed in Russia and, in terms of capitalist development, there was not time for the incremental processes that evolved a rural bourgeoisie from yeoman farmers as had happened, for example, in England. Stolypin himself believed that the process would take twenty years. At the actual rate of change (at which the number of independent peasant farms was less than 33% of the total by 1917), it has been estimated that it would have taken nearly a century.9 Besides, it was not Stolypin’s intention to create a ‘new’ bourgeoisie – he distrusted the old one far too much for that. A class of independent farmers, loyal to the state (and the Tsar) was nearer the mark. The real problem with Stolypin’s reform – and the reason that there was no state mobilisation to carry it through–was that the creation of such a class impinged on the interests of the landed nobility. At first, he brushed this aside: “Let the nobles reorganize their own economic affairs. That is their business.”10 But the reform soon encountered entrenched opposition from this quarter–and since, after Stolypin’s coup of 1907, they dominated the Duma, yet another avenue of reform was effectively blocked by Tsarism and its supporters. The inability of the system to reform and the endurance of Tsarism as an obstacle to development ensured the continuation of two forms of opposition (in terms of those elements capable of developing the forces of production): that of the bourgeoisie and that of those identified in the last chapter as proponents of the developmental state.

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Bourgeois opposition The Russian bourgeoisie entered the elections for the first State Duma organised into four main political parties. Based in St Petersburg, and formed after the proclamation of the October Manifesto, were the AllRussian Commercial-Industrial Union (merchant-oriented and conservative) and the Progressive Economic Party (drawing its support from the representatives of heavy industry). The latter claimed over 43000 members by early 190611 and, despite its association with the more conservative wing of the bourgeoisie, advocated equality of rights, constitutional reform, the freedoms of speech, the press, religion and movement, as well as that of workers to organise trade unions.12 Moscow also produced two bourgeois political parties. The first of these (chronologically) was the Commercial-Industrial Party (TPP) that existed from November 1905 to June 1906. With seventeen branches in Moscow and seventy across the rest of Russia, the TPP had something like 15,000 members by June 1906. It based itself on the reforms promised by the October Manifesto.13 Two of the leading members of the TPP–and of the progressive Moscow bourgeoisie in general–the brothers Pavel and Vasilii Ryabushinskii, were at the same time involved in the formation of the Moderate Progressive Party (UPP) in November 1905. Easily the most radical of the capitalists’ parties at this time, the UPP demanded democracy and decentralisation, the equality of all before the law and an undivided but federal Russia. They also advocated the right to form trade unions and to strike, as well as safeguards for women and young workers and obligatory social insurance. Though condemning the violence of the Moscow uprising, the party helped publicise the collection of money for the families of slain insurgents.14 In March 1906, UPP members helped found the Party of Democratic Reform.15 None of these parties was particularly successful in the elections to the first Duma. This defeat, together with the aftershock of the violence of late 1905, caused the bourgeoisie to move away from organised politics. They returned to their productive work, despite the partial nature of the October reforms. This was a temporary move on the part of the Moscow bourgeoisie–and even then, their vanguard, the Ryabushinskiis and their supporters, did not leave politics altogether, but for a time joined the Octobrists (of whom, more below).

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For the St Petersburg industrialists however, it was a more serious retreat. Turning away from political organisation altogether, they formed the Association of Industry and Trade in 1906. The basis of the Association was an abstention from politics and a concentration on the purely economic interests of the industrial, commercial and financial organisations that made up its membership.16 The fact that the conflict between Tsarism and the Russian bourgeoisie represented conflict between a fettering production relation and the tendency of the productive forces to develop meant that the retreat by the bourgeoisie from political opposition could only be short lived. The survival of Tsarism in the increasingly threatening conditions of the European state system required the continuation of rapid industrialisation. The autocracy, based on the landed nobility, could not successfully carry out this process itself. It required the bourgeoisie, which it distrusted–and further industrialisation could only strengthen the bourgeoisie’s hand (aided by an economic upswing from 1910 and the increasing activity of Russian, rather than foreign, capital).17 On the other hand, the bourgeoisie (of Moscow in particular) regarded Tsarism as an obstacle to Russian development. So the Moscow capitalists, with the Ryabushinskiis at their head, returned to the political struggle. They were not alone. Despite its apolitical stand, even the St Petersburg Association found itself thrust into opposition to the regime as 1914 approached. The same can be said of industrialists in the south.18 The collaboration between the Octobrists (see below), led by Aleksandr Guchkov, and the Stolypin government led to the secession of an oppositional wing. These ex-Octobrists linked up with the Moscow industrialists to form the Party of Peaceful Renewal in the summer of 1906. The new party took up a position between the Octobrists and the Kadets.19 In its turn, it was superseded by the Progressist Party, which took shape during the term of the third Duma and the elections for the fourth (1907-1912). At its core stood the Moscow bourgeoisie.20 The first congress of the Progressists was held in November 1912. It demanded abolition of the restrictive electoral law of 3 June 1907; a guarantee of civil liberties; the abolition of all distinctions of nationality and estate; universal primary education; and the “active defence” of the interests of agricultural, trade and industry. For these things, the congress said, a government responsible to the Duma (rather than the Tsar) was essential.21

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From 1909, Pavel Ryabushinskii had been publishing the newspaper Utro Rossii (a paper that he described as “progressive–from a capitalist perspective”) to put forward the emerging Progressist point of view. It had achieved a circulation of 40,000 by 1913 and was reputed to be the most censored (legal) newspaper in Moscow.22 In the elections to the fourth Duma in 1912 (held before the first congress), forty-eight Progressist deputies were elected.23

Progressist Ideas Ryabushinskii critically analysed the role of the bourgeoisie in the 1905 events. With the October Manifesto, he said, the bourgeoisie considered that its aims had been achieved. Therefore: … the bourgeoisie began to abandon the proletariat, and then went over to the side of the government … As a result, the government triumphed, and reaction set in, at first cautiously, then openly. In 1905, the bourgeoisie helped the men of the old order put down the revolution.24

Without bourgeois leadership, the revolutionary movement descended into a pugachevshchina (the insurrection in Moscow, the violence on the rural estates). The progressive bourgeoisie continued to take, as the starting point for their political position, the reforms promised by the October Manifesto.25 But especially for the Moscow bourgeoisie, the Manifesto could only be the beginning of a more radical restructuring of the political and economic systems. The Progressists in particular were inspired by the vision that the bourgeoisie could unite; that history was on its side; and that, in any future confrontation with the autocracy, it would command overwhelming popular support.26 The Progressists’ second most prominent member, Aleksandr Konovalov therefore summoned the bourgeoisie in 1912 to “obtain public recognition for its pre-eminent role in the destinies of the country, since in the success of its toiling and public activity there lies in fact the guarantee of a future powerful, rich and free Russia.” The final flourish was important. For the bourgeoisie to assume its historical role it needed freedom–in both the political and economic spheres. The Progressists (together with other sections of the bourgeoisie) believed that political freedom was indispensable to economic development. Like air to breathe [Konovalov continued] industry needs a smooth peaceful course of political life and the protection of property and personal

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interests from arbitrary interference … Thus the immediate interests of Russian industry coincide with the cherished yearnings of all Russian society …27

The St Petersburg Association was also in favour of a democratic political system.28 For the entire period in question, the bourgeoisie kept up political pressure on the increasingly undemocratic nature of the regime. In 1911, sixty-six Moscow industrialists openly protested against repressive measures at Moscow university. Ryabushinskii criticised the persecution of Old Believers (among them he and his family) when prime minister Kokovtsov made a traditional visit to the Moscow Stock Exchange in April 1912. Sections of the bourgeoisie (for example, the Society of Moscow Manufacturers and the St Petersburg Association) objected to the treatment of Jews – and the Association threw in the treatment of Poles, Asians and foreigners for good measure. Representatives of the bourgeoisie also consistently demanded the right of workers to form independent trade unions.29 At this stage (although, as we shall see, this would change), the bourgeoisie was also extremely wary of state interference in the economy– except to regulate the operations of state-owned enterprises.30

The Persistence of the Developmental State The second source of continuing opposition to Tsarism lay with the proponents of the developmental state. In the last chapter I described the emergence of this phenomenon within sections of the elite. Its enthusiasts advocated the intervention of the state to steer the Russian economy onto the industrialised path of its rival Great Powers. For such intervention, they believed that a substantially different kind of state was needed. The standout advocate of this approach before the Russo-Japanese war had been Sergei Witte. Yet despite his removal from power and the defeat for developmental statism that the autocracy’s provocation of war with Japan represented, the phenomenon remained. In fact, defeat by Japan strengthened it. For developmental statists, the autocracy appeared incapable of both industrial development and effective defence. Russia, therefore, would not achieve its Great Power destiny under the autocracy and would be better off without it (although, as we shall see, it would be a few years before the most radical developmental statists came to that conclusion). The fact that the developmental statist strategy, while primarily motivated by the ambitions of a “Great Russia”, also involved

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the development of the productive forces accounts for its persistence–and its ultimate victory. Stolypin himself was, by and large, a developmental statist31–although one with a much greater preference for preserving the position of the Tsar than those before or after him. He believed, however, that a simple return to the pre-1905 autocracy (which on the basis of Stolypin’s own efficient repression of the revolutionary movement, the autocrat certainly hoped for) was impossible–and might prove dangerous for the regime itself. On the one hand, he lectured the Duma in November 1907 on the “historical autocratic power” that was the basis of the Russian state and the only force capable of holding the empire together in a period of “upheaval and danger to the State”.32 On the other hand, he had a firm belief that the state was more than just the autocracy and, just as it had been ruthlessly efficient in repression, it could be used equally effectively to bring about the reforms that were necessary if there was to be a “Great Russia”.33 Stolypin’s reforms were extensive. His agrarian reforms have already been mentioned, but it should be added that Stolypin framed them in typically developmental statist terms–as a revolution from above, initiated and guided by the state. He told the Duma in May, 1910: The idea that all the force of the state must come to the aid of the weakest part of it [i.e. the peasants] may be termed the principle of socialism; but if it is socialism, it is state socialism, which has been applied more than once in Western Europe and has achieved real and substantial results …34

He also advocated, at various times, freedom of speech, assembly and the press; religious liberty; inviolability of the person; improved labour laws; and increased self government (including for the Baltic states and the Poles).35 Stolypin faced a dilemma. He wanted to execute a revolution from above, without exciting social upheaval from below. At the same time he wanted to forestall any radical readjustment of the social composition of the elite. Stolypin was in favour of reforms that would eventually have radically changed Russia’s social hierarchy and its political system. But the 1905 experience showed him that such reforms might unleash social forces–a class of independent farmers, for example, or a resurgent working class that the state could not control. He was therefore in favour of preserving the autocracy, the social base on which it stood (the landed nobility) and

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the repressive powers of the autocratic state. Unfortunately, it was precisely these forces that stood in the way of Stolypin’s reforms. He ended his career, therefore, relying on forces opposed to his reformist intentions. Towards the end, those forces made their opposition both clear and public–and they counted in their number the Tsar himself.36 The bullet that took Stolypin’s life in 1911, however, by no means finished off developmental statism. A new and, as it turned out, more virulent stream had begun to emerge after 1905 in the forces represented by the Octobrist party, led by Aleksandr Guchkov. Octobrism, according to Guchkov, was “an attempt made by the Russian public to effect a peaceful, painless transition from the old, condemned system, to a new order …”.37 This attempt involved taking the regime at its word regarding the reforms promised in the October Manifesto and gradually transferring the centre of gravity of the Russian elite from the autocracy to an alliance of the enlightened elements of the bureaucracy with the bourgeoisie. The Octobrists, like Stolypin, wanted both stability and reform. To achieve the former, in order to make way for the latter, they supported Stolypin’s agrarian reform, despite the fact that half of their Duma deputies were land owners.38 Stolypin initially had a close rapport with Guchkov, and the Octobrist deputies largely supported Stolypin’s government in the Duma. Guchkov had a clear idea of the sources of opposition to Stolypin and Octobrism: Three nests of these reactionary circles can be defined: first … court circles, the camarilla; second a group of bureaucrats who formed the rightwing of the State Council; and third, the so-called United Nobility.39

But what differentiated the developmental statism of Stolypin from that of the Octobrists were the questions of nationalism, foreign policy and military preparedness. Over time, Stolypin and the Octobrists (most especially Guchkov) fell out. After the defeat by Japan, there was a generalised anxiety (initially in elite circles, but eventually achieving a considerable resonance in the general population) concerning Russia’s position as a Great Power, her relative position in the European First Division and her ability to defend herself. We have noted that the autocracy’s performance on this score was generally regarded as inadequate. That judgement was exacerbated after 1905 by what were considered to be periodic failures of Russian foreign policy. The first major one of these was the Bosnian crisis of 1908-9, when, despite her pan-Slavic pretensions, Russia was forced to accept

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Austria’s annexation of Bosnia even in the face of vigorous Serbian opposition. Then came the war between Italy and Turkey in 1911 that closed the Black Sea straits, blocking a large proportion of Russian exports. Russia was apparently powerless to end the blockade. Finally, in the Balkan wars, Russia was incapable of effective intervention. In addition to these events, there was a rising fear of the emerging power of Germany, both economically and politically. The autocracy was seen as being unequal to the tasks at hand, particularly in the face of a German threat, and the foreign policy of its governments appeared to reflect that inadequacy.40 The Octobrists wanted Russia to pursue an active and aggressive foreign policy, worthy of a Great Power. That policy should be concentrated on the Balkans and the Black Sea straits. Its long-term aim should be the “liberation” of the Balkan Slavs, the take-over of Constantinople and control over the Straits.41 To this end–and most importantly for this discussion–they wanted the build-up of efficient and powerful armed forces. For this reason they strove for rapid economic development (and we have noted before the coincidence of interests between developmental statism and the development of the productive forces).42 Just as importantly, they wanted radical reform of the military machine. The Octobrists therefore pursued a similar aim, in terms of economic development, to the developmental statism of Witte and Stolypin, but parted company with them over the role of foreign policy and military preparedness in the pursuit of a “Great Russia” (a division to which we will return below). There was significant support for the Octobrist brand of developmental statism within the lower ranks of the Tsarist state itself. The government was worried by the prospect of support for liberal causes in the ministries of justice and finance.43 Guchkov and the Duma’s Octobrist-controlled Imperial Defence Committee were certainly in contact with sympathetic junior officers–and perhaps even with those of higher rank.44 These officers were in favour of democratic reform because they felt it would engender patriotism, which would in turn create a positive atmosphere for military preparedness.45

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The Defence debate There emerged a three-sided debate on defence–between Stolypin and his supporters, the new developmental statists (the Octobrists and others) and the autocracy. Stolypin was in favour of a cautious foreign policy and for the preservation of peace in Europe–very much in the style of Witte before 1905. His government did not support grandiose plans for rearmament. Stolypin was well aware of Russia’s industrial weakness (compared to the other European powers) and seems also to have had doubts as to the autocracy’s ability to withstand (let alone initiate) a major European conflict. He was concerned with the strain that a war would place on Russia’s domestic stability. He had not given up on Russia as a Great Power; but he wanted to restore its position slowly. He told a foreign ministry conference in January 1908: In several years, when we have achieved full pacification [of the revolutionary movement], Russia will again begin to speak its former language. Any policy other than a purely defensive one would be at present the delirium of an abnormal government, and would bring with it danger for the Dynasty.46

Stolypin was supported in the stand by his successor as prime minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov, and by their respective foreign ministers Aleksandr Izvol’skii (at least initially) and Sergei Sazonov.47 There was, however, a fundamental contradiction in Stolypin’s position. He recognised Russia’s industrial backwardness and the way in which that backwardness inhibited the overblown rearmament schemes of the Tsarist military and autocracy. Consequently, he wanted Russia to retain or regain its Great Power Status without being involved in the increasingly tense relations between European states, especially in and around the Balkans. Non-involvement however, was not an option for an aspiring Great Power. This contradiction can be seen in the evolving position on these questions of Izvol’skii, Stolypin’s foreign minister until 1910. In April 1907, Izvol’skii expressed support for Stolypin’s cautious approach and urged that Russia “renounce any plans that are in insufficient accord with the real powers of the country.” But he became increasingly concerned over Russia’s ability to maintain herself as a Great Power and was soon advocating active intervention in the Balkans and the Black Sea straits to

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that end. Were Russia not to intervene, he said in January 1908 (at the foreign ministry conference referred to above), she would no longer be a Great Power: Or perhaps, we are presently in such a state that we ought to renounce an active policy no matter what happens.

On that occasion, Stolypin was able to persuade Izvol’skii to toe the line. But the latter’s commitment to “an active policy” deepened until his position as Stolypin’s foreign minister was untenable.48 Similarly, the next prime minister, Kokovtsov, even though just as committed to caution as Stolypin, “could not avoid realising that the regime’s claim to be a great power forced it to keep up in the international arms race.”49 The pressure of the Russian state’s pretensions to Great Power status ensured that, despite all the efforts of Stolypin and his supporters, military expenditure was a crippling burden on the economy by 1913.50 The new stream of developmental statism was motivated by quite different ideas. As noted above, the Octobrists favoured an aggressive foreign policy, aimed at flexing considerable muscle in the Balkans and around the Black Sea straits. If war were necessary, then war would come. But they were very aware of the need for a re-armed and above all efficient and modern military machine to pursue these ends. They were particularly embittered by Russia’s foreign policy floundering during the Bosnian crisis and the Italo-Turkish war, regarding it as further evidence that the autocracy and its supporters were fit to conduct neither the external nor internal policies of a Great Power. Responsibility for defence and foreign policy, they argued, had to be transferred from the court to the state–the latter as manifested in the Duma (and its Octobrist majority). The Duma seemed to represent an opportunity for state institutions to challenge the authority of the autocracy in these areas51–though, as we shall see, the autocracy would defend its prerogatives here with savage desperation. Led by Guchkov, the Octobrists established, through the third Duma, a Committee of Imperial Defence in 1907, the clear aim of which was to exercise some responsibility over military matters.52 In 1908, Guchkov denounced by name the Grand Dukes in charge of various military institutions, who had been appointed by the Tsar.53 He then turned his sights on the Ministry of the Navy. As the force that had emerged with the least military credibility from the Russo/Japanese war, the Naval command and its governmental bureaucracy were regarded by the developmental statists as urgently in need of reform and reorganisation. So keenly was this felt, that the Octobrists led moves in the Duma (from

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1908) to refuse the approval of new financial credits to the Navy until some reform was evident. They argued (according to the British naval attaché): That it is useless to expend large sums of money in constructing costly vessels as long as the present state of organization (or disorganization) of the Marine Ministry continues.54

The developmental statists therefore advocated political reform (the replacement of autocratic authority with that of the state over the armed forces) in order to achieve military reform (the streamlining of the military machine) in order to prosecute a war over the Balkans and the Black Sea straits that they considered to be inevitable. In time, their argument worked back the other way. Increasingly frustrated by the Tsarist regime’s refusal to cede control over the military machine, they argued for war in order to bring about reform. The third voice in the defence debate came from the autocracy itself. As a basically military operation, the Tsarist state fought tenaciously to maintain complete control over military matters–military preparedness, military command and foreign policy. No fundamental concessions were made on this in either the October Manifesto or the Fundamental Laws (of April 1906).55 The autocracy’s position in the debate was for the aggrandisement of Russia’s role as a Great Power together with the avoidance of any internal reform or disturbance. This manifested itself in two ways, Firstly, in a desire for rapid rearmament after 1905–with special emphasis on the navy, which was regarded as important from the point of view of international prestige.56 But secondly in a cautious foreign policy, since the experience of 1905 led the autocracy to the conclusion that foreign adventures could spark domestic upheaval.57 So Nicholas and his supporters favoured increased spending on the armed forces–though spending that was aimed more at boosting Russia’s imperial image than anything else, and therefore tended to be military ineffective.58 But they also favoured caution in Europe, particularly with regard to Germany. They wanted reconciliation with Germany (and her ally, Austria-Hungary) and were correspondingly nervous about the alliance with France and a naval policy requiring British approval.59 Unfortunately for the autocrat and his regime (and repeatedly pointed out by the Octobrists), rearmament was a waste of time without reform. And, in an increasingly tense European state system up to 1914, a “Great

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Power” with a cautious foreign policy was an impossibility. The more cautious it became, the less Great it could claim to be. In the defence debate, the Stolypin position displayed a realistic assessment of Russia’s material situation and of the limits that placed on its military abilities. The consolidation and development, as well as the cautious foreign policy, that this assessment produced had the potential to develop the productive forces. But, in the long term, Stolypin’s position endangered the state (the dominant production relation) because it meant that Russia would attempt to abstain from the conflicts of the European state system and would fall militarily behind its European rivals. Stolypin’s vision of a restoration of Russia’s greatness over time (twenty years to consolidate a reformed agricultural sector, for example) put that restoration out of reach. The position of the autocracy had none of the realism of Stolypin and his supporters. It would have brought about neither efficient rearmament (due to its inability to drive forward the industrial economy and its emphasis on the prestige of the Navy) nor proper Great Power behaviour (due to its fear that war would produce revolution). Left to the autocracy, Russia’s forces of production would have been inhibited in their development, while her state would have been threatened by Germany’s rise. Only the developmental statists appeared able both to develop the productive forces (driven by their acceptance of the prospect of war) and to defend the state (through reform, including military reform). But it was war, rather than economy, that preoccupied the Octobrists. According to Hutchinson, “They did not grasp … the intimate relationship between the realisation of their imperial ambitions and the productive capabilities of Russian industry and agriculture.”60 So, even this group of aspiring state managers were caught between the needs of the state and the capabilities of the Russian economy. This would ensure that the production relations they would bring into existence would continue to include (and be dominated by) a state distinctly tinged by oriental despotism.

The Developmental State and the Bourgeoisie reconciled The importance of the defence debate and the new developmental statism for our discussion lies in the fact that, between 1909 and 1914, the progressive bourgeoisie went over to the stand of the developmental statists. This was the reason–recognised but not understood by many

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historians–for the change in the bourgeoisie’s outlook during the period; from an anti-war to a pro-war stand; from a revolution led by the bourgeoisie to the needs of the bourgeoisie being met by a “Great Russia”. Going over to the state was, for the bourgeoisie, a course that would immeasurably strengthen the state (Tsarist, republican and then Soviet) at their expense, especially in the context of world war. The rise of the state during the war–in Russia, across Europe and beyond-would not only derail the bourgeois revolution in Russia, but in Europe as a whole–and ultimately in the world. To this point, the Russian bourgeoisie had not been distinguished by its patriotism. I noted in the last chapter that they were by no means enthusiastic supporters of Tsarist imperial expansion and were certainly not enchanted with the adventures in the Far East that had led to the war with Japan. The Union of Liberation carried out propaganda against the war and (as noted previously) representatives of oil and heavy industry called for peace in early 1905. The prominent Moscow publishing entrepreneur, Ivan Sytin, printed the truth about the war (including extensive coverage of the Tsushima disaster), regardless of the effect on the war effort.61 In fact, such was the open nature of bourgeois opposition that after the war it was rumoured “that Berlin, with the help of Russian industrial circles, had forced St Petersburg to accept an unequal treaty to end the Far Eastern war …”.62 The lack of patriotic fervour stretched beyond the war, with the TPP demanding in late 1905 that rearmament should only take place within the constraints of the state budget.63 As we shall see, these sentiments were in marked contrast to bourgeois opinion by 1914.64 How did this dramatic change in attitude come about? In part, the change had a solid material basis. The progressive bourgeoisie had little interest in the Far East, but the issue of Russian exports to Europe, and its economic standing there, were quite a different matter. Russia’s foreign trade was heavily dependent on the export of grain through the Black Sea straits. Healthy grain exports in turn defended Russia’s international credit. Grain accounted for fifty percent of total Russian exports in 1911–but the amount of grain exported after that year fell. As observed by a British diplomat in 1914, those falls were due to the vulnerability of Russia’s grain exports to disturbances around the Black Sea straits and in the Balkans. The fall in 1912 was “partly [accounted for] by the disturbance of the Black Sea trade consequent on the Turco-Italian war.” A fall in the following year was “mainly due to the disturbance of the same trade through the Balkan war.”65 Russian business therefore was

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interested in stability around and free access through the Straits. An effective way of achieving these aims was the establishment of Russian control over the area–or at least the flexing of Russian state muscle when unrest flared. As for Russia’s economic position in Europe, the problem here was perceived to be the threat of German economic expansion. Between 1905 and 1913, German exports to Russia increased by over 150%. German grain was being sold in traditional Russian markets in Scandinavia and German exports were penetrating Asia Minor and Persia. Russian business was afraid that Russia would become an agrarian appendage for an advanced, industrialised and expanding Germany. Konovalov, the Progressist leader, warned the Duma in December 1912 against ‘economic enslavement’.66 The progressive bourgeoisie was not only of the opinion that the Tsarist regime was not confronting these threats, but also convinced that it was simply not up to the job. There was, however, more to the progressive bourgeoisie’s emerging identification with a “national” interest than grain exports and fear of Germany. A coincidence of interests occurred between the bourgeoisie and the developmental statists. That coincidence was articulated through Petr Struve. Struve was an ex-Marxist by the turn of the century and ex-radical after 1905. He advocated the peaceful development of Russia along Western lines. In a celebrated article, “Great Russia” (the title taken from one of Stolypin’s speeches) in January 1908, Struve criticised the Russian intelligentsia for having no proper conception of the state–and consequently having an improper attitude towards it. For Struve, the state was a cause, an idea and an aspiration–it was something that transcended this or that form of government (even one as enduring as the Tsarist autocracy). It embodied the nation and the nation’s people, and therefore was something worth fighting for. The intelligentsia, he wrote later, were wrong in their “atheistic dissociation from the state”.67 Struve constructed the ideological foundations for a nationalism that was not loyal to the autocracy, but instead directed its patriotism towards a future state–a state that was coming into being–that would be cleansed of its Tsarist detritus. This vision demanded reform in two ways. On the one hand, success (for a state in a system of states) meant military success (and

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military capacity) in competition with its rivals. As he wrote in “Great Russia”: The touchstone and the yardstick of all so-called domestic politics of the government as well as [political] parties ought to lie in the answer to the question: in what measure does this policy further the so-called external power of the state?

This was an argument for militarisation. “To revive Russia without the army and apart from the army,” he wrote, ‘is impossible. The army–this is the living personification of the official being of Russia.”68 On the other hand, militarisation and military capacity were only possible with further and faster industrial development.69 The most important thing then, was “a policy directed towards the accumulation of capital in the country”.70 Furthermore, industrial development and militarisation should be put to external use. The interests of the nation and its state would be fostered and inspired by an imperialist foreign policy properly befitting a Great Power. But imperialism itself had to be reformed. It had to eschew Tsarist adventures in the Far East in favour of a business-like concentration closer to home: It is high time that we recognise that there is only one means of establishing a ‘Great Russia’: the concentration of all [our] strength toward the region where the true hegemony of Russian culture is possible. That region is the entire basin of the Black Sea, that is, those European and Asiatic countries which lie in its vicinity.71

Struve’s ideas made an enormous impact on the progressive bourgeoisie. As well as providing ideological ballast for the new developmental statism, they paved the way for the progressive bourgeoisie to join forces with it. The bourgeoisie’s emerging ideas on the national interest, the Black Sea straits and the possibilities of economic development through a dynamic state were linked with the future developmental state by Struve. The Moscow bourgeoisie in particular did not display the intelligentsia’s general disdain for the state of which Struve complained.72 The progressive bourgeoisie in Moscow, led by the Ryabushinskiis and Konovalov, were strongly influenced by Struve and set about publicising and developing his ideas among their supporters.73 Konovalov took the lead in organising a series of “Economic Discussions” (Ekonomicheski besedy) from 1908 to 1912, at first in his house, then in Ryabushinskii’s.

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Taking part were the industrialists, together with a floating (and expanding) collection of academics, economic specialists, intellectuals and even middle-ranking government officials. Struve inaugurated the Discussions with a talk on “The National Economy and the Intelligentsia” in November 1908. The sessions that followed covered the role of foreign investment, the question of syndicates and trusts, labour legislation and the zemstva.74 The Discussions were oriented in an increasingly political direction.75 It was on the basis of the ideas developed in the Economic Discussions that both Utro Rossii (from November 1909) and the Progressist Party (in November 1912) were born.

The Nationalism of the Bourgeoisie The leaders of the progressive bourgeoisie continued to see themselves as representatives of the nation, and now expanded that sense of representation to encompass a “Great Russia” that would be built by the bourgeoisie in alliance with the new state. Utro Rossii defined real nationalism as “the rapid development of the idea of an all-Russian statism’ as opposed to the nationalism of the autocracy which treated Russian statism as ‘a sickly hothouse flower and not a powerful growing tree.”76 This alliance would be, according to Ryabushinskii, a constructive combination of two egos: … egoism of the state and egoism of individual personality … the pledge of our future victories, victories of a new, powerful Great Russia over the Russia of frustrated dreams, of fruitless strivings and bitter failures.77

Great Russia required reform, organisation, cohesion–and (the sine qua non of developmental statism) economic planning. Most of the bourgeoisie acknowledged that planning was the province of the state-but not the state of the autocrat. Even the St Petersburg Association had, in the pre-war years, come to a “neo-mercantilist” position, informed by List and inspired by contemporary Germany. They called for “conscious planning in production and in the organization of the market.” They endorsed a form of corporatist organisation and toyed with the concept of autarky.78 The bourgeoisie endorsed the putative state’s militarism–partly because it involved their areas of interest in foreign policy (the Black Sea straits and the German threat) and partly because it necessitated a large-scale programme of industrialisation.79 Ryabushinskii was prepared to endorse a reformed army, not only as a fighting force, but as a model for the nation. In the collection, Velikaya Rossiya, he wrote:

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There are whole realms of culture, that of will as well as of the moral and physical, which the atmosphere of the army encourages: will, decisiveness, selflessness, physical health – especially harmony of soul and will – these are what war builds well.80

They also endorsed the imperialism at which that militarisation was aimed. As Lenin put it in 1912, “They [the Progressists] want a ‘strong authority’ that would pursue the ‘patriotic’ policy of conquering with sword and fire, new markets for national industry.”81 The progressive bourgeoisie’s conversion to developmental statism did nothing to lessen their hostility to the Tsarist autocracy. They (along with Struve) were outraged at the government’s weaknesses in foreign policy in the pre-war years and blamed those weaknesses on “the bureaucratic structure that was beaten at Tsushima and suffered defeat in BosniaHerzegovina”. Foreign policy follies were linked back to Russia’s internal situation, where the lack of political reform stifled those forces that wanted to build Great Russia in the face of Tsarist autocracy.82

Tsarism reasserts itself Weakness abroad was accompanied by the reassertion of the regime’s prerogatives at home. This process began with the state coup of 3 June 1907, which effectively ended any claim of the Duma to be representative. During and after the “Naval Staff crisis” of 1909 (a further attempt by the Octobrists and others to establish Duma control over the armed forces), the Tsar moved to take back his powers over defence, foreign policy and military preparedness. The activities of the Duma’s Imperial Defence Committee were curtailed. The Minister of War was forbidden to address the Duma and instructed not to discuss military spending with the Minister of Finance.83 The crisis solidified an elite bloc of support around the Tsar, consisting of the court, the landed nobility, the upper hierarchy of the church and sections of the bureaucracy–with the Black Hundreds putting in the spadework on the streets.84 This, in turn, gave the Tsar renewed confidence in his personal authority.85 By 1914, even the frail remnants of the post-1905 political reforms were considered to be in danger. The polarisation of Russian society was the result, between the autocracy and the bulk of society.86 This division was worsened by the fact that the anti-autocratic forces identified the autocracy (with some justification) as pro-German (or at least not sufficiently anti-German)–and they identified Germany as the

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centre of European reaction. Thus, declared Utro Rossii, all Europe was threatened with “Germanisation”, while in Russia “the military preparations of the government hardly go beyond the need of internal pacification.”87 This was no longer incompetence in defending Russia’s interests. It was treason. As was to be expected, British diplomats were particularly alert to the presence of pro-German sentiment in high places. Politically, they located such sentiment on the conservative right.88 And in higher places as well; the Ambassador’s annual report for 1910 states: There is … an influential section of public opinion in Russia (chiefly localised in Court and military circles and what are called here the governing classes), which holds that the paramount object of Russian foreign policy should be to live on the best possible terms with her powerful German neighbour … if necessary, at the sacrifice of the understanding with England.89

Guchkov declared in November 1913 that Russia’s only hope lay in “marshalling those social circles and groups of the population whose political faith lies primarily in Russia’s role as a great power”–a rallying call for the elements of the future developmental state.90 One by one, the reformers had given up on the prospects of combining reform with the preservation of Tsarism. After the Naval Staff crisis, Stolypin let his reform proposals drop–though even this did not save him from the increasing hostility of the monarch. The St Petersburg Association had reached the end of its petitioning patience. The Moscow metals and textile industrialist, Yurii Guzhon told their Congress in 1914: Therefore I am convinced that any new appeal to the Ministers is completely without purpose; nothing will come of it; they will not help us; they will keep to their own opinion. It will only be a waste of time.91

Most famously, Guchkov turned against the regime. He had already called for a constitutional monarchy in March 1910. At the Octobrists’ Conference in November 1913, he renewed his call for Russia to take up its responsibilities as a Great Power and attacked the autocratic state for not doing so. … that state of prostration and miasma which numbed our political organism at home also hampered our movements and paralysed our will abroad.

His conclusion was clear:

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Now, looking back … we must admit that the attempt made by Russian society … to reach an accord with the authorities … has suffered failure … The attempt of Octobrism to reconcile these two external and hostile forces–the state and society–has failed.92

What should follow that attempt however, was not clear, which meant that the anti-autocratic forces were in a state of some confusion at this point. In these circumstances, the Progressists moved sharply to the left.93 By early 1914, they saw no way out but a renewed attempt at revolution. Utro Rossii appealed directly for active force to bring about change.94 Furthermore, they pursued this path with those forces they felt were most capably of bringing it about–still with the unshakeable certainly that the end result would favour their interests. The Progressists donated money to the Bolsheviks: 2000 rubles in 1913 for a printing press; 3000 rubles in 1914 directly to Lenin; and a further 5000 rubles to the Bolshevik leader in the Duma, Malinovsky. In early March 1914, Konovalov set up an “Information Committee” (Informatsionnyi Komitet – IK) to liase between Progressists, left KDs, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Its purpose was to keep all those represented informed about the others and to discuss possible joint action. Konovalov took the need for some manifestation of physical force very seriously–and was prepared to pay for it. According to the Moscow Okhrana, the IK met in May 1914 and promised the Bolsheviks 20,000 rubles towards calling a Party Congress (something Lenin considered essential before a general strike and uprising could be attempted). It is unclear whether they actually received any of this money, since it seems that each side became simultaneously nervous of the other’s intentions, and the IK faded into obscurity. The fact of its existence, however brief, gives some indication of the Progressists’ commitment to radical change.95

War? These events did not take place in an international vacuum. Rising tensions in Europe, together with popular pressure within Russia, slowly but surely pushed the autocracy into a war which it did not want, and which it doubted it could survive.96 Such a war–as a catalyst for change– was now welcomed by the progressive bourgeoisie. The St Petersburg Association saw opportunities for the greater glory of the Russian state through war, in terms of new markets and territorial gains. Utro Rossii maintained in February 1914 that if there were not a war, the revolution would take much longer. When it came, war with Austria was met with

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enthusiasm. “Long live the war, long live the fire in which the old world perishes,” trumpeted Utro Rossii on 10 August 1914.97 By the eve of the European conflagration, the progressive bourgeoisie in Russia had fundamentally changed its attitude towards war–because it had changed its attitude towards the state. Not towards the autocratic state, to which it remained deeply opposed, but to the state that was to come: the developmental state, which could be forged, if necessary, in war. Between 1906 and 1914, the progressive bourgeoisie increasingly identified its interests–the liberation of capitalist relations of production, the solution of the land problem in the interests of the more efficient peasant farmers (at the expense of the land-owning nobility), the establishment of democracy–with those of the developmental state and its proponents. It began to talk about “state-ness” or “statism” (gosudarstvennost’) as a beneficial and progressive concept, and one that stood in opposition to the autocracy. The progressive bourgeoisie clearly believed that it could establish an alliance with developmental statism in order to reorganise the Russian economy to their mutual advantage. This alliance reached its high point with the European war.98 The support of the bourgeoisie for the war (in marked contrast to the Russo-Japanese exercise) was propelled by three factors. First, as we have seen, was their concern with the Black Sea straits. If a blow could be delivered against Turkey and its allies in Europe, and Constantinople established as a free city, then Russia’s exporters could rest easy. Secondly, we need to remember the heavily “state-ised” situation of Europe at the time. The arms build-up and the general assumption of the inevitability of a European war must have made it seem only natural that states–and efficient states at that–were necessary to defend business. Despite the “globalisation” of the previous three decades or so,99 it must have appeared that to advance even purely economic interests in the statesystem of Europe, it was necessary to have a strong state. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, the support of the bourgeoisie came from the notion (shared with the developmental statists) that the war provided an opportunity to sweep away the wavering and inefficient autocracy and to reorganise Russia, socially and economically. As one Duma member put it, “The war, by revealing all our internal strength, will give us the opportunity to defeat not only the external enemy, but will also open up joyful hopes for solving the problems of internal construction and reform.”100

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Thus the Russian bourgeois revolution ceased to be seen as a repeat of the worker-led 1905 affair–a proposition much too dangerous for economic stability. Instead it would be initiated by the progressive state. The bourgeoisie would support it, reap its rewards–and prevent the state from once again becoming too powerful by constructing a democracy. It was not that the goals of the bourgeois revolution had somehow been eliminated by a wave of nationalist frenzy. It was that the bourgeoisie now believed that those goals could be achieved through a suitably reformed, reorganised and “de-autocracised” state. The necessities of total war forced a dramatic extension (or reassertion) of state power (especially over the economy) in all the belligerent countries during World War One. This process had its beginnings in the European state system in the late nineteenth century. The rise of the state in relation to capital (two production relations competing for dominance) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and what has been called its “apogee” in the First World War,101 not only snuffed out the bourgeois revolution in Russia–but also brought to a halt the continuation and completion of the bourgeois revolutions in most of Europe, and the initial stages of the bourgeois revolution in the world at large. The result was the incompleteness of the bourgeois revolution on a world scale.

Notes 1

K. Marx, and F. Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1973), 65-66. 2 “[The Russo-Japanese War] impelled Russians towards the common conclusion that the autocracy could not meet the first duty of all governments, defense of the integrity and honour of the nation.” (A.Mendel, “On Interpreting the Fate of Imperial Russia,” in Russia Under the Last Tsar, ed. by T.G. Stavrou (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 21.) This was also a conclusion drawn outside the empire. A German Foreign office memorandum in April 1908 stated “Russia has at present no justifiable claim to be treated as a great power.” (cited in A. Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, Volume 1: Russia in Disarray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 252.) 3 Cited in G. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 5. 4 P. Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998), 69. 5 “As long as the rural sector, employing three quarters of the population, produced 43 percent of the nation’s wealth, it would hinder growth.” (H. Rogger, Russia in

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the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881-1917 (London: Longman, 1987), 242.) 6 See Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, 74; Ascher, Stolypin, 153-164. 7 Cited in D.C.B. Lieven, ed. British Documents on Foreign Affairs: reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print; Part I, Series A – Russia, 18591914. Volume 5, 1907-1909 (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1983, document number 14, Stolypin’s speech to the Duma, 16 November 1907, 49 (henceforward: British Documents, volume, document #, date, page number). 8 Lenin, V.I. ‘The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907’, Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/agrprogr/ch01s6.htm. 9 See O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London: Pimlico, 1997), 238-240. For a more optimistic view, see H. Seton-Watson, The Decline of Imperial Russia, 1855-1914 (London: University Paperbacks, 1964), 277. 10 Cited in Ascher, Stolypin, 158. 11 V.Yu. Karnishin, “Partii promyshlennikov i predprinimatelei,” in Politicheskie Partii Rossii: istoriya i sovremennost’ ed. A.I. Zevelev, et al. (Moscow: Rosspen 2000), 100. 12 V.Yu. Karnishin, comp., Partii rossiiskikh promyshlennikov i predprinimatelei: dokumenty i materialy 1905-1906 gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 8-10. 13 Karnishin, Partii rossiiskikh promyshlennikov, 14-15. See also Karnishin in Zevelov, Politicheskie Partii, 103-4. West describes this party as that of the conservative wing of the Moscow stock exchange (J.L. West, “The Moscow Progressists: Russian industrialists in liberal politics, 1905-1915” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1974), 158-9)–but this seems unlikely, since the Ryabushinskii brothers were involved in its formation. 14 Karnishin in Zevelov, Politicheskie Partii, 106. 15 Karnishin, Partii rossiiskikh promyshlennikov, 17-18; E.D. Chermenskii, Burzhuaziya i tsarizm v pervoi russkoi revolyutsii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1970), 191; British Documents, volume 4, document number 53 n.d., 91. 16 R.A. Roosa, “Russian Industrialists Look to the Future: thoughts on economic development, 1906-17,” in Essays in Russian and Soviet History in honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, ed. J.S. Curtiss (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1965), 199 & 204. It was for precisely this reason that the Moscow bourgeoisie was wary of, if not hostile to the Association, regarding its political stand (such as it was) as marked by a “petitioning mentality” (West, Progressists, 171 & 345). 17 L. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917, Part 2,” Slavic Review 1 (March 1965): 621; Von Laue, T.H. “Problems of Industrialization,” in Russia Under the Last Tsar, ed. T.G. Stavrou (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 141-2; Mendel in Stavrou, Russia Under the Last Tsar, 25. 18 On the Association, see R.A. Roosa, “Russian Industrialists and ‘State Socialism’, 1906-17,” Soviet Studies, XXIII (3) (January 1972): 3-4. Roosa’s account was challenged by J.D. White (“Moscow, Petersburg and the Russian

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industrialists: in reply to Ruth Amende Roosa,” Soviet Studies XXIV 3 (January 1973): 414-420) for ignoring the Association’s ‘Petersburg orientation’ and its consequent subservience to the regime. Roosa replied (correctly, in my view) that the Association’s growing politicisation “was reflective of a budding maturation of the Russian business class as a whole–a class … which was now aspiring to a new position of freedom, independence and dignity.” (R.A. Roosa, “United Russian Industry,” Soviet Studies XXIV 3 (January 1973): 424) On the southern industrialists, see S.P. McCaffrey, The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: the Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874-1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996), 229. 19 E.D. Chermenskii, Burzhuaziya i tsarizm v pervoi russkoi revolyutsii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1970), 318-319; V.Ya. Laverychev, Po tu storonu barrikad (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo-Mysl’, 1967), 51-2. The party was at first refused legal registration because it advocated compulsory expropriation of land (H. O’Beirne, ‘Political Survey, 25 October 1906’, British Documents, volume 4, document number 169, 247). 20 I.F. Gindin, “Russkaya burzhuaziya v period kapitalizma, ee razvitie i osobennosti,” Istoriya SSSR 3 (1963), 57; Haimson, Social Stability Part 2, 4; Hosking, Experiment, 189; West, Progressists, 269-70, 374. Lenin remarked in December 1912: “The ‘Progressist’ group … are on the verge of becoming the official party representatives of the national liberal bourgeoisie in the parliamentary arena … They will be a party of the ‘genuine’ capitalist bourgeoisie, such as we see in Germany.’ (V.I. Lenin, “The National-Liberals” (22 December 1912), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/dec/22.htm. 21 “Rezolyutsii s’ezda progressistov, 11-13 noyabrya 1912 g.” in N.B. Khailova, ed., Partii Demokraticheskikh Reform, Mirnogo Obnovleniya, Progressistov: dokumenty i materially, 1906-1916 gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2002), 298-301; Laverychev, Po tu storonu, 87-95. 22 JL West, “The Rjabusinskij Circle: Russian Industrialists in Search of a Bourgeoisie, 1909-1914,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteeuropa 32 (1984): 363. On other early Progressist papers see V.V. Shelokhaev, “Progressisty,” in Politicheskie Partii Rossii: istoriya i sovremennost’ ed. A.I. Zevelev et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000), 136. 23 H. Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881-1917 (London: Longman, 1987), 239. 24 Utro Rossii, number 149, 18 May 1910, 1; West, Rjabusinskij circle, 365. 25 This stand was reiterated as late as 1913 by a “toast” (in reality, a hostile political speech) proposed by the chairman of the Nizhni Novgorod Fair Committee to the prime minister in August of that year (British Documents, volume 6, 4 March 1914, 371). 26 Especially in “Burzhua ili dvoryanin?,” Utro Rossii, number 150, 19 May 1910, 1. The idea that “the kupets [merchant] is on the move” was put to the All-Russian Trade and Industry Association by Pavel Ryabushinskii in 1912 (Utro Rossii, numbers 105, 9 May 1912; 106, 10 May 1912, 1; 110, 15 May 1912, 1). See also

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West, Progressists, 336, 342, 366, 368. In a striking phrase, West comments: “With the certitude of Marxian determinists they invoked history itself to demonstrate the inevitability of their own triumph.” (343) See Ryabushinskii on the bourgeoisie replacing the nobility as the ruling class in V.S. Dyakin, Russkaya Burzhuaziya i Tsarizm v godu pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914-1917) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1967), 34. 27 P.A. Berlin, Russkaya Burzhuaziya v staroe i novoe vremya (Moscow: Kniga, 1922), 295. V.V. Zhukovskii told the 6th Congress of Trade and Industry in 1912 that “bourgeois classes are always the most constitutional because parliamentary democracy most closely answers their interests.” (cited in V.S. Dyakin, Burzhuaziya, Dvoryanstvo I Tsarizm v 1911-1914 gg. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1988), 77-8) See also Utro Rossii in April 1912 (Dyakin, Burzhuaziya, Dvoryanstvo, 80). For more on the Progressists’ programme see Shelokhaev in Zevelev, Politicheskie Partii Rossii, 137-142. 28 Roosa, State Socialism, 410. 29 Gindin, Russkaya burzhuaziya, 57. Protest of the 66 in Utro Rossii, numbers 29, 6 February 1911, 2-3; 33, 11 February 1911, 3. See the special issue of Utro Rossii to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the abolition of serfdom – and to urge further “anti-feudal” reforms (19 February 1911). See also R. Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 183-4; West, Progressists, 356; Roosa, State Socialism, 406, 410; Roosa, Russian Industrialists, 212. In March 1910, The Anglo-Russian reported on a St Petersburg conference of “the delegates of Bourses and Chambers of Commerce” which “entered an emphatic protest against the treatment of their Jewish colleagues.” (The Anglo-Russian XIII 5 (March 1910): 1320.) 30 B. Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy: a study of the evidence (New York: Vintage Books, 1961 [1939]), 115-116. For Progressist views see Hosking, Experiment, 191; for the Association, Roosa,State Socialism, 398-9, 405-6. In his otherwise excellent account of the Moscow Progressists, West states that the bourgeoisie’s expectations of popular support for its political stance were “pure fancy” (West, Progressists, 342). He concludes that the bourgeoisie’s opposition to the autocracy in 1905 was reluctant and temporary, and that, after a brief reappearance of this opposition, it disappeared by 1912. Clearly, I cannot agree. It seems to me that there is evidence aplenty of the bourgeoisie’s continuing opposition to the autocracy up to 1917. What did change, after about 1909, was the attitude of the bourgeoisie to the state (but not to the autocracy), as we shall see. As to the “fancy” of popular support, was not the first revolution in 1917 a convincing demonstration of the historical necessity and popularity of the bourgeois revolution? And could it not be seen as some justification for the progressive bourgeoisie’s (perhaps unconscious) “Marxian determinism” (see footnote 25)? 31 Von Laue disagrees, comparing him unfavourably with Witte, and concluding “Stolypin’s agrarian measure merely offered a half-solution to only one of the major tasks ahead …”. What, he asks, of industry, urban social tensions, the national minorities? (TH Von Laue, “Of the Crises in the Russian Polity,” in

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Essays in Russian and Soviet History in honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, ed. J.S. Curtiss (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1965), 310.) Fair questions, though Stolypin did advocate reform in some of these areas. 32 Stolypin’s speech to the Duma, 16 November 1907 in British Documents, volume 5, document number 14, 51-53. 33 “In his view, the state stood above the interests of the aristocracy – even above the dynasty itself …”. (Figes, Tragedy, 226) According to Ascher, “… like Bismarck, he was guided by two principal concerns, to strengthen the state and to preserve as much as possible of the existing order.” (Ascher, Stolypin, 395). See also A.M. Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 337; E. Chmielewski, “Stolypin and the Ministerial Crisis of 1909,” California Slavic Studies IV (1967): 3. 34 Stolypin to the Duma, 10 May 1907 in T.W. Treadgold, “Was Stolypin in favour of the Kulaks?,” American Slavic and East European Review XIV (1955): 3. 35 See Nicolson to Grey on the government reform programme: British Documents,volume 4, document number 137, 7 September 1906, 211-212; Stolypin to the Duma, 19 March 1907: British Documents, volume 4 document number 208, 342-3; Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, 67-93. 36 See Stolypin on the main danger coming from the right and “the spirit of reaction”: Nicolson in conversation with Stolypin, 16 August 1907, in British Documents, volume 5, document number 6, 31. See also Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, 115; Rogger, Age, 236; Ascher, Stolypin, 209. 37 Guchkov to the Octobrist congress, November 1913 in T Riha, “Constitutional Developments in Russia,” in Russia Under the Last Tsar, ed. T.G. Stavrou (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 114. 38 D.B. Pavlov and V.V. Shelokhaev, “Soyuz 17 oktyabrya,” in Politicheskie Partii Rossii: istoriya i sovremennost’, ed. A.I. Zevelev et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000), 115; J.F. Hutchinson, “The Octobrists and the Future of Imperial Russia as a Great Power,” Slavonic and East European Review 50 119 (April 1972): 236-7. 39 E. Chmielewski, “Stolypin’s Last Crisis,” California Slavic Studies III (1964): 96. See also Guchkov’s speech to the Octobrist Conference in November 1913 in O.V. Volobuyev et al. eds. Partiya ‘Soyuz 17 Oktyabrya’, Tom 2 1907-1915 gg (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000), 429-30. On the Stolypin/Guchkov relationship, see Mendel in Stavrou, Russia Under the Last Tsar, 38; Rogger, Age, 236; Ascher, Stolypin, 216. 40 Buchanan to Grey, 7 April 1913: “There is no doubt that Slav feeling is running higher and higher throughout the country, and the pacific policy of the Russian government is daily becoming more unpopular.” (British Documents, volume 6, document number 143, 312) See also D. Geyer, Russian Imperialism: the interaction of domestic and foreign policy, 1860-1914 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), 309; Von Laue, Of the Crises, 312. 41 Hutchinson, Octobrists, 223-4. 42 See for example the speeches by N.V. Shchenkov and Guchkov at the Octobrist Central Committee, 19-25 September 1909 and the report of M.V. Krasovskii to

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the Octobrist Third Congress, 4-8 October 1909, in Volobuev, Partiya ‘Soyuz 17 Oktyabrya’, 74-5 & 174-187. 43 Ascher, Stolypin, 220. See also M.T. Florinsky on elements of the bureaucracy as “a civilizing force in the life of the nation” (The End of the Russian Empire (New York: Collier Books, 1961), 16). 44 W.C. Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 202-4; Hosking, Experiment, 80; D.C.B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1984), 54. See Katkov on General Gurko’s clandestine relations with Guchkov (G. Katkov, Russia 1917: The February Revolution (London: Longmans, 1967), 41. 45 There had been a more forthright expression of these views in the immediate aftermath of 1905. The newspaper Voennyi Golos (Military Voice), which was published between January and September 1906 (when it was suppressed) put forward the views of radical reformers in the armed forces. The newspaper advocated both military reorganisation and political reform along constitutional lines. It also asserted that the interests of the dynasty and those of the nation could diverge – and that the armed forces owed their ultimate allegiance to the latter rather than the former (Fuller, Civil-Military, 198-201). Fuller comments that for the reforming military “the preservation of the army [was] a goal more important than the survival of the Romanov dynasty or the Empire.” (Civil-Military, 261) 46 Stolypin in D.M. McDonald, “A Lever without a Fulcrum: domestic factors and Russian foreign policy, 1905-14,” in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. H. Ragsdale & V.N. Ponomarev (Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Centre & Cambridge University Press, 1993), 290. Witte meanwhile was supporting détente with Germany and a reduction in armaments. Otherwise, he argued, there would be a conflict so great that it would lead to a general European decline (Lieven, Origins, 76). On the Stolypin government’s position see also P. Gatrell, Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900-1914: the last argument of tsarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 91-102; W.C. Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600-1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 415; Ascher, Stolypin, 253, 259. 47 Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 256, 274; McDonald, Lever, 284. 48 Izvol’skii in April 1907 in McDonald, Lever, 284; in January 1908, McDonald, Lever, 289. See also Fuller, Strategy and Power, 417-8. 49 Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 260. These contradictions were also evident at the newspaper Novoye Vremya, the editorials of which (from1906 to 1914) were “torn between knowledge of Russia’s need for peace, and an aggressive assertion of national interests …” (Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 131). 50 Lieven, Russia and the Origins, 12-13. 51 See for example the speech by Yu. N. Milyutin on 26 April 1909 in Volobuev, Partiya “Soyuz 17 Oktyabrya”, 44-46. 52 Gattrell, Government, Industry, 67; Seton-Watson, Decline, 265; Hutchinson, Octobrists, 227; Hosking, Experiment, 76.

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53 Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, for example, headed the State Defence Council; Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich was General Inspector of Artillery (Seton-Watson, Decline, 267). 54 British naval attaché to Nicolson, 29 January 1908, in British Documents, volume 5, document number 21, 116. See also document number 26, 122; document number 47, 168: document number 65, 273-4. 55 Article 13 of the Manifesto gave to the Tsar alone the power to authorise treaties, to declare war and to make peace. Articles 14 and 96 made him the supreme commander in chief of the armed forces. Article 6 excluded the Duma from foreign policy and, to drive home the point, the Foreign Minister was obliged to report to the Tsar, not to the government (and still less to the Duma). 56 “The hugely expensive commitment to a national fleet, based upon modern battleships, pandered to the court’s ideal of Russian imperial grandeur and to a more widespread vision of an enhanced national esteem.” (Gattrell, Government, Industry, 159) 57 This, of course, was the message of former Foreign Minister and State Councillor Durnovo’s famous memorandum to the Tsar in 1914 (see the next chapter). On the autocracy’s position see Gattrell, Government, Industry, 98, 1012, 117, 159; Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 251, 266, 278-9, 281-3. 58 For the Octobrists, even the autocracy’s advocacy of re-armament was flawed by incompetence. Since they looked forward to an actual war, rather than the enhancement of national prestige, they favoured rearming the army rather than redecorating the navy (Hutchinson, Octobrists, 225-6). Geyer says “… Russia’s naval rearmament was almost useless from a military point of view.” (Russian Imperialism, 284) 59 Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 297. 60 Hutchinson, Octobrists, 235. 61 On the Union of Liberation: R. Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 340-1; on oil and heavy industry: B.H. Sumner, “Tsardom and Imperialism in the Far East and Middle East, 18801914,” Proceedings of the British Academy XXVII (1941): 42; on Sytin: C.A. Rudd, Russian Entrepreneur: publisher Ivan Sytin of Moscow, 1851-1934 (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 69-72. West however says that “they [the Moscow bourgeoisie] loyally supported the government during the Russo-Japanese War” (J.L. West, “Visions of Russia’s Entrepreneurial Future: Pavel Riabushinsky’s Utopian Capitalism,” in Merchant Moscow: images of Russia’s vanished bourgeoisie, ed. J.L. West & I.A. Petrov, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 162); but I can find no evidence for this – and he gives none. 62 Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 308. Utro Rossii urged no more adventures in the Far East and better relations with Japan (number 192, 8 July 1910, 1). 63 Karnishin, Partii rossiiskikh promyshlennikov i predprinimatelei, 17. 64 By that stage Sytin, for example, was quite prepared to embellish or conceal the truth in his publications about Russian fortunes in the Great War in order to maintain the war effort (see Rudd, Sytin, chapter 9).

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65 O’Beirne memo, 25 July 1914, in British Documents, Volume 6, document number 175, 384-5. The Association of Trade and Industry discussed the closure of the Black Sea straits at its congress in May 1912. “This is death for all our exports”, said delegate Krestovnikov (reported in Utro Rossii, number 106, 10 May 1912, 2). 66 Gindin, Russkaya burzhuaziya, 57; plea for protection against German goods in Utro Rossii, number 100, 1 May 1912, 7; Konavalov in West, Progressives, 444. See also Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 308. 67 Pipes, Struve on the Right, 84; Lieven, Origins, 126; West, Progressives, 229230. On atheistic dissociation, P. Struve, “The Intelligentsia and the Revolution,” in Vekhi/Landmarks: a collection of articles about the Russian intelligentsia, eds. and trans. M.S. Shatz and J.E. Zimmerman, (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1994 [1909]), 121. 68 “Velikaya Rossiya” in Pipes, Struve on the Right, 90; Struve in W.E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 388. 69 “… the higher the economic development of a country, the higher – other things being equal – its military preparedness, and the greater the force which it is able to put forth in military conflict.” (from Velikaya Rossiya (1911-12), in Pipes, Struve on the Right, 185) 70 Pipes, Struve on the Right, 186. 71 Struve in West, Progressists, 230. See also Pares on the publication of Struve’s “Great Russia”: British Documents, volume 5 document number 47, July 1908, 154; Pipes, Struve on the Right, 90-91; Hosking, Experiment, 218; Lieven, Origins, 127. 72 As Pipes notes in passing: “This was a bourgeoisie in the classical Marxist sense … perceiving the well being of Russia and that of its own estate as inextricably linked …”. (Pipes, Struve on the Right, 174) 73 “… P.P. Riabushinskii … seems to have fallen completely under [Struve’s] intellectual influence.” (Pipes, Struve on the Right, 182) See also West, Progressists, 232-3, 236. 74 Shelokhaev in Zevelev, Politicheskie Partii Rossii, 136; Pipes, Struve on the Right, 182-4; West, Rjabusinskij Circle, 362; West, Progressists, 233-4. 75 Ryabushinskii told the session on foreign capital in March 1909: “The question is not only one of capital; capital we can find. The problem is one of the conditions which so hinder public and private initiative that all taste for business is lost. Everywhere there is police tutelage and wardship, everywhere obstacles and intervention.” (Cited in West, Progressists, 236) 76 Utro Rossii, number 100, 1 May 1914, 1. The St Petersburg Association would eventually arrive at the same view: a “willingness and ability to rise above narrow class interests and to approach national, economic problems from a broadly patriotic point of view.” (Roosa, State Socialism, 409) 77 Utro Rossii, number 149, 18 May 1910, 1. 78 Shelokhaev, in Zevelev, Politicheskie Partii Rossii, 138; Roosa, Russian Industrialists, 201-212: on planning, Promyshlennost’ i torgovlya, 15 June 1913; on corporatism, 15 December 1909; on autarky 15 July 1911. The Association,

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however, displayed a certain ambiguity on the question of state ownership of industry, denouncing its expansion while endorsing it in areas that could not attract private capital and those that supplied the armed forces (Roosa, State Socialism, 399 & 412). This ambiguity may have reflected a residual realisation that, although contingently united, the interests of state and capital remained different. See also the envious comparison with how the German state aided the development of industry by N. Kol’tsov in Utro Rossii, 100, 1 May 1914, 1. 79 See Ryabushinskii’s “Predislovie” in V.P. Ryabushinskii, ed. & pub. Velikaya Rossiya: sbornik statei po voennym i obshchestvennym voprosam, volume II (Moscow: 1912), 5-7. Utro Rossiya denounced pacifism and endorsed rearmament (number 75, 2 April 1911, 2). See also Promyshlennost’ i torgovlya, 15 December 1913 in Roosa, Russian Industrialists, 202. 80 Ryabushinskii, ‘Predislovie’ in Ryabushinskii, Velikaya Rossiya volume II, vii. On Progressist ideas on the reorganisation of the armed forces see Shelokhaev, “Progressisty” in Zevelev et al (eds.), Politicheskie Partii Rossii, 141. 81 Lenin, National Liberals. 82 Utro Rossii, 6 March 1911, number 153, 2; Shelokhaev, “Progressisty” in Zevelev, Politicheskie Partii Rossii, 142. On the link, see Ryabushinskii in Lieven, Origins, 135. 83 Hutchinson, Octobrists, 229; Rogger, Age, 236. 84 Figes, People’s Tragedy, 227. 85 Pares reported from the British Embassy in 1910 that “The Emperor is more than ever the arbiter of all questions” (“Report on the Political Situation”, British Documents, volume 6, document number 34, 22 August 1910, 56). 86 Mendel argues that this was on a par with events leading to 1905 (A. Mendel, “Peasant and Worker on the Eve of the First World War,” Slavic Review 1 (March 1965): 26). Haimson suggests that there was also a polarisation between urban workers and “educated privileged society”; but “a second process of polarisation – this one between the vast bulk of privileged society and the tsarist regime – appeared almost equally advanced.” (Haimson, Problem of Stability Part 2, 2) See also the remarks of S. Elpatevsky on the same polarisation in the provinces (cited in Haimson, Problem of Stability Part 2, 10). 87 Utro Rossii, 29 November 1909, 1; 6 March 1911, 2. 88 See Arthur Nicolson’s report in British Documents, volume 4, document number 57, 16 June 1906, 97; and again, reporting the remarks of a journalist, British Documents, volume 6, document number 8, 5 March 1910, 7. 89 British Documents, volume 6, document number 61, 22 March 1911, 101. Pares wrote in the same year that “The influences round the throne are … increasingly reactionary and pro-German …” (British Documents, volume 6, document number 74, 24 July 1911, 159). See also Buchanan to Grey in early 1914: “there can be no doubt that persons in the immediate entourage of the Emperor not infrequently contrast the material advantages to be derived from an understanding with Germany with the very problematic ones which the Anglo-Russian understanding has to offer.” (British Documents, volume 6, document number 174, 31 March 1914, 379)

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90 Guchkov cited in Geyer, Russian Imperialism, 306. He told the Octobrist Conference in October 1913: “The historical drama that we are living through consists in this: that we have been forced to defend the monarchy against those who are the natural defenders of the monarchic principle; we have been forced to defend the church against the church hierarchy, the army against its commanders, the authority of governmental power against the bearers of this power.” (in Volobuev, Partiya “Soyuz 17 Oktyabrya”, Rosspen, Moscow 2000, 438) On the future state, Haimson writes: “… it appeared that in the proliferating organs of self expression and independent activity of educated society … a whole organized structure of order and potential authority had now crystallized, far better prepared to take and effectively exercise power than had been the case, say, of any of their institutional counterparts on the eve of the French Revolution.” (Haimson, Problem of Stability Part 2, 11) 91 Roosa, State Socialism, 413. He went on to say that if industrialists were repressed, then there was nothing further for them to do in Russia. Ryabushinskii expressed the hope that “our great country can survive its petty government.” (cited in Dyakin, Burzhuaziya, Dvoryanstvo, 186) 92 Guchkov in E.D. Chermenskii, Fevral’skaya Burzhuazno-Demokraticheskaya Revolyutsiya 1917 g. v Rossii (Moscow: Gospolit’izdat, 1959), 94; Pavlov & Shelokhaev, Soyuz 17 oktyabrya in Zevelev, Politicheskie Partii Rossii, 121; Hutchinson, Octobrists, 223; Chmielewski, Stolypin and Ministerial Crisis, 5; Riha, Constitutional Developments, 114; Rogger, Age, 236. 93 Haimson, Problem of Stability Part 2, 4. They were not alone. The Kadets’ 12th Congress endorsed a turn from “organic” (moderate) to “declarative” (radical) opposition – a return to “the radical political platform originally advocated by the Kadet Party in 1905-6 …”. (L. Haimson, “The Problem of Political and Social Stability in Urban Russia on the Eve of War and Revolution Revisited,” Slavic Review LIX 4 (Winter 2000): 860-861). The St Petersburg Association, with the prospect of its petitions now being routinely ignored by the government, also moved into opposition (West, Progressists, 451-7). 94 Utro Rossii number 104, 22 May 1914, 1. 95 I.S. Rosenthal’, “Russkii liberalism,” Istoriya SSSR 6 (1971): 57-63; Dyakin, Burzhuaziya, Dvoryanstvo, 210-211; Haimson, Problem of Stability Part 2, 4-8; L.H. Siegelbaum, “Moscow Industrialists and the War-Industries Committees during World War 1,” Russian History/Histoire Russe V Part 1 (1978): 68; West, Progressists, 461-2. 96 “Having so long resisted war for fear of social repercussions, the Russian government now entered it for the same reasons,” says McDonald (D.M. McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia, 1900-1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 207). However, Rodzyanko, president of the Duma, declared in March 1913: ‘A war will be joyfully welcomed, and will raise the government’s prestige.’ (Hutchinson, Octobrists, 225). See also T.H. Von Laue, “The Chances for Liberal Constitutionalism,” Slavic Review 1 (March 1965): 40; Geyer, Imperialism, 312.

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97 Roosa, Russian Industrialists, 215; Utro Rossii in February in Dyakin, Burzhuaziya, Dvoryanstvo, 199; on war with Austria in Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya, 46; in August, Utro Rossii, number 185, 10 August 1914, 4. 98 “The state is the deity of its people. It demands religious devotion.” (Utro Rossii, number 179, 3 August 1914, 2) 99 See P. Hirst & G. Thompson, Globalization in Question: the international economy and the possibilities of governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), chapter 2. 100 Cited in Hosking, Constitutional Experiment, 241. 101 N. Harris, The Return of Cosmopolitan Capital: globalization, the state and war (London: IB Tauris, 2003), chapter 4.

CHAPTER FOUR STATE FAILURE: RUSSIA AND THE GREAT WAR

The eve of the Great War was also the eve of Russia’s bourgeois revolution, and so perhaps we should pause to take stock of the Russian bourgeoisie’s prospects in historical comparison with other bourgeois revolutions in Europe. This is best done by considering two of the most common arguments used against the notion of the Russian bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class. The first of these is that, by the early twentieth century, the Russian bourgeoisie was still divided. Reiber argues that “no common social or political consciousness had emerged to bind together the merchants and entrepreneurial groups into a cohesive class striving for power and cultural supremacy.”1 The division most commonly cited is that between the St Petersburg industrialists (who were considered close to the Tsarist bureaucracy) and those of Moscow (who were not). Reiber further charges that the bourgeoisie lacked “a clear ideology, a unified organization and a strong will”. There is nothing in the least surprising about this–and it was no different in the initial stages of any of the other European bourgeois revolutions. The capitalist class developed piecemeal in the nooks and crannies of feudalism. Its various elements had varying relationships with the existing state–some clinging on at the edges, while others moved into opposition. Christopher Hill contends that the idea of a bourgeois revolution in England is not refuted “by the observation that rich businessmen scrambled to win privileges and monopolies under the pre-1640 regime, and that some of the richest merchants supported Charles I during the Civil War.”2 Naturally enough, the bourgeoisie was divided in its opinions on the political organisation of society. In seventeenth century England and eighteenth century France, it was somewhat miraculous that sections of the bourgeoisie achieved any kind of political organisation and unity at all.

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But this was achieved mainly during the initial stages of the bourgeois revolution itself–and was not to last for very long. The bourgeoisie does not choose to be a revolutionary class. But if capitalism is to triumph (that is, if the forces of production are to be allowed to develop), the relations of production (including the political arrangements) have to be changed. Most commonly this has taken place at the (eventual) behest of a section of the bourgeoisie, with the urban (and occasionally rural) poor behind them. Even then, as Kautsky tells us, “revolutions cannot be made as one wishes … they occur of necessity under certain conditions and remain impossible as long as these conditions … do not exist.”3 The conditions existed in Russia in 1914 for a bourgeois revolution. The revolutionary elements of the Russian bourgeoisie were gathered around the Moscow textile magnates. They were represented politically by the Progressists–but also by individuals in other political organisations such as the Octobrists and the Kadets.4 It is true that they were divided, economically and politically, from their brethren in St Petersburg, whom they regarded as entangled with the Tsarist bureaucracy and with the autocracy itself. For this very reason, the Moscow bourgeoisie struggled against its counterpart in the capital. Nevertheless, in the end St Petersburg too despaired of Tsarism’s ability to defend or develop Russia, and no section of the bourgeoisie defended either Tsarism or the political structures on which it depended. The striking thing about the revolutionary Russian bourgeoisie was its advanced consciousness of itself as a class–and a class that should hold the future of Russia in its hands. This was not mediated through religion (as in the English revolution) or the rights of man (as in the French). It was a straightforward claim that, if Russia were to develop economically (and, in the wartime context, to maintain credible defences), the autocracy and its land-owning support base would have to give way to the rule of the capitalist class. The second argument often levelled at the Russian industrialists is that they were too weak to carry out a bourgeois revolution–afraid simultaneously of the autocracy on the one hand, and the righteous anger of the workers and peasants on the other.5 Comparisons are sometimes made with the German bourgeoisie in 1848, of whom Marx wrote: The German bourgeoisie developed so sluggishly, timidly and slowly that at the moment when it menacingly confronted feudalism and absolutism, it saw menacingly pitted against itself the proletariat and all sections of the

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middle-class whose interests and ideas were related to those of the proletariat.6

Whereupon it scuttled back to the government side. “The bourgeoisie,” according to Kautsky, “then left it up to the individual governments to continue the revolution for it …”7 A comparison with the Russian bourgeoisie cannot be sustained. Its development in the late nineteenth century was extremely rapid. By the early twentieth century, its progressive elements had reached the conclusion that the Tsarist autocracy stood in its way. In chapter two we saw its opposition to Tsarism in 1905. As a result of the 1905 events it was wary of the urban workers, but not afraid of them–certainly not to the extent of defecting to Tsarism. Indeed, as we shall see, some serious efforts were made by elements of the bourgeoisie to unite with the workers in the revolutionary cause. In chapter three we examined the continuation of bourgeois opposition after 1905 and the increasing interest of the Moscow bourgeoisie in the ideas of the proponents of (and potential participants in) a new, non-Tsarist state. It is here that Kautsky’s comment has some resonance: that the bourgeoisie might have “left it up to the individual governments to continue the revolution for it.” But again, this would underestimate the Russian bourgeoisie. It was more conscious, stronger and better organised than the other bourgeoisies of Europe at similar points in their history. It remained so because it could not make a deal with the autocracy, since the conflict between Tsarism and capitalism was endemic. The latter could not triumph while the former remained. The peculiar circumstance in Russia was that this point was reached almost simultaneously with Russia’s descent into Europe’s worst war. This had the double effect of making the eradication of Tsarism a question of urgency (since Tsarism appeared unable to defend Russia) and forcing that eradication in a statist direction (since a strong state was vital for the war effort). Nevertheless, Russian capitalists maintained their belief in their pre-eminent position in the post-Tsarist set up–equal, if not superior, to the new state institutions.

The Defence Debate Continues In chapter three, I noted the importance of a three-way debate over Russian defence that emerged after the war with Japan and in the wake of the 1905 revolution. On one side of this debate were the developmental

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statists of the Witte and Stolypin school, who argued that Russia needed a lengthy period of restoration and reconstruction before she could resume her Great Power position in Europe. Moderation in rearmament programmes and caution in foreign policy were their watchwords. On the other was the autocracy, advocating rearmament to create the image of a Great Power but anxious to avoid war in order to prevent social upheaval. And a third position was taken by the new developmental statists, joined by the progressive bourgeoisie, who embraced an active (even aggressive) foreign policy in Europe, on the supposition that a consequent war would both necessitate and drive radical political and economic reform. All three of these positions were still being actively promoted by 1914. Stolypin was dead, but Count Witte remained to argue that Russia’s material interests would not be well served by a European war. Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador, reported in 1914 that “he [Witte] was now openly declaring that Russia had nothing to gain by continuing the war and ought to make peace.” Witte told the French ambassador “We must liquidate this stupid adventure as soon as possible.”8 The autocracy’s position was accurately summarised in the famous memorandum by former police chief and Minister of the Interior, Petr Durnovo, submitted to the Tsar in February 1914. Durnovo argued that the alliance with Britain had brought Russia nothing but “an inevitable armed clash with Germany”. Russia would bear the brunt of a European war as “a battering ram, making a break in the very thick of the German defense”. Russia was not prepared for such a war, which would “necessitate expenditures which are beyond Russia’s limited financial means.” Both victory and defeat promised equally gloomy prospects. In the case of the former, “there must inevitably break out in the defeated country a social revolution which … will spread to the country of the victor.” Likewise, if Russia herself were defeated, “social revolution in its most extreme form is inevitable.”9 But the autocracy found itself in an unenviable position in 1914. On the one hand, it was convinced that anything less than a rapidly and spectacularly victorious war would eventually produce serious social unrest on the pattern of 1905. On the other, its most serious opponents (with the exception of the revolutionary left) were busily making pro-war propaganda, with such success that public opinion (at least in the urban centres) seemed to be solidly in favour of war with Germany.10 Pro-war unrest in the immediate term, or the possibility of upheaval in the long

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term if the war was not successful – that was the choice that faced Nicholas in 1914. Unwillingly, he placed his bet on uncertain success in war. Now given the loud opinions of Witte, Durnovo and others, as well as the clear reluctance of the autocracy to go to war, it can be understood why the pro-war sections of Russian political life entertained some doubts as to the unbridled enthusiasm of their rulers for a vigorous prosecution of the war effort. That was precisely what the developmental statists demanded. They and their capitalist allies had for some time believed (in the words of Utro Rossii), “War is inevitable. War cannot be averted.”11 They welcomed it as an opportunity to shake up Russian society, to further industrialise their backward economy and to take part in an economic reordering of Europe.12 The political parties most interested in reform (Progressists, Octobrists, Kadets) were therefore those most enthusiastic about “war until victory”. Such a war, Utro Rossii warned its readers would require sacrifices not only from soldiers but from the people as a whole.13 For the moment, any doubts in the ability of the regime to fight the war were lost in a groundswell of support for the army, the Tsar, the motherland and all things patriotic. “Today in Russia,” said Utro Rossii after the war’s declaration, “there is neither left, nor right, neither government nor society, but only one united Russian people.” A further editorial in August called for all political questions, “all unsettled debts of the government to the population to be postponed until after the War.” And a few days later, “Today questions of war take precedence over questions of peace.”14 Even at this early stage though, the paper was at pains to point out that in its support for the war, it was supporting a new Russia–“the dawn of a new life” for Russia and her people at war’s end.15

Extension of State Power As with the other belligerents, the Russian empire entered the Great War with the hope that it would not last long and the prayer that it would not bring with it social collapse. Businessmen believed that they must attend to their affairs just as they did before the War. Trade and industry were to operate in their normal manner; the transport service and the working classes were to go on with their

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But businessmen, workers and state officials alike were soon disabused of these notions by the emerging nature of the war. As became clear throughout the belligerent countries, the economic mobilisation necessary for successful industrialised warfare could not be entrusted to the free play of a market economy. The amount of profit to be made would not be sufficient to turn most of a national economy towards war production and its back-up activities. In any case, national resources had to be sternly extracted and jealously guarded for the war effort–not used to entice private industry into the campaign in pursuit of profit.17 An economy that could withstand the Great War would therefore have to be run by the state. Despite the already state-centred nature of the Tsarist system, the war still provided plenty of opportunities (and necessities) for the extension of state power. And for the most part, in the initial euphoria of the war effort, business and developmental statists were prepared to accept the state’s demands. After a one-day session on 26 July 1914, to provide the members with an opportunity to demonstrate patriotic loyalty, the Duma was prorogued. Regulations were then issued by Government departments under the state of emergency law.18 As soon as war was declared, new regulations had been announced giving the Government the right of requisition: “the compulsory acquisition from the population of all kinds of resources and also of compulsory work in cases of military necessity.” Requisition could be carried out by all commanding officers.19 The state extended its control over factories. State factories were placed under a special regime accompanied by the militarisation of labour– workers were subject to army discipline and unauthorised departures were forbidden.20 Privately owned factories were ordered to give priority to military and naval orders. If they refused, they were threatened with state sequestration (temporary nationalisation).21 There too labour discipline was intensified. Workers’ organisations were crushed and restrictions on labour mobility extended.22 Mass conscription was introduced.23 In September 1915, the government set up regional factory boards to tighten control on private enterprises. The boards were empowered to inspect books, distribute state orders, determine wage rates, remove managers and

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carry out sequestrations.24 Sequestration would result if enterprises sold defence-related goods at above the state-determined maximum price.25 The repressive powers of the state were also increased at this time. Censorship was tightened. Under martial law, the police could forbid (unconvicted) individuals from living in specified areas. Provincial governors were empowered to ban public meetings and to dismiss officials.26 The state was concerned not only about the activities, but also the attitudes of the public–and so, surveillance (“the collection of information for the purpose not of reporting the population’s collective mood, but of managing and shaping it”) was hugely expanded in the course of the war. The Interior Ministry ordered its provincial and district officials to compile monthly reports on the mood of the people.27 The spirit and ideology of state intervention and control gripped Russia, both at official and popular levels, during the war years. The chairman of the State Metal Committee (established in November 1915 to purchase metals and supply them to the defence industries) advocated “the principle that all metal … is at the sole disposal of the government … without whose agreement and organisation no one should be able to produce a single ton.”28 Zaitsev and Dolinsky wrote that state intervention in the economy was “imperatively dictated by the exigencies of the moment” and was leading towards “a complete system of governmental regulation of the economic life of the nation, on an unexpected and unprecedented scale.”29 There was, however, constant pressure on the state to do more. As we shall see, when this pressure did not produce the required results, some sections of society (the bourgeoisie and the developmental statists in the vanguard) took up the initiative themselves. This increased the pressure on the Tsarist state even further. With an eye to the methods of war organisation being put to use in Germany and Britain, the Government decided that it was not enough to regulate–it also had to organise and direct. In something of an effort to reassert its control over the war effort, in May 1915 the Government set up a Special Commission for State Defence, chaired by the War Minister and including representatives from the Duma, the State Council, as well as from business (carefully chosen from the industrialists of Petrograd rather than Moscow). A month later, a Special Council for the Improvement of Artillery Supplies was established, with similar representation.30

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In August, with “the Government itself … anxious to transfer at least some share of this responsibility to the shoulders of the representatives of the nation,” four Special Councils were set up for defence, transport, fuel and food supply.31 A fifth Special Council for the relief of refugees was added at the end of the month. The Special Councils generally included representatives from the Duma and the State Council. The Defence Council eventually added representatives from the War Industry Committees and the Unions of Zemstvos and Towns (see below). Each Council was empowered to exercise control over the enterprises in its area–monitoring management, inspecting books, requisitioning supplies and fixing prices and wages. The Defence Council (which was the most powerful) directly controlled 4900 enterprises–nearly two million workers.32 And controls did not end there. Between September 1915 and December 1916, the Ministry of Trade and Industry set up nine special committees to regulate the textile industry–“to control prices, allocate raw materials, dictate output levels to the combines and finally to fix harvest prices inside the Empire.”33 The State Council for Defence decided to sequester the Putilov armaments factory (the largest in Russia) in February 1916, on charges of incompetence and profiteering. Putilov technically remained private property, but after sequestration was run by the Main Artillery Administration and a state-controlled board. As the war continued, the Defence Council sequestered a further twenty eight enterprises.34 The Special Councils were, according to Gronsky, “an entirely new phenomenon in Russian political life”. For Zaitsev and Dolinsky, the powers of the Councils were such that the “authority [of Council chairmen] in this way acquired a dictatorial nature.”35 The Special Council on Food evolved further towards a state-run economy than the others.36 This was because food was such a vital area in terms of the survival and morale of both consumers and producers. Free market failure and the necessity of state regulation therefore became apparent at an early stage in the war. But it was also probably connected with the fact that the Agriculture Minister from September 1915 was Aleksandr Krivoshein, a Stolypin-style agrarian reformer who felt that “the war represented an opportunity to pursue the State’s agenda … he could now cast his ministry’s reformist agenda in terms of national defense.”37 Before the formation of the Special Council, the Government had committed itself to the compulsory regulation of food supply and had given special powers

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to commanders of military districts as well as to state and ministry commissioners. They were then able to prohibit the removal of food supplies if they were required by the armed forces; fix prices for sale to the armed forces; and requisition supplies at a lower price (up to fifteen percent lower) if the producers refused to sell. These powers became more draconian once the Food Council was formed. The Council could order the inspection of enterprises and books, the collection of food “by any means and on any conditions” and overrule all government and other institutions. In November 1915, the Council chairman was empowered “to prescribe throughout the empire or in any particular section of it maximum prices for the sale of food and fodder.” The Council thereafter systematically established fixed prices for oats, sugar, grains, wheat and wheat flour, hay and spring straw and tobacco. By the end of the following year, fixed prices had been extended to all food transactions.38 The Food Council was on the road to a state take-over of the food industry, and it was taking the Government with it. Zaitsev and Dolinsky conclude: It was moving irresistibly toward a State grain monopoly, driven in this direction not only by the immanent forces of the economic process, but likewise by public opinion which was inclined to regard State regulation as the only effective means of averting a catastrophe.39

This was an instance in which the views of state officials and the developmental statists in the voluntary organisations that sought to aid the war effort coincided. They were agreed, not only on state control of the industry, but on the use of coercion to force the increasingly recalcitrant producers to co-operate.40 State power was extended in another form by the increase in the political importance of the Supreme Military Headquarters, the Stavka. Just before Russia’s general mobilisation in July 1914, the Tsar approved “Regulations on the Field Administration of the Troops in Wartime”. These made the Stavka independent of both the War Minister and the civilian Government. Administration of much of the western provinces was handed over to the Stavka as a combat zone–“The central ministries in the capital were legally excluded from any direct share in the administration of the theatre [of operations], which … constituted the most important part of the country.”41 Within this area, Stavka could dismiss officials, close down educational establishments and seize private property. By 1915 it was running its own diplomatic service.42 There were

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attempts to extend Stavka’s power well beyond the combat zone, particularly when it came to questions of military supplies. These attempts were largely successful since military failure was more often than not blamed on the incompetence of the civilian Government and a shortage of powers on Stavka’s part.43 Not unnaturally, the encroaching power of the military high command, while a foreseeable consequence of the war economy, caused disquiet among the Council of Ministers. At its meetings during the summer of 1915, the Interior Minister, Prince Shcherbatov, drew attention to the “subtraction from his [the Minister’s] charge of nearly half of European Russia”. He complained that “the Minister of Internal Affairs has no voice or power there … everything is managed by the military authorities who are armed with the terrifying words–‘military necessity’.” The combat zone, he went on, was ruled by “the universal despotism of the rear-area ensigns with despotic inclinations and very little knowledge of the things they have responsibility for.” Aleksei Polivanov, the War Minister, was disturbed as well. During a discussion in August 1915, provoked by a report that the military were planning to evacuate Kiev, he reported “The plans and intentions of headquarters are unknown to me, as it is considered unnecessary to keep the Minister of War informed of the course of events.”44 Galling though this may have been to the civilian Government, it reflected a situation, common in all of the warring European powers, in which the public placed a great deal more confidence in the armed forces that in their civilian “masters”. As in the rest of Europe, the concept of “business as usual” in Russia, encouraged by the initial war-euphoria and hopes for a short war, rapidly crumbled as the probable duration of the conflict became clearer. Somewhat more slowly, the Tsarist state moved towards total mobilisation for total war. Zagorsky wrote, “By degrees the march of events forced government intervention into new spheres of action, and resulted in the State regulating not only all the industrial but all the economic life of the country.” This was, according to Gronsky, a “Military Socialism”.45 For some, this was a signpost for the future. Ya.M. Bukshpan told a conference on food supply in August 1916 that the increased importance of the state “has created a new current in the national economy and points to unheard-of possibilities for economic creativity.”46 Yet great obstacles lay in the path of a successful total mobilisation by the Tsarist state.

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The first was that the state’s progress depended on the preservation of the fragile (and, for the most part, conditional) unity of August 1914–which, in turn, depended on the state demonstrating that it was capable of winning the war (or at least defending Russia). The second was the fact that the position of the Tsarist state itself was contested. The pre-war oppositions had been temporarily disarmed by the danger, as they saw it, to Russia in 1914. If the state proved incapable of warding off that danger, forces were gathering that were prepared to take over the task themselves.

Defeats and Difficulties As early as December 1914, the French ambassador found “a profound melancholy among the public. Everyone I meet is downhearted.” He ascribed this to the evacuation of Lodz, general uncertainty over the military situation in Poland and the fear of potentially huge losses.47 One month into the war it had been discovered that, at least in terms of shells, Russia was unprepared. The state factories could not supply them in sufficient numbers.48 One of the first manifestations of actual warfare was the appearance of wounded soldiers–and even here, before the defeats that were to come, the state’s response was criticised as incompetent. The Duma president, Mikhail Rodzyanko, wrote that the Ministry of War was incapable of efficiently organising first aid, and yet would not allow any other organisation to help.49 Utro Rossii was critical of government arrangements for the wounded from the start, and kept up a constant campaign on the subject.50 After some initial military success against the Austrians, Russia faced a powerful and effective counter-attack by the Central Powers in the spring and summer of 1915. The Germans took Poland (including Warsaw), Lithuania and large parts of Belarus. The Austrians retook Galicia. As we have seen, the question of evacuating Kiev was raised and Petrograd itself was endangered. Within a five month period, Russia had a million dead and wounded–and a million taken prisoner. Such a catastrophic series of defeats convinced many Russians that, whatever the autocracy and its state were doing to win the war, they were either not doing enough of it or not doing it in the right way. The Government were quick to blame the military. In their meetings in 1915 there was a constant refrain that Stavka had “lost its head” and had

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no idea what it was doing.51 The Government itself however took no firm lead. The War Minister, Polivanov, was reduced to intoning (in August 1915), “I rely on impassable spaces, on impenetrable mud, and on the mercy of St. Nicholas, the patron of Holy Russia.”52 We have seen that, ostensibly, the state attempted to organise and direct the economy towards the war effort. But in important ways it was simply not prepared to go far enough. In food for example, Struve (who was a Zemstvo adviser and representative in the area) provides an account of the wartime industry under Tsarism that is critical of the regime for not introducing generally “a carefully devised system of State control.” His co-authors contend that the free market was unable to provide the necessary supplies but it still demanded higher and higher prices.53 Struve told a Zemstvo conference in December 1915 that “the fiction of free commerce … cannot and actually does not, exist under wartime conditions”. Instead, he demanded “a well-planned, well-reasoned harmonization of necessary measures by a governmental authority which is alive to its responsibilities and does not fear them.”54 The Kadet, Andrei Shingarev, told a meeting of the four Special Councils in September 1916, “the most correct and radical solution of the problem would be to establish a state grain monopoly.”55 But the regime drew back from radical solutions, fearful of the social forces or social unrest (or both) that they would unleash. The state’s failure to take control of the food situation was illustrated by the decision of the Commission for Combating the High Cost of Living in late December 1915 not to introduce rationing in Petrograd – not because it would cut down the amount of food available to the urban population, but because it would raise expectations of the amount of food that citizens had a right to demand!56 Even the Special Councils, with all their powers, did not fulfil the expectations that the Government (and perhaps the public) had of them. The Tsar presided over a glittering opening ceremony for them at the Winter Palace on 28 August 1915, and then promptly departed for the front to take over as supreme commander. The Councils (and, in some ways, the Government) were left to languish. The economic policy of the State remained the same. The control that was now initiated over war industry was merely of an administrative, not an economic nature. As before, the conditions of the market remained outside the scope of its control.57

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Milyukov, the Kadet leader, complained that the representation of the Duma on the Special Councils was “fictitious” in terms of control.58 Unsurprisingly then, the Special Councils did not restore public faith in either the Government or the autocracy.59 The Government also refused to fully militarise industry and labour, even though this was suggested several times by the War Minister and continued to be advocated by the “hard right” in the Council of Ministers (Shtyurmer and Maklakov) right up to the eve of the February Revolution.60 The Government’s refusal was based on the advice of the Ministry of the Interior–the danger of unrest was too great.61 But while secretly making concessions to the popular mood on the one hand, the regime would not take the public into its confidence on the other. It systematically rejected (for as long as it could) co-operation with elements of Russian society outside the charmed autocratic circle. It distrusted the voluntary organisations to such an extreme and obvious extent that Lord Milner, the head of the British mission to the Inter-Allied Conference in early 1917, felt obliged to gently admonish the Tsar, suggesting that whereas in Britain the Government had “enrolled public service volunteers to help government officials and even given these volunteers high executive posts”, by 1917 “Russia has not been able as yet [!] to use its own resources to the full”.62 In its relations with private industry (into which it was forced by the exigencies of the war effort), the regime demonstrated a similar timid conservatism. At first, it attempted to restrict its dealings to a small number of approved capitalists, mostly in Petrograd–excluding both the feared Moscow industrialists and those in the provinces.63 By late 1915, there was a concerted call from politicians, economists, food supply experts and a number of generals for the state to intervene more deeply into the national economy. Something had gone radically wrong and the only way out was through radical change. “The failure in Galicia,” said Guchkov, “forces the shake up of Russian society and government.”64 For many, that shake up meant the take over of the economy by an efficient state.65 In the absence of such an extension of state power and with defeats at the front continuing, opposition forces were returning rapidly to the conclusion, first voiced after 1905, that the autocracy was incapable of

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defending Russia. Zagorsky argued that the regime “would refuse to take measures which were dictated by the march of events and by the whole trend of its own economic policy” because of its “fear of public forces” (the voluntary organisations and their like). He concluded: “So it was that in many instances political considerations prevented the full applications of necessary measures.”66 This is certainly partly true. The regime stopped short of the kind of intervention that was necessary – taking over the food industry and other industries essential to the war effort, expanding both the powers of and representation on the Special Councils, militarising labour and including elements in planning that were outside the court and its friends–partly for fear of endangering its own position, partly for fear of the social forces that it might empower and partly for fear of unleashing unrest. “Guchkov,” reported General Knox (the British military attaché), “is thoroughly in agreement with the idea of militarization of labour, but says such a step could only be taken by a Government that possessed the confidence of the people.”67 But there was a further obstacle to the Tsarist state operating a modern war economy, and it lay in the attitude of the progressive bourgeoisie and the developmental statists. For, while they consistently advocated state intervention, they increasingly believed that only a new kind of state could properly intervene. There were doubts concerning the Tsarist state’s ability to mobilise, organise and administer an efficient war economy. This was variously ascribed to bureaucracy, incompetence and fear of the consequences. More damaging to the regime was the idea that these problems were exacerbated by a reluctance to fight the war at all.68 The bourgeoisie was more than prepared to join the rising chorus of criticism of the autocratic state for not intervening enough and not taking charge of the economy. On the other hand, how ever much the Government did, the bourgeoisie remained critical, since the extension of state power meant the strengthening of an unreformed autocracy. The dilemma was expressed by the Kadet Nikolai Astrov, to an economic conference in January 1916: It is the tragedy of Russian society that while we do not believe in those who hold power, we at the same time cannot but acknowledge that only powerful authority can save the situation.69

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Utro Rossii had also expressed the bourgeoisie’s refusal to place complete control of the economy “into the hands of those very elements whose inability to deal with the great problem of national defense has been proved.”70 The Russian bourgeoisie was prepared to take its dose of strong state medicine–but they were not prepared to take it from the Tsarist state. When the Moscow industrialists called for a more efficient industrial mobilisation for the war, they were simultaneously calling for a new kind of state. Even the Association of Industry and Trade (more influenced by the Petrograd magnates than those of Moscow) was moved to declare at its May 1915 Congress: … such a reforming role will be within the capacity not of a bureaucratic, police and class state but of an economic state, a state which not only bases itself on society but which operates through society, a state which knows how to unite all the vital forces of the people, which does not oppress but is grounded in the free individuality.71

This was why the bourgeoisie opposed a state take over of the economy. They were alarmed when the idea of the nationalisation of industry was discussed in the Council of Ministers in April 1915. When excessive profits by the oil monopolies led the Special Council on Fuel in late 1915 to propose compulsory price fixing in the industry, opening up a further debate on nationalisation, they argued strongly against it. They rejected the militarisation of labour when the Government raised the issue in August. When the Putilov works was sequestered, they disputed that as well.72 For the progressive bourgeoisie, until the autocratic state was gone (or at least substantially deprived of power), a state economic take over was neither desirable nor workable. In the meantime, Utro Rossii editorialised: It needs to be said that gradually the Government must begin to make use of the work of the industrial organisations, not as the suppliers of services, but as directive advisers, able to arrange state needs more cheaply and regularly … 73

By the beginning of 1917, the paper was demanding a new Government as the only means by which the latent energy revealed by the war could be drawn into national defence.74 When the state did not change and did not hand over economic direction to the progressive bourgeoisie’s organisations, it set about implementing its own agenda for the defence and renewal of Russia.

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A Class For Itself: the Programme of the Bourgeoisie (a) Alternative organising: the War Industry Committees Since further state intervention was needed, but the actually existing state was not trusted, the bourgeoisie stepped into the breach itself. As the Bolshevik activist Shlyapnikov put it, “the bourgeoisie decided to erase the pernicious effect of the tsar’s policy and to take over by itself the conduct of the war.”75 In the first few months, its main activities consisted of filling the gaps in the state’s war effort. As the state’s failure became more apparent, the initiatives of the bourgeoisie widened. Utro Rossii declared “It is this incompetence [of the autocracy] that has caused the present unanimous desire of all the productive forces of Russia to come to the aid of out heroic armies.” The Moscow capitalists were in the forefront of this effort.76 It would appear that the defeats in Galicia and Poland were what the bourgeoisie had expected at the hands of the Tsarist state and that these defeats prompted them to strive for a direct role in the war economy, particularly with respect to ensuring that the armed forces had access to adequate military supplies. Ultimately they aspired to direct the war economy. In May 1915, Utro Rossii called for the reorganisation and centralisation of industry under one All-Russian directing body, drawn from the representatives of existing industrial organisations.77 As the Russian armies were being beaten back in May 1915, the Association of Industry and Trade prepared to hold its ninth congress in Petrograd. Originally, this was planned very much as a business-as-usual affair, concentrating more on industry’s problems than on the war-induced crisis of the state.78 The progressive bourgeoisie however had other ideas. On the opening day, Utro Rossii demanded an abandonment of businessas-usual in favour of urgent consideration of the current situation.79 On the second day, Ryabushinskii spoke, hot foot from the front. He successfully proposed that the bourgeoisie should attempt to take charge of the war effort itself by organising “War Industry Committees” (WICs) in the large industrial centres, that would mobilise industry and undertake to supply the armed forces.80 The congress thereupon scrapped its previous agenda and voted to establish the Central WIC – based in Petrograd, but dominated by the Moscow bourgeoisie.81 Moscow’s influence over the WICs strengthened over the next few months. The first All-Russian congress of the committees in July 1915 saw something of a confrontation between Petrograd (which, after all, was the home of the Association that had given birth to the WICs) and Moscow, a confrontation that was decisively settled in favour of the latter. Guchkov became the president of

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the Central WIC, with Konovalov as his deputy, while Ryabushinskii assumed the presidency of the Moscow committee.82 Utro Rossii, mouthpiece of the Moscow bourgeoisie, maintained a strong interest in and defence of the committees.83 The committees spread, both geographically and in the scope of the operations to which they aspired. Ryabushinskii told the Moscow WIC in June 1915 that the committees should not just be transmitting Government orders to industry–it was necessary for them to organise production as well. While the Moscow bourgeoisie was the leading element in the WICs, they also called on experts–scientists, engineers, statisticians, the technical staffs of town and zemstvo councils–to join in, with some considerable success.84 In this can be seen the merging of interests between the progressive bourgeoisie and the emerging new state. Slowly and reluctantly, the Government was forced to extend begrudging recognition to the WICs. As we have noted, the committees were eventually given limited representation on the Special Councils. In September 1915, the Government issued a set of regulations under which the WICs were to work. These granted them a measure of autonomy: “The composition, resources, relations [with other institutions] and activities of the Central WIC are determined by the committee itself.” They also gave the Central, regional and local WICs “the right to take over every kind of movable and unmovable property …”.85 However, as the work of the committees expanded, so did the regime’s suspicion and distrust of their motivations. The war demanded ever more efforts from industry, well beyond the capacities of the autocracy’s favoured Petrograd business interests. The Government was therefore forced to rely on the WIC network–a reliance that alarmed the tsarist state by increasing the prestige and importance of an alternative state structure.86 The Communications Minister, Sergei Rukhlov, told the Government on 9 September 1915: One should take notice that Guchkov is transforming his committee into some kind of second government, making it a focus of public organisation and attracting the workers. A revolutionary organ is being formed under the very nose of the government, and it doesn’t even find it necessary to hide its aims.87

The Government began to reconsider the right of the WICs to representation on the Special Councils.

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(b) Alternative vision: the future economy The pressures of the war did not make the progressive bourgeoisie abandon its plans for economic development in Russia–plans that it hoped could be implemented in post-war and post-autocratic circumstances. In fact, the experience of organising during the war had the effect of renewing the confidence of the bourgeoisie in its own efforts and (as elsewhere in Europe) enhancing the prestige of the alternative state formations as a model of efficient economic organisation. The renewed spirit of bourgeois confidence was not confined to Moscow– it infected even the Association of Industry and Trade. The Association’s journal, Promyshlennost’ i Torgovlya declared four months after the formation of the WICs: Russian capital has shown itself to be a social force–not a cosmopolitan force, but a national one, realising not only its own interests but its duties to the motherland.88

The Association maintained that the main aim of the WICs was “to promote the consolidation of the power of the commercial-industrial class” and to take over the organisation of the national economy.89 Ryabushinskii told his new organisation, the All-Russian Union of Industry and Trade (see next chapter) that the bourgeoisie would have to be better organised after the war in order to take an even more active and constructive role in Russian economic life.90 Utro Rossii continually asserted the right of the bourgeoisie to lead. According to articles in September 1915, they were “the leading column in the outposts of Russian political life.” The paper went on, “According to the ‘timetable of history’, a moment has come when the will of the commercial-industrial class must lead state construction.”91 This view was not confined to the bourgeoisie. Gvozdev, a Menshevik and eventually the chairman of the Central WIC workers’ group, declared that “we stand on the eve of a bourgeois revolution”, and that therefore the purpose of his group was to “nudge the bourgeoisie forward in its timorous struggle for power.” To this end, the Central WIC workers’ group demanded that the committee, as representatives of the bourgeoisie, should assume political power with the support of the workers.92 The post-war economic vision of the bourgeoisie had turned in a decidedly statist direction. Promyshlennost’ i Torgovlya announced in January 1916

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that “the realm of private interests, striving toward maximal personal advantage, must end … a new era is at hand in which the interests of the state and society are triumphant.”93 At its core was to be the preservation of the WICs as an instrument of economic organisation and construction.94 The WICs would strive, as their second congress put it in early 1916, “to introduce the organizational idea into the chaos of Russian economic reality”. From 1916 onwards, the Association called for a state economic plan, something for which it believed there was considerable public support. “This plan,” declared Promyshlennost’ i Torgovlya, “must embrace all aspects of our economic life …It must determine the entire future economic policy of Russia.”95 The position of the urban workers in Russia’s development was also a matter of interest for the bourgeoisie. The businessman, leading Progressist and deputy chairman of the Central WIC, Konovalov, was the most forceful in taking up this question. He told Moscow industrialists in September 1916 that only the patriotism of the workers prevented them from an onslaught against the ruling order. He predicted that, unless steps were taken–of an inclusive, not a repressive nature–the external war would be followed by an internal war which would lead to anarchy. He saw the WICs as the centre of planned change, of post war reconstruction and of healing the rift with the working class.96 Utro Rossii was similarly concerned with the workers’ mood, especially in view of an expected post war recession.97 The aim of the bourgeoisie, through the WICs, was to come to some sort of understanding with organised labour–for the two sides to construct a system of industrial relations. This would be vital to a new bourgeois social order. To this end, the central WIC decided to invite organised working class participation in the committees. This decision was, it seems, the brain child of Konovalov.98 As it turned out, WIC workers’ groups were only consistently operated by the Central WIC and by the committees in Petrograd, Moscow and Kiev. Their establishment in these centres, however, was a considerable achievement–carving out a democratic space (albeit a temporary one) within the brittle shell of Tsarist repression. The experience in Petrograd was particularly significant. There, the Central WIC arranged democratic elections for the workers’ representatives to the committee. Despite a boycott by the Bolshevik wing and part of the Menshevik wing of the Social Democrats, “the election campaign,” according to Seigelbaum, “… was an unprecedented phenomenon in Russia … not since the beginning of the war could workers so openly meet

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to discuss political questions.”99 In other words, one of the first exercises in real democracy in Russia was organised, in defiance of the autocratic state, by the bourgeoisie. For some of them, this was by no means enough. Again, with a view to the future organisation and development of the economy, Konovalov and Guchkov supported the campaign, launched by the Central WIC workers’ group in December 1915, for the convocation of an All-Russian workers’ congress. Konovalov envisaged such a congress establishing an AllRussian workers’ union which, in his words, would send delegates to “some kind of Soviet of workers’ deputies.” Guchkov looked forward to the take over of state functions by an alliance of the workers’ organisation, the WICs and the voluntary organisations (in the first place, the Unions of Towns and Zemstvos).100 The workers’ congress campaign was approved by the second congress of the WICs in February 1916.

(c) Alternative system: political change Any hope that the exigencies of war would force meaningful political reform on the autocracy did not last long. For the bourgeoisie, the lack of such reform now stood in the way of the war effort. “It is to be remembered,” Konovalov told the WIC second congress, “that the problem of organisation in the rear is also a problem of the organisation of power.”101 Ryabushinskii was eloquent (and carefully reported by the secret police) on the bungling and inactivity of the regime which “is leading the country to destruction, incapable as it was of organising the country for victory. It was necessary for ‘society’ to take power into its own hands.” Efremov, the Progressist leader in the Duma, appealed to the Progressive Bloc in late 1916: “Brothers, overthrow this government.”102 From 1915, the Progressists continually demanded the introduction of political liberties. In March that year they started agitating for an emergency Duma session to discuss and act on the deteriorating military situation. Utro Rossii began a campaign in May for a new Government, responsible to the Duma. Such a Government was not just required for victory but to bring about bourgeois participation in state construction. Initially these demands were rejected by the Kadets as too radical. Milyukov described them as “the realization of a parliamentary system, that is a sort of revolution”. The ongoing crisis however, pushed the Kadets into a more sympathetic position.103

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In June 1915, combining their concerns and demands on the war effort with those for political reform, the Progressists put forward a reorganisation plan based on a Committee of State Defence (made up of leading Duma representatives) that would run the country, directly responsible to the Tsar – and therefore bypassing the Government entirely.104 Needless to say, this plan remained on paper. The Progressive Bloc, formed by most of the Duma parties in August 1915, demanded extensive political reform. Its programme (which, according to Milyukov, “had come out rather radical”)105 called for a Government of public confidence, freedom of association, the right to form trade unions, the release of political prisoners, the abolition of discrimination against Jews and autonomy for Poland.106 By this stage, Utro Rossii had begun publishing helpful lists of proposed alternative Governments.107 The Progressists were very active in the Progressive Bloc, taking into it both the mandate and the programme of the WICs (with which they were closely associated), demanding power based on popular representation, abolition of religious and national restrictions, a workers’ congress and a minimum wage.108 On 16 August 1915, representatives of the WICs and the voluntary organisations (including Prince L’vov, Ryabushinskii and some prominent Kadets) met under the auspices (and in the apartment) of Konovalov in Moscow. They resolved to establish connections between all the ‘social organisations’ across the empire and to launch a campaign for a Government of public confidence. This began with a resolution introduced two days later into the Moscow Duma.109 The Interior Minister, Shcherbatov, reported on the Konovalov meeting to the Council of Ministers: “The mood was most warlike, but under a patriotic flag.” He had demanded the Moscow Duma not consider the resolution – but “I am afraid that the Council will go ahead anyway.”110 Which it did–and passed the motion.

The New State Emerges The bourgeoisie was not alone in its attempts to save the failing war effort. In response to the Tsarist state’s inadequacies, a number of voluntary, nonstate organisations emerged, at first in an effort to supplement state activities, but increasingly substituting themselves for state institutions. Most prominent among these were the Union of Zemstvos and the Union of Towns–limited local organs of rural and urban government, established

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in the era of reforms that followed defeat in the Crimean War. The two organisations had assisted with the wounded and evacuated during the Russo-Japanese war and so it was only natural that they should step up to play the same sort of role in 1914. In August, the Moscow provincial zemstvo initiated the process that led to the formation of the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos, which the Government approved. The Union’s High Commissioner was Prince Georgii L’vov.111 Meanwhile, members of the Duma had also met and established a Provisional Committee for the Relief of Wounded and Sick Soldiers.112 From its inception, the Zemstvo Union continually extended the scope of its work. As L’vov wrote later, “In every direction the zemstvos were ready to go much further than was intended by the law”–a tendency which, he noted, the Government “deemed dangerous”.113 It was a tendency that had its own momentum. The Unions’ aid to the wounded extended to general welfare work. This soon included the welfare of refugees and those evacuated–and welfare was extended to food, clothing and housing. The latter raised the question of the production of these necessities– bringing the Unions into contact and collaboration with the WICs. The influence of the Unions increased correspondingly. Whereas, as we have seen, the Government was excluded from the war zone, the Unions were not. In September 1914, according to Gronsky, the Union of Towns “crossed the line that separated the country in the rear from the area of military operations, and came to the relief of sick and wounded soldiers in the actual trenches.” This laid the basis for strong ties between the voluntary organisations (the Unions and other non-state groups) in general and the military.114 By 1916, the Unions were major national organisations, controlling 8000 affiliated institutions, including 2000 enterprises producing military supplies.115 In June 1915, the Unions united in Zemgor, a central committee to supply and equip the army, headed by Prince L’vov and the Kadet Mayor of Moscow, Mikhail Chelnokov.116 The spirit of the voluntary organisations in the early years of the war was expressed by Evgenii Trubetskoi, a leading Kadet, when he wrote that “Everyone believes in victory and no one believes in the government.”117 On its part, the Government attitude towards the voluntary organisations ranged from contradictory to downright obstructive. It had allowed the formation of All-Russian organisations and used them to supplement the war effort–but it was extremely distrustful of the motives of those involved. A combination of need and fear produced the situation described by Gurko:

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The government’s attitude toward the All-Russian Zemstvo Union was incomprehensible. On the one hand, it treated the union with utter, complete and sometimes open distrust; and, on the other, it supplied it with tens of thousands of rubles and exercised no control over their expenditure.118

In times of crisis, the Government turned to the Union in desperation. But once the crisis had passed, Government officials would remember that the voluntary organisations were only mandated to help sick and wounded soldiers and would resume obstructing their work. The chairman of the Council of Ministers, Boris Shtyurmer, declared in 1916 that if the Unions were allowed to operate unimpeded, “Russia would have two governments, of which the public one would be independent not only of governmental authority, but also in general of the state.”119 Examples of a nervous Government trying to halt the spread of the voluntary organisations’ activities abound. In late 1914, Rodzyanko (president of the Duma) wanted to convene a conference of local government heads to organise the provision of boots for the army. The Interior Minister (Maklakov), who had heard about the plan from his agents, wrote to Rodzyanko as follows: According to the information of my agents, the congress to take up the needs of the army has for its real object to discuss political questions and demand a constitution.120

And the conference was prohibited. The Union of Towns’ congress in September 1915 accused the Government of placing “fatal obstacles in the path of final victory”, while L’vov wrote late that “even now, in time of war, the old policy of obstruction was not abandoned by the Government without a struggle.”121 But abandoned it had to be. The Tsarist state simply had neither the capacity nor the popular support (after late 1914) to carry on the war effort by itself, and therefore it was forced, with increasing frequency, to call up the efforts of the voluntary organisations.122 The fears of the state about the increasingly politicised nature of the voluntary organisations were by no means misplaced. The more obstructive the Government became, the more the voluntary organisations’ work became a political question, and the more they were prepared to seek both public support for that work and channels through which that support could be expressed. The course of the war pushed them in the same direction. “We do not fight,” L’vov told the Zemstvo Union congress in

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September 1915, “nor have we now any need to fight for the right of participating in the work of the nation. The facts themselves are now handing over that work to us …”.123 As with the bourgeoisie, the impetus for national unity had not so much run out as changed direction. The voluntary organisations felt that Russia would only be defended and preserved if the war could be used to shake up and reform the political system. “Our country is longing not only for the resumption of peaceful existence, but for the reorganization of that existence,” L’vov told the congress.124 There was then, a natural progression from the voluntary organisations’ non-state welfare work to political agitation. “Even Prince L’vov’s strictly business organization was being penetrated by political attitudes,” wrote Milyukov in his memoirs.125 All welfare work was similarly affected. The Duma’s Provisional Committee for the Relief of Wounded and Sick Soldiers, formed in August 1914, resolved to meet twice a week and was soon regularly discussing current problems and political questions.126 The real turning point–the point at which the struggle against Tsarism was fully resumed–came in the summer and autumn of 1915. In June, at their respective Congresses, both the Kadets and the Unions of Towns and Zemstvos put forward the demand for the convocation of the Duma and the formation of a Government of public confidence.127 The voluntary organisations gathered at a conference on the high cost of living in Moscow in July 1915 and expressed their disappointment that “The expectation that there would be a transformation in the organs of Government was not realized.” They demanded more vigorous mobilisation, an “act of conciliation” from the regime, as well as a Government of national confidence.128 According to a perceptive operative of the Moscow secret police, it was from this point that legal struggle against the autocracy resumed in earnest.129 Shortly afterwards, the Kadets declared that “the Government, as now composed, had proved unequal to the task of organizing the rear.”130 It was a short step from pointing out the regime’s inadequacies as far as the war effort was concerned to accusing it of not wanting to organise for victory. Sure enough, in September 1915, a meeting of voluntary organisation representatives, Duma members, Guchkov and Konovalov at the house of the Moscow mayor agreed on the “treason” of the Government. According to the secret police once again, the meeting concluded that the Government would attempt to drive a wedge between

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the armed forces and the people. It would then conclude a separate peace and use the army to put down internal unrest.131 This not only put Government obstruction in a different light (treason rather than ineptitude) but also increased the urgent necessity for reform–both for victory and self-preservation. As to the reach of that reform, the opposition was still divided over how radical it had to be. The Kadets were split. Their leader, Milyukov, maintained that radical change (the overthrow of the monarchy, for example) in the middle of a war would be a criminal adventure and lead to Russian defeat. His radical opponents (most prominently Nikolai Nekrasov and Mikhail Mandel’shtam) believed that Russia could only be saved from military defeat by radical political change.132 The voluntary organisations were dominated by the so-called ‘Third Element’, the employed experts of the zemstvos: “Doctors, engineers, teachers, statisticians, agronomists, veterinary surgeons, all the educated men and women who worked in the zemstvos, not as elected representatives of the population, but as hired employees … considered by the bureaucrats as a particularly dangerous element …”133 The Third Element numbered some 85,000 by 1912, often from peasant backgrounds.134 They had changed from “a passive auxiliary into an independent, active political force within the zemstvos”.135 Their mission was to convert the zemstvo into an agency of change. As Lenin had put it in 1901: … if unsubmissive economic development persistently undermines the foundations of the estates [on which tsarism rested] by the very growth of capitalism and gives rise to the need for “intellectuals” … then it must be expected that the third element will strive to break out of its narrow confines.136

The technological demands of industrial warfare (machinery, organisation, planning–to name but a few) increased the importance of experts of all kinds. Their natural benefactor was an interventionist state–but in the Russian case, the actual state regarded them with intense suspicion. The Third Element became a crucial part of the opposition to the regime as well as the nucleus of a state that would replace it. Members of the element in the Moscow provincial zemstvo resolved after the declaration of war to meet once a month “to coordinate the activities of the third element.” Struve (a prominent representative of the element) wrote to Lord

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Milner in early 1917 that “In the present conflict all the best elements of the bureaucracy are on the side of the people.”137 Expertise had also become increasingly important in the armed forces, which seem to have spawned a Third Element of their own. Technically proficient middle-ranking officers, as well as military administrators, were aghast at the regime’s conduct of the war and began to be seen in opposition circles.138 The leaders of the voluntary organisations wanted military support for their political aims and generally backed the military against the Government. They were able to make their appeals to the armed forces since the nature of their work brought them into close contact with all levels of the military. In its declaration at the opening of the Duma in November 1916, the Progressive Bloc included an address to the army and navy.139 The appeal of the opposition was perhaps increased for the middle ranks of the armed forces by their changing social composition. Due to the rapid depletion of the officer corps under fire, it was being “deautocratised” by an influx of non-aristocratic elements.140 Just as the work of the WICs renewed the confidence of the bourgeoisie, that of the voluntary organisations strengthened the resolve of the new state elements to rule. L’vov told the Zemstvo Union “This war has equipped the forces of the public with all kinds of organs for performing the tasks of the State … We have already abandoned the position of mere passive objects of government.” And in a pamphlet on the work of the Union, published in 1917, he wrote that “The Union’s work has acquired all the significance of State work, for State work it really is.”141 Zemstvo leaders advocated the compulsory mobilisation of industry, “extending the principle of regulation to all significant branches of the economy.” Some Zemstvo organisations, perhaps precipitately adopting the trappings of a new state, tried to collect information on the mood of the population. The political representatives of this trend, the Kadets, were consistent proponents of a new, strong state to renovate Russian society.142 Holquist notes that “Educated society came to idolize the state as an ideal in its own right and an instrument for achieving all its own fondest dreams.”143 A victorious end to the war necessitated a new state, populated by the voluntary organisations, the WICs and the experts, engineers and technocrats in both civilian and military spheres.

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The Autocracy Defends Itself Despite considerable division in the Government over how to react to the opposition’s campaign (some of the more liberal ministers wanted to come to an agreement with the Progressive Bloc, the voluntary organisations and the Duma), the Tsar decided that the drift away from autocratic power had gone far enough. He counter attacked. The advice of liberal ministers was ignored. The Duma was closed at the beginning of September 1915 and Nicholas bunkered down in the more congenial company of selected army commanders and court favourites. In response, Konovalov and Efremov (for the Progressists) wanted the Duma to continue sitting and appeal for public support. Ryabushinskii and Poplavskii (director of the Moscow Society of Factory and Mill Owners) suggested a strike by the public organisations. Workers’ strikes did break out in Moscow, at first on economic grounds, but eventually adding to their demands one for the resumption of Duma activities.144 The reassertion of autocratic authority however continued. The Duma’s right to approve taxation was withdrawn. A new Duma session was promised for November, then cancelled and then postponed indefinitely. It was rumoured that, once the war ended, the regime would revoke the 1906 constitution and reintroduce untrammelled autocracy.145 The government cracked down on the WICs. Already, WIC leaders were being shadowed by the secret police and had their telephone calls tapped. Now the Government began to reduce the scale of the committees’ operations. They were excluded from deliberations on food policy. Military supply departments were advised to by-pass the WICs. A campaign to discredit the committees among the public was begun. Within a year, the committees were at a low ebb–their orders were reduced, their credit cut off and their congresses banned (as were those of the voluntary organisations). The Government proceeded to arrest the members of the WIC workers’ groups in January 1917, first in Moscow and then in Petrograd and Samara.146 When WIC representatives nevertheless met in Petrograd in early 1917, the police ordered them to disperse. They resolved to call on the WICs and voluntary organisations “not to lose courage and to devote all their strength in the common struggle for the honour and freedom of the country.”147

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The bourgeoisie and the voluntary organisations were now convinced that that honour and freedom had to be defended against the Tsarist regime itself. As noted above, the charge of treason had been hurled at the autocracy–and the idea that elements of the regime were working towards a separate peace with Germany seized the popular imagination. “It seemed as if the ministers were working purposely against Russia and in favour of Germany,” wrote Rodzyanko, “The Government and the Empress lead Russia toward a separate peace, to shame, and into the arms of Germany.”148 Struve reported to Lord Milner in February 1917 that “the persons who stand nearest to the Crown are pro-German in their sympathies. This view cannot now be uprooted from the public mind by any mere words.” Lenin himself believed that “There is a pro-German party in Russian ‘governing circles’ …”.149 For the purposes of this discussion, it matters little whether the autocracy, or part of it, were actually pursuing this path.150 It was the popular perception that was important–and that was a manifestation of the popular realisation that the Tsarist system could not (or would not) defend Russia.151 “Russia is in mortal danger,” the Progressist Aleksandr Bryanchaninov told the French ambassador, “… The German poison that she has carried in her body already for two centuries threatens to kill her. She can be rescued only at the price of a national revolution.”152 The position of the progressive bourgeoisie and of the new statists became increasingly radical. A clear distinction began to be drawn between the “national” interest of Russia (which we might interpret as the constant need to defend and develop its productive forces) and the sectional interests of the autocracy (the temporary nature of its political arrangements). The former had to be defended at the expense of the latter. Having advocated victorious war as a means of bringing about reform, the bourgeoisie and new statists now believed that only reform of the most radical kind would bring about victory. Ryabushinskii told the Duma on 25 January 1917 that only a change in both the Government and the political system could alleviate the crisis, conclude the war victoriously and set the economy right.153 Utro Rossii’s new year slogan for 1917 was “victory over the enemies of the new Russia–at the front and at home.”154 The Union of Towns congress declared (the previous October), “power should not remain in the hands of those who are unable to resist secret influences, who refuse to struggle against influences hostile to Russia, and who cannot organise the resources of the country for the War.”155 The Octobrist, Nikanor Savich believed that:

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If events continue to evolve with this tragic necessity as they have developed so far, then the moment approaches when we will be able to demand everything, and we can be assured that we will be given everything.156

Various “palace coup” plans were circulated, with the support of the armed forces. Speaking to the Duma in January 1917, General Krymov said, “The feeling in the army is such that all will greet with joy the news of a coup d’etat … Should you decide to do this, we will support you.”157 Aleksei Putilov, the Petrograd industrialist, told Paleologue, “The days of Tsarism are numbered; it is lost, lost beyond hope”. But he warned, “from the bourgeois revolution, we shall at once descend to the working class revolution and soon after that to the peasant revolution. And then will begin the most frightful anarchy …”158 No matter what fears lay in store–whether from an insurgent peasantry, a socialist-inclined working class or a state beyond their control–the Russian bourgeoisie was prepared to accept a “revolution from above.” The prerequisite for this was that the “above”–the state–had to be changed. But this was not the nineteenth century German bourgeoisie scuttling back to its profit-and-loss sheets, leaving it to a new Government to complete the revolution for on its behalf. The experiences of war and their faith in topdown reform pushed the Russian bourgeoisie to accept a strong, postTsarist state. The interests of the bourgeoisie made them stake a considerable claim in the new political dispensation.159 That claim would eventually place the bourgeoisie and the new state at odds with each other.

Notes 1

A.J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 415. For a similar view see F.A. Gaida, “Fevral’ 1917 goda: revolyutsiya, vlast’, burzhuaziya,” Voprosy Istorii, 3 (1996): 31-45. Ziva Galili argues that “Russia’s commercial-industrial sector entered the revolution much fragmented and lacking a nationally recognised leadership.” On the same page however, she states that the war had seen “the rise of a new potential leadership from within the commercial-industrial sector dedicated to a vision of … ‘industrial progressivism’.” (Z. Galili, “Commercial-Industrial Circles in Revolution: The Failure of ‘Industrial Progressivism’,” in Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, ed. E.R. Frankel et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 190. 2 C. Hill, “A Bourgeois Revolution?” in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 ed. J.G.A Pocock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 128.

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K. Kautsky, The Road to Power: political reflections on growing into the revolution (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1996 [1909]), 2. See also Hill: “Nobody, then, willed the English Revolution: it happened. But if we look at its outcome … what emerged was a state in which the administrative organs that most impeded capitalist development had been abolished …” (Bourgeois Revolution? 134). 4 It is not the purpose of this chapter to dissect the complex workings of bourgeois, moderate or liberal political groups and personalities. As I am attempting to demonstrate, the bourgeois revolution does not depend on such machinations, but on more elemental forces. What the chapter tries to show is the general movement of the progressive bourgeoisie, together with elements of a new state, towards confrontation with the autocracy. 5 This is, of course, Trotsky’s argument, and that of many a Bolshevik and Soviet historian after him-for example P. A. Zaionchkovsky, for whom the bourgeoisie was “dependent” on Tsarism (P.A. Zaionchkovsky, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, ed. and trans. Susan Wobst (Florida: Academic International Press, 1978), 1; P.A. Zaionchkovskii, “Capitalism and the ‘Prussian Path’ of Agricultural Development,” in Emancipation of the Russian Serfs, ed. Terence Emmons (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 102-3). It was a useful argument for Soviet historiography since it permitted the identification of all the upper elements of imperial Russian society–the Tsar, the court, the bourgeoisie and the landowners–as one reactionary mass, against whom it was legitimate to make a “socialist” revolution. The contradictory Soviet argument maintained that even though the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak and pro-Tsarist to make its own bourgeois revolution, nevertheless the February revolution was “bourgeois”-so that October could be satisfactorily “socialist”. One is reminded of Plekhanov’s remark on the Narodniks: “References to the weakness or complete absence of the bourgeoisie give the answer to all the most difficult questions of the past, present and future.” (G.V. Plekhanov, “Our Differences”, Selected Philosophical Works, Volume 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 291.) 6 Karl Marx, “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution,” Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/12/10.htm. 7 Kautsky, Road to Power, 3. 8 G.W. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia (New York: Arno Press, 1970 [1923]), 220; G.M. Paleologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 123. Buchanan reported to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey: “Count Witte is of course well known to be one of those who consider that it should be a fundamental principle of Russia’s foreign policy to establish the closest possible links with Germany.” (D.C.B. Lieven , ed., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print; Part I, Series A – Russia, 1859-1914. Volume 6, 1910-1914 (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1983), Document Number 174, 379). 9 Durnovo in F.A. Golder ed. Documents of Russian History, 1914-1917 (Gloucester, Mass.: Smith, 1964), 8-11, 19, 21.

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10 So for example, Golovin tells us that 96% of those subject to military service reported for duty at the outbreak. However, he quotes the chairman of the Duma Military Commission, Colonel Engelhardt: “Even in the beginning I did not think that a certain access of patriotism, which at the moment of the declaration of war developed among the people of the capital, was any measure of the actual attitude of the nation … I felt from the beginning that the Russian peasant served unwillingly.” (N.M. Golovin, The Russian Army in World War I (Hamden: Archon Books, 1969 [1931]), 122 &202). 11 Utro Rossii, number 179, 3 August 1914, 2. 12 See F.A. Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya na Putyakh k Vlasti (1914-vesna 1917 g.) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), 52; L.H. Siegelbaum, “Moscow Industrialists and the War-Industries Committees during World War 1.” Russian History/Histoire Russe V Part 1 (1978), 65; R.A. Roosa, “Russian Industrialists Look to the Future: thoughts on economic development, 1906-17,” in Essays in Russian and Soviet History in honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, edited by J.S. Curtiss (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1965), 213. 13 Utro Rossii, number 179, 3 August 1914, 2. 14 “Neither left nor right,” Utro Rossii, 20 July 1914 in V.S. Dyakin, Russkaya Burzhuaziya i Tsarizm v godu pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914-1917) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1967), 61; Utro Rossii, number 182, 6 August 1914, 1; number 190, 15 August 1914, 1. 15 Utro Rossii, number 179, 3 August 1914, 2; number 182, 6 August 1914, 1. 16 S.O. Zagorsky, State Control of Industry in Russia During the War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), 75. 17 “No economy relying purely on market forces will of itself acquire the characteristics of a [war] economy; this pattern of priorities can be imposed only by planning and direction on the part of a State.” (W.M. Stern, “Wehrwirtschaft: A German Contribution to Economics,” Economic History Review XIII 2 (1960): 276.) 18 G. Katkov, Russia 1917: The February Revolution (London: Longmans, 1967), 4. Gronsky describes this, together with the Tsar’s personal rule, as a “peculiar revival of the autocracy”. It should be noted however, that he was under the impression that Russia was a “constitutional monarchy” after October 1905 (P.P. Gronskii, ed., The War and the Russian Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929), 3 & 27). 19 Zagorsky, State Control, 77. 20 P. Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: a social and economic history (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 25. 21 Zagorsky, State Control, 77. 22 Siegelbaum, L.H. “The Workers’ Groups and the War-Industries Committees: Who Used Whom?” Russian Review XXXIX 2 (April 1980): 153. 23 Although, as Gatrell points out, this was something of a double-edged sword as far as the regime was concerned: “Mass conscription implied a different relationship between the state and its subjects. A degree of reciprocity entered the

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equation whereby, in return for service, soldiers and the soldatki expected support from the state.” (Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 80) 24 Siegelbaum, Moscow Industrialists, 81. 25 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 94. 26 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 87. 27 P. Holquist, “‘Information is the Alpha and the Omega of our Work’: Bolshevik surveillance in its pan-European context,” Journal of Modern History LXIX 3 (September 1997): 245; P. Holquist, “What’s so Revolutionary about the Russian Revolution? State Practices and the New-Style Politics, 1914-21,” in Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices ed. D.L. Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 2000), 92-3. 28 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 112. 29 Zaitsev K.I. & N.V. Dolinsky, “Organization and Policy,” in Food Supply in Russia During the World War, ed. P.B. Struve (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 3. See also Gronskii, War and Government, 26; W.G. Rosenberg, “The Problem of Market Relations and the State in Revolutionary Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History XXXVI (1994): 365. 30 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 90; O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London: Pimlico, 1997), 273. 31 Government transferring reponsibility: Gronskii, War and Government, 41. On the Special Councils, see Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 91; L.H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia: a study of the War-Industries Committees (Hong Kong: St Antony’s/Macmillan), 1983, 78; Gronskii, War and Government, 34. The president of the Duma, Rodzyanko, claimed the Special Councils as his own scheme (Rodzyanko’s Memoirs in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 89). The Duma had discussed such Councils in June (Zaitsev and Dolinsky, Organization & Policy, 10). 32 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 93-7. 33 C. Ward, “The Textile Industries,” in From Tsarism to the N.E.P.: continuity and change in the economy of the USSR, ed. R.W. Davies (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990), 164. 34 Grant, J.A. Big Business in Russia: the Putilov Company in late imperial Russia, 1868-1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 115-125. 35 Gronskii, War and Government, 42; Zaitsev and Dolinsky, Organization & Policy, 12. 36 The regulation of food supply during the war is the special study of Peter Holquist in P. Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s continuum of crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 2002. 37 Holquist, Making War, 19. Other “Stolypinite” agricultural specialists also held this view-see A. Stanziani, “Specialistes, Bureaucrates et Paysans: les Approvisionnements Agricoles pendant la Premiere Guerre Mondiale, 1914-1917,” Cahiers du Monde Russe XXXVI 1-2 (January-June 1995): 72. 38 Zaitsev and Dolinsky, Organization & Policy, 7, 11-12, 41-44, 54-56. 39 Zaitsev and Dolinsky, Organization & Policy, 88-89.

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40 Holquist, Making War, 22; Rosenberg, The Problem of Market Relations, 367; Figes, Tragedy, 299. 41 D.W. Graf, “Military Rule behind the Russian front: the political ramifications,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas XXII 3 (1974): 390-2. 42 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 28-9. 43 Katkov, Russia 1917, 37; N. Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), 197. 44 A.N. Yakhontov, Prologue to Revolution: notes of A.N. Yakhontov on the secret meetings of the Council Of Ministers, 1915, ed. M. Cherniavsky (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 100, 27, 147. 45 Zagorsky, State Control, 88; Gronskii, War and Government, 42. 46 Cited in L.T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press), 1990, 26. 47 Paleologue, Memoirs I, 218. 48 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 24. 49 Rodzyanko in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 82. 50 For example, see: Utro Rossii, number 201, 26 August 1914, 1. 51 This is stated twice during the first few minutes of the Council of Ministers’ meeting on 30 July 1915 (Yakhontov, Prologue, 36 & 38). 52 Yakhontov, Prologue, 45. 53 Zaitsev and Dolinsky, Organization & Policy, 6 & 162. 54 Zaitsev and Dolinsky, Organization & Policy, 48-49; Stanziani, Specialistes, 756. 55 Cited in Lih, Bread and Authority, 29. 56 “The Commission did not consider it possible for the Government to guarantee such continuous and adequate supply of the population out of the resources of the State …” (Zaitsev and Dolinsky, Organization & Policy, 161). 57 Zagorsky, State Control, 85. 58 T.Riha, “Miliukov and the Progressive Bloc in 1915: a study in last-chance politics,” Journal Of Modern History XXXII 1 (March 1960): 20. 59 Gronskii, War and Government, 120. 60 V.Ya. Laverychev, Tsarizm i rabochii vopros v Rossii, 1861-1917 gg (Moscow: Mysl’, 1972), 270-294. 61 Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 122. The alternative state had no such qualms. Solzhenitsyn, in November 1916, has the Kadet, Shingarev, declare: “Labour conscription is an inevitable stage in the course of events. It’s a universal requirement of modern war, compelling us to deviate from the ideal of freedom. Even if a government enjoying society’s confidence is set up tomorrow, it will be forced to do the same thing!” (A. Solzhenitsyn, November 1916: the Red Wheel, Knot II (London: Penguin, 1998), 289) 62 Milner’s memorandum to the Tsar in Katkov, Russia 1917, 228. His lordship further demonstrated the Allies’ confidence in the regime by suggesting that all further special equipment sent to Russia by the Allies should be accompanied by technicians from the supplying countries, “only … to satisfy ourselves that the

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military supplies which we are giving to Russia are transmitted in full to their destination …”. 63 R. Pearson, The Russian Moderates and the Crisis of Tsarism, 1914-1917 (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1977), 34; Stone, Eastern Front, 160; J.L. West “The Fate of Merchant Moscow,” in Merchant Moscow: images of Russia’s vanished bourgeoisie, ed. J.L. West & I.A. Petrov (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 174. 64 V.I. Startsev, Russkaya burzhuaziya i samoderzhavie v 1905-1917 gg. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1977), 148. 65 Solzhentisyn’s ‘Shingarev’ again: “War is nothing but coercion, and there’s no getting around it, we shall be drawn into the sort of ‘war socialism’ that has taken over Germany. Grains, sugar, tea, kerosene, everything will have to be brought under central control if we’re to get through the war.” (Solzhenitsyn, November 1916, 288) 66 Zagorsky, State Control, 236. 67 A.W.F. Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914-1917 (New York: Arno Press, 1971 [1921]), 526. 68 “The public regarded the Government as an institution that was alien, and might even be hostile, to the aims it [i.e. the public] was pursuing in the work of national defense.” (Zagorsky, State Control, 236). See also Rosenberg, The problem of Market Relations, 368.) 69 Cited in Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 122. As Shlyapnikov put it, “… the policy of barbarian tsarism … frequently subordinated the ‘final ends’ of the Russian bourgeoisie to the interests of the court and thus sowed anxiety in the business hearts of our country’s merchants and manufacturers.” (A.G. Shlyapnikov, On the Eve of 1917 trans. Richard Chappell (London: Allison & Busby, 1982), 167.) 70 Zagorsky, State Control, 88. 71 Cited in R.A. Roosa, “Russian Industrialists and ‘State Socialism’, 1906-17,” Soviet Studies XXIII 3 (January 1972): 415. 72 Pearson, Moderates, 34, 74, 90; McKean, R.B. St Petersburg between the revolutions: workers and revolutionaries, June 1907-February 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 443. 73 Utro Rossii, number 229, 23 September 1914, 1–emphasis added. See also Utro Rossii’s recipe for victory in F.A. Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya na Putyakh k Vlasti (1914-vesna 1917 g.) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), 77. 74 Utro Rossii, 22 January 1917, 2. 75 Shlyapnikov, 1917, 167. 76 Utro Rossii in Zagorsky, State Control, 88. See I.F. Gindin on Moscow as “the social-political leadership” of the bourgeoisie (I.F. Gindin, “O nekotorykh osobennostyakh ekonomicheskoi i sotsial’noi struktury rossiskogo kapitalizma v nach. XX v,” Istoriya SSSR number 3 (1966): 49). West confirms that Moscow “became the principal spokesman for the aspirations of Russia’s ‘national bourgeoisie’” – but on the same page oddly suggests that during the war the

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Moscow bourgeoisie “reverted to the passive and deferential posture of old.” (West, Fate of Merchant Moscow, 174) 77 V.S. Dyakin, Russkaya Burzhuaziya i Tsarizm v godu pervoi mirovoi voiny (1914-1917) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1967), 73. 78 Siegelbaum comments that the congress was to have devoted itself “not [to] what industry could contribute to the war effort but rather the reverse.” (Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 44) 79 Utro Rossii, number 143, 26 May 1915, 1. 80 Startsev, Russkaya burzhuaziya i samoderzhavie, 134; V.I. Gurko (assistant Interior Minister), Features and Figures of the Past: government and opinion in the reign of Nicholas II (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 1939, 55; Siegelbaum, Moscow Industrialists and the War Industries Committees, 71. 81 See Katkov, Russia 1917, 8. The favouritism displayed by the state towards Petrograd industrialists played a part in the establishment of the WICs. However, it is wrong to suggest that this was the main reason for their creation (see, for example, Figes, People’s Tragedy, 274). Siegelbaum contends that “… industrialists were to organise themselves not simply to obtain more lucrative contracts … This could only be temporarily profitable but in the long run disastrous, for they would be obtaining these orders from a government whose incompetence made the fulfilment of orders difficult and in fact threatened the very survival of Russian industry. The government itself had to be reorganized to put Russia’s war economy on a sound footing, and in the absence of any other group, Russia’s patriotic industrialists and technical personnel would reorganize it.” (Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 45.) 82 Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppoxitsiya, 78-9. Siegelbaum comments that this was “a severe blow to the Association from which it did not recover.” (Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 67) 83 See for example “V voenno-promyshlennom komitetom” (Utro Rossii, number 36, 5 February 1917, 2). 84 Ryabushinskii in Burzhuaziya Nakanune Fevral’skoi Revolyutsii, ed. B.B. Grave (Moscow & Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1927), 8; Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 49 & 53. 85 WIC regulations in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 125-126. 86 The State Comptroller, Petr Kharitonov, showed an awareness of the situation when he told the Council of Ministers in August 1915, “The army and the population do not rely on us, but on the Duma and on the Military-Industrial Committees.” (Yakhontov, Prologue, 89.) 87 Yakhontov, Prologue, 89. Solzhentisyn’s November 1916 character, Obodovsky, an engineer attached to the WICs says “the Guchkov committees were preoccupied not with supplying arms but with reinforcing their own positions in society and attacking the regime … From time to time an unnecessary conference or congress of representatives of the War Industry Committees would be held, at which the main subject for discussion was not technical or organizational but political: the regime did not measure up to the tasks before the country, the government was inspired by dark forces and was leading the country to destruction, the cabinet

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ought to be composed of persons in whom the country had confidence.” (November 1916, 405) 88 Approvingly reprinted in Utro Rossii, number 229, 23 September 1914, 1. 89 Promyshlennost’ i Torgovlya, number 11, 1915, 542 in Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 78. 90 Utro Rossii, 15 January 1917, 6. 91 Utro Rossii, 3 & 4 September 1915 in Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya i tsarism, 146. 92 Gvozdev in L.H. Siegelbaum, “The Workers’ Groups and the War-Industries Committees: Who Used Whom?” Russian Review XXXIX 2 (April 1980): 161; Central WIC in L. Haimson, “The Problem of Political and Social Stability in Urban Russia on the Eve of War and Revolution Revisited,” Slavic Review LIX 4 (Winter 2000): 872. One of Gvozdev’s comrades in the workers’ group was kind enough to remark that the industrialists had three aims: “to contribute to the defence of the country, gradually to seize all power, and lastly to line their pockets …” (Katkov, Russia 1917, 21 – emphasis added). 93 Cited in Rosenberg, The Problem of Market Relations, 365. A minor reason for this turn may have been that in Russia, as in other Allied countries (see Chapter Seven), a trade war with a still industrially strong Germany was expected after the conclusion of (battlefield) hostilities – see Utro Rossii, 19 February 1917, 5. 94 See Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 45-6; Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 189-191. 95 2nd congress in Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 158; Promyshlennost’ i Torgovlya, 13 February 1916 in Roosa, Russian Industrialists Look to the Future, 216. 96 As reported by the secret police on 20 September 1916 in Grave, Nakanune, 140. 97 Utro Rossii, 10 November 1916, 1. 98 Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya i tsarizm, 95; Grave, Nakanune, 139-140. It should be noted that even the most progressive of the bourgeoisie were not unanimously in favour of this initiative–it was opposed by Ryabushinskii, Tretyakov and Guzhon (McKean, St Petersburg, 439; West, Fate of Merchant Moscow, 174; Siegelbaum, Who Used Whom?, 165). Ironically, it found some support in higher circles. Aleksei Polivanov, the War Minister, defended the idea, on the grounds that “mobilization of industry is impossible without the cooperation of the workers.” (Yakhontov, Prologue, 173.) 99 Siegelbaum, Who Used Whom?, 157. 100 Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 172; Katkov, Russia 1917, 18. 101 V.Ya. Laverychev, Po tu storonu barrikad (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo-Mysl’, 1967), 134. 102 Grave, Nakanune, 21; Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya i tsarizm, 290 & 241. 103 Startsev, Russkaya burzhuaziya i samoderzhavie, 131; Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 77; Utro Rossii, 24 May & 30 May, 1915 in Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya i tsarizm, 74; P. Miliukov, Political Memoirs, 1905-1917 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 321 & 325.

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Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya i tsarizm, 87; Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya,

90. 105

Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 322. Golder, Documents of Russian History, 134-6. 107 One on 13 August 1915, another the following day–in Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 109-110. 108 Haimson, The Problem Revisited, 871; Siegelbaum, Who Used Whom?, 164168. 109 Golder, Documents of Russian History, 31 August 1915, 132; Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 111; Gurko, Features and Figures, 565. 110 Yakhontov, Prologue, 128-9. 111 W.G. Gleason, “The All-Russian Union of Zemstvos and World War 1,” in The Zemstvo in Russia: an experiment in local self-government ed. T. Emmons and W.S. Vucinich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 366. See also Utro Rossii’s report on the meeting of the Union of Towns: number 222, 16 September 1914, 4. 112 Gronskii, War and Government, 28. 113 GE L’vov, “Introduction,” to Russian Local Government during the War and the Union of Zemstvos by T.I. Polner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930), 5. 114 Gronskii, War and Government, 174. “As the union [of Zemsvos] entered the area of battle, the army encouraged it to extend its operations as fully as possible, whatever the cost.” (Gleason, The All-Russian Union, 370.) 115 Figes, Tragedy, 271; Katkov, Russia 1917, 7. Figes refers to the Unions as “a state within a state”. 116 Golder, Documents on Russian History, 12 June 1915 and 18 June 1915, 130; Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 42. 117 Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 56. 118 Gurko, Features and Figures, 540. Gurko’s own attitude was similarly contradictory. He described the Union as a combination of “revolutionary agitators on the one hand and many who desired to avoid active military service on the other.” However, a little later on he admits that “the All-Russian Zemstvo Union did some good work” and did not take up revolution until February 1917 – unlike the Union of Towns, which “was revolutionary from the outset.” (541) 119 Gleason, The All-Russian Union, 371. 120 Rodzyanko in Golder, Documents on Russian History, 85-86. For more obstruction see Polner, Russian Local Government, 303; Gronskii, War and Government, 177. 121 Union of Towns congress resolution, 22 July 1915 in Golder, Documents on Russian History, 150; L’vov, Introduction, 10. Polner goes on to say “The trouble was that free self-governing institutions possessing absolute autonomy within the limits of the law were utterly at variance with those principles of autocracy to which the Russian bureaucracy had been so long accustomed.” (Polner, Russian Local Government, 23) 106

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122 Concern at the conflict between the Tsarist state and the voluntary organisations was expressed at high levels. Aleksandr Krivoshein, the Agriculture Minister, told the French Ambassador in February 1915: “The antagonism between imperial authority and civil society is the greatest scourge of our political life … The future of Russia will remain precarious so long as the Government and society continue to regard each other as two hostile camps …” (Paleologue, Memoirs I, 272). 123 L’vov, Introduction, 85. The Kadet mayor of Moscow commented that the Union of Towns had to turn to political activism in order to preserve itself (see M.F. Hamm, “Liberal Politics in Wartime Russia: an analysis of the Progressive Bloc,” Slavic Review XXXIII 3 (September 1974): 462). 124 L’vov to the Zemstvo Union congress, Moscow, 20-22 September 1915 in Golder, Documents on Russian History, 148. 125 Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 322. 126 “The more alarming the news from the front, the greater was the attendance at the meetings of the Committee and the more insistent became the demands of the deputies for the convocation of the Duma … Thus the political activities of the Provisional Committee overshadowed its purely humanitarian work.” (Gronskii, War and Government, 29.) 127 Startsev, Russkaya burzhuaziya i samoderzhavie, 132; I.Ya. Trifonov, Likvidatsiya Ekspluatatorskikh Klassov v CCCP (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1975), 46; Polner, Russian Local Government, 85; Riha, Last Chance, 18. 128 Together with specific reforms: an end to legal distinctions between religions and nationalities, freedom of speech and the press, the free organisation of labour (Golder, Documents in Russian History, Conference on High Cost of Living, 1312). 129 Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 96. 130 Zagorsky, State Control, 84. 131 Katkov, Russia 1917, 157. Katkov suggests that this was a new line from the opposition: “instead of claiming, as they had done before, that the government was incapable of winning the war without their help, they now alleged that it was not working for victory at all, but was secretly preparing a separate peace and a shameful betrayal of the Allies.” (Katkov, Russia 1917, 155.) There is a strong implication that this was political opportunism. However, suspicions about the regime’s enthusiasm for war can be traced back to the pre-war defence debate (see Chapter Three). And after 1914, the autocracy’s general attitude provided plenty of ammunition to make charges of defeatism stick, whether they were true or not. 132 Haimson, The Problem Revisited, 866. For Milyukov’s ideas on revolution as objectively inevitable, but not desirable, see Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 49. 133 L’vov, Introduction, 4. They were the “Third” element as opposed to the other two in the zemstvo system: administrators and elected deputies. 134 Rogger, Age, 50. 135 R. T. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 192. On the rise of the Third Element see Manning, Crisis, 51-7, 188-195; Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 54.

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136 V.I. Lenin, “Review of Home Affairs” (Zarya, 2-3 December 1901), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/home/index.htm. Shlyapnikov claims that the voluntary organisations were created by and were the “class organizations” of the bourgeoisie (Shlyapnikov, 1917, 167). This was not so-and it is the failure to distinguish between the bourgeoisie and new statist elements that weakens so much of Soviet (and other) history of this period. 137 Moscow provincials: Gleason, All-Russian Union, 374-5; Struve’s letter to Lord Milner of 7 February 1917 in S.J.G. Hoare, The Fourth Seal: the end of a Russian chapter (London: Heinemann, 1930), 191. 138 See Katkov on “the middle ranks … of the military administration … ready to shift their allegiance to the service of the leadership of the voluntary organisations.” (Russia 1917, 229.) Sanborn tells us that these elements argued that “Modern war … could only be won by soldiers imbued with a civic spirit, with a sense of initiative, independence and with a strong dose of masculine vigor.” They also “placed the interest of the ‘nation’ at least on a par with the interest of the tsar.” (J. Sanborn, “The Mobilization of 1914 and the Question of the Russian Nation: a re-examination,” Slavic Review LIX 2 (Summer 2000): 284 & 286.) L’vov told the Zemstvo congress in 1915, “We have actually been welded together with the army.” (L’vov to Zemstvo Congress, 20-22 September 1915 in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 146.) 139 Army appeals: Katkov, Russia 1917, 11, 18, 38-41. Bloc declaration: Shlyapnikov, 1917, 169. According to Shlyapnikov, this represented “a desire to win over the sympathies of the officer corps to the State Duma.” 140 Gattrell, Russia’s War, 23; R.W. Pethybridge, The Social Prelude to Stalinism, Macmilan, London 1974, 81. Gattrell comments that military commanders “were attracted by the idea of a new political dispensation. Whether this would take the form of a military dictatorship or a system maintained by the public organisations remained unclear.” (Russia’s First World War, 101.) See also Gleason on “the intimate, one might even say cosy, relationship between civilian and military elites.” (The All-Russian Union, 373.) 141 L’vov to the Zemstvo Congress, 20-22 September 1915 in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 147; G.E. L’vov, Russian Union of Zemstvos (London: PS King & Son Ltd, 1917). (War Reserve Collection (WRA-WRE) Part 8, reel 5, WRC.33.301. Used by kind permission of Cambridge University Library), 2. 142 Mobilisation: Zagorsky, State Control, 87, Kondrat’ev in Holquist, Making War, 36. Collecting information: Holquist, Alpha and Omega, 5. Kadets: Holquist, Making War, 15. 143 Holquist, Making War, 284. In the voluntary organisations, Holquist traces the emergence of “a ‘parastatal complex’ in which society and state were tightly intertwined.” It was this complex that achieved power in March 1917 (Making War, 4). Haimson draws attention to “the further crystallization … of a seemingly effective network of new organizations, new order, new authority, fully prepared to take over and hold the reins of power as soon as the old state power fell.” (L. Haimson, “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917, Part 2,” Slavic Review 1 (March 1965): 17.)

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144 Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 83; Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsaya, 129. 145 Pearson, Moderates, 65-70; Katkov, Russia 1917, 220. 146 Startsev, Russkaya burzhuaziya i samoderzhavie, 148; Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 185-193. On arrests, Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya i tsarizm, 273; Siegelbaum, Who Used Whom?, 176; Grave, Nakanune, 180-185. 147 Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 193. 148 Rodzyanko’s Memoirs in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 116-117. 149 Stuve’s letter to Milner, 7 February 1917 in Hoare, Fourth Seal, 190; Lenin, V.I. “A Separate Peace” (Sotsial-Demokrat, number 566 November 1916) Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/nov/06.htm. 150 V.P. Semennikov, writing in 1926, believed that they were (V.P. Semennikov, Politika Romanovykh Nakanune Revolyutsii (Moscow: Gosudartsvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1926), 7. Katkov does not (Russia 1917, 158). However, although Katkov suggests that “It is difficult to believe that … responsible politicians … could really believe in the existence of a ‘Black [pro-German] Bloc’ …,” he goes on to say “it does appear that responsible politicians were genuinely convinced that powerful forces close to the throne were working for the conclusion of an immediate separate peace.” (Russia 1917, 158.) See also the British diplomat Buchanan on court elements working “for a peace as favourable as possible to Germany” (G.W. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia (New York: Arno Press, 1970 [1923]), 19). 151 When Rodzyanko presented the allegations against the Tsarina to the Tsar (in January 1916), the Emperor demanded, “‘Produce your facts’ … ‘There are no facts [Rodzyanko replied], but her politics are such that the masses draw their conclusions.’” (Rodzyanko’s Memoirs in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 119.) Dyakin reports that Foreign Minister Aleksandr Protopopov advised the Tsar in December 1916 to tell the Allies that Russia could not continue the war–and if they would not agree to peace than Russia should go it alone. According to Protopopov, the Tsar agreed–but changed his mind (Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya i tsarizm, 283-4). 152 Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsaya, 76. 153 V.Ya. Laverychev, “Vserossiiskii Soyuz Torgovli i Promyshlennosti,” Istoricheskie Zapiski 70 (1961): 37. 154 Utro Rossii, 1 January 1917, 1. In his memoirs, Milyukov commented on “the unexpected (for me) leftism of the ‘Progressivist’ Duma faction which … suddenly jumped over us [the Kadets] into the ideological neighbourhood of the Duma’s extreme left wing and separated off from the ‘bloc’.” (Milyukov, Political Memoirs, 324.) 155 Gronskii, War and Government, 178. 156 Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya i tsarizm, 76. 157 Krymov in Rodzyanko, Memoirs in Golder, Documents of Russian History, 116. Trifonov and Dyakin claim that coup plans were the project of the bourgeoisie (Trifonov, Likvidatsiya, 49; Dyakin, Russkaya burzhuaziya i tsarizm, 5). However

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it is more likely that they originated from the new statists and their military allies. Chermenskii argues that the coup plans were supported (though not initiated) by Guchkov, Nekrasov (Kadets) and Tereshchenko (Progressists) (E.D. Chermenskii, Fevral’skaya Burzhuazno-Demokraticheskaya Revolyutsiya 1917 g. v Rossii (Moscow: Gospolit’izdat, 1959), 94. 158 Paleologue, Memoirs I, 349-350. 159 Polner’s description of the Tsarist system at war held true after the February revolution: “Two forces were struggling in Russia. Historical and geographical reasons demanded the formation of a strong central government for the defence of the frontiers against the enemy. On the other hand, the progress of the nation called for freedom from government tutelage and decentralization.” (Russian Local Government, 1.)

CHAPTER FIVE A BOURGEOIS REPUBLIC?

The revolution that overthrew the Tsarist autocracy and established a potentially democratic republic in February 1917 was the initial stage of the bourgeois revolution in Russia. As we have noted, bourgeois revolutions are, historically, messy processes, with forces other than the bourgeoisie itself doing the fighting and often carrying away the political spoils. In these circumstances, the bourgeois nature of the revolution can be obscured. Despite the fact that that nature was clear to orthodox Marxists, political moderates and the bourgeoisie alike in 1917, subsequent accounts have tended to ignore it. If the purpose of the bourgeois revolution is to establish the conditions for the further development of capitalism–in Russia’s case, to break the fetter on that development that Tsarist autocracy represented–then the February Revolution began that process. The fact that it was statism (a set of production relations in which the state dominates), rather than ordinary capitalism, that emerged at the other end of 1917 can be accounted for by three factors. Firstly, the continuation of the war was a grave obstacle to Russian development, causing economic destruction and popular alienation. However, it was one which the new state (dragging the bourgeoisie with it) felt was vital to its existence and survival. Secondly, the revolution of the bourgeoisie was contested, not just by the urban workers under “socialist” leadership, but by the new state itself. Thirdly, the low level of development of Russia’s productive forces, especially in the countryside, meant that the further development of Russian capitalism would be a gradual and lengthy process–something for which the radical urban elements (workers and intelligentsia) did not have the patience. When the Tsar dissolved the Duma for the last time on 26 February 1917, its leadership did not take up the radical measures suggested by the Moscow industrialists. They were concerned by the actions of the people in the streets demanding bread, an end to autocratic mismanagement of the

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war effort–and now, the recall of the Duma. Duma members, mostly from the Progressive Bloc, together with Aleksandr Kerensky (a Trudovik) and Nikolai Chkheidze (a Menshevik) from the Petrograd Soviet, formed a “Temporary Committee of the Duma for the Restoration of Order.” The Petrograd Soviet and the prospect of anarchy in the streets forced that Committee to organise the first Provisional Government.1 In the Provisional Government, the bourgeoisie was well represented. Aleksandr Konovalov (as we know, an industrialist, a Progressist and a leader of the WICs) became Minister for Trade and Industry. Mikhail Tereshchenko, a sugar millionaire and head of the Kiev WIC, became Minister for Finance.2 Milyukov introduced the Provisional Government members at a meeting at the Tauride Palace on 2 March 1917. Anxious to assure the crowd of Konovalov’s and Tereshchenko’s credentials, he said “Further, we gave two posts to the representatives of that liberal group of the Russian bourgeoisie who were the first in Russia to attempt to organise the representatives of the working class.”3 But was the Provisional Government a bourgeois government? For some (at the time and in subsequent Soviet historiography), the fact that it was formed behind closed doors and did not consist of workers, soldiers and peasants made it so. In 1917, there were generally two reasons for attaching the label “bourgeois” to the Provisional Government. The first was as a term of hostile opprobrium. In Russia’s cities at this time, the term was a generalised insult, covering social status and wealth, political position, dress, personality, degree of selfishness, degree of adherence to “socialism” and position on the war.4 The perceived “bourgeois” nature of the government increased in inverse proportion to its popularity. The second reason derived from the orthodox Marxist position that, having overthrown feudalism and representing the forces of the bourgeois revolution, the Provisional Government should be bourgeois. “Power,” wrote the Menshevik historian Nikolai Sukhanov, “must go to the bourgeoisie”–even though the bourgeoisie “had been dragged by the hair into the movement,” and the capitalist class aimed at “turning the State into an instrument of its class rule and the country into an oligarchy of capitalists.”5 In a less hostile tone, the Menshevik Iraklii Tsereteli said in April 1917: We do say to the people: “They are bourgeois–the Provisional Government is the responsible organ of the bourgeoisie.” But we add: “The Provisional Government represents that part of the bourgeoisie which has agreed upon

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a general democratic platform and has agreed to defend Russia’s freedom together with the entire democracy …”.6

Some representatives of the bourgeoisie were not averse to this sort of labelling. In March 1917, Pavel Ryabushinskii was referring to the Provisional Government as “our regime.”7 But the reality was rather more complicated. Despite its bourgeois members, the Provisional Government by no means proceeded to enact an exclusively capitalist programme. The measures agreed upon with the Petrograd Soviet included abolition of the monarchy, democratic freedoms, the calling of the Constituent Assembly, an amnesty for political prisoners and rights for soldiers. All elements of the bourgeoisie’s democratic outlook of course, but nothing specifically beneficial to the capitalists. Gaida argues that there was nothing in either the formation or the activities of the Provisional Government that made it an organ of bourgeois power. A government with a platform that contains no particular favours for the bourgeoisie can hardly be labelled a bourgeois government … how can we possibly claim that the Provisional Government charted its course to suit the bourgeoisie or that the bourgeoisie believed that it owned the Provisional Government?8

In fact, the dominant force in the Provisional Government was the Third Element–those we have described as representing a new state (the voluntary organisations, the WICs, Zemgor, as well as significant sections of the existing bureaucracy). Prince L’vov, the leader of the Zemstvo Union, became prime minister. Guchkov (of the WICs) took over war and the navy, while Shingarev, Nekrasov and Manuilov–all members of the principal new statist political organisation, the Kadets-became ministers of agriculture, transport and education respectively. These men were the tip of the new statist iceberg. Up and down the wartime bureaucracy, new statist elements stepped forward to run the new administration.9 Zemgor, the WICs and the city Dumas supported the Duma’s Temporary Committee and the Provisional Government that it produced. They stepped into the power vacuum that the February Revolution had created. On 4 March the Tsarist governors and vicegovernors of the provinces were removed and replaced by Zemstvo chairmen. Zemstvo organisation was expanded, democratised and spread across the empire.10

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As for the WICs, the Tsarist crack-down on their operations had seen the industrialists start to drift away, so that by 1917, they were dominated by the Third Element – and it was the latter’s interests (especially in planning and development) that were brought to bear on the “WIC Ministers”, Konovalov and Tereshchenko. It was the WIC programme, rather than a specifically capitalist one, that they tended to promote.11 Holquist concludes: “The men of February [were] those specialists and public activists who had been staffing wartime parastatal organizations …”.12 This was not a bourgeois government–it was a statist one. The principal reason for the new government’s statist orientation was, of course, the war. There was no question that the Provisional Government would remain committed to Russia’s participation. After all, the February Revolution was aimed (for everyone except the anti-war left) not so much at the war itself, as at its inefficient (and possibly treacherous) conduct in the hands of the autocracy. The main charge in the Provisional Government’s declaration of war aims on 27 March was that “The overthrown government has left the defense of the country in an utterly disorganized condition.” Guchkov claimed in April that while the old regime was “Lacking ability in matters of peace, it proved even more incapable in matters of war.”13 Tsereteli was quite clear that the revolution had been necessary for the war to continue. He told the Moscow State Conference in August, “Everybody knows that if the great Russian revolution had not occurred, we would have created a separate peace by now.”14 Accordingly, the government’s first declaration placed national defence on a par with the convocation of the Constituent Assembly in its priorities. There would be no separate peace.15 Milyukov and Guchkov tried to preserve an unexpurgated version of the new statists’ war aims, including the extension of Russian control over Constantinople and the Black Sea straits.16 But this was too much for most. Democratic Russia, joining the other European democracies in a struggle against the authoritarian central powers was one thing–a renewed quest for empire was quite another. A mass campaign forced Milyukov and Guchkov out of office, preparing the way for the first coalition government. The war aims changed from annexation to defence–for victory (or peace, depending on the speaker) without annexations or indemnities. The war however would continue: “The Provisional Government believes firmly that the Russian revolutionary army will not permit the German troops to destroy our Western allies and then throw themselves upon us with the full force of

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their arms.”17 Prince L’vov declared that “revolutionary Russia should raise the might of her army to an adequate level, and [that] all the efforts of the Government will be directed toward this purpose.”18 Defencist war aims did not lessen the Provisional Government’s military fervour. In fact, the war effort would intensify over the ensuing months, culminating in the ill-fated July offensive, through which the government hoped to rekindle the revolutionary-patriotic spirit of February.19 Consequently, the militarisation of Russian society–a phenomenon present before 1917 and common to all the belligerent powers–continued and expanded. Despite provincial autocracy being dismantled and replaced by the zemstvos, new legislation soon “virtually subordinated the zemstvo to military command.”20 We will examine this more fully when we look at the strengthening of state power by the Provisional Government, but for the moment it is worth noting Gatrell’s argument that the war and the war effort were increasingly identified with unfreedom. Thus, the government “established the connection in the popular mind that genuine freedom could be secured only by bringing about a rapid end to the war.”21 The people then, were headed for a confrontation with those who supported the war–the Provisional Government, the new statists and the bourgeoisie. But it is also worth noting that militarisation infected the revolution and the revolutionary forces themselves. The military aspect of the urban revolutionary events should not be underestimated. In the Petrograd Soviet for example, “the number of deputies quickly reached 3,000, of whom more than 2,000 were soldiers.”22 As Holquist concludes, “a wartime parastatal complex … and its moblizational techniques provided a common heritage for all political movements after 1917.”23 The continuation of war and the spread of militarism placed considerable strain on the bourgeoisie. The economic destruction wrought by the war resulted in factory and plant closures. Some closed in hope of better days ahead, some were deserted, some were surrendered to Factory Committees.24 Yet despite the economic fall-out and the Provisional Government’s increasing statism, the bourgeoisie did not waver in its support of the war.25 It was this, above all, that split the revolutionary forces in Russia, opening up a widening gap between the bourgeoisie and the people.

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War was not the only pressure on the bourgeoisie at this time. The urban workers, who had struck work against the autocracy, were in no mood for business as usual once the autocracy was overthrown. Their movement continued and intensified after February, demanding better wages and conditions (including the eight-hour day), and the increased intervention of the state into the economy. Initially, the latter demand was closely linked to the autocracy’s failure in the war effort and to the notion that the renewed state would deliver more efficient organisation. As the prospect of any kind of victory faded in 1917, state intervention was increasingly linked by the left parties to the vague but roseate glow of a kind of “socialism.” These parties thought that the War, as it had rendered necessary the vigorous intervention of the State in the economic life of the country, and had given rise to a so-called “war-time socialism”, would lead in future to a new State policy … not only as a more active way of organizing the country for victory … but as a means of carrying the program of socialism into effect after the War.26

The absence of any kind of restraint in the workers’ movement, the steady escalation of its demands and its change of emphasis from victory to ongoing social revolution brought it into irresolvable conflict with the bourgeoisie.27 At first, the bourgeoisie was conciliatory towards the post-February workers’ movement. The Petrograd Society of Factory and Mill Owners reached an agreement with the Soviet on the eight-hour day, the recognition of Factory Committees and the establishment of a minimum wage.28 At a private meeting of former Duma members, the Progressist engineer Aleksandr Bublikov stated that “the upper bourgeoisie [for whom he claimed to speak] in no way pursues the same policy as the counterrevolution … it, too, yearns for the earliest onset of an era of law and order … The way to achieve this is … through self-restraint, calmness, mutual concession and mutual respect.”29 But the realities of dual power, especially given the divergence of interest between the bourgeoisie and the workers’ movement, overcame the desire for conciliation. “Dual power is a synonym for anarchy,” charged Utro Rossii, “Only by unifying around the Provisional Government, giving it full confidence, can free Russia decisively prepare its fate.”30 The first AllRussian Congress of the Representatives of Industry and Trade (Petrograd, June 1917) warned against the workers’ illusions:

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Under the present conditions of world production no economic organization other than capitalism is possible in Russia. Therefore all private attempts to create a partial, socialistic regime in isolated enterprises are fruitless and injurious.31

From the summer of 1917 onwards, industrialists in Moscow, Petrograd and beyond began resisting the demands of the workers’ movement, shifting the bourgeoisie to a position of confrontation with it. By September, that confrontation was marked by lock-outs, widespread violence and the destruction of property.32 Consequently, the bourgeoisie turned to the state for protection and was prepared to support stronger state powers in order to get the job done. The difficulties of the bourgeoisie in prosecuting the bourgeois revolution were brought into sharp relief by the situation in the countryside. For there, even while the urban workers were surging towards what they thought was socialism, things were moving in an entirely opposite direction. The February Revolution did not usher in the beginnings of rural capitalism. Instead, there was a re-communalisation of the land and a levelling of the peasantry. The Provisional Government (with an eye to its popularity among the majority of the population and the crucial need for peasant bodies for the war effort) repealed Stolypin’s agrarian laws and abolished the machinery set up to enforce them.33 A majority of the Stolypin “separators” (those who had left the commune for private farms) returned to the commune during 1917.34 The commune, and communal forms of land ownership, underwent a huge revival.35 Lewin concludes that the peasantry: … destroyed the capitalist and market-oriented sectors of agriculture, curtailed the better producers, restored what the Stolypin reforms tried to change, and in particular, revived … the repartitional commune. By so doing, peasants thickened their rural shell …36

The peasants turned away from the “outside” world and back into their own local communities.37 This was social regression–and on a vast scale. The results of the situation in rural Russia would have had to be dealt with by any political system–Tsarist, republican or soviet–intent on raising the level of development of Russia’s productive forces. For our purposes, it is illustrative of the real backwardness of the Russian economic structure, of how difficult and protracted the successful prosecution of the bourgeois

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revolution would have been–and of how utterly inappropriate any talk of ‘socialism’ was. As it was, the demands of the war (and eventually those of civil war and forced-pace industrialisation) would make the peasants’ reversion to the commune unacceptable to the Russian state, in all its forms. For the moment, the Provisional Government would try to settle with the peasantry on the question of food–but it would fail. All of these pressures then–the war, the demands of the workers’ movement, the regression of the peasantry–pushed the bourgeoisie towards acceptance of a stronger and stronger state. During 1917, the Provisional Government was to travel quite a long way down that road.

Statism and the Provisional Government (a) The Economy The principal task of the Provisional Government was the defence of the new Russian state. Kerensky told the State Conference in August, “We desire and we will see to it that no one dare relegate the Russian empire to second place in the chorus of world nations.”38 Its success would be measured against the perceived failures of the old regime to organise an efficient war effort, beginning with the economy. The Provisional Government therefore, could be expected to maintain the level of state intervention that had been achieved before February, and to extend it on all fronts. This began immediately after the overthrow of the autocracy and picked up pace as the composition of the government moved leftwards. The first coalition government declared in May: The Provisional Government will fight resolutely and inflexibly against the economic disorganization of the country by the further systematic establishment of governmental control of the production, transportation, exchange and distribution of commodities, and in necessary cases it will have recourse also to the organization of production …39

At a congress on the urgent question of food shortly afterwards, the relevant minister Aleksei Peshekhonov “argued that the only way to solve the crisis is to institute state control of all branches of the economy … There is no other way …”40

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The war pushed the Provisional Government in this direction. Sergei Prokopovich (Minister for Trade and Industry from July to August) told the State Conference that he was convinced “not a single person in this audience … would advocate absolute freedom of trade and unlimited rights of private ownership during a war which is as heavy to bear as the present one.”41 Bread rationing was introduced in March 1917. The Ministry of Agriculture ordered local Food Supply Committees (on which, more below) to start conscripting local labour for the loading, unloading and transport of food and grain.42 Zagorsky contends that the Provisional Government intended to introduce labour conscription “over the whole country, for each district and every branch of industry.”43 At a conference of the Labour, Trade and Industry and Finance Ministries, it was agreed that stronger state intervention was needed in the mining, smelting and textile industries. A state monopoly of coal and petroleum should be introduced, while in other industries there should be “a compulsory syndication of enterprises under state control.”44 The Provisional Government proceeded to centralise and regulate the metals, fuel, leather goods, textiles, transport and communications industries. A state sugar monopoly was introduced in September.45 As in the other war economies, the government began to regard a state-run economy more as a permanent fixture than a war-time necessity. Looking beyond immediate war-time needs, the Ministry of Trade and Industry established a “supply committee” in May, “to promote the regular and successful development of domestic industry.” At the same time, the government set up a Council on Questions of the Development of the Productive Forces under Konovalov.46 Within weeks, this was transformed into the Economic Council of the Provisional Government, charged with preparing “a general plan for the organization of the national economy and of labor, as well as … for the regulation of economic life …”. At the Council’s first meeting, Kerensky declared that its “foremost task” was “the drawing up of a plan and the gradual control of all economic-financial life.”47 In this, the Provisional Government was again urged on by the left, characteristically identifying state intervention with “socialism.” The Menshevik newspaper, Rabochaya Gazeta, commented happily: At last the step has been taken, upon the necessity of which [the Soviet] had been insisting from the first day of the revolution … [The Council] can and should become the basis of vigorous interference in economic life. This should be taken care of by the revolutionary democracy with all the required energy.48

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In fact, the “revolutionary democracy”–the left, the Soviets and their supporters–was putting considerable pressure on the government to take state intervention to its logical conclusion, as a step on the road towards socialism (envisaged as a long and winding one for the Mensheviks, but a mere leap for the Bolsheviks). “The times of ‘free enterprise’,” said the Petrograd Soviet’s Izvestiya in April, “the times of a government policy of non-interference in the economy have passed, never to return … Free enterprise can only lead us to complete economic stagnation.”49 The Economic Department of the Petrograd Soviet eventually demanded a state trade monopoly in bread, meat, salt and leather; state trusts to run the coal, oil, metals, sugar and paper industries; state regulation of distribution and state-controlled prices in almost all industries.50 The first All-Russian Soviet Congress in June called for the virtual state takeover of agriculture. In fact, the congress said, “it is only through the systematic regulation of the entire economic life of the country that the villages can be provided with the indispensable industrial products.”51 The moving force behind the Soviet’s economic policy was the Menshevik, Vladimir Groman, who had worked as a zemstvo statistician and then became head of the economic department of the Union of Towns. Driven by the faith in the state of both the war-time socialist and the Third Element, Groman was made chairman of the Petrograd Soviet’s Food Commission, and became its most authoritative spokesperson on economic matters. Groman’s vision stretched well beyond food. According to his coworker, Naum Jasny: Groman wanted a Unified Economic Plan to regulate the national economy and labour for Russia as a whole, to be worked out in several weeks immediately after the February Revolution …’52

When he was in charge of the distribution of consumer goods in the capital in 1917, Groman is alleged to have declared, “I shall not distribute a single pair of shoes until the national economy as a whole has been regulated.”53 Groman’s ideas were not confined to Soviet or leftist circles. They were also common currency among new statist and Third Element types. An American journalist was told by a Moscow Food Supply Committee functionary: “All of this work of ours,” he said, “is under one great national plan, which reaches through committees to every village in the land.” And he displayed a Russian map all speckled with committees – and committees by the

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thousands, specks of every colour and size. It really was a beautiful plan …54

The necessities of war were pushing Russia in the direction of statedominated production relations. That is why we can recognise a clear continuity between the Provisional Government’s plans, the Groman/Soviet economic model and future Bolshevik policy. This was alluded to by Nikolai Sukhanov, at the so-called ‘Menshevik Trial’ in March 1931. Sukhanov told the court: Groman [who was also on trial] was the author of War Communism. When did he proclaim it? He proclaimed it soon after the February Revolution … He took the Kadet Shingarev [the Minister for Agriculture] by the throat and squeezed out of him the basic element of War Communism, namely the [state] grain monopoly.55

But the Provisional Government did not introduce war communism. It was not, by and large, “socialist,” and while it marched (or was pushed) steadily down the road of a strong state, it was at pains to portray that march as one towards a “modern” capitalism. In mid-May it rejected the Soviet’s call for comprehensive state regulation of all entrepreneurial activity. The government agreed with the planner in the Ministry of Supplies who told Ernest Poole: … the country is quite unprepared for a socialistic plan of this kind. I myself am a socialist but in the last few months I have found this is not a socialist country. Our people are not made like that. Each one is greedy for his own and thinks very little of the State.56

At the Food Congress in May, Sergei Prokopovich (later to become Minister of Trade and Industry, and then of Food) expressed doubts that the government could control industry even if it wanted to. Such control “requires a strong government, which we do not have. Control over industry is possible in countries like Germany and England, but not here …”57 At the State Conference, now as a Minister, he condemned “the interference of workers in the management of enterprises”–something advocated by the left and the Soviet.58 In a memorandum to the Provisional Government in June 1917, the acting Minister for Trade and Industry, Vasilii Stepanov, admitted that “the Government cannot recommend to the country a return to a free economy” and supported “state regulation of the main branches of the national economy.” However, he continued, neither private property nor private enterprise should be eliminated; and he warned:

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Chapter Five The incautious use of socialist slogans would make it utterly impossible not only to attract new foreign capital, but even to retain merely that which has been invested in Russia …59

But the pressure on the Provisional Government was relentless, particularly in that area which was as crucial to the Russian economy after the February Revolution as it had been before: the question of food.

(b) Food and Force The Provisional Government set up a State Committee on Food Supply on 9 March to replace the old regime’s Special Council. The committee had representatives from the Duma, the Soviet, Zemgor, the co-operatives and the WICs.60 It was not long before agitation commenced for the new government to take the measure that the old one would (or could) not: the state take-over of food production and distribution. The Kadet newspaper, Rech’, declared on 21 March: “The measure that has long been needed is a [state] grain monopoly.”61 Just four days later, the government established just such a monopoly. It decreed: All grain crops of earlier years, of 1916 and the future harvest of 1917, less the reserve defined … for the food and economic needs of the owner, shall … be placed at the disposal of the State …62

This would be implemented by local Food Supply Committees and accompanied by “the establishment of fixed prices on articles of prime necessity.”63 The government hinted that the food legislation was a sign of things to come: “the new law … constitutes the first serious step on the road to bringing order into the economic life of the country which was disrupted during the war by the bad government of the old regime.”64 In April it was decreed that “crops … are state property according to the law on the transfer of grain to the State …”. The first coalition government not only controlled grain, but took a hand in how it was produced. It declared that it would take “all necessary steps toward ensuring the greatest possible production of grain required by the country and toward furthering the systematic utilization of the land in the interests of the national economy and of the toiling population …” Underlining the importance of food in all areas of the economy, the Food Ministry was given the responsibility in July for organising the supply of textiles, footwear, kerosene, soap and other products of prime necessity. The Ministry itself reiterated at that time that “grain constitutes state property

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and all surpluses … must be made available as soon as possible for the army and the needy population.”65 The increasing power of the state with regard to food and agriculture was accompanied by two other features: the nudging aside of the bourgeoisie and the use of force. With regard to the former, the newspaper Den’ pointed out that the grain monopoly could lead to further inroads on the rights of private property. “From the moment when all the grain was declared to be at the disposal of the Government, it was natural that the sown areas should also be considered the property of the State …”.66 The Moscow Food Supply Committee official, cited above, told Poole that the peasants could sell surplus grain to private grain merchants, but that the latter could only sell it on to the government. “In short, the government takes the place of the great wholesale merchants.”67 The Food Minister Aleksei Peshekhonov went further than this, addressing the Soviet Congress in June: During the war we were forced to come to the conclusion that even the slightest participation of [grain] dealers led to a sharp and rapid increase in prices … The Provisional Government decided to reject [the dealer system] and to abolish entirely the role of private commerce in supplying the country with grain.68

It was to be expected that the peasants would resist state intervention in the agrarian economy. This they did by dispersing and physically assaulting the local Food Supply Committees, which were charged with enforcing the writ of the Provisional Government. The government retaliated by decreeing that peasants who refused to sow grain would have their land confiscated and given to those who would.69 In April, the government authorised the use of troops to suppress any disorder in the countryside. In July, it was announced that recalcitrant peasants (those not sowing and harvesting with sufficient vigour) would be subject to criminal prosecution, as would Food Supply Committees and their chairmen not making adequate amounts of grain available to the cities and the army.70 A month later, Peshekhonov called for “exceptional measures” of coercion to extract grain supplies, up to and including the use of the armed forces. The Food Supply Committees were to form armed requisition squads, and, if that were not enough, the army could be used.71 Sergei Prokopovich (Trade and Industry) said:

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Chapter Five We must cease our attempts at persuasion … a shift to compulsion is now absolutely necessary … without this shift we will not be able to save either the cause of our homeland or the cause of our revolution.72

As late as October, the Minister of the Interior, Alexei Nikitin, authorised the use of force to expedite the shipment of grain.73 In the same month, drastic measures (including restrictions on movement, railway blockades and armed searches) were being promoted by the Ministry and local Food Supply Committees to eliminate “sackmen”–individuals going to the villages to get grain.74 State power advanced on other fronts as well. Holquist points out that the new government took over all the methods of censorship, surveillance and propaganda from the old regime and expanded them.75 Under threat during the “July Days,” it introduced a host of repressive powers: the right to shut down seditious and inflammatory publications; the right of local organs to suppress disorder; the authority to close down meetings and demonstrations; the right to arrest and deport those “whose activity constitutes a particular threat to the defense and internal security of the State”; criminal penalties for “an act of violence designed to change the existing state structure of Russia.”76

The Bourgeoisie and the Provisional Government There is no question that the bourgeoisie supported the February Revolution and the Provisional Governments that it produced. It was aware that the new state would insist on a generous measure of economic intervention. As we know, the progressive bourgeoisie had specifically signed up to the new statist project from about 1909 onwards. The bourgeoisie understood that the expansion of state intervention was due to the demands of the war–a project it had also signed up to. In the early post-autocratic days then, the bourgeoisie gave clear, if critical, support to the Provisional Government’s economic initiatives. But as the government’s statism intensified, elements of the bourgeoisie were inclined to step back, appraising it more critically–if not opposing it outright. One of the Moscow industrialists (“one of the great manufacturers there … [with] wide interests both in cotton and other industries”) expressed a rather ambivalent attitude when he told Poole:

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… affairs have for a time come into rather impractical hands and will have to be left to run their course–until everything, so to speak, is suddenly melted in the pot. Then I suppose will come a time for some decisive action. There may be a dictator. Who can tell? But my friends and I are all against a return to the Old Regime. We want a liberal government.77

Ambivalence could also be seen in the reaction to the state grain monopoly in March. The president of the Association of Trade and Industry, Nikolai Kutler, was moved to ask whether the government intended to socialise industry or preserve the capitalist order. Grain merchants, on the other hand, merely expressed the hope that “the measure is being introduced only for the period of the war.”78 Ryabushinskii, speaking at the first congress of his newly-formed All-Russian Union of Trade and Industry in March, expressed support for the Provisional Government tempered by anxiety at increasingly statist trends. “We must,” he said, “pass through the stage of the development of private enterprise”–and quoted Engels in support.79 The congress went on to describe the grain monopoly as “dangerous”–but, recognising the impossibility of free trade in grain, demanded representation for business on the Food Supply Committees.80 Conciliatory noises continued to come from both business and the new state up to mid-1917. An Association of Trade and Industry representative declared in May that “the government must assume the most active participation in all aspects of economic life: in the regulation of wages, prices and even the profits of employers.”81 The Menshevik newspaper, Rabochaya Gazeta told its readers: It is not proved that all strata of the bourgeoisie have already passed to the side of counter-revolution … certain elements of the organised bourgeoisie … are still travelling a common road with revolutionary democracy.82

By mid-year however, the bourgeoisie felt themselves squeezed between the twin pressures of increasing statism from the government and increasingly radical demands from the workers’ movement. They appealed to the former to protect them from the latter–but such protection (when it was forthcoming) was a two-edged sword. It increased still further the powers of the state in the economy. Furthermore, as the Provisional Government moved leftwards, it was less inclined to confront the workers’ movement (until its very existence was threatened during the July Days), but more inclined to take over enterprises if their owners felt they could no longer manage.

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The bourgeoisie’s ability to resist the state was seriously compromised by its continuing support for the war. The war demanded a strong state, as the bourgeoisie was only too well aware.83 It decided instead to confront its other enemy, the workers’ movement. Moscow took the lead once again. Lockouts began in June. In July, the All-Russian Union of Trade and Industry and the Moscow Society of Factory and Mill Owners proposed a strategy of resistance. In early August, Ryabushinskii famously told the second congress of the All-Russian Union: … unfortunately it is necessary for the bony hand of hunger and the people’s poverty to grab by the throat the false friends of the people, the members of various committees and soviets, before they come to their senses … The people at present do not understand this, but they soon will, and they will say: “Away deceivers of the people.”84

Not quite so well known is the fact that Ryabushinskii also had a message for the Provisional Government–a message which encapsulated the attitude of the progressive bourgeoisie at this time: We have to say, and this is recognised by all the left groups, that the present revolution was a bourgeois revolution (Voices: “it’s true”), that the bourgeois order that exists at the present time is inevitable … [and] from this it is necessary to draw fully the logical conclusion that those who govern the state must think and act in a bourgeois way.85

In terms of party politics, the Progressists (formerly the political standard bearers of the progressive bourgeoisie) divided after February. Not a few gravitated towards the Kadet party, which was steadily becoming a vociferous proponent of statism, particularly on questions of social order. These included Konovalov and they were joined by some of the left Octobrists.86 The remaining representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie–led by Ivan Efremov and Professor Ruzskii–formed the Radical-Democratic Party (in March-April 1917), which had two seats in the Provisional Government after July. In September, the party decided to amalgamate with the Liberal-Republican Party, but this decision was forestalled by the Soviet seizure of power.87 Ryabushinskii stayed aloof from party politics, advocating a position (primarily through his All-Russian Union) of more state order but less state control. We will consider his subsequent political activities below. The Kadets were closely involved with his new organisation.88

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These political manoeuvres were symptomatic of real divisions within the bourgeoisie, appearing under the strain of the events of 1917.89 To begin with, the old division between Moscow and Petrograd reopened. Thus, the purpose of the All-Russian Union, White suggests, was “to represent the Russian national entrepreneurs as distinct from those circles connected with foreign capital centred in Petrograd.”90 The political dimension of the divisions within the bourgeoisie is probably best represented in the diverging paths of the two Moscow capitalists by now best known to us: Aleksandr Konovalov and Pavel Ryabushinskii. Konovalov was the most direct representative of the bourgeoisie within the Provisional Government. He was the Trade and Industry Minister for two periods, from the February revolution until May, and then from September to October. He it was who, as vice-chairman of the government and in Kerensky’s absence, presided over its final meeting in the Winter Palace and was the first arrested by the Soviet insurgents. Konovalov was an early proponent of a welfare state which would attempt to harmonise the interests of capital and labour; to this end, he required sacrifices from both. In the early days of the revolution, Konovalov persuaded the Petrograd employers to accept the eight-hour day, an end to child labour and the beginnings of industrial arbitration. He intervened personally to end a significant number of industrial disputes.91 He brought representatives of the trade unions, the voluntary organisations and industrialists into his ministry.92 He believed that once the war ended, class war could break out in earnest, sweeping away the government and bringing workers and capitalists into head-on confrontation; “We will find ourselves face to face with the workers, and their strength and our weakness will be utterly indisputable.” To avert this danger, he advocated a national system of conciliation, which necessitated the encouragement of workers’ organisations. Salvation is to be found in one thing: in organising ourselves, on the one hand, and in organising the workers, on the other … Both the government and many industrialists have a negative attitude towards the workers’ groups in the VPKs [WICs], but whoever can clearly imagine what is going to happen after the war can understand the madness of destroying these groups.93

From the other side, the expansion of the workers’ movement and the radicalisation of its demands drove Konovalov to denounce “demands

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whose realization would mean the complete destruction of enterprises.” He appealed to the Soviet leadership “to direct [the workers’ movement] into the channel of legitimate [i.e. arbitrated] class struggle.”94 It was apparently a combination of despair at the non-restraint of the workers’ movement and his consequent inability to persuade his fellowindustrialists to make further concessions that brought about his resignation as a minister in May. By the time he returned in September, his concept of the welfare state was crushed under the combined weight of the war, worker radicalism and bourgeois confrontation. Ryabushinskii was also concerned with the role of the state–but his conception of that role was moving in an altogether different direction. The state, he believed, stood above the rights of society and was the essential thing to be protected–by the bourgeoisie, if necessary, against the dark masses.95 The first congress of Ryabushinskii’s new organisation, the All-Russian Union of Trade and Industry, in March 1917, pledged support for the Provisional Government but attacked over-zealous state intervention in the economy. Specifically, it criticised the grain monopoly and demanded that the introduction of the eight-hour day be halted in war-production enterprises. More importantly than these by now routine criticisms, it called for stronger state repression. It demanded decisive measures against the revolutionary movement. Utro Rossii called for the suppression of the Bolsheviks and a curb on the power of the Soviets.96 Ryabushinskii saw to it that the All-Russian Union was not simply a peak council of business leaders, but an organisation competing for support on the ground. To this end, it was engaged throughout 1917 in mass agitation, by leaflet, lecture and public meeting. By the beginning of August, its Moscow branch had published twenty three pamphlets, including titles such as “People and Classes in the Russian Republic,” “Is a Socialist Revolution Possible?,” “What is Socialism?” and “Bakunin and Contemporary Bolshevism.” The main burden of this propaganda was that socialism was premature and impossible in Russia.97 In July, the Union’s Council declared that the Russian revolution should be national, rather than class based, and decried the fact that there were elements abroad that “ended the war at the front and began it inside the country.” It demanded “a radical break by the Government with the dictatorship of the Soviets” and “the awakening … of a national, state

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consciousness.”98 An indication of the direction in which Ryabushinskii’s thought was moving was the fact that the All-Russian Union believed it important to carry out propaganda work in the armed forces–the ultimate expression of the state. The sum of twenty five thousand rubles was given to the Union of Officers of the Army and the Fleet for this purpose.99 Evidently, Ryabushinskii was returning to a version of his pre-1914 militarism and endorsement of state power. It will be remembered that at that time, he was a contributor to the Velikaya Rossiya collection in which he proposed a reformed army as a model for the nation (see Chapter Three). This goes some way to explaining Ryabushinskii’s support for a military solution. Konovalov and Ryabushinskii now represented bourgeois support for each of the two ends of the statist continuum–welfare statism on the part of the former and military statism on the part of the latter. In the conditions of generalised warfare, war economy and rampant militarism, the bourgeoisie could not assert an independent role. It was now trapped within a statist project which would eventually destroy it.

The Kornilov Coup In mid-July, the government appointed General Lavr Kornilov, a known hardliner, commander in chief of the Russian armed forces in a bid to impose some discipline at the front and at home. This, the general was intent on doing–if need be, at the expense of the government. On 3 August he presented a memorandum to the government making a series of demands mainly concerning military discipline. About a week later, he fired off a further memorandum reiterating his disciplinary points and adding some demands concerning the economy. The railways should be under military control. Factories working for the war effort should be placed under martial law with enforced production quotas. There should be no interference by workers in economic matters. And, for the duration of the war, strikes and lockouts should be prohibited.100 We will consider the implication of these demands for the capitalist class a little later. Despairing of the Provisional Government’s willingness or ability to put these measures into effect, General Kornilov prepared to march on Petrograd in order to replace it with a military dictatorship. It is unclear how much support he had for this scheme from within the government itself.101 However, just before Kornilov’s long march began, Kerensky

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broke from him, refused the general’s demand that the government resign and called for resistance to the attempted coup. That resistance came, in fact, from below–from the very Soviets, factory committees and other organs of direct democracy that Kerensky had been trying to repress in the aftermath of the July Days. Due to that resistance, despite some early success, Kornilov’s forces were turned back and the coup collapsed by 30 August. Who supported Kornilov? Obviously, sections of the military command did. By August, he disposed of significant military forces, which implies that the commanders of those forces (if not their rank and file) were solidly behind his programme.102 In the prevailing atmosphere of militarism it was not in the least surprising that military commanders should seize on a military solution to Russia’s troubles. Statists too supported the military option. Guchkov had been a supporter of Kornilov’s since his appointment as commander of the Petrograd military district in March 1917, while the Kadets made his promotion to commander in chief a condition for entering Kerensky’s government. A majority of the Kadet leadership supported the coup attempt.103 However, it was (and sometimes still is) the bourgeoisie that was generally indicted as the major backer of the Kornilov coup. Even before the coup began, Tsereteli told the All-Russian Soviet Executive Committee that “a considerable segment of the bourgeoisie … are taking advantage of the difficulties of the country by launching an open onslaught on the empowered organs of the revolutionary democracy and by undermining the Provisional Government …”.104 The Bolsheviks declared in the aftermath that “Kornilov’s undertaking was not his own doing but that of the whole bourgeoisie.”105 According to the memoirs of the Octobrist, Vladimir L’vov (in 1920), Kornilov’s supporters included “the commercial and industrial class” as well as the Kadets and the military.106 For Sukhanov, Kornilov represented “the Stock Exchange, capital and the rentiers” and was “striving for a pure dictatorship” of these elements. Further, “Kornilov … had of course all the organised bourgeoisie behind him.”107 In Trotsky’s view, “The victory of the bourgeoisie could come only in the form of a military dictatorship … the real thing was the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the people under the banner of Kornilov.”108 There is no doubt that sections of the bourgeoisie supported Kornilov. In April 1917 a committee was set up by businessmen in order (according to

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Guchkov) to collect funds for “moderate bourgeois candidates to the Constituent Assembly [and] for combating the influence of socialists at the front.”109 This committee, the Society for the Economic Regeneration of Russia, seems to have been dominated by the more conservative Petrograd industrialists.110 Guchkov, having resigned as Minister of War, became head of the Society, which managed over the next few months to raise some four million rubles.111 When Kornilov asked the Society for help, Guchkov recollected: “In the end we decided to place the large funds that we collected at the dispersal of General Kornilov for the purpose of organizing an armed struggle against the Soviets.” It may have been the case that the Society was under the impression that Kornilov had government support in his undertaking.112 Kornilov asked the Society to enlist the support of the Moscow industrialists. They approached Ryabushinskii’s All-Russian Union– which, given its close links with the Kadets, seemed a likely hunting ground. It appears that Ryabushinskii at least accepted their approaches warmly and gave support to Kornilov’s scheme.113 But Moscow was not unanimously behind him on this. Putilov approached Sergei Tret’yakov on behalf of the Society and Kornilov: “To this S.N. Tretyakov answered: ‘I take no part in such adventures.’ I left with nothing.”114 Elements of the bourgeoisie then–some of the Petrograd industrialists, those around Ryabushinskii in Moscow–were, in the face of social disintegration and premature attempts at socialism, prepared to endorse a military coup. Once again, we should recall the prevailing militarism of the time, which no doubt had its effect on the mentality of the bourgeoisie. It should also be remembered that the Bolsheviks (with more and more support in the Soviets) were now talking about the “inevitability” (even the desirability) of a civil war. The Provisional Government itself had taken on some of the attributes of a military dictatorship. While almost everyone else was promoting military solutions to the crisis of one sort or another, it is hardly surprising that elements of the bourgeoisie decided to join in. Yet what would have been the result if Kornilov had been victorious? Recall his programme: a military dictatorship in which military needs would prevail, economically and in every other way. State control of the railways. State control and militarily-enforced production quotas for factories producing for the war effort–and it was already clear how far that effort could reach. A state controlled economy?

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Ryabushinskii and the others may have been prepared to accept these things as temporary measures to restore order and win the war. But a Kornilovite victory would have been a tremendous boost for the power of the state–something that Ryabushinskii himself had already warned against. He and his supporters were in the contradictory position of demanding more state order (to combat the revolutionary movement and win the war) but less state intervention (to enable the development of capitalism)–for the state to simultaneously strengthen and weaken itself (as did Konovalov’s vision of a powerful welfare state–though in a relatively more benign way). This was symptomatic of the contradictory position of the Russian bourgeoisie in 1917.

Endgame The progressive bourgeoisie supported and participated in the February Revolution as part of the strategy that they had evolved after 1909. An important, successful and (hopefully) popular war would necessitate radical reform, up to and including the destruction of the autocracy, and initiate modern capitalism in Russia. As it turned out, the Great War, February and its aftermath had proved a rather more rigorous and testing experience for the bourgeoisie than many of them might have expected. Still, for the most part and for most of 1917, they stood with the various manifestations of the Provisional Government– and they continued to support the war. This proved to be their undoing.115 Total and industrialised warfare necessitated the strengthening of state power in order to create a war (as opposed to a market) economy.116 In the wake of the overthrow of the autocracy, an increase in state power meant a decrease in the autonomous power of capital (the rise of one production relation relative to another)–and this would have been so whether it had been the state of Kerensky, Konovalov, Kornilov or Lenin. The increase in the power of the state, necessitated by war, led away from the bourgeois revolution–the latter understood as a process in which the capital production relation lays and consolidates the foundations of a capitalist economic structure in order to raise the level of development of the productive forces. It led instead towards another kind of revolution–and it had two effects that ensured that the process would continue. Firstly, the growth of state power to continue the war effort alienated an increasingly war-weary

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population and quite rapidly turned it into an enemy. Popular hostility was not conjured up just by the fighting–the privation occasioned by the war, which naturally fell mainly on the lower orders, greatly intensified it. Resistance to the war, resentment of the war effort and economic militancy resulting from hardship, on the one hand gave rise to calls for and measures of even stronger state repression, and on the other made the Bolshevik-led Soviet insurrection possible. Secondly, the strong state brought with it its companions in arms, militarism and authoritarianism. Militarism was only to be expected in the 1914-1918 context and it affected all of the warring powers. But in Russia, it was accompanied by a strong faith in the state to provide solutions, a belief that came from both the left (as seen in Groman’s economic plans and as would be seen in Bolshevik practice) and the right (beginning with the Provisional Government, continuing with Kornilov and still detectable in the anti-Soviet White movements). Whereas, in the advanced economies, some of this would be rolled back after 1918, in Russia–and for example in Germany, Italy and Japan–it would become a permanent feature of the inter-war period. Authoritarianism–the drift and then the rush away from democracy–had many of the same roots, beginning when the Provisional Government realised that it simply could not carry through its programme democratically and perpetuated for the same reason by its successor. By the end of 1917, the bourgeoisie found itself circumscribed by boundaries of its own making. It had joined its own revolution to the project of the new statists, and both had used the opportunity of the war to remove the autocratic obstacle that blocked their path. Once that was done, the bourgeoisie found the direction of its revolution contested by the new state. Committed to the war (which, with increasing defeats, increasingly became a matter of survival) they were forced to endorse an increase in state power. Both these things enraged the population and turned it against the bourgeoisie.

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Notes 1

R.P. Browder & A. Kerensky eds., The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents, Volumes I-III (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), Volume I, 41; O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London: Pimlico, 1997), 326-7. 2 Provisional Government Documents I, 135; A.I. Zevelev, et al., eds., Politicheskie Partii Rossii: istoriya i sovremennost’ (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000), 166; F.A. Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya na Putyakh k Vlasti (1914-vesna 1917 g.) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), 305. 3 Provisional Government Documents I, 131-2. Milyukov was referring to the elections for the workers’ groups of the WICs. 4 See Boris I. Kolonitskii, “Antibourgeois Propaganda and Anti-‘Burzhii’ Consciousness in 1917,” The Russian Review LIII (April 1994): 190-193. He continues: “In the mass consciousness of 1917, the ‘bourgeoisie’ was not so much an economic, social or political category; rather it was an infernal, insidious and powerful force standing in the way of the great and holy resurrection promised by the Revolution.” (195) 5 N.N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917: a personal record, trans. J. Carmichael (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 [1922]), 9, 77, 102. As we know, the bourgeoisie’s revolutionary credentials were rather better than that. Sukhanov also accuses the capitalists of being intent on saving the autocracy from democracy (35) and not supporting the revolution at all (57). 6 Speaking to a conference of members of the four Dumas in April 1917, in Provisional Government Documents III, 1263. 7 Z. Galili, “Commercial-Industrial Circles in Revolution: The Failure of ‘Industrial Progressivism’,” in Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, ed. E.R. Frankel et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 195. 8 F.A. Gaida, “Fevral’ 1917 goda: revolyutsiya, vlast’, burzhuaziya.” Voprosy Istorii 3 (1996): 17 & 24. He suggests (incorrectly in my view) that this was because the bourgeoisie was too politically weak to impose its views – however, he also makes the point that the bourgeoisie did not believe “a monopolistic assumption of power to be part of its mission.” (25) 9 Guchkov was of the opinion that the entire government should be composed of experts and technicians from the existing bureaucracy, rather than of politicians or worse, “the public at large.” (Gaida, Fevral’ 1917, 13) 10 Provisional Government Documents I, 49, 242, 276-7. See also W.G. Rosenberg, “The Zemstvo in 1917 and its Fate under Bolshevik Rule,” in The Zemstvo in Russia: an experiment in local self-government, ed. T. Emmons, & W.S. Vucinich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 386, 391-2. Rosenberg says, “The new government wanted effective, orderly, popular rule in the countryside guided by liberal professionals …” (393). 11 The Central WIC organised a special session, attended by over one thousand businessmen to honour the WIC ministers (L.H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia: a study of the War-Industries Committees (Hong

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Kong: St Antony’s/Macmillan, 1983), 200, 205-6; Galili, Commercial-Industrial Circles, 192-3). 12 P. Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s continuum of crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 46. Their attitudes were aptly summarised by an official of the Moscow Food Supply Committee, who declared, “But when our whole plan has gone into effect and our government controls our life, these troubles will all be remedied.” (E. Poole, The Dark People: Russia’s Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 100.) 13 War aims: Provisional Government Documents II, 1045; Guchkov (to conference of members of the four Dumas) 27 April 1917, Provisional Government Documents III, 1260. 14 Provisional Government Documents III, 1490. Once again conflating the new statists with the bourgeoisie, Sukhanov makes the half correct point that “the entire bourgeoisie” saw the February Revolution “merely as a means of strengthening our military power.” (Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 12.) 15 Provisional Government Documents I, 157. 16 Provisional Government Documents II, 1057-8. Fedor Rodichev told the Kadet Congress on 25 March that Russia needed the Straits: “Citizens, they say that these are the strivings of Russian imperialism and seizure. No! This is not seizure. It is the preservation of Russian independence.” (cited in W.G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: the Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917-1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 87.) 17 Declaration of the first coalition government, 5 May 1917, Provisional Government Documents III, 1277. 18 Reported in Rech’, 7 May 1917, Provisional Government Documents II, 1102. 19 Kerensky’s order for the July offensive, Provisional Government Documents III, 426-7. 20 Rosenberg, Zemstvo in 1917, 392. 21 P. Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: a social and economic history (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 198. 22 Provisional Government Documents I, 78. See also Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 222-3. 23 Holquist, Making War, 110. 24 S.O. Zagorsky, State Control of Industry in Russia During the War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928), 174. Yulii Guzhon closed his Moscow metals factory (supplying 85% of the capital’s metal) in June 1917 after a rise in wages. The factory was confiscated by the Provisional Government (Provisional Government Documents II, 764-5). Trotsky considered that plant closures were a conspiracy on the part of the bourgeoisie to sabotage the revolution (L.D. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 1979 [1932-3]), 423-5). 25 See for example, Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 232. 26 Zagorsky, State Control, 170. 27 ‘The journal Financial Life, for example, complained that the revolution which had begun as an “all-national revolution” had been turned into a “class revolution” and had in fact put trade and industry under “a socialist siege”.’ (Galili,

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Commercial-Industrial Circles, 203.) In early 1917, Karl Kautsky advised the Russian workers (once again) that, given the relative strength of the peasantry and Russia’s overall backwardness, socialism was impossible. Instead, they should strive for “a democratic republic, in which a progressive government could promote the rapid development of industry and so strengthen the working class numerically and mature it politically.” (“Die Aussichten der Russischen Revolution” in M. Salvadori, Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 18801938 (London: Verso 1990), 220-221). 28 Provisional Government Documents II, 712-13. The Society’s journal declared as late as 1 June: “We do not shut our eyes to the inevitable class struggle; but now, it can, and must, proceed under normal conditions … We believe that the free citizen-industrialist and the free citizen-worker will find a common language in which to communicate [and] will find normal forms of mutual relations.” Cited in Galili, Commercial-Industrial Circles, 199. See also P. Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: a social and economic history (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 204, 579-9. 29 Provisional Government Documents III, 1416. 30 Utro Rossii, 21 March 1917 in V.I. Startsev, Vnutrennyaya Politika Vremennogo Pravitel’stva pervogo sostava (Leningrad: Nauka, 1980), 141. The division of dual power was illustrated in the WICs, from which the business members gravitated towards the Provisional Government, while the workers’ groups trooped off to the Soviets (Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 200-203). 31 Provisional Government Documents II, 671. 32 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 212. 33 T.H. Von Laue, “Problems of Industrialization,” in Russia Under the Last Tsar, ed.T.G. Stavrou (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 140. 34 Figes, Tragedy, 363. At the beginning of 1917, one third of peasant households were on private land. By 1922, less than 2% were. 35 L.T. Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914-1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 69-70. 36 M. Lewin, The Making of Soviet Society (New York: The New Press, 1994), 18. 37 Peasants resisted the new zemstvo authorities, “demanding the dismissal of zemstvo teachers, agronomists and other third-element professionals.” (Rosenberg, Zemstvo in 1917, 389.) It is perhaps worth noting that Russia’s orthodox Marxists had pointed out the possibility of such an outcome as far back as 1906. They did not get this quite right – Plekhanov argued that the commune would return as a means of renewed state exploitation rather than (as actually happened) an escape from it. But they did recognise the potential for rural regression resulting from Russia’s backwardness (see K.A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: a comparative study of total power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 391-394). 38 Provisional Government Documents III, 1459. 39 Provisional Government Documents III, 1277. For good measure, it went on: “the Provisional Government will devote particular attention to the increasing of direct taxes on the wealthy classes …”

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40 Reported in Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel’stva, number 61, 24 May 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 633. 41 Provisional Government Documents III, 1464. 42 Rationing: Provisional Government Documents II, 617, 627-8; labour conscription: Provisional government Documents II, 625-6. 43 Zagorsky, State Control, 177. 44 Zagorsky, State Control, 176. 45 Provisional Government Documents II, 685-708; 664. 46 Provisional Government Documents II, 667. The Committee’s purpose was “the discussion of basic principles of economic policy and for a survey of general measures for promoting the development of extractive and manufacturing industry, as well as of domestic and foreign trade.” 47 Provisional Government Documents II, 677. 48 Rabochaya Gazeta, number 88, 23 June 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 679. 49 Izvestiya, number 54, 30 April 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 660. 50 Trotsky, History, 426-7. Lenin commented that “The programme is excellent” – it was, he pointed out, the equivalent of a “programme of frightful Bolshevism.” 51 Reported in Izvestiya, 24 June 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 637. 52 N. Jasny, Soviet Economists of the Twenties: Names to be Remembered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 102. Jasny was opposed to any such ambition. As a better Menshevik than Groman, he points out “Groman … should have realised that the immensely primitive nature of the country and the disturbed conditions of the time completely excluded the elaboration of a Unified Economic Plan or anything remotely similar to this in a period of weeks, months or even years.” 53 Jasny, Soviet Economists, 99. 54 Poole, The Dark People, 109. 55 From Protsess kontrrevolyutsionnoi organizatsii menshevikov (mart 1931 g.) (Moscow 1931), 386-7 in Jasny, Soviet Economists, 100. Jasny caustically remarks that Sukhanov’s statement “shows that people could be crazy not only in 1917 but also fourteen years later … the grain monopoly had little or nothing to do with War Communism …” (100). But it seems to me that Sukhanov was basically correct in drawing attention to the continuity between the two policies. In any case, he was making a polemical point to the kangaroo court: that Groman and his fellowdefendants should not be on trial for advocating what would become Soviet government policy. 56 Z. Galili, The Menshevik Leaders in the Russian Revolution: social realities and political strategies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 361; Poole, The Dark People, 107. 57 Reported in Vestnik Vremennogo Pravitel’stva, number 61, 24 May 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 633.

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58 Provisional Government Documents III, 1468. The liberal newspaper Russkaya Vedomosti proposed the state take-over of industries precisely to forestall the seizure of enterprises by workers (number 150, 4 July 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 732). 59 Provisional Government Documents II, 674. 60 Provisional Government Documents II, 615. 61 Quoted in Jasny, Soviet Economists, 97. 62 Provisional Government Documents II, 619. 63 Provisional Government Documents II, 621. The committees were originally to have representatives from Zemgor, the WICs, the soviets, Peasant Unions and cooperatives (620). However, Yaney points out that the government ‘began striving to eliminate the democratic decentralized element in their organization immediately after establishing them.’ (Yaney, GL The Urge to Mobilize: agrarian reform in Russia, 1861-1930, University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1982, 441) 64 Announcement of the Grain Monopoly, 28 March 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 621. 65 Crops as state property: Law on the Protection of Crops, 11 April 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 621; Coalition government and production: Provisional Government Documents III, 1277; Food Ministry responsibilities: Provisional Government Documents II, 662; Ministry declaration, Provisional Government Documents II, 564. 66 Number 36, 17 April 1917, Provisional Government Documents II, 637. 67 Poole, The Dark People, 109. 68 Provisional Government Documents II, 635. Peshekhonov told the State Conference that a further reason for so doing was “the extreme distrust and even outright hostile attitude toward the commercial class on the part of the local population.” (Provisional Government Documents III, 1465) 69 Lih, Bread, 61-2; W.G. Rosenberg, “The Problem of Market Relations and the State in Revolutionary Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History XXXVI (1994): 356-396, 372 & 376; Gatrell, Russia’s First World War War, 210. 70 Troops: Provisional Government Documents II, 584; Food Ministry order to Food Supply Committees, 18 July 1917, Provisional Government Documents II, 564. 71 G.L. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: agrarian reform in Russia, 1861-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 442; Holquist, Making War, 106. 72 Holquist, Making War, 106. 73 Provisional Government Documents II, 653. 74 Lih, Bread, 79. Lih comments “These proposals, which are redolent of the civil war, hardly stand out from other proposals by food-supply officials in the fall of 1917.” 75 P. Holquist, “‘Information is the Alpha and the Omega of our Work’: Bolshevik surveillance in its pan-European context,” Journal of Modern History LXIX 3 (September 1997): 6-7; P. Holquist, “What’s so Revolutionary about the Russian Revolution? State Practices and the New-Style Politics, 1914-21,” in Russian

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Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices ed. D.L. Hoffmann and Y. Kotsonis (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 2000), 95-6. 76 Provisional Government Documents III, 1436-1441. 77 Poole, The Dark People, 112 & 114. According to Peshekhonov, some capitalists were falling over themselves to co-operate with the new government: “many came and said: ‘Take over our enterprises, we are giving them away–please manage them yourselves’ … the Government is very willing to go firmly in this direction.” (Speech to first Soviet Congress in Izvestiya, number 85, 7 June 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 636.) 78 Kutler: Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 331; grain merchants: Provisional Government Documents II, 631-2. 79 Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 201. 80 Galili, Menshevik Leaders, 120. Such representation was not forthcoming. 81 Rosenberg, Market Relations, 373. 82 Provisional Government Documents III, 1455. At the time of the State Conference (August), the newspaper Den’ described the bourgeoisie as “a mighty force which wishes to live and act in a bourgeois way, a force with which it is necessary to reckon not in proportion to its number, but in accordance with its social significance.” (18 August 1917 in Provisional Government Documents III, 1518.) 83 As Kautsky put it in late 1917: “… war and democracy are two forces that cannot be easily brought into harmony … This war threatens the very essence of the Russian revolution, its democracy.” (K. Kautsky, “The Russian Revolution,” Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/works/1910s/russian.htm.) 84 In Lih, Bread, 101. 85 In V.Ya. Laverychev, “Vserossiiskii Soyuz Torgovli i Promyshlennosti,” Istoricheskie Zapiski 70 (1961): 48. Russkiye Vedomosti commented on the congress (somewhat harshly): “The commercial-industrialists … at all times remained commercial-industrialists, and not for a moment did they become citizens.” (5 August 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 682.) 86 On the Kadets: Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 332; Figes, Tragedy, 384. On Konovalov: Laverychev, Vserossiiskii Soyuz, 42. Left Octobrists: Zevelev, Politicheskie Partii Rossii, 150. 87 Zevelev, Politicheskie Partii Rossii, 150. 88 Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 84, 164, 209. Laverychev notes the close relationship between the All-Russian Union’s local committees and Kadet branches: “it became impossible to tell them apart.” (Vserossiiskii Soyuz, 53.) 89 The strain was evident to the acting Minister of Trade and Industry, Vasilii Stepanov, who wrote in a memorandum to the government in June: “The industrialists are living through a state of great confusion. Losing faith in the stability of the economic situation, they show an inclination to suspend production … the energy of the industrial class, which is essential for saving the country, is greatly weakened.” (Provisional Government Documents II, 673.)

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J.D. White, “The Kornilov Affair – A Study in Counter-Revolution,” Soviet Studies XX 2 (October 1968): 189. While Ryabushinskii and his Moscow supporters formed the All-Russian Union, the Petrograd industrialists formed their own All-Russian Union of Factory and Mill Owners’ Societies (Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 201.) 91 Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 318; Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 204; Figes, Tragedy, 371. 92 Provisional Government Documents II, 710-711. 93 Speech to Moscow businessmen in September 1917 in Burzhuaziya Nakanune Fevral’skoi Revolyutsii, ed. B.B. Grave (Moscow & Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1927), 140. See also Galili, Commercial-Industrial Circles, 192 & 195; Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 200; Galili, Menshevik Leaders, 85-8. 94 Speech to the WIC Congress, 16 May 1917 in Provisional Government Documents II, 669. 95 Galili, Menshevik Leaders, 81 & 89; Galili, Commercial-Industrial Circles, 192. 96 Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya, 339; Laverychev, Vserossiiskii Soyuz, 44-5; White, Kornilov Affair, 196. 97 Laverychev, Vserossiiskii Soyuz, 51-2. 98 Statement of the Council of the All-Russian Union of Trade and Industry, 19 July 1917 in Provisional Government Documents III, 1404. 99 Part of this was used to finance the officers’ publication, War and Peace (Laverychev, Vserossiiskii Soyuz, 44 & 53; White, Kornilov Affair, 192). 100 White, Kornilov Affair, 198-9. 101 White comments that “At no time does Kerensky seem to have opposed the programme [contained in Kornilov’s memoranda] on principle.” (Kornilov Affair, 199.) 102 White says: “The element common to all the groups and organizations supporting the Kornilovist movement was the military. This element welded together all the dissimilar components whose common purpose was the establishment of a military dictatorship.” (White, Kornilov Affair, 191; see also Provisional Government Documents III, 1535.) 103 Figes, Tragedy 442-3; Zeveleva, Politicheskie Partii Rossii, 167. 104 Provisional Government Documents III, 1444. 105 Reported in Rech’, 13 September 1917, in F.A. Golder, ed., Documents of Russian History, 1914-1917 (Gloucester (Mass.): Smith, 1964), 532. 106 Provisional Government Documents III, 1561. 107 Sukhanov, Russian Revolution, 501 & 503. 108 Trotsky, History, 702. 109 Guchkov quoted by the industrialist Aleksei Putilov in Provisional Government Documents III, 1527. 110 Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 213. White says that the Kornilovite movement was disrupted by Moscow/Petrograd rivalries (Kornilov Affair, 204). 111 According to Putilov, some of this was spent on anti-socialist propaganda, but over half of it was “lost in the process of nationalization by the Soviets.” (Provisional Government Documents III, 1534.)

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112 Kornilov requests: Provisional Government Documents III, 1529. Guchkov remembers: Provisional Government Documents III, 1527. Government support: Provisional Government Documents III, 1531. 113 This was at about the same time as his “bony hand of hunger” speech. According to Lih, Ryabushinskii gave “a ringing public endorsement [to Kornilov] in early August.” (Bread, 109.) General Denikin had the impression that Ryabushinskii and other Moscow industrialists were more supportive of Kornilov than those in Petrograd (White, Kornilov Affair, 192). 114 Provisional Government Documents III, 1530. White calls into question whether Tret’yakov was “rejecting in totality” the Kornilov scheme, but nevertheless concludes: “the Moscow group seems in general to have been rather less convinced about the need for violence than their Petrograd counterparts.” (Kornilov Affair, 201.) 115 “The war had indeed betrayed Russian industrialists. In 1915 they perceived it as a stimulus for economic development ‘in the European manner’; by late 1917 they were fighting a desperate and losing battle against the revolutionary disintegration of industry which the war had unleashed.” (Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 208.) 116 “By October, certainly [i.e. before the Soviet insurrection], the ‘invisible hand’ was not on the tiller.” (Rosenberg, Market Relations, 377.)

CHAPTER SIX UNDIGNIFIED EXIT

The level of development of Russia’s productive forces could have been raised by the extension of urban capitalism, the elimination of the semifeudal system in the countryside and its replacement by the gradual establishment of capitalism there too–in short by a bourgeois revolution. This was not to be, for three reasons. Firstly, the bourgeoisie had a rival in its attempt to make capital the dominant production relation in Russia and that was the state. The reasons for the historical continuity of the strong state in Russia have been wellrehearsed. The Tsarist state eventually proved an obstacle to the defence and development of Russia’s productive forces. The republican state was not strong enough in their defence and endangered them by continuing a disastrous war. Only the Soviet state, the strongest of all, could end the War and defend its power. And the Soviet state brooked no competition with any other social forces. Secondly, the continuation of the War necessitated a stronger and stronger state–thus building up this rival to the bourgeoisie. Thirdly, from mid1917 onwards, Russia’s workers and soldier-peasants had been fed on an almost unadulterated diet of socialist possibilities by the Bolsheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)–the peasants proper were spared this since they were engaged in a most un-socialist project of either recommunising or dividing up the land. Occasionally, this was leavened with words of caution about the necessity for a European revolution. But the net effect was to convince the urban masses (if only temporarily) that socialism was on the agenda and best achieved by a physical assault on the bourgeoisie and all their works. What emerged then, was not a bourgeois revolution but a new state (albeit one that would fulfil some of the bourgeois revolution’s tasks), equipped with an ideology and beset by external circumstances which, in a very short space of time, would evolve into an almost pure example of its type-

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the state unfettered, untrammelled by any social force and able to pursue its agenda unhindered. The remainder of this story then is briefly told. In the course of this chapter, the Russian bourgeoisie will fade away. The new state will end up centre stage. The fate of the Russian bourgeoisie after November 1917 was intimately connected with the aims of the Soviet revolution. The Bolshevik leadership however was studiedly ambiguous as to what those aims actually were. As the takeover proceeded, it was justified in terms of the need to defend the gains of the revolution–to ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, for example. It was declared necessary in order to end the war (probably an explanation that came nearest the mark). It was seen as an assurance that land would be distributed to the peasants. None of these aims, if implemented, would have materially affected either the bourgeoisie or the bourgeois nature of the revolution. But beyond them was the question of socialism. As is well known, Lenin and Trotsky did not hold out socialism as an immediate prospect. Enough of their residual Marxism remained to make them see that Russia’s backwardness made such a thing impossible. Socialism, they argued, was dependent on revolutions in the more advanced economies. But this position too was somewhat ambiguous. Here is Lenin speaking to the seventh Party congress in March 1918: Yes, we shall see the world revolution, but for the time being it is a very good fairy-tale, a very beautiful fairy-tale. I quite understand children liking beautiful fairy-tales.1

Once the land was distributed, the Constituent Assembly dissolved and the war ended, Russia remained in chaos and misery. “Socialism” was left as the only light on the horizon. The problem was that it was difficult to enthuse and mobilise the Soviet population about something for which the prospects, given the failure of the European revolution, seemed so dim. Socialism then, began to be talked of by the Bolsheviks as something towards which steps could be taken-and in an immediate sense. Prominent among those immediate steps would be an attack on the bourgeoisie.

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The Bolsheviks and the Bourgeoisie We have seen that the Bolsheviks turned their backs on the bourgeoisie as a progressive force in 1905, when the latter were disinclined to support the eight-hour day and the armed insurrection in Moscow (see Chapter Two). After that, the Bolsheviks spent little time considering the position of industry under a revolutionary government, and even less on the position of the bourgeoisie itself.2 Lenin took up the question of economic organisation in his “April Theses” in 1917: It is not our immediate task to ‘introduce” socialism, but only to bring social production and the distribution of products at once under the control of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies.3

A Soviet regime would control and even nationalise industry-and he pointed out (in September 1917) that these were measures “which have been frequently resorted to during the war by a number of bourgeois states”.4 In early October he urged the Provisional Government to nationalise the banks and “the largest, monopolistic capitalist associations (sugar, oil, coal, iron and steel, and other syndicates).” He suggested that these measures were not being implemented “because of the vile greed of an insignificant handful of rich people.”5 The bourgeoisie would not be driven out however. Later that month he wrote, “We must also compel the capitalists to work within the framework of the new state organisation” and that the new state “will be able to appoint ten or even a hundred supervisors to each of them.”6 So, under Lenin’s pre-November plans, the bourgeoisie were to be subject to control rather than expropriation. This moderation was suitably decorated for mass consumption by vituperative attacks on capitalists as individuals and much talk of the virtues of “workers’ control”.7 For their part, the bourgeois reaction to the Soviet insurrection was relatively muted, perhaps because it was seen as simply one in a series of political upheavals and, as such, not expected to last. Ryabushinskii’s AllRussian Union of Trade and Industry continued to appeal to the new authorities against the confiscation of private property until those authorities closed it down.8 There had been a certain rallying to the Kadets by the progressive Moscow bourgeoisie-Konovalov and Sergei Smirnov had joined before the Soviet takeover. At the end of November 1917, the Soviet government outlawed the Kadets as “enemies of the people”. The Moscow journal of the WICs declared once again at the end of November

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that any attempt at socialism in Russia would lead to economic anarchy and that “Russian capitalism is not yet obsolete”.9 But few were listening. It is hard not to agree with Victor Serge’s harsh judgement on the postNovember bourgeoisie: From November 1917 to the spring of 1918 it appears to be crushed, reduced to almost total impotence. It has no leader, no policy of any strength, not one serious party. Its disarray is total.10

Attack from Below By November, there was tremendous confusion amongst the urban masses as to who the bourgeoisie actually was.11 The propaganda of the Bolsheviks and the SRs (among others) had encouraged their supporters to identify anyone opposed to Soviet power as “bourgeois” or “agents of the bourgeoisie”.12 In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet takeover, “the bourgeoisie”, however defined, became the main enemy of the new regime-and that regime had to take steps, or authorise steps to be taken, to demonstrate that it was striking down its main enemy. What Lenin would later describe as a “Red Guard” attack on capital was launched.13 Workers took over enterprises, either driving out the owners or taking advantage of that fact that they had left. Employers that remained were punished if they did not accept workers’ control.14 This was a political as well as an economic attack on the bourgeoisie. As two Soviet writers point out, “Confiscation [of industrial property] undermined the economic position of the Russian bourgeoisie and limited its possibilities for offering material aid to the counter-revolutionaries”.15 Local Soviets were authorised to impose punitive taxes on the bourgeoisie. In December 1917, the Ekaterinburg Soviet levied a tax of 150,000 rubles on the local bourgeoisie. The Baku city Soviet decided to extract a forced loan of five million rubles from theirs. If the wealthy were unwilling to pay, physical pressure was applied. The Samara Military Revolutionary Committee, still in December, took nineteen capitalists hostage until their fellow bourgeois agreed to the Committee’s monetary demands. In Kharkov the Red Army arrested its fifteen wealthiest citizens and threatened to send them to work in the Donets mines if one million rubles was not handed over for the Kharkov workers. It is estimated that during the Red Guard offensive some 739 million rubles was taken from the bourgeoisie in European Russian alone in these ways.16

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Individual acts of humiliation were carried out as well. Capitalists undertook forced labour (clearing snow, sweeping the streets, putting up decorations for revolutionary festivals).17 They were told that numbers of poor citizens would be billeted in their houses or that their houses would be confiscated outright. For those that remained, this was often the case.18 More frightening were incidents such as that in Sevastopol in February 1918, when “the sailors of the Black Sea Fleet ran amuck through the town, killing hundreds of ‘bourgeoisie’, men women and children …”.19 The Red Guard offensive from below was not without encouragement from above. Lenin suggested to the Supreme Council of the National Economy (Vesenkha) in December 1917 that all banks and large-scale industries should be nationalised, more or less immediately. This was rejected as impractical, but his Draft Economic Programme was not. Under this, “members of the wealthy classes” had to declare their assets, “make weekly statements of their activities” to local Soviets, enter into labour books the work assigned to them and keep all their money in the State Bank, from which they could only withdraw 100-125 rubles per week.20 Private banks were occupied by Red Guards on 27 December and a government decree nationalised them on the same day. Lenin wrote in the following April: The bourgeoisie in our country has been conquered, but it has not yet been uprooted, not yet destroyed, and not even utterly broken.

Evidently, there was more Red Guard work to do. The struggle had to be taken to a “higher form”, said Lenin–from expropriation to the creation of conditions in which the bourgeoisie could not exist.21 According to the Soviet writers Avdakov and Borodin, the bourgeoisie “put up fierce resistance” to the Soviet government during 1917-1918, since they were “counting on overthrowing Soviet power by force”. They curtailed production, closed their enterprises, transferred their capital abroad-and started “a campaign of lies and intimidation of the working class”.22 Most of this was passive resistance. It is true that individual members of the bourgeoisie joined the White movements (see below). The Kadet Central Committee did meet secretly in Moscow in early January 1918 and resolved to support a temporary military dictatorship to fight the Bolsheviks. And in the first half of 1918, individual capitalists, the Engineering and Technical Union and the sugar owners protested against uncompensated nationalisation-not unexpectedly.23

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But for the most part, prominent capitalists kept an extremely low profile in the period following November, in marked contrast to their activities during 1917. So much was this the case that the semi-Menshevik Novaya Zhizn’ commented in January 1918 that “during the whole period from the November Revolution our industrialists abstained from adopting any political resolution.”24 I shall deal with individual cases later but it can be said that in the early period, Russia’s capitalists either attempted an uneasy compromise with the new regime or made arrangements to leave, taking their capital with them.

Pressure from Above The Bolshevik leadership soon realised that if the Red Guard offensive continued, the industrial economy would cease to operate. Lenin said in April 1918: If we decided to continue to expropriate capital at the same rate at which we have been doing it up to now, we should certainly suffer defeat, because our work of organising proletarian accounting and control has obviously … fallen behind the work of directly “expropriating the expropriators”.25

Instead, what was needed was a system of “state capitalism”, in which industrialists would continue to own and even manage their concerns, under state (but not workers’) supervision. Rather than a retreat from the socialism that was sometimes promised, this was portrayed as a step towards it. “For,” as Lenin explained, “socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly … socialism is merely statecapitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people”.26 If a capitalist war economy, like that in Germany, were controlled by a Soviet state, “you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.”27 A step forward this kind of state capitalism certainly would have been–but not away from capitalism and towards socialism. The level of Russia’s development determined that the economy could only move forward to capitalism–nurtured in its early stages by the state perhaps, but on the road to a capitalism freed from the state. Only on that basis could the foundations of future socialist development be laid. Lenin’s recognition of the need for state capitalism, as well as his recognition of it as an advance, was a quiet refutation of the basis on which the Bolsheviks took and retained power.

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State capitalism opened up the possibility of a compromise between the government and the remaining capitalists. Lenin told his readers: On the one hand, we must ruthlessly suppress the uncultured capitalists who refuse to have anything to do with “state capitalism” or to consider any form of compromise … On the other hand, we must use the method of compromise, or of buying off the cultured capitalists who agree to “state capitalism” …28

Signs of such a compromise had already appeared. The Moscow regional Vesenkha and the Kharkov regional People’s Commissariat of Agriculture both contained representatives of the employers.29 There were also capitalist representatives on a number of industrial committees and central administrations before June 1918.30 From the other side, the All-Russian Union of Factory and Mine Owners passed a resolution recognising the necessity of state control during wartime (and even accepting workers’ control, as long as it “does not interfere with the management of the enterprise”).31 In early 1918, negotiations began between Vesenkha and the Association of Moscow Factory Owners, represented by Prince Meshcherskii, a director of the Sormovo-Kolomna metallurgical complex. The object of the exercise was the formation of a state-supervised trust combining twenty enterprises with the potential to control the majority of Russia’s machine building and metals industries.32 Similar negotiations were conducted with the Stakhaev Company to create a Urals metallurgical trust.33 Meanwhile, workers in the tanning industry approached Lenin with a scheme in which tanning enterprises would not be expropriated “but were to come under a joint control of a bourgeois-proletarian syndicate subsidized by the state.”34 While none of these negotiations produced results, they were manifestations of the Bolshevik retreat from the Red Guard offensive. That retreat did not go unnoticed, especially within the Bolsheviks’ own ranks. The left of the Party-the Left Communists-argued against any step back. Specifically on the negotiations with Meshcherskii and the others, they said that if such deals went through “all initiative in organising and managing the enterprise would have remained in the hands of the organizer of the trust.”35 Both sides in this debate were partially correct. Lenin was quite right to say that the Red Guard offensive was utopian and that state capitalism in Russia was a step forward. But had such a step been taken, it would have led towards capitalism, not socialism. The Left

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Communists were right in their contention that if the Bolshevik state cultivated capitalism-in the shape of the already existing bourgeoisie and the forces being built up in the countryside-eventually it would overwhelm them. They recognised that Lenin’s state capitalism would not produce the kind of Russia they envisioned and demanded “socialism” instead. But that socialism would not hold together, let alone advance, the economy. Karl Kautsky commented at the time: The dictatorship of the proletariat means the inhibition of capitalist production. The capitalist mode of production becomes impossible under a proletarian regime. Is Russia already equipped to put in its place a Socialist mode of production?36

The Red Guard offensive was stopped, but the proposed deals with the iron and steel industrialists were rejected by April 1918. Some suggested that was due to a lack of co-operation on the part of the bourgeoisie. Shlyapnikov told the first All-Russian Trade Union Congress in 1918 that “the capitalist class renounced the organizing role in production assigned to it.”37 Osinskii said that the worker-capitalist plan for the tanning industry “proved nothing but a bait by which the industrialists hoped to secure a subsidy …”.38 Avdakov and Borodin believed that Meshcherskii, Stakhaev and the others had only entered into negotiations to slow down and undermine the nationalisation process.39 In fact, the moves towards a co-operative state capitalism were not sabotaged by the perfidy of the bourgeoisie. They came to an end due to the serious onset of the civil war and the need once again for a state-directed war economy.

Increasing Centralism Even before that, the Bolsheviks’ endorsement of the state both as a mobiliser for economic development and military defence set the Soviet regime on a clear course of escalating state power, militarism and authoritarianism. The main culprit here had been the war itself, which had necessitated strong, interventionist states and, along with them, a positive endorsement of state violence to achieve their ends. In The War and the International, Kautsky wrote: Today the worker has learned in practice to despise [bourgeois] legality, and violently to destroy it … Heavy guns are knocking into his head the idea that, in cases where it is impossible to avoid an obstacle, there remains the possibility of destroying it.40

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Having withdrawn from the war, the Soviet regime still took its monopoly on the use of legitimate force seriously-and grimly endorsed the use of violence by its supporters as Soviet power spread, especially against “class enemies”.41 The Soviet Union would be marked for the rest of its existence by this kind of militarism, which reflected the state’s domination of the production relations. Military methods and the Red Army itself rapidly replaced the worker and the discipline of collective labour in the factory as social models.42 In the economy there was rapid centralisation as part of the move away from the Red Guard offensive and towards a more controllable state capitalism. Vesenkha was established in December 1917, to “draw up general standards and plans for the regulation of the economic life of the country”. It had the right “to confiscate, requisition, sequester, and consolidate various branches of industry, commerce, and other enterprises in the field of production, distribution, and state finance.”43 All of the directive parts of the Provisional Government’s war economy were taken over by Vesenkha.44 The WICs were not revived as the Soviet regime mistrusted them and their personnel, much as had their Tsarist predecessors. They were moved from department to department, renamed and finally decreed out of existence.45 The debate about the virtues of state capitalism as opposed to workers’ control came to an abrupt end in 1918. On the one hand, negotiations with industrialists stopped. On the other, further exercises in workers’ control were halted. In new regulations, Vesenkha declared in February: From now on no institution other than those indicated in Article 1 [Vesenkha and the Council of People’s Commissars] has a right to confiscate enterprises.46

The aim was now state nationalisation under centralised control.47 In some instances this was a relief for a number of industrialists who saw nationalisation as a defence against workers’ control.48 The third AllRussian Soviet Congress in January 1918 declared its intention to bring about “the complete transfer of the factories, shops, mines, railroads, and other means of production and transportation to the Soviet Republic …”.49 Entire industries now began to be nationalised-sugar in May, oil in June. As well as a means of establishing central control of the economy, state nationalisation may also have been prompted by German interest in Russian resources. After the Brest-Litovsk peace, German investors were apparently buying up quantities of shares in Russian heavy industry. This

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not only posed a threat to the Soviet state’s control over the Russian economy, but might also have produced a backlash if German-influenced firms were nationalised.50

Civil War With the Soviet state treading the well-worn path of taking control of strategic industries, it was the return to war and the consequent strengthening of state power that finally brought the Russian bourgeoisie to its knees. As the anti-Soviet “White” forces gradually arranged themselves into something resembling a serious threat, the Soviet regime moved single-mindedly to the re-creation on an even greater scale of a war economy. In this sense, it completed the process initiated by the outbreak of the first world war.51 The measures adopted would become known as “war communism”.52 The bourgeoisie now found themselves politically as well as economically disenfranchised. The new Soviet Constitution (adopted by the Soviet Congress in July 1918) specifically denied the right to vote to those who employed labour, who lived on the interest from capital or rent from property and to “private merchants, trade and commercial brokers.”53 Declaring “The Socialist Fatherland in Danger” from the White armies, a joint meeting of the Soviet Executive Committee, the trade unions and factory committees announced its intention: To intensify vigilance in regard to the bourgeoisie, which everywhere takes the side of the counter-revolutionaries. The Soviet regime must safeguard its rear, placing the bourgeoisie under close watch and carrying out mass terror against it in practice.54

A start was made with a government decree nationalising all large-scale industry on 28 June 1918. The nationalised enterprises were to be considered “as leased rent-free to their former owners” who were further instructed that “the boards of directors and the former owners shall continue to finance the enterprises … and also to receive income from them”. They were forbidden to leave their posts.55 There followed the rapid nationalisation of a familiar list of industries essential to the Soviet war effort: metals, leather, textiles, chemicals, and electrical. A “chief fuel committee” was established and invested with dictatorial powers. Nikolai Bukharin noted that by Septemebr 1919 about 80-90% of large scale industry had been nationalised.56

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From the implementation of the nationalisation decree, we can see the beginning of the end of the Russian bourgeoisie as a social class. Its physical presence, though fading fast, was still useful to the regime-just as the mythological threat that it represented would be useful in years to come. In 1918, the Soviet government was not only faced with civil war and the threat of foreign intervention. On 6 July the Left Socialist Revolutionaries assassinated the German ambassador and staged a rebellion in Moscow. In August, the SRs killed the leading Bolshevik Moisei Uritskii and made an attempt on Lenin’s life. These events provoked a vengeance campaign by the Soviet government, largely aimed at the bourgeoisie. The People’s Commissar for the Interior, Petrovskii, demanded that: A considerable number of hostages should be taken from the bourgeoisie and [former army] officers. The least opposition, the least movement among the White Guards, should be met with wholesale executions.

This was certainly vague enough (both in terms of “the bourgeoisie” and what constituted “the least opposition”) to provide local authorities with plenty of material but, just in case, Petrovskii added: “Local organs which show hesitation should immediately be reported … to the Commissar of the Interior.”57 Hostages were duly taken, the formerly wealthy prominent among them.58 That most of “the bourgeoisie” had nothing to do with an SR assassination campaign, and that the hostage system inevitably swept up large numbers of innocents was not considered important. After all, said Krasnaya Gazeta in Petrograd: What bourgeois does not have on his conscience the ruined lives of working-class women and children? There are no innocents among them … The interests of the revolution demand the physical extermination of the bourgeoisie.59

Later that year the government announced an “Extraordinary Tax on the Bourgeoisie”: ten billion rubles, to be extracted from “the propertied class in cities and villages.” Local soviets were given the right to impose their own extraordinary taxes, which they did.60 By the end of 1918, Serge tells us: The expropriation of capital-industrial, commercial, real-estate and ruralwas so complete that the bourgeoisie became transformed, in the phrase used by one Russian economist, into a kind of ex-bourgeoisie in rags or “lumpen-ex-bourgeoisie”.61

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The End of the Bourgeoisie Within a little over a year of the Bolsheviks’ assumption of power, the Russian bourgeoisie had ceased to exist as a class within the Soviet Republic. For the most part, they were not physically eliminated, though significant numbers of them were. (In fact in this respect, the Soviet regime would prove much kinder to the real bourgeoisie than to their embryonic successors, the kulaks.) However, by the definition used in this account-as owners of the industrial means of production-by the end of 1918, the Russian bourgeoisie had ceased to be. Some prominent representatives of the bourgeoisie carried on their political activities after 1918, though it should be emphasised that these were the activities of a minority. The disappearance of their class as a class meant that a distinctive bourgeois position faded. Within Russia, some of the bourgeoisie had been involved in the various last-ditch stands that were prepared to resist the Soviet onslaught. In July 1917, businessmen, politicians (mostly Kadets-including Petr Struve) and officers had formed the Group of Public Figures in Moscow, which hoped to combat the influence of the Soviets on the Provisional Government. In August the Group held a conference, attended by more than four hundred participants, which denounced the Provisional Government (especially its land reform programme), demanded economic stability and praised the military-in fact, frequent and favourable mention of a military dictatorship was made. A second conference was held at the end of September.62 After the November insurrection, Ryabushinskii’s All-Russian Union of Trade and Industry (henceforward the All-Russian Union) demanded the release of the arrested Provisional Government ministers, called for the restoration of law, urged a boycott of the new government “with gun in hand”-and made preparations for its own illegality.63 Expecting suppression as well, Struve and others from the Group of Public Figures formed an inner group, consisting of three representatives each from the original Group (Struve, Aleksandr Krivoshein and Pavel Novgorodtsev), the Kadets and business-the last three drawn from the All-Russian Union. This became known as “The Nine” (Devyatka), the first group that would seriously set about organising aid for a military challenge to the Soviet regime. It established contact in upper military circles and began channelling funds to the White Volunteer Army that General Alekseev was forming in southern Russia.64 The group was subsequently known as the Right Centre.

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The military disposition of various forces in Russia came more and more to dominate the political scene. The White movement had to adopt an attitude towards the major military powers on Russian soil-the Germans and Austrians (after the Brest-Litovsk peace, occupying large areas of the west of the former empire) and Russia’s erstwhile wartime Allies. This question provoked a split in the Right Centre. One group was in favour of seeking out support from Germany and pursued negotiations to this end.65 The former Kadet leader Pavel Milyukov met with German generals and diplomats in occupied Kiev in the spring of 1918 in an unsuccessful bid for support.66 Opposed to aid from the Central Powers was a pro-Ally grouping, consisting mostly of Kadets, which split away in June 1918 to form the National Centre. This group sympathised with the Volunteer Army of Generals Alekseev and Denikin. It eventually became the Union for the Regeneration of Russia.67 Given the events in Soviet Russia and the increasing hostility towards the bourgeoisie, many did not take the path of renewed political activity, but fled. This included the two most prominent representatives of the progressive bourgeoisie, Pavel Ryabushinskii and Aleksandr Konovalov. After the Kornilov coup (of which, as we saw in the last chapter, he was an active supporter), Ryabushinskii withdrew from political activity. He travelled to the Crimea for treatment for TB. There he was arrested by the Simferopol Soviet in September 1917 as an accomplice of the Kornilov conspiracy-but released after the intervention of prime minister Kerensky. Following the November Revolution, Ryabushinskii was protected by Crimea’s White status. He left for Paris in 1919 and was made president of the Trade and Industrial Congress (Torgprom). There, he worked to bring the former industrialists of Russia together in the expectation of imminent Bolshevik collapse. He was much cheered by the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921 which he took to indicate Bolshevik failure and to herald capitalist restoration. On that basis, he urged his fellow former industrialists to prepare for the return. He died in Paris in 1924.68 As we know, Aleksandr Konovalov was the acting prime minister (in Kerensky’s absence) on the night of the Soviet insurrection. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Peter-Paul fortress. Released in January 1918, he left for Paris. There, he worked with other exiled Kadets (once the party was outlawed, all of its members were subject to immediate arrest). Konovalov’s politics had evolved in an entirely different direction

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from those of Ryabushinskii, as can be seen in the positions of the Paris Kadets. The Paris Kadet group was disinclined to support a military dictatorship in Russia (unlike the party members who remained behind). They acknowledged that the party had made mistakes, particularly in its refusal to support land distribution and its rejection of various demands for autonomy and national self-determination. It was only prepared to support the White armies on the basis of a programme of social reforms.69 Konovalov formed a close political relationship in Paris with Pavel Milyukov. The latter, having failed in his bid for German supprt, was similarly unsuccessful with the Allies once the war had ended. He had made his way to Paris via Constantinople.70 By the time Milyukov arrived in Paris in December 1920, he was advocating a “new tactic” with regard to the Soviet government. The antiSoviet movement had to dissociate itself from the nobility and and the land-owning gentry, as well as from narrow nationalism. It had to win popular support by endorsing land distribution and the rights of national minorities. Milyukov argued for an internal mass revolt, rather than external military invasion, and to this end he was prepared to enter a coalition with the left-specifically, the SRs.71 Disagreement over Milyukov’s new tactic split the exiled Kadets in July 1921. Konovalov became a prominent member of Milyukov’s new organisation, the Republican Democratic Group. He fled from the advancing German armies to Portugal at the beginning of the second world war, and then, in June 1941, to New York. Returning to Paris after the war, he died there in 1948.72 Other former bourgeois involved themselves actively in the White armies and government. Petr Struve was not a former capitalist but was, as we have seen, a strong intellectual influence on the progressive bourgeoisie after 1905. He attempted to link up with General Alekseev’s Volunteer Army in December 1917 but was forced to flee to Finland. After that, he participated “fully and without reservations of any kind in the White movement.” He joined General Denikin’s forces in southern Russia in September 1919 and became Director of Foreign Affairs under his successor, Baron Wrangel.73 Sergei Tret’yakov became the Minister for Trade in Admiral Kolchak’s government in September 1919 and then deputy prime minister and acting head of Foreign affairs the following month. He was later a member of Wrangel’s Financial Council before fleeing abroad when Wrangel’s army was finally defeated at the end of 1921.74

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The former industrialists and their supporters who joined forces with the White armies (and, according to West, this was “the majority of Moscow businessmen”)75 faced a problem, one which was mirrored on the other side. In Soviet Russia, the Soviet state militarised its society and mobilised it for war (a war which Lenin believed was an inevitable outcome of revolution and was to be welcomed).76 The Soviet state became a dictatorship. The White armies emerged as a result of the anti-Soviet forces’ endorsement of a military solution in Russia. The White states became dictatorships too, under the successive military dictators, Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel. This parallel rise of state power swiftly excluded any politics or economics that were not devoted to, or under the direction of, the state. The demands of warfare and the imposition of order brought about the domination of the economic structures on both sides by the state production relation. The Russian bourgeoisie had already had a taste of what this meant during the war. The attempts of former bourgeois individuals to influence the White armies were treated far more ruthlessly. These attempts drew their support from that stream of bourgeois opinion that regarded military dictatorship as the best means of combating Bolshevism. Various representative bodies of the bourgeoisie had expressed enthusiasm for such a dictatorship after the Soviet takeover – the Vladivostok Chamber of Commerce in August 1918, the All-Russia Union in September, the first Urals Congress of Trade and Industry in October.77 The influence of the former bourgeoisie on the White military governments was however negligible. The assumption of power by Admiral Kolchak as “supreme leader” in the east and the elimination of his rivals in November 1918 was particularly warmly received in ex-business circles. The All-Russian Union advised its members “to render to the new government the most friendly support”.78 But while Kolchak introduced severe restrictions on workers’ rights, the former capitalists were largely ignored. Kolchak called together a State Economic Conference in November 1918 in Omsk, at which five representatives of the All-Russian Union attended. But then, “he allowed the State Economic Conference to languish in relative obscurity”.79 Repressed, in exile, or scattered among the White forces, the Russian bourgeoisie was no longer a class – and was therefore in no position to influence the White state. Both sides of the alliance that had sought to reform and modernise Russia through the construction of a new state in war were provided with a final,

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though ultimately false, glimmer of hope as the Soviet state crashed through the parameters of their project and destroyed them. Firstly, the new statists. Many of them recognised a familiar atmosphere in the emerging Soviet state structures. State officials of this type had made the transition from Tsarist to republican structures and now saw the opportunity to move on, into the Soviet bureaucracy. The most wellknown of them was the Menshevik economic planner, Vladimir Groman, who settled into a senior position in Gosplan. But he was not alone. There were seven thousand former Zemstvo experts at work in the Soviet government (especially in agriculture) in the early 1920s. It is estimated that their number may have reached some seventeen thousand by 1928.80 Until 1928, the ideas of such experts appeared to coincide quite neatly with those of their Soviet employers. But it was not to be. The political leadership jealously guarded its prerogatives and was not about to let an alternative technocratic leadership arise–especially when those technocrats began, on the grounds of economic rationality, to advise against the political decision to rapidly collectivise and industrialise. In the context of that decision, Soviet authorities turned on these experts and, through a series of show trials, cut them down.81 As for the former bourgeoisie, they were momentarily diverted by the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1921. As noted in Ryabushnskii’s case, the exiles were cheered by the restoration of markets in agriculture and the possibility of small-scale trade in the cities that NEP represented. Here perhaps was an alternative to the economic collapse for which, up to this point, they had been waiting. But while NEP staved off collapse, it did not generate a general invitation to the former industrialists to return. A new bourgeoisie, the “NEPmen”, did appear. But they were of post-Civil War vintage-“a small merchant community of recent birth and diverse social provenance.”82 Much weaker than their pre-revolutionary predecessors, they were easily dispensed with when NEP was brought to an end after 1928.

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Notes 1

V.I. Lenin, “Political Report of the Central Committee to the Seventh Congress of the RCP(B)” (March 1918), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/7thcong/01.htm. 2 E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1923: Volume Two (London: Macmillan Press, 1978), 24. 3 V.I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution” (April 1917) in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: Volume Two (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 45. 4 V.I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution” (September 1917), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/tasks/ch09.htm. Original all in italics. 5 V.I. Lenin, “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It” (October 1917) in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: Volume Two (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 246 & 247. 6 V.I. Lenin, “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” (October 1917) in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: Volume Two (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 410 & 413. 7 In his speech to the first All-Russian Soviet Congress (June 1917), Lenin advocated the arrest of “fifty or a hundred of the biggest millionaires” in order to make them reveal “the hidden springs, the fraudulent practices, the filth and greed” (V.I. Lenin, “Speech on the Attitude Towards the Provisional Government” (June 1917) in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: Volume Two (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 1970, 170). Carr argues that Lenin’s phrases about workers’ control were “merely a gloss” on plans for state nationalisation (Carr, Bolshevik Revolution Volume 2, 58. 8 J.L. West, “The Moscow Progressists: Russian industrialists in liberal politics, 1905-1915.” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1974), 488. 9 L.H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia: a study of the War-Industries Committees (Hong Kong: St Antony’s/Macmillan, 1983), 207. 10 V. Serge, Year One of the Russian Revolution, trans. and ed. Peter Sedgewick (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1972 [1930]), 140-141. 11 See Boris I. Kolonitskii, “Antibourgeois Propaganda and Anti-‘Burzhii’ Consciousness in 1917,” The Russian Review LIII (April 1994): 190-191. 12 In Saratov: “Communists conflated members of the intelligentsia who did not back the Bolshevik revolution with the bourgeoisie.” (D.J. Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War: Politics, Society and Revolutionary Culture in Saratov, 19171922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 248, footnote 6.) 13 He went on: “at one time the ‘Red Guard’ attack on capital was absolutely dictated by circumstances.” (V.I. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” (April 1918) in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: Volume Two (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 653.)

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14 See for example the government decree confiscating the property of the Bogoslovsk Mine Stock Company, “In view of the refusal of the management … to submit to the decree of the Sovnarkom [Council of People’s Commissars] concerning workers’ control over production …”. (J. Bunyan & H.H. Fisher eds. The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1918: Documents and Materials (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965 [1934]), 315-316. 15 Y. Avdakov & V. Borodin, USSR State Industry during the Transition Period (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 62. It might also be suggested that, given the impossibility of any practical implementation of socialism, the taking over of factories by individual workforces may have seemed a satisfyingly “socialist” thing to do. The Mensheviks resolved in early December that “The Bolshevik experiments with workers’ control, in the event of their consistent implementation, must end in a disgraceful fiasco, in the total collapse of industry, in unemployment, and in the discrediting of the very idea of socialism in the eyes of the masses for many years.” (In V.N. Brovkin, The Mensheviks after October: Socialist Opposition and the Rise of the Bolshevik Dictatorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 53.) 16 Izvestiya, 28 May 1918 in J. Bunyan, ed. Intervention, Civil War, and Communism in Russia, April-December 1918: Documents and Materials (New York: Octagon Books, 1976 [1936]), 441; W.H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, Volume One: 1917-1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 [1935]), 360-1; Brovkin, Mensheviks, 50. 17 J.L. West “The Fate of Merchant Moscow,” in Merchant Moscow: images of Russia’s vanished bourgeoisie, ed. J.L. West & I.A. Petrov (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 176; Brovkin, Mensheviks, 50. 18 As in Saratov in the autumn of 1918 – see Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 249. 19 W.H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, Volume Two: 1918-1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987 [1935]), 67. 20 Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 313-317. 21 Lenin, Immediate Tasks, 651. 22 Avdakov & Borodin, State Industry, 65. 23 W.G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: the Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917-1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 285; Avdakov & Borodin, 65. 24 Novaya Zhizn’, 9 February 1918 in Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 622. 25 Lenin, Immediate Tasks, 653. 26 Lenin, Impending Catastrophe, 269. 27 V.I. Lenin, “‘Left-Wing’ Childishness and the Petty-Bourgeois Mentality” (May 1918) in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: Volume Two (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 694. 28 Lenin, Left Wing Childishness, 698. See also Carr, Bolshevik Revolution Volume 2, 81; W.G. Rosenberg, “The Problem of Market Relations and the State

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in Revolutionary Russia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History XXXVI (1994): 380. 29 Carr, Bolshevik Revolution Volume 2, 78. 30 Avdakov & Borodin, State Industry, 18. They warn us though that this “should not be seen as an attempt by the Soviet authorities to establish class peace with the bourgeoisie. It was a specific form of the class struggle of the proletariat in the economic sphere.” 31 Novaya Zhizn’, 9 February 1918 in Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 622. 32 S. Malle, The Economic Organization of War Communism, 1918-1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 56. 33 Buyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 621. 34 Valerian Osinskii, speaking on the origins of Vesenkha in November 1918 in Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 313. 35 Osinskii, head of Vesenkha to the Central Committee, 4 April 1918 in Malle, War Communism, 57. 36 K. Kautsky, “The Bolsheviki Rising.” (March/April 1918) Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/03/bolsheviki.htm. 37 Quoted in Carr, Bolshevik Revolution Volume 2, 91. Perhaps, as Nove suggests, this was because “there was no reason why they should have shown good-will to a regime which had usurped power and publicly announced that their ruin was a good and desirable objective.” (A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 19171991 (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 50.) 38 Valerian Osinskii, speaking on the origins of Vesenkha in November 1918 in Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 313. 39 Avdakov & Borodin, State Industry, 66. 40 Quoted in L.D. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: a reply to Karl Kautsky (University of Michigan Press, 1961 [1920]), 66. 41 “A social struggle,” warned Maxim Gorky in Novaya Zhizn’, “is not a bloody smashing of faces, as the Russian worker is being taught by his frightened leaders.” (Novaya Zhizn’, 26 January 1918 in M. Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 130.) 42 See M. Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: the Red Army and the Soviet Socialist State, 1917-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 247250. 43 Soviet Central Executive Committee decree establishing Vesenkha, 14 December 1917 in Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 314-315. 44 Osinskii, the Vesenkha head, later related: “… we revised the statutes of the Chief Economic Committee and the [Supreme Economic] Council which existed during the Kerensky [period] … and gave them a purely proletarian character … adapting them to the aims of socialist construction … Quite naturally we ‘requisitioned’ Kerensky’s Chief Economic Committee.” (Osinskii, speaking on the origins of Vesenkha in November 1918 in Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 311.) See also Malle, War Communism, 202; Rosenberg, Market

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Relations, 379; P. Gatrell, Russia’s First World War: a social and economic history (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 224. 45 Siegelbaum, Politics of Industrial Mobilisation, 213-214; Gatrell, Russia’s First World War, 224. 46 Regulations for the Confiscation of Industrial Enterprises, 16 February 1918 in Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 612. 47 See Malle, War Communism, 47. 48 For example, the Directors of the Metal and Iron works in Kharkov (Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 623-7). Another was Pavel Ryabushinskii’s brother, Dmitrii, who owned and managed an aerodynamic laboratory at Kuchino. In April 1918, he successfully petitioned the Soviet government for nationalisation of his business. He remained working there. (West, Fate, 176-7.) 49 Bunyan & Fisher, Bolshevik Revolution, 373. 50 Carr, Bolshevik Revolution Volume Two, 98-9. 51 “State control of the industrial machine, already stimulated by the first world war … now received a fresh and overwhelming stimulus from the civil war …”. (Carr, Bolshevik Revolution Volume 2, 173). 52 There was (and is) considerable debate as to whether war communism was established just as a response to the civil war or as an attempt to establish the basis for socialism (at the level of the relations of production rather than in the economic base). This debate started early, as can be seen in the discussions within the Socialist Academy from 1922 to 1924. There, E.A. Preobrazhenskii argued that “the civil war compelled us to go over to nationalization all along the line.” But B. Gorev, contended that it was because “the rebellious proletariat demanded equality” (quoted in Nove, Economic History, 74). Certainly, there was pressure from the urban masses, who had been encouraged to expect “socialism”. Partly in response to that pressure and partly to dissolve it, the new state intervened, producing an increasing trend towards state centralisation. The civil war exacerbated this trend. 53 Article 4, chapter 13, paragraph 65, RSFSR Constitution (1918), www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/constitution/1918/article4.htm. 54 Resolution declaring the Socialist Fatherland in Danger, 29 July 1918 in Chamberlin, Russian Revolution Volume 2, 472. Lenin would write in the following year regarding “the class of exploiters[:] one can and must destroy it-it can be written off.” (Notes on the dictatorship of the proletariat, SeptemberOctober 1919, quoted in I. Getzler, “Lenin’s Concept of Revolution as Civil War,” Slavonic and East European Review 74 (3) (July 1996): 470. 55 Soviet Government decree on the Nationalisation of Large Scale Industries, 28 June 1918 in Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, 397-9. For both Carr (Bolshevik Revolution Volume Two, 173) and Nove (Economic History, 47), this decree represents the beginning of war communism. 56 Carr, Bolshevik Revolution Volume Two, 176. See also Serge on the escalating number of nationalisations (Year One, 353). Bukharin in Nove, Economic History, 63.

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57 Circular by the Commissar for the Interior, 5 September 1918 in Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, 239-240. 58 See Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 250; Chamberlin, Russian Revolution Volume Two, 72. Among those arrested in the sweep of the Red Terror was Dmitrii Ryabushinskii (see note 48 above)-until that time still at his post at the aerodynamic laboratory he had formerly owned. He was eventually deported to Denmark (West, Fate, 177). 59 Krasnaya Gazeta, 31 August 1918 in Serge, Year One, 288. The newspaper writer went on: “But no, we are not going to have a massacre … It will be in an organized manner that we shall seek out the bourgeoisie, the well-fed ones and their hirelings …” (289). 60 Soviet Government decrees 30 & 31 October 1918 in Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, 450-2; Raleigh, Experiencing Russia’s Civil War, 249-250. 61 Serge, Year One, 355. 62 R. Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 241; Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 210211, 222, 251. 63 V.Ya. Laverychev, “Vserossiiskii Soyuz Torgovli i Promyshlennosti.” Istoricheskie Zapiski 70 (1961): 57-8. 64 “This group was in possession of some resources, supplied principally by industrialists,” reminisced Vasilii Gurko: in Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, 175. See also Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 289-290; Pipes, Struve on the Right, 255. 65 Rosenberg comments: “It is a revealing characteristic of liberal statism that Bolshevik radicalism was now considered by many a more terrible danger to Russia than the country’s former military enemy itself …”. (Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 290.) 66 Milyukov’s memorandum to the Right Centre in Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, 177-9; Riha, T. A Russian European: Paul Miliukov in Russian Politics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969, 331-2. 67 Bunyan, Intervention, Civil War, 176-7, 179; Editor’s notes in E. Varneck, & H.H. Fisher, eds. The Testimony of Kolchak and other Siberian materials (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1935), 228; Chamberlin, Russian Revolution Volume Two, 421. 68 “Ryabushinskii, Pavel Pavlovich”, www.hrono.info/biograf/ryabushin.htm; Laverychev, Vserossiiskii Soyuz, 60; Pipes, Struveon the Right, 341. 69 Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revoution, 440-442. 70 Riha, A Russian European, 331-2. 71 Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 447. 72 “Konovalov, Aleksandr Ivanovich”, www.hrono.info/biograf/konovalov.html. 73 Pipes, Struve on the right, 268, 278,283. 74 Laverychev, Vserossiiskii Soyuz, 60; J.D. Smele, Civil War in Siberia: the AntiBolshevik government of Admiral Kolchak, 1918-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 121; Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution, 531. Gaida states that Tret’yakov became a Soviet intelligence agent in Paris and, as

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such, was shot by the Nazis in 1943 (F.A. Gaida, Liberal’naya Oppozitsiya na Putyakh k Vlasti (1914-vesna 1917 g. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), 424). He is, however, mistaking him for Nikolai Tret’yakov, “a relative of the founder of the famous Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow”, who was indeed spying on Torgprom and the Russian Armed Services Union in Paris for the Soviet government. He was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Germany (D.V. Lehovich, White Against Red: the Life of General Anton Denikin (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1974), 448). 75 West, Fate, 177. 76 See I. Getzler, Lenin’s Concept of Revolution as Civil War, 464-472. 77 Smele, Civil War, 56. 78 Smele, Civil War, 116 & 447. 79 Smele, Civil War, 504. See also Kolchak on the State Economic Conference, Varneck & Fisher, Kolchak Testimony, 196-7. 80 Sometimes the continuity went back even further. At the beginning of 1928, it was estimated that somewhere between 45-55% of the local officials of the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture started out as agricultural agents of the Tsarist government during the Stolypin land reforms (G.L. Yaney ‘Agricultural Administration in Russia’ in JR Millar (ed.), The Soviet Rural Community: a symposium (University of Illinois Press: Urbana 1971), 6). 81 The Shakhty trial (1928); the “Industrial Party” trial (1930); the Menshevik trial (1931). See A. Liebich, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 182-214. 82 A. Banerji, Merchants and Markets in Revolutionary Russia (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997), 94-5.

CHAPTER SEVEN TRIUMPH OF THE STATE – DIVERSION OF THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION

In this account, I have laid some stress on the peculiarities of Russia’s historical development. Russia’s geography, its size and the military threats that it faced contributed to the domination of the state production relation, from the Tsarist autocracy through to the Soviet regime. The tendency towards the strong state (and therefore away from the completion of the bourgeois revolution) was not unique to Russia. On the contrary, the resurgence of the state and the eclipse of capital that resulted from the First World War, was a Europe-wide, and subsequently a global phenomenon. This was to have crucial consequences for the progress of the bourgeois revolution on a world scale. In this chapter, I hope to draw out those consequences by making some comparisons between what was happening in Russia with parallel developments in Britain and Germany, the two major capitalist economies in Europe.

An incomplete bourgeois revolution Russia was not alone in needing a bourgeois revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century. Much of the world outside Western Europe and North America was in the same situation. Let us recall that the bourgeois revolution is not a single event, but a process. And, as we have already noted, in their more sanguine moments Marx and Engels were prepared to acknowledge that this process would be a lengthy one, possibly stretching over decades, or even centuries. In Europe itself by 1900, the process of the bourgeois revolution had by no means been completed, even in the most advanced economies. Nowhere had capital completely cast off the integuments of states, which sought to hold it close and direct its purposes to the “national interests” of national development and its twin, national defence. The subordination of capital to the state varied between European economies. A continuum could perhaps be set up with Britain up one end and Russia down the other, with the rest of the European nations strung

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out in between. But nowhere had the ultimate aim of the bourgeois revolution been achieved.1 A brief look at Britain and Germany will illustrate the point. Perry Anderson argues that the English Revolution of the 1640s, despite being “a supremely successful capitalist revolution” (in the sense of consolidating the foundations for the further development of a capitalist economic structure) did not have (and did not require) “a victorious industrial bourgeoisie to launch it”.2 For this reason, “England had the first, most mediated and least pure bourgeois revolution of any major European country.”3 Rather than producing bourgeois domination, argues Tom Nairn in the same journal, it produced a compromise (and later a fusion) between the emerging bourgeoisie (predominantly mercantile) and the land-owning aristocracy in which “the landlords kept control of the State and its main organs, as a governing elite trusted (on the whole) by the bourgeoisie.”4 The landowners continued to rule–and Anderson forcefully makes the point that they were not a bourgeoisie.5 The fusion came about in Britain due to the economic compatibility of the landed aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie, the political conjuncture (fear of both the French Revolution and the rise of the industrial working class) and the ideological setting (no autonomous intelligentsia).6 The Industrial Revolution led to the emergence of a new, industrial bourgeoisie in “the manufacturing middle class of Manchester and the North”. Conflict ensued between this new force and the land-owning elite, but despite extending the franchise (in 1832) and having the Corn Laws repealed (in 1846),7 the industrial bourgeoisie eventually rallied to the aristocracy. Undisturbed by a feudal state, terrified of the French Revolution and its own proletariat, mesmerized by the prestige and authority of the landed class, the bourgeoisie won two modest victories, lost its nerve and ended by losing its identity.8

After that, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie were welded together “in a single social bloc”.9 For Anderson, Nairn and their supporters in and around New Left Review, the point of this analysis was that the bourgeois revolution was incomplete, even by the mid-1960s.10 As Anderson put it, “The international pressures of contemporary capitalism require a radical

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adaptation. The unfinished work of 1640 and 1832 must be taken up where it was left off.”11 In Germany, unification had not created a democracy by the beginning of the twentieth century, let alone the rule of the bourgeoisie. Instead there arose “an unstable compound of federalism, autocracy and constitutional monarchy”, dominated by the state in the persons of the Kaiser, the Chancellor and the Prussian junker elite.12 This was despite “the emergence of a diverse and powerful economic bourgeoisie”, based on the textile entrepreneurs, iron and steel magnates and “second industrial revolution” industrialists (in the electrical industry, for example).13 However, in its attempts to stand against the Prussian state before 1914, this bourgeoisie had been defeated. Wehler concludes, “The outcome of this conflict was to seal the political impotence of the bourgeoisie up until 1918.”14 Having surveyed Britain and Germany up to 1914, Eley asks rhetorically: If neither Germany (the most dynamic capitalism in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe) nor Britain ( the pioneer of capitalist industrialization) possessed a triumphant bourgeoisie, then where on earth has the bourgeoisie ever “risen”?15

The answer is that it was rising everywhere in the industrialised and industrialising economies of Europe – but that its rise had not been completed.

Late nineteenth century globalisation Despite the fact that the bourgeois revolution had not been completed even in Europe, evidence for its steady progress up to 1914 was not lacking–if, as I argue, one measure of that progress can be taken as the distancing of capital from the national state. It is generally agreed that between 1870 and 1914 capital originating in the advanced economies of Europe and North America over spilled its erstwhile national boundaries.16 The volume of world foreign trade grew at more than three percent per year at this time. Economies had never been more open to foreign investment. Manufacturing multinationals made their appearance–of those officially recorded, there were 114 by 1914. It was also an era of unprecedented mass migration across national borders.17 Jones argues that, together with these developments, “there came into being, by the middle years of the

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nineteenth century, a truly cosmopolitan bourgeoisie trading internationally under British naval protection.”18 The period of late nineteenth century globalisation was very much associated with the fact that there had been peace–or at least an absence of Europe-wide (or worldwide) conflict–since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Capital and the bourgeoisie had been allowed to get on with the expansion of international trade, without having their resources diverted or drained by states’ demands for warfare. To this extent, the bourgeoisie was identified with the preservation of that peace and as a force against war.19 Kennedy points out that “the ideology of laissez-faire political economy, which flourished alongside this early industrialization, preached the causes of eternal peace, low government expenditures (especially on defence), and the reduction of state controls over the economy and the individual.” By the middle of Victoria’s reign, British defence expenditure was being kept down to an absolute minimum. The Crimean War was “widely recognised as a mistake.”20 It was generally accepted that any large-scale European war would pose huge problems for the British economy in terms of its export markets, its dependence on imports and the potential collapse of the global banking and financial system based in the City of London.21 The identification of the international bourgeoisie with peace presumably explains why the German philosopher, Max Scheler, was able to declare, when the World War broke out, that it was a “War against capitalism!”22 The presumed position of the European bourgeoisie as separate from and opposed to increasingly militarised states was considered to be “one of the intrinsic and central features of European society…”.23 All of these assumptions, however, were about to change. States were also taking advantage of late nineteenth century improvements in technology, transport and communication to increase their power.24 The relentless competition for superiority between European states continued and minor wars (like those to unify Italy and Germany, the FrancoPrussian war) were a foretaste of things to come. Despite globalisation and the (temporarily) cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, “there were in Europe apparently decreasing constraints on the development of a militarised society”.25 This was manifest in the increasing arms race between the Great Powers and the readying of military alliances between them. Accompanying this, there was an increasing atmosphere of nationalism and, in more practical terms, the introduction of conscription.26 Formal conscription of course was only the tip of a military iceberg. According to

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Best, by 1914 fully one-sixth of the British workforce was carrying out some task for the Royal Navy.27

War as liberation? Just as in Russia, the voices of the intelligentsia and then elements of the bourgeoisie began to rise in a hymn of praise to war as a liberating force. By 1914 there was considerable support for a general European war as a liberating exercise that would renovate society and strengthen the progressive aspects of the state–which were identified with modernism, fairness and efficiency. Support for the war was by no means confined to the representatives of the old regime and fanatical nationalists.28 Opposition to it was neither automatic nor unanimous among those who considered themselves critics or opponents of the European social order. Many revolutionaries, reforming state officials, intellectuals and young people welcomed the war as a chance to shake up society (with varying degrees of radicalism) and bring it fully into the twentieth century. In July 1914, the German Chancellor perceived that “whichever way the war ends it will bring about a revolution of everything that exists.”29 Hilaire Belloc spoke for many when he declared, “How I long for the Great War! It will sweep Europe like a broom, it will make kings jump like coffee beans on the roaster.”30 When it came, intellectuals went into overdrive to analogise its beneficial effects. In Germany it was “the blacksmith that will pound the world into new shapes” (Ernst Junger). For the French it was “a resurrection” (Maurice Barres) and a “regeneration” (Paul Claudel). In England, the poet Isaac Rosenburg maintained that “the ancient crimson curse” would “Give back the universe / Its pristine bloom.”31 These and many others were convinced that the Great War would not only destroy the old society, but replace it with a better one. The kind of society envisaged by these war-as-liberation intellectuals lent itself to increasing state power. Given the nature of a total war, it was inevitable and broadly accepted that military influence on it would be strong. In countries like Germany, with a solid tradition (stemming from the rise of Prussia, German unification and the consolidation of the Bismarckian state) of revolution from above, usually encouraged or accompanied by war, the prospect of further reform from an even bigger war seemed not unreasonable.32 Adding to the state and military-oriented nature of that reform was the existence within the military establishment

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itself of “a radical brand of militarism” that tended “to idealize total war, to make of total mobilization a vision of the society of the future.”33 In Italy too, pro-war radicalism, as expressed by Benito Mussolini, also endorsed military forms. He wrote after the defeat at Caporetto, in October 1917: “I campaigned for War-discipline–first behind us and all over the land, then at the Front … A high spirit of duty and sacrifice was the rule of life in our Italy!”34 Meanwhile in Britain, the emphasis was more on the war giving ordinary folk the chance to exercise extraordinary influence.35 But once again, they were seen to do so through the military machine. G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1915 about the start of the war: Simple men with simple motives came out of their dreary tenements and their tidy shops, their fields and their suburbs and their factories and rookeries and asked for the arms of men.36

Clearly, whatever the hopes of revolutionaries, reformers and poets for the future, a new society imbued with military radicalism would tend towards the military values of organised collectivism, enforced social egalitarianism, hierarchy, discipline and planning. Above all, it would be dominated, not by private interests, but by those of the nation–represented by the state. For many this was a welcome development. On the left, social democrats and trade unionists who did not oppose the war (and they were the great majority) saw, in war-time measures, elements of “progress”. The collectivist aspects of state policy in the belligerent countries and its enforced egalitarianism enabled the left to detect elements of a future socialism within it–even if it was the “barracks socialism” that Marx had warned against.37 In fact, the barracks themselves were endorsed as a progressive social model by sections of the labour movement, particularly in Germany and Russia. In the former, the army was generally considered to be more efficient and more genuinely concerned with the nation’s wellbeing than the state bureaucracy.38 So even here, far from being resisted (at least by the majority and in the first two to three years of the war), the state came to be seen as the embodiment of modern times, efficiency, fairness and organisation. The promise of the state resurgent had replaced that of the bourgeois and democratic revolution.

The Bourgeoisie Falls In The importance of the state is immeasurably enhanced when international competition leaves the arena of commerce and enters that of the military.39 This is an area in which the bourgeoisie, disposing of no military forces,

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cannot compete. Yet, if unchecked – if, for example, militarism escalates into world war – it creates a sufficiently dangerous situation for the bourgeoisie that the latter is forced to turn to the state for defence. In the increasingly militarised atmosphere leading to 1914, it must have seemed to the bourgeoisie that to defend (let alone advance) its economic interests in the state-system of Europe it was necessary to cling to a strong state.40 And it may even have seemed to sections of the bourgeoisie that, despite the calamitous destruction that a prolonged European conflict promised, if its duration could be contained then there might be some commercial advantage to be reaped in the end. The “social truce” between hostile classes that was loudly proclaimed in all the belligerent nations at the beginning of the war is usually understood to mean the organised working class foregoing its struggles for the duration. It also applied, however, to the bourgeoisie in its relationship with the state. The British bourgeoisie, abandoning its former vision that free trade would end despotism and war, clambered aboard the gunboat of imperialism and endorsed the war aims of the British state.41 In Germany, the bourgeoisie had long deferred to the state (which was identified, at least in part, with political and economic progress) and maintained a similarly deferential attitude towards its most visible manifestation, the military machine.42 Nationalism never ceased to be a potent political force in this relatively recent national state and “Even the National Liberals [the main political party of the bourgeoisie] … realized that nationalism was a weapon they could not do without.”43 That nationalism encompassed both support for the state and its expansionist agenda.44 It would be wrong to say that in Britain most representatives of business clamoured for state intervention when the war began. State interference in the economy was regarded by the bourgeoisie as inefficient–as it might well have been if the object had been profit. But what was needed was a war economy, the object of which was the mobilisation of the nation’s resources to maximise its military effort. Though the British state initially had little in the way of a plan to mobilise the economy, as the war went on such a plan necessarily emerged–and as it emerged the directing role of the state became clearer and clearer.45 The willingness of business to accept state intervention and direction increased rapidly, even in areas where (as one Government report commented in 1917) “such interference would previously have been regarded as arbitrary unless it had been accompanied by liberal or even lavish compensation”–which it was not.46 So great was

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the spirit of co-operation in the bourgeoisie that the British Government actively sought out business people for key administrative tasks.47 The German bourgeoisie, despite its historic acquiescence to the state, was initially somewhat divided in its reaction to the demands of the state-run war economy. On one side were those like Walther Rathenau (of whom more below) who embraced state direction as part of a crusade for a new society. On the other side, there were German companies that were unwilling even to retool for military production for what they thought (and were repeatedly told) was going to be a short war.48 But as the nature of the war revealed itself and rapidly became a matter of national survival, the state’s pressure on business increased and the German bourgeoisie fell in with the rest.49 Rathenau later described how quickly industrial businessmen changed their methods and thinking from those of entrepreneurial profit makers to those more resembling civil servants.50 A virtually complete surrender to the demands of the German state had begun–and indeed some sections of the bourgeoisie outdid each other in demands for more state control and more centralisation. In 1915 some industrialists requested the introduction of compulsory labour for civilians, while others petitioned against the free movement of labour. The following year they demanded further centralisation of procurement practices and labour organisation and an expanded munitions programme (i.e. more productive capacity to be turned over to war production). When the “Hindenberg Programme” was announced in 1916 (see below), industrialists by and large welcomed it.51 Germany’s Walther Rathenau, head of the General Electric Company (AEG), provided a philosophical basis for an enthusiastic endorsement of state intervention (and Rathenau would have been the first to agree that his ideas did not apply to Germany alone). For Rathenau, the big companies (and he led one of them) had become so powerful that their decisions transcended the interests of their boards and stockholders; they had become matters of national interest. The interests of the nation should be exercised by the state. The state therefore should control these companies. Industrial reorganisation along these lines would attack poverty and alleviate alienation. It would lay the foundations of a new kind of society.52 These ideas might have remained the utopian whimsy of an idealistic businessman, had it not been for the fact that Rathenau (in a most unwhimsical way) recognised the war as an opportunity to advance his

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proposals. Within days of the outbreak of hostilities he had convinced the War Ministry that centralised control was needed at the very least over the raw materials required for military production. Thus was initiated state control over many of Germany’s big companies. Rathenau and his colleagues set up the War Ministry’s Raw Materials Section (the KRA) before the end of August 1914. Rathenau recognised that these measures undermined the market economy, taking it in a statist direction. It contributed, he wrote “to the overthrow of the gods to whom, before August 1914, the world prayed …”.53 Further, he said that “It is an economic event touching the methods of socialism and communism …”. Nevertheless, it was “an industrial form which perhaps foreshadows the future.”54 His endorsement of a reforming state to bring about economic (and therefore social) advance transcended the war years.55 With or without Rathenau’s philosophy, the bourgeoisie in the belligerent countries of the Great War either gradually or rapidly, either with ideological conviction or with none, with either profit or patriotism or some combination of both in mind, gave up their resistance to the state and allowed it to re-establish itself as the dominant production relation. What made this different to previous situations in which capital had acquiesced to states’ war-making demands was that never before had the state demanded such an overwhelming and total commitment from capital.

The State Moves On The necessity for state-run economic mobilisation was not immediately grasped by either states or capital in August 1914. Britain’s Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith (president of the Board of Trade, destined to become one of the key state directing institutions) tentatively suggested at the beginning of 1915 that “It is … probable that we shall ultimately find some form of compulsion necessary”56 but this fell far short of the mark. Since the ultimate extension of state control was unknown, the path towards it was generally unplanned. In the end though, it meant that, in Britain and across Europe, “The normal play of market forces was suspended during the war, replaced by stringent controls administered by a greatly swollen bureaucracy.”57 To start with, moves in this direction in Britain and Germany were hardly decisive. The British government imposed certain limits on international

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trade, took over some of the merchant fleet and placed the railways under state control (though they remained privately owned). Later (in November 1914) the Admiralty and the War Council were given the right to take over factories (or their output) engaged in war production.58 In Germany, although eventually economic measures under Rathenau would prove more stringent, in the first days it was measures of political control that were considered a priority. State authority was transferred to the army– specifically to the Deputy Commanding Generals of the military regions.59 This was designed to preserve stability (rather than promote mobilisation) in the rear, while the army got on with the job at the front–what Feldman calls “the twin pillars of military mobilization and civil immobilization.”60 As the war settled down to a lengthy stalemate, requiring greater and greater inputs of men and munitions, these initial moves were soon outstripped by the necessities of the military situation. Between 1915 and 1916, most of the belligerent countries went through a kind of crisis in which the failure of the market economy to keep up with the war was translated into failure on the battlefield. In Britain this started with the “Shell Scandal” in 1915 that erupted after Field-Marshal Sir John French (commander of the British forces in Europe) revealed to the public his fears on the lack of adequate munitions. By its end it had forced the creation of a Ministry of Munitions (that would be the cutting edge of British state intervention), brought down the Asquith government and was only really resolved when Lloyd George came to power in December 1916 with the promise of energetic government economic activity.61 In the popular and military view, the market economy and “business as usual” had failed to supply what the British state needed for its defence, and what the soldiers in the trenches needed to survive. The responsibility for that supply would therefore have to be taken out of the hands of private enterprise. The new Ministry of Munitions was given the power to ensure the munitions supply–defined as “anything required to be provided for war purposes”, which encompassed the munitions themselves, their material components, their production, transport and protection.62 The Ministry was destined to become the heart of war-time statism in Britain. How far its directing personnel were thinking into the future can perhaps be seen in the fact that by the end of the war the Ministry had established some 240 “National Factories” producing for war purposes. It was the greatest

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employer of labour in the country and, for that labour, it was in the process of constructing housing developments.63 The state also asserted its control in the following areas:

Food The “Shell Scandal” was exacerbated by actual shortages of food in the summer of 1915. By 1916, according to W.G. Gillings: Serious political and industrial disturbances were threatened, and the Commissioners of Inquiry into Industrial Unrest recommended, among other things, the control of essential foodstuffs, the State limitation of profits derivable from their sale, and the reduction of their cost by means of a subsidy or otherwise.64

Public opinion was therefore strongly in favour of the government taking control of food supplies to prevent profiteering (more distrust in the free market here) and instituting rationing to ensure fairness (an example of war-induced confidence in the virtues of egalitarianism). Even before Lloyd George became prime minister in December 1916, “the state was directly responsible for buying and shipping the bulk of Britain’s imported foodstuffs and was engaged in the regulation of prices and distribution and in conservation.”65 A Food Controller had been appointed the previous month to regulate supply and consumption.66 Extensive rationing was established by July 1918 and imposed a “ruthless equalitarianism” on all classes.67 In order to increase the food supply the government set up stateowned tractor teams to plough up unused privately owned land.68

Requisitions Having taken control of the railways early on, the government extended its control over harbours and merchant shipping – from 1917 virtually every ship was taken over by the state.69 Coal mines and the coal industry as a whole were taken over by September 1917, following the report of a government committee (in April 1915) that stated that the market mechanism of coal distribution “has broken down in the extraordinary circumstances of the present winter”.70 The production of a large range of strategic goods (chemicals, timber, textiles, iron and steel, tungsten etc) was brought under government regulation.71 By the end of the war, the state was purchasing 98% of all steel produced and 90% of all steel imports.72

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Controls In industry by March 1916, the price of shell steel, pig iron, other steel and the materials for their production were all state controlled and remained so until the end of the war. Profits were controlled as well, “limited to onefifth more than the standard amount, for the two financial years before the war”.73 The government directed investment in the national interests and protected that interest against any opposition by enhanced measures of internal security and repression.74 The official History of the Ministry of Munitions tells us, “Once any measure of control had been undertaken the forces pressing for complete control became stronger and were ultimately irresistible.”75 The War Cabinet Report for 1917 stated: … 1917 may be described as a year in which State control was extended until it covered not only national activities directly affecting the military effort but every section of industry–production, transport and manufacture.76

In Germany, despite the greater extent of state direction from the start, parallel moves were afoot. A similar crisis in the abilities of the semi-free market led to the appointment of Hindenberg as head of the supreme command and Ludendorff as his chief of staff in August 1916. With them came the “Hindenberg Programme”, the object of which was “to create an extraordinary increase in the supply of weapons and munitions within an arbitrarily fixed period of time”–to double the stores of munitions, triple the supply of artillery and machine guns and send three million extra workers into the munitions sector.77 Such a massive project (assuming it was achievable at all) could only be carried out by a state that fully controlled the commanding heights (and a good deal more) of the economy.78 In fact, despite some initial hesitations, with a more dominant state and a less developed bourgeoisie, the transformation of the German economy was both rapid and ruthless. Once Rathenau’s KRA had been established, it became “the kernel from which an all-embracing system of military management of the German economy was to grow in the next three years.”79 After that, national cartels were set up for each commodity in short supply. They were managed by capitalists–but under the close direction of the War Ministry. Property was not confiscated, but the right to dispose of it was taken away from the property owners. The latter were

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forced, if their production facilities were suitable, to move into production for the war effort. 80 Woe betide those that did not, for “the War Ministry now had the capacity to maim or even to strangle nonessential industries should the need arise.”81 From the beginning, the organisation of the war economy in Germany was a more directly military operation than in Britain. Military rule was imposed at the same time as the general mobilisation (under the 1851 Prussian Law of Siege) and from that point the military authorities were expected to take charge.82 The supply of food once again emerged as a crucial factor in the extension of state power. In early 1915, wheat production was placed under government control and all wheat produced was directed into government hands. But when the food situation worsened, public opinion turned to the military for a solution. There were calls for a military food dictator and an economic “general staff”.83 Eventually, military force was sanctioned (from March 1917) in order to requisition grain.84 The garrison state also intervened in the relationship between capital and labour. Compulsory worker/management arbitration boards were set up, despite capitalist opposition, to rule on questions of wages and conditions. It is clear that Hindenberg for one wanted to go further than this. He wrote to the Chancellor in June 1918: It is not possible to leave the regulation of wages to the employers if the workers are tied to specific factories and if their productivity is maintained by state intervention. It will be necessary to place the wage question and, as a logical consequence, the profit question under state regulation.85

This illustrates the point that, while German industrialists deferred to state interests during the war, those interests were not the same as their own.86 The “new” state–a product, in Germany, Britain and Europe as a whole of radical militarism, modernism and state-infected ‘socialism’–was heading in a new direction, away from the market-oriented and globalising capitalism of the nineteenth century. And away from the bourgeois revolution.

The Results Towards the end of the war, it was broadly accepted in the advanced economies of Europe that something like the degree of state direction induced by the conflict would continue once peace was established.87 This

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was the case even in Britain where state intervention was perhaps less willingly accepted than elsewhere. Those who began writing semi-official histories of the period clearly expected no “roll-back” of the state after the war. Lloyd, in his Experiments in State Control (published in 1924) tells us: … I am disinclined to admit that all the measures of industrial and commercial organization adopted during the war … were merely necessary evils to be got rid of as soon as possible, and never to be thought about again … I believe that there is something to be learnt from the experiments in State control during the war which may be of positive value in the difficult times ahead.88

Fairlie, in British War Administration (1919) echoes the thought. “… [I]t is not improbable,” he wrote, “that some features of the government control of industry developed in connection with the Ministry of Munitions will be continued in force.”89 While H. Sanderson Furniss argued that, since private enterprise had failed the war effort, “there now seems no reason to doubt that, with public opinion behind it, what the state can do in a time of emergency, it can do when times are normal.”90 Such sentiments were present within the government itself. “The war,” stated the War Cabinet Report of 1917, “has brought a transformation of the social and administrative structure of the state, much of which is bound to be permanent.”91 In the popular realm, no less a person that H.G. Wells asked in 1916 “How Far will Europe Go Towards Socialism?” (which he, along with almost everyone else by this stage, identified with “a more highly organised state”).92 The answer was quite a long way. It was impossible to revert to the pre-war era. By the end of the war, “transit … shipping, collieries, and large portions of the machinery of food and drink production and distribution” would be run by “a sort of provisional public administration.” Furthermore, “Behind it is an idea, a new idea, the idea of the nation as one great economic system working together …”.93 From about 1916, the British government started discussing reconstruction. To this end, it began to sponsor schemes for post-war state intervention in welfare, health and education.94 It set about securing the position of the British economy after the war, particularly with regard to international competition. It established special committees to chart the future direction of various industries (for example, shipping, textiles, coal, engineering, iron and steel and the electrical industry).95 In June 1916, the Allies held

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an Economic Conference in Paris which recommended that in the post-war world they should strive to be “independent of enemy countries as regards raw materials and essential manufactures”. One way of achieving this was through the establishment of “government enterprises [and] government aid for scientific and industrial research”.96 Apart from the US, there seems to have been a clear sentiment in favour of some kind of stateorganised economic integration among the post-war European allies.97 As in Russia, the emerging new state was producing (and presumably, in the post-war years, would strengthen) a new elite. In contrast to the aristocrats, land owners and hide-bound bureaucrats of the pre-war era, there emerged “engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, scientists and visionaries”,98 empowered by state intervention and schooled in the wartime virtues of planning and efficiency. Who else was in the new statist elite? For Wells, it did not encompass “the businessmen, for the most part old men with old habits of mind, who have stayed behind.”99 For many after the war, having noted the failures of private business in the European conflict, capital was on probation. It would be retained to the extent that it served the national interest–that is to say, the interest of the national state. After all, wrote Spengler in 1920: The critical question not only for Germany but for all of the world … is this: In the future, shall business rule the state, or the state rule business?100

He answered, conventionally enough at this time, in favour of the latter. One other candidate for the new elite did come forward. For four years, most of the states of Europe had been engaged in continuous armed violence with one other, and the cutting edge of that violence was, of course, their armies. The whole effort of the state-directed war economies was devoted to having those armies carry out the state’s demands at the front. The size of the military mobilisation necessary for total war meant not only that significant proportions of nations’ populations were directly involved in military activities, but that the military culture of the armies permeated back into the home fronts.101 Little wonder then that as the state’s prestige as a social organiser grew, so did that of its quintessential manifestation, the armed forces. Soldiers and ex-soldiers were regarded as an essential factor in the new elite and the new organisation of society. For soldiers at the front, the war produced an intense experience of those features we have already identified with the state in arms: collectivism,

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egalitarianism, hierarchy and efficient organisation. As Herbert Read put it, “During the war I used to feel that this comradeship which had developed among us would lead to some new social order when peace came.” For Anthony Eden, “War promoted working together into something good and true and rare, the like of which was never to be met in civilian life.”102 Wells observed: In the trenches there are workers who have broken with the old slacking and sabotage, and there are prospective leaders who have forgotten profit … to-morrow these men will be the nation.103

That a debt was due to the soldiers of 1914-18 and that they embodied positive virtues were pan-European ideas, both feeding on the resurgence of state power and adding credence to it. In Italy for example, Benito Mussolini, having completed his transition from socialism to militaristic populism (the subtitle on his newspaper had been changed from “socialist daily” to “daily for soldiers and producers”) declared “We who have survived, we who are returning, demand the right to govern Italy.” The combattenti–or more specifically the trincerocrazia, the aristocracy of the trenches–would be the new elite.104 Many of these men were distinctly dissatisfied with the world before the war–and uninspired by the societies to which they were returning. T.E. Lawrence wrote: … the old men came out again and took from us our victory and re-made it in the likeness of the former world they knew … we stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, they thanked us kindly and made their peace.105

Mosley took note of the “smooth, smug people who had never fought or suffered, [and who] seemed to the eyes of youth … to be eating, drinking, laughing on the graves of our companions.”106 The new elite wanted a new society. The British War Cabinet itself understood that reconstruction was “not so much a question of rebuilding society as it was before the war, but of moulding a better world out of the social and economic conditions which have come into being during the war.”107 Mosley declared that it was necessary to take the “noble inspirations from wartime experience” and “unite them in the great synthesis which will make possible the creative future”.108 Private interests had to be replaced by the national interest. Wells believed that the

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European nations would emerge, each as a “great national factory”–an idea echoed by Mussolini: “From October to December 1918 Italy seemed like a factory, working in full blast in complete accord with progress.”109 As can be seen, visions of the new society were, as Rabinbach puts it, ‘politically promiscuous’.110 But whatever its ideological trappings, such a system would be state-dominated.111 If we ask what that state domination was for, we will stumble across an altogether darker side to this new kind of society, perhaps unseen by its gentler advocates. We would do best to examine this by degrees. To begin with, any programme of social construction (or reconstruction) that places the national state front and centre has an inbuilt tendency towards authoritarianism. Scott argues that the state (and its “highmodernist ideology”) strove to exclude politics (by which he means the political interests of groups outside the state).112 Further, the kind of largescale economic projects that visions of a new society entailed had to be carried out by the state and it alone. They necessitated an increase in state powers and the power of the state over capital.113 This incipient authoritarianism, and its potential to spread out from the state, was expressed by Spengler in 1920: For us, the controlling factor is the interplay of command and obedience in a strictly ordered community, be it state, party, officers’ corps, or civil service.114

Secondly, it was unclear whether the new society and its new elite were preparing for peace or war. Certainly many of its advocates were strong in the belief that the disaster of the Great War should never be repeated.115 But given the central role of the state, and the state’s historic predilections, it does not come as a great surprise that many more saw the new society at least partly as an exercise in war preparation. For many of them, the peace of 1918 was merely a truce, and thus the war economy–or the potential to remobilise the war economy–had to be maintained. Immediately the war ended, French politicians and generals started preparing the country for another European war, a war that “would resemble that of 1914-1918, a long gruelling conflict demanding the mobilzation of national resources on a massive scale.”116 In Britain, Fairlie’s endorsement of continuing forms of state intervention was partly justified by the fact that they might be needed “in the event of another war.”117 The British Minister for Reconstruction, justifying the establishment of a Ministry of Health to Parliament in February 1919, pointed out that during the war hundreds of

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thousands of men of military age had been found to be physically unfit. He went on: Then it was revealed as a source of national weakness, which is very great in time of emergency, but it is just as much a source of national weakness in time of peace.118

In Germany, Rathenau wrote in July 1918 that “The coming peace will be a short armistice and the number of future wars unforeseeable …”. For this reason, while he remained a strong proponent of a new society, he declared after the war: Never again can, nor should it happen that we enter a new war insufficiently prepared economically. All future years of peace must contribute to the utmost for this preparation … A general plan for economic moblization must be created, and constantly renewed …119

Furthermore, future wars would demand ever stronger states. “Another great war,” Lloyd gloomily forecast, “will plunge the world into a sort of military communism, in comparison with which the control exercised during the recent war will seem an Arcadian revel.”120 Finally, the point should be made that strong states engender militarised societies. The stronger the military (and ex-military) elements in the post1918 state–the returning soldiers in their various political manifestations– the more directly was that militarisation expressed. The collectivism of the trenches was translated into a military ordering of everyday life. Wehler comments: In an unprecedented perversion of human values, the abnormal social relationships which can develop at the front, in the omnipresence of death, were presented as a model for an ideal society in which authoritarian, disciplined and anachronistic forms of community life would prevail.121

This was not a uniform movement across Europe of course. But almost everywhere, there emerged in the aftermath of the war political forces (decorated with the ideologies of both left and right) that “based their identity on their military service for the nation, pursued the mobilization of society for war as social therapy, or, ultimately, aimed at the violent creation of new societies …”.122 And with them came the notion of politics as a military exercise: uniforms, drilled squads, hierarchical organisation and eventually street warfare.123

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Not everywhere were such forces successful. In Britain and France, for example, the “old men” largely held the line–or adopted as much of the new state agenda and co-opted as much of the new state elite as would allow them to hold it. But where the old order collapsed and elements of the new elite gained power, the state-dominated war economy was the result. Russia, Italy and Germany were clear examples of this phenomenon.

Destatisation and Restatisation Where the old order did not collapse, the state even received a setback in its progress (though a temporary one as it turned out) with the end of the war. Where private property continued to exist and prosper, within statedetermined limits, the interests of state and capital had never actually fused. When the war danger receded, capital entertained some hopes that business as usual (in the pre-1914 sense) could be resumed. In Britain, industrialists were in the vanguard of what one authority calls “the headlong charge back to 1914”, with what another deems “almost undignified haste”.124 The de-statisation that was allowed in the Allied countries came about partly because of the rather sudden, and unexpectedly total, collapse of Germany. We have noted that an important motive for the continuation of state intervention was the prospect of another war. With the German military collapse and subsequent social upheaval, the main reason for that war–as well as a major economic rival–seemed to have disappeared.125 Governments also feared that war would be followed by economic depression, as had happened in the past. State controls were eased (in Britain at least) to give confidence back to business.126 But most importantly, the bourgeoisie, where it was able–and, arguably, in the defeated countries it was not–simply reasserted its interests, separately from those of the national state. The time allowed to it to do so however was running out. The destatisation within the victorious powers was a mere pause in the state’s post-war progress. Given the gravity of the military and social collapse, state intervention continued well into the era of post-war reconstruction.127 Even in Britain there were those who discerned that the era of state control, far from ending, was just getting into its stride. “[T]he pendulum is swinging back towards integration,” wrote Lloyd in 1924. Competition was being superseded “by a more conscious control of

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economic processes … [and] more or less deliberate efforts to control prices, production and distribution.”128 One factor that demanded the attention of states was the collapse in world trade that the Great War had brought about.129 The national state had somehow to pick up the pieces, if it was to hold together a reasonable amount of economic sovereignty–and after 1918, there were even more states in Europe, each striving to establish their economic sovereignty at the expense of the others.130 Two further opportunities arose for the state to cement its position astride the relations of production. The onset of the Great Depression from 1929 threw up a crisis, perhaps as serious as the Great War itself, with which the operation of the free market seemed once again unable to cope. Just as economic liberalism had failed its peoples in the war, it failed again in the Depression. Governments, whatever their ideological preferences, were sent reeling in the direction of state intervention. Practices that had been given a thorough rehearsal in 1914-18 were taken up again–from Europe to the USA to Japan and elsewhere.131 After that, the measures necessary to withstand and/or prosecute the Second World War of the twentieth century must have seemed hardly extraordinary at all.132 On the contrary, the features of the war economy may well have appeared to be either the norm, or the radiant future–and indeed, the latter was the ideological thrust of those who ruled where its “total” form existed.

Revolution Delayed The diverging interests of states and capital were evident in the most advanced economies at the end of the nineteenth century. The desire of capital to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere”133 was evident in the globalisation that took place between 1870 and 1914. Capitals were moving away from “their own” states (and even beyond “their own” empires) and were resentful of state attempts to restrict their ability to do so. The progress of the bourgeoisie towards completing its own revolution (at least in Europe and the United States) was brought to a grinding halt in 1914. But the potential for states to reassert their power had always been there. Engels certainly noticed it in the declining years of the nineteenth century. He wrote:

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The army has become the main purpose of the state, and an end in itself; the people are there only to provide soldiers and feed them. Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe.134

It might seem curious that Engels should put forward such a frank account of autonomous state interests dominating society (including the bourgeoisie), when Marxism would seem to demand that the state was subordinate to capital (even if only to its “general interests”).135 But, at the risk of repetition, the peculiarity remains only for as long as the state is regarded as part of the “superstructure”–produced and determined by the economic structure which in turn is dependent on the level of development of the productive forces. But if the state is regarded instead as one of the production relations, part of the economic structure, that vies with other production relations for domination within the economic structure, then a state-dominated economy and society (that dominates capital, its rival production relation, as well) ceases to be such a problem for orthodox historical materialism. It helps to explain why disentanglement from the national state is such a necessity for the completion of the bourgeois revolution–and why the massive increase in the power of states after 1914 made that completion, at that time, impossible. Such was the power of the state resurgent–the restoration of state domination of the production relations–that it did not simply disrupt latenineteenth century globalisation; it brought it to a halt and drove it back. It was able to do so partly because of the desperate situation that many European states were facing by the beginning of the twentieth century, and partly because they were able to convey that desperation to their respective populations. Those populations were often prepared to support an increase in the powers of the state for three reasons: firstly, to defend the nation; secondly, as a blow against the feudal remnants of the pre-war order in Europe; thirdly, in return for the promise of state-initiated social reform. Once that initial support was secured, faith in the state as defender, developer, organiser and reformer continued across the political spectrum, well past the Depression and the Second World War, and on into the 1950s and 1960s. More materially, during this period state-dominated production relations managed in many cases to raise the level of development of the productive forces. Thus they remained dominant. It cannot be said that the bourgeoisie fiercely resisted this trend. Capitalists could recognise the huge rise in productive power that followed the Second World War as well as anyone else. And it was entirely unclear that, freed from national states,

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capital itself could raise that level any more quickly, or any higher, than the state-dominated process.136 In general, the bourgeoisie acceded to the power of state after 1914 with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm. The state-dominated model–from the centrally planned economy of the Soviet Union (despite the destruction of its German and Italian versions) to the mixed economies of western Europe–spread around the world. It became the model of choice for the former colonies. As a result, the bourgeois revolution was delayed on a world scale.

Notes 1

In his book The Persistence of the Old Regime, Arno Mayer clearly shows this to be the case. He recognises the bourgeois revolution as a process, with the French Revolution as “the first act of the breakup of Europe’s ancien regime” and (rather too optimistically) the Great War as starting the final act of its dissolution (A.J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War. London: Croom Helm, 1981, 15). He stresses “the importance of preindustrial economic interests, prebourgeois elites, predemocratic authoritarian systems, premodernist artistic idioms and ‘archaic’ mentalities” before 1914 (5). However, his assertion that the pre-1914 European order (“a peasant economy and rural society dominated by hereditary and privileged nobilities” (6) onto which industrial capitalism had been “grafted” (22)) was “thoroughly preindustrial and prebourgeois” (5) is a huge exaggeration. It is not necessary to deny the existence of the bourgeois revolution in order to acknowledge its incomplete nature. 2 P. Anderson, “Origins of the present crisis,” New Left Review 23 (January/February 1964): 30; P. Anderson, “Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism,” New Left Review 35 (January/February 1966): 9. This point has been argued in Chapter 1. Unfortunately, Anderson goes on (Pseudo-Empiricism, 9 and 41) to make the completely mistaken point that in the same way “socialism” does not “necessarily” require an industrial proletariat either–and has therefore been miraculously brought forth by “the Hunan and Yenan peasantry in arms” in China and “the subsistence farmers of the Sierra Maestra” in Cuba. Acceptance of this would make a mockery of Marx’s dictum, laid down in the General Rules of the First International (October 1864) that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” (K. Marx and F. Engels, “General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association,” in K. Marx & F. Engels, Collected Works Volume 22 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), 14) and not some other class on its behalf. Furthermore, while the beginnings of capitalism were kick-started by a force outside the bourgeoisie–the state in the interests of efficient war making–it is difficult to understand why forces outside the working class (peasants for example) would want to encourage socialism. 3 Anderson, Origins, 28.

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4 T. Nairn, “The British Political Elite,” New Left Review 23 (January/February 1964): 20. 5 “A bourgeoisie, if the term is to mean anything at all, is a class based on towns …” (Anderson, Pseudo Empiricism, 8). The point is made as part of Anderson’s reply to E.P. Thompson’s criticism of his and Nairn’s theses. Thompson objects to the idea that the landed aristocracy fused with the industrial bourgeoisie into a hybrid ruling class. He prefers to describe Britain in the nineteenth century as ruled by something called “Old Corruption”–which, rather confusingly, was “nothing but itself” (E.P. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” in The Socialist Register 1965 ed. R. Miliband & J. Saville (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 323). Nevertheless, it is clear, even on Thompson’s account, that whatever “Old Corruption” was, it kept the bourgeoisie from real power. Thus: “the nascent industrial bourgeoisie … regarded Old Corruption with a baleful eye”; “the industrial bourgeoisie had been excluded from the political game in 1688”; and therefore “As their property became more substantial they felt a corresponding accession of resentment…” (323-4). Anderson contends that Thompson’s argument that the industrial bourgeoisie was on the rise from the mid-19th century onwards “is supported by very weak evidence, and provides no explanation for the present character of British capitalism.” (Pseudo Empiricism, 40) 6 Anderson, Pseudo Empiricism, 14. 7 The Corn Laws were, according to David French, “a way of making Britain independent of foreign food supplies. But … autarky was an impossible goal … The most convinced exponents of the argument that free trade would eventually make war obsolete were the spokesmen of the Anti-Corn Law League.” (D. French, British Economic and Strategic Planning, 1905-1915 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 10.) 8 Anderson, Origins, 31-2. 9 Anderson, Origins, 39. This proposition was echoed, at about the same time, by Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution: “Somewhere in the nineteenth century … the English middle class lost its nerve, socially, and thoroughly compromised with the class it had virtually defeated.” (R. Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965), 346.) 10 Anderson refers to “… the fragmented, incomplete character of the English bourgeoisie’s historical experience” (Anderson, Origins, 40). This view was strongly influenced by what was seen as the archaic nature of British political and social institutions in the final years of Conservative rule in the early 1960s (which had produced, as the last Tory prime minister, a fourteenth earl), and the prospect and promise of a Labour government. 11 Anderson, Origins, 53. See also Nairn: “the British bourgeoisie has decided that the archaic historical baggage it has so far carried with it has become a mere dead weight, a hindrance to necessary development, to be exchanged overnight for something more rational” (Nairn, British Political Elite, 25) and Williams: “The fact is that we are still in a stage of transition from a social stratification based on birth to one based on money and actual position” (Williams, Long Revolution, 345.)

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12 G.R. Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914-1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 8-9. 13 D. Blackbourn, “Introduction,” to The German Bourgeoisie: essays on the social history of the German middle class from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century eds. D. Blackbourn & R.J. Evans (London & New York: Routledge, 1991), 7. 14 H. Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg Publishers, 1985), 21. Frederic Howe concludes: “… the land-owning aristocracy rules Prussia. This is in spite of the commanding importance of industry, of trade and of commerce, which form the strength and power of the state.” (F.C. Howe, Socialized Germany (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917), 43.) 15 Before assuring the reader that “the choice is not quite as stark as this.” G. Eley, “Defining the State in Imperial Germany,” in D. Blackbourn & G. Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: bourgeois society and politics in nineteenthcentury Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 138. 16 According to J.G. Williamson, the “period was one of rapid globalization: capital and labor flowed across national frontiers in unprecedented quantities, and commodity trade boomed as transport costs declined sharply.” (J.G. Williamson, “Globalization, Convergence, and History,” Journal of Economic History LVI 2 (June 1996):277) 17 See P. Hirst, & G. Thompson, Globalization in Question: the international economy and the possibilities of governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 207; A. Plummer, International Combines in Modern Industry (London: Pitman & Sons Ltd, 1934), 3. John Torpey adds that the economic liberalism of the period “had undergirded an unprecedented trend toward the relaxation of passport controls on movement in late-nineteenth-century Western Europe …”. The Great War would reverse this trend. (J. Torpey, “The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Passport System,” in Documenting Individual Identity: the development of state practices in the modern world, ed. J. Caplan & J. Torpey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 256) 18 C.A. Jones, International Business in the Nineteenth Century: the rise and fall of a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1987), 2. It seems to me that in describing this new phenomenon, Jones rather downplays the continuing power of the national state. Indeed, in his account of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie’s demise (which he ascribes to the “disruptions and adjustments of the late nineteenth century”, 4), the state hardly appears at all. 19 Thus the American radical, Randolph Bourne, stated that “Our modern civilization, with its international bonds of financial and economic dependence, is a civilization organized for peace and peace alone” (in R.N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: the intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1982), 180). More prosaically, Andrew Carnegie declared that a major war was impossible because: “We won’t give them the money” (Stromberg, Redemption, 9). 20 P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 195-7.

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Britain’s annual defence expenditure fell from a (Napoleonic) wartime peak of over 72 million pounds to between fourteen and sixteen million pounds in the 1820s to 1840s (French, British Planning, 9). 21 Kennedy, Rise & Fall, 202. See also French: “By the beginning of the twentieth century [Britain’s] continued prosperity depended on the smooth and continuous flow of goods into and out of the country … Britain was totally dependent on the continued flow of international trade for its economic survival …”. (British Planning, 12-13). 22 Stomberg, Redemption, 9. 23 M. Geyer, “The Militarization of Europe, 1914-1945,” in The Militarization of the Western World, ed. J.R. Gillis (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 70. 24 Before the mid-nineteenth century, according to Scott, “They lacked the consistent coercive power, the fine-grained administrative grid, or the detailed knowledge that would have permitted them to undertake more intrusive experiments in social engineering.” (J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 88) 25 N. Harris, The Return of Cosmopolitan Capital: globalization, the state and war. London: IB Tauris, 2003, 74. 26 On the general acceptance of nationalism in Germany, see J.J. Sheehan, German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278). Before 1870, conscription was only seriously carried out in the German states; “After the Franco-Prussian war, the whole continent moved in the German direction.’ (G. Best, “The Militarization of European Society, 1870-1914,” in The Militarization of the Western World, ed. J.R. Gillis (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 15) 27 Best in Gillis, Militarization, 17. 28 Mayer makes a strong case for the war guilt of the old order: “Under the aegis of the sceptre and miter, the old elites, unrestrained by the bourgeoisie, systematically prepared their drive for retrogression, to be executed with what they considered irresistible armies.” (Mayer, Persistence, 322. See also 321, 323.) However, the old regime was not alone in this preparation–nor were they unanimous in their enthusiasm for it. As we saw in Chapter Four, the Tsarist regime was distinctly unenthusiastic about involvement in a European war. Furthermore, Olive Anderson argues that by the late 19th century military strength was identified with efficiency: “and this was inevitably associated with the middle class and modernity, not with the aristocracy and tradition.” (O. Anderson, A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics during the Crimean War (London: MacMillan, 1967), 104) 29 Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in W. Deist, “The German army, the authoritarian nation-state and total war,” in State, society and mobilization in Europe during the First World War, ed. J. Horne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 166. 30 Stromberg, Redemption, 180.

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31 All in Stromberg, Redemption, 11-12. See Yaney on the enthusiasm of professionals, experts and specialists for war: G.L. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: agrarian reform in Russia, 1861-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 443. 32 See Feldman, Army Industry, 27-8. 33 Feldman, Army Industry, 37. 34 B. Mussolini, My Autobiography (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1928), 59. 35 Lloyd writes in his 1924 account of state control in Britain: “During the war the humblest, the most aimless, and the most despised were filled with a new vision of usefulness and purpose in their lives. Their country wanted them.” (E.M.H. Lloyd, Experiments in State Control at the War Office and the Ministry of Food (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), 2) 36 Chesterton in Stromberg, Redemption, 38. 37 In Britain, the Daily Citizen, a newspaper associated with the Labour Party, declared in October 1914: “Thus in the hour of its supreme need does the nation turn to the collectivist experiments urged for so many years by the Labour movement ... Is it too much to hope that these experiments will still be remembered when these dark anxious days are at an end?” (Quoted in A. Marwick, The Deluge: British society and the First World War (London: The Bodley Head, 1965), 161-2). Halevy comments: “And there is this to be said in favour of the socialists who helped to fight the battles of their respective countries, that some measure of socialism permeated the policy of all the belligerent countries.” (E. Halevy, The Era of Tyrannies: essays on socialism and war (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 240). 38 See Feldman, Army Industry, 97. Korrespondenzblatt (a paper of the Social Democratic Trade Unions) said: “The military dictatorship has in many cases shown more understanding for the needs of the people than the bureaucracy” (in Feldman, Army Industry, 109). 39 “Mobilization for war stiffens the backs of states and, like the threat of a hanging, concentrates their minds; administration becomes focused on one single overriding aim.” (Torpey, Great War and Modern Passport System, 257) 40 “… for a time the themes of increased nationalism in the political sphere and increased cosmopolitanism in the economic sphere appeared to coincide.’ (Harris, Cosmopolitan, 85) It would not be long however before the former crushed the latter. 41 “By these two routs–the illusion of war as the supreme administrative problem [i.e. the main concern of the state] and the illusion of war as chivalric crusade–all but the most clear-minded of the British bourgeoisie could be drawn into an accommodation with the state.’ (Jones, International Business, 205. See also 1-4, 189.) 42 Blackbourn, Introduction to German Bourgeoisie, 24. “With such traditions as these, it was perfectly natural for the state to undertake new activities and tighten its control over the individuals and corporations whose actions were inimical to the state.” (Howe, Socialized Germany, 87.) 43 Sheehan, German Liberalism, 276.

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44 Blackbourn tells us: “They [the bourgeoisie] did … subscribe to the importance of a strong state, with which they broadly identified. They were also, for the most part, supporters of an active German search for a place in the sun, through a vigorous foreign policy.” (Blackbourn, Introduction to German Bourgeoisie, 26) See also Wehler, German Empire, 193. Sheehan adds that for German liberals [and presumably their bourgeois supporters], “The struggles for nationhood and for political reform seemed to be against the same enemies and for the same goals.” (Sheehan, German Liberalism, 274) 45 “The development of war-time control was thus due almost entirely to the overwhelming force of circumstances and hardly at all to a deliberate policy of State intervention … As the war proceeded conscription of trade and industry was seen to be necessary if the nation was to put forth its maximum fighting power.” (Lloyd, Experiments, 260) 46 Second Report of the Defence of the Realm Losses Royal Commission, 1917 quoted in S.J. Hurwitz, State Intervention in Great Britain: a study of economic control and social response, 1914-1919 (London: Frank Cass & Co, 1949), 152. 47 Lloyd George in March 1915: “We are on the lookout for a good strong business man, with some go in him, who will be able to push the thing [increased war production] through.” (Hurwitz, State Intervention, 150) 48 R. Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 37. Von Schlieffen for example (he of The Plan) considered that modern nations needed uninterrupted trade and industry and that therefore a lengthy war was unlikely (Feldman, Army Industry, 6). 49 Colonel Bauer of the Supreme Command told industrialists in September 1916: “Be clear that what industry must accomplish is just as important as what the army has to do. Only with your help can we march to victory. It is a question of existence or non-existence.” (Quoted in Feldman, Army Industry, 164) 50 In A. Mendelssohn-Bertholdy, The War and German Society: the testament of a liberal (New York: Howard Fertig, 1971), 230. 51 Feldman, Army Industry, 76-7, 85, 156, 195. On subservience to the state in preWar Germany, see Howe, Socialized Germany, chapters 2 & 6. He comments: “No other nation has so completely subordinated the individual to the state; nowhere does such unchallenged authority attach to so large an official class; and nowhere does the official command such unquestioned obedience.” (12) 52 J.A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: the legacy of the international scientific management movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 187; Feldman, Army Industry, 46; Bertholdy, War & German Society, 225; Scott, Seeing Like a State, 99. 53 Letter of 14 August 1914 in W. Rathenau, Walter Rathenau: industrialist, banker, intellectual and politician–Notes and Diaries, 1907-1922, ed. H.P. Von Strandmann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 189. 54 In F.Redlich, “German Economic Planning for War and Peace,” Review of Politics VI (July 1944): 315; Merkle, Management & Ideology, 185. 55 He wrote in Of Things to Come in 1916: “the realisation is dawning that all economic life rests on the fundamental basis of the state, that state policy is more

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important than ‘business’ …”. (In J. Joll, Intellectuals in Politics: three biographical essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), 96-7). See Yaney on Rathenau: G.L. Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize: agrarian reform in Russia, 18611930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 446-454. 56 Marwick, Deluge, 160. 57 L.M. Barnett, British Food Policy during the First World War (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 1. In France, “Private industry did not have the resources necessary to initiate this kind of production programme on its own in the time required.” This led the French state to establish the arsenal at Roanne. ((J.F. Godfrey, Capitalism at War: industrial policy and bureaucracy in France 19141918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1987), 290). See also Hurwitz, State Intervention, 149; W.H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: technology, armed force and society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 317. 58 Marwick, Deluge, 157-9. 59 Bertholdy, War & German Society, 108. Feldman remarks: “The Bismarckian revolution from above which had created the German Empire was the work of the army, and it was now the army which was given the task of being the chief guardian of its internal as well as external security.” (Army Industry, 31) See also Chickering, Imperial Germany, 33. 60 Feldman/ Army Industry, 7. 61 McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 326; Marwick, Deluge, 169-79. In the latter stages of this (in November 1916), Winston Churchill told Parliament that before the end of the war he expected government regulation of shipping, employment, prices and rationing “for everything that matters”. “But,” he asked, “why not do these [things] now? Why not do them while there is still time?” (In Marwick, Deluge, 178). He did not have long to wait. 62 J.A. Fairlie, British War Administration (New York: Carnegie Endowment & Oxford University Press, 1919), 100-101. 63 Marwick, Deluge, 253; Hurwitz, State Intervention, 155, 157. 64 W.G. Gillings, Knight’s Handbook for Food Control Committees (London: Knight & Co., 1917. War Reserve Collection (WRA-WRE) reel 8, WRC.30.373. Used by kind permission of Cambridge University Library), vi. 65 Barnett, British Food Policy, xv. 66 Fairlie, British War Administration, 205. The extensive powers of the Food Controller are set out in Gillings, Knight’s Handbook, vii-viii. 67 J. Harris, “Bureaucrats and Businessmen in British Food Control, 1916-19,” in War and the State: the transformation of British government, 1914-1919, ed. K. Burk (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 144. By the end of the war there had been 70,000 prosecutions for infringements of the rationing system. 68 McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 343. He adds that these state-owned tractors were “grouped into machine tractor stations like those the Russians later used in their collectivization drive of the 1930s.” Much the same sort of regulatory framework for food was established in the US when it entered the war. See Herbert Hoover on the control of prices, exports and shipping in H. Hoover, Food in War (London:

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WH Smith, 1918. War Reserve Collection (WRA-WRE) reel 7, WRC.30.348. Used by kind permission of Cambridge University Library), 12-14. 69 Fairlie, British War Administration, 166; Marwick, Deluge, 251. 70 In Marwick, Deluge, 171, 250. 71 Fairlie, British War Administration, 179-84. Fairlie lists no less than 409 official Commissions and Committees set up to regulate various strategic activities, including the Dentists Act Committee and the Horse Demobilisation Committee (271-309). 72 Hurwitz, State Intervention, 157; S. Newton, & D. Porter, Modernisation Frustrated: the politics of industrial decline in Britain since 1900 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 36. 73 Munitions of War Act (1915) in Fairlie, British War Administration, 101. 74 Marwick, Deluge, 163; Fairlie, British War Administration, 120. 75 Marwick, Deluge, 166. 76 Marwick, Deluge, 250. Newton & Porter say that it was “almost impossible” to limit the scope of the Munitions Ministry’s activities (Modernization Frustrated, 55). Harris compares the Food Ministry (in scope if not in ruthlessness) to “a totalitarian state” (Bureaucrats & Businessmen, 147). Hurwitz argues that before the end of the war the state had established “Control over the basic industries of Great Britain …” (State Intervention, 164). 77 Feldman, Army Industry, 149; Chickering, Imperial Germany, 76. 78 McNeill concludes on the Hindenberg programme: “Germany thus became a garrison state, in principle and to a considerable degree also in practice, subordinating everything to the needs of the army as defined by the High Command’s strategic plans for the coming year.” (Pursuit of Power, 338) He also notes that after much the same sort of market failure in France, from 1916 “A far more rigorously étatist and technocratic system … thus emerged” (Pursuit of Power, 342). In 1918 the French government was given power over the production, distribution and sale of any product for human or animal consumption; “1918 was the year of the greatest extension of state power over industry” concludes Godfrey (Capitalism at War, 61-2). 79 McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 323. 80 Bertholdy, War & German Society, 231. 81 Feldman, Army Industry, 52. There is some controversy over the relationship of the German state to capital during this period. Some historians, in what I suspect is an attempt to maintain that the Great War was fought in the interests of capital, play down the extent to which capital was made subservient to the state. Chickering, for example, in Imperial Germany, starts out with the correct observation that the war “brought a sudden and seismic shift in the market mechanism … whose workings were too slow to adjust to the military emergency” (36). But he goes on to say that the state’s attempts to bring about this shift “made it clear that the war would bring no tampering with the foundations of German capitalism … the allocation of resources was ultimately to be guided by considerations of profit.” (39) This however was clearly not the case, since the entire economy was skewed towards war production for the purposes of defence,

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not profit. Chickering illustrates this point himself by pointing out that the economy had to be drastically reorganised to allow “the concentration of every available resource in the manufacture of arms and munitions”; that capital, raw materials and labour were directed into war production firms by the state; that the economy was directed by a central agency, led by soldiers; and that capitalists were by no means pleased with the results (all on page 77). For other exponents of this view see C.S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: stabilization in France, Germany and Italy in the decade after World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 11; Wehler/German Empire, 203-5. 82 Feldman, Army Industry, 31-3. 83 Feldman, Army Industry, 102-6. 84 P. Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s continuum of crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 33. For the extent of state control over industry before the War, see Howe, Socialized Germany, 89-93. 85 Feldman, Army Industry, 62-64; 86-94; (Hindenberg quote) 496. 86 The differences between state and industrialists on the French side are noted by Godfrey: “The bureaucrats strove unceasingly to reduce to an acceptable level the extent to which the government was being exploited by industrialists. The industrialists were fighting for the best interests of their firms …”. (Capitalism at War, 212). 87 As one contemporary put it: “As the war continued, we became increasingly accustomed to restrictions of every sort. When the fourth anniversary came, Government control was so much part of our lives that we found it difficult to jump back in our minds to the pre-war world in which we lived in July 1914.” (E. Wrench, Struggle 1914-1920 (1935), 333 in Marwick, Deluge, 254. Writing in 1917, Howe envisaged a strengthening of the state in post-war Germany (Socialized Germany, 327). 88 Lloyd, Experiments, xi. 89 Fairlie, British War Administration, 116. This despite the fact that Fairlie’s general editor (perhaps on behalf of the Carnegie Endowment) prefaces the book with the contention that its purpose is to disprove “A superficial view and hasty judgment … that the world has taken great strides in the direction of state socialism.” (iii) However, even he is forced to concede that “we may continue, as a result of our war administration, to operate through government agencies some industries that have heretofore been wholly individualistic in their management.” (v) 90 H. Sanderson Furniss ed., The Industrial Outlook by Various Writers (1917) in Newton & Porter, Modernisation, 51. 91 In Marwick, Deluge, 254. 92 H.G. Wells, What is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the War (London: Cassell & Co., 1916), chapter 5; socialism defined, 97. 93 Wells, What is Coming? 112-113. The British Labour Party demanded in November 1918 that the state should maintain control over railways, canals and mines; should take over the electricity industry; and should resume its ownership of agricultural land (Labour Party, Report of the Executive Committee (London:

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n.p., 1919. War Reserve Collection (WRA-WRE) reel 2, WRB.30.303. Used by kind permission of Cambridge University Library), 57-58. 94 Marwick, Deluge, 239-246. Such schemes, for much the same reasons, had preceded the war in Germany; “One explanation of the devotion of the German people to the Fatherland is the devotion of the Fatherland to the people.” (Howe, Socialized Germany, 21-22.) 95 Fairlie, British War Administration, 192. 96 1916 Economic Conference recommendations in Fairlie, British War Administration, 193. 97 See McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 343; Barnett, British Food Policy, 211. The British Engineers’ Association pressed for the creation of a Ministry of Industry to push forward the recommendations of the Allied Economic Conference. See Engineering Industry in War and Peace, ed. British Electrical and Allied Manufacturers’ Association (London: Published by the Association, 1916. War Reserve Collection (WRA-WRE) reel 6, WRC.30.337. Used by kind permission of Cambridge University Library), 28-31. 98 Scott, Seeing like a State, 88. Scott identifies these social forces with “High Modernism”: “the ideology par excellence of the bureaucratic intelligentsia, technicians, planners and engineers” (96), for whose influence the Great War was “the high water mark” (100). See also A. Rabinbach, The Human Motor: energy, fatigue and the origins of modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 261. 99 Wells, What is Coming? 120. 100 O. Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism (1920), www.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/spengler/prussianism.html. 101 “Towards the end of the war the Army had become practically coterminous with the community …”. (Lloyd, Experiments, 6). 102 Herbert Read in Annals of Innocence, Eden in Another World, both in Stromberg, Redemption, 87. 103 Wells, What is Coming? 121. 104 C.S. Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s,” Journal of Contemporary History V (2) (1970): 40-1, 44; G.J. Kasza, The Conscription Society: administered mass organizations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, 22. Oswald Mosley’s first political grouping within the Conservative Party (for which he was elected as an MP in 1918) “was composed mostly of members who had fought in the war …” (O. Mosley, My Life (London: Nelson, 1968), 101). 105 T.E. Lawrence, Letters (London: Cape Publications, 1938), 262. 106 Mosley, My Life, 70. 107 War Cabinet Report 1917 in Marwick, Deluge, 239-40. 108 Mosley, My Life, 60-61. 109 Wells, What is Coming? 123; Mussolini, Autobiography, 63. Wells also said, “The Allies will become State firms, as Germany was … already becoming before the war; setting profit aside in the common interest …”. (What is Coming? 121). On Germany, see Howe, Socialized Germany, 119, 322.

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110 “The vision of a society in which social conflict was eliminated in favour of technological and scientific imperatives could embrace liberal, socialist, authoritarian, and even communist and fascist solutions.” (Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 272) 111 Scott argues that after the Great War, “Society became an object that the state might manage and transform with a view toward perfecting it …” (Scott, Seeing like a State, 92). Wells predicted: “By 1926 … we shall tour in State-manufactured automobiles upon excellent roads, and we shall live in houses equipped with a national factory electric light installation, and at every turn we shall be using and consuming the products of nationalised industry …’ (Wells, What is Coming? 124). 112 “Political interests can only frustrate the social solutions devised by specialists …” (Scott, Seeing like a State, 94). 113 Such projects “typically required a vast public authority empowered to condemn private property, relocate people against their will, guarantee the loans or bonds required, and coordinate the work of the many state agencies involved.” (Scott, Seeing like a State, 95). 114 Spengler, Prussianism and Socialism. 115 To cite only one (and perhaps a surprising) British example: “Driving purpose had begun; there must be no more war … we of the war generation are marching on and we shall march on until our end is achieved and our sacrifice atoned …” (Mosley in 1918: My Life, 70). 116 T. Imlay, “Preparing for Total War: The Conseil Supérieur de la Défense Nationale and France’s Industrial and Economic Preparations for War after 1918,” War in History 15 1 (2008): 45 & 47. 117 Fairlie, British War Adminstration, 116. Similarly for Wells: What is Coming? 102. 118 Addison in Marwick, Deluge, 242. As J.C. Perry put it in the US, “It is as vital to maintain the health of our army of workers as it is that of our military forces, because the successful prosecution of the war is directly dependent upon the output of [this] labor …”. (J.C. Perry, “Military Health Dependent on Civil Health,” in Mobilizing America’s Resources for the War, ed. C.L King (Philadelphia: AAPSS, 1918. War Reserve Collection (WRA-WRE) reel 7, WRC.30.341. Used by kind permission of Cambridge University Library).) 119 Rathenau in Joll, Intellectuals in Politics, 103; in Bertholdy, War & German Society, 235. Constant military preparation of course militated against a freer society. Bertholdy recognised the contradiction here. He wrote that Rathenau’s part in the war “consisted almost entirely in creating and perfecting the means by which a power alien to him, if not inimical, sought to attain an end of which he, Rathenau, was either ignorant or disapproved …”. (War & German Society, 223). Redlich points out that Rathenau’s ideas could lead in two directions. On the one hand, to “war economy as it is practiced today [1944] all over the world’; on the other, to Nazi economic thinking (German Economic Planning, 334). See also Redlich, German Economic Planning, 320; W.M. Stern, “Wehrwirtschaft: A

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German Contribution to Economics,” Economic History Review XIII 2 (1960): 273. 120 Lloyd, Experiments, xi. And he adds: “Personal freedom and private property are condemned by the exigencies of modern war …’ (xi). 121 Wehler, German Empire, 214. 122 Geyer, Militarization of Europe, 70. 123 For example, in Germany (but not only there): “Political struggle, Kampf, took on a new meaning in the wake of the First World War, as violence left its mark on almost all aspects of civil society. A line had been crossed: physical violence had become part of the political armoury which, increasingly, Germans habitually employed.” (R. Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 262); “The most disastrous effect of World War 1, finally, consisted in the miseducation of a whole generation toward solving its problems in a military, authoritarian manner.” (P.H. Merkl, The Making of a Stormtrooper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 15) As Mussolini put it: “It was necessary to give timely, genial [!] recognition to chivalrous violence … It was necessary to make our way by violence, by sacrifice, by blood …” (Mussolini, Autobiography, 119). 124 Newton & Porter, Modernisation, 39; Barnett, British Food Policy, 211. See also Lloyd, Experiments, 388. On the French case, see Godfrey, Capitalism at War, 297-8. 125 P. Cline, “Winding Down the War Economy: British plans for peacetime recovery, 1916-1919,” in War and the State: the transformation of British government, 1914-1919 ed. K. Burk (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), 159-60; see also Wells,What is Coming? 98, 115. 126 Barnett, British Food Policy, 212. On fears of economic collapse after the war, see Garton Foundation, Memorandum on the Industrial Situation after the War. London: Harrison & Sons, 1916; W. Ramsay, Six Articles on Germany’s Commercial War Machine. Manchester: Daily Dispatch, 1916 (War Reserve Collection [WRA-WRE], reel 2, WRB.30.306; reel 5, WRC.30.314). Used by kind permission of Cambridge University Library). 127 On Germany, see Merkle, Management and Ideology, 183. As Holquist puts it, “National security states that emerged to manage the practices of total war did not pass from war to peace, but from war to preparation for future wars. National security states throughout Europe found the measures implemented during war to be equally useful in managing their populations in peace.” (Holquist, P. “‘Information is the Alpha and the Omega of our Work’: Bolshevik surveillance in its pan-European context.” Journal of Modern History LXIX 3 (September 1997): 12). 128 Lloyd, Experiments, 398. 129 Average world foreign trade increased by less than one percent a year between 1913 and 1950. (Hirst & Thompson, Globalization in Question, 22) 130 See J. Foreman-Peck, A History of the World Economy: international economic relations since 1850 (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983), chapter seven. Desai writes that during the war: “Capitalism regressed into a cluster of separate national

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economies at war for the present but failing, when peace came, to revert to a global system. This was the phase of ‘capitalism in one country’ which was to be the twentieth-century pattern. It was deglobalization with a vengeance.” (M. Desai, Marx’s Revenge: the Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (London: Verso, 2004), 107.) 131 Scott, Seeing like a State, 97; Barnett, British Food Policy, 216; McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 346, 349; Godfrey, Capitalism at War, 298. 132 In Britain in 1936, a group of insiders at the Bank of England prepared a report for measures in the event of war. This would “recommend a total mobilisation of resources, without any consideration of the rights of the individual … the execution of our projected measures would require official interference with practically every aspect of personal and institutional activity.” (Sir George Bolton, one of the report’s authors, in D. Kynaston, The City of London, Volume 3: Illusions of Gold, 1914-1945 (London: Pimlico, 2000), 441). In France in 1936, the opular Front government nationalised a number of industries as well as the national bank and set up a Ministry of the National Economy. The mobilisation law of July 1938 officially established a state-controlled economy, and this arrangement was maintained by the Vichy regime. Godfrey notes the contention that the post-WW2 economy “owes much to the [mobilisation] law, essentially the rationalisation of the industrial experience of the state in the 1914-18 war, as transmitted to post-war France via Vichy …” (Capitalism at War, 300). 133 K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 45 134 F. Engels, Anti-Duhring (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 204. 135 Nigel Harris is aware of the curiosity here, pointing out that “Engels presents a supposedly capitalist society in which the army rules society in its own interest, rather than in the interests of capital.” (Harris, Cosmopolitan Capital, 76) 136 This only became the case once the changes in economic production that followed the Second World War had worked their way through the world economy, laying the basis for a world market. See D. Lockwood, The Destruction of the Soviet Union (Houndmills: MacMillan, 2000), chapter 2.

CONCLUSION

It may be useful to summarise the argument at this point before making some brief concluding remarks. The state and capital bring into being certain production arrangements (relations of production in Marxist terminology). They are different kinds of arrangements because their purposes are different. The state needs to produce sufficient war-making capacity to defend itself against and to compete with its rival states. Capital needs to produce profit. In their early stages, societies are often dominated by states, but at a certain level of development of their productive forces, capitalist production methods become necessary in order for efficient production to take place. Since the state requires efficient production for efficient warmaking, it is often the state that nurtures and encourages the beginnings of capitalism. As capital becomes stronger, the two sets of production relations compete for resources–that is, they wrestle for domination. Societies in which capital dominates are advanced capitalist economies, heading towards a situation in which capital is independent of the national state. This trend can be identified in late nineteenth century Europe and North America where, as we have seen, forms of globalisation were beginning to emerge. We are witnessing the same kind of process today. Societies where the state dominates tend, given the state’s proclivities, to be centralised, militarised and authoritarian.1 At the extreme, they are permanent war economies. Given the global change in production relations brought about by the increase in the level of development of the productive forces which we often refer to as globalisation, such species are today increasingly rare. Both state-dominated and capital-dominated societies produce “capitalism” of a sort. But under the state, it is a capitalism subject to the state’s political will, not one devoted to profit. If the productive forces are to continue to develop, there has to be a transition from the domination of the state to the domination of capital. In other words, there has to be a bourgeois revolution.

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Russia was a state-dominated society, from Muscovy to the Soviets. Late Tsarism however, discovered that it needed capitalist industrialisation to fulfil its Great Power obligations–otherwise it was in danger of eclipse in the manner of the Ottoman Empire. The Tsarist state therefore encouraged industrialisation in the latter half of the nineteenth century–only to discover that it was at the same time helping to develop a Russian bourgeoisie. As social forces representing two competing sets of production relations, the autocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie found themselves almost immediately in conflict. That conflict and its resolution has been the main focus of this account. Russian economic development strained against the restrictions of the Tsarist autocracy. For the ongoing development of the productive forces, Russia needed a bourgeois revolution. This was a huge task for the Russian bourgeoisie. It was small, urbanbased and somewhat regionally divided. The society that surrounded it was industrialising but was still based overwhelmingly on agriculture. Peasants were the vast majority of the population. An alliance with the urban workers against Tsarism in 1905 proved a powerful weapon–but one in which the proletarian contingent got rapidly out of hand, extending its wrath from Tsarism to encompass aspects of capitalism itself. Spurned by (and, to a large extent, spurning) the political leadership of the urban workers after 1905, the progressive bourgeoisie believed it had found a new mechanism for bringing about the bourgeois revolution: a revolution from above, in which the creation of a new “developmental” state would neutralise or eliminate the autocracy. In this project, they found allies amongst the intelligentsia (from whom the idea first sprang), politicians, state officials, army officers and the rising breed of professional experts. The power of states received a huge boost during the First World War in all the actively belligerent nations. The autocratic state in Russia proved to be too weak and unpopular to raise itself to the heights required. The new state actually began to appear under Tsarism in the voluntary organisations and the military, filling in the gaps in Tsarism’s lamentable wartime performance. This new state staked its claim successfully against Tsarism– but succeeded in it at the expense of the bourgeoisie. What emerged was statism–somewhat timidly under the Provisional Government and then in a virulent form under the Soviets. The diversion of the bourgeois revolution into statism was a global phenomenon which started with the First World War and continued up

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until the middle of the last century. The bourgeois revolution was incomplete, even in Western Europe, before the Great War. It was thrown back by the resurgence of state power necessitated by the war–and then held back by the ensuing crises of the Depression and World War Two. I have attempted to reinterpret the decline of Tsarist and Republican Russia, using the tools of historical materialism–examining the kind of revolution that Russia was able to produce (given the level of development of the productive forces) and those who might have been expected to lead it. My purpose though has not been simply to produce another interpretation, but to draw some conclusions from these events that are useful for Marxism in an era which is leaving behind the domination of states and entering into the domination of capital. For much of the left, the Bolshevik victory has been regarded as a template. 1917 was meant to inaugurate the final conflict, the demise of capitalism and the victory of socialism. At the beginning of the new century, with capitalism still standing and socialism widely dismissed as, at best, irrelevant, surely some kind of balance sheet is appropriate. The politics that led to the Bolshevik revolution and the lessons drawn from it have proved little short of disastrous for the left. As I said in Chapter One, the left’s mistakes derived partly from the failure of Marxism to recognise the autonomous role of the state, and partly from its radical underestimation of the role of the bourgeoisie by the early twentieth century. The first of these was a direct consequence of the views of Marx and Engels on the state. The state, they believed, was a superstructural development of the economic structure. In his time Engels argued that “The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists …”.2 As the economic structure changed, the state (as part of the superstructure) would change with it. But historically, this has not been the case. Engels himself illustrated this. In his major work on the state, he traced the development of the state from ancient Athens, through Rome and Germany, to the nineteenth century state. Given the different economic structures that he is examining, we would expect that the superstructure (including the state) would differ with them But at no stage does he create separate categories of state–the “Athenian state” or “the state in the ancient world” or even “the precapitalist state.” In fact, having followed developments in Athens, he declares that “the state” was “now complete in its main features”. He goes

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on to cheerfully compare the ancient state (holding down slaves) with the feudal state (holding serfs and/or peasants) and the modern representative state–concluding that they all fulfil the same kind of function.3 In Russia, the fact that the Provisional Government was laying the basis for further capitalist development did not produce a capitalist state. The fact that the Soviet regime claimed it was laying the basis for socialism did not produce a socialist one either–despite the Bolsheviks’ stronger and stronger protestations to the contrary. There is no sense in which a particular economic structure erects a state as a suitable superstructure for the continuation and development of the economic system. The state in capitalism, for example, does not arise with the capitalist system–it predates it. The state does not reflect certain sets of production relations–as it should do if it were part of the superstructure. It is a production relation in its own right and, if it is strong enough, can give rise to a particular kind of superstructure. Without this kind of analysis, it seems to me that Marxists can have no satisfactory explanation of the twentieth century, in which, time and again, the state comes to the fore, bending other social forces to its will and laying the basis for a kind of capitalism. In Russia, the state remained, cleared of its Tsarist fetters by the March revolution and then cleared of the influence of the bourgeoisie in November. It went on to produce a “socialism” of its own. The underestimation of the bourgeoisie flowed from the assumption that the bourgeois revolution had been completed everywhere that it could be (or everywhere that was important). Marx and Engels had also encouraged this view. They wrote as though the bourgeoisie had already achieved its liberation by the mid-nineteenth century. It was thus able to ignore states (or control them) and “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”4 Some of their successors in the Second International (Kautsky and Plekhanov for example) did not fully accept this and could see that the bourgeois revolution was still necessary in societies like Russia. But others (Trotsky to start with, and then Lenin) drew the conclusion that, with the bourgeois revolution more or less completed, there could be no further development of the productive forces under capitalism. The First World War signified the final collapse of the system.5 Socialism therefore was the next thing on the agenda. Even in those societies where the bourgeois revolution had not even begun, the bourgeoisie was no longer seen as a progressive force but an enemy of progress.

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None of these assumptions was true. For more than a century after the publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the bourgeois revolution remained incomplete everywhere–even in Europe and North America where it was obstructed by resurgent state power. It was still a necessary stage. Its completion would be signalled by the separation of capital from particular national states–the decline of the state production relation and the ascent of capital. That would not come until the latter half of the twentieth century. The consequence of the left’s underestimation of the state and abandonment of the bourgeois revolution was the Bolshevik seizure of power. Having taken power, the Bolsheviks were forced (in order to survive) to continue strengthening the state, a process they increasingly equated with socialism. Almost all of the left outside Russia believed the latter to be true and consequently accepted the former as necessary to achieve it. As a direct result of the Bolshevik experience, socialism for the post-war left became identified with armed insurrection, civil war and state centralisation. There also arose a distinct tolerance of one-party dictatorships for good measure. From here begins the dreary succession of authoritarian state-centred regimes, forcing through (not always successfully) the initial stages of the bourgeois revolution, from Stalin all the way down to the current dynastic representative in Pyongyang. Viewed through the prism of 1917, much of the left cannot help but see the twentieth century as a huge disappointment. If the bourgeois revolution no longer mattered and socialism really was on the agenda, then it seemed to have failed utterly–unless one redefined socialism to encompass the series of rather grubby dictatorships that claimed its name. Which of course, is what much of the left did. But if the periodisation is readjusted, along lines that I claim to be those of orthodox historical materialism, the twentieth century ceases to be an agonising saga of mistaken tactics, betrayal and dashed hopes. All the revolutions of the last century were stages in the bourgeois revolution. While the bourgeoisie may not have led them, they have laid the basis for the further development of capitalism. Many of them have been long affairs, from the first stirrings of national capitalism through to the bourgeoisie’s final break with the national state. Looked at in this way, the twentieth century was one of considerable advance. Had it seen the events before and after 1917 in this light, the left would have to have had considerable reserves of patience to await, or even

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contribute to, the successful completion of the bourgeois revolution. Yet had it done so, I would suggest that it might have prevented some of its more spectacular disasters–and, at the very least, avoided the identification of socialism with authoritarianism, militarism and violence. However, the left’s hour may have struck. The technological advances (a rise in the level of development of the productive forces) that followed World War Two had the effect of renewing the process of globalisation. Almost everywhere, advanced capital has grown stronger at the expense of national states. In the current global economic crisis, it is argued that the world market has failed and that states will reassert their sovereign rights to direct market forces. But providing banks and failing companies with large amounts of capital does not constitute the reappearance of the directive state. The era of “state capitalism” is over, as the former Soviet bloc, the Newly Industrialising Countries, as well as India and China have discovered. While state control at one time aided the development of the productive forces, it can do so no longer. There will be no return to strongstate protectionism because globalisation, this time around, cannot be turned back. If the liberation of capital from its ties to particular national states continues, we may be living through the final stages of the bourgeois revolution, at least in substantial and important sections of the globe. Thus will the material basis for socialism be laid–and it is only on that basis that it can succeed.

Notes 1

James Burnham (The Managerial Revolution (London: Penguin, 1945) and George Orwell (1984 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949) recognised these tendencies even in the western democracies in the state-dominated aftermath of the Second World War. 2 F. Engels, Anti-Duhring (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 330. 3 F. Engels, Chapters Five & Nine, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1884), Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm. 4 K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 45. They were about 150 years premature in this happy conclusion. 5 Lenin’s book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, was designed to prove this (V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: a popular outline” (1916) in V.I. Lenin, Selected Works: Volume One (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970).)

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INDEX

America... 16, 33, 59, 100, 103, 140, 162, 207, 209, 230, 241, 245, 261, 267, 272 Anderson, P...208, 228-29, 231, 247 Anglo-Russian (The) .....60, 72, 102, 107 aristocracy ....103, 136, 208, 221-22, 229-31 armistice.....................................224 Asia .... 12, 29-30, 32, 43-46, 54- 57, 59, 70, 83, 92-93, 251, 256, 25859, 267, 269, 272, 274 Athenian.....................................243 Austria.... ...51, 56, 89, 97, 109, 121, 197 autarky….53-54, 71, 94, 106, 229 authoritarianism.7, 31, 70, 156, 175, 192, 223-24, 228, 231, 238-39, 241, 245-46, 251 autocracy9-10, 21, 31, 33-34, 36-37, 51-52, 54-59, 61-62, 66, 68-69, 74, 76-78, 81-90, 92, 94-95, 9799, 102, 112-15, 121, 123-24, 126, 130, 134, 137-38, 140-41, 147, 153, 156-58, 160, 174, 176, 207, 209, 242 Axelrod, P. .......................22, 41, 75 Baku ...........................................188 Bakunin, M.................................170 Balkans...................................86, 91 Baltic ................................45, 60, 84 Baron, S……44-46, 72, 76, 198, 248 Beijing......................................... 58 Belarus .......................................121 Belloc, H. ...................................211

Berezovsky, B. ...2, 5, 8, 11, 13, 259 Black Hundreds ..................... 64, 95 Black Sea Straits…....86-89, 91, 9394, 98, 106, 156 Bolshevik….... 21, 64-67, 74-75, 97, 126, 129, 140, 142, 162-63, 170, 172-73, 175-76, 180, 185-92, 195-97, 201-05, 239, 243-45, 249-50, 255, 257, 261, 268, 270 Bolshevism ...73, 170, 179, 199, 251 Bourgeois Revolution..... 10, 16, 18, 20, 22.23, 28, 35-36, 38, 43, 52, 63, 66, 68, 91, 99, 102, 111-12, 128, 139-40, 153-54, 159-60, 168, 174, 185, 207-09, 219, 22728, 241-46 bourgeoisie ...6, 8-10, 15-22, 28, 3337, 39, 43, 45, 47, 49, 53, 60-70, 74, 76, 79-83, 85, 90-94, 97-102, 105-06, 111, 113-14, 117, 12431, 134, 136-38, 140, 144, 146, 148, 150, 153-55, 157-60, 16577, 181, 185-89, 192, 194-203, 205, 208-13, 215, 218, 225-33, 242-45, 258, 273-74 German ................ 112, 139, 214 Russian... 5, 9, 15, 22-23, 31, 3437, 59, 67-68, 80-81, 91, 11113, 125, 139, 154, 174, 186, 188, 194-96, 199, 242 Boxer Uprising ............................ 57 Britain... 18, 48, 114, 117, 123, 20709, 212-16, 219-20, 223, 225, 229, 231-33, 235, 240, 257, 265 Bukharin, N. ...................... 194, 204 Burke, E......................... 17, 38, 250 Callinicos, A...... .17, 38-39, 41, 250 Calvinism .................................... 18

278 Caporetto....................................212 Chesterton, G.K..................212, 232 Chevron......................................... 6 China.. ....30, 44, 56-57, 60, 70, 228, 246, 265, 274 Cohen, G.. 23, 26-27, 38-42, 250-51 Commercial Industrial Party (TPP) ..........................................80, 91 Cordeliers .................................... 17 Crimea........................................197 Crimean War . 33, 60, 132, 210, 231, 247 Denikin, A.I.......183, 197, 199, 206, 251, 260 Devyatka ("The Nine") ..............196 Duma.. 37, 43, 62, 77-82, 84-86, 88, 92, 95, 97-100, 103, 105, 108, 116-18, 121, 123, 130-34, 13640, 142, 145, 148-50, 153, 155, 158, 164, 257 Durnovo, P.N. .............. 114-15, 140 Efremov, I.N. .............130, 137, 168 egalitarianism .............212, 217, 222 Ekaterinburg...............................188 Ekonomicheski besedy................. 93 Engels, F. .. 15-20, 22-25, 30, 33-34, 38-42, 44-48, 51, 65, 70, 76, 99, 167, 207, 226-28, 240, 243-44, 246, 252, 263-64 England ....16, 38-39, 42, 45, 60, 79, 96, 111, 163, 208, 211, 240, 256 English Revolution..... 16-18, 38-39, 112, 139, 208, 256, 262 Europe… ....8-10, 12, 16, 20, 29, 32, 39-41, 43, 45, 54, 84, 87, 89, 9192, 96-99, 111, 113-15, 120, 128, 207, 209-11, 213, 215-16, 219-21, 224, 226-28, 230-31, 236, 239, 241, 243, 245, 251, 254, 256-57, 259, 262-64, 267, 271 ExxonMobil .................................. 6 Factory Committee.... ..157-58, 172, 194 Fairlie, J.A............ 220, 234-38, 252

Index February Revolution..104, 123, 141, 153, 155-56, 159, 162-64, 166, 174, 177, 258, 272 First World War.....5, 10, 18, 35, 99, 104-05, 107, 111, 115-16, 14143, 146-47, 149, 174, 177-78, 180, 182, 204, 207, 210-11, 215, 223, 226, 228, 230-35, 237-39, 242-44, 248, 250-51, 253, 257, 262, 264, 272 France.... 16, 37-38, 42, 44, 89, 111, 225, 234-36, 238, 240, 254, 257, 262, 265 French Revolution ... 17-18, 38, 108, 112, 208, 228, 257, 262, 270 Galicia ....................... 121, 123, 126 Gattrell, P. .... 36, 47-48, 73, 104-05, 149 Gazprom........................................ 6 Geneva......................................... 22 Germanisation ............................. 96 Germany ..40, 45, 52, 57, 86, 89, 92, 94-95, 101, 104, 107, 114, 117, 137, 140, 144, 146, 150, 163, 175, 190, 197, 206-15, 218-19, 221, 224-25, 230-37, 239, 243, 248-50, 252, 257, 262 globalisation .... 23, 98, 209-10, 219, 226-27, 241, 246 Gorbachev, M.S............. 1, 254, 269 Gosplan ..................................... 200 Great War (see First World War) Groman, V............ 162-63, 179, 200 Guchkov, A.I… ... 81, 85-86, 88, 96, 103-04, 108, 123-24, 126-27, 130, 134, 145, 150, 155-56, 17273, 176-77, 182-83, 264 Gurko, V.I. ....61, 73, 132, 145, 147, 205, 255 Guzhon, Yu.P. ........62, 96, 146, 177 Gvozdev, K.A.................... 128, 146 Herzegovina ................................ 95 Hill, C…....17, 39, 47, 73, 111, 139, 256, 268 Hindenberg, P.von… ... 214, 218-19, 235-36

Cronies or Capitalists? Hintze, O. ................. 25, 41-42, 256 Holquist, P....136, 142, 149, 156-57, 166, 177, 180, 236, 239, 257 Hungary....................................... 89 imperialism...53, 55-59, 93, 95, 177, 213 Industrial Revolution............17, 208 intelligentsia 92, 106, 153, 201, 208, 211, 237, 242, 270-71 Italy .... .16, 42, 61, 86, 91, 175, 210, 212, 222-23, 225, 228, 236, 262 Izvestiya..............162, 179, 181, 202 Jacobins....................................... 17 Japan ... 38, 52-53, 56-62, 64, 70-72, 77, 85, 91, 99, 105, 175, 226, 255-59, 262, 264, 270, 272, 274 Jasny, N................ 162, 179-80, 257 Jews......................................83, 131 Kadet(s)…63, 68, 81, 108, 112, 115, 122-24, 130-32, 134-36, 143, 148-50, 155, 163-64, 168, 17273, 177, 181, 187, 189, 196-98 Kaiser .........................................209 Kautsky, K.. ... 15, 21-22, 24, 39-42, 112-13, 139-40, 178, 181, 192, 203, 244, 258, 269, 272 Kerensky, A.F. ... .154, 160-61, 171, 174, 176, 182, 197, 203, 249 KGB .......................................... 3, 7 Kharkov......................188, 191, 204 Khodorkovsky, M.. .... 1, 2, 4-6, 8-9, 13, 259 Kiev.............120-121, 129, 154, 197 Kokovtsov, V.N. .............. 83, 87-88 Kolchak, A.V… .. 199, 205-06, 270, 272 Kommersant ....................... 8, 12-13 Komsomol..................................... 2 Konovalov, A.I... 37, 49, 62, 82, 9293, 97, 127, 129, 130-31, 134, 137, 154, 156, 161, 168-69, 171, 174, 181, 187, 197-98, 205, 259 Korea...... 52-53, 56-60, 70, 71, 247, 258 Kornilov, L.G. 171-75, 182-83, 197, 274

279

KRA (Raw Materials Section).. 215, 218 Krasnaya Gazeta ....................... 195 Krivoshein, K.A. ....... 118, 147, 196 Krymov, A.M. ................... 139, 150 Kutler, N.N........................ 167, 181 L’vov, G.E..... .131-34, 136, 147-49, 155, 157, 172, 262 Lenin, V.I… .. 43, 61, 64, 66-67, 7275, 95, 97, 100-01, 107, 135, 138, 148, 150, 174, 179, 186-91, 199, 201-02, 204, 244, 246, 250, 260-61 Lewin, M. .................. 159, 178, 261 Lithuania ............................. 30, 121 Ludendorff, E. ........................... 218 Lukoil ............................................ 8 Lyadov, M. ............... 65, 74-75, 262 Manchester ................ 208, 239, 267 Manchuria .................. 56-60, 70, 77 Martov, Yu.O ........... 67, 74-75, 254 Marx, K. ... 15, 18-21, 23, 25-26, 29, 30, 38-45, 99, 112, 140, 207, 212, 228, 240, 243-44, 246, 250, 252, 263-64, 270 Marxism .. 15, 18, 21, 23, 38, 42-43, 45, 73, 186, 227, 243, 248-49, 253-54, 264, 268-69 Marxist. ... 15, 18, 22-24, 30, 31, 34, 38-40, 42-44, 47, 53, 63, 66-67, 70, 72, 74-76, 92, 100-01, 106, 140, 148, 150, 153-54, 178, 181, 201, 203, 241, 244, 246, 251-52, 258, 260-61, 263-64, 274 Menatep..................................... 2, 4 Menshevik .... 15, 21-22, 40-41, 43, 65, 66, 68, 74-75, 97, 162, 202, 247, 249 Meshcherskii, V.A................ 191-92 militarisation..93, 95, 116, 125, 157, 224 militarism .. 29, 70, 94, 157, 171-73, 175, 192-93, 212-13, 219, 246 Milner, A. ..... 123, 136, 138, 149-50

280 Milyukov, P.... 123, 130-31, 134-35, 146, 148, 150, 154, 156, 176, 197-98 Moderate Progressive Party (UPP) ............................................... 80 Mongols ................................. 29-30 Moscow1, 2, 6, 11-12, 36-43, 45-49, 51, 61-70, 72-76, 80-83, 91, 93, 96-97, 100-03, 105, 107-08, 11113, 117, 123, 125-29, 131-32, 134-35, 137, 140-41, 143-46, 148-51, 153, 156, 159, 162, 16566, 168-70, 173, 176-77, 179, 182-83, 187, 189, 191, 195-96, 199, 201-02, 206, 240, 246-53, 255, 258-64, 266-67, 269-70, 272-75 Mukden ....................................... 61 Muscovite.... 29, 44, 49, 64, 76, 242, 256, 266-67 Mussolini, B… .... 212, 222-23, 232, 237, 239, 265 NEPmen .....................................200 New Economic Policy (NEP)....197, 200 Nicholas II.... .55, 60, 71, 73, 77, 89, 103, 115, 122, 137, 145, 255, 272 Nikitin, A. ..................................166 Nikolaevskii Railway .............37, 49 Novosibirsk ................................... 1 NTTM (Centres for Scientific Technical Creativity of Youth) 2, 11 October Manifesto.....68, 77, 80, 82, 85, 89 Octobrists… ... 68, 80-81, 85-90, 95, 97, 103-05, 107-08, 112, 115, 138, 168, 172, 181, 257 Okhrana ...................................... 97 oligarchs.............................. 3-5, 7-8 Omsk ..........................................199 Osinskii, V.V......................192, 203 Paleologue, G.M.. 139-40, 143, 148, 151, 265 Party of Peaceful Renewal .......... 81

Index perestroika ..................................... 9 Petrograd 117, 121-23, 125-27, 129, 137, 139, 145, 154-55, 157-59, 162, 169, 171-73, 182-83, 195 petroleum................................... 161 Plehve, V. .............................. 59, 72 Plekhanov, G.V. .. 15, 21, 29-30, 32, 35, 39-40, 43-48, 60, 63, 67, 72, 76, 140, 178, 244, 248, 266 Poland...................69, 121, 126, 131 Poles ................................ 30, 83, 84 Progressists.... .69, 81-82, 92, 94-95, 97, 100-02, 106-08, 112, 115, 129-31, 137-38, 150, 154, 158, 168, 201, 251, 273 Promyshlennost’ i torgovlya..... 10607, 128 protectionism....................... 54, 246 Provisional Government.10, 154-61, 163-83, 187, 193, 196, 201, 242, 244, 249, 261 Putilov… ...118, 125, 139, 142, 173, 182, 255 Putin, V.V…... 7-8, 12-13, 248, 259, 268 Pyongyang................................. 245 Qingdao ....................................... 57 Rabochaya Gazeta......161, 167, 179 Rathenau, W. .. 214-16, 224, 233-34, 238, 267 Restatisation (post war) ............. 225 Rodzyanko, M.V… ...108, 121, 133, 138, 142-43, 147, 150 Rozneft .......................................... 6 Russo-Japanese War..10, 51, 71, 83, 88, 113, 132, 274 Ryabushinskii brothers ... 37, 49, 62, 69-70, 73, 80-83, 93-94, 100-01, 106-08, 126-28, 130-31, 137-38, 145-46, 155, 167-71, 173-74, 182-83, 197-98, 205, 269 Sakhalin....................................... 61 Samara............................... 137, 188 Sazonov, S.D. .............................. 87 Scandinavia ................................. 92

Cronies or Capitalists? Second World War 52, 226-27, 240, 243, 246 Serbian ........................................ 86 Sevastopol ............................60, 189 Shcherbatov, N.B. ..............120, 131 Shingarev, A.I. ...122, 143, 155, 163 Shlyapnikov, A.G.126, 144, 148-49, 192, 270 Shtyurmer, B.V. .................123, 133 Siberia ..................36, 205, 270, 272 Sibneft ....................................... 6, 8 Simferopol..................................197 Smolensky, A. ............................... 2 St. Petersburg ... 7, 36-37, 63-65, 69, 72-74, 80-81, 83, 91, 94, 96-97, 100, 102, 106, 108, 111-12, 144, 146, 264-65, 274 Stalin, J.V.....76, 245, 249, 267, 273 statism.. .... 83, 85-86, 88, 90, 93-95, 98, 153, 157, 166-68, 171, 205, 216, 242 Stavka.................................119, 121 Stepanov, V.A. ...................163, 181 Stolypin, P.A…. ... 78-79, 81, 84-88, 90, 96, 99-100, 103-04, 108, 114, 118, 159, 206, 247, 250, 260, 272-73 Struve, P.B... ... 92-93, 95, 102, 10506, 122, 135, 138, 142, 196, 198, 205, 266, 271, 275 Sukhanov, N.N. .154, 163, 172, 17677, 179, 182, 271 Tax, taxation.....1, 3, 8, 28, 137, 188 technocrats .................136, 200, 221 Tereshchenko, M.I. ....150, 154, 156 Tilly, C. .............. 25, 41-42, 44, 271 Torgprom ...........................197, 206 Trans-Siberian Railway... 54, 56-57, 59, 61 Tretyakov, S.N. ............49, 146, 173 Trotsky, L.D... 32, 35, 40, 43, 45-47, 63, 65-66, 75, 177, 179, 182, 186, 203, 244, 272 Trudoviks ...................................154

281

Tsereteli, I ................. 154, 156, 172 Tsushima ......................... 72, 91, 95 TPP (see Commercial Industrial Party) Turkey .....32, 51, 56, 59, 71, 86, 88, 98, 272 Turkistan ..................................... 59 UPP (see Moderate Progressive Party) Urals .................................. 191, 199 Uritskii, M.S.............................. 195 USA..................................... 45, 226 Utro Rossii .. 69, 82, 94, 96-97, 10102, 105-09, 115, 121, 125-26, 128-31, 138, 141, 143-47, 150, 158, 170, 178 Velikaya Rossiya...... 70, 94, 106-07, 171, 269 Vesenkha ............189, 191, 193, 203 Vladivostok ................... 57, 61, 199 War Industries Committee (WIC) .....126-32, 136-37, 145-46, 15456, 164, 169, 176, 178, 180, 182, 187, 193 Warsaw...................................... 121 Witte, S.Yu.... 52, 54-58, 61, 65, 7074, 77, 83, 86-87, 102, 104, 11415, 140, 264, 273-74 WWI (see First World War) WWII (see Second World War) Wrangel, P.N. ....................... 198-99 Yabloko ......................................... 6 Yeltsin, B.N......3-5, 7-8, 11-12, 275 Yukos .................. 1, 4-6, 11-12, 269 Zagorsky, S.O... 120, 124, 141, 14344, 148-49, 161, 177, 179, 275 Zaitsev, K.I..... .117-19, 142-43, 275 Zemgor ...............132, 155, 164, 180 Zemstvo(s) ..37, 118, 122, 127, 13036, 147-49, 155, 157, 162, 17678, 200, 251, 254, 262, 267-68 Zemstvo Union132-33, 136, 147-48, 155