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Introduction: Prerevolutionary Russia: Intimations of Modernity
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12791 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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3 / 1987 |
1,848 Words |
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On November 7, 1917, revolutionary forces made their way toward the Winter Palace in Petrograd. The male guards, upon seeing the Bolsheviks gather in front of the Palace, left their positions to the Women's Brigade. There was a standoff - at least until the Bolsheviks realized how fragile the opposition was. Thereupon, they walked through a side door into the Palace and arrested all the remaining government officials, thus ending Russia's brief encounter with freedom.
While these events proceeded quite rapidly, a great deal more was involved in the Bolshevik revolution. The taking of the Winter Palace and the subsequent civil war were developments related to events in Russia going back to the nineteenth century.
A number of reforms in the 1860s succeeded in undermining the old social, economic, and administrative patterns. The Emancipation Act instituted by Alexander II ended legal serfdom without substantially changing the economic situation of the peasantry. The Mir, a peasant communal system for tilling and paying for land, took the place of the older regional authority. But the Mir failed to give the peasants any real independence. The Zemstvo created a form of administrative self-government but placed actual political power in the hands of the landed gentry, not in those of the peasants. Both the Mir and Zemstvo represented changes that aroused expectations of reforms, without giving the majority of people more than a taste for freedom.
Universities and technical schools, which opened students to new ideas, were created throughout Russia in the middle and late nineteenth century. Here, students gathered and expressed dissatisfaction with the tsarist regime. Discontent among the peasantry, working classes, and intellectuals festered and led to revolt in 1905. Violence and chaos prevailed at home, while Russia was engaged in a humiliating war with Japan. Despite governmental efforts to introduce social reforms and parliamentary government after 1906, the outbreak of World War I threw the old order into a disastrous situation that culminated in its destruction. In March 1917, the first and more democratic of two revolutionary governments took power in Russia. The provisional government of Alexander Kerensky was unwilling to extricate Russia from the war or to deal effectively with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, even when they threatened to overthrow the regime.
Both the March and November revolutions drew their leadership and ideas from a class that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century.
The "intelligentsia" consisted of the children of poorly paid priests, merchants, and government officials, as well as some displaced aristocrats, who felt separated by education but were nonetheless sympathetic to the Russian peasants. As this newly evolving class of intellectuals acquired Western learning, they grew more dissatisfied with life in Russia. They complained of Russian backwardness and hoped to change dramatically the social and political conditions of the country.
Searching for the tools to transform their society, the Russian intelligentsia enthusiastically embraced a wide range of ideas. They found certainty and strength in the positivist, materialist, and utilitarian ideas that came out of Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mixed with the strengths and weaknesses of the Russian religious
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