For the Russian Empire, Central Asia, once conquered, was not a serious problem until nearly the end of the empire. Aside from a small Islamic revolt in 1898 in Andijan, the interior of Central Asia was quiet. In the Kazakh steppe matters were more complicated. Russian cities appeared on the northern fringes of the steppe and in them a small Kazakh intelligentsia emerged, dependent on Russian institutions and loyal to the empire. At the same time the economic integration of the Kazakhs into the emerging Russian industrial economy brought demand for cattle and other products that disrupted the traditional nomadic society. Even worse, large numbers of Russian peasants settled among them with the encouragement of the state. Before 1905, however, open conflict was largely absent.
THE MANCHURIAN GAMBLE
Russia’s last attempt at empire on the Western model was its expansion into Manchuria. Witte’s Transsiberian Railroad went right through Chinese territory to Vladivostok, and Russia carved out a sphere of influence like those of the other Western powers in China. The railroad was under Russian control, and the Ministry of Finance had its own police force to guard it. The Russian fort at Port Arthur provided a base for the Russian navy and also anchored the Russian military presence in Manchuria. The center of Russian administration and business, however, was Harbin, a modern city built from scratch by the Russians, with a Russian administration and a progressive urban order unknown in the rest of the empire. Most restrictions on Jews, for example, did not apply in Harbin. Witte was building a modern Russia on Chinese soil. All these plans came to an end, however, with the Russo-Japanese war. The final peace gave the Russian naval base at Port Arthur to Japan, and Japan proceeded on the path of development and control that led to its further expansion in China. Russia retained control of the railroad, but never achieved dominance in northern China. Manchuria was too far away from the Russian heartland, and too close to Japan.
The Russian Empire, conglomerate as it was, functioned successfully only as long as it could remain a coalition of nobilities united by loyalty to the Romanov dynasty and rewarded appropriately for faithful service. Clearly this model of the empire mainly applied to the European areas and the Christian Caucasus, but there it did work until the strains of modernization undermined the domination of the nobility. The Russian state also tried to increase administrative uniformity and centralization, the policy known as Russificiation, but its efforts were half-hearted. There were too many obstacles, lack of financial resources, the influence of local elites, and the general backwardness of the country. The state could not abolish the variety of legal status and local administration in favor of a single unified state that might strive to assimilate all minorities to Russian language and culture, and indeed almost no one in the government had any such aim. Outside government policy, there were, of course, other more modern forces of integration – the power of the huge Russian market, the modernization of Russian culture, modern transportation and media, as in other countries, but they were all weaker than in Western Europe. The result was an unstable equilibrium in an empire too modern to remain an empire of nobilities around the tsar but too backward to fully unleash the social forces that integrated minorities in Western Europe. The Russians could not hope to imitate the ruthless and highly successful Germanization schemes in the German parts of Poland, for those depended on the combination of state resources, enthusiastic public support from a populace mobilized around nationalism, and the economic pull of German society. Russia had little of this, and its policies, especially in Poland, antagonized the people without being effective. Such integration of non-Russian minorities that did occur, and it was not small, came about simply by the ordinary motion of social change, not from state policy.
As time progressed, traditional loyalties eroded. Nationalist movements among the minorities emerged during the 1890s, but did not yet set the tone among non-Russian peoples. Few, save the Poles and the more radical of the Finns, actually anticipated or sought independence: their aim was greater autonomy within Russia. Many of the minorities were more concerned about one another than about Russians or the imperial state. The Baltic peoples saw their main antagonists in the Germans, the Finns fought over the Swedish-Finnish language issue, the nationalist movements of the Poles and Ukrainians feared each other and the Jews. Politicized Jews increasingly turned to Jewish socialist movements (the Bund) or to Zionism. At the same time, the great cities, especially St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the Donbass mining and manufacturing towns, were powerful integrating forces, attracting thousands of migrants from among the Baltic peoples, Finns, Poles, and Jews. The main concern of the state remained the politics of the Russian core, the maturing liberal opposition and the revolutionary socialists. The autocracy saw them, not local nationalists, as their main threat, and it was right.
1 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the term “Baltic Provinces” did not include Lithuania, which was part of the former Polish political and cultural sphere. Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania came to be called the “Baltic states” and seen as a group only after independence in 1918.
15 Autocracy in Decline
The quarter of a century from the assassination of Alexander II until the 1905 Revolution was one of political stagnation. The response of the new government to the assassination was to stop the process of reform, to publicly affirm the necessity of autocracy, and to formulate plans for counter-reforms. The latter came to little, but the government took advantage of every possibility to block criticism, political discussion, and organization among the public. Though it returned to sponsoring economic development in the 1890s under Minister of Finance Sergei Witte, it refused to recognize the implications of the further modernization of society that resulted in part from its own measures. The increasing isolation of the government and its own internal lack of coordination led to the botched attempt at modern imperialism in Manchuria, an attempt resulting in a failed war with Japan that nearly brought down the monarchy.
Alexander III had become the heir to the throne in 1865 on the death of his older brother. Alexander was already twenty at the time and the product of a rather narrow military education unlike that provided for his brother. In 1866 he married Princess Dagmar of Denmark (Mariia Fedorovna after her conversion to Orthodoxy), leading to a stable marriage with a woman of intelligence and extremely conservative views. The young heir was no intellectual, but he did come in contact with Slavophile ideas at court and through his tutor in jurisprudence, Konstantin Pobedonostev. Through the guards and other aristocrats he became friends with the conservative publicist (and the most prominent gay in the St. Petersburg aristocracy), Prince V. M. Meshcherskii. These were highly principled radical conservatives, with nothing but contempt for freedom of speech, democracy, and representative government, all of which they saw as shams and likely to lead to revolution. In their view what was needed was the unity of society and the monarch, which they saw as the essence of autocracy. By the 1870s they formed a powerful opposition to the more liberal ministers around Alexander II, powerful largely because of their association with the heir. As part of his attempt at balanced government, Tsar Alexander II appointed Pobedonostsev head of the Synod, a position he held for the next twenty-four years. After Alexander III came to the throne, Pobedonostsev used his position at the Synod to retain constant access to the tsar, offering him advice on all sorts of subjects well beyond the ecclesiastical issues under his purview. In the eyes of liberal society and many government officials, he had far too much power and influence, all of it in a conservative direction. “Prince of Darkness” was one of his milder nicknames.