Seekers of predictability in history will note that both yesterday's and today's Leninist superpowers, Russia and China, are nations with exceptionally long histories of centralised and autocratic government. But, suggestive as such parallels may be, surely one of the key lessons of the 1917 revolution is the need to view grand theories of historical inevitability, and their purveyors, with immense caution. As the chapters above show, the history of the revolution is littered with ironies. Even the clearest sighted and best intentioned could be blown off course by accident or misfortune. Witte's Duma became a cockpit for opposition that helped bring down the very regime it was intended to save. Nicholas's patriotic feeling that he could best serve his people at the battlefront left St Petersburg in the disastrous hands of Alexandra and Rasputin. Rodzyanko's efforts to get Nicholas to abdicate in favour of his son produced the unintended end of the whole dynasty. The German General Staff, by sending Lenin back in 1917, gained a temporary advantage in the First World War, but also created the communist menace that loomed over Germany for the next seventy years. The non-Bolshevik opposition, by their willingness to tolerate Bolshevik excesses in the interests of revolutionary unity, swiftly found themselves in the 'dustbin of history'. And even Lenin, for all his amoral extremism, was driven by the Marxist vision of a fairer, gentler world. He and his successors produced exactly the opposite. They did so essentially by trying to bend reality to their ideas, rather than adjusting their ideas to reality.
All of this messy, bloody, unpredictable drama took place in Russia, and it is there that this book should end. Not only are individual personalities at a discount among the historical profession, but so too is national character. Theorists of revolution tend to overlook the inescapable Russianness that flavoured, and occasionally drove, much of what happened around 1917. The fanatical intelligentsia, driven to revolutionary excess by abstract theory, is laceratingly described in Dostoyevsky, just as the ineffectual bourgeoisie, unable to face up to necessary hard decisions, is portrayed by Chekhov. Nicholas II as 'Little Father' of his people, believing in a mystical bond that obviated any need for popular representation by rascally politicians, simply reflected the way Russia's rulers had always seen themselves. Rasputin is recognisably in the Russian tradition of the 'yurodiviy', the holy man who speaks truth to power.
And Russia was always an extraordinarily riven society. On one side stood her sparse, westernised, ruling class. On the other was the great mass of the 'dark people', serfs until 1861, focused on their own communities, suspicious and resentful of any interference from outside. It was Pushkin who wrote of the 'Russian revolt; mindless and merciless' - the mass uprising which, coming out of nowhere, sporadically through history burned and massacred entire Russian provinces. One picture of 1917 is that it was just such an uprising that consumed the whole country, and whose shadow then hung over world history for the next seventy years. We surely owe it to the many, many victims to ask whether we could have found another way.
notes
CHAPTER 1. FOREIGN INTERVENTION: THE LONG VIEW
A. A. Kireev: Dnevnik 1905-1910 (Moscow: 1910), p. 150.
Readers interested in further exploring these themes and the evidence on which my counterfactual arguments are based should consult my new book: Dominic Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2015).
CHAPTER S. THE ASSASSINATION OF STOLYPIN
Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 2: Everything She Wants (London: Allen Lane, 2015), p. 617.
In the context of this chapter, see especially, V. S. Diakin, Byl li shans u Stolypina? Sbornik statei (St Petersburg: LISS, 2002).
S. G. Kara-Murza, Stolypin: Otets russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow: Algoritm, 2002); Kara-Murza, Oshibka Stolypina: Prem'er, perevernuvshii Rossiiu (Moscow: Eksmo, Algoritm, 2011).
Monakh Lazar' (Afanas'ev), Stavka na silnykh: Zhizn'PetraArkadevicha Stolypina (Moscow: Russkii Palomnik, 2013), p. 3.
Richard S. Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2: From Alexander II to the Death of Nicholas II (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 377-9, 380.
Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 13-33.
Already by late 1909, their relationship had been damaged by the Tsar's refusal to ease the legal position ofJews and by a crisis over the budget for the Naval General Staff. See Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Emperor of All the Russias (London: John Murray, 1993), pp. 174-6.
On obshchestvennost', see Geoffrey A. Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917 (London: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 325, 332, 400-402.
Faith Hillis, Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. 249-50.
10. P. A. Pozhigailo, ed. Taina ubiistva Stolypina (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2003).
Here I follow Richard Pipes, Revolutionary Russia, 1899-1919 (London: Collins, 1990), pp. 188-90, and Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, pp. 363-89. The leading advocate of the conspiracy theory is A.Ia. Avrekh, Stolypin i tret'ia duma (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 367-406.
Ascher, P. A. Stolypin, pp. 393-4.
From an extensive (and deeply riven) literature, see Judith Pallot, Land Reform in Russia, 1906-1917: Peasant Responses to Stolypin's Project of Rural Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma 1907-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 41-55.
Peter Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal (London: UCL Press, 1998), pp. 115-46.
V. V. Rozanov, Russkaiagosudarstvennost' i obshchestvo: Stat'11906-1907 gg., ed. A. N. Nikoliukin (Moscow: Respublika, 2003), p. 336, describing Stolypin's speech in the second Duma on 6 March 1907. This article appeared in the liberal newspaper Russkoe slovo under Rozanov's widely- known pseudonym, V Varvarin. He was more complimentary when writing for the conservative Novoe vremia. See, for example, Rozanov, Staraia i molodaia Rossiia: Stat'I i ocherki 1909 g., ed. A. N. Nikoliukin (Moscow: Respublika, 2004), pp. 138-40, unsigned, praising Stolypin's determination to stand above party.
Simon Dixon, 'The "Mad Monk" Iliodor in Tsaritsyn', Slavonic and East European Review, 88, 1-2 (2010), pp. 377-415.
1.1. Tolstoi: Dnevnik, ed. B. V Ananich et al., 2 vols (St Petersburg: Liki Rossii, 2010), vol. II: pp. 207-208, 6 September 1911.
A. Bogdanovich, Triposlednikh samoderzhtsa (Moscow: Novosti, 1990),
pp. 385, 387.
A. A. Kireev: Dnevnik 1905-1910, ed. K. A. Solov'ev (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), p. 145, 22 May 1906.
Ibid., pp. 177-78, 5 November 1906; 'gentleman' in English in the original. For a wide range of contemporary responses to Stolypin, see P. A. Stolypin, Pro et Contra, ed. I.V. Lukoianov, 2nd ed. (St Petersburg: Izdatel'stvo Russkoi khristianskoi gumanitarnoi akademii, 2014).
Osobye zhurnaly Soveta ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii: 1911 god, ed. B.D. Gal'perina (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), pp. 371-72, 13 September 1911. 'I mourn the untimely decease of my faithful servant, state-secretary Stolypin', the tsar scribbled disingenuously on 22 September.