Hi I’m the Political Junkie.
Our story begins here, at the Deptford Dockyard.
It lies on the river Thames, about 6 miles east of Buckingham Palace.
It was founded in 1513 by Henry VIII and for about 3 centuries it played a principal role
launching newly christened ships of the Royal Navy, as you can see in this 1747 painting
of the St Albans’ maiden voyage.
Other, larger ships of the line were constructed here as well, which is why it served as a
hub for shipbuilders and apprentices from around Europe.
Another advantage for Deptford was while strategically located, it was far enough from central London
to grant visitors some peace.
There were even gardens and large homes nearby, like the Sayes Court, an Elizabethan mansion,
where the six-foot-eight student Peter Mikhailov resided during his 1698 visit.
Mr. Mikhailov had a voracious appetite for learning the design aspects of building such
magnificent ships, but also the hands-on, day-to-day practices of operating a Navy.
He spent some months in the Netherlands looking at windmills and shipyards, at Oxford University,
the Royal Society, and then finally, the Royal Observatory, absorbing contemporaneous strategies
for ship navigation.
Despite how studious he seemed, he and his mates managed to trash the Sayes Mansion evenings
and weekends; they stained carpets, burned chairs, shot holes in portraits, and raced
wheelbarrows through the aristocratic hedges.
Under normal circumstances this would warrant eviction, but not when your tenant is the
young Tsar of Russia, one who would come to be known as Peter the Great.
Peter, like many of Russia’s future leaders, was determined to drag the country into the
future.
The purpose of this grand embassy into western europe was to learn how to modernize the Russian
navy, but while he traveled, he noticed the way Europeans acted and dressed, their architecture,
even the way the men shaved their beards.
He developed what you might call an inferiority complex about the half-asiatic/half-european
rural empire which he reigned.
And this is just my opinion here, but he seems to have identified Russia’s naval disadvantage
perfectly.
When he left London, he took with him experts and quickly built a proper Russian fleet.
Where he seems to diverge from reality, however, was when he decided that by imposing European
architecture and fashion on Russia, he could emulate those Western powers.
And he did try.
He forced warm-weather European fashion on his ice-cold winter empire.
He demanded men shave their beards; he was known to rip facial hair off their faces.
One Russian tradition he would not question, however, was his absolute power as the Tsar,
Caesaropapism; that is the merging of Caesar and the Pope.
The Tsar was God’s chosen autocrat, and the Orthodox church was a mere department
of his holy government.
His power sat atop a pyramid dangerously unstable, a society comprising over 90% feudal peasants
living in destitute poverty, forcibly tied to land and landlords.
And it was many of these peasants who were conscripted to build Peter the Great’s new
European city, St. Petersburg.
10’s of thousands of peasants died constructing an imperial capital on a swamp, replete with
European baroque buildings, churches and facades.
The city was said to have been built on bones.
Peter fulfilled his vision for European modernity by exploiting an archaic feudal system.
How fitting then, that Peter’s Romanov Dynasty would end in this exact city 200 years later.
Now most of us here think of the Russian Revolution and we immediately think of Marx, the writer
of the Communist Manifesto, Lenin- the leader of the Bolsheviks, later Joseph Stalin.
But what you don’t see at this moment, at the collapse of the Tsarist regime in March
1917, is communist initiative.
Bolshevik and Menshevik Socialist agitators were present, sometimes organizing, but they
didn’t start the revolt on the 7th of March.
Their best were exiled.
Vladimir Lenin in Switzerland.
Leon Trotsky was in New York, sampling Jewish Delis.
The Tsar abdicated not at the point of a communist’s gun, but at the behest of Army chiefs and
ministers.
And while the provisional government that took over after him certainly contained Socialists
and Revolutionaries, it’s Prime Minister was a pragmatist, a liberal reformer always
uncomfortable with radical forces.
Furthermore, most of the crowd on the street during those 9 days weren’t trained revolutionaries,
but a diverse mixture of peasants, mutinous soldiers, skilled & unskilled workers, even
pudgy liberal business owners, and their cause was decisively pro-bread and anti-Tsar.
To understand if the February Revolution was communist, to understand this gap between this
image we have in our head of the start of the Russian Revolution and the subtle realities,
we need to go deeper with this topic, and examine a missed opportunities for
reform in Tsarist Russia before the February Revolution, before Peter the Great’s caesaropapist
Pyramid finally eroded into the wind.
Let’s talk about someone unimportant.
But in being unimportant becomes critical to our understanding the pattern of Russian History.
Trust me here.
It’ll become clear.
Let’s talk about Pyotr Stolypin, Russia’s Prime Minister from 1906 until 1911.
Now wait---,
if the Tsar and his autocracy didn’t fall until 1917, how is it that there was a Parliamentary
figure, a Prime Minister 10 years prior?
It’s important to understand that the February Revolution in 1917 wasn’t the first Russian
Revolution.
This is a photo from 1905.
In the center you’ll notice Father Georgy Gapon, an Eastern Orthodox priest, leading
columns of 10’s of thousands of peaceful demonstrators towards the Winter Palace where
Tsar Nicholas II lived.
On the other side, you’ll see some of the 12,000 troops sent by Nicholas to stop them
from delivering their petition for fairer wages and an eight hour working day.
Father Gapon, like many of the workers there and like peasants across the country, believed
a number of myths about the Tsar, myths which Orlando Figes describes clearly in the first
chapter of his book, A People’s Tragedy.
He writes,
“Three perceived principles of Muscovite Tsardom appealed to the Romanovs in the final
years.
The first was the notion of patrimonialism whereby the Tsar was deemed literally to own
the whole of Russia as his private fiefdom in the manner of a medieval lord….The second
principle of Muscovy was the idea of personal rule: as the embodiment of God on earth, the
Tsar’s will should be unrestrained by laws or bureaucracy of duty and right...Lastly,
there was the idea of a mystical union between the Tsar and the Orthodox people, who loved
and obeyed him as a father and a god.
It was a fantasy of paternal rule, of a golden age of popular autocracy”
That last tenant, of a mystical union, the idea that the Tsar was a benevolent despot,
this is what convinced Father Gapon and his crowd that day that the Tsar would receive their petition
; perhaps the Tsar simply wasn’t aware of their suffering in the factories.
He would remedy the situation, if only he knew of it!
1,000 demonstrators were shot that day on their way to the Winter Palace.
The Tsar wasn’t even home.
He wasn’t interested.
There was no mystical union.
Only sisyphean piety.
In response to the deaths and injuries at the hands of the Tsar’s guard, a massive
protest movement was born.
Nearly half a million workers held strikes in the following month.
Chaos spread to the countryside.
Under threat of violent revolution, Tsar Nicholas II reluctantly issued a call for reforms.
He would form an elected national assembly.
Granted, he could dissolve this new assembly anytime they suggested something not up to
his liking.
And in keeping with that, he needed a sycophant to lead his trumpian institution: our unimportant
person, Pyotr Stolypin:
I’m choosing to speak about Stolypin, who became Prime Minister in 1906, not because
he was a hero, far from it, but because he was a reformer.
And in his attempted reforms, in the pushback against his reforms, we can see the cracks
in Russian Society just before it toppled.
Now in a serious irony, our last great reformer- the man who some historians say might have
saved the Russian system from collapse- was himself a violent supporter of the status
quo.
The Tsar selected him specifically because of his brutal tactics suppressing peasants
in the countryside, in downing strikes and political dissent.
He executed so many that the hangman’s noose came to be known as ‘Stolypin’s necktie’.
He was a provincial governor from a rich family.
He supported the Tsarist system and his actions must be viewed through this lens.
Any reforms he pushed were an attempt to save the system that had been so good to him and
and his family and so bad for the masses.
The largest group among those masses was the peasants.
In 1900, they numbered 100 million and accounted for 85% of the population.
Stolypin tried to organize property rights for these communities accustomed to communal
ownership and family strips of overused farmland.
In doing so, he believed Russia could develop a middle class, a strong group of independent
Russian farmers.
Prior to 1861 the peasants lived as serfs, forced to work land for landlords who enjoyed
infinitely more legal rights than they did.
But even after Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861, most continued to live
in destitute poverty.
Like former american slaves, freed serfs didn’t enjoy economic opportunity or legal equality
simply because they were ‘free’.
As a result, many peasants found themselves heading towards the big cities, Russia was
undergoing industrialization, and St. Petersburg and Moscow offered opportunities to live a
Marxian nightmare: long hours, child labor, disease, sleeping on wooden cots in factory
barracks, and all for less pay than their still really miserable European counterparts.
By 1900, 2 million peasants had joined this new class of urban labor.
In his quest to save the Tsar’s system, Stolypin introduced legislation in the Assembly
to improve conditions for factory workers, give peasants civil equality, and to provide
universal elementary education to all children, including for those in the empire of different
ethno-nationalities.
But in trying to do so, he alienated another strata in this wobbly Russian pyramid: the
Orthodox Church.
As Figes describes, church representatives in the Assembly smacked down Stolypin’s
education reforms and his plans for ending discrimination against religious minorities.
The Orthodox church was the second largest christian sect after its split with catholicism
in 1054.
As a part of the Tsar’s caesorpapist cult, it enjoyed ubiquity in the empire, even if
the illiterate peasants were unaware of its tenants.
When liberal reformers within the clergy and politicians like Stolypin began to push a
new role for peasant education, conservatives within the Orthodox church scrambled back
to their Tsarist roots, aligning with Nicholas II and away from change.
It returned to its tradition of stamping out resistance to the Tsar in rural areas, missing
its opportunity to serve urban industrial workers in these big new population centers.
But Stolypin’s final failure came when he alienated his fellow nobleman.
Even after manipulating the electoral system to reduce the influence of those on the left,
he struggled to pass a reform of local governing systems because of new opposition on the right.
The landed gentry were wary of his plan to introduce a voting system based on a combination
of property and nationality.
And rather than backing down, Stolypin committed political suicide.
Faced with resistance, He made a dramatic ultimatum to the Tsar.
According to Edward Acton in “Rethinking the Russian Revolution”, Stolypin, “consented
to continue in office only on the condition that the Tsar suspended both chambers [of
the assembly], disciplined his leading opponents...and promulgated the [reform].
The Tsar felt humiliated.
[Stolypin’s] downfall was widely predicted..”
Now we can see how this unimportant Prime Minister, who truly only made enemies during
his time in office, nonetheless illuminates Russian society for us.
He suppressed those on the left and the right, and failed to reform for the masses.
His land privatization and education programs did little for peasants and urban workers,
while angering the church and his fellow nobles.
In pressuring Nicholas II with an ultimatum, he lost the support of the man who chose him
in the first place.
And this is what I really want to draw your attention to with this video.
The Tsarist system was unwilling to change.
Stolypin’s violent flair earned him deserved disdain from the left, but his gradual transition
from the Tsar's hand-picked agent to pariah among his fellow nobles shows how
entrenched the Tsarist systems were.
The point here is not to downplay marxist influence.
It was all over, socialist revolutionaries played a role in the February revolution.
But the ultimate fall of the regime occurred because these pillars of society, which Stolypin
identified but failed to address, simply resisted change until they fell over.
Historians continue to argue if the Russian Revolution was inevitable- check out Edward
Acton’s book and see the fault lines in that debate.
But as I’m a storyteller and not a historian, suffice it to say, this is a recurring motif
in Russian History: militant opposition to incremental change.
Let me explain.
On September 14, 1911, both Stolypin and the Tsar attended the theater in the Kiev Opera House.
During the second intermission, anarchist revolutionary and police informer, Dmitry
Bogrov drew a gun and approached Stolypin near the orchestra pit.
“Bury me where I am assassinated,” Stolypin wrote in his will.
Attempts had been made on his life before, but the meaning behind his trip to Kiev made
this situation different.
He and the Tsar traveled to the city in order to unveil a monument to Tsar Alexander II,
the so-called Tsar Liberator, a man who in an attempt to modernize Russian in the 1860’s,
had loosened censorship laws, introduced local self governing, trial by jury, eliminated
corporal punishment in the military, even emancipated all Russian serfs almost 2 years
before Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation in the US.
But it didn’t take long for the populace to become dissatisfied with the effects of
the emancipation.
Noble’s wealth crumbled without free labor.
Newly freed serfs were slapped with exorbitant property prices as they tried to buy pieces
of the land on which they were once enslaved.
Believing they were acting as populists for all of Russia dissatisfied with the slow progress
of reform, a socialist revolutionary group called ‘The People’s Will’ assassinated
Alexander II in February 1880.
As punishment for his incrementalism, Alexander was hunted down and murdered with bombs.
It was 30 years later, on a trip to revere this reformer of Russian society, that Pyotr
Stolypin was shot twice on the floor of the Kiev Opera House.
As per his will, he was buried in that city.
With all opportunities for change now dead or embalmed in bronze, Russian Society waited
for the catalyst that would push it over.
Playing at the Opera that night in 1911 was The Tale of Tsar Saltan, during which the
Tsar travels far away to fight a war, but while away, learns that his wife the Tsarina
has given birth to a monster.
The details of that fiction were likely long forgotten by the true Tsar Nicholas II as
he enjoyed lunch in his usual fashion on March 15, 1917 in Pskov, 300 km from Petrograd,
the name he gave to St. Petersburg.
By that afternoon, he would abdicate, the final Tsar of Russia.
A strange fact when you consider that as Tsar Nicholas II entered the Great War against
Germany in 1914, there was a moment of national unity.
Aside from the far left, the country came together behind him and the fatherland.
Military funding and readiness were up since the embarrassing Russo-Japanese War, and the
Tsar in his affection for all things military ran his household with an officer’s discipline.
This meant that Nicholas II felt engaged with his armed forces; he even obsessed over the
flair of the uniforms.
But there were three major problems: 1.
The military was not ready for a long-term war of attrition- a war of prolonged trench
warfare.
Supply shortages affected the front lines as well as the fatherland.
2.
The army was mostly peasants and the officers mostly members of nobility.
As the death toll rose on the Eastern front and hunger set in back home, morale plummeted.
The government to which soldiers dedicated their lives was submitting them to death without
equipment or rations.
3.
Tsar Nicholas may have liked the military, but unlike Peter the Great, he was no tactician.
Even worse, he was a fatalist.
When he fired the Grand Duke and took personal control of the military command on September
5th 1915, he believed that god would guide him.
However, the reality was that the incompetent Tsar had now directly associated his dynasty
with a disastrous war; every failing on the front, every empty stomach back home would
be personally linked with him.
The coeliac society was just waiting for a scratch.
For that reason you and I need to discuss the role of the military in the success of
the February revolution.
The fundamental question became, ‘would you shoot your own mother?’.
It sounds hyperbolic, but that was essentially the order the Tsar telegraphed to his generals
in Petrograd as protest turned to riots on March 11th, 1917.
Tell those peasant soldiers to fire into the crowds.
Shoot.
End it just like in 1905.
“Only blood can change the color of history”, said Father Gapon after that Bloody Sunday
10 years prior.
And now, the Tsar was demanding that his capitol be a canvas.
It started on March 8th, with groups of women demanding bread.
By evening, they were joined by men as 100,000 demonstrators took to the streets.
March 9th saw 150,000.
200,000 on the 10th.
Violence broke out as calls for bread became shouts for the end of the Tsar and the War.
Nicholas ordered that the protests be dispersed with bullets.
But Russians had learned their lesson in 1905.
Backing down now would only embolden the regime.
Every protester shot dead by police further inflamed the crowds.
Revolution was at hand.
And critically, soldiers began to disobey orders to kill civilians.
Mutinous middle ranking cadets chose their people over their commanding officers.
As politicians in Petrograd made arrangements for a democratic election and a provisional
government with liberal Georgy Lvov at its head, a more uncompromising figure was already
plotting ways to undermine them.
For him, this bourgeois revolution of moderate liberals would fail to bring Russians the
‘peace, land and bread’ they desired.
A true socialist revolution, one that would actually pave the way to communism, would
be his.
On the 15th of March 1917, on a train stranded 300 kilometers from his capital, having been
stabbed by each pillar of Russian society: peasants, workers, nobles, reformers, and
reluctant revolutionaries, the Tsar’s final gash came from those he admired most- the
military.
The unanimous advice of his generals was that he, Tsar Nicholas II, should abdicate his role
as Caesar and Pope.
Et tu, Brute?
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