Reply to Lars Lih

Lars Lih’s probing review in this journal of several studies of late tsarist Russia, including my history of the Lena massacre and a book by Leopold Haimson, raises several interesting issues.¹ Lih concludes that a debate he expected between Leopold Haimson and myself did not come off (873). Lih might have commented on the fact that in the Lena book, as well as in a 2002 Revolutionary Russia article, I did engage and criticize aspects of Haimson’s famous two-part article and his updated version.² Haimson’s book, which appeared in 2005, finally addressed newspaper coverage of society’s responses to the shooting and effectively short-circuited the debate by admitting the existence of historical phenomena that I and Manfred Hagen (Otechestvennaia istoriia) had already analyzed, virtually synchronously and with similar conclusions, in 2002.³ Imagine the difference in our understanding of prewar Russian society and politics if, given Haimson’s vast influence, he had written about this decades ago Whatever we call his original approach (and whether or not he has now altered it), few of us whose grasp of late tsarist history was shaped by his ideas had doubts about their implications.

On another tack, at no point did I suggest the viability of a political alliance stretching from Black Hundreds to Bolsheviks! Still, the broad agreement about the government’s culpability in this case is surprising. I dare say that if one had polled Russian historians a few years back about how right-wing parties might have been expected to respond to the repression of striking workers, few would have guessed at the reality, not to mention the outraged responses of the Nationalists, Octobrists, and Progressists (in other words, the big bourgeoisie). I raised the issue mainly to highlight a widening agreement about the necessity of addressing the plight of Russia’s laboring classes. On this basis, the workers’ health insurance law reached the Duma with the support of industrialists shortly before the shooting and passed into law shortly thereafter, notwithstanding renewed political clashes. This did not exhaust the potential for additional ameliorative legislation (see Louise McReynolds’s analysis of the press and society during 1913–14).⁴ Amelioration may not satisfy radical aspirations, but it often works. The tsarist regime had poor prospects for survival one way or the other. The beneficiaries of amelioration would have been the State Duma and the idea of parliamentary, constitutional government. Whether or not the war was inevitable, prewar Russia’s socio-economic and political status had not inevitably fated it to radical social revolution à la October 1917. Much that occurred during the war and even during 1917 brought that particular result. The hand wrote revolution on the wall but not what kind.