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Introduction
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Introduction The events to which I shall devote my attention in this study, even at the remove of a century, retain immense interest for historians of revolutionary processes that shook the ancien régime in Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century. The “dress rehearsal” for the larger cataclysms of 1917 from which Soviet power emerged triumphant, the First Russian Revolution of 1905–1907 occupies a significant place in this historiography . Among the tumultuous events of these years, the waves of unrest that engulfed many rural districts of the Empire during 1905–1907, particularly in the Baltic, Central Agricultural and Mid-Volga Regions, have rightly attracted special attention. Indeed, these events are now often viewed as the opening phase in a period of rural unrest that, prefigured already in the disturbances in Poltava and Khar’kov Provinces in 1902, ended only with the Red Army’s ultimately successful campaign to put down peasant revolts against Soviet power during 1920–1922.1 Parallels drawn between the intensification of the “peasant movement” during 1905–1906 and again in 1917–1918 derive in part from larger historical contexts: disastrous military defeats suffered by Russian armies in wartime, acute political turmoil and economic dislocation, and a paralysis of the ruling elites in the face of the ensuing crises, leading—although only for a short interval in 1905—to an eclipse of state authority. In both periods, a political crisis forced to the surface increasingly bitter conflicts between the autocratic state and those powerful cross-currents of opposi1 T. Shanin and V. Danilov, “Nauchno-issledovatel’nyi proekt… (Vmesto vvedeniia),” in Danilov and Shanin, eds., Krest’ianskaia, 5–6; V. V. Kondrashin, “Krest’ianskaia revoliutsiia na Povol’zhe,” Istoricheskie zapiski (Penza), 179–186. 2 Introduction tion that expressed the aspirations of disparate and competing elements within Russia’s “census society” toward a decisive voice in the affairs of the nation. These extraordinary confrontations were both framed and profoundly shaped by irruptions of revolutionary unrest in the urban centers and rural districts of unprecedented scale that dictated in the most essential way the correlation of forces in the political arena and the evolving calculations of all political actors. Mass revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence in 1905–1907, which brought Russia to the brink of civil war, the duration and ferocity of state-organized repression, and the strident, super-heated passions that colored the political struggle were, seen together, symptomatic of the larger crisis and of those social fears and hatreds tearing at the fabric of Imperial society. The direct result of the rising revolutionary tide of 1905, the institution of a nationally elected legislature, declaration of civic freedoms of conscience , of speech, of assembly and of person, and an unprecedented proliferation of political parties and organizations inaugurated the short-lived experiment in constitutional government that was to be swept aside in 1917.2 The Manifesto of 17 October 1905 and subsequent legislative acts, culminating in the proclamation of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire of 23 April 1906, however, set out only a rudimentary and ambiguous framework for grafting “alien” legislative principles onto the old edifice of bureaucratic government that had historically derived its sense of mission and legitimacy from the unlimited personal political authority of the Russian autocrat. To be sure, the very survival of the Duma as an institution would henceforth reflect the tense and fragile consensus that the status quo ante could now not be restored, that the Manifesto had set down a historical boundary line that could not now be recrossed.3 The unrestrained acrimony between Tsarist ministers and majorities of the people’s deputies during sessions of the first two (“revolutionary”) Dumas nevertheless expressed the central tensions inherent in the structure of “constitutional autocracy”: the bitter, seemingly existential contest between the state power (vlast’) and that vital element of the Empire’s public -minded elite (obshchestvennost’) that had come to see itself as representative of the nation, and the deep hostility with which the Duma was 2 From an extensive literature surrounding proclamation of the Manifesto of 17 October 1905, see especially Anan’ich, Ganelin, Dubentsov, Diakin and Potolov, Krizis samoderzhaviia v Rossii, 1894–1917, 157–323; Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy; Ganelin, Rossiiskoe samoderzhevie v 1905 godu; Malysheva, Dumskaia monarkhiia. 3 G. M. Kropotkin, “Praviashchaia biurokratiia,” OI, 2006, No. 1, 24–42. [3.239.13.1] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:54 GMT) Introduction 3 viewed both by Russia’s revolutionary parties and by reactionary circles both...