Antony Beevor - Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921

For Lyuba Vinogradova

In January 1902, the Duke of Marlborough wrote to his first cousin Winston Churchill, describing a court ball he had attended in St Petersburg. Marlborough was astonished by the anachronistic grandeur in which the Tsar of All the Russias appeared to be trapped. He described Nicholas II as a nice and amiable man who tries to play the proper part of an autocrat.

The reception was worthy of Versailles in all its ostentatious glory. Supper was served for nearly three thousand people. The effect of this spectacle of so many people sitting down at the same time is difficult to describe. The scale on which it is carried out can only be estimated when I remind you that there were some two thousand servants in all to wait upon the guests, including Cossacks, Mamelukes and runners [footmen] like those we have heard of in eighteenth century England with huge ostrich-feather hats on their heads. A regimental band is stationed in every room, so as to play the national anthem wherever the Czar may go There was another guard of honour whose duty apparently was to hold their swords at attention for five consecutive hours.

When Marlboroughs young wife, Consuelo Vanderbilt, asked the Tsar at a subsequent dinner about the possibility of introducing democratic government in Russia, he replied: We are two hundred years behind Europe in the development of our national political institutions. Russia is still more Asiatic than European and must therefore be governed by an autocratic government.

Marlborough was also struck by the idiosyncrasies of the Guards regiments which dominated the military system. The Grand Duke Vladimir, who is the head of a portion of the army, has the recruits brought up before him. Those men who possess snub noses go into the Pavlovsky Regiment, which was created by the Emperor Paul, who possessed a snub nose.

Like the court, the Imperial Russian Army was ossified by archaic etiquette, protocol and bureaucracy. Captain Archie Wavell, the future field marshal but then a young officer in the Black Watch, observed when on attachment there just before the First World War that even officers of field rank were afraid of showing initiative. An example of the conservatism of the Russian Army, he added, was their custom of invariably carrying the bayonet fixed on the rifle at all times. This dated back to an order of Marshal Suvorov in the late eighteenth century after a Russian column was surprised in an ambush and wiped out.

Russian officers regarded it as disgraceful ever to be seen out of uniform. A dragoon captain who quizzed Wavell on the customs of the British Army could not believe that their officers wore civilian clothes off duty and did not carry swords in public. He jumped to his feet, scandalised. But people will not be afraid of you, he blurted out. A Tsarist officer had the right to punch any of his soldiers in the face as a summary punishment.

Wavell was not surprised that the Russian intelligentsia regarded their rulers as bureaucratic oppressors; they mistrusted the police and despised the army. After the humiliating disasters of the RussoJapanese War of 19045 and the massacre of Father Georgy Gapons peaceful protest march to the Winter Palace in January 1905, respect for the regime and the armed forces had disintegrated. Russia swung to the left overnight, wrote Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, under her nom de plume of Teffi. There was unrest among the students, there were strikes among the workers. Even old generals could be heard snorting about the disgraceful way the country was being run and making sharp criticisms of the Tsar himself.

In exchange for its great privileges, the nobility was supposed to provide its sons as officers for the army and the bureaucracy in St Petersburg. The 30,000 landowners were meanwhile expected to maintain order over the countryside through local land captains.

The liberation of the serfs in 1861 had done little to improve their desperate lot. Our peasantry lives in horrible conditions, lacking properly organised medical care, wrote Maksim Gorky. Half of all peasant children die of various diseases before the age of five. Almost all the women in the village suffer from womens diseases. The villages are rotting with syphilis; the villages have sunk into destitution, ignorance and savagery. The women also suffered from the violence of their men, usually when drunk.

Any idea of the sturdy Russian peasant forming part of an irresistible military steamroller was an illusion. Roughly three out of four young peasants were rejected in peacetime on the grounds of ill health. Officers complained of the quality of conscripts arriving during the First World War. In the Second Army, a report stated, It is deplorable and quite common that lower ranks inflict wounds on themselves to avoid combat. There are also a lot of cases of surrendering to the enemy. It described them as just ordinary muzhiks They stare in front of them in an indifferent, stupid and gloomy way. They are not in the habit of looking back cheerfully and merrily into their commanders eyes. Evidently, the Russian peasant in uniform adopted the tactic which the British Army used to define as dumb insolence.

Even enlightened members of the gentry and aristocracy feared the dark masses and their occasional explosions of terrifying violence, like that of 1773 led by Yemelyan Pugachev. Aleksandr Pushkin described it as Russian revolt, senseless and merciless. In the wave of unrest and manor-burnings in 1905 which followed the disasters of the Japanese war, the only hope of landowners was to appeal to the local governor to call out troops from one of the many garrison towns.

Karl Marxs notorious remark in the Communist Manifesto about the idiocy of rural life, with its implication of credulity, apathy and submission, was also true beyond the peasant village. Small provincial towns could be almost as stultifying. Satirists such as Saltykov-Shchedrin and Gogol peered beneath the murky surface of the stagnant pond. It was Saltykov, ironically a favourite author of Lenin, who also invoked the devastating effect of legalised slavery upon the human psyche, a phenomenon common to both Tsarist and Soviet eras. Leon Trotsky blamed the mental straitjacket of the Orthodox Church. He argued that revolution could never come until the people broke with the icons and cockroaches of Holy Russia.

Attempts at land reform achieved results only in certain areas. Unlike that great magnate of the nineteenth century, Count Dmitry Sheremetev, who owned 1.9 million acres (763,000 hectares) with approximately 300,000 serfs, most estates were small and impoverished. Even if they had wanted to, very few landowners could afford to improve housing conditions or introduce the most basic form of mechanisation. Instead, many were compelled to sell or mortgage their properties. Relations became increasingly artificial and tense. The poorer peasants remained victims of illiteracy, which meant that they were exploited by both village elders and corn merchants, and also mistreated by many landowners, still resentful of their loss of power. As a result, obsequious tenants, bowing to their noble masters, would take any opportunity to cheat them as soon as their backs were turned.

Migration to the cities accelerated the growth of the urban working class, the proletariat which Marxists saw as the vanguard of the revolution. From little more than a million inhabitants at the turn of the century, the population of St Petersburg rose to more than 3 million by the end of 1916. Conditions in factories were appalling and dangerous. Workers were regarded as expendable by the owners since so many peasants were waiting to take their place. There was no right to strike, and no compensation for dismissal. In the case of any dispute, the police always sided with the factory owners. Many saw it as serfdom in the city. The workers slept in galleried barracks, doss-houses and tenements amid squalor and disease. There are no sewage systems in the cities, wrote Gorky, there are no flues in factory chimneys; the open ground has been poisoned by the miasma of rotting refuse, the air by smoke and dust. In such overcrowded conditions, tuberculosis and venereal diseases spread alongside occasional epidemics of cholera and typhus. Life expectancy was as low as in the poorest villages. The only freedom lay in the lowest circle of hell inhabited by the lumpen proletariat of the unemployed a subterranean world of child prostitution, petty theft and drunken fights, an existence worse than anything depicted by Dickens, Hugo or Zola. The only disaster which could make life even worse for the poor in Russia was a major European conflict.