Historiography of Late Imperial Russia

Soviet historiography

They say that History is written by the winners but, in the case of the Russian Revolution, this is not true. 

The first Soviet histories of the revolution HAD (on pain of death) to be Marxist histories, and were written under the influence/direction of Mikhail Pokrovsky, first president of the Society of Marxist Historians, founder of the Central State Archives and for a while a senior Communist Party official.  Pokrovsky’s history (1932) described the Russian Empire as “a prison of the peoples” and criticised the brutality of the upper classes, but – as a Marxist – he interpreted the 1905 Uprisings primarily as the first, bourgeois revolution; portrayed Nicholas II’s reign as the final (imperialistic) phase of capitalism; and saw Nicholas II as just one of many factors in the inevitable ascent of the masses to the second, proletarian revolution of 1917:

“My own feeling for Nicholas II, which I assure you was far from friendly, was like tepid milk when compared to the boiling heat of what that workman said”. 

In the 1970s, many ‘structuralist’ historians came to see History similarly – i.e. as the outworking of underlying socio-economic developments … but, in the 1920s and 1930s, no one in the West was going to listen to a Soviet historian. 

The ‘Traditional’ interpretation

Instead, therefore, the West’s first interpretations of late Imperial Russia were derived from two highly influential sources: Russian literature, and émigré historians. 

Russian literature: You may have heard of Dostoyevsky, Chekov and Tolstoy.  They were all deeply moral writers who portrayed a decadent, effete and declining aristocracy, set in a milieu of cruel bureaucrats and suffering peasants.  Tolstoy actually wrote an open letter to the Tsar in 1901:

“This reactionary movement has separated the Government more and more from the people and their wants.  It is thus not the malicious and turbulent persons who are to blame, but you administrators yourselves.”

Chekov’s play The Cherry Orchard (1903) presents a bankrupted aristocratic family drinking and playing billiards even as they are being forced to sell their estate … having rejected a plan which would have saved them because doing so would have involved felling their Cherry orchard and spoiling the view.  Chekov had written it as a comedy; it appeared in theatres as a tragedy. 

Russian literature thus disseminated the feeling in aristocratic society itself of late Imperial Russia as a ‘twilight’ period, a society ‘in decline’ and inevitably ‘on its way out’. 

Émigré historians: You have to remember that the historians who fled Russia after the 1917 Revolution had lost EVERYTHING – family, possessions, career – and this shows in the histories they wrote.  Some were thinly-veiled apologias for the regime, some conspiracy theories of German and masonic plots … but, when they looked for somewhere to blame, most found an easy scapegoat.  The best such history, written by Russian-born Michael Florinsky (1931), acknowledged the economic and political problems, and the impact of the War, but ended with the unyielding autocracy of Nicholas and the downright stupidity of Alexandra:

“the Emperor and the Empress moved blindly toward the doom which they had brought upon themselves”. 

Florinsky’s telling comment at this point was that the situation, even during the War, was “far from being irreparable” – i.e. the Revolution was NOT inevitable, and the regime COULD have saved itself. 

This overall picture was continued in 1939 by the British historian Bernard Pares, in a well-researched and sympathetic book which is easy-reading even today:

“The story which emerges from this material is as tragic as anything I have ever known.  Following the events throughout while they were evolving and later filling in one gap after another in my knowledge of them, I have become quite convinced that the cause of the ruin came not at all from below, but from above...  The Tsar had many opportunities of putting things right, and several times he was on the point of taking them; the reader will find out why he did not.  So far from a dictation of events from below, this passive people went on enduring long after it ought to have ceased to do so…

“The initiative comes from above; and there, 'above' – we are faced with the strangest of human tangles, the complicated and abnormal relations of three persons – Rasputin, the Empress and the Emperor: set in an ascending order of authority and a descending order of influence.”

The Debate and its Upshots

This, therefore, became the ‘Traditional’ interpretation, that the Revolution was the result of an inept autocracy and an enfeebled aristocracy … but it was ‘optimistic’ in that the government’s situation had not been hopeless.  And I suppose that this was a welcome message at the time for people in the West facing an expanding communist bloc in eastern Europe and around the world. 

Thus it was THIS question – could the regime have reformed itself and moved safely to a Western-style constitutional monarchy – which was the road (imho a blind alley) that the historiography would drive down for the next six decades. 

For the historian Arthur Mendel (1969), the question was crucial.  Was the history of the reign to be found in “such purely accidental factors as a weak-willed Tsar, a hysterical wife, a haemophiliac son, a personality like Lenin, and a weighty batch of comparable bits and pieces”, or did it provide evidence of underlying revolutionary forces facing the world? 

On the ‘pessimist’ (revolution-was-inevitable) side, Leopold Haimson (1965) portrayed Russian society in terms of its capitalist classes.  And, during the 1980s, a number of historians studying the working class in late Imperial Russian identified the role of ‘structural’ influences – e.g.  the influx of young workers, urbanization, technological change & time management, and economic upturn – in developing a revolutionary working-class. 

Nikita Lychakov (2019) drew a direct line from the financial crisis of 1899-1902 and the 1905 Revolution.

For the revolution-was-avoidable ‘optimists’, other historians began to revisit the portrayal of late imperial Russia as cruel and incompetent.  They pointed to the zemstva and the Duma as evidence of political development, the 1906 Basic Law and other reforms as evidence of civil rights:

“The constitutional reforms of 1905 and 1906 changed not only Russia's political institutions, but also her style of government and her political culture” (1989).

Even Nicholas got a make-over.  The film Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) showed the tsar as a human being trying to do his best.  Dominic Lieven (1993) portrayed Nicholas positively as captive to a sense of duty who faced impossible problems.  And in 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church canonised the royal family for their "humbleness, patience and meekness" during the Revolution. 

One of the upshots of this looking-for-the-positives is that in the 1990s historians dug down into the local details of late Imperial Russia, and found many of the mitigations that you studied here – the economy was growing, even in the countryside, and standards of living with it; workers were not as highly politicised as previously thought, peasants much more so etc. 

At the same time, it has to be said, historians uncovered also much of the downside of Tsardom: an overcontrolling crown consistently preventing the state from reforming, and an arbitrary and inconsistent oppression. 

In 1994, thank goodness, Richard Pipes called a halt on the whole debate: “The most one can say is that a revolution in Russia was more likely than not” – a conclusion he ascribed to the humiliation of tsardom when its whole authority derived from its prestige. 

Modern Interpretations

What holds a society together?  One way is ‘Patronage’ – a system, coming from Roman or medieval times, where noble/wealthy people or organisations would give their supporters advancement, jobs, favours or money.  The American historian Daniel Orlovsky (1983) believed that ties of patronage were what held Imperial Russia together politically, exercised by the royal family and nobility, through kinship or bureaucracy , or simply coming from the same place.  Loyalty/obedience, therefore, was not to the law (as in a modern democracy), or horizontally to a particular class (as in socialism), but vertically, through a system of personal allegiances.

Historians such as the Britsh historian Geoffrey Hoskins (2000) suggested that this system began to fail in the late Imperial period – developments such as the abolition of serfdom, the bankruptcy of the nobles, and the move to the towns, broke the ties of patronage that bound Russia together politically, forcing the Tsar to rely on emergency measures, armed force, and on hated officials such as the ‘land captains’.  If this is true, the Russian Revolution was not so much a failure of government as a societal meltdown.

The ‘cultural turn’ of the 1990s, and the post-revisionist tendency to see conflicts as misunderstandings of different ideas, produced some exciting research.  Laura Engelstein (1992) noticed a chasm between the attitudes towards sex of the ruling classes and the emerging bourgeois class.  Joan Neuberger (1993) studied the growth of hooliganism in the early years of the 20th century, and found social significance both in the hooliganism itself, and in the shocked public reaction to it.  Writers found a split society, deeply-divided, with “cross-cultural misunderstandings” – e.g.  Peter Waldron (1997):

“Social change left no family or individual in the empire untouched...  Here there is no discourse of 'twilight' or ‘decline’ of Russia as a whole.  The emphasis is on dynamic change and the autocracy's difficulty in keeping up … the dynamics of Russian society were moving at a pace which the state could no longer regulate.”

By contrast, David Saunders’ (1997) investigations of Russian society led him to believe that it was “static” and “not fundamentally revolutionary”; and Ilya Gerasimov (2009) showed graduate agronomists ‘bridging’ the social gap and working constructively with peasants ...he sees Russian imperial history as “a complex, open-ended process and not as a straightforward vector culminating in the 1917 collapse”. 

And in 2013 Richard Wortman identified a Tsar far from dithering or overwhelmed, with a firm view of how he wanted to rule: as an autocratic Tsar with 17th century-style Zemskii Sobor (assembly of the land) to hear the needs of his people:

“The violent confrontations of the early twentieth century must be conceived not as the unsuccessful assault of revolutionary groups against a beleaguered and obsolete autocracy, but as a collision of two fiercely opposed insurgent forces, a Russia awakening politically and demanding to be heard, and a monarch seeking to create a pure autocracy drawing personal authority from God and the people, unencumbered by institutions of the state or the critical opinion of educated society.”

Are we looking at Russian history the right way?

Looking at the debates above, one has to wonder if all these views are mutually exclusive.  Is it not possible, for example, that the people of the time were motivated by structural changes AND by culture and ideology?

Arthur Mendel argued that there is no point to history if we cannot extract generalisations to inform our actions today; but there is no point in acting on generalisations which are wrong.  The vast hugeness of Russia makes generalisations all-but-impossible – we should not be surprised if the political motivation of two ‘peasant’ villages 6,000 miles apart, or industrial workers twelve years later, or even the day-to-day ‘laziness’ of the Tsar, appears to vary wildly ... it probably did.

Jane Burbank (2004) wondered “whether our categories are doing us any good, or getting in the way”.  One area “that demands rigorous rethinking”, she suggested “is the role of the emperor, as an emperor, rather than as an autocratic monarch…  Is there something about imperial rule that [changed the form of] the society and political culture”?

Given the ‘otherness’ of Russia, are historians even asking the right questions?  All the concepts you have read about above – Marxism, structuralism, modernisation, the ‘cultural turn’ – are concepts we apply to WESTERN historiography.  By contrast, the émigré historian George Vernadsky regarded Eurocentrism as a ‘trap’, and tried to redefine the whole of Russian history in terms of its relationship with Asia.

Vernadsky saw Russia, not as a ‘European’ nation, but as a ‘Eurasian’ fusion, taking its national consciousness as much from its interactions with the eastern steppes as from Europe.  Character traits which Russians took from the east and regard as positives – e.g. collectivism, social harmony, ‘acceptance, ‘simplicity’ – Western historians (in, to be blunt, a kind of racism) tend to dismiss as ‘backwardness’, ‘inertia’ and ‘passivity’ ... all words with a negative meaning.

Above all, should the Western belief that a neoliberal democracy is the highest good be imposed upon late Imperial Russia?  The historian Stephen Smith (2017) comments that “looked at from the vantage point of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, it may seem as though the Russian Revolution barely made a dent on Russia’s political culture”.

Vernadsky’s Eurasianism received considerable criticism from both Marxist and liberal historians, but has come back into prominence recently.  In a 2021 poll, 64% of Russians identified Russia as a non-European country, while only 29% regarded Russia to be part of Europe; and – if you are seeking guidance for future actions – in 2023 Putin declared Russia’s foreign policy to be ‘Eurasian’ and aligned with China and the Muslim world.