Europe in the Belle Époque, 1871–1914515the judiciary. Russification was again imposed on mi-
norities. Jews suffered especially severe restrictions, but
Catholics in Poland and small sects, such as the “Old
Believers,” also endured harassment. Nearly eight thou-
sand trials of political opponents were held in the
1880s. Alexander II’s reforms were diluted, and two-
thirds of the eligible voters for the zemstvawere disen-
franchised; turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg thus had
an electorate of seven thousand men in a population of
1,267,000 (0.6 percent).
The repressive regime of Alexander III,
Pobedonostsev, and Plehve provoked a revolutionary
opposition. Populist movements, collectively known as
the Narodniki,continued the Russian tradition of peas-
ant socialism and assassinations, although the govern-
ment broke up the most militant terrorist groups. Early
industrialization in Moscow and St. Petersburg led
some dissidents to Marxism. George Plekhanov began
to introduce Marxism into Russia in the 1880s, and im-
perial censors assisted him by permitting the publica-
tion of Das Kapital,reasoning that it was too boring to
be a threat.
Alexander III died of natural causes in 1894,
bringing to the throne his son, the last czar of Russia,
Nicholas II. Nicholas was a more sensitive and intelli-
gent man than his father, but less forceful and resolute.
He was fortunate to inherit a capable statesman, Count
Sergei Witte, whom Alexander had named minister of
finance in 1892. Witte’s tenure in that post and subse-
quent leadership as prime minister marked the first sus-
tained effort to bring Russia into the industrial age. He
pressed the cause of economic westernization with a
vigor unseen since Peter the Great, arguing that an
unindustrialized Russia would be unable to compete in
the European state system. During the 1890s Witte’s
view of Russia’s future supplanted Pobedonostsev’s
slavophilic insistence upon guarding Russia’s separate
historic evolution.
The Russia of the 1890s had far to go before it
could compete with western Europe. The empire had a
large labor supply, but restraints remained upon its mo-
bility, because of the obligation of former serfs to help
their commune repay the redemption bonds given to
the landowners at the time of emancipation. Nearly 10
percent of the imperial budget depended upon these re-
demption payments, and rural communities kept a max-
imum working population in the fields. Factories
consequently remained few in number and small in size
before the expansion of the 1890s. A study of Ukraine
has shown that factories tripled their average workforce
(to forty-six hundred workers) during that decade.
Russian agriculture had the potential to feed this urban
population and to raise capital by exporting surpluses,
but it remained too backward to fulfill the promise. AtDOCUMENT 26.3
Pobedonostsev: Conservative Critique of Democracy, 1898
Konstantin Pobedonostsev expressed his opposition to the liberalization
of Russia in his memoirs, published after Count Sergei Witte had begun
to lead Russia toward westernization.Among the falsest of political principles is the principle of
the sovereignty of the people, the principle that all power
issues from the people, and is based upon the national
will—a principle which has unhappily become more
firmly established since the time of the French revolution.
From it proceeds the principle of parliamentarianism,
which, today has deluded much of the so-called “intelli-
gentsia,” and has unfortunately infatuated certain foolish
Russians. It continues to maintain its hold on many minds
with the obstinacy of a narrow fanaticism, although every
day its falsehood is exposed more clearly to the world....
What is this freedom by which so many minds are ag-itated, which inspires so many insensate actions, so many
wild speeches, which leads the people so often to misfor-
tune? In the democratic sense of the word, freedom is the
right to political power, or, to express it otherwise, the
right to participate in the government of the state. This
universal aspiration for a share in government has no con-
stant limitations, and seeks no definite issue, but inces-
santly extends.... Forever extending its base, the new
democracy now aspires to universal suffrage—a fatal
error, and one of the most remarkable in the history of
mankind.... In a Democracy, the real rulers are the dex-
terous manipulators of votes.... [T]hey rule the people as
any despot or military dictator might rule it.
Pobedonostsev, Konstantin. Reflections of a Russian Statesman.
London: Robert Long, 1898.