<>1855fe18:1881mr01; Russian Emperor Alexander
II reigned for 26 years
1) THE ERA OF GREAT REFORMS [LOOP] and
2) RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY SITUATIONS
(The first and the second)
*--Alexander II, Emperor of Russia.
The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II
to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, 1857-1864
*--Aleksandr Nikitenko,
The Diary of a Russian Censor
(1975)
*--v1:1859-1880 British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the
Foreign Office confidential print. Part I, from the mid- nineteenth century to the First
World War. Series A, Russia, 1859 -1914 (1983)
*--Nikolai K. Girs, The Education of a Russian Statesman: The Memoirs of Nich.
Karl. Giers (1962)
\\
*--Larissa Zakharova, "THE GOVERNMENT AND THE GREAT REFORMS OF THE 1860s"
[TXT]
*--W. Bruce Lincoln,
In the Vanguard of
Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861
*----------. Nikolai Miliutin: An Enlightened Russian Bureaucrat
*--Daniel T. Orlovsky,
The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in
Imperial Russia, 1802-1881 (1981)
*--S. Frederick Starr,
Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830-1870
(1972)
*--N. G. O. Pereira,
Tsar-Liberator: Alexander II of Russia, 1818-1881
(1984)
*--E. M. von Almedingen,
The Emperor Alexander II
(1962)
*--James Malloy, P. A. Valuev and his career in Nineteenth century Russian state
service
*--Werner Eugen Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia. London:1958
*--Website
of Walter Moss, "Alexander II and His Times"
<>1855sp:Russian conservative Konstantin Aksakov
(son of Sergei Aksakov and brother of Ivan Aksakov) wrote a
memo to Emperor Alexander II, "On the Internal State of Russia" [TXT
| Raeff3:231-51]
*--This loyal and strong defense of freedom of speech could not be published until
1881
*--Collection of writings =
Tribune of the Slavophiles: Konstantin Aksakov
*1853:Poetic defense of freedom of Expression [DIR3:284-5]
<>1855:USA| Walt Whitman, Leaves
of Grass [TXT]
\\
*--Wagar on Whitman [TXT]
<>1855ja:Shimoda | After losing all but the ship Diana
(1806:1812:GO) to needs of the Crimean War, and after great earthquake and tidal wave
leveled Shimoda and shipwrecked Diana [Beasley, MHJ:61], in 1855fe07 Putiatin
arranged Treaty of Amity (Nichiro Washin Joyaku). Modelled on Kanagawa treaty, recently
signed by USA Commander Matthew Perry [KEJ,4:179.
PHandG:782]. Lensen thinks Shimoda "provisions" are "more extensive"
than Kanagawa [KEJ,6:270]. "Went beyond" by
opening 3 ports [KEJ,6:341]. Opened Shimoda, Hakodate,
and Nagasaki to Russia, but only for ship repairs and provisioning. BUT did allow posting
of consuls at Hakodate or Shimoda Russia chose Hakodate and established reciprocal
extra-territoriality. Kurils divided so that Japan held those islands south of Iturup
(Etorofu); Russia, those north of Urup (Uruppu) [KEJ,6:270
Lensen. I think he means "S FROM" and "N FROM". NB!:Kurils divided N
of Etorofu (KEJ,2:238 Stephan)]. Sakhalin a
"common possession" (Lensen) or "jointly occupied" (Stephan)
[Harrison, Japan's N.Frontier]. Lensen feels that "relations between Russian
residents, mostly personnel of naval vessels wintering in Japan, and local inhabitants
were on the whole amicable. As military men, Japanese officials could identify more
readily with monarchist naval officers than with merchants or with missionaries [KEJ,6:341]. Lensen
goes too far to put Russia in good light. Says 1st lessons in European shipbuilding from Putiatin's stranded crew, but
cf.PH&G:766 re.Adams "Anjin"
<>1855my08:Heda, NW coast of Izu Peninsula | Putiatin and 40 men were moved to Heda, built
European-style schooner
in partnership with Japanese craftsmen, and departed for Russia from
Japan (took 2 wks) [KEJ,6:270]
*That year novelist Ivan Aleksandrovich
Goncharov began serial publication of his Fregat Pallada (1858:book publication)
about his experience with Putiatin in Japan
*--Goncharov mocked and
ridiculed Japanese in a most unfortunate manner. "It was difficult to look without
laughter at these skirt-clad figures with their little topnots and their bare little
knees". Lensen says that G's portrait of Japan as "ludicrous and effeminate"
was very
damaging
\\
*--KEJ,3:46
*--Lensen"Historicity
<>1855je16:San Francisco Journal carried article by
the German traveler Julius Frobel which stressed parallel rise of USA and Russia.
Prognosis = three-way suzerainty over globe, USA, Europe and Russia
*--Frobel later wrote
memoirs of his travels to the New World, Frobel, Julius, 1805-1893 Seven years' travel
in Central America, northern Mexico, and the far West of the United States
(London:1859) F1409.F92
<>1855oc13:1857my21; French intellectuals Edmund and Jules
Goncourt kept diary of everyday life in Paris in which they reflected on the inferiority
of women [P20:14]
<>1856:1870; Italian unification under the leadership of
Camillo di Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi, a
complex 14-year process of gathering widely different jurisdictions under single
governmental administration, not complete until Rome and Vatican City brought
under the authority of the new Italian liberal monarchy [MAP]
*--"Italy", the nation-state, made
its late appearance on the historical stage [DPH:187-91]
<>1856:Sergei Aksakov published
Chronicles of a Russian Family,
a remarkable tale of gentry
family life in the time of serfdom on the Orenburg, trans-Volga frontier or Bashkir steppes
[excerpts= KRR:352-4]
*1914:Mikhail Nesterov landscape portrait of area around Aksakov homestead in
Olga's Gallery
*--Sergei
Aksakov's UO bibliography
*--For Sergei's famous sons, GO Konstantin and Ivan
<>1856mr18 (mr30 NS): Treaty
of Paris ended Crimean War
[VSB,3:606-7 | DPH:197-9 |
DIR2:209-20 | ORW:118] France,
England, Turkey, Sardinia, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Russia agreed to
neutralization of Black Sea, open to all commercial fleets but closed to all
military navies
*--Romania (till 1859 called Moldavia and Walachia) became semi-independent
states under Ottoman Turkish suzerainty. Russia ceded to Romania the mouth of
the Danube River and Bessarabia. All of lower Danube placed under international
commission
*--Russian imperial advance in Ottoman Turkish Central Asia was hereby pushed back. Ottoman
Turkey was now declared to be part of what was called the "European concert" and its
integrity protected as such. Turkey became a part of Europe in the effort to
keep its imperial domains from becoming a part of Russia
*--Russian imperialist ambitions were conspicuously damaged while the imperialist
ambitions of "The West" were conspicuously advanced. The
concept of "The West" (and the derivative expression "Westernization") very
possibly originated in Russia [LOOP on
anachronistic use of the term "Westernization"]. Now these loose concepts
were increasingly used to describe powerful and rapidly modernizing (i.e.,
industrializing) northwestern European nation-states in their domineering or
imperialist relationship to the rest of the world. The rest of the world was
labeled over
time with a series of progressively less slanderous adjectives = "savage", "primitive", "backward",
"undeveloped", and (by the late 20th century) "developing"
*--It took Russia twenty years to bolster its military strength and prepare to
reassert itself into the Black Sea and the Balkans. The first moves in "The
Great Game" after Crimea went England's way, but Russia waited its turn
*1856de:Caucasus Mountains, northern slopes. Chechen people shifted from imam
leadership to Russian administration as General Evdokimov introduced program of receiving
into Russian territory immigrants from Shamil’s Chechen and Daghestan territories
[ID]
<>1856mr30:Russian Emperor Alexander II advised
Moscow aristocrats gathered in their provincial noble assembly, "It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to await the time when it
will begin to abolish itself from below" [VSB,3:589
| DPH:282]
- Noble assemblies were institutions created in the time of Catherine
II [ID]
- These aristocratic "corporate" or soslovie-based
institutions responded to Alexander's dramatic announcement in hope and fear
- Russian landowning elites now entered into a brilliant, yet
futile -- perhaps we could say final -- period of corporate or "class-conscious" political action
- Newspaper reports on this Moscow Noble Assembly alerted reading public to the immediate
possibility of significant reform
- 1858su:Nizhnii-Novgorod and Moscow nobles heard addresses by Alexander II on same theme
[VSB,3:591]
- Internal Ministry official Aleksei Levshin and Senator Yakov Solov'ev described
the
background to reforms [VSB,3:589-91]
- At the autocratic center, in Petersburg, the Main Committee and Editorial Commission laid the groundwork for abolition of
serfdom [VSB,3:591-3]
- Landowning nobles (rural gentry political activists)
distrusted the reformist state and were thus not at all certain that this "great
reform" would be all that great
- What might this suggest about the status of
the landowning aristocracy as a "ruling class" in Imperial Russia?
<>1856de01:USA WDC | Jefferson Davis, USA Secretary of War
(1853-57) and future president of the rebellious Confederacy, addressed new challenge
faced by a dispirited US military, scattered across the Great Plains in small, vulnerable
forts
- Davis understood the close parallel of frontier and imperialist expansion
=
The occupation of Algeria by the French presents a case having much parallelism to
that of our western frontier, and affords an opportunity of profiting by their experience.
Their practice, as far as understood by me, is to leave the desert region to the
possession of the nomadic tribes; their outposts, having strong garrisons, are established
near the limits of the cultivated region, and their services performed by large
detachments making expeditions into the desert regions as required
[Webb,Great Plains:194-5 & ff.]
- 1855mr03:Davis had gotten $30,000 from Congress to experiment with camels in TX
- 1858:Davis also understood the military-industrial closeness of frontier expansion and
the development of railroads. He was the first to propose
construction of a railroad to the Pacific Ocean. He considered it a military necessity and
thus a government project, that is, it required government subvention (monetary support)
of private enterprise. Davis arranged for government survey of 4 possible routes
- As USA was poised to launch a campaign into the Great Plains against the Native Americans who lived there, it was diverted by the disasters of
the great Civil War
<>1857ja26:Russian Emperor Alexander II decree laid out
plan for vigorous development of railroads [VSB,3:607]
<>1857my10:1858au02; India
| Sepoy Rebellion ushered in brutal year of imperialist war which pitted England against an Indian independence movement
- Prominent English cultural figure, John Ruskin [ID] , delivered
a speech characteristic of British imperialist attitudes toward those who resisted their power = "Since the race of man began
its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever been done by it so significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial
degradation, as the act [of] the Indian race in the year that has just passed by" [2011au19:TLS:3]
- The rebellion forced abolition of 250-year-old English East India Co. and
caused imposition in India of direct administration by imperialist English crown
- Termination of the great English mercantilist corporation, followed
in a decade by the demise of the Russian-America Company
[ID], indicated that a 300-year
phase of European overseas-corporate economic life was over
- And all this just as a new breed of industrial company moved to the center of European economic
life, as epitomized by the new railroad companies [ID]
and trans-national grain and petroleum corporations
<>1857oc11:Nagasaki | Putiatin back from China,
where he was working to create a new generation of treaties more favorable to
Russia than the old Nerchinsk Treaty.
He found no word from Edo
*1857oc16:Nagasaki officials decided to move ahead in their dealings with
Putiatin, using the Dutch proposal as prototype
*--Week later Putiatin signed similar treaty, w/promise that
another port than Shimoda would be opened. USA diplomatic representative Townsend Harris
wouldn't accept this plan and proposed to force a greater opening of
Japan
*-- Putiatin soon had some imperialist success in China, and
Russian imperialist ambitions in Asia mounted as the 19th century wound down
\\
*--Beasley,MHJ:65
<>1857:1870; In London political exile, the
pundit Alexander Herzen was beyond the grip of Russian censorship and free to publish and circulate back in Russia
his influential journal of opinion and political news, Kolokol [The Bell] for 13 years, until his
death [KMM:165-90 | RRC2,2:321-31 | Excerpts:
Edie,1:328-78 |
VSB,2:582-4]
- 1849:1855; Various Herzen writings [DIR3:271-84]
- 1851:Paris | Six years before the appearance of
Kolokol, Herzen explained to Europeans that Russia had a long and
progressive revolutionary tradition, "Du développment des idées revolutionnaires en Russie" [KMM:158-64]
- 1851se22:Herzen letter to Michelet [Excerpts =
TXT | DIR2:233-54].
Herzen defended Russia from standard west European clichés repeated in Michelet's writing. Herzen insisted,
"The time has come to show Europe that they cannot speak about Russia as of something mute, absent, and defenseless"
- Herzen's
critical and radical patriotism, his insistence that Russia was as able as Europe to reach for the better future,
and especially his inclination to idealize Russian village political tradition, inspired the
"populist"
movement. [TXT on the meaning of "obshchina" in Russian political discourse in the 1860s]
- 1852:Herzen, with his close associate
Nikolai Ogarev, founded "Free
Russian Press". The press issued a stream of information and opinion back into Russia where
censorship constrained free expression. These publications were suppressed by
Russian officials, but they were read in secret and with enthusiasm both by
political opponents of autocracy and by the autocrat himself
- 1852:1868; Herzen published, first in serial form, one of the great political/intellectual autobiographies of all times,
My Past and Thoughts. These
memoirs not only shed light on the early history of European
socialism and the rise of the Russian
intelligentsia [ID] but entered into the Russian literary canon
-
1856:London|
Voices from Russia [Golosa iz Rossii] began to appear. It contained examples of the a
growing body of thoughtful essays sent to Herzen from Russia, where official
censorship prevented free deliberation
on significant national issues
- The lead article was critical of political extremism and was signed "A Russian
Liberal" (written jointly by Konstantin Kavelin and Boris Chicherin)
- Chicherin also published a piece on the weaknesses
of the Russian aristocracy, "Ob aristokratii, v osobennosti russkoi" [GRV:189-93]
- That very year, back in Russia, Kavelin's MS critique of serfdom circulated = "Gosudarstvennoe krepostnoe
pravo v Rossii" [GRV:194-7]
- Russian
liberalism stood forth here at mid-century, promoted in the publication Herzen
and Ogarev, who are always thought to be more nearly “socialists” than “liberals”
- 1857fe03:Herzen letter to the novelist Turgenev compared Russia, America and
Europe [VSB,3:634-5]
- 1858:Herzen wrote of Russia and America:
“Both -- from different direction -- reached across awesome expanses,
building towns, settlements, and colonies, to the shores of the Pacific
Ocean, the ‘Mediterranean of the future’”
- 1859:"Russian Germans and German Russians" offered more critique of "The West" [VSB,3:635-6]
- 1867:Herzen portrait painted by Nikolai Gay and in
Olga's
Gallery
\\
*--Martin Malia,
Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism
*--VRR, ch.1 & ch.3 on Herzen & Kolokol
*--Alexander Kucherov, "Alexander Herzen's Parallel between the United States
and Russia", in Curtiss, ed., Essays...:34-47
*--English playwright Tom Stoppard on Herzen [TXT]
Review of Stoppard’s dramatic trilogy, "The Coast of Utopia"
[TXT]
<>1858:London exile, as a result of unsuccessful
radical republican political activism in Italy, provided
Guiseppe Mazzini the opportunity to
publish a theoretical and political journal, Pensiero ed Azione [Thought
and Action]
<>1858:Leipzig | Russian priest and advocate of greater independence of the
Russian Orthodox Church from state control and for general church reforms, I. S. Belliustin, published
Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia:
The Memoir of a Nineteenth-Century Parish Priest [Excerpt= KRR:336-9]
- The Church, as institution, was largely put outside the range of
tsarist reform planning. The Petrine subordination of church to state
[ID] was given little official
attention
- However, the newly aroused public and energized seminary teachers and
students, as well as certain activist clergy (such as Belliustin), subjected the
Russian Orthodox Church to critical scrutiny
<>1858my:Russian pundit Nikolai Dobroliubov (-1861),
"The Organic Development of Man...." [Raeff3:263-87 |
CF=Selected Philosophical Essays | 1859:review
of Nikolai Goncharov's novel about aristocratic indolence, Oblomov | RRC2,2#28 |
DIR3:321-5]
- In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the monthly journal Sovremennik [Contemporary],
in which Dobroliubov and Nikolai Chernyshevskii played leading roles, gained great popularity because
of its broad-ranging "muckraking" journalism and advocacy of a "modern" secular, science-based world
view
- Because of censorship, philosophical, political-economic and social issues had
to be disguised as literary criticism
- Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov:
Selected Criticism
- Chernyshevskii wrote on leading issues in the life of the struggling Russian agrarian order =
- 1857: "On the Ownership of Landed Property"
- 1858: "A Critique of the Philosophical Prejudices against Communal Possession" [SLM | Q.PSS#05:357-92]
- He also developed a deep interest in contemporary European political-economic thought and its efforts to understand
the geographically expanding industrial transformation of traditional agrarian civilization, the rise of the
historically unprecedented social formation wage-labor
- He wrote "Capital and Labor" (1860) [VSB,3:637]
- He translated into Russian and extensively annotated John
Stuart Mills' principles of political economy [ID]
- He also wrote engagingly on philosophical issues, as in "The Anthropological Principle in
Philosophy" [Edie,2:29-60 | VSB,3:638]
- Chernyshevskii, Selected Philosophical Essays
-
Chernyshevskii was an outstanding example of the new
"public intellectual" in European life, filled with confidence in
science and
progress and the need to propagate their virtues among the educated public, and
this in order to solidify or promote the growth of a modern civil society
-
Mid-century pundits or journalists put themselves in competition with
secular and Church censorship, the
traditional institutions of control and maintenance of prevailing world views at
that interpretive taxonomic level of historical experience
[ID]
\\
*--Wagar on world view of the Russian 1860s [TXT]
*--Vladimir Nabokov,
The Gift [short novel lampooned Chernyshevskii
and the epoch of Russian positivism]
*--William Woehrlin,
Chernyshevsky: The Man and the Journalist
*--N. G. O. Pereira, The Thought and Teachings of N. G. Cernysevskij
*--VRR, ch.5 & ch.6
<>1858my28:China and Russia signed Aigun treaty;
1858je13:Tientsin treaty [DIR2:257-70 | DIR3:296-304]
<>1858au19:Japan, Edo | Putiatin signed 1st Russian/Japanese treaty
of Friendship and Commerce w/Nagai Naomune (1816:1891) Inoue Kiyonao etc
<>1859:1862; Prussian
[north German] Ambassador to St. Petersburg court
was future architect of German unity, Otto von Bismarck
<>1859:1863; Russian revolutionary situation
(the first, lasting 4 years) arose early in the
Era of Great Reforms [KRR:430ff
| FFS:101-96
(1860:1864 | various petitions etc)]
- The 1860s have been called "The First Russian Revolutionary Situation"
which was provoked when Alexander II and his administration decided they could no longer allow themselves to govern
as they had in the past
- Failure in the Crimean War [ID] exposed glaring Russian weaknesses
- Serfdom over the long run and the legacy of Nicholas I more recently
[ID] made the status quo
unacceptable even to highest authorities
- Promotion of Imperial interests required extensive change
- The state came to see the need for extensive change, and the people of Russia, the subjects of the tsar, agreed
- The situation in which old regime authorities and their subjects agreed on the need for
significant change was revolutionary
- First because authorities and subjects did not agree about what changes needed to be made
- Second, two forces -- state bureaucrats and various social groups -- were
ready to mobilize themselves to promote their own various and clashing ideas about change.
Different ideas were rooted in different interests. Social formations,
individuals and institutions act according to interests [ID]
- A new and recognizably modern political opposition arose =
- Radical-left pro-reform and radical-right anti-reform factions arose in the ranks of
civilian and military state servitors and attenuated official reform energies
- Peasants wanted more land under better conditions
- Gentry thought they were invited to help design the reform when the tsar asked noble assemblies to
form gentry committees to deliberate on serfdom
- An emerging "civil society" sought political and social reforms well beyond
anything the state could accept, simply because the causes that inspired civili
society were not the causes that inspired official reform
- A lively new print medium weighed in, from abroad and on the domestic
scene
- Poland rose up in rebellion against Russian rule
- Reformist authorities (who promoted reform) and reactionary authorities
(who opposed reform) could agree on this =
- Political activism (self-generated public mobilization) on the part of either
peasants, gentry, "intelligentsia" [ID], or national minorities was unacceptable
- But reactionary authorities proved wrong on their one essential
do-nothing position because tsarist government could not rule as in the past, and
significant changes had to be made
- An emerging Russian "public" agreed, but an increasingly mobilized public, for a brief and intense period of crisis, rejected
changes proposed by reigning authorities
- That was the essence of the
mid-century revolutionary situation, but
no revolution followed
- The state temporarily restrained its own radical
reformers and reactionary
resistance and pushed through compromised but authentic reforms
- The state prevailed over peasants with its army
- The state
prevailed over the gentry and the fledgling civil society with harsh police
measures and subtle policies of cooptation
- A second revolutionary situation nonetheless arose
15 years later at the end of the reign of Alexander II
\\
*--Alan Kimball, "Tsarist State & Origins of Revolutionary Opposition
in the 1860s"
*--VRR, ch.4-13 (90-315)
*--Jonathan Daly,
Autocracy Under
Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1855-1905 (1998)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
<>1859:England |
A
remarkable publication year in London [Map of London]
Four characteristic works appeared =
(1) John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
[TXT] [CCC2,2:865-93]
\\
[W]
*1971:USA| John Rawls renewed the search for an understanding
of the liberal tradition
*--Anthony Appiah,
The Ethics of Identity
*--John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill and
The Cambridge Companion to
Mill
*--Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian
Firebrand
(2) Samuel Smiles, Self Help; With Illustrations of Conduct
and Perseverance [TXT].
The second chapter described the personal traits that promoted remarkable
success of capitalist/manufacturing/engineering leaders, the heroes appropriate to this new
industrial age
(3) Karl Marx,"Preface to Contribution
to a Critique of Political Economy" [Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie
(Vorwort)] (the heart of Zur Kritik = indicated [TXT])
\\
Marx-Engels
website
(4) Charles Darwin, Origin of Species [TXT]
[CCC2,2:625-46 CCC3,2:813-33]
\\
*--Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian
Evolutionary Thought (O:UP,1989)
*--Alexander S. Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (1988)
*-----------. Science in Russian Culture
- Five "isms" seemed to be mastering formal European thought =
(1) Liberalism
(2) Positivism [ID]
(3) Progressivism
(4) Socialism and
(5) Science -- or at least "scientism"
- In this great year 1859, two specific "isms" consolidated their hold on the European
then the world imagination =
(1) "Marxism", a powerful expression of radical socialism, and
(2) "Darwinism", a powerful expression of scientism
- Some even thought that old-regime conservatism and traditional spiritualisms had been eclipsed
- The formal contemporary mind-set of "The West" was now fully apparent
- 1856 (only three years earlier), the Connecticut-born (USA) writer and
publisher Samuel Griswold Goodrich compiled
his Recollections of a lifetime, or
men and things I have seen in a series of familiar letters to a friend: historical, biographical, anecdotical, and
descriptive. In an early chapter, "Letter VI" [v1:63], he extoled the
virtues of good old-fashioned agricultural ways of life and lamented how the new
era ushered all that out. In his town everyone, even preachers and judges, used
also to be farmers. Goodrich's father, a Congregationalist minister, farmed and so did the
writer-publisher Goodrich. In his view, this made for a better and more wholesome life. But
the old agrarian ways were transformed by economic modernization. Goodrich made a direct
connection between the larger macro-economic, political and intellectual trends of his day. Since
the time of Jefferson (here Goodrich implies democratic politics), an era of "Talk", demagoguery,
etc., opened. A swarm of "isms" had been set loose on the world
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
<>1859:1869;
Egypt, between Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea | French
engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps oversaw the ten-year construction of the
100-mile-long Suez Canal
- Essentially an imperialist adventure, the industrial
company founded by de Lesseps was a hybrid of the old mercantilist and modern
capitalist corporation
[ID]
- The canal required no locks and was navigable by even
the largest ships (minimum of 196 feet wide and 42 feet deep)
- By 1875, the canal was under English imperialist control
- On the average, annual traffic level through the first century of the canal
was 6000 ships
- Around half of all sea-borne trade between western Europe and Asia
passes through the canal
<>1859:Russian folklorist Aleksandr Afanas’ev published Russian
Folk Legends [KRR:391-4]
<>1859fe19:Russia-France treaty of
neutrality and cooperation [DIR2:225-6 | DIR3:294-6]
<>1859ap:Caucasus Mountains | Russia rallied in
Chechnya and Daghestan after Crimean War
- Russian military captured Shamil and exiled him with a Russian title to estates near Kaluga in Russia
[pix]
[pix]
- Caucasus Viceroy and commander of the Russian army there, Field Marshal Prince
Aleksandr Bariatinskii outlined his vision of Russian imperialism in the Caucasus [VSB,3:607-10]
- The Great Game heated up
- In 1870, Shamil was near death and was permitted to travel to Mecca where 1871mr:Shamil died,
ending epic that began in 1830fe04
<>1859my01:Saint Petersburg | Anton Rubinshtein founded the
Russian Musical Society
- Russian cultural figures mobilized to promote the
interests of the creative arts and of the professional artists who created it
- In this same year several important, nation-wide voluntary societies were
organized. EG =
(1) The Literary Fund
(2) the Political-Economic
Committees of the Free Economic Society and the Russian Imperial Geography
Society, and hundreds of individual Sunday Schools, soon coordinated by a
Literacy Committee of the Free Economic Society
- These expanding
societies had as their objective to wrest control over national
mentalities exercised until now by an autocratic and bureaucratic
authority, to abolished censorship in high culture, and to bring literacy and other appropriate
forms of primary education for the first time to the millions of "common folk"
- A table illustrates growth of voluntary societies into this period =
[pix]
- A second table illustrates ups and downs in the turbulent 1860s = [pix]
- These tables are graphic illustration of a phenomenal growth of a
fledgling Russian "civil
society"
\\
*--Yuri Olkhovsky, Vladimir Stasov and
Russian National Culture
<>1859fa:1862;
Russian noble assemblies became mobilization centers of
rural gentry politics, and they often clashed with official
reformers. Provincial gentry committees complained, but the state did not waiver [VSB,3:593-8]
<>1859oc16:oc17; VA
Harpers Ferry attacked by a guerilla army with anti-slavery zealot John Brown (1800:1859de) at its head
- This decisive event had a 5-year background =
- 1854:Kansas-Nebraska Act assured that these new territories would not be slave states
- 1855:KS Osawatomie | John Brown joined six of his sons and one son-in-law on their claim
in the "free-state" KS
- He soon was captain of
a "para-military" [as we would now say] organization of local "free-soil" Kansans
on the border of the slave-state Missouri
- 1856my:USA
| Missouri "border ruffians" crossed into KS again to harass free-staters. William Quantrill [ID] raided Lawrence
KS before the vigilante force, made up of Brown and his sons, could bring relief
- Brown’s
fundamentalist Calvinism, heavily influenced by the images of Old-Testament prophet-warriors, inspired Brown
to wage holy war against slavery
- Those who followed him were soon involved in their own border raids. They
rode into the claims along Pottawatomie Creek, seizing and killing four pro-slavery settlers (who had no
direct role in the border raids, such as Quantrill's)
- Brown subsequently also became involved in the planning of an African-American
Republic, but grew tired of political debate = "Talk! talk! talk! That will never free the
slaves. What is needed is action -- action."
- And that action took place at Harper's Ferry. John Brown expected wide-spread slave
rebellion to follow
- Or did he seek martyrdom in an ill-planned and poorly executed
military assault?
- Reinforcements eventually defeated Brown’s forces
- 1859de02:VA Charlestown | John Brown
was hanged, but not
before he handed a prison guard the following prophetic note = "I John Brown
am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will
never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly
flattered myself that without verry much bloodshed; it might be done."
[2005my12:NYR:14-17]
1942:John Steuart Curry: The Tragic Prelude [to the US Civil
War]
[Original on the Kansas State House wall, Topeka KS]
\\
*--David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
*--Merrill D. Peterson, John Brown: The Legend Revisited
*--Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman, Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown
<>1860:Japan | After brief eclipse, Kawaji became Interior Minister
(commissioner gaikoku bugyo). In 1867, he committed suicide after Edo Castle, seat of
Tokugawa regime, fell to Meiji Restoration forces [noPHandG]
<>1860:Siberia | Vladivostok founded
*1860:Asia (Map of Eurasia showing its
Political Divisions and also the various Routes of Travel between London and
India, China and Japan), S. A. Mitchell, New General Atlas, 1860. The decorative
map includes the Russian Empire, south to India and east to the Philippine and
Japanese Islands
<>1860no14:Russia and China
signed Peking [Beijing] treaty [DIR2:257-70]
<>1860:Russian Slavophile
Aleksei Khomiakov died
- Khomiakov was a leading example of influential religious or spiritual
vitality in the ranks of secular intellectuals rather than in the ranks of
Russian Orthodox theologians, and a representative of the hostility these
religous or spiritual figures felt toward the state-administered Russian
Church
- Komiakov left a
rich and influential philosophical/publicistic
legacy =
- "On Recent Developments in Philosophy" [Edie,1:221-269]
- "On Humboldt" [Raeff3:209-29 | KMM:108-112]
- Russia and the English Church... (LND:1895) [at UW; ORBIS SUMMIT]
- "On the Western Confessions of Faith" [SUQ:31-70]
- Excerpts [LDH:89-94]
\\
Books about
Aleksei Khomiakov
<>1861:Japan, Hakodate |
Russian Orthodox Church founded. The second
priest there, Nikolai (1836:1912), was remembered as the founder of Orthodoxy in Japan
<>1861:Ottoman Turkey | Abdul Aziz became Sultan in a time of deep
decline of his empire
- In the late 19th century, "Capitulations"
[ID] virtually surrendered the Turkish economy to European
imperialist powers, particularly to England
- England sought internal financial influence and control over the Turks [EG]
- Russians drifted toward further war [EG]
- The Great Game became very complex, involving national
financial security, but when opportunities arose the Russian Empire just reached
for its sword
- This was the eve of the "petroleum revolution" in
European industrialization and the appearance of trans-national corporate
enterprise to develop that source of energy. The Near-Eastern possessions of the
Ottoman Empire were to become a central bone of contention
<>1861ja28:Alexander II addressed State Council
urging firm action to bring serfreform to conclusion [VSB,3:599]
- 1861fe19:Russian social/institutional reform of most profound
significance, EMANCIPATION of privately owned (gentry owned) serfs
- English-language Proclamation [TXT]
etc. [VSB,3:600-02 | DIR2:271-5
| DPH:282-5 | Page,Russia]
- Russian Proclamation [TXT].
Obshchee polozhenie... [TXT]
[These and others in Russian:
RA2:38f, 82f, and 124f]
- Brief history of serfdom, from its formal establishment to final
dismantlement [LOOP on "serf"]
- A year and a half later, USA began at the national
level to emancipate slaves [LOOP on
"slave"]
- Russian peasant songs described village attitudes toward the institution
serfdom [Reeder:105-08]
- Gentry landlord and peasant -- the two bookends that held
Imperial social/service hierarchies upright -- both had reason to be discontented with the
terms of this greatest of the great reforms =
- Serf reform expropriated half the lands in gentry hands, with compensation
- The compensation was insufficient to bring the Russian landed aristocracy, as a
class, out of bankruptcy
- Noble assemblies fumed, but rural gentry politics proved powerless
- Expropriated gentry lands and village lands were granted to peasants through their village societies,
rather than to peasant households
- Peasants were saddled with redemption payments which
were too high (greater than the productive value of the often inferior lands distributed) and
charged 6% interest on unpaid principle. Immediately, peasants fell into arrears
- [TXT on Russian agricultural land over the half
century after emancipation]
- Nothing galled Russian villagers more than the immediate fact that freedom did not mean
freedom at all for three years of "temporary obligation" to the old landlord
master
- 1861mr22:Intrior Minister Sergei Lanskoi circular on creation of Peace
Arbitrators to facilitate negotiations between gentry and their ex-serfs [VSB,3:602-3]
These arbitrators were thought to represent a "civil society"
under state sponsorship
- 1861ap:Bezdna, a village south of Kazan | Peasant rebellion, caused by
uncertainties about emancipation, was crushed by decisive military action [Daniel Field, ed.
Rebels in the Name of the Tsar].
More from Rebels
- More on peasant disturbances among recently "emancipated" serfs, and other forms of mass
response to the greatest of the Great Reforms [VSB,3:603-5]
- Emancipation did not solve the ages-old problem of serfdom, nor did USA emancipation solve
the problems caused by slavery, but both great legislative moves brought an
end to bound labor in both Russia and
USA. [SWH:300-15 contains comparative primary
documents, especially petitions from freed serfs and slaves]
- One of the most important long-term historical consequences of
Russian serf emancipation in 1861 was the transformation of an unfree rural soslovie
[formally defined social class (ID)] into free village
laborers. The imperial state continued to enforce and defend traditional divisions of the
imperial Russian population into these five "medieval" sosloviia. And the
state pressured peasants to continue to live within traditional village
institutions and practices. But in truth, the state wholly remodeled those
village institutions and practices along statist lines. The state's own reforms
were tearing apart rotten social/service hierarchies, but at the same time
officials made strenuous effort to preserve ancient social
divisions. Emancipated village laborers in Russia are best not called "workers" or "proletariat"
so long as they stayed "down on the farm" and worked the fields. Villagers were
not allowed to travel away from their villages without receiving an "internal
visa" or passport. It seems best to call
these post-emancipation villagers "peasants" [peasant LOOP]
- Some post-emancipation Russian peasants did manage to drift away from village community
ways. Those who drifted away contributed to the rise of a new social class, a "laboring class"
or "wage-labor". These either hired out their labor in agricultural pursuits or became hirelings
in newly appearing industrial enterprises
- In the 1860s, Russia and USA both were beginning to experience a general European (and soon
universal) social/economic novelty, the proletariat. England had been wrestling with this novel
challenge for nearly a century. As other nations entered the
industrialization process, they too had to confront a challenge that intensified in the second half of
the 19th century = [labor LOOP]
- Unlike west Europe and USA, Russia did not experience a powerful new liberal "middle
class", the "bourgeoisie", that other novel 19th-century social class, the one that benefited most
obviously from industrialization and pushed to abolish all vestiges of the medieval past
- But Russia was significantly very much like west Europe in its rush to extract advantages from expanding imperialist exploitation of peoples and regions
at the periphery of imperialist power. For Imperial Russia as for England,
France and the other widely expansive European states, the vaunted "progressive" features of
"Western" bourgeois capitalist
industrialization (EG="free labor" or wage labor, representative government, liberal civil
rights, etc.) played essentially no role in those peripheral regions subjected
to their projected power
- Serf emancipation was the first of the "great reforms", but.....
- Peasant emancipation in the 1860s was incomplete, and no serious or thorough
measures were to follow the initial legislation until the
1906no09:Stolypin land reforms targeted the
village foundations of Russian agriculture and, we might say, sought to convert
Russian "peasants" into "farmers". [Try this farm LOOP]
- From this point forward, Russian Imperial social/service hierarchies entered into
their death agonies. This is certain, but need the social/service death
agonies have brought down old Russia in the revolutions of 1917? Another vital
question = Did the USSR inherit Imperial social/service traditions?
\\
*--Kolchin to p47 (p49 = chronology of world-wide emancipation of unfree labor), ch.3:157-191, & Conclusion:359-75
*--Saul,1:312-21
*--Mironov,2:107-142 (social sources of the demise of social/economic bondage)
*--Blum:345-66 describes the serf-owning gentry on the eve of emancipation
*--Blum:575-620 describes emancipation, and concludes his general account of serfdom in Russia
*--Robinson, ch3 (peasants in the last decades of serfdom) & ch4 (gentry landlords on the eve of emancipation)
*--UO website map of Slave crops in the American South
*--Petr Zaionchkovskii, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia (1978)
*--Roxanne Easley, The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia: Peace arbitrators and the development of civil society (2009:Routledge)
*--Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and Peasant Emancipation (1968)
*--Terence Emmons, ed. Emancipation of the Russian Serfs. Series: European Problem Studies. NYC:1970
*--Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861
(1976)
*--David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of
Emancipation (1990)
*--Ben Eklof and Stephen Grant, eds. World of the Russian Peasant: Post-Emancipation
Culture and Society (1990)
*--Wayne Vucinich, ed. The Peasant in Nineteenth Century Russia
(1968)
*--Reginald Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St.
Petersburg, 1855-1870 (1971)
<>1861ap01(NS 13):1865; USA Civil War lasted four years
- Newspaper accounts of two Virginia communities [TXT] on the eve of and during
the Civil War. Newspaper accounts of the militant rebel against
slavery, John Brown
- Russia sided with the North, England with the South
- 1865sp:North Pacific waters, Bering and Okhotsk seas,
Siberian coastal waters were the cruising grounds of Confederate naval
commander James Waddell aboard his cruiser Shenandoah. His mission =
harass Union whalers. This was months after the Civil War formally terminated,
but the commander had not been informed of that fact. More on whaling =
- 1872:Arctic Sea | A large part of the USA whaling fleet
caught in ice and destroyed. Civil War had already damaged whaling industry.
The Union purchased many whaling vessels with the purpose of weighting them
down with stone and sinking them in Confederate harbors
- 1846:1875; Gray Whales nearly exterminated; 11,000 killed in these thirty years
- The third and most glorious phase of USA whaling was
at its end. Whale oil as a vital component of global trade was also at an end
of its noteworthy 300-year history [Sanderson,Follow:248-9 argues that whaling had
little influence on the course of history. When petroleum came to replace it,
"the whole business just petered out without leaving any outstanding imprint
on the world" (249) Surely he exaggerates]
- A new age of petroleum was dawning, and with it a new
age of energy politics. Value of whale oil fell, though the value of baleen
remained high. Thus, the herds were slaughtered and left to rot with only
baleen extracted. Several whale species were nearly extinguished as the 19th
century wound down
\\
*--[W]
*--Saul,1:322-85
<>1861jy04:Russian
great reforms included a new vodka tax-farm system (Polozhenie o piteinom sbore and other financial reforms [RA2:144f and 191f])
<>1861se:Saint Petersburg | Circulation of revolutionary proclamation "To the Young
Generation" [VSB,3:639]
- The swift arrest and
exile of one author, Mikhail Mikhailov, could not be mentioned in the legal
press. All efforts to do so were censored = [pix]
- 1861jy01:London| Ogarev composed the revolutionary proclamation "What Do the People Need?"
["Chto nuzhno narodu? (GRV:198-201)] which circulated widely in Russia, beginning at this time
- Soon student disturbances forced officials to close most universities. Herzen advised
"Go to the people!" [VSB,3:636]
-
"Civil society" was getting impatient, increasingly ready for bold action just months after
the great serf emancipation [ID]. Over the next half century, Russians came to view
expressions of discontent within universities and other institutions of higher learning as a sensitive
barometer of wider, educated public opinion
<>1861de05:1862fe; Russian
gentry in their noble assemblies
deliberated on the problem of serf emancipation [FFS:103-113]
- 1862fe:Tver gentry assembly issued a most visionary (radical) address to
Emperor Alexander [FFS:104-5].. Especially noteworthy is its concentrated assault on the evils of the
enforced social/service hierarchies (i.e., soslovie
and chin, the superannuated medieval social estates
and the absolutist bureaucratic structures created by the Table of Ranks)
- Elite resistance failed, but continued to inspire
social-political activists for decades to come
[EG]
- The futile and grand initiative in Tver harmonized with the views of many
Russian gentry landowners and with the emerging urban
civil society
<>1862ja25:1863my; Russian peasants submitted petitions [FFS:170-179]
<>1862fe:Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev published
his controversial
Otsy i deti [Fathers
and Children (or Sons)
Translated
TXT1
TXT2
TXT3]
- Turgenev offered his famous definition of "nihilist" in chapter five [cf. DIR2:298-302].
A distorted version of the term "nihilist" evolved in the public imagination and
quickly worked its way as such into the vocabulary of Russian and then world
political culture. In the novel, Arkady corrected Nikolai and Pavel's
distortions, but many readers -- especially anti-reform officials -- found
Nikolai and Pavel's distortions useful.
- Reactionaries sought not only to demonize and constrain
a vigorous public mobilization which supported and urged more state reform, but
they also sought to choke off the modern inclination toward scientific or
experimental/rational ways of thinking about the world
- The scene in chapter five portrays two older brothers, Nikolai and Pavel, who
live on Nikolai's gentry estate in modest, old-fashioned, aristocratic comfort.
Peasant servants cater to their daily needs. Nikolai's son, Arkady, and his friend,
Bazarov, were visiting on break from university studies
- Uncle Pavel spoke at breakfast. [SAC Editor has entered in brackets a couple
of interpretive elaborations] =
"Where have I heard that name before, Bazarov? Nikolai, don't you remember, there was a surgeon called Bazarov in our father's division."
"I believe there was."
"Exactly. So that surgeon is his father. Hm!" [Pavel sought to establish Bazarov's lineage, his
bona fides in familiar old-regime terms of social/service eminence and
rank] Pavel Petrovich pulled his mustache. "Well, and Monsieur Bazarov, what is
he?" he asked in a leisurely tone.
"What is Bazarov?" Arkady smiled. "Would you like me to tell you, uncle, what he really is?"
["really is" rather than "seems to be" as defined in old-regime terms]
"Please do, nephew."
"He is a nihilist!"
"What?" asked Nikolai Petrovich, while Pavel Petrovich lifted his knife in the air with a small piece
of butter on the tip and remained motionless.
"He is a nihilist", repeated Arkady.
"A nihilist", said Nikolai Petrovich. "That comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, as far as I can judge; the word must mean a man who . . . who believes in
nothing?"
"Better to say 'who respects nothing' ", interposed Pavel Petrovich and lowered his knife with the butter on it.
"Who regards everything from the critical point of view", said Arkady.
"Isn't that exactly the same thing?" asked Pavel Petrovich.
"No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a person who does not bow down to any authority, who does not accept
any principle on faith, however much that principle may be revered."
"Well, and is that good?" asked Pavel Petrovich.
"That depends, uncle dear. For some it is good, for others very bad."
"Indeed. Well, I see that's not in our line. We old-fashioned people think that without principles, taken
as you say on faith, one can't take a step or even breathe. Vous avez change tout cela; may God
grant you health and a general's rank, and we shall be content to look on and admire your . . . what was the
name?"
"Nihilists", said Arkady, pronouncing the word very distinctly.
"Yes, there used to be Hegelists [ID] and now there are nihilists."
[Here Pavel used an awkward term for "Hegelians", Gegelisty
(rather than the more proper Gegel'iantsy). This allowed a sononorous
mocking of Gegelisty among the fathers (his own cohort) and nigilisty among the
children (Bazarov and Arkady). Pavel wrapped up his interrogation =]
"We shall see how you will manage to exist in the empty airless void; and now ring
up the servant girl, please, brother Nikolai, it's time for me to drink my cocoa."
- The settled ways of these old landed noble elites faced great uncertainty
as modernizing reform picked up steam
- This was the first summer after serf
emancipation, and the countryside was unsettled all around
[ID]
- Unrest was also evident in big cities. In the coming fall, student
rebellion was going to force closure of Russian universities [EG]
- For the Russian reading public, the rustic ways of Nikolai's gentry estate
seemed a becalmed island encircled by inevitable but perilous change. In this
setting, Pavel's cocoa habit might seem a symbol of hide-bound and callous
indifference. Bazarov's scientific interest in frog dissection might seem an
ominous foreshadowing of vast calamity
- By the mid-1860s, grandee elites, police
officials and others who dreaded impending reform had fashioned the meaning of
the term "nihilist" in public discourse in such a way that it served as a
scare-label for all progressive action and opinion, especially that of the
young
- That's how Uncle Pavel saw it, even after Nephew Arkady tried to correct
him
- 1867:USA diplomat and traveler Eugene Schuyler
[ID] translated
Fathers and Sons. This marked the beginning of more than a decade of
mutual Russian-USA cultural fascination [GO 1958:Brussels
for another such epoch]
- Other works by Turgenev of particular cultural/historical
significance =
- 1852:Zapiski okhotnika [Sportsman's Sketches
Translated TXT]
[or Hunter's Notebook, etc.]
- 1855:Rudin [Translated TXT] (1855) a portrait of a "superfluous gentleman" or rootless
intelligent, probably modeled largely on Mikhail Bakunin
[ID]
- 1867:Dym [Smoke =
Translated TXT
| 1919:USA radical John Reed Introduction [TXT]
The book hinted at east European revolutionary movements
- 1876:Nov' [Virgin Soil =
Translated TXT],
a story based on the populist revolutionary movement of the day
[ID]
- Turgenev was probably the most widely read and publicly
influential of the Golden-Age novelists, even if he was not perhaps the greatest
of these [EG#1 | EG#2]
\\
*--Julicher:
chapter 9
*--Saul,2:167-213, 225-31
*--Victor Ripp, Turgenev's Russia, from Notes of a Hunter to Fathers and Sons
(1980)
<>1862fe05:fe16;
Nikolai Chernyshevskii wrote one of his most important political/theoretical pieces,
"Unaddressed
Letters" [SLM | Q.PSS#10:90-116] [MER 44 246 256 272 277]
<>1862sp:Mysterious fires burned large sections of Petersburg,
causing wide-spread panic and providing a pretext for harsh state action against
social activists
*--Officials encouraged public outrage by leaking
suggestions that the fires were set by "nihilistic" university-student arsonists
<>1862my:Revolutionary proclamation "Young Russia"
written by the headlong student radical of gentry background, Petr Zaichnevskii [VSB,3:639-41
| Rooney]
*--Another proclamation appeared in these days which was very different from
Zaichnevskii's = Chernyshevskii composed "Salute
to the Gentry-owned Peasants from their Well-wishers..." [Kimball resumé of contents | Russian
TXT]
\\
*--VRR
<>1862my20:USA Homestead Act [TXT]
[TXT with commentary] opened vast
public lands to emigrants willing to put down roots and make a life for themselves
farming
- Industrial mechanization of farming was making
remarkable progress [pix]
- 1862jy02:Morrill Act [TXT] eventually created 69
state colleges. These 'land acts" were components of an emerging plan for
national economic modernization in which the railroad was the first giant
organizational expression =
- 1862jy01:USA Pres. Lincoln signed Pacific Railway Act, approving an act
of Congress which was anticipated by the Homestead Act and proposed "to aid in the construction of a railroad
and telegraph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean."
- Section 3 of said act provided "that there be, and is hereby granted to the said
company * * * * every alternate section of public land, designated by odd numbers, to the
amount of five alternate sections per mile on each side of said railroad, on the line
thereof, and within the limits of ten miles of each side of said road, not sold, reserved,
or otherwise disposed of by the United State, and to which a pre-emption or homestead
claim may not have attached, at the time the line of said road is definitely fixed."
Mineral lands were exempted, and all lands not sold or disposed of by said company within
three years after the completion of the entire road were to be subject to settlement and
pre-emption, like other lands at a price not exceeding $1,25 per acre, to be paid to said
company.
- Section 4 provided that whenever said company completed forty consecutive
miles of any portion of said railroad, the President of the United States should
appoint three commissioners to examine the same, and report to him in relation
thereto; and upon satisfactory information to him of the completion of forty
miles, patents should be issued conveying the right and title to said lands to
said company, on each side of the road, as far as the same was completed, to the
amount aforementioned; and patents were in like manner to be issued on the
completion of each forty mil
- Section 5 provided that in addition to the issuance of patents to lands to the company
upon the completion of each forty miles, the Secretary of the Treasury was also to issue
to said company, bonds of the United States of $1,000 each, payable in thirty years after
date, bearing six per cent per annum interest, to the amount of sixteen of said bonds per
mile for such section of forty miles; and to secure the repayment to the United States of
the amount of said bonds, together with all interest thereon which may have been paid by
the United States, the issue of said bonds and delivery to the company were to constitute
a first mortgage on the whole line of the railroad, together with the rolling stock,
fixtures and property of every kind and description
- The act specified the official charge to newly formed industrial companies,
The Union Pacific Railroad and
all of its subsidiaries
- 1864:A second railroad act followed
\\
*--[W]
*--20th century revival of homestead concept [W]
<>1862je06:China suffered further refinement of open ports and cities
arrangements at the hands of England, Russia, France, and the Netherlands
*--Two decades later, a new imperialist power, Japan,
upset the balance among those that fed on China,
and those old imperialist powers in any event were themselves growing restless
with the status quo in the far east
\\
Beasley,MHJ:80
<>1862su:Russian activist members of fledgling "educated
public" arrested
by the hundreds (e.g., Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Serno-Solov'evich), journals suppressed
(e.g., Sovremennik [ID])
- The Reform spirit was dampened and a fledgling
civil society blighted
- Consequently, a Russian revolutionary
movement was spawned within a newly identified stratum of the Russian
population, the "intelligentsia" [ID]
- That summer witnessed first one then, a few days later, a second
assassination attempt on two different tsarist Viceroys in Poland
- The second
of these targeted Grand Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich, the tsar's "liberal"
brother
- Terrorism entered the political mix, closely connected at first with
the motive of revenge, "eye for an eye". Polish viceroys had approved execution
of activist junior officers in Warsaw. [TXT w/provisional definition
of "terrorism"]
- Terrorism began to appear in political pamphlets and actual terrorist acts
increased in number over the next twenty years. This first epoch of political terror in
Russia culminated in the assassination of the tsar liberator himself
<>1862se17:1890mr18(NS); German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck guided Prussia and then German
Reich in the 27 years after he served in the Russian capital St.Petersburg [DPH:140-55
|
DIR2:289-97]
- Sometimes called "the Iron Chancellor", Bismarck created a nation-state out of political patchwork
[MAP] of Protestant,
German speaking peoples in north central Europe, under Prussian dominance and with capital
in Berlin
- A few days after he assumed his new post, he delivered a speech with the famous line,
"The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority
decisions, but by blood and iron"
- He transcended much of the political
concepts of the post-Napoleon world -- radical, liberal, conservative,
reactionary ideologies -- in favor of Realpolitik [practical politics,
actual POLITICAL policies]
- 1863:1890; For a quarter century, Bismarck managed the Prussian-
then German-Russian diplomatic relationship with superb adroitness [DIR3:336-45]
\\
*--Dietrich Geyer,
Russian Imperialism: The interaction of Domestic and Foreign
Policy, 1860-1914
*--[W]
<>1862se22(NS):USA President Lincoln issued his
"Emancipation Proclamation" [TXT]
[ditto] which set a
timetable for freeing slaves in specified locales
*--Eighteen months earlier, Russia emancipated its serfs
*--Problems of slavery were far from settled by this act, but the
long history of bound labor in USA was
formally at an end [LOOP on "slave"]
*--For Russia, as for USA, the liberation of unfree labor marked the beginning
of modern industrial labor movements
<>1863:1864; USA National Banking Act
<>1863:1873; French author of
pop-art fiction,
Jules Verne
(1828-1905) glorified the scientific and engineering potential of the industrial era
*1863:Cinq semaines en Ballon
*1864:Voyage au centre de la terre
*1870:Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
*1873:Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
<>1863:French artists rebelled against the cultural
establishment when they opened an exhibit, "Salon des refusés",
comprising works refused for official display. This marked the beginning of the
profoundly influential "impressionist" era in European graphic arts, lasting a
quarter of a century
[W]
*--Some call the epoch that followed the
"post-impressionist" era
<>1863ja23:Polish rebellion reached stage
of open armed insurrection against Russian imperialism. Polish National Committee
proclamation [VSB,3:611-]
*--Polish "freedom fighters" tried to enlist the Russian political opposition
into their struggle in a effort to create an uprising in the middle Volga basin.
The "Kazan Conspiracy" was designed to create a diversion, perhaps a "second
front", forcing Russian authorities to commit resources to suppress both a
Polish and a Russian uprising. The Conspiracy was a flop, in part because nearly
all Russian activists refused to be a part of it
*--The central question was
this = Are Polish activists after the same things as Russian activists?
\\
*--R.F. Leslie, Reform and Insurrection in Russian Poland, 1856-1865
*--Joseph Wieczerzak,
A Polish chapter in Civil War America; the effects of the
January insurrection on American opinion and diplomacy
*--VRR, ch.12 about the Kazan Conspiracy
<>1863ja:Russian statist journalist and newspaperman Mikhail
Katkov wrote patriotic editorials against Revolution in Poland [DIR2:276-83
| DIR3:312-21]
- At the end of the Nicholas-era, Katkov had been replaced as editor of the major Moscow daily newspaper, Moskovskie vedomosti [Moscow News]
- Over the
seven years since then the newspaper became a strong voice of an emerging "public"
- Now Katkov was returned to control over the powerful newspaper and, with
state subventions and support, he launched a crusade against progressive public opinion and
self-organization
- He gained control also over the monthly journal Russkii vestnik [Russian messenger]
and turned it to the same establishmentarian cause
- Katkov was one of the first allowed, in collusion with officials in the censorship bureaus and
with Interior Minister Valuev, to discuss the émigré Alexander Herzen and
his popular publications
- Katkov was allowed to do what
censorship allowed no other Russian writer or
publication to do because he attacked Herzen relentlessly
- Katkov made
great effort to link Herzen with Polish rebellion -- with sedition in general -- and to link all that with every expression of social/political
independence among the Russian public. Liberals and progressives were traitors to holy Russia
- The influence and authority of Russian mass media -- both official and independent publishing outlets --
on national consciousness continued to grow [ID]
\\
*--Karel Durman, The Time of the Thunderer: Mikhail Katkov, Russian Nationalist
Extremism, and the Failure of the Bismarckian System, 1871-1887 (1988)
*--Michael R. Katz,. Mikhail N. Katkov: A Political Biography, 1818-1887
(1966) [noUO]
*--Louise McReynolds,
News Under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a
Mass-Circulation Press (1991)
<>1863ap13:Russian Interior Minister Petr Valuev submitted
memo on the relationship of state and society, a statist version of "civil
society" [Raeff2:122-131
<>1863je18:Russian
university reform
and other educational reforms [VSB,3:610-11]
*--Russian texts, Obshchii ustav... etc. [RA2:382f, 411f, and 417f]
*--The "great reforms" continued, but notice later
official reactionary measures
\\
*--P. Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia
*--Danierl R. Brower,
Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia
*--Abbott Gleason,
Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s
(1980)
*--Alan Kimball,
"Student Interests and Student Politics: Kazan University"
<>1863fa:Russian pundit Chernyshevskii
while imprisoned by tsarist authorities published a novel, What Is to Be Done?
[1989 translation is better than
1986 | Electronic
TXT#1 |
TXT#2 |
TXT#3]
- It has been described as an awful novel but the greatest awful novel ever written. Its greatness derived mainly from
the immense popularity and influence it had on an emerging reading public and, subsequently, on Russian political culture
[EG | CF:KMM:141-54]
- One of the novel’s characters was modeled on the physiologist and psychologist Ivan Sechenov. See
Sechenov's Autobiographical Notes and
Selected Physiological and Psychological Works (MVA)
<>1864:1866; USA | Second railroad act followed first
- Western-Union effort to link USA and Europe via
Alaska and
Siberia failed when Atlantic cable
[pix] eliminated need, but great Atlantic-to-Pacific project
moved ahead
- 1864fe09:USA government grant to the State of Kansas was accepted and handed directly to the newly formed
private industrial company, Achison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company [AT&SF]
which was driving a line from Kansas, through Indian Territory, to the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston, Texas
- Railroads found their way
directly into US folk culture, for example the popular folksong "Wabash
Cannonball" [TXT]
- They found their way into the cultures of the world around. So we give full
rein to our iron horse as we gallop over a wide global terrain in the
LOOP on railroads
- The end of the Civil War can be taken as the beginning of the era of
industrial transformation of the USA economy
\\
Saul,1:360-70
<>1864:1876; London was the HQ of
The International Workingmen's Association [later known as "The First International"]
*1871:General Rules [DPH:205-7]
*--"Socialism" beginning to take on organized existence in
Europe, sometimes in close association with wage-labor, sometimes less close
<>1864:1949au12;
Geneva Convention signed as an international treaty, then augmented and
perfected over the next nine decades
- The Geneva Convention would be augmented by 3 further
conventions over the next 84
years [TXT~]
- 1906:Second Geneva Convention signed
- 1929:Second augmented
- 1949au12:Third and fourth Geneva Conventions signed,
with signing of renewed and augmented First and Second conventions
<>1864wi:Russian novelist Fedor
Dostoevsky criticized Chernyshevskii-style materialist philosophy in 1st half of Notes
from the Underground [TXT] [cf.
Edie,2:240-9]
*--Dostoevsky presented one of the first powerful critiques of the emerging
European "scientistic" trends
<>1864ja01:Russian state made significant
concessions to
provincial and local public and their need for self administration = the "Zemstvo
Reform" [VSB,3:613-4 | DPH:285-7]
<>1864fe19:Polish rebellion
allowed Russian officials to pass "progressive" reforms that weakened indigenous
Polish resistance to Russian power
<>1864oc29:Russian Foreign Minister Aleksandr Gorchakov's
memo on Central Asia
- Gorchakov compared Russian imperialism with general
European imperialism, that of "all civilized states that come into contact with
half-savage nomadic tribes without firm social organization"
- Like USA, France,
Holland and England, Russia felt compelled to establish "a certain authority over its
neighbors, whose wild and unruly customs render them very troublesome"
- Expansion into
new territory created another even more remote frontier where yet other "wild
and unruly"
peoples begin to cause trouble
- That forced yet further movement, and then
further. The choice was to give up or
"advance farther and farther into the heart of savage lands". Russia advanced
"not so much from ambition as from dire necessity, where the greatest
difficulty lies in being able to stop" [VSB,3:610 |
BNE:168-70 | SAC emphasis]
- Compare this argument with the English argument [ID] and with an
early US argument [ID] and a later US argument
[ID]
- Map
of Russian Empire and its "sphere of influence"
- Gorchakov was
in part defending and justifying Russian imperialism, but at the same time
he sought to cool growing competitive heat in the relations between
European powers as they careened outward toward one anothers' imperialist
peripheries. He hoped to keep
Europeans from attacking Europeans as they all responded to the imperatives of the Great Game
- 1867 in the Indian city Deoband, near Dehli, local Muslims took action to bring an end to that condition described by Gorchakov
as "tribes without firm social organization". They organized themselves against English rule. They centered their
activities on the village madrasa, the fundamentalist Islamic school, which emphasized training the young, especially
the poor, in fundamentals of the Koran and the sharia (Islamic law). Over the next century and a half, Deoband
issued about 250,000 fatwa (instructions on proper Muslim behavior)
- By the late 20th century, the Taliban, with US help,
had in much the same way become a serious force among Islamic peoples of that region
\\
*--Robert D. Crews,
For Prophet and
Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia
*--E. Allworth, ed.
Central Asia
*----------.
Nationality Question in Soviet Central Asia
*----------.
Tatars of the Crimea: Their Struggle
for Survival...
*--S. Becker,
Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara
and Khiva, 1865-1924
*--Richard A. Pierce,
Russian Central
Asia, 1867-1917:A Study in Colonial Rule
*--Serge A. Zenkovsky, ed.,
Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia
<>1864no:USA CO Ft.Lyon area | In good faith, CO Volunteers
Colonel Edward Wynkoop convinced Native American Cheyenne tribe to place selves under
protection of the US military [Hutton:56]
- Shortly, Colorado Governor John Evans and the Colorado Volunteers, under the command of
John Chivington, attacked the peaceful village and declared a war of extermination against
the Cheyenne
- The event came to be known as the Sand Creek Massacre and marks the symbolic
beginning of several years of warfare on the Great Plains
- The ambush unsettled the whole territory from the Platte.R south to Red.R
- Military commander/administrator Philip Sheridan, a well-known Civil War commander now
assigned to duties in the war against Native Americans on the Great Plains, later put
stress on the importance of this period in his and his nation's life. He referred to it vaguely as the beginning of Indian harassment of settlers and disruption of stage and
railroad routes [ShePH.vsp,2:282. (03):this number in parentheses
records the order in which Sheridan's memoirs accounted these events]
- Sheridan made no mention of the Sand Creek massacre
- 1864:1870; KS the scene of "Indian troubles" as military shifted its
attention from Civil War and occupation of the defeated South in the era of Reconstruction
- 1883:Early Kansas historian William Cutler described the era
[W]
- 1864:1868; KS Ft.Larned | Significant construction of bridges, stone & lumber
buildings. Military projects were designed for "protection" of the Santa Fe
Trail
- 1866:USA Great Plains divided into military administrative units,
"divisions", "with a view to controlling the Indians". Division of Missouri was created and put under the command of General
Sherman. "Former temporizing" had made Native Americans "confident"
& "defiant" [(15) ShePH.vsp,2:297]
- 1866:Major General William Hazen, a veteran of the Indian wars even before the
Civil War, described his policy outlook: "allot to each tribe, arbitrarily, its
territory or reservation, and make vigorous, unceasing war on all that do not
obey and remain upon their grounds" [Hutton:43]
- 1866su:KS | "military operations" against "hostile tribes" of
Native Americans
commenced
<>1864no20:Russian legal
reform [VSB,3:614-16] Russian text Uchrezh. sudeb. ustanovlenii [RA2:278f]
- Legal reforms created independent judiciary, trial by jury, the right to
legal representation, and a large promise of "rule by law" in civil cases
- They extended to recently freed peasant the right to bring suit at court
- They also caused large numbers of professionally oriented Russians to take
up careers as lawyers
- This was an important moment in the long history of Russian "rule of law" [LOOP
on history of Russian "law codes"]
- More than a dozen years later, the
trial of Vera Zasulich
confirmed the worse fears of those who opposed this "great reform"
\
*--Mironov,2:223-365 puts late Imperial law in the
broadest Russian historical and social context, reaching back to medieval times
*--Richard Wortman, The Development of
a Russian Legal Consciousness
*1981ap:JGO:161-84 | T. Taranovski, "The Aborted Counter-Reform: The Muravev
Commission and the Judicial Statutes of 1864"
*--S. Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (NYC:1953)
<>1864de08(NS):Vatican issued Pope Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors" [DPH:233-41], including "Errors about civil society,
considered both in itself and in its relation to the Church" [237-9] Other Catholic
Church/state documents [DPH:241-5]
<>1865:1869; Russian novelist at the dawn of world fame,
Leo Tolstoy
(1828:1910) produced his first great novel War and Peace
- Just for fun, try this brief comic-book version of the massive novel =
[TXT,part.1]
[TXT,part.2]
- Tolstoy was a central figure of the Russian "golden age" in its late novelistic phase, from the 1850s to the 1880s
- His most important writings in this "golden age" =
- 1851:1857; Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (written while serving in the military in the Caucausus)
- 1854:Sebastopol or Tales of Sevastopol, Crimean War battle reportage in the journal
Sovremennik
- 1861:1862; Tolstoy on Education and
very similar translation (as if a close copy) Tolstoy
on Education: Tolstoy's Educational Writings
- 1875:1877; Anna Karenina
- 1884:"Death of Ivan Ilyich"
- He outlived the Golden Age, and was possibly even more widely influential in
the Russian "Silver Age" a quarter of a century later
\\
*--Wagar on the Golden Age
of Russia culture [TXT]
<>1865ja11:Moscow
noble
(gentry) assembly, following the lead of V.P. Orlov-Davydov, addressed
Alexander II with request that he complete the zemstvo reforms "by calling
together a general assembly of elected representatives from the Russian land"
[VSB,3:616 | "Vsepoddaneishii adres moskovskogo
dvorianstva" (GRV:201-2)]
- The Moscow noble assembly presumed that only nobles would elect and be
elected. But, however "establishmentarian", the suggestion that a national representative political body
ought to be created and that it was a natural fulfillment of Zemstvo institutions shocked officials. This
is what they told Emperor Alexander =
The nobility has always been the firm mainstay of the Russian throne. Not being officials of the
government and not enjoying the rewards that such service brings, doing their duty without remuneration
for the benefit of the fatherland and the public order, these men, by virtue of their very position
within the state [as elected representative], will have the mission of preserving those moral and
political principles that are so valuable for the people and so necessary for their true
well-being, and upon which rests the structure of the state
<>1865ap06:Russian
censorship granted writers, publishers
and readers "some degree of
relief" in a two-minded reform
[VSB,3:616-17]
*--Russian text O darovanii nekotorykh oblegchenii... etc. [RA2:438f and 440f]
*--"Great reforms" continued
<>1865je28:Russian State Council and Interior Ministry
reformed laws on Jewish pale, allowing mechanics, distillers,
brewers, master craftsmen and artisans in general to live anywhere in the Empire [VSB,3:617-18]
<>1866:Russian novelist
Fedor
Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment
[TXT]
<>1866ja03:Russian financial reform
(Vrem. polozh o kontrol [RA2:204f])
*--The deep need for fiscal and military reform was addressed only late in the
process, and then under the influence of an official reactionary mood that arose
following an attempt on the life of the tsar
=
<>1866ap04:Russian terrorist Dmitrii Karakozov
tried to shoot Alexander II
- This was the second blow to civic activism and reform.
In "society", revolutionary activities now
intensified and went underground. A large body of political activists were
"burnt away" by tsarist suppression and fear of serious commitment to conspiracy
and revolution, but a small body of largely youthful activists, with "nothing to
lose", continued the struggle
- Among government figures, reactionary officials
felt vindicated in their opposition to progressive change. They could now assert
that there was a causal link between reform and terrorism
- The pace of "great
reforms" slackened
\\
*--Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism
*--VRR, ch.14
<>1866su:USA Assistant Secretary of
the Navy Gustavus Fox in Russia [VSB,3:618-20]
<>1866no24:Russian state peasant reform. State
peasants represented about half
the village population of the Empire. This reform preserved their advantages over ex-serfs
recently emancipated from private gentry ownership [VSB,3:620-1]
<>1867:London |
Karl Marx, Das
Kapital, volume one
<>1867:Paris Universal Exhibition (world's fair)
*--French engineers Léon Droux and Léon Rueff described technological and industrial
advancements [BNE:145-6]
<>1867:1876; USA Federal Government imposed
Reconstruction Act to administer defeated South for nearly ten years
<>1867mr30:Russia and USA signed treaty selling Alaska
to USA [DIR2:284-7]
- Russian ambitions through
Siberia to the New World gave way to ambitions directed south and east from Siberia in the
direction of Manchuria and Korea
- A 120-year Alaska adventure was over for Russia
- And the
70-year-old
trans-national or trans-oceanic mercantilist corporation,
the "Russian-America Company" was also at its end
- A new era of economic organization was dawning, the era of industrial companies
- A grave with Russian inscription next to the Kodiak Russian Orthodox Cathedral
[pix]
- In these years Secretary of State Seward also sought to gain possession of
the Virgin Islands, Canadian British
Columbia, and Greenland
- Canada also got many long looks from ambitious USA officials in the
time of U.S. Grant’s presidency
- For decades, Alaska had been filling with a spontaneous stream of immigrants
from the "lower 48". This human influx helped convince the Russians that Alaska
would someday soon be dominated by American pioneers and should be sold while
the selling was good
- Then, a half century after the sale, in a time of domestic
economic crisis, followed soon by international crisis, the
fate of Alaska Territory took another turn
\\
*--Saul,1:185-93, 267-311, 385-96
*--Howard Kushner,
Conflict on the Northwest Coast: American-Russian Rivalry in the
Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867 (see ch.6: "The Oregon Question and Russian-America")
*2008sp:PNQ#99,2:73-91 | Roxanne Easley, "Demographic Borderlands: People of Mixed Heritage in the Russian American Company and
the Hudson's Bay Company, 1670-1870"
*--Stuart Ramsey Tompkins, Alaska: Promyshlennik and Sourdough (1945)
<>1867ap:Vienna | Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph declared the Empire divided into a
"Dual Monarchy", the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Joseph maneuvered
his empire into position for its final half-century flare, an adventure that
ended in the catastrophe of WW1
<>1867ap01:India
became Crown Colony as rule of the trans-national imperialist corporation, The East India Company,
was brought to an end
<>1867my:Moscow | Second Slav Congress a critical moment in
the shift of Panslavism from cultural doctrine toward Russian
imperialist ideology
<>1867jy20:USA WDC | In anticipation of the
67oc21:Great Council treaty gathering in KS Medicine Lodge, Congress created the
Indian Peace Commission
- 1867se05:MO St.Louis | General Philip Sheridan left for Ft.Leavenworth KS,
reassigned from military administration of "Reconstruction" in the defeated South
- 1867oc21:KS Medicine Lodge | Great Council led to the Medicine Lodge Treaty
[W]
- 1868ja07:WDC | "Report to the President by the Indian Peace Commission"
[TXT]
- However, the government had already dispatched Sheridan and almost
immediately got underway with preparations for a massive attack on Native
Americans in the plains states
- 1868fe29:KS Ft.Leavenworth | General William Tecumseh
Sherman was now commander of the Division of the Missouri, consisting of 6000
soldiers in 27 forts. Sheridan took up command of
Sherman's department #3 (of 4). Sheridan distinguished himself in the War
Between the States. He was ready now to distinguish himself in the war between
USA and Native Americans, even as apparent efforts at peace-making were under
way
- 1868jy:WDC | Congress finally appropriated $500,000, not to the civilian Indian
Agency but to Sheridan and the military
- USA relations with the native nations
were now securely in the hands of military and railroad managers
- In preparation for the war against Native Americans, Sheridan moved his HQ to KS Ft.Hays, now Union Pacific Railroad
terminus; good depot for supplies. "Protection of the railroad was Sheridan's primary
concern" [Hutton:39]
[MAP]
- 1868jy:WY | The army forced Union Pacific Railroad President Thomas Durant to accept
Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge's route for building the railroad
further westward. Dodge an old comrade of the Civil War military. All were West Point
graduates. US President Grant and General Sherman played a role here too [Hutton:40 lxt].
Many motives swarmed around this tragic tale
- NB! also military effort to preserve and protect its
budgets from demobilization after the Civil War and "Reconstruction". For
example = 1868:Fifth Cavalry was not demobilized when no longer needed for
"Reconstruction". It was dispatched to KS [Hutton:50]
- Sheridan prepared 6-mo winter campaign (like the cavalries of Chinggis-khan
[ID], Sheridan's cavalries preferred to
strike their targets in winter)
a) "asked for additional cavalry"
b) "applied for regiment of Kansas volunteers"
c) application granted
d) organization of regiment begun in KS Topeka
e) gathered supplies
f) hired guides
- 1868au:se;KS & CO frontier settlers suffered 79 killed in Indian raids.
Now Sheridan began to attack villages in order to scatter Native Americans. Only policy
was that Indians "be soundly whipped, and the ringleaders in the present trouble
hung, their ponies killed, and such destruction of their property as will make them very
poor" [Hutton:38]
- Sheridan addressed a joint session of TX House and Senate =
These men, the buffalo hunters, have done in the last two years, and will do more in
the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done
in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary; and it is a
well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great
disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of lasting peace,
let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be
covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second
forerunner of an advanced civilization. [Rister,No Man’s Land:29]
- Here
Sheridan foreshadowed the famous Turner Thesis. He put the matter
in the proper context of expanding USA power. Sheridan helps us see that the
Turner thesis is able to frame
both frontier and imperialist expansion
- 1868au:se; MO St.Louis |General Sherman turned against the Medicine Lodge Treaty which
had not in any event been ratified, nor had any of the promised gifts and assistance been
given to the Native Americans
- Military and civilian authorities were at
loggerheads
<>1867au21(NS):North German Confederation's new Reichstag
had delegates August Bebel (1840-1913) and Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900), the first
socialists so elected
<>1868:1912;
Japan entered
into industrial modernization in the 44-year era called "Meiji Restoration"
*--Japanese businessmen Fukuzawa Yukichi and Shibuzawa Eiichi gave expression to
a new entrepreneurial, industrializing and modernizing ethos [SWH:358-63]
*--Yamagata Arimoto gave expression to a Japanese variation on militant
Chauvinism [ID] which was waxing in "The
West" in these years [SWH:340-5]
\\
*--Black, Cyril E., et al.
The Modernization of Japan and Russia: A Comparative Study
<>1868:1869; Vologda Guberniia, in far NE
Russia | Politically exiled philosopher and social theorist Petr Lavrov (1823-1900)
wrote Historical Letters
[cf. Edie,2:123-69 | VSB,3:650-1]
- Historial Letters explored the choice which the 19th century seemed to present
mankind, a choice between history and science, between "humanities", the record of human
experience, and the more universalistic laboratory and math-based ways of
knowing. Lavrov came down on the side of history
- Lavrov sought to counter the
hyper-scientism or positivism of Dmitrii Pisarev [ID] and to
inspire youth and his older generation as well to the activist life of a "critical-minded individual"
- 1856:1866; In the "pre-revolutionary" decade that preceded arrest,
imprisonment, exile, and then commitment to revolutionary struggle, Lavrov inspired a whole generation of thinking
and reading youth [EG]. He described his philosophy as "anthropologism",
not the emerging empirical social science "anthropology" but a philosophy that
put anthropos [ID]
at the heart of all that was real, actual and right. Lavrov emphasized the subjective human (even very individual and
experiential) foundations of all knowledge
- He had his way of understanding and respecting
the materialist view of the world and the dominant "positivist" trends of his
century. For that he was sometimes accused of being "eclectic" ["cherry picking"
among powerful intellectual trends]
- He was an almost pedantic historian of
thought. But he once wrote that the phrase "I WANT to know" (with emphasis on
willful desire) was the matrix of advanced human consciousness. In his
exploration of that insight, he had in his time and place little by way of pre-planted cherry orchards
of thought to pick among
- In this way he predicted ways of thinking more common to
the century that followed him, a post-scientistic
century, than to any that had come before
- 1870:From NE Russian exile to Paris
| Lavrov had given up on receiving a pardon from tsarist officials for
the largely trumped up charges brought against him in 1866. He went
into political emigration for the final thirty years of his life
- As an émigré, Lavrov quickly (and somewhat surprisingly) assumed a
position of high moral esteem and editorial responsibility within burgeoning revolutionary
movements in Russia
- 1869:Nikolai Mikhailovskii (1842-1904), published "What is Progress" [Edie,2:170-98,
esp. 177-87]. Mikhailovskii was at the very beginning of a long career in
journalism and was much influenced by Lavrov's "subjective sociology".
Mikhailovskii was now launched on a career as "public intellectual". He was one
of the first to come to maturity in the years in which Russians actually used
the word "intelligentsia" [ID]. Like many of his
generation, he took inspiration from Lavrov's realistic subjectivism. However,
also like many contemporaries, he had only a slight inclination toward Lavrov's
eventual full commitment to the cause of revolution.
Mikhailovskii remained a moderate supporter -- never "underground" or émigré --
of a progressive political trend that came to be called "legal populism"
- Continue
"populism" LOOP
<>1868:CUBA rebelled unsuccessfully against Spanish
version of European imperialism
*--CUBA and Puerto Rico all that remained of
Spanish empire in the New World after the independence revolutions of
the 1820s.
<>1868:England, London | Herbert Spencer,
Social
Statics described a new "social Darwinism" with emphasis on "natural
selection" and the beneficial results that came from "the survival of the
fittest", not just out there in the animal and vegetable world but also in
the social world of humans [CCC2,2:727 |
CCC3,2:834]
- Social Darwinism influenced anti-welfare and
anti-egalitarian politics around the globe and gave an intellectual
justification for some of the suffering that resulted from "laissez-faire"
policies
- 1869:Robert Galton published
Hereditary Genius, a pioneer study
inspired by Darwinian biological ideas. Galton's work over the next few years
resulted in the creation of a "science" of human reproduction called "eugenics"
[based on Greek morphemes and implying "well-born", something of an
"aristocratic" concept in the European world that had moved far from medieval
social concepts of superiorities by birth]
- Science now applied itself, via
eugenics, to the problems and prospects of managing the most intimate feature of
the most local of all local human institutions, the breeding nuclear family
- The application of biology to society was not the intention of
Darwin, but his science was becoming an "ism" = DarwinISM
- Nor was
it Spencer's explicit intention, but popularizations of his teachings also fed into
growing racism of the late 19th century
\\
*--Rimlinger [TXT]
offers a paragraph on social Darwinism
*--[W
devoted to definition of "eugenics", with useful bibliography]
*--[W devoted to the history and
current status of "eugenics"]
<>1868:Russian pundit Dmitrii Pisarev drowned
*--Pisarev wrote "Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism" (1861), "Bazarov"
[a powerful review of Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Children"] (1862),
"Flowers of Innocent Humor" (1864), "The Realists" (1864) [VSB,3:641-3] See
Edie,2:66-108, and
Pisarev, Selected Philosophical, Social and Political Essays (MVA:1958)
*--Described USA [Plotkin,Pisarev:35f]
<>1868se01:Switzerland
| Russian political émigré in western Europe, the
anarchist activist Mikhail Bakunin
wrote "Our Program" for the revolutionary journal Narodnoe delo [People's
Cause] [VSB,3:644]
- The movement that gathered around
this volatile and now revived old activist and his publication was a clear sign that the
poet Nikolai Nekrasov was right when he predicted that the policies of the
tsarist state bred revolutionists, not citizens
- In 1868, with
Sergei Nechaev, Bakunin wrote
"Catechism of a revolutionary" [Full English
TXT | full Russian
TXT | excerpts =
DIR2:301-8 | VSB,3:649 | cf.
Edie,1:385-423]
- A website on
Bakunin features many of his writings
- More Bakunin bibliography
- Years earlier, Bakunin caught European attention during the Revolution of 1848
[ID], spent time in Siberian
exile, escaped, and more recently rose to prominence in the First International
[ID]
- Now in the final eight years of his life
Bakunin began for the first time to have some influence on social movements in
Russia in the era of revolutionary populism here on the
eve of the great "going to the people"
\\
*--VRR, ch.2 on Bakunin and ch.15 on Nechaev
<>1868no26:USA Oklahoma Territories, Washita River |
General George Custer launched surprise winter-season attack on large Native American
village [W]
[MAP]
- The four-year Great Plains wars were drawing to an end
- Superior logistical strength and a firm resolve to wage aggressive war against all aspects
of Native American life were paying off for Euro-American
invaders
\\
Hutton:56-76, 99-100 summarizes the Washita winter war with special emphasis on lessons
applied there from the Civil War, for example, from the bombardment of civilian
targets in Vicksburg
<>1869:1895;
Central Asia | Turkmen territories absorbed into Russian Empire
*--West of the Black Sea, Balkan tensions mounted and Russian-Turkish relations deteriorated
as the focus of the Great Game shifted to
south-eastern Europe
<>1869:English political-economist
John Stuart Mill,
"The Subjection of Women"
[TXT]
*--John Stuart Mill was the last representative of the
century-long
"classical economist" tradition, and he carried that
liberal tradition a
great distance toward emerging European social-democratic views
<>1869:French democrat Leon Gambetta
ran for election and asked electors to draw
up a program for him to follow if elected
*--Gambetta's Belleville Program became a model for French
democratic politics for years [DPH:309-10]
<>1869:Russian chemist
Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834-1907) stated his "periodic law" of the elements and
laid the foundation for much of the rapid progress that followed in the study of
chemistry around the world
<>1869su:Russian émigré revolutionist
Sergei Nechaev wrote program for his revolutionary journal Narodnaia rasprava
[People's Vengeance] [VSB,3:647]
- The extraordinarily rebellious 22-year-old Nechaev was, in a sense, adopted
by the 55-year-old Bakunin
- Bakunin had an international reputation, but his contact with
actual Russian politics had until these years been very theoretical and
tangential
- He now welcomed even this
darkly sinister Nechaev
- Together, Bakunin and Nechaev conspired to gain
control over the resources that had financed Herzen's highly esteemed Kolokol
[ID]
- Together, Bakunin and
Nechaev introduced the element of extreme revolutionary conspiracy and life-dedication,
"revolutionary professionalism", into Russian populism
\\
*--Julicher::
chapter 9
<>1869au:German Marxists rejected Lassalle's
radical reformist approach to labor organization with its close ties to the
Bismarckian state. They formed an independent Social-Democratic Workers Party [Sozialdemokratische
Arbeiterpartei] and ratified its Eisenach Program [DPH:155-6]
- In these years, national workers movements were strengthened by association with an international
labor organization, the
First International
- Now, in Germany, a
political party for the first time based itself on the new
social formation, wage-labor
- In Russia this year, Nikolai Flerovskii [Bervi-Flerovskii] published his
Condition of the Working Class in Russia [LDH:253-8].
Bervi-Flerovskii captured the imagination of the Russian reading public with his
reportorial precision and his moral indignation as he described rural, suburban
and urban labor conditions
- Karl Marx was learning to read Russian so that he
might make himself directly familiar with a new generation of Russian social
critics, including Flerovskii
- Marx was beginning to see that he had so far
neglected or misunderstood the global meaning of rural wage-labor
in un-industrialized or agrarian "modes of production" such as Russia,
but also such as in much of the non-European industrializing world
- Marx and
Engels made a bold but pseudo-appeal to "workers of the world" in 1848
[ID]. Marx was in his final years making effort to actualize that appeal,
and that is a central component of the rise of a globally significant
"Marxism"
<>1870:Saint Petersburg Association of Russian Playwrights
formed with Aleksandr Ostrovskii as president
<>1870:Japan, Tokyo Kyoto Nagasaki and
Hakodate. ??ROchx missions estab in JPN. Archbishop Nikolai(861:GO) est. TOK smnandscl.
1st JPN blt svt and ikon specialists
\\
*--Togawa"Russian and Slavic:6
*--KEJ,6:3-4
<>1870:USA | About 32 nation-wide labor unions
were in existence
*--Workers were organizing themselves in the face of forceful
resistance of industrialists and financiers, and their political allies
*--Self-organized
wage-laborers represented a check and
balance on self-organized "capitalists"
<>1870:1899; Mature international grain trade fully operational.
This, plus railroad construction and the appearance of international energy competition are signs that the epoch of
"the second industrial revolution" was opening
- In addition to
earlier corporations -- Bunge, Louis Dreyfus [family
name with dash, company without], and Pillsbury -- several more great
global grain-trading family corporations formed in these 30 years =
Cargill
General
Mills
Continental
1877:Switzerland | Georges André
- 1870:USA | William Cargill began to buy grain elevators
- 1871:USA
railroad connected Minneapolis with
eastern markets
- 1871:An air-puff purification process made flour whiter
- 1874:Russia ceased to be the main source of grain
for England
- 1878my02:Minneapolis | Washburn Mill exploded.
Built new mill with stolen Hungarian mill technique, able to mill hard grains
- 1880:Global grain-trade routes thickened and extended themselves vigorously in
the late 19th and 20th centuries [maps]
- 1883:Liverpool grain market allowed trading in
"futures" | Very quickly grain exchange "clubs" or "rings" became active in the
London "Baltic Mercantile and Shipping Exchange" | The Baltic Exchange was
founded over a hundred years earlier (1746), but now economic modernization,
especially the growth of industrial urban centers, with huge non-agricultural
populations, "democratized" bread production and created a need to feed swelling
factory-labor populations. The astonishing growth of the urban population in
England created a novel situation in which England was no longer able to produce
sufficient agricultural product on the island to feed its exploding population
- The grain-trade was becoming a trans-national
corporate enterprise
- 1880s: world grain trade concentrated in USA, Russia, Canada,
Argentina, Australia, and India
- 1875:Minneapolis produced 850,000 barrels of
flour; profit = $0.50/barrel
- 1885:Minneapolis produced 5,000,000 barrels of
flour; profit = $4.00/barrel, but power shifting to big grain dealers who were
able to handle world-striding storage and transportation
- 1886:Minneapolis |
Frank Peavey built world’s
largest grain terminal
[W#1]
[W#2]
[W#3] | More about
grain elevators, with pix at bottom =
[W#4]
- 1890s:Russian branch of Louis Dreyfus grain trade
managed by the founder’s son, Charles, in the Black Sea ports
- 1895:OR Portland | Frank Peavey built a one million bushel
grain elevator and shipped wheat down the Pacific coast, then overland at the
Isthmus of Panama into the Caribbean Sea and across
the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool,
England
- 1899:MN Minneapolis | Peavey constructed 80-foot
high concrete grain elevator
- 1870:USA grain export = $60,000,000
- 1898:USA grain export = $200,000,000
- 1900s:Russian tsar invited Peavey’s son-in-law to visit
- The modernized world increasingly depended on huge, trans-national industrial
companies for its food, its "daily bread"
- GO 1972su:USA-USSR
\\
*2008:ETC Group publication, "Who
Owns Nature?" brings the topic into the 21st century
<>1870je16:Russian urban reform
promoted municipal self administration [VSB,3:621-2],
expanding upon the Charter for the Towns of Catherine II
[ID]
*--Russian text Gorodovoe polozhenie... [RA2:232f]
*--Just as self-administration was apparently promoted now in the countryside (Zemstvo
institutions of self-administration), so
also in the cities, in growing modern urban centers
*--Only one "great reform" remained to be
instituted
\\
*--Hausmann,G
<>1870jy:1871fe; Franco-Prussian war broke out. France humiliated [DPH:200-205]
<>1870jy18(NS):Rome, Vatican City | The Papal See of the Catholic Church
handed down a pronouncement on the infallibility of the Pope [DPH:243]
<>1870se04:French Third Republic declared as Louis Napoleon III fell in disgrace
[DPH:310-11]
*--Two dark decades in French political life came
to an end; but what followed was not all light =
<>1871fe26(NS):France, in the great French national
monument, the Versailles Palace near Paris | Treaty
signed ending Franco-Prussian war
- German Kaiser [emperor, German version of Caesar, just as "tsar" is the
Russian form] crowned at Versailles
- NB! this is in France, the great palace of
the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the location was an intentional insult to the
humiliated France of Napoleon III
- A united German imperial state was now
created [MAP] [compare with
MAP of Germany before union]
- Kaiser Wilhelm I (King of Prussia) offered views on the new united
German imperial throne [DPH:262-3]
- Otto von Bismarck was the man behind the throne
- Prussian kingdom grew to great power over the
previous century
- Prussian kingdom had survived a stormy
half century since the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire.
Now =
- 1871fe:1918no; For 47 years, the Prussian kingdom provided the backbone for a new north-central European
German Empire (the "Second Reich")
- German-speaking peoples now lived in and dominated two great
central European states = Germany
and Austria
- 1888:Upon Kaiser Wilhelm I’s death, Wilhelm II assumed the throne
- 1918no09:At
the end of World War One, the Hohenzollern
monarchy collapsed and the "Second Reich" evaporated
- Fifteen years later
came the "Third Reich"
<>1871:English
biologist Charles Darwin published Descent
of Man [excerpts = PWT2:227+]
- Darwin stated boldly, "The main conclusion here arrived at, and now held by many
naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is
descended from some less highly organized form"
- All biological observations, he
wrote, "point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the
co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor"
- He also stated bluntly that the educated person "cannot any longer believe
that man is the work of a separate act of creation"
- Over more than a decade, Darwin published his
thoughtful and extraordinarily systematic observations. Whatever else he was, he
was one of the world's most acute "naturalists". He looked widely, he saw much,
he recorded and systematized his observations
- Then he generated powerful
rational explanatory narratives that shocked the world
- The reading public found
it easy to carry this science into realms of emotional social/political
debate [ID]
- Darwin did not always resist the
temptation to do this himself. It is possible that English social theories
influenced Darwin as much as Darwin influenced English social theories
- Even
ideological opponents of conventional English industrialist social theories
could find inspiration in Darwin's science
<>1871:1872;
Fedor Dostoevsky
caricatured Russian revolutionists and their soft-headed allies in his novel
The
Possessed [cf. Edie,2:240-66]
<>1871sp:Russian Mennonites (German speaking Protestant
farming peoples who had lived in Russia
for a century)
initiated plans to migrate to USA
\\
*--Saul,2:75-85
*--Saul essay [TXT]
<>1871mr18:my28;
Paris Commune declared
the French capital independent from Third Republic France. Lasted about 9 weeks
before army crushed it resolutely |
[W] [DPH:311-17]
*1871ap19:Declaration [BNE:140-3]
*--International Workingmen's Association
fell into
an uproar
*1876:Paris | Prosper Lassagaray published
History of the Paris Commune of 1871
<>1871je:Russian Education Minister
Dmitrii Tolstoi introduced counter-reform measures only seven years after
progressive reform of higher education [ID]
- His goal was to block entrance into universities for
all but privileged social formations whose children went through the elite
gymnasia
- Tolstoi's "classical" education emphasized Orthodox theology, Greek and Latin
- These three topics took up about half of all instruction time [VSB,3:622-4]
- Compare the new elitist Russian elementary and secondary requirements with
the knowledge emphasized in a contemporary but more democratic educational
system, the Kansas public-school eighth grade graduation exam
in 1895
- (This exam might possibly also provide a comparison of democratic public
education in 19th-century USA with what it had become by the early 21st century)
\\
*--Samuel D. Kassow,
Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia
(1989)
*--James C. McClelland,
Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in
Tsarist Russia (1979)
*--Allen Sinel,
The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia
under Count Dmitry Tolstoi (1973)
<>1871oc08:oc10; Chicago
burned [W]
<>1871fa:1872wi; Russian Grand Duke Aleksei (son of Alexander II) visited USA and, among other things, hunted Buffalo
with General George Custer in Kansas. Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, more recently commander of prairie Indian Territory, returned the visit
\\
Saul,2:54-75
<>1872:1874; German state in struggle with Catholic
Church, the Kulturkampf [DPH:245-50]
<>1872:1883; German composer Richard Wagner created
theatre (Festspielhaus) in Bayreuth, Bavaria, where annual music festivals
allowed for the first time proper staging of his massive and revolutionary operas
<>1872:Japan, Hakodate | First Russian language schools established. Russian
psalmist Vissarion L'vovich Sartov and Japanese assistant taught languages, math,
geography and history in Russian.
\\
Togawa"Russian and Slavic:5
<>1872:International Workingmen's Association
[First International] collapsed
<>1872:USA Senate rejected USA Presidential plan to build a military base in
Samoa Islands
<>1872de:Zurich | If the venerable rebel Bakunin
was revived in this new era of revolutionary opposition [ID],
47-year-old Petr Lavrov, ex-artillery Colonel, ex-professor of
mathematics, and aspiring philosopher of notable promise, was now "reborn"
as revolutionary ideologist
<>1873:Tokyo | School of Foreign
Languages included Russian. ??NB! TOK.unv excluded Russian, showing stt comparative
indifference to Russia. Prior to Meiji, 6 samurai svt gt.Russia to std; 868:rtr.JPN and
fade away, while std frm zpd and USA bcm sig Meiji srv. BUT this scl hired Mechnikov, Lev
(ppl and Ntx1) and one of Russian samurai Ichikawa Bunkichi
\\
Togawa"Russian and Slavic:6-7
<>1873:USA PA Pittsburgh | Scottish-born
immigrant Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was now eight years into a brilliant career as
industrialist, concentrated on building a colossal steel manufacturing enterprise
- During the US Civil War, Carnegie served as a War Department railway division bureaucrat. He instantly saw an industrial
future opening before him
- Inspired by his war-time procurement experiences, in 1865 he entered the steel business
- Victory of the North in the American Civil War and an associated industrial productivity boom,
especially in railroad construction, launched the careers of several of the most famous entrepreneurs
of modern history, and Andrew Carnegie was among the first in line
- Pittsburgh PA was the base of operations for another future internationally connected billionaire
financier Andrew Mellon (1855-1937)
- Mellon inherited his father's fortune. The father wrote an autobiography =
Thomas Mellon and His Times
- In the boom years after the Civil War, Andrew Mellon built mightily on his father’s
fortune, concentrating on banking, coal, oil, railroads, public
utilities, steel, aluminum, and eventually in the aviation industry
- Mellon the younger showed a masterly control of diverse but vertically integrated
economic enterprises
- And he understood the central role of finance capital (putting the manufacturing
process itself, and certainly labor, in a position subordinate to financial profit considerations)
- But he also understood the role of governmental power and the sometimes shady political
manipulation of the "free market"
- The markets and industrial companies he worked in cannot be described as
altogether "free", or laissez-faire, or simply entrepreneurial, nor can they be
called simply "criminal"
- Mellon was an active supporter of the pro-business
and bribe-prone Republican-Party political machine in Pennsylvania
\\
*--David Cannadine, Mellon: An
American Life
<>1874:1875;
Russian "Going to the People" movement [RRC2,2:344-57]
Russian revolutionary populist movement intensified
- The "Going to the People" was one of the most
spontaneous and dramatic confrontations in all of Russian history between the
state, urban elites and the laboring folk in villages and factories
- By the hundreds, Russians -- mainly college-age youths -- fanned out into
the countryside to learn about peasant life but also to educate peasants about
their best interests, to encourage peasant mobilization for causes presumed to
be popular
- These causes were, for certain, dear to radical youth, but were they dear to villagers?
- Some of these crusaders settled into village routine for a period, but others were repelled by
the hostility or indifference of villagers
- Nonetheless, the center of attention within democratic circles remained still
peasants
- Officials were deeply alarmed. Authorities had
always controlled and restrained spontaneous "inter-soslovie" intercourse.
Official policy prevented anything like a "public sphere" to evolve within the
tightly restricted social/service hierarchies
[ID]
- Now thousands of city folk broke
with conventional practices and
spilled out into wage-labor work environments and into the countryside to mix
with and open conversations with the narod [the Russian people;
laboring folk]
- 1873oc:Young urbanite spoke with construction workers about their plight (as
remembered during interrogation after he was arrested) [TXT]
- 1875:Justice Minister Konstantin Pahlen
reported that his investigation of the "Going to the People" [ID just above] had so far turned up 770 activists from all "strata" of
imperial society, active in 37 provinces. And these were just the ones snared in
official investigations
- The
failure of students and others to adhere to assigned roles defined by their
"stratum" appeared to Pahlen to be a symptom of wide moral decay. Pahlen was shocked
to report that students shed themselves of their university uniform, the outward
sign of their stratum, and that they took on the garb of villagers as they
attempted to mix freely with them
- One soslovie imitating another and
unauthorized socializing by any group were illegal in Russia
- Pahlen emphasized
the broad sympathy for this movement among all strata of Russian society. He
expressed amazement that "many persons no longer young, fathers and mothers of
families, who enjoy material security and a more or less honored social
position, not only failed to oppose the young people but, on the contrary, often
gave them open encouragement, help, and support". In Pahlen's view, these folks seemed not to
understand that this movement to the people threatened the very foundations of
Russian life. These folks were breaking free of social/service hierarchies
- Activists among the folk distributed illegal books and other publications by Russian
émigrés abroad
[VSB,3:654-6]
- The most characteristic Russian "ideological" trends in this epoch were associated with Petr
Lavrov, Mikhail Bakunin (with Sergei Nechaev [ID]), and Petr Tkachev
- These
pundits, ideologues and theorists have been lumped together under the term "populism". The term is fine
so long as we remember that the central concept was radical rural egalitarianism with a good dash
of late-nineteenth-century socialism. Populism [narodnichestvo] was an "ism" based on "the people"
[narod, with is wide implications of "nation", "the people", "peasants" |
TXT
on the word "narod"]
- Populists were democrats in so far as they put their faith in the possibility that the Russian "people"
(90% of whom were villagers) were in a position to shape their own better
future
- Not all populists saw things that way. Some populists veered from
democracy when they pondered the possibility that a "backward" people might need the guidance of an
advanced "minority" -- an "intelligentsia" [ID]
- Even when it was not always
democratic, even when it veered toward managerial elitism, Russian populism remained at heart radical
rural egalitarianism and in stark opposition to Russian social/service
hierarchies
- Populists put a lot
of faith in the progressive implications of a pre-modern, pre-industrialized, largely rural
population. Villagers represented a promise every bit as bright as -- maybe brighter than -- that of
any other European people. Why should one presume that labor ghettos in the big industrialized cities were
better able than the Russian village to produce citizens of a wholly transformed future egalitarian and
socialist world?
- Populists put a lot of faith in the narod, but they also put a lot -- maybe a
lot more -- faith in themselves as an active ingredient in a new social mixture, a new free socialization
among all the people [what contemporaries described with the Russian word obshchenie
(ID)]
- In the early years, populists received much intellectual guidance from the émigré publications
of Alexander Herzen [ID]. But Herzen was now dead.
Mikhail Bakunin and
Petr Lavrov sought to replace him as inspirational theorists and publicists. These two did not quite reach
Herzen's level, but they were important émigré revolutionary leaders with Europe-wide reputations
- Bakunin
died in 1876, bringing and end to a spotty but unforgettable
three
decades of revolutionary activity. His influence continued in Russia and abroad
- Lavrov occupied a place of
esteem in the minds of thinking and fighting Russians (and these were not always the same people) for another
quarter of a century, living in émigré poverty and misery, until his death in 1900, ending
more
than four decades of widely various public advocacy. Lavrov's influence
continued into the 20th century
- Petr Tkachev's influence on events back in Russia was different from that
of Lavrov, Bakunin and Herzen, but like these others, Tkachev exerted his influence from a distance
- Justice Minister Pahlen
had enough sense to know that much of the energy of the epoch flowed from cultural sources far
broader and indigenous than the ideological publications of pundits in west
European emigration, broader even than the small and harassed home-bred oppositional movement. For some time, an
intense nationalistic self-consciousness had attached itself to "the folk" [narod]
and flourished in Russia in a generalized atmosphere of dissent against the
established and seemingly foreign or "un-Russian" autocratic order
- For the second time in Russian history, a wide debate arose on the virtues
and shortcomings, but mainly the virtues, of the peasant village assembly [mirskoi
skhod], the communitarian practices associated with "mutual assurance" [krugovaia poruka
-- almost always and misleadingly translated as "collective responsibility"
(ID)]
- The first epoch of such debate was in
the 1830s and 1840s [ID]
- Russian peasants lived in an unusually ancient and traditional environment
where very old European community practices survived as nowhere else. These
timeless Russian peasant practices seemed capable of serving as a foundation for
the construction of that bright egalitarian future that so many 19th-century
Europeans -- and not only Russians -- expected just around the corner
- Traditional agrarian ways in
Russia, however, also included a whole set of primitive agricultural practices -- strip
farming, three-field system, periodic redistribution of land-holding
responsibilities among village households. Redistribution seemed a bit like
"socialism", but it also functioned as a sort of "temporary private property",
in which households held land as if their own. [TXT
on these village land practices]
- Hop to this
page
of portraits and other contemporary visual representations of peasant/village life
- BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES ON THE POPULIST ERA
- The great
"going to the people" originated six years earlier but
was now being transformed, in part by state action, into resolute revolutionary conspiracy. The tsarist state
arrested hundreds of these youths and eventually brought the most vulnerable to
trial. As the political struggle of the Russian state with radical political opposition intensified,
the populist movement back in Russia took a turn toward terrorism. Efforts at
close contact with peasants and other working folk slackened
\\
*--VRR, ch.18 on the group conventionally called "Chaikovtsy"
and the movement "to the people"
<>1874:1896;
German historian and "chauvinist" ideologist Heinrich von Treitschke dealt with the contradictions between
individual freedoms and national unity
[ID] by shifting
increasingly in the direction of militaristic and nationalistic "chauvinism"
- Treitschke inspired a war-fever even in the final years of the great and peaceful
inter-European 19th century with his influential "Politics" [BNE:143-5 |
CCC3,2:989-1004 | PWT2:258-60]
- 1882mr11:French intellectual Ernest Renan, who had been a serious Germanophile prior to the
Franco-Prussian War. Now he turned against Germany, but stopped short of affirming
French nationalism in ethnic or racists terms. In a famous article, "What is a
Nation?", he emphasized group action together, the vast community of national
accomplishment. He also cautioned that a nation can remember its glories, but it
also has to learn how to think about (perhaps forget) its atrocities. Here are
some of his words =
Man does not belong to his language or to his race, he belongs
to himself alone, for he is a free being, a moral being. We no longer condone
the persecution of people in order to change their religion; persecuting them to
make them change their language or homeland appears just as evil to us.
What makes a nation is not speaking the same language or belonging to the same
ethnographic group, it is having done great things together in the past and
wanting to do more great things in the future. [...] Language invites unity,
without, however, compelling it. The United States and England, Latin America
and Spain share the same languages, but do not form single nations. Conversely,
Switzerland, so solid because it is based on the consent of its various parties,
has three or four languages. There is in humanity something superior to
language; it is will. The will of Switzerland to be united, despite the variety
of its tongues, is much more important than the similarities often obtained by
means of persecution. [TXT |
RWP2:281-91]
<>1874:China accepted Japanese control of Ryukyu Isl
<>1874:Russian philosopher
Vladimir Solov'ev published The Crisis of Western Philosophy
\\
*--Wagar on Solov'ev [TXT]
<>1874:USA, Kansas, Howard Co., Cedar Vale |
Wm. Frey (Geims) headed up a Progressive community, a populist commune = Russkaia
obshchina [Hasty:54-82]
*--KS prairie described by Grigorii Machtet [Hasty:16-53]
\\
*--Saul,2:213-25
<>1874:USA | John Fiske, Outlines of
Cosmic Philosophy, influenced American religious thinkers on the question of the harmony of the
Christian faith with the Darwinian concept of biological evolution and with its social corollary,
"Social Darwinism"
\\
*--Wagar on Fiske [TXT]
<>1874ja01:Russian military reforms
instituted universal military service [VSB,3:625 | RA2:338f = Russian text
Ustav o voinskoi povinnosti]
- This was the last of the "great reforms" actually implemented
- In
the waning years of reform, War Minister Dmitrii Miliutin reflected on rise of
reactionary attitudes among high officials = "What an amazing and lamentable
comparison with the situation as it was when I entered the top echelons of the
government thirteen years ago [1860]. Then everything surged forward; now
everything drags back. Then the sovereign was sympathetic to progress, he moved
things forward himself; now he has lost confidence in everything he himself
created, in everything that surrounds him, even himself" [VSB,3:624-5]
- 1874:1881; Seven years passed without further reforms.
The tsarist state
was turning toward reaction
- Then one crucial but belated and still-born
reform gesture
was made on the very eve of Alexander II's assassination
<>1875:1876;
Central Asian
Uzbek territories conquered by Russia
*1876:Kirghiz people also conquered
<>1875:Japan and Imperial Russia in tense
negotiations. Japan took northern Kuril Islands in exchange for dropping claims
on Sakhalin Island
\\
*1962:JGO#10:337-48| G. A. Lensen, "Japan and Tsarist Russia: Changing
Relationships, 1875-1917"
*1942:LND| B. H. Sumner, Tsardom and Imperialism in the Far East and Middle East, 1880-1914
<>1875:Russian revolutionist in exile, Petr Tkachev
published his revolutionary journal Nabat
[Tocsin; the alarm bell] [VSB,3:656 | LDH:286-93 |
"Nabat (Programma zhurnala)"| GRV:212-19]
- Tkachev was the first "populist"
[ID] to express a strong critique of rural native tradition.
Russian backwardness demanded a greater leadership role from a dedicated "intelligentsia"
[ID]
- Tkachev
was less interested in egalitarian or democratic obshchenie
[ID] than he was in effective command and
control at the head of a national assault on the Russian old order.
Tkachev urged
tighter organization and more decisive action than either Bakunin or Lavrov
[IDs]
- Tkachev was inclined toward "internal war" rather than politics. He argued that
terror was
the only way to cure Russian ills [Russian
TXT]
- The active political career of Tkachev was not very long, but his legacy lived on. Some have seen a premonition of
Lenin in the politics of Tkachev
\\
*--VRR, ch.16
<>1875:Russian
censorship officials planned restrictions against Ukrainian publications
[DIR3:268-70]
<>1875my:German
wage-laborers and socialists united
to form the Social Democratic Party [SDP] of Germany and to sign their
"Gotha Program" [DPH:263-5]
<>1876:Japan forced
a trade treaty on Korea which
opened two Korean ports
*--As Japanese industrial modernization progressed, so did
Japanese imperialist ambitions
<>1876:USA | Last Federal Troops of occupation left the
South as "Reconstruction" came to an end
*--Philadelphia World's Fair (Centennial Exposition) on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the
American Revolution
\\
Saul,2:138-43
<>1876:1885; USA and Russia | First decade in which
great trans-national petroleum corporations consolidated their grip on that industry =
- 1859:USA PA Titusville discovery [pix]
- 1863:USA Cleveland, Excelsior Works of John David Rockefeller began kerosene production
[CF=21st-century Russian version of these beginnings]
- 1869:1874; USA economic depression, 2nd worse in USA history
- Standard Oil adjusted
by gaining control of full process, "upstream" and "downstream", and introduced
rebates, kickbacks, secret rates, etc
- 1876:Baku Tovarishchestvo brat’ev Nobel [Nobel Brothers Company] soon
had Russia involved in the emerging world petroleum market
- Three Nobel
brothers, Liudvig (1831-1888), Alfred (1833-1896) and Robert, were sons of a
Russian military contractor of Swedish origin who lived in Saint-Petersburg.
The family fortune rested on their profitable industrial enterprise,
bolstered by government contracts to produce explosives and gunpowder for
the military
- 1867:Brother Alfred developed nitroglycerine into an effective explosive, but
accepted a French government contract to build a modern gunpowder plant there.
When Alfred died in 1896, he left a portion of his immense fortune to Stockholm
University to support a peace prize
- Oldest brother Liudvig inherited the
father's Russian business. He took over management of Russian factories and was given a procurement contract to supply field
artillery to Russian forces in the Russo-Turkish War
- With
his brothers' participation, Liudvig now branched out of "military-industrial" enterprise
into petroleum production, founding great works in the Baku (Azerbaijan) fields
[pix]
- At first they shipped kerosene in barrels
by sail to the mouth of the Volga. Barrels were transshipped to river boats and delivered
upstream to the great yarmarka [faire] in Nizhnii Novgorod, to be marketed throughout
Russia and to the east. This was expensive, and the Nobels could not compete with cheaper
USA kerosene
- Protective tariffs helped, but Liudvig innovated on his own to lower the
price of his product. He introduced railroad tankers and
invented pipeline delivery methods which made his kerosene competitive even
on the USA market. He transported crude oil to the Black Sea port of Batumi,
and he pioneered transportation by sea-going oil tankers. He introduced
effective petroleum reservoirs near all major cities [BrE,41:216]
- Should we think of the Nobels as "Swedish" or "Russian"? What of "European" émigrés at
heart of US economic development in these years? Was Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours
[ID] French or "American"? Was Andrew
Carnegie [ID] British or, more exactly, a Scot, or was he an "American"?
- Nobel Brothers Company value =
1879 = 3,000,000r
1916 = 45,000,000r
- 1877:1881; USA | Standard Oil "gobbled up" domestic business rivals and began to
build network of trunk and side pipelines
- 1882:USA oil refining capacity 95% under the control of
the giant energy company Standard Oil. Standard was a trust
- One great novelty was that Standard became a business well beyond Cleveland, well beyond the
borders of Ohio. Standard was a pioneer "trans-national corporation". There were no USA nationally chartered corporations, only
state chartered. Of course, there were no "international" charters in this ultra-nationalistic 19th century.
Standard expanded beyond the reach of geographically more limited legal and
governmental authorities
- By the 1880s, kerosene = main product (over 1/2 of all USA oil output; 4th
largest USA export). European office of Standard Oil boasted that oil "forced its way
into more nooks and corners of civilized and uncivilized countries than any other product
in business history emanating from a single source [i.e., emanating from this vast new trans-national
corporation]"
- Another novelty = "The concept of management by owners had evolved to the policy of
management by an active inside board [Standard Oil Executive Committee] who
met daily to determine what policies and decisions were in ‘the general
interest’ " [Gnrg] In this way, Standard represented the first huge example of
the fiduciary problem caused when "ownership" and "management" are dissociated
from one another, a problem later famously described by Adolph Berle,
and a weakness of the free market system that stretches into the 21st century
- 1886:Rothschild banking company formed Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Co. [Bnito]
The Nobel Brothers Company worked in close financial association with the
Paris-based Rothschild banking company. It was from the beginning a
"trans-national" corporation
- The oil or petroleum epoch with its great
trans-national industrial companies, was upon all who would play
the Great Game
\\
*--SAC Narrative Extension on
"Energy and Politics"
*--Saul,2:143-8 deals with the petroleum industry
*--Daniel Yergin,
The Prize: Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power
*--R. W. Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga
of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry
*2003su:Russian publication with wide circulation offered its views on how the great Rockefeller
and J. P. Morgan industrial/financial empires were built in USA [TXT]
<>1877:1879; Russian author Gleb Uspenskii,
Village Diary [RRC2,2#30]
<>1877:English pundit
Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia
[excerpts: VSB,3:626-9
| WRH3:291-375]
<>1877:Russian Samara-Orenburg
railroad complete, linking Bashkir steppes east of the middle course of the Volga.River to the main lines of
Russian transport to the west
<>1877ja28:USA poet
Walt Whitman
delivered speech "In Memory of Thomas Paine"
[TXT]
<>1877ap12:1878jy13; Ottoman Turkish and Russian
empires at war [MAP]
- *1876:Eugene Schuyler's investigations of Ottoman atrocities in Slavic lands
[ID]
helped stoke anti-Ottoman sentiments among Russians and a wider reading public
- Russian declaration of war [VSB,3:629-30]
- Prince P.A. Viazemskii disturbed by
the intensity of Russian enthusiasm for cause of Serbia and
Montenegro [VSB,3:629]
- In addition, a
three-year-old Bulgarian independence movement, led by Stefan Stambulov,
inspired a Russian desire to help a Slavic "brother"
- Panslavism
and Russian imperial ambition seemed to some to be in harmony. Panslavism
was based on a growing sense of ethnic "brotherhood" among Slavic peoples =
East Slavic (EG=Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian)
South Slavic (EG=Serbian,
Montenegran, Bosnian, Hercegovinan, Bulgarian), or
West Slavic
(EG=Polish, Czech, Slovak)
The sense of ethnic sodality was strongest
among Orthodox Slavs, especially among East Slavic and South Slavic peoples
- Bulgarians
under Ottoman authority had ceased centuries before to live in a
sovereign nation-state of their own, and now there was much sympathy
among Slavic peoples for the creation of an independent Bulgaria in eastern
Macedonia
- That sympathy was not shared by the great European powers,
especially England and Austria, who were jealous of growing Russian influence in
that part of the world and had their own ambitions there
- Turkey and Russia fought and negotiated on their own, without any
concern for Austrian or English interests and, at first, without overt
interference from European states to the west
- 1878mr17:The Russian
and Otroman empires signed
the bilateral San Stefano treaty [TXT] [Excerpts
DIR2:317-28]
- The main provision of the San
Stefano treaty was creation of an enlarged Bulgaria [now including a sizable
portion of Macedonia, a vaguely defined territory running roughly from the
eastern border of Albania to the Aegean Sea and populated by Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek and
many other Illyrian and Balkan peoples]
- The new Bulgaria would be
semi-independent and with an elected princely monarch. NB! no Russian authority over Bulgaria
was implied.
In fact, the new Bulgaria was to pay "tribute" to the Turks. Russia did gain
significant territory around the southeast shores of the Black Sea
- Serbia and
its close neighbor Montenegro were earlier declared independent from Turkey.
An 1876 Serbian war against Turkey, occasioned by Serbian support
of Bosnia-Hercegovina independence, had turned ugly for Serbia, helping convince
Russia to intervene. Serbs were now vindicated
- Bosnia-Hercegovina [Bosna i Hercegovina] were promised reforms from Turkish overlords.
NB! B-H not made independent of the Turks or given over to Serbia. This area had
since medieval times been a rich potpourri of religious confessions. Catholics,
Orthodox and Bogomils vied with one another. From 1463 and for the next four
hundred years, B-H was ruled by Ottoman Turks. Elites accepted Islam, and thus
added another ingredient to the stew of conflict
- The fate of B-H and other
Yugoslav peoples, however, has not been shaped by
hatreds among the population so much as by the maneuvers of the great
imperialist powers that now and again
compete for influence or gain in and around these territories
- As of 1878, B-H
was a fruit on the Ottoman tree that Austria sought to pick. The Russians still
thought of it as unripe and made no overt effort to gain advantage there. They
simply demanded that the Turks reform their administration. Austrian had grander
plans and was able to roost quietly nearby, like an expectant vulture. Austria
was happy to pretend, along with the other "Western empires" (EG=England
and Germany), that it was the Russians who sought unnatural expansion of imperial
authority
- Therefore, western and central European powers were alarmed at the
extensive provisions of San Stefano. Some western European capitals feared a
possible rapprochement between traditional rivals, Russia and Ottoman Turkey.
They feared the possibility that western and central European powers might be
isolated from the benefits they expected to follow from their careful long-term
dismantlement of Turkey
- In view of Russian/Turkish diplomatic
success, "The West"
decided to intervene. They claimed that Russia had overturned the Treaty of Paris
[ID] without
sufficient international consultation. Making bald threat of war, a small group of European great powers,
with England in the lead, forced a
new treaty on Russia and Ottoman Turkey
- Ambitious "Western" powers took this opportunity to rectify San Stefano in such a way as to
enhance their own positions in the eastern Mediterranean and to weaken the
positions of Russia and Bulgaria. The Berlin Congress that followed was a sorrowful inning in the "Great Game"
\\
*--Barbara Jelavich,
The Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and the Straits Questions,
1870-1887
*--David MacKenzie,
The Serbs and Russian Pan-Slavism, 1875-1878
*--B. H. Sumner,
Russia and the Balkans, 1870-1880
<>1877su:USA
experienced 45 days of intense and wide-spread labor unrest when thousands of railroad workers
went on strike
[ID]
*--Some of the nation's biggest
cities -- Baltimore [pix],
Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St.Louis -- were gripped in violent clashes
between wage-laborers and authorities, ending frequently
in military intervention and use of live ammunition against strikers
<>1877:1881; Russian second "revolutionary
situation" (4 years) intensified in the months of Russo-Turkish War and expanded into a crisis of Russian revolutionary populism and the beginnings
of modern political parties in Russia
- More dark thoughts in diary of War Minister Miliutin [VSB,3:632-4].
He observed a contest within the highest circles of tsarist state authority
between authentic reformers and those who now sought to reverse the reform
trends, those who dreamt of return to a past never
really experienced (perhaps a good definition of political reaction
[ID], in this
case "official reactionary politics")
- A big historical question is
this = Did the terroristic revolutionary movement cause the crisis within the
autocratic state and provoke the shift toward reactionary measures, or did
reactionary measures precede terrorism (and perhaps cause it to appear on the
scene)?
- Political ferment was very much alive among émigré Russians. But back
in Russia, unlicensed self organization or voluntary associations of all sorts were
illegal, especially political groups. After the unorganized, largely
spontaneous "Going to the People" [ID], all
populist oppositional movements were of necessity at first underground and
conspiratorial, revolutionary parties
- 1876fa:Underground political party "Land and Liberty" [Zemlia i volia]
issued its first program ["Programma "Zemli i voli": Pervonachal’naia redaktsiia" (GRV:219)]
- Activists in the second revolutionary situation at first concentrated on the
(1)
peasantry. But soon the dominant feature of this
phase came to the fore =
(2) revolutionary terror. A small number of activists moved
from the village, rejected terrorism, and shifted attention to
(3)
the industrial workplace
- Field,
Rebels:112-207,
contains documents on village rebelliousness fomented by "revolutionary populists"
[CF=1861ap]
- Sergei Kravchinskii [Stepniak],
The
Russian Peasantry: Their Agrarian Condition, Social Life, and Religion (1888)
[Excerpted TXT] [Print excerpts:
VSB,3:754-6]
- Kravchinskii's first-hand account of revolutionary conspiracy,
Underground Russia (1883), written
five years after his own traumatizing act of political terror
[ID]
- Women played an unexpected and active role as political opposition in
Russia became violent
- The optimistic era of revolutionary populism, with its faith in the possibility
of imminent success of a rural socialist transformation of Russia, was nearing its end
as
"Land
and Liberty" broke up
\\
*--Petr A. Zaionchkovskii,
The Russian Autocracy in
Crisis, 1878-1882 (1979)
*2009jy:Russian Social Science Review#50,4:36 - 48|
Boris N. Mironov| "The Myth of a Systemic Crisis in Russia After the Great Reforms of the 1860s-1870s"
*--VRR, ch.20 on
Zemlia i volia, ch.21 on Narodnaia volia
*--Julicher: chapter 9
*--Amy Knight, "Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party"
[TXT]
*--Vera Broido, Apostles into
Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II (1977),
esp. ch.10 "Apostles into Terrorists", ch.11 "Towards Terrorism", & ch.13 "Regicide"
<>1877se27:London|
Karl Marx to F. A. Sorge on the Russian revolutionary movement =
This [Russian] crisis is a new turning point in European history. Russia--and I have
studied conditions there from the original Russian
sources, unofficial and official (the latter accessible to but few persons, but obtained
for me through friends in Petersburg)--has long been standing on the threshold of an
upheaval; all the elements of it are prepared. The gallant Turks have hastened the
explosion by years with the thrashing they have inflicted [ID] not
merely to the Russian army and Russian finances, but to the very persons of
the dynasty commanding the army (the Tsar, the heir to the throne, and six other
Romanovs). The upheaval will begin secundum artem [according to the rules of the game], with
some playing at constitutionalism, et puis il y aura un beau tapage [and then follows the
brawl]. If Mother Nature is not particularly unfavorable towards us, we shall yet live to see the fun!
The stupid nonsense the Russian students are perpetrating is merely a symptom, worthless in itself.
[Kazan demonstration, involving future Russian Marxist leader George Plekhanov among
others] But it is a symptom. All sections of Russian society are in full decomposition
economically, morally, and intellectually.
This time the revolution begins in the East, hitherto the unbroken bulwark and reserve army of
counter-revolution [M&E, Selected Corr:374 | Itenberg,RS2:4 selective citation]
*--1878fa:A year after his letter to Sorge (above), Marx composed a letter to the editor of the Russian
journal Otechestvennye zapiski [Notes of the Fatherland]. Marx suggested
that Russia need not traverse the same historical path that Germany or England followed as revolutionary
workers advanced toward the better future [SLM]
<>1878:Afghanistan
the site of imperialist military clashes between Russia and England in which
each country tried to play the Great Game through subordinate emirs, native
Islamic rulers
*--Central Asia was falling under Russian dominion, but England gained upper hand in the
imperialist struggle for predominance in Afghanistan
and south Asia
<>1878:Russian religious philosopher
Vladimir Solov'ev,"Lectures on Godmanhood" [Edie,3:62-84
| KMM:214ff]
<>1878ja24:Saint Petersburg | Vera Zasulich with a
pistol wounded Petersburg Governor-General Fedor Trepov
*--Zasulich’s act was
eye-for-eye in her view. Prison authorities had apparently tortured a fellow
political activist in their charge, and Zasulich held Trepov responsible
*--She dropped the gun and awaited arrest
<>1878mr31:A jury trial [sud prisiazhnyi] found Zasulich not guilty
- She confessed to the
attack, but the jury would not find her guilty. The jury, the defense lawyers,
and the wider public seemed ready to accept a higher moral law justifying this
violent act of generic self-defense or righteous revenge
- It was understood that the police state would now try to use its absolute
administrative power to get her back into prison. Society just didn’t
want her or any of its members abused by state power. So, a huge crowd greeted
her outside the courtroom and helped spirit her away to safe haven in
west-European emigration where she became an important figure in
the rise of
Marxism within Russian oppositional movements
- In the Zasulich trial, as in the Nechaev trial earlier, Russians could
follow proceedings in newspapers. Thousands of readers thus learned how
the new reform-era legal system [ID] might work against
arbitrary administrative justice, might even seem to favor terrorists over police officials
<>1878jy13(NS):Berlin Treaty reversed the
San Stefano Treaty
- Russia agreed to congress only after "The West" threatened war
-
Otto von Bismarck agreed to mediate
- Berlin
Treaty nullified Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian gains from war with Turkey
- England and Austria
won great concessions as Russia was stripped of nearly all advantages [VSB,3:630-1 |
DPH:207-09]
- Bulgarian independence was nullified and the nation divided.
The northern half fell under
indirect Ottoman authority, southern half completely under Ottoman rule
- Macedonia was taken from Bulgaria and placed under complete Ottoman
suzerainty. As a result of this affront, national independence terrorist groups,
komitadjis, arose there under Bulgarian sponsorship
- The main push for this reversal came from England and Austria. In addition to their own
fish to fry, these powers were concerned about expansion of Russian power and
the "dangerous" rise of authentic independence in Balkans
- Austro-Hungarian imperial interests were connected with an ancient authority
they exercised over restless Slovenes and Croats, Catholic Slavs whose native
language was basically the same as the Orthodox Serbs. (Slovenes and Croats
write with the Latin rather than the Cyrillic alphabet since literacy came to
them in its Roman Catholic form). Austria did not want events to inspire
national independence movements among these people, but Vienna’s interests were
more directly touched by developments in Bosnia-Hercegovina
- Serbia was declared independent, but suffered two serious insults =
- First, Bosnia-Hercegovina was taken from Turks and Serbs, and placed under
Austrian administration and military occupation. This represented a slap in the
face for both Turkey and newly independent Serbia. (Austria gained great
expansion of power from Russian victory, and denied any advantages to Russia.)
This move was the most aggressive and least defensible in an era and area that
required wise diplomacy rather than unrestrained opportunism. This move at this
time and place will echo down through the 20th century
- Montenegro [Crna gora] declared independent (but not a part of
Serbia). This represented a second insult and a serious threat to Serbia.
Montenegro was over the centuries the mountain fastness, the last refuge, of
Serbian independence from Turkish and German power. It was also the oldest of
Russian allies in the Balkans. 1516:1851; Montenegro
was ruled by Orthodox bishop/princes [vladikas]. From 1715 Montenegro was
in close alliance with Russia, recognizing the spiritual leadership of Russian
emperors over the vladikas
- Romania became independent, but ceded southern Bessarabia to Russia
in return for Dobruja
- England took this occasion to acquire the strategically located island of
Cyprus with its large population of Orthodox Greeks and Moslem Turks
- NB!
"The West" took strong and significant stand
against national independence for Bulgarians and other South-Slavic [Yugoslavian]
peoples, so long as that independence threatened -- or failed to further --
their own imperialist aims. "The West" took an equally strong but ironic stand in support of
Ottoman imperial rule, so long as that Ottoman
imperialism could be controlled by them
- This congress was a "big inning" for England and Austria in the Great Game
- The Berlin Treaty, however, failed to meet significant needs in the area =
- Unrestrained imperialist practices were now employed within the European homeland
- "Life support" applied
by "The West" to the Ottoman Empire ("the sick man of Europe")
was breaking down
- A Turkish nationalistic and militaristic movement arose
[ID] in the same year
that Austria seized Bosnia and Herzegovina [ID]
- The
ground was laid for the vicious Balkan wars of 1912-1913 and the
subsequent outbreak of WW1
<>1878au04:Petersburg | Sergei Kravchinskii (with assistance of A. I. Barannovskii) killed Third-Section
police chief N.V. Mezentsov in broad daylight as he was out walking. This early
act of successful political assassination was taken in revenge for what was
considered extreme and unjust state action in the execution of I.M. Koval’skii.
These early acts of terror in the second revolutionary situation were acts of
revenge
<>1878oc18:1879ja23; Petersburg | The great "Trial of the 193"
followed soon and lasted three months, but it was only indirectly related to
recent sensational physical assaults
on authority carried out by Zasulich [ID] and
Kravchinskii [ID]. This was a trial of leading figures
from amng the more than 4000 activists who had been arrested over the previous four years,
almost all in connection with the "Going to the People"
[ID]
- Prisons overflowed.
Nearly 100 died or went insane before the trial
- At least 30 different actual
organizations and voluntary political associations were involved
- About one-fourth of the defendants were women
- Defendants were represented by independent lawyers, according to the new legal
reforms
- The trial showed that "The Going"
was an expression of widely felt impulses that realized themselves in
individual and small group actions without any central coordination
- For its own
purposes, the tsarist state treated this expression of national political discontent and
optimism as a single conspiracy, a single "criminal association" [prestupnoe
soobshchestvo] with the goal of "overthrowing the government" [s
tsel’iu
gosudarstvennogo perevorota]
- Against the towering power of the state, and the obduracy of villagers,
some of the increasingly isolated individual activists felt they had only one
weapon -- terror
<>1878oc21(NS):German Empire outlawed political parties
organized by socialists or
wage-laborers
[DPH:265-6]
<>1878oc25:Russian revolutionary
political
party "Land and Liberty" [Zemlia i volia] ] issued its final program [VSB,3:662-3
| Russian TXT]
*--As "Land and Liberty" faded from the scene,
"The People's Will" [Narodnaia volia] stepped in
to fill the gap with heavy accent on terrorism
<>1878no:Tver Zemstvo presented
address to the tsar =
In his concern for the welfare of the Bulgarian people after their liberation
from the Turkish yoke [ID], the sovereign emperor
has deemed it necessary to grant this people true self-government, the
inviolability of the rights of the individual, an independent judiciary, and
freedom of the press. The zemstvo of Tver Province dares to hope that the
Russian people, who bore the entire burden of the war with such complete
readiness and with such self-sacrificing love for their tsar-emancipator, will
be allowed to enjoy the same blessings, which alone can lead them, in the words
of the sovereign, along the path of gradual, peaceful, and legal development
[VSB,3:634]
- This was a third moment in the history of Russian political culture when
tsarist constitutional initiatives were taken in non-Russian areas under
imperial power but denied to Russians themselves [first
moment | second moment]
- Zemstvos became increasingly political as its technical functions began to take hold
after a slow 15-year startup, and especially as Zemstvo activists gained control over
increasing tax revenues
- Zemstvos were discovering links between their technical functions
and their political needs, a discovery characteristic of the general European
experience of modernization
<>1879:1880; Russian novelist
Fedor Dostoevsky [pix] wrote his most widely acclaimed work
Brothers Karamazov
*--Petrozavodsk State University Russian-language complete works of Dostoevsky
[W]
\\
*--Wagar on Dostoevsky [TXT]
<>1879:Russian Workers, Northern Union of, issued program in defense of
wage-laborer interests [Harding:41f]
- The rise of modern urban centers -- cities -- introduced, as always, three new
elements to social/political life =
(1) Industrial labor -- the proletariat --
and
(2) Urban industrial/professional elites -- capitalists, business people,
and all others whose interests were meshed with modern enterprise in the
"post-agrarian" era, and
(3) The institutional expression of modern urban
enterprise = industrial and business "companies"
- 1879oc:Lithuanian provinces, Vilnius | Formation of General
Jewish Workers
Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia [Vseobshchii evreiskii rabochii soiuz v
Litve, Pol'she i Rossii], Jewish Bund for short
- As old skins of
social/service hierarchies were being shed
on all levels, Russia experienced a beginning of political movements among
wage-laborers (#1 above)
- But what
about those other European-style "liberal" urban
social/economic and political formations? (#2 & #3 above)
\\
*--VRR, ch.19 on the Russian working class movement
*--J. Frankel, Prophecy
and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1861-1917 (1981)
<>1879:USA reformer and economic theorist Henry George
published Progress and Poverty
- Henry George subsequently had a startlingly successful political
career, running on a reformist/progressive platform with his infamous "single
tax" at the center
- He believed that the growth rate of poverty was always
greater than the growth rate of wealth. This sad fact was caused, in his view,
by increase over time of land rents and values
- Larger social forces caused the
increase, but isolated owning individuals cashed in on that increase
- He felt
that a single tax on land would solve the problem
- Critics found much to dislike in
this scheme, but the biggest force at work against George was the transformation
of economic life from agriculture to industry, the shift from the countryside to the city
<>1879fe:Kharkov Governor-General D. N.
Kropotkin was assassinated
- 1879mr13:Petersburg | L. F. Mirskii fired a pistol at Third-Section Chief
Gendarme Drentel'n and escaped
- 1879ap02:Petersburg Winter Palace Square
A. K. Solov’ev fired 3 times at Alexander II, without hitting him. He acted
also without approval of the underground revolutionary party Land and Liberty, but with a revolver they
supplied
- 1879ap05:Russian Emperor Alexander II, having
narrowly escaped a terrorist attempt on his life, issued counter-reform decree
strengthening the power of governor-generals [VSB,3:665]
- Tsarist state moved from statist reform toward statist reaction
- 1879my:Within
Zemlia
i volia, a dedicated terrorist group formed, calling itself "Freedom or
death" [Svoboda ili smert’]
- 1879jy25:au05; Odessa "Trial of the Twenty-Eight".
These 28 "revolutionists", including a
14-year old girl, V. L. Gukovskaia, held in camera because oficials no longer
trusted open trial by jury, such that acquitted Vera Zasulich
[ID]
- 1879fa:Narodnaia volia [People's Will] party program [DIR3:355-9]
- 1879au25:Narodnaia volia handed down a death sentence against Alexander II. Here monarchical
subjects "turned the tables" by handing down a sentence of capital punishment against their sovereign – what could be in
principle more authentically revolutionary than that, taking possession of the state's monopoly on violence?
- The mode of execution was to be dynamite. At first Narodnaia volia concentrated on mining railroad lines at three points [VRR:681-3]. At Odessa,
Kibal’chich,
Kviatkovskii and Vera Figner set up the attack [Figner,
Memoirs of a
Revolutionist]. Kolodkevich, Frolenko and Lebedeva were to carry it off. It had to be canceled
- 1879oc01: The People and the State [SLM:219-23]
- 1879no18:Aleksandrovsk | Andrei Zheliabov improperly triggered the dynamite under the tsar’s train. No
explosion, no assassination
- Zheliabov (1850-1881) was born into a serf family,
liberated and given the opportunity for a higher education at Odessa
University,
involved in the great "going to the people" [ID]
- He was arrested and a defendant at the Trial of the 193 [ID],
found innocent and turned to political organizational work, helping organize
"Land and Liberty" [ID]
- He was now a member of the
executive committee of "People's Will" [ID]
- Zheliabov
was a "man of the people", having spanned a life in the village to a life of
underground political organization and terrorist action
- Though Lenin rejected
nearly every feature of Zheliabov's political creed and
commitment, he always cited him as proof that the Russian people could
produce revolutionists of world quality [ID]
-
1879no19:Moscow | Sof’ia Perovskaia and Stepan Shiriarev blew up the wrong train. The tsar pulled
into Moscow unscathed
<>1879my02:Moscow Medical Practitioners'
School for Women [BRW:196-7]
<>1880:Russia enforced corporal punishment in military [Page.RR]
<>1880ja01:Russian revolutionary
political party "People's Will" [Narodnaia volia] issued
program, written mainly by Lev Tikhomirov, Nikolai Morozov, and Aleksandr Mikhailov
[SLM:207-212 | VSB,3:664 | Kennan,Siberia,2:495-503 |
WRH3:399-402 | DIR2:309-13 |
DIR3:335-9 |
RN7,2:170-4 | "Programma ispolnitel’nogo komiteta" (GRV:229]
- This party put terrorism at the head of its agenda
- 1880ja17:Petersburg apartment of
Narodnaia volia party members raided by police. Gunfire resulted in several
casualties and arrests [VRR:685]
- 1880fe05:Petersburg | Stepan Khalturin, working closely with the
Narodnaia volia Executive Committee
(Aleksandr Kviatkovskii and Zheliabov), blew up the tsarist dining room in the Winter Palace, a
spectacular achievement. Eleven were killed and 56 wounded, but the tsar was not one of them. He had not yet joined the banquet
- Rifts opened among the
terrorists who accepted the need to kill the tsar but were opposed to more generalized terrorism. These were unhappy with what the contemporary world
calls "collateral damage"
- 1880wi:As village-centered "Land and Liberty" came apart and
terror-prone "People's Will" [Narodnaia volia] formed up, a small
group led by Georg Plekhanov moved in a third direction, forming "Black Repartition" [Chernyi peredel' |
Russian language program = GRV:222-9]
- 1880fe12:Count Loris-Melikov became head of a newly created state
institution, "Supreme Administrative Commission for the Protection of State
Order and Public Tranquility"
- 1880fe20: Young activist I. O. Molodetskii
attacked Loris-Melikov, without success. He acted alone as something of a
"freelance" terrorist
- Narodnaia volia disavowed Molodetskii's personal attacked because it was
uncoordinated with any defined political program. Still, Narodnaia volia praised
his bravery
- 1880sp:People's Will tactical Program [SLM:223-31 |
RN7,2:175-183]
- 1880sp:Odessa grocery store was the site at which
Vera Figner and Sof’ia Perovskaia prepared a dynamite attack on
the tsar. Another woman, A.V. Yakimova, was also involved. Nothing came of these preparations
- 1880su:Terrorism seemed in fact to
have results. It succeeded in its desire to influence official behavior in the direction of political concession. Loris-Melikov engaged certain
public figures in the Zemstvo constitutionalist movement and even some close to
Narodnaia volia in secret
negotiations aimed to bring an end to terrorist attacks and to initiate governmental reforms. Perhaps Loris acted deceitfully, perhaps not. In
any event, talks broke down
- 1880oc25:Revolutionary populist journal
Narodnaia Volia [NaV] Executive Committee
wrote letter to Karl Marx [SLM:206-7 |
RN7,2:228-9]
- 1880oc25:oc30; SPB Military District court conducted the
in camera Trial of 16, the Narodnaia volia Executive
Committee. Kviatkovskii was sentenced to death
- 1880no:Narodnaia volia Workers’ Organization Program [SLM:231-7 |
RN7,2:184-91]
- 1880au:Loris-Melikov's Commission was disbanded and the Count became Interior Minister, pursuing a policy of vigorous hunt for revolutionaries,
accompanied by continued hints at concessions to a fledgling civil society in the form of European-style
liberal reforms
- Even terrorist opponents of the tsarist state backed off for a moment to give
Loris-Melikov
a chance to make something of his so-called "dictatorship of the heart"
- Some concluded from this momentary
calm and concession that political terrorism brought results
<>1880je08:Moscow |
Leading cultural figures pulled together a large
Pushkin
Commemoration
<>1880de:Geok-Tepe, a Turkmen stronghold in Central Asia,
captured by Russian army
- Dostoevsky described the meaning of this event in his
journal-like publication Diary of a Writer [RFP2,1:18-24]
See excerpts in VSB,3:659-62
- In
1849 at the beginning of his public
career, Dostoevsky was targeted by the Russian Emperor; at the end, Dostoevsky extolled
the virtues of the Russian Empire
<>1881:Ottoman Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid II agreed to
"Decree of Muharrem" which created joint "Council of the Public Debt",
further consolidating English fiscal power over the Turks
[ID]
*--Russia had done well on its own in dealing with the Turks, but "The West" was
not going to let that succeed
*--The big financial
dimension of the Great Game was too much for Russia even
in Ottoman regions directly on its own imperial
frontiers
<>1881:USA, Pittsburgh | Leaders of National Labor Union,
Knights of Industry, and Knights of Labor formed Federation of Organized Trades and Labor
Unions of the United States and Canada
- This represented the beginnings of organized
wage-labor
on the national level
- 1881:In a development not unrelated to economic struggles of labor,
Henry James published his most enduring novel, Portrait of a Lady. While born into
a comfortable establishment Boston family, a scion of US social/cultural elite, James
had fled abroad into émigré status and now depended in some measure on income
from his publications. He lived in Europe like his good friend, the Russian novelist
Ivan Turgenev. Not only was high culture transcending "national" limits, it was becoming a commodity. Creators had to
sell their "product" or perish. James had to publish or perish. He had no professorial salary like his brother, the Harvard
philosopher William James [ID]
\\
*--Sheldon M. Novick,
Henry James: The Mature Master
<>1881:Tver activist Fedor Rodichev memo on
peasantry [*1934ja:SEER#12,35:361-2]
<>1881ja28:Russian state servitor
Count Loris-Melikov, memo to Emperor Alexander II [Raeff2:133-40]
Other memos suggested that constitutional reform might be under consideration [VSB,3:665-7]
*--Political/institutional reform of this sort had been on nearly everyone's mind since Alexander ascended the throne
a quarter-century earlier, but by now the time of significant progressive reform was over in Russia. Loris-Melikov's
brand of official liberalism was too little, too late
<>1881wi:Kibal’chich
showed he had interests that extended beyond terrorism when he wrote article on political revolution and the economic question
[SLM:212-8]
- This was a busy season of reconsideration all across the political spectrum =
- 1881fe:Zasulich drafted a letter to Marx asking about the possibility that Russia rural mode of production might give some promise of a
progressive future in her homeland
- 1881fe:mr; Marx drafted a reply to Zasulich letter
- 1881mr:Marx settled on a final text of the letter to Zasulich
in which he conceded that the Russian village institutions might contribute to a
Russian variety of socialism
<>1881fe15(NS):German chancellor
Bismarck's
opening speech to the Reichstag [parliament] [CCC2,2:835f CCC3,2:1005-6]
- Over the preceding half decade, Bismarck worked hard to maintain best possible
relationships with Russia [DIR3:337-9]
- His final
decade in power was devoted to the maintenance of a balance of power in central and
eastern Europe [DPH:209-14 | DIR3:339-45]
- German imperialist ambitions complicated this process [DPH:268-71]
- 1879:German theologian Friedrich Fabri posed the question -- Does Germany Need
Colonies? -- and gave a resounding answer = YES [P20:27]
- The
German version of European imperialism caused special inter-European problems.
European imperialism was "coming home"
<>1881mr01:Russian Emperor Alexander II
was assassinated
[RRC2,2:368-77]
Spas na krovi [The Savior on the Blood]
A cathedral build in Petersburg on the spot
where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated
<>1881mr02:1894;
Russian Emperor Alexander III reigned in a time of
official reactionary policy [ID] following the second revolutionary situation
and terrorist assassination of his father, Alexander II, the "tsar liberator"
- 1877se17:1882my06; Alexander III was much influenced by the political ideas of reactionary Ober-prokurator of the Holy Synod,
Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who dispatched a steady stream of advisory memos over the critical five-year period surrounding
the assassination of Alexander II [VSB,3:671-5]
- 1881ap25:1887mr04; Mikhail Katkov wrote monarchist and imperialist editorials in his daily newspaper
Moskovskie vedomosti [Moscow News]
[VSB,3:677-9] and in his last four years of life was
rewarded with high aristocratic/service rank on the Table of Ranks and put
in charge of the Moscow University printing presses
- Katkov's
quarter century of journalistic service to the Russian imperialist
establishment ended with an ironic mirror-image reversal of Nikolai Novikov's
publishing career one century earlier [ID]
- 1881mr08:1882ap10; reform-minded Dmitrii Miliutin's diary described atmosphere of crisis in governmental circles
[VSB,3:679-80]
- 1881su:1882fa; Petersburg court insiders
(government ministers, generals,
grand dukes and other high-ranking members of the royal family, statist elites close to the tsarist throne) formed the
Holy Retinue [Sviashchennaia druzhina]. This covert organization
was designed to do combat with the revolutionary movement
- A secret Central Committee
of the Holy Retinue directed
operations under the leadership of Prince P.P. Shuvalov who commanded a widely
ramified network of spies and provocateurs. These operations were independent of
regular police agencies, "off the books", and they were kept secret both from
revolutionaries and the public. Operatives raided underground printing presses and worked
to identify and entrap political suspects
- The organization was especially active abroad. It published two newspapers
in Geneva, Vol’noe slovo [The Free Word] and Pravda [The Truth]
without revealing the organization behind the publications
- Security operations,
political opposition and war conflated in a time of generalized
terrorism
- Yet it might be said that profound, possibly even "progressive", changes took place in these years of
reactionary policy
- Over the next quarter century,
the tsarist state made its contribution both to the promotion and the suppression
of impending revolution
- USA opinion of Russia, and thus USA-Russian relations, deteriorated to some degree
- A new era of macro-economic struggle, in which
world markets in grain and, very soon,
petroleum increased the stakes in
the Great Game
- N. Kh. Bunge, The Years 1881-1894 in Russia: A Memorandum Found in the Papers of N. Kh. Bunge [ORBIS]
- British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office
confidential print. Part I, from the mid- nineteenth century to the First World War. Series A,
Russia, 1859 -1914 v2
\\
*--Saul,2:240-310
*1961de:JMH#33:384-97 | Hans Heilbronner, "Alexander III and the Reform Plan of Loris-Melikov"
*--Heide W. Whelan,
Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and
Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia (1982)
*--Petr Zaionchkovskii,
The Russian Autocracy Under Alexander III (1976)
<>1881mr08(NS):German chancellor Bismarck's justification for the first accident insurance
bill, a component of a wider program of social welfare [CCC3,2:1007-10 |
DPH:266-8]
*1884mr10:Bismarck speech on the need to promote the welfare of
wage-laborers
[PWT2:192-4]
<>1881mr10:Russian revolutionary
political party Narodnaia volia [People's Will]
wrote letter to new Emperor Alexander III [DIR2:313-16
| DIR3:359-63]
- Manifesto to Europe [DPH:288]
- 1882fe16:Last will and testaments of revolutionary populists A.Mikhailov and A.Barannikov [SLM:239-40]
- In
its short two years of existence, People's Will left a big mark on Russian history without furthering the cause
of radical reform or revolution
Execution of terrorists involved in the assassination of Alexander II,
including
Andrei Zheliabov
<>1881sp:Ivan Aksakov repeated
Panslav and
Slavophile themes in his
"Address to...Benevolent Slav Society" [KMM:112-15
| RRC2,2#32]
- 1861:1883; Selections from Ivan Aksakov's long journalistic career [VSB,3:657-9] suggest distinction
between Slavophilism and panslavism
*1883:Aksakov asked what panslavism was and
answered first with what it wasn't = "It does not exist as a political party, nor
as a political program, nor even as a definite political ideal. The unification
of all the Slavs of east and west in a single political body has so far never
been envisaged by anyone in any clear form, nor even as a dream"
- Then Aksakov took
up what it was = "Yet panslavism indubitably exists in our time as the
awareness, shared by all the manifold branches of the Slavic race, of their
common Slavic character and common ethnic origin." [To help define "Slavic"
consult this table organized by language groups]
- Aksakov said panslavism was not a "political party" but insisted that the Russian state could
not renounce a panslav mission "that can bring existence, life, and freedom to
the Slavic peoples and to the entire Orthodox-Slavic world". That would force
Russia to renounce "her very self, her very essence, and her mission among
mankind"
- Aksakov was disturbed that Germans regarded any Russian nationalism in
literature or politics as panslavic and therefore odious =
We repeat: there
exists neither a political panslavic program nor a political
panslavic ideal. But as the spiritual solidarity and the gravitation of various
branches of the same race toward each other, as the awareness of Slavic
brotherhood, as an Orthodox-Slavic world headed by Russia
[emphasis added] and asserting its claim to exist, live, and develop side by
side with the Roman [Romance-language cultures = France, Italy, Spain, etc.] and
Germanic [including England] worlds, panslavism exists both as an idea and as a
fact.
- GO TO Ivan's father Sergei and his brother
Konstantin
<>1881ap29:Alexander III's manifesto reaffirmed inviolability of autocracy [VSB,3:680]
<>1881au14:Russian statute sought to strengthen law and order [VSB,3:680-1]
*--The tsarist state sought to reaffirm what it took to be the fundamental truths
of Russian politics
*--These truths were increasingly embodied in
reactionary policy, but occasionally in certain reform
measures
<>1881oc:Russian revolutionary groups
Narodnaia volia and Chernyi peredel'
joined forces to compose a program [DPH:288-9]
*1881fa:1882wi; Narodnaia
volia Military-revolutionary organization composed a Program [SLM:238 |
RN7,2:196-200]
<>1882:Switzerland | Friedrich Engels published
Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific, a summary of Marxism published in the last year of Marx's life [CCC3,2:701-24 |
CCS:775-801 | CCS,2:265-291]
- It was a simplification, and its claim to be "scientific"
might be questionable to some, but it eventually achieved a popularity as great
as The Communist Manifesto
(1847-1848), which opened the public careers of Marx and Engels
- As an
explanation of what "Marxism" was all about, it was more detailed and
self-explanatory than the condensed and high-impact "A Preface
to A Contribution..." of 1859
- 1882ja:Marx and Engels composed a preface to the 2nd Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto [MER:88-9]
- Distinct "socialist" ideologies and movements were forming in Europe, much as had happened with revolutionary
liberalism over the previous century
- "Marxism", as
ism, survived Marx and Engels, as specific thinking and acting individuals
whose political careers had by this time
spanned 35 years. The "ism" continued for
more than a century to inspire a significant variety of political movements in Germany, Russia and elsewhere. The complexities and
contingencies of the specific thinking and acting individuals who had created the "ism" faded from memory
as they became global celebrities
<>1882:1890; Russian
welfare
legislation (child labor [TXT], working hours, factory inspection) [VSB,3:752-4
| cf. RRC2,2#36]
- Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii, The Russian
Factory in the 19th Century
- As Russian urban life expanded, the state made efforts to incorporate the new
social formation -- proletariat or wage-labor -- into traditional
social/service hierarchies
- Tsarist bureaucrats displayed as much reform initiative in these realms as
did new urban social formations
- If was as if
officials presumed that Russia might not need
a progressive liberal bourgeoisie if it had a progressive state. Russia might
curb an activist wage-labor class with an
activist state
<>1882my02:je09; Russian state sought to give relief to
its Jewish subjects [VSB,3:682]
<>1882my18:Russian statute established
Peasant
Land Bank [TXT] [VSB,3:751]
*--Three years it established the Noble's Land Bank
[ID]
*--Clearly the "reactionary" autocratic state was
capable of notable reform initiatives
<>1883:USA and world tours of ex-frontier scout William
Frederick Cody ("Buffalo Bill") and his Wild West Show got under way
*--The
Native American hero of the Battle of the Little Big Horn,
Sitting Bull, performed in this early version of
US commercial culture, mixing the authentic and the artificial without any
desire to do harm to either
<>1883:1891; Switzerland | German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900) published his most influential work,
Also sprach Zarathustra
[TXT]
Nietzsche's Death Mask
Which calls to mind the finest-ever graffito that I personally saw.
*1965su:On the entrance to the NYC subway at the main gate of Columbia
University, someone had written =
"God is dead -- Nietzsche"
Just below this, someone else wrote =
"Nietzsche is dead -- God"
<>1883je27:France |
Ivan Turgenev letter to Leo Tolstoy (Turgenev's last letter)
[GPR:627-8]
<>1884:English theorist Herbert Spencer,
The Man
Versus the State [PWT2:179-80
| P20:6]
*--Spencer continued to develop his concepts of
"Social Darwinism" and acquisitive individualism
<>1884:Geneva | Russian
émigré Marxist Georgii
Plekhanov, "Our Differences" [TXT | Excerpts = Edie,3:359-89
|
VSB,3:705-7 | SPW]
- A quick read would be from beginning through ch.1
pt.1 (ca. 69pp),
- Then ch.3 pt.1-3 (ca. 17pp)
- Then ch.4 pt.1-3 (ca. 48pp), and
- finally ch.5 (ca.22pp)
- Here Plekhanov laid out with some
clarity the differences between his brand of Marxist socialism for Russia and
the now extinguished "populism" of the 1860s
and 70s
- Plekhanov began as a populist activist, but in
exile he now based his revolutionary socialism on industrial wage-labor
- Program of his
Marxist group "Liberation of Labor" [DIR2:353-7
| DIR3:400-5 |
VSB,3:707-8 | DPH:290-4]
- Vera Zasulich, the famous one-act "terrorist" [ID], was an active member of Plekhanov's
émigré group where she became again famous for a "one-act" ideological moment (letter to Karl
Marx [ID])
\\
*1980:JHI#40,1:89f| Henry Eaton, "Marx and the Russians" [TXT]
<>1884my:Paris | Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) thrilled audiences with her popular
portrayal of Lady Macbeth in a stunning French translation of the Shakespeare tragedy
*--"The Divine Sarah" might be thought
of as the first great popular entertainment "celebrity" [TXT], the pioneer of
commercial-culture pop-arts
<>1884au23:Russian University statute
[VSB,3:682-4] reversed reformist gains in the 1863 University
statute [ID]
*--By placing new restrictions on university life,
the tsarist state pursued a recognizable reactionary policy
goal to reserve "careers open to talent" only for
presumed old regime elites rather than for an increasingly dynamic Russian
population at large
<>1884fa:Korean court struggles
roused Japanese and Chinese appetites and caused tensions [Beasley,MHJ:161]
*--Paul George von Molendorff, a high-ranking German administrator or "adviser" within the Korean government,
tried to draw Russia into conflict [KEJ,6:341]
\\
*--George Alexander Lensen,
Balance of intrigue
: international rivalry in Korea and Manchuria, 1884-1899 (1982)
<>1885:USA Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong wrote
Our
Country (purchased by 185,000 readers [Zimmerman:46])
- Americans, he preached, are a "race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth
behind it—the representation, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest
Christianity, the highest civilization"
- The preacher noted with approval USA’s
development of "peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions
upon mankind" [46-47]
- He predicted that USA will "spread itself across the
earth". He added, "Can any one doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol
and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the
remainder, until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized
mankind?"
- Later he expressed racist views on Anglo-Saxon Predominance
[TXT]
<>1885:1901; Asian kerosene market the scene of a 15-year
competition among emerging trans-national petroleum corporations
- 1885:Russian crude oil discoveries allowed significant involvement in world petroleum
market. More than one half of all Russian petroleum production was exported,
2/3 of this to Europe.
Standard Oil had not yet extended its control of the market beyond New York
City docks
- 1888:Russian kerosene dominated 22% of the world market as a
result of low production costs, proximity to markets, and government support
- 1888ap24(NS):USA | Standard Oil Company founded the Anglo-American
Oil Company to market its products in England
- 1890:Black Sea | Marcus
Samuel, an English import/export businessman, saw the world’s first oil
tankers, operated by the Russian company "Nobel Brothers". Samuel realized that bulk
transport was superior to Standard's method of shipping kerosene in metal
cases by clipper ship. He signed a ten-year supply contract with Rothschild
interests in Russia
and ordered eight tankers for shipping Russian kerosene in bulk through the
Suez Canal [ID] to Asia
- 1890:Sumatra oilfield | The Royal Dutch Company for the Working of Petroleum
Wells in the Dutch East Indies formed, J.B. August Kessler, manager
- Petroleum
shipper Samuel came into business association with Royal Dutch. A Dutch-English
trans-national petroleum company was forming around these partnerships
- 1891:Marcus Samuel won contract with Paris branch of the great
Rothschild banking house to sell Russian kerosene, borne on his specially
designed tankers (based on a Russian innovation) from Russian Black-Sea ports to
the markets of the world east of Suez. Samuel was soon in close association with
the new trans-national petroleum corporation, Royal Dutch Shell
- 1891mr10:Netherlands & Belgium | American Petroleum Company (51% Standard
owned), then two Italian companies (60% Standard owned) and a Scandinavian
firm (21.45% Standard owned)
- 1892:Suez Canal plied by Samuel’s tanker
Murex, followed by the Conch
[shell names on tankers eventually gave name to whole company]
- 1892:Sumatra, Pankalan Brandan | Royal Dutch Pipeline and refinery began
operations
- 1895:1899; British merchant ships carried 70.8% of world sea trade
- 1896:Royal Dutch manager Kessler hired young banker and accountant
Henri Deterding who was to launch that company on its global career
- 1896:Samuel finagled a Dutch concession on Borneo,
where he struck oil and then built refinery in Balik Papan
- 1897:Borneo oil business so extensive that Samuel formed a separate "Shell"
Trading and Transport Company
- 1898:England
knighted Marcus Samuel for services to the Empire = Shell ship freed a Navy
warship that ran aground in the Suez Canal
- 1899:Samuel first formally tried to persuade the Navy to
test oil as a fuel, the fuel his own fleet used. Samuel pioneered the use of
oil as marine fuel and tried to get the Navy to convert to oil. So it
happened, but Samuel was not allowed to play the central role
- 1900:Dutch East Indies production encouraged Samuel to renew contract with the Rothschilds
to purchase Russian petroleum products for overseas transport and marketing
- Shell expanded everywhere and determined to market gasoline in Europe by
purchasing a German company from the Deutsche Bank
- Shell now intended
to enter into active competition with the companies that controlled the market
there = Standard, Nobel and Rothschild
- 1901fa:Shell was Britain's largest oil company, second only to Standard
worldwide. As it prepared to enter the European market, it was the only company
with global sources of
crude
- Certain industrial companies were by definition "trans-national" and began to
act like sovereign nation-states, at first like like small sovereign states and
then later like largish ones
- The stage was set for a titanic struggle between Standard and Shell for world
dominance in the new and every-day more imperative
petroleum age
<>1885fe26(NS):Berlin Conference agreed on General Act
whereby European imperialist powers settled on a division of Africa that made
Europeans ("The West"?) temporarily happy, if not the Africans
- This was Africa's route to European imperialist domination [1914:MAP of Africa]
- Bismarck was the less-than-neutral host, seeking
advantages for Germany as the western European states sliced the cake of Africa
and took possessions of their respective assigned pieces
- The King of Belgium,
Leopold, received as personal property the lands drained by the
Congo River
- 1877:Englishman
Cecil Rhodes,
on the eve of a great career of personal aggrandizement and imperialistic
adventure in African diamond extraction, jotted down his most heartfelt views on
the need to prepare an organization to consolidate and expand English
imperialist control [TXT]
- Rhodes dreamt of an international shadow state designed to repair historical damage to the global British Empire
- EG= Repossess
USA, earlier lost in the colonial revolution
- Expand English control over Africa, etc., where
other European states were competing with England
- Protect it English
imperialist dominion everywhere
- Rhodes invisioned a vast, world-wide secret society, a colonial/imperialist
version of the Jesuit order or Free Masons
- Rhodes' company, De Beers Consolidated Mines, controlled 90% of the world's diamond production
and had a huge stake in south African gold mining
- 1883jy06:Hamburg Chamber of Commerce on German interests in West Africa [BNE:171-4]
- 1892se16:English Foreign Secretary justified taking Uganda as an English imperialist
possession on the basis of the need to protect English possession of Egypt and the Suez
Canal (taken in 1882). This can be compared with Gorchakov's
argument, and the "domino theory" of
the 1960s might be taken to be the other side of the same coin
- While England was intimately involved in the Russo-Turkish conflict in the Balkans [ID],
Russia was altogether excluded from Africa . The Great Game
was not child's play
<>1885ap21:je03; Russian government established Nobles'
Land Bank [VSB,3:751-2]
*--Gentry landowners got some economic relief from the state [TXT]
*--But it did not come until three years after the establishment of the Peasant Land Bank [ID]
<>1886:French journalist,
racist
(particularly anti-Jewish) and rabid conservative Édouard Drumont published
La France Juive
[Jewish France, excerpt in P20:32]
<>1886:Russian musician Vasilii Andreev began to appear in public with his
popular balalaika orchestra [ID]
*--Pop-arts and nostalgia for the pre-industrial world were often linked
<>1886my04:USA
Chicago, Haymarket Square the site of violent labor disorder when police moved
to break up a large crowd of demonstrators gathered in support of the eight-hour
working day. In the midst of the assembly, a bomb detonated, killing seven policemen and four others.
More than 100 were injured. Riots followed
- Public hysteria forced "rush to
judgment" against eight "anarchists". No evidence was found or presented at
trial linking these eight to the manufacture or use of the bomb that detonated
at Haymarket, but they were all found guilty of "inciting violence". Four were
hanged and one committed suicide
- In 1893 the Illinois Governor pardoned the
remaining three in view of the evident injustice of the trial
- In the "trial
of public opinion" the Haymarket riot served not only those who sought to
criminalize organized labor but also those who sought to condemn
establishment legal culture
- "Terror" had a place in the arsenals of many different political persuasions,
"left" and "right"
- 1886:AFL [American Federation of Labor] formed out of 1881:Federation of...Unions. Federal structure (local, city,
national, and international levels). The United Mine Workers and the Brotherhood of
Carpenters and Joiners came in, but the four big railroad unions did not
- Samuel Gompers, AFL leader until 1924, struggled against company-sponsored pseudo-unions and for
higher wages, lower hours, and unemployment insurance for factory labor
\\
*--
Gompers website
<>1886je06:Russian Finance Minister N.K. Bunge took
leading role in creation of the first Russian labor code [TXT]
<>1886se12:USA NYC |
The World#27:13.
Anonymous article, "Theosophy in New York: Facts about Mme. Blavatsky, Her Powers and Her Religion"
[TXT]
- Russian "spiritualism" swept USA
high society [W]
- Growing popularity of figures like Blavatsky
[Portrait] built on the accomplishments of talented spiritualists like Daniel Dunglas Home
[W#1]
[W#2]
[W#3] and Eusapia Palladino
[W#1] [W#2]
- Altogether, these entertaining figures might be taken as warning against crude
generalizations about the "positivist" or "scientistic" mentality of 19th century "Western Civ"
[ID] and, for that matter, about
the profound "sea-change" as European thinkers made effort to escape cliché positivistic simplicities
[EG]
- Perhaps most important, these supernatural "psychic" figures
represented a religious, mystic or spiritual side of the burgeoning
pop-arts,
heretical whether viewed from the position of traditional European Christianity
or science
\\
*1997:|
The
Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture
<>1887:German theorist
of peasant origins, Ferdinand Tönnies, wrote powerful and
influential critique of modernizing/industrializing society, contrasting it with an
idealized recollection of pre-industrial everyday life in the rural setting, Gemeinschaft
und Gesellschaft [Community and Society] [CCS:227-51 |
CCS,1:543-67]
- Tönnies influenced a significant growth of a public reactionary mood in
Europe (the desire to return to a mythic past, a past not in fact ever
experienced)
- His disenchantment with his contemporary world was shared by many
who had no personal experience with life "down on the farm"
- 1887:USA author Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward: 2000-1887
[TXT], a bit of
"science fiction" intended to promote progressive values by showing that
everyday life was not as good as the elite establishment of the time -- 1887 -- sometimes claimed
[ID]
- Bellamy contrasted what he took
to be the sorrowful truths of his 1887 with the good life in an imagined
future year 2000. Looking Backward offered a complex variation
on the "utopian" tradition
- If Tönnies (just above) can be called "reactionary", Bellamy can be called
"radical" in the sense that he recommended movement forward toward a mythic industrialized,
scientific and technological future, hitherto not
actually experienced by anyone
- William Morris wrote his utopian novel,
News from Nowhere,
in part to correct Bellamy's many perceived deficiencies
- Some American social critics, reacting in part to Bellamy, expressed their version
of the growing general-European unease with conditions of everyday life caused by industrial modernization
[TXT]
<>1887:USA reading public
was captivated by Leo Tolstoy or, more
accurately, "Tolstoyanism", which exploded into a virtual "Tolstoy craze"
- In his late years, the great Russian novelist was becoming a moral force
throughout the world
- Tolstoy's broad appeal and his turn toward popular preachment linked the high art of his novels with the
emerging era of pop-arts [TXT]
- "The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1893) and 1894:"Christianity and
Patriotism" [VSB,3:733]
- What is Art? (1897:1898)
- 1873:Ivan Kramskoi's portrait of Tolstoy in
Olga's Gallery
- 1884:Nikolai Gay's portrait (detail) of Tolstoy in
Olga's Gallery
- 1890s photo of
Leo Tolstoy walking in a
pasture at his Tula Province country estate "Yasnaia poliana"
- LOOP on pop-art continues
\\
Saul,2:311-34
<>1887:Russian religious thinker Konstantin Leont'ev became
a monk [cf. Edie,2:271-80]
\\
*--Stephen Lukashevich,
Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891):A Study in Russian "Heroic
Vitalism" (NYC:1967) ORBIS/SUMMIT
<>1887mr01: Here on the sixth anniversary of Alexander II's
assassination, Aleksandr Ulianov (Lenin's older brother) was arrested with others who were planning
the assassination of the dead tsar's son and heir, Alexander III
*--Terrorism had slackened, but had not disappeared from Russian political culture
\\
*--Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother
<>1888:Russian publicist, an ex-leader of revolutionary terrorist party
[ID], now
loyal to his tsar, Lev Tikhomirov [ID] published a revealing interpretation
Russia,
Political and Social [TXT]
<>1889:Russian philosopher
Vladimir
Solov'ev on Slavophilism, and "On Sins and Ailments" [VSB,3:731-3]
*1885:Ivan Kramskoi portrait of Solov'ev in
Olga's Gallery
<>1889:1905; Russian statesman
Sergei Witte came
to St.Petersburg from Odessa as head of the railroad department of the Finance Ministry
*1892: Witte was appointed Finance Minister and launched an amazing
Russian Imperial Industrial Revolution
of the late nineteenth century
[Russian language website with primary and secondary documents]
[TXT on general European industrialization]
*--"The Witte System" guided the destiny of Russia over an intense
period (16 years). These were fateful years in which industrial modernization was combined with two other transformational features
of the general European experience in these years =
(1) IMPERIALISM [TXT
on general European imperialism | Also LOOP on Japan]
(2) REVOLUTION [TXT
on general European experience of revolution | Also
LOOP on 1905 Revolution]
*--The great challenge of
industrialization lies at the root of these two other transformations. In
Russia, the state seemed determined to play the leading role in urban-centered
industrial modernization. Russian everyday life would
never again be the same. Welfare legislation, including
urban and wage-labor policies, took on new meaning. But was an urban "middle class" evolving as
well? And what about the vast majority of Russian Imperial subjects =
peasants? Didn't the state continue its customary and largely
reactionary
policies under conditions of radical modernization?
*--Perhaps the biggest question of all = Was Russian industrialization
essentially unlike earlier processes of European economic modernization? [TXT]
*--"The Witte System" was inspired by a clear sense of a global
industrial future in which agrarian nations would be gobbled up
if they did not modernize
[table]. The challenge was to
solve the "riddle of economic backwardness" =
- An
impoverished consumer economy was squeezed in order to restrict imports and win
export capital for investment in heavy industry [EG]
- The state took the central role in this process, rather than independent
entrepreneurial companies. The imperial state grabbed the initiative, sometimes
pushing independent enterprises to the side (most notably railroads). Governmental
"tutelage" over the economy and society (rather than social independence and
free-market decision-making) was the norm. Was this altogether different in the
USA?
- Foreign investment was encouraged, but always with an eye to restricting
"repatriation" or draining of profits out of Russian
- Tariffs on certain imports
were introduced to protect the young and vulnerable Russian industrial
economy from other more "advanced" economies. In this connection, Witte was
opposed to open markets and pure laissez faire measures. He was influenced by the economic ideas of
Friedrich List
- "Big ticket" items, like railroads, mining,
large-scale industrial companies were given heaviest and disproportionate attention. The consumer market
was thus further squeezed. These measures
restrained consumer expenditures and raised revenue for focused state investment in further
heavy industrial development
- The Russian agrarian economy was weak on the world market. Now USA became increasingly powerful, and thus an
effective competitor with Russia on world grain markets. USA competition
weakened
Russian export trade and, thus, capital accumulation for investment in the
domestic market. Many Russians were committed to a Russia in which
peasant traditions might be protected from the
standard ruinous processes that accompanied industrialization
[EG]
- Russia's role in the early evolution of a global petroleum
industry showed other weaknesses in comparison with competitors
*1947:JEH#7:149, Alexander Gerschenkron measured "The Rate of Growth of
Industrial Production in Russia since 1885" came up with these measures of
Witte's success =
| 1885-1889 |
6.10 % per year |
|
| 1890-1899 |
8.00 % per year |
1894:1899; nearer 9.00 % |
| 1900-1906 |
1.45 % per year |
|
| 1907-1913 |
6.25 % per year |
1910:1913; ca. 7.50 % |
| 1885-1913 |
5.72 % per year |
Roughly = 1928:1955 levels of growth |
*--Olga Crisp (in Rondo Cameron, et al., Banking in the Early Stages of
Industrialization [1967]:184) created this comparison of gross national
product in rubles per capita, Russia and four other major nations, 1897-1913
=
| NATION |
1897 |
1913 (AS PERCENT) |
| Russia |
63 |
101.4 (62%) |
| Germany |
184 |
399.4 (46%) |
| France |
233 |
NA
(NA) |
| Great Britain |
273 |
460.6 (59%) |
| United States |
346 |
682.2 (51%) |
*--High ranking official V.I. Gurko evaluated Witte's
accomplishments as Finance Minister [VSB,3:759]
Vladimir Iosifovich Gurko (1862-1927), son of a field marshal and brother of a general
(Vasilii), graduated from Moscow University in 1885. In 1902, having served in
several bureaucratic posts and having published two books on agrarian problems,
he was appointed to a high post in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and in 1906
he served briefly as assistant minister. Subsequently turning to zemstvo
activity, he was elected in 1912 to the State Council, where he served until the
Revolution. Gurko give his appraisal of Witte as Finance Minister in the
following passage from his posthumously published memoirs, Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of
Nicholas II, pp. 56-57,66-67 =
Witte's economic policy was but a program to meet the current need and showed
that simplicity of conception which was his distinctive trait. This policy was,
in brief, the accumulation of funds in the state treasury and the accumulation
of private capital in the country. Realizing that the best method of increasing
state resources was to develop the country's economic life, he encouraged such
development; but he considered that the only means to attain this end was to
develop industry, heavy industry especially, since it was the source of all
great private fortunes. . . . Witte held that agriculture is but a limited field
for the application of human labor, while industry, unconfined by material
limitations, may develop indefinitely and thereby use an indefinite amount of
labor. Agriculture to him was a necessary but purely subordinate branch of
public economy; agriculture was necessary to feed the population, but could not
serve as the sole source of its well-being. This explains his negative attitude
toward all measures designed to improve the agricultural situation. [?!] As to
selection of method, Witte was . . . an opportunist; he was facile also in
shifting his opinion when he considered such shifts advisable. But his aim of
promoting the economic development of Russia as a basis for political strength
was steady and unswerving. In summary, Witte's accomplishments as Minister of
Finance reveal his great merit as an organizer of our state economy. He brought
order into the state budget, avoided deficits, and achieved even a pronounced
increase of revenues; he strengthened Russian finances as much by the
introduction of the gold standard as by his successful conversion of state loans
to a lower rate of interest, to four instead of six per cent. He extended the
network of our railways; he introduced and developed university and secondary
technical education; he assembled a fine group of assistants and other officers
in the Ministry of Finance; he organized the department of tax supervision; he
most successfully introduced and organized the large-scale liquor monopoly. All
these were the fruits of Witte's strenuous labor. Thanks to him our industry
began to develop at an almost incredible speed and attracted a part of the
population away from agricultural pursuits which could not absorb all the
peasant labor as the population increased.
*--Aleksandr I. Fenin,
Coal and Politics in Late Imperial Russia: Memoirs of a Russian
Mining Engineer
*--Sergei Yu.Witte,.
The Memoirs ofCount Witte
[Excerpts, CCC2,2:611-14]
*--Some images of Russian industrialization =
Moscow Peasant women factory workers [pix]
Moscow Factory dormitory
[pix]
Petersburg on banks of the Neva River | Cotton Mill
[pix]
Petersburg, same factory, peasant workers
[pix]
Moscow Morozov Factory hiring hall
[pix]
Baku Oil field
[pix]
Siberian gold mine
[pix]
Central Asian petroleum pipelines
[pix]
*--More on
Sergei Witte
\\
These first secondary sources provide significant comparison with USA =
*--White: Chapters 7 & 8
*--Rimlinger:245-52 [TXT]
*--Saul,2:148-53, 409-20, 451-5
*--Fred V. Carstensen, "American Multinational Corporations in Imperial Russia: Chapters on Foreign Enterprise and Russian Economic
Development" | 1977mr:JEH#37,1:245f
*--Thomas C. Owen,
Russian Corporate Capitalism, chapter 3:
"Corporations in the Russian Empire, 1700-1914" (pp. 16-49), and the discussion
of Russian capitalism in a comparative perspective [TXT (pp. 78-83)]
*--J. P. McKay,
Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian
Industrialization, 1885-1913
*--George Sherman Queen,
The United States and the Material Advance in Russia,
1881-1906 | Tells of McCormick Harvesting Machine Co.,
Remington Rand, Allis-Chalmers Mfg Co., Robins Conveying Belt Co., and several banking
firms
*--The great German sociologist Max Weber
was fascinated by the modern experience of the two peripheral European
peoples, Russians and Americans
\\
The following secondary sources deal more directly with Russia =
*--James H. Bater,
St.
Petersburg: Industrialization and Change
*--William L. Blackwell,
The
Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800-1860
*----------.
The
Industrializaton of Russia: An Historical Perspective
*--Daniel Chirot, ed.
The
Origins of Backwardness in East Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until
the Early Twentieth Century
*--Jonathan Coopersmith,The
Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926
*--Olga Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914 (LND:1976)
*--Malcom Falkus,
Industrialization of Russia, 1700-1914 (LND:1972)
*--Alexander Gerschenkron, "Agrarian Policies and Industrialization: Russia,
1861-1917". The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol. 6, pt. 2.
Cambridge:1965, pp. 706-800
*----------. "Problems and Patterns of Russian Economic Development". In his
Economic
Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Cambridge MA:1962; Reprint in CSH:282-308
*----------. "The Rate of Industrial Growth in Russia since 185l"
*1947:JEH#7:144-174
*--R. W. Goldsmith, "The Economic Growth of Tsarist Russia, 1860-1913"
Economic
Development and Cultural Change 9 (1961):441-75
*--Paul R. Gregory, "Economic Growth and Structural Change in Tsarist Russia: A Case
of Modern Economic Growth?" Soviet Studies 23 (January 1972):418-34
*----------. "Russian Industrialization and Economic Growth: Results and Perspectives
of Western Research". 1977:JGO#25:200-18
*----------.
Russian National Income:1885-1913. Cambridge ENG:1982
*--M. S. Miller,
The Economic Development of Russia, 1905-1914. London:1926
*--Roger Portal, "The Industrialization of Russia".
The Cambridge Economic
History of Europe 6, pt. 2:801-872
*--Theodore Von Laue,
Sergei
Witte and the Industrialization of Russia
*--Post-Soviet Russian-language studies = Search JANUS with KEYWORD "vitte"
\\
The following articles devoted to Russian industrial
companies are in MERSH
(KNIGHT library reference) =
All-Russian Society of Sugar Manufacturers
Association of Industry and Trade, 1906-1917
Central War Industries Committee
Congresses of Representatives of Industry and Trade
Councils of Congresses of Russian Industrialists
Factories and Plants in Russian Empire
Factories and Plants owned by the Tsarist Russian Government
Industrial Labor Legislation in the Russian Empire
Manufactories in Tsarist Russia
Manufacturing Council
Morozov
Nationalization of Industry and Finance after 1917
Oil Production
Putilov Works
Russian Commercial-Industrial Bank
Russian Industrial Society
Russian Steam Navigation and Trade Company
Russian Timber Company of the Far East
Societies of Plant and Factory Owners
Union of Ship Building Factories
War-Industries Committees
Zhurnal Manufaktor i Torgovli
<>1889:English stevedores, longshoremen and other
unskilled dockers organized massive and finally successful strike, marking the beginning
of modern wage-labor union movement in England
*--Strike organizer
Tom Mann wrote memoirs of the strike [CCC2,2:827f CCC3,2:877-84]
*--Socio-economic
map of London
that year provides insight into the population-geography of European industrial
urbanization
*1889:English cultural elite, led by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, published
Fabian
Essays in Socialism [Sidney Webb's contribution in
CCC3,2:953-70]
*--LOOP on Socialism
<>1889:USA Theodore Roosevelt published
The Winning of
the West
- His book reflected his
experience on the range and his desire to be identified with the mythic vigor of
pioneer life. He praised the supreme "righteousness" of war against indigenous "savages" of the prairie,
"though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman". Wide-eyed
acknowledgment of this gruesome reality lies at the heart of his "heroism". He
wrote further, "American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tatar, New Zealander
and Maori, -- in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep
the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people". NB! his future-forward
view that horror today might eventually be justified by a great tomorrow
- Roosevelt was the son of a wealthy
New York importer. As he pursued a political career in NY, he was able to
purchase ranch lands in Dakota territory where Native American Lakota Sioux were
being pushed off their lands and pressed into reservations. After a political
setback and devastating personal loss of close family members, he retired for
two years (1884-1886) to his ranches. "Though unsuccessful as a rancher", as one
popular desk encyclopedia put it, "he gained in the West many of the picturesque
mannerisms that complimented his positive personality"
<>1889ja01:USA NV Paiute native, Wovoka, fell into a
trance and had visions that became the basis of a new mystery religion called the
"Ghost Dance"
*--Within a year, the Native American
reservations on the Great Plains were alive with Ghost Dancers
<>1889je:USA journal
North American Review
published article "The Gospel of Wealth"
[TXT] which was written by
industrialist Andrew Carnegie and appeared
in book form under that
title in 1900 [CCC2,2:803f CCC3,2:885-99]
*Since 1888,
Andrew Carnegie was the chief owner of the
great industrial company,
Homestead Steel Works, just upstream from Pittsburgh
<>1889jy12:Russian counter-reform measures established
"firm governmental authority" in the villages, in the form of Zemskie
nachal'niki [Land Captains] [VSB,3:687-8]
- As a rule, only those gentry who chaired regional noble assemblies could hold this office.
The
tsarist state sought to restore the power of the nobility over peasants, and
thus, in part, to reverse one of the essential elements of serf
emancipation, but also to extend state authority more intimately
into the post-emancipation village
- This was the last effective moment in the life of
the noble
assembly as organizational center of aristocratic political life. The state
made this final institutional effort to resuscitate a seriously damaged soslovie [social-estate]
- But now other organizations --
zemstvos
and then political parties -- seemed better to meet the felt needs of the Russian well-born
- Nobility, as a legally-defined and defended social formation [soslovie],
was not actually prospering in the countryside, but for some of them, life was
still sweet =
- 1894:Tea-time on a Kharkov province country estate
[pix]
- 1894:Cadets prepare to practice dancing at the exclusive Corps of Pages
[pix]
- Finance Minister
Sergei Witte deplored the
creation of Land Captains. He understood that it met no
authentic aristocratic need and that it did harm to the most numerous soslovie, the
peasantry. In his memoirs, Witte
described how those who introduced Land Captains presumed that villagers "are
eternally under age, so to speak. This belief seems to me profoundly erroneous".
This belief "is fraught with disastrous consequences for the future"
- More Russians, even in privileged circles, were beginning to see that
reactionary policy and the old order were indeed
doomed
- Gentry politics moved into more clearly
"modern" institutional frameworks
<>1889:Paris World's Exposition on the centennial of
the Great French Revolution was less focused on "liberty, equality and
fraternity" than on the muscular accomplishments of economic progress. This
world's fair followed in the emerging
tradition by featured the newly built steely symbol of French industrial
modernization, the Eiffel Tower
<>1889jy14:jy20; Paris | In the year of the
Paris Exposition, an equally global or universal-minded organization, the Second International, held
its founding congress
- European (and soon world-wide) social-democracy was becoming a public force.
From this time forward for over a quarter century, the Second International worked to mobilize European, North American and world-wide
progressive political parties and workers' unions, in an attempt to hasten economic
reform and limit the economic power of capitalism and the political power of
industrial companies
- The liberal revolution
over the previous century had gone only so far to break free of the old feudal hierarchies. It had in
fact created a new hierarchy, as depicted in a pamphlet published by the International Workers of the World
[pix]. The long-term goal was to replace the capitalist
or bourgeois "mode of production" with a radically democratic socialist mode of production in which
wage-laborers became both management and labor
- European socialism was splitting, giving birth to two main trends in Social Democracy
(creating a functional equivalent of contradictions built into European liberalism
[ID]) =
(1) moderate socialism, or left-wing-liberal or radical-liberal, an
increasingly overt movement (EG=Eduard Bernstein) and
(2) revolutionary, conspiratorial socialism, an increasingly covert
movement (EG=Vladimir Il'ich Lenin)
- The first trend expressed optimism about the ability to build on the
successes of the earlier liberal revolution
- The second trend presumed that the
earlier liberal revolution would have to be overturned
by domestic war, by violent revolution
- European Marxism broke into factions, and the Russian
movement was soon to do the same
- The Second International lasted a quarter century, but it
collapsed at the outbreak of World War One and died
at its end
- The size and strength of The Second International did
pressure industrializing nations of Europe and North America to follow
Bismarck’s lead in Germany in the direction of social
welfare reform
\\
*--Rimlinger's comparative history of
welfare, ch. 1:1-10 (Intro) [TXT]; chs. 6-7:193-301 (USA
[TXT]
and Russia [TXT]); ch. 9:333-43 (Conclusion)
*--P. Flora and A. J. Heidenheimer, eds.,
Development of Welfare States in America and
Europe
*--GO 1927 to see how welfare comparison looked four decades later in a time of
crisis, between WW1 & WW2
*--GO 1964 to see
how welfare comparison was done yet four more decades later, in the era of the Cold War
*--GO 2007 to see a TABLE that
compares affluence in USA with affluence in welfare-oriented Norway
<>1889se:USA, Chicago | From an 1892 speech by founder
Jane Addams, Hull House was described in the following way=
It
represented no association, but was opened by two women, backed by many friends, in the
belief that the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable
and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so
easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for
Chicago. Hull House endeavors to make social intercourse express the growing sense
of the economic unity of society. It is an effort to add the social function
to democracy [boldface added to highlight sense of "civil society" embedding
in Addams' comments]. It was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each
other is reciprocal; and that as "the social relation is essentially a reciprocal
relation, it gave a form of expression that has peculiar value" ["The
Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (TXT)]
<>1890:African Cape Colony under the control of
English imperialist adventurer and free-wheeling colonial entrepreneur
Cecil Rhodes
*1888:1889; Documents describe Rhodes administration [CCC3,2:1138-49
| CCC2,2:841f]
<>1890:English public activist William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army,
published In Darkest England and the Way Out in which he compared the
degradation and suffering of English wage-laborers with those of the peoples
of Africa under imperial/colonial subjugation [PWT2:173-6]
<>1890:Finland brought more tightly under Russian
imperialist control
*1892ja:Russian diplomat Vladimir Lamsdorf warned of the harm that Russification policy
caused in Poland [VSB,3:690]
*--While Russification rushed ahead in
Finland and
Poland, reactionary policy was finding opposition within the
highest ranks of Russian officialdom
\\
*--E. C.
Thaden,
Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855-1917
<>1890:French imperialist legislator and
occasional Prime Minister Jules Ferry stated
sacred claim to Vietnam in Le Tonkin et la
Mère-Patrie [TXT
excerpt]
*1870s:Ferry held liberal views on democratic education [CCC2,2:512-21
CCC3,2:1030-]
*1884mr28:French Chamber of Deputies heard Ferry speech on the need for French
imperial expansion [W]
*1885jy28:The Chamber heard Ferry on the question of French interests in Madagascar [BNE:174-9]
<>1890:Russian mathematician Sonia Kovalevskaia described her
everyday life
in A Russian Childhood, a significant
account of women's education
- Other women left significant memoirs of their experience, sometimes highly
political. See Barbara Engel, ed.,
Five Sisters: Women
against the Tsar
- Vera Broido,
Daughter of
Revolution: A Russian Girlhood Remembered (1998)
- Vera Figner,
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
- Russian-born
Emma Goldman emigrated to USA and launched herself on a
remarkable half-century of anarchist activism
\\
*--Anna Hillyar and Jane McDermid,
Revolutionary
Women in Russia, 1870-1917 (2000), chapters 1, 2 & 3
*--Barbara Alpern Engel,
Women in Russia,
1700-2000 (2004)
*--Nataliia Pushkareva,
Women in Russian
History from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (1997)
*--Dorothy Atkinson, et al.,
Women in Russia
(1977)
*--Rochelle Ruthchild,
Women in Russia
and the Soviet Union: An Annotated Bibliography (1993)
<>1890:USA Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan published
The
Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783
[TXT]
<>1890:USA Harvard University Professor William James
(1842-1910) marked the beginning of an epoch in American intellectual history
with the publication of Principles of Psychology
- James always claimed that his ideas were derived from the principles of Charles
Sanders Peirce
(1839-1914) [W#1 |
W#2 |
W#3]
- James popularized "Pragmatism", a broad school of philosophy so dominant in
USA in the generation before WW1 [CCC2,2:1035-41 | CCC3,2:1173-91]
=
- Consciousness is not a mirror of actuality, it is selective, interested,
goal-oriented
- Action is a function of consciousness. The mind "carves out" a
vision of actuality from "the jointless continuity of space"
- Knowledge is
instrumental. "Truth" is not absolute but "only the expedient in our way of
thinking"
- "Radical empiricism" [see below] is a philosophy that exalts "pure
experience"
- It rejects transcendent principles and seeks meaning in the
"conjunctive relations" that variously link ideas with one another and join
thought with experience. [1935:CDE:995]
- 1897:The Will to Believe
[TXT]
- 1902:The Varieties of Religious Experience [TXT]
- 1907:Pragmatism [TXT]
- 1909:The Meaning of Truth
- 1912:Essays in Radical Empiricism [TXT], published posthumously
\\
*--[W]
*--Wagar on Pragmatism [TXT]
<>1890mr18:German Emperor dismissed Chancellor Otto von
Bismarck [DPH:271-4], an act which dismayed many contemporaries [pix]
*--Bismarck's public career of 30 years, one of the most decisive and brilliant in the
European 19th century, was at its end
\\
*--George Frost Kennan,
The Decline of Bismarck's European Order: Franco-Russian
Relations, 1875-1890
<>1890je12:Russian Zemstvo
electoral and voting laws altered
- One result of these alterations was strengthening the position of landlords and
marginalizing villagers within Zemstvos
- More generally, whether for landlords
or for villagers, the range of zemstvo authority was seriously constricted
- This
happened on the very eve of the great 1891:1892; Russian famine
[ID]
when the Zemstvo was much needed [VSB,3:688-9]
- The tsarist state seemed bent on scuttling the zemstvo
and other "great reforms"
- This and other clumsy official reactionary measures provoked Witte to compose
a bitter and ironic "more rightist than thou" tirade
- In this year the world-famous chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev resigned his SPb
University post in protest over the refusal of Minister of Education I. D. Delianov (an acolyte of
Dmitrii Tolstoi) to accept a student petition
which Mendeleev had
agreed to deliver
<>1890jy02:USA
passed Sherman Anti-Trust Act
[ID]
*--The Act was
originally intended for use against the unchecked pursuit of their own perceived
interests sought by large corporations and other business conglomerates
[ID]
*--But the Act was more frequently and effectively employed against
wage-laborers who sought to organize themselves in the pursuit of their
perceived interests
<>1890de15:SD Standing Rock Reservation,
not far from his family cabin, Sitting Bull was killed by US
Government Agency forces in connection with the policy of forceful suppression of native
religious practice
<>1891:English artist, craftsman and writer
William Morris published his novel in the "utopian"
tradition, News from Nowhere, or , An Epoch of Rest
[TXT]
- Morris described a humane ideal future in 22nd-century England, where the
observation of communitarian and libertarian principles eradicated cultural,
political, social and economic exploitation
- Morris refused to accept the
rampant vulgarities of mass-production industrial urbanization and commercial
culture or pop-arts
- He was steeped
in an esthetic of rural virtue that harmonized with a European cultural
nostalgia for a "down-on-the-farm" life-style
- He reacted to the narrowness of Bellamy's utopian concept of
industrial progress. Morris, perhaps looking down his nose, called Looking Backward
"a horrible cockney dream". The refined Englishman Morris certainly put the
American author in his place
\\
*--Website of Wm.Morris
Society
<>1891:Russian
scholar Maksim Kovalevskii published Modern
Customs and Ancient Laws in Russia [TXT]
<>1891:1892; Russian famine
*--Not long before, Finance Minister Ivan Vyshnegradskii foolishly stated, "We
may starve, but we WILL export"
\\
*--Saul,2:335-64
*--R. G. Robbins,
Famine in Russia, 1891-1892:The Imperial Government Responds to a
Crisis
<>1891:1903; Russia | Trans-Siberia railroad, after a
half-century delay, nearly completed in nine years
<>1891:USA traveler and lecturer George Kennan published
Siberia
and the Exile System with its powerful condemnation of Russian
tsarist state's
oppression by means of removal and
frontier development in Siberia [Excerpts: VSB,3:684-7
|
WRH3:387-404]
*--As that great symbol of progressive modernization -- the Trans-Siberian
Railroad -- reached for Pacific shores, Siberian exile
expressed but another facet of reactionary state policy
<>1891my01:Russian industrial workers delivered
and listened to speeches on May Day
[Harding:84-91]
*1891fe04:French Labor Party and the National Federation of Trade Unions urged
French workers to join the international labor day of protest (May Day) against
miserable conditions of wage-laborers [BNE:146-7] GO my15
<>1891my11:Japan, Otsu | Terrorist Tsuda Sanzo, an escort policeman, slightly
wounded future Russian Emperor Nicholas II during state visit. Kojima Iken, Supreme court, ruled
against the death penalty, showing unusual independence of the law and its courts, but
also diplomatic slight to Russia
\\
*--KEJ
<>1891my15:Vatican issued Pope Leo XIII's radical
encyclical Rerum novarum
[TXT]
that gave Church sanction to the burgeoning world wage-labor
movement and strengthened the Church's claim to be the spokesperson for the
working masses
*1931 anniversary of this radical
encyclical struck a very different tone
*--The German
Kulturkampf spread to France [DPH:258-61]
<>1891oc:German Social-Democratic Party adopted its Erfurt Program [DPH:274-7]
*--German miner Nikolaus Osterroth wrote later memoirs about his first
confrontation with the Social Democratic Party [PWT2:170-3]
<>1892:1894; Russian religious philosopher
Vladimir Solov'ev,
The Meaning of Love [Excerpts
= Edie,3:85-98]
<>1892:Geneva |
Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov published On the Tasks of the Socialists in the
Campaign against Famine in Russia [VSB,3:708-9]
<>1892je11:Tsarist
state revised the 1870 city-duma reform statute
- The revised statute on city dumas increased central control over municipal
self administration and reduced the number who could participate in elections [VSB,3:689-10]
- The center of gravity in Russian economic and social life was shifting from the
countryside to the city
- Labor legislation (e.g., "police
socialism") and welfare legislation were designed to
meet the needs of a small but crucial and growing urban wage-labor
population
- Semen Kanatchikov wrote an autobiography,
A Radical
Worker in Tsarist Russia which illustrated in great detail the life of a
fresh-minted Russian proletarian or wage-laborer in the years up to the 1905 Revolution
- Photos of early 20th-century
Petersburg street scenes =
- Russian Empire, 1895-1910. Pictures of St.Petersburg. Photographs from
stereoscopic negatives in the Keystone-Mast Collection. They are presented by
California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside (comments:
edward.earle@ucr.edu)
- Photos of early 20th-century
Moscow street scenes =
- But what about urban elites? Was there a non-bureaucratic "bourgeois" liberal
political culture? Was there anything of that much debated European bürgerliche
Gesellschaft [urban or civil society]? Did modern city life come to Russia only at the end of the great
European epoch of urban capitalist liberalism?
- Tighter restriction on the evolution of urban institutions was another
example of reactionary state policy
\\
*--Metropolis, 1890-1940
[Another
edition]. See Kenneth T. Jackson, "The Capital of Capitalism: the New York Metropolitan Region,
1890-1940":319-353; and R. A. French, "Moscow, the Socialist Metropolis":355-379.
*--L. S. Bourne., et al., eds.,
Urbanization
and Settlement Systems: International Perspectives, section 1, ch. 1:23-48 (USA); section 4, ch. 1:335-55 (USSR)
*--Thomas C. Owen,
Russian Corporate
Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika (1995), NB! "Russian Entrepreneurship in Comparative
Perspective" [TXT pp.78-83]
*------------------------,
Capitalism
and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855-1905
*--Henri Troyat,
Daily Life in Russia Under the
Last Tsar [1903 fictional social history = everyday life, business & other elites in touch w/ folk]
*--Alfred J. Rieber,
Merchants and
Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia
*--Jo Ann Ruckman,
The Moscow Business
Elite: A Social and Cultural Portrait of Two
Generations, 1840-1905
*----------. Savva Morozov: A Moscow Entrepreneur on eve of the Russian Revolution
*--Daniel R. Brower,
The Russian City
Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900
*--Joseph Bradley,
Muzhik and Muscovite:
Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia
*--Hamm, ed.
City in Late
Imperial Russia
(Bloomington:1986)
*--M. C. Kaser, "Russian Entrepreneurship". In Cambridge Economic History of Europe 8, part 2. Cambridge ENG:1978
\\
The following articles devoted to Russian wage-labor organizations are
in MERSH (KNIGHT library reference) =
All-Jewish Workers Union
Assembly of Russian Factor and Will Workers of Saint Petersburg [~~Zubatov]
Bakinskii Proletarii
Belorussian Workers and Peasants Party
Labor Groups of the War Industries Committee [Central War Industries Committee]
Ludinovo Workers' Disturbances 1861, 1865-66
Putilov Strikes
Union of Oil Industry Workers
<>1892jy04:USA | Platform of the Progressive or Populist
Party addressed central issue of economic inequality and criticized the growing role of
government in fostering and protecting that inequality
- Much rhetorical energy
was exerted to praise laissez faire and "free" markets, but there was by
this time little authentic dispute among US political factions, left, right or
center, about whether a vigorous government should or should not be involved in
social and economic matters. In practice (if not in rhetoric) all factions
agreed that government should play an active role in the economy
- The only real
issue was this = Whose social and economic interests ought to be fostered
and protected by vigorous government action
- The new Progressive Party
opposed use of governmental power to support privilege. It sought to break up
the close alliance of government and wealth. It did not seek to curb governmental
power, rather to shift the focus of governmental power from protection of industrial companies
toward protection of the needs of the vast majority of working people, to convert government
into an active agent of popular welfare
- Among
their goals was the institution of a graduated income tax, introduction of initiative
and referendum, and democratic election of senators
- At the same time, the Progressive or Populist Party challenged the near
monopoly on political power held by the two main political
parties
- The Progressive Era in the USA gave Russian scholar Moisei Ostrogorskii
[ID] grounds for optimism
about the future of democratic politics [TXT of 3 hopeful
paragraphs from his book
Democracy and the
Organization of Political Parties]
-
The
Progressive Era: Primary Documents...1890-1914 (2004)
-
The Muckrakers . .
.
\\
*2003au03:Kommersant (a progressive business-oriented post-Soviet Russian serial) described what
happened in the USA progressive era when big oil and big finance
became too big [TXT]
*--Michael McGerr,
A Fierce Discontent: The
Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (2003)
*--Robert D. Johnston,
The Radical Middle Class: Populist
democracy and the question of capitalism in progressive era Portland, Oregon (2003)
<>1892jy06:USA Homestead Strike (near Pittsburgh)
[W]
[W]
- Five-month labor dispute with the huge industrial company, Carnegie Steel, turned violent when corporation manager Henry
C. Frick hired 300 Pinkertons, a private police force founded by Allan Pinkerton
[W] (who was also involved
in Civil War espionage and contributed thusly to the creation of the Federal Secret
Service)
- Frick organized military operations against workers, eventually
involving the Pennsylvania National Guard
- Carnegie, the owner, and Frick,
the manager, broke with one
another, in part because of Frick's hostility toward wage-labor
- Occurring within two days of one another, the formation of the Progressive
Party and the Homestead Strike announced that the Progressive Era was going to be a highly fretted quarter century in US
history
\\
*--James Howard Bridge, The Inside History
of the Carnegie Steel Company: The Romance of Millions (1903)
*--Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead:
Politics, Culture and Steel
<>1894ja04(NS):France and Russia
signed secret military treaty, based on an earlier (1892au17[NS]) military
convention [Fay, Origins,1:118-9 | DIR2:358-9
| DIR3:405-7]
*--The diplomatic system forged by Bismarck
[ID] was
breaking down. Powerful nations on eastern and western borders of Germany were
taking action to protect themselves from "The Triple Alliance"
[ID]
<>1893:1934; Russian cultural phenomenon,
lasting nearly a half-century, called "The Silver Age"
- The Silver Age opened with Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's "On the Present Condition of Russian Literature". Merezhkovskii also wrote on revolution and religion, and the
Jewish Question [RRS:187-224]
-
The Silver
Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
-
Russian art of the avant-garde: Theory and criticism, 1902-1934
- The diary of Valery Bryusov (1893-1905)|
- Some would extend this remarkable epoch 41 years, through the 1917 Revolutions, into
emigration, but also into the early Soviet period, up to the imposition of Stalinist
"Socialist Realism" in 1934
- The Silver Age coincided with new trends in
Russian
philosophical and religious thought
- Russian artistic developments are best understood in a pan-European, perhaps
one should say "global", context
\\
*--William Brumfield, The
Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture
*--Robert C. Williams, Russian
Art and American Money, 1900-1940
<>1893:English theorist Thomas Huxley
published Evolution and Ethics
[excerpts = CCC3,2:855-66] which encouraged application of Darwinian biology
to the analysis of human morality and behavior
- 1894:US scholar, diplomat and President of Cornell University, Andrew D. White, summarized some
telling moments in the emerging struggle between science and religion, with special reference
to the impact of Darwinian biology, A History of the
Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom [excerpts = PWT2:229-31]
- White described how Darwin's biology "had come into the theological world like a plough into an
ant-hill"
- White and his university were accused of teaching atheism and
"infidelity"
- Darwinian
concepts gladdened some and outraged others
- Science continued its
original role as challenger to received or customary ways of seeing the
world
- And science expanded its second role = A
new totalistic explanation and solution of human problems, a substitute for
received or customary ways of seeing the world
<>1893:French philosopher and social critic
Elie Halévy (1870-1937) and associates (largely from the elitist
Ecole Normale) founded
Revue de métaphysique
et de morale
- The new journal stated that "it is necessary to act against the miserable positivism, which we
are departing from, and the irritating religiosity, which we risk getting stuck in, to
build a philosophy of action and reflection, to be rationalists with a passion"
- Halévy at this time devoted serious attention to the English classical
liberal economic thinkers, the philosophical radicals of the
early 19th century [ID] =
- 1904:He published
Growth of philosophic radicalism
- He sought to install an economic foundation, so to speak, under his
neo-Kantian philosophy [ID Kant]
<>1893:French sociologist
Émile Durkheim published
The Division of Labor in
Society in which he emphasized the essential social or communitarian setting of
individual choices, rounding off the extreme individualism of the "classical
economists" who emphasized the atomized individual. He distinguished between
"mechanical solidarity" and "organic solidarity", though he presumed
that advanced society required a bit of both [CCS,1:483-515]
<>1893:Hawaiian Islands under control of USA sugar plantation owner
<>1893:Russian government
focused on industrial companies when it launched a review of national manufacturing industry and trade [CCC2,2:603-10]
<>1893my01:Chicago World's Fair (Columbian
Exposition). In a year of economic crisis in USA, Chicago put on the best show possible
- George Ferris, Jr., constructed the first modern Ferris wheel, powered by a 1000 horse
power engine. Thirty-six wooden cars were suspended around the 264 feet high wheel. Each
car held 60 riders. More than one million paid fifty cents for a ride
- At this same fair, Wisconsin University [old "Northwest Territory"] Professor
Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced his great theory about US history, "The
Significance of the Frontier in American History" [TXT]
- He later published a book-length study
[TXT]
- Some idea of the target of Turner's remarks can be gained from
this paragraph of Tocqueville's Democracy in America
- East Coast elites had reason to be affronted [EG] by the frontier-oriented and westward-looking
cultural radicalism of Turner's thesis
- Sitting Bull’s SD reservation cabin had been crated up
and shipped to Chicago for exhibit at this World's
Fair, just down the lanes from where Turner held forth on the essence of the American
frontier experience. When the Fair closed down, the cabin — so it is said — was
packed off to the city dump
- Turner announced the closing
of the American frontier, then Sitting Bull's cabin was trashed. These two
Chicago events together were like a mythic announcement that
the era of
Native American independence on the Great Plains was over
- More than that, the longer era
that spanned nearly two hundred years in the relations
of Euro-Americans and Native Americans was also at a close. A new era was about to dawn
- In this same year, the Russian Trans-Siberian
Railway Committee
issued provisional regulations to promote peasant emigration to the Bashkir Steppes and
Siberia (after nearly 200 years of frontier
confrontation, the Bashkir steppes now brought fully under Russian dominion).
1899:Refinements published in "Regulations concerning government Grants-in-Aid to
Settlers Migrating with Required Authorization to Siberia and the Steppe Governorship
General" [VSB,3:760]
- Library of Congress
website devoted to the shared
frontier experience of Russia and USA (bilingual)
\\
*--White:18-40 compares RUS-USA indigenous populations, rates
of geographical expansion, and early commercial phases of economic development [TXT]
*--D. W. Treadgold,
The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in
Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War [TXT]
*--Wagar on Turner [TXT]
*--Saul,2:365-77
*--Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, "Russian Expansion in the Far East in the Light of the
Turner Hypothesis", in Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber,
The Frontier in Perspective
*--D. W. Treadgold, "Russian Expansion in the Light of Turner's Study of the American
Frontier", 1952oc:Agricultural History:147-152
*--William Wykoff and Gary Hausladen, "Settling the Russian Frontier: With
Comparisons to North America", 1989mr:Soviet Geography [now titled
Eurasian Geography and
Economics] #30, 3:179-89
<>1893de14:Russian law restricted peasant ability to buy or sell land
independently from village community [VSB,3:756]
*--Reactionary policy resisted evolution of independent peasant farmers
just as the Siberian frontier opened for them
*1893:English traveler F. J. Wishaw,
Out of Doors in Tsarland described
peasant village life [WRH3:426-34]
*1894:Konstantin Korovin painting of wintry scene, a sleigh in front of peasant hut, in
Olga's Gallery
<>1894:USA NYC | William Dean Howells published a utopian novel,
A Traveler from
Altruria
- One of Howells' characters described the main change in American
life, 1850-1890 =
- In 1850, a person who ran into difficulties, who did not at
first succeed, turned his hand to something else
- As a last resort, a person
"went West, pre-empted a quarter section of public land, and grew up with the
country"
- But, as the theorist/historian Turner declared, the frontier was now
closed. "The struggle for life", Howells wrote, "has changed from a free fight to an encounter of
disciplined forces, and the free fighters that are left get ground to pieces
between organized labor and organized capital". [Kazin:17]
- As the 19th century wound down, the giganticism of the "second industrial
revolution" presented a looming menace to the contemporary imagination
- Heavy
stripes of disenchantment ran through cultural life, not excluding the
fine arts
- Events seemed to contradict
the naive "liberal" belief in progress
- A feeling of disenchantment drove
Max Weber into deeper theoretical
and sociological searches for sources of current problems
- For others it
encouraged a romantic affirmation of earlier, simpler, often rural virtues. For
example, Thorstein Veblen praised life "down on the farm"
and contrasted it with urban and industrial dehumanization
- Disenchantment stimulated
both dreamy projections of utopian escape (remember
Tönnies) as well as terrifying projections of utopian hell (in the emerging
anti-utopian trends of the 20th century)
- Industrialization of farm production moved ahead
[pix]
- Some concluded that the era of
urban-based "bourgeois" liberalism was over because the laissez faire,
entrepreneurial and true free-market foundations for its existence had been
transformed to meet the needs of trans-national finance and corporate industrial
giganticism
- The economy had outgrown its original liberal political ideology
- Nonetheless,
at the turn of the 20th century, some Americans took courage from
the saving graces of European civilization
("Western Civ"). These might have been a latter-day USA example of that general
trend labeled "Westernizer" when it appeared a half century earlier in
Russian cultural debate [ID]
- Howells, for example, was much influenced by Tolstoy and the more
clearly "Western" Ivan Turgenev
- However, American-born but Europe-centered author Henry James, an important
representative of the US "Westernizer" trend and a friend of
Turgenev, expressed his fear that old Europe was
stagnant. Its future "is more likely to be one of disintegration, with Russia
for the eccentric on one side and America on the other" [Kazin:17]
- Van Wyck Brooks showed a deep affinity for the traditions of the Russian
intelligentsia [TXT]
<>1894:English journalist William Thomas Stead
[ID] published
Chicago Today: The Labour War in America
[TXT]
<>1894:1895; Manchuria.
China and
Japan at war
<>1894ja04:France and Russia
signed secret military treaty [Fay, Origins,1:118-9 |
DIR2:358-9]
<>1894ja22;1897mr31; English Parliamentarian Joseph
Chamberlain delivered three rousing imperialist and racist
speeches, The British Empire: Colonial Commerce ... [P20:23
| PWT2:213-15]
English version of European imperialism
<>1894je:Korea revolted against imperialist
Japan and asked China for help. Japan sent troops
<>1894su:USA Pullman Strike (south of
Chicago) became a
national crisis. The American Railway Union, led by
Eugene Debs, had grown strong over the preceding two years
and was now backed by a wide-spread, well-organized labor movement. President Cleveland sent in nearly 2000 US army troops to join the nearly 4000 National
Guardsmen and about 8000 police and private security forces. These paramilitary forces deployed against laborers. At the same time, steps were taken to make
self-organization of wage-laborers a federal crime
\\
*-- [W#1]
[W#2]
<>1894oc20:1917mr; Russian
Emperor Nicholas II,
the last tsar and emperor, reigned for a quarter century
- Nicholas II ruled via brutal
official reaction inherited from his father Alexandr III, but he responded with half-hearted reforms
as revolution loomed
- 1905 Revolution stripped Nicholas of his absolutist,
autocratic authority
- 1906:1917; The Russian State Duma was created in the
institutional place of the old absolute and autocratic tsarist authority, but
the autocrat remained and the new representative or "parliamentary" governing
institution was slow to put down roots. In fact, it collapsed with tsarist
authority in 1917
- The final disaster of
World War One
caused Emperor Nicholas II to resign the
Russian throne
- Yet this pitiful reign witnessed one of histories most
remarkable cultural
explosions that exerted a lasting world influence well into the Soviet
period
- At the beginning of Nicholas' reign, political opposition to
the tsarist state was centered on the
Zemstvo movement,
but increasingly involved a broader spectrum of opinion and social action. EG=Tver
Zemstvo address to the new emperor Nicholas II [1934:SEER#12:347-67]
- Nicholas characterized liberal political objectives as "senseless dreams"
\\
*1890:1905; Tver Province Zemstvo politics in the 15 years leading up to
the Revolution of 1905 are characterized by Charles Timberlake in
Emerging
Democracy..., pp. 30-59
<>1895ja17:ja19; Tver liberals addressed new tsar Nicholas II about need for
representative government, and Nicholas replied with rebuke of their "senseless
dreams" about a constitution in Russia [*1934ja:SEER#12,35:349-50 & 352-4]
*--To the dismay a a large segment of the Russian educated population, Nicholas
seemed to be saying that reactionary policy would
continue as before
<>1895fe12:Petersburg New Port strike leaflet. That summer, a Moscow "Workers Union"
stated labor demands [Harding:143-6]
- 1895de:Tsarist police arrested leaders of this movement, some of them
wage-laborers and some of them representatives
of the educated Russian population, active as a revolutionary intelligentsia
[ID]
- An important example of this new generation of dedicated labor-oriented intelligentsia was ex-student Vladimir Il'ich Ulianov. In this year of mounting
labor organization, Ulianov helped organize a Petersburg Union of Struggle [Soiuz bor'by] [Harding:149-215]
- Ulianov's father was a tsarist education official who had received noble status as a result of long and high quality service. The family lived a
comfortably established "middle class" provincial life
[pix]
- But Vladimir's brother Aleksandr
[pix] went off to the
university where
he got involved in political circles associated with terrorist plots. He was arrested and executed
- Now, for his acts of labor agitation, younger brother Vladimir Ulianov was sent into Siberian exile in the valley of the Lena River. He changed his
family name, adapting the Siberian river of exile to label his new identity =
"Lenin"
[pix]
- Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia wrote memoirs of their experience in the three years of Siberian exile [StH:6-15]
<>1895:1908; English pundit, historian and sociologist,
H.G. Wells
(Herbert George, 1866-1946) wrote fantastic science-fiction, often projecting a future in
a prophetic tone, sometimes utopian, sometimes dystopian
- With its fixation on modern technological,
industrial life, pop-arts science fiction seemed always to be asking
of science and technology, "Is you is, or is you ain’t my baby?"
Here are some of the most widely read Wells publications =
*1895:The Time Machine
*1896:The Island of Doctor Moreau
*1897:The Invisible Man
*1898:The War of the Worlds
*1908:The War in the Air
<>1895:USA
efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) delivered a technical
paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, "A Piece-Rate System: A
Step toward Partial Solution of the Labor Problem"
- For Taylor, the essence of the matter was the need for closer and more detailed structuring of worker behavior,
a near mechanical and scientifically scrupulous managerial attentiveness to
every productive movement of workers and machines. Economic efficiency was the
ultimate virtue, whether in connection with machines or humans
- This was a "partial solution" not so much of the workers' own "labor problem"
as it was of the capitalist managers' labor problem
- Taylor's inauspicious
presentation marked the beginning of a globally significant "managerial
revolution" which was redefining the functional meaning of "ownership" and
old-fashioned notions of capitalist property. Managers were replacing owners at
the levers of economic enterprise (EG= Henry C. Frick)
- Taylor's insights had especially important implications as the European
industrial revolution expanded into its gigantic, corporate second phase
- And it
had important implications far beyond the board rooms of corporate enterprise
- For one thing, the "Taylor system" worked against the central objectives of the Progressive Era.
More =
\\
*--Merkle:7-8
*--Alfred Chandler, Jr.,
The
Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business and later, on the global
stage, Scale and
Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism | A relatively small
number of gigantic corporations -- DuPont, Westinghouse, Dunlop,
Armstrong-Whitworth, Farben, Siemens, etc. -- were beginning to function
in the world like nation-states unto themselves, struggling to be winners in the
quest to organize the earth. This was less a process of "Darwinian" survival of
the fittest in some natural process. It was an exercise in rational economic
planning rather than "natural selection". The "hand" was not
"invisible" [ID], even if it was
kept out of public view. Chandler argued that mass production
expanded levels of productivity to such heights that by merging plants, bringing
unit costs down, "economies of scale" were possible. Corporate organizational
and distributive power gave them further close control over the process. Oil
refiners bought wells "upstream on the pipeline" and also filling stations
"downstream on the pipeline" in order to position themselves profitably through
the full production and distribution of industrial commodities. This required
meticulous or micro-control of humongous investment and income related to
colossal industrial enterprises. This required extremely disciplined and ornate
organizational structure, yet a structure always open to intervention and
control from a central point. Elaborate structures -- marketing, engineering,
accounting, research, finance, etc. departments -- were under centralized
managerial control. This was called "scientific management". It marked
the opening of the managerial revolution
<>1895mr061895mr06:German Reichstag heard
racist (particularly
anti-Semitic
[ID]) speech by Hermann Ahlwardt,
The Semitic Versus the Teutonic Race [P20:30]
<>1895ap13:Kansas, Salina | Eighth-grade final exam
[W]
*--Universal and compulsory public education, at least through the eighth grade,
was a central component of the Progressive Era
<>1895ap23:Japan and China
brought war to a close
- Shimonoseki Treaty gave Japan Liaotung Peninsula, w/Port Arthur and Dalny (Japanese:Dairen
Chinese:Dalian or Ta-lien
- Russia, France and Germany considered Japanese gains to be excessive, so they launched
a tripartite intervention. [Beasley, MHJ:163 has strange list of motives, including German
desire "to edge Russia away from European politics"]
- German Kaiser Wilhelm
corresponded with Nicholas II over the next weeks urging Russia eastward, "to
cultivate the Asian Continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow
Race" [VSB,3:693]
- Russian-Japanese relations, up to this point, had been
businesslike, now relations w/Asia embittered by this act in concert with west European
imperial powers
- Sir Ernest Satow, British Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan (1895-1900) and China (1900-1906),
Korea and Manchuria
between Russia and Japan, 1895-1904
<>1895my19:Cuban
revolution against Spain led by Jose Marti from USA
- Spain suppressed the rebellion and moved
rebellious groups -- ex-slaves, mulattos and small holders of Spanish descent -- into
areas called reconcentrados in garrison cities (a grim variation on now familiar
frontier or imperialist policies of removal, transport
and concentration)
- Cuban economy suffered, especially the $50m worth of USA investments. USA business
shifted to support rebels and a Cuban shadow government, a junta, settled in NYC under
watchful USA eyes
- The Spanish version of European imperialism was coming unglued, and a
new imperialist competitor arose in the "New World", the first serious
overseas efforts of US imperialism
\\
*--John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide
in Cuba, 1895-1898 (2006)
<>1895je02:Russian
women trained
to become doctors at the Petersburg Women's Medical Institute [BRW:197-9]
<>1896:1916; Central Asian expansion of Russian power brought it into Kazakhstan
\\
*--G. J. Demko,
The Russian Colonization
of Kazakhstan, 1896-1916
<>1896:Austria | Hungarian-born Jewish leader Theodor
Herzl (1860-1904), Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State,
(TXT)]. Soon a Zionist movement arose in favor of the creation of
a Jewish nation-state, preferably in Palestine
<>1896:French philosopher Alfred Fouillée criticized dominant positivist
traditions of European thought in Le mouvement idéaliste et la réaction contre la
science positive [BMC4:618-23]
*--Science, or should we say "scientism", was
coming under increasing critical scrutiny
<>1896:Russian Procurator of the Holy
Synod [ID] Konstantin Pobedonostsev,
Reflections of a Russian Statesman [TXT]
gave expression to the most extreme official reactionary views on modernization of Russian life
[cf. VSB,3:736-9 | WRH3:434-46 |
RRC2,2:390-401]
- To what degree did these official reactionary views reflect views among the
public, or beyond the urban public and out into the countryside? Does
Pobedonostsev represent an "official reactionary world view" or does he
represent a "public reactionary world view", or more broadly a "Russian
reactionary world view"? Were his extreme views the expression of a hot-house
statism or the expression of a wide-spread national outlook?
- In any event,
Pobedonostsev, as secular bureaucratic head of the
Russian Orthodox Church, became the representative figure of
Russian
reactionary policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
- Are his views essentially different from those of prominent Oregon public
figures in the same late-nineteenth century epoch? Consider this historical
evaluation by Russell Sadler [TXT] which appeared
in 2006mr29:ERG
\\
*--Robert F. Byrnes,
Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought
(1968)
*--Vera Shevzov,
Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution
(2004)
explores tension in Russia between the Church as bureau of central
government (the Petrine Church) or the Church as a "grass-roots" expression
of Russian spirituality, a place not so much for
official doctrine as for popular religious and communitarian ceremony (as seen by Khomiakov
[ID] and other Slavophiles)
<>1896mr01:Ethiopia defeated aggressive, imperialist
Italy
<>1896ap19:Saint Petersburg League for the Struggle to
Emancipate the Working Class, secretly organized by Russian Marxists in the previous year, issued a proclamation [VSB,3:709]
*--The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party [SDs] was coming into existence,
and in these months, future
SDs were active in labor strikes
[Harding:121-208]
<>1896my22:Moscow | Russia-China
treaty hostile to interests of Japan and Manchuria (shortcut for
Trans-Siberian Railroad secured) [DIR2:360-2
| DIR3:407-9]
- In this same month, Seoul [Korea] Memorandum exchanged between
Russia and Japan
- The
two powers shied away from Yamagata Aritomo proposal to divide Korea into North and South
- Korean King Kojong had fled to the Russian embassy when his Queen Min was killed by Japanese
"henchmen"
- Russia and Japan now agreed that the King would return to his
palace, and Japan would impose some control over its "henchmen"
- Japanese military expenditure had this year reached 53m/yen, up from 15m/yen three
years earlier. Remained this high till
Russo-Japanese
War
- Japanese naval expenditures wavered as army expenditures were much increased
- Japan made decision to head inland into Manchuria rather than overseas toward
Taiwan [Beasley,MHJ:165 | compare
w/Matsusaka,Tak lct 8x11]
- Contemporary French journalist, Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu wrote
The Awakening of the East: Siberia, Japan, China
(1900)
- At a great trans-oceanic distance, US imperialism was on a collision course with
Russian imperialism
\\
*--Zabriskie
on USA/Russian rivalry in the Pacific, 1895-1914
*--Don C. Price,
Russia and the Roots of the Chinese Revolution, 1896-1911
*--A. Malozemoff,
Russian Far Eastern Policy, 1881-1904
*--B. A. Romanov,
Russia in
Manchuria, 1892-1906
<>1896je:Saint Petersburg labor strikes [MR&C2:350]
<>1896je09:Japan and Russia signed Yamagata-Lobanov
Agreement, apparently guaranteeing Korean independence. Russian-Japanese relations seemed deceptively harmonious as they jockeyed
with one another to cash in on China's weakness and for advantage in Manchuria,
Korea, Sakhalin and the southern Kuril Islands
<>1896jy09:Chicago, at the Democratic Party's National Convention | William Jennings Bryan
delivered his stirring oration against what he thought was an urban elitist assault on rural America, "Cross
of Gold" [TXT]
*1896:USA
Chicago | Russian visitor Vladimir Korolenko recorded his impressions
of wage-labor conditions in a US "Factory of Death" [Hasty:83-94]
<>1896jy31:London | French and German
ambassadors to England met for long and serious (though
informal) conversation about how their two nations might be marginalized by
recent global developments. They feared that Europe was in danger if strong and
innovative measures were not taken. They were not thinking only of the old
imperialist monster England. They noted also the rise of two new giants, Russia
and USA, for example, recently in Japan and China.
[BNE:195-8] While Russian and USA imperialism seemed
to flourish, serious conflicts among other European imperialists threatened
disastrous war =
*--Imperialism was coming home
*--Subsequent events in China and Japan only
deepened these concerns
<>1896au26:Philippine Islands rebelled against Spain.
Rebel leaders were at first pro-USA, then they were betrayed by USA. USA closely followed
stirrings for independence in the Philippines and Cuba. This sort of US
"anti-imperialism" was designed to weaken Spanish control, not
necessarily to promote revolution
*1896:USA political leader,
Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924)
wrote "For Intervention in Cuba"
[TXT].
Lodge was imperialist in one direction (overseas) and isolationist in another
("the homeland"), free-trader in one direction and protectionist in another, so
long as advantage flowed in a direction beneficial to his cohort.
Pressures for a new US imperialism were mounting, but it
had to cloak itself in anti-imperialist rhetoric
*1897:Cartoon showed Uncle Sam "patient" as he waited for his colonies to come fully ripe
before picking [pix]. Uncle Sam is dressed in the mode of a tropical
plantationist, and his basket already holds Louisiana
[ID],
Texas [ID], California
[ID], and Alaska
[ID]. On the branch above his head hangs Cuba, soon ripe for the picking.
Notice that the large fruit tree is rooted behind a high and deteriorating wall
of some possibly declining power, yet the branches now stretch out toward the
new plantationist, ready to take up the old plantationist's "burden"
[ID]
<>1896au31:Leo
Tolstoy
wrote open letter [TXT] with political advice to
Russian liberals who were upset because of Russian reactionary
state actions to shut down volunteer societies devoted to cultural life
<>1897:1899; Russian
philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev, Foundations
of Theoretical Philosophy [Edie,3:99-134 |
VSB,3:732]
*--"The Enemy from the East" and "The Russian National Ideal" in
RRS:41-60
*--Excerpts [VSB,3:731-3]
<>1897:French
sociologist Émile Durkheim published
Suicide: A Study in Sociology [CCS,1:383-420]
<>1897:Italian nationalist and imperialist political
figure Ferdinando Martini reacted to Italian defeat on the borders of Ethiopia [CCC2,2:571f]
*--This late blooming modern European nation-state, Italy, found itself in deep
conflict between original half-century-old liberal principles
of Italian nation-state formation and the emerging European imperative of
imperialist dominion over non-European peoples.
Forty years later,
Fascist Italy took revenge as it sought to carve a niche out for itself among
the other European imperialist states
<>1897ja28:Russia conducted 1st modern census,
Obshchii svod
po Imperii rezul’tatov razrabotok dannykh pervoi vseobshchei perepisi
naseleniia, proizvedennoi 28 ianvaria 1897 goda
*--The Perepis' counted 129 million (13 million in
cities) [cf. RRC2,2#38] Translated title page
[W]
*--Eastview Press reprinted the census on CD and described "the first
and last census of the Russian Empire". Its initiator was
the famous Russian geographer and public figure Petr Semenov-Tian-Shanskii. He
lobbied three decades to make this census happen. To test and
improve the census questionnaire, he conducted an experimental census on his
family country estate, Gremiachka. The final version of the questionnaire was
designed for a household and included 14 questions. The announced goal of the
census was "to learn more about the population and to study it … to understand
precisely the various conditions of popular life". It was also promised that the
census would not "generate new taxes or other burden". The 1897 Census continues
to be the most authentic source on the number of Russia’s population and its
ethnic composition at the end of the 19th century
*--Red Book of
the Peoples of the Russian Empire provides population statistics for
almost 90 "minority" peoples of Russia
<>1897je02:Russian factory law [TXT] expanded on
previous welfare
legislation [VSB,3:719]
*--Reactionary policy mixed with "progressive"
reform
<>1898:France rocked by "Dreyfus Affair" (with its origins in 1894 and final
resolution not until 1906)
*1894se:Evidence of treasonous communications of a French officer with German authorities were found. The culprit was Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, scion
of a French branch of a Hungarian aristocratic family. But he was an ardent Catholic and French patriot, well-connected in French upper-class circles. Thus
a scape-goat was needed. A Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was framed, found guilty and sent to exile on Devil's Island where it was expected he would soon
die. French public protest grew stronger and found sympathetic support among a few high-ranking military and civilian officials
*--At a first glance, the Affair pitted progressives (liberals and socialists), humanists of all political stripes and defenders
of Enlightenment and French Revolutionary traditions against racists (anti-Jewish elements), militaristic patriots, Catholic Church activists, and a wide
spectrum of "right-wing" politicians. Closer examination reveals a painfully complex picture [CF=Harris below], but the larger European meaning of the more
than 10-year long Affair was a victory over anti-Semitism, over Church ambitions to dominate politics, or at least national education, and over chauvinistic
[ID] military ambition and the still active movement to restore the French monarchy. But it took more
than ten years, and the way to victory was rocky =
*1897:Esterhazy was put under pseudo-court martial where he was hastily cleared by fellow officers. Officers who questioned Dreyfus' guilt and the
expanding political charade were demoted and/or reassigned in punishment
*1898ja13:Paris | Great French novelist Émile Zola's
J'accuse exposed in a most public way the injustices of the Dreyfus
Affair [DPH:323-5]. The racist/nationalist press thought it was sufficient rebuttal to accuse Zola of being an "Italian". Zola was
himself put on trial, charged with political libel. Outside the courtroom a mob called for blood. Anti-Jewish riots broke out across France and across
the Mediterranean in French Algeria
*--Masked beneath the racist mob mentality was a struggle that pitted civilian national virtue -- justice -- against mounting
military virtue -- chauvinistic patriotism. Among the many high-ranking military officers who took the stand against Zola was Chief of Staff General Charles
Le Mouton de Boisdeffre who identified support of the military as the central issue, as he put it = "confidence in the leaders of the army, in those who bear
the responsibility for national defense". Zola was found guilty, spent a year in prison, and then went into political emigration in England
*--Rival volunteer associations formed. The
Ligue des Droits de l'Homme [League of the Rights of Man (a clear evocation of the French Revolution)] arose
against the Ligue de la Patrie Française [League of the French Fatherland]. Jean Baffier defended
the racists [BNE:148-52]. Charles Maurras denounced those whom he felt had subverted the nation, not
just Jews but also Freemasons, Protestants and other foreigners. Maurras argued that France -- like England, Germany and Russia -- should be ruled by a
monarchy. Influential Church leaders took this opportunity to reassert their desire to control national education
*1899je03:French Appeals Court overturned Dreyfus' conviction. He was brought back from Devil's Island. A ravaged and deteriorated Dreyfus now faced another
trial. Military judges found him guilty again. The President of the French Republic
took steps to forestall further appeals and to bring an end to the national
agony. He pardoned Dreyfus. Political expediency, rather than justice or chauvinistic patriotism, prevailed. In order to minimize the possibility of a military
coup d'état, all military leaders responsible for the persecution and prosecution of Dreyfus were pardoned. In another direction, the state took action against
what it called "occult forces" in the Catholic Church. The Assumptionists
[ID] were expelled
from France. Then =
*1905:French law now formally created a separation of church and state. The most important consequence was the end of a century of post-Napoleonic state
financial support of the Catholic Church (and to a much lesser extend support of Protestant churches)
*1908:Right-wing extremist assassin attempted to kill Dreyfus
\\
*--Ruth Harris,
Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
*--Louis Begley,
Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters | Begley emphasizes the weakness of reason against hysterical demands of emotionalism in public
life. He draws explicit parallels = Devil's Island and Guantánamo Bay, even the details of Dreyfus' shackles and those employed by USA on captured and
imprisoned "terrorists", the use of military rather than civilian courts, the danger of rigged justice under the influence of aggressive chauvinism, and
punishment of military officers who criticize all this
<>1898:German
Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism [TXT~
| Excerpt = CCC2,2:934-8 | CCC3,2:971-5]
*--Bernstein was a moderate influence in the
Second
International
*1899:He published a reply to his critics, The Preconditions of Socialism
\\
*1994my06:TLS:27 | A summary of the main "revisions" that
Bernstein is thought to have made in Marxist socialist ideology and tactics [TXT]
<>1898:Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Muraviev to Cassini, with Cassini reply
to Muraviev and Lamsdorf [Zabriskie]
<>1898:USA
Chicago | Theodore Roosevelt
delivered speech "The Strenuous Life" [CCC3,2:1127-37]
<>1898:1902; Russian Riazan Provincial
peasant village
the subject of intensive ethnographic study designed by Olga Tian-Shanskaia and K.V.
Nikolaevskii. Results published as
Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia
*--In the half-century preceding the 1905 Revolution, Russian ethnography made
tremendous strides toward full and accurate ethnographic description of Russian
village life and culture. See Reeder (2nd
ed.):85-104 (agriculture-ritual songs) and 109-136 (love, marriage, family)
<>1898ja01:Spain launched a reform of Cuban
administration, designed to introduce self-rule to the island
*1898fe:Puerto Rico granted independence. No one much liked these seemingly
progressive measures. It was too little too late for stumbling Spanish
imperialism
<>1898fe15:Cuba, Havana Harbor | USA Battleship Maine
exploded and sank. Without any evidence, USA officials and an expanding jingoist newspaper
press—particularly the William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer sheets—blamed
Spain and called for revenge. One headline read, "THE WARSHIP MAINE SPLIT IN TWO BY
ENEMY’S SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE". Only one authoritative investigation of this
event was ever completed, that by Admiral H. G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine was
Destroyed [Resume
TXT]. Rickover concluded that it was
the navy’s fault for poor management of fuel and powder storage on the big ship,
rather than some infernal Spanish "weapon of mass destruction"
*--This explosive moment may be taken as the symbolic opening of a distinctly
imperialist era in USA foreign policy. A catastrophe could be linked to specific
evil-doers, and the hand of military-industrial adventurers and profit-seekers
(some of whom were actually responsible for lax security on the Maine) was freed
of restraint. Manipulated public opinion fell behind ambitious USA imperialists|
Admiral Rickover's 1976 revelations about the true story of the Maine did not
win him any friends in the military-industrial "community"
*--Now the USA offered its version of European imperialism
*--Documents of USA foreign
policy 1898-1914
<>1898mr:1898ap; USA pursued dual policy of trying to insert itself between Spain
and Cuba in defense of Cuban independence, and trying to buy the island from
Spain, thus betraying Cuban independence [Hugh Thomas in 98ap23:NYR 45,n7:10-12]
\\
*--Website related to
US
imperialism LOOP
<>1898mr:China leased Port Arthur to Russia, Kiaochow
to Germany and Kowloon to England. In this year in China, wide-spread
traditionalism, anti-modernism, and anti-imperialism helped create an
anti-"West", anti-Christian movement called the Society of Righteous, Harmonious
Fists [better known as Boxers]
*--Imperialism was producing local revolutionary resistance to expansionist
European states, but also inter-state
violence among these very expansionist European states. Imperialism was coming
home
<>1898mr01:Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party [SDs] opened first congress in Minsk and issued a proclamation,
written from a Marxist perspective [VSB,3:709-10]
<>1898ap10:Egypt | Eyewitness accounts of the English attack
on the Sudanese at the Atbara River. The
English were under the command of Kitchener. The indigenous anti-imperialist forces were led by
al-Mahdi. Winston Churchill described the one-sided battle in which the Sudanese lost 20,000 and the
English, 500 [Eye:398-407]
<>1898ap25:Japan displeased with Russia/China agreement in Liaotung Peninsula region (Port Arthur), but took
initiative to offer Russia free hand in Manchuria for Japanese free hand in Korea. That
initiative failed, but Nishi-Rosen Agreement pledged both sides to provide no military or
financial advisers to Korea w/o prior agreement, and Russia recognized
Japan’s
preponderant economic interests in Korea
<>1898ap25:USA declared war on Spain. Spanish-American
War. Tensions with Russia mounted
\\
*--Library of Congress narrative,
a part of a multi-page website devoted to the Spanish-American War
*--Saul,2:421-51
*1998sp:WWQ#22,2:42-65 | Warren Zimmerman (Z was 1989:1992; US ambassador to
Yugoslavia)
<>1898my01:Philippine Islands, Manila Bay | USA Admiral George Dewey destroyed
Spanish Pacific fleet
<>1898jy01:Cuba | Rough Riders with
Teddy
Roosevelt fought the Battle of El Caney
*--James Creelman described the battle and the
USA author Steven Crane described the aftermath [Eye:407-9]
*--Roosevelt had recently resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (in part responsible
for the vigorous expansion of US naval readiness for war, and for the way the Maine was
loaded with fuel and powder [ID]) and decked out now in a new Brooks Brothers uniform, charged
onto the pages of history
<>1898jy03:Cuba, Santiago Bay | USA fleet captured entire
Spanish
Caribbean fleet.
<>1898jy07:Hawaiian Islands annexed to USA as territory
<>1898jy08:Puerto Rico Islands come under US imperialist administration
<>1898se:USA journal
North American Review
| Charles A. Conant published "The Economic Basis of 'Imperialism' " [TXT].
Conant was a major figure in US financial
affairs. He was editor of the Wall Street Journal and a trusted adviser
to presidents from McKinley to Wilson. His central message was that recent
disorders in American capitalist market would be solved by
expansion of USA imperialism. In his own way, he was saying what leading socialist theorists
were saying [EG] = Modern capitalism needs imperial dominion. But in another sense,
Conant was
merely extending the concept of frontier expansion overseas. Which was it? The
answer depends on the nature of the relationship between metropol ("core") and periphery
[ID]
<>1898se16:USA Senator from Indiana
Albert Beveridge delivered campaign speech
"The March of the Flag"
[TXT], expressing evident
patriotic, imperialistic and racist pride.
US
imperialism was supported by something like a political ideology
*1900ja09:Speech on US policy in the Philippines [RWP2:265-9]
<>1898oc14:Moscow Art Theatre founded by Konstantin
Stanislavskii [real name=Alekseev] and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
*--Russian
homepage
*--VIDEOTAPE
history of the Moscow Art Theatre
*--Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, with his sparse language and quotidian
themes, seemed at odds with contemporary avant-garde trends in the
fine arts
*1899:1900; Maksim Gorky (1868:1936; real name "Aleksei
Maksimovich Peshkov"; "Gor'kii" means "bitter") had been a struggling provincial
writer (born in Nizhnii Novgorod). He now made the acquaintance of Chekhov and
the great novelist Leo Tolstoy and, with his distinctly radical social and
political ideas, he broke into the capital-city big-time. A few years later,
Gorky wrote brilliant memoirs of his early acquaintance with Chekhov
[TXT]
[TXT],
Leo Tolstoy
[TXT],
Aleksandr Blok and Leonid Andreev. [Webpage
devoted to Gorky]
*1902:Moscow Art Theatre production of Gorky's play, THE LOWER DEPTHS [Na dne]
won international fame. At some odds with the prevailing sensibilities of the
Russian "Silver Age", Maksim Gorky
dealt with the Russian lower classes, the laboring poor of the neglected Russian
backwaters, and did so in an increasingly "realistic" or descriptive style
\\
*--W. H.
Bruford,
Chekhov and His Russia: A Sociological Study (1947)
<>1898oc18:USA,
Chicago Peace Jubilee | AFL President
Samuel Gompers delivered speech which expressed labor union dissent,
"Imperialism--Its Dangers and Wrongs"
*1898:Boston | German-born Karl Schurz founded Anti-Imperialist League,
supported by unions of wage-laborers and major
business leaders, EG=
Andrew
Carnegie
*1898: 278,000 members in AFL
*1900: 560,000 in AFL
*1904: 1,670,000 in AFL
*1915: 2,500,000 in all USA labor unions
<>1898de10:Paris Treaty. Spain ceded Philippine Islands,
Guam Islands and Puerto Rico to USA. Spain renounced sovereignty
over CUBA and USA established military governance there
<>1899:USA PA Pittsburgh |
Andrew Carnegie consolidated his vast steel holdings and
created Carnegie Steel Company
*1901:Two years later, Carnegie merged with United States Steel and retired
*--In retirement, he funded hundreds of local libraries across the USA,
supported public education, and world peace. He endowed the Carnegie Corporation
of New York, with $125 million for use in support of various charitable causes
*--Andrew Carnegie devoted the final two decades of
his long
and remarkably productive career to philanthropy
<>1899:USA
sociologist, born of émigré Norwegian
farmers
in Minnesota, Thorstein Veblen defined and
criticized
The Theory of the Leisure Class [CCS:699-725
|
CCS,2:126-52]
*--Nostalgia for life "down
on the farm" had become a persistent feature of modernizing
political-economic systems
<>1899:1902; Philippine-USA War
*--Charles A. Conant published his analysis of the new
USA imperialism,
The United States
in the Orient: The Nature of the Economic Problem (1900)
<>1899:1908;
China market
now felt new USA presence. US imperialism had its distinct
economic side
*--Compare 10-year change in Russian and USA kerosene export (in millions of gallons)
[Laserson:324]:
|
Russia |
from 25 to |
3.0 |
88% decrease |
| USA |
from 42 to |
122.0 |
195% increase |
<>1899:Atlantic crossing to New World. Russian visitor Vladimir Bogoraz
[Hasty:95-110] Bograz crossed USA from coast to coast by rail. Wrote on "Black
student" [Hasty:111-27]
<>1899:England | Russian
émigré anarchist philosopher Petr Kropotkin
[ ID ] Memoirs of a Revolutionist
*--USA
anarchist (Russian émigré)
Emma Goldman
(1869-1940) into the first decade of her 50-year activist career
[W]
<>1899:German (English-born) dilettante cultural figure
Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1926) championed "Pan-Teutonism", a political
and cultural association based on crude racist presumptions, as
expressed in Foundations of the Nineteenth Century [BMC1:554-7 |
BMC4:606-10]
<>1899:Hague Conferences
[W] (International Peace Conference)
proposed by Russia [DPH:215-20]
*--Conferences sought to reduce armaments and monitor peace treaties
*--Conferences created Permanent Court of
Arbitration (Hague Tribunal) to mediate international discord
*--USA opposed
because
international arbitration or enforceable international law seemed a threat to
nation-state sovereignty and to
US imperialist ambitions
*--Second Hague Conference
<>1899:Russian Finance Minister Sergei
Witte
memo to Emperor Nicholas II, "Autocracy and Zemstvo"
[TXT]
*--The profound ambiguities embedded in Witte's memo can be taken as a signal of
impending political crisis in the highest ranks of the state bureaucracy.
Over the previous two decades of largely
reactionary
policy, frequent contradictory and arguably "progressive" state actions had
been taken. The time had now arisen in which the contradictions (as that between
centralized autocracy and flourishing institutions of local and provincial
self-administration) could no longer be brushed over
*--Witte's remarkable pamphlet aroused the political exile
Vladimir Lenin to new polemical/theoretical heights as he was completing his
massive study of the Russian economy
*--Zemstvos came under attack from all sides, left
and right, as the tsarist state wavered
<>1899fe:English writer Rudyard Kipling celebrated manly
virtues and touted Anglo-Saxon imperialism with his poem "The White Man's
Burden", published in McClure's Magazine
[TXT]
[TXT]. Here he
urged the USA to quit lagging and take up the cause of European imperialist
expansion and global dominion. Underneath Kipling's aggressive imperialism there
lurked also a certain disdain for the sorts of politics that arose in the US
Progressive Era
*1899:USA NJ | United Fruit Company
[ID]
incorporated under ownership and management of Andrew Preston and M.C. Keith
(1848-1929). Their plantations were arrayed around the shores of the Caribbean
Sea and grew bananas. The company formed a near monopoly in the harvesting, transportation
and marketing of bananas. They soon included other fruits as well, all
cultivated in ways very destructive of natural environments.
Maintenance of this economic monopoly was assured by political domination over
local authorities, control over native wage-laborers
bound in conditions approaching slavery
*--United Fruit in some cases gained near
total command over the routing, construction and management of Central American
railroads. Regions in the grip of these large agribusinesses were thus denied
the possibility of self-administered and independent economic modernization
*--This growing trans-national corporation wielded considerable insider influence
with the US government. United Fruit closely coordinated its own profit-centered
foreign policy with Washington, DC. For example =
*1911:Honduras was invaded by US forces with United Fruit Company collusion
*1928:Columbia massacred striking workers on
United Fruit Company lands
*--Kipling's appeal to USA (above) appeared to be getting results
<>1899fe08:Saint Petersburg University hit by student demonstrations
*--Over the next three years, the student movement spread to other institutions of higher
learning and intensified [VSB,3:739-41]
*--University student unrest was a harbinger of the 1905 Revolution, and
the tsarist state
perceived it as such
<>1899mr:Russian political exile
Vladimir Lenin
published The Development of Capitalism in Russia [website
text], based on careful analysis of Zemstvo statistics on the village-level
and region-level agricultural economy. His main contribution here was to show
how peasants were not a distinct social class but were a complex and
transitional social formation. There were three sorts of peasants in this
account. "Rich peasants" (kulaks) were akin to a social class considered by
Marxists to be genuine, the bourgeoisie. "Poor peasants" were akin to another
genuine social class, proletariat. "Middle peasants" made up the rest of the
rural population in this analysis. The curious thing here is that this third,
very large but theoretically inchoate portion of the Russian population (a large
majority) who were neither "rich" nor "poor" held the future of Russia in their
hands. Everything depended on which direction this unstable middle element moved
as it fell into orbit with one of the two authentic social classes. It had to
move either into the ranks of the "rich" (bourgeoisie) or the "poor"
(proletariat). Peasants thus were granted no intrinsic
status in this socially dualistic Leninist world-view, based as it was on an
orthodox understanding of Karl Marx's teachings
\\
*--David Mitrany,
Marx Against the Peasants
<>1899mr20:Canada, Ottawa | Down and out D.H. Davies
described how he had a foot severed while trying to jump
a train [Eye:409-11]
<>1899mr22:Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte submitted
another significant report to Emperor Nicholas II =
"Report of the Minister of Finance
to His Majesty on the Necessity of Formulating and Thereafter Steadfastly Adhering to a
Definite Program of a Commercial and Industrial Policy of the Empire" [*1954mr:JMH#26,1:60-74
|
Translated
with an introductory article, by T. H. Von Laue] [TXT excerpts]. Other published Excerpts=
RRC2,2#37
| VSB,3:757-9]
*--Witte was working hard to convince the Emperor to support the "Witte System"
[ID]
*--Witte's views of Russian imperialist foreign policy
were consistent with his policy of economic modernization [VSB,3:693-6]
*1899je03:French government seemed to awaken rather late, but very perceptively, to what
was happening in China, and reacted with alarm at Russian/English agreement on
"spheres of influence" that allowed Russia to build railroads
north of the Great Wall, and England, south [BNE:180-3]
<>1899jy:USA President McKinley, whose 1897 hesitance to
pursue imperialist war against Spain
[W] led
Teddy
Roosevelt to compare his fortitude to a chocolate éclair, now appointed Elihu Root, a
prominent member of the USA imperialist party, to the War Department for the purposes of
administering the islands taken from Spain. USA beginning to enjoy the fruits of its
victory over old imperialist Spain
*--Root (1847-1937) was a corporation lawyer in the service of powerful NY businesses:
William A. "Boss" Tweed, E. H. Harriman, and J. P. Morgan
*1899no21:McKinley interview outlined justifications for US imperialist expansion, recapitulating
arguments long familiar in Europe [BNE:183-4]
<>1899se06:USA proposed
"Open Door"
[TXT]
imperialist policy to Germany, Russia (99de18:Reply
[TXT]),
England (99no30:Reply
[TXT]),
Japan, Italy and France. Russia resisted
*--USA Secretary of State John Hay was the author of the "Open Door" doctrine,
one of the first US foreign policy initiatives to gain immediate international attention, if
not assent
*--In these years USA sponsored a "trust company" to build a
railroad across
China,Canton-Hankow-Peking [Beijing]. Concession handed over to American China
Development Co with prominent USA capitalists. Russia sensed competitive pressure from USA
businessmen and suspected official support from the US government. Suspicions deepened when USA-Japan
agreements became known and rapprochement between USA and England matured
*--Russia felt surrounded and didn’t want to "open its doors"
*--USA efforts to cool down European imperialist rivalry were not working, perhaps in part because these efforts
were always accompanied by efforts to enhance US imperialist advantage
*--John Hay (1838-1905) began his public career as Secretary to President Abraham
Lincoln whom he had met when both practiced law in Springfield IL. After
marrying into a wealthy Cleveland family of financiers, he devoted his life to
travel and literature. In 1879 he became Assistant Secretary of State and moved
to WDC, where he was an important member of the cultural/intellectual group that
formed up around Henry Adams. He served as Secretary of State from 1898 until
his death
*--The larger significance of John Hay derived from the way he helped re-orient
US policy toward international outreach, IE= imperialism. USA was forging a new
closeness to the "mother culture" of the ex-enemy Great Britain (England), was
in fact picking up what Kipling called "the white man's burden"
[ID].
The English were showing some signs of fatigue, and USA was showing ample signs
of potential imperialist vigor. In a sense, the Hay re-orientation squelched the
ambitious hopes of certain Englishmen [ID] to repossess the
American colonies, lost over the previous century
*--The intellectual impact of the US sea-change is reflected in the now widely employed concept
"The West". The concept is reflected, for example, in a curricular
innovation that spread across US campuses from this time forward, "Western Civ",
based on the trans-national notion that there were familial ties of Americans
with Classical Athenian Greeks, with Romans of the great empire, and the vast
European mission of global progress and civilization. The concept was a conscious effort to refute the provincial New-World democratism
or geo-egalitarianism implied, for example, in the Turner Thesis
[ID]
and other enthusiasms of the Progressive Era
<>1900:Austrian psychologist
Sigmund Freud published Interpretation
of Dreams [TXT]
at the beginning of a public career that transformed modern ideas about how the
mind works [CCC2,2:1061 | CWC:155 |
CCS:73,623]
JANUS
COLLECTION
<>1900:English mathematician Karl Pearson delivered lecture "National Life
from the Standpoint of Science"
[ID], in which he explained the meaning of
social
Darwinism and expounded the cause of eugenics [ID], with emphasis on selective breeding
of the very best "stock" [PWT2:215-17]
*--Pearson justified, in voguish contemporary
scientistic terminology, the re-imposition of medieval concepts of inherent
status by birth, as well as European racism and imperialism. Pearson was proud of
his "free-thinker" reputation and his association with the English socialist movement
*--Eugenics was at the beginning of a sorrowful career through the first half of the 20th century
*--Hop ahead a half century
<>1900:USA census
counted 76 million (17 million immigrants). EG= Mennonites,
Jews
*--Michael Kraus,
The North Atlantic Civilization:151-80
presents documents and commentary on the immigrant experience
*1845:1846; Scottish minister described emigration from his point of view. Also German
emigration explained [BNE:155-8]
\\
*--Charles A. Ward, et al., eds.,
Studies in Ethnicity: The East European Experience in
America
<>1900sp:South
Africa | J.E. Neilly described civilian
suffering in the English-Dutch
[Afrikaaner] imperialist Boer War. The war pitted two European colonial
peoples against one another, the English and the Dutch, in a struggle to grab
and hold onto the lands of indigenous African peoples at the southern tip of the
continent [Eye:412-13]
<>1900je:China | Boxer
Rebellion [W] occupied
capital city Peking [then called Peiping; now Beijing]
<>1900je:German Imperial Naval Act (#2) passed with goal of building
vast, modern oceanic navy to rival English dominance of the high seas
*--Satirical journal
Simplicissmus satarized Admiral von Tirpitz
and Kaiser Wilhelm II [pix]
<>1900jy04:USA, KS City Democratic Party National
Convention. William Jennings Bryan delivered speech
[TXT] against
US imperialism
*--The American "two-party"
system was under great strain to accommodate the several varieties of political interest and
opinion growing within the old political party system in the
Progressive Era
<>1900se19:Russian Chief Gendarme, Count
Viacheslav Plehve, received and eventually approved a secret report by Sergei Zubatov, Chief of the
Moscow bureau of the Okhrana [secret anti-revolutionary police] As a result,
state-sponsored labor unions were created in Moscow, a policy known as "police
socialism", lasting three years [VSB,3:697-8
|
WRH3:466-7]
*--Police Socialism can be understood as an official reactionary measure against
growing unrest among workers. But it was much more than that. It also harmonized
perfectly well with a long-term and sanctioned relationship of state to society.
It sought to bring
the Russian proletariat under the wing of officialdom, in the tradition of the
1722ja24:Table of Ranks and Catherine II's
Charters for the nobility and the towns
*--State action among wage-laborers brought earlier action among village laborers
to mind = Arakcheev's "military
settlements". And it
expanded Russian labor/welfare reforms of the previous decade
*--Muscovite tsars and Russian emperors worked constantly to shape the social
structure to statist needs. Police Socialism could be seen as an
extension of traditional social/service hierarchies
into the ranks of a newly erupting and still amorphous social formation,
wage-labor
*1901:A new and simplified version of the Table of Ranks was issued [VSB,3:760-1]
*--The tsarist state was suspended and oscillating between reformist and reactionary
policy
*--Revolutionary and other oppositional political parties had their own ideas about the
appropriate way to organize workers. Some treated them as
a new social formation, others as a variation on the ancient peasant
soslovie. And, of course, labor had views of its own on this
question [See workers' memoirs in Victoria Bonnell, ed.,
The Russian
Worker]
*1898fa:1900ja31; Skilled laborer Semen Kanatchikov went by train from Moscow to
Petersburg and, for more than one year, was active in independent-minded
worker circles. This group of wage-laborers was arrested and sent into exile [Kanatchikov:83-120]
\\
*--Rose Glickman,
Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society 1880-1914
*--Robert Eugene Johnson,
Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the
Late Nineteenth Century
*--D. Pospielovsky,
Russian Police Trade Unionism: Experiment or Provocation?
<>1900oc:1905fa;; Saint Petersburg | Russian Assembly [Russkoe sobranie]
as the first large "nationalistic" public reactionary political party. Membership was, however, not so
much generated from among members of Russian society at large as from the ranks of high state servitors
and could be called a feature of official reactionary policy.
It is sometimes hard to separate out the "official" and "public" facets of this
movement. The political party came to be known as
Union of Russian Peoples [Soiuz russkikh liudei]
<>1901:1906; Spanish-born painter
Pablo Picasso: blue and rose period.
At first, Picasso seemed to assault all conventions of the
fine arts, but before long his creations
were taken to be the modern standard
<>1901:Polish-born English-language novelist
Joseph Conrad published his provocative
fiction Heart of Darkness [TXT]
set in the Belgian Congo. Is it racist? Anti-imperialist?
Pro-imperialist?
*--Two editions of this fabulous novel were published by Norton with EXTENSIVE
historical documentation about Europe and the Belgian Congo [ID], plus critical
commentary [1st ed]
[2nd ed]
*--Contemporary socialist critique of European imperialism in the
Congo can be compared with Conrad's
complex views on the matter [BNE:187-90]
\\
*--Mary Ann Gillies,
The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880-1920 | A new middleman entered into the process
of (increasingly "the business of") English literary production. The literary agent stepped between writers and their presses/publishers | This book
concentrates on agents A.P. Watt and J.B. Pinker. Watt developed "agent’s clauses" in agreements with publishers,
settled "agent-client agreements" on writers, and sold copyrights. Pinker served as agent for Joseph Conrad, as well as for
Rebecca West and D.H. Lawrence
<>1901:Panama Canal
project was transferred by treaty from England to USA. The canal would connect
the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean at the balmy global mid-waist -- thus avoiding
the distant and stormy tip of South America and the remote and icy Arctic seas
above Canada
*--USA took the project out of European hands|
US imperialism
was
now at full steam in the Progressive Era
<>1901je:Japan | Ito Hirobumi [PH&G:217-8] replaced by Katsura Taro, protege
of Yamagata Aritoma [PH&G:741]
<>1901je:Russian
émigré theorist in Switzerland, fresh from Siberian exile, Lenin published analysis "THE
PERSECUTORS OF THE ZEMSTVO AND THE HANNIBALS OF
LIBERALISM" [TXT]
*--Lenin expanded on Sergei Witte's
1899 Memo and laid down a
thorough Social-Democratic critique of all liberal reformers
AND political opposition since the beginning of the "Era
of Great Reforms". Lenin was forming his own political conceptions
through a careful study of the past four decades of Russian politics,
oppositional and official. He sought to bring national traditions into proper
relationship to
Marxism. "Leninism" was
about to make its historical appearance
<>1901no:1901de; Japanese negotiator Ito and Russian
negotiator Lamsdorf tried to rebalance Russia-Manchuria Japan-Korea exchange, but failed,
propelling Japan diplomatically into arms of England
[Beasley,MHJ:169-70]
<>1901de12:Canada, Newfoundland | Marconi described waiting
for the first trans-Atlantic radio signal [Eye:414]. The era of electronic media was opening
<>1902:English economist John Atkinson
Hobson wrote an early and influential critique of European colonial expansion,
Imperialism [PWT2:217-19]
<>1902:French "decadent" literary figure
and nationalist ideologue Maurice Barrès
[ID] published
Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme [CCC2,2:522f
CCC3,2:1040-4]
<>1902:Geneva | Vladimir Il'ich Lenin
published "What's to be Done?" [TXT | Excerpts =
CCC3,2:976-86 |
DIR2:363-78 | VSB,3:710-11 |
BBMC1:620-2] The title question, Chto delat'?, was the Russian thinking person's
eternal question, in this case very distinctly remindful of Chernyshevskii's notorious novel
40 years earlier [ID]
*--Lenin's essay was devoted to a very local dispute over editorial power in an
émigré journal of limited circulation. But it became one of the most influential
political tracts of the 20th century. Lenin expanded on his
critique of statist
reforms and liberal
civil society in Russia. He now went even further, questioning the applicability
to Russia of standard social democratic tactics as devised in the Europe-wide movement centered on
the Second
International and practiced among most other Russian SDs, those whom he
would soon label Mensheviks ["minoritarians"]
*--Lenin explained why the better future of Russia depended on the creation of a
disciplined
cadre party organization
*--A comparison of "What's to be Done?" with Lenin's last sustained piece of political
writing two decades later, "Better Fewer, But Better",
gives a simple two-point measure of his political evolution
*--Lenin, with considerable justification, claimed to represent Karl Marx's
original recommendations to Russian revolutionists, thus he claimed to be the
only authentic Marxist. It is worth considering also the degree to which he
might have justifiably claimed to inherit the traditions of oppositional
politics within the broader Russian political culture [documents on this
question in Late Marx...]
*--Lenin never openly claimed the inheritance from earlier decades of Russian political opposition because he did
not want to be associated with the widely discredited legacy of "Russian populism". Nor did he want to be confused with the large rival
Social Revolutionary Party which did claim to be the heir to the legacy of
revolutionary populism. Lenin "went along" with the standard Social Democratic
ridicule heaped on earlier movements. Nonetheless, he mined them carefully, for lessons
about the peculiar features of the Russian "mode of production" and the
political tactics those features recommended to all, whatever their ideologies
*--As the general revolutionary crisis intensified
in the first years of the 20th century, Russian SDs
began to split into two factions, in fact two political parties,
eventually to be called Bolsheviks ("majoritarians", though they were the
minority on all but
a very few issues)
and Mensheviks ("minoritarians", though they were the larger part of the party).
Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks.
Menshevik leaders were Yulii Martov, Plekhanov
and other more moderate social democrats who represented Russian variations on the general
European, labor-leaning, "left-wing liberal" or "radical
liberal" trend associated primarily with
Eduard Bernstein [VSB,3:713-14]
*--Russian Marxism expressed itself in a variety of
interpretations of
Russian realities. The party was caught by surprise when the 1905 Revolution
broke out, and it thus played only a marginal role
<>1902:London | Russian
émigré
anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution,
refuted Spencerian notion of "social Darwinism"
*--Excerpts from this and other works [VSB,3:729-30]
*--Russian-language website with general-European
anarchist texts
[W]
\\
*--Wagar on Russian anarchism [TXT]
<>1902:Russian political thinker
Maksim
Kovalevskii published
Russian political
institutions; the growth and development of these institutions from the
beginnings of Russian history to the present time (1902) [EXCERPTS]
<>1902:USA | Great coal strike forced into arbitration by
President Theodore Roosevelt
*--National Association of
Manufacturers [NAM], etc., resisted. Courts used 1890:Sherman Anti-Trust Act
[ID] against
labor unions and the organizational efforts of
wage-laborers
<>1902ja:je; USA
citizens
jolted by emerging details of brutal imperialist behavior and great atrocities
committed by US forces in the Philippines during the Spanish American War
[ID]
*--For six months a specially created "Lodge
Committee" gave all appearances of an effort to get to the bottom of this matter,
but the Committee achieved only an effective "cover up" of US actions in the
Philippines [W]
*--No one was surprised at the outcome. In the chair sat Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge
(MA Republican), a powerful pro-imperialist figure in Congress, closely
associated with fellow Senator Albert Beveridge
(IN Republican) and sympathetic to the rising Anglo-Saxon racism sweeping over
the US establishment in these exciting years of
Progressive Era debate on the question of
projecting US power across the seas
<>1902ja30:Anglo-Japanese Alliance
\\
*--One Japanese
historian wrote that this, plus Russo-Japanese
War, made Japan very "Western" and, at the same time, very "anti-Western".
Pressure from Europe and US "brought revenge, self-confidence and a sense of mission, setting
Japan on the road that was to make her in the following forty
years an exemplar of Western civilization, transplanted; a champion of Asia against
'The
West'; and the megalomaniac builder of an empire overseas" [Beasley,MHJ:173]0
<>1902mr26 (NS=ap08):Chinese/Russian agreement said
Russian troops would leave Manchuria after 18 months, but they stayed on the
Manchurian frontier, now a bone of contention between Russia,
China and Japan (with increasing USA economic presence and constant English
and German diplomatic entanglement)
<>1902ap:Russian Interior Minister D. S. Sipiagin
was assassinated
*--Sipiagin's assassin was a member of the newly organized mass Party of
Socialists-Revolutionaries [SRs], which from the beginning served as home for a
group dedicated to violent struggle by means of terror. The group was called "The Battle Organization" [Boevaia organizatsiia
| Two-paragraph ID]
*--The specter of
political terror again raised its head
twenty years after the assassination of Alexander II
*--Notorious statist
reactionary Police Chief Viacheslav Plehve replaced Sipiagin and was the
last gasp of official reactionary policy
\\
*--Jonathan Daly
[ID] helps explain how harsh
and arbitrary bureaucratic (rather than judicial) incarceration and punishment
can provoke "terrorism" [Begin
TXT w/first full pgf]
*--Amy Knight, "Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party"
[TXT]
<>1902my:Russia/Ukraine, Poltava and Kharkov
provinces | Peasant disturbances
provoked new Interior Minister Plehve to make reprisals [MR&C2:369]
*--Forty years of peasant reform had by this time failed to
meet the needs of the rural population. Chernigov Province police reported on political
"propaganda" among local peasants =.
In one or another region there
appear unknown young people, who pass through in railroad
trains and in carriages, or on horseback along country roads, or on foot through
the villages. They scatter revolutionary books and pamphlets about.... The books
and pamphlets are eagerly read by the rural populace and ... are passed on from
one person to the next, without any thought of evil. In some cases public
readings of them have been delivered to whole crowds of peasants. When peasants
learn the contents of the literature, rumors spread among them about imminent
partition of proprietors' lands. Relations with local landowners become more or
less strained
Police did not identify agitators, nor have they apprehended any. Local
police resources are limited, so it might be best "to take measures to alert
peasants themselves to seize agitators and hand them over to authorities and
thus nip the evil in the bud" [Based on Page:53]
*--Plehve and the Interior Ministry seemed to
prefer
reactionary policies, but =
*--At the same time more constructive measures were taken under the
leadership of Finance Minister Sergei Witte, who
argued that "the evil" perceived among restless villagers perhaps did
not reside in scattered books and pamphlets but in
conditions of rural life. Witte created local committees of the Special
Conference on the Needs of Agriculture in 49 provinces. All-Russian assemblies
were instructed to discuss the agricultural crisis [MR&C2:347]
*1903:Aleksandr Rittikh summarized early deliberations of the Special Conference and defended
peasant practice of periodic redistribution of land within the village
commune [VSB,3:761]
*--The tsarist state moved in contradictory
directions
<>1902je08:1905; Germany, Stuttgart | Russian
émigré publication "Liberation" [Osvobozhdenie] was for three years edited by Petr Struve
and expressed Russian liberal political viewpoint of the Union of Liberation [VSB,3:721-4]
*--The journal was published abroad rather than in Russia because
censorship and police suppression of
political movements made domestic publication impossible
*1902je20:je22; Germany |
The Union of Liberation [Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia]
held 1st informal meeting. Soon it was able to operate in Russia itself
*--In this year a Saint Petersburg publisher issued two-volume Russian-language
edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government
[ID],
the classic, and now pan-European, statement on liberal
political thought
<>1902je25:Russian Social Revolutionary Party [SRs] political proclamation [VSB,3:719]
*--The SRs grew directly out of
populist socialist traditions of
the 1870s
*1900:London | A newly formed "Agrarian-Socialist League" published
The
Immediate Tasks of the Revolutionary Cause by Viktor Chernov, the leading
figure among SRs [VSB,3:717]
*1925:Prague exile Viktor Chernov looked back and summarized the essential platform of his
political party [VSB,3:717-19]
<>1902jy02:jy03; Russian
Zemstvo activist
Dmitrii Shipov met with Plehve and
Witte to discuss
possible truce and cooperation [GFF:691-703]
<>1902au:Russian commander Kuropatkin report on political "propaganda"
within the Russian military [MR&C2:373-4]
<>1902de30:Russian State Council met to discuss economic problems
[MR&C2:373-4,325-6]
*--In these months, high-ranking state servitor Aleksandr Polovtsev entered into
his diary depressing observations about how the tsarist state was working [VSB,3:698]
*1902:1904; These two years of mounting crisis fed into the 1905 Revolution
[1905 Revolution LOOP]
<>1903:1904; TIBET the object of Russian
and English competition as Chinese
authority waned. England invaded, ostensibly
to counteract Russian inspired religious propaganda in Lhasa by Buryat-born Buddhist monk
Agvan Dorzhiev [BrE]. As English troops approached they surrounded Tibetan fortress. Six
hundred twenty-eight Tibetan soldiers who surrendered were slaughtered by the English
*--More Russia in Asia and more on the
Great Game
\\
*1997je12:NYR:45
*--Bibliography on Buddhism in Europe
[W]
<>1903:English mathematician, philosopher, pacifist
and anti-dogmatist Bertrand Russell published his essay, "A Free Man's Worship"
[CCC3,2:1213-20]
<>1903mr:Dmitrii
Shipov met a second time with Plehve and Witte
*--In these months police action against political opposition sharply increased
<>1903mr20:Finnish autonomy
further limited by Russian imperialist decree,
reacting to mounting nationalist independence sentiment in
Finland [VSB,3:701]
<>1903ap06:ap07;
The Kishinev Pogrom
[TXT]. Jews
suffered one of the most severe of several pogroms [maltreatment and even murder at the
hands of irregular gangs who invaded and terrorized Jewish settlements] [VSB,3:698-701
| PWT2:205-8]. Kishinev is in a largely Ukrainian
and Moldavian (Romanian speaking) region, sometimes referred to as "Right-bank
Ukraine". Today it is capital of Moldova, but for a century it had been
part of the Russian Empire and would be a component of the Soviet Union
*--Pogroms first broke out in the aftermath of the
assassination of
Alexander II, then fell off for almost 20 years. The Kishinev pogrom
occurred in
Easter Week and marked a new wave of racist disorder that extended into the 1905
Revolution and beyond. In many cases, officials looked on without acting. Some degree of
local military and police participation was noted. Certain ministers,
Plehve for example, were distinctly
anti-Semitic. Some
sought to turn growing mass discontent away from official
circles and to divert it with racist distractions aimed particularly, but not
exclusively, against Jews
*--Ukrainian/Russian writer and journalist Vladimir Korolenko reported on the
scene a few days after the pogrom [TXT]
*--It is possible to see a parallel in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in USA, but
a difficult interpretive maneuver is called for = both a connection and a
distinction must be made between "official" and "public" attitudes and behavior,
between governmental tactics and outlook, on the one hand, and popular attitudes
and actions, on the other
*--Racist attitudes in society grew with nationalism and imperialism in late
19th-century Europe
<>1903my:Siberian city Ufa's Governor-General Bogdanovich was assassinated by
political terrorist
<>1903su:Manchuria "Russian Lumber
Company" sent "workers" (actually soldiers in disguise) down the
Trans-Siberian Railroad
*--This was a sign of
Witte's failure
to convince tsarist officials that a military approach to Asia was not in
Russia's best interests, and that the best approach was "peaceful economic
penetration" along the full length of the Trans-Sib
*--The views of Aleksandr Mikhailovich Bezobrazov, an entrepreneurial adventurer with huge
timber concessions in Russian maritime provinces and in North Korea, and with close ties
to the Russian military, prevailed. The
Russo-Japanese
War was the most important consequence
*--Failed domestic policy of
the tsarist state now contributed to failure
in international relations
*--In this same year, German imperial ambitions caused the "Berlin-Baghdad
Express" railroad project to be launched. German-Ottoman relations quickened as
German diplomats, bankers and military leaders perceived an opportunity to
project their power along rails through Istanbul to Baghdad, to extract natural
resources (12 miles on either side of the tracks) and to market German goods in
the northern heart of Ottoman Arabia
*--European imperialism (and not just Russian imperialism) forged close ties
between military establishments and large economic enterprises, in contradiction
to standard ideas of Adam Smith
and other liberal political economists. Liberal domestic economic arrangements in European nations showed very little resemblance to those
arrangements imposed on non-European peoples. As the 20th
century opened, Europeans were beginning to feel the bite of militarist statism in their own
realms. Imperialism was "coming home". Was liberalism coming to an end as a
general European experience just as liberalism gained a
sudden new energy in Russia?
*--The railroad had for sixty years been the powerful expression
of industrial might and promoter of economic prosperity. But now it became clear that the
railroad could be turned to imperialist and military uses
that were often at odds
with the needs of national industrial might and economic prosperity
<>1903jy17:Brussels and London | Russian
SDs Congress #2 issued program [McC1:25-8
|
H05:263-8 | VSB,3:711-13]
*--Party rejected Lenin's draft of Party rules [DPH:294-5]
Some saw a connection between the way a political party governed itself and the
way it might govern a whole nation [TXT]
*1903au:Russian SDs agreed with difficulty on a single party platform
[W] [DIR2:394-9 |
DIR3:426-31]
*--Lenin's concepts of "democratic centralism"
and his insistence on "managerial" manipulation of the larger political
association did not harmonize with standard Social Democratic notions of the
future egalitarian order. A serious ideological crisis grew within the
ranks of Russian Marxists
<>1903au31::Plehve wrote revealing letter to retired General Aleksandr Kireev, in
response to Kireev's Slavophile critique of Plehve's official reactionary
policies. Plehve said constitutionalism might be unworkable, but the desire for
it flowed from "pure springs" of political inspiration, whereas much other
political action flowed from muddier sources = ambition for personal power and
the machinations of a "non-Russian origin". Best thing was to place "various obstacles" in the
way of those whose inspiration was muddy and to remove the reason for activism
among those of pure inspiration. In summary, the best way "to pacify agitated minds"
was by
"gradually and organically improving norms of civil life". Plehve
conflated "norms of civil life" with "government policies". But he did at least
concede that significant
improvements in government were called for [VSB,3:701-2]
*--The "official reactionary"
Plehve thus conceded the need for "official reform"
in response to cultural conservative Kireev's complaint about
reactionary state policy
<>1903no:Russia | Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists [Soiuz
Zemtsev-Konstitutsionalistov] founded
*--The
liberal movement was organizing itself within Zemstvo institutions into
a political party, not abroad but in Russia itself
<>1903no18:USA treaty authorized seizure of
Panama Canal Zone
[TXT]
*--South American nation Columbia had the Zone cut out of its hide by a USA sponsored separatist revolution
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