As you noticed, there was nothing of the kind on the Russian territories.
Not something you can know for sure before you do the deed.
But the less you know, the easier your task as a preacher of a progress.
Apparently that even extended into
the art of writing.
How such drivel became popular, I will never know.
Not necessarily. In 1825, with some stretch of imagination you can put into this category Chaadaev (starting from 1826) and a couple of the really bad poets (Ryleev and Kuchelbecker). Most of the culture-related people had been loyal to the regime.
Pushkin was associated with the Decembrists and, though not charged with anything, his works were censored and his right to travel was revoked.
Anyone in that circle was considered suspect by default.
And, somehow, a lot of government’s criticism had been published. Anyway, the “masses” tended not to read the newspapers.
The archetypal Okhrana fuck-up:
Censor: *sees a Russian translation of
Das Kapital, tries to finish it without falling asleep*
*fails, concludes this shit is impenetrable and will be perfectly harmless except as a murder weapon*
*gives it the seal of approval, book sells out in two weeks. uh-oh*
*weeks later, hears from every informant that Das Kapital is now THE hot shit in Russian dissident circles*
*belatedly ban the book, prepare to get fired for criminal negligence*
(or at least I
think it was Das Kapital. It might've been the Communist Manifesto.)
The desirable but cynical solution (not that anybody at that time would dare to spell it out) was to economically destroy a majority of the poorest peasants forcing them to migrate to the industrial centers and become a proletariat. This would cause a lot of noise but it did happen after the RCW as an explicit state policy providing cadres for a massive industrialization. As it was, Russia entered WWI as an excessively agricultural country with the inefficient agriculture and inadequate manufacturing.
This graph might be of interest, then. From this, it's my hypothesis that, despite the disasters on the battlefield, WW1 was doing for Russia's industry what WW2 did for America's. Rapid growth of factories + associated technical professions for the war effort, which would've pivoted to civilian production after the war.
And as the peasants become increasingly impoverished, migrating to the cities with their new factories would seem like a more attractive prospect, since the pay is better and there's more to spend it on in a city as opposed to a rural area.
