Not something you can know for sure before you do the deed.
That’s true but let’s put it this way: military insurrection of the Russian
nobility in the 1850s over the serfdom reform and later was extremely unlikely. What was more important, loyalty of the troops was guaranteed (unlike the Polish gubernias). However, to be fair, AII had some fears and specific horses were assigned for the case of emergency.
Apparently that even extended into
the art of writing.
How such drivel became popular, I will never know.
Because the people, not having ideas of their own were looking for any “ideas” and accepting them as a religion, aka, without head being involved.
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associated with the Decembrists and, though not charged with anything, his works were censored and his right to travel was revoked.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.
This is something of a misinformation propagated during the Soviet times: a great poet
had to be a progressive. 😂
Pretty much who was somebody was somehow “associated” with some of the Decembrists: most of them had been members of a society and somebody’s relatives, friends, etc. The “circle” of the initially investigated people was huge and an overwhelming majority of the potential cases was dismissed out of hand. Pushkin, IIRC, was not even considered and Nicholas almost immediately after accession returned him from exile and even granted a personal audience. An idea that everybody in the “circle” was suspected, while popular, does not fit the facts. A big part of the Moscow society, including high-ranking administrators was openly considered sympathetic to the exiled Decembrists: there were numerous family and social connections which were not expected to cease just because someone made a serious mistake. This was not a secret and nothing was done about it: unlike the SU links to the political criminals were not making one a criminal.
Of course, being educated where he was and when he was, Pushkin was, especially in the younger years a “liberal” as most of his friends but this did not mean too much. He wrote poetry lauding reign of NI and censorship was a common practice. In his case NI was his personal censor, which was a honor.
There was no
right to travel, it was a privilege granted on individual basis and I strongly suspect that Pushkin was not granted it not because he was considered a revolutionary but because, while his literary talent was not in doubt, his personal and moral qualities were not on the same level and nobody wanted scandals abroad. His temper was absolutely terrible even by the standards of time: between 1816 and 1837 he
initiated 26 duels (most of them cancelled by the friends’ efforts but nonetheless). Another possible reason which I would not exclude, was reluctance to deprive the court of one of its leading beauties (Pushkin’s wife). 😉
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.)
Censure Committee had nothing to do with Okhrana. Okhrana was in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Censorship Committee in the Ministry of Education.
But, let’s face it. Das Kapital is a voluminous piece of a boring crap with a very primitive logic related to the capitalistic process (surely, it took a genius to figure out that capitalist wants profit; prior to this nobody knew that) and the huge gaps in it due to the author’s plain ignorance on the subject. If anything, presented logic meant that the book is worthless because, not being a member of the proletariat, Marx could not be correct to start with (IIRC, there is no social niche for the writing nincompoops except as the servants of the capitalists). The best way to make it popular was to forbid its publishing: at least the idiots interested in reading will be busy for a while and ill not invent something of their own. 😂
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 pivotedi 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.
The industrial part is just to the point and had to be done by that scenario decades prior to WWI but it did not happen because government was under the mantra of “peasant community is a backbone of the regime” and artificially maintained it.
There was a big problem with doing this during a war. Russia was an overwhelmingly agricultural country with a very low average productivity and underdeveloped infrastructure. The huge losses resulted in a need to send millions of peasants to the front hurting agricultural production. This is an
objective factor. Now come
subjective ones:
- The government, being inept and incompetent, was trying to preserve a peace-time system of purchase and distribution which resulted in the speculations and plain refusal to sell if the price was lower than the expectation. Eventually, the government came with the idea of prodrazverstka (campaign of confiscation of grain and other agricultural products from peasants at nominal fixed prices according to specified quotas) in 1916 but never implemented it (and 1916 was too late).
- Underdeveloped transport system, which was already overburdened with the military traffic, created additional difficulties in getting agricultural products to the major cities (industrial centers) and to the front.
- Underdeveloped canning industry, added to the transportation issue, created problems with supplying the industrial centers and front with meat products. Brusilov wrote that on his front a number of the meatless days had been steadily raising to, IIRC, three per week, which was very bad comparing to the regulated norm.
- Gross incompetence of the most of the military and political leadership leading to the huge losses with very few victories. Shortage ofnfood and absence of glory were a deadly combination.