Alexander Kurin, Russia After Tolstoy (St. Petersburg: Rodina, 1984)
… Tolstoy’s death in 1911 took part of the soul out of the Russian Revolution. He had, to be sure, been in the background for years, involving himself little in day-to-day politics and devoting himself to writing and contemplation. But he had always been
there. It had become traditional for party leaders to go to the
vozhd to resolve disputes; his writings and occasional speeches were taken as guidance; and on the rare occasions when he did step in, people listened. Tolstoy was an overwhelming presence in postwar Russian politics, all the more so because his rarely overt about it, and his departure shattered the unwritten system of checks and balances that had grown up around him.
In the post-Tolstoy era, power flowed in three directions: to the faction leaders in the Zemsky Sobor, to the grass-roots village and factory councils, and to the six state companies that now managed the great majority of the Russian economy. [1] In practice, this meant an alliance between the state companies and the largest parties in the legislature. The Zemsky Sobor had secured the appointment of political executives in the companies during the late 1900s; these were invariably loyal to the parties in power, and usually exercised more authority than the companies’ elected boards. In the 1910s, this system became self-perpetuating, with the large parties using their
de facto control of the companies (and therefore of the economy) to secure votes while the companies’ importance gave their officers great power within the parties. As the global economy worsened and the companies’ role in “emergency planning” encompassed even more of the Russian economy, the political and economic oligarchy hardened further.
This was something of a mixed curse for the Russians of the time. On the one hand, the slide toward central planning mitigated the worst effects of the depression: the companies made sure that factories remained open and workers kept their jobs, and while many made do with less, few did without. On the other hand, economic policy increasingly became an overt method of control, with work and relief benefits directed to politically loyal factories and villages at the expense of dissenters.
The control was never total. No one party or person was ever able to take over the entire system – no one assumed Tolstoy’s non-title of
vozhd, and the leadership throughout the 1910s was collective – and there was pushback by back-benchers appalled at the sacrifice of revolutionary ideals. Nor, for the most part, did the oligarchs interfere with the literary or artistic world. But it was enough. Democracy remained in the village communes, on the floors of the self-managed factories and at the general meetings of cities and peri-urban towns, but there was little left of it at the national level.
Most Russians accepted the situation for the time being; with a depression in progress, keeping their jobs and putting food on the table were more important. But for the narodniks and others who sympathized with anarchism – a group which had included Tolstoy – the oligarchy’s increasing grip was intolerable. Many migrated to Siberia and the Far Eastern provinces where the state companies’ control was thin, and some went beyond Russia’s borders altogether to settle in Manchuria and Korea.
Still others went to Turkestan, which had become the cultural crossroads that Abay Qunanbaiuli had hoped it would be. The politics of Turkestan were as much of a patchwork as ever, with its constituent peoples maintaining their personal law and with Ottoman, British, Russian, Persian and Chinese diplomats competing for influence, but that very patchwork made it into a meeting-place. Samarkand, Tashkent and Bukhara had become university towns that attracted students from throughout the Islamic world and that were a cultural bridge between Russia and northwest China. The Russians who migrated there during the 1910s – most of them Muslim, but an increasing number Christian and Jewish – found themselves in a place as familiar as it was alien…
Ismet Yücel: Belloism: The History of an Idea (Stamboul: Tulip Press, 2001)
… The Transbaikal Mahayana Orthodox faith is usually regarded as a synthesis of Christianity and Buddhism, and in many ways it is, just as the people among whom it grew are a union of Slavic, Manchurian and steppe peoples. The population of Ukrainians and Russians in the Far Eastern provinces stood at a million in 1914, and grew to two million by 1920 as more people voted with their feet against the growing power of the state companies in metropolitan Russia. Another million Russians lived in Manchuria, making up a majority in several cities along the rail line. The settlers – many of them, during the early years, single or widowed women unable to find Russian husbands due to wartime casualties – married into the Manchurian, Mongol and Buryat populations nearly as often as they married each other. As early as the late 1900s, and certainly by the 1910s, it was clear that a new cross-border people was emerging.
The settlers were primed to accept new religious ideas: they tended toward the anarcho-syndicalist end of the narodnik movement, had moved east precisely to escape the pressure of convention and received wisdom, and were heavily influenced by the theology of the Doukhobors and by Tolstoy’s pantheistic vision of Christianity. They remained strongly Christian in their basic cosmology and life-cycle ceremonies, and even brought many Asians into the faith, but theirs was a grass-roots Christianity that rejected hierarchical authority, and they adopted many aspects of the Buddhist outlook. They identified Jesus with both the Maitreya, representing the future salvation of the world, and the Medicine Buddha, representing salvation and healing in the here and now. Their rituals incorporated meditation and the chanting of mantras adapted for Christian worship as well as aspects of Manchurian and Mongol folk religion, with mountain and nature spirits being subsumed into a pantheist understanding of all things being part of the divine essence.
What is often neglected in studies of the Transbaikal Mahayana Orthodox church is the influence of Islam, and particularly Belloism. The settlers knew of Islam both from the existing Muslim community of Manchuria and from the Muslim narodnik ethos that filtered up from Ma Zhanshan’s Chinese Turkestan. Belloist ideas of communal solidarity, collective labor, mutual education, apolitical creativity and self-rule by consultation and consensus appealed strongly to the settlers’ sensibilities, and gave their collective living arrangements a spiritual and educational as well as an economic dimension.
The Belloist influence was felt mostly in “deep doctrine” and life patterns, meaning that it was less evident in day-to-day ritual than Christianity or Islam. But it is there for those who care to see. Sufi meditation patterns imported through Belloism exist alongside Buddhist meditation among the Far Eastern Russians, the equality of all adults in the religious life of the community is a very Belloist concept, and the concept of mundane work and play as acts of worship is likewise. Several favorite sayings in contemporary Manchuria and Far Eastern Russia – “power shackles the soul,” for instance – are of West African origin.
The balance between Christianity, Buddhism and Islam varied from place to place, as did local practice, and as late as the 1910s, the Mahayana Orthodox were commonly viewed as a collection of syncretisms rather than a single faith. As time went on, however, they developed a common core of ritual, poetry and doctrinal writings, and by 1920, both they and their neighbors saw themselves as a distinct church. And they would gain further purchase during the upheaval that the late 1910s and 1920s would bring to China…
Sun Dixiang, East Asia in the Decade of Revolutions (Shanghai: New Wisdom, 1937)
… The last Qing Emperor began his reign as a forceful and effective reformer, and he might have finished it as one if he hadn’t stopped halfway. By 1905, he had crushed the rebellious nobles and warlords, instituted land reform across much of the north and patches of the coast, and overseen two legislative elections and the first steps toward industrialization. But he was reluctant to go any further. He balked at giving the legislature more than token powers, for fear that this would lead to a takeover of the government by Han Chinese, and he shrank from the confrontation that would result if he forced land reform in the districts where peasant self-defense societies hadn’t done most of the job for themselves.
By the later 1900s, he had shifted instead to purely economic modernization, trusting that steady growth and improved rural conditions would substitute for further political reforms. But they didn’t; the taste of democracy provided by the legislature only made the people want more, and the peasants in the south wanted to own their land rather than being more comfortable tenants. Migration to the growing industrial cities also led to a displaced urban class that was outside traditional authority structures and which became a center of discontent and agitation. A decade after the nobles’ revolt had been beaten, the emperor faced a challenge from the opposite end of society.
The breaking point was reached in 1913, when a dispute between the reformist and reactionary factions at court escalated into open warfare. The reformists were led by Ma Zhanshan, the Muslim general and former governor of the northwest who was now the imperial minister of trade, and they urged the emperor to continue with the political liberalization of the late 1890s and 1900s. By 1912 they formed a majority of the cabinet, and began to bypass the imperial court and implement reforms through loyal provincial officials. The reactionaries, seeing a threat, decided to act pre-emptively, and in what proved to be a fatal error, the emperor gave them his tacit approval. On the “Night of Swords,” they staged a palace coup, executing Ma and several other reformist ministers and carrying out a purge of the government.
The reformists, however, proved to be far from finished. In the north, they rallied behind Ma Qi, a nephew of the slain minister, and gathered their forces in Xinjiang. In the south, several reformist provincial governors, including those of Yunnan, Guangdong and Fujian, rose in rebellion and declared their support for Ma. With several other provinces staying neutral, the rebels, augmented by allies from Turkestan, advanced against the imperial forces. The imperial armies in the northeast proved a tough nut to crack, and it would take two years before the capital fell, but fall it did, and by 1916, the Qing had been reduced to their Manchurian heartland.
The new regime began with Ma Qi’s coronation as emperor and the promulgation of a fully democratic constitution. In fact, however, power lay in the hands of a clique of generals and provincial governors, and the election of 1916-17 (conducted in several stages in different parts of the country) was tightly controlled. The government did pursue land reform, but this also came with a twist; while Ma confiscated the landlords’ estates, he sought to impose by force the system of quasi-narodnik village communes that the northwestern provinces had adopted voluntarily. This led to yet another wave of unrest in the south, with the peasants and former landlords amazingly finding themselves on the same side. The ruthless crash industrialization program that Ma embarked on beginning in 1919 did nothing to add to China’s social cohesion…
… Korea’s Queen Min was more successful in her effort to steer a middle course. She was no more eager for democracy than her Chinese counterpart, but she was far more thorough about land reform. The gentry’s alignment with Japan during the war, and the peasants’ resolute support of the monarchy, had given her a perfect pretext, and between 1897 and 1907, she confiscated nearly all the disloyal nobles’ land and distributed it to the peasants. After 1905, she forced even the loyal gentry to sell much of their holdings, although she compensated them generously and mollified them with political posts and preferential access to trade licenses. The combination of land reform and economic growth, along with rigorous policing of the civil service and a merciless attitude toward corruption, kept discontent at a manageable level.
The queen’s good fortune was also aided by the religious crisis that Korea had fallen into during and after the war. Many of the Buddhist monasteries had joined the rural gentry in siding with Japan, which had cost them the respect of the peasants, as had postwar revelations of corruption among the monastic hierarchy. Many peasants turned instead to Orthodox Christianity, which had been introduced by the increasingly influential Russian community and which was closely allied with the throne. Others joined the Religion of the Heavenly Way, an outgrowth of the Donghak movement and the wartime peasant militias, which incorporated aspects of Orthodoxy (including widespread use of icons) as well as Confucianism and traditional shamanism. This movement was more radical than the straightforward Orthodox Christians, and its mutual-aid networks would prove troublesome later, but for the time being, it looked to the queen as champion of the poor…
… The 1900s and early 1910s in Japan were a time of rapid growth; its Pacific investments and merchant fleet prospered, the new territories in Kamchatka yielded rich timber and coal harvests, and Filipino independence had given it an ally that was both a large market and a bountiful source of resources. In 1914, Japan bought Spain’s Micronesian possessions, which were no longer tenable after the loss of the Philippines, and brought a large swath of the Pacific under its control.
Under the surface, though, the Japanese power structure was increasingly strained. Since the imperial restoration, Japan had what was often called a
matoryoshika government after the popular Russian nesting dolls: successive layers of bureaucratic, military, governmental and court figures with the emperor at the center but often weakest in terms of actual power. The balance of power between these layers, and between factions within them, often changed, most spectacularly with the failed army coup of 1898 and the subsequent ascendancy of the navy and merchant class, but the cliquish essence remained unchanged.
The rising middle class was unhappy with this situation, and after the economic downturn of the mid-1910s took hold, the disaffection spread rapidly to the working class and the newly unemployed. Indeed, Japan’s dependence on exports and maritime trade made it particularly vulnerable to a falloff in global demand, and it was both hard-hit by the crisis and slow to recover.
The result was an unprecedented growth of mass politics, which for the first time in centuries became a serious challenge to the powers that were. Several factions sought to mobilize the disaffected workers for their own ends, and some also recruited the neglected and often-mistreated army veterans to their cause. The veterans’ movement that had existed since soon after the war now had powerful sponsors who publicly proclaimed that the soldiers should not be ashamed. Many ex-soldiers refused to be used, but others, along with their sons, repaid this sponsorship by acting as street enforcers and supporting their patrons at mass demonstrations.
By 1918, the faction leaders exercised enough pressure through street gangs and labor unions – and, increasingly, through the emperor, who saw them as a way to break free of the entrenched court bureaucracy – to force through a package of constitutional changes. These gave greater powers to the Diet, instituted universal suffrage and social insurance, and brought the military and the civil service under direct government oversight. In practice, elections would be fought as much on the streets as on the ballot box, with each party having its private militia of ex-soldiers and unemployed workers and its deep network of patronage. Power had again moved between factions and institutions, but the rule of the cliques had not yet been broken…
Dimitri Negassie, The Remaking of Ethiopia (New Moscow: Icon Press, 1978)
… Menelik II died in December 1913, hailed as one of Ethiopia’s greatest emperors. Only the old still remembered the old days of warring principalities; the young had grown up in an empire that Menelik had made strong and kept at peace. Two million people descended on Gondar to line the streets at his funeral procession: peasants and townsmen from the Ethiopian heartland; Somalis; Russians from Eritrea; tall tribesmen from the upper Nile. Christians and Muslims, and the capital’s few Jews, stood together in the rain as the emperor’s coffin passed.
The rule of Ethiopia now fell to Menelik’s oldest son Tewodros III and his wife, the Grand Duchess Anastasia. In a double coronation ceremony on February 11, 1914, Tewodros formally assumed the title of emperor and Anastasia became the
nigist; in a startling break with precedent, Anastasia was crowned empress and co-ruler in her own right rather than simply holding the title by marriage. In a country where dynastic politics still mattered and where the Russian minority had become a symbol of modernity and progress, the symbolism was unmistakable.
It soon became clear that Anastasia was not co-ruler only in name. The two had developed a strong partnership in their decade of marriage, and shared a desire to complete Ethiopia’s modernization. Menelik had reformed the army, improved the roads and ports, and founded the empire’s first university, but he had left the feudal society of the countryside untouched and had done little to build a modern economy. Tewodros and Anastasia were determined to do what Menelik had left undone.
The new emperor began by rationalizing Ethiopia’s patchwork of feudal domains into six kingdoms: Amhara, Oromo, Tigray, Eritrea, Samaale and Kush. The nobles’ landholdings became districts of purely administrative significance; real power would reside in the kingdoms’ centrally appointed civil service, which was dominated by imperial loyalists. The princes were given high-ranking posts in the new government, but lesser nobles suffered a staggering blow, and the one that followed would be even more so. In January 1915, Tewodros decreed that serfdom was abolished and that the former serfs would have the immediate right to purchase their farms at fixed prices. The compensation scheme for their ex-landlords was reminiscent of Russia, and doubtless showed Anastasia’s hand at work: the government would give lump-sum payments to the nobles which would be repaid by the peasants over 30 years, with the lump sums being raised by bonds secured by the peasants’ debt obligation.
The nobles’ reaction to this was as may be expected, and much of the country was in rebellion by summer. Similar revolts had torn the country apart in the past, and this one might also have done, if not for the fact that Menelik had transformed Ethiopia’s feudal army into a professional one. Tewodros and Anastasia could also count on the allegiance of their Somali and Nilotic subjects, among whom feudalism and serfdom had never become entrenched and who had become integrated into the imperial patronage system through fostering and education – and, critically, they could count on the Russians. The old Tsar had complained bitterly about Eritrea’s new status, correctly inferring that “kingdom” meant “province,” but the governor and most of the settlers believed that they were better off as an integral part of a regional power than as a backwater vassal, and Anastasia’s presence on the throne did much to ensure their loyalty. Like the French civil war, the nobles’ rebellion was bitter but short, and by early 1916, the empire was under firm control and the nobles that refused to submit were a head shorter.
The same year would see the election of Ethiopia’s first imperial parliament, composed of a house of commons chosen by universal suffrage and a house of lords that was a consolation prize for the dispossessed noble class. The parliament was, as yet, a weak one, as were the legislatures of the six kingdoms; the emperor and empress still had broad powers, and the appointment and dismissal of governments remained with the throne. It had the problems of many top-down attempts at democratization and would not be satisfactory forever. But for the first time, Ethiopia was a constitutional state, and its people had a hand in government.
The remainder of the 1910s were devoted to administrative and economic reforms. Anastasia, whose long interest in the Nile provinces had been recognized with the title Kandake of Kush, oversaw infrastructure improvements in the Nile Valley and introduced a corps of
jajis to bring primary education to the countryside. The other four kingdoms would also use itinerant teachers along with brick-and-mortar schools, albeit with separate corps of teachers for Christian and Muslim villages. Tewodros also invested in industrial development in Gondar and the Eritrean littoral, creating the empire’s first industrial zones with significant Russian expatriate investment.
In the meantime, Ethiopia’s regional influence grew with Yemen’s increasing detachment from the Ottoman Empire. Here, too, the Russian and Eritrean populations played a key part: Valentin Mikoyan and his army were well remembered among the Yemenis, and his postwar service in the Ethiopian general staff helped persuade them to trust Ethiopia as peacekeeper and arbiter of their disputes. By 1919, the political and cultural power of Ethiopia was strong in this region, and it would become more so with that year’s crisis in Aden…
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[1] See post 3278.
