Revolutinary Challenges to Empire: Popular Sovereignty and Industrialisation

At the very moment when the power and prestige of the Romanovs' empire was reaching its apogee, developments were occurring which in time put its viability into question. The most immediate and obvious problem was Russia's acquisition of most of Poland as a result of the peace settlement that concluded the Napoleonic wars.

The Poles proved an even greater and more immediate problem. Napoleon had restored an independent Polish state in the form of the Duchy of Warsaw. This state had been a loyal French client, as well as the base and jumping-off point for his invasion of Russia in 1812. Scores of thousands of Polish troops had fought for Napoleon between 1806 and 1814.

Alexander sympathized with the Poles. He believed that the partition of Poland in the late eighteenth century had been a crime and that the Polish desire for a separate national political identity must be met for reasons both of justice and of political stability. He was convinced that the needs of Russian security and Polish national identity could only be reconciled by making the Russian tsar simulta­neously the king of an autonomous Poland, located within the Russian Empire but granted a free constitution. Many of his advisors from the start warned him of the dangers of this policy, stressing the difficulties of combining the roles of Russian autocrat and constitutional king of Poland. Still in his liberal phase, in 1814-1815 Alexander tended to believe that his generous concessions to Polish aspirations would secure Polish loyalty and satisfaction. He also saw Polish au­tonomy and constitutionalism as the first step in the introduction of similar prin­ciples to the Russian core of his empire. Though the emperor held to this dream for a number of years after 1815, in time he came to believe that Russia was unready for constitutions and that liberal reforms would merely result in her falling prey to the revolutionary conspiracies which bubbled intermittently in Europe in the years following Napoleon’s demise.^[2259]

By the early 1820s many of the dire warnings of Alexander’s advisors were turning out to be true. Many members of the Russian elite were outraged that their tsar had granted to the Polish enemy rights and freedoms which he denied to Russia.

From 1863 down to 1914, repression remained the core of Russian policy in Poland. The 1863 rebellion was widely interpreted as evidence that the Poles were irreconcilable enemies and would exploit any signs of weakness and conciliation. From St. Petersburg’s perspective, fear of Polish disloyalty was a constant source of worry should the empire find itself at war in Europe. The policies introduced to reduce Polish landholding, constrain the use of the Polish language, and restrict Polish civil rights became models which were subsequently sometimes extended to other non-Russian peoples, with unfortunate results. Repression bred of fear of non-Russian disloyalty became a self-fulfilling prophecy.^[2261]

The other challenges to the Russian Empire’s viability which lurked beneath the surface in 1815 were more fundamental but took longer to mature. The principles underlying the French Revolution were of course a threat to all empires, not just Russia. Popular sovereignty struck at monarchical legitimacy. It also immediately raised the question of who exactly were the sovereign people.

By 1914 this threat was becoming a nightmare for the region's rulers, those of Russia included. Earlier in the nineteenth century the most immediate danger caused by “French” principles was a military one. From the start, the French re­public had included the universal obligation to serve in the army as one of the core elements of citizenship. The levee en masse of 1793 had been made permanent in the Loi Jourdain of 1798, which underpinned conscription policy under Napoleon. In 1813 Prussia, needing to mobilize all its meager manpower resources to secure its independence, adopted the same principle of universal conscription. Universal conscription based on principles of citizenship threatened to make the Russian mil­itary system redundant. Russian soldiers were, in the overwhelming majority of cases, peasants conscripted into the army for 25 years. These men formed a separate military “estate,” divorced from the civilian society into which they were born. No army based on such principles could match the numbers of enemy forces recruited through a system of short-term universal service. In wartime, the latter could in ad­dition be swollen by recalling to the colors the many reservists who had completed their military service and had returned to civilian life. But for Russia to adopt Franco-Prussian military principles had revolutionary implications.

If the French Revolution was one key divide between pre-modern and modern history, the other was the Industrial Revolution. Napoleonic-era warfare still belonged to the pre-industrial era. Basic military and naval technology had not changed fundamentally in the last two centuries. Russian industry could more or less sustain the immense war effort of 1812-1814. Even here, strains were evident. The Russian textile industry could not uniform all the empire's troops. Russian small-arms were often inferior to their English equivalents. Above all, Russia could not remotely match Britain's commercial and financial power. But the key changes of the early Industrial Revolution were just over the horizon in 1814. The first postwar generation witnessed the coming of the railway and the transformation of the iron industry.

By the time of Russia's next major war in 1854-1856, the Industrial Revolution was having a major impact. Russia lost the Crimean War in large part because its armies still fought and moved with the technology of the pre-industrial era against more modern enemies.

The cost of defeat could easily have been higher. The British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, dreamed of restricting Russia to her pre-Petrine borders and ending her role as a European great power. Fortunately for Russia, Napoleon III saw no French interest in using his army to pursue a purely British cause. Even so, defeat inflicted severe damage both to Russian prestige and to the security of her Black Sea territories. Deprived of the right to have a navy or coastal fortifications in the Black Sea, Russian territory was wide open to attack by the British and French fleets, should the sultan choose to open the Straits to them. Since in Crimea and the North Caucasus Muslim populations traditionally looked to the Ottomans for support against Russia, this was an additional threat, which partly explains Russian “encouragement” for Crimean Tatars and Circassians to decamp to the Ottoman Empire after 1856. The Polish rebellion of 1863 posed the same threat of non­Russian revolt being supported by foreign enemies, but this time in the empire's crucial western borderlands, within striking distance of the centers of Russian po­litical, military, and economic power. It soon became apparent that the French and British were unwilling to start a European war for Poland's sake and the immediate danger receded. But the basic nightmare that external weakness and the growth of anti-Russian minority nationalism would combine to destroy the empire not just remained right down to 1914, but grew even sharper. This was the inevitable re­sult both of the increasing hold of nationalist doctrines on the peoples of eastern Europe (including the minority peoples of the Russian Empire) and of the enor­mous growth of German power after 1871.^[2265]

Map 35.1. The Russian Empire at Its Greatest Extent, 1914.

Source: Lieven, 2000, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, xxxvi-xxxvii. Copyright: Dominic Lieven.

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