Russia at the turn of the twentieth century was a large-scale agrarian society that was much more economically backward than the societies of Western Europe. Politically it had formed itself into an empire that extended into other parts of Europe and Asia. Most Russians, about 80–85 percent, were peasants. In 1649 Russia legally established serfdom, and by the mid eighteenth century over half of the peasants were serfs. Serfdom was officially abolished in 1861, but this brought about no real improvement in the economic status of former serfs and in some cases made things even worse. Their lives continued much as before. The peasants held much of their land communally, and there was a village council, the Mir, that made decisions about how the land was to be farmed and a variety of other aspects of peasant life. The majority of peasants lived in an extremely backward state and had little contact with the larger society. Many peasants still used wooden plows and relied on other highly antiquated farming techniques. They lived in little more than huts, slept on their stoves, and shared their houses with their animals. The peasant economy was at a mere subsistence level, if that. Many peasants had to hire themselves out as seasonal workers in such activities as agriculture, mining, and construction in order to make ends meet. The level of peasant discontent was very high and was one of the key elements of the revolutionary turmoil that was to come. Russia was a late industrializer, industrialization having begun only around 1890. On the eve of the Revolution of 1917, Russia was still an overwhelmingly agrarian society with a very small working class. The industrial working class emerged from the peasantry, and most Russians classified as workers worked only seasonally, farming the rest of the year. In fact, the majority of Russia’s factories were placed in the countryside in order to make access to workers easier. A full-time industrial working class living in cities developed only in mining and in such technology- intensive industries as metallurgy and machine building. In 1900 the full-time working class constituted less than 1 percent of the population. The rest of the non-peasant population consisted of clergy, government officials, and the bourgeoisie in the broadest sense (i.e., not only businessmen but also professionals and civil servants of various types). Politically, Russia had an extremely autocratic state headed by the tsar who, until 1905, claimed unlimited power. By this time many of the absolutist states of Western Europe had given way to parliamentary and democratic institutions, but Russia was nowhere near these political achievements. The tsar not only refused to allow any representatives from the population to have a political voice but made it a criminal offense even to question his authority. Another contrast with Western Europe was that Western European monarchs respected private property, especially that of private landlords. But in Russia, the tsar owned everything.
The tsar established a large bureaucracy to protect his rule. An integral part of this bureaucracy was the police department, which played the dual role of maintaining law and order among the general population and protecting the state from popular unrest and potential rebellion. That branch of the department concerned with protecting the state against the people had extraordinary powers to enforce political conformity: It could engage in open or secret surveillance, search and arrest, imprisonment, and, by administrative fiat—that is, without trial—exile for periods of up to five years. Through a network of agents, it penetrated every facet of the country’s life; its foreign branches even tracked émigrés. Such measures were considered necessary to counteract an unprecedented wave of political terrorism by radical extremists, which in the decade preceding World War I claimed the lives of thousands of government officials. They made late tsarist Russia in many respects the prototype of a modern police state. Russia also maintained a standing army of some 1.4 million men, the largest in the world. For hundreds of years Russia was one of the most militaristic societies in Europe and the world, engaging in numerous wars. However, the army was also employed for political repression, frequently being used for putting down internal disturbances. Political Parties and Revolutionary Thought Political parties were illegal, but they began to emerge nevertheless toward the end of the nineteenth century. In 1883, a group known as the Liberation of Labor was founded by several Russian exiles living in Switzerland. A prominent member of this group was Georgi Plekhanov, a major Marxist intellectual who translated Marx’s works into Russian. Some years later this organization was transformed into the Russian Social Democratic Party, a party that favored the transition to a socialist economy. At a meeting held in 1903, the party split over who was to lead it. A major leader of the Social Democrats, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, argued that only the most vigorous party activists should be involved in governing it. Lenin argued against full democratic participation by the party’s rank and file because he thought such participation would make it easy for the tsar’s secret police to repress its activities. When the party voted on this issue, Lenin lost, but the candidates Lenin was supporting for the party’s central committees won. After this point Lenin and his supporters came to be known as the Bolsheviks, and their opponents, led by Plekhanov and Leon Trotsky, the Mensheviks. This split widened over time.
The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were divided on more than just how the Social Democratic Party should be run. They both supported a transition to socialism, but they disagreed on how that should be achieved. The Mensheviks stayed closer to the thinking of Marx, who argued that socialism could develop only after capitalism had reached a highly advanced form. Advanced capitalism was a prerequisite for socialism, Marx had argued, because only capitalism was capable of leading a society to a high enough level of industrialization to produce a large amount of wealth. In Marx’s view, a society could not go directly from a feudal or agrarian stage to socialism without first passing through industrialized capitalism. The Mensheviks therefore favored a political strategy that was gradualist and that concentrated on developing capitalism in Russia before attempting a socialist revolution. The Bolsheviks took a much harder line and were impatient. They thought it was possible to create a peasant-worker alliance that would be capable of overthrowing the Tsarist state and leading Russia into a highly industrialized form of socialism. The Bolsheviks wanted to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” or a one-party political system that would be led by a revolutionary vanguard—a small number of the most committed socialist intellectuals. They borrowed this phrase from Marx, who had used it to describe the political system of socialism in its transitional phase. This dictatorship was needed to raise the consciousness of workers and make them truly revolutionary. Left to themselves, workers would develop only a “trade union consciousness,” which would favor reform over revolution and, hence, the acceptance of capitalism rather than its overthrow.
