The Russian Peasant Uprising
On August 26, 1883, the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia erupted.
The scale of the eruption was something humanity had never witnessed. In a short span the colossal volcano hurled more than twenty million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, blotting out sunlight and dropping the Earth’s average temperature by four-tenths of a degree.
That terrifying reach did not spare Russia in the Northern Hemisphere. The cold damage and diminished sunlight that began in late summer dealt a heavy blow to Russian agriculture. Volcanic disruption of the weather brought unseasonable torrential rains and snowfalls that only deepened the misery of peasants already crushed by land-redemption payments.
Under Alexander II’s Emancipation Edict the freed serfs had been required to pay redemption dues for the land they took over from their former masters. Those dues had been set far above the land’s real market value, placing an enormous burden on the peasantry. Alexander III had cut the payments by thirty percent upon his accession, but the relief proved largely meaningless.
The irony was that the massive influx of New World grain, together with the railways and steamships that now carried it, had driven international grain prices into a long, steady decline—and 1883 was the year that decline steepened sharply.
Peasants who lived by selling their harvests watched their real income sink almost to nothing. To be forced, on top of that, to pay the crushing redemption dues? Russian peasants decided they simply could not.
“Even if I sold my daughter I couldn’t raise that money!”
They screamed at the officials that they could not pay.
“Shall we do this by the book, then?”
Corrupt and greedy Russian bureaucrats showed no mercy. Forced confiscations of land began in place after place, and even the traditionally obedient Russian peasantry could bear it no longer.
“We can’t go on living like this!”
“Smash the filthy landlords and nobles to pieces!”
The peasant uprisings spread like wildfire across the vast expanse of European Russia.
In the Winter Palace, sipping warm coffee, Tsar Alexander III first heard the news of the massive revolt and thought little of it.
“Just send the army and crush them, no?”
“A most wise suggestion, Your Majesty.”
It was not that simple. Even the troops dispatched to suppress the rising were shaken by what they saw.
“I—I can’t shoot them.”
“What? That is an order. Do you think the army is a game?”
In some cases the soldiers simply ignored their officers’ commands.
“Go shoot the rioters!”
“We never heard any such order.”
The Russian army’s confusion in the face of the peasant revolt finally planted a sense of crisis even in the minds of the Tsar and the nobility. The rising was spreading in every direction while the troops dithered. If the situation spun completely out of control, what would become of the country?
Alexander III realized that simple hard-line measures alone would not crush the peasantry. I need a way to win the serfs over.
In truth he was no stranger to conciliation. Cutting the redemption payments right after his accession had itself been a gesture meant to soothe peasant discontent. At a moment like this there was no harm in borrowing a little of the Englishmen’s cunning wisdom.
Divide and rule.
Alexander III decided to co-opt the wealthier peasants—the kulak stratum.
“I shall establish a Peasant Land Bank that will lend money at low interest so that farmers may purchase land.”
Of course, one needed a certain amount of capital already to borrow from that bank. The kulaks greeted the Tsar’s announcement with cheers.
“The Tsar understands our hearts.”
They drank the sweet water Alexander III offered and swung overnight into the Tsarist camp. Why worry about redemption payments when we can simply borrow cheap money from the Peasant Land Bank?
The defection of the kulaks dealt a decisive blow to the peasant revolt. The rising had been sporadic from the start, lacking clear leaders or a central force. If any group could have been called the driving stratum it was precisely those better-educated, better-off kulaks—and now they had walked away.
The end of the uprising was obvious.
“Teacher, how can you just leave after waving the flag?”
“Ah, it’s not our problem. Why should I care?”
“What?”
The peasant revolt rapidly unraveled. Only then did the wavering army and police recover their discipline.
“As His Majesty commands—crush the reactionaries thoroughly. Anyone who can’t do it can take off his uniform and leave.”
No one wanted that. The army and police suppressed the remaining rebels with savage severity.
“You—exile to Siberia!”
“You—exile to Central Asia!”
After many twists and turns the peasants’ rising was put down, yet the Russian government had tasted the terror of a system that could collapse in an instant. Accordingly Alexander III instituted a still more rigorous reactionary regime.
“Give them room to breathe and they start getting ideas. If we’d made them keep their eyes on the dirt the way Peter the Great did, nonsense about refusing redemption payments would never have arisen.”
As Alexander III’s oppressive rule intensified, more and more people began taking the bait of Waldemar’s emigration proposal. Households from the German-Russian communities of the Caucasus, the Volga, and the Baltic were now regularly packing up for German Africa; the sight was no longer rare.
The Russian authorities showed little interest in the German exodus.
“A few peasants disappear—what of it?”
They preferred to spend their attention on other problems. Looking at this affair, there must certainly be a mastermind behind it.
Russians could not believe that ignorant, stupid peasants had organized a revolt on their own. They pointed instead to anti-government and revolutionary groups such as the People’s Will.
“But those people are almost nonexistent inside the country.”
“Exactly why we need branches abroad as well.”
The Okhrana, Russia’s secret police, established overseas stations in France and elsewhere to watch the émigré opposition and dispatched personnel. In the process the Okhrana’s Paris station uncovered a few suspicious scraps of information.
“Why have a handful of minority intellectuals who recently left the country suddenly gone to work in French orchards?”
“We can’t determine the exact circumstances, but we have confirmed that several of them received invitations.”
“There are plenty of useful Frenchmen nearby—why hire Russians who don’t even speak the language? Who the devil are these people?”
“Checking the land registry, the vineyards appear to be owned by Americans.”
“Americans?”
“Yes.”
Vyacheslav von Plehve, head of the Okhrana, decided there was little to worry about. Americans came from every background; looking after their own ethnic kin was hardly strange. A few details still felt off, but that was the nature of intelligence work—a world in which black and white were never cleanly separated.
“Leave that side alone. Look elsewhere first.”
“Yes, sir.”
While the Okhrana hunted for a non-existent mastermind of the revolt, the minority intellectuals in the vineyards read the news of the Russian rising with complicated feelings. They despaired at the strength of a Tsarist regime that had not toppled even when the entire peasantry rose, yet they were also heartened that so vast a resistance could erupt inside so solid a system.
If another chance ever comes, we must take part as well.
Whatever others might think, the Piłsudski family believed exactly that.
“Father, will Russia ever shake again?”
“It will, without fail.”
The rotten Russian autocracy could never forever crush the will of a Polish people that yearned for independence. If a hundred years were not enough they would fight for two hundred; if two hundred failed, three hundred.
The Piłsudski brothers’ eyes lit up at those words.
“I hope we can see that day soon.”
“You will see it soon enough.”
The Piłsudski family returned to the newspapers covering the Russian revolt and dreamed of hope.
Hope was not the monopoly of minority intellectuals. Russian revolutionaries living in Paris likewise burned with hope at the prospect of the empire’s collapse. At the same time they witnessed the limits of the peasantry.
Leading Narodnik thinkers—Pyotr Lavrov, Lev Tikhomirov, head of the terrorist organization the People’s Will that the Empire had outlawed—read the papers and began to wonder whether revolution needed to be attempted from an entirely new angle.
The man who offered an answer was Georgi Plekhanov. He founded the Marxist Emancipation of Labor Group and proposed shifting the axis of revolution from the peasantry to the workers—the proletariat.
“Not peasants but workers?”
Plekhanov’s call to base a revolution on a handful of laborers was, at that moment, of little practical use. Yet revolutionaries who could no longer pin their hopes on the poorly organized peasantry found a powerful allure in this new foundation.
“In time Russia too will pass through industrialization. When that day comes Russian workers will no longer be a minority. Preparing from now is hardly wrong.”
It was also a way to overcome the limits of Narodnik terrorism and the peasant-centered armed-struggle line.
“We need not decide at once. Let us think it over carefully.”
The revolutionaries’ change of course proceeded slowly yet surely. That change was certain to prove fatal to Russia. From Paris the wind of Russian revolution began, little by little, to blow.