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Civil Society in Imperial Russia

Дата публикации: 04 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Imperial Russia →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1188907385


Were the independent social institutions of Imperial Russia--including the media, professional associations, charitable groups, and artistic enterprises--contributing to the modernization of the country during the decades before 1917?

Viewpoint: Yes. A burgeoning Russian civil society was gradually creating a modern and democratic Russia during the last decade of tsarism.

Viewpoint: No. The development of Russian civil society was restricted by the tsarist autocracy and then destroyed by the Bolshevik regime, both of which considered independent social institutions a threat to government authority.

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A recent trend in the historiography of Imperial Russia has examined evidence of its capacity to sustain civil society. A term borrowed from the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who used it to describe the emergence of independent social and economic institutions in Western Europe, civil society can include such relatively modern innovations as the mass media, local government, business and industry, professional groups, voluntary associations, and other communities of citizenship that function beyond the purview of the central state.
Many scholars of prerevolutionary Russia have found its civil society an apt and somewhat neglected area of study. Contrary to traditional scholarship, which emphasized evidence of social discontent as the cause behind the revolutions of 1917, newer studies have focused on positive evidence of modernization. They argue that--with emerging democratic institutions, a relatively free public sphere, and surging civic involvement in the economy and society--paths other than massive upheaval were open to Russia. Yet, others do not agree that Russia was developing a sufficiently modern society capable of avoiding revolution in the early twentieth century. They assert that an unswervingly autocratic government, gaping social inequality, deteriorating urban conditions, and other major problems derailed any potential for Russia to move toward modern functionality and left revolution as the only possible outcome.



Viewpoint: Yes. A burgeoning Russian civil society was gradually creating a modern and democratic Russia during the last decade of tsarism.

Conventional wisdom has long held that authoritarian rule is intrinsic to Russia and that its people do not possess the public initiative, expertise in free enterprise, or experience in self-government to limit government intervention in their political and economic life; thus, Russia is unable to overcome its historically underdeveloped sense of private property and civil liberties. European travelers' accounts--such as those of Adam Olearius in the seventeenth century and Astolphe, Marquis de Custine, in 1839--invariably asserted that, because the Russian people were born slaves, they were accustomed to, and actually appreciated, strong rulers. It has become almost prescribed for scholars to emphasize the arbitrariness that has characterized Russian political culture, at least as compared to Western political models. Russians themselves have often added weight to the argument that nearly insurmountable difficulties prevented the development of a civil society in Russia. The censor Aleksandr Nikitenko noted in the middle of the nineteenth century that "our qualities as responsible citizens have not yet been formed because we do not yet have the essential elements without which there can be only civic cohabitation but not civic virtue, namely public-spiritedness, a sense of legality, and honor."

To be sure, the tsarist regime sought to dominate the economic and political life of Russia in a manner that would have been considered intolerable in the West. There is, however, considerable evidence suggesting that in the final decades of Imperial Russia, its educated society was becoming increasingly active and reformist and that a civil society was in the making. Whereas many previous studies of Imperial Russia were replete with learned expositions about the fragmented nature of that society, discounting even the possibility that a civil society could develop there, some historians are now exploring this model of theoretical analysis to counter "the unwarranted sense of historical inevitability" that has permeated scholarship in the field. This scholarship also serves to discredit simple and invidious comparisons between a backward Russia with an inert society and an idealized West that had tapped into the initiative and dynamism of its entrepreneurial classes. These scholars acknowledge that the tsarist government was still authoritarian on the eve of World War I, but they argue that a careful examination of social and political developments in the quarter century before the outbreak of conflict allows for a more positive assessment of the role that autonomous civic groups might have played in the transformation of Russia from a servile to a civil society.

There has been much debate among social scientists over the definition of the term civil society and to what extent its development in Russia might have coincided with that of a Russian middle class. Broadly defined, the term refers to a social structure in which there is an abundance of voluntary associations and one in which professional elements have developed organizations that are separate from the state. In his treatise Democracy in America (1835-1840), Alexis de Tocqueville noted that voluntary associations and independent institutions of local self-government promote the development of an open, or civil, society. Examining the development of civil society has proven useful as a means through which to investigate the processes of modernization. Voluntary associations exemplify the ideals of public service and philanthropy, while independent organs of local self-government provide for citizen participation in governance. They are essential preconditions for the development of the public sphere, a term that the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas used to describe the independent public activity that the middle class first undertook in the eighteenth century. Tocqueville also noted the close ties between the development of civil society and the public sphere: "Civil associations pave the way for political ones, but on the other hand, the art of political association singularly develops and improves this technique for civil purpose."

Through intercourse with Europe, a civil society developed in Russia. Peter the Great's efforts to modernize Russia by grafting Western technology onto a fundamentally different system of governance sowed the seeds of social and political pluralism, exposing the Russian elite to the dynamic models of Western polities. Peter virtually created a Westernized elite, which then began to demand a larger role in the governance of Russia and an extension of its privileges.

Europe had also struggled with the concept of citizen participation in governance; thus, the history of Imperial Russia should be viewed as being within the context of European history. In the Russian case the concepts of natural law posited by the French Enlightenment ultimately led to friction between a state that still held to an ethos like that of the "enlightened despots" of eighteenth-century Europe and an increasingly independent nobility and a nascent middle class. The conflict arose over the role that society should be allotted in the government's quest for public cooperation to resolve the social problems that inevitably arise in modernizing societies.

The last tsars' programs of modernization called into existence a middle class that eventually demanded an end to the restrictions imposed on it by the state. The regime continued to espouse outdated ideals and to extol the virtues of autocracy while pursuing the industrialization of the state; it remained wedded to the concept of a well-ordered police state and never accepted the political consequences of modernization. By the turn of the twentieth century, cities in European Russia were experiencing soaring rates of growth and social diversification, which implied the possibility of public identities similar to those of Western models. In 1912 the Moscow city directory listed about six hundred independent associations and private groups devoted to civic improvement. Writing about the proliferation of voluntary associations in Moscow on the eve of World War I, Joseph Bradley has concluded that these civic-minded, independent associations "contributed significantly to the formation of sensibilities commonly thought of as middle-class in Western Europe and North America." The educated men and women who participated in these associations took great pride in their professional qualifications, and they began to demand that responsibility for the common welfare be shared between the government and its citizens.

While some scholars have asserted that a middle class did not exist in late Imperial Russia, many specialists (including Jo Ann Ruckman, Charles Ruud, Paul Gregory, and several Russian historians) have found evidence of an incipient Russian bourgeoisie with highly developed entrepreneurial skills, which was organized into social and civic groups and had a coherent vision for the transformation of Russia from a servile to a civil society. In addition, zemtsy, activists in the zemstva, organs of self-government (singular zemstvo), were calling for an increase in these organs' sphere of competence and the right to coordinate public activity. The nexus between these two societal groups were the nonnoble technical specialists employed by the zemstva to carry out the myriad tasks of local self-government. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the zemstva employed more than one hundred thousand of these specialists--including statisticians, agronomists, veterinarians, teachers, and doctors--who considered themselves to be engaged in public service, as opposed to the tsarist civil service. These professional men and women, whatever their social origins, did not think of themselves as being members of the soslovie (estate) system because the preemancipation system of social orders and their traditional assemblies no longer fit a rapidly changing Russia, with its emerging middle class and its many voluntary and professional associations in cultural, social, and economic spheres. Civil society provides for an interlocking network of nonpolitical relations among various groups that carry out economic, social, and political functions independently of the state. More important, the range and nature of these contacts were increasing in the years immediately prior to the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. For example, the growing complexity of zemstvo programs, the creation of new zemstvo fields such as agronomy and statistical analysis, and the sheer volume of zemstvo business necessitated an increased reliance on the emerging class of specialists and increased contact and cooperation with their professional associations. The zemstvo created institutional space that afforded these specialists greater input and autonomy through various advisory congresses and conferences, councils, bureaus, and commissions whose opinions were heeded by elected zemstvo assemblies and their executive boards. The hundreds of zemstva-sponsored conferences that were convened to discuss technical, social, economic, and other issues during the prewar years were instrumental in fostering the public space for an emerging civil society in provincial Russia.

This phenomenon was replicated in the cities of the empire and perhaps represented tsarist Russia's best hope for a modern democratic government and a thriving capitalist sector. In Moscow and several other industrial centers the various philanthropic organizations, members of municipal governments (many of whom came from the business community), and liberal industrialists committed themselves to urban and democratic reforms, and in some notable cases individuals such as Pavel Riabushinskii and Aleksandr Guchkov became national political leaders between 1907 and 1917. On the eve of World War I, the political and social transformation of Russia was well under way. The existence of this process suggests that the possibility of middle-class leadership in a transition to a liberal constitutional democracy in Russia cannot be dismissed. World War I revealed still further the increasing irrelevance of the tsarist regime, as the Russian public stepped forward and demonstrated its vitality by assuming burdens such as refugee relief, care for the sick and wounded soldiers of the Russian army, and providing the army with weapons and munitions, a role that normally would have been the responsibility of the state. The thin crust of this pluralistic, democratic Russia, however, was burned away in the fires of war and social revolution.

-- Thomas Earl Porter, North Carolina A&T State University


Viewpoint: No. The development of Russian civil society was restricted by the tsarist autocracy and then destroyed by the Bolshevik regime, both of which considered independent social institutions a threat to government authority.

In seeking to explain the growth and stability of Western democracies, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued for the importance of a public sphere, a space in which civil society can congregate to critique the government and otherwise engage in political activities. Habermas's sphere was both literal, as in public-spirited clubs and organizations, and figurative, as in public opinions that formed and circulated through mass media. In essence, Habermas borrowed from the Enlightenment emphasis on disinterested reason and science, in which informed discourse was considered critical to participatory democracy. The notion of this public sphere has since provided the basis for a paradigm used to explain the political transformation of a so-called developing society, a term appropriate to Russia before 1917. The appearance and growth of a public sphere anticipated the evolution of Russia into a Western-style electoral representative democracy. Since the activities of the eighteenth-century "enlightened despot" Catherine the Great, small public spheres began to form among the educated elite. Then, as a result the Great Reforms of the 1860s, many institutions and mass-oriented media began to appear in the tsarist empire, opening the space that Habermas found crucial for allowing the civic-minded to engage in actions that had political resonance. The question, therefore, is not whether a civil society existed in Russia, but why it proved unable to confront the autocracy effectively. This question is especially vexing because actions taken in the public sphere proved pivotal to launching the Revolution of 1905 and resulted in the greater independence of civil society in the years that followed. Yet, civil society failed in 1917.

The three most critical components of a public sphere--voluntary public-minded organizations, professional associations, and a mass-circulation press--could be found in relative abundance in Russia by the turn of the twentieth century. The Free Economic Society (FES), founded in 1765, was the prototype. Although it depended on material support from the government and required official approval for its charter, its members nonetheless enjoyed relative freedom to pursue their objective of "the increase and diffusion of useful knowledge." Improvements in Russian agriculture depended heavily on the research performed by its members, who prided themselves on their knowledge of science and sense of public duty. Moreover, after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the FES established an autonomous Literacy Committee, an important corollary to the government's growing commitment to public education. Another important learned society, the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, was founded in 1845 and--according to Joseph Bradley--"brought together scientists, scholars, and other reform-minded officials to study social and economic questions." The Russian Technical Society, founded in 1866 as part of the effort to industrialize Russia after its disastrous showing in the Crimean War (1853-1856), helped significantly to train a technical intelligentsia. Thousands of voluntary associations had sprouted up in Russia by the turn of the century, teaching valuable lessons of citizenship--that is, participation in nation building--to their members. However, these groups remained increasingly reluctant handmaidens to the state, because even though they were furthering so many of their own objectives, they were also fostering the state's goal of education and industrial modernization.

As professions became organized in Imperial Russia, they were forced into an ambivalent relationship with the state, on which they depended for patronage and often employment. Theoretically, a profession is restricted to those who have mastered a specialized body of knowledge. Also, a professional must serve in the interests of the public; even those professionals who are privately employed must adhere to a code of ethics that imbues their actions with moral responsibility. Professions did not truly develop in Russia until after the Great Reforms of the 1860s. Athough there were many educated specialists--such as physicians, legal experts, and engineers--their corporate status was defined by the state they served. The government's postreform commitment to modernization increased its need for specialized knowledge, and those who had it began to chafe under the constraints that the state placed on their ambitions to re-create their roles according to the models of their Western European colleagues. Although they were permitted to circulate information through professional journals, for example, only physicians were permitted to hold congresses with any sort of regularity, a privilege they enjoyed because of their great value to an unhealthy empire.

Professionals themselves were in part to blame for their lack of success in establishing an ethos that brought them together with patients or clients in the formation of a civic base. The frustrated elites placed so much emphasis on establishing their independence that they placed the transformation of the state over the more- narrow concerns of their chosen specialties, substituting politics for professionalism. They rose to revolution in 1905 because, according to Harley D. Balzer, "for a few months they believed that radical professionals might displace professional radicals as the agents of change in Russian politics." This strategy might have been successful if professional associations had also been willing to relax their exclusionary policies and open themselves up to include the second tiers, the support staffs, such as nurses and orderlies, who though identified as "physicians' assistants," usually held primary medical responsibilities in villages where doctors were in dangerously short supply. In another example, psychiatrists spoke for universal suffrage in the larger political realm, but not for equality in decision making in their own institutions. Other professionals preferred to use the power of the state, still centralized and the primary source of research funds, to their advantage. Groups that collected at the fringe of professionalization because their knowledge is not necessarily specialized--from schoolteachers to government bureaucrats--also sought the status and the autonomy associated with the free professions. They, however, lacked the ability to liberate themselves from the state, which undermined their political ambitions at the same time that it depended on their commitment to public service.

The mass media, especially the commercialized mass-circulation press, had the smallest investment in the state. Government censorship kept certain topics--such as the desire for a Russian constitution--off-limits for editorial discussion, but newspapers provided information that encouraged readers to engage in the reasoned discourse that Habermas considered so important for a civil society. Russian readers, for example, suffered no shortage of news about the functioning of European parliaments and the inadequacies of local governments. The press played an especially important role in providing information about the wars Russia fought, reporting on the widespread discontent during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and military setbacks during World War I (1914-1918). In the days before the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917, they even broadcast the impending coup. Journalists also sought professional status, to report the news rather than to act on it.

Revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin showed a great sensitivity to the potential power of civil society, moving against it swiftly and surely after the Bolshevik seizure of power. One of the Bolsheviks' first actions was to close down the free press; it was relatively easy to send armed guards to newspaper offices. The culture of violence and terror that supported Bolshevik rule went a long way toward persuading many educated and idealistic people, the backbone of prerevolutionary civil society, to emigrate. Many others were later expelled by the regime. Against those who remained, the Bolsheviks began a far-reaching campaign of deprofessionalization. Dependent as their regime was on specialized knowledge and technical expertise, the Bolsheviks manipulated the structure that kept professionals invested in the state and implemented a model of state-dominated professions that curtailed autonomous professional activity. The new regime was aided in this change initially by such relatively marginal professional groups as medical orderlies and primary-school teachers, who had always been prone to socialist positions and parties. Voluntary and charitable associations, which had undergone the same sort of politicization as the professions, found themselves equally vulnerable. Almost all were put out of business by the early 1920s, even those that dealt effectively with such pressing matters as organizing famine relief. As Joseph Bradley has pointed out, Russian civil society was "hijacked by the revolutionaries for the purposes of its own destruction."

-- Louise McReynolds, University of Hawai'i, Manoa


NO REAL PROGRESS

Alexander Kerensky, prime minister of the Provisional Government that was overthown by the Reds in 1917, made these observations on the impact of Bolshevism on Russian civil society:

Leninism represents the most complete political, social and economic reaction, unprecendented in the history of Europe. And like all reaction, the dictatorship of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party is utterly incapable of any gradual, evolutionary and peaceful readjustment of its substance.

To be sure, Russia has during the ten years returned from the complete economic paralysis of the period of integral Leninism (1918-20), styled shamefacedly by the Bolsheviki as "military communism," through the "Nep" to purely capitalist forms. But, this capitalism represents a most backward, primitive, avaricious and poorly productive order, based upon the most cruel exploitation of the workers and peasants.

The experiment of the Bolshevist reaction has proved once more that no social or political progress is possible without recognition and affirmation of the rights of the individual to complete liberty of thought, of conscience and of expression.

Social welfare, popular enlightenment, domestic order and international security will not be assured to the Russian people as long as the Bolsheviki continue to hold Russia in the grip of their party dictatorship. For no social order capable of guaranteeing to the people the blessings of work and freedom is possible in a country the people of which are deprived of fundamental human rights and civil liberties, of economic initiative and of the protection of law based and administrated on the principle of equality. Where "party expediency" gives way to social and national interest there can be no civilization and no real progress.

To-day, after ten years of Bolshevik domination, Russia stands at the starting point of the circle of Leninism: terrorism and severe economic crisis. These are the results of acute, unnatural, artificial economic and political causes, collectively expressed in the nature and substance of dictatorship, which stifles the independent, creative life and activity of the people.

In the struggle for liberation Russia must inevitably return to the road of popular, national, democratic construction, the road upon which the Russian people embarked--hesitatingly and with uncertain step--in March, 1917!

Source: Alexander F. Kerensky, The Catastrophe: Kerensky's Own Story of the Russian Revolution (New York & London: Appleton, 1927), pp. 376-377.

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FURTHER READINGS

References


Harley D. Balzer, ed., Russia's Missing Middle Classes: The Professions in Russian History (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).

Nancy Bermeo and Philip Nord, eds., Civil Society before Democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Europe (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

Joseph Bradley, "Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia," American Historical Review, 107 (October 2002): 1094-1123.

Bradley, "Voluntary Associations, Civic Culture and Obshchestvennost' in Moscow," in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, edited by Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 183-199.

Mary Schaeffer Conroy, ed., Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia: Case Studies on Local Self-Government (the Zemstvos), State Duma Elections, the Tsarist Government, and the State Council Before and During World War I (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998).

Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, eds., Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).

John Keane, ed., Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives (London & New York: Verso, 1988).

Louise McReynolds, The News Under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Thomas Porter and Scott Seregny, "The Zemstvo Reconsidered," in The Politics of Local Government in Russia, edited by Alfred Evans and Vladimir Gelman (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 19-44.

Charles Timberlake, "The Zemstvo and the Development of a Russian Middle Class," in Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, pp. 164-179.

Опубликовано на Порталусе 04 сентября 2007 года

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