The Revolutionary Masses
 |
Only in the last year of his life was the tsar finally persuaded by
the newly appointed progressively-inclined Minister of the Interior
Michael Loris-Melikov
(1825-1888) to take up the idea of political reform. |
Loris-Melikov realized that the
intransigence of the authorities alienated and radicalized the
liberal circles of educated society, making them view the
revolutionaries as their possible allies. The establishment of a
nationally elected body of representatives was the most
important concession that the government could make in order to
win the liberal opposition over to its side. According to Loris-Melikov’s
plan, this national body was to take the form of a preliminary
committee of the State Council. The committee would be comprised
of elected representatives of provincial zemstvos
and towns and would examine draft bills before they were passed
for approval to the State Council. Moreover, ten or fifteen of
these public representatives would also participate in the
legislative work of the State Council itself.
In February
1881 these proposals were discussed by a special conference of
senior officials presided over by Alexander. Although the notion of
public representatives in the State Council was rejected, the idea
of having elected representatives in a preliminary committee was
approved. On the morning of 1 March 1881, the very day on which he
met his tragic death at the hands of terrorists-revolutionaries,
Alexander II signed the government announcement about the
convocation of a preliminary committee and, speaking to the members
of the royal family, declared that he had made ‘the first step
towards the constitution’. The tragedy of Alexander’s murder was
that his heir, Alexander III, rejected Loris-Melikov’s scheme, and
the idea of a nationally elected representative institution, which
would have signified an epoch-making advance for Russia, was
abandoned for a quarter of a century.
In spite of
all the positive changes that Alexander II’s reforms had brought to
Russia, the country remained in essence as before an autocratic
monarchy with no place for either a constitution or parliament. As
before, the landowners, the nobles and their children enjoyed many
privileges as classes, while the rights (both civil and property) of
the other estates were still restricted. The peasants in particular,
despite the fact that they were now free, remained socially
segregated from the rest of the population.
Alexander’s
biggest failing was his refusal to combine the abolition of serfdom
in the socio-economic sphere with political emancipation of
his subjects. He had abolished the slavish dependence of peasantry
on landed nobility, but he did little to eliminate the slavish
dependence of both peasantry and gentry on the Sovereign. By
preserving the control of the commune and the State over the person
of the peasant, by denying the gentry and other classes the role in
government at an all-Russian level, the autocracy absolved them from
civic and political responsibility and delayed the ‘coming of age’
of Russian society.
The ‘Great
Reforms’ had raised the expectations of the progressives, belonging
to different sections of the population. Frustrated with the
government’s refusal to change the political structure of tsarism
and deeply disappointed with emancipation settlement, more and more
members of the educated classes were becoming attracted by the
prospect of popular revolution as the only means to bring down the
existing political system and give the mass of the Russian
population real land and liberty. These two demands - land and
liberty - became the rallying-cry of the Russian revolutionary
Narodnichestvo - the ideological movement which formed a major focus
of opposition to the policies of Alexander II.
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