Disclaimer: I already plugged an extract of this essay I wrote for a third year university module a few days ago, but in regards to a different question and the entire essay is much more befitting of this question.

I would argue that the liberal process was hijacked by revolutionary ideology. True Marxism, which advocated a two stage revolution first to a liberal democracy and then to a socialist/communist state, was never practiced in Russia and was instead hurried along by revolutionaries like Lenin who saw the Provisional Government as damaging or threatening to end the ongoing revolution which the people had fought for over a decade.

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In 1962, Jurgen Habermas published his thesis The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in which he described the emergence of public opinion and the transformation of feudal societies into bourgeoisie liberal democracies during the eighteenth century. Habermas’ thesis was initially applied to the French Revolution of 1789 demonstrating the rise of non-industrial capitalism, and Enlightenment writers such as Kant, Locke, Rousseau and Montesquieu; similarly, there was a rough Russian approximation of the ‘public sphere’ known as obshchestvo or obshchestvennost’ meaning ‘society’ or ‘general public’. The development of obshchestvennost’ roughly coincided with the Gold and Silver Ages of Russian Literature following the emancipation of the peasantry in 1861, essentially a second Enlightenment in Russia. However, the form of public sphere that developed in Late Tsarist Russia was splintered into anaemic, non-homogenous cul-de-sacs that failed, in contrast to the French Revolution, to become fully autonomous of the state nor integral to promoting legislative change within it. As such these wider fragmentations and ideologies sought their political expression and desire for change in the form of violence in both the 1905 and 1917 Russian Revolutions.

Habermas’ theory, in short, outlines that the state must be accountable to public opinion in order to be legitimised. However Romanov legitimacy stemmed from the crown itself, reflected in the coronation oath of the Tsars in which the Tsar swore to protect the ideals of autocracy, ruling with justice and impartiality. Orlando Figes in A People’s Tragedy has described this autocratic society as being held up by ‘unstable pillars’; a backward aristocratic bureaucracy, a backward society within the illusion of civilization, a feudal army, the transfer of religious power to secular Tsarist power, and finally a ‘prison of peoples’ a vast empire made up of divergent nationalist ideals and peoples. A number of these pillars will remain pertinent throughout this essay in order to showcase the divisive public sphere created through obshchestvo. Nicholas II himself expressed the backwardness of the first pillar in 1902, “I conceive of Russia as a landed estate … of which the proprietor is the Tsar, the administrator is the nobility, and the workers are the peasantry.” Despite the growth of the industrial sector, the nobility made up the vast majority of the civil service, dependent on a small number of elite families with a diminishing shortfall of expertise. This ruling elite, and indeed the Tsars themselves, was committed to an increasingly archaic view of Russian society outlined in the soslovie (social estates) system, which divided society into the nobility, the clergy, urban dwellers and rural peasants. This social rigidity ignored the ‘middle grounds’ of each estate, sorting different professions on the peripheries into a sort of social ‘cubby-hole’, failing to anchor the rising middle class to a social identity. The rising industrialists, professional classes and artists, the burzhuaziia (bourgeoisies), were perhaps defined by what they were not; “They were not gentry, not chinovniki (bureaucrats), not peasants. Their place meshed poorly, if at all, with traditional soslovie categories”. Social rigidity in this sense has been described as the foundation of a ‘sedimentary society’ in which the autocratic state system attempted to impose order to social fluctuations through a number of top-down reforms. Alfred Rieber argued that social reform in Imperial Russia was almost always initiated from above in an irregular, arbitrary manner that fluctuated depending on bureaucratic unity, resistance from the populace, the distraction of foreign wars, or the succession of rulers. This arbitrariness meant that social reform was hardly ever permanent; everything that was enacted could just as easily be overturned or ignored. One such example was the codification of the Svod Zakonov in 1832, which looked to reinstate and clarify the Ulozhenie of 1649 that had fallen into disuse. The codification clarified and systematised the soslovie system but also looked to eliminate repetition; whenever contradictory laws were encountered they were simply removed in favour of the most recently enacted. The ‘sedimentary’ layers of this autocratic society perhaps stemmed from the lack of a central political ideology; the arbitrary laws and sweeping changes did little to instil a unified sense of political direction leading up to the 1905 revolution. Dena Goodman, in writing about the public sphere in eighteenth century France argued that the most important factor in developing a platform for political criticism and debate was access to various ‘institutions’; coffee shops, salons, academies and masonic lodges. Joseph Bradley argues in Russia that similar ‘free associations’ were no doubt coming into existence, but that the diversity of their interests and contestation for the same political space meant that the developing public sphere was soon hijacked by revolutionaries. These anaemic and sedimentary political cul-de-sacs were unstable and lacked a central ethos, and thus would instead seek their expression in the form of violence in both the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.

If the middle classes were compartmentalised and the aristocratic bureaucracy were devoid of a political compass, the opposite had occurred in peasant society. Since the Emancipation of 1861, Russia had taken a large step forward in its transition from a medieval feudal society into the modern world. In post-Emancipation rural Russia, peasants owed a sort of debt to the mir (village council) and made payments to offset their former masters’ loss of land; peasants still worked their allotment of land, but were now hired by their former masters to pay this debt. This debt effectively prevented a mass migration of peasants from rural Russia into towns and cities, preventing the creation of a landless proletariat. The terms of Emancipation also prevented the consolidation of allotments, preventing a transition into independent farming and estate owning. The potential for the peasant class to become a neo-landed gentry was a worry shared by upper classes from Stolypin’s Reforms to Lenin, and also a persistent image in contemporary literature. Most notably in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, the overarching theme of which depicts the futility of aristocracy as a declining estate is sold to a former serf. Peasants were however permitted to undertake ‘seasonal work’ in mines, agriculture or construction, with the money earned being sent back to the village, they were given representation in the local zemstvo (local government) and younger seasonal workers had a higher literacy rate than their village-tied counterparts. The issue with this newfound peasant mobility lay in that the peasant class was evolving into something entirely unknown. On one hand modernisation and industrialisation were transforming the peasants’ lives into this seasonal, landless force, perhaps the foundation for the proletariat, but on the other hand, ties to the village remained strong. As such, various factions sought to take control, utilise or simply pacify the peasantry. One such example is the Stolypin Reforms from 1905 to 1911. A law passed on 9 November 1906 allowed the head of a peasant family to consolidate communal farming strips into private property; this was an attempt to create a new landed peasantry who, by owning property, might feel they had a bigger stake in the Russian system. A landed peasantry was seen as a key step in closing the divide between rural and urban Russia, this newly created class would be supportive of the regime and allow a tighter control over the rural zemstvos. Stolypin’s reforms failed, largely due to a lack of support from the peasants themselves, as such in the eventual revolution of 1917, “without a stake in the old ruling system, the peasants in 1917 had no hesitation in sweeping away the entire state … Tsarism in this sense had undermined itself; but it also created the basic conditions for the triumph of the Bolsheviks”. Rieber argues that this was perhaps because the sedimentary layers within peasant society were thinner, in the result of the revolution the peasants receded back into archaic and more pragmatic socio-economic responses: they seized and redistributed land. The peasantry remained a volatile class that factions sought to control from their Emancipation in 1861 to the outbreak of civil war in 1917, as political roads closed off to these factions violence prevailed, and the attempted militarisation of the peasantry and of politics perhaps caused the 1917 Revolution to erupt into war.