On the eve of the 100 anniversary of the Great October Revolution in Russia, the ninth wave of anti-Soviet propaganda passed.In 1868, Alexander Ostrovsky in the play “Every Wise Man Enough Simplicity” brought up a comedic character who wrote a treatise “On the dangers of reform in general”. All Russia laughed at this. Well, now wise politicians and professors in all seriousness argue about the harm of revolutions in general, that Russia has exhausted the limit on revolutions, etc. I do not want to argue with them, so as not to repel bread from psychiatrists.
Naturally, drinking pills is better than lying on a complex operation, and evolution is preferable to revolution. Only modes capable of operational evolution can withstand the struggle for survival. Lag in political, economic and scientific evolution leads either to a bloody revolution, or to the death of the entire state.
FIRST REVOLUTIONARY
The Mongol invasion and 200 years of subordination to the Golden Horde led to a slowdown in the rate of evolution, and in some cases to regress in the Russian principalities. This was facilitated by the trade, scientific and cultural blockade declared in the XII century by the Roman popes, Polish, Swedish and German feudal lords. So Ivan III, Vasily III and Ivan IV became the first revolutionaries in Russia. I note that Ivan III was the first to receive the nickname “Grozny”, and only after a century - his “ferocious grandson”.
Three Moscow sovereigns slaughtered or expelled from the country most of the princes of Rurikovich, who had ruled in Russia for almost six centuries, and made the survivors their slaves.
That Moscow princes began scrapping the feudal system in Russia. Ivan III introduced the system of regionalism, which radically broke the system of governance of the Russian principalities. According to her, the most prominent person was considered not by his pedigree, but by how important his ancestors occupied in the hierarchy of the Moscow principality. Localism helped to convert the serfs and sons of the grand princes of Tver, Ryazan, Smolensk and to equalize their rights with ordinary Moscow noblemen.
However, in general, the system of Moscow regionalism was a marasmus, and already in the time of Alexei Mikhailovich, decrees were issued that on such a hike or on such a holiday "to be without places." In 1682, localism was officially banned, and bit books are set on fire.
In addition, three Moscow rulers completely cut out all their near and distant relatives, making an exception for only a few women sent to monasteries. The right of departure was taken away from the boyars and princes, and Yuryev's day was taken from the peasants.
The Great Smoot 1603 — 1618's threw Russia back. The country was made great by two more revolutionaries, Peter and Catherine, who were given the titles “Great” and “Great” by the nobles and the people. Neither before nor after in Russia there were no great kings. But the great monarchs had great mistakes.
In 1762, Catherine the Great issues a decree on the liberty of the nobility. That is, the nobles are not obliged to serve the state. Thus, the centuries-old “social contract” was violated, and the peasants got every reason to look at the nobles as idlers and parasites.
Catherine the Great, during her reign, annexed the empire of 15 provinces. But worthless is the price of that province, where only 3 – 5% of the Russian people are in the population. Similar gubernias keep only on bayonets. Both Ivana and Peter the Great would have issued a decree, and thousands of landowners with tens of thousands of serfs would set off without a murmur to explore the Crimea and New Russia. And Catherine fought like a fish on the ice, picking up people in new provinces, sending Germans, Serbs, Little Russians, and Jews to New Russia. The result was a new Russia, but not very Russian.
Catherine returned to the Russian state all the western lands of the Old Russian state. Peasants and the vast majority of townspeople of cities spoke there in Russian and professed the Orthodox faith. To secure these provinces to Russia, it required nothing at all — several thousand middle and lower managers and several thousand teachers. But the Empress did not have any of them because of serfdom! Noblemen, at the very least, went as officers to the guards regiments, but dismiss as a schoolmaster in Volyn or as a schoolteacher. And their serfs were not given. As a result, Poles remained managers and teachers, who raised at least six generations of Little Russians in the spirit of Russophobia. The pans did not hesitate, they snooped: “Not us, not you”.
“LOSSFILLS” AND DECOMPOSED NOBILITY
Alexander II freed the peasants. This is a half-truth, if not a lie. Peasants were required to pay 49 for their meager allotments for years, and most of the land was left to the landlords.
Landlord farming at the beginning of the 19th century was generally ineffective. Yes, take the same Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. His father in 1830 gave him 200 male souls with their families in the village of Kistenevo in the Nizhny Novgorod province. Sergey Pushkin himself in this estate had 474 souls, of which 200 were mortgaged for debts. The remaining souls the father gave to his son as a wedding gift.At the beginning of the 19th century, the landlords laid down 5% of serfs, 30% by the 42 years, and by the 1859 year, already 65%. Many landowner estates burdened with debts “went under the hammer”: by the 1833 year from the 127 thousands of noble families of the 18 thousands had no serfs, and by the 1859 year such families numbered 27 thousand. state credit institutions, reached an astronomical magnitude - 425 million rubles, which is twice the annual income in the budget of the country.
It is not excluded that the crisis with landowner land ownership would be significantly reduced if the kings did not climb into this question at all. But, alas, they supported the degrading landlord farms with all their might.
Pledged estates regularly went under the hammer. If in 1886, 166 noble estates were sold for debts, in 1893, 2237 was sold.
To help landowners in the 1880-ies, two banks were founded: Noble Land Bank, which on favorable terms gave landowners loans on the security of land, and Peasant Land Bank, which accepted land from landowners for sale to peasants and, thanks to its monopoly, maintained high price level.
In addition, the king and queen annually gave landowners, at their request, hundreds of thousands of rubles to support the ruined estates.
Thus, in the early twentieth century, the landlords' estates were unprofitable collective farms of the Brezhnev era. By 1912, landlords in Russia produced less than a quarter of marketable bread.
In parallel with the exacerbation of the peasant question, the decay of the Russian nobility proceeded. There are two philosophical systems and two legal doctrines. According to the first, God made people equal, and they should have rights and privileges in accordance with their personal merits. According to the second, the rights and privileges of people are determined by their origin. The last doctrine will be called feudal law. Let's try according to him to assess the state of the Russian nobility at the beginning of the XX century.
The first three or four centuries of the rule of Rurikovich completely corresponded to the classical feudal law. Yes, Rurik fought with each other, blinded and killed their relatives. But on the princely table was not allowed any squad or boyar. I’m not talking about the smerds - the stokers, the hare merchants, choristers, etc.
In the first four centuries of the Rurik rule all princes were born from legitimate wives. Needless to say that Rurikovich were normal men and had several, and sometimes several dozen concubines. But not a single bastard (bastard) could even think about the throne.
GREAT REFORMER
The merits of Peter the Great are indisputable to Russia, but he delivered many terrible blows on feudal law and on feudal and church morality.
Peter I, introducing the Table of Ranks in 1722, legalized the possibility of the transition of people "from a low breed" to the nobility. At the same time, the former ranks — the boyars, the stewards, and others — were abolished. First time in stories Russia were divided civilian and military ranks.
On the basis of the Table of Ranks (paragraphs 5, 11 and 15), all persons of any origin who reached the first officer's rank - XIV class (ensign), received hereditary nobility (transferred to children and wife).
Finally, Peter I and his heirs appropriated the right to distribute titles of barons and earls, which were not there before, and also princes, who previously had such title only “by blood”.
Production in the counts, barons and princes was carried out in a purely Asian way at the whim of the monarch. No regulatory documents, such as when and for what you can give these titles, of course, was not.
And by the end of the XIX century, that is, in less than two centuries, the Romanovs produced 310 (!) Count families and 240 (!) Baronial ones. Of these, a good half were “guest workers” from abroad. In addition, there were 250 Russian princely families, the vast majority of whom were made princes in the XVIII and XIX centuries.
According to the 1897 census, 125,68 million people lived in Russia. Of these, hereditary noblemen 1222 thousand (0,97% of the total population), personal nobles 631 thousand (0,5%) and clergy - 589 thousand (0,47%).
In order to preserve the income of the nobility, the Russian tsars systematically opposed the interests of the Orthodox Church and the Russian state.
Thus, in the 30 – 40s of the 19th century, Estonians and Latvians began to massively switch from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy. A truly wild situation developed: the Orthodox Tsar Nicholas I, the official head of the Orthodox Church, organized repressions against Baltic peasants who wanted to convert to Orthodoxy. According to official data, more than 74 thousand Latvians have converted to Orthodoxy. Lutheran shepherds forbade the burial of deceased Orthodox Latvians in village cemeteries. And the king-father sent troops against them.
I would not believe it myself, having read about it in the work of the Soviet historian. But, alas, all of the above is taken from the book of Patriarch Alexy II "Orthodoxy in Estonia."
Later, the German propagandists and local nationalists will place all the responsibility for the 1905 — 1906 massacre solely on the Russians, more precisely, on the Russian people as a whole.
But it was the Germans who for centuries made it impossible to bring the Russian people and the peoples of the Baltic states closer together. Imagine for a second if Peter I or Catherine II had expelled the Germans from the Baltic. Estonians and Latvians just physically could not accept the enlightenment and culture from the Russians. Add more economic factors, and in the Baltics over two or three centuries, what would have happened in the Vologda region or on Izhora land (in the Neva region) would have happened, that is, almost complete Russification of the population.
PEASANT RIOT
At the end of the 50-x - the beginning of the 60-s of the XIX century, the Tatars began to leave the Crimea en masse. They were abetted by local religious leaders, as well as the government of the Ottoman Empire, who promised them the most fertile lands in Bulgaria and other places. By this time in Istanbul they realized that it was almost impossible to keep the Balkans without their settlement by Muslims.
It would seem that Alexander II should have been delighted. But then the Crimean landlords and bureaucrats headed by Count Vorontsov came running. They began to argue that, supposedly, until the Russian men moved to the Crimea, the landowner economy would suffer enormous damage. As a result, no one stopped the Tatars with rifle fire and many left. But the Crimean authorities did everything possible to make it difficult for the Tatars to leave.
And here are a few numbers on “agrarian riots”. 16 April 1902 of the year (April 3 under Art. Art.). Punitive troops suppressed the Poltava-Kharkiv peasant uprising (9. 03 — 3. 04. 1902 under Art. Art.), During which 336 landlord estates and savings were crushed by 105 peasants. The 1092 of the arrested peasants were subsequently brought to justice, of which 836 people were sentenced to imprisonment.
In addition, at least dozens of peasants were killed, and hundreds punished with whips. In the suppression of peasant uprisings in 1902, in the Ukraine, over 200 thousand (!) Infantrymen, cavalrymen and gunners took part, that is, more than Kutuzov had in the Battle of Borodino.
In February 1905, the peasant uprisings resumed in the Kursk, Oryol and Chernihiv gubernias. They began with the withdrawal of grain reserves in landlord economies and distribution among the population of the surrounding villages, which once again met hand-to-hand spring.
In the autumn of 1905, the peasant movement encompassed more than half of European Russia, almost all regions of landlord tenure. In total for 1905 year, 3228 peasant speeches were registered, for 1906 year - 2600, for 1907 year - 1337.
In August, 1906, the governor of the Stavropol province, Yevgeny Felsikovich Elsner, denounced St. Petersburg: “Yesterday, a serious revolutionary center arrived in the village of Petrovskoye. Artillery fired seven grenades. However, the population persists, does not extradite members of the committee. This morning I'll start shelling again. In the next village Konstantinovsky spent three days. The artillery made eleven shots, after which the peasants drew up a sentence of humility and issued the rest of the committee members on September 1. ”
According to various estimates, 1905 — 1907 years in European Russia were destroyed from 3 to 4 in thousands of noble estates, that is, from 7 to 10% of their total number.
In 1917, the mass seizure of landlords began immediately after the abdication of Nicholas II, and the Bolsheviks at first had nothing to do with it.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, in April 1917, 205 of “agrarian unrest” was recorded, in May - 258, and in June - 1122! And according to the Encyclopedia "The Great October Socialist Revolution" 1977, published in March - June 1917, only Great Russian provinces of Russia produced 2944 peasant appearances, and in September-October in 26 provinces of European Russia - over 3500 peasant appearances.
The total burning of the manor’s estates is a consequence of “class struggle,” as Soviet historians have argued, or the wildness and ignorance of the peasants, as is commonly believed now? Neither one nor the other. This is a competent calculation from both political and economic points of view.
Here, for example, does it make sense to burn a building of a private hydroelectric power station? Well, the peasants will burn it. And after the suppression of unrest the owner will return, will deliver a new, more powerful and cost-effective equipment. And then, even in a narrow circle, he will chuckle that the “red rooster” has sharply increased his income.
It was serfdom and its terrible consequences that neither Alexander II, nor his son and grandson wanted to eliminate, and became one of the main causes of the 1915 — 1907 revolutions and 1917 of the year, as well as the death of the Russian Empire.
The hatred of the peasants and farm laborers to the bars became the main cause of the terrible cruelty of both the Reds and the Whites in the Civil War.
But now we are paying for our short-sighted monarchs, who failed to integrate many regions of Russia.
LACK OF IDEOLOGY AND CRISIS OF MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
The Bolsheviks in the 70 years fastened non-integrated regions with Marxist-Leninist ideology. In 1990 – 1991, the communist ideology and power collapsed, and a sluggish civil war began on the territory of the former USSR. Judging by its dynamics, now we see "flowers", and "berries" are still ahead.
The second no less important reason for the Russian revolution was the systemic crisis of empire management. Formally, the king had unlimited power in the empire.
I note that the term "autocracy" in Western Europe implies the publication by the monarch of laws according to his own understanding, and then the government in strict accordance with the established laws. And in the East, the khan could write any laws, and he could rule the country as he pleased.
It is not difficult to guess what type of autocracy existed in Russia. Here, for example, the Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich in 1891, he married the daughter of Prince Nassau. But Alexander III did not like the fact that Sofia’s mother, Countess von Merenberg (by the way, the daughter of A.S. Pushkin) gave birth to her in a second marriage. On this occasion, by imperial decree, marriage was considered fictitious. All the ranks and titles, awards and estates were taken from the disobedient. As a result, Mikhail Mikhailovich became a political émigré. He lived in England "idly, merrily, richly", together with Albert Vickers entered the Masonic Lodge and died in 1929, surrounded by three children.
Grand Prince Nikolai Konstantinovich presented several family diamonds to his mistress, actress Fanny Lear, in 1874. For this, Alexander II sent him to prison, and then to exile. There he stayed 43 (!) Of the year, and then was released by decree of the Minister of Justice Kerensky. The sufferer died of the flu in Tashkent and on January 18 1918 was buried near the Military St. George's Cathedral. A number of historians claim that the procession was headed by a detachment of the Red Guard, and "the orchestra blew copper": "You fell victim to the fateful fight ..." And indeed, Nikolai Konstantinovich was a prisoner of autocracy longer than any Decembrist or patriot.
But the grand dukes, General-Admiral Alexey Alexandrovich and General-Fieldmaker Sergey Mikhailovich dragged from the treasury for themselves and their metress Eliza Ballet and Matilda Kshesinskaya several million gold rubles and brought the fleet and artillery to the pen.
However, Tsar Nicholas II didn’t even threaten with his finger On the contrary, he regretted his uncle, who was called “the prince of Tsushima” - “Poor Alexey! He is not guilty of anything. ”
Alexander III and Nicholas II never spent the night in St. Petersburg, but only came from their country residences to the capital for several hours to conduct official ceremonies. As a result, any minister needed to visit the tsar in the Winter Palace, it took 5 – 10 minutes, in Tsarskoe Selo or Peterhof - a day or two, in Livadia or Finnish skerries - 7 and more days.
Everything that was not connected with the affairs of the Family, Nicholas II called "occupations." But the lion's share of these “occupations”, no less than 90%, could be carried out by the secretariat, the top and middle administration.
The king loved to accept subjects. “The performances were collective and individual:“ After the report, 21 people were received ”,“ Before breakfast, 56 people were received. military and sailors in the Rotunda ", we read in the book of Igor Zimin" Tsar's work. XIX - the beginning of the twentieth century. Daily life of the Russian Imperial Court ". It took a lot of time for numerous regimental holidays, reviews. At the same time, information on the state of the armed forces obtained during these events was close to zero.
And how many were quite anecdotal situations! For example, the ballet dancer of the Mariinsky Theater Matilda Kshesinskaya did not want to dance in fizz (underskirt). Who should solve the problem? Producer? Theater director? As a result, Matilda went to complain to the emperor. And Nicholas II entered into negotiations with the director of the theater, forcing him to remove his petticoat from Kshesinskaya.
THIS IS NOT YOU "KOKAN KANATSTY"
By 1894, the control system of the Russian Empire no longer corresponded to the time. Formally, there was a Committee of Ministers in the country, but it was an empty talking room. Neither the cabinet minister, nor all the ministers together could influence his colleague. Each minister had the right to report directly to the king and reported only to the king. Such a system was tolerant in the XVIII - early XIX century, when a strong monarch, having advisers of the level of Panin, Potemkin, Bezborodko, Speransky and others, could directly manage the ministers. By the beginning of the twentieth century, only the amount of information delivered to the king increased many times. As Leo Tolstoy wrote caustically in 1895, the year: "... in the Kokan Khanate, all things could be considered one morning, and in Russia today, in order to govern the state, tens of thousands of daily decisions are needed."
This is how the typical adoption took place. The minister was accepted by the king one-on-one, without strangers. The minister reported, the king was silent, occasionally made insignificant remarks, but never entered into an argument. The audience took just a few minutes, only occasionally was delayed, there were never many wordy discussions.
In the morning, the king could take up to three or four ministers, and then ride a bike or shoot a raven. If the report was delayed, then the king was unhappy and wrote in his diary: "As a result, [the hearing of the report] was late for breakfast." In some cases, the king took the report, but he did not read it for long. Never in the 23 year of the reign did Nicholas II even write a couple of pages analyzing any report - rare notes are extremely laconic.
The author knows about the quality of reports to the tsar not according to his memoirs. When I, as a student, took the beautiful dear volume of sheets on 300 for the first time, “The All-Effort Report on the War Department” for Nicholas II, I almost cried. There was a chop. It was virtually impossible to understand the condition of the army. It was only clear that all was well. For example, it was said in the 1902 report for the year that there are about 11 thousand guns in the land fortresses. Well, seemingly not bad.
Only a few years later I found in the Military Historical Archive reports of military districts, polygons, the Main Artillery Directorate, etc., specially written for the preparation of the General Report. The most accurate information and in a very compressed form, where, how much and in what form of soldiers, horses, guns, machine guns, cartridges, shells, etc. And it turned out that by the year 1909 11 thousands of serf guns of large and medium caliber about 30% - sample 1877 of the year, 45% - sample 1867 of the year, 25% of smooth-bore systems since Nicholas I and ... not a single modern weapon!
From the reports of the districts, administrations and polygons a report was drawn up for the Minister of War. All data was filtered and combed, but still from this report it was more or less possible to present the real situation in the army. Then, on the basis of the report, the All-Giving Report, written in simple Russian, was made to the Minister. In some places, entertainment moments were interspersed, for example, about the lower ranks of the Jewish religion, funny incidents in the military court, etc. It was physically impossible to understand anything about the real state of affairs. Directly even send a report to Berlin or Vienna, to send them to the bedlam of their General Staff. It goes without saying that no analysis of the state of the Russian army or its comparison with the armies of potential opponents was made in the reports.
The same author saw in the reports of the Maritime Office. It is difficult to imagine a different picture in the reports of other ministers.
As early as 1900, Prince Trubetskoy wrote: “There is an autocracy for the police, governors-general and ministers. The tsar’s autocracy does not exist, since it knows only what comes to it through the complex system of “filters”, and thus the autocrat tsar, because of ignorance of the real situation in his country, is more limited in real exercise of his power than the monarch having direct ties with the elect of the people. "
In the Russian Empire, every official could afford to act not according to the law, but within the framework of what was permitted by his superiors. Well, who doubts this, let him look in Yandex at the actions of the Yalta governor Dumbadze, by the way, the favorite of Nicholas II.
Emperor Nicholas II and his ministers did not have strategic plans either in foreign or domestic policy, but only responded to the current situation. So, by February 1917, the goals of the war were not worked out - what to do with Galicia, with Armenia, with Poland, etc. All that is known about the internal plans after the war, this letter from Empress Nicholas II with the proposal after the war "to punish the enemies of our Friend", and send demobilized soldiers to the construction of railways in order to avoid agrarian unrest.
The struggle against separatism in 1894 — 1917 has been reduced to dozens of prohibitions and dozens of their repeals. The country was going to disaster. But the fact that the peasants and workers worked hard and gave birth to children, and the merchants increased the capital, there was no merit of the Romanovs.
In the Livadia Palace, I saw a stand where it was claimed that thanks to the Romanovs, Russian literature had become the best in the world. What a great fellow! Pushkin and Lermontov were banished to exile, Dostoevsky was nearly shot, then sent to penal servitude, Count Tolstoy was searched, and then they were followed up with dozens of agents. Mayakovsky was sent to prison. Hundreds of works of classics banned. So we became “ahead of the rest” in the field of literature.
WERE AN ALTERNATIVE
Could there be an alternative to the 1917 revolution of the year? Naturally, was. Our service historians hide from us that the majority of Russian tsars were elected. And they chose their "big battalions." The first elected king was Boris Godunov. And loyal to the stable boyar of the archery regiments built him to the throne, and the Council stamped this decision.
False Dmitry I and Vasily Shuisky also chose the “big battalions”. At the end of 1612, Prince Pozharsky dismissed the noble militia, and as a result Tush Cossacks “chose” 16-year-old Mishka Romanov - “Small is stupid, but ours, Tushinsky! And his father served as the patriarch of the Tushino thief. "
Tsarevna Sofya Alekseevna was chosen by the archery regiments, and Petr Alekseevich - amusing regiments. Accordingly, the Guard chose Catherine I, Anna Ioannovna, Elizabeth, Catherine II and Alexander I.
But in December 1825, the Guards Coup ended in failure. Nicholas I, instead of carrying out radical reforms in the army and the country, turned Guards officers into non-speculative martinet. Unfortunately, in the Russian Empire over 80% of generals, governors and ministers came from among the officers of the guard.
Theoretically, the Guards Coup could have guided Russia along the evolutionary path to the 1904 year. Russia's defeat in the war with Japan ruled out this possibility. The Russian patient could not have been helped by any pills, but a complicated operation was required.