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Empire
the liberal Restoration regime.
19
The same nearly happened in Italy after the
catastrophe of Adowa in 1896, itself the product of Crispi’s search for mili-
tary glory to legitimise the liberal regime and assuage a desperate thirst for
recognition as a great power.
20
Russia was a great power but not one with
many victories to its name in the decades before 1914. Partly for that reason,
the nationalist newspaper Novoe vremia greeted the new year in 1914 with a
reminder to all of Russia’s ‘still terrible thirst for greatness’.
21
Defeat against
Japan had indeed been tsarism’s equivalent of Adowa and Anual, and had even
more dramatic domestic consequences. Of course, the British and French too
sometimes suffered colonial disasters. On Europe’s periphery, however, weak-
ness made colonial disasters both more likely and more politically dangerous.
In general, political stability in Russia was even more under threat in 1914
than in the other major states of the periphery, Hungary, Spain and Italy. The
sheer size and multiethnic complexity of Russia contributed to this. So too did
the fact that tsarism had made fewer concessions to liberalism than the regimes
in power in Hungary, Spain and Italy. Civil rights were therefore less secure
in Russia than elsewhere, much to the fury of many members of the upper
and middle classes.
22
Another aspect of the survival of the Old Regime was
that the dynastic state was less under the control of social elites in Russia than
was the case elsewhere in the periphery, which added to the sense of distrust
and alienation from authority, even in circles which were natural supporters
of conservatism.
The survival of a ‘pure’ Old Regime meant that trade union rights were
even less secure and the working class even more militant in Russia on the
eve of the war than was the case in Spain and Italy. Meanwhile the attempt
at a conservative strategy of agrarian modernisation in Russia had led to
the preservation of the peasant commune as a barrier against landlessness
and immiseration in the countryside. Though in many ways this strategy
embodied a vision of social justice which was attractive in comparison to the
19 On the impact of Spain’s loss of her ‘second’ empire see: S. Balfour, The End of the Spanish
Empire 1898–1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Compare this e.g. to the much less
traumatic response to the much greater loss of the ‘first’ empire in the early nineteenth
century: see M. P. Costeloe, Responses to Revolution:Imperial Spain and the Spanish American
Revolution 1810–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
20 C. Duggan, Francesco Crispi: From Nation to Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), especially pp. 670–709.
21 Cited in D. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London: Macmillan,
1983), p. 132.
22 See the very revealing comparisons of the status of civil rights in various pre-1914 Euro-
pean states: N. Bermeo and P. Nord (eds.), Civil Society before Democracy (Lanham: Row-
man and Littlefield, 2000).
24