Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

158 angela k. smith

This evocative extract is rather like a piece of art in itself. Apollinaire immediately

places Picasso within an artistic tradition as both subject and object with his reference

to Raphael and Forain. He uses the color blue, rather as Picasso does, to build a

picture of the artist and the studio. The studio itself is structured around the pictures,

those same geometric shapes. Picasso has the appearance of an artisan and the lan-

guage of a rebel. He is represented as the center of the movement, perhaps rather

romanticized and certainly original.

Gertrude Stein, on the other hand, used cubism in a different way in her writing.

Instead of writing about it, allowing it to inﬁltrate the words, she wrote cubism itself,

creating a whole new language based on the same principles. Stein was a patron and

friend of Picasso and had lived in Paris for some years. Stein used a portrait by Cezanne

to shape her 1909 book, Three Lives. She also wrote in response to a number of cubist

paintings in her own collection. Stein used language to create geometric shapes in

much the same way as the artists, developing patterns within her writing intended to

give it dimension. Lacking conventional structure and punctuation, Stein’s work is

clearly modernist, making a direct link between these two artistic ﬁelds.

Performing Arts

Upon my word, yes, our intimacy was like a minuet . . . You can’t kill a minuet de la

cour. You may shut up the music-book, close the harpsichord . . . but surely the minuet

– the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet of

the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still.

15

The central protagonists of The Good Soldier perform their roles within the text like

the best modern actors. Edward Ashburnham acts out the role of the perfect English

gentleman; his wife endorses this with her affected devotion. Florence pretends to

be an invalid, to have a “heart” in order to get closer to her precious England. Dowell

acts as though he knows nothing. But the old music, the music to which they have

all danced, will no longer do. The psychology of The Good Soldier is also evident in

the modern theater. The European theater, although dependent on public support

and critical attention, tied to the commerciality of performance, had begun to change

at the end of the nineteenth century, with radical dramatists such as Ibsen, Strindberg,

and Shaw starting to use the stage as a forum for political and social ideas as well as

for entertainment. But, as Christopher Innes has argued, it is difﬁcult to ﬁt the

developments in theater into the same general framework of modernism that can be

applied to literature and other art forms:

On the stage, art could neither assert itself as an autonomous activity, independent of

external experience, nor aspire to pure form. In sharp contrast to the modernist drive

in poetry or painting, imitation was always present . . . Simply presenting a sequence

of actions in a temporal and spatial frame evoked the “narrative method” that Eliot

rejected, along with Kandinsky, whose declaration that “the literary element, ‘storytell

-

ing’ or ‘anecdote’ must be abandoned” was picked up by Pound and the Vorticists.

16

But modernity did continue to impact on the theater in the ﬁrst decades of the

twentieth century in a number of different ways, ways perhaps more associated with

modernity 159

other performing arts such as music and the ﬂedgling art form, the cinema. One

example is in the work of George Bernard Shaw. Although at times politically chal-

lenging (he was an active member of the Fabian Society) his plays give the impression

of being traditional in structure and form. Yet the intellectualism of his work moves

it beyond tradition, and he experimented with structures built around those in music

to give his drama an alternative feel. Shaw conceived his plays as “musical perfor-

mances” in which the “long rhetorical speeches” were consciously written “like

operatic solos.”

17

These allow the audience to glimpse the interior working of the

characters’ minds; that inner space explored once more. Within this, much of Shaw’s

drama satirizes the established social order, offering allegorical examples of how this

order is heading for disaster. In this way his work parallels The Good Soldier despite

using a notably different technique.

More experimentally perhaps, Wyndham Lewis turned to drama as a way to articu-

late his ideas in Blast. An early drama, The Enemy of the Stars, was published as

an artistic manifesto, never intended for performance. “The Enemy of the Stars is a

composite of fragmented cubist ‘visions from within’ ”:

18

thus it is all that could be

expected of modern art. It was signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced by the work of Max Stirner,

especially The Ego and Its Own which was, coincidentally, a driving force behind much

of Dora Marsden’s writing for The Egoist. Stirner, whose philosophical work focused

on the primacy of the individual or the “ego,” was an inﬂuence on the later nineteenth

century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings fed much of the creative

development of the early twentieth century, as will be discussed later. Violent and

subliminal, this drama of the mind might stand as the epitome of modernism, with

human ﬁgures expanded to puppet-like monsters in a technologically conceived uni-

verse where the stars are “machines of prey” and the imagination determines reality.

Needless to say, it has never been produced.

19

However, plays that are not produced have limited theatrical value. Elsewhere,

dramatists were responding to modernity in more productive ways. W. B. Yeats, the

successful poet, whose interests in symbolism and primitivism had established him as

innovative, worked with the Abbey theater company to produce Irish political drama.

Yeats’s symbolist past gave him more in common, linguistically, with the imagist

poets, but his interests in mythology and Irishness gave his work a different

dimension.

The primitivism that can ﬁnd roots in some of Yeats’s work, later to be located in

the angry words of Wyndham Lewis and the politics of Eugene O’Neil, perhaps

reached its climax in the musical world with the ﬁrst performance of Stravinsky’s Rite

of Spring. This was a ballet performed by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on May 29,

1913. Its subject was “scenes from pagan Russia,” and it was choreographed by

Nijinsky. It is structured in two parts, “Dance of the Earth” and “Sacriﬁcial Dance,”

each beginning slowly and building to a loud, pulsating ﬁnale. The performance

caused a riot, in part because of the content, subject matter and choreography, but

also because of the radical nature of the music.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, musical composition was still built

around traditions that had been established with the Renaissance. Harmonic consis-

tency, thematic development, and metrical ﬂow remained fundamental. In the ﬁrst

years of the century, composers, like so many other artists, began to question the

uniformity of this tradition and search for more individual expression in their

160 angela k. smith

composition. A principle player in this musical experimentation was Arnold

Schoenberg. Austrian-born Schoenberg believed in originality as the only means to

create an authentic expression of space and vision. His eventual abandonment of

tonality in his compositions allowed him to create an expressionist music that he

understood to correspond with similar experiments within the visual arts. Schoenberg

adopted

an “atonal” musical universe within which all pitches, at least in principle, were equally

related, proclaiming what he called “the emancipation of dissonance”: the right of all

notes to exist on their own terms, without reference to some higher tonal authority. In

so doing he negated a compositional principle that had governed Western music since

its beginnings.

20

Like Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky broke with tradition to create a new music. He

alternated major and minor and disrupted traditional harmony. At the same time he

changed rhythm, moving away from beat towards pulse to build irregular bars and

irregular phrases. He introduced new musical modes, such as folk or church music,

and the combination of all this resulted in a change to the form and structure of

the music. As with other modern art forms, there is no clear resolution and the

compositions often sound fragmented. These two composers pushed the boundaries

of musical composition, inﬂuenced by the same factors of change as other artists

and the same need to articulate that change. Robert P. Morgan suggests: “Indeed

music . . . had been transformed almost as much between 1907 and 1913 – that is,

between the appearance of Schoenberg’s ﬁrst post-tonal works and the premiere of

Stravinsky’s Rite – as it had been in the entire preceding 300 years.”

21

There were other impulses of change in music, often directly linked with other

radical movements within the arts. For example, the futurist composer Luigi Russolo

invented mechanical “noise-makers” in order to create new sound sources. These

sources reﬂected the futurist celebration of the machine age and included things like

motorcars, trams, and other engine sounds – a kind of precursor to the makers of

electronic music who would become prominent later in the century.

Away from the traditional performance medium of the stage, a new kind of

performance art was developing rapidly in the ﬁrst years of the twentieth century, on

the screen. Magic lantern shows had fascinated and frightened Victorian audiences

for decades, but the turn of the century saw the birth of a new art form that would

become one of the most prominent. The desire to make still photographs move had

been growing for some time. Although the name of the American Thomas Edison

is commonly associated with the birth of cinema, its real origins were in France. The

Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, produced the ﬁrst moving picture on celluloid

ﬁlm in 1895, Sortie d’usine (Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory). This ﬁlm was

shot with a ﬁxed camera, hidden from the workers so that they would not be

distracted by it. The Lumières followed this with other famous tableaux such as Repas

de bébé (Baby’s Dinner) and Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La

Ciotat), which frightened viewers with its unexpected realism. Similar ﬁlms appeared

in Britain showing real life experiences, such as the 1901 ﬁlm Fire, one of several

depicting the work of the ﬁre brigade. Things began to change in 1903 when an

American engineer, Edwin S. Porter, produced the ﬁrst major ﬁlm to tell a story,

modernity 161

The Great Train Robbery, and the industry never looked back. Another early ﬁlm,

the French production of Queen Elizabeth, committed the famous Victorian actress

Sarah Bernhardt to celluloid, allowing her to be seen by more people than ever

before.

Early cinema remained much like theater in the way that it was produced and

presented. Pioneers in Italy worked to change the format of the moving picture with

large-scale ﬁlms such as Cabiria (1914), but World War I had a crippling effect on

the industry in Europe. The moving picture was then also used for political purposes,

most famously in the propaganda ﬁlm The Battle of the Somme (1916), which shocked

audiences despite being manufactured to avoid showing the worst horrors of the

trenches.

The cinema stands out from the other forms of art considered here in that, unlike

most other disciplines, it was not reacting against a previous tradition. It was new,

and an entity in itself. But it was still a product of the same developments in society,

the rapid pace of change that forced culture to evolve, the same impulse of modernity,

and underlying all these artistic responses, feeding the impulse through the intellect,

were the same set of radical ideas.

Ideas

When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden within

them . . . by what they say and what they show, I thought the task was a harder one

than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no

mortal can keep a secret.

22

The above quotation is from Sigmund Freud in 1905, but the words could equally

apply to any readers of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, listening to the mono-

logue of John Dowell as he searches within himself for the story of the Ashburnhams.

He recounts his own symptoms and gradually, as the stories unfold, ﬁnds his own

cure: “So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the ﬁreplace

of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me.”

23

Sympathetic soul,

reader, psychoanalyst – in such company, Dowell, in the end, can keep no secrets.

In 1900 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. Much of his most inﬂu-

ential work had been published by 1914. Alan Bullock argues: “No single man,

probably, has exercised a greater inﬂuence on the ideas, literature and art of the

twentieth century than Freud.”

24

Freud’s work was, of course, multi-dimensional,

but some of his key ideas relate well to cultural development of the period, particularly

in the arts. Freud’s principal arguments, set out in The Interpretation of Dreams and

other important writings, concerning the structure of the psyche (the ego, the super-

ego, and the id), place an emphasis on interior life, both conscious and unconscious,

that corresponds with and directly inﬂuences many literary and artistic experiments.

The notion of displacement, the shifting of an emotional reaction from one part of

life to another; the idea of the dream as the location for wish-fulﬁllment, that is the

disguised fulﬁllment of a suppressed wish; the use of interpretation as a key tool for

deciphering these – all are concepts that lend themselves well to art and literature.

The reader psychoanalyzes Dowell in The Good Soldier; Henry James searches for the

162 angela k. smith

inside of his characters; later writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy

Richardson ﬁnd a language for this interior space through “stream of consciousness”

narratives. The imagist poets locate the essence of an emotion in an image. Picasso

and Braque look inside their subjects for meaning. There are many links and these

continue to develop during the course of the century.

Freud himself saw psychoanalysis as a way of interpreting the arts, writing on lit-

erature and art, applying his ideas to a range of genres. His understanding of the way

that his writings would impact upon the arts is clear. Much later in the century, of

course, psychoanalytic literary criticism was to become a major tool of the literary

scholar and it is hard now to imagine a world without Freudian ideas.

Similarly inﬂuential at the time, although perhaps not quite so integrated into late

twentieth-century culture, were the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s

writing days were over by 1889 when he was committed to an asylum where he spent

the rest of his life, but prior to that he had developed ideas that signiﬁcantly inﬂu-

enced early twentieth-century artistic and cultural development. His 1873 essay, “On

Truth and Falsehood in the Extra-Moral Sense,” was particularly important. In this

very early essay, Nietzsche argued that language itself was inadequate to convey the

objective truth about external reality. In 1873 this idea may have been hard to com-

prehend, but by the early 1900s, when the pace of change in the external world was

so great, ﬁnding a means to convey it was a real issue in the arts. As we have seen,

new languages – literary, visual, musical – had to be devised to keep pace with a

shifting world. Such linguistic invention was, perhaps, accelerated by the cultural

impact of World War I; how do you articulate the unspeakable events of the western

and other fronts. Indeed, during the war years, Dora Marsden wrote a series of philo-

sophical editorials for The Egoist that were heavily indebted to Nietzsche’s ideas on

the inadequacy of language. The high modernism of the 1920s can be read in direct

relation to this, searching for an answer to a problem identiﬁed by Nietzsche ﬁfty

years earlier.

Nietzsche’s famous declaration “God is dead,” in his 1882 book, The Joyful

Wisdom, also had a profound impact, picking up as it did on the decreasing popularity

of organized religion across Europe, particularly in the wake of Darwin’s ideas on

evolution. Nietzsche’s madman, who declares the death of God, is disbelieved; he

has come too early. But the cults of mysticism and spiritualism that grew in popularity

at the end of the nineteenth century indicate that he may not be as early as he thinks.

Many of Nietzsche’s ideas are expressed through different dramatic personae or

masks, giving his writings a ﬁctive as well as philosophical dimension. Such techniques

can be seen to inﬂuence the work of, for example, W. B. Yeats, whose poetry over

the following decades reﬂected his interest in both the use of masks and in spiritual-

ism. For Nietzsche, every word was a mask, hiding something, perhaps another phi-

losophy, within. Words conceal, rather than reveal, both the interior and the exterior

worlds, and in a godless world, humanity needed to ﬁnd a new moral code to live

and work by. The world needed to change, and so it did.

“In or about December, 1910, human character changed.” Of course, it didn’t

really. Virginia Woolf’s statement can only be metaphorical. Or can it? The old world,

the one into which she had been born, was changing rapidly, and would become

unrecognizable within the next ten years. The world itself got smaller as mechanized

transport literally took off and enabled people to travel as never before. The concept

modernity 163

of globalization, so familiar at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century, was

beginning to develop. At the same time, advancements in technology, in medical

science, and in the understanding of the human condition led to a greater compre-

hension of how that world functioned. The people of 1910 had a very different

impression of themselves from their grandparents, or even their parents. The writers,

artists, and musicians who most embodied this change within their work were still

in a minority, but theirs is the work that is remembered a hundred years later and

the work that went on to shape twentieth-century culture. They created the new

languages of modernity to convey the world around them and to differentiate it from

the world of the past.

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” John Dowell tells us at the beginning

of The Good Soldier.

25

It is sad because it represents so many endings; accumulatively,

the ending of an era. Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier, embodies that era.

From the outset we know that he is dead, but it is not until the ﬁnal paragraphs that

Dowell actually tells us the details of his passing. He is the English gentleman, the

feudal landlord, the philanderer, the soldier imperialist, “a sentimentalist, whose mind

was compounded of indifferent poems and novels.”

26

He cuts his throat with a pen-

knife. It is a strange postscript, but we, the readers, are somehow not sad despite

Dowell’s assertion. The world that Ashburnham embodied has been shown to be

corrupt, outmoded, and obsolete. The violence of his death parallels World War I,

which was literally killing the old world as Ford was writing. The fact of his suicide

implies the element of self-destruction that had led the powers of Europe into a

conﬂict that would change the balance of the world forever. Human character

changed, and with it the ways in which humanity presented itself. And Ford Madox

Ford’s perfectly modernist novel, with its own language of modernity, conveys this

to great effect.

NOTES

1 Virginia Woolf, “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” 1924, reproduced in

A Modernist Reader,

P. Faulkner, ed. (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986), p. 113.

2 There are clear exceptions to this; for example, James Joyce’s

Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s

A la Recherche du temps perdu.

3 Ford Madox Ford, dedicatory letter to

The Good Soldier, quoted in Randall Stevenson,

Modernist Fiction (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), p. 25.

4 Ford Madox Ford,

The Good Soldier (London: Penguin, 1946), p. 20.

5 Ibid, p. 25.

6 Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts for Imagistes,” reproduced in Faulkner,

Modernist Reader,

p. 59.

7 Ibid, p. 60.

8 H. D., “Oread,” in

Imagist Poetry, Peter Jones, ed. (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 62.

9 Jones,

Imagist Poetry, p. 31.

10 Glen Macleod, “The Visual Arts,” in

The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Michael

Levenson, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 200. I would refer the

reader to this chapter for a much more detailed discussion of artistic developments in

this period.

11 Ibid, p. 195.

164 angela k. smith

12 Ibid, p. 200.

13 Extracts from these texts can be found in Herschel B. Chipp, ed., with Peter Selz and

Joshua C. Taylor,

Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968),

part 4.

14 Guillaume Apollinaire, “The Beginnings of Cubism” (1912), in Chipp,

Theories,

p. 218.

15 Ford,

The Good Soldier, pp. 13–14.

16 Christopher Innes, “Modernism in Drama,” in Levenson,

Cambridge Companion,

pp. 131–2.

17 Ibid, p. 147.

18 Ibid, p. 133.

19 Ibid.

20 Robert P. Morgan, ed.,

Modern Times (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 6.

21 Ibid, p. 7.

22 Sigmund Freud (1905) “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora),”

in

Sigmund Freud, Pamela Thurschwell, ed. (London: Routledge), p. 27.

23 Ford,

The Good Soldier, p. 19.

24 Alan Bullock, “The Double Image,” in

Modernism: A Guide to European Literature

1890–1930, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds (London: Penguin), p. 67.

25 Ford,

The Good Soldier, p. 11.

26 Ibid, p. 229.

GUIDE TO FURTHER READING

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds,

Modernism (London: Penguin, 1991). A general

guide to European literature, 1880–1930.

Noel Burch,

Life to Those Shadows (London: British Film Institute, 1990). A detailed study of

critical approaches to early ﬁlm history.

Herschel B. Chipp, ed.,

Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).

A source book of artists and critics.

Peter Faulkner, ed.,

A Modernist Reader (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986). A collection of

original modernist writings and ideas.

Sigmund Freud,

The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Penguin, 1991). Some of Freud’s key

ideas.

Paul Grifﬁths,

Modern Music: A Concise History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994).

A historical survey of modern music.

Stephen Kern,

The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University

Press, 2000). An examination of culture, modernity, and philosophy.

Michael Levenson, ed.,

The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1999). A generic guide to modernisms.

Jesse Matz,

Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2001). A study of impressionism in writing.

Mark S. Morrison,

The Public Face of Modernism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

2001). A study of the audiences and reception of Little Magazines 1905–20.

Randall Stevenson,

Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).

A comprehensive guide to modernist ﬁction.

Pamela Thurschwell,

Sigmund Freud (London: Routledge, 2000). An accessible guide to

Freud’s principal ideas.

Chapter Eleven

Politics: The Past and the Future

Peter Waldron

In the years after 1900, Europeans recognized that they were standing on the brink

of fundamental change. The arrival of the new century prompted widespread reﬂec-

tion on the future of the continent. The old political order clung to the remnants of

its power, especially in eastern and central Europe, while the forces of democratic

politics were pushing their way to the fore in the west of the continent. At the turn

of the century, Europe’s political structures ranged from the unreformed autocracy

of the Russian empire to the near-constitutional monarchy of Britain and to the third

French republic. The European old order was clearly on the defensive across the

continent and, even in states where traditional political structures endured, it was

under severe attack. Radical politics was gaining adherents across Europe and politi-

cians on the left were growing in conﬁdence as they gained increased popular support

and saw governments begin to implement programs of social reform in an attempt

to appease radical opinion.

It was social change that lay at the heart of this shift in political fortunes. The twin

buttresses of church and landed nobility had acted as the main supports for monar-

chies since the emergence of cohesive European states in the early medieval period.

Kings had depended on the nobility and the church to act as their agents, reinforcing

royal power across societies that were overwhelmingly rural. The thinly spread agrar-

ian populations of medieval and early modern Europe could be controlled by the

local nobility, and the message of obedience to authority that was preached by the

clergy served to discourage rebellion. Populations that were overwhelmingly illiterate

had little access to other sources of information and, even after the invention of

printing, printed material was expensive and hard to come by. Poor communications

in pre-industrial Europe also served to help sustain traditional political structures,

since they restricted mobility and made it easier for national political and social elites

to continue to exercise absolute authority. The changes to Europe’s societies and

economies that began in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries had a profound impact

on the politics of the continent. The growth of new commercial classes posed a sig-

niﬁcant threat to the traditional authority of nobility and church, and the political

revolution that occurred in Britain in the seventeenth century was the ﬁrst instance

166 peter waldron

of a monarch being deposed by the burgeoning middle class. The British monarchy

that was restored later in the century had its powers signiﬁcantly restricted by

parliament.

As the shoots of industrial revolution began to appear across agrarian Europe, the

pace of political change accelerated. Not only were the new industrial and business

classes ﬂexing their muscles and demanding a part in the political life of Europe but,

increasingly, the people who worked in mines, mills, and factories sought a political

voice. The French revolution of 1789 marked the beginning of a process of political

change throughout Europe that was reaching its climax at the beginning of the

twentieth century. The model that the French experience offered to the downtrodden

of Europe was a powerful and magnetic one; it offered an example of the power that

ordinary people could wield and of the ideals of liberty towards which they could

strive. Even though the French revolution had failed fully to achieve its objectives

and the century after 1789 had witnessed reversals as the French monarchy was

restored, the ideals of 1789 became the model for revolutions and political upheaval

across Europe during the nineteenth century.

1

The revolutionary tradition was well

established in Europe by 1900, as rebellions had swept across almost the whole of

the continent in the century since the Bastille had been stormed. Only Russia and

Britain had been largely immune from the virus of revolution.

Russia: Autocracy and Democracy

As the twentieth century dawned, the political elites of Europe faced unparalleled

challenges. In the east of the continent, the Russian state was feared as the most

repressive and autocratic regime in Europe. Tsar Nicholas II had come to the throne

in 1894 on the death of his deeply conservative father, Alexander III, and believed

that it was his duty to pass the empire on unchanged to his own heirs. Nicholas and

his ministers argued that Russia needed uniquely strong government to keep its

rebellious peoples in check and that any hint of democracy would endanger the entire

state. “Senseless dreams” was how Nicholas described liberal aspirations for a national

assembly shortly after his accession.

2

The Russian government utilized draconian

methods to keep its people in check: much of the empire was governed under emer-

gency legislation after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and this gave

very wide powers of arrest and punishment to local ofﬁcials. The Russian state main-

tained its traditional paternalist attitudes towards its people, and turned a blind eye

to instances of oppression by its own ofﬁcials. The Jewish population of the empire

suffered particularly from antisemitic pogroms, carried out with the collusion of the

authorities, most shockingly in Kishinev in 1903 when 47 people were killed. Russia’s

last tsar harked back to the era of his seventeenth-century Romanov ancestors, ignor-

ing the pressures for change that were developing among the people of the empire,

and attempting to project the image of a benign autocrat, keeping a ﬁrm grip on his

state for the beneﬁt of the people. This policy came under severe challenge after

1900. Even though political parties were illegal, liberal activists were vocal in their

calls for the people of the empire to have some say in the government of Russia.

These pressures came to a head in 1905, when Russia was comprehensively

defeated in war with Japan and working people took to the streets in St Petersburg

to voice their own discontent about their working and living conditions. The regime’s

politics: the past and the future 167

troops opened ﬁre on these demonstrators on what became known as “Bloody

Sunday” and this massacre sparked off rebellion right across the empire. Both the

nascent working class in the great Russian cities and the peasants in the countryside

rose up in revolt. Tensions also ran high in areas of the empire dominated by non-

Russians. The Poles were overwhelmingly opposed to Russian rule and attempted to

take advantage of the apparent weakness of the imperial regime by staging a rebellion,

and in Finland attempts were made to extend Finnish autonomy from Russian rule.

The tsarist regime was in danger of losing control of the situation, and it was forced

to resort to concessions in an attempt to restore tranquility. In October 1905,

Nicholas II announced the creation of Russia’s ﬁrst parliament – the Duma – to be

elected on a wide franchise. This move was greeted with widespread acclaim, and

many Russians believed that it marked the beginning of a process of reform that

would set Russia ﬁrmly on the path towards becoming a constitutional monarchy.

This view was not, however, shared by the tsar and his advisors. Nicholas II deeply

resented the existence of the new parliament and attempted to curb its powers and,

once the revolts of 1905 had been quelled, wanted to return to a traditional autocratic

style of government. Some Russian statesmen recognized that this was not a sustain-

able course of action. Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 until his assassination in

1911, attempted to drive through a wide-ranging program of economic and social

reform, predicated upon establishing a class of small peasant landowners in Russia

who would have no interest in supporting rebellion and would instead identify their

interests with the tsarist state. Stolypin’s land reform had made only limited progress

by the time war broke out in 1914 and his vision remained unfulﬁlled.

3

The constitutional reforms that were introduced in 1905 included a commitment

to signiﬁcant extensions in civil rights. The Russian people were able to voice their

opinions more freely, and they took full advantage of this opportunity. The number

of newspapers and magazines in circulation grew as censorship was relaxed. The tsarist

regime was faced with a dilemma: Nicholas II fervently believed that he was ordained

by God to rule as an autocrat and he wanted to return to governing as he had before

1905. But this was not a realistic option. Once the genie of constitutionalism had

been released, it was impossible to reverse the process. The tsarist regime was able

to make changes to the franchise in 1907 to restrict the voting rights of the peasantry,

even though such a move was illegal, but it dared not go further and entirely neuter

the new Duma. Government and Duma maintained an uneasy truce, essentially

antagonistic to each other, with the Duma unable to fulﬁll the lofty aspirations that

had accompanied its introduction and the government compelled to accept the exis-

tence of the new parliament. The new constitutional system in Russia failed to rep-

resent the interests of the people as a whole. The tsarist state was able to restore

order in the immediate aftermath of its announcement of concessions, but it became

clear by 1908 that the fundamental causes of the discontent that had raged across

the empire during 1905 were not being addressed by the new Duma.

Popular unrest began to grow again and calls for the overthrow of the monarchy

were heard more loudly. Russia had industrialized very rapidly during the 1890s and

St Petersburg and Moscow had developed into huge urban centers. The new migrant

working class was a fertile ground for revolutionary ideas. The Russian Social

Democratic Party had been founded in 1894 and argued for violent revolution to

destroy the monarchy. It was successful in carrying out a series of assassinations of

Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.