1918: Lenin dedicates a statue honouring

      Stenka Razin.

      The insurrections were led by the Don Cossacks: Stepan (Stenka) Razin (1667–71) and, a century later, Emilian Pugachev (1773–75), who took on Catherine II. The Cossack core of both insurrectionary groups rapidly expanded and embraced discontents of every sort. Both were ultimately defeated. Interestingly, both Razin and Pugachev had been born in the same South Russian village of Zimoyevskaya. Of the two, Razin was showier and more adventurous, a Cossack Robin Hood much given to tormenting and mocking his captives and extending his adventures to neighbouring Persia. Pugachev was more politically astute, pretending to be a popular deposed prince to whom he bore a resemblance. Mass movements in those days, not only in Russia, flourished on such myths. Pugachev took Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, today Volgograd), laid unsuccessful siege to Simbirsk (where Lenin was born), claimed to be defending a good tsar against the bad boyars and won the support of the Cossack krug, a representative though unelected assembly, for a march to the North. This triggered a wave of peasant uprisings en route, greatly enlarging the size of the army. After four years on the road and a betrayal by Cossack elders loyal to the tsar, Pugachev was captured and publicly decapitated in Moscow’s Red Square. Some months later, his brother and elderly parents were eliminated in similar fashion. Punishing families to prevent revenge killings in the future is an old tradition.

      The Volga rebellions typified the revolutionary traditions of the Russian peasantry, and radical poets and minstrels would glorify them for centuries to come. For all that the most popular jacqueries (as in China and India) linked themselves to a national history of resistance, they rarely transformed the living conditions of the people, offering temporary respite at best. Razin, for instance, pledged to ‘wipe out the boyars and the nobles’, but his efforts failed at a time when Russian cities were strongholds of reactionary sentiment, dominated by nobles and their retainers, state bureaucrats of every kind and the army. ‘That is why’, wrote Trotsky, ‘after each of these grandiose movements … the Volga washed the bloodstains into the Caspian Sea, and the tsar’s and landlord’s oppression weighed heavier than ever.’¹ Few decades that followed were unaccompanied by localised peasant risings.

      The 1825 Decembrist uprising was the first major sign of urban discontent, a military revolt whose most radical leader, Pavel Pestel, was hugely influenced by the Jacobins and the French Revolution: Rousseau and Robespierre, Babeuf and Buonarotti. The ideological links between revolutionary Paris and the most radical sections of the Russian intelligentsia lasted for over a century following the Decembrist defeat; references to 1789, 1793 and 1815 are ubiquitous in the texts of Bakunin, Lenin, Trotsky and others. The impact of the December rebellion was electric. It enlarged the size of a small but active radical intelligentsia based in universities and literary circles. Pushkin, who had close friends among the Decembrist plotters, originally sent the eponymous hero of Eugene Onegin, badly disappointed in love, to join the Decembrists. Circumstances, however, compelled Pushkin to burn some of his verses and suppress others. This description of the vengeful tsar survived and was included in later editions:

      A ruler, timorous and wily,

      A balding fop, of toil a foe,

      Minion of Fame by chance entirely,

      Reigned over us those years ago.

      We knew him not at all so regal,

      When cooks, who were not ours, were sent

      To pluck our double-headed eagle,

      Where Bonaparte had pitched his tent.

      The Decembrist mutiny was savagely crushed. Executions and imprisonment followed. Pushkin was distraught, but helpless. He was deeply touched when Maria Volkonskaya, a young woman he had known (possibly in the biblical sense) some years before in Tashkent, ignored the entreaties of her noble family and insisted on joining her imprisoned Decembrist husband, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, in Siberia. Pushkin knew she did not love Volkonsky, who was twice her age, but that only made her melancholic and courageous decision even more impressive in his eyes. It was, he reflected, the purest form of solidarity. He composed ‘Message to Siberia’ for Maria and, a week after her departure, pressed it into the hands of the wife of another Decembrist who was leaving Moscow to join her husband in internal exile:

      Deep in the Siberian mine

      Keep your patience proud

      The bitter toil shall not be lost,

      The rebel thought unbowed …

      The heavy-hanging chains will fall,

      And walls will crumble at a word,

      And freedom greet you in the light,

      And brothers give you back the sword.²

      Rural unrest and urban dissidence made reform inevitable. In 1861, Tsar Alexander II, while retaining the other structures of absolutism, abolished serfdom. A wave of joy engulfed the countryside, till the dark side of the ruling began to sink in: the former serfs were burdened with redemption payments to their former masters, for the land they had obtained after abolition as well as the lands they had worked for centuries. The redemption payments could not be enforced, however, and the peasants’ spirits rose once again. The landlords were compelled to liquidate properties, marry into merchant families and invest in railways and factories in order to stay financially solvent, aiding the development of capitalism in Russia. The cities grew bolder and richer. Many began to ask why the creators of serfdom had not been abolished as well and, as is often the case, the reform led to more radical demands. In the countryside itself, half the peasants had never owned land as individuals, only as a village collective. Consequently, many peasants had little incentive to improve the land and became poorer as time went by. Simultaneously, social differentiation in the countryside began to sharpen, producing a group of wealthier peasants (the kulaks).

      The end of serfdom was not accompanied by similar political reforms. Apart from a slight improvement on the judicial