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Autocracy and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia

AUTOCRACY AND REVOLUTION IN NINETEENTHCENTURY RUSSIA* Nineteenth-century Russian political history is a story of the interplay of autocracy, revolution and the forces caught between them. Now we can approach that history with greater hope of understanding through studies of two pure champions of the polar positions: Constantine Pobedonostsev (1827-1907), the most extreme reactionary in a political and intellectual milieu notorious for its extremes, and Peter Tkachev (1844-1886), the most outstanding proponent of the Jacobin or Blanquist position in the Russian socialist revolutionary movement before Lenin. 1. Neither Pobedonostsev nor Tkachev has previously been the subject of a book-length study in English, Which is surprising in view of the importance of each in Russian history. Pobedonostsev was by all odds the strongest conservative force in the Russian government throughout the quarter of a century preceding the revolution of 1905, through his positions as Senator, as tutor to the impressionable Alexander III , and above all as Ober-Prokuror of the Most Holy Synod, or lay head of the established Russian Orthodox Church, a position which gave him ministerial status in the government. Originally a student of law and history and a noted writer on jurisprudence, Pobedonostsev was linked closely with legal reforms and the failure thereof in Russia during his career. Professor Byrnes in his exhaustive and interesting biography shows the determining role Pobedonostsev played in the defeat of the Loris-Melikov reform proposals of 1881, Which might have launched Russia on the road to peaceful liberalization, as well as in many other steps to preserve and strengthen autocracy. 2. Tkachev's importance lies not so much in what he did as in what he said. A law student and journalist, after a term of imprisonment for revolutionary agitation Tkachev in 1873 fled to Switzerland, where he engaged in polemics against other segments of the Russian emigre radical movement, both the "gradualist" followers of Peter Lavrov and the anarchistic Bakuninists. In a journal, Nabat {The Alarm), with a short but influential career, Tkachev developed his political program: an organized, disciplined body of professionals must seize state power and impose a socialist revolution from above. One of Tkachev's most admiring readers in later years was Vladimir