Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [461]
The news that his Uncle Boris had given the boy was certainly exciting. ‘This year, little Ivan, is the most important year in the history of Russia. And do you know why? Because the revolution has begun.’
The revolution. It was certainly an exciting word, but the boy was not certain what it meant. ‘It means,’ his uncle explained, ‘that we are going to kick the Bobrovs out and take all the land for ourselves. What do you think of that?’ And little Ivan had to agree that this sounded wonderful indeed.
He knew that his mother Arina liked the Bobrovs, and not everyone in the village spoke badly of them. But Uncle Boris was always right. ‘Long live the revolution!’ he cried, to please his uncle.
The extraordinary events of 1905 had been brewing for a long time. If the reign of Alexander III had been one of reaction, the last eleven years under his unimaginative son Nicholas II and his German wife had been a sorry continuation of almost everything that was dull and oppressive in the former regime. Indeed, sometimes it almost seemed as if the unfortunate Tsar Nicholas was deliberately looking for people to oppress. For nearly a century, the people of Finland had been an autonomous duchy within the empire; now, suddenly, the government had decided to Russify them, as it had the Ukraine, with the result that the Finns were rioting. In the Ukraine, meanwhile, there had been a peasant rising, and in 1903 a terrible pogrom. Meanwhile the government, frightened and determined to control everything, had become almost irrational. For no reason, there was a sudden clampdown on the universities; and when students protested they were treated like political agitators and sent into the army. It had even alienated the last supporters who might have helped them, by curtailing the work of the liberal gentry in the zemstvos.
Police spies were everywhere. So tangled had the government’s system of supervision become, that in order to prove himself to the terrorists he had infiltrated, a government agent had been forced to shoot the Minister of the Interior! Illegal political parties were forming.
True, there were bright spots. Under the brilliant Finance Minister, Sergei Witte, Russia’s railways and heavy industry had made great strides. The Trans-Siberian line reached as far as the Pacific now. Foreign capital was pouring in, especially from France. But these developments, important though they were, scarcely as yet meant a great deal to the ordinary people, and indeed in recent years there had even been a mild economic depression.
But the cause of the cataclysm, when it came, was the war.
It was the same story as before, when Russia had so disastrously become involved in the Crimea. This time it was in the Far East where the Trans-Siberian railway had caused Russia to extend her influence, bullying the Chinese and coming into conflict with Japanese interest in the region. Over-confident in her army and navy, the mighty land empire had allowed herself to get into a war with the little island nation. And now she had been catastrophically beaten.
It was humiliating. Month after month, news came of Russian failure. Russian troops, fighting a distant war that neither they nor their families understood, were suffering appalling casualties. The cost of the war had caused economic chaos. There was a famine. And the government had not a friend. Even the Temporary Regulations – the martial law still in force since 1881! – were useless to contain the situation. The liberal gentry of zemstvos begged the Tsar to grant the people an assembly.
And then, in January of that year, had come Bloody Sunday.
This incident – the spark which, most believe, ignited the great Russian conflagration – was a strange and confused affair. The demonstration, led by a Ukrainian priest and demanding only the redress of grievances, wound its way in some confusion through the frozen streets of St Petersburg. The massacre did not, as always portrayed, take place in front of the Winter Palace. (The Tsar, in any case, was not in the city that