In Our Time - Tsar Alexander II's assassination

Episode Date: January 6, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. On 1st March 1881, the Russian Tsar, Alexander II, was travelling through the snow to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. An armed Cossack sat with the coach driver, another six Cossacks followed on horseback and behind them came a group of police officers in sledges. It was the day that the Tsar, known for his liberal reforms, had signed a document granting the first ever constitution to the Russian people.But his journey was being watched by a group of radicals called 'Narodnaya Volya' or 'The People's Will'. On a street corner near the Catherine Canal, they hurled the first of their bombs to halt the Tsar's iron-clad coach. When Alexander ignored advice and ventured out onto the snow to comfort his dying Cossacks, he was killed by another bomber who took his own life in the blast.Why did they kill the reforming Tsar? What was the political climate that inspired such extreme acts? And could this have been the moment that the Russian state started an inexorable march towards revolution?With Orlando Figes, Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London; Dominic Lieven, Professor of Russian Government, London School of Economics; Catriona Kelly, Professor of Russian, Oxford University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, on the 1st of March 1881, the Russian Tsar Alexander II was travelling through the snow to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.

An armed Cossack sat with the coach driver, another six Cossacks followed on horseback and behind them, came a group of police officers in sledges. It was the day that Tsar, known for his liberal reforms, had signed a document granting the first ever constitution of the Russian people. But his journey was being watched by a group of radicals called Narodnia Volaya, all the people's will. On a street corner near the Catherine Canal,

they hurled the first of their bombs to halt the Tsar's ironclad coach. When Alexander ignored advice and ventured out under the snow to comfort his dying Cossacks, he was killed by another bomber who took his own life in the blast. But why did they kill the reform in Tsar? What was the political climate that inspired such extreme acts? And could March 1881 have been the moment that the Russian state started an inexorable march towards revolution?

With me to discuss the assassination of Sir Alexander II is Orlando Fijer, Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, Cacciona Kelly, Professor in Russian at Oxford University, and Dominic Levine, Professor of Russian Government at the London School of Economics. Orlando, he was famous, Sarah Alexander II, was famous, for his emancipation of the serfs. He was even given the title, Tsar Liberator.

The root of his feeling for the necessity for reform can go back to the Crimean War. Can you tell us why that had such an impact on him and what impacted it had on Russia? Well, the war was a huge shock for Russia, having gone into it full of optimism that Slavafilism would prevail over Western powers in the crisis of the Middle East.

And the army had been shown up very badly, and the Navy had been practically destroyed. And there was a general feeling in 1855, 56, as the war came to a close, that a modern state was needed, that it couldn't go on being an economy run on the basis of serf labour, that a modern army was needed, reform of the government was needed.

And this had been a sense within the bureaucracy for some time. And I think Alexander, not being by disposition, a reformer or a liberal, although he had some liberal upbringing as a child, was a European statesman in the sense that he could see the need for reform and began to bring that in being. You've alluded to the state of Russia by alluding to the serfs in those opening remarks. Generally speaking, what was the state of Russia in the 1850s when it came out of the war, a defeated empire,

having built itself up as a great imperial power and, in fact, surged towards the West and so on? What was the state of Russia, in broad stroke, terms, obviously? Heavily indebted in terms of the serfs. Most of the serfs were in fact mortgaged out to state and noble banks by the landowners, which is one of the reasons why the government was able to

force through the emancipation in order to clear the debts of the gentry. So there was a general sense that actually, you know, the surf economy was not going to take Russia any further. It's bogging out the search, but a third of the populations I understand it. Well, considerably more. The peasantry, which

probably represented 80% of the population was mainly serf. There were other types of peasant, crown peasant, state peasants, which were legally tied to the state. But the serfs were the majority of the peasants, and they were tied to the land through the commune, and they came with the land as part of the landowner's fiefdom estate, and the landowner had judicial power, administrative power in the locality, and owned the serfs as a slave owner might own a slave, except in Russia, of course, the slaves also pay taxes. So the army was basically. based on serf's conscription.

And many of the serfs have gone into the Crimean War on the hope, at least, and certainly informed by rumours that they would get their liberation by fighting. So there was a huge expectation at all levels of society that the defeat would lead to some form of reform. So if a massive area of land, a backward agrarian society, little if any, industrialisation in the mid-19th century, can we come, Dominic Nvin, can we come to Alexander II's most first, famous reform, which was the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.

So he got on with it very quickly after the war. What risks was he taking, and what did that entail? Any government which tries to change the basic system of property owning throughout an entire country is taking risks. It's taking risks in terms of making itself deeply unpopular with the people whose property it's expropriating, particularly since that's the dominant class, the land-owning gentry. Can I just pause one second?

We just have to get it absolutely clear to our listeners is that the serfs were property. So when we were talking about property owning, the property that these landowners owned was land, forests, lakes, but also serfs. Yes, and the emancipation expropriates both their property in labour, without which the land is, to a great extent, valueless, but also part of their land. So by the standards of Victorian Europe,

this is a rather extreme, you know, thing to do. Beyond that, the state is scared of bankruptcy, because somewhere along the line, a financial system which has already been gutted by the costs of the Crimean War is supposed to cover the costs or somehow manage the cost of expropriating the basic system of wealth in the country. So you've got two immediate problems and then you've got a real fear that since serfdom is the effective system of government for half the peasant population, once you abolish it, what is going to happen? who's going to provide, you know, for order, and how are you going to actually persuade a lot of former serfs

for whom liberation was supposed to be some kind of opening to a far better life, that, you know, all the inevitable compromises involved in this reform are acceptable. So their whole range of fears and dangers. What state was the Tsar and his administration in to bring this about? Well, they were in a state, or the Tsar himself was in a state, state of desperation would be putting it too strongly. But after all, the whole principle of the Tsarist state was that it existed to make Russia a great power competitive with the other European great powers. And ever since 1812, when they defeated Napoleon, the theory was that Russia was

the greatest power in continental Europe. They'd just been defeated on their own territory by relatively small numbers of British and French soldiers. And quite clearly, the state was simply not in a position to compete internationally. You know, the Tsar was getting information about what was going on in the Crimea via Paris, because it was going out to Paris by Telegraph. It took less time for British and French reinforcements to reach the Crimea from Western Europe. It did for Russian reinforcements to come down from Moscow. That's because one side's fighting and moving with communicating with the technology of the industrial revolution

and the other is still, Russia is still in the pre-industrial age. well, you don't need to be a genius to realize that you're not going to survive long if this goes on. He not only tackled the serfs, which is the biggest thing, but he moved in to try to tackle the military and the judiciary, didn't he? Can you give us some idea of that? There was a very fundamental set of reforms across the board. They didn't all come at the same time. Once you destroy serfdom, you almost have to completely reform local government

because local government is to a great extent connected to the system of serfdom. On top of that, I mean, if your main aim is to modernise, and that means modernising the economy as much as anything else, quite clearly the first thing that occurs to a mid-Victorian statesman is that you need an effective system of civil law so that you can enforce contracts so that you can protect property in the modern age. So probably the most radical of all the changes is in fact the judicial reform of 1864. The main military reform comes later, comes after they've seen Prussia defeat first Austria and then France in 1866 to 71, when it becomes clear that you need a mass conscript army with a short-service soldiers who will then go into a reserve because the situation in the Crimea in military terms is catastrophic.

You know, Russia runs out of troops because there are no reserves. the army, which goes into the Crimean War, is the old long-service army. The soldiers serve for 25 years, and it's a complete separate caste. Well, the soldiers die off in droves. In any event, they're deployed around the entire circumference of the empire. You have to realize that most of the army never gets anywhere near Crimea. It's either in Poland or it's on the Baltic. So there is an absolute pressing need for military reform,

but that itself has dramatic, you know, broader social consequences. Again, setting out the broad scene here, Catrani, before we move on to Alexander II, more particularly, what effected these changes that have been raised by Orlando and by Dublin have on Russian society in the short term? How did Russian society act in the 1860s, 1870s to this assault on the serfs, on the position of the serfs and on the judiciary and the military? Well, it depends which part of society you're talking about it, the part that's most familiar to Westerners, so the works of great writers. novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

I mean, I think to begin with, they probably have been written whatever the conditions. I mean, even if they've been written for what in Russian is called the desk drawer, in other words, without thought of publication. So they were helped the public domain quickly by the fact that there'd been censorship reform in 1865, which means that writers can write, as it were, what they want for publication, with less fear of what's going to go on. But it has to be said that the majority of great writers at this period actually aren't particularly pro-reformists. more anxious about the way that the reforms are going to affect the society.

And one can see that, for example, in crime and punishment, which is about how a member of the younger generation has got these terrible ideas about the admissibility of murder. You can see it also in fathers and sons, which is about somebody who came to be called, not by Toggenyev, but by his readers and nihilist, so about the sort of the mood of negation and materialism that's sweeping through society.

And then there is, of course, a quite strong body of opinion and quite influential opinion. That's strongly nationalist. I mean, they're sort of what one might call the tail end of the Slavophile movement, so the people who had been the first generation of, what we might call nationalist with a historical perspective, so people who looked back to Russia before Peter the Great

and saw that as being the path that Russia should have been on and had deviated from. would it be fair to say then in the 1860s and early 70s that as a result of the fallout from the war and what Alexander was trying to do and the result of ideas coming in from the West there was a great blooming or outburst of new groups

new ideas various forms of radicalism going through Russia at the time that's certainly true and that you can see for example in the strength of the feminist movement in Russia at this period and I mean there's a connection of that with the revolutionary movement I mean it's not at all a coincidence that some of the most fervent revolutionaries were women and they were women

who'd trained in universities. I mean, not inside Russia because Russian universities weren't open to women but who'd gone abroad and trained there. And then, I mean, it's also a period when women writers are publishing in large quantities in the main literary journals. There's a lot of talk about women's

education. People are setting up university level courses for women, for example. And yes, there's a great deal of debate on reform, but not all of it reaches the public domain by any means. Well, Honolfeiting is, is there a sort of contradiction growing then at the time between the increasing desire to take things from the West, to take the best from the West, the things they didn't like about the West, but to take the best from the West, particularly in ideas, on the one hand, as it were, at the Western side of the country almost, and the great Slavophile, pre-Peter the Great, idealised, peasantry, serfdom, which had its own movement growing? Are there contradictions here? Are they fertile, or what's going on? There's a chasm because, as Dominic says,

the main challenge confronting society post-1861 is how to integrate the peasant as a citizen into local government, how to recognise the peasant as a fellow Russian. And so the sort of literature that Cachione has mentioned is almost obsessed, really, by the peasant question, the question of what is Russia going to be? How are we going to... The soul of Russia?

Yeah, the soul of Russia. Who are these peasants? how are we going to find a common nationhood with them? And so that really becomes the central issue for the whole of educated society. And I think there's a sense also that 1861 is the birth of a new society, that this is a new Russia, this negation of the old Russia, of the Russia of serfdom, is very strong, particularly among youth group students who are coming through the university, is influenced by Western ideas

and confronting the peasant question as a question of, you know, who are we going to be as a nation? How are we going to reform ourselves as a society based on ideals of liberty and justice? So that contradiction, in a sense, the contradiction between Westernism and Slavafelism has run its course by 1861

because everyone now agrees, essentially, that yes, Russia has to base itself on Western technology has to become a modern society. The Crimean War has consolidated that truth. But it's now going to be a question of how do we marry peasant traditions, how do we marry our native customs, how do we integrate the peasant who's yet to be educated and brought up to the level of Western technology into a society which can be based upon the rule of law and universal values.

I know it's always, it's a fatal question to ask a historian about when anything new began. because we traced back several centuries. But nevertheless, could it be proposed as a conversational generalization that in the 1860s there was a new force of radicalism and new sorts of people being educated or in numbers or where they came from and they were beginning to drive the thinking of Russia in a way that said the Decemberists hadn't done in the 1820s? I think, firstly, you've got the issue of new ideas

and the legitimacy of the old setup, the Nicholas set up, being smashed by the Crimean War. And then not, I think, immediately in large numbers, but soon after, yes, you do have all sorts of new people coming through. You shouldn't also forget the fact that some of these so-called new people are dispossessed sons and daughters of the gentry. Are they called the Raznor Chinsie? That just means people of different social classes, groups, you know.

Whereas the old Russian... set up has got people typecast in legally defined social estates. So you've got all sorts of people floating around, sons of priests, daughters of chemists, new sort of middle class, spin-offs of bankrupt, gentry, all sorts of things. But it's not just the social issue, it's there's a really new intellectual current running through, linked in part to the expectations which had been raised and then in certain cases not met by the emancipation and linked also, of course, to the influence of similar ideas passing through Europe at that time. Can we just dwell for a moment on what these people were coming to the cities, as I understand it,

they were forming groups. I'm trying to just get the real context for so the assassination of Alexander fits into place of a society which in general terms he has tried to reform radically with the service, and as you indicated with the judiciary and the military, in very substantially, He also looked at the universities. In some ways he can't meet his own demands because of the inadequacy of his own system. But he's tried to do that, and he's created a force. Would you admit that this is a force that has not been there before?

The force might be the number of groups, but it is still an intellectual force for change, agitating. I think the key is that it's a force outside the state system. You know, these people's grandfathers, if they had had these ideas, worked within the state system. now as the society is growing and there are a larger number of people who are educated and at the same time

they're more footloose because they may not have an income any longer if they're the children of the gentry you've actually got a more complicated relationship between state and society and that is something that Alexander is forced to have to come to terms with and in the end of course kills him and it's a generational thing too isn't it

I mean it's white again of course it fathers and sons because you do have a conflict really between the liberal men of the 1840s, who would be the men of 1864, very European in their ambitions for Russia, very liberal in their outlook about how you reform provincial Russia, and a younger generation who've come through the universities who don't necessarily think in terms of running the estate in the way that their father's generation would have done,

who are looking to become involved in the professions or who are taking up the pen and writing for local newspapers, or whatever, and who are influenced by radical ideas. And in a way, coming back to a point you were making earlier, a question you were asking earlier about Russia and the West, I think this nihilistic strand that's coming through in intellectual terms in the 1860s is something rather foreign to European traditions of radical thought.

It's something quite not just revolutionary, but almost millenarian, really. in its connotations and significance in the 1860s because it's returning to the, or picking up again the idea of negating the whole of official Russia, the Russia of our fathers, the Russia that is still, despite the emancipation of the Serfs based on huge injustice

and we have a great debt to the people, the serfs and so on. Kachian, I was seeing in the great literature of the 60s and 70s, I was seeing these ideas carried out inside the novels, inside the literature, and is that part of the... the writers see this as part of their purpose to portray and move on the society? Well, I suppose, I mean, I'm essentially a literary snob, so I'd have to say within great literature,

no, but within the literature of the period, without any doubt. So there is, what is for my money, a truly awful novel called What is to be done by Nikolai Chiang Nishevsky, which is one of the most influential books, I mean, a life guide for young people in this generation and later generations sort of right through

to the Soviet period where it was taught as a set text in schools, which is about, I mean, it's essentially about a menagerieie where the husband nobly stands aside in order to let the other man take his place and there's no kind of quarrelling or anything nasty like that. But the influential parts of it are not just to do with that but also a sewing commune of ex-prostitutes is founded. I mean, it's about creating a utopia in the society that you live in.

And, I mean, its tone is much gentler than, that's the interesting paradox that Bazaar of the hero of fathers and sons who storms into the drawing room and offends everybody. And what is to be done is really much more about cooperation and harmony. Perhaps that's why it's so deeply unsatisfactory to literary specialists. But anyway, it was, as I say, very widely read. And very influential precisely because it was telling people how they should live. And it was also a complete negation of existing Russia.

I mean, it was the idea that this is going to be, we're going to set up a totally new. Russia. We're going to find brotherhood among ourselves and we're going to live like peasants in an egalitarian way. And so this is already, you know, Western ideas of

liberty, equality and justice have suddenly become a very revolutionary tool in the hands of student and Russian youth. Can we just briefly go to the very public representation of the, as it were, the

West Slav connection? This to the people movement in the 1870s. Can you tell us what that was and how far it, what which limitations were? Essentially it's a relatively small group numbered in sort of low thousands of educated, you could call them Razner Chinzi, sometimes children of the gentry, sometimes of what you might call middle class,

who decide to establish a link with the people, which in those days means the peasantry, going out to the villages, partly to serve the people and partly to mobilize the people against the state in some kind of revolutionary movement. There's, of course, a vast disillusionment because these urban types, young people,

going out to the villages, firstly find that it's immensely difficult to actually acquire the trust of the peasantry, and secondly, that sometimes these peasants aren't actually quite what they'd expected. And then there's also the Tsarist police to cope with. So the movement of the people, people is in a sense a flop, though rather a spectacular one. It does bring out in part, though,

one element of this counterculture, which Orlando is talking about and Catriona, in the sense that these younger people, having divorced themselves from their own families and from, you know, really the society in which they live, create an alternative society with a completely alternative set of values, they dress differently. And part of the desperation is that having cut themselves off, they're trying to find a new purpose for their existence. And this linking up with the people, serving the people, is a sort of substitute for religion in some ways, which helps to explain the extra desperation

when those who you're serving don't seem to be interested. The censorship slightly changes, and 1872, Das Capital, Marx's Das Capital, Marx's Das Capital, is allowed in and translated, and in terms of that sort of book, enjoys a considerable success in Russia. Do you think that had any impact? were, well, obviously had impact on people read it.

Can you tell us what sort of impact it had? It had enormous impact. As you say, it came in almost by default. The censors thought it was such an sort of academic book that no one would understand it or take any lessons from it and so it could quite easily, although the censors then got wind of it and punished the publisher, Nikola Poliakov

by, I think, banning an edition of Diderot or something that he brought out the next year. But it had enormous influence, I think mainly because until that point, Russian radical movements only had a sort of homegrown Jacobinism to go on, a nihilism that they constructed themselves. And suddenly they received from Europe the commandments of what it meant to be a proper socialist, and it was scientific.

So they felt suddenly they had history on their side, and they had Europe on their side, and that there was salvation for Russia because it could not anymore avoid the march of capitalism. So that even if the peasants, as Dominic says, were slightly reluctant to join the students in rising up against the Tsar in the going to the people movement, nevertheless, in the long run, social forces would inevitably bring about contradictions in society leading to the rise of a revolutionary force that could be built on. And the impact as a result was just as, I mean, we often sort of try to divide as historians,

the populist and the Marxists and look at two different strands. And I don't think we should do that really because, in fact, Marxism was just as influential on the populists and on the people's will, which was the assassination group that saw of Alexander II, as it was on the social democratic or Marxist movement itself. Now we're going to turn the assassination. Before you, can I make perhaps a last attempt, Katrina, to bring literature to barrel? You've said that the only literature that was any of any infants at all was literature sort of way below the salt. Nevertheless, in your early remarks, you did mention the appearance of a certain radical persons in Dostoevsky,

and wasn't Tegany of sympathetic to the radicals as well. Well, I don't think in fathers and sons. I mean, I think he managed to annoy everybody. It was that book. I mean, he annoyed conservatives. I don't want to push you, but was Tegadia of sympathetic of the radicalists? I mean, I want to know what's coming into force at this time. I think it was, if I may say, I know you're the scholar.

I think Virgin's sort of. It's quite sympathetic to those. Well, I suppose, yes, and on the eve. Yes, I mean, there is a sort of sense of, I think actually that on the whole people are writing, great writers writing from a relative conservative point of view, and I would include to again even that. But relative conservatism in a country that's been cemented in ultra-conservatism can be a move towards liberalism, can't it?

But Dostoevsky is more conservative than the state. Dostovsky is more conservative than the Tsar. But inside Dostoevsky, characters work their way, which can inflame the lives of young persons reading about this characters. It works the other way with Dostoevsky. You think people read Dostoevsky, say I'll never lift a bomb again? I think people read Dostovsky and fear what godlessness will bring Russia to. Do you think 22-year-olds do that? A lot of them, yes.

At that time. Yes, if they get to read Dostoevsky, yes. I would disagree with that, actually. I would disagree with both of you because I think that both, Tegain, although a liberal, and Dostoevsky, although nayselife, although Nelov, although Nays a... reactionary still harbored sympathy, some sympathy for the idealism of people who went out, got off their butts, didn't just read books, but went out there and did something to try and help Russia. And I think that it gets transposed in perhaps in Dostovsky's case into a sort of sense of religious calling. I mean, but I think Dostovsky nonetheless would almost

equate socialism and Christianity. I think there's a sort of struggle in later Dostoevsky. so you put those two together. So from that point of view, as well as in the later writings of Tegay now, I think there is a sort of sympathy, which in fact echoes a sympathy in society as a whole. I mean, even within the administration itself, there are people who still sympathize with the revolutionary terrorists because they're seen to be fighting for a good cause. Well, I think this maybe as an oversimplification, I must remember even some of the terrorists. I mean, Sophia Pirovska, after Alexander II had been blown up, was reduced to floods of tears and saying,

why did we do it? Why did we kill him? It's all right to do it when you've blown him up, isn't it? Well, you could say that. But if he was a terrorist and it was part of the blowing up, it's kind of, you know, crocodile tears. I think what I'd say is there was a sort of general messianic feeling in Russian society, sort of sense that things needed to be changed, which in some Russians led them into revolutionary sympathies,

and in Dostoevsky, for example, led him into a belief in Christian reform, which is what we see in Brothers Karam. One of the things you've got to note is that, yes, Dostoevsky is in certain sense socialist and in a complete sense, very conservative and Christian. The one thing that he has many, many, many, many, many other Russians are. It's anti-liberal. And the left and the right are united on that.

Right, let's move to this group, the people's will, who assassinated Alexander II. What was particularly distinctive briefly about them, Orlando? The commitment to political revolution, I think. the going to the people movement was essentially a movement for social revolution, in other words, the idea that the way to reform

Russia was by educating the people, using propaganda, and raising their consciousness so that they would organise themselves, and therefore that would be a form of social revolution. Whereas, out of frustration in the late 1870s,

the peoples were emerged, it was formed in 1879, and was from the very beginning, to political revolution. It was influenced by earlier Jacobin Russian thinkers like Sorginajayev and Piotr Tkatchev, who had both argued for a coup d'etat in Russia. And their executive committee, which was a tiny group of about a dozen people, demanded from its followers in the major cities of Russia who amounted to no more than a couple of hundred probably. Absolute allegiance to the dictates of the executive committee that they would be a revolutionary vanguard and that they would essentially overthrow the state and set up

a revolutionary dictatorship as a means to social revolution. And use assassination if they had to. Yeah, the assassination is, in fact, the first point on their agenda. And between 1879 and 81, there are, I think, eight attempts on Alexander's life. It's an A. It's an AIF question, but worth asking Kachronius, why would they want to assassinate the Tsar, who, the first of the Tsars, had begun to put in reforms and began to change society? in the general direction, although

and obviously not as radically as, but in the general direction in which they approved. Well, I think the, I mean, my understanding would be that as it were, contempt for the reform process and a sort of sense that you can't work it like that, that you have to fundamentally change things and, as well, work

from the bottom up. I mean, you're talking about a process of reform at the highest levels and they want interaction with the population, essentially above all, as I understand it, land reform. I mean, a land reform on a much broader scale. I mean, essentially what can't be termed nationalisation of land,

but cessation of the land, making over the land to the people through the village commune, that was certainly the aim of the movement that the people's world came out of. Dominic, the... Sorry. Yes, sorry. Did I interrupt you? I did interrupt you. Do you want to finish?

No, I just added the words land and people, that sort of. Dominic, so the Alexander 2nd is assassinated. in 1881. What was the immediate effect of his assassination? Well, the immediate effect was his replacement by his son, Alexander III. And, of course, the assassination of his father reinforced the message which had been coming from the sort of conservative ends of the elite of the bureaucracy, parts of the aristocracy, that this is what happens when you reform.

You give people all sorts of ideas. They begin expecting far more radical reforms than one could ever hope. provide and reforms which will blow Russia apart. You do have to remember that Nicholas the first regime was one of the most... Yes, the regime of his father, who died in 1855, was one of the most conservative in Europe. Within six years of Nicholas being dead, you've got a small but nevertheless influential element of the educated class,

calling not just for the overthrow of the monarchy, but also private property and marriage. This is a rather radical line to take in Victorian Europe. It's not altogether unlike Gorbachev coming to power in 1980. Soviet Union and international communism being dead six years later. From the conservative perspective, it just proves that in this kind of state and society, if you take the brakes off, all hell gets released.

And that is how they interpreted the assassination. So we've had, as it were, from Dominic, the conservative reaction because Alexander in his reform seemed to manage to alienate both the reactionaries and the radicals. But what was the reaction of the other radicals to this assassination, Orlando? You mean within the revolution movement? Yeah, within that broad movement. Well, I think the assassination, in a sense,

just accentuated the dilemma that had confronted the revolutionary opposition from the beginning, which is do you go through social revolution or do you go through political revolution? And the assassination was a desperate attempt to deal with that problem from the point of view that we cannot organise a social revolution, while we had this overbearing autocracy

stopping our every movement, we have to eradicate the state structure of oppression before we can organise ourselves. So revolutionary dictatorship becomes the trigger to social revolution, which is essentially from that point on, still the model for, I would say, the dominant form of the Russian revolutionary tradition, which eventually comes out in Bolshevism.

So we have the right-wing reaction, as it were, and from Dominic, as it were, if we can use these terms, which is a slightly helpful left. What about the cultural consequences, Katrana Kelly? Well, it's, in terms of the precise figures we were talking about in regard to the 1860s, 1870s, it's slightly difficult to say because Tuggenia died in 1883, so there's not much time for him left,

Dostoevsky in 1881. With Tolstoy, it appears to lead long term to radicalisation in him as well, because if one compares the Telstoy of War and Peace, who's very much on the side of the landowners with the Telstoy of the 1890s, who's quite a radical populist in many ways and believes in making over the land to the peasantry. You see, he's gone through a sort of evolution,

you could say rudely belatedly, if you like, which approaches that of the liberal gentry class in general. So he's a kind of example of movement, I mean, sort of strong political movement. And in time also creates, It's a popular movement. He has a great deal of followers, so many indeed that he's still considered a threat in the Soviet period.

So, I mean, that's an example. As far as sort of literature and culture goes generally, though, I mean, I wouldn't see 1881 as really all that important a break. I mean, it's a strange thing, but the paradoxes that, for example, in the theatre, in 1882, Alexander III's government ends, the monopoly of the imperial theatres in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which had formerly made it very difficult to stage plays outside the imperial theatres. I mean, the result is a very vibrant private theatre culture in the late 1880s,

1890s, which is far more exciting than anything that had gone on before that. And the irony is that traditionally the theatre had been something of which the Tsarist regime was very afraid, because it meant a public assembly, it meant something that had sort of saucy connotations, possibly that it wasn't very easy to police that might be considered inflammatory and so it's a very strange thing that you get this apparently very repressive regime which makes this change it doesn't add up and I think in many ways

the cultural situation in other respects doesn't add up either but you still have increased censorship after 1881 and I think you have as a result a retreat from what one might call the civic populism of most of the arts and literature in the 1860s and 70s. So you have a retreat from political engagement, I think,

in most of the arts after the 1880s. Yes, but, I mean, on the other hand, they move into a full-scale decadent movement by the late 1880s, early 1890s, which is hardly one could say, I mean, in terms of issues of personal autonomy looks like liberalisation, if not issues of social commitment.

Do you think, I know, that there's a direct line from the assassination of Alexander the second second, and 81, to the Bolsheviks coming to power. Do you think that, to put it bluntly, that this was an end of an attempt to reform and the beginning of the necessity in inverted commas, as they might see it, for revolution, it was that bigger turning point? Well, without wanting to be too deterministic, I'd say yes, probably, on two grounds. Firstly, that, as Dominic says, political reform was now shelved, and neither of the last

two times, Alexander the third nor Nicholas the same. second really was a reformist in any sense. Nicholas the second obviously made some concessions when he was threatened with losing his throne in 195, but they were short-lived concessions. So the sort of autocratic principle was strengthened, and representative government and forms of the Zemstfers and municipal government were rolled back. And I would say yes, also on the grounds that the example of the people's will, Narodnavolya, was, was the prototype of the Bolshevik Party. And because of the intensification of autocratic power after 1881,

social revolution was this always, I think, on the back foot from that point. Yes, mensheism is in that tradition. Yes, there's neopopopopulism, which is in that tradition. But essentially, when you look at the history of Marxism in Russia, at every point where they have to choose between social revolution or political putchism, they take the political high road. And so the conspiratorial party becomes the model of Russian revolutionary organisation leading up right to 1917.

Dominic. Yes, I don't all together disagree with that. I think the key in 1881 is that Alexander II, the assassinated Tsar, had been persuaded that to stabilise the regime, regime, you needed to win back the support or hold the support of broad sections of educated public opinion. After he's murdered, his son decides that you can crush the revolutionary movement through a more effective police regime. And in the short run, he's right. They succeed. But it does result longer term in the regime increasingly losing support in educated society, partly because

it stomps on the civil rights of ordinary educated citizens. Having said all of that, I'm not myself a great optimist about the chances of regime and civil society working together to bring 20th century Russia into some liberal or liberal democratic era. Partly I just think because essentially what one's dealing with in the early 80s is still the politics of notables of a very narrow section of society really the big challenge comes not just in Russia but everywhere in Europe when you get on to mass politics with mass literacy, working class, increasingly educated peasantry. And rather sadly, I mean, the truth is that virtually everywhere in the periphery of Europe, whether you're talking about Spain, Portugal, Italy, Hungary, the Balkans, everywhere.

Actually, liberalism collapses. And you get various forms of nasty authoritarian regime, either of the right or of the left, usually of the right. But it's a, it's almost, it might be a, but it's perhaps an interesting distinction between not to say, well, no, this would not have led to a liberal democratic state in the early the century, but it would have prevented a revolution of the sort and of the virulence which became the revolution of the early 20th century. That is also, it's also a question. It's conceivable. It's conceivable. I don't myself think it probably would have done, but, you know, once one begins going in for counterfactuals, there are endless, endless things

to be said. Look, I agree with Orlando. It seems to me that there is no doubt that what happened in 1881 did stop Alexander II's policy of trying to reconcile the Tsarist state with educated society and its more moderate liberal elements and that in the long run certainly contributed to the illegitimacy of the regime and to its collapse. Metternich, Alanda you know this but a now, the Austrian satirin, Prince Metternich once said that the most dangerous moment for a state is when it reforms. Do you think that's what we've got here? Absolutely. And I think Alexander is like all Russian reformers in that sense, that he's effectively making it up as he goes along

without a real strategy or plan. And he can't stop social processes running ahead of his political reforms so that, in fact, his grip on society loosens as he reforms. And in that sense, he's similar to Stalipin, another great reformer, although I think doomed in the 1900s. And indeed Gorbachev, who dominated, Dominic has already compared Alexander 2. This is the problem. How do you reform and stabilise the society

on the basis of the rule of law and property ultimately in a social crisis where revolutionary forces are constantly kicking against? And in a political system whose entire historical logic is authoritarian and centralist. Now you're bringing in Western liberal principles. It's not necessarily very easy to match the two. Final word? And I mean something we haven't talked about at all, which is the broadening of educations.

On the one hand, you need education because you've got to get workers who are skilled in the factories. On the other hand, education destabilises the system because then people have got access to all these dangerous books that before you've been able to publish knowing that they'd have an audience of 2000. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Katrina Kelly, Don McLevin,

Arlandof Hyges. Thank you for listening. Next week, we'll be talking about the mind and body problem. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.