Moscow

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MOSCOW

liberalism and conservatism in moscow
social conditions, politics, and the revolution of 1905
the prewar years: tsarism vs. liberalism in the city
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Moscow, traditionally styled the other "capital" of imperial Russia along with St. Petersburg, rose from the ashes of the French invasion of 1812 to become a great cultural center by 1900. Moscow was then home to Russia's most vibrant acting company, the Moscow Art Theater, for which Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) wrote plays such as Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Many of the country's most important artists, such as Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910), worked primarily in or near Moscow. The university, founded 1755–1758, and for decades the only one in Russia, continued to be a vital locus of scholarship and social thought.

Nineteenth-century tsars were buried in St. Petersburg but crowned in Moscow, suggesting their recognition of that city as the heart of Russia. National memories of 1812 focused on Moscow because of the widespread destruction it suffered; St. Petersburg was untouched. The immense, ungainly Cathedral of Christ the Savior was erected in Moscow as the country's premier monument to the war.

Intense fighting between troops and Muscovites marked the city in 1905. Major social problems continued to 1914, further undermining support for tsarism.

liberalism and conservatism in moscow

Tension between tsarist officials and liberal Muscovites appeared by the 1790s. Alexander Radishchev, born in 1749 and a resident of the city into the early 1760s, then again in 1775–1776, managed to slip A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow past the censors and into print in 1790. The book was highly critical of serfdom and its impact on both serf owners and their peasants. Catherine II (r. 1762–1796), whose attitudes toward criticism were hardening in reaction to the French Revolution, exiled Radishchev to Siberia.

The Moscow publisher Nikolai Novikov (1744–1818) was arrested in 1792. He had helped organize learned societies, a secondary school, pharmacies, and libraries as well as a prolific publishing business. But with his arrest, due partly to his association with somewhat liberal Freemasons at the university, all unsold copies of his firm's productions were destroyed.

Ironically, the same group of Freemasons helped shape the highly conservative Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), Russia's first major historian. Based for most of his life in Moscow, Karamzin founded the first private literary and political journal in Russia, Vestnik Evropy (The European herald) in the city in 1802. It became the model for the "thick" journals that contributed immensely to the country's intellectual life in the nineteenth century. Karamzin's twelve-volume history of Russia, which glorified the monarchs' role in the country's past, began to appear in 1818. Karamzin's work launched the "statist" school of interpretation but also awakened many Russians to the fact that their nation had a history.

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), whose ties with Moscow were minimal, simultaneously demonstrated the marvelous creative possibilities of the Russian language. These cultural developments gratified national pride but also deepened the educated stratum's concern about Russian identity. Was the country, clearly behind the "West" technologically and otherwise, merely a poor imitation of cultured "Europe"? Or had Russians achieved anything noteworthy?

One of the most important figures to address these questions was Alexander Herzen, born into an aristocratic Moscow family in 1812. He graduated from the city's university in 1833. Moscow's distance from the political capital fostered a relatively free atmosphere in the early part of Nicholas I's reign (1825–1855), allowing students to debate the latest French and German social and philosophical ideas. From this background, Herzen identified the peasant-run village commune as the base upon which his homeland could be the first country to reach socialism. Russian radicals from the 1840s forward continued to grapple with Herzen's ideas.

If the major center of Russian literary and political life during most of the nineteenth century was St. Petersburg, Moscow remained the site of intense thought about the Russian past. Sergei Soloviev (1820–1879) taught history at the university beginning in 1845. His outlook was also statist, but he emphasized Russia's "organic" if not inevitable development. Soloviev was followed at the university by Vasily Kliuchevsky (1841–1911), who stressed the limited but vibrant political participation of the elite into the seventeenth century; then, he thought, the demands of governing a vast territory engendered the state's growing and eventually absolute domination of society. His lectures became public events that encouraged educated Russians to ponder the country's past and present political structures.

Following Kliuchevsky, Russia's leading historian was Pavel Milyukov (1859–1943), who lectured briefly at the university but taught mainly at the Moscow Pedagogical Institute. In 1895 his public criticisms of tsarism prompted the government to dismiss him and banish him from the city. Milyukov went on to become a leading liberal and to help found the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party, great admirers of British political life. The Kadets' major role in protests against autocracy during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 spread discontent with the regime beyond liberal circles.

social conditions, politics, and the revolution of 1905

Moscow was, and is, laid out in concentric circles around the Kremlin, a generic Russian word for citadel. The "center" was the area between the Kremlin and the boulevards, whose medians were pleasant places to stroll but also favorite sites for prostitution. Between the boulevards and the broad circular road called the Sadovoye (Garden) Ring was the "second belt," and beyond that the outskirts or "third belt." South of the Kremlin

was a section often mentioned separately, Zamoskvoreche ("beyond the Moscow River"). Industrial workers tended to concentrate in the third belt or Zamoskvoreche; artisans, tavern and restaurant workers, and tradespeople were scattered about the city; and the wealthy lived mostly in the second belt. But some newly rich clans, for instance the Ryabushinskys and Morozovs, built luxurious and sometimes astonishing homes in the center and throughout Moscow.

The city's population in 1800 was about 250,000. By 1912 the growth rate was 4.04 percent annually, faster even than New York's, and Moscow counted 1,617,700 residents. The most rapid population increase by far was on the outskirts. Moscow remained a "big village," a sprawling hodgepodge of low structures, punctuated by the occasional mansion or posh apartment building. Immigration from the countryside prompted one observer to write in 1915 that in general Moscow was "a peasant city."

Much of the background to the upheaval of 1905 in Moscow lay in worsening social conditions. Most new arrivals were males. They often maintained ties and even some land in their home villages and returned to them after a debilitating injury or for their final years. There was no social safety net for these "peasant/workers," as the regime saw them. A 1912 census counted 165,000 workers in industry, 37 percent of all who toiled in trade and production.

In 1871 there were only 700 women for every 1,000 men in the city, a picture that encouraged drunkenness and the unfortunate Russian custom of mass fistfights as entertainment. By 1912 the female/male ratio was 839:1,000, far below the Berlin figure of 1,083:1,000, but an indication that

Moscow's population was beginning to settle in town more permanently.

However, this trend did not mean improved conditions. In 1911, 17.6 of every 100,000 Londoners died from tuberculosis, while the rate among Muscovites was 45.6. Housing was desperately overcrowded: Berlin averaged 3.9 residents per apartment in 1899, Moscow 8.7. This picture worsened before 1905.

The average wage in the greater Moscow region in 1908 was 11 rubles 89 kopecks, while in England it was equivalent to 26.64 rubles; in North America, 56.97. But rent was high in Moscow, and in 1911 one writer estimated that the city's workers spent from 55 to 88 percent of their budgets on essentials, while in France the figure was 40 to 45 percent.

Industrial laborers' ties to the countryside and the fact that they were often unskilled textile hands, rather than St. Petersburg's more literate metal workers, retarded the militance of Moscow's workforce. But given the disastrous war with Japan, efforts by liberals to attain civil liberties, and agitation by socialists of various stripes, Moscow workers and lower-level employees became increasingly politically conscious and organized during 1905. Print workers, bakers, and railroad shop workers, for example, joined together by the fall of 1905 to press for better job conditions and political rights. Nicholas II's October Manifesto, which promised civil liberties and a legislative parliament (duma), split the opposition in Moscow but failed to mollify a large part of the working class and the intelligentsia.

A soviet (council) of workers and lower-middle-class employees formed in the city in late November. Now the police and the army, relying in part on reactionary laborers, attacked demonstrators and closed the new postal workers union. Railroad workers voted to strike in sympathy with the postal staff, and in early December the soviet supported the second general strike in three months. But the tsarist government had regrouped; soldiers fired into crowds, cleared Moscow of street barricades, and shot groups of worker-prisoners in factory courtyards. The city council (also duma in Russian), elected on a narrow franchise of well-to-do taxpayers, stayed on the sidelines, appalled by the army's actions but also frightened of social revolution.

the prewar years: tsarism vs. liberalism in the city

During the December Uprising, the soviet and its allies bitterly accused the Moscow city council of betraying the common people. After 1905 the council was dominated by Kadets and especially the more moderate Octobrists, who wished both to avoid further social unrest and to cooperate with the tsarist authorities in making Russia a constitutional monarchy. The Moscow duma adopted various programs, including building public housing and expanding municipal schools, intended to alleviate social tension and increase residents' productive capacity. But the breakdown of cooperation between the national parliament and Nicholas's government was mirrored in disputes between the Moscow and tsarist authorities over issues ranging from school curricula to limits on municipal taxation. Tsarist gradonachalniki (city commanders) in the large towns held far more power to regulate urban conditions than locally elected councils did. By 1912 the Moscow duma and national authorities had reached an impasse; Kadets dominated the city council, but mayors it elected from that party were barred from taking office by the state.

Tsarism remained firmly oriented toward the countryside; major "reforms" for the lower classes after 1905 involved peasants above all. Occasional benign intervention in social problems by centrally appointed officials solved little in Moscow. St. Petersburg (called Petrograd 1914–1924) led the way into the Revolutions of 1917, but Muscovites' resentment over the government's brutality in 1905 and its tepid attention to urban problems thereafter made the second capital's workers and liberals eager to see the end of the Old Regime.

See alsoCities and Towns; Russia; St. Petersburg.