<>1855fe18:1881mr01; Russian Emperor Alexander II reigned for 26 years
  1) THE ERA OF GREAT REFORMS [LOOP] and
  2) RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY SITUATIONS (The first and the second)
*--Alexander II, Emperor of Russia. The Politics of Autocracy: Letters of Alexander II to Prince A. I. Bariatinskii, 1857-1864
*--Aleksandr Nikitenko, The Diary of a Russian Censor (1975)
*--v1:1859-1880 British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print. Part I, from the mid- nineteenth century to the First World War. Series A, Russia, 1859 -1914 (1983)
*--Nikolai K. Girs, The Education of a Russian Statesman: The Memoirs of Nich. Karl. Giers (1962)
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*--Larissa Zakharova, "THE GOVERNMENT AND THE GREAT REFORMS OF THE 1860s" [TXT]
*--W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861
*----------. Nikolai Miliutin: An Enlightened Russian Bureaucrat
*--Daniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802-1881 (1981)
*--S. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self-Government in Russia, 1830-1870 (1972)
*--N. G. O. Pereira, Tsar-Liberator: Alexander II of Russia, 1818-1881 (1984)
*--E. M. von Almedingen, The Emperor Alexander II (1962)
*--James Malloy, P. A. Valuev and his career in Nineteenth century Russian state service
*--Werner Eugen Mosse, Alexander II and the Modernization of Russia. London:1958
*--Website of Walter Moss, "Alexander II and His Times"

<>1855sp:Russian conservative Konstantin Aksakov (son of Sergei Aksakov and brother of Ivan Aksakov) wrote a memo to Emperor Alexander II, "On the Internal State of Russia" [TXT | Raeff3:231-51]
*--This loyal and strong defense of freedom of speech could not be published until 1881
*--Collection of writings = Tribune of the Slavophiles: Konstantin Aksakov
*1853:Poetic defense of freedom of Expression [DIR3:284-5]

<>1855:USA| Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [TXT]
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*--Wagar on Whitman [TXT]

<>1855ja:Shimoda | After losing all but the ship Diana (1806:1812:GO) to needs of the Crimean War, and after great earthquake and tidal wave leveled Shimoda and shipwrecked Diana [Beasley, MHJ:61], in 1855fe07 Putiatin arranged Treaty of Amity (Nichiro Washin Joyaku). Modelled on Kanagawa treaty, recently signed by USA Commander Matthew Perry [KEJ,4:179. PHandG:782]. Lensen thinks Shimoda "provisions" are "more extensive" than Kanagawa [KEJ,6:270]. "Went beyond" by opening 3 ports [KEJ,6:341]. Opened Shimoda, Hakodate, and Nagasaki to Russia, but only for ship repairs and provisioning. BUT did allow posting of consuls at Hakodate or Shimoda Russia chose Hakodate and established reciprocal extra-territoriality. Kurils divided so that Japan held those islands south of Iturup (Etorofu); Russia, those north of Urup (Uruppu) [KEJ,6:270 Lensen. I think he means "S FROM" and "N FROM". NB!:Kurils divided N of Etorofu (KEJ,2:238 Stephan)]. Sakhalin a "common possession" (Lensen) or "jointly occupied" (Stephan) [Harrison, Japan's N.Frontier]. Lensen feels that "relations between Russian residents, mostly personnel of naval vessels wintering in Japan, and local inhabitants were on the whole amicable. As military men, Japanese officials could identify more readily with monarchist naval officers than with merchants or with missionaries [KEJ,6:341]. Lensen goes too far to put Russia in good light. Says 1st lessons in European shipbuilding from Putiatin's stranded crew, but cf.PH&G:766 re.Adams "Anjin"

<>1855my08:Heda, NW coast of Izu Peninsula | Putiatin and 40 men were moved to Heda, built European-style schooner in partnership with Japanese craftsmen, and departed for Russia from Japan (took 2 wks) [KEJ,6:270]
*That year novelist Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov began serial publication of his Fregat Pallada (1858:book publication) about his experience with Putiatin in Japan
*--Goncharov mocked and ridiculed Japanese in a most unfortunate manner. "It was difficult to look without laughter at these skirt-clad figures with their little topnots and their bare little knees". Lensen says that G's portrait of Japan as "ludicrous and effeminate" was very damaging
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*--KEJ,3:46
*--Lensen"Historicity

<>1855je16:San Francisco Journal carried article by the German traveler Julius Frobel which stressed parallel rise of USA and Russia. Prognosis = three-way suzerainty over globe, USA, Europe and Russia
*--Frobel later wrote memoirs of his travels to the New World, Frobel, Julius, 1805-1893 Seven years' travel in Central America, northern Mexico, and the far West of the United States (London:1859) F1409.F92

<>1855oc13:1857my21; French intellectuals Edmund and Jules Goncourt kept diary of everyday life in Paris in which they reflected on the inferiority of women [P20:14]

<>1856:1870; Italian unification under the leadership of Camillo di Cavour and Giuseppe Garibaldi, a complex 14-year process of gathering widely different jurisdictions under single governmental administration, not complete until Rome and Vatican City brought under the authority of the new Italian liberal monarchy [MAP]
*--"Italy", the nation-state, made its late appearance on the historical stage [DPH:187-91]

<>1856:Sergei Aksakov published Chronicles of a Russian Family, a remarkable tale of gentry family life in the time of serfdom on the Orenburg, trans-Volga frontier or Bashkir steppes [excerpts= KRR:352-4]
*1914:Mikhail Nesterov landscape portrait of area around Aksakov homestead in Olga's Gallery
*--Sergei Aksakov's UO bibliography
*--For Sergei's famous sons, GO Konstantin and Ivan

<>1856mr18 (mr30 NS): Treaty of Paris ended Crimean War [VSB,3:606-7 | DPH:197-9 | DIR2:209-20 | ORW:118] France, England, Turkey, Sardinia, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Russia agreed to neutralization of Black Sea, open to all commercial fleets but closed to all military navies
*--Romania (till 1859 called Moldavia and Walachia) became semi-independent states under Ottoman Turkish suzerainty. Russia ceded to Romania the mouth of the Danube River and Bessarabia. All of lower Danube placed under international commission
*--Russian imperial advance in Ottoman Turkish Central Asia was hereby pushed back. Ottoman Turkey was now declared to be part of what was called the “European concert” and its integrity protected as such. Turkey became a part of Europe in the effort to keep its imperial domains from becoming a part of Russia
*--Russian imperialist ambitions were conspicuously damaged while the imperialist ambitions of “The West” were conspicuously advanced. The concept of "The West" (and the derivative expression "Westernization") very possibly originated in Russia [LOOP on anachronistic use of the term "Westernization"]. Now these loose concepts were increasingly used to describe powerful and rapidly modernizing (i.e., industrializing) northwestern European nation-states in their domineering or imperialist relationship to the rest of the world. The rest of the world was labeled over time with a series of progressively less slanderous adjectives = "savage", "primitive", "backward", "undeveloped", and (by the late 20th century) "developing"
*--It took Russia twenty years to bolster its military strength and prepare to reassert itself into the Black Sea and the Balkans. The first moves in "The Great Game" after Crimea went England's way, but Russia waited its turn
*1856de:Caucasus Mountains, northern slopes. Chechen people shifted from imam leadership to Russian administration as General Evdokimov introduced program of receiving into Russian territory immigrants from Shamil’s Chechen and Daghestan territories [ID]

<>1856mr30:Russian Emperor Alexander II advised Moscow aristocrats gathered in their provincial noble assembly, "It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to await the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below" [VSB,3:589 | DPH:282] Noble assemblies were institutions created in the time of Catherine II [ID]. These aristocratic "corporate" or soslovie-based institutions responded to Alexander's dramatic announcement in hope and fear. Russian landowning elites now entered into a brilliant, yet futile -- perhaps we could say final -- period of corporate or "class-conscious" political action
*--Newspaper reports on this Moscow Noble Assembly alerted reading public to the immediate possibility of significant reform
*1858su:Nizhnii-Novgorod and Moscow nobles heard addresses by Alexander II on same theme [VSB,3:591]
*--Internal Ministry official Aleksei Levshin and Senator Yakov Solov'ev described the background to reforms [VSB,3:589-91]
*--At the autocratic center, in Petersburg, the Main Committee and Editorial Commission laid the groundwork for abolition of serfdom [VSB,3:591-3]
*--Landowning nobles (rural gentry political activists) distrusted the reformist state and were thus not at all certain that this "great reform" would be all that great. What might this suggest about the status of the landowning aristocracy as a "ruling class" in Imperial Russia?

<>1856de01:USA WDC | Jefferson Davis, USA Secretary of War (1853-57) and future president of the rebellious Confederacy, addressed new challenge faced by a dispirited US military, scattered across the Great Plains in small, vulnerable forts. Davis understood the close parallel of frontier and imperialist expansion =

The occupation of Algeria by the French presents a case having much parallelism to that of our western frontier, and affords an opportunity of profiting by their experience. Their practice, as far as understood by me, is to leave the desert region to the possession of the nomadic tribes; their outposts, having strong garrisons, are established near the limits of the cultivated region, and their services performed by large detachments making expeditions into the desert regions as required [Webb,Great Plains:194-5 & ff.]
*1855mr03:Davis had gotten $30,000 from Congress to experiment with camels in TX
*1858:Davis also understood the military-industrial closeness of frontier expansion and the development of railroads. He was the first to propose construction of a railroad to the Pacific Ocean. He considered it a military necessity and thus a government project, that is, it required government subvention (monetary support) of private enterprise. Davis arranged for government survey of 4 possible routes
*--As USA was poised to launch a campaign into the Great Plains against the Native Americans who lived there, it was diverted by the disasters of the great Civil War

<>1857ja26:Russian Emperor Alexander II decree laid out plan for vigorous development of railroads [VSB,3:607]

<>1857my10:1858au02; India | Sepoy Rebellion ushered in brutal year of imperialist war which pitted England against Indian independence movement
*--The rebellion forced abolition of 250-year-old English East India Co. and caused imposition in India of direct administration by imperialist English crown.
*--Termination of the great English mercantilist corporation, followed in a decade by the demise of the Russian-America Company [ID], indicated that a 300-year era of European overseas-corporate economic life was over
*--And all this just as a new breed of trans-national corporation [ID] was about to be born

<>1857oc11:Nagasaki | Putiatin back from China, where he was working to create a new generation of treaties more favorable to Russia than the old Nerchinsk Treaty. He found no word from Edo
*1857oc16:Nagasaki officials decided to move ahead in their dealings with Putiatin, using the Dutch proposal as prototype
*--Week later Putiatin signed similar treaty, w/promise that another port than Shimoda would be opened. USA diplomatic representative Townsend Harris wouldn't accept this plan and proposed to force a greater opening of Japan
*-- Putiatin soon had some imperialist success in China, and Russian imperialist ambitions in Asia mounted as the 19th century wound down
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*--Beasley,MHJ:65

<>1857:1870; In London political exile, the pundit Alexander Herzen was beyond the grip of Russian censorship and free to publish and circulate back in Russia his influential journal of opinion and political news, Kolokol [The Bell] for 13 years, until his death [KMM:165-90 | RRC2,2:321-31 | Excerpts: Edie,1:328-78 | VSB,2:582-4]
*1849:1855; Various Herzen writings [DIR3:271-84]
*1851:Paris | Six years before the appearance of Kolokol, Herzen explained to Europeans that Russia had a long and progressive revolutionary tradition, "Du développment des idées revolutionnaires en Russie" [KMM:158-64]
*--He soon began to issue in serial form one of the great political/intellectual autobiographies of all times, My Past and Thoughts. These memoirs not only shed light on the early history of European socialism and the rise of the Russian intelligentsia [ID] but have become a part of the Russian literary canon
*1851se22:Herzen letter to Michelet [Excerpts = TXT | DIR2:233-54]. Herzen defended Russia from standard west European clichés repeated in Michelet's writing. Herzen insisted, "The time has come to show Europe that they cannot speak about Russia as of something mute, absent, and defenseless". Herzen's critical and radical patriotism, his insistence that Russia was as able as Europe to reach for the better future, and especially his inclination to idealize Russian village political tradition, inspired the "populist" movement. [TXT on the meaning of "obshchina" in Russian political discourse in the 1860s]
*1852:Herzen founded "Free Russian Press". The press issued a stream of information and opinion back into Russia where censorship constrained free expression. These publications were suppressed by Russian officials, but they were read in secret and with enthusiasm both by political opponents of autocracy and by the autocrat himself
*1857fe03:Herzen letter to the novelist Turgenev compared Russia, America and Europe [VSB,3:634-5]
*1858:Herzen wrote of Russia and America: "Both -- from different direction -- reached across awesome expanses, building towns, settlements, and colonies, to the shores of the Pacific Ocean, the ‘Mediterranean of the future’"
*1859:"Russian Germans and German Russians" offered more critique of "West" [VSB,3:635-6]
*1867:Alexander Herzen portrait painted by Nikolai Gay and in Olga's Gallery
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*--Martin Malia,  Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism
*--VRR, ch.1 & ch.3 on Herzen & Kolokol
*--Alexander Kucherov, "Alexander Herzen's Parallel between the United States and Russia", in Curtiss, ed., Essays...:34-47
*--English playwright Tom Stoppard on Herzen [TXT] Review of Stoppard’s dramatic trilogy, “The Coast of Utopia” [TXT]

<>1858:London exile, as a result of unsuccessful radical republican political activism in Italy, provided Guiseppe Mazzini the opportunity to publish a theoretical and political journal, Pensiero ed Azione [Thought and Action]

<>1858:Leipzig | Russian priest and advocate of greater independence of the Russian Orthodox Church from state control and for general church reforms, I. S. Belliustin, published Description of the Clergy in Rural Russia: The Memoir of a Nineteenth-Century Parish Priest [Excerpt= KRR:336-9]
*--The Church, as institution,  was largely put outside the range of tsarist reform planning. The Petrine subordination of church to state [ID] was given little official attention. However, the newly aroused public and energized seminary teachers and students, as well as certain activist clergy (such as Belliustin), subjected the Russian Orthodox Church to critical scrutiny

<>1858my:Russian pundit Nikolai Dobroliubov (-1861), "The Organic Development of Man...." [Raeff3:263-87]; cf. Selected Philosophical Essays (MVA:1956) and 1859:review of Nikolai Goncharov's novel about aristocratic indolence, Oblomov [RRC2,2#28 | DIR3:321-5]
*--In the late 1850s and early 1860s, the monthly journal Sovremennik [Contemporary], in which Dobroliubov and Nikolai Chernyshevskii played leading roles, gained great popularity because of its broad-ranging "muckraking" journalism and advocacy of a "modern" secular, science-based world view. Because of censorship, philosophical, political-economic and social issues had to be disguised as literary criticism
*--Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov: Selected Criticism
*--Chernyshevskii wrote on leading issues in the life of the struggling Russian agrarian order = *1857: "On the Ownership of Landed Property", *1858: "A Critique of the Philosophical Prejudices against Communal Possession" [SLM | Q.PSS#05:357-92]
*--He also developed a deep interest in contemporary European political-economic thought and its efforts to understand the geographically expanding industrial transformation of traditional agrarian civilization, the rise of the historically unprecedented social formation wage-labor. He wrote "Capital and Labor" (1860) [VSB,3:637], and he translated into Russian and extensively annotated John Stuart Mills' principles of political economy [ID].
*--He also wrote engagingly on philosophical issues, as in "The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy" [Edie,2:29-60 | VSB,3:638]
*--Chernyshevskii, Selected Philosophical Essays
*--Chernyshevskii was an outstanding example of the new public intellectual in European life
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*--Wagar on world view of the Russian 1860s [TXT]
*--Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift [short novel lampooned Chernyshevskii and the epoch of Russian positivism]
*--William Woehrlin, Chernyshevsky: The Man and the Journalist
*--N. G. O. Pereira, The Thought and Teachings of N. G. Cernysevskij
*--VRR, ch.5 & ch.6

<>1858my28:China and Russia signed Aigun treaty; 1858je13:Tientsin treaty [DIR2:257-70 | DIR3:296-304]

<>1858au19:Japan, Edo | Putiatin signed 1st Russian treaty of Friendship and Commerce w/Nagai Naomune (1816:1891) Inoue Kiyonao etc. Exchanged ministers and began trade
*--Putiatin later signed 1860no14:Peking treaty with China
*--Putiatin's slow starting, fifteen-year diplomatic mission to China and Japan ended in success
*--Russian-Japanese friendship seemed solid as Japan positioned itself for a great internal transformation, later to have immense impact on its foreign policy = Japanese Meiji Restoration

<>1859:1862; Prussian Ambassador to St. Petersburg court was future architect of German unity, Otto von Bismarck

<>1859:1863; Russian revolutionary situation (the first, lasting 4 years) arose early in the Era of Great Reforms [KRR:430ff | FFS:101-96 (1860:1864 | various petitions etc)]
*--The 1860s have been called "The First Russian Revolutionary Situation" in which Alexander II and his administration could no longer allow themselves to govern as in the past. Serfdom over the long run and the legacy of Nicholas I more recently made the status quo unacceptable even to highest authorities. Significant changes had to be made. The people of Russia, the subjects of the tsar, agreed that significant change was necessary. The situation in which old regime authorities and their subjects agreed on the need for significant change was revolutionary first because authorities and subjects did not agree about what changes needed to be made. Second, state bureaucrats and various social groups were ready to mobilize themselves to promote their conflicting ideas about change. A reforming state machine and a new political opposition clashed =
*--Peasants wanted more land under better conditions
*--Gentry thought they were invited to help design the reform when the tsar asked noble assemblies to form gentry committees to deliberate on serfdom. Some gentry political activists decided to resist reform and others decided to push them to the limit
*--An emerging "civil society" sought political and social reforms well beyond anything the state could accept. A lively new print medium weighed in, from abroad and on the domestic scene
*--Poland rose up in rebellion against Russian rule
*--Political activism of either peasants, gentry, "intelligentsia" [ID], or national minorities were unacceptable to tsarist authorities. Thus tsarist government could not rule as in the past, and Russians agreed, but the people for a brief and intense period of crisis rejected changes proposed by reigning authorities
*--It was a revolutionary situation, but no revolution followed. The state prevailed over peasants with its army; it prevailed over the gentry and the fledgling civil society with harsh police measures and subtle policies of cooptation
*--A second revolutionary situation nonetheless arose 15 years later at the end of the reign of Alexander II
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*--Alan Kimball, "Tsarist State & Origins of Revolutionary Opposition in the 1860s"
*--VRR, ch.4-13 (90-315)
*--Jonathan Daly, Autocracy Under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1855-1905 (1998)

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<>1859:England | Map of London. A remarkable publication year:

*--John Stuart Mill, On Liberty [TXT] [CCC2,2:865-93]
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[W]

*--Samuel Smiles, Self Help; With Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance [TXT]. The second chapter described the personal traits that promoted remarkable success of capitalist/manufacturing leaders, the heroes appropriate to this new industrial age

*--Karl Marx,"Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy" [Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Vorwort)] (the heart of Zur Kritik = indicated [TXT])
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Marx-Engels website

*--Charles Darwin, Origin of Species [TXT] [CCC2,2:625-46 CCC3,2:813-33]
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*--Daniel P. Todes, Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought (O:UP,1989)
*--Alexander S. Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (1988)
*-----------. Science in Russian Culture

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<>1859:1869; Egypt, between Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea | French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps oversaw the ten-year construction of the 100-mile-long Suez Canal. The canal required no locks and was navigable by even the largest ships (minimum of 196 feet wide and 42 feet deep). By 1875, the canal was under English control. Around half of all sea-borne trade between Europe and Asia passes through the canal. On the average, annual traffic level through the first century of the canal was 6000 ships

<>1859:Russian folklorist Aleksandr Afanas’ev published Russian Folk Legends [KRR:391-4]

<>1859fe19:Russia-France treaty of neutrality and cooperation [DIR2:225-6 | DIR3:294-6]

<>1859ap:Caucasus Mountains | Russia rallied in Chechnya and Daghestan after Crimean War. Captured Shamil, exiled him with a Russian title to estates near Kaluga in Russia [pix] [pix]
*--Caucasus Viceroy and commander of the Russian army there, Field Marshal Prince Aleksandr Bariatinskii outlined his vision of Russian imperialism in the Caucasus [VSB,3:607-10] The Great Game heated up
*--In 1870, Shamil was near death and was permitted to travel to Mecca where 1871mr:Shamil died, ending epic that began in 1830fe04

<>1859my01:Saint Petersburg | Anton Rubinshtein founded the Russian Musical Society. Russian cultural figures mobilized to promote the interests of art and the professional artists who created it
*--In this same year several important, nation-wide voluntary societies were formed by a fledgling "civil society": The Literary Fund, the Political-Economic Committees of the Free Economic Society and the Russian Imperial Geography Society, and hundreds of individual Sunday Schools, soon coordinated by a Literacy Committee of the Free Economic Society. One objective was to bring literacy and other appropriate forms of primary education for the first time to the millions of "common folk"
*--A table illustrates growth of voluntary societies into this period = [pix]
*--A second table illustrates ups and downs in the turbulent 1860s = [pix]
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*--Yuri Olkhovsky, Vladimir Stasov and Russian National Culture

<>1859fa:1862; Russian noble assemblies became mobilization centers of rural gentry politics, and they often clashed with official reformers. Provincial gentry committees complained, but the state did not waiver [VSB,3:593-8]

<>1859oc16:oc17; VA Harpers Ferry attacked by a guerilla army led by John Brown(1800:1859de). He expected this act to spark wide-spread slave rebellion. Or did he seek martyrdom in an ill-planned and poorly executed military assault? Reinforcements eventually defeated Brown’s forces
*1859de02:VA Charlestown | John Brown hanged, but not before he handed a prison guard the following prophetic note = “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without verry much bloodshed; it might be done.” [2005my12:NYR:14-17]
*--THESE DRAMATIC EVENTS WERE THE CULMINATION OF A 5-YEAR INTENSIFICATION IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST SLAVERY =


1942:John Steuart Curry: The Tragic Prelude
[Original on the Kansas State House wall, Topeka KS]

*1854:Kansas-Nebraska Act assured that these new territories would not be slave states
*1855:KS Osawatomie | John Brown joined six of his sons and one son-in-law on their claim in the “free-state” KS. He soon was captain of a “para-military” [as we would now say] organization of local “free-soil” Kansans on the border of the slave-state Missouri
*1856my:USA | Missouri “border ruffians” crossed into KS again to harass free-staters. John Brown was determined to attack slavery and all who supported slavery with force. William Quantrill [ID] raided Lawrence KS before the vigilante force, made up of Brown and his sons, could bring relief. Brown’s fundamentalist Calvinism, heavily influenced by the images of Old-Testament prophet-warriors, inspired Brown to wage holy war against slavery. Those who followed him were soon involved in their own border raids. They rode into the claims along Pottawatomie Creek, seizing and killing four pro-slavery settlers (who had no direct role in border raids)
*--Brown subsequently also became involved in the planning of an African-American Republic, but grew tired of political debate = “Talk! talk! talk! That will never free the slaves. What is needed is action -- action.”
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*--David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
*--Merrill D. Peterson, John Brown: The Legend Revisited
*--Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman, Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown

<>1860:Japan | After brief eclipse, Kawaji became Interior Minister (commissioner gaikoku bugyo). In 1867, he committed suicide after Edo Castle, seat of Tokugawa regime, fell to Meiji Restoration forces [noPHandG]

<>1860:Siberia | Vladivostok founded
*1860:Asia (Map of Eurasia showing its Political Divisions and also the various Routes of Travel between London and India, China and Japan), S. A. Mitchell, New General Atlas, 1860. The decorative map includes the Russian Empire, south to India and east to the Philippine and Japanese Islands

<>1860no14:Russia and China signed Peking [Beijing] treaty [DIR2:257-70]

<>1860:Russian Slavophile Aleksei Khomiakov died, leaving rich and influential philosophical/publicistic legacy
*--"On Recent Developments in Philosophy" [Edie,1:221-269]
*--"On Humboldt" [Raeff3:209-29 | KMM:108-112]
*--Russia and the English Church... (LND:1895) [at UW; ORBIS SUMMIT]
*--"On the Western Confessions of Faith" [SUQ:31-70]
*--Excerpts [LDH:89-94]
*--Khomiakov was a leading example of how religious or spiritual vitality in Russia was so often found among secular intellectuals rather than among theologians or church officials
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Books about Aleksei Khomiakov

<>1861:Japan, Hakodate | Russian Orthodox Church founded. The second priest there, Nikolai (1836:1912), was remembered as the founder of Orthodoxy in Japan

<>1861:Ottoman Turkey | Abdul Aziz became Sultan, deep decline. "Capitulations" virtually surrendered Turkish economy to European imperialist powers, particularly to England
*--The English sought internal financial influence and control over the Turks; the Russians drifted toward further war. The Great Game became very complex, involving national financial security
*--This was the eve of the "petroleum revolution" in European industrialization and the appearance of trans-national corporate enterprise to develop that source of energy

<>1861ja28:Alexander II addressed State Council urging firm action to bring serf reform to conclusion [VSB,3:599]
*1861fe19:Russian social/institutional reform of most profound significance, EMANCIPATION of privately owned (gentry owned) serfs
*--English-language Proclamation [TXT] etc. [VSB,3:600-02 | DIR2:271-5 | DPH:282-5 | Page,Russia]
*--Russian Proclamation [TXT]. Obshchee polozhenie... [TXT] [These and others in Russian: RA2:38f, 82f, and 124f]
*--Brief history of serfdom, from its formal establishment to final dismantlement [LOOP on "serf"]
*--A year and a half later, USA began at the national level to emancipate slaves [LOOP on "slave"]
*--Russian peasant songs described village attitudes toward the institution serfdom [Reeder:105-08]
*--Gentry landlord and peasant both had reason to be discontented with the terms of this greatest of the great reforms =

*--Nothing galled Russian villagers more than the immediate fact that freedom did not mean freedom at all for three years of "temporary obligation" to the old landlord master
*1861mr22:Intrior Minister Sergei Lanskoi circular on creation of Peace Arbitrators to facilitate negotiations between gentry and their ex-serfs [VSB,3:602-3] These arbitrators were thought to represent a "civil society" under state sponsorship
*1861ap:Bezdna, a village south of Kazan | Peasant rebellion, caused by uncertainties about emancipation, was crushed by decisive military action [Daniel Field, ed. Rebels in the Name of the Tsar]. More from Rebels
*--More on peasant disturbances among recently "emancipated" serfs, and other forms of mass response to the greatest of the Great Reforms [VSB,3:603-5]
*--Emancipation did not solve the ages-old problem of serfdom, nor did USA emancipation solve the problems caused by slavery, but both great legislative moves brought an end to bound labor in both Russia and USA. [SWH:300-15 contains comparative primary documents, especially petitions from freed serfs and slaves]
*--One of the most important long-term historical consequences of Russian serf emancipation in 1861 was the transformation of an unfree rural soslovie [formally defined social class (ID)] into free village laborers. The imperial state continued to enforce and defend traditional divisions of the imperial Russian population into these five "medieval" sosloviia. And the state pressured peasants to continue to live within traditional village institutions and practices. But in truth, the state wholly remodeled those village institutions and practices along statist lines. The state's own reforms were tearing apart the declining social structure, but at the same time it made strenuous effort to preserve ancient social divisions. Emancipated village laborers in Russia are best not called "workers" or "proletariat" so long as they stayed "down on the farm" and worked the fields. It seems still best to call these post-emancipation villagers "peasants" [peasant LOOP]
*--But some post-emancipation peasants drifted away from village community ways. Those who drifted away contributed to the rise of a new social class, a "laboring class" or "wage-labor". These either hired out their labor in agricultural pursuits or became hirelings in newly appearing industrial enterprises
*--In the 1860s, Russia and USA both were beginning to experience a general European (and soon universal) social/economic novelty, the proletariat. England had been wrestling with this novel challenge for nearly a century. As other nations entered the industrialization process, they too had to confront the challenge, and the challenge intensified in the second half of the 19th century = [labor LOOP]
*--Serf emancipation was the first of the "great reforms", but.....
*--Peasant emancipation in the 1860s was incomplete, and no serious or thorough measures were to follow the initial legislation until the 1906no09:Stolypin land reforms targeted the village foundations of Russian agriculture and, we might say, sought to convert Russian "peasants" into "farmers". [Try this farm LOOP]
\\
*--Kolchin to p47 (p49 = chronology of world-wide emancipation of unfree labor), ch.3:157-191, & Conclusion:359-75
*--Saul,1:312-21
*--Mironov,2:107-142 (social sources of the demise of social/economic bondage)
*--Blum:345-66 describes the serf-owning gentry on the eve of emancipation
*--Blum:575-620 describes emancipation, and concludes his general account of serfdom in Russia
*--Robinson, ch3 (peasants in the last decades of serfdom) & ch4 (gentry landlords on the eve of emancipation)
*--UO website map of Slave crops in the American South
*--Petr Zaionchkovskii, The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia (1978)
*--Roxanne Easley, The Emancipation of the Serfs in Russia: Peace arbitrators and the development of civil society (2009:Routledge)
*--Terence Emmons, The Russian Landed Gentry and Peasant Emancipation (1968)
*--Terence Emmons, ed. Emancipation of the Russian Serfs. Series: European Problem Studies. NYC:1970
*--Daniel Field, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855-1861 (1976)
*--David Christian, Living Water: Vodka and Russian Society on the Eve of Emancipation (1990)
*--Ben Eklof and Stephen Grant, eds. World of the Russian Peasant: Post-Emancipation Culture and Society (1990)
*--Wayne Vucinich, ed. The Peasant in Nineteenth Century Russia (1968)
*--Reginald Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855-1870 (1971)

<>1861ap01(NS 13):1865; USA Civil War lasted four years
*--Newspaper accounts of two Virginia communities [TXT] on the eve of and during the Civil War. Newspaper accounts of the militant rebel against slavery, John Brown
*--Russia sided with the North, England with the South
*1865sp:North Pacific waters, Bering and Okhotsk seas, Siberian coastal waters were the cruising grounds of Confederate naval commander James Waddell aboard his cruiser Shenandoah. His mission = harass Union whalers. This was months after the Civil War formally terminated, but the commander had not been informed of that fact. More on whaling =
*1872:Arctic Sea | A large part of the USA whaling fleet caught in ice and destroyed. Civil War had already damaged whaling industry. The Union purchased many whaling vessels with the purpose of weighting them down with stone and sinking them in Confederate harbors
*1846:1875; Gray Whales nearly exterminated; 11,000 killed in these thirty years
*--The third and most glorious phase of USA whaling was at its end. Whale oil as a vital component of global trade was also at an end of its noteworthy 300-year history [Sanderson,Follow:248-9 argues that whaling had little influence on the course of history. When petroleum came to replace it, “the whole business just petered out without leaving any outstanding imprint on the world” (249) Surely he exaggerates]
*--A new age of petroleum was dawning, and with it a new age of energy politics. Value of whale oil fell, though the value of baleen remained high. Thus, the herds were slaughtered and left to rot with only baleen extracted. Several whale species were nearly extinguished as the 19th century wound down
\\
*--[W]
*--Saul,1:322-85

<>1861jy04:Russian great reforms included a new vodka tax-farm system (Polozhenie o piteinom sbore and other financial reforms [RA2:144f and 191f])

<>1861se:Saint Petersburg | Circulation of revolutionary proclamation "To the Young Generation" [VSB,3:639] The swift arrest and exile of one author, Mikhail Mikhailov, could not be mentioned in the legal press. All efforts to do so were censored = [pix]
*--Soon student disturbances forced officials to close most universities. Herzen advised "Go to the people!" [VSB,3:636]
*--"civil society" was getting impatient, increasingly ready for bold action just months after the great serf emancipation [ID]. Over the next half century, Russians came to view expressions of discontent within universities and other institutions of higher learning as a sensitive barometer of wider, educated public opinion

<>1861de05:1862fe; Russian gentry in their noble assemblies deliberated on the problem of serf emancipation [FFS:103-113]
*1862fe:Tver gentry assembly issued a most visionary (radical) address to Emperor Alexander [FFS:104-5].. Especially noteworthy is its concentrated assault on the evils of the enforced social/service hierarchies (the superannuated medieval social estates and the bureaucratic structures created by the Table of Ranks [i.e., soslovie and chin]. Elite resistance failed, but continued to inspire social-political activists for decades to come [EG]
*--The futile and grand initiative in Tver harmonized with the views of many Russian gentry landowners and with the emerging urban civil society

<>1862ja25:1863my; Russian peasants submitted petitions [FFS:170-179]

<>1862fe:Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev published Fathers and Children [or Sons]. Here Turgenev offered his famous definition of "nihilist" in chapter five [TXT] [TXT] [TXT] [cf. DIR2:298-302]
*--Eugene Schuyler’s 1867 translation marked beginning of more than a decade of mutual Russian-USA cultural fascination [GO 1958:Brussels for another such epoch]
   Other works by Turgenev of particular cultural/historical significance =
*--Sportsman's Sketches [TXT] [or Hunter's Notebook, etc.] (1852:several editions)
*--Rudin [TXT] (1855) a portrait of a "superfluous gentleman" or rootless intelligent, probably modeled largely on Mikhail Bakunin [ID]
*--Smoke (1867) hinted at east European revolutionary movements
*--Virgin Soil [TXT] (1876) based on populist revolutionary movement of the day [ID]
*--Perhaps not the most profound Russian author of the Golden Age, Turgenev nonetheless made an imprint on readers
\\
*--Julicher: chapter 9
*--Saul,2:167-213, 225-31
*--Victor Ripp, Turgenev's Russia, from Notes of a Hunter to Fathers and Sons (1980)

<>1862fe05:fe16; Nikolai Chernyshevskii wrote one of his most important political/theoretical pieces, Unaddressed Letters [SLM | Q.PSS#10:90-116] [MER 44 246 256 272 277]

<>1862sp:Mysterious fires burned large sections of Petersburg, causing wide-spread panic and providing a pretext for harsh state action against social activists

<>1862my:Revolutionary proclamation "Young Russia" written by the headlong student radical of gentry background, Petr Zaichnevskii [VSB,3:639-41 | ??Rooney,RRe]
*--Another proclamation appeared in these days which was very different from Zaichnevskii's = Chernyshevskii composed "Salute to the Gentry-owned Peasants from their Well-wishers..." [Kimball resumé of contents | Russian TXT]
\\
*--VRR

<>1862my20:USA Homestead Act [TXT] [TXT with commentary] opened vast public lands to emigrants willing to put down roots and make a life for themselves farming. Industrial mechanization of farming was making remarkable progress [pix]
*1862jy02:Morrill Act [TXT] eventually created 69 state colleges
*1862jy01:USA Pres. Lincoln signed Pacific Railway Act, approving an act of Congress which was anticipated by the Homestead Act and proposed "to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean."

Section 3 of said act provided "that there be, and is hereby granted to the said company * * * * every alternate section of public land, designated by odd numbers, to the amount of five alternate sections per mile on each side of said railroad, on the line thereof, and within the limits of ten miles of each side of said road, not sold, reserved, or otherwise disposed of by the United State, and to which a pre-emption or homestead claim may not have attached, at the time the line of said road is definitely fixed." Mineral lands were exempted, and all lands not sold or disposed of by said company within three years after the completion of the entire road were to be subject to settlement and pre-emption, like other lands at a price not exceeding $1,25 per acre, to be paid to said company.

Section 4 provided that whenever said company completed forty consecutive miles of any portion of said railroad, the President of the United States should appoint three commissioners to examine the same, and report to him in relation thereto; and upon satisfactory information to him of the completion of forty miles, patents should be issued conveying the right and title to said lands to said company, on each side of the road, as far as the same was completed, to the amount aforementioned; and patents were in like manner to be issued on the completion of each forty miles

Section 5 provided that in addition to the issuance of patents to lands to the company upon the completion of each forty miles, the Secretary of the Treasury was also to issue to said company, bonds of the United States of $1,000 each, payable in thirty years after date, bearing six per cent per annum interest, to the amount of sixteen of said bonds per mile for such section of forty miles; and to secure the repayment to the United States of the amount of said bonds, together with all interest thereon which may have been paid by the United States, the issue of said bonds and delivery to the company were to constitute a first mortgage on the whole line of the railroad, together with the rolling stock, fixtures and property of every kind and description

The act specified the official charge to the newly formed Union Pacific Railroad and all of its subsidiaries
*1864:A second railroad act followed
\\
*--[W]
*--20th century revival of homestead concept [W]

<>1862je06:China suffered further refinement of open ports and cities arrangements at the hands of England, Russia, France, and the Netherlands
*--Two decades later, a new imperialist power, Japan, upset the balance among those that fed on China, and those old imperialist powers in any event were themselves growing restless with the status quo in the far east
\\
Beasley,MHJ:80

<>1862su:Russian activist members of fledgling "educated public" arrested by the hundreds (e.g., Chernyshevskii and Nikolai Serno-Solov'evich), journals suppressed (e.g., Sovremennik)
*--The Reform spirit was dampened and a fledgling civil society blighted. Consequently, a Russian revolutionary movement was spawned within a newly identified stratum of the Russian population, the "intelligentsia" [ID]
*--That summer witnessed first one then, a few days later, a second assassination attempt on two different tsarist Viceroys in Poland. The second of these targets was Grand Prince Konstantin Nikolaevich, the tsar's "liberal" brother. Terrorism entered the political mix, closely connected at first with the motive of revenge, "eye for an eye". Polish viceroys had approved execution of activist junior officers in Warsaw. [TXT defining "terrorism"]
*--Terrorism began to appear in political pamphlets and actual terrorist acts increased in number over the next twenty years, culminating in this first epoch of political terror in Russia with the assassination of the tsar liberator himself

<>1862se17:1890mr18(NS); German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck guided Prussia and then German Reich in the 27 years after he served in the Russian capital St.Petersburg [DPH:140-55 | DIR2:289-97]. Sometimes called "the Iron Chancellor", he created a nation-state out of political patchwork [MAP] of Protestant, German speaking peoples in north central Europe, under Prussian dominance and with capital in Berlin
*--A few days after he assumed his new post, he delivered a speech with the famous line, "The great questions of the day will not be settled by speeches and majority decisions, but by blood and iron". He transcended much of the political concepts of the post-Napoleon world -- radical, liberal, conservative, reactionary ideologies -- in favor of Realpolitik [practical politics, actual POLITICAL policies]
*1863:1890; For a quarter century, Bismarck managed the Prussian- then German-Russian diplomatic relationship with superb adroitness [DIR3:336-45]
\\
*--Dietrich Geyer, Russian Imperialism: The interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1860-1914
*--[W]

<>1862se22(NS):USA President Lincoln issued his "Emancipation Proclamation" [TXT] [ditto] which set a timetable for freeing slaves in specified locales
*--Eighteen months earlier, Russia emancipated its serfs
*--Problems of slavery were far from settled by this act, but the long history of bound labor in USA was formally at an end [LOOP on "slave"]
*--For Russia, as for USA, the liberation of unfree labor marked the beginning of modern industrial labor movements

<>1863:1864; USA National Banking Act

<>1863:1873; French author of pop-art fiction, Jules Verne (1828-1905) glorified the scientific and engineering potential of the industrial era
*1863:Cinq semaines en Ballon
*1864:Voyage au centre de la terre
*1870:Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
*1873:Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours

<>1863:French artists rebelled against the cultural establishment when they opened an exhibit, "Salon des refusés", comprising works refused for official display. This marked the beginning of the profoundly influential "impressionist" era in European graphic arts, lasting a quarter of a century [W]
*--Some call the epoch that followed the "post-impressionist" era

<>1863ja23:Polish rebellion reached stage of open armed insurrection against Russian imperialism. Polish National Committee proclamation [VSB,3:611-]
*--Polish "freedom fighters" tried to enlist the Russian political opposition into their struggle in a effort to create an uprising in the middle Volga basin. The "Kazan Conspiracy" was designed to create a diversion, perhaps a "second front", forcing Russian authorities to commit resources to suppress both a Polish and a Russian uprising. The Conspiracy was a flop, in part because Russian activists largely refused to be a part of it. The central question was this = are Polish activists after the same things as the Russian activists?
\\
*--Leslie, R. F. Reform and Insurrection in Russian Poland, 1856-1865. London:1963
*--Joseph Wieczerzak, A Polish chapter in Civil War America; the effects of the January insurrection on American opinion and diplomacy
*--VRR, ch.12 about the Kazan Conspiracy

<>1863ja:Russian statist journalist and newspaperman Mikhail Katkov wrote patriotic editorials against Revolution in Poland [DIR2:276-83 | DIR3:312-21]
*--Russian mass media continued to grow in status in Russian intellectual/institutional life [ID]
\\
*--Karel Durman, The Time of the Thunderer: Mikhail Katkov, Russian Nationalist Extremism, and the Failure of the Bismarckian System, 1871-1887 (1988)
*--Michael R. Katz,. Mikhail N. Katkov: A Political Biography, 1818-1887 (1966) [noUO]
*--Louise McReynolds, News Under Russia's Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (1991)

<>1863ap13:Russian Interior Minister Petr Valuev submitted memo on the relationship of state and society, a statist version of "civil society" [Raeff2:122-131] Valuev was a master of political "co-optation", that is, the harnessing of independently mobilized social energy to officially authorized tasks
*--Valuev also led the official assault on the spontaneous public movement to create a nation-wide system of elementary education
*1880s:Ivan Kramskoi portrait of older Valuev in Olga's Gallery
\\
*--Alan Kimball web essay on Valuev and public mobilization in the 1860s

<>1863je18:Russian university reform and other educational reforms [VSB,3:610-11]
*--Russian texts, Obshchii ustav... etc. [RA2:382f, 411f, and 417f]
*--The "great reforms" continued, but notice later official reactionary measures
\\
*--P. Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia
*--Danierl R. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia
*--Abbott Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (1980)
*--Alan Kimball, "Student Interests and Student Politics: Kazan University"

<>1863fa:Russian pundit Chernyshevskii while imprisoned by tsarist authorities published a novel, What Is to Be Done? or What’s to be Done? [latest translation is best] It has been described as an awful novel but the greatest awful novel ever written because of its immense popularity and influence on Russian culture [cf. KMM:141-54]
*--One of the novel’s characters was modeled on the physiologist and psychologist Ivan Sechenov. See Sechenov's Autobiographical Notes and Selected Physiological and Psychological Works (MVA)

<>1864:1866; USA | Second railroad act followed first. Western-Union effort to link USA and Europe via Alaska and Siberia failed when Atlantic cable [pix] eliminated need, but great Atlantic-to-Pacific project moved ahead
*1864fe09:USA government grant to the State of Kansas was accepted and directly transferred to the newly formed Achison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company AT&SF which was driving a line from Kansas to the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston, Texas
*--The end of the Civil War can be taken as the beginning of the era of industrial transformation of the USA economy. Railroads found their way directly into US folk culture, for example the popular folksong "Wabash Cannonball" [TXT]
\\
Saul,1:360-70

<>1864:1876; London was the HQ of The International Workingmen's Association [later known as "The First International"]
*1871:General Rules [DPH:205-7]
*--"Socialism" beginning to take on organized existence in Europe, sometimes in close association with wage-labor, sometimes less close

<>1864wi:Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevskii criticized Chernyshevskii-style materialist philosophy in 1st half of Notes from the Underground [TXT] [cf. Edie,2:240-9]

<>1864ja01:Russian state made significant concessions to provincial and local public and their need for self administration = the "Zemstvo Reform" [VSB,3:613-4 | DPH:285-7]
*--Russian text Polozhenie o guberskikh i uezdnykh zemskikh uchrezhdeniiakh [RA2:212f]
*--This was arguably the second most important "great reform". For one thing, zemstvos became the institutional home of a significant liberal oppositional movement
\\
*--Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich, eds. The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government (Cambridge ENG:1982) [JS6058.Z46, click on title for status]
*--Abbott Gleason, Local Opposition to Autocracy, 1864-1905
*--Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia

<>1864fe19:Polish rebellion treated in part as reform issue. Russian state put through peasant reforms designed in a way to weaken noble elite of Poland [VSB,3:612-13]
*--The most important expression of national independence within the first revolutionary situation was for the time being silenced

<>1864oc29:Russian Foreign Minister Aleksandr Gorchakov's memo on Central Asia compared Russian imperialism with general European imperialism, that of "all civilized states that come into contact with half-savage nomadic tribes without firm social organization". Like USA, France, Holland and England, Russia felt compelled to establish "a certain authority over its neighbors, whose wild and unruly customs render them very troublesome". Expansion into new territory created another even more remote frontier where yet other "wild and unruly" peoples begin to cause trouble. That forced yet further movement, and then further. The choice was to give up or "advance farther and farther into the heart of savage lands". Russia advanced "not so much from ambition as from dire necessity, where the greatest difficulty lies in being able to stop" [VSB,3:610 | BNE:168-70 | my emphasis] Gorchakov sought to keep Europeans from attacking Europeans as they all responded to the imperatives of the Great Game
*--Compare this argument with the English argument and with an early US argument and a later US argument
*1867 in the Indian city Deoband, near Dehli, local Muslims took action to bring an end to that condition described by Gorchakov as "tribes without firm social organization". They organized themselves against English rule. They centered their activities on the village madrasa, the fundamentalist Islamic school, which emphasized training the young, especially the poor, in fundamentals of the Koran and the sharia (Islamic law). Over the next century and a half, Deoband issued about 250,000 fatwa (instructions on proper Muslim behavior). By the late 20th century, the Taliban, with US help, had become a serious force among Islamic peoples of that region
\\
*--Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia
*--E. Allworth, ed. Central Asia
*----------. Nationality Question in Soviet Central Asia
*----------. Tatars of the Crimea: Their Struggle for Survival...
*--S. Becker, Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924 (Cambridge MA:1968)
*--Richard A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867-1917:A Study in Colonial Rule
*--Serge A. Zenkovsky, ed. Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia. Cambridge MA:1960

<>1864no:USA CO Ft.Lyon area | In good faith, CO Volunteers Colonel Edward Wynkoop convinced Native American Cheyenne tribe to place selves under protection of the US military [Hutton:56]
*--Shortly, Colorado Governor John Evans and the Colorado Volunteers, under the command of John Chivington, attacked the peaceful village and declared a war of extermination against the Cheyenne. The event came to be known as the Sand Creek Massacre and marks the symbolic beginning of several years of warfare on the Great Plains
*--The ambush unsettled the whole territory from the Platte.R south to Red.R
*--Military commander/administrator Philip Sheridan, a well-known Civil War commander now assigned to duties in the war against Native Americans on the Great Plains, later put stress on the importance of this period in his and his nation's life. He referred to it vaguely as the beginning of Indian harassment of settlers and disruption of stage and railroad routes. He made no mention of the Sand Creek massacre [ShePH.vsp,2:282. (03):this number in parentheses records the order in which Sheridan's memoirs accounted these events]
*1864:1870; KS the scene of "Indian troubles" as military shifted its attention from Civil War and occupation of the defeated South in the era of Reconstruction
*1883:Early Kansas historian William Cutler described the era [W]
*1864:1868; KS Ft.Larned | Significant construction of bridges, stone & lumber buildings. Military projects were designed for "protection" of the Santa Fe Trail
*1866:USA Great Plains divided into military administrative units, "divisions", "with a view to controlling the Indians". Division of Missouri was created and put under the command of General Sherman. "Former temporizing" had made Native Americans "confident" & "defiant" [(15) ShePH.vsp,2:297]
*1866:Major General William Hazen, a veteran of the Indian wars even before the Civil War, described his policy outlook: "allot to each tribe, arbitrarily, its territory or reservation, and make vigorous, unceasing war on all that do not obey and remain upon their grounds" [Hutton:43]
*1866su:KS | "military operations" against "hostile tribes" of Native Americans commenced

<>1864no20:Russian legal reform [VSB,3:614-16]
*--Russian text Uchrezh. sudeb. ustanovlenii [RA2:278f]
*--This reform created independent judiciary, trial by jury, the right to legal representation, and a large promise of "rule by law" in civil cases. It extended to recently freed peasant the right to bring suit at court. It also caused large numbers of professionally oriented Russians to become lawyers
*--This was an important moment in the long history of Russian "rule of law" [LOOP on history of Russian "law codes"]
*--More than a dozen years later, the trial of Vera Zasulich confirmed the worse fears of those who opposed this "great reform"
\\
*--Mironov,2:223-365 puts late Imperial law in the broadest Russian historical and social context, reaching back to medieval times
*--Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness
*1981ap:JGO:161-84 | T. Taranovski, "The Aborted Counter-Reform: The Muravev Commission and the Judicial Statutes of 1864"
*--S. Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (NYC:1953)

<>1864de08(NS):Vatican issued Pope Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors" [DPH:233-41], including "Errors about civil society, considered both in itself and in its relation to the Church" [237-9] Other Catholic Church/state documents [DPH:241-5]

<>1865:1869; Russian novelist at the dawn of world fame, Leo Tolstoy (1828:1910) produced his first great novel War and Peace [TXT] Just for fun, try this brief comic-book version of the massive novel = [TXT,part.1] [TXT,part.2]
*--Tolstoy was a central figure of the Russian "golden age" in its late novelistic phase, from the 1850s to the 1880s
*--He outlived his Golden Age, but he was even more widely influential in the Russian "Silver Age" a quarter of a century later
*--His most important writings in this "golden age" =
*--Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1851:1857) while serving in the military in the Caucausus
*--Sebastopol or Tales of Sevastopol (1854), Crimean War battle reportage in the journal Sovremennik
*--Tolstoy on Education (Chicago:1967 [reprint]) [LB675.T6 T63] and very similar translation (as if a close copy) Tolstoy on Education: Tolstoy's Educational Writings, 1861-1862 (Rutherford NJ:1982) [LB675.T6]
*--Anna Karenina (1875:1877)
*--"Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1884)
\\
*--Wagar on the Golden Age of Russia culture [TXT]

<>1865ja11:Moscow noble (gentry) assembly addressed Alexander II with request that he complete the zemstvo reforms "by calling together a general assembly of elected representatives from the Russian land". They presumed that only nobles would elect and be elected. "The nobility has always been the firm mainstay of the Russian throne. Not being officials of the government and not enjoying the rewards that such service brings, doing their duty without remuneration for the benefit of the fatherland and the public order, these men, by virtue of their very position within the state [as elected representatives in a new zemskii sobor], will have the mission of preserving those moral and political principles that are so valuable for the people and so necessary for their true well-being, and upon which rests the structure of the state." However "establishmentarian", the suggestion that a national representative political body ought to be created and that it was a natural fulfillment of Zemstvo institutions shocked officials [VSB,3:616]

<>1865ap06:Russian censorship granted writers, publishers and readers "some degree of relief" in a two-minded reform [VSB,3:616-17]
*--Russian text O darovanii nekotorykh oblegchenii... etc. [RA2:438f and 440f]
*--"Great reforms" continued

<>1865je28:Russian State Council and Interior Ministry reformed laws on Jewish pale, allowing mechanics, distillers, brewers, master craftsmen and artisans in general to live anywhere in the Empire [VSB,3:617-18]

<>1866:Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevskii published Crime and Punishment [TXT]

<>1866ja03:Russian financial reform (Vrem. polozh o kontrol [RA2:204f])
*--The deep need for fiscal and military reform was addressed only late in the process, and then under the influence of an official reactionary mood that arose following an attempt on the life of the tsar =

<>1866mr:Russian terrorist Dmitrii Karakozov tried to shoot Alexander II
*--This was the second blow to civic activism and reform. In "society", revolutionary activities now intensified and went underground. A large body of political activists were "burnt away" by tsarist suppression and fear of serious commitment to conspiracy and revolution, but a small body of largely youthful activists, with "nothing to lose", continued the struggle
*--Among government figures, reactionary officials felt vindicated in their opposition to progressive change. They could now assert that there was a link between reform and terrorism. The pace of "great reforms" slackened
\\
*--Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism
*--VRR, ch.14

<>1866su:USA Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox in Russia [VSB,3:618-20]

<>1866no24:Russian state peasant reform. State peasants represented about half the village population of the Empire. This reform preserved their advantages over ex-serfs recently emancipated from private gentry ownership [VSB,3:620-1]

<>1867:London | Karl Marx, Das Kapital, volume one

<>1867:Paris Universal Exhibition (world's fair)
*--French engineers Léon Droux and Léon Rueff described technological and industrial advancements [BNE:145-6]

<>1867:1876; USA Federal Government imposed Reconstruction Act to administer defeated South for nearly ten years

<>1867mr30:Russia and USA signed treaty selling Alaska to USA [DIR2:284-7]
*--Russian ambitions through Siberia to the New World gave way to ambitions directed south and east from Siberia in the direction of Manchuria and Korea
*--A 120-year Alaska adventure was over for Russia, and the 70-year-old trans-national or trans-oceanic corporation, the "Russian-America Company" was also at its end
*--A grave with Russian inscription next to the Kodiak Russian Orthodox Cathedral [pix]
*--In these years Secretary of State Seward also sought to gain possession of the Virgin Islands, Canadian British Columbia, and Greenland
*--Canada also got many long looks from ambitious USA officials in the time of U.S. Grant’s presidency
*--For decades, Alaska had been filling with a spontaneous stream of immigrants from the "lower 48". This human influx helped convince the Russians that Alaska would someday soon be dominated by American pioneers and should be sold while the selling was good. Then, a half century after the sale, in a time of domestic economic crisis, followed soon by international crisis, the fate of Alaska Territory took another turn
\\
*--Saul,1:185-93, 267-311, 385-96
*--Howard Kushner, Conflict on the Northwest Coast: American-Russian Rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867  (see ch.6: "The Oregon Question and Russian-America")
*2008sp:PNQ#99,2:73-91 | Roxanne Easley, "Demographic Borderlands: People of Mixed Heritage in the Russian American Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, 1670-1870"
*--Stuart Ramsey Tompkins, Alaska: Promyshlennik and Sourdough (1945)

<>1867ap:Vienna | Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph declared the Empire divided into a "Dual Monarchy", the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Joseph maneuvered his empire into position for its final half-century flare, an adventure that ended in the catastrophe of WW1

<>1867ap01:India became Crown Colony as rule of East India Company brought to an end

<>1867my:Moscow | Second Slav Congress a critical moment in the shift of Panslavism from cultural doctrine toward Russian imperialist ideology. National liberation of the "little Slavs" from Ottoman (and perhaps Austrian) imperialist dominion was a useful idea as Russia continued to play its role in the Great Game
\\
*--Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology
*--Donald Fanger, "On the Russianness of the Russian Nineteenth-Century Novel". In Stavrou, Art:40-56
*--Charles Katsainos, The Theory and Practice of Russian Panslavism in the Light of Russia’s Expansion in the Balkans until 1912

<>1867jy20:USA WDC | In anticipation of the 67oc21:Great Council treaty gathering in KS Medicine Lodge, Congress created the Indian Peace Commission
*1867se05:MO St.Louis | General Philip Sheridan left for Ft.Leavenworth
*1867oc21:KS Medicine Lodge | Great Council led to the Medicine Lodge Treaty [W]
*1868ja07:WDC | "Report to the President by the Indian Peace Commission" [TXT]
*1868fe29:KS Ft.Leavenworth | Sheridan took up command of department #3 (of 4) of General William Tecumseh Sherman's Division of the Missouri. Sherman commanded 6000 soldiers in 27 forts. Sheridan thus was reassigned from military administration of Reconstruction in the defeated South to Indian Affairs
*--NB! military shifting around to preserve and protect its budgets from demobilization after the Civil War [EG:In 1868:5th cavalry sent to KS when no longer needed for Reconstruction duty in South (Hutton:50)]
*--Sheridan prepared 6-mo winter campaign
  a) "asked for additional cavalry"
  b) "applied for regiment of Kansas volunteers"
  c) application granted
  d) organization of regiment begun in KS Topeka
  e) gathered supplies
  f) hired guides
*--Sheridan moved his HQ to KS Ft.Hays, now Union Pacific Railroad terminus; good depot for supplies. "Protection of the railroad was Sheridan's primary concern" [Hutton:39] [MAP]
*1868jy:WDC | Congress finally appropriated $500,000, but turned it over not to civilian Indian Agency, but to Sheridan and the military. USA relations with the native nations shifting from civilian to military hands.
*1868jy:WY | The army forced Union Pacific Railroad President Thomas Durant to accept Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge's route for building the railroad further westward. Dodge an old comrade of the Civil War military. All were West Point graduates. US President Grant and General Sherman played a role here too [Hutton:40 lxt]
*1868au:se;KS & CO frontier settlers suffered 79 killed in Indian raids. Now Sheridan began to attack villages in order to scatter Native Americans. Only policy was that Indians "be soundly whipped, and the ringleaders in the present trouble hung, their ponies killed, and such destruction of their property as will make them very poor" [Hutton:38] Sheridan addressed a joint session of TX House and Senate: "These men, the buffalo hunters, have done in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization." [Rister,No Man’s Land:29]
*--Here Sheridan foreshadowed the famous Turner Thesis. He put the matter in the proper context of expanding USA power. Sheridan helps us see that the Turner thesis frames both frontier and imperialist expansion
*1868au:se; MO St.Louis  |General Sherman turned against the Medicine Lodge Treaty which had not in any event been ratified, nor had any of the promised gifts and assistance been given to the Native Americans. Military and civilian authorities were at loggerheads

<>1867au21(NS):North German Confederation's new Reichstag had delegates August Bebel (1840-1913) and Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900), the first socialists so elected

<>1868:1912; Japan entered into industrial modernization in the 44-year era called "Meiji Restoration"
*--Japanese businessmen Fukuzawa Yukichi and Shibuzawa Eiichi gave expression to a new entrepreneurial, industrializing and modernizing ethos [SWH:358-63]
*--Yamagata Arimoto gave expression to a Japanese variation on militant Chauvinism [ID] which was waxing in "The West" in these years [SWH:340-5]
\\
*--Black, Cyril E., et al. The Modernization of Japan and Russia: A Comparative Study

<>1868:1869; Vologda Guberniia, in far NE Russia | Politically exiled philosopher and social theorist Petr Lavrov (1823-1900) wrote Historical Letters [cf. Edie,2:123-69 | VSB,3:650-1]
*--Historial Letters explored the choice which the 19th century seemed to present mankind, a choice between history and science, between "humanities", the record of human experience, and the more universalistic laboratory and math-based ways of knowing. Lavrov came down on the side of history. He sought to counter the hyper-scientism or positivism of Dmitrii Pisarev [ID] and to inspire youth and his older generation as well to the activist life of a "critical-minded individual"
*1856:1866; In the "pre-revolutionary" decade that preceded arrest, imprisonment, exile, and then commitment to revolutionary struggle, Lavrov inspired a whole generation of thinking and reading youth [EG]. He described his philosophy as "anthropologism", in which he emphasized the subjective human (even very individual and experiential) foundations of all knowledge. He had his way of understanding and respecting the materialist view of the world and the dominant "positivist" trends of his century. For that he was sometimes accused of being "eclectic" ["cherry picking" among powerful intellectual trends]. He was an almost pedantic historian of thought. But he once wrote that the phrase "I WANT to know" (with emphasis on willful desire) was the matrix of advanced human consciousness. In his exploration of that insight, he had little by way of pre-planted cherry orchards of thought to pick among. In this way he predicted ways of thinking more common to the century that followed him than to any that had come before
*1870:From NE Russian exile to Paris | Lavrov had given up on receiving a pardon from tsarist officials for the largely trumped up charges brought against him in 1866. He went into political emigration for the final thirty years of his life. As an émigré, Lavrov quickly (and somewhat surprisingly) assumed a position of high moral esteem and editorial responsibility within burgeoning revolutionary movements in Russia
*1869:Nikolai Mikhailovskii (1842-1904), published "What is Progress" [Edie,2:170-98, esp. 177-87]. Mikhailovskii was at the very beginning of a long career in journalism and was much influenced by Lavrov's "subjective sociology". Mikhailovskii was now launched on a career as "public intellectual". He was one of the first to come to maturity in the years in which Russians actually used the word "intelligentsia" [ID]. Like many of his generation, he took inspiration from Lavrov's realistic subjectivism. However, also like many contemporaries, he had only a slight inclination toward Lavrov's eventual full commitment to the cause of revolution. Mikhailovskii remained a moderate supporter -- never "underground" or émigré -- of a progressive political trend that came to be called "legal populism"
*--Continue "populism" LOOP

<>1868:CUBA rebelled unsuccessfully against Spanish version of European imperialism. CUBA and Puerto Rico all that remained of Spanish empire in the New World after the independence revolutions of the 1820s.

<>1868:England, London | Herbert Spencer, Social Statics described a new "social Darwinism" with emphasis on "natural selection" and the beneficial results that came from "the survival of the fittest", not just out there in the animal and vegetable world but also in the social world of humans. Social Darwinism influenced anti-welfare and anti-egalitarian politics around the globe and gave an intellectual justification for some of the suffering that resulted from "laissez-faire" policies [CCC2,2:727 CCC3,2:834]
*--This was not the intention of the biologist Darwin, but the science had become an "ism" = DarwinISM
*--Nor was it Spencer's explicit intention, but popularizations of his teachings also fed into growing racism of the late 19th century
\\
Rimlinger [TXT] offers a paragraph on social Darwinism

<>1868:Russian pundit Dmitrii Pisarev drowned
*--Pisarev wrote "Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism" (1861), "Bazarov" [a powerful review of Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Children"] (1862), "Flowers of Innocent Humor" (1864), "The Realists" (1864) [VSB,3:641-3] See Edie,2:66-108, and Pisarev, Selected Philosophical, Social and Political Essays (MVA:1958)
*--Described USA [Plotkin,Pisarev:35f]

<>1868se01:Switzerland | Russian political émigré in western Europe, the anarchist activist Mikhail Bakunin wrote "Our Program" for the revolutionary journal Narodnoe delo [People's Cause] [VSB,3:644]. The movement that gathered around this volatile and now revived old activist and his publication was a clear sign that the poet Nikolai Nekrasov was right when he predicted that the policies of the tsarist state bred revolutionists, not citizens
*--In 1868, with Sergei Nechaev, Bakunin wrote "Catechism of a revolutionary" [Full English TXT | full Russian TXT |  excerpts = DIR2:301-8 | VSB,3:649 | cf. Edie,1:385-423]
*--A website on Bakunin. featuring many of his writings
*--More Bakunin bibliography
*--Years earlier, Bakunin caught European attention during the Revolution of 1848 [ID], spent time in Siberian exile, escaped, and more recently rose to prominence in the First International [ID]
*--Now in the final eight years of his life Bakunin began for the first time to have some influence on social movements in Russia in the era of revolutionary populism here on the eve of the great "going to the people"
\\
*--VRR, ch.2 on Bakunin and ch.15 on Nechaev

<>1868no26:USA Oklahoma Territories, Washita River | General George Custer launched surprise winter-season attack on large Native American village [W] [MAP]
*--The four-year Great Plains wars were drawing to an end
*--Superior logistical strength and a firm resolve to wage aggressive war against all aspects of Native American life were paying off for Euro-American invaders.
\\
Hutton:56-76, 99-100 summarizes the Washita winter war with special emphasis on lessons applied there from the Civil War, for example, from the bombardment of civilian targets in Vicksburg

<>1869:1895; Central Asia | Turkmen territories absorbed into Russian Empire
*--West of the Black Sea, Balkan tensions mounted and Russian-Turkish relations deteriorated as the focus of the Great Game shifted to south-eastern Europe

<>1869:English political-economist John Stuart Mill, "The Subjection of Women" [TXT]
*--John Stuart Mill was the last representative of the century-long "classical economist" tradition, and he carried that liberal tradition a great distance toward emerging European social-democratic views

<>1869:French democrat Leon Gambetta running for election asked electors to draw up a program for him to follow if elected. Belleville Program became a model for French democratic politics for years [DPH:309-10]

<>1869:Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834-1907) stated his "periodic law" of the elements and laid the foundation for much of the rapid progress that followed in the study of chemistry around the world
*--In that same year, pundit Nikolai Danilevskii, published his Russia and Europe [Excerpts=KMM:195-211 | DIR2:328-37 | DIR3:372-82 | RRC2,2#33]
*--Danilevskii compared USA and Russia [KMM:207-8]
*1888:Vladimir Solov'ev critique of Danilevskii [KMM:214f | also VSB,3:731]
\\
*--R. E. MacMaster, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher

<>1869su:Russian émigré revolutionist Sergei Nechaev wrote program for his revolutionary journal Narodnaia rasprava [People's Vengeance] [VSB,3:647]
*--The extraordinarily rebellious 22-year-old Nechaev was, in a sense, adopted by the 55-year-old Bakunin. Bakunin had an international reputation, but his contact with actual Russian politics had until these years been very theoretical and tangential. He now welcomed even this darkly sinister Nechaev. Together, they conspired to gain control over the resources that had allowed Herzen's highly esteemed Kolokol [ID] to be published. Together, Bakunin and Nechaev introduced the element of extreme revolutionary conspiracy and life-dedication, "revolutionary professionalism", into Russian populism
\\
*--Julicher: chapter 9

<>1869au:German Marxists rejected Lassalle's radical reformist approach to labor organization with its close ties to the Bismarckian state. They formed an independent Social-Democratic Workers Party [Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei] and ratified its Eisenach Program [DPH:155-6]
*--In these years, national workers movements were strengthened by association with an international labor organization, the First International
*--Now, in Germany, a political party for the first time based itself on the new social formation, wage-labor
*--In Russia this year, Nikolai Flerovskii [Bervi-Flerovskii] published his Condition of the Working Class in Russia [LDH:253-8]. Bervi-Flerovskii captured the imagination of the Russian reading public with his reportorial precision and his moral indignation as he described rural, suburban and urban labor conditions
*--Karl Marx was learning to read Russian so that he might make himself directly familiar with a new generation of Russian social critics, including Flerovskii. Marx was beginning to see that he had so far neglected or misunderstood the global meaning of rural wage-labor in un-industrialized or agrarian "modes of production" such as Russia but also such as in much of the non-European industrializing world

<>1870:Saint Petersburg Association of Russian Playwrights formed with Aleksandr Ostrovskii as president
*--Also, the Peredvizhniki or "Itinerants" or "Company of Itinerant Art Exhibits" formed. See, e.g., Arkhip Kuindzhi's landscape "After the Storm" [Posle grozy] 1879
*--A Century of Russian ballet : documents and accounts 1810-1910
*--Aleksandra A. Orlova, Musorgsky's days and works: A biography in documents Cf. 1859my01
\\
*--Alain Besançon, "The Dissidence of Russian Painting" in CSH:381-411
*--Richard Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia: As Preached and Practiced in the 1860s
*--Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: The State and Society; the Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition

<>1870:Japan, Tokyo Kyoto Nagasaki and Hakodate. ??ROchx missions estab in JPN. Archbishop Nikolai(861:GO) est. TOK smnandscl. 1st JPN blt svt and ikon specialists
\\
*--Togawa"Russian and Slavic:6
*--KEJ,6:3-4

<>1870:USA | About 32 nation-wide labor unions were in existence. Workers were organizing themselves in the face of forceful resistance of industrialists and financiers, and their political allies. Self-organized wage-laborers, represented a check and balance on "capitalists" and their own self-organized economic interests

<>1870:1899; Mature international grain trade fully operational. This and the appearance of international energy competition are signs that the epoch of "the second industrial revolution" was opening
*--In addition to earlier corporations -- Bunge, Louis Dreyfus [family name with dash, company without], and Pillsbury -- several more great global grain-trading family corporations formed in these years = Cargill, General Mills, Continental, 1877:Switzerland | Georges André
*1870:USA | William Cargill began to buy grain elevators
*1871:USA railroad connected Minneapolis with eastern markets
*1871:An air-puff purification process made flour whiter
*1874:Russia ceased to be the main source of grain for England
*1878my02:Minneapolis | Washburn Mill exploded. Built new mill with stolen Hungarian mill technique, able to mill hard grains
*1880:Global grain-trade routes thickened and extended themselves vigorously in the late 19th and 20th centuries [maps]
*1883:Liverpool grain market allowed trading in “futures” | Very quickly grain exchange “clubs” or “rings” became active in the London “Baltic Mercantile and Shipping Exchange” | The Baltic Exchange was founded over a hundred years earlier (1746), but now economic modernization, especially the growth of industrial urban centers, with huge non-agricultural populations, “democratized” bread production and created a need to feed swelling factory-labor populations. The astonishing growth of the urban population in England created a novel situation in which England was no longer able to produce sufficient agricultural product on the island to feed it exploding population. The grain-trade was becoming a trans-national corporate enterprise
*1880s: world grain trade concentrated in USA, Russia, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and India
*1875:Minneapolis produced   850,000 barrels of flour; profit =  $0.50/barrel
*1885:Minneapolis produced 5,000,000 barrels of flour; profit = $4.00/barrel, but power shifting to big grain dealers who were able to handle world-striding storage and transportation
*1886:Minneapolis | Frank Peavey built world’s largest grain terminal [W#1] [W#2] [W#3] | More about grain elevators, with pix at bottom = [W#4]
*1890s:Russian branch of Louis Dreyfus grain trade managed by the founder’s son, Charles, in the Black Sea ports
*1895:OR Portland | Frank Peavey built a one million bushel grain elevator and shipped wheat down the Pacific coast, then overland at the Isthmus of Panama into the Caribbean Sea and across the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool, England
*1899:MN Minneapolis | Peavey constructed 80-foot high concrete grain elevator
*1870:USA grain export =   $60,000,000
*1898:USA grain export = $200,000,000
*1900s:Russian tsar invited Peavey’s son-in-law to visit
*--GO 1972su:USA-USSR

<>1870je16:Russian urban reform promoted municipal self administration [VSB,3:621-2], expanding upon the Charter for the Towns of Catherine II [ID]
*--Russian text Gorodovoe polozhenie... [RA2:232f]
*--Just as self-administration was apparently promoted now in the countryside (Zemstvo institutions of self-administration), so also in the cities, in growing modern urban centers
*--Only one "great reform" remained to be instituted
\\
*--Hausmann,G

<>1870jy:1871fe; Franco-Prussian war broke out. France humiliated [DPH:200-205]

<>1870jy18(NS):Rome, Vatican City | The Papal See of the Catholic Church handed down a pronouncement on the infallibility of the Pope [DPH:243]

<>1870se04:French Third Republic declared as Louis Napoleon III fell in disgrace [DPH:310-11]
*--Two dark decades in French political life came to an end; but what followed was not all light =

<>1871fe26(NS):France, in the great French national monument, the Versailles Palace near Paris | Treaty signed ending Franco-Prussian war
*--German Kaiser [emperor, German version of Caesar, just as "tsar" is the Russian form] crowned at Versailles. NB! this is in France, the great palace of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the location was an intentional insult to the humiliated France of Napoleon III
*--A united German imperial state was now created [MAP] [compare with MAP of Germany before union]
*--Kaiser Wilhelm I (King of Prussia) offered views on the new united German imperial throne [DPH:262-3]
*--Otto von Bismarck was the man behind the throne
*--Prussian kingdom grew to great power over the previous century
*--Prussian kingdom survived a stormy half century since the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire
*1871fe:1918no; For 47 years, the Prussian kingdom now provided the backbone for a new north-central European German Empire (the "Second Reich"). German-speaking peoples now lived in and dominated two great states = Germany and Austria
*1888:Upon Kaiser Wilhelm I’s death, Wilhelm II assumed the throne
*1918no09:At the end of World War One, the Hohenzollern monarchy collapsed and the "Second Reich" evaporated. Fifteen years later came the "Third Reich"

<>1871:English biologist Charles Darwin published Descent of Man [excerpts = PWT2:227-] in which he stated boldly, "The main conclusion here arrived at, and now held by many naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly organized form." All biological observations, he wrote, "point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor". He also stated bluntly that the educated person "cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation".
*--Over more than a decade, Darwin published his thoughtful and extraordinarily systematic observations. The reading public found it easy to carry this science to into realms of emotional social/political debate [ID], and Darwin did not always resist the temptation to join this debate

<>1871:1872; Fedor Dostoevskii caricatured Russian revolutionists and their soft-headed allies in his novel The Possessed [cf. Edie,2:240-66]

<>1871sp:Russian Mennonites (German speaking Protestant farming peoples who had lived in Russia for a century) initiated plans to migrate to USA
\\
Saul,2:75-85

<>1871mr18:my28; Paris Commune declared the French capital independent from Third Republic France. Lasted about 9 weeks before army crushed it resolutely | [W] [DPH:311-17]
*1871ap19:Declaration [BNE:140-3]
*--International Workingmen's Association in an uproar
*1876:Paris | Prosper Lassagaray published History of the Paris Commune of 1871

<>1871je:Russian Education Minister Dmitrii Tolstoi introduced counter-reform measures only seven years after progressive reform of higher education [ID]. His goal was to block entrance into universities for all but privileged social formations whose children went through the elite gymnasia. Tolstoi's "classical" education emphasized Orthodox theology, Greek and Latin. These three topics took up about half of all instruction time [VSB,3:622-4]
*--Compare the new elitist Russian elementary and secondary requirements with the knowledge emphasized in a contemporary but more democratic educational system. Try this Kansas public-school eighth grade graduation exam in 1895. (This exam might possibly also provide a comparison of democratic public education in 19th-century USA with what it had become by the early 21st century)
\\
*--Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (1989)
*--James C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia (1979)
*--Allen Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dmitry Tolstoi (1973)

<>1871fa:1872wi; Russian Grand Duke Aleksei (son of Alexander II) visited USA and, among other things, hunted Buffalo with General George Custer in Kansas. Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, more recently commander of prairie Indian Territory, returned the visit
\\
Saul,2:54-75

<>1872:1874; German state in struggle with Catholic Church, the Kulturkampf [DPH:245-50]

<>1872:1883; German composer Richard Wagner created theatre (Festspielhaus) in Bayreuth, Bavaria, where annual music festivals allowed for the first time proper staging of his massive and revolutionary operas

<>1872:Japan, Hakodate | First Russian language schools established. Russian psalmist Vissarion L'vovich Sartov and Japanese assistant taught languages, math, geography and history in Russian.
\\
Togawa"Russian and Slavic:5

<>1872:International Workingmen's Association [First International] collapsed. Titanic struggles between German-born political-economist Karl Marx and Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin neutralized the eight-year old organization
*--European, largely French activists, followers of peasant-born anarchist Pierre Proudhon, also added their contentiousness to the mix
*--Administrative HQ of the international organization transferred to USA NYC and finally disbanded in 1876
*--Twelve years later, in Paris, Second International founded

<>1872:USA Senate rejected USA Presidential plan to build a military base in Samoa Islands

<>1872de:Zurich | If the venerable rebel Bakunin was revived in this new era of revolutionary opposition [ID], 47-year-old Petr Lavrov, ex-artillery Colonel, ex-professor of mathematics, and aspiring philosopher of notable promise, was now "reborn" as revolutionary ideologist. He accepted a new personal mission, émigré revolutionary publicist. He wrote "Our Program" for his Russian revolutionary journal Vpered! [Foreward] [VSB,3:651]
*--The era of Herzen [ID] was over, and now Lavrov and Bakunin became ideological rivals within Russian revolutionary populist circles in the era of the "Going to the People"
\\
*--VRR, ch.17 on Bakunin and Lavrov

<>1873:Tokyo | School of Foreign Languages included Russian. ??NB! TOK.unv excluded Russian, showing stt comparative indifference to Russia. Prior to Meiji, 6 samurai svt gt.Russia to std; 868:rtr.JPN and fade away, while std frm zpd and USA bcm sig Meiji srv. BUT this scl hired Mechnikov, Lev (ppl and Ntx1) and one of Russian samurai Ichikawa Bunkichi
\\
Togawa"Russian and Slavic:6-7

<>1873:USA PA Pittsburgh | Scottish-born immigrant Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was now eight years into a brilliant career as industrialist, concentrated on building a colossal steel manufacturing enterprise
*--During the US Civil War, he served as a War Department railway division bureaucrat. He instantly saw an industrial future opening before him. Inspired by his war-time procurement experiences, in 1865 he entered the steel business. Victory of the North in the American Civil War and an associated industrial productivity boom launched the careers of several of the most famous entrepreneurs of modern history, including Andrew Carnegie
*--Pittsburgh PA was the base of operations for future internationally connected billionaire financier Andrew Mellon (1855-1937)
*--Mellon’s father, Thomas, who laid the foundations of the family fortune, wrote an autobiography = Thomas Mellon and His Times
*--In the boom years after the Civil War, Andrew Mellon built mightily on his father’s fortune, concentrating on banking, coal, oil, railroads, public utilities, steel, aluminum, and eventually in the aviation industry. He showed a masterly control of diverse but vertically integrated economic enterprises, and he understood the central role of finance capital (positioning the manufacturing process itself, and certainly labor, in a position subordinate to financial profit considerations), but he also understood the role of governmental power and the sometimes shady political manipulation of the “free market”. The market he worked in cannot be described as altogether “free”, or laissez-faire, or simply entrepreneurial. Mellon was an active supporter of the pro-business and bribe-prone Republican-Party political machine in Pennsylvania
\\
*--David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life

<>1874:1875; Russian "Going to the People" movement [RRC2,2:344-57] Russian revolutionary populist movement intensified.  This was one of the most spontaneous and dramatic confrontations in all of Russian history between urban elites and the laboring folk in villages and factories
*--By the hundreds, Russians -- mainly college-age youths -- fanned out into the countryside to learn about peasant life but also to educate peasants about their best interests, to encourage peasant mobilization for causes presumed to be popular. These causes were, for certain, dear to radical youth, but were they dear to villagers? Some of these crusaders settled into village routine for a period, but others were repelled by the hostility or indifference of villagers. Nonetheless, the center of attention within democratic circles remained still peasants
*--Officials were deeply alarmed. Authorities had always controlled and restrained spontaneous "inter-soslovie" intercourse. Official policy prevented anything like a "public sphere" to evolve within the tightly restricted social/service hierarchies [ID]. Now thousands of city folk broke with conventional practices and spilled out into wage-labor work environments and into the countryside to mix with and open conversations with the narod [the Russian people; laboring folk]
*1873oc:Young urbanite spoke with construction workers about their plight (as remembered during interrogation after he was arrested) [TXT]
*1875:Justice Minister Konstantin Pahlen reported that his investigation of the "Going to the People" [ID just above] had so far turned up 770 activists from all "strata" of imperial society, active in 37 provinces. And these were just the ones snared in official investigations. The failure of students and others to adhere to assigned roles defined by their "stratum" appeared to Pahlen to be a symptom of wide moral decay. Pahlen was shocked to report that students shed themselves of their university uniform, the outward sign of their stratum, and that they took on the garb of villagers as they attempted to mix freely with them. One soslovie imitating another and unauthorized socializing by any group were illegal in Russia. Pahlen emphasized the broad sympathy for this movement among all strata of Russian society. He expressed amazement that "many persons no longer young, fathers and mothers of families, who enjoy material security and a more or less  honored social position, not only failed to oppose the young people but, on the contrary, often gave them open encouragement, help, and support". In Pahlen's view, these folks seemed not to understand that this movement to the people threatened the very foundations of Russian life
*--Activists among the folk distributed illegal books and other publications by Russian émigrés abroad [VSB,3:654-6]
*--The most characteristic Russian "ideological" trends in this epoch were associated with Petr Lavrov, Mikhail Bakunin (with Sergei Nechaev [ID]), and Petr Tkachev. These pundits, ideologues and theorists have been lumped together under the term "populism". The term is fine so long as we remember that the central concept was radical rural egalitarianism with a good dash of late-nineteenth-century socialism. Populism [narodnichestvo] was an "ism" based on "the people" [narod, with is wide implications of "nation", "the people", "peasants" | TXT on the word "narod"]
*--Populists were democrats in so far as they put their faith in the possibility that the Russian "people" were in a position to shape their own better future. Not all populists saw things that way. Some populists veered from democracy when they pondered the possibility that the people might need the guidance of an advanced "minority" -- an "intelligentsia" [ID]. Even when it was not always democratic, even when it veered toward managerial elitism, Russian populism remained at heart radical rural egalitarianism and in stark opposition to Russian social/service traditions. Populists put a lot of faith in the progressive implications of a pre-modern, pre-industrialized, largely rural population. Villagers represented a promise every bit as bright as -- maybe brighter than -- that of any other European people. Why should one presume that labor ghettos in the big industrialized cities were better able than the Russian village to produce citizens of a wholly transformed future egalitarian and socialist world. Populists put a lot of faith in the narod, but they also put a lot -- maybe a lot more -- faith in themselves as an active ingredient in a new social mixture, a new free socialization among all the people [obshchenie (ID)]
*--In the early years, populists received much intellectual guidance from the émigré publications of Alexander Herzen [ID]. But Herzen was now dead. Mikhail Bakunin and Petr Lavrov sought to replace him as inspirational theorists and publicists. These two did not quite reach Herzen's level, but they were important émigré revolutionary leaders with Europe-wide reputations. Bakunin died in 1876, bringing and end to a spotty but unforgettable three decades of revolutionary activity. His influence continued in Russia and abroad. Lavrov occupied a place of esteem in the minds of thinking and fighting Russians (and these were not always the same people) for another quarter of a century, living in émigré poverty and misery, until his death in 1900, ending more than four decades of widely various public advocacy. Lavrov's influence continued into the 20th century
*--Petr Tkachev's influence on events back in Russia was different from that of Lavrov, Bakunin and Herzen, but like these others, Tkachev exerted his influence from a distance
*--Just as Justice Minister Pahlen sensed, much of the energy of the epoch flowed from cultural sources far broader and indigenous than the ideological publications of pundits in west European emigration, broader even than the small and harassed home-bred oppositional movement. For some time, an intense nationalistic self-consciousness had attached itself to "the folk" [narod] and flourished in Russia in a generalized atmosphere of dissent against the established and seemingly foreign or "un-Russian" autocratic order
*--For the second time in Russian history, a wide debate arose on the virtues and shortcomings, but mainly the virtues, of the peasant village assembly [mirskoi skhod], the communitarian practices associated with "mutual assurance" [krugovaia poruka -- almost always and misleadingly translated as "collective responsibility" (ID)]. The first epoch of such debate was in the 1830s and 1840s [ID]
*--Russian peasants lived in an unusually ancient and traditional environment where very old European community practices survived as nowhere else. These timeless Russian peasant practices seemed capable of serving as a foundation for the construction of that bright egalitarian future that so many 19th-century Europeans -- and not only Russians -- expected just around the corner. Traditional agrarian ways in Russia, however, also included a whole set of primitive agricultural practices -- strip farming, three-field system, periodic redistribution of land-holding responsibilities among village households. Redistribution seemed a bit like "socialism", but it also functioned as a sort of "temporary private property", in which households held land as if their own. [TXT on these village land practices]
*--Hop to this page of portraits and other contemporary visual representations of peasant/village life
*--BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES ON THE POPULIST ERA
*--The great "going to the people" originated six years earlier but was now being transformed, in part by state action, into resolute revolutionary conspiracy. The tsarist state arrested hundreds of these youths and eventually brought the most vulnerable to trial. As the political struggle of the Russian state with radical political opposition intensified, the populist movement back in Russia took a turn toward terrorism. Efforts at close contact with peasants and other working folk slackened
\\
*--VRR, ch.18 on the group conventionally called "Chaikovtsy" and the movement "to the people"

<>1874:1896; German historian and "chauvinist" ideologist Heinrich von Treitschke dealt with the contradictions between individual freedoms and national unity [ID] by shifting increasingly in the direction of militaristic and nationalistic "chauvinism". He inspired a war-fever even in the final years of the great and peaceful European 19th century with his influential "Politics" [BNE:143-5 | CCC3,2:989-1004 | PWT2:258-60]
*1882:French intellectual, who had been a serious Germanophile prior to the Franco-Prussian War, turned against Germany, but stopped short of affirming French nationalism in ethnic or racists terms. In a famous article, "What is a Nation?", he emphasized group action together, the vast community of national accomplishment. He also cautioned that a nation can remember its glories, but it also has to learn how to think about (perhaps forget) its atrocities [RWP2:281-91]

<>1874:China accepted Japanese control of Ryukyu Isl

<>1874:Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev published The Crisis of Western Philosophy
\\
*--Wagar on Solov'ev [TXT]

<>1874:USA, Kansas, Howard Co., Cedar Vale | Wm. Frey (Geims) headed up a Progressive community, a populist commune = Russkaia obshchina [Hasty:54-82]
*--KS prairie described by Grigorii Machtet [Hasty:16-53]
\\
Saul,2:213-25

<>1874:USA | John Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, influenced American religious thinkers with his harmonization of Christian faith with the Darwinian concept of evolution with its social corollary "Social Darwinism"
\\
*--Wagar on Fiske [TXT]

<>1874ja01:Russian military reforms instituted universal military service [VSB,3:625]
*--Russian text Ustav o voinskoi povinnosti [RA2:338f]
*--War Minister Dmitrii Miliutin reflected on rise of reactionary attitudes among high officials = "What an amazing and lamentable comparison with the situation as it was when I entered the top echelons of the government thirteen years ago [1860]! Then everything surged forward; now everything drags back. Then the sovereign was sympathetic to progress, he moved things forward himself; now he has lost confidence in everything he himself created, in everything that surrounds him, even himself"  [VSB,3:624-5]
*--Military reforms were the last of the "great reforms" actually implemented
*--Seven years passed without further reforms. The tsarist state was turning away from reform and toward reaction. Then, one crucial but belated and still-born reform gesture was made on the very eve of Alexander II's assassination

<>1875:1876; Central Asian Uzbek territories conquered by Russia
*1876:Kirghiz people next

<>1875:Japan and Imperial Russia in tense negotiations. Japan took northern Kuril Islands in exchange for dropping claims on Sakhalin Island
\\
*--G. A. Lensen, "Japan and Tsarist Russia: Changing Relationships, 1875-1917". JGO 10 (1962):337-48
*--B. H. Sumner, Tsardom and Imperialism in the Far East and Middle East, 1880-1914. London:1942

<>1875:Russian revolutionist in exile, Petr Tkachev published his revolutionary journal Nabat [Tocsin; the alarm bell] [VSB,3:656 | LDH:286-93]
*--Tkachev was the first "populist" [ID] to express a strong critique of rural native tradition and to call for a greater leadership role from a dedicated "intelligentsia" [ID]. Tkachev was less interested in egalitarian or democratic obshchenie [ID] than he was in effective command and control of a national assault on the Russian old order. Tkachev urged tighter organization and more decisive action than either Bakunin or Lavrov [IDs]
*--Tkachev expressed his thoughts on terror as the only way to cure Russian ills [Russian TXT]
*--The active political career of Tkachev was not very long, but his legacy lived on. Some have seen a premonition of Lenin in the politics of Tkachev
\\
*--VRR, ch.16

<>1875:Russian censorship officials planned restrictions against Ukrainian publications [DIR3:268-70]

<>1875my:German wage-laborers and socialists united to form the Social Democratic Party [SDP] of Germany and to sign their "Gotha Program" [DPH:263-5]

<>1876:Japan forced trade treaty on Korea, opened two Korean ports. As Japanese industrial modernization progressed, so did Japanese imperialist ambitions

<>1876:USA | Last Federal Troops of occupation left the South as "Reconstruction" came to an end
*--Philadelphia World's Fair (Centennial Exposition) on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution
\\
Saul,2:138-43

<>1876:1885; USA and Russia | First decade in which great petroleum corporations consolidated their grip on that industry =
*1859:USA PA Titusville discovery [pix]
*1863:USA Cleveland, Excelsior Works of John David Rockefeller began kerosene production
*1869:1874; USA economic depression, 2nd worse in USA history. Standard Oil adjusted by gaining control of full process, “upstream” and “downstream”, and introduced rebates, kickbacks, secret rates, etc
*1876:Baku Tovarishchestvo brat’ev Nobel [Nobel Brothers Company] soon had Russia involved in the emerging world petroleum market. The Nobel brothers, Liudvig (1831-1888), Alfred (1833-1896) and Robert, were sons of a Russian military contractor of Swedish origin who lived in Saint-Petersburg. The family fortune rested on their profitable industrial enterprise, including a government contract to produce explosives and gunpowder. The oldest brother, Liudvig, inherited the father's Russian business
*1867:Brother Alfred had developed nitroglycerine into an effective explosive, but accepted a French government contract to build a modern gunpowder plant there. When Alfred died in 1896, he left a portion of his immense fortune to Stockholm University to support a peace prize
*--Brother Liudvig stayed closer to home. He took over management of his father's factories and was given a procurement contract to supply field artillery to Russian forces in the Russo-Turkish War. With his brothers' participation, Liudvig now branched into petroleum production, founding great works in the Baku (Azerbaijan) fields [pix]. At first they shipped kerosene in barrels by sail to the mouth of the Volga. Barrels were transshipped to river boats and delivered upstream to the great yarmarka [faire] in Nizhnii Novgorod, to be marketed throughout Russia and to the east. This was expensive, and the Nobels could not compete with cheaper USA kerosene. Protective tariffs helped, but Liudvig innovated on his own to lower the price of his product. He introduced railroad tankers and invented pipeline delivery methods which made his kerosene competitive even on the USA market. He transported crude oil to the Black Sea port of Batumi, and he pioneered transportation by sea-going oil tankers.. He introduced more effective petroleum reservoirs near all major cities [BrE,41:216]
*--Should we think of the Nobels as "Swedish" or "Russian"? What of “European” émigrés at heart of US economic development in these years? Was Andrew Carnegie [ID] British or, more exactly, a Scot, or was he an "American"?
*--Nobel Brothers Company value =
    1879 =   3,000,000r
    1916 = 45,000,000r
*1877:1881; USA | Standard Oil “gobbled up” domestic business rivals and began to build network of trunk and side pipelines
*1882:USA oil refining capacity 95% under the control of the giant energy company Standard Oil. Standard was a trust. Novelty was that Standard became a business well beyond Cleveland, well beyond the borders of Ohio. There were no USA nationally chartered corporations, only state chartered. Of course, there were no "international" charters. Standard expanded beyond the reach of geographically more limited legal and governmental authorities. Another novelty = “The concept of management by owners had evolved to the policy of management by an active inside board [Standard Oil Executive Committee] who met daily to determine what policies and decisions were in ‘the general interest’” [Gnrg] In this way, Standard represented the first huge example of the fiduciary problem caused when "ownership" and "management" are dissociated from one another, a problem later famously described by Adolph Berle
*--Over previous 20 years, kerosene = main product (over 1/2 of all USA oil output; 4th largest USA export). European office of Standard Oil boasted that oil "forced its way into more nooks and corners of civilized and uncivilized countries than any other product in business history emanating from a single source [i.e., this vast new trans-national corporation]"
*1886:Rothschild banking company formed Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Co. [Bnito] The Nobel Brothers Company worked in close financial association with the Paris-based Rothschild banking company. It was from the beginning a "trans-national" corporation
*--The oil or petroleum epoch  was upon all who would play the Great Game
\\
*--Saul,2:143-8 deals with the petroleum industry
*--Daniel Yergin, The Prize: Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power
*--R. W. Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry
*2003su:Russian publication with wide circulation offered its views on how the great Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan industrial/financial empires were built [TXT]

<>1877:1879; Russian author Gleb Uspenskii, Village Diary [RRC2,2#30]

<>1877:English pundit Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia [excerpts: VSB,3:626-9 | WRH3:291-375]

<>1877:Russian Samara-Orenburg railroad complete, linking Bashkir steppes east of the middle course of the Volga.River to the main lines of Russian transport to the west

<>1877ja28:USA poet Walt Whitman delivered speech "In Memory of Thomas Paine" [TXT]

<>1877ap12:1878jy13; Ottoman Turks and Russia at war [MAP]
*--Russian declaration of war [VSB,3:629-30]
*--Prince P.A. Viazemskii disturbed by Russian enthusiasm for cause of Serbia and Montenegro [VSB,3:629]
*--Also involved in Russian-Turkish conflict, Bulgarians had ceased centuries before to live in a sovereign nation-state of their own. Now the three-year-old Bulgarian independence movement, led by Stefan Stambulov, inspired a Russian desire to help a Slavic “brother”. Panslavism and Russian imperial ambition seemed to some to be in harmony. There was much sympathy among Slavic peoples for the creation of an independent Bulgaria in eastern Macedonia. That sympathy was not shared by the great European powers, especially England and Austria, who were jealous of growing Russian influence in that part of the world
*--Turkey and Russia fought and negotiated on their own at first, without any overt interference from European states to the west. They signed the bilateral San Stefano treaty [TXT] [Excerpts DIR2:317-28] Main provision was creation of an enlarged Bulgaria [now including a sizable portion of Macedonia, a vaguely defined territory running roughly from the eastern border of Albania to the Aegean Sea and populated by Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek and many other Illyrian and Balkan peoples]. The new Bulgaria would be semi-independent and with an elected princely monarch. NB! no Russian authority over Bulgaria implied. In fact, the new Bulgaria was to pay "tribute" to the Turks. Russian did gain significant territory around the southeast shores of the Black Sea
*--Serbia and its close neighbor Montenegro were earlier declared independent from Turkey. In 1876 Serbian war against Turkey, occasioned by Serbian support of Bosnia-Hercegovina independence, had turned ugly for Serbia, helping convince Russia to intervene. Serbs were now vindicated
*--Bosnia-Hercegovina [Bosna i Hercegovina] were promised reforms from Turkish overlords. NB! B-H not made independent of the Turks or given over to Serbia. This area had since medieval times been a rich potpourri of religious confessions. Catholics, Orthodox and Bogomils vied with one another. From 1463 and for the next four hundred years, B-H was ruled by Ottoman Turks. Elites accepted Islam, and thus added another ingredient to the stew of conflict
*--The fate of B-H and other Yugoslav peoples has not been shaped by hatreds among the population so much as by the maneuvers of the great imperialist powers that now and again have competed for influence or gain in and around these territories.  As of 1878, B-H was a fruit on the Ottoman tree that Austria sought to pick. The Russians still thought of it as unripe and made no overt effort to gain advantage there. They simply demanded that the Turks reform their administration. The Austrians had grander plans, and they were happy to pretend along with the other “Western” powers that it was the Russians who sought unnatural expansion of imperial authority
*--Therefore, western and central European powers, alarmed at the extensive provisions of San Stefano, decided to intervene. They claimed that 1856:Treaty of Paris (settling Crimean War) had been overturned without sufficient consultation. Through threat of war, a small group of European great powers forced a new treaty on Russia and Turkey. Ambitious "Western" powers took the opportunity to rectify San Stefano in such a way as to enhance their own positions in the eastern Mediterranean and to deny Russian and Bulgarian gains
*--The Berlin Congress that followed was a sorrowful inning in the "Great Game"
\\
*--Barbara Jelavich, The Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and the Straits Questions, 1870-1887
*--David MacKenzie, The Serbs and Russian Pan-Slavism, 1875-1878
*--B. H. Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, 1870-1880

<>1877:1881; Russian second "revolutionary situation" (4 years) intensified in the Russo-Turkish War and expanded into a crisis of Russian revolutionary populism and the beginnings of modern political parties in Russia
*--More dark thoughts in diary of War Minister Miliutin [VSB,3:632-4] He observed a contest within the highest circles of tsarist state authority between authentic reformers and those who now dreamt of return to a past never really experienced (perhaps a good definition of political reaction [ID], in this case "official reactionary politics"). A big historical question is this = Did the terroristic revolutionary movement cause the crisis within the autocratic state and provoke the shift toward reactionary measures, or did reactionary measures precede terrorism (and perhaps cause it to appear on the scene)?
*--Political ferment was very much alive among émigré Russians. But back in Russia, unlicensed self organization or voluntary associations of all sorts were illegal, especially political groups. After the unorganized, largely spontaneous "Going to the People" [ID], all populist oppositional movements were of necessity at first underground and conspiratorial, revolutionary parties
*--The two most important Russian revolutionary organizations in Russia itself were "Land and Liberty" [Zemlia i volia] and, after the first broke up, "The People's Will" [Narodnaia volia]
*--Activists in the second revolutionary situation at first concentrated on the
  (1) peasantry. But soon the dominant feature of this phase came to the fore =
  (2) revolutionary terror. A small number of activists moved from the village, rejected terrorism, and shifted attention to
  (3) the industrial workplace
*--Field, Rebels:112-207, contains documents on village rebelliousness fomented by "revolutionary populists" [Cf. 1861ap]
*--Sergei Kravchinskii [Stepniak], The Russian Peasantry: Their Agrarian Condition, Social Life, and Religion (1888) [Excerpted TXT] [Print excerpts: VSB,3:754-6]
*--Kravchinskii's first-hand account of revolutionary conspiracy, Underground Russia (1883), written five years after his own traumatizing act of political terror [ID]
*--Women played an unexpected and active role as political opposition in Russia became violent
*--The optimistic era of revolutionary populism, with its faith in the possibility of imminent success of a rural socialist transformation of Russia, was nearing its end
\\
*--Amy Knight, “Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party” [TXT]
*--Julicher: chapter 9
*--Petr A. Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 1878-1882 (1979)
*--VRR, ch.20 on Zemlia i volia, ch.21 on Narodnaia volia
*--Vera Broido, Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II (1977), see especially ch.10 "Apostles into Terrorists", ch.11 "Towards Terrorism", and ch.13 "Regicide"

<>1877se27:London| Karl Marx to F. A. Sorge on Russian revolutionary movement, "This [Russian] crisis is a new turning point in European history. Russia--and I have studied conditions there from the original Russian sources, unofficial and official (the latter accessible to but few persons, but obtained for me through friends in Petersburg)--has long been standing on the threshold of an upheaval; all the elements of it are prepared. The gallant Turks have hastened the explosion by years with the thrashing they have inflicted [ID] not merely to the Russian army and Russian finances, but to the very persons of the dynasty commanding the army (the Tsar, the heir to the throne, and six other Romanovs). The upheaval will begin secundum artem [according to the rules of the game], with some playing at constitutionalism, et puis il y aura un beau tapage [and then follows the brawl]. If Mother Nature is not particularly unfavorable towards us, we shall yet live to see the fun! // The stupid nonsense the Russian students are perpetrating is merely a symptom, worthless in itself. [Kazan demonstration, involving future Russian Marxist leader George Plekhanov among others] But it is a symptom. All sections of Russian society are in full decomposition economically, morally, and intellectually. // This time the revolution begins in the East, hitherto the unbroken bulwark and reserve army of counter-revolution [M&E, Selected Corr:374 | Itenberg,RS2:4 selective citation]
*1878fa:A year after his letter to Sorge (above), Marx composed a letter to the editor of the Russian journal Otechestvennye zapiski [Notes of the Fatherland]. Marx suggested that Russia need not traverse the same historical path that Germany or England followed as revolutionary workers advanced toward the better future [SLM]

<>1878:Afghanistan the site of imperialist military clashes between Russia and England in which each country tried to play the Great Game through subordinate emirs, native Islamic rulers. Central Asia was falling under Russian dominion, but England gained upper hand in the imperialist struggle for predominance in Afghanistan and south Asia

<>1878:Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev,"Lectures on Godmanhood" [Edie,3:62-84 | KMM:214ff]

<>1878:USA philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)

<>1878ja24:Saint Petersburg | Vera Zasulich with a pistol wounded Petersburg Governor-General Fedor Trepov. Zasulich’s act was eye-for-eye in her view. Prison authorities had apparently tortured a fellow political activist in their charge, and Zasulich held Trepov responsible. She dropped the gun and awaited arrest

<>1878mr31:A jury trial [sud prisiazhnyi] found Zasulich not guilty. She confessed to the attack, but the jury would not find her guilty. The jury, the defense lawyers, and the wider public seemed ready to accept a higher moral law justifying this violent act of generic self-defense or righteous revenge
*--It was understood that the police state would now try to use its absolute administrative power to get her back into prison. Society just didn’t want her or any of its members abused by state power. So, a huge crowd greeted her outside the courtroom and helped spirit her away to safe haven in west-European emigration where she became an important figure in the rise of Marxism within Russian oppositional movements
*--In the Zasulich trial, as in the Nechaev trial earlier, Russians could follow proceedings in newspapers. Thousands of readers thus learned how the new reform-era legal system [ID] might work against arbitrary administrative justice, might even seem to favor terrorists over police officials

<>1878jy13(NS):Berlin Treaty reversed the San Stefano Treaty. Russia agreed to congress only after “The West” threatened war. Otto von Bismarck agreed to mediate. As a result, Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian gains from war with Turkey were nullified. England and Austria won great concessions as Russia was stripped of nearly all advantages [VSB,3:630-1 | DPH:207-09]
*--Bulgarian independence was nullified and the nation divided. northern half fell under indirect Ottoman authority, southern half completely under Ottoman rule
*--Macedonia was taken from Bulgaria and placed under complete Ottoman suzerainty. As a result of this affront, National independence terrorist groups, komitadjis, arose there under Bulgarian sponsorship
*--The main push for this reversal came from England and Austria. In addition to their own fish to fry, these powers were concerned about expansion of Russian power and the "dangerous" rise of authentic independence in Balkans
*--Austro-Hungarian imperial interests were connected with an ancient authority they exercised over restless Slovenes and Croats, Catholic Slavs whose native language was basically the same as the Orthodox Serbs. (Slovenes and Croats write with the Latin rather than the Cyrillic alphabet since literacy came to them in its Roman Catholic form). Austria did not want events to inspire national independence movements among these people, but Vienna’s interests were more directly touched by developments in Bosnia-Hercegovina
*--Serbia declared independent, but suffered two serious insults =
*--First, Bosnia-Hercegovina was taken from Turks and Serbs, and placed under Austrian administration and military occupation. This represented a slap in the face for both Turkey and newly independent Serbia. (Austria gained great expansion of power from Russian victory, and denied any advantages to Russia.) This move was the most aggressive and least defensible in an era and area that required wise diplomacy rather than unrestrained opportunism. This move at this time and place will echo down through the 20th century
*--Montenegro [Crna gora] declared independent (but not a part of Serbia). This represented a second insult and a serious threat to Serbia. Montenegro was over the centuries the mountain fastness, the last refuge, of Serbian independence from Turkish and German power. It was also the oldest of Russian allies in the Balkans. 1516:1851; Montenegro was ruled by Orthodox bishop/princes [vladikas]. From 1715 Montenegro was in close alliance with Russia, recognizing the spiritual leadership of Russian emperors over the vladikas
*--Romania became independent, but ceded southern Bessarabia to Russia in return for Dobruja
*--England took this occasion to acquire the strategically located island of Cyprus with its large population of Orthodox Greeks and Moslem Turks
*--NB! “The West” took strong and significant stand against national independence for Bulgarians and other South-Slavic [Yugoslavian] peoples and an equally strong but ironic stand in support of Ottoman imperial rule when that independence threatened -- or failed to further -- their own imperialist aims and so long as that Ottoman imperialism could be controlled by them. This congress was a “big inning” for England and Austria in the Great Game. The Berlin Treaty, however, failed to meet significant needs in the area. Unrestrained imperialist practices were now employed within the European homeland. "Life support" applied by "The West" to the Ottoman Empire ("the sick man of Europe") was breaking down. A Turkish nationalistic and militaristic movement arose in the same year that Austria seized Bosnia and Herzegovina. The ground was laid for the vicious Balkan wars of 1912-1913 and the subsequent outbreak of WW1

<>1878au04:Petersburg | Sergei Kravchinskii (with assistance of A. I. Barannovskii) killed Third-Section police chief N.V. Mezentsov in broad daylight as he was out walking. This early act of successful political assassination was taken in revenge for what was considered extreme and unjust state action in the execution of I.M. Koval’skii. These early acts of terror in the second revolutionary situation were acts of revenge

<>1878oc18:1879ja23; Petersburg | The great “Trial of the 193” followed soon and lasted three months, but it was only indirectly related to recent sensational physical assaults on authority carried out by Zasulich [ID] and Kravchinskii [ID]. More than 4000 activists had been arrested over the previous four years, almost all in connection with the “Going to the People” [ID]. Prisons overflowed. Nearly 100 died or went insane before the trial. At least 30 different actual organizations and voluntary political associations were involved. About one-fourth of the defendants were women. Defendants were represented by independent lawyers, according to the new legal reforms
*--The trial showed that “The Going” was an expression of widely felt impulses that realized themselves in individual and small group actions without any central coordination. For its own purposes, the tsarist state treated this expression of national political discontent and optimism as a single conspiracy, a single "criminal association" [prestupnoe soobshchestvo] with the goal of "overthrowing the government" [s tsel’iu gosudarstvennogo perevorota]
*--Against the towering power of the state, and the obduracy of villagers,  some of the increasingly isolated individual activists felt they had only one weapon -- terror

<>1878oc21(NS):German Empire outlawed political parties organized by socialists or wage-laborers  [DPH:265-6]

<>1878oc25:Russian revolutionary political party "Land and Liberty" [Zemlia i volia] issued its program [VSB,3:662-3 | Russian TXT]

<>1878no:Tver Zemstvo presented address to the tsar = "In his concern for the welfare of the Bulgarian people after their liberation from the Turkish yoke [ID], the sovereign emperor has deemed it necessary to grant this people true self-government, the inviolability of the rights of the individual, an independent judiciary, and freedom of the press. The zemstvo of Tver Province dares to hope that the Russian people, who bore the entire burden of the war with such complete readiness and with such self-sacrificing love for their tsar-emancipator, will be allowed to enjoy the same blessings, which alone can lead them, in the words of the sovereign, along the path of gradual, peaceful, and legal development" [VSB,3:634]
*--This was a third moment in the history of Russian political culture when tsarist constitutional initiatives were taken in non-Russian areas under imperial power but denied to Russians themselves [first moment | second moment]
*--As Zemstvo technical functions began to take hold, and especially as Zemstvos gained more stable control over tax revenues to finance their expanding functions, Zemstvos became increasingly political. They were discovering links between the technical and the political embedded in European notions of modernization

<>1879:1880; Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevskii [pix] wrote his most widely acclaimed work Brothers Karamazov
*--Petrozavodsk State University Russian-language complete works of Dostoevskii [W]
\\
*--Wagar on Dostoevskii [TXT]

<>1879:Russian Workers, Northern Union of, issued program in defense of wage-laborer interests [Harding:41f]
*--The rise of modern urban centers -- cities -- introduced, as always, two new elements to social/political life = (1) industrial labor -- the proletariat -- and (2) urban industrial/professional elites -- capitalists, business people, and all others whose interests were meshed with modern enterprise in the "post-agrarian" era
*1879oc:Lithuanian provinces, Vilnius | Formation of General Jewish Workers Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia [Vseobshchii evreiskii rabochii soiuz v Litve, Pol'she i Rossii],  Jewish Bund for short
*--Russia experienced a beginning of labor-centered political movements among wage-laborers, but what about the other European-style "liberal" urban social/economic and political formations?
\\
*--VRR, ch.19 on the Russian working class movement
*--J. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1861-1917 (1981) 

<>1879:USA reformer and economic theorist Henry George published Progress and Poverty. He subsequently had a startlingly successful political career, running on a reformist/progressive platform with his infamous "single tax" at the center. He believed that the growth rate of poverty was always greater than the growth rate of wealth. This sad fact was caused, in his view, by increase over time of land rents and values. Larger social forces caused the increase, but isolated owning individuals cashed in on that increase. A single tax on land would solve the problem, he felt. Critics found much to dislike in this scheme, but the biggest force at work against George was the transformation of economic life from agriculture to industry, from the countryside to the city

<>1879fe:Kharkov Governor-General D. N. Kropotkin was assassinated
*1879mr13:Petersburg | L. F. Mirskii fired a pistol at Third-Section Chief Gendarme Drentel'n and escaped
*1879ap02:Petersburg Winter Palace Square A. K. Solov’ev fired 3 times at Alexander II, without hitting him. He acted also without approval of the underground revolutionary party Land and Liberty, but with a revolver they supplied
*1879ap05:Russian Emperor Alexander II, having narrowly escaped a terrorist attempt on his life, issued counter-reform decree strengthening the power of governor-generals [VSB,3:665] Tsarist state moved from statist reform toward statist reaction
*1879my:Within Zemlia i volia, a dedicated terrorist group formed, calling itself "Freedom or death" [Svoboda ili smert’]
*1879jy25:au05; Odessa "Trial of the Twenty-Eight" revolutionists, including a 14-year old girl, V. L. Gukovskaia, held in camera. Officials no longer trusted open trial by jury, such that acquitted Vera Zasulich [ID]
*1879fa:Narodnaia volia [People's Will] party program [DIR3:355-9]
*1879au25:Narodnaia volia handed down a death sentence against Alexander II. Here monarchical subjects "turned the tables" by handing down a sentence of capital punishment against their sovereign – what could be in principle more authentically revolutionary than that, taking possession of the state's monopoly on violence? The mode of execution was to be dynamite. At first they concentrated on mining railroad lines at three points [VRR:681-3]. At Odessa, Kibal’chich, Kviatkovskii and Vera Figner set up the attack [Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist]. Kolodkevich, Frolenko and Lebedeva were to carry it off. It had to be canceled
*1879oc01: The People and the State [SLM:219-23]
*1879no18:Aleksandrovsk | Andrei Zheliabov improperly triggered the dynamite under the tsar’s train. No explosion, no assassination. Zheliabov (1850-1881) was born into a serf family, liberated and given the opportunity for a higher education at Odessa University, involved in the great "going to the people"  [ID]. He was arrested and a defendant at the Trial of the 193 [ID], found innocent and turned to political organizational work, helping organize "Land and Liberty" [ID]. He was now a member of the executive committee of "People's Will" [ID]. Zheliabov was a "man of the people", having spanned a life in the village to a life of underground political organization and terrorist action. Though Lenin rejected nearly every feature of Zheliabov's political creed and commitment, he always cited him as proof that the Russian people could produce revolutionists of world quality [ID]
*1879no19:Moscow | Sof’ia Perovskaia and Stepan Shiriarev blew up the wrong train. The tsar pulled into Moscow unscathed

<>1880:Russia enforced corporal punishment in military [Page.RR]

<>1880ja01:Russian revolutionary political party "People's Will" [Narodnaia volia] issued program [SLM:207-212 | VSB,3:664 | Kennan,Siberia,2:495-503 | WRH3:399-402 | DIR2:309-13 | DIR3:335-9 | RN7,2:170-4] This party put terrorism at the head of its agenda
*1880ja17:Petersburg apartment of Narodnaia volia party members raided by police. Gunfire resulted in several casualties and arrests [VRR:685]
*1880fe05:Petersburg | Stepan Khalturin, working closely with the Narodnaia volia Executive Committee (Aleksandr Kviatkovskii and Zheliabov), blew up the tsarist dining room in the Winter Palace, a spectacular achievement. Eleven were killed and 56 wounded, but the tsar was not one of them. He had not yet joined the banquet. Rifts opened among the terrorists who accepted the need to kill the tsar but were opposed to more generalized terrorism. These were unhappy with what the contemporary world calls “collateral damage”
*1880fe12:Count Loris-Melikov became head of a newly created state institution, "Supreme Administrative Commission for the Protection of State Order and Public Tranquility"
*1880fe20: Young activist I. O. Molodetskii attacked Loris-Melikov, without success. He acted alone as something of a "freelance" terrorist. The revolutionary party Narodnaia volia disavowed this personal attacked because it was uncoordinated with any defined political program. Still, Narodnaia volia praised his bravery
*1880sp:People's Will tactical Program [SLM:223-31 | RN7,2:175-183]
*1880sp:Odessa grocery store was the site at which Vera Figner and Sof’ia Perovskaia prepared a dynamite attack on the tsar. Another woman, A.V. Yakimova, was also involved. Nothing came of these preparations
*1880su:Terrorism seemed in fact to influence official behavior in the direction of political concessions. Loris-Melikov engaged certain public figures in the Zemstvo constitutionalist movement and even some close to Narodnaia volia in secret negotiations aimed to bring an end to terrorist attacks and to initiate governmental reforms. Perhaps Loris acted deceitfully, perhaps not. In any event, talks broke down
*1880oc25:Revolutionary populist journal Narodnaia Volia [NaV] Executive Committee wrote letter to Karl Marx [SLM:206-7 | RN7,2:228-9]
*1880oc25:oc30; SPB Military District court conducted the in camera Trial of 16, the Narodnaia volia Executive Committee. Kviatkovskii was sentenced to death
*1880no:Narodnaia volia Workers’ Organization Program [SLM:231-7 | RN7,2:184-91]
*1880au:Loris-Melikov's Commission was disbanded and the Count became Interior Minister, pursuing a policy of vigorous hunt for revolutionaries, accompanied by continued hints at concessions to a fledgling civil society in the form of European-style liberal reforms
*--Even terrorist opponents of the tsarist state backed off for a moment to give Loris-Melikov a chance to make something of his so-called "dictatorship of the heart". Some concluded from this momentary calm and concession that political terrorism brought results

<>1880je08:Dostoevskii lecture on Pushkin [Raeff3:289-300]
*--Liberal historian Konstantin Kavelin replied [302-21]
*--Vladimir Solov'ev also replied critically [KMM:220-22]
*--GO 1880de
\\
*--Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (1989)

<>1880de:Geok-Tepe, a Turkmen stronghold in Central Asia, captured by Russian army. Dostoevskii described the meaning of this event in his journal-like publication Diary of a Writer [RFP2,1:18-24] See excerpts in VSB,3:659-62
*--In 1849 at the beginning of his public career, Dostoevskii was targeted by the Russian Emperor; at the end, Dostoevsky extolled the virtues of the Russian Empire

<>1881:Ottoman Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid II agreed to "Decree of Muharrem" which created joint "Council of the Public Debt", further consolidating English fiscal power over the Turks
*--Russia had done well on its own in dealing with the Turks, but "The West" was not going to let that succeed, and now the big financial dimension of the Great Game was too much for Russia

<>1881:USA, Pittsburgh | Leaders of National Labor Union, Knights of Industry, and Knights of Labor formed Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada. This represented the beginnings of organized wage-labor on the national level
*1881:In a development not unrelated to economic struggles of labor, Henry James published his most enduring novel, Portrait of a Lady. While born into a comfortable establishment Boston family, a scion of US social/cultural elite, James had fled abroad into émigré status and now depended in some measure on income from his publications. He lived in Europe like his good friend, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. Not only was high culture transcending “national” limits, it was becoming a commodity. Creators had to sell their “product” or perish. James had to publish or perish. He had no professorial salary like his brother, the Harvard philosopher William James [ID]
\\
*--Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Mature Master

<>1881:Tver activist Fedor Rodichev memo on peasantry [*1934ja:SEER#12,35:361-2]

<>1881ja28:Russian state servitor Count Loris-Melikov, memo to Emperor Alexander II [Raeff2:133-40] Other memos suggested that constitutional reform might be under consideration [VSB,3:665-7]
*--Political/institutional reform of this sort had been on nearly everyone's mind since Alexander ascended the throne a quarter-century earlier, but by now the time of significant progressive reform was over in Russia. Loris-Melikov's brand of official liberalism was too little, too late

<>1881wi:Kibal’chich showed he had interests that extended beyond terrorism when he wrote article on political revolution and the economic question [SLM:212-8]. This was a busy season of reconsideration all across the political spectrum =
*1881fe:Zasulich drafted a letter to Marx asking about the possibility that Russia rural mode of production might give some promise of a progressive future in her homeland
*1881fe:mr; Marx drafted a reply to Zasulich letter
*1881mr:Marx settled on a final text of the letter to Zasulich in which he conceded that the Russian village institutions might contribute to a Russian variety of socialism

<>1881fe15(NS):German chancellor Bismarck's opening speech to the Reichstag [parliament] [CCC2,2:835f CCC3,2:1005-6]
*--Over the preceding half decade, he had worked hard to maintain best possible relationships with Russia [DIR3:337-9]
*--His final decade in power were devoted to the maintenance of a balance of power in central and eastern Europe [DPH:209-14 | DIR3:339-45]
*--German imperialist ambitions complicated this process [DPH:268-71]
*1879:German theologian Friedrich Fabri posed the question -- Does Germany Need Colonies? -- and gave a resounding answer = YES [P20:27] A German version of European imperialism

<>1881mr01:Russian Emperor Alexander II assassinated [RRC2,2:368-77]

*--The 26-year "era of great reforms" came to an end as the culminating moment in the "second Russian revolutionary situation", the apex (or nadir) of the previous twenty years of political terrorism
*--Loris-Melikov resigned under pressure as Interior Minister. His intense one-year career in the spotlight of imperial politics was at an end. He emigrated to western Europe, where he died in 1888. Everywhere in Europe, but most dramatically in Russia, the forms of liberalism that moved crowds to action over the previous century, seemed no longer to fit the needs of the time.
*--The success of terrorists in the political party People's Will ironically was the death of the party. And at the same time, terrorism abated, not to take center stage again in Russia for another twenty years. But in other locales terror continued to play a role
\\
*--VRR, ch.22

Spas na krovi [The Savior on the Blood]
A cathedral build in Petersburg on the spot
where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated
spas.na.krovi.gif (42565 bytes)

<>1881mr02:1894; Russian Emperor Alexander III reigned in a time of official reactionary policy [ID] following the second revolutionary situation and terrorist assassination of his father, Alexander II, the "tsar liberator"
*1877se17:1882my06; Alexander III was much influenced by the political ideas of reactionary Ober-prokurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who dispatched a steady stream of advisory memos over the critical five-year period surrounding the assassination of Alexander II [VSB,3:671-5]
*1881ap25:1887mr04; Mikhail Katkov wrote monarchist and imperialist editorials in his daily newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti [Moscow News] [VSB,3:677-9]
*1881mr08:1882ap10; reform-minded Dmitrii Miliutin's diary described atmosphere of crisis in governmental circles [VSB,3:679-80]
*--Yet it might be said that profound, possibly even "progressive", changes took place in these years of reactionary policy
*--Over the next quarter century,  the tsarist state made its contribution both to the promotion and the suppression of impending revolution
*--USA opinion of Russia, and thus USA-Russian relations, deteriorated to some degree. A new era of macro-economic struggle, in which world markets in grain and, very soon, petroleum increased the stakes in the Great Game
*--N. Kh. Bunge, The Years 1881-1894 in Russia: A Memorandum Found in the Papers of N. Kh. Bunge [ORBIS]
*--British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print. Part I, from the mid- nineteenth century to the First World War. Series A, Russia, 1859 -1914 v2
\\
*--Saul,2:240-310
*1961de:JMH#33:384-97 | Hans Heilbronner, "Alexander III and the Reform Plan of Loris-Melikov"
*--Heide W. Whelan, Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia (1982)
*--Petr Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy Under Alexander III (1976)

<>1881mr08(NS):German chancellor Bismarck's justification for the first accident insurance bill, a component of a wider program of social welfare [CCC3,2:1007-10 | DPH:266-8]
*1884mr10:Bismarck speech on the need to promote the welfare of wage-laborers [PWT2:192-4]

<>1881mr10:Russian revolutionary political party Narodnaia volia [People's Will] letter to new Emperor Alexander III [DIR2:313-16 | DIR3:359-63] Manifesto to Europe [DPH:288]
*1882fe16:Last will and testaments of revolutionary populists A.Mikhailov and A.Barannikov [SLM:239-40]
--|In its short two years of existence, People's Will left a big mark on Russian history without furthering the cause of radical reform or revolution

Execution of terrorists involved in the assassination of Alexander II,
including Andrei Zheliabov

<>1881sp:Ivan Aksakov repeated Panslav and Slavophile themes in his "Address to...Benevolent Slav Society" [KMM:112-15 | RRC2,2#32]
*1861:1883; Selections from Ivan Aksakov's long journalistic career [VSB,3:657-9] suggest distinction between Slavophilism and panslavism
*1883:Aksakov asked what panslavism was and answered first with what it wasn't = "It does not exist as a political party, nor as a political program, nor even as a definite political ideal. The unification of all the Slavs of east and west in a single political body has so far never been envisaged by anyone in any clear form, nor even as a dream." Then he took up what it was = "Yet panslavism indubitably exists in our time as the awareness, shared by all the manifold branches of the Slavic race, of their common Slavic character and common ethnic origin." [To help define "Slavic" consult this table organized by language groups] He said it was not a "political party" but insisted that the Russian state could not renounce a panslav mission "that can bring existence, life, and freedom to the Slavic peoples and to the entire Orthodox-Slavic world". That would force Russia to renounce "her very self, her very essence, and her mission among mankind." Aksakov was disturbed that Germans regarded any Russian nationalism in literature or politics as panslavic and therefore odious. "We repeat: there exists neither a political panslavic program nor a political panslavic ideal. But as the spiritual solidarity and the gravitation of various branches of the same race toward each other, as the awareness of Slavic brotherhood, as an Orthodox-Slavic world headed by Russia [emphasis added] and asserting its claim to exist, live, and develop side by side with the Roman [Romance-language cultures = France, Italy, Spain, etc.] and Germanic [including England] worlds, panslavism exists both as an idea and as a fact."
*--GO TO Ivan's father Sergei and his brother Konstantin

<>1881ap29:Alexander III's manifesto reaffirmed inviolability of autocracy [VSB,3:680]

<>1881au14:Russian statute sought to strengthen law and order [VSB,3:680-1] The tsarist state sought to reaffirm what it took to be the fundamental truths of Russian politics. These truths were increasingly embodied in reactionary policy, but occasionally in certain reform measures

<>1881oc:Russian revolutionary groups Narodnaia volia and Chernyi peredel' joined forces to compose a program [DPH:288-9]
*1881fa:1882wi; NaV Military-revolutionary organization composed a Program [SLM:238 | RN7,2:196-200]

<>1882:Switzerland | Friedrich Engels published Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, a summary of Marxism published in the last year of Marx's life [CCC3,2:701-24 | CCS:775-801 | CCS,2:265-291]
*--It was a simplification, but it eventually was as popular as The Communist Manifesto (1847-1848), which opened the public careers of Marx and Engels, and it was more detailed than the condensed and high-impact "A Preface to A Contribution..."
*1882ja:Marx and Engels composed a preface to the 2nd Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto [MER:88-9]
*--Distinct "socialist" ideologies and movements were forming in Europe, much as had happened with revolutionary liberalism over the previous century
*--"Marxism", as ism, survived Marx and Engels, as specific thinking and acting individuals whose political careers had by this time spanned 35 years. The "ism" continued for more than a century to inspire a significant variety of political movements in Germany, Russia and elsewhere. The complexities and contingencies of the specific thinking and acting individuals who had created the "ism" faded from memory as they became global celebrities

<>1882:1890; Russian welfare legislation (child labor [TXT], working hours, factory inspection) [VSB,3:752-4 | cf. RRC2,2#36]
*--Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii, The Russian Factory in the 19th Century
*--As Russian urban life expanded, the state made efforts to incorporate the new social formation -- proletariat or wage-labor -- into traditional social/service hierarchies. Tsarist bureaucrats displayed as much reform initiative in these realms as did new urban social formations

<>1882my02:je09; Russian state sought to give relief to its Jewish subjects [VSB,3:682]

<>1882my18:Russian statute established Peasant Land Bank [TXT] [VSB,3:751], three years before the establishment of the Noble's Land Bank [ID]
*--Clearly the "reactionary" autocratic state was capable of notable reform initiatives

<>1883:USA and world tours of ex-frontier scout William Frederick Cody ("Buffalo Bill") and his Wild West Show got under way. The Native American hero of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull, performed in this early version of US commercial culture, mixing the authentic and the artificial without any desire to do harm to either.

<>1883:1891; Switzerland | German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) published his most influential work, Also sprach Zarathustra [TXT]
*--Earlier work = The Birth of Tragedy (1871)
*--Other influential works: Genealogy of Morals (1887); The Will to Power, and The Antichrist [missing in the UO library, but excerpted in CCC2,2:964-80 | CCC3,2:1192-1212]
*--Excerpts (including Antichrist) PWT2:236-42]
*--Full UO holdings [W]
\\
*--A Study Guide to Zarathustra
*--Wagar on Nietzsche and irrationalism [TXT]

Nietz.totenmask.jpg (16175 bytes)

Nietzsche's Death Mask
Which calls to mind the finest-ever graffito that I personally saw.
*1965su:On the entrance to the NYC subway at the main gate of Columbia University, someone had written =
"God is dead -- Nietzsche"
Just below this, someone else wrote =
"Nietzsche is dead -- God"

<>1883je27:France | Ivan Turgenev letter to Leo Tolstoy (Turgenev's last letter) [GPR:627-8]

<>1884:English theorist Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State [PWT2:179-80 | P20:6], continued to develop concept of "Social Darwinism" and acquisitive individualism

<>1884:Geneva | Russian émigré Marxist Georgii Plekhanov, "Our Differences". A quick read would be from beginning through ch.1 pt.1 (ca. 69pp), then ch.3 pt.1-3 (ca. 17pp), then ch.4 pt.1-3 (ca. 48pp), and finally ch.5 (ca.22pp) =  [TXT]  [Excerpts = Edie,3:359-89 | VSB,3:705-7 | SPW]
*--Here Plekhanov laid out with some clarity the differences between his brand of Marxist socialism for Russia and the now extinguished "populism" of the 1860s and 70s
*--Plekhanov began as a populist activist, but in exile he now based his revolutionary socialism on industrial wage-labor
*--Program of his Marxist group "Liberation of Labor" [DIR2:353-7 | DIR3:400-5 | VSB,3:707-8 | DPH:290-4]
*--Vera Zasulich, the famous one-act "terrorist" [ID], was an active member of Plekhanov's émigré group where she became again famous for a "one-act" ideological moment (letter to Karl Marx [ID])

<>1884my:Paris | Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923 [ID]) thrilled audiences with her popular portrayal of Lady Macbeth in a stunning French translation of the Shakespeare tragedy [pix]. Sarah Bernhardt might be thought of as the first great popular entertainment "celebrity" [pix]. Two websites allow you to listen to Divine Sarah [W#1] [W#2]
*--Across the Atlantic Ocean, The New York Times took notice of "the divine Sarah's" performance, placing emphasis on the way the French translation acknowledged Shakespeare's violence and thus shocked traditional French audiences [W]
*--By the last quarter of the 19th century, a new sort of culture pressed itself on public consciousness. It might be called "popular entertainment" or "popular culture" [pop-culture or pop-arts]. But it was not popular culture in the sense of ancient folkways. For one thing it was increasingly an innovative "commercial culture" rather than traditional folkways, and it was certainly not traditional church-culture or secular "high arts"
*--"High culture" [civilization] discovered "folk culture" in the 18th century, and resoundingly approved of it. And why not? Wide familiarity with folk culture seemed to require mediation by learned elites who could help "audiences" understand the spontaneous and traditional creations of "the people". Folk culture might be the product of "simple people", but its meaning required the cogitation of savants., e.g., Herder [ID], Slavophiles [ID], etc. The new pop-arts were something very different from church-culture, folk culture and "high culture"
*--The circus and the burlesque stage had long done very well without learned commentary, thank you. In fact "high culture" was inclined to exterminate or marginalize popular entertainments. As the 19th-century neared its end, "mass society" and "mass culture" made their first forceful appearance and now pushed toward center stage. Mass-circulation newspapers and magazines ("zines") and, by the early 20th century, a very new set of electronic media promoted this development
*--In this significant story, the contributions of a lowly mechanical innovation, the typewriter, should not be forgotten [W]
*--Altogether, popular entertainments puzzled and challenged "high-brow" expectations about art and culture, much as "mass society" challenged "high-brow" expectations about political and social life, much as radical market economics with accent on laissez-faire independence and exercise of entrepreneurial talent promised disorderly "rags to riches" transformations of the social landscape and threatened old, settled establishmentarian notions about status
*--One characteristic of the European modernization was the erosion of "patronage" (political or social elites providing monetary life support to artists) and the painful substitution of market forces, the imposition on artists of the need to "sell" their creative product. "Art" was becoming a commodity, and that upset many people
*--Those who created "high culture" (writers, painters, etc.) under these conditions often turned against their own audiences, rebelled against conventional sensibilities, and assumed an almost self-destructive relationship to the "art market". These creative artists erected maximum obstacles before any who sought conventional esthetic pleasure from "modern" high art. Roger Shattuck described the 1885-1914 period as The Banquet Years, a generation of French high-cultural writers, painters and composers shaped by a clash of artistic sensibility with dominant "bourgeois" values and emerging mass society. European "fine arts", not just in France but also in Russia and USA, threatened to turn against a soulless middle class and a crude public [W]
*1892:French impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, having fled Europe, described his wedding to native Tahiti girl [Eye:394-6]
*--This website is devoted to the French artist Henri Matisse and the "post-impressionist" era in European graphic arts (with outstanding images) [W] [Post-impressionist era, by obvious implication, followed the impressionist era]
*--These developments in European fine arts created a huge esthetic void which popularized forms of artistic entertainment moved quickly to fill. Pop-arts found marketization very comfortable, perhaps even necessary as a growing segment of the population gained literacy. A new public leisure sought to be filled by some form of art, whether low-brow, high-brow or no-brow
*--It would be decades before "high culture" (and eventually even traditional theological culture) gave up the effort to exterminate or marginalize now dominant popular entertainments and, instead, put its energies into controlling and even co-opting pop-arts. "Propaganda" was a positive word in the 19th century, describing the instruments, largely the printed word, through which culture, especially religious doctrine, was spread ("propagated") to new adherents.. As governments and business enterprises ("ads") adopted propaganda techniques, expanding far beyond the printed word in the 20th century, "propaganda" gained a new and negative meaning. Pop-arts were here to stay
\\
*--Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of the Typewriting [Summit]

 <>1884au23:Russian University statute [VSB,3:682-4] reversed reformist gains in the earlier University statute of 1863 and placed new restrictions on university life. The tsarist state pursued the reactionary policy goal of reserving "careers open to talent" only for presumed old regime elites

<>1884fa:Korean court struggles roused Japanese and Chinese appetites and caused tensions [Beasley, MHJ:161]
*--Paul George von Molendorff, a high-ranking German administrator or "adviser" within the Korean government, tried to draw Russia into conflict [KEJ,6:341]
\\
*--George Alexander Lensen, Balance of intrigue : international rivalry in Korea and Manchuria, 1884-1899 (1982)

<>1885:USA Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong wrote Our Country (purchased by 185,000 readers [Zimmerman:46]). Americans, he preached, are a "race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it—the representation, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization". The preacher noted with approval USA’s development of "peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind" [46-47]. Predicted that USA will "spread itself across the earth". Added, "Can any one doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind?"
*--Later he expressed racist views on Anglo-Saxon Predominance [TXT]

<>1885:1901; Asian kerosene market the scene of a 15-year competition among emerging trans-national petroleum corporations
*1885:Russian crude oil discoveries allowed significant involvement in world petroleum market. More than one half of all Russian petroleum production was exported, 2/3 of this to Europe. Standard Oil had not yet extended its control of the market beyond New York City docks
*1888:Russian kerosene dominated 22% of the world market as a result of low production costs, proximity to markets, and government support
*1888ap24(NS):USA | Standard Oil Company founded the Anglo-American Oil Company to market its products in England
*1890:Black Sea | Marcus Samuel, an English import/export businessman, saw the world’s first oil tankers, operated by the Russian company “Nobel Brothers”. He realized that bulk transport was superior to Standard's method of shipping kerosene in metal cases by clipper ship. He signed a ten-year supply contract with Rothschild interests in Russia and ordered eight tankers for shipping Russian kerosene in bulk through the Suez Canal [ID] to Asia
*1890:Sumatra oilfield | The Royal Dutch Company for the Working of Petroleum Wells in the Dutch East Indies formed, J.B. August Kessler, manager. Petroleum shipper Samuel came into business association with them. A Dutch-English trans-national petroleum company was forming around these partnerships
*1891:Marcus Samuel won contract with Paris branch of the great Rothschild banking house to sell Russian kerosene, borne on his specially designed tankers (based on a Russian innovation) from Russian Black-Sea ports to the markets of the world east of Suez. Samuel was soon in close association with the new trans-national petroleum corporation, Royal Dutch Shell
*1891mr10:Netherlands & Belgium | American Petroleum Company (51% Standard owned), then two companies (60% owned) in Italy in 1891; and a 21.45% interest was purchased in a Scandinavian firm late in 1891
*1892:Suez Canal plied by Samuel’s tanker Murex, followed by the Conch [shell names on tankers eventually gave name to whole company]
*1892:Sumatra, Pankalan Brandan | Royal Dutch Pipeline and refinery began operations
*1895:1899; British merchant ships carried 70.8% of world sea trade
*1896:Royal Dutch manager Kessler hired young banker and accountant Henri Deterding who was to launch that company on its global career
*1896:Samuel finagled a Dutch concession on Borneo, where he struck oil and then built refinery in Balik Papan
*1897:Borneo oil business so extensive that Samuel formed a separate "Shell" Trading and Transport Company
*1898:England knighted Marcus Samuel for services to the Empire = Shell ship freed a Navy warship that ran aground in the Suez Canal
*1899:Samuel first formally tried to persuade the Navy to test oil as a fuel, the fuel his own fleet used. Samuel pioneered the use of oil as marine fuel and tried to get the Navy to convert to oil. So it happened, but Samuel was not allowed to play the central role
*1900:Dutch East Indies production encouraged Samuel to renew contract with the Rothschilds to purchase Russian petroleum products for overseas transport and marketing. Shell expanded everywhere and determined to market gasoline in Europe by purchasing a German company from the Deutsche Bank. Shell now intended to enter into active competition with the companies that controlled the market there = Standard, Nobel and Rothschild
*1901fa:Shell was Britain's largest oil company, second only to Standard worldwide. As it prepared to enter the European market, it was the only company with global sources of crude
*--The stage was set for a titanic struggle between Standard and Shell for world dominance in the new and every-day more imperative petroleum age

<>1885fe26(NS):Berlin Conference agreed on General Act whereby European imperialist powers settled on a division of Africa that made Europeans ("The West"?) temporarily happy, if not the Africans. This was Africa's route to European imperialist domination [1914:MAP of Africa]
*--Bismarck was the less-than-neutral host, seeking advantages for Germany as the western European states sliced the cake of Africa and took possessions of their respective assigned pieces. The King of Belgium, Leopold, received as personal property the lands drained by the Congo River
*1877:Englishman Cecil Rhodes, on the eve of a great career of personal aggrandizement and imperialistic adventure in African diamond extraction, jotted down his most heartfelt views on the need to form a vast, world-wide secret society, a colonial/imperialist version of the Jesuit order or Free Masons, an international shadow state designed to repair historical damage to the global British Empire (as in USA, earlier lost in the colonial revolution), expand it (in Africa, etc., where other European states were competing with England) and protect it (everywhere) [TXT] His company, De Beers Consolidated Mines, controlled 90% of the world's diamond production and had a huge stake in south African gold mining
*1883jy06:Hamburg Chamber of Commerce on German interests in West Africa [BNE:171-4]
*1892se16:English Foreign Secretary justified taking Uganda as an English imperialist possession on the basis of the need to protect English possession of Egypt and the Suez Canal (taken in 1882). This can be compared with Gorchakov's argument, and the "domino theory" of the 1960s might be taken to be the other side of the same coin
*--While England was intimately involved in the Russo-Turkish conflict in the Balkans [ID], Russia was altogether excluded from Africa . The Great Game was not child's play

<>1885ap21:je03; Russian government established Nobles' Land Bank [VSB,3:751-2] Gentry landowners got some economic relief from the state [TXT]. But it did not come until three years after the establishment of the Peasant Land Bank [ID]

<>1886:French journalist, racist (particularly anti-Jewish) and rabid conservative Édouard Drumont published La France Juive [Jewish France, excerpt in P20:32]

<>1886:Russian musician Vasilii Andreev began to appear in public with his popular balalaika orchestra. The balalaika was largely created by Andreev, based on an instrument occasionally found in the Russian village over the previous century or so. The balalaika is a stringed instrument somewhat similar to the mandolin (in its current form only about a century older than the balalaika). It is sounded by the right hand strumming or plucking three metal strings (two of them tuned to the same note!). Melodies are produced by the left hand working the strings against the fretted neck that extends from the triangular shaped sounding body
*1890s:1910s; Music Hall Songs about love and sex [DRW:140-43]
*--We are often surprised to learn that many characteristic national cultural expressions and cherished "timeless" traditions, in Russia and elsewhere, are of relatively recent origin, and have often been the product of modern "pop-arts"
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*--Entertaining tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life, 1779-1917 with an illustrative Compact Disk

<>1886my04:USA Chicago, Haymarket Square the site of violent labor disorder when police moved to break up a large crowd of demonstrators gathered in support of the eight-hour working day. A bomb detonated in the midst of the assembly, killing seven policemen and four others. More than 100 were injured. Riots followed
*--Public hysteria forced "rush to judgment" against eight "anarchists". No evidence was found or presented at trial linking these eight to the manufacture or use of the bomb that detonated at Haymarket, but they were all found guilty of "inciting violence". Four were hanged and one committed suicide. In 1893 the Illinois Governor pardoned the remaining three in view of the evident injustice of the trial
*--In the "trial of public opinion" the Haymarket riot served not only those who sought to criminalize organized labor but also those who sought to condemn establishment legal culture. "Terror" had a place in the arsenals of many different political persuasions
*--That year the "American Federation of Labor" [F/AFL/] formed out of 1881:Federation of...Unions. Federal structure (local, city, national, and international levels). The United Mine Workers and the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners came in, but the four big railroad unions did not. Samuel Gompers [F/], AFL leader until 1924, struggled against company-sponsored pseudo-unions and for higher wages, lower hours, and unemployment insurance for factory labor
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*-- Gompers website

<>1886je06:Russian Finance Minister N.K. Bunge took leading role in creation of the first Russian labor code [TXT]
*--The code incorporated all the demands made earlier by striking wage-laborers at one of Savva Morozov's large cotton mills [Harding:72-3 | See "Morozov" in MERSH]
*--Since 1882, Bunge pushed through both welfare and banking reforms (creation of peasant land banks and then noble land banks) in an effort to stem the tide of official reactionary policy under Alexander III
*--Now tsarist state forced him to resign under pressure exerted by those who sought tax increases in order to bolster military expenditure

<>1886se12:USA NYC | The World#27:13. Anonymous article, “Theosophy in New York: Facts about Mme. Blavatsky, Her Powers and Her Religion” [TXT]. Russian "spiritualism" swept USA high society. Blavatsky portrait
*--Growing popularity of figures like Blavatsky built on the accomplishments of talented spiritualists like Daniel Dunglas Home [W#1] [W#2] [W#3] and Eusapia Palladino [W#1] [W#2]. Altogether, these entertaining figures might be taken as warning against crude generalizations about the "positivist" mentality of 19th century "Western Civ" [ID] and, for that matter, about the profound "sea-change" as European thinkers made effort to escape cliché positivistic simplicities [EG]. Perhaps most important, these supernatural "psychic" figures represented a religious, mystic or spiritual side of the burgeoning pop-arts, heretical whether viewed from the position of traditional European Christianity or science

<>1887:German theorist of peasant origins, Ferdinand Tönnies, wrote powerful and influential critique of modernizing/industrializing society, contrasting it with an idealized recollection of pre-industrial everyday life in the rural setting, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [Community and Society] [CCS:227-51 | CCS,1:543-67]
*--Tönnies influenced a significant growth of a public reactionary mood in Europe (the desire to return to a mythic past, a past not in fact ever experienced). His disenchantment with his contemporary world was shared by many who had no personal experience with life "down on the farm"
*1887:USA author Edward Bellamy published Looking Backward: 2000-1887 [TXT], a bit of "science fiction" intended to promote progressive values by showing that everyday life was not as good as the elite establishment sometimes claimed. Bellamy contrasted the good life in the year 2000 with his own time, offering a complex variation on the "utopia" tradition
*--If Tönnies (just above) can be called "reactionary", Bellamy can be called "radical" in the sense that he recommended movement forward toward a mythic industrialized and technological future, hitherto not actually experienced by anyone. William Morris wrote his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, in part to correct Bellamy's many perceived deficiencies
*--American social critics, reacting in part to Bellamy, expressed their version of the general-European discomfort with industrial transformation of life [TXT]

<>1887:USA reading public captivated by Leo Tolstoy or, more accurately, "Tolstoyanism", which exploded into virtual "Tolstoy craze". The great Russian novelist was becoming a moral force throughout the world in his late years, and his broad appeal linked the high art of his novels with the emerging era of pop-art
*--"The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1893) and 1894:"Christianity and Patriotism" [VSB,3:733]
*--What is Art? (1897:1898)
*1873:Ivan Kramskoi's portrait of Tolstoy in Olga's Gallery
*1884:Nikolai Gay's portrait (detail) of Tolstoy in Olga's Gallery
*1890s photo of Leo Tolstoy walking in a pasture at his Tula Province country estate "Yasnaia poliana"
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Saul,2:311-34

<>1887:Russian religious thinker Konstantin Leont'ev became a monk [cf. Edie,2:271-80]
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*--Stephen Lukashevich, Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891):A Study in Russian "Heroic Vitalism" (NYC:1967) ORBIS/SUMMIT

<>1888:Russian publicist, an ex-leader of revolutionary terrorist party [ID], now loyal to his tsar, Lev Tikhomirov [ID] published a revealing interpretation Russia, Political and Social [TXT]

<>1889:Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev on Slavophilism, and "On Sins and Ailments" [VSB,3:731-3]
*1885:Ivan Kramskoi portrait of Solov'ev in Olga's Gallery

<>1889:1905; Russian statesman Sergei Witte came to St.Petersburg from Odessa as head of the railroad department of the Finance Ministry and in 1892 was appointed Finance Minister
*--Russian language website with primary and secondary documents
*--"The Witte System" guided the destiny of Russia over an intense period (16 years). These were fateful years =

(1) INDUSTRIALIZATION (as described in this entry with its several links) [TXT on general European industrialization]
(2) IMPERIALISM (follow Japan links) [TXT on general European imperialism]
(3) REVOLUTION (follow 1905 Revolution LOOP) [TXT on general European experience of revolution]

*--The state seemed determined to play the leading role in the urban modernization of Russia. Everyday life and the face of the empire were being transformed. Welfare legislation, including urban and wage-labor policies, took on new meaning. But was an urban "middle class" evolving as well? Didn't the state continue its largely reactionary policies under conditions of radical modernization?
*--"The Witte System" was inspired by a clear sense of a global industrial future in which agrarian nations would be gobbled up [table]. The challenge was to solve the "riddle of economic backwardness" =

  • An impoverished consumer economy was squeezed in order to win capital for investment in heavy industry
  • The state took the central role in this process, rather than independent entrepreneurial companies. The imperial state grabbed the initiative, sometimes pushing independent enterprises to the side (most notably railroads). Governmental "tutelage" over the economy and society (rather than social independence and free-market decision-making) was the norm
  • Tariffs on certain imports were introduced to protect the young and vulnerable Russian industrial economy from other more "advanced" economies. In this connection, Witte was opposed to open markets and pure laissez faire measures. He was influenced by the economic ideas of Friedrich List
  • "Big ticket" items, like railroads, mining, large-scale manufacturing were given heaviest and disproportionate attention. The consumer market was thus further squeezed. These measures restrained consumer expenditures and raised revenue for focused state investment in further heavy industrial development
  • The Russian agrarian economy was weak on the world market. Now USA became increasingly powerful, and thus an effective competitor with Russia on world grain markets. USA competition weakened Russian export trade and, thus, capital accumulation for investment in the domestic market
  • Russia's role in the early evolution of a global petroleum industry showed other weaknesses in comparison with competitors
*1947:JEH#7:149, Alexander Gerschenkron measured "The Rate of Growth of Industrial Production in Russia since 1885" came up with these measures of Witte's success =
1885-1889 6.10 % per year  
1890-1899 8.00 % per year 1894:1899; nearer 9.00 %
1900-1906 1.45 % per year  
1907-1913 6.25 % per year 1910:1913; ca. 7.50 %
1885-1913 5.72 % per year Roughly = 1928:1955 levels of growth
*--Olga Crisp (in Rondo Cameron, et al., Banking in the Early Stages of Industrialization [1967]:184) created this comparison of gross national product in rubles per capita, Russia and four other major nations, 1897-1913 =
NATION  1897 1913  (AS PERCENT)
Russia   63 101.4      (62%)
Germany 184 399.4      (46%)
France 233 NA         (NA)
Great Britain 273 460.6      (59%)
United States 346 682.2      (51%)

*--High ranking official V.I. Gurko evaluated Witte's accomplishments as Finance Minister [VSB,3:759]
Vladimir Iosifovich Gurko (1862-1927), son of a field marshal and brother of a general (Vasilii), graduated from Moscow University in 1885. In 1902, having served in several bureaucratic posts and having published two books on agrarian problems, he was appointed to a high post in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and in 1906 he served briefly as assistant minister. Subsequently turning to zemstvo activity, he was elected in 1912 to the State Council, where he served until the Revolution. Gurko give his appraisal of Witte as Finance Minister in the following passage from his posthumously published memoirs, Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II, pp. 56-57,66-67 =

Witte's economic policy was but a program to meet the current need and showed that simplicity of conception which was his distinctive trait. This policy was, in brief, the accumulation of funds in the state treasury and the accumulation of private capital in the country. Realizing that the best method of increasing state resources was to develop the country's economic life, he encouraged such development; but he considered that the only means to attain this end was to develop industry, heavy industry especially, since it was the source of all great private fortunes. . . . Witte held that agriculture is but a limited field for the application of human labor, while industry, unconfined by material limitations, may develop indefinitely and thereby use an indefinite amount of labor. Agriculture to him was a necessary but purely subordinate branch of public economy; agriculture was necessary to feed the population, but could not serve as the sole source of its well-being. This explains his negative attitude toward all measures designed to improve the agricultural situation. [?!] As to selection of method, Witte was . . . an opportunist; he was facile also in shifting his opinion when he considered such shifts advisable. But his aim of promoting the economic development of Russia as a basis for political strength was steady and unswerving. In summary, Witte's accomplishments as Minister of Finance reveal his great merit as an organizer of our state economy. He brought order into the state budget, avoided deficits, and achieved even a pronounced increase of revenues; he strengthened Russian finances as much by the introduction of the gold standard as by his successful conversion of state loans to a lower rate of interest, to four instead of six per cent. He extended the network of our railways; he introduced and developed university and secondary technical education; he assembled a fine group of assistants and other officers in the Ministry of Finance; he organized the department of tax supervision; he most successfully introduced and organized the large-scale liquor monopoly. All these were the fruits of Witte's strenuous labor. Thanks to him our industry began to develop at an almost incredible speed and attracted a part of the population away from agricultural pursuits which could not absorb all the peasant labor as the population increased.
*--Aleksandr I. Fenin, Coal and Politics in Late Imperial Russia: Memoirs of a Russian Mining Engineer
*--Sergei Yu.Witte, Background for Chamberlain: A Turn of the Century Plan for European Peace
*----------. The Memoirs of Count Witte [Excerpts, CCC2,2:611-14]
*--Some images of Russian industrialization =
  Moscow Peasant women factory workers [pix]
  Moscow Factory dormitory [pix]
  Petersburg on banks of the Neva River | Cotton Mill [pix]
  Petersburg, same factory, peasant workers [pix]
  Moscow Morozov Factory hiring hall [pix]
  Baku Oil field [pix]
  Siberian gold mine [pix]
  Central Asian petroleum pipelines [pix]
*--More on Sergei Witte
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     These first titles provide significant comparison with USA =
*--White: Chapters 7 & 8
*--Rimlinger:245-52 [TXT]
*--Saul,2:148-53, 409-20, 451-5
*--Fred V. Carstensen, "American Multinational Corporations in Imperial Russia: Chapters on Foreign Enterprise and Russian Economic Development" | 1977mr:JEH#37,1:245f
*--Thomas C. Owen, Russian Corporate Capitalism, chapter 3: "Corporations in the Russian Empire, 1700-1914" (pp. 16-49), and the discussion of Russian capitalism in a comparative perspective [TXT (pp. 78-83)]
*--J. P. McKay, Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 1885-1913
*--George Sherman Queen, The United States and the Material Advance in Russia, 1881-1906 | Tells of McCormick Harvesting Machine Co., Remington Rand, Allis-Chalmers Mfg Co., Robins Conveying Belt Co., and several banking firms
*--The great German sociologist Max Weber was fascinated by the modern experience of the two peripheral European peoples, Russians and Americans
\\
    The following titles deal more directly with Russia =
*--James H. Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change
*--William L. Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800-1860
*----------. The Industrializaton of Russia: An Historical Perspective
*--Daniel Chirot, ed. The Origins of Backwardness in East Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century
*--Jonathan Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926
*--Olga Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914 (LND:1976)
*--Malcom Falkus, Industrialization of Russia, 1700-1914 (LND:1972)
*--Alexander Gerschenkron, "Agrarian Policies and Industrialization: Russia, 1861-1917". The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol. 6, pt. 2. Cambridge:1965, pp. 706-800
*----------. "Problems and Patterns of Russian Economic Development". In his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Cambridge MA:1962; Reprint in CSH:282-308
*----------. "The Rate of Industrial Growth in Russia since 185l" *1947:JEH#7:144-174
*--R. W. Goldsmith, "The Economic Growth of Tsarist Russia, 1860-1913" Economic Development and Cultural Change 9 (1961):441-75
*--Paul R. Gregory, "Economic Growth and Structural Change in Tsarist Russia: A Case of Modern Economic Growth?" Soviet Studies 23 (January 1972):418-34
*----------. "Russian Industrialization and Economic Growth: Results and Perspectives of Western Research". 1977:JGO#25:200-18
*----------. Russian National Income:1885-1913. Cambridge ENG:1982
*--M. S. Miller, The Economic Development of Russia, 1905-1914. London:1926
*--Roger Portal, "The Industrialization of Russia". The Cambridge Economic History of Europe 6, pt. 2:801-872
*--"Russian Steam Navigation and Trade Company". MERSH 32:166-70
*--Theodore Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia
*--Post-Soviet Russian-language studies = Search JANUS with KEYWORD "vitte"

<>1889:English stevedores, longshoremen and other unskilled dockers organized massive and finally successful strike, marking the beginning of modern wage-labor union movement in England. Strike organizer Tom Mann wrote memoirs of the strike [CCC2,2:827f CCC3,2:877-84]
*--Socio-economic map of London that year provides insight into the population-geography of European industrial urbanization
*1889:English cultural elite, led by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, published Fabian Essays in Socialism [Sidney Webb's contribution in CCC3,2:953-70]

<>1889:USA Theodore Roosevelt published The Winning of the West. Roosevelt was the son of a wealthy New York importer. As he pursued a political career in NY, he was able to purchase ranch lands in Dakota territory where Native American Lakota Sioux were being pushed off their lands and pressed into reservations. After a political setback and devastating personal loss of close family members, he retired for two years (1884-1886) to his ranches. "Though unsuccessful as a rancher", as one popular desk encyclopedia put it, "he gained in the West many of the picturesque mannerisms that complimented his positive personality". His book reflected his experience on the range and his desire to be identified with the mythic vigor of pioneer life. He praised the supreme "righteousness" of war against indigenous "savages" of the prairie, "though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman". Wide-eyed acknowledgment of this gruesome reality lies at the heart of his "heroism". He wrote further, "American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tatar, New Zealander and Maori, -- in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people". NB! his future-forward view that horror today might eventually be justified by a great tomorrow

<>1889ja01:USA NV Paiute native, Wovoka, fell into a trance and had visions that became the basis of a new mystery religion called the "Ghost Dance". Within a year, the Native American reservations on the Great Plains were alive with Ghost Dancers

<>1889je:USA journal North American Review published article "The Gospel of Wealth" [TXT] which was written by industrialist Andrew Carnegie and appeared in book form under that title in 1900 [CCC2,2:803f CCC3,2:885-99]
*Since 1888, Andrew Carnegie was the chief owner of the Homestead Steel Works, just upstream from Pittsburgh

<>1889jy12:Russian counter-reform measures established "firm governmental authority" in the villages, in the form of Zemskie nachal'niki [Land Captains] [VSB,3:687-8] As a rule, only those gentry who chaired regional noble assemblies could hold this office. The tsarist state sought to restore the power of the nobility over peasants, and thus, in part, to reverse one of the essential elements of serf emancipation, but also to extend state authority more intimately into the post-emancipation village
*--This was the last effective moment in the life of the noble assembly as organizational center of aristocratic political life. The state made this final institutional effort to resuscitate a seriously damaged soslovie [social-estate]. But now other organizations -- zemstvos and then political parties -- seemed better to meet the felt needs of the Russian well-born
*--Nobility, as a legally-defined and defended social formation [soslovie], was not actually prospering in the countryside, but for some of them, life was still sweet =
*1894:Tea-time on a Kharkov province country estate [pix]
*1894:Cadets prepare to practice dancing at the exclusive Corps of Pages [pix]
*--Finance Minister Sergei Witte deplored the creation of Land Captains. He understanding that it met no authentic aristocratic need and that it did harm to the most numerous soslovie, the peasantry. In his memoirs, Witte described how those who introduced Land Captains presumed that villagers "are eternally under age, so to speak. This belief seems to me profoundly erroneous". This belief "is fraught with disastrous consequences for the future"
*--More Russians, even in privileged circles, were beginning to see that reactionary policy and the old order were indeed doomed. Gentry politics moved into more clearly "modern" institutional frameworks

<>1889:Paris World's Exposition on the centennial of the Great French Revolution was less focused on "liberty, equality and fraternity" than on the muscular accomplishments of economic progress. This world's fair followed in the emerging tradition by featured the newly built steely symbol of French industrial modernization, the Eiffel Tower

<>1889jy14:jy20; Paris | In the year of the Paris Exposition, an equally global or universal minded organization, the Second International, held its founding congress
*--European (and soon world-wide) social-democracy was becoming a public force. For over a quarter century from this time forward, the Second International worked to mobilize European, North American and world-wide progressive political parties and unions of wage-laborers, in an attempt to hasten economic reform and limit the economic power of capitalism. The liberal revolution over the previous century had gone only so far to break free of the old feudal hierarchies. It had in fact created a new and oppressive hierarchy, as depicted in a pamphlet published by the International Workers of the World [pix]. The long-term goal was to replace the capitalist or bourgeois "mode of production" with a radically democratic socialist mode of production
*--The Second International collapsed at the outbreak of World War One and died at its end as European socialism split, giving birth to two main trends in European Social Democracy (creating a functional equivalent of the contradictions built into European liberalism [ID]) =
 (1) moderate (e.g., Eduard Bernstein) and
 (2) revolutionary (e.g., Vladimir Il'ich Lenin)
*--European Marxism broke into factions, and the Russian movement was soon to do the same
*--The Second International did however force industrializing nations of Europe and North America to follow Bismarck’s lead in Germany in the direction of social welfare reform
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*--Rimlinger's comparative history of welfare, ch. 1:1-10 (Intro) [TXT]; chs. 6-7:193-301 (USA [TXT] and Russia [TXT]); ch. 9:333-43 (Conclusion)
*--P. Flora and A. J. Heidenheimer, eds., Development of Welfare States in America and Europe
*--GO 1927 to see how welfare comparison looked four decades later in a time of crisis, between WW1 & WW2
*--GO 1964 to see how welfare comparison was done yet four more decades later, in the era of the Cold War
*--GO 2007 to see a TABLE that compares affluence in USA with affluence in welfare-oriented Norway

<>1889se:USA, Chicago | From an 1892 speech by founder Jane Addams, Hull House was described in the following way: "It represented no association, but was opened by two women, backed by many friends, in the belief that the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago. Hull House endeavors to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society. It is an effort to add the social function to democracy [boldface added to highlight sense of "civil society" embedding in Addams' comments]. It was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal; and that as 'the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gave a form of expression that has peculiar value'" ["The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" [TXT]]

<>1890:African Cape Colony under the control of English imperialist adventurer Cecil Rhodes
*1888:1889; Documents describe Rhodes administration [CCC3,2:1138-49 | CCC2,2:841f]

<>1890:English public activist William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, published In Darkest England and the Way Out in which he compared the degradation and suffering of English wage-laborers with those of the peoples of Africa under imperial/colonial subjugation [PWT2:173-6]

<>1890:Finland brought more tightly under Russian imperialist control
*1892ja:Russian diplomat Vladimir Lamsdorf warned of the harm that Russification policy caused in Poland [VSB,3:690]
*--While Russification rushed ahead in Finland and Poland, reactionary policy was finding opposition within the highest ranks of Russian officialdom
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*--E. C. Thaden, Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855-1917

<>1890:French imperialist legislator and occasional Prime Minister Jules Ferry stated sacred claim to Vietnam in Le Tonkin et la Mère-Patrie
*1870s:Ferry held liberal views on democratic education [CCC2,2:512-21 CCC3,2:1030-]
*1884mr28:French Chamber of Deputies heard Ferry speech on the need for French imperial expansion [W]
*1885jy28:The Chamber heard Ferry on the question of French interests in Madagascar [BNE:174-9]

<>1890:Russian mathematician Sonia Kovalevskaia described her everyday life in A Russian Childhood, a significant account of women's education
*--Other women left significant memoirs of their experience, sometimes highly political. See Barbara Engel, ed., Five Sisters: Women against the Tsar; or see Vera Broido's Daughter of Revolution: A Russian Girlhood Remembered (1998)
*--Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist
*--Russian-born Emma Goldman emigrated to USA and launched herself on a remarkable half-century of anarchist activism
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*--Anna Hillyar and Jane McDermid, Revolutionary Women in Russia, 1870-1917 (2000), chapters 1, 2 & 3
*--Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700-2000 (2004)
*--Nataliia Pushkareva, Women in Russian History from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (1997)
*--Dorothy Atkinson, et al., Women in Russia (1977)
*--Rochelle Ruthchild, Women in Russia and the Soviet Union: An Annotated Bibliography (1993)

<>1890:USA Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 [TXT]

<>1890:USA Harvard University Professor William James (1842-1910) marked the beginning of an epoch in American intellectual history with the publication of Principles of Psychology
*--James always claimed that his ideas were derived from the principles of Charles Peirce (1839-1914)
*--James popularized "Pragmatism", a broad school of philosophy so dominant in USA in the generation before WW1 [CCC2,2:1035-41 | CCC3,2:1173-91] Consciousness is not a mirror of actuality, it is selective, interested, goal-oriented. Action is a function of consciousness. The mind "carves out" a vision of actuality from "the jointless continuity of space". Knowledge is instrumental. "Truth" is not absolute but "only the expedient in our way of thinking". "Radical empiricism" [see below] is a philosophy that exalts "pure experience". It rejects transcendent principles and seeks meaning in the "conjunctive relations" that variously link ideas with one another and join thought with experience. [1935:CDE:995]
*1897:The Will to Believe [TXT]
*1902:The Varieties of Religious Experience
*1907:Pragmatism
*1909:The Meaning of Truth
*1912:Essays in Radical Empiricism [TXT],  published posthumously
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*--Wagar on Pragmatism [TXT]

<>1890mr18:German Emperor dismissed Chancellor Otto von Bismarck [DPH:271-4], an act which dismayed many contemporaries [pix]
*--Bismarck's public career of 30 years, one of the most decisive and brilliant in the European 19th century, was at its end
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*--George Frost Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck's European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875-1890

<>1890je12:Russian Zemstvo electoral and voting laws altered, strengthening the position of landlords and marginalizing villagers within the organization. More generally, whether for landlords or for villagers, the range of zemstvo authority was seriously constricted
*--This happened on the very eve of the great 1891:1892; Russian famine when the Zemstvo was much needed [VSB,3:688-9]
*--The tsarist state seemed bent on scuttling the zemstvo and other "great reforms"
*--This and other clumsy official reactionary measures provoked Witte to compose a bitter and ironic "more rightist than thou" tirade
*--In this year the world-famous chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev resigned his SPb University post in protest over the refusal of Minister of Education I. D. Delianov (an acolyte of Dmitrii Tolstoi) to accept a student petition which Mendeleev had agreed to deliver

<>1890de15:SD Standing Rock Reservation, not far from his family cabin, Sitting Bull was killed by US Government Agency forces in connection with the policy of forceful suppression of native religious practice

<>1891:English artist, craftsman and writer William Morris published his novel in the "utopian" tradition, News from Nowhere, or , An Epoch of Rest [TXT] Morris described a humane ideal future in 22nd-century England, where the observation of communitarian and libertarian principles eradicated cultural, political, social and economic exploitation. Morris refused to accept the rampant vulgarities of mass-production industrial urbanization and commercial culture or pop-arts. He was steeped in an esthetic of rural virtue that harmonized with a European cultural nostalgia for a "down-on-the-farm" life-style. He reacted to the narrowness of Bellamy's utopian concept of industrial progress. Morris, perhaps looking down his nose, called Looking Backward "a horrible cockney dream". The refined Englishman Morris certainly put the American author in his place
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*--Website of Wm.Morris Society

<>1891:Russian scholar Maksim Kovalevskii published Modern Customs and Ancient Laws in Russia [TXT]

<>1891:1892; Russian famine
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*--Saul,2:335-64
*--R. G. Robbins, Famine in Russia, 1891-1892:The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis

<>1891:1903; Russia | Trans-Siberia railroad, after a half-century delay, nearly completed in nine years. Rail connection between Europe and the markets of Korea, China and Japan now established [pix] [MAP]
*--Ussuri River (north of Vladivostok) steamboat [pix]
*--Russia now poised to become vigorous Pacific Rim presence, but would it be a commercial or a military/imperialist presence?
*1893:Russia published an official explanation of the railroad's significance [CCC2,2:616-20]
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*--Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917
*--WEBSITE on Russian railroads, esp. Trans-Siberian

<>1891:USA traveler and lecturer George Kennan published Siberia and the Exile System with its powerful condemnation of Russian tsarist state's oppression by means of removal and frontier development in Siberia [Excerpts: VSB,3:684-7 | WRH3:387-404]
*--As that great symbol of progressive modernization -- the Trans-Siberian Railroad -- reached for Pacific shores, increased use of Siberian exile expressed but another facet of reactionary state policy

<>1891my01:Russian industrial workers delivered and listened to speeches on May Day [Harding:84-91]
*1891fe04:French Labor Party and the National Federation of Trade Unions urged French workers to join the international labor day of protest (May Day) against miserable conditions of wage-laborers [BNE:146-7] GO my15

<>1891my11:Japan, Otsu | Terrorist Tsuda Sanzo, an escort policeman, slightly wounded future Russian Emperor Nicholas II during state visit. Kojima Iken, Supreme court, ruled against the death penalty, showing unusual independence of the law and its courts, but also diplomatic slight to Russia
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*--KEJ

<>1891my15:Vatican issued Pope Leo XIII's radical encyclical Rerum novarum [TXT] that gave Church sanction to the burgeoning world wage-labor movement and strengthened the Church's claim to be the spokesperson for the working masses
*1931 anniversary of this radical encyclical struck a very different tone
*--The German Kulturkampf spread to France [DPH:258-61]

<>1891oc:German Social-Democratic Party adopted its Erfurt Program [DPH:274-7]
*--German miner Nikolaus Osterroth wrote later memoirs about his first confrontation with the Social Democratic Party [PWT2:170-3]

<>1892:1894; Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev, The Meaning of Love [Excerpts = Edie,3:85-98]

<>1892:Geneva | Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov published On the Tasks of the Socialists in the Campaign against Famine in Russia [VSB,3:708-9]

<>1892je11:Tsarist state revised the 1870 city-duma reform statute, increasing central control over municipal self administration and reducing the number who could participate in elections [VSB,3:689-10]
*--The center of gravity in Russian economic and social life was shifting from the countryside to the city. Labor legislation (e.g., "police socialism") and welfare legislation were designed to meet the needs of a small but crucial and growing urban wage-labor population
*--Semen Kanatchikov wrote an autobiography, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia which illustrated in great detail the life of a fresh-minted Russian proletarian or wage-laborer in the years up to the 1905 Revolution
*--Photos of early 20th-century Petersburg street scenes =

*--Russian Empire, 1895-1910. Pictures of St.Petersburg. Photographs from stereoscopic negatives in the Keystone-Mast Collection. They are presented by California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside (comments: edward.earle@ucr.edu)
*--Photos of early 20th-century Moscow street scenes = *--But what about urban elites? Was there a non-bureaucratic "bourgeois" liberal political culture? Was there anything of that much debated European bürgerliche Gesellschaft [urban or civil society]? Did modern city life in Russia begin only at the end of the great European epoch of urban capitalist liberalism?
*--Tighter restriction on the evolution of urban institutions was another example of reactionary state policy
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*--Metropolis, 1890-1940  [Another edition]. See Kenneth T. Jackson, "The Capital of Capitalism: the New York Metropolitan Region, 1890-1940":319-353; and R. A. French, "Moscow, the Socialist Metropolis":355-379.
*--L. S. Bourne., et al., eds., Urbanization and Settlement Systems: International Perspectives, section 1, ch. 1:23-48 (USA); section 4, ch. 1:335-55 (USSR)
*--Thomas C. Owen, Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika (1995), NB! "Russian "Entrepreneurship in Comparative Perspective" [TXT pp.78-83]
*------------------------, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855-1905
*--Henri Troyat, Daily Life in Russia Under the Last Tsar [1903 fictional social history = everyday life, business & other elites in touch w/ folk]
*--Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia
*--Jo Ann Ruckman, The Moscow Business Elite: A Social and Cultural Portrait of Two Generations, 1840-1905
*----------. Savva Morozov: A Moscow Entrepreneur on eve of the Russian Revolution
*--Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900
*--Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia
*--Hamm, ed. City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington:1986)
*--M. C. Kaser, "Russian Entrepreneurship". In Cambridge Economic History of Europe 8, part 2. Cambridge ENG:1978

<>1892jy04:USA | Platform of the Progressive or Populist Party. Addressed central issue of economic inequality and criticized the growing role of government in fostering and protecting that inequality. Much rhetorical energy was exerted to praise laissez faire and "free" markets, but there was by this time little authentic dispute among US political factions, left, right or center, about whether a vigorous government should or should not be involved in social and economic matters. In practice (if not in rhetoric) all factions agreed that government should play an active role in the economy. The only real issue was this = Whose social and economic interests ought to be fostered and protected by vigorous government action. The new Progressive Party opposed use of governmental power to support privilege. It sought to break up the close alliance of government and wealth. It did not seek to curb governmental power, rather to shift the focus of governmental power toward the needs of the vast majority of working people, to convert government into an active agent of popular welfare. Among their goals was the institution of a graduated income tax, introduction of initiative and referendum, and democratic election of senators
*--At the same time, the Progressive or Populist Party challenged the near monopoly on political power held by the two main political parties
*--The Progressive movement in the USA gave Russian scholar Moisei Ostrogorskii [ID] grounds for optimism about the future of democratic politics [TXT of 3 hopeful paragraphs from his book Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties]
*--The Progressive Era: Primary Documents...1890-1914 (2004)
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*--Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (2003)
*--Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist democracy and the question of capitalism in progressive era Portland, Oregon (2003)

<>1892jy06:USA Homestead Strike (near Pittsburgh) [W] [W]. Five-month labor dispute with Carnegie Steel turned violent when corporation manager Henry C. Frick hired 300 Pinkertons, a private police force founded by Allan Pinkerton [W] (who was also involved in Civil War espionage and contributed thusly to the creation of the Federal Secret Service). Frick organized military operation against workers, eventually involving the Pennsylvania National Guard. Carnegie, the owner, and Frick, the manager, broke with one another, in part because of Frick's hostility toward wage-labor
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*--James Howard Bridge, The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company: The Romance of Millions (1903)
*--Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead: Politics, Culture and Steel

<>1894ja04(NS):France and Russia signed secret military treaty, based on an earlier (1892au17[NS]) military convention [Fay, Origins,1:118-9 | DIR2:358-9 | DIR3:405-7]
*--The diplomatic system forged by Bismarck [ID] was breaking down. Powerful nations on eastern and western borders of Germany were taking action to protect themselves from "The Triple Alliance" [ID]

<>1893:1934; Russian cultural phenomenon, lasting nearly a half-century, called "The Silver Age" opened with Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's "On the Present Condition of Russian Literature". Merezhkovskii also wrote on revolution and religion, and the Jewish Question [RRS:187-224]
*--The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
*--Russian art of the avant-garde: Theory and criticism, 1902-1934
*--The diary of Valery Bryusov (1893-1905)|
*--Some would extend this remarkable epoch 41 years, through the 1917 Revolutions, into emigration, but also into the early Soviet period, up to the imposition of Stalinist "Socialist Realism" in 1934
*--The Silver Age coincided with new trends in Russian philosophical and religious thought
*--Russian artistic developments are best understood in a pan-European, perhaps one should say "global", context
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*--William Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture
*--Robert C. Williams, Russian Art and American Money, 1900-1940

<>1893:English theorist Thomas Huxley published Evolution and Ethics [excerpts = CCC3,2:855-66] which encouraged application of Darwinian biology to the analysis of human behavior
*1894:US scholar, diplomat and President of Cornell University, Andrew D. White, summarized some telling moments in the emerging struggle between science and religion, with special reference to the impact of Darwinian biology, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom [excerpts = PWT2:229-31]. White described how Darwin's biology "had come into the theological world like a plough into an ant-hill". White and his university were accused of teaching atheism and "infidelity".  Darwinian concepts gladdened some and outraged others

<>1893:French philosopher and social critic Elie Halévy (1870-1937) and associates (largely from the elitist Ecole Normale) founded Revue de métaphysique et de morale with the statement that "it is necessary to act against the miserable positivism, which we are departing from, and the irritating religiosity, which we risk getting stuck in, to build a philosophy of action and reflection, to be rationalists with a passion"
*--Halévy at this time devoted serious attention to the English classical liberal economic thinkers, the philosophical radicals of the early 19th century [ID] =
*1904:He published Growth of philosophic radicalism
*--He sought to install an economic foundation, so to speak, under his neo-Kantian philosophy [ID Kant]

<>1893:French sociologist Émile Durkheim published The Division of Labor in Society in which he emphasized the essential social or communitarian setting of individual choices, rounding off the extreme individualism of the "classical economists" who emphasized the atomized individual. He distinguished between "mechanical solidarity" and "organic solidarity", though he presumed that advanced society required a bit of both [CCS,1:483-515]

<>1893:Hawaiian Islands under control of USA sugar plantation owner

<>1893:Russian government review of national manufacturing industry and trade [CCC2,2:603-10]

<>1893my01:Chicago World's Fair (Columbian Exposition). In a year of economic crisis in USA, Chicago put on the best show possible. George Ferris, Jr., constructed the first modern Ferris wheel, powered by a 1000 horse power engine. Thirty-six wooden cars were suspended around the 264 feet high wheel. Each car held 60 riders. More than one million paid fifty cents for a ride
*--At this same fair, Wisconsin University [old "Northwest Territory"] Professor Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced his great theory about US history, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" [TXT] He later published a book-length study [TXT]
*--Some idea of the target of Turner's remarks can be gained from this paragraph of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. East Coast elites had reason to be affronted [EG] by the frontier-oriented and westward-looking cultural radicalism of Turner's thesis
*--Sitting Bull’s SD reservation cabin had been crated up and shipped to Chicago for exhibit at this World's Fair, just down the lanes from where Turner held forth on the essence of the American frontier experience. When the Fair closed down, the cabin — so it is said — was packed off to the city dump. Turner announced the closing of the American frontier, then Sitting Bull's cabin was trashed. These two Chicago events together were like a mythic announcement that the era of Native American independence on the Great Plains was over. More than that, the longer era that spanned nearly two hundred years in the relations of Euro-Americans and Native Americans was also at a close. A new era was about to dawn
*--In this same year, the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway Committee issued provisional regulations to promote peasant migration to the Bashkir Steppes and Siberia (after nearly 200 years of frontier confrontation, the Bashkir steppes now brought fully under Russian dominion). 1899:Refinements published in "Regulations concerning government Grants-in-Aid to Settlers Migrating with Required Authorization to Siberia and the Steppe Governorship General" [VSB,3:760]
*--Library of Congress website devoted to the shared frontier experience of Russia and USA (bilingual)
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*--White:18-40 compares RUS-USA indigenous populations, rates of geographical expansion, and early commercial phases of economic development
*--Saul,2:365-77
*--Wagar on Turner [TXT]
*--Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, "Russian Expansion in the Far East in the Light of the Turner Hypothesis", in Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, The Frontier in Perspective
*--D. W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War
*--D. W. Treadgold, "Russian Expansion in the Light of Turner's Study of the American Frontier", 1952oc:Agricultural History:147-152
*--William Wykoff and Gary Hausladen, "Settling the Russian Frontier: With Comparisons to North America", 1989mr:Soviet Geography [now titled Eurasian Geography and Economics] #30, 3:179-89

<>1893de14:Russian law restricted peasant ability to buy or sell land independently from village community [VSB,3:756]
*--Reactionary policy resisted evolution of independent peasant farmers
*1893:English traveler F. J. Wishaw, Out of Doors in Tsarland described peasant village life [WRH3:426-34]
*1894:Konstantin Korovin painting of wintry scene, a sleigh in front of peasant hut, in Olga's Gallery

<>1894:USA NYC | William Dean Howells published a utopian novel, A Traveler from Altruria, in which one character described the main change in American life, 1850-1890. In 1850, a person who ran into difficulties, who did not at first succeed, turned his hand to something else. As a last resort, a person "went West, pre-empted a quarter section of public land, and grew up with the country". But, as the theorist/historian Turner declared, the frontier was now closed. "The struggle for life", Howells wrote, "has changed from a free fight to an encounter of disciplined forces, and the free fighters that are left get ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital". [Kazin:17]
*--As the 19th century wound down, the giganticism of the "second industrial revolution" presented a looming menace to the contemporary imagination. Heavy stripes of disenchantment ran through cultural life, not excluding the fine arts. Events seemed to contradict the naive "liberal" belief in progress. A feeling of disenchantment drove Max Weber into deeper theoretical and sociological searches for sources of current problems. For others it encouraged a romantic affirmation of earlier, simpler, often rural virtues. For example, Thorstein Veblen praised life "down on the farm" and contrasted it with urban and industrial dehumanization. Disenchantment stimulated both dreamy projections of utopian escape (remember Tönnies) as well as terrifying projections of utopian hell (in the emerging anti-utopian trends of the 20th century)
*--Industrialization of farm production moved ahead [pix]
*--Some Americans took courage from the saving graces of European civilization ("Western Civ"). These might have been a latter-day USA example of that general trend labeled "Westernizer" when it appeared a half century earlier in Russian cultural debate. Howells, for example, was much influenced by Tolstoy and the more clearly "Western" Ivan Turgenev. However, American-born but Europe-centered author Henry James, an important representative of the US "Westernizer" trend and a friend of Turgenev, expressed his fear that old Europe was stagnant. Its future "is more likely to be one of disintegration, with Russia for the eccentric on one side and America on the other" [Kazin:17]. Van Wyck Brooks showed a deep affinity for the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia [TXT]
*--Some concluded that the era of urban-based "bourgeois" liberalism was over because the laissez faire, entrepreneurial and true free-market foundations for its existence had been transformed to meet the needs of trans-national finance and corporate industrial giganticism. The economy had outgrown its original liberal political ideology

<>1894:English journalist William Thomas Stead (1849-1912) published Chicago Today: The Labour War in America. Stead was a wealthy supporter of progressive reform
*--Stead had a great interest in Russia and USA. In 1888 he published The Truth about Russia which placed some emphasis on the religious side of Leo Tolstoy
*--In 1890 he began publication of the journal Review of Reviews [AP4.r4]
*--Stead died on the Titanic
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*--Joseph O. Baylen, The Tsar's Lecturer General: W.T. Stead and the Russian Revolution of 1905

<>1894:1895; Manchuria. China and Japan at war

<>1894ja04:France and Russia signed secret military treaty [Fay, Origins,1:118-9 | DIR2:358-9]

<>1894ja22;1897mr31; English Parliamentarian Joseph Chamberlain delivered three rousing imperialist and racist speeches, The British Empire: Colonial Commerce ... [P20:23 | PWT2:213-15] English version of European imperialism

<>1894je:Korea revolted against imperialist Japan and asked China for help. Japan sent troops

<>1894su:USA Pullman Strike (south of Chicago) became a national crisis. The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, had grown strong over the preceding two years and was now backed by a wide-spread, well-organized labor movement. President Cleveland sent in nearly 2000 US army troops to join the nearly 4000 National Guardsmen and about 8000 police and private security forces. These paramilitary forces deployed against laborers. At the same time, steps were taken to make self-organization of wage-laborers a federal crime
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*-- [W#1] [W#2]

<>1894oc20:1917mr; Russian Emperor Nicholas II, the last tsar and emperor, reigned for a quarter century
*--Nicholas II ruled via brutal official reaction inherited from his father Alexandr III, but he responded with half-hearted reforms as revolution loomed
*1905 Revolution stripped Nicholas of his absolutist, autocratic authority
*1906:1917; The Russian State Duma was created in the institutional place of the old absolute and autocratic tsarist authority, but the autocrat remained and the new representative or "parliamentary" governing institution was slow to put down roots. In fact, it collapsed with tsarist authority in 1917
*--The final disaster of World War One caused Emperor Nicholas II to resign the Russian throne
*--Yet this pitiful reign witnessed one of histories most remarkable cultural explosions that exerted a lasting world influence well into the Soviet period
*--At the beginning of Nicholas' reign, political opposition to the tsarist state was centered on the Zemstvo movement, but increasingly involved a broader spectrum of opinion and social action. E.g., see Tver Zemstvo address to the new emperor Nicholas II [1934:SEER#12:347-67]
*--Nicholas characterized liberal political objectives as "senseless dreams"
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*1890:1905; Tver Province Zemstvo politics in the 15 years leading up to the Revolution of 1905 are characterized by Charles Timberlake in Emerging Democracy..., pp. 30-59

<>1895ja17:ja19; Tver liberals addressed new tsar Nicholas II about need for representative government, and Nicholas replied with rebuke of their "senseless dreams" about a constitution in Russia  [*1934ja:SEER#12,35:349-50 & 352-4]
*--To the dismay a a large segment of the Russian educated population, Nicholas seemed to be saying that reactionary policy would continue as before

<>1895fe12:Petersburg New Port strike leaflet. That summer, a Moscow "Workers Union" stated labor demands [Harding:143-6]
*1895de:Tsarist police arrested leaders of this movement, some of them wage-laborers and some of them representatives of the educated Russian population, active as a revolutionary intelligentsia [ID]
*--An important example of this new generation of dedicated labor-oriented intelligentsia was ex-student Vladimir Il'ich Ulianov. In this year of mounting labor organization, Ulianov helped organize a Petersburg Union of Struggle [Soiuz bor'by] [Harding:149-215]
*--Ulianov's father was a tsarist education official who had received noble status as a result of long and high quality service. The family lived a comfortably established "middle class" provincial life [pix]
*--But Vladimir's brother Aleksandr [pix] went off to the university where he got involved in political circles associated with terrorist plots. He was arrested and executed
*--Now, for his acts of labor agitation, younger brother Vladimir Ulianov was sent into Siberian exile in the valley of the Lena River. He changed his family name, adapting the Siberian river of exile to label his new identity = "Lenin" [pix]
*--Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia wrote memoirs of their experience in the three years of Siberian exile [StH:6-15]

<>1895:1908; English pundit, historian and sociologist, H.G. Wells (Herbert George, 1866-1946) wrote fantastic science-fiction, often projecting a future in a prophetic tone, sometimes utopian, sometimes dystopian. With its fixation on modern technological, industrial life, pop-arts science fiction seemed always to be asking “is you is, or is you ain’t my baby?” Here are some of the most widely read Wells publications =
*1895:The Time Machine
*1896:The Island of Doctor Moreau
*1897:The Invisible Man
*1898:The War of the Worlds
*1908:The War in the Air

<>1895:USA efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) delivered a technical paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, "A Piece-Rate System: A Step toward Partial Solution of the Labor Problem". This was not so much a "step toward partial solution" of the workers' own "labor problem" but of the capitalist managers' labor problem. Taylor's inauspicious presentation marked the beginning of a globally significant "managerial revolution" which was redefining the functional meaning of "ownership" and old-fashioned notions of capitalist property (e.g., Henry C. Frick)
*--And the new managerial revolution had implications far beyond the board rooms of capitalist enterprise
\\
*--Merkle:7-8
*--Alfred Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business and later, on the global stage, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism | A relatively small number of gigantic corporations -- DuPont, Westinghouse, Dunlop, Armstrong-Whitworth, Farben, Siemens, etc. --  were beginning to function in the world like nation-states unto themselves, struggling to be winners in the quest to organize the earth. This was less a process of "Darwinian" survival of the fittest in some natural process. It was an exercise in rational economic planning rather than "natural selection". Chandler argued that mass production expanded levels of productivity to such heights that by merging plants, bringing unit costs down, "economies of scale" were possible. Corporate organizational and distributive power gave them further close control over the process. Oil refiners bought wells "upstream on the pipeline" and also filling stations "downstream on the pipeline" in order to position themselves profitably through the full production and distribution of industrial commodities. This required meticulous or micro-control of humongous investment and income related to colossal industrial enterprises. This required extremely disciplined and ornate organizational structure, yet a structure always open to intervention and control from a central point. Elaborate structures -- marketing, engineering, accounting, research, finance, etc. departments -- were under centralized managerial control. This was called "scientific management".

<>1895mr061895mr06:German Reichstag heard racist (particularly anti-Semitic) speech by Hermann Ahlwardt, The Semitic Versus the Teutonic Race [P20:30]

<>1895ap13:Kansas, Salina | Eighth-grade final exam [W]

<>1895ap23:Japan and China brought war to a close. Shimonoseki Treaty gave Japan Liaotung Peninsula, w/Port Arthur and Dalny (Japanese:Dairen Chinese:Dalian or Ta-lien)
*--Russia, France and Germany considered Japanese gains to be excessive, so they launched a tripartite intervention. [Beasley, MHJ:163 has strange list of motives, including German desire "to edge Russia away from European politics"] German Kaiser Wilhelm corresponded with Nicholas II over the next weeks urging Russia eastward, "to cultivate the Asian Continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow Race" [VSB,3:693]
*--Russian-Japanese relations, up to this point, had been businesslike, now relations w/Asia embittered by this act in concert with west European imperial powers
*--Sir Ernest Satow, British Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan (1895-1900) and China (1900-1906), Korea and Manchuria between Russia and Japan, 1895-1904

<>1895my19:Cuban revolution against Spain led by Jose Marti from USA. Spain suppressed the rebellion and moved rebellious groups -- ex-slaves, mulattos and small holders of Spanish descent -- into areas called reconcentrados in garrison cities (a grim variation on now familiar frontier or imperialist policies of removal, transport and concentration)
*--Cuban economy suffered, especially the $50m worth of USA investments. USA business shifted to support rebels and a Cuban shadow government, a junta, settled in NYC under watchful USA eyes. The Spanish version of European imperialism was coming unglued, and a new imperialist competitor arose in the "New World", the first serious overseas efforts of US imperialism
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*--John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (2006)

<>1896:1916; Central Asian expansion of Russian power brought it into Kazakhstan
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*--G. J. Demko, The Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan, 1896-1916

<>1896:Austria | Hungarian-born Jewish leader Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State, (TXT)]. Soon a Zionist movement arose in favor of the creation of a Jewish nation-state, preferably in Palestine

<>1896:French philosopher Alfred Fouillée criticized dominant positivist traditions of European thought in Le mouvement idéaliste et la réaction contre la science positive [BMC4:618-23]

<>1896:Russian Procurator of the Holy Synod [ID] Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian Statesman [TXT] gave expression to the most extreme official reactionary views on modernization of Russian life [cf. VSB,3:736-9 | WRH3:434-46 | RRC2,2:390-401]
*--To what degree did these official reactionary views reflect views among the public, or beyond the urban public and out into the countryside? Does Pobedonostsev represent an "official reactionary world view" or does he represent a "public reactionary world view", or more broadly a "Russian reactionary world view"? Were his extreme views the expression of a hot-house statism or the expression of a wide-spread national outlook. In any event, Pobedonostsev, as secular bureaucratic head of the Russian Orthodox Church, became the representative figure of Russian reactionary policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
*--Are his views essentially different from those of prominent Oregon public figures in the same late-nineteenth century epoch? Consider this historical evaluation by Russell Sadler [TXT] which appeared in  2006mr29:ERG
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*--Robert F. Byrnes, Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought (1968)
*--Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (2004) explores tension in Russia between the Church as bureau of central government (the Petrine Church) or the Church as a "grass-roots" expression of Russian spirituality, a place not so much for official doctrine as for popular religious and communitarian ceremony (as seen by Khomiakov [ID] and other Slavophiles)

<>1896mr01:Ethiopia defeated aggressive, imperialist Italy

<>1896ap19:Saint Petersburg League for the Struggle to Emancipate the Working Class, secretly organized by Russian Marxists in the previous year, issued a proclamation [VSB,3:709] The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party [SDs] was coming into existence
*--In these months, future SDs were active in labor strikes [Harding:121-208]

<>1896my22:Moscow | Russia-China treaty hostile to interests of Japan and Manchuria (shortcut for Trans-Siberian Railroad secured) [DIR2:360-2 | DIR3:407-9]
*--In this same month, Seoul [Korea] Memorandum exchanged between Russia and Japan. The two powers shied away from Yamagata Aritomo proposal to divide Korea into North and South. Korean King Kojong had fled to the Russian embassy when his Queen Min was killed by Japanese "henchmen". Russia and Japan now agreed that the King would return to his palace, and Japan would impose some control over its "henchmen"
*--Japanese military expenditure had this year reached 53m/yen, up from 15m/yen three years earlier. Remained this high till Russo-Japanese War
*--Japanese naval expenditures wavered as army expenditures were much increased. Japan made decision to head inland into Manchuria rather than overseas toward Taiwan [Beasley,MHJ:165 | compare w/Matsusaka,Tak lct 8x11]
*--Contemporary French  journalist, Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu wrote The Awakening of the East: Siberia, Japan, China (1900)
*--At a great trans-oceanic distance, US imperialism on a collision course with Russian imperialism
\\
*--Zabriskie on USA/Russian rivalry in the Pacific, 1895-1914
*--Don C. Price, Russia and the Roots of the Chinese Revolution, 1896-1911
*--A. Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern Policy, 1881-1904
*--B. A. Romanov, Russia in Manchuria, 1892-1906

<>1896je:Saint Petersburg labor strikes [MR&C2:350]

<>1896je09:Japan and Russia signed Yamagata-Lobanov Agreement, apparently guaranteeing Korean independence. Russian-Japanese relations seemed deceptively harmonious as they jockeyed with one another to cash in on China's weakness and for advantage in Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin and the southern Kuril Islands

<>1896jy09:Chicago, at the Democratic Party's National Convention | William Jennings Bryan delivered his stirring oration against what he thought was an urban elitist assault on rural America, "Cross of Gold" [TXT]
*1896:USA,Chicago | Russian visitor Vladimir Korolenko recorded his impressions of wage-labor conditions in a US "Factory of Death" [Hasty:83-94]

<>1896jy31:London | French and German ambassadors to England met for long and serious (though informal) conversation about how their two nations might be marginalized by recent global developments. They feared that Europe was in danger if strong and innovative measures were not taken. They were not thinking only of the old imperialist monster England. They noted also the rise of two new giants, Russia and USA, for example, recently in Japan and China. [BNE:195-8] While Russian and USA imperialism seemed to flourish, serious conflicts among other European imperialists threatened disastrous war
*--Subsequent events in China and Japan only deepened these concerns

<>1896au26:Philippine Islands rebelled against Spain. Rebel leaders were at first pro-USA, then they were betrayed by USA. USA closely followed stirrings for independence in the Philippines and Cuba. This sort of US "anti-imperialism" was designed to weaken Spanish control, not necessarily to promote revolution
*1896:USA political leader, Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) wrote "For Intervention in Cuba" [TXT]. Lodge was imperialist in one direction (overseas) and isolationist in another ("the homeland"), free-trader in one direction and protectionist in another, so long as advantage flowed in a direction beneficial to his cohort. Pressures for a new US imperialism were mounting, but it had to cloak itself in anti-imperialist rhetoric
*1897:Cartoon showed Uncle Sam "patient" as he waited for his colonies to come fully ripe before picking [pix]. Uncle Sam is dressed in the mode of a tropical plantationist, and his basket already holds Louisiana [ID], Texas [ID], California [ID], and Alaska [ID]. On the branch above his head hangs Cuba, soon ripe for the picking. Notice that the large fruit tree is rooted behind a high and deteriorating wall of some possibly declining power, yet the branches now stretch out toward the new plantationist, ready to take up the old plantationist's "burden" [ID]

<>1896au31:Leo Tolstoy wrote open letter [TXT] with political advice to Russian liberals who were upset because of Russian reactionary state actions to shut down volunteer societies devoted to cultural life

<>1897:1899; Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev, Foundations of Theoretical Philosophy [Edie,3:99-134 | VSB,3:732]
*--"The Enemy from the East" and "The Russian National Ideal" in RRS:41-60
*--Excerpts [VSB,3:731-3]

<>1897:French sociologist Émile Durkheim published Suicide: A Study in Sociology [CCS,1:383-420]

<>1897:Italian nationalist and imperialist political figure Ferdinando Martini reacted to Italian defeat on the borders of Ethiopia [CCC2,2:571f]
*--This late blooming modern European nation-state, Italy, found itself in deep conflict between original half-century-old liberal principles of Italian nation-state formation and the emerging European imperative of imperialist dominion over non-European peoples. Forty years later, Fascist Italy took revenge as it sought to carve a niche out for itself among the other European imperialist states

<>1897ja28:Russia conducted 1st modern census, Obshchii svod po Imperii rezul’tatov razrabotok dannykh pervoi vseobshchei perepisi naseleniia, proizvedennoi 28 ianvaria 1897 goda
*--The Perepis' counted 129 million (13 million in cities) [cf. RRC2,2#38] Translated title page [W]
*--Eastview Press reprinted the census on CD and described "the first and last census of the Russian Empire". Its initiator was the famous Russian geographer and public figure Petr Semenov-Tian-Shanskii. He lobbied three decades to make this census happen. To test and improve the census questionnaire, he conducted an experimental census on his family country estate, Gremiachka. The final version of the questionnaire was designed for a household and included 14 questions. The announced goal of the census was “to learn more about the population and to study it … to understand precisely the various conditions of popular life“. It was also promised that the census would not “generate new taxes or other burden“. The 1897 Census continues to be the most authentic source on the number of Russia’s population and its ethnic composition at the end of the 19th century
*--Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire provides population statistics for almost 90 "minority" peoples of Russia

<>1897je02:Russian factory law [TXT] expanded on previous welfare legislation [VSB,3:719]
*--Reactionary policy mixed with "progressive" reform

<>1898:France rocked by "Dreyfus Affair" (with its origins in 1894 and final resolution not until 1906). Progressive (liberals and socialists) combined with humanitarians of all political stripes to oppose racists (anti-Jewish elements) among right-wing politicians
*1898ja13:Paris | Great French novelist Émile Zola's J'accuse exposed in a most public way the injustices of the Dreyfus Affair [DPH:323-5]. The racist/nationalist press thought it was sufficient rebuttal to accuse Zola of being an "Italian"
*--Jean Baffier defended the racists [BNE:148-52]

<>1898:German Social Democrat and moderate influence in the Second International, Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism (England,1909) [Excerpt = CCC2,2:934-8 | CCC3,2:971-5]
*1899:He published a reply to his critics, The Preconditions of Socialism
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*1994my06:TLS:27 | A summary of Bernstein's main "revisions" of Marxist socialist ideology and tactics [TXT]

<>1898:Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Muraviev to Cassini, with Cassini reply to Muraviev and Lamsdorf [Zabriskie]

<>1898:USA,Chicago | Theodore Roosevelt delivered speech "The Strenuous Life" [CCC3,2:1127-37]

<>1898:1902; Russian Riazan Provincial peasant village the subject of intensive ethnographic study designed by Olga Tian-Shanskaia and K.V. Nikolaevskii. Results published as Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia
*--In the half-century preceding the 1905 Revolution, Russian ethnography made tremendous strides toward full and accurate ethnographic description of Russian village life and culture. See Reeder (2nd ed.):85-104 (agriculture-ritual songs) and 109-136 (love, marriage, family)

<>1898ja01:Spain launched a reform of Cuban administration, designed to introduce self-rule to the island
*1898fe:Puerto Rico granted independence. No one much liked these seemingly progressive measures. It was too little too late for stumbling Spanish imperialism

<>1898fe15:Cuba, Havana Harbor | USA Battleship Maine exploded and sank. Without any evidence, USA officials and an expanding jingoist newspaper press—particularly the William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer sheets—blamed Spain and called for revenge. One headline read, "THE WARSHIP MAINE SPLIT IN TWO BY ENEMY’S SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE". Only one authoritative investigation of this event was ever completed, that by Admiral H. G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine was Destroyed (USA Naval History Division publications). Rickover concluded that it was the navy’s fault for poor management of fuel and powder storage on the big ship
*--This explosive moment may be taken as the symbolic opening of a distinctly imperialist era in USA foreign policy. A catastrophe could be linked to specific evil-doers, and the hand of military-industrial adventurers (some of whom were actually responsible for lax security on the Maine) was freed of restraint. Manipulated public opinion fell behind ambitious USA imperialists.
*--Now the USA offered its version of European imperialism
*--Documents of USA foreign policy 1898-1914

<>1898mr:1898ap; USA pursued dual policy of trying to insert itself between Spain and Cuba in defense of Cuban independence, and trying to buy the island from Spain, thus betraying Cuban independence [Hugh Thomas in 98ap23:NYR 45,n7:10-12]
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*--Website related to US imperialism LOOP

<>1898mr:China leased Port Arthur to Russia, Kiaochow to Germany and Kowloon to England. In this year in China, wide-spread traditionalism, anti-modernism, and anti-imperialism helped create an anti-"West", anti-Christian movement called the Society of Righteous, Harmonious Fists [better known as Boxers]
*--Imperialism was producing local revolutionary resistance to expansionist European states, but also inter-state violence among these very expansionist European states. Imperialism was coming home

<>1898mr01:Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party [SDs] opened first congress in Minsk and issued a proclamation, written from a Marxist perspective [VSB,3:709-10]

<>1898ap10:Egypt | Eyewitness accounts of the English attack on the Sudanese at the Atbara River. The English were under the command of Kitchener. The indigenous anti-imperialist forces were led by al-Mahdi. Winston Churchill described the one-sided battle in which the Sudanese lost 20,000 and the English, 500 [Eye:398-407]

<>1898ap25:Japan displeased with Russia/China agreement in Liaotung Peninsula region (Port Arthur), but took initiative to offer Russia free hand in Manchuria for Japanese free hand in Korea. That initiative failed, but Nishi-Rosen Agreement pledged both sides to provide no military or financial advisers to Korea w/o prior agreement, and Russia recognized Japan’s preponderant economic interests in Korea

<>1898ap25:USA declared war on Spain. Spanish-American War. Tensions with Russia mounted
\\
*--Library of Congress narrative, a part of a multi-page website devoted to the Spanish-American War
*--Saul,2:421-51
*1998sp:WWQ#22,2:42-65 | Warren Zimmerman (Z was 1989:1992; US ambassador to Yugoslavia)

<>1898my01:Philippine Islands, Manila Bay | USA Admiral George Dewey destroyed Spanish Pacific fleet

<>1898jy01:Cuba | Rough Riders with Teddy Roosevelt fought the Battle of El Caney
*--James Creelman described the battle and the USA author Steven Crane described the aftermath [Eye:407-9]
*--Roosevelt had recently resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (in part responsible for the vigorous expansion of US naval readiness for war, and for the way the Maine was loaded with fuel and powder [ID]) and decked out now in a new Brooks Brothers uniform, charged onto the pages of history

<>1898jy03:Cuba, Santiago Bay | USA fleet captured entire Spanish Caribbean fleet.

<>1898jy07:Hawaiian Islands annexed to USA as territory

<>1898jy08:Puerto Rico Islands come under US imperialist administration

<>1898se:USA journal North American Review | Charles A. Conant published "The Economic Basis of 'Imperialism' " [TXT]. Conant was a major figure in US financial affairs. He was editor of the Wall Street Journal and a trusted adviser to presidents from McKinley to Wilson. His central message was that recent disorders in American capitalist market would be solved by expansion of USA imperialism. In his own way, he was saying what leading socialist theorists were saying [EG] = Modern capitalism needs imperial dominion. But in another sense, Conant was merely extending the concept of frontier expansion overseas. Which was it? The answer depends on the nature of the relationship between metropol ("core") and periphery [ID]

<>1898se16:USA Senator from Indiana Albert Beveridge delivered campaign speech "The March of the Flag" [TXT], expressing evident patriotic, imperialistic and racist pride. US imperialism was supported by something like a political ideology
*1900ja09:Speech on US policy in the Philippines [RWP2:265-9]

<>1898oc14:Moscow Art Theatre founded by Konstantin Stanislavskii [real name=Alekseev] and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
*--Russian homepage
*--VIDEOTAPE history of the Moscow Art Theatre
*--Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, with his sparse language and quotidian themes, seemed at odds with contemporary avant-garde trends in the fine arts
*1899:1900; Maksim Gorky (1868:1936; real name "Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov"; "Gor'kii" means "bitter") had been a struggling provincial writer (born in Nizhnii Novgorod). He now made the acquaintance of Chekhov and the great novelist Leo Tolstoy and, with his distinctly radical social and political ideas, he broke into the capital-city big-time. A few years later, Gorky wrote brilliant memoirs of his early acquaintance with Chekhov [TXT] [TXT], Leo Tolstoy [TXT], Aleksandr Blok and Leonid Andreev. [Webpage devoted to Gorky]
*1902:Moscow Art Theatre production of Gorky's play, THE LOWER DEPTHS [Na dne] won international fame. At some odds with the prevailing sensibilities of the Russian "Silver Age", Maksim Gorky dealt with the Russian lower classes, the laboring poor of the neglected Russian backwaters, and did so in an increasingly "realistic" or descriptive style
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*--W. H. Bruford, Chekhov and His Russia: A Sociological Study (1947)

<>1898oc18:USA, Chicago Peace Jubilee | AFL President Samuel Gompers [F/] delivered speech which expressed labor union dissent, "Imperialism--Its Dangers and Wrongs"
*1898:Boston | German-born Karl Schurz founded Anti-Imperialist League, supported by unions of wage-laborers and major business leaders, e.g., Andrew Carnegie
*1898:   278,000 members in AFL
*1900:   560,000 in AFL
*1904: 1,670,000 in AFL
*1915: 2,500,000 in all USA labor unions

<>1898de10:Paris Treaty. Spain ceded Philippine Islands, Guam Islands and Puerto Rico to USA. Spain renounced sovereignty over CUBA and USA established military governance there

<>1899:USA PA Pittsburgh | Andrew Carnegie consolidated his vast steel holdings and created Carnegie Steel Company
*1901:Two years later, Carnegie merged with United States Steel and retired
*--In retirement, he funded hundreds of local libraries across the USA, supported public education, and world peace. He endowed the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with $125 million for use in support of various charitable causes
*--Andrew Carnegie devoted the final two decades of his long and remarkably productive career to philanthropy

<>1899:USA sociologist, born of Norwegian émigré farmers in Minnesota, Thorstein Veblen defined and criticized The Theory of the Leisure Class [CCS:699-725 | CCS,2:126-52]

<>1899:1902; Philippine-USA War
*--Charles A. Conant published his analysis of the new USA imperialism, The United States in the Orient: The Nature of the Economic Problem (1900)

<>1899:1908; China market now felt new USA presence. US imperialism had its distinct economic side
*--Compare 10-year change in Russian and USA kerosene export (in millions of gallons) [Laserson:324]:

 Russia

  from 25 to

3.0

88% decrease
 USA  from 42 to

122.0

195%  increase

<>1899:Atlantic crossing to New World. Russian visitor Vladimir Bogoraz [Hasty:95-110] Bograz crossed USA from coast to coast by rail. Wrote on "Black student" [Hasty:111-27]

<>1899:England | Russian émigré anarchist philosopher Petr Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. JANUS HOLDINGS
*--USA anarchist (Russian émigré) Emma Goldman (1869-1940) into the first decade of her 50-year activist career [W]

<>1899:German (English-born) dilettante cultural figure Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1926) championed "Pan-Teutonism", a political and cultural association based on crude racist presumptions, as expressed in Foundations of the Nineteenth Century [BMC1:554-7 | BMC4:606-10]

<>1899:Hague Conferences [W] (International Peace Conference) proposed by Russia [DPH:215-20]. Strove for reduction in armaments and monitoring of peace treaties. Created Permanent Court of Arbitration to help mediate international discord (Hague Tribunal). USA opposed because US imperialist ambitions seemed threatened by international arbitration or enforceable international law, above the authority of the sovereign nation-state
*--Second Hague Conference

<>1899:Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte memo to Emperor Nicholas II, "Autocracy and Zemstvo" [TXT]
*--The profound ambiguities embedded in Witte's memo can be taken as a signal of impending political crisis in the highest ranks of the state bureaucracy.  Over the previous two decades of largely reactionary policy, frequent contradictory and arguably "progressive" state actions had been taken. The time had now arisen in which the contradictions (as that between centralized autocracy and flourishing institutions of local and provincial self-administration) could no longer be brushed over
*--Witte's remarkable pamphlet aroused the political exile Vladimir Lenin to new polemical/theoretical heights as he was completing his massive study of the Russian economy
*--Zemstvos came under attack from all sides, left and right, as the tsarist state wavered

<>1899fe:English writer Rudyard Kipling celebrated manly virtues and touted Anglo-Saxon imperialism with his poem "The White Man's Burden", published in McClure's Magazine [TXT] [TXT]. Here he urged the USA to quit lagging and take up the cause of European imperialist expansion. Very soon it seemed his appeal got results

<>1899fe08:Saint Petersburg University hit by student demonstrations
*--Over the next three years, the student movement spread to other institutions of higher learning and intensified [VSB,3:739-41]
*--University student unrest was a harbinger of the 1905 Revolution, and the tsarist state perceived it as such

<>1899mr:Russian political exile Vladimir Lenin published The Development of Capitalism in Russia [website text], based on careful analysis of Zemstvo statistics on the village-level and region-level agricultural economy. His main contribution here was to show how peasants were not a distinct social class but were a complex and transitional social formation. There were three sorts of peasants in this account. "Rich peasants" (kulaks) were akin to a social class considered by Marxists to be genuine, the bourgeoisie. "Poor peasants" were akin to another genuine social class, proletariat. "Middle peasants" made up the rest of the rural population in this analysis. The curious thing here is that this third, very large but theoretically inchoate portion of the Russian population (a large majority) who were neither "rich" nor "poor" held the future of Russia in their hands. Everything depended on which direction this unstable middle element moved as it fell into orbit with one of the two authentic social classes. It had to move either into the ranks of the "rich" (bourgeoisie) or the "poor" (proletariat). Peasants thus were granted no intrinsic status in this socially dualistic Leninist world-view, based as it was on an orthodox understanding of Karl Marx's teachings
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*--David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasants

<>1899mr20:Canada, Ottawa | Down and out D.H. Davies described how he had a foot severed while trying to jump a train [Eye:409-11]

<>1899mr22:Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte submitted another significant report to Emperor Nicholas II = "Report of the Minister of Finance to His Majesty on the Necessity of Formulating and Thereafter Steadfastly Adhering to a Definite Program of a Commercial and Industrial Policy of the Empire" [*1954mr:JMH#26,1:60-74 | Translated with an introductory article, by T. H. Von Laue] [TXT excerpts]. Other published Excerpts= RRC2,2#37 | VSB,3:757-9]
*--Witte was working hard to convince the Emperor to support the "Witte System" [ID]
*--Witte's views of Russian imperialist foreign policy were consistent with his policy of economic modernization [VSB,3:693-6]
*1899je03:French government seemed to awaken rather late, but very perceptively, to what was happening in China, and reacted with alarm at Russian/English agreement on "spheres of influence" that allowed Russia to build railroads north of the Great Wall, and England, south [BNE:180-3]

<>1899jy:USA President McKinley, whose 1897 hesitance to pursue imperialist war against Spain [W] led Teddy Roosevelt to compare his fortitude to a chocolate éclair, now appointed Elihu Root, a prominent member of the USA imperialist party, to the War Department for the purposes of administering the islands taken from Spain. USA beginning to enjoy the fruits of its victory over old imperialist Spain
*--Root (1847-1937) was a corporation lawyer in the service of powerful NY businesses: William A. "Boss" Tweed, E. H. Harriman, and J. P. Morgan
*1899no21:McKinley interview outlined justifications for US imperialist expansion, recapitulating arguments long familiar in Europe [BNE:183-4]

<>1899se06:USA proposed "Open Door" [TXT] imperialist policy to Germany, Russia (99de18:Reply [TXT]), England (99no30:Reply [TXT]), Japan, Italy and France. Russia resisted
*--USA Secretary of State John Hay was the author of the "Open Door" doctrine, one of the first US foreign policy initiatives to gain immediate international attention, if not assent
*--John Hay (1838-1905) began his public career as Secretary to President Abraham Lincoln whom he had met when both practiced law in Springfield IL. After marrying into a wealthy Cleveland family of financiers, he devoted his life to travel and literature. In 1879 he became Assistant Secretary of State and moved to WDC, where he was an important member of the cultural/intellectual group that formed up around Henry Adams. He served as Secretary of State from 1898 until his death
*--The larger significance of John Hay derived from the way he helped re-orient US policy toward international outreach, i.e., imperialism. USA was forging a new closeness to the "mother culture" of the ex-enemy Great Britain (England), was in fact picking up what Kipling called "the white man's burden". The English were showing some signs of fatigue, and USA was showing ample signs of potential imperialist vigor. In a sense, the Hay re-orientation squelched the ambitious hopes of certain Englishmen to repossess the American colonies lost over the previous century
*--The intellectual impact of the US sea-change is reflected in the now widely employed concept "The West". The concept is reflected, for example, in a curricular innovation that spread across US campuses from this time forward, "Western Civ", based on the trans-national notion that there were familial ties of Americans with Classical Athenian Greeks, with Romans of the great empire, and the vast European mission of global progress and civilization. The concept was a conscious effort to refute the provincial New-World democratism or geo-egalitarianism implied in the Turner Thesis
*--In these years USA sponsored a "trust company" to build a railroad across China, Canton-Hankow-Peking [Beijing]. Concession handed over to American China Development Co with prominent USA capitalists. Russia sensed competitive pressure from USA businessmen and suspected official support from the US government. Suspicions deepened when USA-Japan agreements became known and rapprochement between USA and England matured
*--Russia felt surrounded and didn’t want to "open its doors"
*--USA efforts to cool down European imperialist rivalry were not working, perhaps in part because these efforts were always accompanied by efforts to enhance US imperialist advantage

<>1900:Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud published Interpretation of Dreams [TXT] at the beginning of a public career that transformed modern ideas about how the mind works [CCC2,2:1061 | CWC:155 | CCS:73,623] JANUS COLLECTION

<>1900:English mathematician Karl Pearson delivered lecture "National Life from the Standpoint of Science", in which he explained the meaning of social Darwinism and expounded the cause of eugenics (selective breeding of the very best "stock") [PWT2:215-17]. Science seemed to justify European racism and imperialism

<>1900:USA census counted 76 million (17 million immigrants). E.g., Mennonites, Jews
*--Michael Kraus, The North Atlantic Civilization:151-80 presents documents and commentary on the immigrant experience [CB245.K68 1957]
*1845:1846; Scottish minister described emigration from his point of view. Also German emigration explained [BNE:155-8]
\\
*--Charles A. Ward, et al., eds., Studies in Ethnicity: The East European Experience in America

<>1900sp:South Africa | J.E. Neilly described civilian suffering in the English-Dutch [Afrikaaner] imperialist Boer War. The war pitted two European colonial peoples against one another, the English and the Dutch, in a struggle to grab and hold onto the lands of indigenous African peoples at the southern tip of the continent [Eye:412-13]

<>1900je:China | Boxer Rebellion [W] occupied capital city Peking [then called Peiping; now Beijing]

<>1900je:German Imperial Naval Act (#2) passed with goal of building vast, modern oceanic navy to rival English dominance of the high seas
*--Satirical journal Simplicissmus satarized Admiral von Tirpitz and Kaiser Wilhelm II [pix]

<>1900jy04:USA, KS City Democratic Party National Convention. William Jennings Bryan delivered speech against US imperialism [TXT]
*--The American "two-party" system was under great strain to accommodate the several varieties of political interest and opinion growing within the old political party system

<>1900se19:Russian Chief Gendarme, Count Viacheslav Plehve, received and eventually approved a secret report by Sergei Zubatov, Chief of the Moscow bureau of the Okhrana [secret anti-revolutionary police] As a result, state-sponsored labor unions were created in Moscow, a policy known as "police socialism", lasting three years [VSB,3:697-8 | WRH3:466-7]
*--Police Socialism can be understood as an official reactionary measure against growing unrest among workers. But it was much more than that. It also harmonized perfectly well with a long-term and sanctioned relationship of state to society. Muscovite tsars and Russian emperors worked constantly to shape the social structure to statist needs. Police Socialism could be seen as an extension of traditional social/service hierarchies into the ranks of a newly erupting and still amorphous social formation, wage-labor. It sought to bring the Russian proletariat under the wing of officialdom, in the tradition of the 1722ja24:Table of Ranks and Catherine II's Charters for the nobility and the towns
*--State action among wage-laborers brought earlier action among village laborers to mind = Arakcheev's "military settlements". And it expanded Russian labor/welfare reforms of the previous decade
*1901:A new and simplified version of the Table of Ranks was issued [VSB,3:760-1] The tsarist state was suspended and oscillating between reformist and reactionary policy
*--Revolutionary and other oppositional political parties had their own ideas about the appropriate way to organize workers. Some treated them as a new social formation, others as a variation on the ancient peasant soslovie. And, of course, labor had views of its own on this question [See workers' memoirs in Victoria Bonnell, ed., The Russian Worker]
*1898fa:1900ja31; Skilled laborer Semen Kanatchikov went by train from Moscow to Petersburg and, for more than one year, was active in independent-minded worker circles. This group of wage-laborers was arrested and sent into exile [Kanatchikov:83-120]
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*--Rose Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society 1880-1914
*--Robert Eugene Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century
*--D. Pospielovsky, Russian Police Trade Unionism: Experiment or Provocation?

<>1900oc:1905fa; Saint Petersburg | Russian Assembly [Russkoe sobranie] as the first large "nationalistic" public reactionary political party. Membership was, however, not so much generated from among members of Russian society at large as from the ranks of high state servitors and could be called a feature of official reactionary policy. It is sometimes hard to separate out the "official" and "public" facets of this movement. The political party came to be known as Union of Russian Peoples [Soiuz russkikh liudei]

<>1901:1906; Spanish-born painter Pablo Picasso: blue and rose period. At first, Picasso seemed to assault all conventions of the fine arts, but before long his creations were taken to be the modern standard

<>1901:Polish-born English-language novelist Joseph Conrad published his provocative fiction Heart of Darkness [TXT] set in the Belgian Congo. Is it racist? Anti-imperialist? Pro-imperialist?
*--Two editions of this fabulous novel were published by Norton with EXTENSIVE historical documentation about Europe and the Belgian Congo [ID], plus critical commentary [1st ed] [2nd ed]
*--Contemporary socialist critique of European imperialism in the Congo can be compared with Conrad's complex views on the matter [BNE:187-90]
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*--Mary Ann Gillies, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880-1920 | A new middleman entered into the process of (increasingly "the business of") English literary production. The literary agent stepped between writers and their presses/publishers | This book concentrates on agents A.P. Watt and J.B. Pinker. Watt developed “agent’s clauses” in agreements with publishers, settled "agent-client agreements" on writers, and sold copyrights. Pinker served as agent for Joseph Conrad, as well as for Rebecca West and D.H. Lawrence

<>1901:Panama Canal project was transferred by treaty from England to USA. The canal would connect the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean at the balmy global mid-waist -- thus avoiding the distant and stormy tip of South America and the remote and icy Arctic seas above Canada. The project was taken from European hands. US imperialism was now at full steam

<>1901je:Japan | Ito Hirobumi [PH&G:217-8] replaced by Katsura Taro, protege of Yamagata Aritoma [PH&G:741]

<>1901je:Russian émigré theorist in Switzerland, fresh from Siberian exile, Lenin published analysis "THE PERSECUTORS OF THE ZEMSTVO AND THE HANNIBALS OF LIBERALISM" [TXT]
*--Lenin expanded on Sergei Witte's 1899 Memo and laid down a thorough Social-Democratic critique of all liberal reformers AND political opposition since the beginning of the "Era of Great Reforms". Lenin was forming his own political conceptions through a careful study of the past four decades of Russian politics, oppositional and official. He sought to bring national traditions into proper relationship to Marxism. "Leninism" was about to make its historical appearance

<>1901no:1901de; Japanese negotiator Ito and Russian negotiator Lamsdorf tried to rebalance Russia-Manchuria Japan-Korea exchange, but failed, propelling Japan diplomatically into arms of England [Beasley,MHJ:169-70]

<>1901de12:Canada, Newfoundland | Marconi described waiting for the first trans-Atlantic radio signal [Eye:414]. The era of electronic media was opening

<>1902:English economist John Atkinson Hobson wrote an early and influential critique of European colonial expansion, Imperialism [PWT2:217-19]

<>1902:French "decadent" literary figure and nationalist ideologue Maurice Barrès published Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme [CCC2,2:522f CCC3,2:1040-4]

<>1902:Geneva | Lenin published "What's to be Done?" [TXT] [CCC3,2:976-86 | DIR2:363-78 | VSB,3:710-11 | BMC1:620-2] This essay was devoted to a very local dispute over editorial power in a journal of limited circulation. But it became one of the most influential political tracts of the 20th century. He expanded on his critique of statist reforms and liberal civil society in Russia. He now went even further, questioning the applicability to Russia of standard social democratic tactics as devised in the Europe-wide movement centered on the Second International and practiced among most other Russian SDs, those whom he would soon label Mensheviks ["minoritarians"]
*--Lenin explained why the better future of Russia depended on the creation of a disciplined cadre party organization
*--A comparison of "What's to be Done?" with Lenin's last sustained piece of political writing two decades later, "Better Fewer, But Better", gives a simple two-point measure of his political evolution
*--Lenin, with considerable justification, claimed to represent Karl Marx's original recommendations to Russian revolutionists, thus he claimed to be the only authentic Marxist. It is worth considering also the degree to which he might have justifiably claimed to inherit the traditions of oppositional politics within the broader Russian political culture [documents on this question in Late Marx...]
*--Lenin never openly claimed the inheritance from earlier decades of Russian political opposition because he did not want to be associated with the widely discredited legacy of "Russian populism". Nor did he want to be confused with the large rival Social Revolutionary Party which did claim to be the heir to the legacy of revolutionary populism. Lenin "went along" with standard Social Democratic ridicule of earlier movements. Nonetheless, he mined them carefully, for lessons about the peculiar features of the Russian "mode of production" and the political tactics those features recommended to all, whatever their ideologies
*--As the general revolutionary crisis intensified, SDs began to split into two factions, in fact two political parties, eventually to be called Bolsheviks ("majoritarians", though they were on all but a very few issues the minority, followers of Lenin) and Mensheviks ("minoritarians", though they were the larger part of the party, followers of Yulii Martov, Plekhanov and other more moderate social democrats who represented Russian variations on the general European Bernsteinian trend) [VSB,3:713-14]
*--Russian Marxism expressed itself in a variety of interpretations of Russian realities. The party was caught by surprise when the 1905 Revolution broke out, and it thus played only a marginal role

<>1902:London | Russian émigré anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution, refuted Spencerian notion of "social Darwinism" [ID]
*--Excerpts from this and other works [VSB,3:729-30]
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*--Wagar on Russian anarchism [TXT]

<>1902:Russian political thinker Maksim Kovalevskii published Russian political institutions; the growth and development of these institutions from the beginnings of Russian history to the present time (1902) [EXCERPTS]

<>1902:USA | Great coal strike forced into arbitration by President Theodore Roosevelt. National Association of Manufacturers [NAM], etc., resisted. Courts used 1890:Sherman Anti-Trust Act against labor unions, though the still ineffective Act was originally intended for use against large corporations and other business conglomerations, but was more effectively employed against wage-laborers who sought to organize themselves in the pursuit of their own perceived interests

<>1902ja:je; USA jolted by emerging details of brutal imperialist behavior and great atrocities committed by US forces in the Philippines during the Spanish American War [ID]. For six months a specially created "Lodge Committee" gave all appearances of an effort to get to the bottom of this matter
*--The Lodge Committee managed an effective "cover up" of US actions in the Philippines [W]
*--No one was surprised at the outcome. In the chair sat Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (MA Republican), a powerful pro-imperialist figure in Congress, closely associated with fellow Senator Albert Beveridge (IN Republican) and sympathetic to the rising Anglo-Saxon racism sweeping over the US establishment in these exciting years of debate on the question of projecting US power across the seas

<>1902ja30:Anglo-Japanese Alliance
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*--One Japanese historian wrote that this, plus Russo-Japanese War, made Japan very "Western" and, at the same time, very "anti-Western". Pressure from Europe and US "brought revenge, self-confidence and a sense of mission, setting Japan on the road that was to make her in the following forty years an exemplar of Western civilization, transplanted; a champion of Asia against 'The West'; and the megalomaniac builder of an empire overseas" [Beasley,MHJ:173]0

<>1902mr26 (NS=ap08):Chinese/Russian agreement said Russian troops would leave Manchuria after 18 months, but they stayed on the Manchurian frontier, now a bone of contention between Russia, China and Japan (with increasing USA economic presence and constant English and German diplomatic entanglement)

<>1902ap:Russian Interior Minister D. S. Sipiagin was assassinated
*--Sipiagin's assassin was a member of the newly organized mass Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries [SRs], which from the beginning served as home for a group dedicated to violent struggle by means of terror. The group was called "The Battle Organization" [Boevaia organizatsiia | Two-paragraph ID]
*--The specter of political terror again raised its head twenty years after the assassination of Alexander II
*--Notorious statist reactionary Police Chief Viacheslav Plehve replaced Sipiagin and was the last gasp of official reactionary policy
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*--Amy Knight, “Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party” [TXT]

<>1902my:Russia/Ukraine, Poltava and Kharkov provinces | Peasant disturbances provoked new Interior Minister Plehve to make reprisals [MR&C2:369]
*--Forty years of peasant reform had by this time failed to meet the needs of the rural population. Chernigov Province police reported on political "propaganda" among local peasants. "In one or another region there appear unknown young people, who, pass through in railroad trains and in carriages, or on horseback along country roads, or on foot through the villages. They scatter revolutionary books and pamphlets about.... The books and pamphlets are eagerly read by the rural populace and ... are passed on from one person to the next, without any thought of evil. In some cases public readings of them have been delivered to whole crowds of peasants. When peasants learn the contents of the literature, rumors spread among them about imminent partition of proprietors' lands. Relations with local landowners become more or less strained." The agitators are never identified or apprehended because local police resources are limited, so it might be best "to take measures to alert peasants themselves to seize agitators and hand them over to authorities and thus nip the evil in the bud" [Based on Page:53]
*--Plehve and the Interior Ministry seemed to prefer reactionary policies, but =
*--At the same time more constructive measures were taken under the leadership of Finance Minister Sergei Witte, who argued that "the evil" perceived among restless villagers perhaps did not reside in scattered books and pamphlets but in conditions of rural life. Witte created local committees of the Special Conference on the Needs of Agriculture in 49 provinces. All-Russian assemblies were instructed to discuss the agricultural crisis [MR&C2:347]
*1903:Aleksandr Rittikh summarized early deliberations of the Special Conference and defended peasant practice of periodic redistribution of land within the village commune [VSB,3:761]
*--The tsarist state moved in contradictory directions

<>1902je08:1905; Germany, Stuttgart | Russian émigré publication "Liberation" [Osvobozhdenie] was for three years edited by Petr Struve and expressed Russian liberal political viewpoint of the Union of Liberation [VSB,3:721-4]
*--The journal was published abroad rather than in Russia because censorship and police suppression of political movements made domestic publication impossible
*1902je20:je22; Germany | The Union of Liberation [Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia] held 1st informal meeting. Soon it was able to operate in Russia itself
*--In this year a Saint Petersburg publisher issued two-volume Russian-language edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government [ID]

<>1902je25:Russian Social Revolutionary Party [SRs] political proclamation [VSB,3:719]
*--The SRs grew directly out of populist socialist traditions of the 1870s
*1900:London | A newly formed "Agrarian-Socialist League" published The Immediate Tasks of the Revolutionary Cause by Viktor Chernov, the leading figure among SRs [VSB,3:717]
*1925:Prague exile Viktor Chernov looked back and summarized the essential platform of his political party [VSB,3:717-19]

<>1902jy02:jy03; Russian Zemstvo activist Dmitrii Shipov met with Plehve and Witte to discuss possible truce and cooperation [GFF:691-703]

<>1902au:Russian commander Kuropatkin report on political "propaganda" within the Russian military [MR&C2:373-4]

<>1902de30:Russian State Council met to discuss economic problems [MR&C2:373-4,325-6]
*--In these months, high-ranking state servitor Aleksandr Polovtsev entered into his diary depressing observations about how the tsarist state was working [VSB,3:698]
*1902:1904; These two years of mounting crisis fed into the 1905 Revolution [1905 Revolution LOOP]

<>1903:1904; TIBET the object of Russian and English competition as Chinese authority waned. England invaded, ostensibly to counteract Russian inspired religious propaganda in Lhasa by Buryat-born Buddhist monk Agvan Dorzhiev [BrE]. As English troops approached they surrounded Tibetan fortress. Six hundred twenty-eight Tibetan soldiers who surrendered were slaughtered by the English
*--More Russia in Asia and more on the Great Game
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*1997je12:NYR:45
*--Bibliography on Buddhism in Europe [W]

<>1903:English mathematician, philosopher, pacifist and anti-dogmatist Bertrand Russell published his essay, "A Free Man's Worship" [CCC3,2:1213-20]

<>1903mr:Dmitrii Shipov met a second time with Plehve and Witte
*--In these months police action against political opposition sharply increased

<>1903mr20:Finnish autonomy further limited by Russian imperialist decree, reacting to mounting nationalist independence sentiment in Finland [VSB,3:701]

<>1903ap06:ap07; The Kishinev Pogrom. Jews suffered one of the most severe of several pogroms [maltreatment and even murder at the hands of irregular gangs who invaded and terrorized Jewish settlements] [VSB,3:698-701 | PWT2:205-8]. Kishinev is in a largely Ukrainian and Moldavian (Romanian speaking) region, sometimes referred to as "Right-bank Ukraine". Today it is capital of Moldova, but for a century it had been part of the Russian Empire and would be a component of the Soviet Union
*--Ukrainian/Russian writer and journalist Vladimir Korolenko reported on the scene a few days after the pogrom [TXT]
*--Pogroms first broke out in the aftermath of the assassination of Alexander II, then fell off for almost 20 years. The Kishinev pogrom occurred in Easter Week and marked a new wave of racist disorder that extended into the 1905 Revolution and beyond. In many cases, officials looked on without acting. Some degree of local military and police participation was noted. Certain ministers, Plehve for example, were distinctly anti-Semitic. Some sought to turn growing mass discontent away from official circles and to divert it with racist distractions aimed particularly, but not exclusively, against Jews
*--It is possible to see a parallel in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in USA, but a difficult interpretive maneuver is called for = both a connection and a distinction must be made between "official" and "public" attitudes and behavior, between governmental tactics and outlook, on the one hand, and popular attitudes and actions, on the other
*--Racist attitudes in society grew with nationalism and imperialism in late 19th-century Europe

<>1903my:Siberian city Ufa's Governor-General Bogdanovich was assassinated by political terrorist

<>1903su:Manchuria "Russian Lumber Company" sent "workers" (actually soldiers in disguise) down the Trans-Siberian railroad
*--This was a sign of Witte’s failure to convince tsarist officials that a military approach to Asia was not in Russia's best interests, and that the best approach was "peaceful economic penetration". That powerful expression of industrial might, the railroad, had for sixty years seemed to promise economic prosperity, but now would be turned to imperialist and military use
*--The views of Aleksandr Mikhailovich Bezobrazov, an entrepreneurial adventurer with huge timber concessions in Russian maritime provinces and in North Korea, and with close ties to the Russian military, prevailed and the Russo-Japanese War was the most important consequence. Failed domestic policy of the tsarist state now contributed to failure in international relations
*--European imperialism (and not just Russian imperialism) was forging close ties between military establishments and large economic enterprises, in contradiction to standard liberal ideas of Adam Smith, et al. Earlier, liberal domestic economic arrangements in European nations showed very little resemblance to those arrangements imposed by imperialist European nations on non-European peoples. But as the 20th century opened, Europeans began to feel the bite of militarist statism in their own realms. Imperialism was "coming home"

<>1903jy17:Brussels and London | Russian SDs Congress #2 issued program [McC1:25-8 | H05:263-8 | VSB,3:711-13]
*--Party rejected Lenin's draft of Party rules [DPH:294-5] Some saw a connection between the way a political party governed itself and the way it might govern a whole nation [TXT]
*1903au:Russian SDs agreed with difficulty on a single party platform [W] [DIR2:394-9 | DIR3:426-31]
*--Lenin's concepts of "democratic centralism" and his insistence on "managerial" manipulation of the larger political association did not harmonize with standard Social Democratic notions of the future egalitarian order. A serious ideological crisis grew within the ranks of Russian Marxists

<>1903au31:Plehve wrote revealing letter to retired General Aleksandr Kireev, in response to Kireev's Slavophile critique of Plehve's official reactionary policies. Plehve said constitutionalism might be unworkable, but the desire for it flowed from "pure springs" of political inspiration, whereas much other political action flowed from muddier sources = ambition for personal power and the machinations of a "non-Russian origin". Best thing was to place "various obstacles" in the way of those whose inspiration was muddy and to remove the reason for activism among those of pure inspiration. In summary, the best way "to pacify agitated minds" was by "gradually and organically improving norms of civil life". Plehve conflated "norms of civil life" with "government policies". But he did at least concede that significant improvements in government were called for [VSB,3:701-2]
*--The "official reactionary" Plehve thus conceded the need for "official reform" in response to cultural conservative Kireev's complaint about reactionary state policy

<>1903no:Russia | Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists [Soiuz Zemtsev-Konstitutsionalistov] founded
*--The liberal movement was organizing itself through Zemstvo institutions into a political party in Russia itself

<>1903no18:USA treaty authorized seizure of Panama Canal Zone [TXT]
South American nation Columbia had the Zone cut from its hide by a USA sponsored separatist revolution

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