The Russian Revolution by Sheila Fitzpatrick Page B

of 1905-7 bred parliamentary politicians just as the legal reforms of the i86os had bred lawyers; and both groups had an inherent tendency to develop values and aspirations that the autocracy could not abide.
    One thing that the 1905 Revolution did not change was the police regime that had come to maturity in the i88os. Due process of law was still suspended (as in the case of the field courts martial dealing with the rebellious peasantry in 1906-7) for much of the population much of the time. Of course there were understandable reasons for this: the fact that in 1908, a comparatively quiet year, i,8oo officials were killed and 2,083 were wounded in politically motivated attacks20 indicates how tumultuous the society remained, and how much the regime remained on the defensive. But it meant that in many respects the political reforms were only a facade. Trade unions, for example, had been made legal in principle, but individual unions were frequently closed down by the police. Political parties were legal, and even the revolutionary socialist parties could contest the Duma elections and win a few seats-yet the members of revolutionary socialist parties were no less liable to arrest than in the past, and the party leaders (most of whom returned to Russia during the 1905 Revolution) were forced back into emigration to avoid imprisonment and exile.
    With hindsight, it might seem that the Marxist revolutionaries, with 1905 under their belts and 1917 already looming on the horizon, should have been congratulating themselves on the workers' spectacular revolutionary debut and looking confidently towards the future. But in fact their mood was quite different. Neither Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks had got more than a toehold in the workers' revolution of 1905: the workers had not so much rejected as outpaced them, and this was a very sobering thought, particularly for Lenin. Revolution had come, but the regime had fought back and survived. Within the intelligentsia, there was much talk about abandoning the revolutionary dream and the old illusions of social perfectibility. From the revolutionary standpoint, it was no gain to have a facade of legal political institutions and a new breed of selfimportant, chattering liberal politicians (to summarize Lenin's view of them, which did not greatly differ from Nicholas II's). It was also deeply, almost unbearably disappointing for the revolutionary leaders to return to the familiar dreariness of emigre life. The emigres were never more prickly and contentious than in the years between 1905 and 1917; indeed, the Russians' continual petty bickering became one of the scandals of European Social Democracy, and Lenin was one of the very worst offenders.
    Among the bad news of the prewar years was that the regime was embarking on a major programme of agrarian reform. The peasant revolts of 1905-7 had persuaded the government to abandon its earlier premise that the mir was the best guarantee of rural stability. Its hopes now lay in the creation of a class of small independent farmers-a wager on `the sober and the strong', as Nicholas's chief Minister, Petr Stolypin, described it. Peasants were now encouraged to consolidate their holdings and separate from the mir, and land commissions were established in the provinces to facilitate the process. The assumption was that the poor would sell up and go to the towns, while the more prosperous would improve and expand their holdings and acquire the conservative petty-bourgeois mentality of, say, the French peasant farmer. By 1915, between a quarter and a half of all Russia's peasant farmers held their land in some form of individual tenure, although, given the legal and practical complexity of the process, only about a tenth had completed the process and enclosed their land.21 The Stolypin reforms were `progressive' in Marxist terms, since they laid the basis for capitalist development in agriculture. But, in contrast to the development of urban capitalism,