How many military aircraft a month was Tsarist Russia producing at the end of 1916, just before its collapse? You may know the answer. The distinguished historian Norman Stone, to whom all students of old Russia are infinitely in debt, supplies it in his ‘Eastern Front, 1914-1917’ (Hodder).

If on the other hand you are, like most of us, honest but uninstructed, you will suspect a catch in the question: why otherwise would I ask it or attach any importance to the answer? How many aircraft? Your mind may grope among vague memories of the Tsar’s armies in the First World War, of hordes of heroic but bedraggled, starving and frozen peasants, armed with long-handled axes or if lucky with precious rifles seized from the dead, and hurled with little or no artillery or other support against an enemy infinitely better equipped than they. You may have recently read Solzhenitsyn’s sombre masterwork ‘August 1914’. Here we find generals and staff work of an incompetence which would be incredible if it were not reproduced in other armies of the period. In fact Russia’s best generals were as good as any: were her worst worse than the worst of others? We also find repeated by Solzhenitsyn dark hints of treason and dirty work in high places, at court, in the circles of the German-born Empress and of the ‘sinister’ Chief of Staff, Sukhomlinov—hints durable yet all, so far as I know, without the slightest foundation in fact, part of a gigantic anti-Tsarist myth. Certainly nowhere in ‘August 1914’ do we find evidence of advanced technology applied to warfare.

How many aircraft, then? Well, precious few if any, a sort of scornful instinct tells us, and those presumably made of logs, string, furs and mud, piloted by drunken superstitious mouzhiks, blessed by verminous priests and crashing all the same on take-off.

Yet of course there is a catch: the real figure is 175 effective military aircraft a month (we [the Brits] at that time produced about the same number). This fact bears brooding on. Think of all the relatively sophisticated electrical and mechanical parts which go into the most primitive flying machine and ponder how precisely the word ‘backward’ fits an economy, an industrial system capable of manufacturing them—and that in 1916, more than 60 years ago! Nor were these aircraft just knocked together out of imported parts, though some of the machine tools used in their manufacture may indeed have been imported or designed abroad. Russia in 1916 was practically cut off from her allies. It was thus from her own resources that she achieved an increase over 1914 production of 2,000 per cent more shells, 1,000 per cent more guns, 1,100 per cent more rifles, apart from adequate supplies of wireless sets, telephones, gas masks, hand grenades and all the necessities of (then) modern warfare. By January 1917, on the very eve of the revolution, the Russian army was superior to the German and Austro-Hungarian armies facing it not only in numbers but also in materiel—a superiority, according to Mr. Stone, akin to that of the West over the Central powers in 1918.

Remarkable achievements these, especially from the feeble and primitive Tsarist economy of legend—that economy which, according to every self-exculpating Tsarist general’s memoirs, could not produce the shells he needed for the victory which eluded him, but which in fact produced shells in abundance, to be fired off by those generals senselessly into bogs. Why, even the Tsar’s railways—always said to have ‘broken down’—acquired in the war more track, more rolling stock, more engines. Harvests in the war, as before it, were abundant. Why then did the cities ‘starve’? Katkov, in his fascinating ‘February 1917’ doubts whether they did: he finds evidence of food enough in or available to Petrograd in early 1917. The huge angry queues present us with a riddle—one of so many. The answer to this one lies, I suspect, not in mechanical breakdowns or ‘backwardness’ but rather in a thoroughly modern combination of hideous inflation (336 per cent from 1914 to the end of 1916) and idiotic price controls, two factors which can always be relied upon to produce want amidst plenty. These phenomena were by no means unique to Russia at that time (like other belligerents, she expected a short war, to be financed by unorthodox makeshifts) nor are they unknown to us today. Nor perhaps need the war have been long, had Russia adhered to her original intention of invading East Prussia not with two armies, but with four. Her mobilisation was in fact, if chaotic, extremely rapid. Even misdeployed as they undoubtedly were, her impetuous forces badly messed up the time-scale of the Schlieffen plan—France knocked out quickly first, then Russia at leisure. They saved France but, alas, not Russia.

The pre-1914 German General Staff was simply terrified of Russia’s growing might. We assume them now to have been timid superstitious men, frightened by spectres and goblins, as subsequent events appear to confirm. No one who reads or credits Mr. Stone can doubt that their fears were perfectly reasonable or even wholly justified.

My task here is in fact to draw attention to a very great lie, a lie not merely of historical importance but one powerfully affecting our judgement of the most important geo-political fact facing us today—the Soviet Union. For who can understand this baleful threat who knows not what preceded it, what it replaced?

The lie takes many forms, infests many heads, not all of them ‘progressive’, many of them seemingly shrewd and realistic. Mr. Stone himself in an interview mocked it in its most absurd form—a view of pre-1917 Russia as ‘a howling desert over which Stalin waved a wand and turned it into Welwyn Garden City’. The lie postulates that Russia was till 1917 hopelessly and in all ways backward; that it took the Bolshevik revolution to drag her into the twentieth century; that the material, educational and social progress achieved since then is vast, and of a sort and scale which the Tsarist regime would not or could not possibly have achieved. That all this has been accomplished at a fearful cost, the lie does not always deny: it calls up subordinate lies, however, to put the cost ‘into perspective’. Thus: if the Russian people have utterly lost their freedom, the lie asserts, they have in fact lost nothing, for they never had any. And thus again: if the Bolsheviks have murdered and imprisoned millions without trial or compunction, what are they doing according to the lie but re-applying the cruel and barbarous penal practices of the Tsars, if on a larger scale then perhaps for a nobler or more constructive purpose?

I submit that all of this, where not at least questionable or gravely misleading, is the most unmitigated tripe. If praise or blame are ever appropriate in human life or history, they are here absolutely and perversely maldistributed, with the Soviet regime taking credit for Tsarist achievements and the Tsars blamed for Soviet crimes.

[...]

It is not unknown, though it is often forgotten because it does not fit the lie, that Russia enjoyed a fantastic rate of growth before 1914 (Mr. Stone newly demonstrates that this continued or even accelerated after 1914, albeit in a form distorted by the demands of war). Out of the last 25 years before 1914, Russia’s growth rate led the world in 18 of them. Her average rise in industrial output from 1894 to 1914 was about eight per cent per year. In the latter part of the period agricultural production rose proportionately, at an accelerating rate, stimulated by land reform. In the same period Russia’s coal output went up fivefold, iron fourfold; output of oil and grain doubled, as did railway mileage and the cattle herd. In these last three fields the Soviet regime has achieved nothing comparable in 60 years!

But all this progress, some will object, was achieved from an incredibly low starting level. This is not wholly wrong: yet by 1913 Russia was the world’s fifth industrial power, just ahead of Austro-Hungary and behind only the United States, Germany, Britain and France, the last of which she must have overtaken during the war, despite the loss of Polish industry. In 1913 she held second place in world oil production, third place in railway construction and cotton manufacture, fourth place in machine building.

As Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace reminds us, [in ‘Russia’ (revised edition 1912), surely the greatest survey of Tsarist Russia ever to appear originally in the English language] Russian statistics should always be treated with caution—yes, but more now than then. For Tsarist statistics show a steady advance in precision and comprehensiveness; Tsarist Russia moreover, unlike its successor, was an almost completely open society, in which official statistics could be checked (as Wallace checked them) against private information and personal observation. It was not a Russian, anyway, but a Frenchman, Edmond Thery, who wrote in 1912: ‘If things develop in the major European countries as they have done between 1900 and 1912, Russia will towards the middle of the present century dominate Europe politically as well as from the economic and financial points of view’. Foreign observers all tended to agree that Russia would by that time have become the world’s second industrial power—and this of course without all the horrors of the revolution.

But surely all this progress must under the Tsars have been achieved at terrible cost? Indeed there are costs inseparable from industrial development, though these may of course be reduced—by those who industrialise later and who can thus learn from the successes and mistakes of others. In fact the Russian standard of living rose pretty steadily throughout the period of industrialisation, reaching in 1913 a level not again attained till well after the Second World War. It was not till 1965, for instance, that Russians enjoyed again the pre-revolutionary density of 6.6 square metres of living space per head—a figure unsatisfactory in 1913, perhaps, quite shocking 50 years later, and not to be explained away by any sort of population increase. The Russian population between 1860 and 1914 actually doubled; the post-revolutionary population, for various reasons, some grim indeed, has not.

In real terms, the pre-revolutionary Russian industrial worker earned about half as much as his British counterpart; he now probably earns about a third. At least until recently, his impoverishment was absolute as well as relative. [...It was observed,] about ten years ago, [that] ‘The Soviet citizen today is poor not only in comparison with his counterpart in other European countries, but also in comparison with his own grandfather. In terms of essentials—food, clothing and housing—the Soviet population as a whole is worse off than it was before the revolution’.

The Tsarist Government also intervened actively to protect the welfare of the worker. Its factory legislation, enforced by an inspectorate, was generally modelled on that of Germany and Britain, though in some respects it was even more advanced—for instance, in the provisions for free medical care at work. Hours of work were reduced by law in 1897 to 11 1/2 hours a day (less for women and children) and again in 1906 to nine or 10 hours for most and eight hours for many workers. Trade unions were legalised in 1906, though they had been active for some time before. In 1903 employers were made liable for factory accidents, sickness benefits and pensions for those disabled. In 1912 this act was reinforced; workers’ compensation and disability payments were raised under a scheme largely administered by the workers themselves (in old Russia there was always a lot of democracy at the lower levels, as in the village communes). Large factories outside towns (as many or most were) were bound by law to supply free schools, libraries, hospitals and bath-houses.

In all this paternal activity we can discern one great advantage the Russian grandfather had over his descendants. The State was not then, as it is now, the sole employer, the sole trade union, the sole provider of goods and services (as it is now, save for the astonishing plenty still produced by the two per cent of land still in private cultivation, which produces half Russia’s meat, vegetables, milk and eggs and without which she would assuredly starve). No, the Tsar’s administration stood for the most part outside and above the economic process; it did not even greatly like capitalists (nor did they like it: most were Liberals; one or two of the most prominent were Marxists and lavishly financed their own destruction); it regulated their operations if not very effectively at least with a sort of well-meaning impartiality.

This paternal activity also shows Nicholas II in an unfamiliar light, as a great reforming Tsar, or at least as one who if he did not initiate at least endorsed the vigorous reforming activities of his Ministers. Nor have we touched yet on the peasantry, who were the beneficiaries of the greatest reforms of all, the agrarian reforms launched and carried through after 1905 by Stolypin, without doubt the greatest Russian statesman of this century—that is to say, if greatness has any moral content, any connection with the public weal, rather than just expressing groveling admiration for mere power, however wickedly and destructively used. These reforms empowered the peasants to break up the village communes and to consolidate their scattered strips into privately owned farms. By low-interest loans and grants the peasants were encouraged to buy land from the gentry, the State and the Imperial family, as also to settle in virgin Siberia. Lenin saw at once with fury what was afoot—nothing less than the consummation of the work set in hand by Alexander II with the emancipation of the serfs [on February 19, 1861, nearly two years prior to the effective date of Lincoln's "Emancipation Proclamation" in the United States (January 1, 1863)]. Stolypin had shot his fox, and gravely jeopardised his chances of starting a revolution. Nonetheless, ‘All land to the people’ remained the Bolshevik slogan—another gigantic lie! For by 1916 about 89 per cent of the total cultivated area was owned by the peasantry, as was about 94 per cent of the livestock. ‘All land from the people’ would have been an apter slogan, a. slogan given fearful effect by Stalin in the early thirties when, in a crime for which no Romanov offers any precedent, accompanied by mass murder, famine and brutality, he stole the land back from the peasants and in effect restored serfdom—or rather slavery, a better word for what ... exists ... today.

Another subordinate lie, bolstering the great lie, is the Communists’ claim, widely credited even by their enemies (‘you’ve got to be fair’), to have educated the Russian people, to have found them illiterate and to have made them masters of all the arts and sciences. At first glance this lie finds some support in fact, for undoubtedly and not surprisingly more Russian people are literate now than were in 1913. Yet literacy is not in itself education; and ‘we must be sure that those Russians who were before the revolution truly educated had got for themselves something not obtainable at all, unless in secret, in the Soviet Union. Maurice Baring, no fool nor stranger to Russia, wrote in 1914 that ‘The average Russian of the educated middle-class [is] extremely well educated—so much better educated than the average educated Englishman that comparison would be silly’ [quoted in Kyril FitzLyon’s admirable introduction to ‘Before the Revolution’] Mr. Baring would hardly have written so of the instructed dogma-blinkered automata which Soviet education apparently aims with some success to produce.

It was in the main from this educated class that there sprang that abundance of great novelists, poets and thinkers, of musicians, artists and scientists, which is the sublime glory of late Tsarist Russia and her imperishable legacy to a rather ungrateful world. It was also of course this class which provided the critical audience for their efforts: they did not create in a void. To attribute their fantastic achievements to the regime would be absurd, though indeed imperial and official patronage of the arts and sciences was on a heroic scale; and to say that Nicholas II was, from our knowledge of his private tastes and public benefactions, the most cultivated ruler Russia has known in this century, is (despite Lenin’s narrow intellectuality) to understate rather than overstate the truth. It would be equally absurd, on the other hand, to deny to the regime such credit as must be due to it, if not actually for fostering, then at least for permitting this stupendous flowering—a flowering which continued in exotic profusion right up to 1917, after that to be part cruelly extinguished, part dispersed, part to find a brief and hectic prosperity in the twenties, part left to wither away in sad and obscure silence, in prison, poverty or in death. It would be equally absurd too (though it has happened) somehow to transfer the credit for this stupendous flowering from the epoch and conditions which actually produced it to the succeeding epoch which extinguished it. Eugene Lyons in ‘Assignment in Utopia’ describes how in 1928, young and still full of illusions, he arrived in the land of his dreams:

I took in the Russian theater, ballet and opera in great draughts. Ardently if illogically, I gave the revolution credit for everything cultural that it had inherited from the tsarist era. A hundred years of classical ballet, the meticulous art of Stanislavsky’s theaters, the piled-up treasures of Russian music and stagecraft were for me, as for all foreign worshippers, subtle confirmation of Karl Marx’s theories. Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, Moskvin and Madame Geltzer have made more converts to Sovietism among visiting outsiders than the marvels of the Five Year Plan or the adroitness of the guides.

One can see how this legerdemain might deceive honest people. The achievements of pre-revolutionary Russian genius might be regarded by some (not by me) as the achievements of the Russian people as a whole; of this people the Soviet regime could speciously claim to be the embodiment and representative in a way that the Tsars could not have done; this regime could thus further claim to have acquired its cultural riches not by theft but by just inheritance. As well might any jackal which prowls in the ruins of Persepolis claim the lawful ownership thereof!

[...]

Returning to education in pre-revolutionary Russia we find in this field too the reforming Tsardom busily at work.

When Nicholas II came to the throne, only about 25 per cent of his subjects were literate (though we must remember that this total included the inhabitants of newly acquired colonial territories in the East: our own educational statistics at that time would not have looked so good had India, say, been included). By 1914 the figure had doubled to nearly half. In 1908 universal primary education was introduced; by 1915 more than half the children of the relevant age were receiving it. In that year, despite the war, it was proposed to make it compulsory and to introduce compulsory secondary education up to the age of 15 by 1925, by which date also illiteracy should have been wiped out except among the very old. Progress along these lines was rapid and tangible. The effect of the revolution was not to accelerate these developments but greatly to retard them. It was not till 1930 that the Soviet regime aimed at the same targets; not till about 1950 did it actually hit them.

We tend perhaps to think of higher education under the Tsars as the preserve of the well-to-do, unavailable to the masses. Nicholas II’s reign saw great changes here too. In 1880, as Mr. FitzLyon points out, university students of working-class origin accounted for only 12.4 per cent of the total student body, of peasant origin 3.3 per cent. By 1914 24.3 per cent of students were of working-class origin and 14.5 per cent of peasant origin— more than a third altogether (and also more than Soviet Russia can today produce). At other higher educational establishments workers and peasants together accounted for more than 50 per cent of the student body. Fees were low; for the poor they were waived altogether; state grants and bursaries were also available.

Disorders at these universities caused much understandable disquiet at the time (no less than three of the Tsar’s Ministers were murdered by students between 1900 and 1904) and have served since to discredit the Tsarist regime, to reinforce doubts of its legitimacy and acceptability. It was until recently perhaps too readily taken for granted that rioting and the outrages of terrorists were, whether evil or not in themselves, a sure indicator of the evil nature of the regime against which they were directed and, in particular, an expression of the fact that all other roads to freedom and justice were obviously blocked. I do not seek to deny all truth to this view, though the fate for instance of President McKinley, the free choice of the American people, was even then awkward for its proponents. In recent years, moreover, we have seen student unrest and acts of terrorism persistently directed against societies which are indisputably legitimate from the democratic point of view and which offer no obstruction whatever to reforms genuinely desired by a majority of the people. With this new wisdom, with this new lack of confidence in our own standards of judgement, we may perhaps be forgiven for wondering now whether all the manifestations of discontent under the later Tsars tell us more about the nature of the regime than about the nature of its opponents... . Do they tell us that it was an intolerable, unalterable and irreformable tyranny? Or do they rather tell us that its opponents, whether liberals (Cadets, i.e. constitutional democrats) or extremists of various sorts, were impatient, unreasonable and irresponsible [being ... typical of British intellectuals at that time in seeing little difference between liberals, nihilists and terrorists and in approving of all opposition to the Tsars? Yet the Liberator Tsar, Alexander II, was murdered just as he was about to embark on further major reforms.]

[...]

In particular we must note the amount of freedom under the law which the Russian people did enjoy in 1914, and which is quite sufficient to rebut that part of the great lie which suggests that they have never known freedom or justice in any form.

In the first place, there were irremovable judges, to whose independence, incorruptibility and zeal for the truth [even the arch-traitor] Kerensky, himself a revolutionary, [nevertheless] pays ... tribute in his memoirs.

There was trial by jury in all criminal cases (though this was understandably withdrawn in serious political cases, after a jury had found the terrorist Vera Zasulich not guilty of shooting General Trepov, whom she had indisputably shot).

There was no death penalty, except for attempts on the lives of the Imperial family and except in times of emergency, such as after the 1905 revolution. It was also after the 1905 revolution that Tsarist Russia recorded its highest figure of persons in custody, 184,000 in 1912 according to Robert Conquest in ‘The Great Terror’, [probably not counting, of course, those people not actually in custody, but under restrictions or in exile (which could, according to Lenin among others, be pleasant and fruitful -- except for that degenerate female who was Lenin's mistress and who, accompanying him into "exile" in his hunting lodge in Siberia, has left a record of the "suffering" that she was forced to endure by the terrible Russian Autocracy, notably the fact that, given her violent temper, she was without a single servant for four whole days!)but not actually in custody.) [This] ... figure [of 184,000] ... compares quite reasonably with modern free countries like our own and America, which normally keep in prison just under 1,000 persons per million of population (0.01 per cent). Stalin by contrast held in 1952 some 15 to 18 million people in labour camps, not far off a tenth of the population, and would have held many more had not so many died in his charge.

Had not so many died.... It is a modest but surviving part of the great lie that at least the Bolsheviks brought peace and an end of bloodshed to a Russia war-tormented and bled white. In fact it brought first a civil war, with mortality greater than that of the First World War, terrible as that had been. During collectivisation of the land by Stalin four million peasants died; during the ensuing famine, another six million; in the Great Purge, six million more; in other purges, in exportations and deportations during and after the Second World War, three, four, five million more—we shall never know. More than 20 million dead, therefore, untried, undefended, to be presumed innocent: and this is a very conservative estimate—Solzhenitsyn, quoting Professor Kurganov, puts the cost of Communism to Russia at 110 million lives. [Dostoevsky had predicted that it would be 100 million.] Nor of course can any such statistics encompass the sum total of human misery involved—the blasted hopes, the wrecked careers, the exile, the families sundered or ruined, the tears of the living who envied the dead. So many million eggs broken, if you will forgive the coarse expression, and no omelette. In all these respects here indeed is progress, vast, monstrous and indisputable, progress of a kind which marks the transition from an authoritarian to a totalitarian state, which marks in one grim way the difference between an imperfect society, as all are, and a hell on earth, which all are not.

To what extent was pre-war Tsarism even an authoritarian society? To the end of his reign, Nicholas II called himself autocrat: but he was no longer so. There was [full] freedom of religion after 1903. Foreign travel was unrestricted. The censorship had been abolished. The Press was free, even to be scurrilous. We remember the impotent fury of the poor Tsaritsa, her relationship with Rasputin grossly calumniated in the St. Petersburg papers, and her husband’s patient explanations that nothing now could be done about it. Bolshevik and other revolutionary publications appeared without restriction. Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries sat in the Duma, the Russian Parliament, which from 1906 till the fall of the monarchy was neither all-powerful nor impotent, a force to be reckoned with for good and for mischief alike. Had Tsarist Russia survived until the present day with all her institutions and laws unaltered (unlikely, this, since these were in a constant state of flux, moving generally if with backslidings in a liberal direction), she would have to be numbered... , ‘compared to the 126 members of the United Nations Organisation, as one of the 15 or 20 most liberal states in the world’.

Of those moderate well-intentioned liberals who assisted in her overthrow, and who thus assisted in their own overthrow and in the overthrow of all freedom and hope for the future (of both of which there might have seemed then to a reasonable man so much), a recollection of Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace is terribly revealing. (Please remember he is writing in 1912, with no advantage of hindsight.) ‘In theory the Cadets were a moderate constitutional party, and if they had possessed a little more prudence and patience they might have led the country gradually into the paths of genuine constitutional government; but, like everyone in Russia at that time, they were in a hurry. ... Their impatience was curiously illustrated during a friendly conversation which I had one evening with a leader of the party (at the time of the opening of the first Duma in 1906). With all due deference, I ventured to suggest that, instead of maintaining an attitude of systematic and uncompromising hostility to the Ministry, the party might co-operate with the Government and thereby create something like the English parliamentary system, for which they professed such admiration; possibly in eight or ten years this desirable result might be obtained. On hearing these last words my friend suddenly interrupted me and exclaimed: "Eight or ten years? We cannot wait as long as that!".’

Poor, vain, impatient, sad dreamers, indeed, who died by violence or in exile, with all their hopes unfulfilled. They could not wait eight or ten years. They had to wait forever.

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Colin Welch was born in 1924 at Ickleton in Cambridgeshire and educated at Stowe and Peterhouse, Cambridge (major history scholar and degree). In service in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment from 1942 to 1945, he was twice wounded. He spent a year with the Glasgow Herald in the late ‘40s, and has since been writing leaders for the Daily Telegraph with an interval as half of Peter Simple: Deputy Editor, 1964.

"Broken eggs, but no omelette: Russia before the Revolution" is taken from: pp. 47 - 60 of "The Encyclopedia Of Delusions: A critical scrutiny of current beliefs and conventions"

Complied by RONALD DUNCAN and MIRANDA WESTON-SMITH

Copyright 1979 by Pergamon Press, Ltd