Twenty years before the great war

Historian Mikhail Davydov lives in Zhukovsky. In an ordinary Khrushchev building on Gagarin Street. Meanwhile, this is one of the famous Russian scientists, whose works are quoted and discussed in many serious discourses. Many popular media invite him as an expert when it comes to the most controversial and little meaningful episodes in the history of our state.

Mikhail Davydov is a professor at the Department of Political History at the Higher School of Economics. He is also the author of several books (monographs), which contain not only unique historical facts, but also an obvious connection between what was and what is. The titles of the books themselves speak of the relevance of their content for today’s Russia: “His Majesty’s Opposition: the Nobility and Reforms at the Beginning of the 19th Century.” “Essays on agrarian Russia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries”, “The All-Russian market at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries and railway statistics”...

Mikhail Davydov’s latest book was published quite recently, at the end of 2016, and is dedicated to the most successful and most slandered period of Russian history of the twentieth century - the Stolypin reforms. Multi-page monograph “Twenty years before the great war. Modernization of Witte-Stolypin" is a huge array of data and strictly structured thoughts that make it possible to reproduce a new, non-mythical picture of the twenty-year era of the last reforms of the Russian Empire.

What was this 20th anniversary? And was the inevitability of the “Great October” really so inevitable? Our conversation with Mikhail Davydov was about this.

In the preface to the book “20 ​​years before the great war. “Russian modernization of Witte-Stolypin” you outlined an almost rebellious thought: judging by those processes, by that modernization of Russia twenty years before the October events, the revolution did not come from the stomach, that is, not from the impoverishment of the masses, as we were taught at school...

Certainly. What you were taught in school is a cliche of traditional negativist historiography. In fact, statements about the plight of the people are essentially an ordinary myth, designed to substantiate the inevitability of the October Revolution and justify it. However, such characteristics as “land scarcity”, “hungry exports”, “exorbitant payments”, “ruin of the peasantry”, when turning to the sources, turn out to be a fiction or a major simplification. And the semantic inflation of terms over the course of a hundred years leads to serious deformations of our ideas. Thus, according to the linguistic norms of pre-revolutionary times, “famine” meant any major crop failure, which, by the way, was usually accompanied by multimillion-dollar government food aid of almost 500 million rubles for the years 1891-1908. There were terms “coal hunger”, “wood hunger”, “meat hunger”... That is, the word “hunger” was synonymous with any shortage. But at the same time, Russia during this period was one of the most dynamically developing countries in the world. And in terms of the pace of industrial development, the average annual increase in industrial output was unparalleled in the world and amounted to 6.65 percent. The Stolypin reform in a number of sectors of the national economy had an effect already in the first years. This is easily proven by analyzing railway statistics and a number of other statistical indicators. Trade and industrial legislation is being modified, gold circulation is being introduced, and foreign capital is being actively attracted, which has solved the problem of financial industrialization. Stalin (by comparison) solved this problem with collectivization, killing 10 million of our compatriots, as he told Churchill.

Facts show that at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, there was an increase in people's well-being in Russia. Thanks to the modernization of Witte-Stolypin, there is quite a lot of evidence of this. I tried to show in my book the scale of this reform. After all, it is usually reduced to the destruction of the community and “general ruralization”... Meanwhile, it was about transforming the country. It, of course, could not go without problems. Moreover, forty years before this, the government pursued the opposite policy, artificially preserving the equalization-redistribution community. The book has a chapter “Are reforms ever ideal?” They don't exist. Modernization in general does not make everyone happy. But by and large the country turned out to be healthy. Then. Millions of peasants were ready for change. And it turned out that many educated people, including those with opposition views, found a new way of existence for themselves. I quote in the book the memoirs of Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, a member of the Central Committee of the Kadet Party. She writes about her brother, a former Narodnaya Volya member, who in 1910 became the main figure in cooperation in their district. After all, it was a huge movement! It is very important that in the history of the Stolypin reform the cross-cutting motive is the desire for contact with society, which was big news. The society stumbled at first, and then believed the government.

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The people are not the immutable Greenwich meridian. A people is a product of its history. He changes when he is helped to change. And the Stolypin era showed this
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And yet, a revolution happened...

Yes, the October revolution in a minute (from the point of view of history) overturned the old value system and replaced it with the Red Terror, military communism, surplus appropriation and the famine of 1921-1922, which claimed 5.5 million victims. Lenin at least allowed foreign food aid, Stalin did not allow any help for the starving. All disasters were accompanied by cannibalism, and it was they that shaped modern ideas about what hunger is.

That is, the Stolypin-Witte reform really didn’t have enough years to become stable. But did something turn Russia off the civilizational path? If not the decay of the economy and the plight of the masses (as we were taught in school), then what?

I, like many of my colleagues, believe that the global reason for the 1917 revolution was that Germany was hopelessly losing the war. Such things demoralize the nation and, by definition, indicate the insolvency of the government. Russia faced the war at the peak of its economic development. That didn't mean she didn't have problems, of course. There were, but they were not associated with the impoverishment of the people, as we were convinced for almost a hundred years. But the immediate cause and main driver of the revolution was the struggle of elites for power. As historian Sergei Kulikov convincingly shows, after the military defeats of 1915, a top conspiracy took place under the slogan “revolution in the name of victory,” caused by the desire to turn the tide of the war. Then the renunciation of the king, which awakened the archetypes of consciousness, and the thin layer of civilization was quickly swept away by the emerging opportunity to do evil with impunity. As a result, the government lost all authority, which became almost self-destructive.

You write that socialism has become a form of compensation for the feudal consciousness of Russian people who can read. Is this relevant today?

Absolutely. After more than a century and a half, serfdom has not been eradicated. And I'm afraid it won't go away. At that time, the peasants did not know the word “socialism,” but those who knew how to read were captured by socialist ideas. Today, young people, most often out of ignorance, also have a craving for socialism as a certain form of social order with the right to go abroad. In addition, the Soviet government gave birth to a huge layer of people who find it easier when people think for them and at the same time give them a living wage. And this layer has not disappeared during perestroika, democratization and the appearance of the first signs of freedom.

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Are reforms ever ideal? They don't exist. Modernization does not make everyone happy
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Does this mean that successful reforms in Russia are impossible in principle? Or is there a chance? Does the study of Stolypin's reforms provide some answer to such a rhetorical question?

Let me start with the fact that the people are not the unchanging Greenwich meridian. A people is a product of its history. He changes when he is helped to change. And the Stolypin era showed this. Specific numbers and destinies are in the book.

The first component of successful reforms, in my opinion, is the good and firm will of the government, expressed not only in declarations, but also in the laws confirming these declarations, as well as in tireless monitoring of their implementation, without imitations and guile.

The second is a clear, detailed, scientifically based reform program. It must be based on real knowledge of your country.

The third is the presence of qualified leaders and performers who (I will say an important thing) do not have faith in an immediate miracle, but have faith in slow and gradual changes. Stolypin said: “The agrarian question cannot be solved. It can only be solved!”

Fourth, a well-thought-out legal framework that develops the plot from simple to complex. Henry Ford launched the assembly line for four years from simple to complex. I don’t even want to think how many weeks later he would have turned out to be a pest in the USSR.

And finally, fifth, cooperation with society plus the population’s conscious trust in the government.

Today it’s even hard to believe that all this is not a utopia. Meanwhile, a hundred years ago, during the time of Stolypin, this was reality.