Untitled - OUDL Home

The bureaucracy meant the government and, aspersonified by the tsar, the principle of authority. Ofall the factors which help to account for the course ofthe Revolution the most fundamental is that featurewhich for the last two centuries has been the majorproblem in Russian history, the chasm between thesmall minority of the educated and the vast mass ofpeasants and working men living in a different world ofthought, speech, and emotion. The educated minoritywere the rulers and civilizers of modern Russia. Effectivegovernment depended on sufficient cohesion being maintainedbetween the bureaucracy and the remainder ofthe educated minority. By 1917 there was no questionof cohesion; there was almost complete divorce (cf. pp.323-325, 370).The bureaucracy in Russia, which began to take itsmodern shape as a result of administrative reforms underAlexander I (1801-25), was the stock butt of Russianliterature, 1 anathema to revolutionaries, and for half acentury before 1917 the despair of progressives. Manyof the diatribes against it were all too justified; neverthelessRussia owed far more to it than is generallyallowed. It included a long series of able, sincere, andhard-working administrators; but always there were toofew of such, and at the time of the War, so it proved, alltoo few. Its greatest weakness was that it could veryrarely produce or absorb statesmen or leaders. It requiredas its coping-stone the traditional belief of themasses in the authority of the tsar. If this belief faded,and if the army were unreliable, the bureaucracy couldnot govern by itself. It was in some ways alien toRussia and, though it inspired a certain prestige of fear,it never enjoyed prestige such as the German civilservice. It developed a strong esprit de corps and in sodoing became more and more divorced from the liberalsection of the educated minority outside it, e.g. in theDuma, the provincial councils, the municipal bodies, theprofessional classes, the co-operative societies.1 For instance in many of the ever-popular fables of Krylov (1768-1844);admirably translated by Sir Bernard Pares in the Penguin series (1942,with Russian text; also a fuller selection, without Russian text, 1926.)72