1893-1896 – We Are The People, And We Say No
The Brusilov Crisis reached its climax in the 1893 election as an unprecedently large electorate was called upon to decide the fate of the empire in a bitter and angry contest. Despite the stalwart work of Prime Minister Petr Orlov over the past year, his party suffered one of the gravest electoral massacres in Polish history. Beset by the National Liberal defectors and their conservative allies on the Right, a series of confident challengers on the Left and the difficulties of extending their appeal to the poor, the Constitutionalists’ vote share dropped by two fifths and they shed nearly two thirds of their seats. Even Orlov himself was unseated in his constituency in Smolensk by a Trudovik challenger.
Indeed, the most damaging aspect of the result for the liberals were not their losses, but the socialists’ gains. Benefitting from concentrated backing from urban workers, while also developing a sizeable rural base of support, the Trudoviks overtook the Constitutionalists to become the Duma’s second force, more than doubling their seat tally. Elsewhere, the Democrats also made strong gains in popular support – although this only translated into four new seats. Among Tatar electors, the promise of a reformed Polish state had drawn a sizeable number of separatist voters back towards the Hindu-Muslim Block – although results in the Jewish imperial core would frustrate their ambitions yet again.
Although only winning a minority of the vote, the Right’s decision to present a single list to the electorate proved decisive. All 42 National Liberal defectors held on to their seats, running under the umbrella of the National Alliance, while the National Conservatives and Agudah Yisrael both made modest gains to top the Alliance to a fragile parliamentary majority that doomed the effort to abolish the Brusilov Line. Twelve years after last relinquishing the office, Yildilz Kazimzade was the premier once more. This new ministry would not have the same reforming zeal and ideological energy of his previous government in the 1870s. After inviting the National Liberals into the fold, the National Alliance had become more ideological diffuse – united by the need to protect the existing constitution, rather than a grand vision of Poland’s future. This left the government more constrained in its actions, while fate would see it lurch from one emergency to another.
In the east, the popular response to yet another frustration of Tatar ambition was immediate and inevitable. Throughout the empire, Tatars and Mongols rallied in protests led by both the Congress and more mainstream groups. Many of these bitter demonstrations fell into violence, as angry crowds attacked symbols of Jewish power and the Polish state alike in chaotic riots. Most concerningly, around the Aral Sea a local Emir proclaims an independent Emirate and led gangs of armed men in pogroms against communities of Russian settlers that had migrated to the region over the past few decades – massacring thousands. The government came down on the Aral rebels harshly – sewing yet more unrest among the Tatars of the empire. It was in response to these events that small elements of separatists on the fringes of the Turanian Congress formed the Brotherhood of the Wolf – a paramilitary force named after the great symbol of Tatar nationhood.
The Tatars lands were not the only area suffering from violent ethnic tensions. In the far north, the areas traditionally inhabited by the Ugric peoples had seen large scale inward migration from Muscovite Russians, and to a lesser extent Tatars, since the middle of the century. By the 1890s, the incomers narrowly outnumbered the indigenous Ugric tribes who were forced away from the most profitable areas onto more marginal lands by the migrants. Starting in 1894, bands of Ugrian fighters descended from the tundra and the forests to launch fierce raids into Russian and Tatar communities – burning their villages and killing scores of settlers. While the imperial army would soon arrive in the area to oppose the insurrection, the Ugrians would simply melt away into the desolate parts of Permia from where their raids would continue for years.
The fates of Europe and Africa had been closely intertwined since ancient times. Although Europeans had dominated significant parts of the continent since the Middle Ages, it was only in the 19th century that Europe set out to totally conquer the Dark Continent. From the middle of the century, the Europeans had pushed their influence ever deeper into Africa – beginning rapidly annex huge swathes of African territory in the 1870s and 1880s. The greatest winners of the Scramble for Africa was the Holy Roman Empire, which conquered Algiers and an enormous contiguous domain in the heart of the continent stretching from the Rift Valley to the Atlantic Ocean and from Natal in the south to equatorial central Africa. The Andalucians expanded outwards from Morocco into the Sahel and much of Nigeria, and from centuries old Indian Ocean enclaves across eastern Africa. Similarly, the Italians and Skots struck inland from existing ports, the former state with much greater success. By the mid-1890s, the only indigenous African states with non-European ruling elites were in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Madagascar and Somalia, the latter themselves a colonial power with holdings in the East Indies and Arabia.
While the Empire had secured the King’s share of Africa, it had left a sea of ill-feeling in its wake. The Dutch and the Danes, who had both controlled lands around the Cape of Good Hope for centuries and possessed their own ambitions in southern Africa, seethed with resentment after being left out in the cold entirely, while the Skots were deeply dissatisfied with their paltry gains in West Africa. The Papacy had gained nothing the Scramble but saw their decades-long dispute with the Empire over influence in Templar Sudan heat up in the aftermath of German territorial gains to the south. The Holy Roman Empire was quickly emerging as the world’s hegemonic power with an empire spanning much of western and central Europe, the largest share of Africa and much of North America – in doing so, it was gaining new enemies.
While Poland had avoided embroiling itself in Africa, it had its own colonial machinations far to the north. The first of these was in Greenland in 1894. The vast frozen island had been the subject of European interest for centuries, particularly from the Nordic powers of Scandinavia and Britain and the Holy Roman Empire from their bases in Iceland. However, for all that time it had never been subject to a lasting European settlement – remaining firmly under the thumb of the indigenous Inuits well into the modern age. As the European powers struck out across the world in the late 19th century, Greenland attracted attention once more. Unexpectedly, Poland emerged as the most interested party in the island’s fate – establish a permanent scientific and military base at Nuuk in 1887, which became the starting point for the first expedition to reach the North Pole in 1893.
It was in the aftermath of this great feat that the Polish government reached agreements with the Danes and Skots that saw both parties agree to surrender any claim to the island and recognise a Polish annexation of Greenland in 1894. The Poles’ move caused fury in Vienna, and the Germans deployed a gunboat to menace Nuuk, threatening to fight to defend the Inuits’ independence – an incredible irony considering that the Empire had spent the past two decades subjugating millions of Africans. It was a sign of the shifting sands of European diplomacy that the Germans found themselves wholly isolated in this dispute and, fearing an escalation, were forced to back down and accept Polish sovereignty over Greenland.
In an ironic twist of fate, Yildilz Kazimzade, the great symbol of 19th century Jewish Nationalism, was the premier who led Poland into its most thorough entanglements with the Christian West for more than a century. Fears of German world domination had simply grown to great for Poland to maintain the policy that it could stand aloof from the affairs of the continent, same behind its mighty army and unshakeable faith. Building upon existing anti-German sentiment, the Polish government stretched out its hand to sympathetic states across the continent. Between 1894 and 1896 the Polish government signed a series of pacts and alliances that offered gauruntees against German aggression to Denmark, Skotland, the Netherlands and their existing allies in Crusader Anatolia. For better or worse, Poland had cast her lot in with the disgruntled middling powers of Christian Europe.
Kiev’s diplomatic tentacles spread out through cultural, as well as more traditional, channels – most importantly in the religious sphere. The origins of this religious diplomacy were in a quite unique event held in 1891, during the time of the Vlaslov ministry. On the initiative of the Archbishop of Krakow, a number of intellectuals in the Catholic University of Krakow and the Chief Rabbi of Warsaw, the Conference of the World’s Religions was held. This event sought to build interfaith dialogue across all world religions – increasing understanding. In practise, the majority of the delegates were from Polish – drawing upon the empire’s incredible diversity to bring Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu religious figures to Krakow. However, some Christian and Muslim leaders from the West did make the journey, alongside a scattering of South and East Asians. While quite the spectacle, the Conference also had a more practical effect in that it stimulated wider debates over interfaith religions – more pointedly within the Catholic and Jewish Orthodox churches.
As these ideas matured through the 1890s, and dovetailed with geostrategic fears of German power, they facilitated a stunning rapprochement between the religious heads of the world’s two greatest religious institutions. In 1895 Pope Luke VII travelled to the Jerusalem in an unexpected state visit to Israel, where he met with the Kohen Gadol Elijah IV. The two prayed together and made statements celebrating the friendship and shared heritage of the Christian and Jewish peoples, with the Catholic Church being offered greater control over Christian holy sites in Israel. This remarkable visit was more than a religious excursion, offering the first clear sign that the Great Game, the long Papal-Polish rivalry over the Middle East and Central Asia that had loomed over much of the past century, was coming to an close.
Domestically, the return of the Right to power in 1893 coincided with the beginning of Poland’s most severe economic recession for at least half a century, if not longer. After decades of rapid economic growth, the Polish economy was riddled with speculative bubbles, over-leveraged financial institutions and under-performing investments. So long as growth continued and investor confidence remained high, these issues could be overlooked as progress kept rolling on. This train would come to an abrupt, and devastating, stop beginning in 1893 by something as mercurial as the Indian cotton harvest. After unexpectedly poor yields in India, the price of cotton soared. High costs pushed many Polish mills, who operated on tight margins of profitability in the face of strong competition, into bankruptcy. Textile production dropped by 10% between 1893 and 1894, failing to recover until the end of the decade. With textiles forming the backbone of the Polish industrial economy, several major financial institutions were driven into bankruptcy – seeing depositors who had intrusted them with their savings ruined. As consumers surged to withdraw deposits, credit dried up as banks sought to protect themselves from further damage. With loans hard to come by, investments in new factories slowed significantly. Steel production dropped by 5%, alcohol by 15% while smaller industries like machine parts and shipbuilding saw expansion grind to a halt. Only arms production, fuelled by the accelerating Polish-German arms race, saw significant growth during this period.
While the urban economy slowed down, rural-urban migration continued at an unrelenting pace – leading to a huge surge in unemployment throughout the towns and cities of the empire. With this reserve army of unemployed undermining the value of labour, employers took the opportunity to force through pay cuts and demand lengthier working days in an effort to ensure profitability and protect their own industries from collapse. In response, the trade unions led the workers into battle, leading to a lengthy period of industrial militancy that reached its high point over the winter of 1895 to 1896 when much of the Polish economy was completely shut down by strikes.
The period of industrial turmoil shifted the focal point of Polish politics away from the constitutional and the Brusilov Line, towards the issues of class conflict and social reform. The union movement was very closely tied to the Trudovik party and was imbued with its socialist and labourist ideology. The unrest therefore offered the Trudoviks the ideal opportunity to cement their position as the leading opposition to the National Alliance. It also presented the opportunity for the party’s first leader of genuinely national stature to step forth – Daniil Chernov. Coming from a middle class Moldavian family, Chernov had been joined the party soon after its foundation and was given a quick route to the Duma as a result of his social background, seen as more suitable for the parliamentarianism than the gruff union leaders of the grassroots.
Despite this, he proved himself equally comfortable with the street politics of rallying striking workers and the unemployed as he was in the parliamentary chamber. Chernov and his colleagues would put forward a radical set of solutions to the empire’s ongoing crisis – demanding legislative support to protect pay and the length of the working day, unemployment subsidies to combat the miserable poverty the recession had caused, state support for industries to fight unemployment, land reform to improve peasant conditions and slow the migratory flow into the cities, and, of course, the end of the Brusilov Line to ease Jewiah-Muslim tensions.
As these troubles overshadowed the government, its parliamentary majority was evaporating as by-elections saw it fall into a minority in early 1896. Concerned for the stability of the government at such a testing time, the Tsar demanded that Kazimzade either bring the Constitutionalists into his government to support his majority or call a new election. Faced with this choice, the premier chose to go to the people once again.