1863-1867 – Empire of the Bourgeoisie
The new Constitutionalist-led government of Boris Zhakov had grand ambitions of political and economic reform. In the relatively short time between the fall of Roman Putatia’s administration of the 1866 elections, it would achieve a great deal. Notably, laws on censorship and public meetings were significantly relaxed, accommodating the more active political atmosphere of the times. On the economic front, the government’s dependence of the moderate Putatia-aligned Slavophile deputies in the Duma precluded efforts to do away with the tariff entirely but facilitated further reductions in trade barriers. With an unwieldy parliamentary majority dependent on a complicated array of alliances with ethnic minorities and conservatives, there were clear limits to how far the reform agenda could go. The biggest area of disappointment was in franchise reform.
Recent decades had witnessed the rise of a new class – the bourgeoisie. While there had always been a privileged class existing below the nobility and above the impoverished masses, since the mid-19th century it had grown in size, cohesiveness, economic influence and political interest. The rise of the industrial economy, increases in international trade and the progress of urbanisation were powering this change by enriching business owners large and small and creating new demand in the elite professions, including medicine, law and the senior civil service. With the spread of print media and parliamentary politics, this literate group had become highly attuned to the political struggles and intrigues of the day. They were increasingly frustrated that they were largely shut out from participating while the aristocracy, contributing a declining part of the national wealth, continued to rule the roost. It was this tension that had motivated many Constitutionalists to support an extension of suffrage to include the bourgeois within the electoral system. Yet, so long as they governed in a minority, there was little prospect of passing substantive reform through the Duma.
Away from world of politicians and the bourgeoisie, the Zhakov ministry began its life in highly inauspicious fashion. In the summer of 1863, months into the new government, potato blight hit the western province of Old Poland and Slovakia – wiping out the harvest of a crop millions relied upon. The potato had not really taken hold in the Polish empire under the 18th century, but since then had risen to become one of the primary staples of Polish agriculture, valued for its high yields and sturdiness. The blight led to serious food shortages in Old Poland – threatening starvation. While local elites pleaded for government assistance, the regime in Kiev, committed to laissez faire ideology, believed that private charity was the appropriate response to a humanitarian crisis rather than government action.
Where the state failed, the faithful stepped forward. The Jewish Orthodox Church spearheaded one of the largest public charitable appeals in history to that point, raising huge sums to support relief efforts in Old Poland. The Hasidim were at the forefront of this – calling upon pious Jews to surrender as much as half of any disposable income in the winter months of 1863-64 in a desperate attempt to save lives. These efforts enjoyed great success, saving millions from starvation. This Jewish aid was spread out throughout the effected region, benefiting both Christians and Jews. Not to be outdone, the Catholic Church also stepped in, with His Holiness Pope Urban XII putting the imperial rivalry between his realm and Poland aside to launch a call for the Christian world to send aid to the Poles, contributing a large part of Egypt’s grain export to the cause. Notably, this action strengthened ties between Polish Catholics and Rome and stimulated new thinking in Catholic circles over the role of the Church and Papacy in the modern world. There were certainly difficult moments, notably in December when hungry plebeian crowds clashed with imperial troops in Krakow after attempting to storm a barracks stocked with military rations. Yet the threat of famine was averted.
Putting that harsh winter behind them, in 1865 the Poles launched another imperialist war of conquest in Central Asia and Iran against the Mervians and Farsi. With the technological gap between Poland and the Persians having widen since the last Persian War in the 1840s, there was little contest. It took just six months of fighting for the imperial army to overwhelm its opponents and force them to agree to a costly peace. The Mervians surrendered their exclave on the northern shore of the Aral Sea – already completely surrounded by Polish territory since the collapse of the Ranikotids. Meanwhile, Fars gave up a much greater prize – Tehran, the greatest of all the Persian-speaking cities.
Allied in the Duma with the minority blocks, Zhakov was pushed to offer them some red meat for their support. He found this in a reform of local government that would have great consequences across the realm. Since the mid-18th century, under the reign of Radoslav the Great, the provinces of the empire had been managed by governors directly appointed by the Tsar. These governors often had little connection to the local area and were disproportionately Russian – even in ethnically mixed or minority-populated areas. The government changed this situation by introducing a new layer of local government below the governors, that would take on much of their previous responsibility. In contrast to the governors, these provincial council would be directly elected – on a slightly wider suffrage than existed in national elections. This transferred a significant degree of political power away from Judaeo-Russian elites and into the hands of minority elites through much of the empire.
The move was especially controversial in Muscovy – where Muscovite Russian populations were often marooned among local Tatar-Mongol majorities. One such town was Ryazan, not far from Moscow. Although the city itself was evenly split between Russians and Tatars, the wider countryside was almost exclusively Muslim. This left the city under a solidly Turkic local administration, in an area in which the Jews had traditionally maintained state control through friendly Russian governors in Moscow. The first elections to the new councils, held in April 1866, were accompanied by violent clashing in the streets between Jewish and Muslim mobs. With the situation growing out of hand, the army was sent into the city. While the Muslims withdrew from the streets in the face of this show of force, the Russians offered strong resistance. In the resulting fighting, more than a hundred civilians were killed. The Agudah Yisrael, who had previously had limited success in expanding beyond their Hasidic core constituency to take in greater Olegite support, took up the cause of the Ryazan Martyrs with great gusto – denouncing the regime as callous murderers, hellbent on destroying Jewish power. In the years that followed, Israelite political organisations would build up a culture of commemoration of the Martyrs, marching annually in Ryazan and later in cities across the empire in remembrance. Although mainstream conservatives were cautious not to associate themselves with disorder, there was undoubtedly a well of quiet commiseration with the Martyrs and the actions of Agudah Yisrael.
In the shadow of this unrest, Poland went to the polls. While the right had hoped that events in April would galvanise opposition to the Constitutionalists, it instead added an important new string the Prime Minister’s bow. The liberals were able to pose as both the party of order and freedom – promising to restrain the masses, pursue further political reform and bring new unity to government. Despite standing aside for Putatia-Slavophile candidates in almost a tenth of constituencies, the Constitutionalists saw their popular vote surge and made incredible gains of nearly 100 seats. Indeed, they exceeded all expectations in shooting to an absolute majority in their own right. They won scores of seats from the Right through the Jewish heartland, and made more than a dozen gains in the Protestant Baltic at the expense of the Christian Block, although fairer more poorly among the Catholic Krakowian where memories of the government inaction during the potato blight remained strong.
The Right was utterly savaged. The anti-government conservatives of the Denekin-Slavophile block won less than a quarter of the vote and saw their seat tally plunge. If it hadn’t been for a number of gains from the pro-government Putatia-Slavophiles, their situation would have been even more severe. Meanwhile, the Agudah Yisrael, capturing Zealous anger over events in Ryazan, made some solid gains to recover from a poor performance in 1862, but failed to equal, never mind surpass, it best ever results in 1858.
The final faction of the Right, the Putatia-Slavophiles, also had a difficult election. Having been closely aligned to the Constitutionalists, the former Prime Minster’s faction was able to defend its existing cohort of seats without competition from their government allies, who stood aside in their favour. With no coherent party structure among the Slavophiles as a whole, the reaction to Left Slavophile candidates differed from constituency to constituency. In some seats, Putatia and Denekin candidates faced off against one another, while in others there was a sole Slavophile candidacy. With this uneven pattern, the grouping was able to defend most of their seats, although they did lose a number of deputies in more conservative areas to either Israelite of pro-Denekin opposition. Unfortunately for the faction, the Constitutionalist majority rendered them obsolete – allowing Zhakov to govern without them but leaving them marooned from their old allies on the Right.
With the mandate of a majority government, Zhakov forged ahead with plans for electoral reform. Through the next year, the administration would carefully navigate its own backbenches, the Senate and the tolerance of the Tsar for political change to design a new extension of the franchise that would bring the bourgeoisie into the voting public and recongise their growing social weight. The 1867 Electoral Reform Act made huge changes. Constituency boundaries were redrawn to take account for the growing population of the cities and to address problems of severely uneven representation – with some seats previously possessing only a handful of electors while others had thousands. More importantly, the franchise would henceforth be awarded according to wealth rather than social position, with a property qualification now instituted. Exceptions made for those who already qualified under the previous franchise but did not meet the new requirement – mostly poorer Boyars. While the 1839 electorate was overwhelmingly aristocratic, with a few other scattered notables, the 1867 voter base was predominantly upper middle class, taking in the wealthy rather than the titled. The share of the adult male population with voting right West of the Brusilov line rose from 1 to 5.5%, from around 180,000 to a little under 1,000,000. This was an immense leap, yet in an empire whose population had recently passed 100,000,000, the vast majority remained disenfranchised.
One of the interesting consequences of the new act was the empowerment of the Ashkenazi. While distribution of the vote among the ethnic groups was relatively unchanged by the 1867 Act, the Ashkenazi were a huge exception. With no aristocracy of their own, vanishingly few had possessed voting rights under the 1839 franchise, yet, with the success of their communities in commerce and the professions, they would make up close to a tenth of the voting public under the 1867 reform, transforming them into kingmakers overnight.
