• Valuev was a master of political "co-optation", that is, the harnessing of independently mobilized social energy to officially authorized tasks
• Valuev also led the official assault on the spontaneous public movement to create a nation-wide system of elementary education
• 1880s:Ivan Kramskoi portrait of older Valuev in Olga's Gallery
  \\
  *--Alan Kimball, TXT on Valuev and public mobilization in the 1860s

<>1863je18:Russian university reform and other educational reforms [VSB,3:610-11]
*--Russian texts, Obshchii ustav... etc. [RA2:382f, 411f, and 417f]
*--The "great reforms" continued, but notice later official reactionary measures
\\
*--P. Alston, Education and the State in Tsarist Russia
*--Danierl R. Brower, Training the Nihilists: Education and Radicalism in Tsarist Russia
*--Abbott Gleason, Young Russia: The Genesis of Russian Radicalism in the 1860s (1980)
*--Alan Kimball, "Student Interests and Student Politics: Kazan University"

<>1863fa:Russian pundit Chernyshevskii while imprisoned by tsarist authorities published a novel, What Is to Be Done? [1989 translation is better than 1986 | E-TXT#1 | E-TXT#2 | E-TXT#3]

• It has been described as an awful novel but the greatest awful novel ever written
• Its greatness derived mainly from the immense popularity and influence it had on an emerging reading public and, subsequently, on Russian political culture [EG | CF:KMM:141-54]
• One of the novel's characters was modeled on the physiologist and psychologist Ivan Sechenov
• See Sechenov's Autobiographical Notes and Selected Physiological and Psychological Works (MVA)
\\
*2016de11:Politico| "The Most Politically Dangerous Book You’ve Never Heard Of" [E-TXT]

<>1864:1866; USA | Second railroad act followed first

• Western-Union effort to link USA and Europe via Alaska and Siberia failed when Atlantic cable [pix] eliminated need, but great Atlantic-to-Pacific project moved ahead
• 1864fe09:USA government grant to the State of Kansas was accepted and handed directly to the newly formed private industrial company, Achison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company [AT&SF]
  • AT&SF was driving a line from Kansas, through Indian Territory, to the Gulf of Mexico at Galveston, Texas
• Railroads found their way directly into US folk culture, for example the popular song "Wabash Cannonball" [TXT with great variations sung by = Hank Snow | Boxcar Willie | Ernest Tubb | Roy Acuff | James Coffee (dandified by orchestral accompaniment) | Randy Latshaw | Tomy (homemade w/toy trains) | Johnny Cash | Carter Family | Flatt and Scruggs | Minnesota Ranch Hands | Tumble Weeds | Kansas State University pep band (at 1min 10sec mark) | Ronny (auf Deutsch)] | Off the Wabash theme, but beautiful, look at this more recent footage of diesel enjine clearing snow from the tracks
• As suggested in that last performance of "Wabash Cannonball" just above, railroads found their way into pop-art cultures the world around
• So we give full rein to our iron horse as we gallop over a wide global terrain on the railroad LOOP
• The end of the Civil War can be taken as the beginning of the era of industrial transformation of USA economy
  \\
  Saul,1:360-70

<>1864:1876; London was the HQ of The International Workingmen's Association [later known as "The First International"]

• 1871:General Rules of the International Workingmen's Association [DPH:205-7]
• "Socialism" was beginning to take on organized existence in Europe, sometimes in close association with wage-labor, sometimes less close
• A epoch of international organization was dawning in "The West", a step up from temporary conferences and congresses [EG] towards creation of permanent institutions of international arbitration
• EG=See 1864:1949au12; just below
  \\
  *--Wki

<>1864:1949au12; Geneva Convention signed as an international treaty, then augmented and perfected over the next nine decades

• The Geneva Convention would be augmented by 3 further conventions over the next 84 years [TXT~]
  • 1906:Second Geneva Convention signed
  • 1929:Second augmented
  • 1949au12:Third and fourth Geneva Conventions signed, with signing of renewed and augmented First and Second conventions
  \\
  *--Wki
  *--LOOP on "international organization"

<>1864wi:Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevsky criticized Chernyshevskii-style materialist philosophy in 1st half of Notes from the Underground [TXT | CF= Edie,2:240-9]
*--Dostoevsky presented one of the first powerful critiques of emerging European "scientistic" trends

<>1864ja01:Russian state made significant concessions to provincial and local public and their need for self administration = The "Zemstvo Reform" [VSB,3:613-4 | DPH:285-7]

• Russian text, Polozhenie o guberskikh i uezdnykh zemskikh uchrezhdeniiakh [RA2:212f]
• This was arguably the second most important "great reform"
• For one thing, zemstvos became the institutional home of a significant liberal oppositional movement
  \\
  *--Terence Emmons and Wayne S. Vucinich, eds. The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-Government
  *--Abbott Gleason, Local Opposition to Autocracy, 1864-1905
  *--Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia

<>1864fe19:Polish rebellion allowed Russian officials to pass "progressive" reforms that weakened indigenous Polish resistance to Russian power

• The most important expression of national independence in the years of the first revolutionary situation was for the time being silenced
• Russian state put through peasant reforms designed to weaken noble elite of Poland [VSB,3:612-13]

<>1864oc29:Russian Foreign Minister Aleksandr Gorchakov distributed to other European powers a memo on Central-Asia [VSB,3:610 | BNE:168-70]

• Gorchakov compared Russian imperialism with general European imperialism, that of "all civilized states that come into contact with half-savage nomadic tribes without firm social organization". Here's what he said =
  • Like USA, France, Holland [Netherlands] and England, Russia felt compelled to cross its borders and its frontiers to establish "a certain authority over its neighbors, whose wild and unruly customs render them very troublesome"
  • Expansion into new territory created another even more remote frontier where yet other "wild and unruly" peoples begin to cause trouble
  • Preventive movement outward forced yet further movement, and then further
    • The choice was to give up or "advance farther and farther into the heart of savage lands"
    • Russia advanced "not so much from ambition as from dire necessity, where the greatest difficulty lies in being able to stop" [SAC emphasis]
      • Compare this argument with the English argument [ID] and with an early US argument [ID] and a later US argument [ID]
• Map of Russian Empire and its "sphere of influence"
• Note the long southern sphere of influence toward the English dominated Near Eastern territories
• The future WW1 "Southern Front" located itself within this long southern sphere of influence [ID]
• Don't miss Alaska there on the far left of the map, and notice the North American "sphere of influence" further south down the Pacific Coast
• Gorchakov's memo was in part defending and justifying Russian imperialism
• But at the same time he sought to cool growing competitive heat in the relations between European powers as they careened outward toward one another's jealously guarded imperialist peripheries =
• He hoped to keep Europeans from interfering in what he took to be Russian affairs in that NE half of the "Middle East" the Russians called "Central-Asia" [Continue LOOP on "AfroAsia" ]
• He also sought to prevent Europeans attacking Europeans as they all responded to the imperatives of the Great Game
• 1867: "South-Asia", in the Indian city Deoband, near Dehli, local Muslims took action to bring an end to that very condition described by Gorchakov as "tribes without firm social organization"
• In Deoband, Muslim's organized themselves against English rule
• They were beginning to take up defensive self-organization against European imperialism
• They sought to define Islamic civilization as a force such as Gorchakov called "a firm social organization"
• They centered their activities on the village madrasa, the fundamentalist Islamic school
• The madrasa emphasized training the young, especially the poor, in fundamentals of the Koran and the sharia (Islamic law)
• Over the next century and a half, Deoband issued about 250,000 fatwa (instructions on proper Muslim behavior)
• By the late 20th century, the Taliban, with US help, had in much the same way become a serious force among Islamic peoples of that region
\\
*--Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia
*--E. Allworth, ed., Central Asia
*----------, Nationality Question in Soviet Central Asia
*----------. Tatars of the Crimea: Their Struggle for Survival...
*--S. Becker, Russia's Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1924
*--Richard A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867-1917:A Study in Colonial Rule
*--Serge A. Zenkovsky, ed., Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia

<>1864no:USA CO Ft.Lyon area | In good faith, CO Volunteers Colonel Edward Wynkoop convinced Native American Cheyenne tribe to place selves under protection of the US military [Hutton:56]

• Shortly, Colorado Governor John Evans and the Colorado Volunteers, under the command of John Chivington, attacked the peaceful village and declared a war of extermination against the Cheyenne
  • The event came to be known as the Sand Creek Massacre and marks the symbolic beginning of several years of warfare on the Great Plains
  • The ambush unsettled the whole territory from the Platte.R south to Red.R
• Military commander/administrator Philip Sheridan, a well-known Civil War commander, was now assigned to duties in the war against Native Americans on the Great Plains
  • He later put stress on the importance of this period in his and his nation's life
  • He referred to it vaguely as the beginning of Indian harassment of settlers and disruption of stage and railroad routes [ShePH.vsp,2:282. (03):this number in parentheses records the order in which Sheridan's memoirs accounted these events]
  • Sheridan made no mention of the Sand Creek massacre
• 1864:1870; KS the scene of "Indian troubles" as military shifted its attention from Civil War and occupation of the defeated South in the era of Reconstruction
• 1883:Early Kansas historian William Cutler described the era [W]
• 1864:1868; KS Ft.Larned | Significant construction of bridges, stone & lumber buildings
• Military projects were designed for "protection" of the Santa Fe Trail
• 1866:USA Great Plains divided into military administrative units, "divisions", "with a view to controlling the Indians"
• Division of Missouri was created and put under the command of General Sherman
• "Former temporizing" had made Native Americans "confident" & "defiant" [(15) ShePH.vsp,2:297]
• 1866:Major General William Hazen, a veteran of the Indian wars even before the Civil War, described his policy outlook: "allot to each tribe, arbitrarily, its territory or reservation, and make vigorous, unceasing war on all that do not obey and remain upon their grounds" [Hutton:43]
• 1866su:KS | "military operations" against "hostile tribes" of Native Americans commenced
  \\
  *2016ap15(3:30-5pm): UO campus, 375 McKenzie | Ari Kelman, the McCabe Greer Professor of History at Penn State University, will present a talk based on his A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek. The Sand Creek Massacre is one of the most infamous cases of state-sponsored violence in US history. Kelman' lecture and book examine the ways in which generations of Americans have struggled to come to terms with the meaning of both the attack and its aftermath, most publicly at the 2007 opening of the Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site

<>1864no20:Russian legal reform [VSB,3:614-16] Russian text Uchrezh. sudeb. ustanovlenii [RA2:278f]

• Legal reforms created independent judiciary, trial by jury, the right to legal representation, and a large promise of "rule by law" in civil cases
• They extended to recently freed peasant the right to bring suit at court
• They also caused large numbers of professionally oriented Russians to take up careers as lawyers
• This was an important moment of "modernization" in the long history of Russian "rule of law" [LOOP on history of Russian "law codes"]
• More than a dozen years later, the trial of Vera Zasulich confirmed the worse fears of those who opposed this "great reform"
  \
  *--Mironov,2:223-365 puts late Imperial law in the broadest Russian historical and social context, reaching back to medieval times
  *--Richard Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness
  *1981ap:JGO:161-84 | T. Taranovski, "The Aborted Counter-Reform: The Muravev Commission and the Judicial Statutes of 1864"
  *--S. Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars (NYC:1953)

<>1864de08(NS):Vatican issued Pope Pius IX's "Syllabus of Errors" [DPH:233-41], including "Errors about civil society, considered both in itself and in its relation to the Church" [237-9]
*--Other Catholic Church/state documents [241-5]

<>1865:1869; Russian novelist at the dawn of world fame, Leo Tolstoy (1828:1910) produced his first great novel War and Peace

• Just for fun, try this brief comic-book version of the massive novel = [TXT,part.1 | TXT,part.2]
• Tolstoy was a central figure of the Russian "golden age" in its late novelistic phase, from the 1850s to the 1880s
• His most important writings in this "golden age" =
  • 1851:1857; Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (written while serving in the military in the Caucausus)
  • 1854:Sebastopol or Tales of Sevastopol, Crimean War battle reportage in the journal Sovremennik
  • 1861:1862; Tolstoy on Education and very similar translation (as if a close copy) Tolstoy on Education: Tolstoy's Educational Writings
  • 1875:1877; Anna Karenina
  • 1884:"Death of Ivan Ilyich"
• He outlived the Golden Age, and was possibly even more widely influential in the Russian "Silver Age" a quarter of a century later
  \\
  *--Wagar on the Golden Age of Russian culture [TXT]

<>1865ja11:Moscow noble (gentry) assembly, following the lead of the great landowner V.P. Orlov-Davydov, addressed Alexander II with a request that he complete the zemstvo reforms "by calling together a general assembly of elected representatives from the Russian land" [VSB,3:616 | "Vsepoddaneishii adres moskovskogo dvorianstva" (GRV:201-2)]

• The Moscow noble assembly presumed that only nobles would elect and be elected
  • However "establishmentarian" the Moscow assembly was, the nobles gathered there suggested something quite radical = A national representative political body to complete the local, district and provincial Zemstvo institutions
  • Moscow nobles sought to "crown the edifice" of national representative government, expanding from the grass-roots upward
• Officials were shocked to read the following words addressed to Emperor Alexander =

  The nobility has always been the firm mainstay of the Russian throne. Not being officials of the government and not enjoying the rewards that such service brings, doing their duty without remuneration for the benefit of the fatherland and the public order, these men, by virtue of their very position within the state [as elected representatives], will have the mission of preserving those moral and political principles that are so valuable for the people and so necessary for their true well-being, and upon which rests the structure of the state

<>1865mr:China| English firm, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Ltd, [HSBC] founded. Continuous existence into 21st c.
*--HSBC became a major expression of British global financial projection of metropol power in Asia and the rest of the globe
*--Internet home page, official bank history
\\
*--Wki for a full summary of the bank's globe-striding history
*2013je:TED|>Gooch,Charmian, "Meet Global Corruption's Hidden Players" [E-TXT]

Well, it's not going to come as any surprise for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money, but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too. For example, in Sarawak, Malaysia. Now this region, it has just five percent of its forests left intact. Five percent. So how did that happen? Well, because an elite and its facilitators have been making millions of dollars from supporting logging on an industrial scale for many years. So we sent an undercover investigator in to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite, and the resulting footage, well, it made some people very angry, and you can see that on YouTube, but it proved what we had long suspected, because it showed how the state's chief minister, despite his later denials, used his control over land and forest licenses to enrich himself and his family. And HSBC, well, we know that HSBC bankrolled the region's largest logging companies that were responsible for some of that destruction in Sarawak and elsewhere. The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process, but it earned around 130 million dollars. Now shortly after our exposé, very shortly after our exposé earlier this year, the bank announced a policy review on this. And is this progress? Maybe, but we're going to be keeping a very close eye on that case.

<>1865je28:Russian State Council and Interior Ministry reformed laws on Jewish pale, allowing mechanics, distillers, brewers, master craftsmen and artisans in general to live anywhere in the Empire [VSB,3:617-18]

<>1866ja03:Russian financial reform (Vrem. polozh. o kontrol [RA2:204f])
*--The deep need for fiscal and military reform was addressed only late in the process
*--Then it had to proceed under the influence of an official reactionary mood that arose following an attempt on the life of the tsar =

<>1866ap04:Russian terrorist Dmitrii Karakozov tried to shoot Alexander II

• This was the second blow to civic activism and reform [ID the first]
  • In "society", revolutionary activities now intensified and went underground
  • A larger body of political activists were "burnt away" by tsarist suppression and fear of serious commitment to conspiracy and revolution
  • A small body of largely youthful activists, with "nothing to lose", continued the struggle
• Among government figures, reactionary officials felt vindicated in their opposition to progressive change
  • They could now assert that there was a causal link between reform and terrorism
  • The pace of "great reforms" slackened
  \\
  *--Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism
  *--Alan Kimball review of Verhoeven [TXT]
  *--VRR, ch.14
  

<>1866:Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment [E-TXT]

<>1866su:USA Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox in Russia [VSB,3:618-20]

<>1866no24:Russian state peasant reform
*--State peasants represented about half the village population of the Empire
*--This reform preserved their advantages over ex-serfs recently emancipated from private gentry ownership [VSB,3:620-1]

<>1867:London | Karl Marx, Das Kapital, volume one, published
*--This first volume and the volumes that followed achieved a status equal to that of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations [ID], the original globally influential study of political-economy
*--Here are two examples of influential concepts set afloat in world consciousness = "Primitive accumulation" and "surplus value" [ID]

<>1867:Paris Universal Exhibition (world's fair)
*--French engineers Léon Droux and Léon Rueff described technological and industrial advancements [BNE:145-6]

<>1867:1876; USA Federal Government imposed Reconstruction Act to administer defeated South for nearly ten years

<>1867mr30:Russia and USA signed treaty selling Alaska to USA [DIR2:284-7]

• For decades, Russian Alaska had been filling with a spontaneous stream of USA immigrants from the "lower 48"
• This human influx helped convince the Russians that Alaska would someday soon be dominated by American pioneers and should be sold while the selling was good
• A 120-year Alaska adventure was over for Russia
  • And, after 70 years of existence, the trans-oceanic mercantilist corporation, "Russian-America Company", was also at its end
  • In the century after Adam Smith, mercantilism revived itself time and again, and influenced national economic policies into the contemporary era
  • But the Russian phase of Alaska history did not fade away altogether = A grave with Russian inscription next to the Kodiak Russian Orthodox Cathedral [pix]
• Earlier Russian ambitions through Siberia to the New World gave way now to ambitions directed south and east from Siberia toward an emerging global hot-spot, Manchuria and Korea
• In these years Secretary of State Seward also sought to gain possession of the Virgin Islands, Canadian British Columbia, and Greenland
• Canada also got many long looks from ambitious USA officials in the time of U.S. Grant' s presidency
• A half century after purchase of Alaska, in a time of domestic US economic crisis, followed soon by international crisis, the fate of Alaska Territory took another turn
  \\
  *--Saul,1:185-93, 267-311, 385-96
  *--Howard Kushner, Conflict on the Northwest Coast: American-Russian Rivalry in the Pacific Northwest, 1790-1867 (see ch.6: "The Oregon Question and Russian-America")
  *2008sp:PNQ#99,2:73-91 | Roxanne Easley, "Demographic Borderlands: People of Mixed Heritage in the Russian American Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, 1670-1870"
  *--Stuart Ramsey Tompkins, Alaska: Promyshlennik and Sourdough (1945)

<>1867ap:Vienna | Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph declared the Empire divided into a "Dual Monarchy", the Austro-Hungarian Empire
*--The newly created dual monarchy went under several names = Wki
*--Franz Joseph maneuvered his complex empire into position for its final half-century flare, an adventure that ended in the catastrophe of WW1

<>1867ap01:India became Crown Colony as rule of the transnational imperialist corporation, The East India Company, was brought to an end

<>1867my:Moscow | Second Slav Congress a critical moment in the shift of Panslavism from cultural doctrine toward Russian imperialist ideology

• National liberation of the "little Slavs" from Ottoman Turkish (and perhaps Austro-Hungarian) imperialist dominion was a useful idea as Russia continued to play its role in the Great Game
  \\
  *--Hans Kohn, Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology
  *--Donald Fanger, "On the Russianness of the Russian Nineteenth-Century Novel". In Stavrou.ART:40-56
  *--Charles Katsainos, The Theory and Practice of Russian Panslavism in the Light of Russia' s Expansion in the Balkans until 1912

<>1867jy20:USA WDC | In anticipation of the 67oc21:Great Council treaty gathering in KS Medicine Lodge, Congress created the Indian Peace Commission

• What followed was a growing and one-sided contest between civilian and military government officials =
• 1867se05:MO St.Louis | General Philip Sheridan was reassigned from military administration of "Reconstruction" in the defeated South and now transfered to Ft.Leavenworth KS,
• 1867oc21:KS Medicine Lodge | Great Council led to the Medicine Lodge Treaty [W]
• 1868ja07:WDC | "Report to the President by the Indian Peace Commission" [TXT]
• However, the government had already dispatched Sheridan and almost immediately got underway with preparations for a massive attack on Native Americans in the plains states
• 1868fe29:KS Ft.Leavenworth | General William Tecumseh Sherman was now commander of the Division of the Missouri, consisting of 6000 soldiers in 27 forts
  • Sheridan took up command of Sherman's department #3 (of 4)
  • Sheridan distinguished himself in the War Between the States
  • He was ready now to distinguish himself in the war between USA and Native Americans, even as apparent efforts at peace-making were under way
• 1868jy:WDC | Congress finally appropriated $500,000, not to the civilian Indian Agency but to Sheridan and the military
• USA relations with the native nations were now securely in the hands of military and railroad managers
• In preparation for the war against Native Americans, Sheridan moved his HQ to KS Ft.Hays, now Union Pacific Railroad terminus; good depot for supplies, a strategic storage point for the US cavalry's "commissaries"
• "Protection of the railroad was Sheridan's primary concern" [Hutton:39] [MAP]
• 1868jy:WY | The army forced Union Pacific Railroad President Thomas Durant to accept Chief Engineer Grenville Dodge's route for building the railroad further westward
  • Dodge was an old comrade of the Civil War military
  • All were West Point graduates
  • US President Grant and General Sherman played a role here too [Hutton:40 lxt]
  • Many motives swarmed around this tragic tale
• NB! also military effort to preserve and protect its budgets from demobilization after the Civil War and "Reconstruction"
  • For example = 1868:Fifth Cavalry was not demobilized when no longer needed for "Reconstruction" of the South
  • It was dispatched to KS [Hutton:50]
• Sheridan prepared 6-mo winter campaign (like the cavalries of Chinggis-khan [ID], Sheridan's cavalries preferred to strike their targets in winter). Sheridan took these steps =
  • "Asked for additional cavalry"
  • "Applied for regiment of Kansas volunteers"
• Sheridan's application was approved, and the organization of regiment was well begun in KS Topeka =
  • Supplies were amassed
  • Guides were hired
• 1868au:se;KS & CO frontier settlers suffered 79 killed in Indian raids
  • Now Sheridan began to attack villages in order to scatter Native Americans
  • Only policy was that Indians "be soundly whipped, and the ringleaders in the present trouble hung [i.e., hanged], their ponies killed, and such destruction of their property as will make them very poor" [Hutton:38]
• Sheridan addressed a joint session of TX House and Senate =

  These men, the buffalo hunters, have done in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians' commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization. [Rister,No Man' s Land:29]

• Here Sheridan's military vision foreshadowed the famous but non-military vision of the Turner Thesis
  • Sheridan put the matter in the context of expanding USA power rather than expanding USA civilization
  • Sheridan helps us see that the Turner thesis is able to frame both frontier and imperialist expansion
• 1868au:se; MO St.Louis |General Sherman turned against the Medicine Lodge Treaty which had not in any event been ratified, nor had any of the promised gifts and assistance been given to the Native Americans
• Military and civilian authorities were at loggerheads

<>1867au21(NS):North German Confederation's new Reichstag had delegates August Bebel (1840-1913) and Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900), the first socialists so elected

<>1868:1912; Japan entered into industrial modernization in the 44-year era called "Meiji Restoration"
*1914:|_Japanese government documents, Walter Wallace McLaren, ed. [UO]
*--Japanese public figures Fukuzawa Yukichi [ID] and Shibuzawa Eiichi [ID] gave expression to a new entrepreneurial, industrializing and modernizing ethos [SWH:358-63]
*--In another reflection of late 19th-century global trends, Yamagata Arimoto [ID] gave expression to a Japanese variation on militant Chauvinism [ID] [SWH:340-5]
\\
*--"The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire 日本帝國的興衰" [YouTube]
*1975:NYC,Free Press|>Black,Cyril E., et al|_The_Modernization of Japan and Russia: A Comparative Study| ((UO))

<>1868:1869; Vologda Guberniia, in far NE Russia | Politically exiled philosopher and social theorist Petr Lavrov (1823-1900) wrote Historical Letters [cf. Edie,2:123-69 | VSB,3:650-1]

• Historical Letters explored the choice which the 19th century seemed to present mankind, a choice between history and science,
  between "humanities" (the record of human experience) and the more universalistic laboratory and math-based ways of knowing
  • Before arrest, Lavrov was a professor of mathematics and an almost pedantic historian of thought
  • But now he came down on the side of history
  • Lavrov sought to counter the hyper-scientism or positivism of Dmitrii Pisarev [ID]
  • He encouraged youth and the older generation as well to the activist life in the public realm as "critical-minded individuals"
• 1856:1866; In the "pre-revolutionary" decade that preceded arrest, imprisonment, exile, and then commitment to revolutionary struggle, Lavrov inspired a whole generation of thinking and reading youth [EG]
  • He described his philosophy as "anthropologism"
  • By anthropologism, Lavrov did not mean the emerging empirical social science "anthropology" but a philosophy that put anthropos [ID] at the heart of all questions about what was real, actual and right
  • Lavrov emphasized the subjective (the experiential, even very individual) human foundations of all knowledge
  • But he also had his way of understanding and respecting the materialist view of the world and the dominant "positivist" trends of his century
  • For that he was sometimes accused of being "eclectic" ["cherry picking" among powerful intellectual trends]
  • But he once wrote that the phrase "I WANT to know" was the matrix of advanced human consciousness. He emphasized "want" or willful intellectual desire
  • In his approach to that insight, he had in his time and place little by way of pre-planted intellectual cherry orchards to pick among
  • In this way he predicted ways of thinking more common to the century that followed him, a post-scientistic century, than to any that had come before
  • 1870:In NE Russian exile in Vologda,| Lavrov gave up on receiving a pardon from tsarist officials for the largely trumped up charges brought against him in 1866 [ID]
  • He fled from exile and went into west European political emigration in Paris for the final thirty years of his life
  • As an émigré, Lavrov quickly (and somewhat surprisingly) assumed a position of high moral esteem and editorial responsibility within burgeoning revolutionary movements in Russia
• 1869:Nikolai Mikhailovskii (1842-1904), published "What is Progress" [Edie,2:170-98, esp. 177-87]
  • Mikhailovskii was at the very beginning of a long career in journalism and was much influenced by Lavrov's "subjective sociology"
  • Mikhailovskii was now launched on a career as "public intellectual"
  • He was one of the first to come to maturity in the years in which Russians actually used the word "intelligentsia" [ID]
  • Like many of his generation, he took inspiration from Lavrov's realistic subjectivism
  • However, also like many contemporaries, he had only a slight inclination toward Lavrov's eventual full commitment to the cause of revolution
• Mikhailovskii remained a moderate supporter -- never "underground" or émigré -- of a progressive political trend that came to be called "legal populism" (in contrast with "revolutionary populism")
  \\
  *--LOOP on "populism"

<>1868:CUBA rebelled unsuccessfully against Spanish version of European imperialism
*--After the independence revolutions of the 1820s [ID], Cuba and Puerto Rico were now all that remained of the Spanish empire in the New World, and a pitiful remainder they were

<>1868:England, London | Herbert Spencer's Social Statics described a new "social Darwinism" with emphasis on "natural selection" and the beneficial results that came from "the survival of the fittest", not just out there in the animal and vegetable world but also in the social world of humans [CCC2,2:727 | CCC3,2:834]

• Social Darwinism influenced anti-welfare and anti-egalitarian politics around the globe and gave an intellectual justification for some of the suffering that resulted from "laissez-faire" policies at home and imperialism abroad. It gave scientistic plausibility to various flourishing forms of militarism as well
• 1869:Robert Galton published Hereditary Genius, a pioneer study inspired by Darwinian biological ideas
  • Galton's work over the next few years resulted in the creation of a "science" of human reproduction called "eugenics"
  • Eugenics is a word based on Greek morphemes and implying "well-born"
  • Galton's was a somewhat surprising refurbishment of an "aristocratic" concept that had fallen into disrepute
  • The post-French-Revolutionary European world that had moved far from medieval social concepts of superiorities by birth
  • Eugenics provided a modernized "scientific" version of that medieval hierarchical social concept
• Science now applied itself, via eugenics, to the problems and prospects of managing the most intimate feature of the most local of all local human institutions, the breeding nuclear family
• The application of biology to society was not the central intention of Darwin, but his science was becoming an "ism" = DarwinISM
• Nor was it Spencer's explicit intention, but popularizations of his teachings also fed into a flourishing racism in the late 19th century
  \\
  *--Rimlinger [TXT] offers a paragraph on social Darwinism
  *--[W devoted to definition of "eugenics", with useful bibliography]
  *--[W devoted to the history and current status of "eugenics"]

<>1868:Russian pundit Dmitrii Pisarev drowned
*--Pisarev wrote "Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism" (1861), "Bazarov" [a powerful review of Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Children"] (1862), "Flowers of Innocent Humor" (1864), "The Realists" (1864) [ VSB,3:641-3 ]
*--More Pisarev essays, see Edie,2:66-108, and Pisarev, Selected Philosophical, Social and Political Essays
*--Described USA [Plotkin,Pisarev:35f]

<>1868se01:Switzerland | Russian political émigré, the anarchist activist Mikhail Bakunin wrote "Our Program" for the revolutionary journal Narodnoe delo [People's Cause] [VSB,3:644]

• The movement that gathered around this publication and the volatile and now revived old activist Bakunin was a clear sign that the poet Nikolai Nekrasov was right when he predicted that the policies of the tsarist state bred revolutionists, not citizens
• In 1868, with Sergei Nechaev, Bakunin wrote "Catechism of a revolutionary" [Full English TXT | full Russian TXT | excerpts = DIR2:301-8 | VSB,3:649 | CF= Edie,1:385-423]
• A website on Bakunin features many of his writings
• More Bakunin bibliography
• Years earlier, Bakunin caught European attention during the Revolution of 1848 [ID], spent time in Siberian exile, escaped, and more recently rose to prominence in the First International
• Now in the final eight years of his life Bakunin began for the first time to have some influence on social movements in Russia in the era of revolutionary populism here on the eve of the great "going to the people"
  \\
  *--VRR, ch.2 on Bakunin and ch.15 on Nechaev

<>1868no26:USA Oklahoma Territories, Washita River | General George Custer launched surprise winter-season attack on large Native American village [W] [MAP]

• The four-year Great Plains wars were drawing to an end
• Superior logistical strength and a firm resolve to wage aggressive war against all aspects of Native American life were paying off for Euro-American invaders
  \\
  *--Hutton:56-76, 99-100 summarizes the Washita winter war with special emphasis on lessons applied there from the Civil War, for example, from the bombardment of civilian targets in Vicksburg

<>1869:1895; Central-Asia | Over these thirty years, Turkmen territories were absorbed into the Russian Empire
*--West of the Black Sea, Balkan tensions mounted as relations deteriorated between Russians and Turks and nationalism waxed among the Slavic peoples under Ottoman imperialist dominion
*--The focus of the Great Game shifted to south-eastern Europe and began to concentrate on vast transnational economic issues involved in the coming of the "petroleum era" of global industrialization [ID] throughout AfroAsia

<>1869:French democrat Leon Gambetta ran for election and asked electors to draw up a program for him to follow if elected
*--Gambetta's Belleville Program became a model for French democratic politics for years [DPH:309-10]

<>1869:Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev (1834-1907) stated his "periodic law" of the elements

• Mendeleev thus laid the foundation for much of the rapid progress that followed in the study of chemistry around the world
• In that same year, pundit Nikolai Danilevskii, published his Russia and Europe [Excerpts=KMM:195-211 | DIR2:328-37 | DIR3:372-82 | RRC2,2#33]
• Danilevskii compared USA and Russia [KMM:207-8]
• 1888:Vladimir Solov'ev critique of Danilevskii [KMM:214f | also VSB,3:731]
\\
*--R. E. MacMaster, Danilevsky: A Russian Totalitarian Philosopher

<>1869su:Russian émigré revolutionist Sergei Nechaev wrote program for his revolutionary journal Narodnaia rasprava [People's Vengeance] [VSB,3:647]

• The extraordinarily rebellious 22-year-old Nechaev was, in a sense, adopted by the 55-year-old Bakunin
• Bakunin had an international reputation, but his contact with actual Russian politics had until these years been very theoretical and tangential
• He now welcomed even this darkly sinister Nechaev
• Together, Bakunin and Nechaev conspired to gain control over the resources that had financed Herzen's highly esteemed Kolokol [ID]
• Together, Bakunin and Nechaev introduced the element of extreme revolutionary conspiracy and life-dedication, "revolutionary professionalism", into Russian populism
  \\
  *--Julicher: chapter 9

<>1869:English political-economist John Stuart Mill, "The Subjection of Women" [TXT]
*--He carried that liberal tradition a great distance toward emerging European social-democratic views
*--John Stuart Mill was the last representative of the century-long "classical economist" tradition, but macro-political-economic analysis continued its heavy influence =

<>1869au:German Marxists rejected Lassalle's radical reformist approach to labor organization, especially its close association with the Bismarckian state

• German Marxists formed an independent Social-Democratic Workers Party [Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei] and ratified its Eisenach Program [DPH:155-6]
  • In these years, national workers movements were strengthened by association with an international labor organization, the First International
  • Now, in Germany, a political party for the first time based itself on the new social formation, wage-labor
• In Russia this year, Nikolai Flerovskii [Bervi-Flerovskii] published his Condition of the Working Class in Russia [LDH:253-8]
  • Bervi-Flerovskii captured the imagination of the Russian reading public with his reportorial precision and his moral indignation as he described rural, suburban and urban labor conditions
• Karl Marx was learning to read Russian so that he might make himself directly familiar with a new generation of Russian social critics, including Flerovskii
  • Marx was beginning to see that he had so far neglected or misunderstood the global meaning of rural wage-labor in un-industrialized or agrarian "modes of production" such as Russia
  • Marx and Engels made a bold but pseudo-appeal to "workers of the world" in 1848 [ID] without having much of an idea at all about working people the world around
  • Marx was in his final years making some effort to overcome this blind spot, to actualize that 1848 appeal to "workers of the world"
  • He was just beginning to search for better ways to relate his political-economic views to the non-European industrializing world
• Marx's late-life effort was taken up by others
• The search for a way to connect the objectives of revolutionary social-democracy to the non-European world would became a central feature of the global spread of "Marxism"
  \\
  *--Alan Kimball, Marx and Russia: The Changing Meaning of a Semi-Asiatic Empire, 1852-1883 [TXT]
  *--LOOP on "Political-Economy"

<>1870:Saint Petersburg Association of Russian Playwrights formed with Aleksandr Ostrovskii as president

• A Century of Russian ballet : documents and accounts 1810-1910
• Aleksandra A. Orlova, Musorgsky's days and works: A biography in documents CF= 1859my01
• Also, the Peredvizhniki or "Itinerants" or "Company of Itinerant Art Exhibits" formed [Wki]
• EG= see Arkhip Kuindzhi's landscape "After the Storm" [Posle grozy] 1879
  \\
  *--Alain Besançon, "The Dissidence of Russian Painting" in CSH:381-411
  *--Richard Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia: As Preached and Practiced in the 1860s
  *--Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: The State and Society; the Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition

<>1870:Japan, Tokyo Kyoto Nagasaki and Hakodate. ??ROchx missions estab in JPN. Archbishop Nikolai(861:GO) est. TOK smnandscl. 1st JPN blt svt and ikon specialists
\\
*--Togawa"Russian and Slavic:6
*--KEJ,6:3-4

<>1870:USA | About 32 nation-wide labor unions were in existence
*--Workers were organizing themselves in the face of forceful resistance of industrialists and financiers, and their political allies
*--Self-organized wage-laborers represented a check and balance on self-organized "capitalists"
\\
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>1870:1899; Mature international grain trade fully operational
*--Economic "Globalization" was not new [Beginning of LOOP on "globalize"], but now globalization expanded exponentially in the emerging era of what SAC calls "The Second Industrial Revolution" [ID]

• In addition to earlier corporations -- Bunge, Louis Dreyfus [family name with dash, company without], and Pillsbury -- several more great global grain-trading family corporations formed in these 30 years =
  Cargill
  General Mills
  Continental
  1877:Switzerland | Georges André
• 1870:USA | William Cargill began to buy grain elevators
• 1871:USA railroad connected Minneapolis with eastern markets
• 1871:An air-puff purification process made flour whiter
• 1874:Russia ceased to be the main source of grain for England
• 1878my02:Minneapolis | Washburn Mill exploded. Built new mill with stolen Hungarian mill technique, able to mill hard grains
• 1880:Global grain-trade routes thickened and extended themselves vigorously in the late 19th and 20th centuries [maps]
• 1883:Liverpool grain market allowed trading in "futures"
  • Very quickly grain exchange "clubs" or "rings" became active in the London "Baltic Mercantile and Shipping Exchange"
  • The Baltic Exchange was founded over a hundred years earlier (1746), but now economic modernization, especially the growth of industrial urban centers, with huge non-agricultural populations, "democratized" bread production and created a need to feed swelling factory-labor populations
  • The astonishing growth of the urban population in England created a novel situation in which England was no longer able to produce sufficient agricultural product on the island to feed its exploding population
• The grain-trade was becoming a transnational corporate enterprise
• 1880s: world grain trade concentrated in USA, Russia, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and India
  • 1875:Minneapolis produced 850,000 barrels of flour; profit =  $0.50/barrel
  • 1885:Minneapolis produced 5,000,000 barrels of flour; profit = $4.00/barrel
• But power was shifting to big grain dealers who were able to handle world-striding storage and transportation
• 1886:Minneapolis | Frank Peavey built world’s largest grain terminal [W]
• 1890s:Russian branch of Louis Dreyfus grain trade managed by the founder’s son, Charles, in the Black Sea ports
• 1895:OR Portland | Frank Peavey built a one million bushel grain elevator and shipped wheat down the Pacific coast, then overland at the Isthmus of Panama into the Caribbean Sea and across the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool, England
• 1899:MN Minneapolis | Peavey constructed 80-foot high concrete grain elevator
  • 1870:USA grain export =   $60,000,000
  • 1898:USA grain export = $200,000,000
• 1900s:Russian tsar invited Peavey’s son-in-law to visit
• The modernized world increasingly depended on huge, transnational industrial companies for its food, its "daily bread"
• International grain trade, plus railroad construction and the appearance of international energy competition are the three signs that the epoch of "the second industrial revolution" was opening
• GO 1972su:USA-USSR
  \\
  *2011:SPB,Bulanin|>Kitanina,T | Khlebnaia torgovlia Rossii v kontse XIX--nachale XX veka : Strategiia vyzhivaniia, modernizatsionnye protsessy, pravitel'stvennaia politika
  *2008:ETC Group publication, "Who Owns Nature?" brings the topic into the 21st century

<>1870je16:Russian urban reform promoted municipal self administration [VSB,3:621-2]

• Urban reform belatedly expanding upon the Charter for the Towns of Catherine II [ID]
• Russian text Gorodovoe polozhenie... [RA2:232f]
• Just as self-administration was apparently promoted now in the countryside (Zemstvo institutions of self-administration), so also in the cities, in growing modern urban centers
• Only one "great reform" remained to be instituted
  \\
  *--Mironov,1:371-96 deals with the transition from traditional Russian urban communes and corporations towards something like the modern idea of "community"
  *--Hausmann,G

<>1870jy18(NS):Rome, Vatican City | The Papal See of the Catholic Church handed down a pronouncement on the infallibility of the Pope [DPH:243]

<>1870jy16:1871fe; Franco-Prussian war broke out when France declared war on Prussia. France was quickly humiliated [DPH:200-205]

• 1870se04:Emperor Napoleon III was defeated, was captured on the field of battle, and fell in disgrace
• His "empire" collapsed
• The Third French Republic was declared to replace it [DPH:310-11]
• Two dark decades in French political life came to an end; but what followed was not all light =
• 1871fe26(NS):In the great French national monument, the Versailles Palace near Paris, a treaty was signed ending the Franco-Prussian war
• NB! this is in France, the great palace of the Sun King, Louis XIV
• The Prussians intended this location to be an insult to the humiliated France of Napoleon III
• Kaiser Wilhelm was soon crowned and a Second German Empire [Reich] declared, all in France at Versailles
• German "Kaiser" means "Caesar", just as does "tsar" in Russian
• Kaiser Wilhelm I (King of Prussia) offered views on the new united German imperial throne [DPH:262-3]
• A united German imperial state was now created [MAP] [compare with MAP of Germany before union]
• Over the previous century, The Prussian kingdom grew to great power
• Prussian kingdom had survived a stormy half century since the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire (the First Reich)
• In the decade leading up to 1871, Otto von Bismarck was the man behind the Prussian throne
• 1871fe:1918no; For the next 47 years, the Prussian kingdom provided the backbone for a new north-central European German Empire (called "the Second Reich", though it was in truth more nearly a new-born "nation-state", aggressively expansive at its borders but not yet much like the other European empires of the day)
• But the immediate European future would  be shaped by the two great German-speaking central European states = Germany and Austria
• 1888:Upon Kaiser Wilhelm I' s death, Wilhelm II assumed the throne
• 1918no09:At the end of World War One, the Hohenzollern monarchy collapsed and the "Second Reich" evaporated
• Fifteen years later came the "Third Reich"
• 1871mr18:my28; Meanwhile, back in Paris just after defeat and collapse of the Second French Empire in the Franco-Prussian War, and after the declaration of the Third French Republic, a revolutionary Paris Commune was declared [W] [DPH:311-17]
• The Paris Commune claimed independence from the infant Third French Republic
• The great metropol Paris declared itself independent of its immediate periphery, the nation France
• 1871ap19:Declaration [BNE:140-3]
• The Paris Commune lasted about 9 weeks before the Republican French army crushed it resolutely
• International Workingmen's Association fell into an uproar
• 1871:Marl Marx, member of the General Council of the International, published The Civil War in France [E-TXT]
• 1876:Paris | Prosper Lissagaray, a participant in these events, published History of the Paris Commune of 1871 [E-TXT]
• 1891:Friedrich Engels wrote a "postscript" to a new edition of Marx's Civil War... (abv) [E-TXT]
• F/prefacing/ in that Engels E-TXT just abv, near the very top, and read three paragraphs for a summary of Engels' and Marx's premonition of rising militarism and political command and control in the late 19th- and early 20th-century| [CF=EREV3]
• F/America/ and read to the end for more of that. CF=Ostrogorskii
• F/Blanqui/ and read four paragraphs about the most influential ideologies among the Communards
• F/From the outset/ following just after the abv, and read one paragraph about the great failure of Communards to take command of the French national bank
• 1917jy26(OS):In the midst of Russian Revolutionary turmoil, Vladimir Lenin issued "State and Revolution", his unfinished study of the political and tactical lessons taught by the Paris Commune
  \\
  *--Wawro,Geoffrey (2003)
  *1981:C.ENG,CUP|>Tombs,Robert|_The_War against Paris, 1871| Review by John G. Gallaher [E-TXT]
  *:|>Johnson,Martin Phillip|_The_Paradise of Association: Political Culture and Popular Organization in the Paris Commune of 1871....|
  *--Wki on the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War
  *--Crozier.VICTORY:3-4| What do you make of Crozier's characterization of the Paris Commune as "the first Communist attempt to seize power"?

<>1871:English biologist Charles Darwin published Descent of Man [excerpts = PWT2:227+]

• Darwin stated boldly, "The main conclusion here arrived at, and now held by many naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly organized form"
• All biological observations, he wrote, "point in the plainest manner to the conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor"
• He also stated bluntly that the educated person "cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation"
• Over more than a decade, Darwin published his thoughtful and extraordinarily systematic observations
  • Whatever else he was, he was one of the world's most acute "naturalists"
  • He looked widely, he saw much, he recorded and systematized his observations
  • Then he generated powerful rational explanatory narratives that shocked the world
• The reading public found it easy to carry this science into realms of emotional social/political debate [ID]
  • Darwin did not always resist the temptation to do this himself
  • It is possible that English social theories influenced Darwin as much as Darwin influenced English social theories
• Even ideological opponents of conventional English modernist social theories could find inspiration in Darwin's science

<>1871:1872; Fedor Dostoevsky caricatured Russian revolutionists and their soft-headed allies in his novel _The_Possessed [cf. Edie,2:240-66]

<>1871sp:Russian Mennonites (German speaking Protestant farming peoples who had lived in Russia for a century) initiated plans to migrate to USA
\\
*--Saul,2:75-85
*--Saul essay [TXT]
*2008:Journal of Global History#3(2):203-225 | Moon, David, "In the Russians’ steppes: the introduction of Russian wheat on the Great Plains of the United States of America" [UO E-TXT]

<>1871je:Russian Education Minister Dmitrii Tolstoi introduced counter-reform measures only seven years after progressive reform of higher education [ID]

• His goal was to block entrance into universities for all but privileged social formations whose children went through the elite gymnasia
• Tolstoi's "classical" education emphasized Orthodox theology, Greek and Latin
  • These three topics took up about half of all instruction time [VSB,3:622-4]
  • Compare the new elitist Russian elementary and secondary requirements with the knowledge emphasized in a contemporary but more democratic educational system, the Kansas public-school eighth grade graduation exam in 1895
  • This Kansas 8th-grade exam might possibly also provide a comparison of democratic public education in 19th-century USA [ID] with what it had become by the early 21st century
  \\
  *--Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (1989)
  *--James C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Society in Tsarist Russia (1979)
  *--Allen Sinel, The Classroom and the Chancellery: State Educational Reform in Russia under Count Dmitry Tolstoi (1973)
  *1968my:The Historian#30:412-38|>Zacek,JC| “Champion of the Past: D. A. Tolstoi as Minister of the Interior, 1882-1889”|
  

<>1871oc08:oc10; Chicago burned [W]

<>1871fa:1872wi; Russian Grand Duke Aleksei (son of Alexander II) visited USA and, among other things, hunted Buffalo with General George Custer in Kansas
*--Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, more recently commander of prairie Indian Territory, returned the visit
\\
Saul,2:54-75

*1872:Brooklyn-born painter John Gast portrayed US movement west, titled "American Progress" [W]

The action sweeps from right to left, as the bright eastern sky drives dark clouds ever westward =
Far right, we see crowded east-coast ports (the Brooklyn Bridge is discernible) busy with globalized trade
Railroads, stage coaches, and Conestoga wagons course westward, laden with goods and folks from the bustling east
Telegraph lines run into the arms of a provocative angel, also flying westward. And she carries a book in her arms
Is it a Bible? No, it's Common School [ID]
Farmers follow miners who follow a trapper, as if to predict and thus confirm the "Turner Thesis" [ID]
In front of this onslaught, buffalo and bear (wildlife) and native savages flee from encroaching brightness of the good future
No obvious presence of preachers or the US military can be seen
What we see is simply the natural force of secular "American progress" pressuring alarmed Native Americans and their dogs out of the way
Read Tocqueville's account of Native-Americans forced to cross the Mississippi westward, leaving their dogs on the eastern embankment [TXT]
Is this not a portrait of the "Westernization" of the "West"?

<>1872:1874; German state in struggle with Catholic Church, the Kulturkampf [DPH:245-50]

<>1872:1883; German composer Richard Wagner created theatre (Festspielhaus) in Bayreuth, Bavaria, where annual music festivals allowed for the first time proper staging of his massive and revolutionary operas

<>1872:USA Senate rejected USA Presidential plan to build a military base in Samoa Islands

<>1872:Japan, Hakodate | First Russian language schools established
*--Russian psalmist Vissarion L'vovich Sartov and Japanese assistant taught languages, math, geography and history in Russian
\\
*--Togawa"Russian and Slavic:5

<>1872:International Workingmen's Association [First International] collapsed

• The First International was wrecked in the titanic struggles between German-born political-economist Karl Marx and Russian revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin
• European (largely French) followers of peasant-born Pierre Proudhon, also added their anarchist contentiousness to the mix
• Administrative HQ of the international organization transferred to USA NYC
• The First International, after eight years of active existence, limped on four more years and was finally disbanded in 1876
• Twelve years later in Paris, Second International founded

<>1872de:Zurich | If the venerable rebel Bakunin was revived in this new era of revolutionary opposition [ID], 47-year-old Petr Lavrov, ex-artillery Colonel, ex-professor of mathematics, and an aspiring philosopher of notable promise, was now "reborn" as revolutionary ideologist

• Lavrov accepted a new personal mission, émigré revolutionary publicist
• He wrote "Our Program" for his Russian revolutionary journal Vpered! [Foreward] [VSB,3:651]
• The era of Herzen was over, and now Lavrov and Bakunin became ideological rivals within Russian revolutionary populist circles in the era of the "Going to the People"
• 1873:Bakunin published "Gosudarstvennost’ i anarkhiia: Pribavlenie A" [GRV:202-12]
  \\
  *--VRR, ch.17 on Bakunin and Lavrov

<>1873:Tokyo | School of Foreign Languages included Russian. ??NB! TOK.unv excluded Russian, showing stt comparative indifference to Russia. Prior to Meiji, 6 samurai svt gt.Russia to std; 868:rtr.JPN and fade away, while std frm zpd and USA bcm sig Meiji srv. BUT this scl hired Mechnikov, Lev (ppl and Ntx1) and one of Russian samurai Ichikawa Bunkichi
\\
Togawa"Russian and Slavic:6-7

<>1873:USA PA Pittsburgh | Scottish-born immigrant Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) was now eight years into a brilliant career as industrialist, concentrated on building a colossal steel manufacturing enterprise

• During the US Civil War, Carnegie served as a War Department railway division bureaucrat
  • He instantly saw an industrial future opening before him
  • Inspired by his war-time procurement experiences, in 1865 he entered the steel business
• Victory of the North in the American Civil War and an associated industrial productivity boom, especially in railroad construction, launched the careers of several of the most famous entrepreneurs of modern history, and Andrew Carnegie was among the first in line
• Pittsburgh PA was the base of operations for another future internationally connected billionaire financier Andrew Mellon (1855-1937)
  • Mellon inherited his father's fortune. The father wrote an autobiography = Thomas Mellon and His Times
  • In the boom years after the Civil War, Andrew Mellon built mightily on his father's fortune, concentrating on banking, coal, oil, railroads, public utilities, steel, aluminum, and eventually in the aviation industry
  • Mellon the younger showed a masterly control of diverse but vertically integrated economic enterprises
  • And he understood the central role of finance capital. He subordinated the manufacturing process itself, and certainly labor, in favor of financial profit considerations
  • But he also understood the role of governmental power and the sometimes shady political manipulation of the "free market"
  • The markets and industrial companies he worked in cannot be described as altogether "free", or laissez-faire, or simply entrepreneurial, nor can they be called simply "criminal"
  • Mellon was an active supporter of the pro-business and bribe-prone Republican-Party political machine in Pennsylvania and served in high governmental posts up to the era of the Great Depression in the late 1920s
• 1874:1914; Russian industrial combination formed = Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers [ID]
• Coal, oil, railroads and banking, a harmonious quartet of industrial/financial enterprises that came alive in the late 19th century, in USA, Russia and elsewhere
• Photos of Pittsburgh history

\\
*--David Cannadine, Mellon: An American Life
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>1874:1875; Russian "Going to the People" movement [RRC2,2:344-57] Russian revolutionary populist movement intensified

• The "Going to the People" was one of the most spontaneous and dramatic confrontations in all of Russian history between the state, urban elites and the laboring folk in villages and factories
  • By the hundreds, Russians -- mainly college-age youths -- fanned out into the countryside to learn about peasant life but also to educate peasants about their best interests, to encourage peasant mobilization for causes presumed to be popular
  • These causes were, for certain, dear to radical youth, but were they dear to villagers?
  • Some of these crusaders settled into village routine for a period, but others were repelled by the hostility or indifference of villagers
  • Nonetheless, the center of attention within democratic circles remained still peasants
• Officials were deeply alarmed. Authorities had always controlled and restrained spontaneous "inter-soslovie" intercourse
  • Official policy prevented anything like a "public sphere" to evolve within the tightly restricted social/service hierarchies [ID]
  • Now thousands of city folk broke with conventional practices and spilled out into wage-labor work environments and into the countryside to mix with and open conversations with the narod [the Russian people; laboring folk]
  • 1873oc:Young urbanite spoke with construction workers about their plight (as remembered during interrogation after he was arrested) [TXT]
• 1875:Justice Minister Konstantin Pahlen reported that his investigation of the "Going to the People" had so far turned up 770 activists from all "strata" of imperial society, active in 37 provinces. And these were just the ones snared in official investigations
• In Pahlen's view, the failure of students and others to adhere to assigned roles defined by their "stratum" was a symptom of wide moral decay
  • Pahlen was shocked to report that students shed themselves of their university uniform, the outward sign of their stratum, and that they took on the garb of villagers as they attempted to mix freely with them
  • One soslovie imitating another and unauthorized socializing by any group were illegal in Russia
• Pahlen emphasized the broad sympathy for this movement among all strata of Russian society
• He expressed amazement that "many persons no longer young, fathers and mothers of families, who enjoy material security and a more or less honored social position, not only failed to oppose the young people but, on the contrary, often gave them open encouragement, help, and support"
• In Pahlen's view, these folks seemed not to understand that this movement to the people threatened the very foundations of Russian life
• These folks were breaking free of those foundations, namely, the social/service hierarchies
• Activists among the folk distributed illegal books and other publications by Russian émigrés abroad [VSB,3:654-6]
• The most characteristic Russian "ideological" trends in the 1870s were associated with Petr Lavrov, Mikhail Bakunin (with Sergei Nechaev [ID]), and Petr Tkachev
  • In the early years, populists received much intellectual guidance from the émigré publications of Alexander Herzen [ID]. But Herzen was now dead
  • Mikhail Bakunin [ID] and Petr Lavrov sought to replace him as inspirational theorists and publicists
  • Bakunin died in 1876, bringing and end to a spotty but unforgettable three decades of revolutionary activity. His influence continued in Russia and abroad
  • Lavrov occupied a place of esteem in the minds of thinking and fighting Russians (and these were not always the same people) for another quarter of a century
  • As an émigré in London and Paris, he lived in poverty and misery, until his death in 1900, ending more than four decades of widely various public advocacy
  • Lavrov's influence continued into the 20th century
  • Bakunin and Lavrov did not quite reach Herzen's level of polemical brilliance, but they were important émigré revolutionary leaders with Europe-wide reputations
  • Petr Tkachev's influence on events back in Russia was different from that of Lavrov, Bakunin and Herzen, but like these others, Tkachev exerted his influence from a distance
• These pundits, ideologues and theorists have been lumped together under the term "populism" [narodnichestvo]
  • The term is fine so long as we remember that the central concept was radical rural egalitarianism with a good dash of late-nineteenth-century socialism
  • Populism [narodnichestvo] was an "ism" based on "the people" [narod, with is wide implications of "nation", "the people", "peasants" | TXT on the word "narod"]
  • Populists were democrats in so far as they put their faith in the possibility that the Russian "people" (90% of whom were villagers) were in a position to shape their own better future, much like all other European common folk, whether rural or urban
  • Not all populists saw things that way. Some populists veered from democracy when they pondered the possibility that a "backward" people might need the guidance of an advanced "minority" -- an "intelligentsia" [ID]
  • Even when it was not always democratic, even when it veered toward managerial elitism, Russian populism remained at heart radical rural egalitarianism and in stark opposition to Russian social/service hierarchies
• Populists put a lot of faith in the progressive implications of a pre-modern, pre-industrialized, largely rural population
  • In their view, villagers represented a promise every bit as bright as -- maybe brighter than -- that of any other European people
  • Why should one presume that labor ghettos in the big industrialized cities were better able than the Russian village to produce citizens of a wholly transformed future egalitarian and socialist world?
  • A bit dreamy, a bit idealistic, but no more so than all other European progressive radical-liberal or socialist visions of future egalitarianism
  • Democracy just might be univerally implausible or at least unlikely
• Polulists put a lot of faith in the narod
  • Emerging new and broad public interactions were essential for a democratic future
  • The political system called democracy could not exist without the social structures of broad public interaction among the whole people, the whole nation, the narod
  • Russian contemporaries described this interation as obshchenie (ID)]
• Populists put a lot of faith in the narod, but they also put a lot -- maybe a lot more -- faith in themselves
• They were sure that they were the active ingredient in an emerging new social mixture, a new free socialization among all the people, so unlike historical and exclusive social structures
• In just this era, the Russianized Latinate word "intelligentsiia" came into wide usage [ID]
• The spreading use of the words "narod" and "intelligentsia" can very properly be thought of as a serious subversion of customary Russian imperial social/services hierarchies
• But the various deliberations on the relationship of "narod" to "intelligentsia" also contained fertile seeds of 20th-century Soviet managerial elitism, a future radical version of traditional social/service hierarchies
• Intelligentsia are often accused of "idealizing" the Russian peasant, but they were far more often guilty of idealizing themselves
• Justice Minister Pahlen had enough sense to know that much of the energy of the epoch flowed from cultural sources far broader and indigenous than the ideological publications of a few pundits in west European emigration, broader even than the small and harassed home-bred oppositional movement
  • An intense nationalistic Russian self-consciousness had long ago attached itself to the notion of "the folk" [narod], and it flourished in a generalized atmosphere of dissent against the established and seemingly foreign or "un-Russian" autocratic order
  • For the second time in Russian history, in the 1860s and 1870s, a wide debate arose on the virtues and shortcomings, but mainly the virtues, of the peasant village assembly [mirskoi skhod], the communitarian practices associated with "mutual assurance" [krugovaia poruka -- almost always and misleadingly translated as "collective responsibility" (ID)]
  • The first epoch of such debate was in the 1830s and 1840s [ID]
    • Russian peasant villagers lived in an unusually ancient and traditional institutional environment
    • Very old European community practices survived as nowhere else in Europe
    • These timeless Russian peasant practices seemed capable of serving as a foundation for the construction of that bright egalitarian future that so many 19th-century Europeans -- and not only Russians -- expected just around the corner
    • As an artifact of Russian political culture, idealization of the village assembly was not unlike that ubiquitous English political-cultural artifact = The idealization of the Magna Carta and the early parliaments [ID]
    • It is odd and noteworthy that Russian idealization of the ancient urban veche [LOOP] was slower to arise, and idealization of the early-modern Zemskii Sobor [LOOP] was weak
• Traditional agrarian ways in Russia, however, also included a whole set of primitive agricultural practices -- strip farming, three-field system, periodic redistribution of land-holding responsibilities among village households
• Redistribution seemed a bit like "socialism", but it also functioned as a sort of "temporary private property", in which households held land as if their own. [TXT on these village land practices]
• Hop to this page of portraits and other contemporary visual representations of peasant/village life
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES ON THE POPULIST ERA
• The great "going to the people" originated six years earlier but was now being transformed, in part by state action, into resolute revolutionary conspiracy
  • The tsarist state arrested hundreds of these youths and eventually brought the most vulnerable to trial
  • As the political struggle of the Russian state with radical political opposition intensified, the populist movement back in Russia took a turn toward terrorism
  • Efforts at close contact with peasants and other working folk slackened
  \\
  *--Mironov,1:286-370 analyses the history of Russian rural social institutions
  *--VRR, ch.18 on the group conventionally called "Chaikovtsy" and the movement "to the people"

<>1874:1896; German historian and "chauvinist" [ID] ideologist Heinrich von Treitschke dealt with the contradictions between individual freedoms and national unity [ID] by shifting increasingly in the direction of militaristic and nationalistic "chauvinism"

• Treitschke inspired a war-fever even in the final years of the great and peaceful inter-European 19th century with his influential "Politics" [BNE:143-5 | CCC3,2:989-1004 | PWT2:258-60]
• 1882mr11:French intellectual Ernest Renan, who had been a serious Germanophile prior to the Franco-Prussian War, now turned against Germany, but stopped short of affirming French nationalism in ethnic or racist terms
  • In a famous article, "What is a Nation?" [E-TXT], he emphasized group action together, the vast community of national accomplishment
  • He also cautioned that a nation can remember its glories, but it also has to learn how to think about (perhaps forget) its atrocities
  • Here are some of his words =

    Man does not belong to his language or to his race, he belongs to himself alone, for he is a free being, a moral being. We no longer condone the persecution of people in order to change their religion; persecuting them to make them change their language or homeland appears just as evil to us.
    
    What makes a nation is not speaking the same language or belonging to the same ethnographic group, it is having done great things together in the past and wanting to do more great things in the future. [...] Language invites unity, without, however, compelling it. The United States and England, Latin America and Spain share the same languages, but do not form single nations. Conversely, Switzerland, so solid because it is based on the consent of its various parties, has three or four languages. There is in humanity something superior to language; it is will. The will of Switzerland to be united, despite the variety of its tongues, is much more important than the similarities often obtained by means of persecution. [TXT | RWP2:281-91]

<>1874:China accepted Japanese control of Ryukyu Isl

<>1874:Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev published The Crisis of Western Philosophy
*--Solov'ev's remaining 26 years of life were devoted to a most creative critique of standard forms of contemporary European "Positism" [W.ID]
\\
*2014au01: "Vladimir Solovyov on Sexual Love and Evolution" [E-TXT]
*--Wagar on Solov'ev [TXT]
*--LOOP on Vladimir Solov'ev

<>1874:USA, Kansas, Howard Co., Cedar Vale | Wm. Frey (Geims) headed up a Progressive community, a populist commune = Russkaia obshchina [Hasty:54-82]
*--KS prairie described by Grigorii Machtet [Hasty:16-53]
\\
*--Saul,2:213-25

<>1874:USA | John Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, influenced American religious thinkers on the question of the harmony of the Christian faith with the Darwinian concept of biological evolution and with its social corollary, "Social Darwinism"
\\
*--Wagar on Fiske [TXT]

<>1874ja01:Russian military reforms instituted universal military service [VSB,3:625 | RA2:338f = Russian text Ustav o voinskoi povinnosti]

• This was the last of the "great reforms" actually implemented
• In the waning years of reform, War Minister Dmitrii Miliutin reflected on rise of reactionary attitudes among high officials =

  What an amazing and lamentable comparison with the situation as it was when I entered the top echelons of the government thirteen years ago [1860]. Then everything surged forward; now everything drags back. Then the sovereign was sympathetic to progress, he moved things forward himself; now he has lost confidence in everything he himself created, in everything that surrounds him, even himself [VSB,3:624-5]

• 1874:1881; Seven years passed without further reforms. The tsarist state was turning toward reaction
• Then one crucial but belated and still-born reform gesture was made on the very eve of Alexander II's assassination

<>1875:1876; Central-Asian Uzbek territories conquered by Russia
*1876:Kyrgyz people also conquered
*--AfroAsia imperialist competition intensified

<>1875:Japan and Imperial Russia in tense negotiations
*--Japan took northern Kuril Islands in exchange for dropping claims on Sakhalin Island
*--Russia was forced to put the "Far-East" on a back burner in order to concentrate attentions on a looming crisis in AfroAsia
\\
*1962:JGO#10:337-48| G. A. Lensen, "Japan and Tsarist Russia: Changing Relationships, 1875-1917"
*1942:LND| B. H. Sumner, Tsardom and Imperialism in the Far East and Middle East, 1880-1914

<>1875:Russian revolutionist in exile, Petr Tkachev published his revolutionary journal Nabat [Tocsin; the alarm bell] [VSB,3:656 | LDH:286-93 | "Nabat (Programma zhurnala)"| GRV:212-19]

• Tkachev was the first "populist" [ID] to express a strong critique of rural native tradition. Russian backwardness demanded a greater leadership role from a dedicated "intelligentsia" [ID]
• Tkachev was less interested in egalitarian or democratic obshchenie [ID] than he was in effective command and control at the head of a national assault on the Russian old order
• Tkachev urged tighter organization and more decisive action than either Bakunin or Lavrov [IDs]
• Tkachev was inclined toward "internal war" rather than politics
• He argued that terror was the only way to cure Russian ills [Russian TXT]
• The active political career of Tkachev was not very long, but his legacy lived on. Some have seen a premonition of Lenin in the politics of Tkachev
  \\
  *--VRR, ch.16

<>1875:Russian censorship officials planned restrictions against Ukrainian publications [DIR3:268-70]

<>1875my:German wage-laborers and socialists united to form the Social Democratic Party [SDP] of Germany and to sign their "Gotha Program" [DPH:263-5]

<>1876:Japan forced a trade treaty on Korea which opened two Korean ports

• Japan sought to "Westernize" itself fully
• 1880s:Meiji Restoration economic development in its second decade, the beginning of the "Zaibatsu" [statist corporation] era [CF=Chaebol (S.KOR)]
• As Japanese industrial modernization progressed, so did Japanese imperialist ambitions
  \\
  *--W#1 | W#2 | Wki
  *--Shibagaki Kazuo, "The Early History of the Zaibatsu" [E-TXT]
  *--Kaoru Sugihara, _Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850-1949 ((UO))
  *--LOOP on "finance"

<>1876:USA | Last Federal Troops of occupation left the South as "Reconstruction" came to an end
*--Philadelphia World's Fair (Centennial Exposition) on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of the American Revolution
\\
Saul,2:138-43

<>1876:1885; USA and Russia | First decade in which great transnational petroleum corporations consolidated their grip on that industry =

• 1859:USA PA Titusville discovery [pix]
• 1863:USA Cleveland, Excelsior Works of John Davison Rockefeller began kerosene production
• 1869:1874; USA economic depression, 2^nd worse in USA history
• Standard Oil adjusted by gaining control of full process, "upstream" and "downstream", and introduced rebates, kickbacks, secret rates, etc
• 1876:Baku Tovarishchestvo brat’ev Nobel [Nobel Brothers Company] soon had Russia involved in the emerging world petroleum market
• Three Nobel brothers, Liudvig (1831-1888), Alfred (1833-1896) and Robert, were sons of a Russian military contractor of Swedish origin who lived in Saint-Petersburg
  • The family fortune rested on their profitable industrial enterprise, bolstered by government contracts to produce explosives and gunpowder for the military
  • 1867:Brother Alfred developed nitroglycerine into an effective explosive, but accepted a French government contract to build a modern gunpowder plant there
  • When Alfred died in 1896, he left a portion of his immense fortune to Stockholm University to support a peace prize
• Oldest brother Liudvig inherited the father's Russian business and took over management of Russian factories
  • Liudvig was given a procurement contract to supply field artillery to Russian forces in the Russo-Turkish War
  • With his brothers' participation, Liudvig now branched out of "military-industrial" enterprise into petroleum production
  • He founded great works in the Baku (Azerbaijan) fields [pix]
  • At first they shipped kerosene in barrels by sail to the mouth of the Volga
    • Barrels were reloaded on river boats and transshipped upstream to the great yarmarka [faire] in Nizhnii Novgorod, to be marketed throughout Russia and to the east
    • This was expensive, and the Nobels could not compete with cheaper USA kerosene on the Asian market
  • Protective tariffs helped, but Liudvig innovated on his own to lower the price of his product
    • He introduced railroad tankers
    • He invented pipeline delivery methods which made his kerosene competitive even on the USA market
    • He transported crude oil to the Black Sea port of Batumi, and he pioneered transportation by sea-going oil tankers
    • He introduced effective petroleum reservoirs near all major cities [BrE,41:216]
    • Nobel Brothers Company value =
          1879 =   3,000,000r
          1916 = 45,000,000r
• Should we think of the Nobels as "Swedish" or "Russian"?
• What of "European" émigrés at heart of US economic development in these years?
  • Was Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours [ID] French or "American"?
  • Was Andrew Carnegie [ID] British or, more exactly, a Scot, or was he an "American"?
• 1877-1881:USA| Standard Oil "gobbled up" domestic business rivals and began to build network of trunk and side pipelines
• 1882:USA oil refining capacity 95% under the control of the giant energy company Standard Oil, a "trust company"
• One great novelty was that Standard became a business well beyond Cleveland, well beyond the borders of Ohio
  • Standard was a pioneer "transnational corporation"
  • There were no USA nationally chartered corporations, only state chartered
  • Of course, there were no "international" charters in this ultra-nationalistic 19th century
  • Standard expanded beyond the reach of geographically limited city legal and governmental authorities
• By the 1880s, kerosene = main product (over 1/2 of all USA oil output; 4th largest USA export)
• The European office of Standard Oil boasted that oil "forced its way into more nooks and corners of civilized and uncivilized countries than any other product in business history emanating from a single source [i.e., emanating from this vast new transnational corporation]"
• Another novelty = "The concept of hands-on management by owners had evolved to the policy of financial management by an active insider board of directors [Standard Oil Executive Committee]
  • The Standard Oil Executive Committee met daily to determine which policies and decisions were in "the general interest" [Gnrg]
    • In this way, Standard represented the first huge example of the fiduciary problem caused when "ownership" and "management" are dissociated from one another, a problem explored in 20th-century. USA pop-arts = OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY [ID]
    • This problem was later famously described by Adolph Berle
    • This great weakness of corporate free market capitalism made its first appearance on the world economic scene and survived into the 21st century
  • Standard Oil was a pioneer "trust company" [W ID]
• 1886:Rothschild banking company, a transnational financial institution, formed Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Co. [Bnito]
  • The Russian Nobel Brothers Company worked in close financial association with the Paris-based Rothschild banking company
  • These enterprises were from their beginning "transnational" corporations
• The oil or petroleum epoch with its great transnational industrial companies and financial and banking institutions, was upon all who would play the Great Game
• Petroleum was the energy basis and the organizational paradigm in "the second industrial revolution"
• Look at 1991 publication on international banking below
  \\
  
• SAC Narrative Extension on "Energy and Politics"
• Saul,2:143-8 deals with the petroleum industry
• Daniel Yergin, The Prize: Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power
• R. W. Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry
• LUKoil magazine article about the virtues of kerosene [E-TXT]
• 1991:International Banking, 1870-1914| A joint USA/USSR scholarly project. Especially note the following chapters =
  • V.I. Bovykin and B.V. Anan'ich, "The role of international factors in the formation of the banking system in Russia
  • Mira Wilkins, "Foreign banks and foreign investment in the United States"
  • B.V. Anan'ich and V.I. Bovykin, "Foreign banks and foreign investment in Russia"
  • Ruth AmEnde Roosa, "Banking and financial relations between Russia and the United States"
  • A.A. Fursenko, "The oil industry"
• 2003su:Russian publication with wide circulation offered its views on how the great Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan industrial/financial empires were built in USA, with explanations of why they eventually failed [TXT]
  \\
  *--Rothschild family home page
  *--LOOP on "finance"
  *--LOOP on "banks"

<>1877:1879; Russian author Gleb Uspenskii, Village Diary [RRC2,2#30]

<>1877:English pundit Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Russia [excerpts: VSB,3:626-9 | WRH3:291-375]

<>1877:Russian Samara-Orenburg railroad complete, linking Bashkir steppes east of the middle course of the Volga River to the main lines of Russian transport to the west

<>1877ja28:USA poet Walt Whitman delivered speech "In Memory of Thomas Paine" [E-TXT#1 | E-TXT#2]

<>1877ap12:1878jy13; Ottoman and Russian empires engaged in a 15-month-long but vastly significant Russo-Turkish War [MAP]
*--Photo-panoramic view of 1876:Istanbul [lxt]

• 1876:Eugene Schuyler's investigations of Ottoman atrocities in Slavic lands [ID] helped stoke anti-Ottoman sentiments among Russians and a wider reading public
• In addition, a three-year-old Bulgarian independence movement, led by Stefan Stambulov, inspired a Russian desire to help a Slavic "brother"
• Bulgarians under Ottoman authority had ceased centuries before to live in a sovereign nation-state of their own
• Now there was much sympathy among Slavic peoples for the creation of an independent Bulgaria in eastern Macedonia
• Panslavism and Russian imperialist ambition seemed to some to be in harmony
• Panslavism was based on a growing sense of ethnic "brotherhood" among Slavic peoples =

  East Slavic (EG=Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian)
  South Slavic (EG=Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, Herzegovinian, Bulgarian), or
  West Slavic (EG=Polish, Czech, Slovak)

• The sense of ethnic sodality was strongest among Orthodox Slavs, especially among East Slavic and South Slavic peoples
• That sympathy was not shared by the great European powers, especially England and Austria, who were jealous of growing Russian influence in that part of the world and had their own ambitions there
• In fact not all Russians shared that sympathy =
• Serbia and its close neighbor Montenegro were earlier declared independent from Turkey
• An 1876 Serbian war against Turkey, occasioned by Serbian support of Bosnia-Hercegovina independence, prompted much public support in Russia
• But the war turned ugly for Serbia, helping convince Russia to intervene
• At that time, poet and prominent tsarist establishment official, Prince P.A. Viazemskii, criticized the intensity of Russian enthusiasm for the cause of Serbia and Montenegro =

  Let the Serbs tend to their own affairs, and us Russians to ours. This is indeed our chief error, our chief misunderstanding, that we consider ourselves more Slav than Russian. [...] Any time now Europe will catch fire, and a general war will spread. Do [the Slavophiles] really think that Russia will be strengthened by the resurgence of Slavic nations? Nothing of the sort; rather the contrary. We shall only ensure and confirm the ill will and ingratitude of a neighbor whom we have revived and put on his feet. [...] It is better for us to have as a neighbor a feeble Turkey, old and decrepit, than a young, strong, democratic Slavic land that will be wary of us but will never love us [... All] their sympathies are for the West [VSB,3:629]

• Serbs were now to be vindicated =
• Russian declaration of war [VSB,3:629-30]
• Turkey and Russia fought and negotiated on their own, without any concern for Austrian or English interests and, at first, without overt interference from European states to the west. It seemed at first that Russia and the Ottomans might resuscitate and consolidate the on-off but very real cooperative trends of the previous half-century
• 1878mr17:The Russian and Ottoman empires negotiated and signed the bilateral San Stefano treaty [TXT] [Excerpts DIR2:317-28]
• The dominant provision of the San Stefano treaty was creation of an enlarged Bulgaria [now including a sizable portion of Macedonia, a vaguely defined territory running roughly from the eastern border of Albania to the Aegean Sea and populated by Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek and many other Illyrian and Balkan peoples]
• The new Bulgaria would be semi-independent and with an elected princely monarch
• NB! no Russian authority over Bulgaria was implied
• In fact, the new Bulgaria was to pay "tribute" to the Turks
• Russia did gain significant territory around the southeast shores of the Black Sea
• Bosnia-Hercegovina [Bosna i Hercegovina] were promised reforms from Turkish overlords
• NB! B-H was not made independent of the Turks nor given over to Serbia
• This area had since medieval times been a rich potpourri of religious confessions
• Catholics, Orthodox and Bogomils vied with one another
• From 1463 and for the next four hundred years, B-H was ruled by Ottoman Turks
• Elites accepted Islam, and thus added another ingredient to the complex B-H stew
• As the 19th century wore down and the storm clouds of WW1 gathered, the fate of Bosnia-Hercegovina and other Yugoslav peoples was not shaped by hatreds among the population so much as by the maneuvers of the great imperialist powers that competed for influence or gain in and around these territories
• As of 1878, B-H was a fruit on the Ottoman tree that Austria sought to pick
• The Russians still thought of it as unripe and made no overt effort in the San Stefano Treaty to gain advantage there
• They simply demanded that the Turks reform their administration
• The Austro-Hungarian Empire played the most unsettling role in this region =
• Watching from the sidelines, Austria and other western and central European powers were alarmed at the extensive provisions of the bilaterally negotiated San Stefano Treaty
• Some western European capitals feared a possible re-establishment of the earlier trend toward rapprochement between traditional rivals, Russia and Ottoman Turkey, a trend that Western allies had once before disrupted in the time of the Crimean War [ID]
• They feared that Russo-Turkish rapprochement might isolate western and central European powers and preempt the benefits just for them, benefits "The West" expected to follow from their own careful long-term dismantlement of Turkey
• Austrian imperial power had designs on B-H, grander than the modest San Stefano concessions, yet it was happy to pretend, along with the other "Western empires" (EG=England and Germany), that it was the Russians who sought unnatural expansion of imperial authority
• Austro-Hungary roosted quietly nearby, like a superannuated dual-monarchical vulture and its hungry adolescent chick
• In view of this portentous bilateral Russian/Turkish diplomatic success, "The West" decided to intervene
  • They claimed that Russia had overturned the Treaty of Paris [ID] without sufficient international consultation
  • Making bald threat of war, a small group of European great powers, with England in the lead, forced a new treaty on Russia and Ottoman Turkey
  • Ambitious "Western" powers took this opportunity to alter San Stefano in such a way as to enhance their own positions in the eastern Mediterranean and to weaken the positions of Russia and Bulgaria and, for that matter, Turkey itself
  • They pretended to enhance the position of Ottoman Turkey, but time was to show that was but a diplomatic ruse
• The Berlin Congress followed, a sorrowful inning in the "Great Game" and a fundamental cause of some of the most tragic 20th- & 21st-century "AfroAsia" crises

\\
*--Yavuz.WAR
*--Kennan.DECLINE, chapters 5-7:103-54 emphasizes the central role of the Bulgarian question, 1878-1886 | A vague and personality-centered narrative
*--Barbara Jelavich, The Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and the Straits Questions, 1870-1887
*--David MacKenzie, The Serbs and Russian Pan-Slavism, 1875-1878
*--B. H. Sumner, Russia and the Balkans, 1870-1880
*--LOOP on AfroAsia

<>1877su:USA experienced 45 days of intense and wide-spread labor unrest when thousands of railroad workers went on strike [ID]

• Some of the nation's biggest cities -- Baltimore [pix], Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St.Louis -- were gripped in violent clashes between wage-laborers and authorities
B
• These confrontations ending frequently in military intervention and use of live ammunition against strikers
• John Hay [Wki] was inspired by this shocking, modern industrial strike action to publish in 1883 an anti-labor novel, The Breadwinners: A Social Study [E-TXT]
  • Earlier, through the Civil War, Hay served as secretary to USA President Abraham Lincoln but was now married into a millionaire railroad family in Cleveland OH, and was involved in the family business
  • Hay's novel is "anti- wage-labor", and maybe more than a touch anti-modern, but not narrowly so
  • The novel is filled with fascinating every-day detail related to life in a growing and "progressive" late-19th-century city, "Buffland" [fictional amalgamation of Buffalo NY and Cleveland OH]
  • The novel's treatment of man-woman courtship is of particular historical interest
• John Hay later became Secretary of State in a particularly critical period of US history

<>1877:1881; Russian second "revolutionary situation" (4 years) intensified in the months of Russo-Turkish War and expanded into a crisis of Russian revolutionary populism and the beginnings of modern political parties in Russia

• More dark thoughts in diary of War Minister Miliutin [VSB,3:632-4]
  • He observed a contest within the highest circles of tsarist state authority
  • In his view the contest was between authentic reformers and those who now sought to reverse reform trends, those who dreamt of return to a past never really experienced (perhaps a good definition of political reaction [ID], in this case "official reactionary politics")
• Two big historical questions =
  1. Did the terroristic revolutionary movement cause the crisis within the autocratic state and provoke the shift toward reactionary measures?
  2. Or did reactionary measures precede terrorism (and perhaps cause it to appear on the scene)?
  • Political ferment was very much alive among émigré Russians
  • But back in Russia, it is harder to say because unlicensed self organization or voluntary associations of any sort were illegal, especially political groups
  • After the unorganized, largely spontaneous "Going to the People" [ID], all populist oppositional movements were of necessity at first underground and conspiratorial, revolutionary parties
• 1876fa:Underground political party "Land and Liberty" [Zemlia i volia] issued its first program ["Programma "Zemli i voli": Pervonachal’naia redaktsiia" (GRV:219)]
• Activists in the second revolutionary situation concentrated on
  1. Peasants. But another and soon dominant feature of this phase came to the fore =
  2. Revolutionary terror
  3. A small number of activists moved from the village, rejected terrorism, and shifted attention to the industrial workplace
• Field, Rebels:112-207, contains documents on village rebelliousness fomented by "revolutionary populists" [CF=1861ap]
• Sergei Kravchinskii [Stepniak], The Russian Peasantry: Their Agrarian Condition, Social Life, and Religion (1888) [Excerpted TXT] [Print excerpts: VSB,3:754-6]
• Kravchinskii's first-hand account of revolutionary conspiracy, Underground Russia (1883), was written five years after his own traumatizing act of political terror [ID]
• Women played an unexpected and active role as political opposition in Russia became violent
• The optimistic era of revolutionary populism, with its faith in the possibility of imminent success of a rural socialist transformation of Russia, was nearing its end as "Land and Liberty" broke up
  \\
  *--Petr A. Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 1878-1882 (1979)
  *2009jy:Russian Social Science Review#50,4:36 - 48| Boris N. Mironov| "The Myth of a Systemic Crisis in Russia After the Great Reforms of the 1860s-1870s"
  *--VRR, ch.20 on Zemlia i volia, ch.21 on Narodnaia volia
  *--Julicher: chapter 9
  *--Amy Knight, "Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party" [TXT]
  *--Vera Broido, Apostles into Terrorists: Women and the Revolutionary Movement in the Russia of Alexander II (1977), esp. ch.10 "Apostles into Terrorists", ch.11 "Towards Terrorism", & ch.13 "Regicide"
  *--Has the early 21st century witnessed yet more "revolutionary situations" in Russia? [EG]

<>1877se27:London| Karl Marx to F. A. Sorge on the Russian revolutionary movement =

This [Russian] crisis is a new turning point in European history. Russia--and I have studied conditions there from the original Russian sources, unofficial and official (the latter accessible to but few persons, but obtained for me through friends in Petersburg)--has long been standing on the threshold of an upheaval; all the elements of it are prepared. The gallant Turks have hastened the explosion by years with the thrashing they have inflicted [ID] not merely to the Russian army and Russian finances, but to the very persons of the dynasty commanding the army (the Tsar, the heir to the throne, and six other Romanovs). The upheaval will begin secundum artem [according to the rules of the game], with some playing at constitutionalism, et puis il y aura un beau tapage [and then follows the brawl]. If Mother Nature is not particularly unfavorable towards us, we shall yet live to see the fun!

The stupid nonsense the Russian students are perpetrating is merely a symptom, worthless in itself. [Kazan demonstration, involving future Russian Marxist leader George Plekhanov among others] But it is a symptom. All sections of Russian society are in full decomposition economically, morally, and intellectually.

This time the revolution begins in the East, hitherto the unbroken bulwark and reserve army of counter-revolution [M&E, Selected Corr:374 | Itenberg,RS2:4 selective citation]

• 1878fa:A year after his letter to Sorge (above), Marx composed a letter to the editor of the Russian journal Otechestvennye zapiski [Notes of the Fatherland]
• In the letter Marx suggested that Russia need not traverse the same historical path that Germany or England have followed as revolutionary workers advanced toward the better future [SLM]

<>1878:Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev,"Lectures on Godmanhood" [Edie,3:62-84 | KMM:214ff]

<>1878ja24:Saint Petersburg | Vera Zasulich with a pistol wounded Petersburg Governor-General Fedor Trepov

• Zasulich’s act was eye-for-eye in her view
  • Prison authorities had apparently tortured a fellow political activist in their charge
  • Zasulich held Trepov personally responsible
• She dropped the gun and awaited arrest

<>1878mr31:A jury trial [sud prisiazhnyi] found Zasulich not guilty

• Zasulich confessed to the attack, but the jury would not find her guilty
  • The jury, the defense lawyers, and the wider public seemed ready to accept a higher moral law justifying this violent act of generic self-defense or righteous revenge
  • It was understood that the police state would now try to use its absolute administrative power to get her back into prison
  • Society just didn’t want her or any of its members abused by state power
  • So, a huge crowd greeted her outside the courtroom, shielded her from officers who sought to arrest her, and helped spirit her away to safe haven in west-European emigration
• Once there, she became an important figure, contributing to the rise of Marxism within Russian oppositional movements
• In the Zasulich trial, as in the Nechaev trial earlier, Russians could follow proceedings in newspapers
• Thousands of readers thus learned how the new reform-era legal system [ID] might work against arbitrary administrative justice, might even seem to favor terrorists over police officials

1878my11(NS):German tin worker made unsuccessful attempt on the life of Emperor Wilhelm the First
*1878je02(NS): Less than one month later, a second would-be terrorist assassin lightly wounded the German Emperor
*--CF=1861jy01

<>1878jy13(NS):Berlin Treaty reversed the San Stefano Treaty [ID] [VSB,3:630-1 | DPH:207-09]

• Russia agreed to congress only after "The West" threatened war
• Such bellicosity in connection with AfroAsian ambitions was not new to European powers [EG]
• Otto von Bismarck agreed to mediate
• Berlin Treaty nullified Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian gains from war with Turkey
• With the internationally enforced nullification of the Russian/Turkish bilateral San Stefano Treaty, England and Austria won great concessions. Russia was stripped of nearly all advantages, and Turkey was locking into its sick decline
  • Bulgarian independence was nullified and the nation divided
    • The northern half fell under indirect Ottoman authority
    • The southern half completely under Ottoman rule
  • Macedonia was taken from Bulgaria and placed under complete Ottoman suzerainty
• The main push for this reversal came from England and Austria
• In addition to their own fish to fry, these two powers were concerned about expansion of Russian power and the "dangerous" rise of authentic independence in the Balkans Here are some of the details =
  • England took this occasion to acquire the strategically located island of Cyprus with its large population of Orthodox Greeks and Moslem Turks
  • Austro-Hungarian imperial interests were connected with an ancient authority they exercised over restless Slovenes and Croats
  • These were Catholic Slavs whose native language was basically the same as the Eastern Orthodox Serbs
  • Slovenes and Croats write with the Latin rather than the Cyrillic alphabet since literacy came to them in its Roman Catholic form
  • Austria did not want events to inspire national independence movements among these people, but Vienna’s interests were more directly touched by developments in Bosnia-Hercegovina =
• Serbia was declared independent, but suffered two serious insults
  • First, Bosnia-Hercegovina was taken from Turks and Serbs, and placed under Austrian administration and military occupation
  • This represented a slap in the face for both Turkey and newly independent Serbia
  • Austria gained great expansion of power from Russian victory, and denied any advantages to Russia
  • This move was the most aggressive and least defensible in an era and area that required wise diplomacy rather than unrestrained opportunism
  • This move at this time and place will echo down through the 20^th century
  • Second, Montenegro [Crna gora] declared independent (but not a part of Serbia)
  • This represented an insult but also a serious threat to Serbia
  • Montenegro was over the centuries the mountain fastness, the last refuge, of Serbian independence from Turkish and German power
  • It was also the oldest of Russian allies in the Balkans
  • 1516:1851; Montenegro was ruled for more that three centuries by Orthodox bishop/princes [vladikas]
  • From 1715 Montenegro was in close alliance with Russia, recognizing the spiritual leadership of Russian emperors over the vladikas
• Romania became independent, but ceded southern Bessarabia to Russia in return for Dobruja
• NB! "The West" took strong and significant stand against national independence for Bulgarians and other South-Slavic [Yugoslavian] peoples, so long as that independence threatened -- or failed to further -- their own imperialist aims
• "The West" took an equally strong but ironic stand in support of Ottoman imperial rule, so long as that Ottoman imperialism suited their needs and could be controlled by them
• The Berlin Treaty, however, failed to meet significant needs in the area under its purview. The treaty laid the foundations for European catastrophe =
• Unrestrained imperialist practices were now employed within the European homeland
• "Life support" applied by "The West" to the Ottoman Empire ("the sick man of Europe") was breaking down
• A Turkish nationalistic and militaristic movement arose [ID] in the same year that Austria seized Bosnia and Herzegovina [ID]
• The ground was laid for the vicious Balkan wars of 1912-1913
• As a result of English and Austrian diplomatic/military affront, national independence terrorist groups, komitadjis, arose there under Bulgarian sponsorship
• One such group later assassinated the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and triggered the outbreak of WW1
• The dysfunctional relationships expressed in the freakish 1878:Berlin Treaty sickened European diplomacy
• The near-sighted and low-content alliances that grew out of these deliberations distorted international events from this point forward into the catastrophe of WW1. EG=
1. Turkish/Russian accommodation was forestalled
2. Austria and England teamed up against Russia and Turkey
3. Bulgarian/Serbian enmity was provoked
4. Foundations were laid for an unnatural life-death alliance of England and Russia against Germany
• As WW1 approached, a large symphony of even more broadly freakish diplomatic alliances arose, unrehearsed and unstable in membership, but sectioned up for the first time and sounding forth in the noisy concert that SAC editor has named "Imperialism Comes Home"
• Under the constant distorting influence of global industrialized militaristic competition, the events of 1878 initiated an adjustment of the post-Napoleonic "balance of powers" over the next 36 years, up to 1914 [ID]
• The "Near-East" half of AfroAsia was not the only arena of emerging world conflict that weighed in on 1878 Berlin Treaty deliberations =
• 1878:Afghanistan had become a site of imperialist military clashes between Russia and England
• Each country tried to play the Great Game in this region through subordinate emirs, native Islamic rulers, and propped-up war lords
• Central-Asia was falling under Russian dominion
• But England gained the upper hand in the imperialist struggle for predominance in Afghanistan and the "South-Asian" edges of AfroAsia
• Also England's position grew stronger on the "Near-Eastern" edges of AfroAsia
• England had already nailed-down Egypt [ID]
• After 1885 England consolidated its position in Africa, even at the cost of alienating Ottoman Turks [ID]
• The Ottoman Turkish Empire, the original "sick man of Europe", and its "Near-Eastern" [ID] spheres of influence were becoming a main arena of action in the unfolding of the great and "sick" European tragedy
• Kindling for that great conflagration WW1 was being laid in 
• In just over three decades, WW1 burst into flames there
• The final open battles of WW1 would be fought there
• Our notions of WW1 need to be expanded to add a vital "Southern Front" to the famous Western and Eastern fronts [ID]
• The Berlin congress was a "big inning" for England and Austria, and now Germany entered actively into AfroAsian affairs as the "Great Game" rushed towards its destructive conclusion = WW1 [ID]

\\
*2005:Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies#29,2:167–186| Andrekos Varnava, "Punch and the British occupation of Cyprus in 1878" [E-TXT]
*--Carlton J.H. Hayes, Generation of Materialism:33 addressed in his way the issue that SAC above describes as "freakish" [ID] =

If before 1878 the "Eastern Question" concerned one "sick man" [Ottoman Turkey], after 1878 it involved a half-dozen maniacs. For the Congress of Berlin drove the Balkan peoples mad [quoted in Yavuz.WAR:17]

*--Yavuz.WAR is an anthology of essays on the Russo-Turkish War and the subsequent Berlin Conference. It's contribution to our historical understanding has been described in the following way =

Beginning of the end of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire were (1) The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 and (2) the Treaty of Berlin. These permanently transformed the Balkan and Caucasus political landscape. The treaty marked the end of Ottoman hegemony in the Balkans by formally recognizing the independence or de facto sovereignty of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro, and the autonomy of Bulgaria. By introducing the unitary nation-state as the new organizing concept, the treaty planted the seeds of future conflict, from the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 [ID] and WW1 [ID] to the recent civil wars and ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia [ID]. The magnitude of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by Russia -- and eventually by the other great powers -- and the human, material, and territorial losses that followed proved fatal to the project of Muslim liberal reform and modernization that the Ottoman state had launched in the middle of the 19th century [ID].

*--LOOP on "Imperialism and Revolution"
*--LOOP on AfroAsia, Great Game and WW1a as these three items merged

<>1878au04:Petersburg | Sergei Kravchinskii (with assistance of A. I. Barannovskii) killed Third-Section police chief N.V. Mezentsov in broad daylight as he was out walking

• This early act of successful political assassination was taken in revenge for what was considered extreme and unjust state action in the execution of I.M. Koval’skii
• These early acts of terror in the second revolutionary situation were frequently explicit acts of revenge

<>1878oc18:1879ja23; Petersburg | The great "Trial of the 193" followed soon and lasted three months

• The great trial was only indirectly related to recent sensational physical assaults on authority carried out by Zasulich [ID] and Kravchinskii [ID]
• This was a trial of leading figures from amng the more than 4000 activists who had been arrested over the previous four years, almost all in connection with the "Going to the People" [ID]
  • Prisons overflowed. Nearly 100 died or went insane before the trial
  • At least 30 different actual organizations and voluntary political associations were involved
  • About one-fourth of the defendants were women
  • Defendants were represented by independent lawyers, according to the new legal reforms
• The trial showed that "The Going" was an expression of widely felt impulses that realized themselves in individual and small group actions without any central coordination
• For its own purposes, the tsarist state treated this expression of national political discontent and optimism as a single conspiracy, a single "criminal association" [prestupnoe soobshchestvo] with the goal of "overthrowing the government" [s tsel’iu gosudarstvennogo perevorota]
• Against the towering power of the state, and the obduracy of villagers, some of the increasingly isolated individual activists felt they had only one weapon -- terror

<>1878oc21(NS):German Empire outlawed political parties organized by socialists or wage-laborers [DPH:265-6]
\\
*--[W]

<>1878oc25:Russian revolutionary political party "Land and Liberty" [Zemlia i volia] ] issued its final program [VSB,3:662-3 | Russian TXT]

• As "Land and Liberty" faded from the scene, "The People's Will" [Narodnaia volia] stepped in to fill the gap with heavy accent on terrorism

<>1878no:Tver Zemstvo presented address to the tsar =

In his concern for the welfare of the Bulgarian people after their liberation from the Turkish yoke [ID], the sovereign emperor has deemed it necessary to grant this people true self-government, the inviolability of the rights of the individual, an independent judiciary, and freedom of the press. The zemstvo of Tver Province dares to hope that the Russian people, who bore the entire burden of the war with such complete readiness and with such self-sacrificing love for their tsar-emancipator, will be allowed to enjoy the same blessings, which alone can lead them, in the words of the sovereign, along the path of gradual, peaceful, and legal development [VSB,3:634]

• The Bulgarian constitutional initiative was a third moment in the history of Russian political culture when constitutional reforms were offered non-Russian peoples under imperial power but denied to Russians themselves
  • First moment = Finland
  • second moment = Poland
• Zemstvos became increasingly political as its technical functions began to take hold after a slow 15-year startup, and especially as Zemstvo activists gained control over increasing tax revenues
• Zemstvos were discovering links between their technical functions and their political needs, a discovery characteristic of the general European experience of political institutional modernization

<>1879:1880; Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevsky [pix] wrote his most widely acclaimed work Brothers Karamazov
*--Petrozavodsk State University Russian-language complete works of Dostoevsky [W]
\\
*--Wagar on Dostoevsky [TXT]

<>1879:Russian Workers, Northern Union of, issued program in defense of wage-laborer interests [Harding:41f]

• The rise of modern urban centers -- cities -- introduced, as always, three new elements to social/political life =
  1. Industrial labor -- the proletariat
  2. Urban industrial/professional elites -- capitalists, business people, and all others whose interests were meshed with modern enterprise in the "post-agrarian" era
  3. The institutional expression of modern urban enterprise = industrial and business "companies"
• 1879oc:Lithuanian provinces, Vilnius | Formation of General Jewish Workers Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia [Vseobshchii evreiskii rabochii soiuz v Litve, Pol'she i Rossii],  Jewish Bund for short
• As old skins of social/service hierarchies were being shed on all levels, Russia experienced a beginning of political movements among wage-laborers (#1 above)
• But what about those other European-style "liberal" urban social/economic and political formations? (#2 & #3 above)
  \\
  *--VRR, ch.19 on the Russian working class movement
  *--J. Frankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1861-1917 (1981)

<>1879:USA reformer and economic theorist Henry George published Progress and Poverty [UO E-TXT excerpts with brief introductory essay]

• Henry George subsequently had a startlingly successful political career, running on a reformist/progressive platform with his infamous "single tax" at the center
  • He believed that the growth rate of poverty was always greater than the growth rate of wealth
  • This sad fact was caused, in his view, by increase over time of land rents and values
  • Larger social forces caused the increase, but isolated owning individuals cashed in on that increase
  • He felt that a single tax on land would solve the problem
• Critics found much to dislike in this scheme, but the biggest force at work against George was the transformation of economic life from agriculture to industry, the shift from the countryside to the city
• Still, it is worth noting Thomas Piketty's 2013 revival of Henry George's central insight [Wki] = In capitalist economies, the growth rate of poverty was always greater than the growth rate of wealth, even into the era of advanced capitalism in Europe and North America. Therefore capitalism automatically works against the economic interests of labor and in favor of the capitalist, unless specific governmental policy intervenes to assure democratization of economic life [GOOGLE/Piketty and Henry George/ to discover the similar anxious establishmentarian refutations that arose about 130 years apart (EG) ]

<>1879ja11:jy04; South Africa| English imperialist war against powerful but non-industrialized indigenous Zulu people
\\
*--BBC
*--South African History Online (carries the story of Zulu destruction as "sovereign" African people up to 1896)
*--Wki
||
*--LOOP on AfroAsia, Great Game and WW1a as they merged

<>1879fe:Russia| Kharkov Governor-General D. N. Kropotkin was assassinated

• 1879mr13:Petersburg | L. F. Mirskii fired a pistol at Third-Section Chief Gendarme Drentel'n and escaped
• 1879ap02:Petersburg Winter Palace Square| A. K. Solov’ev fired 3 times at Alexander II, without hitting him. He acted also without approval of the underground revolutionary party Land and Liberty, but with a revolver they supplied
• 1879ap:Congress of constitutionalists made up of representatives of Tver, Chernigov, Moscow and Tula Zemstvos, with reprentatives of Kharkov and Kiev Zemstvos in attendance, plus prominent public figures and Moscow University professors, EG= Maksim Kovalevskii and V.A. Gol'tsev, Ivan Petrunkevich and Fedor Rodichev played key roles in framing constitutional and civil libertarian positions, and in promoting the cause of Zemstvo independence from state control [1929ja:SEER#7,20:319-20]
• 1879ap05:Russian Emperor Alexander II, having narrowly escaped a terrorist attempt on his life, issued counter-reform decree strengthening the power of governor-generals [VSB,3:665]
• Tsarist state moved from statist reform toward statist reaction
• 1879my:Within Zemlia i volia, a dedicated terrorist group formed, calling itself "Freedom or death" [Svoboda ili smert’]
• 1879jy25:au05; Odessa "Trial of the Twenty-Eight". These 28 "revolutionists", including a 14-year old girl, V. L. Gukovskaia, held in camera because oficials no longer trusted open trial by jury, such that acquitted Vera Zasulich [ID]
• 1879fa:Narodnaia volia [People's Will] party program [DIR3:355-9]
• 1879au25:Narodnaia volia handed down a death sentence against Alexander II
  • Here monarchical subjects "turned the tables" by handing down a sentence of capital punishment against their sovereign
  • 1879oc01: "The People and the State" [SLM:219-23]
  • What could be in principle more authentically revolutionary than that, taking possession of the state's monopoly on violence?
  • The mode of execution was to be dynamite
• At first Narodnaia volia concentrated on mining railroad lines at three points [VRR:681-3]
  1. At Odessa, Kibal’chich, Kviatkovskii and Vera Figner set up the attack [Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist]. Kolodkevich, Frolenko and Lebedeva were to carry it off. It had to be canceled
  2. 1879no18:Aleksandrovsk | Andrei Zheliabov improperly triggered the dynamite under the tsar’s train. No explosion, no assassination
  3. 1879no19:Moscow | Sof’ia Perovskaia and Stepan Shiriarev blew up the wrong train. The tsar pulled into Moscow unscathed
• Andrei Zheliabov (1850-1881), was born into a serf family, was liberated and given the opportunity for a higher education at Odessa University
  • Before turning to terrorist plots, he was involved in the great "going to the people" [ID]
  • He was arrested and a defendant at the Trial of the 193 [ID], found innocent and turned to political organizational work, helping organize "Land and Liberty" [ID]
  • He was now a member of the executive committee of "People's Will" [ID]
  • Zheliabov was a "man of the people", he was not an "intelligent"
  • Zheliabov spanned a life in the village to a life of underground political organization and terrorist action
• Though Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin rejected nearly every feature of Zheliabov's political creed and commitment, he always cited him as proof that the Russian people could produce revolutionists of world quality [ID]

<>1879my02:Moscow Medical Practitioners' School for Women [BRW:196-7]

<>1880:Russia enforced corporal punishment in military [Page]

<>1880ja01:Russian revolutionary political party "People's Will" [Narodnaia volia] issued program, written mainly by Lev Tikhomirov, Nikolai Morozov, and Aleksandr Mikhailov [SLM:207-212 | VSB,3:664 | Kennan,Siberia,2:495-503 | WRH3:399-402 | DIR2:309-13 | DIR3:335-9 | RN7,2:170-4 | "Programma ispolnitel’nogo komiteta" (GRV:229]

• The "People's Will" party put terrorism at the head of its agenda
  • 1880ja17:Petersburg apartment of Narodnaia volia party members raided by police. Gunfire resulted in several casualties and arrests [VRR:685]
  • 1880fe05:Petersburg | Stepan Khalturin, working closely with the Narodnaia volia Executive Committee (Aleksandr Kviatkovskii and Zheliabov), blew up the tsarist dining room in the Winter Palace, a spectacular achievement
    • Eleven were killed and 56 wounded, but the tsar was not one of them. He had not yet joined the banquet
    • Rifts opened among the terrorists who accepted the need to kill the tsar but were opposed to more generalized terrorism
    • These were unhappy with what the contemporary world calls "collateral damage"
• 1880wi:As village-centered "Land and Liberty" came apart and terror-prone "People's Will" [Narodnaia volia] formed up, a small group led by Georg Plekhanov moved in a third direction
  • Plekhanov and his group formed "Black Repartition" [Chernyi peredel' | Russian language TXT = GRV:222-9]
• 1880fe12:Count Loris-Melikov became head of a newly created state institution, "Supreme Administrative Commission for the Protection of State Order and Public Tranquility"
  • 1880fe20: Young activist I. O. Molodetskii attacked Loris-Melikov, without success
    • Molodetskii acted alone as something of a "freelance" terrorist
    • Narodnaia volia disavowed Molodetskii's personal attacked because it was uncoordinated with any defined political program
    • Still, Narodnaia volia praised his bravery
• 1880sp:People's Will tactical Program [SLM:223-31 | RN7,2:175-183]
• 1880sp:Odessa grocery store was the site at which Vera Figner and Sof’ia Perovskaia prepared a dynamite attack on the tsar
  • Another woman, A.V. Yakimova, was also involved
  • Nothing came of these preparations
• 1880su:Terrorism seemed in fact to have results
  • Terrorism succeeded in its desire to influence official behavior in the direction of political concession
  • Loris-Melikov engaged certain public figures in the Zemstvo constitutionalist movement
  • In secret, he even engaged in negotiations with some who were close to Narodnaia volia with the aim to bring an end to terrorist attacks and to initiate governmental reforms
  • Perhaps Loris acted deceitfully, perhaps not. In any event, talks broke down
• 1880oc25:The Executive Committee of the Revolutionary populist journal Narodnaia Volia [NaV] wrote a letter to Karl Marx [SLM:206-7 | RN7,2:228-9]
  • 1880oc25:oc30; SPB Military District court conducted the in camera Trial of 16, the Narodnaia volia Executive Committee
  • Kviatkovskii was sentenced to death
  • 1880no:Narodnaia volia Workers’ Organization Program [SLM:231-7 | RN7,2:184-91]
• 1880au:Loris-Melikov's Commission was disbanded and the Count became Interior Minister
  • Melikov pursued a policy of vigorous hunt for revolutionaries
  • But he also continued to give out hints at concessions to a fledgling civil society in the form of European-style liberal reforms
    • Even terrorist opponents of the tsarist state backed off for a moment
    • Certain leaders of the terrorist party "People's Will" were willing to give Loris-Melikov a chance to make something of his so-called "dictatorship of the heart"
    • Some concluded from this momentary calm and concession that political terrorism brought results
  \\
  *--Spartacus Educational www on Tikhomirov and terror (with no mention of his 1888 publication [ID])

<>1880je08:Moscow | Leading cultural figures pulled together a large Pushkin Commemoration

• Organizers tried to exclude Katkov from the roster, even from the guest list
• Of the many celebratory public presentations, Fedor Dostoevsky's lecture "stole the show" [TXT~ with commentary]
• Dostoevsky's lecture provoked wide-ranging polemics, EG= with Aleksandr Gradovskii, Konstantin Kavelin and Vladimir Solov'ev]
• GO 1880de
  \\
  *--Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (1989)

<>1880de:Geok-Tepe, a semi-independent Turkmen stronghold in Central-Asia, captured by Russian army

• Dostoevsky described the meaning of this event in his journal-like publication Diary of a Writer [RFP2,1:18-24 | Excerpts= VSB,3:659-62]
• In 1849 at the beginning of his public career, Dostoevsky was targeted by the Russian Emperor; at the end, Dostoevsky extolled the virtues of the Russian Empire
• 1880fe: Petr Saburov, newly appointed Russian Ambassador to Germany and in close association with German Chancellor Bismarck, wrote a memo to Alexander II in which he defined the fundamental objectives of Russian foreign policy = "the security of Russia's military and political position in the Black Sea (which clashed with Britain); and the emancipation and political organization of the kindred races in the Balkan Peninsula (clashing with Austrian interests)" [The Saburov Memoirs:124]

<>1880de11(NS): German Imperial Military Chief of Staff, Baron Helmut von Moltke, wrote a letter to a leading German jurist in which he revealed a great deal about his militaristic ideas on the nature of war [E-TXT]
*--Moltke was responding to an 1880se09 manual on "The Laws of War on Land" issued by the Institute of International Law at Oxford [E-TXT]

<>1881:Ottoman Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid II agreed to "Decree of Muharrem" which created joint "Council of the Public Debt", further consolidating English fiscal power over the Turks

• Russia had done well on its own in dealing with the Turks, but "The West" was not going to let that succeed
• The big financial dimension of the Great Game was too much for Russia [EG] even at the outer edge of Ottoman Turkish power directly on Russian imperial frontiers in Central-Asia
• And in these years, a new contestant for influence and advantage in the Ottoman world flexed its muscle = Germany
  \\
  *--LOOP on AfroAsia
  *--LOOP on Great Game
  *--LOOP on WW1a
  *--LOOP on "finance"

<>1881:USA, Pittsburgh | Leaders of National Labor Union, Knights of Industry, and Knights of Labor formed Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada

• This represented the beginnings of organized wage-labor on the national level
• 1881:In a development not unrelated to economic struggles of labor, Henry James published his most enduring novel, Portrait of a Lady
  • While born into a comfortable establishment Boston family, a scion of US social/cultural elite, James had fled abroad into émigré status
  • He now depended in some measure on income from his publications
  • He lived in Europe like his good friend, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev
  • Not only was high culture transcending "national" limits, it was becoming a commodity
  • Creators had to sell their "product" or perish. James had to publish or perish
  • He had no professorial salary like his brother, the Harvard philosopher William James [ID]
    \\
    *--Sheldon M. Novick, Henry James: The Mature Master

<>1881:Tver activist Fedor Rodichev memo on peasantry [*1934ja:SEER#12,35:361-2]

<>1881ja28:Russian state servitor Count Loris-Melikov, memo to Emperor Alexander II [Raeff2:133-40]

• Other Loris-Melikov memos suggested that constitutional reform might be under consideration [VSB,3:665-7]
• Political/institutional reform of this sort had been on nearly everyone's mind since Alexander II ascended the throne a quarter-century earlier
• But by now the time of significant progressive reform was over in Russia
• Loris-Melikov's brand of official liberalism was too little, too late

<>1881wi:Nikolai Kibal’chich [ID] wrote an article on political revolution and the economic question [SLM:212-8]

• Kibal’chich thus suggested something of the broader political goals or purposes beyond his party's simple terroristic violence
• This was a busy season of reconsideration all across the political spectrum =
  • 1881fe:Zasulich drafted a letter to Marx asking about the possibility that Russia rural mode of production might give some promise of a progressive future in her homeland
  • 1881fe:mr; Marx drafted a reply to Zasulich letter
  • 1881mr:Marx settled on a final text of the letter to Zasulich in which he conceded that the Russian village institutions might contribute to a Russian variety of socialism

<>1881fe15(NS):German chancellor Bismarck's opening speech to the Reichstag [parliament] [CCC2,2:835f CCC3,2:1005-6]

• Over the preceding half decade, Bismarck worked hard to maintain best possible relationships with Russia [DIR3:337-9]
• His final decade in power was devoted to the maintenance of a balance of power in central and eastern Europe [DPH:209-14 | DIR3:339-45]
• German imperialist ambitions complicated this process [DPH:268-71]
• 1879:German theologian Friedrich Fabri posed the question -- Does Germany Need Colonies? -- and gave a resounding answer = YES [P20:27]
• The German version of European imperialism caused special inter-European problems. European imperialism was "coming home"
  \\
  *--LOOP on "Imperialism and Revolution"

<>1881mr01:Russian Emperor Alexander II was assassinated [RRC2,2:368-77]

• The 26-year "era of great reforms" came to an end as the culminating moment in the "second Russian revolutionary situation", the apex (or nadir) of the previous twenty years of political terrorism
  • The success of terrorists in the political party People's Will ironically destroyed the party
  • And at the same time, terrorism abated, not to take center stage again in Russia for another twenty years
  • But in other locales terror continued to play a role
• Loris-Melikov resigned under pressure as Interior Minister
  • His intense one-year career in the spotlight of imperial politics was at an end
  • He emigrated to western Europe, where he died in 1888
• Everywhere in Europe, but most dramatically in Russia, the liberalism that moved crowds to action over the previous century seemed no longer to fit the needs of the time
  \\
  *--VRR, ch.22

Spas na krovi [The Savior on the Blood]
A cathedral build in Petersburg on the spot
where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated

<>1881mr02:1894; Russian Emperor Alexander III reigned in a time of official reactionary policy [ID] following the second revolutionary situation and terrorist assassination of his father, Alexander II, the "tsar liberator"

• 1877se17:1882my06; Alexander III was much influenced by the political ideas of reactionary Ober-prokurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonostsev
• Pobedonostsev dispatched a steady stream of advisory memos over the critical five-year period surrounding the assassination of Alexander II [VSB,3:671-5]
• 1881ap25:1887mr04; Mikhail Katkov wrote monarchist and imperialist editorials in his daily newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti [Moscow News] [VSB,3:677-9]
  • In the last four years of his life Katkov was rewarded with high aristocratic/service rank on the Table of Ranks and put in charge of the Moscow University printing presses
  • Katkov's quarter century of journalistic service to the Russian imperialist establishment ended with an ironic mirror-image reversal of Nikolai Novikov's publishing career one century earlier [ID]
• 1881mr08:1882ap10; reform-minded ex-Minister of War Dmitrii Miliutin's diary described atmosphere of crisis in governmental circles [VSB,3:679-80]
• 1881su:1882fa; Petersburg court insiders (government ministers, generals, grand dukes and other high-ranking members of the royal family, statist elites close to the tsarist throne) formed the Holy Retinue [Sviashchennaia druzhina]
  • This covert organization was designed to do combat with the revolutionary movement
  • A secret Central Committee of the Holy Retinue directed operations under the leadership of Prince P.P. Shuvalov who commanded a widely ramified network of spies and provocateurs
  • These operations were independent of regular police agencies, "off the books", and they were kept secret both from revolutionaries and the public
  • Operatives raided underground printing presses and worked to identify and entrap political suspects
  • The organization was especially active abroad. It published two newspapers in Geneva, Vol’noe slovo [The Free Word] and Pravda [The Truth] without revealing the organization behind the publications
• Security operations, political opposition and war conflated in a time of generalized terrorism, not just that of revolutionists but of high insiders as well
• Yet it might be said that profound, possibly even "progressive", changes took place in these years of reactionary policy, the reign of Alexander III
• Over the next quarter century, the tsarist state made its contribution both to the promotion and the suppression of impending revolution
• USA opinion of Russia, and thus USA-Russian relations, deteriorated to some degree
• A new era of macro-economic struggle, in which world markets in grain and, very soon, petroleum increased the stakes in the Great Game
• N. Kh. Bunge, The Years 1881-1894 in Russia: A Memorandum Found in the Papers of N. Kh. Bunge [ORBIS]
• British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print. Part I, from the mid- nineteenth century to the First World War. Series A, Russia, 1859 -1914 v2
  \\
  *--Saul,2:240-310
  *1961de:JMH#33:384-97 | Hans Heilbronner, "Alexander III and the Reform Plan of Loris-Melikov"
  *--Heide W. Whelan, Alexander III and the State Council: Bureaucracy and Counter-Reform in Late Imperial Russia (1982)
  *--Petr Zaionchkovskii, The Russian Autocracy Under Alexander III (1976)

<>1881mr08(NS):German chancellor Bismarck's justification for the first accident insurance bill, a component of a wider program of social welfare [CCC3,2:1007-10 | DPH:266-8]
*1884mr10:Bismarck speech on the need to promote the welfare of wage-laborers [PWT2:192-4]

<>1881mr10:Russian revolutionary political party Narodnaia volia [People's Will] wrote letter to new Emperor Alexander III [DIR2:313-16 | DIR3:359-63]

• Manifesto to Europe [DPH:288]
• 1882fe16:Last will and testaments of revolutionary populists A.Mikhailov and A.Barannikov [SLM:239-40]
• In its short two years of existence, People's Will left a big mark on Russian history without furthering the cause of radical reform or revolution

Execution of terrorists involved in the assassination of Alexander II,
including Andrei Zheliabov

<>1881sp:Ivan Aksakov repeated Panslav and Slavophile themes in his "Address to...Benevolent Slav Society" [KMM:112-15 | RRC2,2#32]

• 1861:1883; Selections from Ivan Aksakov's long journalistic career [VSB,3:657-9] suggest distinction between Slavophilism and panslavism
• 1883:Aksakov asked what panslavism was and answered first with what it wasn't =
  • "It does not exist as a political party, nor as a political program, nor even as a definite political ideal"
  • "The unification of all the Slavs of east and west in a single political body has so far never been envisaged by anyone in any clear form, nor even as a dream"
• Then Aksakov took up what it was =
  • "Yet panslavism indubitably exists in our time as the awareness, shared by all the manifold branches of the Slavic race, of their common Slavic character and common ethnic origin"
  • [To help define "Slavic" consult this table organized by language groups]
• Aksakov said panslavism was not a "political party" but insisted that the Russian state could not renounce a panslav mission "that can bring existence, life, and freedom to the Slavic peoples and to the entire Orthodox-Slavic world"
• That would force Russia to renounce "her very self, her very essence, and her mission among mankind"
• Aksakov was disturbed that Germans regarded any Russian nationalism in literature or politics as panslavic and therefore odious =

  We repeat: there exists neither a political panslavic program nor a political panslavic ideal. But as the spiritual solidarity and the gravitation of various branches of the same race toward each other, as the awareness of Slavic brotherhood, as an Orthodox-Slavic world headed by Russia [emphasis added] and asserting its claim to exist, live, and develop side by side with the Roman [Romance-language cultures = France, Italy, Spain, etc.] and Germanic [including England] worlds, panslavism exists both as an idea and as a fact.

• NB! Aksakov's anticipation of certain powerful European trends of thought about the meaning of modern civilization and its impact on popular cultural traditions
• GO TO Ivan's father Sergei and his brother Konstantin
  \\
  *--LOOP on WW1a

<>1881ap29:Alexander III's manifesto reaffirmed inviolability of autocracy [VSB,3:680]

<>1881au14:Russian statute sought to strengthen law and order [VSB,3:680-1]
*--The tsarist state sought to reaffirm what it took to be the fundamental truths of Russian politics
*--These truths were increasingly embodied in reactionary policy, but occasionally in certain reform measures

<>1881oc:Russian revolutionary groups Narodnaia volia and Chernyi peredel' joined forces to compose a program [DPH:288-9]
*1881fa:1882wi; Narodnaia volia Military-revolutionary organization composed a Program [SLM:238 | RN7,2:196-200]

<>1882:Switzerland | Friedrich Engels published Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, a summary of Marxism published in the last year of Marx's life [CCC3,2:701-24 | CCS:775-801 | CCS,2:265-291]

• Engels' summary was a simplification, and its claim to be "scientific" might be questionable to some
  • But it eventually achieved a popularity as wide as The Communist Manifesto, the publication which opened the public careers of Marx and Engels in 1847-1848
  • In comparison with Marx's condensed and high-impact "A Preface to A Contribution..." (1859), Engels' summary, is an explanation of what "Marxism" was all about. It was more detailed and self-explanatory
  • 1882ja:Marx and Engels composed a preface to the 2nd Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto. The preface concluded =

    If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land [the peasant obshchina] may serve as the starting-point for a communist devlopment

• "Marxism", as ism, survived Marx and Engels
• 1883mr14:Karl Marx died
• The political careers of these two specific thinking and acting individuals (to distinguish them from their "ism") had by this time spanned 35 years
• The "ism" continued for more than a century to inspire a significant variety of political movements in Germany, Russia, China and elsewhere around the world
• The complexities and contingencies of the specific thinking and acting individuals who had created the "ism" faded from memory as they became global celebrities
• Distinct "socialist" ideologies and movements were forming in Europe, much as had happened with revolutionary liberalism over the previous century

<>1882:1890; Russian welfare legislation (child labor [TXT], working hours, factory inspection) [VSB,3:752-4 | cf. RRC2,2#36]

• As Russian urban life expanded, the state made efforts to incorporate the new social formation -- proletariat or wage-labor -- into traditional social/service hierarchies
• These reforms can be seen as acts of official co-optation (in the sense that they were acts designed to neutralize or win over wage-labor through assimilation into an established order of things)
• In this famously "reactionary" era of Alexander III, tsarist bureaucrats displayed as much reform initiative in these realms as did new urban social formations
  • Officials presumed that Russia might not need a progressive liberal bourgeoisie if it had a progressive state
  • Russia might curb an activist wage-labor class, might replace it with an activist state
• 1898:Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii [ID] published The Russian Factory in the 19th Century. For his independent views, officials had him fired from his post at St.Petersburg University

<>1882my02:je09; Russian state sought to give relief to its Jewish subjects [VSB,3:682]

<>1882my18:Russian statute established Peasant Land Bank [TXT] | VSB,3:751]

• Three years later it established the Noble's Land Bank [ID]
• Clearly the "reactionary" autocratic state was capable of notable reform initiatives and, however belatedly, was beginning to see the fundamental importance of banks in the modern world

<>1883:USA and world tours of ex-frontier scout William Frederick Cody ("Buffalo Bill") and his Wild West Show got under way

• The Native American hero of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull, performed in this early version of US commercial culture
• From the beginning, pop-arts mixed the authentic and the artificial without any conscious desire to do harm to either

<>1883:1891; Switzerland | German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) published his most influential work, Also sprach Zarathustra [TXT]

• Other influential works =
  *1871:The Birth of Tragedy
  *1887:Genealogy of Morals
  *--The Will to Power, and
  *--The Antichrist [missing in the UO library, but excerpted in CCC2,2:964-80 | CCC3,2:1192-1212]
  *--Excerpts (including Antichrist) PWT2:236-42]
  *--Full UO holdings [W]
  \\
  *--A Study Guide to Zarathustra
  *--Wagar on Nietzsche and irrationalism [TXT]

Nietzsche's Death Mask
Which calls to mind the finest-ever graffito that I personally saw =
*1965su:On the entrance to the NYC subway at the main gate of Columbia University, someone had written =
"God is dead -- Nietzsche"
Just below this, someone else wrote =
"Nietzsche is dead -- God"

<>1883je27:France | Ivan Turgenev letter to Leo Tolstoy (Turgenev's last letter) [GPR:627-8]

<>1884:English theorist Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State [PWT2:179-80 | P20:6]
*--Spencer continued to develop his concepts of "Social Darwinism" and aquisitive individualism

<>1884:Geneva | Russian émigré Marxist Georgii Plekhanov, "Our Differences" [TXT | Excerpts = Edie,3:359-89 | VSB,3:705-7 | SPW]

• A quick read would be from beginning through ch.1 pt.1 (ca. 69pp)
• Then ch.3 pt.1-3 (ca. 17pp)
• Then ch.4 pt.1-3 (ca. 48pp)
• Finally ch.5 (ca.22pp)
• Here Plekhanov laid out with some clarity the differences between his brand of Marxist socialism for Russia and the now extinguished "populism" of the 1860s and 70s
• Plekhanov began as a populist activist, but in exile he now based his revolutionary socialism on industrial wage-labor
• Program of his Marxist group "Liberation of Labor" [DIR2:353-7 | DIR3:400-5 | VSB,3:707-8 | DPH:290-4]
• Vera Zasulich, the famous one-act "terrorist" [ID], was an active member of Plekhanov's émigré group where she became again famous for a "one-act" ideological moment (letter to Karl Marx [ID])
  \\
  *1980:JHI#40,1:89f| Henry Eaton, "Marx and the Russians" [TXT]

<>1884my:Paris | Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) thrilled audiences with her popular portrayal of Lady Macbeth in a stunning French translation of the Shakespeare tragedy

• "The Divine Sarah" might be thought of as the first great popular entertainment "celebrity" [TXT], the pioneer of commercial-culture pop-arts

<>1884au23:Russian University statute [VSB,3:682-4] reversed reformist gains in the 1863 University statute [ID]
*--By placing new restrictions on university life, the tsarist state pursued a recognizable reactionary policy goal to reserve "careers open to talent" only for presumed old regime elites rather than for an increasingly dynamic Russian population at large

<>1884fa:Korean court struggles roused Japanese and Chinese appetites and caused tensions [Beasley,MHJ:161]
*--Paul George von Molendorff, a high-ranking German administrator or "adviser" within the Korean government, tried to draw Russia into conflict [KEJ,6:341]
*--Manchuria was also becoming a prize in this global imperialist conflict
\\
*--George Alexander Lensen, Balance of intrigue: international rivalry in Korea and Manchuria, 1884-1899 (1982)

<>1885:USA Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong wrote Our Country (purchased by 185,000 readers [Zimmerman:46])

• Americans, he preached, are a "race of unequaled energy, with all the majesty of numbers and the might of wealth behind it—the representation, let us hope, of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, the highest civilization"
• The preacher noted with approval USA' s development of "peculiarly aggressive traits calculated to impress its institutions upon mankind" [46-47]
• He predicted that USA will "spread itself across the earth". He added, "Can any one doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind?"
• Later he expressed racist views on Anglo-Saxon Predominance [TXT]

<>1885:1901; Asian kerosene market the scene of a 15-year competition among emerging transnational petroleum corporations

• 1885:Russian crude oil discoveries allowed significant involvement in the early world petroleum market
  • More than one half of all Russian petroleum production was exported, 2/3 of this to Europe
  • Standard Oil had not yet extended its control of the market beyond New York City docks
• 1888:Russian kerosene dominated 22% of the world market as a result of low production costs, proximity to markets, and government support
• 1888ap24(NS):USA | Standard Oil Company founded the Anglo-American Oil Company to market its products in England
• 1890:Black Sea | Marcus Samuel, an English import/export businessman, saw the world’s first oil tankers, operated by the Russian company "Nobel Brothers"
  • Samuel realized that bulk transport in Nobel-type oil tankers was superior to Standard's method of shipping kerosene in metal cases by clipper ship
  • He signed a ten-year supply contract with Rothschild banking interests in Russia
  • He ordered eight tankers for shipping Russian kerosene in bulk through the Suez Canal [ID] to Asian markets
• 1891:Marcus Samuel won contract with Paris branch of the great Rothschild banking house to sell Russian kerosene
  • He would ship this kerosene in his specially designed tankers (based on a Russian innovation) from Russian Black-Sea ports to the markets of the world east of Suez
  • 1890:Sumatra oilfield | The Royal Dutch Company for the Working of Petroleum Wells in the Dutch East Indies formed, J.B. August Kessler, manager
  • Petroleum shipper Samuel moved into business association with Royal Dutch [above]
  • A Dutch-English transnational petroleum company was forming around these partnerships [GO 1892 just below]
• 1891mr10:Netherlands & Belgium | American Petroleum Company (51% Standard owned), then two Italian companies (60% Standard owned) and a Scandinavian firm (21.45% Standard owned)
• 1892:Suez Canal plied by Samuel’s tanker Murex, followed by the Conch [shell names on tankers eventually gave name to whole company]
• 1892:Sumatra, Pankalan Brandan | Royal Dutch Pipeline and refinery began operations
• 1895:1899; British merchant ships carried 70.8% of world sea trade
• 1896:Royal Dutch manager Kessler hired young banker and accountant Henri Deterding who was to launch that company on its global career
  • 1896:Samuel finagled a Dutch concession on Borneo, where he struck oil and then built refinery in Balik Papan
  • 1897:Borneo oil business so extensive that Samuel formed a separate "Shell" Trading and Transport Company
  • 1898:England knighted Marcus Samuel for services to the Empire = Shell ship freed a Navy warship that ran aground in the Suez Canal
  • 1899:Samuel first formally tried to persuade the Navy to test oil as a fuel, the fuel his own fleet used
    • Samuel pioneered the use of oil as marine fuel and tried to get the Navy to convert to oil
    • So it happened, but Samuel was not allowed by the British establishment to play the central role
  • 1900:Dutch East Indies production encouraged Samuel to renew contract with the Rothschilds to purchase Russian petroleum products for overseas transport and marketing
  • Shell expanded everywhere and determined to market gasoline in Europe by purchasing a German company from the Deutsche Bank
  • Shell now intended to enter into active competition with the companies that controlled the market there = Standard, Nobel and Rothschild
  • 1901fa:Shell was Britain's largest oil company, second only to Standard worldwide. As it prepared to enter the European market, it was the only company with global sources of crude
• Certain industrial companies were by definition "transnational" and began to act their spheres of influence like sovereign nation-states, at first like small sovereign states and then later like largish ones
• The stage was set for a titanic struggle between Standard and Shell. Nobels of Russia fell by the wayside. The contemporary struggle for world dominance in the new and every-day more imperative petroleum age was well under way

<>1885fe26(NS):Berlin Conference agreed on General Act whereby European imperialist powers settled on a division of Africa among them

• Bismarck offered himself as the "honest broker", but he was a less-than-neutral host, seeking advantages for Germany as the western European states sliced the cake of Africa and took possession of their respective assigned pieces
• Clearly the slicing was well under way before the Berlin Conference =
• 1877:Englishman Cecil Rhodes, on the eve of a great career of personal aggrandizement and imperialistic adventure in African diamond extraction, jotted down his most heartfelt views on the need to prepare an organization to consolidate and expand English imperialist control [TXT]
  • Rhodes dreamt of an international shadow state designed to repair historical damage to the global British Empire
  • EG= Repossess USA, earlier lost in the colonial revolution
  • Expand English control over Africa, etc., where other European states were competing with England
  • Protect English imperialist dominion everywhere
  • Rhodes envisioned a vast, world-wide secret society, a colonial/imperialist version of the Jesuit order or Free Masons [Wki]
  • Rhodes' company, De Beers Consolidated Mines, controlled 90% of the world's diamond production and had a huge stake in south African gold mining
• 1882:England claimed all of Egypt, having already taken possession of the Suez Canal
• These English moves in AfroAsia weakened the English position in Istanbul and persuaded Sultan Hamid to shift away from England and toward Germany
• 1883jy06:Hamburg Chamber of Commerce laid out its views on German interests in West Africa [BNE:171-4]
• Before long German economic advisers began to supplant the English
• 1884:1896; Istanbul| German Field Marshall Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz [ID] served as Hamid's military adviser. He was soon awarded the Turkish title pasha and eventually was designated an Ottoman Imperial mushir (field-marshal)
• The Berlin Conference now moved to build on these pre-1885 beginnings and to bring them under some sort of international diplomatic management
• The 1885 Berlin Conference made multiple cuts through areas and populations of Africa, dividing large chunks of the continent among European colonial powers, usually with no serious regard for existing territorial regions of native African peoples
• A most remarkable act of the Conference = The King of Belgium, Leopold, received as personal property the extensive lands drained by the Congo River
• The European slicing of the African cake did not stop in 1885 [Animated MAP of Africa from earliest times to our times]
• 1889:English Queen Victoria's Viceroy of India, George Curzon, wrote a powerful interpretation of British/Russian imperialist competition [Curzon.RUS]
• 1892se16:English Foreign Secretary justified taking Uganda as an English imperialist possession on the basis of the need to protect English control over Egypt and the Suez Canal
• 1908:English Lord Cromer justified the taking of Egypt in much the same way [E-TXT]
  • The preceding justifications can be compared with Gorchakov's 1864 explanation or defense of Russian imperialist expansion into Central Asia
  • The "domino theory" of the 1960s might be taken to be a close relative of the preceding justifications
• This was Africa's route to European imperialist domination [1914:MAP of Africa]
• The Berlin Conference made "The West" temporarily happy, if not the Africans or those Europeans (EG=Russia) excluded from the Conference =
• While England presumed the right a few years earlier [ID] to become intimately involved in Russian affairs after the Russo-Turkish war, it now joined other ambitious central and west European states in the exclusion of Russia from the Berlin Conference and its fateful deliberations
• Africa was in the grips of the imperialist powers of north-west Europe
• The Great Game was not child's play, and the story of it is not a soothing lullaby

\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1885ap21:je03; Russian government established the Nobles' Land Bank [VSB,3:751-2]

• The autocratic state saw the need to give gentry landowners some economic relief [TXT]
• But it did not come until three years after the establishment of the Peasant Land Bank [ID]
• Finance Minister N.K. Bunge's banking reforms were essential but spongy foundations for the Witte System of industrialization that was soon to follow
• Still, this was a long quarter century after the beginning of the "era of great reforms" [ID] and well off the pace of general European banking and financial trends
  

<>1886:French journalist, racist (particularly anti-Jewish) and rabid conservative Édouard Drumont published La France Juive [Jewish France, excerpt in P20:32]

<>1886:Russian musician Vasilii Andreev began to appear in public with his popular balalaika orchestra [ID]
*--Pop-arts were often linked with nostalgia for the pre-industrial or "folk" world
*--Also with an awakening of a broad public interest in art that treated simple every-day life ubiquities

<>1886my04:USA Chicago, Haymarket Square the site of violent labor disorder

• Police moved to break up a large crowd of demonstrators gathered in support of the eight-hour working day
  • In the midst of the assembly, a bomb detonated, killing seven policemen and four others
  • More than 100 were injured. Riots followed
• Public hysteria forced "rush to judgment" against eight "anarchists"
  • No evidence was found or presented at trial linking these eight to the manufacture or use of the bomb that detonated at Haymarket
  • But they were all found guilty of "inciting violence"
  • Four were hanged and one committed suicide
  • In 1893 the Illinois Governor pardoned the remaining three in view of the evident injustice of the trial
• In the "trial of public opinion" the Haymarket riot served
  • not only those who sought to criminalize organized labor
  • but also those who sought to condemn establishment legal culture
  • In the broader political culture of the late-19th-century world, "terror" had a place in the arsenals of many different persuasions, "left" and "right" and in between
  • Another thing Haymarket did was instill a new urgency to the labor movement. Organized self protection and self assertion became imperative =
• 1886:AFL [American Federation of Labor] formed out of 1881:Federation of...Unions. Federal structure (local, city, national, and international levels)
  • The United Mine Workers and the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners came in
  • But the four big railroad unions did not
• Samuel Gompers, AFL leader until 1924, struggled =
  • Against company-sponsored pseudo-unions
  • For higher wages, lower hours, and unemployment insurance for factory labor
  \\
  *--Gompers website

<>1886je06:Russian Finance Minister Nikolai Bunge [ID] took leading role in creation of the first Russian labor code [TXT]

• Bunge's  code incorporated all the demands made earlier by striking wage-laborers at one of Savva Morozov's large cotton mills [Harding:72-3 | See "Morozov" in MERSH]
  • Bunge was a stellar representative of those who chose "butter" in the eternal economic policy conflict between "guns or butter"
  • The "guns or butter" financial conflict was especially intense in the era of mature modern imperialism
  • Since 1882, Bunge pushed through both welfare and banking reforms (creation of peasant land banks [ID] and then noble land banks [ID]) in an effort to stem the tide of official reactionary policy under Alexander III
• Within a year, the tsarist state forced Bunge to resign under pressure exerted by those who sought tax increases in order to bolster military expenditure
  \\
  *--LOOP on WW1a
  *--LOOP on "finance"

<>1886se12:USA NYC | The World#27:13. Anonymous article, "Theosophy in New York: Facts about Mme. Blavatsky, Her Powers and Her Religion" [TXT]

• Russian "spiritualism" swept USA high society [W]
• Growing popularity of figures like Blavatsky [Portrait] built on the accomplishments of talented spiritualists like
  • Daniel Dunglas Home [W#1] [W#2] [W#3] and
  • Eusapia Palladino [W#1] [W#2]
• Altogether, these entertaining figures might be taken as warning against making crude generalizations about the "positivist" or "scientistic" mentality of 19th century "Western Civ" [ID]
• Also, for that matter, they recommend skepticism about the profound "sea-change" as European thinkers made effort to escape cliché positivistic simplicities [EG]
• Perhaps most important, these supernatural "psychic" figures represented a religious, mystic or spiritual side of the burgeoning pop-arts
• In the longer terms of "Western Civ", these spiritualist trends were heretical whether viewed from the position of traditional European Christianity OR science
• Blavatsky's pop-arts spirituality adumbrated trends that flourished into the 21st century [EG#1 | EG#2]
  \\
  *1995:|>Johnson,K. Paul|_Initiates of Theosophical Masters [Excerpted E-TXT] pt3:113-61 = Ukhtomskii, Dorzhiev, Gurdjieff(Georgii Ivn*) Lubovedsky Mystery
  *1997:| The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture

<>1887:German theorist of peasant origins, Ferdinand Tönnies, wrote powerful and influential critique of modernizing/industrializing society, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft [Community and Society] [CCS:227-51 | CCS,1:543-67]

• Tönnies contrasted artificial modern Society with an idealized recollection of pre-industrial everyday life in the rural Community
  • Tönnies influenced a significant growth of a public reactionary mood in Europe (the desire to return to a mythic past, a past not in fact ever experienced)
  • Where his influence did not reach we find other thinkers headed down the same path. EG=Russian pundit Ivan Aksakov's contrast between publika [the public] and narod [the people, the folk], a close parallel with Tönnies' Society and Community
  • Disenchantment with the modernizing contemporary world was shared by many who, unlike Tönnies and Aksakov, had no personal experience with life "down on the farm"
• 1887:USA author Edward Bellamy expressed a very different view when he published Looking Backward: 2000-1887 [TXT]
  • This bit of "science fiction" was intended to promote progressive values by refuting the claim often made by elite establishmentarians of the time -- 1887 -- that contemporary everyday life approached perfection [ID]
  • So far Bellamy seemed in line with the views of Tönnies or Aksakov, but he was in fact headed in the opposite direction =
  • He contrasted what he took to be the sorrowful truths of his contemporary 1887 with the good life in an imagined future year 2000
  • Looking Backward offered a complex variation on the "utopian" tradition
  • If Tönnies can be called "reactionary" (as he was above), Bellamy can be called "radical" in the sense that he recommended movement forward toward an idealized industrialized, scientific and technological future, hitherto not actually experienced by anyone
• English visionary William Morris wrote his utopian novel, News from Nowhere, in part to correct Bellamy's many perceived deficiencies
• Some American social critics, reacting in part to Bellamy, expressed their version of the growing general-European unease with conditions of everyday life caused by industrial modernization [Further aspects of Russian/USA "shared history" reveal themselves = TXT ]

<>1887:USA reading public was captivated by Leo Tolstoy or, more accurately, "Tolstoyanism", which exploded into a virtual "Tolstoy craze"

• In his late years, the great Russian novelist was becoming a moral force throughout the world
• Tolstoy's broad appeal and his turn toward popular preachment linked the high art of his novels with the emerging era of pop-arts [TXT]
• "The Kingdom of God is Within You" (1893) and 1894:"Christianity and Patriotism" [VSB,3:733]
• What is Art? (1897:1898)
• 1873:Ivan Kramskoi's portrait of Tolstoy in Olga's Gallery
• 1884:Nikolai Gay's portrait (detail) of Tolstoy in Olga's Gallery
• 1890s photo of Leo Tolstoy walking in a pasture at his Tula Province country estate "Yasnaia poliana"
• LOOP on pop-art continues
  \\
  *--Saul,2:311-34

<>1887:Russian religious thinker Konstantin Leont'ev became a monk [cf. Edie,2:271-80]
\\
*--Stephen Lukashevich, Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891):A Study in Russian "Heroic Vitalism" (NYC:1967) SUMMIT

<>1887mr01: Here on the sixth anniversary of Alexander II's assassination, Aleksandr Ulianov (Lenin's older brother) was arrested with others who were planning the assassination of the dead tsar's son and heir, Alexander III
*--Terrorism had slackened, but had not disappeared from Russian political culture
\\
*--Philip Pomper, Lenin's Brother

<>1888:Russian publicist Lev Tikhomirov [ID], an ex-leader of revolutionary terrorist party [ID] now on his way toward a new loyalty to his tsar, published a revealing interpretation Russia, Political and Social [v1 E-TXT | v2 E-TXT | Bad translation of 1886:PRS|_La Russie, politique et sociale
\\
*--Two remarkable website entries -- Wki and "The Mad Monarchist" -- feature Tikhomirov and his holy transition from terror to religious reactionary support of the Russian Imperial throne, but they do not mention his significant big book above

<>1889:Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev on Slavophilism, and "On Sins and Ailments" [VSB,3:731-3]
*1885:Ivan Kramskoi portrait of Solov'ev in Olga's Gallery
\\
*--LOOP on Vladimir Solov'ev

<>1889:1905; Russian statesman Sergei Witte came to St.Petersburg from Odessa as head of the railroad department of the Finance Ministry

• 1892: Witte was appointed Finance Minister and launched an amazing quarter-century transformation that can be named =

Russian Imperial Industrial Revolution
[Russian language website with primary and secondary documents]
[TXT on general European industrialization]

• "The Witte System" guided the destiny of Russia over an intense period (16 years)
• His reforms continued after he was dropped from power
• These were fateful years in which industrial modernization was combined with two other transformational features of the general European experience in these years =
  1. IMPERIALISM [TXT on general European imperialism | Also LOOP on Japan]
  2. REVOLUTION [TXT on general European experience of revolution | Also LOOP on 1905 Revolution]
• The great challenge of industrialization lies at the root of these two transformations
  • In Russia, the state seemed determined to play the leading role in urban-centered industrial modernization
  • Russian everyday life would never again be the same
  • Welfare legislation, including urban and wage-labor policies, took on new meaning
  • But was an urban "middle class" evolving as well?
  • And what about the vast majority of Russian Imperial subjects = peasants?
  • Didn't the state continue its customary and largely reactionary policies under conditions of radical modernization?
• Perhaps the biggest question of all = Was Russian industrialization essentially unlike earlier processes of European economic modernization? [TXT]
• "The Witte System" in Russia was inspired by a clear sense of a global industrial future in which agrarian nations would be gobbled up if they did not modernize [table]
• The challenge was to solve the "riddle of economic backwardness", and finances were at the heart of the matter =
  • An impoverished consumer economy was squeezed in order to restrict imports and win export capital for investment in heavy industry [EG]
  • The state took the central role in this process, rather than independent entrepreneurial companies or individuals
    • The imperial state grabbed the initiative, sometimes pushing independent enterprises to the side (most notably railroads)
    • Governmental "tutelage" over the economy and society (rather than social independence and free-market decision-making) was the norm
    • Was this altogether different in USA? [EG]
• 1895:1898; As for reform of Russian finances, the Russian Imperial State Bank became the central bank of issue in the Empire
  • This came after Witte brought an end to the paper ruble (with negligible foreign exchange value) and introduced the gold standard (with an exchangeability equal to that of any European currency)
  • Witte gave Russia for the first time an internationally recognized monetary system
• Foreign investment was encouraged, but always with an eye to restricting "repatriation" (profits on foreign investment transfered out of Russia and back to the home country, IE= draining profits out of Russia)
  • Tariffs on certain imports were introduced to protect the young and vulnerable Russian industrial economy from other more "advanced" economies
  • In this connection Witte was opposed to open markets and pure laissez faire measures
  • Like so many world statesmen who addressed the problems of economic modernization in the face of the intrusive or imperialistic advanced economies of "The West", Witte was influenced by the economic ideas of Friedrich List
• "Big ticket" items, like railroads, mining, large-scale industrial companies were given heaviest and disproportionate attention
  • The consumer market was thus further squeezed
  • These measures restrained consumer expenditures and raised revenue for focused state investment in further heavy industrial development
• The Russian agrarian economy was weak on the world market
  • Now USA became increasingly powerful, and thus an effective competitor with Russia on world grain markets
  • USA competition weakened Russian export trade and, thus, capital accumulation for investment in the domestic market
  • Many Russians were committed to a Russia in which peasant traditions might be protected from the standard ruinous processes that accompanied industrialization [EG]
• Russia's sluggish role in the early evolution of a global petroleum industry showed other weaknesses in comparison with competitors
• 1947:JEH#7:149, Alexander Gerschenkron measured "The Rate of Growth of Industrial Production in Russia since 1885" came up with these measures of Witte's success =

  1885-1889	6.10 % per year
  1890-1899	8.00 % per year	1894:1899; nearer 9.00 %
  1900-1906	1.45 % per year
  1907-1913	6.25 % per year	1910:1913; ca. 7.50 %
  1885-1913	5.72 % per year	Roughly = 1928:1955 levels of growth

• Olga Crisp (in an important comparative historical survey of European banking and finance, Banking in the Early Stages of Industrialization:184) created this comparison of gross national product in rubles per capita, Russia and four other major nations, 1897-1913 =

  NATION	1897	1913  (AS PERCENT)
  Russia	63	101.4      (62%)
  Germany	184	399.4      (46%)
  France	233	NA         (NA)
  Great Britain	273	460.6      (59%)
  United States	346	682.2      (51%)

• High ranking official and public activist Vladimir Gurko evaluated Witte's accomplishments as Finance Minister [VSB,3:759]. Here is a passage from his posthumously published memoirs, Features and Figures of the Past:56-57,66-67 =

  Witte's economic policy was but a program to meet the current need and showed that simplicity of conception which was his distinctive trait. This policy was, in brief, the accumulation of funds in the state treasury and the accumulation of private capital in the country. Realizing that the best method of increasing state resources was to develop the country's economic life, he encouraged such development; but he considered that the only means to attain this end was to develop industry, heavy industry especially, since it was the source of all great private fortunes. . . . Witte held that agriculture is but a limited field for the application of human labor, while industry, unconfined by material limitations, may develop indefinitely and thereby use an indefinite amount of labor. Agriculture to him was a necessary but purely subordinate branch of public economy; agriculture was necessary to feed the population, but could not serve as the sole source of its well-being. This explains his negative attitude toward all measures designed to improve the agricultural situation. [?EG?] As to selection of method, Witte was . . . an opportunist; he was facile also in shifting his opinion when he considered such shifts advisable. But his aim of promoting the economic development of Russia as a basis for political strength was steady and unswerving. In summary, Witte's accomplishments as Minister of Finance reveal his great merit as an organizer of our state economy. He brought order into the state budget, avoided deficits, and achieved even a pronounced increase of revenues; he strengthened Russian finances as much by the introduction of the gold standard as by his successful conversion of state loans to a lower rate of interest, to four instead of six per cent. He extended the network of our railways; he introduced and developed university and secondary technical education; he assembled a fine group of assistants and other officers in the Ministry of Finance; he organized the department of tax supervision; he most successfully introduced and organized the large-scale liquor monopoly. All these were the fruits of Witte's strenuous labor. Thanks to him our industry began to develop at an almost incredible speed and attracted a part of the population away from agricultural pursuits which could not absorb all the peasant labor as the population increased.

• Sergei Yu.Witte,. The Memoirs of Count Witte [Excerpts, CCC2,2:611-14]
• More on Sergei Witte
  *--LOOP on "finance"

Some images of Russian industrialization =
Moscow Peasant women factory workers [pix]
Moscow Factory dormitory [pix]
Petersburg on banks of the Neva River | Cotton Mill [pix]
Petersburg, same factory, peasant workers [pix]
Moscow Morozov Factory hiring hall [pix]
Baku Oil field [pix]
Siberian gold mine [pix]
Central-Asian petroleum pipelines [pix]

• The following items (Russian industrial bureaus, companies and societies) have entries devoted to them in MERSH =
  • Bureaus
    Industrial Labor Legislation in the Russian Empire [LOOP on "welfare"]
    Manufacturing Council
    Congresses of Representatives of Industry and Trade [GSE article TXT]
    Councils of Congresses of Russian Industrialists
    Factories and Plants owned by the Tsarist Russian Government
    War-Industries Committees [GSE article TXT]
    Central War Industries Committee [ID]
    Nationalization of Industry and Finance after 1917
    
  • Companies
    Factories and Plants in Russian Empire
    Manufactories in Tsarist Russia
    Morozov [powerful manufacturing family]
    Oil Production
    Putilov Works [great iron-works on the southwestern edge of Petersburg]
    Russian Commercial-Industrial Bank [ GSE article TXT]
    Russian Steam Navigation and Trade Company [Wki]
    Russian Timber Company of the Far East [ID]
    
  • Societies
    All-Russian Society of Sugar Manufacturers
    Association of Industry and Trade, 1906-1917 [ID]
    Russian Industrial Society
    Societies of Plant and Factory Owners
    Union of Ship Building Factories [Wki]
    Zhurnal Manufaktor i Torgovli [Journal of Manufacturing and Trade]
  \\
  These first secondary sources provide significant comparison with USA =
  *--White: Chapters 7 & 8
  *--Rimlinger:245-52 [TXT]
  *--Saul,2:148-53, 409-20, 451-5
  *--Fred V. Carstensen, "American Multinational Corporations in Imperial Russia: Chapters on Foreign Enterprise and Russian Economic Development" | 1977mr:JEH#37,1:245f
  *--Thomas C. Owen, Russian Corporate Capitalism, chapter 3: "Corporations in the Russian Empire, 1700-1914" (pp. 16-49), and the discussion of Russian capitalism in a comparative perspective [TXT (pp. 78-83)]
  *--J. P. McKay, Pioneers for Profit: Foreign Entrepreneurship and Russian Industrialization, 1885-1913
  *--George Sherman Queen, The United States and the Material Advance in Russia, 1881-1906| Tells of McCormick Harvesting Machine Co., Remington Rand, Allis-Chalmers Mfg Co., Robins Conveying Belt Co., and several banking firms
  *--The great German sociologist Max Weber was fascinated by the modern experience of the two peripheral European peoples, Russians and Americans
  \\
  The following secondary sources deal more directly with Russia =
  *--James H. Bater, St. Petersburg: Industrialization and Change
  *--William L. Blackwell, The Beginnings of Russian Industrialization, 1800-1860
  *----------. The Industrializaton of Russia: An Historical Perspective
  *--Daniel Chirot, ed. The Origins of Backwardness in East Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Early Twentieth Century
  *--Jonathan Coopersmith,The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926
  *--Olga Crisp, Studies in the Russian Economy before 1914 (LND:1976)
  *--Malcom Falkus, Industrialization of Russia, 1700-1914 (LND:1972)
  *--Alexander Gerschenkron, "Agrarian Policies and Industrialization: Russia, 1861-1917". The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol. 6, pt. 2. Cambridge:1965, pp. 706-800
  *----------. "Problems and Patterns of Russian Economic Development". In his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Cambridge MA:1962; Reprint in CSH:282-308
  *----------. "The Rate of Industrial Growth in Russia since 185l" *1947:JEH#7:144-174
  *--R. W. Goldsmith, "The Economic Growth of Tsarist Russia, 1860-1913", Economic Development and Cultural Change 9 (1961):441-75
  *--Paul R. Gregory, "Economic Growth and Structural Change in Tsarist Russia: A Case of Modern Economic Growth?" Soviet Studies 23 (January 1972):418-34
  *----------. "Russian Industrialization and Economic Growth: Results and Perspectives of Western Research". 1977:JGO#25:200-18
  *----------. Russian National Income:1885-1913. Cambridge ENG:1982
  *--M. S. Miller, The Economic Development of Russia, 1905-1914. London:1926
  *--Roger Portal, "The Industrialization of Russia". The Cambridge Economic History of Europe 6, pt. 2:801-872
  *--Theodore Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia
  *--Post-Soviet Russian-language studies = Search UO library catalog with KEYWORD "vitte"

<>1889:English stevedores, longshoremen and other unskilled dockers organized massive and finally successful strike, marking the beginning of modern wage-labor union movement in England

• Strike organizer Tom Mann wrote memoirs of the strike [CCC2,2:827f CCC3,2:877-84]
• Socio-economic map of London that year gives insight into the population-geography of European industrial urbanization
• 1889:English cultural elite, led by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, published Fabian Essays in Socialism [Sidney Webb's contribution in CCC3,2:953-70]
• LOOP on Socialism

<>1889:USA Theodore Roosevelt published The Winning of the West

• Roosevelt was the son of a wealthy New York importer
• As he pursued a legal and political career in NY, he was able to purchase ranch lands in Dakota territory where Native American Lakota Sioux were being pushed off their lands and pressed into reservations
• After a political setback and devastating personal loss of close family members, he retired for two years (1884-1886) to his ranches
• His book reflected his experience on the range and his desire to be identified with the mythic vigor of pioneer life
  • He praised the supreme "righteousness" of war against indigenous "savages" of the prairie, "though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman"
  • Wide-eyed acknowledgment of this gruesome reality lies at the heart of his "heroism"
  • He wrote further, "American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tatar, New Zealander and Maori, -- in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people"
  • NB! his future-forward view that horror today might eventually be justified by a great tomorrow
• "Though unsuccessful as a rancher", as one popular US desk encyclopedia put it, "he gained in the West many of the picturesque mannerisms that complimented his positive personality"

<>1889ja01:USA NV Paiute native, Wovoka, fell into a trance and had visions that became the basis of a new mystery religion called the "Ghost Dance"
*--Within a year, the Native American reservations on the Great Plains were alive with Ghost Dancers

<>1889je:USA journal North American Review published article "The Gospel of Wealth" [TXT | Excerpts = CCC2,2:803f CCC3,2:885-99], written by industrialist Andrew Carnegie

• The article appeared in book form under that title in 1900
• Since 1888, Andrew Carnegie was the chief owner of the great industrial company, Homestead Steel Works, just upstream from Pittsburgh

<>1889jy12:Russian counter-reform measures established "firm governmental authority" in the villages, in the form of Zemskie nachal'niki [Land Captains] [VSB,3:687-8]

• As a rule, only those gentry who chaired regional noble assemblies could hold this office
  • The tsarist state sought to restore the power of the nobility over peasants, and thus, in part, to reverse one of the essential elements of serf emancipation [ID]
  • But the state also sought to extend its own authority more intimately into the post-emancipation village
  • The tsarist state made this final half-hearted institutional effort to resuscitate its most privileged but seriously damaged soslovie [social-estate]
  • This was the last effective moment in the life of the noble assembly as organizational center of aristocratic political life
• Gentry politics moved into more clearly "modern" institutional frameworks
• Now other organizations -- zemstvos and then political parties -- seemed better to meet the felt needs of the Russian well-born
• More Russians, even in privileged circles, were beginning to see that reactionary policy and the old order were indeed doomed
• Finance Minister Sergei Witte deplored the creation of Land Captains
  • He understood that it met no authentic aristocratic need and that it did harm to the most numerous soslovie, the peasantry
  • In his memoirs, Witte described how those officials who created Land Captains presumed that villagers were "eternally under age, so to speak. This belief seems to me profoundly erroneous"
  • Witte prophetically predicted that this belief "is fraught with disastrous consequences for the future"
• Not only were gentry politics, per se, increasingly a failure, the Russian nobility, as a legally-defined and defended social formation [soslovie], was not actually prospering in the countryside. On the whole, rural gentry were weak and poor, and thus generally dispirited
• EG= View these film dramatizations = FLM#1 based on Turgenev story | FLM#2 based on a Chekhov story
  • But for some gentry, life was still sweet, or at least had the external trappings of sweetness =
  • 1894:Tea-time on a Kharkov province country estate [pix]
  • 1894:Cadets prepare to practice dancing at the exclusive Corps of Pages [pix]

<>1889:Paris World's Exposition on the centennial of the Great French Revolution was less focused on "liberty, equality and fraternity" than on the muscular accomplishments of economic progress
*--This world's fair followed in the emerging tradition [ID] by featured the newly built steely symbol of French industrial modernization, the Eiffel Tower [W lxt]
*--Painting of the entrance into the Central Dome of the Gallery of Machines [lxt]
*--This was the "Beautiful Era" [Belle Époque] that immediately preceded the WW1 catastrophe
\\
*--Wki

<>1889jy14:jy20; Paris | In the year of the Paris Exposition [just above], an equally global or universal-minded organization, the Second International, held its founding congress

• The First International had faded from the scene in acrimonious factional dispute among leading figures [LOOP]
• But now European (and soon world-wide) social-democracy was becoming a public force
  • From this time forward for over a quarter century, the Second International worked to mobilize European, North American and world-wide progressive political parties and workers' unions
  • The goal was to hasten labor-friendly economic reform and to limit the economic power of capitalism and the political power of industrial companies
• The liberal revolution over the previous century had gone only so far to break free of the old feudal hierarchies
  • Activists felt that the liberal or "bourgeois" revolution had in fact created a new hierarchy based on wealth
  • That hierarchy was depicted in a pamphlet published by the International Workers of the World [pix]
• The long-term goal of the Second International was to replace the capitalist or bourgeois "mode of production" with a radically democratic socialist mode of production in which wage-laborers assumed the roles of both management and labor
• However, European socialism was splitting, giving birth to two main trends in Social Democracy =
1. Moderate socialism, or left-wing-liberal or radical-liberal, an increasingly overt movement (EG=Eduard Bernstein)
2. Revolutionary, conspiratorial socialism, an increasingly covert movement (EG=Vladimir Il'ich Lenin)
• The first trend expressed optimism about the ability to build on the successes of the earlier liberal revolution
• The second trend presumed that the earlier liberal revolution would have to be overturned by domestic war, by violent revolution
• This split represents for socialism a functional equivalent of the contradictions built into European liberalism [ID]) =
• European Marxism broke into corresponding factions, and the Russian movement was soon to do the same
• The Second International lasted a quarter century
  • It collapsed at the outbreak of World War One
  • It died at the end of that terrible war
• The size and strength of the Second International did pressure industrializing nations of Europe and North America to follow Bismarck' s lead in Germany in the direction of social welfare reform
  \\
  *--Rimlinger's comparative history of welfare, ch. 1:1-10 (Intro) [TXT]; chs. 6-7:193-301 (USA [TXT] and Russia [TXT]); ch. 9:333-43 (Conclusion)
  *--P. Flora and A. J. Heidenheimer, eds., Development of Welfare States in America and Europe
  *--GO 1927 to see how welfare comparison looked four decades later in a time of crisis, between WW1 & WW2
  *--GO 1964 to see how welfare comparison was done yet four more decades later, in the era of the Cold War
  *--GO 2007 to see a TABLE that compares affluence in USA with affluence in welfare-oriented Norway
  ||
  *--LOOP on The Second International
  *--LOOP on WW1a

<>1889se:USA, Chicago | From an 1892 speech by founder Jane Addams, Hull House was described in the following way=

It represented no association, but was opened by two women, backed by many friends, in the belief that the mere foothold of a house, easily accessible, ample in space, hospitable and tolerant in spirit, situated in the midst of the large foreign colonies which so easily isolate themselves in American cities, would be in itself a serviceable thing for Chicago. Hull House endeavors to make social intercourse express the growing sense of the economic unity of society. It is an effort to add the social function to democracy [boldface added to highlight sense of "civil society" [ID] embedding in Addams' comments]. It was opened on the theory that the dependence of classes on eachother is reciprocal; and that as "the social relation is essentially a reciprocal relation, it gave a form of expression that has peculiar value" ["The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" (TXT)]

<>1890:African Cape Colony under the control of English imperialist adventurer and free-wheeling colonial entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes
*1888:1889; Documents describe Rhodes administration [CCC3,2:1138-49 | CCC2,2:841f]
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1890:English public activist William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, published In Darkest England and the Way Out
*--William Booth compared the degradation and suffering of English wage-laborers with those of the peoples of Africa under imperial/colonial subjugation [PWT2:173-6]

<>1890:Finland brought more tightly under Russian imperialist control

• While Russification rushed ahead in Finland and Poland, opposition to reactionary policy grew within the highest ranks of Russian officialdom =
• 1892ja:Russian diplomat Vladimir Lamsdorf warned of the harm that Russification policy caused in Poland [VSB,3:690]
  \\
  *--E. C. Thaden, Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855-1917

<>1890:French imperialist legislator and occasional Prime Minister Jules Ferry stated sacred claim to Vietnam in Le Tonkin et la Mère-Patrie [E-TXT] =

Colonial policy is the child of the industrial revolution. For wealthy countries where capital abounds and accumulates fast, where industry is expanding steadily, where even agriculture must become mechanized in order to survive, exports are essential for public prosperity. Both demand for labor and scope for capital investment depend on the foreign market ... All over the world, beyond the Vosges, and across the Atlantic, the raising of high tariffs has resulted in an increasing volume of manufactured goods, the disappearance of traditional markets, and the appearance of fierce competition. Countries react by raising their own tariff barriers, but that is not enough [...] The protectionist system, unless accompanied by a serious colonial policy, is like a steam engine without a safety valve [...] The European consumer market is saturated; unless we declare modern society bankrupt and prepare, at the dawn of the twentieth century, for its liquidation by revolution (the consequences of which we can scarcely foresee), new consumer markets will have to be created in other parts of the world. [...] Colonial policy is an international manifestation of the eternal laws of competition [Heineman, Readings in European History:184]

<>1890:Russian mathematician Sonia Kovalevskaia described her everyday life in A Russian Childhood, a significant account of women's education

• Other women left significant memoirs of their experience, sometimes highly political. See Barbara Engel, ed., Five Sisters: Women against the Tsar
• Vera Broido, Daughter of Revolution: A Russian Girlhood Remembered (1998)
• Vera Figner, Memoirs of a Revolutionist
• Russian-born Emma Goldman emigrated to USA and launched herself on a remarkable half-century of anarchist activism
  \\
  *--Anna Hillyar and Jane McDermid, Revolutionary Women in Russia, 1870-1917 (2000), chapters 1, 2 & 3
  *--Barbara Alpern Engel, Women in Russia, 1700-2000 (2004)
  *--Nataliia Pushkareva, Women in Russian History from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century (1997)
  *--Dorothy Atkinson, et al., Women in Russia (1977)
  *--Rochelle Ruthchild, Women in Russia and the Soviet Union: An Annotated Bibliography (1993)

<>1890:USA naval strategist Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 [TXT]

<>1890:USA Harvard University Professor William James (1842-1910) marked the beginning of an epoch in American intellectual history with the publication of Principles of Psychology

• James always claimed that his ideas were derived from the principles of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) [W#1 | W#2 | W#3]
• James popularized "Pragmatism", a broad school of philosophy so dominant in USA in the generation before WW1 [CCC2,2:1035-41 | CCC3,2:1173-91] =
  • Consciousness is not a mirror of actuality, it is selective, interested, goal-oriented
  • Action is a function of consciousness. The mind "carves out" a vision of actuality from "the jointless continuity of space"
  • Knowledge is instrumental. "Truth" is not absolute but "only the expedient in our way of thinking"
  • "Radical empiricism" [see below] is a philosophy that exalts "pure experience"
  • It rejects transcendent principles and seeks meaning in the "conjunctive relations" that variously link ideas with one another and join thought with experience. [1935:CDE:995]
• 1897:The Will to Believe [TXT]
• 1902:The Varieties of Religious Experience [TXT]
• 1907:Pragmatism [TXT]
• 1909:The Meaning of Truth
• 1912:Essays in Radical Empiricism [TXT], published posthumously
  \\
  *--[W]
  *--Wagar on Pragmatism [TXT]

<>1890mr18:German Emperor Willhelm II dismissed Chancellor Otto von Bismarck [DPH:271-4]
*--This dismayed many contemporaries [pix]
*--Bismarck's public career of 30 years, one of the most decisive and brilliant in the European 19th century, was at its end
\\
*--George Frost Kennan, _The_Decline of Bismarck's European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875-1890
*--Retallack,James, _Germany's Second Reich: Portraits and Pathways

<>1890je12:Russian Zemstvo electoral and voting laws were altered

• One result of these alterations was strengthening the position of landlords and marginalizing villagers within Zemstvos
• More generally, whether for landlords or for villagers, the range of zemstvo authority was seriously constricted
• This happened on the very eve of the great 1891:1892; Russian famine [ID] when the Zemstvo was much needed [VSB,3:688-9]
• The tsarist state seemed bent on scuttling the Zemstvo and other "great reforms"
• This and other clumsy official reactionary measures provoked Witte to compose a bitter and ironic "more rightist than thou" tirade
• In this year the world-famous chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev resigned his St.Petersburg University post in protest over the refusal of Minister of Education I. D. Delianov (an acolyte of Dmitrii Tolstoi) to accept a student petition which Mendeleev had agreed to deliver

<>1890jy02:USA passed Sherman Anti-Trust Act [Wki]
*--The Act was originally intended for use against large corporations and other business conglomerates [ID] engaged in the unchecked pursuit of their own perceived interests
*--But the Act was more frequently and effectively employed against wage-laborers who sought to organize themselves in the pursuit of their own perceived interests
*--NB! these words on the question of "trust" in market-economic transactions [*2009:E-TXT]

<>1890de15:SD Standing Rock Reservation, not far from his family cabin, Sitting Bull was killed by US Government Agency forces in connection with the policy of forceful suppression of native religious practice

<>1891:English artist, craftsman and writer William Morris published his novel in the "utopian" tradition, News from Nowhere, or , An Epoch of Rest [TXT]

• Morris described a humane ideal future in 22nd-century England, where the observation of communitarian and libertarian principles eradicated cultural, political, social and economic exploitation
• Morris refused to accept the rampant vulgarities of mass-production industrial urbanization and commercial culture or pop-arts
• He was steeped in an esthetic of rural virtue that harmonized with a European cultural nostalgia for a "down-on-the-farm" life-style
• He reacted to the narrowness of Bellamy's utopian concept of industrial progress. Morris, perhaps looking down his nose, called Looking Backward "a horrible cockney dream". The refined Englishman Morris certainly put the American author in his place
  \\
  *--Website of Wm.Morris Society

<>1891:Russian scholar Maksim Kovalevskii published Modern Customs and Ancient Laws in Russia [TXT]

<>1891:1892; Russian famine
*--Not long before, Finance Minister Ivan Vyshnegradskii foolishly stated, "We may starve, but we WILL export". Who did he mean by "we"?
*--Also not long before, the reactionary state took steps to confine Zemstvo operations [EG], severely limiting the ability of Russia to deal with famine
*--Nizhnii-Novgorod region| Pioneer Russian news-photographer Maksim Petrovich Dmitriev recorded village and urban life in this difficult time [pix#1 (opening pix is of a mirskoi skhod [village assembly) | pix#2]. News photos presented the suffering of the peasantry as only quality photographic realism can, immediate and horribly beautiful =

Dmitriev photo of dying peasant woman

\\
*--Saul,2:335-64
*--R. G. Robbins, Famine in Russia, 1891-1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis

<>1891:1903; Russia | Trans-Siberia railroad, after a half-century delay, nearly completed in nine years

• Rail connection between Europe and the markets of Korea, China and Japan now established [pix] [MAP]
• Ussuri River (north of Vladivostok) steamboat [pix]
• Russia now poised to become vigorous Pacific Rim presence, but would it be a commercial or a military/imperialist presence?
• Or would it be cultural/spiritual? Consider future Trans-Siberian railroad administrator and Chairman of the Russo-Chinese Bank, Prince Esper Ukhtomskii [Wki-ID | Excerpts from his account of travel "To the East" as companion of tsarevich Nicholas Aleksandrovich (E-TXT)]
• 1893:Russia published an official explanation of the railroad's significance [CCC2,2:616-20]
  \\
  *--Trans-Sib website, w/ good map
  *--WEBSITE on Russian railroads, esp. Trans-Siberian
  *--Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917
  *--Marléna Laruelle, "'The White Tsar': Romantic Imperialism in Russia’s Legitimizing of Conquering the Far East" [E-TXT]
  ||
  *--LOOP on WW1a

<>1891:USA traveler and lecturer George Kennan published Siberia and the Exile System with its powerful condemnation of Russian tsarist state's oppression by means of removal and frontier development in Siberia [Excerpts: VSB,3:684-7 | WRH3:387-404]
*--As that great symbol of progressive modernization -- the Trans-Siberian Railroad -- reached for Pacific shores, Siberian exile expressed but another facet of reactionary state policy

<>1891my01:Russian industrial workers delivered and listened to speeches on May Day [Harding:84-91]
*1891fe04:French Labor Party and the National Federation of Trade Unions urged French workers to join the international labor day of protest (May Day) against miserable conditions of wage-laborers [BNE:146-7] GO my15

<>1891my11:Japan, Otsu | Terrorist Tsuda Sanzo, an escort policeman, slightly wounded future Russian Emperor Nicholas II during state visit
*--Kojima Iken, Supreme court, ruled against the death penalty, showing unusual independence of the law and its courts, but also diplomatic slight to Russia
\\
*--KEJ

<>1891my15:Vatican issued Pope Leo XIII's radical encyclical Rerum novarum [TXT]

• The encyclical gave Church sanction to the burgeoning world wage-labor movement and strengthened the Church's claim to be the spokesperson for the working masses
• 1931 anniversary of this radical encyclical struck a very different tone
• The German Kulturkampf spread to France [DPH:258-61]

<>1891oc:German Social-Democratic Party adopted its Erfurt Program [DPH:274-7]
*--German miner Nikolaus Osterroth wrote later memoirs about his first confrontation with the Social Democratic Party [PWT2:170-3]

<>1892:1894; Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev published The Meaning of Love [Excerpts = Edie,3:85-98]

<>1892:Geneva | Russian Marxist Georgii Plekhanov published On the Tasks of the Socialists in the Campaign against Famine in Russia [VSB,3:708-9]

<>1892je11:Tsarist state revised the 1870 city-duma reform statute

• The revised statute on city dumas increased central control over municipal self administration and reduced the number who could participate in elections [VSB,3:689-10]
• The center of gravity in Russian economic and social life was shifting from the countryside to the city
• This trend also called forth labor legislation (e.g., "police socialism") and welfare legislation were designed to meet the needs of a small but crucial and growing urban wage-labor population
• Semen Kanatchikov wrote an autobiography, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia which illustrated in great detail the life of a fresh-minted Russian proletarian or wage-laborer in the years up to the 1905 Revolution
• Photos of early 20th-century Petersburg street scenes =
  • Nevskii prospekt
  • Kazan Cathedral (across Nevskii from the Singer Sewing Machine Building)
  • Stroganov Palace
  • Yusupov Palace [ditto]
  • Dvortsovskii
  • Peter-Paul Fortress island
  • Finlandskii
  • Smolnyi Cathedral
  • Nikolai bridge
  • Troiskii bridge
  • Street kiosk
  • Zoo
  • Troitskii Church with its Turkish canons
  • Surskii women's monastery
• Russian Empire, 1895-1910. Pictures of St.Petersburg. Photographs from stereoscopic negatives in the Keystone-Mast Collection. They are presented by California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside (comments: edward.earle@ucr.edu)
• Photos of early 20th-century Moscow street scenes =
  • Tverskaia
  • Petrovskaia
  • Grocery outlet
  • Sretenka
  • Strastnoi Square
• But what about urban elites? Was there a non-bureaucratic "bourgeois" liberal political culture? Was there anything of that much debated European bürgerliche Gesellschaft [urban or civil society]? Did modern city life come to Russia only at the end of the great European epoch of urban capitalist liberalism?
• Tighter restriction on the evolution of urban institutions was another example of reactionary state policy
  \\
  *--Website E-TXT of comparative essays on the Russian city Odessa and the USA city New Orleans
  *--Metropolis, 1890-1940 [Another edition]. See Kenneth T. Jackson, "The Capital of Capitalism: the New York Metropolitan Region, 1890-1940":319-353; and R. A. French, "Moscow, the Socialist Metropolis":355-379.
  *--L. S. Bourne., et al., eds., Urbanization and Settlement Systems: International Perspectives, section 1, ch#1:23-48 (USA); section 4, ch#1:335-55 (USSR)
  *--Thomas C. Owen, Russian Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika (1995), NB! "Russian Entrepreneurship in Comparative Perspective" [TXT pp.78-83]
  *------------------------, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants, 1855-1905
  *--Henri Troyat, Daily Life in Russia Under the Last Tsar [1903 fictional social history = everyday life, business & other elites in touch w/ folk]
  *--Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia
  *--Jo Ann Ruckman, The Moscow Business Elite: A Social and Cultural Portrait of Two Generations, 1840-1905
  *----------. Savva Morozov: A Moscow Entrepreneur on eve of the Russian Revolution
  *--Daniel R. Brower, The Russian City Between Tradition and Modernity, 1850-1900
  *--Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia
  *--Hamm, ed. City in Late Imperial Russia (Bloomington:1986)
  *--M. C. Kaser, "Russian Entrepreneurship". In Cambridge Economic History of Europe 8, part 2. Cambridge ENG:1978
  \\
  The following articles devoted to Russian wage-labor organizations are in MERSH (KNIGHT library reference) =
  All-Jewish Workers Union
  Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of Saint Petersburg [~~Zubatov]
  Bakinskii Proletarii
  Belorussian Workers and Peasants Party
  Labor Groups of the War Industries Committee [Central War Industries Committee]
  Ludinovo Workers' Disturbances 1861, 1865-66
  Putilov Strikes
  Union of Oil Industry Workers

<>1892jy04:USA | Platform of the Progressive or Populist Party addressed central issue of economic inequality and criticized the growing role of government in fostering and protecting that inequality

• Much rhetorical energy was exerted to praise laissez faire and "free" markets
  • But there was by this time little authentic dispute among US political factions, left, right or center, about whether a vigorous government should or should not be involved in social and economic matters
  • In practice (if not in rhetoric) all factions agreed that government should play an active role in the economy
  • The only real issue was this = Whose social and economic interests ought to be fostered and protected by vigorous government action
• The new Progressive Party opposed use of governmental power to support privilege
  • It sought to break up the close alliance of government and wealth
  • It did not seek to curb governmental power, rather to shift the focus of governmental power from protection of industrial companies toward protection of the needs of the vast majority of working people, to convert government into an active agent of popular welfare
• Among their goals was the institution of a graduated income tax, introduction of initiative and referendum, and democratic election of senators
• At the same time, the Progressive or Populist Party, as a "third party", challenged the near monopoly on political power held by the two main political parties
• The Progressive Era in USA gave Russian scholar Moisei Ostrogorskii [ID] grounds for optimism about the general European future of democratic politics
• TXT of 3 hopeful paragraphs from his book Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties
• The Progressive Era: Primary Documents...1890-1914 (2004)
• The Muckrakers . . .
  \\
  *2003au03:Kommersant (a progressive business-oriented post-Soviet Russian serial) described what happened in USA progressive era when big oil and big finance became too big [TXT]
  *--Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (2003)
  *--Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist democracy and the question of capitalism in progressive era Portland, Oregon (2003)

<>1892jy06:USA Homestead Strike (near Pittsburgh) [W#1 | W#2]

• Five-month labor dispute with the huge industrial company, Carnegie Steel, turned violent
• Corporation manager Henry C. Frick hired 300 Pinkertons
• Pinkertons were a private police force founded by Allan Pinkerton [W]
• Pinkerton was also involved in Civil War espionage and contributed thusly to the creation of the Federal Secret Service
• Frick organized military operations against workers, eventually involving the Pennsylvania National Guard
• Carnegie, the owner, and Frick, the manager, broke with one another, in part because of Frick's hostility toward wage-labor
• Occurring within two days of one another, the formation of the Progressive Party and the Homestead Strike announced that the Progressive Era was going to be a highly fretted quarter century in US history

\\
*--James Howard Bridge, The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company: The Romance of Millions (1903)
*--Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead: Politics, Culture and Steel

<>1893:1934; Russian cultural phenomenon, lasting nearly a half-century, called "The Silver Age"

• The Silver Age opened with Dmitrii Merezhkovskii's "On the Present Condition of Russian Literature"
  • Merezhkovskii also wrote on revolution and religion, and the Jewish Question [RRS:187-224]
• The Silver Age of Russian Culture: An Anthology
• Russian art of the avant-garde: Theory and criticism, 1902-1934
• The diary of Valery Bryusov (1893-1905)
• Some would extend this remarkable epoch 41 years, through the 1917 Revolutions, into emigration, but also into the early Soviet period, up to the imposition of Stalinist "Socialist Realism" in 1934
• The Silver Age coincided with new trends in Russian philosophical and religious thought
• Russian artistic developments are best understood in a pan-European, perhaps one should say "global", context
  \\
  *--William Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture
  *--Robert C. Williams, Russian Art and American Money, 1900-1940

<>1893:English theorist Thomas Huxley published Evolution and Ethics [excerpts = CCC3,2:855-66] which encouraged application of Darwinian biology to the analysis of human morality and behavior

• 1894:US scholar, diplomat and President of Cornell University, Andrew D. White, summarized some telling moments in the emerging struggle between science and religion, with special reference to the impact of Darwinian biology, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom [Excerpts = PWT2:229-31]
• White described how Darwin's biology "had come into the theological world like a plough into an ant-hill"
• White and his university were accused of teaching atheism and "infidelity"
• Darwinian concepts gladdened some and outraged others
• Science continued its original role as challenger to received or customary ways of seeing the world
• And science expanded its second role = A new totalistic explanation and solution of human problems, a substitute for received or customary ways of seeing the world

<>1893:French philosopher and social critic Elie Halévy (1870-1937) and associates (largely from the elitist Ecole Normale) founded Revue de métaphysique et de morale

• The march of "Western" scientism was resisted in "The West", but not with a view to turning back to old spiritual ways =
  • The new journal stated that "it is necessary to act against the miserable positivism, which we are departing from, and the irritating religiosity, which we risk getting stuck in, to build a philosophy of action and reflection, to be rationalists with a passion"
• Halévy at this time devoted serious attention to the English classical liberal economic thinkers, the philosophical radicals of the early 19th century [ID] =
• 1904:He published Growth of philosophic radicalism
• He sought to install an economic foundation, so to speak, under his neo-Kantian philosophy [ID Kant]

<>1893:French sociologist Émile Durkheim published The Division of Labor in Society [Excerpts = CCS,1:483-515]

• He sought to round off the extreme individualism of the "classical economists" who emphasized the atomized individual
• Durkheim emphasized the essential social or communitarian setting of individual choices
• Still he felt the need to distinguish between "mechanical solidarity" and "organic solidarity"
• He made that distinction, but he presumed that advanced society required a bit of both
• We see again that the "Westernization" of the "West" was not a smooth or natural process

<>1893:Hawaiian Islands under control of USA sugar plantation owner

<>1893:Russian government focused on industrial companies when it launched a review of national manufacturing industry and trade [CCC2,2:603-10]

<>1893my01:Chicago World's Fair (Columbian Exposition)

• In a year of economic crisis in USA, Chicago put on the best show possible
• George Ferris, Jr., constructed the first modern Ferris wheel, powered by a 1000 horse power engine
  • Thirty-six wooden cars were suspended around the 264 feet high wheel. Each car held 60 riders
  • More than one million paid fifty cents for a ride
• At this same fair, Wisconsin University [old "Northwest Territory"] Professor Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced his great theory about US history, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" [TXT]
  • He later published a book-length study [TXT]
  • Some idea of the target of Turner's remarks can be gained from this paragraph of Tocqueville's Democracy in America
  • East Coast elites had reason to be affronted [EG] by the frontier-oriented and westward-looking cultural radicalism of Turner's thesis
• Sitting Bull' s SD reservation cabin had been crated up and shipped to Chicago for exhibit at this World's Fair
  • The transported cabin was situated just down the lanes from where Turner held forth on the essence of the American frontier experience
  • When the Fair closed down, the cabin — so it is said — was packed off to the city dump
• Turner announced the closing of the American frontier, then Sitting Bull's cabin was trashed
  • These two Chicago events together were like a mythic announcement that the era of Native American independence on the Great Plains was over
  • More than that, the longer era that spanned nearly two hundred years in the relations of Euro-Americans and Native Americans was also at a close
  • A new era was about to dawn
• In this same year, the Russian Trans-Siberian Railway Committee issued provisional regulations to promote peasant emigration to the Bashkir Steppes and Siberia
  • After nearly 200 years of frontier confrontation there, the Bashkir steppes now brought fully under Russian dominion
    • 1899:Refinements published in "Regulations concerning government Grants-in-Aid to Settlers Migrating with Required Authorization to Siberia and the Steppe Governorship General" [VSB,3:760]
  • Library of Congress website devoted to the shared frontier experience of Russia and USA (bilingual)
  \\
  *--White:18-40 compares RUS-USA indigenous populations, rates of geographical expansion, and early commercial phases of economic development [TXT]
  *--D. W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War [TXT]
  *--Wagar on Turner [TXT]
  *--Saul,2:365-77
  *--Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, "Russian Expansion in the Far East in the Light of the Turner Hypothesis", in Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, The Frontier in Perspective
  *--D. W. Treadgold, "Russian Expansion in the Light of Turner's Study of the American Frontier", 1952oc:Agricultural History:147-152
  *--William Wykoff and Gary Hausladen, "Settling the Russian Frontier: With Comparisons to North America", 1989mr:Soviet Geography [now titled Eurasian Geography and Economics] #30, 3:179-89
  *--Continue "Eurasia" LOOP

<>1893de14:Russian law restricted peasant ability to buy or sell land independently from village community [VSB,3:756]
*--Reactionary policy resisted evolution of independent peasant farmers just as the Siberian frontier opened for them
*1893:English traveler F. J. Wishaw, Out of Doors in Tsarland described peasant village life [WRH3:426-34]
*1894:Konstantin Korovin painting of wintry scene, a sleigh in front of peasant hut, in Olga's Gallery

<>1894:USA NYC | William Dean Howells published a utopian novel, A Traveler from Altruria

• One of Howells' characters described the main change in American life, 1850-1890 =
  • In 1850, a person who ran into difficulties, who did not at first succeed, turned his hand to something else
  • As a last resort, a person "went West, pre-empted a quarter section of public land, and grew up with the country"
  • But, as the theorist/historian Turner declared, the frontier was now closed [ID]
  • "The struggle for life", Howells wrote, "has changed from a free fight to an encounter of disciplined forces, and the free fighters that are left get ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital". [Kazin:17]
• As the 19th century wound down, the giganticism of the "second industrial revolution" presented a looming menace to the contemporary imagination
• Heavy stripes of disenchantment ran through cultural life, not excluding the fine arts
• Events seemed to contradict the naive "liberal" belief in progress
• A feeling of disenchantment drove Max Weber into deeper theoretical and sociological searches for sources of current problems
• For others it encouraged a romantic affirmation of earlier, simpler, often rural virtues. For example, Thorstein Veblen praised life "down on the farm" and contrasted it with urban and industrial dehumanization
• Disenchantment stimulated both dreamy projections of utopian escape (remember Tönnies) as well as terrifying projections of utopian hell (in the emerging anti-utopian trends of the 20th century)
• Industrialization of farm production moved ahead [pix]
• Some concluded that the era of urban-based "bourgeois" liberalism was over because the laissez faire, entrepreneurial and true free-market foundations for its existence were transformed to meet the needs of transnational finance and corporate industrial giganticism
• The economy had outgrown its original liberal political ideology
• Nonetheless, at the turn of the 20th century, some Americans took courage from the saving graces of modernizing European civilization [EG]
  • These might have been a latter-day USA example of that general trend labeled "Westernizer" when it appeared a half century earlier in Russian cultural debate [ID]
  • Howells, for example, was much influenced by Tolstoy and the more clearly "Western" Ivan Turgenev
  • However, American-born but Europe-centered author Henry James, an important representative of the US "Westernizer" trend and a friend of Turgenev, expressed his fear that old Europe was stagnant. Its future "is more likely to be one of disintegration, with Russia for the eccentric on one side and America on the other" [Kazin:17]
  • Missouri-born provincial Samuel Clemens took the pseudonym "Mark Twain" and left a very complex legacy in connection with the issue of "Western" modernity
    • See Twain's wondrously unwieldy novel/memoir Life on the Mississippi [E-TXT#1 | E-TXT#2]
    • 1922:USA culture critic Van Wyck Brooks wrote a surprisingly negative literary biography of Twain in which Twain is portrayed as a failed artist because he could not break free of the "low-brow" forces of USA commercial culture, The Ordeal of Mark Twain [ E-TXT]
  • Van Wyck Brooks showed a deep affinity for the "Westernizing" and critical, dissent-oriented traditions of the Russian intelligentsia [TXT]
    \\
    *1910:NYC| Howells,William Dean| My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticism [E-TXT]
    *1912c:| Paine,Albert Begelow| Mark Twain: A Biography [E-TXT]
    

<>1894:NYC,Harper| USA Progressive Era muckraking journalist and critic, Henry Demarest Lloyd, published Wealth against the Commonwealth, a general warning about how newly arisen giant corporations organized on a transnational basis ("wealth"), especially Standard Oil, the Russian oil company Nobel, and the Europe-wide banking house Rothschild, threatened democratic civil society ("the commonwealth")
*--He warned against US/Russian collusion to control the world's oil supply [ID]
\\
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>1894:English journalist William Thomas Stead [ID] published Chicago Today: The Labour War in America [TXT]

• Stead was a wealthy supporter of Progressive Era reform who felt that Chicago was the hot-spot of American wage-labor problems, and a lesson to the world
• Stead had a great interest in Russia and USA. In 1888 he published The Truth about Russia which placed emphasis on the religion of Leo Tolstoy
• In 1890 he began publication of the journal Review of Reviews
• Stead died on the Titanic
  \\
  *--Joseph O. Baylen, The Tsar's Lecturer General: W.T. Stead and the Russian Revolution of 1905

<>1894ja04(NS):Franco-Russian Alliance signed, a "secret" military treaty, based on the 1892au17(NS):French and Russian Military Convention [Fay, Origins,1:118-9 | DIR2:358-9 | DIR3:405-7]

• The diplomatic system forged by Bismarck [ID] was breaking down
• Powerful nations on eastern and western borders of Germany were taking action to protect themselves from "The Triple Alliance"[ID]

<>1894ja22;1897mr31; English Parliamentarian Joseph Chamberlain delivered three rousing imperialist and racist speeches, The British Empire: Colonial Commerce ... [P20:23 | PWT2:213-15] English version of European imperialism

<>1894je:Korean peasant uprising caused the anti-Japanese Korean monarchists to ask China for help
*1894jy24:Japan works with pro-Japanese Korean forces to craft a treaty pledging Korean/Japanese alliance to drive China out of Korea [E-TXT]
*1894au01:1895; Manchuria| China and Japan at war
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1894su:USA Pullman Strike (south of Chicago) became a national crisis

• The American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, had grown strong over the preceding two years and was now backed by a wide-spread, well-organized labor movement
  • President Cleveland sent in nearly 2000 US army troops to join the nearly 4000 National Guardsmen and about 8000 police and private security forces
  • These paramilitary forces deployed against laborers
• At the same time, steps were taken to make self-organization of wage-laborers a federal crime
  \\
  *-- [W#1] [W#2]

<>1894oc20:1917mr; Russian Emperor Nicholas II, the last tsar and emperor, reigned for a quarter century that can be summarized in the following fashion =

• Nicholas II ruled via brutal official reaction inherited from his father Alexander III, but he responded with half-hearted reforms as revolution loomed
• This pitiful reign nonetheless continued the Witte economic transformation [ID] and witnessed one of histories most remarkable high-cultural awakenings, the Russian "Silver Age" [GO]
• At the beginning of Nicholas' reign, political opposition to the tsarist state was centered on the Zemstvo movement
  • Tver Zemstvo address to the new emperor Nicholas II called for progressive social, economic and political change [1934:SEER#12:347-67]
    • By this time the Zemstvo movement had expanded into a whole complex network of enterprises
    • Now politics in Russia increasingly involved a broader spectrum of opinion and social action than ever before
  • Zemstvo functions new and essential to the modernizing Russian rural civilization were neglected by traditional administrative institutions
    • By the time of Emperor Nicholas II's reign, Russians spoke with approval of a new "Third Element" in national life
    • By this they meant locally active Zemstvo professionals, distinguished from government officials (first element) or elected representatives to Zemstvo boards (second element)
    • The Third Element was made up of specialists who tended to health, educationsl and economic needs, EG=Doctors, veterinarians, agronomists, teachers, statisticians, engineers and technicians
    • In a broader colloquial sense the Third Element positioned itself between Imperial officialdom (first element) and the nation, the people, the narod\ (second element)
• The political implication of the broader colloquial sense of Third Element was obvious -- representational government
• Nicholas characterized such liberal political objectives expressed in the Tver Zemstvo address as "senseless dreams" [ID]. HOWEVER =
• The 1905 Revolution [GO] stripped Nicholas of his absolutist, autocratic authority =
• 1906:1917; The Russian State Duma was created in the institutional place of the old absolute and autocratic tsarist authority [GO]
  • But the autocrat remained and the new representative or "parliamentary" governing institution was slow to put down roots
  • The most significant legislative initiative taken in the time of the Duma was under the leadership of Prime Minister Petr Stolypin [GO]
• In the midst of disastrous World War One [GO], when confronted with the 1917 February Revolution [GO], the Duma and all its initiatives collapsed with tsarist authority = Emperor Nicholas II resigned the Russian throne and the Duma dissolved itself [GO]
  \\
  *2016:|>Berar,Eva|_Империя и город : Николай II, "Мир искусств" и городская дума в Санкт-Петербурге, 1894-1914
  *2014:|>Davydov,MA|_Двадцать лет до Великой войны [1894-1914]: российская модернизация Витте-Столыпина
  *2010no29:RSH#20,1:5-63|>Pirumova,NM| "The Elected Members of Zemstvo Assemblies and the 'Third Element' "
  *1890:1905; Tver Province Zemstvo politics in the 15 years leading up to the Revolution of 1905 are characterized by Charles Timberlake in Emerging Democracy..., pp. 30-59

<>1895ja17:ja19; Tver liberals addressed new tsar Nicholas II about need for representative government, and Nicholas replied with rebuke of their "senseless dreams" about a constitution in Russia  [*1934ja:SEER#12,35:349-50 & 352-4]
*--To the dismay a a large segment of the Russian educated population, Nicholas seemed to be saying that reactionary policy would continue as before

<>1895fe12:Petersburg New Port strike leaflet

• That summer, a Moscow "Workers Union" stated labor demands [Harding:143-6]
• 1895de:Tsarist police arrested leaders of this movement, some of them wage-laborers and some of them representatives of the educated Russian population, active as a revolutionary intelligentsia [ID]
• An important example of this new generation of dedicated labor-oriented intelligentsia was ex-student Vladimir Il'ich Ulianov
  • In this year of mounting labor organization, Ulianov helped organize a Petersburg Union of Struggle [Soiuz bor'by] [Harding:149-215]
  • Ulianov's father was a tsarist education official who had received noble status as a result of long and high quality service
  • The family lived a comfortably established "middle class" provincial life [pix]
  • But Vladimir's brother Aleksandr [pix] went off to the university where he got involved in political circles associated with terrorist plots
  • He was arrested and executed
• Now, for his acts of labor agitation, younger brother Vladimir Ulianov was sent into Siberian exile in the valley of the Lena River
  • He changed his family name, adapting the Siberian river of exile to label his new identity = "Lenin" [pix]
  • Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia wrote memoirs of their experience in the three years of Siberian exile [StH:6-15]

<>1895:1908; English pundit, historian and sociologist, H.G. Wells (Herbert George, 1866-1946) wrote fantastic science-fiction, often projecting a future in a prophetic tone, sometimes utopian, sometimes dystopian

• Here are some of the most widely read Wells publications =
  *1895:The Time Machine
  *1896:The Island of Doctor Moreau
  *1897:The Invisible Man
  *1898:The War of the Worlds
  *1908:The War in the Air
  *--Examples of 19th-c pop-arts magazines [UO E-TXT]
  *--With its fixation on modern technological, industrial life, pop-arts science fiction seemed always to be asking of science and technology, "Is you is, or is you ain't my baby?"
  

<>1895:USA efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) delivered a technical paper to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, "A Piece-Rate System: A Step toward Partial Solution of the Labor Problem"

• For Taylor, the essence of the matter was the need for closer and more detailed structuring of worker behavior, near mechanical and scientifically scrupulous managerial attention to every productive movement of workers and machines
• Economic efficiency -- profit -- was the ultimate virtue, whether in connection with machines or humans or the products they created for the market
• The industrial commodity might be shabby, but the productive process must be highly regulated and production costs reduced to a minimum
• This was a "partial solution" not so much of the workers' own "labor problem" as it was of the capitalist managers' labor problem
• Taylor's inauspicious presentation marked the beginning of a globally significant "managerial revolution" which was redefining the functional meaning of "ownership" and old-fashioned notions of capitalist property, as well as the increasingly mechanized image of labor in the productive process
• Taylor was a child of the petroleum phase of the industrial revolution
• His insights had especially important implications as the European industrial revolution expanded fully into its gigantic, corporate phase
• His importance lies in his adumbration of the coming "Second Industrial Revolution", the petroleum phase [ID] mounting toward the managerial phase [ID] of economic modernization =
• Managerial executives were replacing entrepreneurial owners at the levers of economic enterprise
• EG= Standard Oil Company and Henry C. Frick
• Taylor's insights had important implications far beyond the board rooms of corporate enterprise
  • For one thing, the "Taylor system" had political/institutional implications. The increasing application of various aspects of the Taylor System to wider areas of public life had two larger effects =
  1. It undermined the liberal phase of the European revolution [ID]
  2. It presented a powerful obstacle to the growing European social-democratic movement [ID] and to the US progressive movement [ID] in the Progressive Era
  3. It laid a scientific foundation for the coming third political/institutional phase of the European and world Revolution [ID]
• Analysis of this phenomenon in secondary accounts =
  \\
  *--Merkle:7-8
  *--Alfred Chandler, Jr [ID] authored two powerful interpretive histories of contemporary business organization and operation
  1. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977)
  2. And later, on the global stage, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (1990) =
• A relatively small number of gigantic corporations -- DuPont, Westinghouse, Dunlop, Armstrong-Whitworth, Farben, Siemens, etc. -- were beginning to function in the world like nation-states unto themselves, struggling to be winners in the quest to organize the earth
  • This was not so much a process of "Darwinian" survival of the fittest in some natural competitive process
  • This was an exercise in rational economic planning rather than "natural selection"
  • The "hand" was not "invisible" [ID], even if it was kept out of public view
• Chandler argued that mass production expanded levels of productivity to such heights that by merging plants, bringing unit costs down, "economies of scale" were possible
• Corporate organizational and distributive power gave them further close control over the process
• Petroleum refiners gained control over oil wells "upstream on the pipeline" and also filling stations "downstream on the pipeline"
• Thus they positioned themselves profitably up and down the full spectrum of production and distribution of oil, gasoline and other petroleum products, all increasingly critical industrial commodities
• This required meticulous or micro-control of humongous financial resources -- investment and income related to colossal industrial enterprises
• This required extremely disciplined and ornate organizational structures, yet structures always open to intervention and control from a central administrative point
• Elaborate structures -- marketing, engineering, accounting, research, finance, etc. departments -- were under centralized managerial control
• This was called "scientific management"
• Scientific management laid the organizational foundations for what can be called "the second industrial revolution"
• In the age of imperialist competition, scientific management also marked the opening of the European, North American and, eventually, world-wide "managerial revolution", the 20th-century political history of the "European Revolution" [ID], now globalized

\\
*--LOOP on WW1a
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>1895mr06:German Reichstag heard racist (particularly anti-Semitic [ID]) speech by Hermann Ahlwardt, The Semitic Versus the Teutonic Race [P20:30]

<>1895ap13:Kansas, Salina | Eighth-grade final exam [E-TXT]
*--Universal and compulsory public education, at least through the eighth grade, was a central component of the Progressive Era

<>1895ap23:Japan and China brought their war to a close

• Shimonoseki Treaty gave Japan Liaotung Peninsula, w/Port Arthur and Dalny (Japanese:Dairen Chinese:Dalian or Ta-lien
• Russia, France and Germany considered Japanese gains to be excessive, so they launched a tripartite intervention. [Beasley, MHJ:163 has strange list of motives, including German desire "to edge Russia away from European politics", perhaps to render Russia vulnerable with its back turned to Germany]
• German Kaiser Wilhelm corresponded with tsar Nicholas II over the next weeks urging Russia eastward, "to cultivate the Asian Continent and to defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow Race" [VSB,3:693]
• Russian-Japanese relations, up to this point, had been businesslike, now relations w/Asia embittered by the tripartite intervention, especially as both Russia and Japan turned their greedy eyes toward Korea and Manchuria
• Sir Ernest Satow, British Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan (1895-1900) and China (1900-1906) wrote Korea and Manchuria between Russia and Japan, 1895-1904

<>1895my19:Cuban revolution against Spain led by Jose Marti from USA

• Spain suppressed the rebellion and moved rebellious groups -- ex-slaves, mulattos and small holders of Spanish descent -- into areas called reconcentrados in garrison cities
• Reconcentrados were a grim variation on now familiar frontier or imperialist policies of removal, transport and concentration
• Cuban economy suffered, especially the $50m worth of USA investments lost
  • USA business shifted to support rebels and a Cuban shadow government
  • A junta, settled in NYC under watchful USA eyes
• The Spanish version of European imperialism was coming unglued
• A new imperialist competitor arose in the "New World", the first serious overseas efforts of US imperialism
  \\
  *--Chronology of USA "intervention" in Latin America
  *--John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (2006)

<>1895je02:Russian women trained to become doctors at the Petersburg Women's Medical Institute [BRW:197-9]

<>1896:1916; Central-Asian expansion over two decades brought Russian power into Kazakhstan
\\
*--G. J. Demko, The Russian Colonization of Kazakhstan, 1896-1916

<>1896:Austria | Hungarian-born Jewish leader Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State, (TXT)]
*--Soon a Zionist movement arose in favor of the creation of a Jewish nation-state, preferably in Arabic Palestine
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1896:French philosopher Alfred Fouillée criticized dominant positivist traditions of European thought in Le mouvement idéaliste et la réaction contre la science positive [BMC4:618-23]
*--Science, or shouldn't we say "scientism", was coming under increasing critical scrutiny

<>1896:Russian Procurator of the Holy Synod [ID] Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Reflections of a Russian Statesman [TXT] gave expression to the most extreme official reactionary views on modernization of Russian life [CF= VSB,3:736-9 | WRH3:434-46 | RRC2,2:390-401]

• To what degree did these official reactionary views reflect views among the public, or beyond the urban public and out into the countryside?
  • Does Pobedonostsev represent an "official reactionary world view" or does he represent a "public reactionary world view", or more broadly a "Russian reactionary world view"?
  • Were his extreme views the expression of a hot-house statism or the expression of a wide-spread national outlook? Were they the views of ordained Russian Orthodox Church functionaries?
• In any event, Pobedonostsev, as ideological anti-secular but institutional secular bureaucratic head of the Russian Orthodox Church (trained as a lawyer, not as a priest), became the representative figure of Russian reactionary policy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
• Are his views essentially different from those of prominent Oregon public figures in the same late-nineteenth century epoch? Consider this historical evaluation by Russell Sadler [TXT] which appeared in 2006mr29:ERG
• Concentrated in this one person, Pobedonostsev, Russian secularization presented itself in both of its two most significant forms =
  1. World view = Pobedonostsev exercised his zealous power against what he perceived to be the diabolical threat of modern intellectual secularism
  2. Institutions. The unordained lawyer Pobedonostsev administered (managed) the Russian Orthodox Church in the decades that preceded the 1905 Revolution
• Over the previous half-millennium, secularization was a central component of "modernization" or "Westernization"
• Secularism continued to pose profound difficulties everywhere it was experienced around this wide globe, in "The West" or in the north, south and east, in Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindi and all other faith-based communities in the grip of seemingly inevitable modernization
  \\
  *--Mironov,1:425-518 deals with the secularization of Russian urban and rural consciousness in the imperial period
  *--Robert F. Byrnes, Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought (1968). How comfortable with secularization is this near-contemporary US scholar?
  *--Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (2004) explores tension in Russia between the Church as bureau of central government (the Petrine Church [ID]) or the Church as a "grass-roots" expression of Russian spirituality, a place not so much for official doctrine as for popular religious and nativist communitarian ceremony, as seen by Khomiakov and other Slavophiles [ID]
  *--John Shelton Curtis, Church and State in Russia: The Last Years of the Empire,1900-1917 (1940)

<>1896mr01:Ancient AfroAsian nation Ethiopia defeated aggressive and reckless imperialist Italy
*--A shocking moment in which a non-European peoples defeated a "Western" aggressor
*--Ethiopia was the only African nation to defeat an invading European colonial power in the age of modern imperialism [W]

<>1896ap19:Saint Petersburg League for the Struggle to Emancipate the Working Class, secretly organized by Russian Marxists in the previous year, issued a proclamation [VSB,3:709]
*--The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party [SDs] was coming into existence, and in these months, future SDs were active in labor strikes [Harding:121-208]

<>1896my22:Moscow | Russia-China treaty was hostile to interests of Japan and Manchuria [DIR2:360-2 | DIR3:407-9]

• Russia secured a shortcut for the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Manchuria
• In this same month, Seoul [Korea] Memorandum exchanged between Russia and Japan
• The two powers shied away from Yamagata Aritomo proposal to divide Korea into North and South
• Korean King Kojong had fled to the Russian embassy when his Queen Min was killed by Japanese "henchmen"
• Russia and Japan now agreed that the King would return to his palace, and Japan would impose some control over its "henchmen"
• Japanese military expenditure had this year reached 53m/yen, up from 15m/yen three years earlier
• The Japanese military budget remained this high till Russo-Japanese War
• Japanese naval expenditures wavered as army expenditures were much increased
• Japan made decision at this point to head inland into the area of Russian threat (Manchuria) rather than overseas toward Taiwan [Beasley,MHJ:165
• Insightful contemporary French journalist, Pierre Leroy-Beaulieu wrote The Awakening of the East: Siberia, Japan, China (1900)
• At a great trans-oceanic distance, US imperialism was on a collision course with Russian imperialism
• USA advanced by railroad and sea power, Russia by railroad
  \\
  *--Zabriskie on USA/Russian rivalry in the Pacific, 1895-1914
  *--Don C. Price, Russia and the Roots of the Chinese Revolution, 1896-1911
  *--A. Malozemoff, Russian Far Eastern Policy, 1881-1904
  *--B. A. Romanov, Russia in Manchuria, 1892-1906
  *--Matsusaka Yoshihisa Tak, The Makiing of Japanese Manchuria, 1904-1932

<>1896je:Saint Petersburg labor strikes [MR&C2:350]

<>1896je09:Japan and Russia signed Yamagata-Lobanov Agreement, apparently guaranteeing Korean independence
*--Russian-Japanese relations seemed deceptively harmonious as they jockeyed with one another to cash in on China's weakness and to gain advantage in Manchuria, Korea, Sakhalin Island and the southern Kuril Islands
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1896jy09:Chicago, at the Democratic Party's National Convention | William Jennings Bryan delivered his stirring oration against what he thought was an urban elitist assault on rural America, "Cross of Gold" [TXT]
*1896:USA Chicago | Russian visitor Vladimir Korolenko recorded his impressions of wage-labor conditions in a US "Factory of Death" [Hasty:83-94]
*--Vladimir Korolenko, History of My Contemporary (memoirs of his upbringing and youthful populist radicalism up to 1885, concentrating on the years of Siberian exile)
\\
*1918:In the last year of her life, the Polish-born German Social Democrat Rosa Luxemburg wrote an appreciative review article devoted to the German translation of Korolenko's autobiography [E-TXT]

<>1896jy31:London | French and German ambassadors to England met for long and serious (though informal) conversation about how their two nations might be marginalized by recent global developments

• The two ambassadors feared that Europe was in danger if strong and innovative measures were not taken
• They were not thinking only of the old imperialist monster England
• They noted also the recent rise of two new giants, Russia and USA in Japan and China [BNE:195-8]
• Russian and USA imperialism seemed to flourish, but serious conflicts among other European imperialists threatened disastrous war =
• Imperialism was coming home
• Subsequent events in China and Japan only deepened these concerns

<>1896au26:Twenty-eight men and women, activists from the ranks of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation [DASHNAKTSUTYUN, OR Dashnaks for short], took over the Ottoman Imperial Bank in the Ottoman Turkish capital for 14 hours, a remarkable act of urban guerilla warfare [W]

• NB! The Ottoman central bank was not managed by a Turk but rather by an English diplomat (an auxiliary feature of the financial imperialism, the "capitulations" that served English interests so well, and coincidentally thwarted the interests of other European competitors for advantage in the Ottoman Empire, especially as England was right there holding the keys to the vaults of "The Sick Man of Europe")
• "Capitulation" agreements with Turkish officials had long ago brought the bank under the executive and administrative control of English and French financiers [LOOP on "finance"]
• Dashnaks didn't much care about capitulations. Still two decades before the notorious Armenian genocide [ID], the Dashnaks sought to bring attention to Turkish massacres of Armenians
• Atrocities against Armenians increased after the bank takeover
• Nervous influential Europeans convinced Sultan Hamid not to bombard the bank but to defuse the situation with a grant of safe passage to France for Dashnak survivors
  \\
  *--Turkish source on Dashnaks and other Armenian political groups [E-TXT]
  *--LOOP on "Imperialism and Revolution"

<>1896au26:Philippine Islands rebelled against Spain

• USA closely followed stirrings for independence in the Philippines and Cuba
  • This sort of US "anti-imperialism" was designed to weaken Spanish control, not necessarily to promote revolution
  • Rebel Filipino leaders were at first pro-USA, then they were betrayed by USA
• 1896:USA political leader, Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924) wrote "For Intervention in Cuba" [TXT]
  • Lodge was imperialist in one direction (overseas) and isolationist in another ("the homeland"), free-trader in one direction and protectionist in another, so long as advantage flowed in a direction beneficial to his cohort
  • Pressures for a new US imperialism were mounting, but it had to cloak itself in anti-imperialist rhetoric
• 1897:Cartoon showed Uncle Sam "patient" as he waited for his colonies to come fully ripe before picking [pix]
  • Uncle Sam is dressed in the mode of a tropical plantationist, and his basket already holds Louisiana [ID], Texas [ID], California [ID], and Alaska [ID]
  • On the branch above his head hangs Cuba, soon ripe for the picking
  • Notice that the large fruit tree is rooted behind a high and deteriorating wall of some possibly declining power, yet the branches now stretch out toward the new plantationist, ready to take up the old plantationist's "burden" [ID]
  \\
  *--LOOP on WW1a

<>1896au31:Leo Tolstoy wrote open letter [TXT] with political advice to Russian liberals who were upset because of Russian reactionary state actions to shut down volunteer societies devoted to cultural life

<>1897:1899; Russian philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev, Foundations of Theoretical Philosophy [Edie,3:99-134 | VSB,3:732]
*--"The Enemy from the East" and "The Russian National Ideal" in RRS:41-60
*--Excerpts [VSB,3:731-3]

<>1897:French sociologist Émile Durkheim published Suicide: A Study in Sociology [CCS,1:383-420]

<>1897:Italian nationalist and imperialist political figure Ferdinando Martini reacted to Italian defeat on the borders of Ethiopia [CCC2,2:571f]

• This late blooming modern European nation-state, Italy, found itself in deep conflict between original half-century-old liberal principles of Italian nation-state formation and the emerging European imperative of imperialist dominion over non-European peoples
• Tensions were mounting between Austria and Italy as they pursued overlapping imperialist objectives along the Adriatic shores of the Balkan Peninsula
• Forty years later, Fascist Italy took revenge on Ethiopia as it sought to carve a niche out for itself among the other European imperialist states
  \\
  *--LOOP on WW1a

<>1897ja28:Russia conducted first modern census, Obshchii svod po Imperii rezul’tatov razrabotok dannykh pervoi vseobshchei perepisi naseleniia, proizvedennoi 28 ianvaria 1897 goda
*--The Perepis' counted 129 million (13 million in cities) [CF= RRC2,2#38] Translated title page [W]
*--Eastview Press reprinted the census on CD and described "the first and last census of the Russian Empire". Its initiator was the famous Russian geographer and public figure Petr Semenov-Tian-Shanskii. He lobbied three decades to make this census happen. To test and improve the census questionnaire, he conducted an experimental census on his family country estate, Gremiachka. The final version of the questionnaire was designed for a household and included 14 questions. The announced goal of the census was "to learn more about the population and to study it ... to understand precisely the various conditions of popular life". It was also promised that the census would not "generate new taxes or other burden". The 1897 Census continues to be the most authentic source on the number of Russia's population and its ethnic composition at the end of the 19th century
*--Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire provides population statistics for almost 90 "minority" peoples of Russia

<>1897je02:Russian factory law [TXT] expanded on previous welfare legislation [VSB,3:719]
*--Reactionary policy mixed with "progressive" reform

<>1898:France rocked by "Dreyfus Affair" (with its origins in 1894 and final resolution not until 1906)

• 1894se:Evidence of a French officer's treasonous communications with German authorities was found
  • The culprit was Major Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, scion of a French branch of a Hungarian aristocratic family
  • But he was an ardent Catholic and French patriot, well-connected in French upper-class circles
  • Thus a scape-goat was needed. A Jewish officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was framed, found guilty and sent to exile on Devil's Island where it was expected he would soon die
• French public protest grew stronger and found sympathetic support among a few high-ranking military and civilian officials
  • At a first glance, the Affair pitted progressives (liberals and socialists), humanists of all political stripes and defenders of Enlightenment and French Revolutionary traditions against racists (anti-Jewish elements), militaristic patriots, Catholic Church activists, and a wide spectrum of "right-wing" politicians
  • Closer examination reveals a painfully complex picture [CF=Harris below], but the larger European meaning of the more than 10-year long Affair was a victory over anti-Semitism, over Church ambitions to dominate politics, or at least national education, and over chauvinistic [ID] military ambition and the still active movement to restore the French monarchy
• But it took more than ten years, and the way to victory was rocky =
  • 1897:Esterhazy was put under pseudo-court martial where he was hastily cleared by fellow officers
  • Officers who questioned Dreyfus' guilt and who resisted the expanding political charade were demoted and/or reassigned in punishment
• 1898ja13:Paris | Great French novelist Émile Zola's J'accuse exposed in a most public way the injustices of the Dreyfus Affair [DPH:323-5]
  • The racist/nationalist press thought it was sufficient rebuttal to accuse the great French author Zola of being an "Italian"
  • Zola was himself put on trial, charged with political libel
  • Outside the courtroom a mob called for blood
• Anti-Jewish riots broke out across France and across the Mediterranean in French Algeria
• Masked beneath the racist mob mentality was a struggle that pitted civilian national virtue -- justice -- against mounting military virtue -- chauvinistic patriotism
  • Among the many high-ranking military officers who took the stand against Zola was Chief of Staff General Charles Le Mouton de Boisdeffre who identified support of the military as the central issue, as he put it = "confidence in the leaders of the army, in those who bear the responsibility for national defense"
  • Zola was found guilty, spent a year in prison, and then went into political emigration in England
• Rival volunteer associations formed = The Ligue des Droits de l'Homme [League of the Rights of Man (a clear evocation of the French Revolution)] arose against the Ligue de la Patrie Française [League of the French Fatherland]
• Jean Baffier defended the racists [BNE:148-52]
• Charles Maurras denounced those whom he felt had subverted the nation, not just Jews but also Freemasons, Protestants and other foreigners
  • Maurras argued that France -- like England, Germany and Russia -- should be ruled by a monarchy
• Influential Church leaders took this opportunity to reassert their desire to control national education
• 1899je03:French Appeals Court overturned Dreyfus' conviction
  • Dreyfus was brought back from Devil's Island. A ravaged and deteriorated Dreyfus now faced another trial
  • Military judges found him guilty again
• The President of the French Republic took steps to forestall further appeals and to bring an end to the national agony
  • He pardoned Dreyfus. Neither justice nor chauvinistic patriotism prevailed; political expediency prevailed
  • In order to minimize the possibility of a military coup d'état, all military leaders responsible for the persecution and prosecution of Dreyfus were pardoned
• In another direction, the state took action against what it called "occult forces" in the Catholic Church
  • The Assumptionists [ID] were expelled from France
  • 1905:French law now formally created a separation of church and state
  • The most important consequence was the end of a century of post-Napoleonic state financial support of the Catholic Church (and to a much lesser extend support of Protestant churches)
• 1908:A right-wing extremist assassin attempted to kill Dreyfus
  \\
  *--Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century
  *--Louis Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters | Begley emphasizes the weakness of reason against hysterical demands of emotionalism in public life. He draws explicit parallels = Devil's Island and the post-9/11 Guantánamo Bay prison. Even the details of Dreyfus' shackles and those employed by USA on captured and imprisoned "terrorists" one hundred years later, the use of military rather than civilian courts, the danger of rigged justice under the influence of aggressive chauvinism, and punishment of military officers who criticize all this

<>1898:German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism [TXT~ | Excerpt = CCC2,2:934-8 | CCC3,2:971-5]
*--Bernstein was a moderate influence in the Second International
*1899:He published a reply to his critics, The Preconditions of Socialism
\\
*1994my06:TLS:27 | A summary of the main "revisions" that Bernstein is thought to have made in Marxist socialist ideology and tactics [TXT]
||
*--LOOP on The Second International

<>1898:Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Murav'ev [Muraviev] to Cassini, with Cassini reply to Murav'ev and Lamsdorf [Zabriskie]

<>1898:USA Chicago | Theodore Roosevelt delivered speech "The Strenuous Life" [CCC3,2:1127-37]

<>1898:1902; Russian Riazan Provincial peasant village the subject of intensive ethnographic study designed by Olga Tian-Shanskaia and K.V. Nikolaevskii
*--Results were published as Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia
*--In the half-century preceding the 1905 Revolution, Russian ethnography made tremendous strides toward full and accurate ethnographic description of Russian village life and culture. See Reeder (2nd ed.):85-104 (agriculture-ritual songs) and 109-136 (love, marriage, family)
\\
*--Mironov,1:123-196 subjects the history of imperial Russian family life, rural and urban, to close scrutiny in an effort to refute wide-spread notions of Russian backwardness and stagnancy

<>1898ja01:Spain launched a reform of Cuban administration, designed to introduce self-rule to the island
*1898fe:Puerto Rico granted independence
*--No one much liked these seemingly progressive measures = It was too little too late for stumbling Spanish imperialism

<>1898fe15:Spanish imperial colonial territory, Cuba, Havana Harbor | USA Battleship Maine exploded and sank

• Without any evidence, USA officials and an expanding jingoist newspaper press—particularly the William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer sheets—blamed Spain for the murderous attack and called for righteous revenge
• One headline read, "THE WARSHIP MAINE SPLIT IN TWO BY ENEMY'S SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE"
• Only one authoritative investigation of this event was ever completed, that by Admiral H. G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine was Destroyed
  • Rickover concluded that it was the US navy's fault for poor management of fuel and powder storage on the big ship, rather than some infernal Spanish "weapon of mass destruction"
  • Admiral Rickover's 1976 revelations about the true story of the Maine did not win him any friends in the US military-industrial "community"
• This explosive moment may be taken as the symbolic opening of a distinctly imperialist era in USA foreign policy
• The sinking of the Maine was a catastrophe that could be linked to the "evil-doing" of an international competitor
• The hand of military-industrial adventurers and profit-seekers (some of whom were actually responsible for lax security on the Maine) was freed of restraint
• Manipulated public opinion fell in line behind ambitious USA imperialists
• Now USA offered its version of European imperialism
• Documents of USA foreign policy 1898-1914

<>1898mr:1898ap; USA pursued a dual policy in the Cuban situation =

• USA tried to insert itself between Spain and Cuba in defense of independence for the Cuban people
• USA tried to purchase the island from Spain. In other words, it tried to achieve "ownership" for itself, thus betraying Cuban independence
  \\
  *--Hugh Thomas [ID] in 98ap23:NYR#45,7:10-12
  *--Website related to US imperialism LOOP

<>1898mr:China leased Port Arthur to Russia, Kiaochow to Germany and Kowloon to England

• In this year in China, wide-spread traditionalism, anti-modernism, and anti-imperialism helped create an anti-"West", anti-Christian movement called the Society of Righteous, Harmonious Fists [better known as Boxers]
• Imperialism was producing local revolutionary resistance to expansionist European states
• Imperialism was also producing inter-state violence among these very expansionist European states. Imperialism was coming home

<>1898mr01:Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party [SDs] opened first congress in Minsk
*--The SDs issued a proclamation, written from a Marxist perspective [VSB,3:709-10]

<>1898ap10:Egypt | Eyewitness accounts of the English attack southward against the Sudanese at the Atbara River

• The English were under the command of Lord Kitchener [ID]
• Kitchener's army built a railroad as they advanced to the south from Egypt into Sudan
• The indigenous anti-imperialist forces against Kitchener were led by an Islamic al-Mahdi [Savior]
• A participant, Winston Churchill, described the one-sided or "asymmetric" battle [Eye:398-407]
• Primitive dessert warriors were confronted with all the might of industrial Great Britain, EG= machine guns and abundant ammunition carried to the battle by railroad
• The Sudanese lost 20,000 and the English, 500

<>1898ap25:Japan displeased with Russian/Chinese agreement in Liaotung Peninsula region (Port Arthur)

• However, Japan offered Russia free hand in Manchuria for Japanese free hand in Korea
• That initiative failed, but Nishi-Rosen Agreement pledged both sides to provide no military or financial advisers to Korea w/o prior agreement, and Russia recognized Japan's preponderant economic interests in Korea

<>1898ap25:USA declared war on Spain
*--Tensions with Russia mounted as the Spanish-American war got under way
\\
*--Library of Congress narrative, a part of a multi-page website devoted to the Spanish-American War
*--Saul,2:421-51
*1998sp:WiQ#22,2:42-65 | Warren Zimmerman (Z was 1989:1992; US ambassador to Yugoslavia)

<>1898my01:Philippine Islands, Manila Bay | USA Admiral George Dewey destroyed Spanish Pacific fleet

<>1898jy01:Cuba | Rough Riders with Teddy Roosevelt fought the Battle of El Caney
*--James Creelman described the battle and the USA author Steven Crane described the aftermath [Eye:407-9]
*--Roosevelt had recently resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy (in part responsible for the vigorous expansion of US naval readiness for war, and for the way the Maine was loaded with fuel and powder [ID])
*--He now decked himself out in a new Brooks Brothers uniform and charged onto the pages of history, a hero of imperialist "asymmetric" warfare

<>1898jy03:Cuba, Santiago Bay | USA fleet captured entire Spanish Caribbean fleet.

<>1898jy07:Hawaiian Islands annexed to USA as territory

<>1898jy08:Puerto Rico Islands come under US imperialist administration

<>1898se:USA journal North American Review | Charles A. Conant published "The Economic Basis of 'Imperialism' " [TXT]

• Conant was a major figure in US financial affairs
• He was editor of the Wall Street Journal and a trusted adviser to presidents from McKinley to Wilson
• His central message was that recent disorders in American capitalist market would be solved by expansion of USA imperialism
• Modern capitalism needs overseas expansion
• From the bankers perspective, Conant looked at the relationship of imperialism to capitalism much as did leading socialist theorists [EG#1 | EG#2]
• But, of course, leading socialist theorists took a stand against the relationship, while Conant recommended it
• In another sense, Conant was merely extending overseas the time-honored concept of frontier expansion

\\
*--LOOP on "Imperialism and Revolution"
*--LOOP on "finance"

<>1898se16:USA Senator from Indiana Albert Beveridge delivered campaign speech "The March of the Flag" [TXT]

• Senator Beveridge expressed an evident patriotic, imperialistic and racist pride
• US imperialism was supported by something like a political ideology
• 1900ja09:Beveridge spoke on US policy in the Philippines [RWP2:265-9]
  \\
  *--LOOP on WW1a

<>1898oc14:Moscow Art Theatre founded by Konstantin Stanislavskii [real name=Alekseev] and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
*--Russian homepage
*--VIDEOTAPE history of the Moscow Art Theatre
*--Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, with his sparse language and quotidian themes, seemed at odds with contemporary avant-garde trends in the fine arts
*1899:1900; Maksim Gorky (1868:1936; real name "Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov"; "Gor'kii" means "bitter") had been a struggling provincial writer (born in Nizhnii Novgorod). He now made the acquaintance of Chekhov and the great novelist Leo Tolstoy and, with his distinctly radical social and political ideas, he broke into the capital-city big-time. A few years later, Gorky wrote brilliant memoirs of his early acquaintance with Chekhov [TXT#1 | TXT#2]], Leo Tolstoy [TXT], Aleksandr Blok and Leonid Andreev. [Webpage devoted to Gorky]
*1902:Moscow Art Theatre production of Gorky's play, THE LOWER DEPTHS [Na dne] won international fame. At some odds with the prevailing sensibilities of the Russian "Silver Age", Maksim Gorky dealt with the Russian lower classes, the laboring poor of the neglected Russian backwaters, and did so in an increasingly "realistic" or descriptive style
\\
*--W. H. Bruford, Chekhov and His Russia: A Sociological Study (1947)

<>1898oc18:USA, Chicago Peace Jubilee | AFL President Samuel Gompers delivered speech which expressed labor union dissent, "Imperialism--Its Dangers and Wrongs"

• 1898:Boston | German-born Karl Schurz founded Anti-Imperialist League, supported by unions of wage-laborers and major business leaders, EG= Andrew Carnegie
• 1898:   278,000 members in AFL
• 1900:   560,000 in AFL
• 1904: 1,670,000 in AFL
• 1915: 2,500,000 in all USA labor unions

<>1898de10:Paris Treaty. Spain ceded Philippine Islands, Guam Islands and Puerto Rico to USA
*--Spain renounced sovereignty over CUBA and USA established military governance there
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1899:USA PA Pittsburgh | Andrew Carnegie consolidated his vast steel holdings and created Carnegie Steel Company

• 1901:Two years later, Carnegie merged with United States Steel and retired
• In retirement, he funded hundreds of local libraries across the USA, supported public education, and world peace. He endowed the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with $125 million for use in support of various charitable causes
• Andrew Carnegie devoted the final two decades of his long and remarkably productive career to philanthropy

<>1899:USA sociologist, born of émigré Norwegian farmers in Minnesota, Thorstein Veblen defined and criticized The Theory of the Leisure Class [CCS:699-725 | CCS,2:126-52]
*--Nostalgia for life "down on the farm" had become a persistent feature the world in the grips of modernizing political-economic systems
\\
*--LOOP on "Political-Economy"

<>1899:1902; Philippine-USA War
*--Charles A. Conant published his analysis of the new USA imperialism, The United States in the Orient: The Nature of the Economic Problem (1900)

<>1899:1908; China market now felt new USA presence. US imperialism had its distinct economic side
*--Compare 10-year change in Russian and USA kerosene export (in millions of gallons) [Laserson:324]:

<>1899:Atlantic crossing to New World. Russian anthropologist Vladimir Bogoraz [ID] visited USA [Hasty:95-110]
*--Bograz crossed USA from coast to coast by rail. Wrote on "Black student" [Hasty:111-27]

<>1899:England | Russian émigré anarchist philosopher Petr Kropotkin [ID] Memoirs of a Revolutionist
*--USA anarchist (Russian émigré in NYC since teenage years, factory worker) Emma Goldman (1869-1940) into the first decade of her 50-year activist career [W]
\\
*--Vivian Gornick, Emma Goldman: revolution as a Way of Life

<>1899:German (English-born) dilettante cultural figure Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1926) championed "Pan-Teutonism", a political and cultural association based on crude racist presumptions, as expressed in Foundations of the Nineteenth Century [BMC1:554-7 | BMC4:606-10]

<>1899:Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte memo to Emperor Nicholas II, "Autocracy and Zemstvo" [TXT]

• The profound ambiguities embedded in Witte's memo can be taken as a signal of impending political crisis in the highest ranks of the state bureaucracy
• Over the previous two decades of largely reactionary policy, frequent contradictory and arguably "progressive" state actions had been taken
• The time had now arisen in which the contradictions (as that between centralized autocracy and flourishing institutions of local and provincial self-administration) could no longer be brushed over
• Witte's remarkable pamphlet aroused the political exile Vladimir Lenin to new polemical/theoretical heights as he was completing his massive study of the Russian economy
• Zemstvos came under attack from all sides, left and right, as the tsarist state wavered

<>1899fe:English writer Rudyard Kipling celebrated manly virtues and touted Anglo-Saxon imperialism with his poem "The White Man's Burden", published in McClure's Magazine [E-TXT#1 | E-TXT#2]

• Here he urged the USA to quit lagging and take up the cause of European imperialist expansion and global dominion
• Underneath Kipling's aggressive imperialism there lurked also a certain disdain for the sorts of radical-liberal or proto-socialist politics that arose in the US Progressive Era
• And there also lurked an impatience with the still lingering USA hostility toward the old imperialist master England. In essence, Kipling urged that racial brotherhood should erase the memory of actual historical division. And something like that erasure was well under way in USA
• 1899:USA NJ | United Fruit Company [ID] incorporated under ownership and management of Andrew Preston and M.C. Keith (1848-1929)
• Their plantations were arrayed around the shores of the Caribbean Sea and grew bananas
• The company formed a near monopoly in the harvesting, transportation and marketing of bananas
• They soon included other fruits as well, all cultivated in ways very destructive of natural environments
• Maintenance of this economic monopoly was assured by political domination over local authorities, control over native wage-laborers bound in conditions approaching slavery
• United Fruit in some cases gained near total command over the routing, construction and management of Central American railroads
• Regions in the grip of these large agribusinesses were thus denied the possibility of self-administered and independent economic modernization
• This growing transnational corporation wielded considerable insider influence with the US government
• United Fruit closely coordinated its own profit-centered foreign policy with Washington, DC. For example =
• 1911:Honduras was invaded by US forces with United Fruit Company collusion
• 1928:Columbia massacred striking workers on United Fruit Company lands
• Kipling's appeal to USA (above) appeared to be getting results
  \\
  *--LOOP on WW1a
  *--LOOP on "Imperialism and Revolution"

<>1899fe08:St.Petersburg University hit by student demonstrations
*--Over the next three years, the student movement spread to other institutions of higher learning and intensified [VSB,3:739-41]
*--University student unrest was a harbinger of the 1905 Revolution, and the tsarist state perceived it as such

<>1899mr:Russian political exile Vladimir Lenin published The Development of Capitalism in Russia [W TXT], based on careful analysis of Zemstvo statistics on the village-level and region-level agricultural economy

• Lenin's main contribution here was to assert that peasants were not a distinct social class but were a complex and transitional social formation
• There were three sorts of peasants in this account
  1. "Rich peasants" (kulaks) were akin to a social class considered by Marxists to be genuine, the bourgeoisie
  2. "Poor peasants" were akin to another genuine social class, proletariat
  3. "Middle peasants" made up the rest of the rural population in this analysis
• The curious thing here is that this third, very large but theoretically inchoate portion of the Russian population (a large majority) who were neither "rich" nor "poor" held the future of Russia in their hands
  • Everything depended on which direction this unstable middle element moved as it fell into orbit with one of the two social classes deemed authentic in Marxist political-economy
  • It had to move either into the ranks of the "rich" (bourgeoisie) or the "poor" (proletariat)
• Peasants thus were granted no intrinsic status in this socially dualistic Leninist world-view, based as it was on an orthodox understanding of Karl Marx's teachings
  \\
  *--David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasants

<>1899mr20:Canada, Ottawa | Down and out D.H. Davies described how he had a foot severed while trying to jump a train [Eye:409-11]

<>1899mr22:Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte submitted another significant report to Emperor Nicholas II

• "Report of the Minister of Finance to His Majesty on the Necessity of Formulating and Thereafter Steadfastly Adhering to a Definite Program of a Commercial and Industrial Policy of the Empire" [Translated with an introductory article, by T. H. Von Laue, *1954mr:JMH#26,1:60-74 | TXT excerpts | Other published excerpts= RRC2,2#37 | VSB,3:757-9]
• Witte was working hard to convince the Emperor to support the "Witte System" [ID]
• Witte placed great emphasis on shortage of investment capital to promote vigorous expansion of the coal and oil sectors of the modernizing Russian Imperial economy
• Witte's views of Russian imperialist foreign policy were consistent with his policy of economic modernization [VSB,3:693-6]
• 1899je03:French government seemed to awaken rather late, but very perceptively, to what was happening in China, and reacted with alarm at Russian/English agreement on "spheres of influence" that allowed Russia to build railroads north of the Great Wall, and England, south [BNE:180-3]
• Aleksandr I. Fenin [ID] wrote his memoirs, Coal and Politics in Late Imperial Russia: Memoirs of a Russian Mining Engineer

<>1899my18(NS):Hague Conference got under way [W] (International Peace Conference) [DPH:215-20]

• Hague Conferences were international gatherings of representatives of the "Great Powers" in response to a Russian proposal offered to the increasingly aggressive European states
• Russian railroad magnate and administrator Ivan Blokh's remarkable analytical studies of modern war [ID] influenced Emperor Nicholas II's decision to sponsor this unprecedented international peace conference
• Blokh predicted a European disaster if industrialized war were to break out
• Hague Conferences sought to reduce armaments and monitor peace treaties
• Do "arms races" cause or prevent wars?
• Do peace treaties prevent wars?
• How about mediation? =
• Hague Conferences created Permanent Court of Arbitration (Hague Tribunal) to mediate international discord
• USA opposed because international arbitration or enforceable international law seemed a threat to nation-state sovereignty and to US imperialist ambitions
• USA was not alone among other reluctant "Great Powers"
• Second Hague Conference
  \\
  *1843+: Website summary of major European peace conferences, with bibliography
  *--Sheehan.WHERE:22-8

<>1899jy:USA President McKinley appointed Elihu Root, a prominent member of the USA imperialist party, to the War Department for the purposes of administering the islands taken from Spain in the recent war [W]

• Elihu Root (1847-1937) was a corporation lawyer in the service of powerful NY businesses =
  • William A. "Boss" Tweed [Wki]
  • E. H. Harriman [Wki]
  • J. P. Morgan [Wki]
• In the previous year, McKinley hesitated to pursue imperialist war against Spain
• For this reason, Teddy Roosevelt compared his fortitude to a chocolate éclair
• Now the US President was on board the imperialist project and ready to enjoy the fruits of victory over old imperialist Spain
• 1899no21:McKinley interview outlined justifications for US imperialist expansion, recapitulating arguments long familiar to old Europe [BNE:183-4]

<>1899se06:USA proposed "Open Door" policy [TXT] to Germany, Russia, England, Japan, Italy and France, one of the first US foreign policy initiatives to gain immediate international attention, if not assent

• 1899no30:English reply [TXT]
• 1899de18:Russian reply showed great reluctance [TXT]
• USA Secretary of State John Hay was the author of the "Open Door" doctrine
  • John Hay (1838-1905) began his public career as Secretary to President Abraham Lincoln whom he had met when both practiced law in Springfield IL
  • After marrying into a wealthy Cleveland family of financiers, he devoted his life to travel and literature
  • In 1879 he became Assistant Secretary of State and moved to WDC, where he was an important member of the cultural/intellectual group that formed up around Henry Adams
  • He served as Secretary of State from 1898 until his death
• In these years USA sponsored a "trust company" to build a railroad across China, Canton-Hankow-Peking [Beijing]
  • The concession was handed over to the American China Development Co. controlled by prominent USA capitalists
  • Russia sensed competitive pressure from USA businessmen in northern China (Manchuria) and suspected official support from the US government
  • Suspicions deepened when USA-Japan agreements became known and rapprochement between USA and England matured
• The larger significance of USA Secretary of State John Hay at the turn of the 20th century derived from the way he helped re-orient early 20th-century US policy toward international outreach, IE=Imperialism
• USA was forging a new closeness to the "mother culture" of the ex-enemy Great Britain (England)
• USA was in fact picking up what Kipling called "the white man's burden" [ID]
• England was showing some signs of fatigue, and USA was showing ample signs of potential imperialist vigor [EG]
• In a sense, the Hay re-orientation squelched the ambitious hopes of certain Englishmen to repossess their American colonies, lost over the previous century [EG]
• The intellectual impact of the US sea-change is reflected in the now widely employed abstract unifying concept "The West"
  • The concept is reflected, for example, in a curricular innovation that spread across US university campuses in the early 20th-century, "Western Civ"
  • The idea of "Western Civ" is based on a transnational notion that Classical Athenian Greeks and Romans of the great empire were closely related to USA
  • In USA the concept provided a refutation of the provincial New-World democratism or geo-egalitarianism implied, for example, in the Turner Thesis [ID] and other anti-East-Coast enthusiasms of the Progressive Era
  • "Western Civ" was fashioned persuasively into a story of a vast European (mainly northwest European and, for some, Anglo-Saxon European) mission of global progress and civilization
• USA efforts to cool down European imperialist rivalry, such as the "Open Door" initiative, did not work, perhaps in part because these efforts were always accompanied by efforts to enhance US imperialist advantage
• As for Russia, it felt surrounded by "The West" and didn’t want to "open its doors" to romping/stomping "Western" self-assertion

<>1899fa:1902my31; South Africa| English/Dutch [Afrikaaner] imperialist/colonial Boer War

• The war pitted two European colonial peoples against one another, the English and the Dutch
• "Boer" in Dutch and Afrikaans (a Dutch colonial dialect) means "farmer" and is pronounced like the English word for an oppressively uninteresting person
• The Boer War was, for the English, an effort to grab -- and for the Boers to hold onto -- the lands of indigenous African peoples at the southern tip of the continent
• 1899no:German Social Democratic leader Karl Kautsky wrote about the Boer War, emphasizing how European imperialism in the wide world was suffocating liberalism and socialism at home [Daly.SDs,ch#6 "The War in South Africa"]
• In Kautsky's view, the great French Revolution launched two dominant trends of European civilization =
1. Socialism, which Kautsky thought of as the original liberal political tradition evolving in natural rhythm with 19th-century industrial modernization
2. Imperialism, which Kautsky thought of as the desperate and ultimately futile effort of the industrializing European ruling class to sustain itself in its waning years of political and financial dominance at home via exploitation of the wider non-European world abroad
• The Boer War roused Kautsky to the fear that the forces of militant imperialism were growing stronger and were deployed, in a sense, as much against domestic socialism (by posing patriotism as a check against the home-grown threat of wage-labor activism) as against indigenous peoples abroad in the pursuit of profitable resources
• 1900sp:J.E. Neilly described civilian suffering in the course of the Boer War [E-TXT | Eye:412-13]
• The direct grappling of two European imperialist cultures with one another at the peripheries of colonial dominance, rather than solely with indigenous peoples of Africa, was an ominous premonition of WW1 [ID]
• So also was the powerful mechanized cruelties put on display in the Boer War
• Afrikaaner leader, at the beginning of a remarkable career, Jan Smuts, played a major role in negotiating settlement with the British
  \\
  *--Wki on Smuts' role in the Boer War and post-war settlement
  *--BBC E-TXT
  *--LOOP on WW1a
  *--LOOP on "Imperialism and Revolution"

<>1900:Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud published Interpretation of Dreams [TXT]
*--Freud was at the beginning of a public career that transformed modern ideas about how the mind works [CCC2,2:1061 | CWC:155 | CCS:73,623]
*--While "Western" power shot outward, "Western" consciousness ducked inward

<>1900:English mathematician Karl Pearson delivered lecture "National Life from the Standpoint of Science" [ID], in which he explained the meaning of social Darwinism and expounded the cause of eugenics [ID], with emphasis on selective breeding of the very best "stock" [PWT2:215-17]
*--In voguish contemporary scientistic terminology, Pearson justified the re-imposition of earlier rejected medieval concepts of inherent status by birth, as well as European racism and imperialism
*--Pearson was proud of his "free-thinker" reputation and his association with the English socialist movement
*--Eugenics was at the beginning of a sorrowful career through the first half of the 20th century
*--Hop ahead a half century

<>1900:USA census counted 76 million (17 million immigrants). EG= Mennonites, Jews
*--Michael Kraus, The North Atlantic Civilization:151-80 presents documents and commentary on the immigrant experience
*1845:1846; Scottish minister described emigration from his point of view. Also German emigration explained [BNE:155-8]
\\
*--Charles A. Ward, et al., eds., Studies in Ethnicity: The East European Experience in America

<>1900je:German Imperial Naval Act (#2) passed with goal of building vast, modern oceanic navy to rival English dominance of the high seas

<>1900je:China | Boxer Rebellion [W] occupied capital city Peking [then called Peiping; now Beijing]
\\
*--Robert Bickers, The Scramble for China (2011)
*--Joseph Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (1987)
*--Cooper.PACIFISM gives special attention to this example of overseas imperialist practice and its contribution to the brutalization of Europe in WW1 = [TXT]
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1900je:Russian state continued its campaign against Zemstvos

• Extending the reactionary trends of father Alexander III's reign into the young son Nicholas' reign, reactionaries took steps to strip Zemstvos of the authority to maintain warehousing of cereal grains and other provisioning against possible future famine (such had so seriously devastated Russia one decade earlier)
• Officials were forced to reverse themselves in the coming winter (1901) when famine once again stalked the Russian countryside
• In this crisis, Zemstvos had to be called back into action to perform essential public welfare functions which the state was unwilling and unable to perform

<>1900jy04:USA, KS City Democratic Party National Convention. William Jennings Bryan delivered speech [TXT] against US imperialism
*--The American "two-party" system was under great strain to accommodate the several varieties of political interest and opinion growing within the old political party system in the Progressive Era

<>1900se19:Russian Chief Gendarme, Count Viacheslav Plehve, received and eventually approved a secret report by Sergei Zubatov, Chief of the Moscow bureau of the Okhrana [secret anti-revolutionary police]

• As a result, state-sponsored labor unions were created in Moscow, a policy known as "police socialism", lasting three years [VSB,3:697-8 | WRH3:466-7]
  • Police Socialism can be understood as an official reactionary measure against growing unrest among workers
  • But it was much more than that. It also harmonized perfectly well with a long-term and sanctioned relationship of state to society
  • It sought to bring the Russian proletariat under the wing of officialdom, in the tradition of the 1722ja24:Table of Ranks and Catherine II's Charters for the nobility and the towns
  • State action in the direction of organizing wage-laborers brought to mind earlier action among village laborers = Arakcheev's "military settlements"
  • And it expanded Russian labor/welfare reforms of the previous decade
  • Muscovite tsars and Russian emperors worked constantly to shape the social structure to statist needs
  • Police Socialism could be seen as an extension of traditional social/service hierarchies into the ranks of a newly erupting and still amorphous social formation, wage-labor
• 1901:A new and simplified version of the Table of Ranks was issued [VSB,3:760-1]
• The tsarist state was suspended and oscillating between reformist and reactionary policy
• Revolutionary and other oppositional political parties had their own ideas about the appropriate way to organize workers
  • Some treated them as a new social formation, others as a variation on the ancient peasant soslovie
• And, of course, labor had views of its own on this question [See workers' memoirs in Victoria Bonnell, ed., The Russian Worker]
  • 1898fa:1900ja31; Skilled laborer Semen Kanatchikov went by train from Moscow to Petersburg and, for more than one year, was active in independent-minded worker circles
  • This group of wage-laborers was arrested and sent into exile [Kanatchikov:83-120]
  \\
  *--Rose Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society 1880-1914
  *--Robert Eugene Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century
  *--D. Pospielovsky, Russian Police Trade Unionism: Experiment or Provocation?

<>1900oc:1905fa;; Saint Petersburg | Russian Assembly [Russkoe sobranie] as the first large "nationalistic" public reactionary political party

• Membership was, however, not so much generated from among members of Russian society at large as from the ranks of high state servitors and could be called a feature of official reactionary policy
• It is sometimes hard to separate out the "official" and "public" facets of this movement
• The political party came to be known as Union of Russian Peoples [Soiuz russkikh liudei]

<>1901fe:Moscow the site of a secret conference of Zemstvo activists

<>1901:1906; Spanish-born painter Pablo Picasso: blue and rose period

• At first, Picasso seemed to assault all conventions of the fine arts, but before long his creations were taken to be the modern standard

<>1901:Polish-born English-language novelist Joseph Conrad published his provocative fiction Heart of Darkness [TXT] set in the Belgian Congo

• Is it racist? Anti-imperialist? Pro-imperialist?
• Two editions of this fabulous novel were published by Norton with EXTENSIVE historical documentation about Europe and the Belgian Congo [ID], plus critical commentary [1st ed] [2nd ed]
• Contemporary socialist critique of European imperialism in the Congo can be compared with Conrad's complex views on the matter [BNE:187-90]
• A great "English" writer, born in Poland, gives one of many indications that European high civilization transcended nation-state borders and adds a special historical nuance to Conrad's choice of topics, the brutalization of a grand European civilization as a result of imperialism, colonial militarism and revolution
• Over a century, the LOOP on "Imperialism and Revolution" described the origins of a central and morally challenging feature of 20th-century world history
• And so it continued to be into the 20th century
  \\
  *--Mary Ann Gillies, The Professional Literary Agent in Britain, 1880-1920 | A new middleman entered into the process of (increasingly "the business of") English literary production. The literary agent stepped between writers and their presses/publishers | This book concentrates on agents A.P. Watt and J.B. Pinker. Watt developed "agent's clauses" in agreements with publishers, settled "agent-client agreements" on writers, and sold copyrights. Pinker served as agent for Joseph Conrad, as well as for Rebecca West and D.H. Lawrence
  *--LOOP on "Imperialism and Revolution"

<>1901:Panama Canal project was transferred by treaty from England to USA

• The canal would connect the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean at the balmy global mid-waist -- thus avoiding the distant and stormy tip of South America and the remote and icy Arctic seas above Canada
• USA took the project out of European hands
• US imperialism was now at full steam in the Progressive Era

<>1901je:Japan | Ito Hirobumi [PH&G:217-8] replaced by Katsura Taro, protege of Yamagata Aritoma [PH&G:741]
*1901:1904; Russian/Japanese diplomatic exchanges [White, The_Diplomacy of the Russo-Japanese War:349ff]
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

<>1901je:Russian émigré theorist in Switzerland, fresh from Siberian exile, Lenin published analysis "THE PERSECUTORS OF THE ZEMSTVO AND THE HANNIBALS OF LIBERALISM" [TXT]

• Lenin expanded on Sergei Witte's 1899 Memo and laid down a thorough Social-Democratic critique of all liberal reformers AND political opposition since the beginning of the "Era of Great Reforms"
• Lenin was forming his own political conceptions through a careful study of the past four decades of Russian politics, oppositional and official
• He sought to bring national traditions or radical opposition into proper relationship to Marxism
• "Leninism" was about to make its historical appearance

<>1901no:1901de; Japanese negotiator Ito and Russian negotiator Lamsdorf tried to rebalance Russia-Manchuria Japan-Korea exchange, but failed, propelling Japan diplomatically into arms of England [Beasley,MHJ:169-70]

<>1901de12:Canada, Newfoundland | Marconi described waiting for the first trans-Atlantic radio signal [Eye:414]

• The era of electronic media was opening

<>1902:French "decadent" literary figure and nationalist ideologue Maurice Barrès [ID] published Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme [CCC2,2:522f | CCC3,2:1040-4]

<>1902:Geneva | Vladimir Il'ich Lenin published "What's to be Done?" [TXT | Excerpts = CCC3,2:976-86 | DIR2:363-78 | VSB,3:710-11 | BBMC1:620-2]

• The title question, Chto delat'?, was the Russian thinking person's eternal question, in this case very distinctly remindful of Chernyshevskii's notorious novel 40 years earlier [ID]
• Lenin's essay was devoted to a very local dispute over editorial power in an émigré journal of limited circulation
• But it became one of the most influential political tracts of the 20th century
  • Lenin expanded on his critique of statist reforms and liberal civil society in Russia
  • He now went even further, questioning the applicability to Russia of standard social democratic tactics as devised in the Europe-wide movement centered on the Second International and practiced among most other Russian SDs, those whom he would soon label Mensheviks ["minoritarians"]
    ||
    *--LOOP on The Second International
  • Lenin explained why the better future of Russia depended on the creation of a disciplined cadre party organization
  • A comparison of "What's to be Done?" with Lenin's last sustained piece of political writing two decades later, "Better Fewer, But Better", gives a simple two-point measure of his political evolution
• Lenin, with considerable justification, claimed to represent Karl Marx's original recommendations to Russian revolutionists, thus he claimed to be the only authentic Marxist
  • It is worth considering also the degree to which he might have justifiably claimed to inherit the traditions of oppositional politics within the broader Russian political culture [documents on this question in Late Marx...]
  • Lenin never openly claimed the inheritance from earlier decades of Russian political opposition because he did not want to be associated with the widely discredited legacy of "Russian populism"
  • Nor did he wish to be confused with the large rival Social Revolutionary Party which did claim to be the heir to the legacy of revolutionary populism
  • Lenin "went along" with the standard Social Democratic ridicule heaped on earlier movements
  • Nonetheless, he mined them carefully, for lessons about the peculiar features of the Russian "mode of production" and the political tactics those features recommended to all, whatever their ideologies
• As the general revolutionary crisis intensified in the first years of the 20th century, Russian SDs began to split into two factions, in fact two political parties, eventually to be called Bolsheviks ("majoritarians", though they were the minority on all but a very few issues) and Mensheviks ("minoritarians", though they were the larger part of the party)
  • Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks
  • Menshevik leaders were Yulii Martov, Plekhanov and other more moderate social democrats who represented Russian variations on the general European, labor-leaning, "left-wing liberal" or "radical liberal" trend associated primarily with Eduard Bernstein [VSB,3:713-14]
• Russian Marxism expressed itself in a variety of interpretations of Russian realities
• The party was caught by surprise when the 1905 Revolution broke out, and it thus played only a marginal role

<>1902:London | Russian émigré anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution, refuted Spencerian notion of "social Darwinism"

• Excerpts from this and other works [VSB,3:729-30]
• Russian-language website with general-European anarchist texts [W]
  \\
  *--Wagar on Russian anarchism [TXT]

<>1902:Russian political thinker Maksim Kovalevskii published Russian political institutions; the growth and development of these institutions from the beginnings of Russian history to the present time (1902) [EXCERPTS]

<>1902:USA | Great coal strike forced into arbitration by President Theodore Roosevelt
*--National Association of Manufacturers [NAM], etc., resisted
*--Courts used 1890:Sherman Anti-Trust Act [ID] against labor unions and the organizational efforts of wage-laborers
*--Coal was still, after nearly two centuries the central energy component of national industrial modernization
*--However, the petroleum products were increasingly sought as replacement for coal energy [Brief 3-hop sub-LOOP on "coal"]

<>1902se:USA journal National Review published a piece by Alfred Thayer Mahan which put into wide circulation the artificial "compass-point" geographical term "Middle East" [AfroAsia in SAC (ID)]

• With little other authentic identity, the label echoed on down through the century
• Mahan predicted that the "Middle East" would be pivotal in the dawning 20th century
• The power competition centered there may be defined as control exercised by expansive sovereign nation-state "metropols" over vulnerable and overlapping territories and resources located on near-by or distant "peripheries" [ID theoretical terms "metropol" and "periphery"]
• In this same year, English economist John Atkinson Hobson wrote Imperialism [ Excerpted E-TXT | Full E-TXT | W&P,1:5-11] | PWT2:217-19 | Wki]
• Hobson was an early and influential critic of competition among these European metropols for colonial predominance over the entire global periphery
• He was apprehensive about the dangerous threat this posed to the wider world but also to "The West" itself
• LOOP on "AfroAsia"
• LOOP on "Imperialism and Revolution" absorbed hereafter in LOOP on WW1a

<>1902ja:je; USA citizens were jolted by emerging details of imperialist atrocities committed by US forces in the Philippines during the Spanish American War [ID]

• For six months a specially created "Lodge Committee" gave all appearances of an effort to get to the bottom of this matter
• The Committee achieved only an effective "cover up" of US actions in the Philippines [W]
• No one was surprised at the outcome. In the chair sat Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (MA Republican), a powerful pro-imperialist figure in Congress
• He was closely associated with fellow Senator Albert Beveridge (IN Republican)
• The two were sympathetic to the rising Anglo-Saxon racism sweeping over the US establishment in these exciting years of Progressive Era debate on the question of projecting US power across the seas

<>1902ja30:Anglo-Japanese Alliance
\\
One historian of Japan wrote that this Anglo-Japanese Alliance, plus Russo-Japanese War, made Japan very "Western" and, at the same time, very "anti-Western". Pressure from Europe and US,

brought revenge, self-confidence and a sense of mission. Japan was set on the road that was to make her in the following forty years an exemplar of Western civilization, transplanted; a champion of Asia against "The West"; and the megalomaniac builder of an empire overseas [Beasley,MHJ:173]

<>1902mr26 (NS=ap08):Chinese/Russian agreement said Russian troops would leave Manchuria after 18 months, but they stayed on the Manchurian frontier, now a bone of contention between Russia, China and Japan (with increasing USA economic presence and constant English and German diplomatic entanglement)
\\
*--LOOP on WW!a

<>1902ap:Russian Interior Minister D. S. Sipiagin was assassinated
*--Sipiagin's assassin was a member of the newly organized mass Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries [SRs], which from the beginning served as home for a group dedicated to violent struggle by means of terror
*--The group was called "The Battle Organization" [Boevaia organizatsiia | Two-paragraph ID]
*--The specter of political terror again raised its head twenty years after the assassination of Alexander II
*--Notorious statist reactionary Police Chief Viacheslav Plehve replaced Sipiagin and was the last gasp of official reactionary policy
\\
*--Jonathan Daly [ID] helps explain how harsh and arbitrary bureaucratic (rather than judicial) incarceration and punishment can provoke "terrorism" [Begin TXT w/first full pgf]
*--Amy Knight, "Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party" [TXT]

<>1902my:Russia/Ukraine, Poltava and Kharkov provinces | Peasant disturbances provoked new Interior Minister Plehve to take reprisals [MR&C2:369]

• Forty years of peasant reform had by this time failed to meet the needs of the rural population
  • Chernigov Province police reported on political "propaganda" among local peasants =

    In one or another region there appear unknown young people, who pass through in railroad trains and in carriages, or on horseback along country roads, or on foot through the villages. They scatter revolutionary books and pamphlets about.... The books and pamphlets are eagerly read by the rural populace and ... are passed on from one person to the next, without any thought of evil. In some cases public readings of them have been delivered to whole crowds of peasants. When peasants learn the contents of the literature, rumors spread among them about imminent partition of proprietors' lands. Relations with local landowners become more or less strained

  • Police did not identify agitators, nor had they apprehended any. Local police resources were limited, so it might be best "to take measures to alert peasants themselves to seize agitators and hand them over to authorities and thus nip the evil in the bud" [Based on Page:53]
• Plehve and the Interior Ministry seemed to prefer reactionary policies, but =
• At the same time more constructive measures were taken under the leadership of Finance Minister Sergei Witte, who argued that "the evil" perceived among restless villagers perhaps did not reside in scattered books and pamphlets but in conditions of rural life
  • Witte created local committees of the Special Conference on the Needs of Agriculture in 49 provinces
  • All-Russian assemblies were instructed to discuss the agricultural crisis [MR&C2:347]
  • 1903:Aleksandr Rittikh summarized early deliberations of the Special Conference and defended peasant practice of periodic redistribution of land within the village commune [VSB,3:761]
• The tsarist state moved in contradictory directions

<>1902je08:1905; Germany, Stuttgart | Russian émigré publication "Liberation" [Osvobozhdenie] was for three years edited by Petr Struve and expressed the strenuously liberal oppositional political viewpoint of the Union of Liberation active back in Russia [VSB,3:721-4]

• The journal was published abroad rather than in Russia because censorship and police suppression of political movements made domestic publication impossible
• 1902je20:je22; Germany | The Union of Liberation [Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia] held its first informal meeting
• Soon the political organization, more or less a political party, was able to operate in Russia itself. The Russian old regime was sagging
• In this year a Saint Petersburg publisher issued two-volume Russian-language edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government [ID], the classic, and now pan-European, statement of liberal political principles
• Petr Struve was at the beginning of a political career that shifted "left" to "right", from socialism to conservatism
  \\
  *--Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870-1905 and Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905-1944

<>1902je25:Russian Social Revolutionary Party [SRs] political proclamation [VSB,3:719]

• The SRs grew directly out of populist socialist traditions of the 1870s
• 1900:London | A newly formed "Agrarian-Socialist League" published The Immediate Tasks of the Revolutionary Cause by Viktor Chernov, the leading figure among SRs [VSB,3:717]
• 1925:A quarter-century later, in Prague exile, Chernov looked back and summarized the essential platform of his political party [VSB,3:717-19]

<>1902jy02:jy03; Russian Zemstvo activist Dmitrii Shipov met with Plehve and Witte to discuss possible truce and cooperation [GFF:691-703]

<>1902au:Russian commander Kuropatkin reported on political "propaganda" within the Russian military [MR&C2:373-4]

<>1902de30:Russian State Council met to discuss economic problems [MR&C2:373-4,325-6]

• In these months, high-ranking state servitor Aleksandr Polovtsev entered into his diary depressing observations about tsarist-state dysfunction [VSB,3:698]
• 1902:1904; These two years of mounting crisis fed into the 1905 Revolution [1905 Revolution LOOP]

<>1903:1904; TIBET the object of Russian and English competition as Chinese authority waned

• England invaded, ostensibly to counteract Russian inspired religious propaganda in Lhasa by Buryat-born Buddhist monk Agvan Dorzhiev [BrE]. As English troops approached they surrounded Tibetan fortress
• Six hundred twenty-eight Tibetan soldiers who surrendered were slaughtered by the English
• More Russia in Asia and more on the Great Game
  \\
  *1997je12:NYR:45
  *--Bibliography on Buddhism in Europe [W]

<>1903:English mathematician, philosopher, pacifist and anti-dogmatist Bertrand Russell published his essay, "A Free Man's Worship" [CCC3,2:1213-20]

<>1903mr:Dmitrii Shipov met a second time with Plehve and Witte

• In these months police action against political opposition sharply increased
• An institutional or structural crisis matured within the tsarist state, along with all the familiar forms of economic and social crisis

<>1903mr20:Finnish autonomy further limited by Russian imperialist decree, reacting to mounting nationalist independence sentiment in Finland f[VSB,3:701]

<>1903ap06:ap07; The Kishinev Pogrom [TXT]. Jews suffered one of the most severe of several pogroms [maltreatment and even murder at the hands of irregular gangs who invaded and terrorized Jewish settlements] [VSB,3:698-701 | PWT2:205-8]

• Kishinev is the central city in a largely Ukrainian and Moldavian (Romanian-speaking) region, sometimes referred to as "Right-bank Ukraine". Today it is the capital of Moldova, but for almost a century it had been part of the Russian Empire and would eventually become a component of the Soviet Union
• Pogroms first broke out in the aftermath of the assassination of Alexander II, then fell off for almost 20 years
• The Kishinev pogrom occurred in Easter Week and marked a new wave of racist disorder that extended into the 1905 Revolution and beyond
• In many cases, officials looked on without acting. Some degree of local military and police participation was noted
• Certain ministers, Plehve for example, were distinctly anti-Semitic
• Some sought to divert growing mass discontent away from official circles and to disfocus it with racist distractions aimed particularly, but not exclusively, against Jews
• Ukrainian/Russian writer and journalist Vladimir Korolenko reported on the scene a few days after the pogrom [TXT]
• It is possible to see a parallel in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in USA, but a difficult interpretive maneuver is called for = Both a connection and a distinction must be made between "official" and "public" attitudes and behavior, between governmental tactics and outlook, on the one hand, and popular attitudes and actions, on the other
• Racist attitudes in society grew in late 19th-century Europe, along with nationalism and imperialism

<>1903my:Siberian city Ufa's Governor-General Bogdanovich was assassinated by political terrorist

<>1903su: Manchuria "Russian Lumber Company" sent "workers" (actually soldiers in disguise) down the Trans-Siberian Railroad to enforce Russian business interests in the far east

• Businessman Aleksandr Mikhailovich Bezobrazov was the leading proponent of this action
  • Bezobrazov was an entrepreneurial adventurer with huge timber concessions in Russian maritime provinces and in North Korea
  • He and his business adventures were carried out in close association with the Russian imperial military establishment
• Bezobrazov's action was a sign of Witte's failure
  • Witte failed to convince tsarist officials that a military approach to Asia was not in the best interests of Russia
  • He failed to convince them that the best approach was "peaceful economic penetration" along the full length of the Trans-Siberian railroad
• The Russo-Japanese War was the most important consequence of Bezobrazov's Manchuria victory over Witte
• Failed domestic policy of the tsarist state now contributed to its failure in international relations. Parallel railroad-related events transpired elsewhere =
• 1903:Iraq| German imperial ambitions caused the "Berlin-Baghdad Express" railroad project to be launched
  • For over a decade, action groups like "Pan-German League" had been urging expansion of German technical and industrial might eastward toward Pacific waters and southward into AfroAsia [E-TXT]
  • German-Ottoman relations quickened as German diplomats, bankers and military leaders perceived an opportunity to project their power along rails through Istanbul to Baghdad
  • The railroad agreement granted extraction and transportation rights to natural resources 12 miles on either side of the tracks
  • It also granted marketing rights to German goods in the northern heart of Ottoman Turkish Arabia
  • In these same years, Ottoman-German cooperation created the Hejaz Railroad [Wki], from Damascus in the north to the holy city Medina in the south [Hejaz indicates the western half of what would after WW1 be known as Saudi Arabia]
  • So we see that German-Ottoman railroad cooperation stretched track west to east and then north to south, a simple rail network of profound implication for the future of AfroAsian territories of The Ottoman Empire
• Over the previous 60 years, the railroad had everywhere become the powerful expression of industrial might and promoter of economic prosperity. And railroads still had a big role to play =
• It was now clear that the railroad could be turned to imperialist and military uses
• Imperialist and military uses were often at odds with the needs of domestic national industrial might and economic prosperity
• Liberal economic arrangements had come to dominate domestic policy in European nations
• But these liberal European domestic arrangements showed very little resemblance to those imposed on non-European peoples
• As the 20th century opened, Europeans were beginning to feel the bite of militarist statism in their own realms
• Imperialism after 200 years of "reaching out" to revolutionize the wider world was now "coming home"
• European imperialism (and not just Russian imperialism) forged close ties between military establishments and large economic enterprises
• The financial opportunities created by the need to prepare for modern industrial-era warfare were unprecedented
• These were years in which the phrase "merchant of death" came into wide usage
• Expanding transnational banking and financial organizations came into play
• These organizations frequently operated in stark contradiction to standard laissez-faire ideas of Adam Smith [ID] and other liberal political economists
• Was liberalism, as a general European experience, coming to an end just as the 1905 Revolution imparted a sudden new energy to liberalism in Russia?
  \\
  *--Eric Rauchway on early history of USA railroads [TXT]
  *--Continue LOOP on railroad
  *--LOOP on WW1a
  *--LOOP on "finance" (IE=global financial trends | This LOOP absorbs the LOOP on global imperialism and colonialism)

<>1903jy17:Brussels and London | Russian SDs Congress #2 issued program [McC1:25-8 | H05:263-8 | VSB,3:711-13]

• Party rejected Lenin's draft of Party rules [DPH:294-5] Some saw a connection between the way a political party governed itself and the way it might govern a whole nation [TXT]
• 1903au:Russian SDs agreed with difficulty on a single party platform [W] [DIR2:394-9 | DIR3:426-31]
• Lenin's concepts of "democratic centralism" and his insistence on "managerial" manipulation of the larger political association did not harmonize with standard Social Democratic notions of the future democratic and egalitarian order
• A serious ideological crisis grew within the ranks of Russian Marxists

<>1903au31:Plehve wrote revealing letter to retired General Aleksandr Kireev, in response to Kireev's Slavophile critique of Plehve's official reactionary policies [VSB,3:701-2]

• Plehve said constitutionalism might be unworkable, but the desire for it flowed from "pure springs" of political inspiration
• But some other political actions flowed from muddier sources = ambition for personal power and the machinations of a "non-Russian origin"
• Best thing was to place "various obstacles" in the way of those whose inspiration was muddy and to remove the reason for activism among those of pure inspiration
• In summary, the best way "to pacify agitated minds" was by "gradually and organically improving norms of civil life"
  • Does Plehve conflate "norms of civil life" with "government policies"
  • Plehve seems to be recommending suppression of independent or "ambitious" political action and "co-optation" of those who simply needed a bone tossed their way
• But he did at least concede that significant improvements in government were called for
• The "official reactionary" Plehve thus conceded the need for "official reform" in response to cultural conservative Kireev's complaint about reactionary tsarist state policy

<>1903no:Russia | Union of Zemstvo Constitutionalists [Soiuz Zemtsev-Konstitutsionalistov] founded
*--The liberal movement continued organize itself within Zemstvo institutions
*--It appeared now as a political party, not abroad but in Russia itself

<>1903no18:USA treaty authorized seizure of Panama Canal Zone [TXT]
*--South American nation Columbia had the Zone cut out of its hide by a USA sponsored separatist revolution
\\
*--LOOP on WW1a

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