10 Germany and Russia in the Belle Epoque:

This age was more likely to have been described as one of insecurity, rising international tension, imperial arrogance, riots, racism, and revolutionary uprisings - a haunting prelude to the horrors of 1914-45.

There were many reasons to be happy.

After another brief plunge in the early 1890s, Europe's economy began to recover, and most countries experienced renewed rates of economic growth.

In Europe, industrial production increased by 40 percent from 1900 to 1914.

The second industrial revolution, spurred by the chemical and electrical industries, helped to provide such things as street lighting, better public transportation, and cleaner water in the larger cities.

The poorer part of the population had more food and cheaper clothing.

In the countryside, where the depression had hit especially hard, farming income rose in large part because of the rapid growth of urban areas.
Russia was fed by investments from the west, especially from Russia's recently acquired diplomatic ally, the French Third Republic.

It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

The alliance between republican France and tsarist Russia was fraught with symbolism, related to Germany's rapid economic growth and the widespread alarm that Germany's rapid rise incurred.

Germany's ascent was notable in many areas: science, technology, higher education, Nobel prizes, music, literature, architecture, and the visual arts.
German businessmen began to offer goods and services that were superior in quality to those offered by the British, who resented the ungentlemanly manners of these German upstarts almost as bad as the Yankees.

For the first time since the 1840s, British elites began to worry about their ability to compete.

They made overtures to the French and Russians because of their concerns about Germany.
The fact that these former antagonists were becoming more friendly was not unrelated to the fact that in 1890 the most prominent symbol of Germany was replaced by the younger, unstable, saber-toothed tiger.
Nicholas II became the new tsar in 1894 at the age of 26.
Nicholas was supposed to be a new "tsar liberator" like Alexander II.
He was at least as bad as the leader.

Under the system of balance of power, these diplomatic shifts might be seen as reasonable in response to Germany's growth.

Because of the speed of Germany's ascent, the shifts had less of the appearance of a reasonable adjustment and more of a vicious cycle, each side intimidating and inciting the other in dangerous directions.
The French, Russians, and British felt the need to surround and contain this new power, which had been replaced by an unbearably bumptious Kaiser.

The Germans were able to strengthen their alliance with Austria-Hungary because of their convictions.

An arms race intensified a shift toward a stark bipolarity in diplomatic relations.
The early 1890s were seen as the beginning of a fatal diplomatic syndrome.

There was a more reckless nationalism and violent internal conflicts that emerged in all countries, visible on many levels: in the screaming headlines of the period's yellow journalism, in the mobs rioting against the Jews, in workers' strikes, and in anarchists' acts of terror.

Both liberals and conservatives accepted the shifts and moved towards a more direct sovereignty by the common people.
Replacing older ideals with newer practices involved manipulation of a mass electorate through emotional appeals to class resentments, nationalist exultation, and racist xenophobia.
Both liberals and conservatives embraced economic nationalism or "neo-mercantilism," which involved new tariffs and expanded roles for the state.

The second industrial revolution was characterized by less individual effort.

Larger amounts of investment capital were needed for general operations.

The SPD emerged from its twelve years of illegal status in Germany in 1890 to become the country's largest party and a new political model that was different from the older-style parties that were led and financed by upper-class, established elites.

The leaders of the SPD were chosen from the working class, with a sprinkling of maverick intellectuals from the middle and upper classes.

Germany's economic barons and allied ruling orders were alarmed by the expansion of the SPD and its associated trade unions.

Germany's leaders felt threats from inside the country as well as from its neighboring states.
Paranoia is a dangerous mentality in a state where people are growing in power.
It is more dangerous when the states around it are in the same situation as France was in 1870-1, and many of Germany's neighbors had concerns about its long-range intentions.

It is possible to conclude that the Belle Epoque was beautiful but also ugly, secure and destructive.

Long-existing beliefs in steady progress clashed with fears of decadence and downfall within the intellectual elites of these years.
Trust in the power of reason was undermined by an appreciation of the power of the irrational.

"End of century" was the last stage of a glorious era.

Edward VII took over the British throne in 1901.
When he became king, he was sixty years old and heir apparent.
He was fond of the pleasures of the Continent.
"Wilhelmian" is derived from the new Kaiser, cursed from birth with a withered arm, and the term, like Edwardian, carried suggestions of release from long, burdensome parental restrains.
The English and German monarchs were related to Nicholas II's wife, who was one of Victoria's many granddaughters.
In Chapter 2, it was noted that Wilhelm, Nicholas, and Edward resembled one another physically.
It is hard to see any of them as hopeful signs of Europe's future.

The thinker who has come for many observers to epitomize the emerging trends of the era, Friedrich Nietzsche, spent his final years in an insane asylum and did his most influential writing in the 1880s.

He spoke to a different audience than the Hegelians, Darwinians, or Marxists.

He had a huge influence on Europe's intellectual life, extending well into the mid-twentieth century.

The traditional right, mocking bourgeois values and the Judeo-Christian tradition were iconsoclastic, but he also took aim at what he believed were the shallow pseudo-certainties of modern science.
His writing style was more like poetry than philosophy.

As with Darwin and Marx, how he was understood may be more important than what he actually wrote.

His intentions were obscure and he had a penchant for paradoxes.
His sense of the Highest Good was uncertain but different from the prevailing attitudes of the day.
The inferior trying to hold down the superior was dismissed as a "slave morality" by him.
He admired Dostoevsky's work, but he did not share the Russian novelist's Christian faith.

Although he was seen as an important influence on the Nazis, his writings were not as sophisticated as those of Hitler or Himmler.

It's easy to see how Nietzschean thought could be used for racist purposes.
He might be the most politically correct writer of the 19th century.
There was a remorseless aesthetic elitism to his statements, and a summons to return to the ethic of the ancient Greeks and to reject the Christian elevation of the meek, poor, and simple.
He held the political antisemites of his day in contempt if they made comments about Jews that appealed to their enemies.

In one sense, the German Question was solved in 1870-1, but in another sense, it was troubling.

It was simply that there were too many Germans in Europe.
The most important issue was not numbers.
The proliferation of German-speakers into parts of central Europe and eastern Europe left many pockets of German minorities.
German-speakers had higher literacy rates than other ethnic groups.
In the mid-nineteenth century Germans seemed to have mastered modern techniques of production more successfully than any other European people, with the exception of the British and Americans.

A significant part of the German population became intoxicated with ultra-nationalism and resentful of how they had been treated before.

It is easy to overlook the extent to which heated nationalist sentiment and self-pitying resentments existed in other countries, especially since these German tendencies stand out especially in retrospect.
It is often overlooked that the SPD, Germany's largest party, opposed racism and stood for peace and international reconciliation.

The Catholic Center, Germany's second-largest party, was a non-racist and universalist.

After 1871, Bismarck offered a conciliatory German face in international relations, despite the fearsome anger he directed at those who opposed him.

He vowed to work as an "honest broker" for international peace after announcing that Germany was a "satiated" power.
He was able to allying Germany with both Austria-Hungary and Russia because of their clashing interests in the Balkans.

Other issues were left in abeyance, unsolved or made worse by the authoritarian nature of the state he created and the way he personally ruled it.

Sir John Tenniel wrote "Dropping the Pilot".

Kaiser Wilhelm II is taking over while the "pilot" is being dismissed.

The issues took on a more urgent aspect when the signals were given after 1890.

In these years, many nations faced internal problems of equal or even greater gravity.

France, Russia, and Austria-Hungary moved from crisis to crisis, deeply divided internally, and with histories that were far bloodier than Germany's.

The British were considered to be the most successful nation-state in modern times, but their record was not without blemish, and at the end of the 1890s Britain became entangled in a divisive imperial war against the Boer republics in southern Africa.

The effects of one of Bismarck's failures linger into the prewar period.

He tried to wean the working class away from socialism by offering its members state-supported welfare measures.
The idea that the state has a major responsibility to help the poor and resolve social conflicts meshes with Hegelian thought.
The critics argue that the political maturity of Germany's population was weakened by people putting too much trust in the state.
When the German state was well run, the danger of that path seemed small.
When socialism was introduced, many Social Democrats thought that existing state institutions could be retained.

The rising SPD began to show serious internal strains.

The implications beyond Germany pushed the SPD to the edge of schism.
The strains were related to the issues discussed in Chapter 9, "what Marx really meant," how long the capitalist stage could be expected to last, and whether the demise of capitalism would involve a violent confrontation between the ruling class and the peasants.
The younger generation took up these long-simmering questions after the death of Engels.

In the 1870s and 1880s, these men faced persecution because of their Marxist beliefs, and they had been friends of Engels.

Bernstein insisted at the end of his life that he was still a Marxist and that he had tried to bring Marx's theory up to date.
Since he did more than update Marxism, his attachment to the Marxist label seemed to have more to do with the emotional bonding of his youth and the comradeship he felt within the social-democratic movement.
The root and branch were criticized by him.
He denied that class conflict was unbridgeable and that capitalism's internal contradictions would inevitably lead to revolution.
He described socialism as desirable, but by no means inevitable; it would come through gradual reform over a long period and patient work guiding socialist ideals, not suddenly in a dramatic confrontation.

Bernstein challenged point after point of what had become Marxist dogma with scrupulously assembled facts and figures.

Capital and wealth are not being concentrated in all sectors of the economy.
Small and medium-sized fortunes were increasing both relatively and absolutely.
Marx predicted that the proletariat would never become an absolute majority and that it would become more impoverished.
Its average salary was going up.
The white-collar, lower-middle-class, or bourgeois "salariat" was growing faster than the proletariat, and the small peasantry in many areas of Germany and elsewhere were resisting proletarianization much more successfully than Marx had predicted.

In the early 1890s, Kautsky devoted a lot of energy to solidifying Marxism as the party's official creed.

He was concerned about fighting reformism in the party, which he dismissed as bourgeois democratic-radicalism.
After 1899 his friendship with Bernstein soured, and he led a successful fight to have Revisionism officially denounced by the SPD.

The Revisionist Controversy was similar to the Christian doctrine of the past.

There was something religious about the indignant way in which the opposition to Bernstein's theories was expressed.
Marxism, the most modern and sophisticated of the socialist theories, offered not only emotional but also intellectual satisfaction and the assurance of being on the winning side of history.
Bernstein's revision of Marxism, removing essential elements of its claims to higher truth, threatened to undermine those emotional satisfactions.
The credibility of the moral universe associated with Christian religion was threatened by the revision of the biblical account, and many social-democratic activists felt the same way.

In his attacks on Revisionism at the party congress, Bebel made arguments that emphasized moral rather than factual points.

Revisionists were composed of mostly bourgeois intellectuals and a newly prosperous "workers' aristocracy" that had lost contact with the sufferings of the toiling mass.
Bernstein's emphasis on practical, mundane reforms threatened to drain the social-democratic movement of that ineffable if crucial aspect that attracted idealists of all classes and gave common workers a sense of worth in a society that held them in low regard.

There were parallels between Revisionism in Germany and other countries.

Alexander Millerand joined the cabinet of a coalition of left-wing republican but non-socialist parties in France in 1898.
The Marxists in France wanted a formal condemnation of Millerand's "ministerialism", which is cooperating with bourgeois parties in parliament.
Revisionism was condemned at the meeting of the Socialist International in Amsterdam in 1904, but not without some ringing dissents from other French socialists.

The prestige and internal following of the SPD continued to grow after this crisis.

The elections of 1912 in Germany marked a significant advance, as the SPD won about a third of the vote and more than 100 seats in the Reichstag.
The party remained politically isolated, unwilling to ally with other parties and not much desired as an ally by them; a large party in France or Britain would almost certainly have become part of a ruling coalition.
Even if a coalition of the SPD and other parties had been achieved, the Reichstag did not have the same authority as the British Parliament or the French Chamber of Deputies.

Although he favored lifting the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1890, he was still an autocrat who believed in the Hohenzollern family's right to rule.

The princes of the various member states, as well as the new industrial magnates, had real power in the Reich.

In his last years, Bismarck contemplated a more effective suppression of the SPD, and similar ideas were given serious attention by many leaders in Germany, in light of the SPD's growth and the prospect of its gaining a majority in the Reichstag within the near future.

The Reich seemed to some observers to be heading for a catastrophic wreck after 1912.

Alexander III was the tsar of Russia from 1884 to 1894 and was similar to Peter the Great.

He cultivated an image of being kind and wise beneath his rough exterior.
Alexander had come into power with a clear mandate: wipe out the revolutionaries who had murdered his father, and take measures to correct the excesses and failures of liberal reform.
Alexander's son, Nicholas, was a disappointment to him, as the father ridiculed him as small, weak, and effeminate.
Nicholas was unprepared to take over as tsar when Alexander died suddenly at the age of forty-nine.
He was praised by the western press in his first years because of his role in organizing the international peace conference in 1899.
He was rumored to be open to liberal reform and even more so to a less strict policy in regards to his Jewish subjects.
Nicholas believed that Russia's Jews and the Jews covertly allied with them in other countries were out to humiliate him and destroy Russia, so he would consider himself "at war" with them.

Nicholas assumed that the country he was in was unchanging.

He blundered into a disastrous war with Japan after Russia's defeat, which led to the revolution of 1905.
The direction of Russia's economy and society since the early 1890s was a blow to the narodnik vision of avoiding western Europe's capitalist stage.
Large industrial enterprises were being established in many areas as Western investment and technical experts poured into the country.
Peasants were leaving their villages to work in the new factories.
They encountered an unfamiliar urban environment similar to what workers in the early industrialization of Britain faced, with similar turmoil and violent clashes with authorities.

A number of narodniks had an interest in Marxism.

The failures of the narodnik movement and the successful model of the SPD are what caused that interest.
By the turn of the century, a capitalist stage seemed to be inevitable for all countries, as well as the working out of its internal contradictions.
By the turn of the century, working-class unrest in Russia had spread and become severe.
The war with Japan was reflected in the revolution of 1905.

The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party was founded in 1898.

Russia's stage of industrialization was much behind that of Germany and had so far produced relatively small numbers of proletarians that it was different from the SPD in a number of aspects.
The Russian party had a period of semi-legal status between 1878 and 1890, but it was also deceptive since millions of workers in Germany retained their right to vote.
The first stages of the Russian party were dominated by leaders and few followers, with little more than a band of intellectuals living in exile and lacking regular or close contact with the lower classes of the Russian Empire.
The creation of the party was crippled by intensefactionalism.
Russian Marxists debated what Marx really meant more than Marxists in western Europe.
Within a few years, personal rivalries and other issues led to the formation of separate parties, known as the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, that were hostile to one another.

The Black Partition, a group of narodniks who claimed that the peasants had a right to all, is associated with the debates within the Russian party.

The debates of Russian Marxist exiles had remarkable levels of subtlety.

The position of Ulyanov eventually stood out from the debates.

He was better known by his revolutionary name, Lenin.
It was necessary for a party of professional revolutionaries to bring revolutionary consciousness to the working class in order to guide them in seizing power, establishing a proletarian dictatorship, and introducing socialism, argued Lenin.

With echoes of Nechaev, that commitment was all-consuming for Lenin.

The nature of the revolution in Russia in 1917 was complicated by the differences between the Bolshevik and Menshevik groups.

The Russian version of Marxism is called leninism.

Critics considered the opposite of an updated Marxism, in that Lenin inserted retrograde Russian-anarchist elements into it.

The Marxism of Marx had been drained of its revolutionary content by men like Bernstein and the trade-union leaders of western Europe, according to Lenin.
The idea of revolutionary elitism was one of the things that was considered peculiarly Russian by his western critics.

The ideas of Blanqui were one of the western antecedents to Leninist elitism.

The way in which Blanqui's theories meshed Marxist analysis of capitalism with revolutionary elitism and voluntarism was more modern than the way in which Lenin's theories meshed Marxist analysis of capitalism with revolutionary elitism and voluntarism.
Russia's narodnik tradition influenced Lenin.
Alexander was sentenced to death for his part in a narodnik conspiracy to kill Alexander III.

The young Lenin concluded that his brother's way was not the correct one, but he still admired the courage and dedication of the narodniks.

The movement came from.
In 1863, the narodnik Nikolai Chernyshevsky wrote a novel with that title, and he was an ardent fan of it.
Rakhmetov was a revolutionary who sacrificed everything for the good of the people.

He saw class conflict as a motor of progress and considered the toiling masses, not great men, to be the makers of history.

Marxists in the west were more concerned with how revolution was to be led than they were with the idea of revolutionary leadership.

As the German social-democratic movement grew to attract millions of new members, many of its leaders expressed exasperation with workers as being intellectually lazy, concerned mostly with immediate pleasures, and inclined to alternate from apathy to violentness.
The leaders concluded that the working class, even in a modern industrial context, needed strong leadership, but of a different sort than was proposed by Lenin.
Many of the leaders believed that the only way the social-democratic movement could aspire to majority support was to abandon its association with Marxism.
The skilled and well paid were put off by Marxist theory because they feared mob rule and the indiscipline of the unskilled.
The leaders of the working class in the west needed to oppose the revolution.

Around the turn of the century, other groups began to organize in Russia.

The narodniks came back to life in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, still counting on the Russian peasant to support them.
The formation of these Russian parties gives a sense of how Russia was moving away from the law.

Russia's imperial ambitions were similar to those of France and Britain, but the spread into Siberia and central Asia was far back in Russian history.

The 1904 war between Russia and Japan was a turning point in Russian history.

More troops than any other time in human history were involved in the battle of Mukden, which took place in February-March 1905.

Military observers from around the world came to watch the huge clash of the Russian and Japanese forces.

Approximately 200,000 casualties and a third of them deaths were the result of the battle at Mukden, which was formally a victory for the Japanese.

Many Europeans were surprised by Japan's victory.
There would be more surprises.
The Russian military incompetence was on full display to the world.
Nicholas II was inclined to refer to the Japanese as "monkeys" but he soon realized that they had mastered the techniques of modern warfare.
The Japanese navy destroyed the Russian Baltic fleet at the Straits of Tsushima in May 1905.
The humiliating defeats set in motion a series of shocks, helping to spread revolution inside Russia and notifying the world of Japan's rising power.

Nicholas's incompetence in leading the war with Japan was revealed in his response to internal developments.

He didn't believe that his own loyal subjects were associated with the discontent that was spreading by the first years of the twentieth century; he thought it was the work of foreigners.
He was particularly interested in the reports that Jewish financiers were trying to prevent the Russians from getting loans from the Japanese.
Large numbers of Jews were noted by his advisers.

In January 1905, there was a wave of workers' strikes in St. Petersburg that led to a plan to petition the tsar for both economic and political reform.

On January 22, a crowd numbering close to a quarter-million marched on the tsar's Winter Palace, singing patriotic songs and led by an Orthodox priest, Father Gapon, who had previously been active, with the support of the tsarist police, in organizing the workers Women and children are usually seen as sign of peaceful intent in the crowd.
The security forces around the palace panicked and opened fire on the crowd, killing or wounding hundreds.
This tragedy was similar to the Peterloo massacre in Britain in 1819.

The news of Sunday's killings spread throughout Russia.

The myth says that the tsar who cared for his people now appeared to be evil.
There was a wave of protest strikes that rolled over the land.
Social democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Kadets scurried to give leadership to this groundswell of popular outrage.

Russia needed a constitutional government that reflected the principle of popular sovereignty and western-style civil liberties, according to an initial consensus.

Nicholas II and his advisers became aware that the country's military could no longer be relied on to maintain order, as they were facing more powerful forces than in the past.
The tsar made concessions after the success of the general strike in Saint Petersburg.
He promised to grant civil liberties to the Russian people, with universal male suffrage and the establishment of a national parliament.

Many of the revolutionaries didn't believe in Nicholas's promises and so the October Manifesto failed to satisfy them.

Nicholas and his advisers played upon the divisions between the moderates and radicals, and in December he ordered the leaders of the St. Petersburg soviet arrested and put on trial for armed rebellion.
Leon Trotsky was a leading figure of the 1917 revolution and the Bolshevik regime.

He gained a lot of attention for his speeches.

His Jewish background did not go unrecognized.

After World War I, the image of Jews as threatening and destructive revolutionaries became a staple of Russia's right-wing organizations.

It was a sign of the times that right-wing political organizations formed and began to take up the tsarist cause, but it was also a sign that the autocratic tsarist regime had previously been unreceptive to popular political initiatives.
In 1903, mob actions against Jews took place in the bustling port city of Kishinev, on the Black Sea, with a large and rapidly growing Jewish population.
Forty-five people were killed and 500 were injured when mobs destroyed Jewish homes and businesses.
The mobs were inciting the Black Hundreds.

The disgrace and humiliation felt by Jews, "with trembling knees, concealed and cowering," was captured by the Jewish poet Bialik.

The issue of Jews fighting back, no longer accepting misfortune as the will of God, became a major concern for a younger generation.
For Jews of many other persuasions, Trotsky became a hero, not only for budding Marxists, but also for Jews of many other persuasions.

Between 1903 and 1906, there were as many as 600 pogroms in Russia.

By this point, some conservatives thought that antisemitism could be used to combat the forces of the left in Russia than in western Europe.
In the early twentieth century, the Russian form of Jew-hatred was more violent than in western Europe.
The events in France in the early twentieth century gave the issue of antisemitism in western Europe a visibility and intensity it had so far lacked.

The deputies of the newly elected duma lived a precarious existence between 1906 and 1914.

Under the direction of the tsar's able prime minister, Peter Stolypin, the government introduced legislation that allowed peasants to acquire private plots.
Property-owning peasants in France were transformed into a conservative force in the 19th century.
It was a promising start, in what seemed a far-seeing policy rather than one of blind oppression.

Millions of peasants took advantage of the new legislation.

The demise of the narodnik vision may have been caused by the transformation of the Russian peasantry intobourgeois holders of private property.
He was killed in a theater in 1911.
He was one of a number of high officials to be killed by revolutionaries.
A number of Russian high officials were killed by Jewish assassins.