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prevent going hungry.’ As early as 1902, demonstrations protesting low wages
and high rents caused agricultural strikes and other problems. Demonstrations
continued sporadically until Bloody Sunday in 1905, considered by many to be
the official beginning of the failed revolution."
The second primary cause of the failed revolution was the issue of nationality
and ethnic background. Legal and cultural oppression for non-ethnic Russian
citizens living within the Russian Empire was widespread, despite problems
in the legal code with the precise classification of these groups.’’ It should be
recalled that it was not abnormal for European countries, both east and west,
as well as the Americas, to have strict cultural and religious hierarchies. Most
people familiar with United States history can recall such discrimination
as “Irish need not apply” or the protracted history of preventing Catholics
from holding government positions due to religious biases, to say nothing
of race relations. However, due to the extremely multi-ethnic nature of the
Russian Empire, this discrimination was felt by a much greater portion of the
population, particularly once the idea of “Russification” (forcing others to adopt
Russian practices and cultural traits, such as attempts to force Lithuanians to
use the cyrillic alphabet) came to be in the mid-nineteenth century.’* Clear
examples of such a policy can be seen in the administrative rules dictating that
Russian must be used as the language of all levels of government throughout
the empire, even in areas where there were few or no native Russian speakers,
and in the prevention of ethnic Poles and Catholics from taking administrative
positions.” Ultimately, though information on peasants in this period is
difficult to gather, it seems to be the case that peasants “identif[ied] far more
strongly” with villages, kin groups, and, at its upper limits, certain regions
rather than the nation or nation state as a whole.?°
The problems of agricultural and ethnic unrest were not unrelated.
The highest percentage of peasant unrest causing serious damage (typically
arson or the destruction of an estate in some other manner in order to seize the
surrounding land) occurred in the Central Black Earth and Southwest regions,
and what is now Ukraine and Belarus." Minority ethnic groups made up the
majority of the peasantry in these regions — most of them have since become
independent countries in the wave of reorganization that took place following
the fall of the Soviet Union. Even within these regions, the peasantry had
developed ethnic hierarchies; families that were the same ethnicity but from
Richard Pipes, A Concise History ofthe Russian Revolution, New York, Vintage Books, 1996, 8.
Perrie, Ihe Russian Peasant Movement, 126.
17 Theodore R. Weeks, Russification: Word and Practice 1863-1914, Proceedings of the
American Philosophical Society, Vol. 148, No. 4 (Dec. 2004), 471.
18 Tbid., 473.
9 Ibid., 474.
20 Ibid., 474.
Perrie, The Russian Peasant Movement, 128.
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