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On the international scene, as on the domestic, evidence could be cited of both success and failure. The greatest failure had come in 1908, when a series of diplomatic misunderstandings left Russia helplessly embarrassed when Vienna unilaterally annexed the disputed Balkan provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Competition between the army and the navy often attaining a high degree of rancour (contributing to the divisiveness of Duma politics), was depleting the budget and demoralizing the military. (Military historians generally agree that the navy’s demands were particularly unrealistic.) Earlier plans for establishing Russian hegemony over Mongolia and Manchuria were forcibly scaled down. Key Russian decision-makers were bitterly divided over how far to the west Russia should commit itself to a fortified defensive perimeter against Germany and Austria.

On the other hand, important diplomatic problems appeared to be resolved. Beginning in 1907 relations with Japan and England had significantly improved, and in 1909 Paris, though still a wary ally (witness France’s restraint at the time of the 1908 annexation crisis), agreed to advance Russia a generous five-year loan. This was an enormous boost to Russia’s economy, facilitating several successive years of industrial recovery (though even that recovery, because industrialists were reluctant to share its rewards with their workers, contributed to the militancy of the strike movement that destabilized urban Russia a few years later). Finally, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, while in some ways frightening to Russian military planners, had the consequence of committing them to a ‘Western’-oriented strategy and, for better or worse, a readiness for full rather than partial mobilization in the event of a major international crisis.

Literature and the Arts

Perhaps the most difficult spheres of Russian life to place squarely in the framework of the optimist–pessimist debate are literature and the arts. Without doubt, the reign of Nicholas II (and especially its last decade or so) witnessed extraordinary artistic creativity, so much so that cultural historians routinely use such terms as ‘silver age’, ‘second golden age’, and ‘cultural renaissance’. In poetry in particular, but also in fiction, theatre, music, and the plastic arts (characteristically, the walls between these fields were often scaled), new ‘modernist’ modes of expression, with Symbolism in the lead, asserted themselves among the cultural élite. Modernism boldly challenged the hegemony of realism, positivism, and a socially oriented and utilitarian civic art that had dominated Russian aesthetics for decades. As part of this challenge, modernists introduced religious, metaphysical, and philosophically idealist perspectives into artistic and intellectual discourse (as, for example, in the collection of essays published in 1902 entitled Problems of Idealism). It should be said, however, that such intellectual experimentation had little effect on the taste of a new mass reading public, a group that expanded rapidly with the growth of primary education and the popular press.

If the first essential steps in a modernist direction preceded the 1905 Revolution, the years that followed were particularly creative, with avant-garde writers such as Andrei Bely Zinaida Gippius, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Valerii Briusov, Alexander Blok, and Vasilii Rozanov producing some of their most creative (and controversial) work. The Symbolist perspective that now dominated soon spawned a series of competing, often polemicizing movements (Acmeism, Futurism, and others), but all purportedly rejected what they viewed as the prosaic civicmindedness of nineteenth-century Russian writers. Not surprisingly, many readers, including members of the political intelligentsia, were hostile to the modernists, viewing their artistic products as esoteric, self-indulgent, and out of touch with popular needs (not to mention popular tastes).

Related to, if distanced from, the modernist rejection of traditional Russian aesthetics was a concurrent rebellion against the traditional assumptions of the left and liberal intelligentsia. Because it originated within the intelligentsia itself, that rebellion sometimes took the form of severe self-criticism. In 1909 a group of prominent intellectuals—among them Struve, Sergei Bulgakov, and other veteran leftists who now harboured painful second thoughts—published Vekhi (Signposts), a symposium that repudiated their past commitment to Marxism and atheism, their lack of national spirit, and their former narrowly political aesthetics; the collection unleashed a stormy backlash, not only from the far left, but also from the likes of Miliukov.