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HUGH PHILLIPS (Bowling Green, KY, USA) HUGH PHILLIPS (Bowling Green, KY, USA) "A BAD BUSINESS"-THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION IN TVER'* The February Revolution of 1917 ended hundreds of years of Russian monarchial absolutism and established Russia virtually overnight as the "frees country in the world." Yet the nature of this revolution, especially the course of events in the provinces, has only recently become accessible to archival study owing to the collapse of the Soviet regime that for so long wished to see only its version of events. To be sure, historians have made admirable and useful efforts to understand February under these unfavor- able circumstances. Most notably, Ronald G. Suny and Donald Raleigh have written indispensable accounts of the entire revolutionary process of 1917 in Baku and Saratov, respectively, but neither was able to consult local archives. Indeed, Raleigh conducted his research without being allowed even to visit the city.1 Until scholars possess a comprehensive body of archival- based literature that encompasses events beyond Petrograd and Moscow, a complete history of the February Revolution will remain impossible. This article is intended to contribute to this effort through a study of the ancient Russian city of Tver', located about 150 miles northwest of Moscow on the rail-line to St. Petersburg. Broadly speaking, I have two objectives. First, I 1. Ronald G. Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917-1918 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972) and Donald J. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga:Saratov in 1917 (Ithaca, NY:Cornell Univ.Press, 1986). Rex Wade's, Red Guards and Workers' Militias in the Russian Revolution,(Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1984) includes a valu- able account of 1917 in Khar'kov. 124 attempt to describe and analyze the uniquely violent collapse of the old or- der in Tver' and the first steps of the new local government and the work- ers' soviet in coping with that. Second, this article assesses Tver"s Febru- ary in Russia's broader revolutionary process, with comparison to the Feb- ruary revolution in other cities.2 Raleigh asserts that Saratov had a reputation as "one of the most radi- cal Volga provinces" well before 1917.3 In its own way, Tver' was also unique. For one, it was "notoriously liberal even before [1894]."4 Two of the empire's most prominent liberals, Ivan ll'ich Petrunkevich and Fedor Rodi- chev, hailed from Tver'. The latter penned the famous 1894 letter of the Tver' Provincial Zemstvo Assembly to Nicholas 11calling for the establish- ment of "public institutions" to inform the Tsar of the "requirements and thought" of the Russian people, notions that Nicholas dismissed as "senseless dreams."5 But this political orientation had deeper roots in Tver' than almost anywhere else in Russia. Terence Emmons found that in 1906 the main liberal party, the Constitutional Democrats, commonly called the Kadets, had an "unusually large number of peasants and workers" in its Tver' organization. Three facts help explain this popularity: the party's call for a "new distribution of land to the peasantry, involving, where necessary., forced (but compensated) expropriation of gentry-estate lands," vigorous propaganda work among the peasantry,6 and the national popularity of Petrunkevich following his rousing speech to the first meeting of the State Duma in April 1906 demanding amnesty for political prisoners. This liberal tradition, however, did not prevent Tver' from having one of the most violent February Revolutions in Russia. Tver"s history reaches back to the era of Mongol domination. At that time, it was one of the leading principalities of central European Russia and it challenged Moscow for supremacy as the Mongol grip loosened. For many reasons, Moscow triumphed and in 1485 Prince Mikhail fled the wrath of Ivan III and settled in Lithuania. Eventually Tver' became merely another 2. Owing to limitations of space, this article focuses on events within the city of Tver'. An excellent account of the even more difficultconditions in the countryside is Evel G. Economakis, "Patterns of Migrationand Settlement in Prerevolutionary St. Pe- tersburg : Peasants from laroslavl and Tver Provinces," The Russian Review, 57, no. 1 (Jan. 1997), 8-24. 3. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga,p. 23. 4. Richard Charques, The Twilightof Imperial Russia (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958),p. 87. 5. George Fischer, Russian Faurn Gentry to Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA:Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), Np. 73-74. 6. Terence E mmonz, rhe Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elec- tions in Ru!:<:.!:.jlambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 33, 194-95. .
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