mbMs University of California Berkeley -72/fJ University of California Bancroft Library/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office George C. Guins IMPRESSIONS OF THE RUSSIAN IMPERIAL GOVERNMENT An Interview Conducted by Richard A. Pierce Copy Number 1971 by The Regents of The University of California George C. Guins in Petrograd 1914 All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between the Regents of the University of Calif ornia and George C. Guins, dated 19 June 1970. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes, All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. The legal agreement with George C. Guins requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty days in which to respond . TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE i INTRODUCTION iii GEORGE C. GUINS BRIEF BIOGRAPHY iv I GROWING REVOLUTIONARY FEELING, 1904-1905 1 Pro Domo Suo 1 Students Strike 2 II GOVERNMENTAL REACTION TO THE REVOLUTIONARY MOOD 4 The Peterhof Conference 4 Kliuchevskii s Appeal to History 5 The Problem of Access to the Tsar 6 Prince S. N. Trubetskoi s Warning 7 The Tsar s Decision 7 \ Disappointment Instigates the Revolutionary Movement 8 Reaction to Witte s Diplomacy 8 Witte as Prime Minister 9 The October, 1905 Manifesto 10 New Electoral Law and Fundamental Laws of 1906 10 Witte Powerless as Prime Minister 11 III BETWEEN THE REVOLUTIONS: GOVERNMENTAL CHANGE AND ACTIVITY 13 The First Duma and the Survival of the "Old Regime" 13 Dissolution of the First Duma 15 The Second Duma and the New Prime Minister 16 The Third Duma 17 LcgislaLive Procedure After the Establishment of the Duma 19 General Kuropatkin as a Statesman 22 The Second Stage of the Legislative Process 23 Legislative Procedure and Administrative Practice 25 Instructions 25 Ukazy 26 The Promulgation of Laws 27 The Codification of Russian Law 28 (A Great Creation by Count Speranskii) General Legislation and the Primitive Tribes 30 The Budgetary Commission of the Duma 30 New Men on the Government Staffs 32 i The Ministry of Agriculture -- A Case History 32 Development and Success of Stolypin s Reforms 34 Industrial Development 34 A New System of Civil Recruitment and Promotion 36 Competence of Many Members of the Bureaucracy 38 Reappraisal of Politicans 40 The Ministry of Agriculture and -National Progress 43 Stolypin and the Ministry of Internal Affairs 45 Stolypin and the Duma 46 Problem of the Zemstvos in the Western Regions 49 Consequences of Stolypin s Murder 50 Krivoshein 52 Wartime Stress 54 IV BETWEEN THE REVOLUTIONS: PROVINCIAL ADMINISTRATION 56 Administrative Officials 56 Namestniks 57 Governor-Generals 58 Appointed Atamans 60 Reminiscences an^ Impressions on the Round Trip in Turkestan 60 Relations Between the Provincial and Central Administrations 61 General Scalon, Governor-General of Warsaw 61 Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, Vicery of the Caucasus 62 Governor-General N. L. Gondatti of the Amur Region 63 General Shmitt, Governor -General of the Steppe Region 64 Appraisal of the Governor-Generals 65 Governor-Generals in the Transitional Period 66 Administration in the Provinces (Gubernias) 67 Some Typical Governors 73 The Role of the Nobility 75 General Appraisal of Gubernia Administration 78 Administration of the Villages 78 The Volost 79 The Zemskii Nachal nik 80 Status of Women 82 " - --" " -- -- i t Inorodtsv (Aliens) 83 (Professor Guins 1970 retrospective appraisal) A GENERAL SURVEY 85 The Third and Fourth Dumas 86 The Role of the Dumas in February, 1917 86 The Central Apparatus of the Government during the War 87 Influences from Behind the Scene 88 Capital and Local Administration (The Origin of Bureaucratism) 89 Personal Observations 89 The "Customary" Institutions of the Natives 90 The Siberian Problem 90 The "Regionalism" 91 "Self-determination" under Suspicion 92 Rapprochement Rejected 92 Governmental Deficiences 93 The Main Factor of the Revolution 95 PREFACE California-Russian Emigre Series The following interview is one of a series of interviews with Russian emigres sponsored by the Center for Slavic and East European Studies and produced by the Regional Oral History Office of The Bancroft Library. Although numerically a small proportion of the population, the Russian- Americans have for a long time been a conspicuous and picturesque element in the cosmopolitan make-up of the San Francisco Bay Area. Some came here prior to the Russian Revolution, but the majority were refugees from the Revolution of 1917 who came to California through Siberia and the Orient. Recognizing the historical value of preserving the reminiscences of these Russian refugees, in the spring of 1958 Dr. Richard A. Pierce, author of Russian Central Asia, 1867-1917, (U.C. Press, Spring 1960) then a research historian at the University working on the history of the Communist Party in Central Asia, made the following proposal to Professor Charles Jelavich, chairman of the Center for Slavic Studies: I would like to start on the Berkeley campus, under the auspices of the Center of Slavic Studies, an oral history project to collect and preserve the recollections of members of the Russian colony of the Bay Region. We have in this area the second largest community of Russian refugees in the U. S., some 30,000 in San Francisco alone. These represent an invaluable and up to now almost entirely neglected source of historical information concerning life in Russia before 1917, the February and October Revolutions, the Civil War of 1918-1921, the Allied intervention in Siberia, the Soviet period, of the exile communities of Harbin, Shanghai, Prague, Paris, San Francisco, etc., and of the phases in the integration of this minority into American life. The proposed series of tape-recorded interviews, as a part of the Regional Oral History Office of the University of California Library, was begun in September 1958 under the direction of Professor Jelavich and with the assistance of Professor Nicholas V. Riasanovsky of the Department of History. At that time Dr. Pierce conducted three interviews and arranged for a fourth. Each interview lasted several recording sessions, was transcribed and if necessary translated, edited by the interviewer and the interviewee, and then typed and bound. In addition he began assemblying papers to document ii the California-Russian emigres. In 1959 Dr. Pierce left to become Assistant Professor of Slavic History at Queen s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, but returned in the summers to continue his research in recent Russian history. In 1966 a second unit of the series was undertaken by Boris Raymond, who conducted three interviews, prepared a bibliography of Russian emigre materials in California, and arranged for the establishment of the California- Russian Emigre Collection in The Bancroft Library. He subsequently left to become Assistant Director of the University of Manitoba Libraries in Winnipeg, Canada, but returned in 1970 to conduct one more interview. A third unit of the series was authorized in the spring of 1969 by Professor Gregory Grossman, chairman of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies, with Professor Nicholas Riasanovsky serving as chairman of the committee in charge of the series. The unit included three interviews conducted by Richard Pierce, one by Boris Raymond, and the continuing collec tion of papers for the California-Russian Emigre Collection. A listing of all interviews done under the series follows. This series is part of the program of the Regional Oral History Office to tape record the autobiographies of persons who have contributed signifi cantly to the development of California and the west. The Office is under the administrative supervision of James D. Hart, director of The Bancroft Library. Willa K. Baum, Head Regional Oral History Office 15 April 1971 Regional Oral History Office 486 The Bancroft Library University of California at Berkeley Ill INTRODUCTION Professor George C. Guins, a Russian emigre, came to the United States in 1941. Earlier, he had served as an official in the Imperial Russian government, in the government of Admiral Kolchak during the Russian Civil War, and in the administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria. The unusual fund of experience provided by this varied background, enriched by his subsequent scholarly research, has made him uniquely qualified to the various levels and functions of the Russian government of pre-Soviet times. Professor Guins originally provided this series of interviews for my own use, but with his permission I have turned over these materials to the Oral History Project so that they may be referred to by other researchers. The several interviews wer e given during August of 1964. I tape- 1 recorded them in the study of Professor Guins home in Berkeley. The present series gave rise to another, on Professor Guins 1 life and on the Russian emigration as he observed it, carried out for the Oral History Project by Boris Raymond, in 1966. Richard A. Pierce Professor of History March 1971 Queen s University Kingston, Ontario Canada iv GEORGE C. GUINS BRIEF BIOGRAPHY Born April 15, (28) !887, in the Russian fortress Novogeorgievsk, now Mod! in, Poland. Father Constantine Guins (Gins) was a commissioned officer; mother Catherine, born Lamzaki, of Greek descent. Father, due to his serious condition of health, was taken from Poland by his parents to Kiev, their domicile, where he died in 1891.