CORRUPTION AND THE COUNTERREVOLUTION: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BLACK HUNDRED by Jacob Langer Department of History Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Marty Miller, Supervisor ___________________________ Donald Raleigh ___________________________ Warren Lerner ___________________________ Alex Roland Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University 2007 ABSTRACT CORRUPTION AND THE COUNTERREVOLUTION: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BLACK HUNDRED by Jacob Langer Department of History Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Marty Miller, Supervisor ___________________________ Donald Raleigh ___________________________ Warren Lerner ___________________________ Alex Roland An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Graduate School of Duke University 2007 Copyright by Jacob Langer 2007 Abstract This dissertation analyzes the ideology and activities of the Black Hundred movement at the end of the Imperial period in Russia (1905-1917). It seeks to explain the reasons for the sudden, rapid expansion of Black Hundred organizations in 1905, as well as the causes of their decline, which began just two years after their appearance. It further attempts to elucidate the complex relationship between the Black Hundred and Russian authorities, including the central government and local officials. The problem is approached by offering two distinct perspectives on the Black Hundred. First, a broad overview of the movement is presented. The focus here is on the headquarter branches of Black Hundred organizations in St. Petersburg, but these chapters also look at the activities of many different provincial branches, relating trends in the provinces to events in the center in order to draw conclusions about the nature of the overall movement. Second, this dissertation offers an extended case study of the Black Hundred in the city of Odessa, where a particularly large and violent Black Hundred movement emerged in 1906. It explores the factors that made Odessa conducive to the Black Hundred, and explains events in Odessa as symptomatic of the overall condition of Black Hundred groups. The research is based primarily on material from archives in Moscow and Odessa comprising police reports and resolutions approved at national monarchist congresses. It also draws on memoirs, newspaper accounts from the liberal, leftist, and Black Hundred iv press, and the secondary literature. The framework primarily consists of analyzing the membership, leadership, ideology, funding, and activities of the Black Hundred organizations that served as the main expression of the monarchist movement. This dissertation concludes that the decline of the Black Hundred cannot be attributed to the harmful actions of government officials, as historians have previously argued. Instead, the movement lost public confidence and fell victim to bitter infighting owing to the corruption of Black Hundred leaders, both in the center and in the provinces. Because Black Hundred organizations enjoyed the backing of many state officials and the outspoken support of the tsar, they were often perceived as officially-sponsored parties. This attracted many unscrupulous members who hoped to use their links to the Black Hundred to cultivate official connections or to identify money-making opportunities. These members, often rising to leadership positions, proved particularly prone to corruption, a habit that ruined the organizations’ finances, sparked bitter internecine rivalries, and ultimately discredited the entire movement. v Contents Abstract.............................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents............................................................................................................... vi Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 1. Roots of the Counterrevolution..................................................................................... 14 2. Taking it to the Streets .................................................................................................. 56 3. Collapse and Catastrophe............................................................................................ 115 4. Rise of the Rabble Rousers: The Black Hundred Come to Odessa ............................ 174 5. The Capture of a City.................................................................................................. 206 6. Corruption Kills .......................................................................................................... 242 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 269 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 273 Biography........................................................................................................................ 281 vi Introduction In July 1917, just months after the tsar was overthrown in the February Revolution, a former State Duma member sat down for a conversation with investigators commissioned by the new Provisional Government. The times were chaotic. Fighting the Great War, Russian troops licked their wounds after their June offensive turned into a rout at the hands of the Germans and Austrians. Internally, economic conditions disintegrated and political power became paralyzed by the rivalry between the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet. As the Bolsheviks staged armed antigovernment demonstrations, liberal and conservative politicians warned that the country faced “catastrophe.” 1 The subject of the interrogation was N. E. Markov II. As the former president of Soiuz Russkogo naroda (Union of the Russian People, or URP), Markov had dedicated his political career to buttressing the authority of the now-deposed tsar. Markov’s union represented the original and quintessential organization of the Black Hundred, a far-right movement that burst on the scene during the Revolution of 1905. 2 For its first two years, 1 A. K. Drezen, ed., Burzhuaziia i pomeshchiki v 1917 godu: Chastnye soveshchaniia chlenov gosudarstvennoi dumy (Moscow and Leningrad: Partiinoe Izdatel'stvo, 1932), 192, 206. 2 The term “Black Hundred” originally applied to guilds of small tradesmen in Medieval Muscovy. See Gurko, V. I. Features and Figures of the Past , ed J. E. Wallace Sterling, Xenia Joukoff Eudin, and H. H. Fisher, trans. Laura Matveev (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1939), 676N. Liberals and socialists called monarchists “Black Hundred” as a pejorative to emphasize the lumpen proletarian and hooligan elements of the movement. In an example of “owning the insult,” many grassroots rightists adopted the moniker themselves, although monarchist leaders tended to eschew it. This dissertation uses the term “Black Hundred” to describe the overall rightist movement. It employs the terms “rightist” and “monarchist” interchangeably to refer to a person who subscribed to an ideology, propagated by the Black Hundred organizations discussed herein, based on Russian nationalism, anti-Semitism, and support for unlimited autocracy. Although adherents of more moderate groups like the Octobrists were technically monarchists in that they supported the existence of the autocracy within the political structures created by the October Manifesto, these groups are best described as “conservative,” as Russians at the time usually reserved the “monarchist” designation for the tsar’s more extremist supporters. 1 the URP led the Black Hundred in meting out vigilante justice against revolutionaries, Jews, and other perceived enemies of the tsar. Its members beat Jewish passers-by, engaged in street fighting with revolutionaries, and developed a paramilitary force that assassinated liberal politicians. But with the suppression of the Revolution of 1905, the URP entered a terminal decline. Its popular support vanished along with the immediate specter of revolution as the group became dependent on government subsidies for its continued existence. By the time Markov gained complete control of the organization in 1912, it had ripped itself apart, done in by the infighting and pervasive corruption of its own leaders. Markov’s interrogators, the kinds of liberals and socialists he had relentlessly denounced as scoundrels and traitors throughout much of his life, had been assigned to investigate possible illegality in the tsarist government’s support for Black Hundred organizations. During the interview, Markov answered questions about the URP’s ideology, secret government subsidies, and its paramilitaries. The key questions, however, concerned the movement’s downfall. By 1916, the Black Hundred had lost 90 percent of its members. When the revolution arrived, the movement proved incapable of putting up the slightest resistance. This critical failure ruined Markov’s political career in Russia. Once a Duma member of national prominence, he went into hiding as his organization disbanded and his newspapers closed down. What had led to this turn of events? What was the root cause of