A Well-Ordered Thing by Gordin Michael D

Author:Gordin, Michael D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Disintegration

Fighting Revolutions with Faith

My God! it is a melancholy thing

For such a man, who would full fain preserve

His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel

For all his human brethren—O my God!

It weighs upon the heart, that he must think

What uproar and what strife may now be stirring

This way or that way o’er these silent hills …

— SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, “FEARS IN SOLITUDE” (1798)

The first six years of the twentieth century—the last six of Mendeleev’s life— were difficult for both the chemist and the empire he served. Beginning with widespread student rebellion in St. Petersburg in 1899, the tsarist regime met with increasingly vocal (and often violent) opposition from a broader spectrum of society than ever before. International currency fluctuations made it harder to acquire necessary financing, while transformations in military technology demanded heavy state expenditures. Nevertheless, Russian ministers and Nicholas II took aggressive action to expand the empire eastward via the Trans-Siberian Railroad, antagonizing the nascent military forces of a modernized Japan. On 26 January 1904, the Japanese launched a preemptive attack on Port Arthur, Korea, and the ensuing Russo-Japanese War ended in Russian humiliation and the almost complete devastation of the flower of the Russian Navy.

In January 1905, rising discontent with the regime led to a protest at Palace Square in Petersburg that—through incompetence and failure of nerve— erupted into Bloody Sunday when soldiers fired on unarmed civilians. The erosion of the goodwill of the populace and the regime’s financial reserves forced Nicholas II to renounce autocracy and submit, in the famous October Manifesto, to restrictions on his absolute power and an elected parliament. The Russian state was now financially weakened, militarily embarrassed, and—most importantly—no longer unfettered. The late Imperial period was coming to a close.

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