The Early Twentieth Century

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Russian Revolutions

It was, however, during his reign that modernity finally caught up with Russia.  The Russian state was able to control the press and punish dissent into the first years of the twentieth century, but then events outside of its immediate control undermined its ability to exercise complete control over Russian society.  The immediate cause of the downfall of Nikolai’s royal line, and the entire traditional order of Russian society, was war: The Russo – Japanese War of 1904 – 1905 (described on a previous page) and, ten years later, World War I.

Japan shocked the world when it handily defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.  To many Russians, the Tsar was to blame for the defeat in both allowing Russia to remain so far behind the rest of the industrialized world economically, and because he himself had proved an indecisive leader during the war.  Following the Russian defeat, 100,000 workers tried to present a petition to the Tsar asking for better wages, better prices on food, and the end of official censorship.  Troops fired on the crowds, which were unarmed, sparking a nationwide wave of strikes.  For months, the nation was rocked by open rebellions in navy bases and cities, and radical terrorist groups managed to seize certain neighborhoods of the major metropolises of St. Petersburg and Moscow.  Nikolai finally agreed to allow a representative assembly, the Duma, to meet, and after months of fighting the army managed to regain control. 

 

The aftermath of this (semi-)revolution saw the Tsar still in power and various newly-constituted political parties elected to the Duma.   Very soon, however, it was clear that the Duma was not going to serve as a counter-balance to Tsarist power.  The Tsar retained control of foreign policy and military affairs.  In addition, the parties in the Duma had no experience of actually governing, and quickly fell to infighting and petty squabbles, leaving most actual decision making where it always had been: with the Tsar himself and his circle of aristocratic advisors.  Still, some things did change thanks to the revolution: unions were legalized and the Tsar was not able to completely dismiss the Duma.  Most importantly, the state could no longer censor the press effectively.  As a result, there was an explosion of anger as various forms of anti-governmental press spread across the country. 

One of Nikolai’s many concerns was that his only male heir, Prince Alexei, was a hemophiliac (i.e. his blood did not clot properly when he was injured, meaning any minor scrape or cut was potentially lethal). 

When World War I began in 1914, the already fragile political balance within the Russian state teetered on the verge of collapse.  In the autumn of 1915, as Russian fortunes in the war started to worsen, Nikolai departed for the front to personally command the Russian army.  In 1916 a desperate conspiracy of Russian nobles, convinced that Rasputin was the cause of Russia’s problems, managed to assassinate him. 

By then, however, the German armies were steadily pressing towards Russian territory, and tens of thousands of Russian troops were deserting to return to their home villages.  As the social and political situation began to approach outright anarchy, one group of Russian communists steeped in the tradition of radical terrorism stood ready to take action: the Bolsheviks.

The form of radical politics that had taken root in Russia in the late nineteenth century revolved around apocalyptic revolutionary socialism.  Mikhail Bakunin was the exemplary figure in this regard – Bakunin believed that the only way to create a perfect socialist future was to utterly destroy the existing political and social order, after which “natural” human tendencies of peace and altruism would manifest and create a better society for all.  By the late nineteenth century, this homegrown Russian version of socialist theory was joined with Marxism, as various Russian radical thinkers tried to determine how a Marxist revolution might occur in a society like theirs that was still largely feudal.

The problem with Marxist theory faced by Russian Marxists was that, according to Marx, a revolution could only happen in an advanced industrial society.  The proletariat would recognize that it had “nothing to lose but its chains” and overthrow the bourgeois order.  In Russia, however, industrialization was limited to some of the major cities of western Russia, and most of the population were still poor peasants in small villages.  This did not look like a promising setting for a revolution of the industrial working class.

The key figure who saw a way out of this theoretical impasse was Vladimir Lenin.  Lenin was an ardent revolutionary and a major political thinker.  He created the concept of the “vanguard party”: a dedicated group of revolutionaries who would lead both workers and peasants in a massive uprising.  Left to their own devices, he argued, workers alone would always settle for slight improvements in their lives and working conditions (he called this “trade union consciousness”) rather than recognizing the need for a full-scale revolutionary change.  The vanguard party, however, could both instruct workers and lead them in the creation of a new society.  Led by the party, not only could a communist revolution succeed in a backwards state like Russia, but it could “skip” a stage of (the Marxist version of) history, jumping directly from feudalism to socialism and bypassing industrial capitalism.  

In Lenin’s mind, the obvious choice of a vanguard party was his own Russian communist party, the Bolsheviks.  By 1917, the Bolsheviks were a highly organized militant group of revolutionaries with contacts in the army, navy, and working classes of the major cities.  When political chaos descended on the country as the possibility of full-scale defeat to Germany loomed, the Bolsheviks had their chance to seize power.

On International Women’s Day in February of 1917 (using the Eastern Orthodox calendar still in use at the time – it was March in the west), women workers in St. Petersburg demonstrated against the Tsar’s government to protest the price of food, which had skyrocketed due to the war.  Within days the demands had grown to ending the war entirely and even calling for the ouster of the Tsar himself, and a general strike was called.  Comparable demonstrations broke out in the other major cities in short order.  The key moment, as had happened in revolutions since 1789, was when the army refused to put down the uprisings and instead joined them.  The Duma demanded that the Tsar step aside and hand over control of the military.  By early March, just a few weeks after it had begun, the Tsar abdicated, realizing that he had lost the support of almost the entire population.

The former Tsar Nikolai and his family were put under house arrest and later imprisoned in a two-story house. In July of 1918, they were lured into the basement, shot and stabbed – even the children.

In the aftermath of the Tsar’s abdication, power was split.  The Duma appointed a provisional government than enacted important legal reforms but did not have the power to relieve the Russian army at the front or to provide food to the hungry protesters.  Likewise, the Duma itself represented the interests and beliefs of the educated middle classes, still only a tiny portion of the Russian population as a whole.  The members of the Duma hoped to create a democratic republic like those of France, Britain, or the United States, but they had no road map to bring it about.  Likewise, the Duma had no way to enforce the new laws it passed, nor could they compel Russian peasants to fight on against the Germans.  Most critically, the members of the Duma refused to sue for peace with Germany, believing that Russia still had to honor its commitment to the war despite the carnage being inflicted on Russian soldiers at the front.

Soon, in the industrial centers and in many of the army and naval bases, councils of workers and soldiers (called soviets) sprang up and declared that they had the real right to political power.  There was a standoff between the provisional government, which had no police force to enforce its will, and the soviets, which could control their own areas but did not have the ability to bring the majority of the population (who wanted, in Lenin’s words, “peace, land, and bread”) over to their side.  Many fled the cities for the countryside, peasants seized land from landowners, and soldiers deserted in droves; by 1917 fully 75% of the soldiers sent to the front against Germany deserted.

Thus, as of the late summer of 1917, there was a power vacuum created by the war and by the incompetence of the Duma.  No group had power over the country as a whole, and so the Bolsheviks had their opportunity.  In October the Bolsheviks took control of the most powerful soviet, that of Petrograd (former St. Petersburg).  Next, the Bolsheviks seized control of the Duma, expelled the members of other political parties, and then stated their intention to pursue the goals that no other major party had been willing to: unconditional peace with Germany and land to the peasants with no compensation for landowners.  In early 1918, after consolidating their control in Petrograd and Moscow, the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, granting Germany huge territorial concessions in return for peace (Germany would lose those new territories when it lost the war itself later that year).

Almost immediately, a counter-revolution erupted and civil war broke out.  The Bolsheviks proved effective at rallying troops to their cause and leading those troops in war.  Their “Red Army” engaged the “White” counter-revolutionaries all over western Russia and the Ukraine.  For their part, the Whites were an ungainly coalition of former Tsarists, the liberals who had been alienated by the Bolshevik takeover of the Duma, members of ethnic minorities who wanted political independence, an anarchist peasant army in the Ukraine, and troops sent by foreign powers (including the United States), terrified of the prospect of a communist revolution in a nation as large and potentially powerful as Russia.  Despite the fact that very few Russians were active supporters of communist ideology, the Red Army still proved both coherent and effective under Bolshevik leadership.

The ensuing war was brutal, ultimately killing close to ten million people (most were civilians who were massacred or starved), and lasting for four years.  In the end, however, the Bolsheviks prevailed in Russia itself, Ukraine, and Central Asia.  Some Eastern European countries, including Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, did gain their independence thanks to the war, but everywhere else in the former Russian Empire the Bolsheviks succeeded in creating a new communist empire in its place: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Cultural Change

The Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent creation of the USSR represents perhaps the most striking political event of its time, but it occurred during a period of profound political, cultural, and intellectual instability across Europe and much of the world.  The first few decades of the twentieth century revolved around World War I in many ways, but even before the war began Western society was riven with cultural and political conflict.  It was an incredibly tumultuous time, one in which “Western Civilization” struggled to define itself in the face of scientific progress and social change that seemed to be speeding forward ever faster. 

Part of this phenomenon was the fact that the old order of monarchy and nobility was finally, definitively destroyed, a casualty of World War I.  Never again would kings and emperors and noblemen share power over European countries.  At the same time, the great political project of the nineteenth century, republican democracy, seemed profoundly disappointing to many Europeans, who had watched it degenerate into partisan squabbles that were helpless to prevent the Great War and its terrible aftermath.  In that aftermath there was a terrific flowering of cultural and intellectual production even as the continent struggled to recover economically.  It is tempting to see these years, especially the interwar period between 1918 and 1939, as nothing more than the staging ground for World War II, but a more accurate picture reveals them as being much more than just a prequel.

Modernism

Modernism in the arts refers to a specific period starting around 1900 and coming into its own in the 1920s.  It expressed a set of common attitudes and assumptions that centered on a rejection of established authority.  It was a movement of skepticism directed toward the post-Victorian middle class, an overhaul of the entire legacy of comfort, security, paranoia, rigidity, and hierarchy.  It rejected the premise of melodrama (melodrama appeals to the emotions), namely clear moral messages in art and literature that were meant to edify and instruct.  Socially, it was a reaction against the complacency of the bourgeoisie, of their willingness to start wars over empire and notions of nationalism. 

Modernist art and literature sometimes openly attacked the moral values of mainstream society, but sometimes experimented with form itself and simply ignored moral issues.  This was the era of l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”), of creation disinterred from social or intellectual duty. Artists broke with the idea that art should “represent” something noble and beautiful, and instead many indulged in wild experiments and deliberately created disturbing pieces meant to provoke their audience.  Sometimes, modernists were distinctly “modern” in glorifying industrialism and technology, while other times they were modern in that they were experimenting with entirely novel approaches to creation.

Here is a gallery of art created during the Modernist period:

One of the quintessential modernist movements was Futurism.  Starting in Italy before World War I, Futurism was a movement of poets, playwrights, and painters who celebrated speed, technology, violence, and chaos.  Their stated goal was to destroy the remnants of past art and replace it with the art of the future, an art that reflected the modern, industrial world.  Futurism sought something new and better than what the Victorian bourgeoisie had come up with: something heroic.

Here’s a gallery of Futurist art:

In 1909, F.T. Marinetti, the movement’s founder, wrote the Futurist Manifesto.  In it, he thundered that the Futurists wanted to “sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness,” and that “poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown.”  The Manifesto went on to proclaim, ominously, that “we want to glorify war – the only cure for the world” and that the Futurists were dedicated to demolishing “museums and libraries” and sought to “fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.”  The Manifesto, in short, was a profound expression of dissatisfaction with the mainstream culture of Europe leading up to World War I, and its proponents were proud partisans of violence, elitism, and misogyny (contempt for women).

Among the creators of the most striking, sometimes beautiful, but other times grotesque images associated with modernism were the Austrian expressionists.  The major point of expressionism was to put the artist’s inner life on display through abstract, often disturbing images.  The governing concept was not to depict things “as they are,” but instead to reflect the disturbing realities of the artist’s mind and spirit.  The greatest Austrian expressionist was Gustav Klimt (1862 – 1918), who created portraits, the most famous of which became one of the quintessential dorm room decorations of collegiate America – The Kiss.

Modernism was not confined to literature and the visual arts, however.  Some composers and musicians in the first decades of the twentieth century sought to shatter musical traditions, defying the expectations of their listeners by altering the very scales, notes, and tempos that western audiences were used to hearing.  Some of the resulting pieces eventually became classics in their own right, while others tended to become part of the history of music more so than music very many people actually listened to.

One of the most noteworthy modernist composers was Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971).  A Russian composer, Stravinsky’s was best known for his Rite of Spring.  The Rite of Spring was a ballet depicting the fertility rites of the ancient Scythians, the nomadic people native to southern Russia in the ancient past.  Staged by classical ballet dancers, the Rite of Spring completely scandalized its early audiences; at its first performance in Paris, members of the audience hissed at the dancers, and pelted the orchestra with debris, while the press described it as pornographic and barbaric.  Within a few years, however (and following a change in its wild choreography), the Rite became part of ballet’s canon of great pieces.

You don’t have to watch this entire video. I’ve just shared it here; in case you are curious about the music and the ballet:

In contrast, the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874 – 1951) invented a form of orchestral music that remains more of an important influence to avant-garde musicians and composers than something actively listened to by mainstream audiences.  Schoenberg’s major innovations consisted of experiments with atonality – music without a central, binding key – and a newly-invented twelve-tone scale of his own creation.  Schoenberg was among the first to defy the entire tradition of western music in his experiments.  Ever since the Renaissance, western musicians had worked in basically the same set of scales.  As a result, listeners were “trained” from birth to expect certain sounds and certain rhythms in music.  Schoenberg deliberately subverted those expectations, inserting dissonance and unexpected notes in many of his works.  

Similar in some ways to the innovations in the visual arts and music, modernist literature created out a new approach to poetry and prose.  Authors like Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce (whose places of origins spanned from Dublin to Prague) created a new form of literature in which the nominal plot of a story was less important than the protagonist’s inner life and experience of his or her surroundings and interactions.  Joyce’s (incredible difficult to read) novel Ulysses described a single unremarkable day in the life of a man in Dublin, Ireland, focusing on the vast range of thoughts, emotions, and reactions that passed through the man’s consciousness rather than on the events of the day itself. 

Proust and Woolf also wrote works focused on the inner life rather than the outside event. 

Kafka’s work brilliantly, and tragically, satirized the experience of being lost in the modern world, hemmed in by impersonal bureaucracies and disconnected from other people – his most famous story, Metamorphosis, describes the experience of a young man who awakens one day to discover that he has become a gigantic insect, but whose immediate concern is that he will be unable to make it in to his job.

Ultimately, artistic modernism in the arts, music, and literature questioned the (post-)Victorian obsession with traditional morality, hierarchy, and control.  The inner life was not straightforward – it was a complicated mess of conflicting values, urges, and drives, and traditional morality was often a smokescreen over a system of repression and violence.  Certain modernist artists attacked the system, while others exposed its vacuity, its emptiness or shallowness, against the darker, more complex reality they thought lay underneath. 

Freud

While not an artist himself, the great thinker of modernism was, in many ways, Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939).  Freud was one of the founders of the medical and scientific discipline of psychology.  He was the forefather of the concept of modern therapy itself and his theories, while now largely rejected by psychologists in terms of their empirical accuracy, nevertheless continue to exert tremendous influence.  In historical hindsight, Freud’s importance derives from his work as a philosopher of the mind more so than as a “scientist” per se, although it was precisely his drive for his work to be respected as a true science that inspired his research and writing.

Freud was born in Moravia (today’s Czech Republic) in 1856, and his family eventually moved to Vienna, the capital of the Austrian Empire of which Moravia was part.  Freud was Jewish, and his family underwent a generational transformation that was very common among Central European Jews in the latter part of the nineteenth century, following legal emancipation from anti-Semitic laws: his grandparents were unassimilated and poor, his parents were able to create a successful business in a major city, and Freud himself became a highly-educated professional (he received his medical degree in 1881). Many of Freud’s theories were influenced by his own experience as a brilliant scholar who happened to be Jewish, living in a society rife with anti-Semitism – he sought to understand the inner psychological drives that led people to engage in irrational behavior.

Freud’s greatest accomplishment was diagnosing the essential irrationality of the human mind. Influenced by modernist philosophers, by great writers like Shakespeare, and by Darwin’s work on evolution, Freud came to believe that the mind itself “evolved” from childhood into adulthood in a fundamentally hostile psychic environment.  The mind was forced to conform to social pressure from outside while being enslaved to its own unconscious desires (the “drives”) that sought unlimited power and pleasure.  Freud wanted to be the “Darwin of the mind,” the inventor of a true science of psychology that could explain and, he hoped, cure psychological disorders.

Freud became well known because of his work with “hysterical” patients.  The word hysteria is related to the Greek hystera, meaning womb.  Essentially, “hysteria” consisted of physical symptoms of panic, pain, and paralysis in women who had no detectable physical problems.  “Hysteria” was a term invented to blame the female anatomy for physical symptoms, in the absence of other discernible causes. Freud, however, believed that hysteria was the result not of some unknown physical problem among women, but instead a physical result of psychological trauma – in almost all cases, that of what we would now describe as sexual abuse.

The word hysteria comes from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus.

The oldest record of hysteria dates back to 1900 B.C. when Egyptians recorded behavioral abnormalities in adult women on medical papyrus. The Egyptians attributed the behavioral disturbances to a wandering uterus—thus later dubbing the condition hysteria.

Related word: A hysterectomy is a surgical procedure to remove a woman’s uterus.

Freud built on the work of an earlier psychologist and employed the “talking cure” with his hysterical patients, naming his version of the talking cure “psychoanalysis.”  The talking cure was the process by which the therapist and the patient recounted memories, dreams, and events, searching for a buried, suppressed idea that is causing physical symptoms. 

There are some mature themes discussed in the video below:

The Great Depression

Modernism in the arts and modernist theory came of age before, during, and after World War I; some of the most interesting writing and art of the modernist movement occurred during the 1920s.  The political order of Europe (Russia, as usual, was an exception) and the United States during the 1920s was beset by struggle and conflict, but while the economies of the west struggled to recover from World War I, there was at least some economic growth.  That growth came crashing to a halt in 1929 with the advent of the Great Depression.

The Great Depression has the dubious distinction of being the worst economic disaster in the modern era.  It constituted an almost total failure of governments, businesses, and banks to anticipate or prevent economic disaster or to effectively deal with it.  The Depression explains in large part the appeal of extremist politics like Nazism, in that the average person was profoundly frightened by what had happened to their world; instead of progress resulting in better standards of living, all of a sudden the hard-won gains of the recent past were completely ruined.

The background to the Depression was the financial mess left by World War I.  The victorious alliance of Britain and France imposed massive reparations on Germany – 132 billion gold marks.  In addition, the former members of the Triple Entente themselves owed enormous sums to the United States for the loans they had received during the war, amounting to approximately $10 billion.  Over the course of the 1920s, as the German economy struggled to recover (at one point the value of German currency collapsed completely in the process), the US government oversaw enormous loans to Germany.  In the end, a “triangle” of debt and repayment locked together the economies of the United States and Europe: US loans underwrote German reparation payments to Britain and France, with Britain and France then trying to pay off their debts to the US.  None of the debts were anywhere near settled by the end of the 1920s, not least because more loans were still flooding into the market.

The Depression started in the United States with a massive stock market crash on October 24, 1929.  The ill-conceived cycle of debt described above had worked well enough for most of the 1920s while the American economy was stable and American banks were willing to underwrite new loans.  When the stock market crashed, however, American banks demanded repayment of the European loans, from Germany and its former enemies alike.  The capital to repay those loans simply did not exist.  Businesses shut down, governments defaulted on the American loans, and unemployment soared.  In one year, Germany’s industrial output dropped by almost 50% and millions were out of work.  In turn, inspired by liberal economic theories, governments embraced policies of austerity, cutting back the already limited social programs that existed, balancing state budgets, and slashing spending.  The result was that even less capital was available in the private sector.  In the United States and Western Europe, the Depression would drag on for a decade (1929 – 1939), at which point World War II overshadowed economic hardship as the great crisis of the century.

Summing Up

What do Modernist art, Freudian psychology, shifts in gender, and the Great Depression have in common besides chronological coincidence?  They were all, in different ways, symptoms of disruption and (often) a profound sense of unease that pervaded Western culture after World War I.  European civilization was powerful and self-confident before the war, master of over 80% of the globe, and at the forefront of science and technology.  That civilization emerged from four years of bloodshed economically shattered, politically disunited, and in many ways skeptical of the possibility of further progress.  It was in this uncertain context that the most destructive political philosophy in modern history emerged: fascism, and its even more horrific offshoot, Nazism.

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