The Volga Famine

The Volga Famine of 1892
Last Chances for the Romanovs
For many who were undecided as to where they stood on the future of the Empire the Volga famine of 1891-2 clarified the issue, millions of waverers chose active or passive resistance to the Romanov dynasty. Statistics on the number of deaths range from 200 to 400,000, and the occasional survey placing it at nearly a million. Perhaps the full extent of the deaths will never be known, and certainly at the time, the more important ideas being disseminated were the likely causes. The government was blamed for excessively taxing the peasants, thus depleting their supplies of grain and foodstuffs to see them through hard times, Robert Service, however, in his biography of Lenin disputes that the issue of taxation was really where the regime was at fault.
The Volga provinces had endured several poor harvests, short summers, early frosts and typhus epidemics, all of which combined added up to a catastrophic decline in grain levels by the summer of 1891. The government was still exporting grain in order to pay for Russia's industrialisation, and perhaps this is a key reason for its lack of interest in addressing peasant needs. I think that it is more likely that the nature of autocracy itself was fundamentally the issue that caused mass governmental inaction, not callousness, not even incompetence (though there may have been plenty of the latter) simply an institutional inability to react to crisis. The institution of autocracy had really been failing for a century, every major crisis it faced in the 19th Century, it failed to adequately deal with. The famine was no different, it required the action of a modern decentralised, efficiently organised state. The famine relief that emerged was very much this state, or rather a state in waiting. Leo Tolstoy Prince Georgi Lvov and the entire local administrative structure of the Zemstva heroically swung into action.
Tolstoy, famous for his paternalist attitudes to the peasants was the prefect figurehead for a campaign to save the stricken people of the Volga region. Lvov, similarly adoring of the peasants and steadfast in his belief of the worthiness of them, also worked tirelessly to save the region.
Tens of thousands of doctors, aid workers, students, nurses and volunteers descended on the region, and in a rare spirit of national unity they risked their own lives in many cases to alleviate the famine and disease that followed it.
In the same way that adversity united the British in 1940, the experience of fighting famine in the Volga forged a sense of national community in Russia that would have been weak, if none existent beforehand. This was the kind of 'patrie' that the Czars of Russia could not comprehend or see, and it was lethal to them. A middle class had risen to the challenge of a crisis where the autocracy had been largely blind to it and they had triumphed. Prince Lvov, who later headed the Provisional Government had managed to pull off a humanitarian feat worthy of a Nobel Prize and he and his class emerged from the crisis confident, aware of their own capabilities and painfully aware of the shortcomings of the Autocracy. Middle Russia had grown up and come of age.
An illuminating footnote to the entire affair was the behaviour of one Vladimir Ulyanov, who was present at the time of the famine, witnessing peasant death all around him. Unmoved by the suffering, he argued that there should be no interference in the crisis, that Marx's predictions about capitalism were coming true and that any attempt to alleviate the suffering of the peasants would affect the chances of the coming revolution. Based on these attitudes, his later treatment of peasants is somewhat unsurprising.