The last years of tsardom. The revolution of 1905 (Russian Revolution of 1905)–06

The last years of tsardom

The revolution of 1905 (Russian Revolution of 1905)–06

The Russo-Japanese War brought a series of Russian defeats on land and sea, culminating in the destruction of the Baltic fleet in the Tsushima Strait. The defeat finally brought to a head a variety of political discontents simmering back at home. First the professional strata, especially in the zemstvos and municipalities, organized a banquet campaign in favour of a popularly elected legislative assembly. Then, on Jan. 9 (Jan. 22, New Style), 1905, the St. Petersburg workers, led by the priest Georgy Gapon (leader of the Assembly of Russian Factory Workers), marched on the Winter Palace to present Emperor Nicholas with a loyal petition containing similar but wider-ranging demands. They were met by troops who opened fire on them, and about 130 were killed.

News of this massacre, known as Bloody Sunday, spread quickly, and very soon most of the other social classes and ethnic groups in the empire were in uproar. There were student demonstrations, workers' strikes, peasant insurrections, and mutinies in both the army and navy. The peasants organized themselves through their traditional village assembly, the mir, to decide when and how to seize the land or property of the landlords. The workers, on the other hand, created new institutions, the Soviets (soviet) of Workers' Deputies: these, consisting of elected delegates from the factories and workshops of a whole town, organized the strike movement there, negotiated with the employers and police, and sometimes kept up basic municipal services during the crisis.

The revolutionary movement reached its climax in October 1905, with the declaration of a general strike and the formation of a soviet (council) in St. Petersburg itself. Most cities, including the capital, were paralyzed, and Witte (Witte, Sergey Yulyevich, Graf), who had just concluded peace negotiations with the Japanese, recommended that the government yield to the demands of the liberals and create an elected legislative assembly (Duma). This the tsar reluctantly consented to do, in the manifesto of Oct. 17 (October Manifesto) (Oct. 30, New Style), 1905. It did not end the unrest, however. In a number of towns, armed bands of monarchists, known as Black Hundreds, organized pogroms against Jewish quarters and also attacked students and known left-wing activists. In Moscow the soviet unleashed an armed insurrection in December, which had to be put down with artillery, resulting in considerable loss of life. Peasant unrest and mutinies in the armed services continued well into 1906 and even 1907.

Throughout the period from 1905 to 1907, disorders were especially violent in non-Russian regions of the empire, where the revolutionary movement took on an added ethnic dimension, as in Poland, the Baltic provinces, Georgia, and parts of Ukraine. There was also persistent fighting between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the towns of Transcaucasia.

A campaign of terrorism, waged by the Maximalists of the Socialist Revolutionary Party against policemen and officials, claimed hundreds of lives in 1905–07. The police felt able to combat it only by infiltrating their agents into the revolutionary parties and particularly into the terrorist detachments of these parties. This use of double agents (or agents provocateurs, as they were often known) did much to demoralize both the revolutionaries and the police and to undermine the reputation of both with the public at large. The nadir was reached in 1908, when it was disclosed that Yevno Azef, longtime head of the terrorist wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, was also an employee of the department of police and had for years been both betraying his revolutionary colleagues and organizing the murders of his official superiors.

The split in the Social Democratic Party was deepened by the failure of the 1905 revolution. Both Mensheviks and Bolsheviks agreed that a further revolution would be needed but disagreed fundamentally on the way to bring it about. The Mensheviks favoured cooperation with the bourgeois parties in the Duma, the new legislative assembly, in order to legislate civil rights and then use them to organize the workers for the next stage of the class struggle. The Bolsheviks regarded the Duma purely as a propaganda forum, and Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) drew from 1905 the lesson that in Russia, where the bourgeoisie was weak, the revolutionaries could combine the bourgeois and proletarian stages of the revolution by organizing the peasantry as allies of the workers. He was also moving closer to Leon Trotsky (Trotsky, Leon)'s theory that the forthcoming Russian revolution, taking place in the country that was the “weak link” of international imperialism, would spark a world revolution. Lenin did not reveal the full extent of the changes in his ideas until 1917, but in 1912 the split with the Mensheviks was finalized when the Bolsheviks called their own congress in Prague that year, claiming to speak in the name of the entire Social Democratic Party.