by James Millar
OCTOBER MANIFESTO
ganizers, especially Mensheviks, were indispensable in the creation and leadership of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, informal bodies of elected factory delegates organized in about fifty locales during 1905, especially in October, to lead and assist strikers over entire urban and industrial areas. The Soviet of St. Petersburg, the most celebrated of these organs of direct democracy, went beyond strike leadership to pursue a revolutionary agenda in the capital. Its arrest on December 3 cut short its political promise, but its brief career and its flamboyant second president, Leon Trotsky, inspired similar organs in later revolutions around the world.
In response to the January strikes, the tsarist government had granted an elected assembly to discuss, but not implement, legislation (the “Bulygin Duma”). To maintain the integrity of autocratic rule, several of Emperor Nicholas’s ministers began to advocate a unified government, headed by a prime minister. Sensing the country’s mood in early October and led by the respected Count Sergei Yu. Witte, they advised Nicholas to grant political and civil rights, legislative authority, and an expanded electorate. Nicholas hesitated between liberalization and forceful repression of the strikers; after deliberating several days, he reluctantly agreed to the former. The Manifesto of October 17 was the most significant political act of the 1905 Revolution. It provoked powerful, euphoric expectations of a total transformation of Russian life. These expectations remained over the long run, themselves transforming Russian politics and culture, though in the short run the promise of a constitutional state divided the opposition and enabled the government to restore the authority of the autocracy by early 1906 through a bloody repression not possible in October. See also: BLOODY SUNDAY; DUMA; NICHOLAS II; REVOLUTION OF 1905; WORKERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ascher, Abraham. (1988). The Revolution of 1905, Vol. 1: Russia in Disarray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Engelstein, Laura. (1982). Moscow, 1905: Working Class Organization and Political Conflict. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Harcave, Sidney. (1964). First Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905. New York: Macmillan. Reichman, Henry. (1987). Railwaymen and Revolution: Russia, 1905. Berkeley: University of California Press. Surh, Gerald D. (1989). 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labor, Society, and Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Trotsky, Leon. (1971). 1905, tr. Anya Bostock. New York: Random House. Verner, Andrew M. (1990). The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
GERALD D. SURH
OCTOBER MANIFESTO
The October Manifesto was published at the peak of Revolution of 1905, following the general strike of October of 1905 in which 2 million people took to the streets and railroads were blocked. The government considered two possible solutions to the crisis: a military dictatorship and liberal reforms to win popular support. Those who supported reforms were led by Sergei Witte, who wrote a report urging Tsar Nicholas II to grant a constitution, a representative assembly, and civil freedoms. On October 27 (October 14 O.S.) Nicholas ordered that the main points of the report were to be listed in the form of a manifesto. The draft was written overnight by Prince Alexei Obolensky. Nicholas signed it on October 30 (October 17 O.S.), and the next day it was published in the newspaper Pravi-telstvennyi Vestnik (Governmental Courier).
The October Manifesto gave the ruling body permission to use every means to end disorders, disobedience, and abuse, and gave the “highest government” the responsibility to act, in accordance with the tsar’s “unbendable” will, to “Grant the population the undisputable foundation for civil freedom on the basis of protection of identity, freedom of conscience, speech, assemblies and unions.” Voting rights were promised, “to some extent, to those classes of the population that, at present, do not have the right to vote,” and it was proclaimed as an “undisputable rule that no law can be passed without the approval of the Duma and for the possibility of supervision of the lawfulness of the actions of the administration to be given to the national representatives.” The manifesto concluded by calling upon “all true sons of Russia to end . . . the unimaginable revolt” and, along with the emperor, “to concentrate all forces on restoring peace and quiet on the homeland.”
The October Manifesto was highly controversial. There were mass meetings and demonstrations
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welcoming its promise of freedom in the regional capitals and many other cities. Similarly, there were mass meetings and demonstrations, often violent, calling for an autocracy of “patriots” and condemning the manifesto as perpetrated by revolutionaries and Jews. In the three weeks after the manifesto was issued, there were outbreaks of violence in 108 cities, 70 small towns, and 108 villages, leaving at least 1,622 dead, and 3,544 crippled and wounded.
The liberal reaction to the manifesto was mixed. Right-wing liberals saw it as a realization of their political hopes and united as the Union of October 17. Left-wing liberals, joining together to organize the Constitutional Democratic Party, believed that further reforms were needed, and their leader, Paul Milyukov, stated that nothing changed and the struggle would continue. Left-wing parties and leaders saw the manifesto as a sign of the government’s weakness; its capitulation under revolutionary pressure showed that the pressure on the government had to be intensified.
The political program embodied in the manifesto began to take effect on October 19, 1905, with the appointment of a government headed by Witte. Between October 1905 and March 1906 the government published a series of orders regarding political amnesties, censorship, modification of the State Council, and other matters. All of these were incorporated in the second edition of the Fundamental Laws, passed on April 23, 1906.
The most important outcome of the October Manifesto was the creation of a bicameral representative institution and the legalization of political parties, trade unions and other social organizations, and a legal oppositionist press. See also: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; DUMA; FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF 1906; OCTOBER GENERAL STRIKE OF 1905; REVOLUTION OF 1905; WITTE, SERGEI YULIEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ascher, Abraham. (1988, 1992). The Revolution of 1905. Vol.1: Russia in Disarray; Vol. 2: Authority Restored. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Harcave, Sidney. (1970). First Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905. New York: Macmillan. Harcave, Sidney, trans. and ed. (1990). The Memoirs of Count Witte. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Mehlinger, Howard D., and Tompson, John M. (1972). Count Witte and the Tsarist Government in the 1905 Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Szeftel, Marc. (1976). The Russian Constitution of April 23, 1906: Political Institutions of the Duma Monarchy. Brussels: Editions de la Libraire encyclop?dique.
OLEG BUDNITSKII
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
During the October 1917 Russian Revolution, the liberal, western-oriented Provisional Government headed by Alexander Kerensky, which was established following the February 1917 Russian Revolution that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II, was removed and replaced by the first Soviet government headed by Vladimir Lenin. The October Revolution began in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), then the capital of Russia, and quickly spread to the rest of the country. One of the seminal events of the twentieth century in terms of its worldwide historical impact, the October Revolution is also one of the most controversial and hotly debated historical events in modern times.
Most western historians, especially at the height of the Cold War, viewed the October Revolution as a brilliantly organized military coup d’?tat without significant popular support, carried out by a tightly knit band of professional revolutionaries brilliantly led by the fanatical Lenin. This interpretation, severely undermined by western “revisionist” social history in the 1970s and 1980s, was rejuvenated after the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of the Gorbachev era, even though information from newly declassified Soviet archives reinforced the revisionist view. At the other end of the political spectrum, for nearly eighty years So
viet historians, bound by strict historical canons designed to legitimate the Soviet state and its leadership, depicted the October Revolution as a broadly popular uprising of the revolutionary Russian masses. According to them, this social upheaval was deeply rooted in Imperial Russia’s historical development and shaped by universal laws of history as formulated by Karl Marx and Lenin. There are kernels of truth and considerable distortion in both of these interpretations.
WAR AND REVOLUTION
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 found Russian politics and society in great flux. To be
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Leaders of the Bolshevik party are pictured around their leader, Vladimir Lenin. Top row (from left): Rykov, Radek, Pokrovsky, Kamenev; middle row: Trotsky, Lenin, Sverdlov; bottom row: Bukharin, Zinoviev, Krylenko, Kollontai, Lunacharsky. Stalin is not included in this 1920 collage. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS sure, the autocratic tsarist political system had somehow managed to remain intact throughout the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even the Revolution of 1905, which resulted in the creation of a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament (the Duma), had left predominant political authority in the hands of Tsar Nicholas II. The abolition of serfdom by Alexander II in 1861 had freed the Russian peasantry, the vast bulk of the empire’s population, from personal bondage. However, the terms of the emancipation were such that most peasants remained impoverished. Moreover, a fundamental land reform program initiated by Peter Stolypin in 1906 was so complex that, irrespective of the long-term prospects, when it was interrupted by the war in 1914, the Russian countryside was in particularly great turmoil.
In the late nineteenth century, enlightened officials such as Sergei Witte had reversed government opposition to industrialization and spearheaded a program of rapid economic development. However, the pace of this development was too slow to meet Russia’s needs, and the industrial revolution resulted in the crowding of vast numbers of immiserated workers into squalid, rat-infested factory ghettos in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other major Russian cities. It is small wonder, then, that in the opening years of the twentieth century, the major Russian liberal and socialist political parties that were destined to play key roles in 1917 took shape and began to attract popular follow-ings. Likewise, it is no surprise that the Russian government was suddenly faced with a growing, increasingly ambitious and assertive professional middle class, waves of peasant rebellions, and burgeoning labor unrest.
Framed against these political and social realities, the significant degree of popular support enjoyed by the Russian government at the start of
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the war, in so far as it was visible, must have been heartening to Nicholas II. The Constitutional Democratic or Kadet Party, Russia’s main liberal party, officially proclaimed a moratorium on opposition to the monarchy and pledged its unqualified support for the war effort. Beginning in early 1915, when the government’s extraordinary incompetence became fully apparent, the Kadets, despite their anguish, made use of the Duma only to call for the appointment of qualified ministers (rather than demand fundamental structural change). With good reason, they calculated that a political upheaval in the existing circumstances would be equally damaging to the war effort and prospects for the eventual creation of a liberal, democratic government. Members of the populist Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party and the moderate social democratic Menshevik Party were split between “defensists,” who supported the war effort, and “internationalists,” who sought an immediate cessation of hostilities and a compromise peace without victors or vanquished. Only Lenin advocated the fomenting of immediate social revolution in all of the warring countries; however, for the time being, efforts by underground Bolshevik committees in Russia to kindle popular opposition to the war failed.
The February 1917 Revolution, which grew out of prewar instabilities and technological backwardness, along with gross mismanagement of the war effort, continuing military defeats, domestic economic dislocation, and outrageous scandals surrounding the monarchy, resulted in the creation of two potential Russian national governments. One was the Provisional Government formed by members of the Duma to restore order and to provide leadership pending convocation of a popularly elected Constituent Assembly based on the French model. The Constituent Assembly was to design Russia’s future political system and take responsibility for the promulgation of other fundamental reforms. The second potential national government was the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and its moderate socialist-led Executive Committee. Patterned after similar “worker parliaments” formed during the Revolution of 1905, in succeeding weeks similar institutions of popular self-government were established throughout urban and rural Russia. In early summer 1917, the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and the First All-Russian Congress of Peasants’ Deputies formed leadership bodies, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and the All-Russian Executive Committee of Peasants’ Deputies, to represent soviets around the country between national congresses. Until the fall of 1917, when it was taken over by the Bolsheviks, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet strived to maintain order and protect the revolution until the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. This was also true of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and the All-Russian Executive Committee of Peasants’ Deputies. The Soviet, led by the moderate socialists, made no effort to take formal power into its own hands, although it was potentially stronger than the Provisional Government because of its vastly greater support among workers, peasants, and lower-level military personnel. This support skyrocketed in tandem with popular disenchantment with the economic results of the February Revolution, the effort of the Provisional Government to continue the war effort, and its procrastination in convening the Constituent Assembly. “ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS!” At the time of the February Revolution, Lenin was in Switzerland. He returned to Petrograd in early April 1917, demanding an immediate second, “socialist” revolution in Russia. Although he backed off this goal after he acquainted himself with the realities of the prevailing situation (including little support for precipitous, radical revolutionary action even among Bolsheviks), his great achievement at this time was to orient the thinking of the Bolshevik Party toward preparation for the replacement of the Provisional Government by a leftist “Soviet” government as soon as the time was ripe. Nonetheless, in assessing Lenin’s role in the October Revolution, it is important to keep in mind that he was either away from the country or in hiding and out of regular touch with his colleagues in Russia for much of the time between February and October 1917. In any case, top Bolshevik leaders tended to be divided into three distinct groups: Lenin and Leon Trotsky, among others, for whom the establishment of revolutionary soviet power in Russia was less an end in itself than the trigger for immediate worldwide socialist revolution; a highly influential group of more moderate national party leaders led by Lev Kamenev for whom transfer of power to the soviets was primarily a vehicle for building a strong alliance of left socialist groups which would form a socialist coalition government to prepare for fundamental social reform and peace negotiations by a socialist-friendly Constituent Assembly; and a middle group of independent-minded
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leaders whose views on the development of the revolution fluctuated in response to their reading of existing conditions.
Then too, events often moved so rapidly that the Bolshevik Central Committee had to develop policies without consulting Lenin. Beyond this, circumstances were frequently such that structurally subordinate party bodies had perforce to develop responses to evolving realities without guidance or contrary to directives from the center. Also, in 1917 the doors to membership were opened wide, and the Bolshevik organization became a genuine mass political party.
In part as a result of such factors, Bolshevik programs and policies in 1917 tended to be developed democratically, with strong inputs from rank-and-file members, and therefore reflected popular aspirations.
Meanwhile, the revolution among factory workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants had a dynamic of its own. At times, the Bolsheviks followed the masses rather than vice versa. For example, on July 14 (July 1 O.S.) the Bolshevik Central Committee, influenced by party moderates, began preparing for a left-socialist congress aimed at unifying all internationalist elements of the “Social Democracy” (e.g., Menshevik-Internationalists and Left SRs) in support of common revolutionary goals. Yet only two days later, radical elements of the Bolshevik Petersburg Committee and Party Military Organization (responsive to their ultra-militant constituencies) helped organize the abortive July uprising, against the wishes of Lenin and the Central Committee, who considered such action premature.
The July uprising ended in an apparent defeat for the Bolsheviks. Lenin was forced into hiding, numerous Bolshevik leaders were jailed, and efforts to form a united left-socialist front were temporarily ended. Still, in light of the success of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, perhaps the main significance of the July uprising was that it reflected the great popular attraction for the Bolshevik revolutionary program, as well as the party’s strong links to Petrograd’s lower classes, links that would prove valuable over the long term.
What was the Bolsheviks’ program? Contrary to conventional wisdom, in 1917 the Bolsheviks did not stand for a one-party dictatorship (neither in July nor at any time before the October Revolution). Rather, they stood for democratic “people’s power,” exercised through an exclusively socialist, soviet, multiparty government, pending convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks also stood for more land to individual peasants, “workers’ control” in factories, prompt improvement of food supply, and, most important, an early end to the war. All of these goals were neatly packaged in the slogans “Peace, Land, and Bread!” “All Power to the Soviets!” and “Immediate Convocation of the Constituent Assembly!” The interplay and political value of these two key factors-the attractiveness of the Bolshevik platform and the party’s carefully nurtured links to revolutionary workers, soldiers, and sailors-were evident in the fall of 1917, after the left’s quick defeat of an unsuccessful rightist putsch led by the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, General Lavr Kornilov (the so-called Kornilov affair).