A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

by Orlando Figes

  from Chicago, who had read about the Republic in the US newspapers, arrived in Markovo to lend it his support. For several months the authorities tried unsuccessfully to defeat the Republic by political means. It dismissed the elected volost elder, one of the Republic's leaders, called Ryzhkov. But the Schweikian peasants counteracted this by refusing to elect a successor, while Ryzhkov declared that to his sorrow he could not relinquish his powers, because there was no one to whom he could hand them. It was only in July 1906, six months after the revolution had been put down in the cities, that this peasant republic was finally destroyed. Ryzhkov was removed by a police trick. All the villages were then raided and their leaders, Semenov among them, rounded up and imprisoned in Moscow. During his eight months as the leader of the Peasant Union in Andreevskoe, Semenov had established a new village school, an agricultural society, two co-operatives, a reading club, and, remarkably, a peasant theatre.43

  The local gentry appealed for help against the peasants, and the government sent in the troops. From January to October the army was used no fewer than 2,700 times to put down peasant uprisings, accelerating the breakdown of army discipline which had begun with the despatch of the troops to Manchuria.44 It was the growing threat of a mutinous revolution at home combined with the prospect of defeat abroad — signalled by the navy's humiliation at Tsushima in May 1905 — which forced the Tsar to sue for peace with Japan. It proved impossible — as it would again in 1917 — to conduct a foreign war in the midst of a domestic social revolution. The vast majority of the infantry were peasants, and resented being used to suppress agrarian discontent. Whole units refused to carry out orders and mutinies spread through the ranks; even the Cossack cavalry was affected. And then, on 14 June, the unrest spread to the Black Sea Fleet.

  It all began with a piece of maggoty meat, which the ship's doctor on board the battleship Potemkin declared was fit to eat. When the sailors complained to the captain, he had their spokesman, Vakulenchuk, shot. The crew rebelled, murdered seven officers and raised the red flag. A small group of active revolutionaries leading the mutiny hoped it would spread to the rest of the fleet. They sailed overnight to Odessa, where striking workers had been in a virtual state of war with the city government for the past two weeks. There they placed Vakulenchuk's body, surrounded by a guard of honour, at the foot of a set of marble steps (later immortalized by Eisenstein's film) leading from the harbour to the city. During the next day thousands of people gathered on the harbour front, placing wreaths around the bier of the martyred revolutionary and offering food to the sailors. As night approached troops were sent in to quell the crowd. Moving down the steps, they fired indiscriminately into the hemmed-in civilians below. Hundreds of people jumped into the sea. By dawn, when the massacre finally ended, 2,000 people had been killed and 3,000

  wounded. The Potemkin set sail from Odessa but, without the support of the rest of the fleet, it was eventually forced to surrender. On 25 June the sailors docked at Constanza in Romania and exchanged the Potemkin for safe refuge.45 In itself, the mutiny had been a minor threat. But it was a major embarrassment to the regime, for it showed the world that the revolution had spread to the heart of its own military machine.

  The subject nationalities of the Empire had been equally quick to take advantage of the regime's temporary weakness. The strikes and protests which followed the Bloody Sunday revolt in St Petersburg were especially intense in the non-Russian borderlands — Latvia and Poland in particular — where social and political tensions were reinforced by a widespread hatred of Russian rule. In Riga up to 15,000 workers marched through the city on 13 January in protest against the tsarist regime and the ruthlessness of the Russian Governor-General, A. N. Meller-Zakomelsky. He gave further cruel evidence of this when he ordered his soldiers to fire on the crowd. Seventy were killed and 200 injured. Meller-Zakomelsky was proud of the way his men had handled the situation and wrote to the Tsar suggesting that if more local authorities were willing to act with such decisiveness there would be no further trouble. In the ten Polish provinces there were more strikes in the spring and summer of 1905 than in the rest of the Empire combined. The textile city of Lodz was particularly turbulent: in mid-June, weeks before anything like it happened in Russia, barricades went up, and there were five days of street-fighting between workers and police. Warsaw was even more violent: up to 100,000 workers took part in demonstrations after Bloody Sunday. Russian troops fired at the crowds, killing ninety-three people, and a state of siege was declared. Later in the summer news of Russia's defeat by Japan was met by further demonstrations in the Polish capital with such slogans as 'Down with Tsarism!', Long Live an Independent Socialist Poland!' and Long Live Japan!'46 Nationalists everywhere welcomed Russia's defeat in the belief that it would bring down the Tsar and thus pave the way for their own autonomy. Pilsudski, the leader of the Polish Socialists, had even gone to Japan to discuss Polish action against Russia's war effort.

  In many of these non-Russian lands virtually the whole of the population became involved in the national liberation movement. In Finland, for example, where the imposition of Russian rule had destroyed the autonomy of the Grand Duchy, there was a mass campaign of passive resistance led by the nationalist intelligentsia. Nearly everyone joined it, including the Finnish Swedes, who had enjoyed many privileges under Russia's domination which they were likely to lose under Finnish rule. The Russian Governor-General, an imperialist hardliner by the name of Bobrikov, was assassinated in 1904, and by the following year Finland was engaged in a full-scale war of passive resistance against St Petersburg. In Georgia the Mensheviks led this national revolution. Theirs was

  the first Marxist national-liberation movement in history to enjoy the support of the peasantry: between 1904 and 1906 it effectively replaced the tsarist state in western Georgia.

  * * * With the Russian Empire teetering on the brink of collapse, the tsarist regime responded to the crisis with its usual incompetence and obstinacy. Witte called it a 'mixture of cowardice, blindness and stupidity'. The basic problem was that Nicholas himself remained totally oblivious to the extremity of the situation. While the country sank deeper into chaos he continued to fill his diary with terse and trivial notes on the weather, the company at tea and the number of birds he had shot that day. His advisers convinced him that foreign agents had been responsible for the demonstration on Bloody Sunday and he duly filled the prisons with suitable political suspects. A carefully picked delegation of 'reliable' workers was summoned to Tsarskoe Selo, where they were lined up like children to hear a short address from the Tsar, in which he blamed the workers for allowing themselves to be deceived by 'foreign revolutionaries' but promised to 'forgive them their sins' because he believed in their 'unshakeable devotion' to him. Meanwhile, the liberal Mirsky was replaced as Minister of the Interior by the decent but malleable A. G. Bulygin, who in effect took orders from his own deputy and chief of police, D. F. Trepov, a strict disciplinarian from the Horse Guards whom Nicholas liked for his straightforward, soldierly approach, and whom he had therefore allowed to become a dominant force at court. When Bulygin suggested that political concessions might be needed to calm the country, Nicholas was taken aback and told the Minister: 'One would think you are afraid a revolution will break out.' 'Your Majesty,' came the reply, 'the revolution has already begun.'47

  The remark must have been enough to make Nicholas a little uncomfortable, for he soon made promises of political reform. On 18 February he issued an Imperial Manifesto and Decree, which, while condemning the disorders, acknowledged the shortcomings of the bureaucracy and summoned the 'well-meaning people of all estates' to unite behind the throne and send in ideas for 'improvements in the state organization'. Bulygin was instructed to draw up proposals for a national assembly. The Manifesto was a tactical manoeuvre, its sole purpose to buy time; there was no sign that it came from the heart. The educated circles on the whole remained sceptical. 'The main aim of this Manifesto', Kerensky wrote to his parents on 18
February, 'is to calm and silence the revolutionary movement that has just begun so that all the forces of the government can be consolidated for one purpose in the future: to prevent any of its promises from being delivered.' Indeed it was typical of the Tsar's obstinate adherence to the archaic principles of patrimonial autocracy that at such a moment he should have attempted to shift the blame for the crisis on to the

  bureaucracy while at the same time appealing to the direct bond between himself and his subjects. If the people had grievances, or so his Manifesto had implied, they should bring them directly to him and they would be satisfied.

  And indeed in the following weeks tens of thousands of reform petitions were sent in to the Tsar from village assemblies, army regiments, towns and factories. Like the cahiers, the letters of grievance of 1789, they gave expression to the evolving language of political and social democracy. But their demands were far too radical for Nicholas. Most of them called for a national parliament with sovereign rights of legislation. Yet the sort of assembly which the Tsar had in mind — and which Bulygin finally presented for his signature on 6 August — was a purely consultative one elected on a limited franchise to ensure the domination of the nobles. This was to be a king's parliament, like the Zemskii Sobor of the seventeeth century, which was compatible with the preservation of the Tsar's own personal rule. Its main purpose, as Nicholas saw it, would be to inform him of his subjects' needs and thus enable him to rule on their behalf without the mediation of the self-aggrandizing bureaucracy.48

  The Bulygin Duma was yet another example of too little too late. Six months earlier it would have been welcomed, and enabled the government to regain the political initiative. But now all but the most moderate reformers found it quite unsatisfactory. The liberal newspapers, having carefully scrutinized the complex provisions of the new electoral law, claimed that less than I per cent of St Petersburg's adult residents would qualify for the vote, while in many provincial cities the proportion would be even tinier. Despite their criticisms, the liberals chose not to boycott the Duma elections. But the Social Democrats and the radicals in the Union of Unions were now more determined than ever to use mass civil disobedience to pressurize the government into making further concessions. The culmination of their efforts was the general strike of September and October, the first general strike in history, which forced the reluctant government to concede real political reforms.

  During 1905 there was a marked increase in the level of organization and militancy of the workers' strikes and protests. This was partly the result of the socialists taking over the labour movement. But it was also — and probably much more so — the result of the workers themselves becoming more class conscious and violent as their conflicts with employers and police became more bitter and intense. Gorky noted the workers' growing aggression after witnessing a clash on Znamenskaya Square in St Petersburg in early September. An officer struck a soldier in the street, and an angry crowd of workers gathered to defend the soldier. They tore the epaulettes from the officer's uniform and, so Gorky thought, would have killed him too had it not been for the timely intervention of the police and Cossacks. 'The crowd conducted itself with remarkable simplicity and openness,' Gorky wrote to Ekaterina, 'they said and chanted everything

  they wanted right there and then in front of the police and in general displayed a great deal of moral strength and even tact. There is a world of difference between this crowd and the supplicant people of 9 January.'49

  Not all the violence in the cities was the result of the growing militancy of the labour movement. There was a marked increase in all forms of violence, from muggings and murders to drunken riots and vandalism, as law and order broke down. Indeed, as the police withdrew from the scene, so the public added to the violence by forming groups of vigilantes and lynching criminals in the streets. Every day the press reported dozens of these cases of 'mob law' (samosud), along with robberies and murders. Mobs of a different kind went round the streets beating up students and well-dressed passers-by. There were pogroms against Jews. In short, the whole country seemed locked into a downward spiral of violence and anarchy. As the US Consul in Batumi reported:

  [Russia] is permeated with sedition and reeking with revolution, racial hatred and warfare, murder, incendiarism, brigandage, robbery and crime of every kind ... As far as can be seen we are on the high road to complete anarchy and social chaos . . . One of the worst signs is that the public under this long reign of anarchy and crime is growing callous and the news of the murder of an acquaintance or friend is, by the bulk of the population, received with indifference whilst cases of brigandage are looked upon as being quite in the ordinary course of events.50

  Because of the preoccupation of many historians with the organized labour movement — and their seduction by the Soviet myth of the armed workers on the barricades — the role of this everyday criminal violence in the revolutionary crowd has been either ignored or, even more misleadingly, confused with the violence of industrial war. Yet the closer one looks at the crowds on the streets, the harder it becomes to distinguish clearly between organized forms of protest — the marching workers with banners and songs — and criminal acts of looting and violence. The one could easily — and often did — break down into the other. It was not just a question of 'hooligans' or criminals joining in labour protests or taking advantage of the chaos they created to vandalize, assault and loot. Such acts seem to have been an integral element of labour militancy, a means of asserting the power of the plebeian crowd and of despoiling and destroying symbols of wealth and privilege. What the frightened middle classes termed 'hooliganism' — mob attacks on the well-to-do and on figures of authority, looting and vandalism, drunken brawling and rioting — could just as easily be categorized as 'revolutionary acts'. And in part that is what they were: the revolutionary violence of 1905—17 was expressed in just these sorts of act. It was driven by the same feelings of hatred for the rich and all

  figures of authority, by the same desire of the poor and the powerless to assert themselves and claim the streets as their own. From the perspective of the propertied there was very little to distinguish between the 'rough' and 'rude' behaviour of the 'hooligans' — their cocky way of dressing, their drunkenness and vulgar language, their 'insolence' and licence' — and the behaviour of the revolutionary crowd.51 Even the most organized labour protests could, on the slightest provocation, break down into violence and looting. It was to become a major problem for all the revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks in particular, who tried to use the violence of the crowd for their own political ends. Such violence was a double-edged sword and could lead to anarchy rather than controlled revolutionary force. This was the lesson the Bolsheviks would learn during the July and October Days in 1917 — outbursts of violence which were far removed from the Soviet image of heroic proletarian power.

  If, however, there was some genuine inspiration for the Soviet myth of the factory worker, gun in hand, fighting for the revolution on the barricades, then that was the general strike of 1905. For it was the classic example of a spontaneous yet disciplined uprising of the working class. It began on 20 September with a walk-out by the Moscow printers — the most educated group of workers — for better pay and conditions. The strikers made contact with the students and held a mass street demonstration, which was attacked by the police. The workers threw stones at the police, smashed shop windows, overturned benches and knocked down trees to make barricades. By the start of October the printers of St Petersburg and several other cities had come out in solidarity with their comrades: middle-class homes went without their newspapers for several weeks. Then the railway workers came out on strike. The Union of Railway Employees and Workers was affiliated to the Union of Unions, which had been discussing the idea of a general political strike to further its campaign for political reform since the summer. By 10 October virtually the entire railway network had come to a halt. Millions of other workers — factory, shop and transport workers, bank and offi
ce employees, hospital staff, students, lecturers, even the actors of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg — came out in support of what had become in effect a national strike against the autocracy. The cities were brought to a standstill. All transport stopped. The lights went out at night. Telegraphs and telephones ceased to work. Shops were closed and their windows boarded up. Food became scarce. Robberies and looting exploded out of control. The gentry and the bourgeoisie took fright at the breakdown of law and order. When the Moscow water system began to malfunction there was panic; rumours spread that the strikers had deliberately contaminated the water. Workers, students and professionals joined together in demonstrations against the authorities. Many ended in the hasty building of barricades and in violent clashes with the police and Cossacks. The political demands of the demonstrators were