Russia A History

by Gregory L. Freeze

  Finally, there were the Bolsheviks, who, like the Mensheviks, claimed to spurn much of the populist legacy—glorification of the commune, rejection of a capitalist phase, terrorism. But the Bolsheviks shared the populists’ thoroughgoing impatience with intermediary, liberal-type solutions, their almost personal contempt for liberals, and even for revolutionaries who tolerated them (Lenin best embodied this contempt), and their furious rejection of any form of attentisme. As Marxists they had no choice but to share the Menshevik belief that the growth of capitalism in Russia was secure and augured progress; this indeed had been the central argument in Lenin’s huge, statistically burdened book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899). But as Russian revolutionary maximalists they would seek every possible way to drive their insurrectionary train past the capitalist station with, at most, the shortest of stops.

  None of the revolutionaries, and least of all the future SRs, could openly endorse Witte’s policies. But the two main groups of Marxists (there were still others, the most vital of which was the Jewish Social Democratic ‘Bund’) did greet the spread of capitalist industry as evidence of the predictive power and dialectical astuteness of their Marxist ‘science’ and welcomed the appearance of both industrial bourgeoisie and industrial proletariat as positive omens of impending class struggle. New labour unrest provided them with further evidence: the militant ‘Obukhov defence’ in St Petersburg in 1901 and general strikes in Rostov-on-the-Don and Odessa in 1903, Russia’s greatest year of labour unrest before 1905. Predictably, the industrial recession that set in around 1900, discrediting the Witte system in the eyes of many, was viewed by most Marxists not as a sign of the weakness of Russia’s economy (and its dependence on foreign capital), but as further evidence that a capitalist Russia was now enmeshed in the international business cycle. It was.

  Militant Moderates: 1900–1904

  The years 1900–4, while displaying great continuity with the 1890s, also witnessed some important new lines of development. One was a burgeoning aggressiveness and self-assertion on the part of liberal constitutionalists. Their centres of gravity were both the zemstvos (including zemstvo employees, generally more radical than their gentry employers) and the thriving professional associations of lawyers, doctors, academics, and journalists, all of them inspired by resurgent unrest among university students (which, after all, most professional intelligentsia had been). At the same time, these years also witnessed the revival of revolutionary terrorism. Usually conducted by a conspiratorial section of the PSR, this terrorism evoked unexpected sympathy among other, less radical members of educated society, many of whom were increasingly alienated from the autocratic state. And, perhaps most important, during these years Russia’s Asian policy became increasingly expansionist and aggressive, culminating in a fateful war with Japan in 1904–5. That war, and especially its glaringly unsuccessful conduct and the resulting national humiliation, served to raise the level of political unrest in almost every layer of society and within every political grouping, pushing Russian political dialogue several degrees to the left.

  The immediate political beneficiary was the movement of liberal constitutionalists. Having started to stir again in the 1890s, they now came to life as never before and, I would argue, never again. By 1902 zemstvo activists—including zemstvo agronomists and other employees, the so-called ‘Third Element’—joined together with urban professionals and even some former Marxists to organize their own illegal, left-liberal paper (Liberation, published in Stuttgart under the editorial leadership of Struve). In one respect, namely their conception of a newspaper as ‘political organ’ and organizing centre for their movement, the ‘Liberationists’ were not very different from Lenin, who in his famous 1902 tract What is to be Done? treated the SD paper Iskra (the Spark) with the same tender adulation as Struve and his colleagues soon were treating Osvobozhdenie (Liberation).

  Liberals also turned out to be ingenious at developing their own non-revolutionary yet militant tactics, of which the most effective was the ‘banquet campaign’ of November-December 1904 (inspired by a similar campaign before the French Revolution of 1848). They used the pretence of every plausible anniversary celebration—from the Emancipation to the 1864 judicial reforms—to assemble, in defiance of government restrictions, and draw society’s attention to the need for constitutional reform. Unsuccessful war had been a major catalyst for change half a century earlier, a lesson not lost on the constitutionalists of 1904–5. And whereas the assassination of Alexander II had purportedly thwarted reform, the new wave of assassinations (which included three imperial ministers and a grand duke and culminated in the SR murder of Plehve, the hated Minister of Interior, in July 1904) actually served to debase the government’s credit and quicken the winds of change. That even liberals like Pavel Miliukov seemed to welcome news of Plehve’s assassination was a sure sign of trouble ahead for the state.

  The tsar’s decision to replace Plehve with a moderate, Peter Sviatopolk-Mirskii (already known for his willingness to appease radical students), as the new Minister of Interior was less a reflection of the tsar’s enlightenment and flexibility than of his vacillation and despair. And it was interpreted as such by contemporaries. After a brief optimistic ‘spring’ based on a false hope that the new minister would be allowed to bring about some fundamental change, the process of political polarization resumed. The contentiousness of autocracy’s enemies now grew apace, as even moderates waited impatiently for the moment that would advance their cause.

  Enter Father Gapon: A Road to Bloody Sunday

  That moment was soon provided by St Petersburg’s industrial workers. In 1904, in what seemed like a reprise of the Zubatov experiment (defunct since the summer of 1903) without Zubatov, the charismatic Orthodox priest Georgii Gapon had succeeded in mobilizing thousands of members into his ‘Assembly of Russian Factory Workers’. Originally approved and even financed by the police (with the goal of weaning workers away from the radicals and bolstering their commitment to autocracy by providing safe outlets such as tea-rooms and public lectures), Gapon’s organization soon took on a life of its own. On the one hand, some of his most trusted aides turned out to be former Marxists who, though no longer very revolutionary, still provided workers with intense exposure to the Western model of a legal labour movement and notions of civil rights and constitutional order. On the other hand, the grass-roots movement—and in this respect gaponovshchina recapitulated the story of zubatovshchina—developed its own dynamic as defender of the interests of its worker-members.

  Both worker militancy and the mood of the former Marxists could not fail to be influenced by society’s leftward swing, especially in the hothouse atmosphere of the capital. When in December 1904 some workers at the giant Putilov factory, members of Gapon’s Assembly, were dismissed, with little justification, in what appeared to be an effort to reduce the Assembly’s influence, the organization could not maintain its credibility unless it rose to the defence of the injured parties. In a sense, everything that had happened to the Assembly over the past year—its organization into neighbourhood branches, the swelling of its ranks, its members’ exposure to liberal and worker-centred political discourse—had conspired to prepare it for this moment of truth. To this concoction must be added the charismatic and sympathetic personality of Gapon himself, who came to embody all the workers’ conflicting and confusing aspirations, lending them palpable personification at a moment when the workers might otherwise have lacked unity and direction.

  The outcome was a city-wide general strike in January 1905 and a dramatic decision, taken almost simultaneously at the grass-roots and upper levels of Gapon’s organization, to organize a mass march on the Winter Palace with a petition for Tsar Nicholas, ‘our father’. Undoubtedly drafted in large part by the workers’ ex-Marxist intellectual advisers, but also with ample feedback from many workers, the petition combined class-centred demands for higher wages and shorter hours (the eight-hour day, an ‘economic’ demand with spec
ial political resonance) with a liberal political programme that included a constitution and free elections based on direct, universal manhood suffrage.

  The decision of the emperor was no less dramatic. It was to disregard the petitioners by failing to appear at the palace to receive the petition. Even more fateful was the decision to authorize military units to fire on advancing petitioners. Since the procession—which included women and children—not only was unarmed but carried Orthodox crosses and icons (Sergei Eisenstein’s filmed depiction of marchers carrying red flags and likenesses of Marx should be ignored) and sang patriotic songs, the order to shoot to kill proved particularly repulsive. Indeed, it turned public opinion against the tsar almost as soon as word got out that well over a hundred were dead and many more were wounded on this ‘Bloody Sunday’ (9 January 1905).

  The 1905 Revolution

  The year 1905 defies succinct summary, in part because the situation changed so radically from month to month, even week to week, in part because each of the various historical actors—workers, peasants, soldiers, liberal intelligentsia, radical political parties, national minorities, students, even clergy—followed a distinct trajectory even if at times displaying a modicum of coordination. Still, whatever its vicissitudes, 1905 was a watershed in the history of late imperial Russia. By early 1906 these varied movements had driven their common enemy to grant a quasi-constitutional political order, based in principle on the rule of law and in some respects comparable to the troubled constitutional order in Germany. Hence it would not be amiss—though the point should not be overstated—to treat pre-and post-1905 Russia as having discrete historical characteristics.

  What happened in 1905 to prepare Russia for change and what accounts for the limits of the change that occurred? Let us begin with the workers, whose January procession had transformed a liberal protest movement (which rarely transgressed the boundaries of civil disobedience) into outright acts of revolution. At issue is not who deserves more credit (or blame) for launching the revolution, workers or liberal professionals: each played an indispensable role and each encouraged the other. Rather, the task is to understand how labour’s clashes with the state drove the revolution in an ever more bellicose direction, forcing the authorities into moderate concessions such as creation of the ‘Shidlovskii Commission’ to hear the grievances of the workers’ elected representatives. In this classic example of ‘too little too late’, elections were held but the elected body never convened. As a result, the government not only augmented the frustration and anger of already embittered workers but also inadvertently provided them with their first large-scale experience of electoral activity (though a small number of factories had held elections in compliance with a 1903 law on factory elders). This electoral experience subsequently helped workers select and shape their own leadership and prepared them in the autumn for elections to the Petersburg ‘soviet’ (Russian for ‘council’). The latter was an extraordinary assembly of workers’ representatives, initially a city-wide strike committee, but soon evolving into what was virtually a shadow government, led for a while by the militant Marxist Leon Trotsky.

  The fact that the soviet began as a strike committee shows that it was the strike movement above all that catapulted workers into the forefront in 1905. September was the key month, for it witnessed a nation-wide general strike, originating with Moscow printers but forming its central nervous system along the railway lines of which Witte had been so justly proud, with the old Moscow– St Petersburg line as the network’s spinal column. The strike gave birth to the Petersburg soviet in October, with other towns soon following the capital’s model. Although the term dvoevlastie was not used until 1917, the transformation of such soviets from strike committees into revolutionary governing bodies represented Russia’s first portentous experiment with ‘dual power’.

  Although a Peasant Union had already been formed in July, September was also a pivotal month for the peasant phase of 1905. In general terms, it was the absence of government troops—off fighting the Japanese on Russia’s eastern frontiers until the war ended in August, then slowly returning to central Russia on the politically inflamed railways—and the example of unpunished worker defiance that facilitated the appearance of peasant unrest. But more specifically it was the end of the harvest season that triggered September’s intense wave of rural upheaval, including the widespread theft and destruction of gentry property. The confluence of these two great streams—peasant rebellion and working-class militance—drove the government to make concessions sufficiently meaningful to split the liberation movement.

  Here the role of the liberal professionals becomes all-important. Their movement, first represented by the Union of Liberation, was transformed into that organization’s militant successor, the ‘Kadet’ or Constitutional Democratic Party (which also absorbed the organization of zemstvo constitutionalists). If the defiance of professionals and liberal zemstvo men in late 1904 had emboldened the labour movement, the militancy of workers and peasants later gave wavering liberals the courage to defy the government and form their own party. Although the movements of workers, peasants, and professionals remained distinct, in the autumn of 1905 they came close to walking hand in hand, however briefly, a cooperation already anticipated earlier in May by the creation of the ‘Union of Unions’, a coalition of organizations headed by Miliukov. That Union was more an association of professionals than of blue-collar workers, but it had a broad range of member organizations, and its inclusion of railwaymen gave the coalition not only symbolic but real material power.

  Faced with these adverse circumstances, coupled with a resounding military defeat (though the peace with Japan signed in Portsmouth in August proved less humiliating than expected) and the painfully slow return from the front of reliable troops (some of whom were in a mutinous mood), the tsar now pledged the biggest concessions to society he had ever made. Earlier, even as recently as August, reform proposals by his government had consistently lagged behind society’s leftward-moving curve. Various configurations of advisory and consultative bodies had been discussed (most notably the so-called Bulygin Duma in August), but none granted genuine legislative independence, let alone election by anything resembling a democratic franchise.

  On 17 October, however, Nicholas issued a manifesto containing a vague promise to grant an elected legislative body (elected not directly or equally, however, but at least on the basis of near universal male suffrage) as well as civil and religious liberties and—for the first time in Russian history—the right to organize unions and political parties. When the detailed electoral law was issued in December, it clearly favoured Russia’s already privileged classes, but was surprisingly generous to peasants, at least in comparison to workers.

  Here at last was a document, the ‘October Manifesto’, with enough substance to divide the opposition. Because it fell far short of the fully-fledged Constituent Assembly (in effect the end of the autocratic system) demanded by most of the left, including Kadets, the Manifesto failed to put an immediate end to the revolution. But because it went as far as it did, it proved satisfactory to the regime’s more moderate critics, including many zemstvo constitutionalists who, having now grown wary of the destructive force unleashed by the popular classes in Russia’s city streets and villages, organized a political party called the Union of 17 October; its members (‘Octobrists’) vowed to co-operate with the government as long as it held to the Manifesto’s promises.

  Although the government still faced a bloody struggle, it soon was able to recoup its forces sufficiently to arrest the Petersburg soviet and to suppress the December uprising of workers and revolutionaries in Moscow. Thanks in part to continuing upheaval among ethnic minorities and peasants, calm would not be fully restored for another year and a half, and then only with the aid of field courts martial and other draconian measures. But the back of the revolution had been broken, especially in the capital cities, and the army, despite some flashes of rebelliousness, was now obeying ord
ers.

  National Minorities

  This account of 1905 would be incomplete without a word about the national minorities. Russia’s previous expansion had extended Romanov rule into Ukraine, Poland, Bessarabia, the Baltics, Finland, Crimea, the Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia (the last two regions being special targets of internal peasant migration during this period). Like Austria-Hungary, Russia was truly a multinational empire, though one in which the dominant nation held a much greater numerical preponderance than did Germans in the Habsburg lands (according to Russia’s census of 1897, the population of 125 million included some 57 million ‘Great Russians’, plus another 22 million Ukrainians and 6 million Belorussians). At varying rates and intensity, minority discontent (in some cases reflected in massive emigration to America and elsewhere) was steadily mounting, especially once Alexander III had made coerced assimilation, though unevenly applied, official policy. Particularly aggrieved were Poles (whose rights were sharply curtailed after the 1863 uprising), Finns (whose status as a semi-independent grand duchy was subjected to major encroachments), and Jews (who though always subject to official discrimination, fell victim to a series of bloody pogroms in 1881–2 and most notoriously in Kishinev in 1903, and were exposed to a new series of discriminatory measures beginning with the infamous ‘May Laws’ of 1882). Poles, Finns, and Jews played particularly active roles in 1905, but other minorities, especially in Transcaucasia and the Baltic region (most notably the Latvians), also had significant nationalist, socialist, and liberal (sometimes all three simultaneously) movements. In the autumn of 1905 Jews were again the victims of pogroms (though the degree of government connivance remains uncertain).