Everything flows and only change endures. What is a year, when seen not through the eyes of an honest petty bourgeois as one chunk of life of their own little “I,” but rather as a time measurement in humanity’s forward development, [as against] just the development of a single people? A transient wave in the changing tides of unceasing passing impressions. And yet, how many meaningful initiatives and new social formations, how many new vistas over the historical process of becoming, has this disappearing year brought to us.
The year 1904 left us with no major decisions. The political inheritance it handed on to its successor was incomplete and undefined. The battles on the fields of Manchuria still raged, undecided, in the Far East. Although Japan’s young military power had succeeded in pushing back the Russian army bit by bit to the north, the result of this wrestling match was still open at the start of 1905. Port Arthur capitulated during the first days of the New Year already, on January 2, and on January 13 the Japanese general Nogi [Maresuke] entered as victor into the city. In March, Mukden,† the old Manchurian imperial city, fell to the Japanese troops after a mighty battle, and on May 28 the Japanese fleet destroyed the replacement naval squadron from the Baltic, under the command of Admiral [Zinovy] Rozhestvensky, in the Korea Strait. The Russian behemoth’s defeat was sealed. By the end of August, the tsar felt forced to agree to a peace settlement of historical significance—not just because it broke Russia’s position of political power in east Asia, but most of all because it signals the beginning of a new phase in the struggle for the Pacific, which seems destined to play the same role in the economic life of the most civilized peoples as the Mediterranean played in antiquity and the Middle Ages and as the Atlantic Ocean has played since the discovery of the Americas.
Yet the outbreak of revolution in Russia appears to be more meaningful still for the long-term fate of the European peoples, and especially the proletariat. Violence, blown like a forest fire in a storm, spread through one region after the other, from the banks of the Neva to the Caucasus, from Poland to the Urals. When on Bloody Sunday, January 22, Petersburg’s striking workers went on pilgrimage to the Winter Palace under the leadership of Priest Gapon to request the tsar’s aid in their moment of destitution, the hearts of the proletariat were still filled with a deep trust and a silent reverence for the “mild and peaceful tsar.” The shooting by the tsar’s henchmen into the beseeching crowd, however, opened the eyes of the masses, who had still hoped that the tsar’s intervention could steer political reform onto the right track. The bestial iniquity of the tsar’s creatures jolted the people out of its paralyzed trance. Their hearts were seized with wild violence, and their ebullient outrage caused the ice floes to break up with a crack under the Russian palace of ice.
At first it seemed as if the people’s passion, whipped up by the atrocity of Bloody Sunday, would break under tsarism’s brutal violence, as if the massacre on January 22 would remain no more than a shocking episode in the history of the Romanovs, written in blood. The Russian press rejoiced together with the German papers, their brothers in spirit, and announced that the oppressive lessons taught by live ammunition had forever rid the “inflamed folk” of their desire for freedom and justice. Even those who knew ordinary life in “holy” Russia better—that revolutionary embers hid amid the ashes—did not imagine public fights on the streets and barricades against the tsarist authority, but rather a slower wrestling match lasting for years, the fight flaring up here and being extinguished there. It was common knowledge, wasn’t it, that the times of the Great French Revolution with the masses’ heroic readiness for sacrifice were done with, [it being] a now-invisible phase of history which people had survived through. The year 1905 showed how wrong this theory was. The kind of heroic courage shown in battles against the troops of a power fitted out with the most modern weapons, played out in Moscow’s streets in the final days of the dying year, was never to be seen during the French Revolution.
The largest parts of Russia’s industrial regions were gripped by the political mass strike only a few weeks after Bloody Sunday. The strike spread like wildfire, so that by the end of March 150 municipalities had caught the strike fever. The executions of Senator Johnson and of Grand Duke [Sergei Alexandrovich] Sergius followed, then the outbreak of disturbances in the Caucasus, peasant revolts in southwest Russian and the Baltic Sea provinces, a new outbreak of disturbances in Baku, the defection of one part of the Black Sea Fleet, Shuvalov’s execution, new clashes in the industrial region of the Vistula Land, and the fights on the barricades Łódź.
The sea of blood turned into a huge fire that burned across the economically developed parts of “holy” Russia, until, the fear rising in him, the “tsar of peace” finally felt himself moved to give up a piece of his egoistic magnificence, in order to douse the raging fire. A constitutional convention of August 19 announced the establishment of an Imperial Duma. Too late, however; these weak concessions were unable to pacify the people’s whipped-up passions. New political strikes followed, new street fights, and renewed bloodletting organized by the tsarist cabal of courtiers. The railroad workers’ general strike, which brought railroad transport to a standstill for more than a week, was swelled enormously when joined by a general strike of the workers in Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Łódź, Kiev, Kharkiv, Samara, and other cities.
Again, Bloody Nicholas sought to calm the raging sea by allowing a constitutional manifesto to be produced on October 30, which promised to “Russia’s loyal sons” the “unshakable foundations of civic freedoms,” and appointed Count Witte as prime minister. But, just one day later, the Social Democratic Party of Russia declared that the tsarist manifesto had no authority to order the proletariat’s struggle to stand still. Instead of trailing off, the conflicts against the tsarist system have expanded even further in their scope, and the close of the year is lit up by the bloody red of the December Battle of Moscow.
Tsarism has lost its power. It is rotting in a living body. That said, the time is not yet ripe for the establishment of a socialist state in Russia; but equally impossible is the continuation of a rotten absolutist regime. No, the proletariat has learned too much in the fire of the revolution about how to take hold of its power and its interests; the strivings toward a fundamental reformation of property ownership relationships in the rural economy have put down roots too deep. The only possibility is a liberal-democratic regime strongly influenced by social politics.
The year 1905 was a time of struggles not only for the Russian proletariat, however. The Social Democratic workers marched forward in almost all civilized European states toward their goal, capturing new positions, influenced by events in Russia. In Germany, the year 1905 began with a large coal miner’s strike in the Ruhr conurbation. A large number of significant strikes soon attached themselves to the coal miners, first in one part of the Empire, then in another, until a big strike broke out in the Berlin electricity industry. The struggle in Italy commenced in February with a general strike by the railroad employees.* This was followed two months later in France by agreement among the French socialists, establishing a position for the united party in the French parliament that it had never occupied during the ministerialist era.† Social Democratic teachings and the politics of workers’ autonomy even gained influence in England, as proven by the trade union congress held in September.‡ And in Austria-Hungary, that double state of half-measures, the Social Democratic proletariat strengthened the zeal with which they are fighting for universal and equal suffrage. Parallel to these major attacks however, an unflagging, smaller battle stretched out through the whole year, a continuous attempt to stand up against the oppressive tendencies of capitalism, to save and pull together whatever could be drawn from culture and humanity in the service of the proletarian classes.
More than any of its predecessors, this dying year deserves the honorable title of a “year of struggle,” a year of exhausting work laden with sacrifices; but also a year of progress, of solidarity, and of the most astonishing self-sacrifice. That said, counterstrokes were not lacking either; the enemy [continued its] convulsive efforts to force the forward march of socialism to a halt. Just shortly before the end of the year, Hamburg’s plutocracy announced their new disenfranchisement plans.* Yet though some individual plans have gone astray and some quiet hopes have been disappointed, even a fleeting look back at the road the dying year carved for itself will tell us that the international proletariat’s emancipatory struggle has moved a fair way forward—and faster than most of us had hoped possible before the year’s end.
If we are not entirely deceived, then the newly beginning year promises to bring forward the openings that the old year left behind it. The history of humanity [shows] that the contractions of birth produce the greatest fevers; new social formations thrust themselves toward the light. The new wishes to become. The year 1906 will not be short of storms and battles demanding utter devotion and taking heavy casualties. We can rely on our hopes that German Social Democracy will know how to fulfill her world-historical duty as the spearhead of these conflicts, and so I say—to work, onward to new battles!