On 18 October 1905, a young Jewish intellectual with a goatee beard, thick black hair and intense dark eyes rose to address an assembly of striking workers in the Technological Institute in St Petersburg:
Citizens! We’ve got the ruling clique1 with its back to the wall! Nicholas II says he will promise us freedom and the right to vote. But he isn’t doing so from the goodness of his heart or because he wants to. Oh, no! He began his reign by murdering the workers … and stepping over their corpses until he arrived at Bloody Sunday in January this year. The man who sits on the throne is a murderer and if it now seems he’s making promises, it’s only because we have forced him to do so!
Today whiteboards and computer screens have replaced the revolutionary banners. When I visited, students were listening earnestly to a lecture on nuclear physics in the lecture hall where Lev Bronstein, known to posterity as Leon Trotsky, addressed the crowd in 1905:
Citizens! If anyone among you believes2 in the tsar’s promises, let him say so! Look around you! Has anything changed? Have the gates of our prisons been opened? Have our brothers returned to their homes from the Siberian deserts? No! The dictator still rules over us with the aid of the army. The guardsmen covered in the blood of January the ninth are his support and his strength. It is he who orders them not to spare their bullets against your breasts and heads … Bloody Sunday has swept away the spring and replaced it by a military dictatorship.
The group Trotsky was addressing in such inflammatory terms was the Soviet Rabochikh Deputatov of St Petersburg. ‘Soviet’ in Russian means ‘council’, so this was the Council of Workers’ Deputies, directly elected in the factories by the workers themselves and immensely popular with the people. So closely identified with the revolutionary cause did the word ‘soviet’ become that it would stand for over 70 years as the name of the greatest empire of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union.
That first St Petersburg Soviet has been romanticised by generations of revolutionary historians, beginning with Trotsky himself. To read his memoirs, you’d think the Soviet was solely responsible for the protest strikes that gripped Russia after Bloody Sunday:
As the October strike3 developed, the importance of the Soviet grew literally hour by hour. The industrial proletariat rallied around it and the Soviet united the revolution around itself. It resolved to transform the working class into a revolutionary army … A tremendous wave of strikes swept the country from end to end, convulsing the entire body of the nation. Every striking factory elected a representative and, having equipped him with the necessary credentials, sent him off to the Soviet. The Soviet was the axis of all events; every thread ran towards it, every call to action emanated from it.
In fact Trotsky, who’d just returned from exile in London, had missed the start of the strikes and was arrested after only two months back in Russia. On 3 December 1905, the St Petersburg governor, Dmitry Trepov (whose father Fyodor was the target of Vera Zasulich’s assassination attempt in 1878), sent troops to crush the Soviet. They stormed the building. All those present were arrested and put on trial. Trotsky was sentenced to exile in Siberia, but conditions were lax and after a few weeks he escaped and made his way back to England. Lenin, who had been in exile since 1900 following a jail sentence in Russia for plotting against the tsar, had come back to St Petersburg even later than Trotsky, in November 1905. He managed to avoid arrest, but he too was forced to flee when the tide turned against the revolutionaries in 1906.
In terms of immediate results, the Soviet had achieved little. Lenin and Trotsky went back into exile and returned to the frustrated bickering that characterised much of the revolutionaries’ existence before 1917. Both men had been members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, dedicated to proletarian revolution, but the RSDLP had split at its Second Party Congress, held in London in 1903. The delegates had quarrelled over the structure of the revolutionary movement. One group, known as Mensheviks (the word in Russian means ‘minority’, despite their followers actually being the majority) advocated a widely based, popular organisation. Trotsky sided with the Mensheviks, but Lenin led the Bolsheviks (Majority), calling for the revolution to be led by a small, ruthless group of professionals. It was Lenin’s vision of a rigidly run revolutionary elite – euphemistically referred to as ‘democratic centralism’ – that would triumph.fn1
The 1905 Soviet failed; but the impact of that failure was immense. The Soviet proved the need for centralised coordination of strikes and protests; it brought practical experience of the distribution of arms to the workers; and it showed Russians that challenging the government through violent insurrection was possible.
For the regime, the events of 1905 – from Bloody Sunday in January to the strikes and the Soviet in October – were a warning that the monarchy could no longer ignore. If Trotsky inflated his account of the opposition’s activities, his depiction of a murderous tsar was also exaggerated. There were many arrests, but the number of executions was low – official figures put it at ten for the whole of 1905, while even the radical opposition lawyer Oskar Gruzenberg claimed only 26. Those numbers would rise dramatically to over 200 in 1906, over 600 in 1907 and over 1,300 in 1908, before declining in subsequent years. The figures suggest that the monarchy was willing at first to try conciliation before eventually resorting to repression.
Nicholas II had reacted to the tragedy of Bloody Sunday with his usual vacillation. He had agreed to meet a delegation of workers ten days after the massacre, and his speech to them – like his diaries – reveals not a ruthless calculating dictator, but a weak man, overwhelmed by events:
I have asked you here4 so you can hear my words directly from me and tell your friends what I have to say … I know your life as working people is not an easy one. Lots of things need to be improved and put right … I would ask you please to have patience … But you know it is wrong of you – criminal, in fact – to come in a mutinous crowd, as you did, to tell me about your needs and desires … I believe in the good intentions of the working people – and in your lasting devotion to me – so I am nonetheless willing to pardon you for what has happened.
Nicholas and Alexandra donated 50,000 roubles to the families of those who died on Bloody Sunday. Three weeks later the tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Sergei, the military governor of Moscow, was blown to pieces as he left his office in the Kremlin. The sight of his uncle’s severed head on the cobblestones, the blood and fingers spattered on the Kremlin walls sent Nicholas into shock. For the next eight years the tsar failed to appear in public. His hysterical German wife lived in terror. Alexandra had produced four healthy daughters, but the tsar’s only male heir – the tsarevich Alexei, born in 1904 – was afflicted with life-threatening haemophilia. In desperation, Alexandra enlisted the aid of a charismatic but dissolute Siberian holy man, Grigory Rasputin, who convinced her he could heal her son. Nicholas too fell under the charlatan’s spell, calling him ‘a good, religious, simple Russian5 … the voice of the people’. He closed his eyes to Rasputin’s drunken lechery and told his advisers, ‘When in trouble or assailed6 by doubts, I like to have a talk with him and invariably I feel at peace with myself afterwards.’ At the same time, the tsar seemed oblivious to the real voices of rising popular protest. The prime minister, Count Witte, wrote despairingly:
When in the course of my official7 conferences with His Majesty, I referred to public opinion, he frequently would snap, ‘What do I care about public opinion?’ He considered that ‘public opinion’ was solely that of the intelligentsia … ‘How I detest the word intelligentsia,’ he declared. ‘I would like the Russian Academy to strike it out of the dictionary.’
Like Louis XVI before the French Revolution, Nicholas was swept along by escalating calamities, incapable of consistent thought or action. Witte tried to persuade the tsar that only an immediate programme of reforms – modernisation, constitutional democracy and respect for civil freedoms – could defuse the pressures threatening to tear Russia apart. In August 1905, he convinced him to accept an embryonic parliament, known as the Duma, but was appalled when at the last minute Nicholas insisted on restricting it to an advisory role:
Such a contrivance was typical8! The Duma had all the prerogatives of a parliament except the chief one. It was a parliament and yet, as a purely consultative institution, it was not a parliament! The law of 6 August satisfied no one. Nor did it in the least stem the tide of the revolution, which continued steadily to rise.
The August reforms failed; the Soviet was formed and a general strike threatened, forcing the tsar into further concessions. Nicholas’s ‘October Manifesto’, composed for him by the liberal Witte, conceded the constitutional democracy he had previously resisted. It granted legislative powers to the Duma and opened it to all classes of society:
We, Nicholas II9, Emperor and Autocrat of all Russia declare that … the unrest and disturbances in our empire fill Our heart with heavy grief … They threaten to cause disorder in the masses and undermine the integrity and unity of the state. We therefore instruct the Government to … grant the population the unshakable foundations of civic freedom on the basis of inviolable personal rights, freedom of conscience, of speech, assemblage and association … to admit to participation in the Duma those classes of the population that have hitherto been deprived of the franchise … to establish as an unshakable rule that no law can be made without the sanction of the Imperial Duma, and that the people’s elected representatives should be guaranteed real participation in supervising the lawful behaviour of our appointed authorities.
The manifesto of October 1905 was an astounding leap forward. After centuries of autocracy, Russia was – overnight – to become a parliamentary democracy. It was, in broad outline, what the moderate opposition had been demanding and, had it been offered earlier and more willingly, it might have worked. But now it was seen as too little, too late, even by Witte:
In the years 1903–190410, one definite idea had fermented in the minds of the people – namely, that to avoid the miseries of a revolution it was necessary to carry out a number of liberal reforms in keeping with the spirit of the times … When the people becomes conscious of its dignity and needs, it is impossible to persist with the patently unjust preferment of the privileged minority at the expense of the majority. Rulers and politicians who do not grasp this simple truth prepare a revolution with their own hands. At the first weakening of the government’s power and prestige, it bursts out with the violence of an uncontrollable explosion.
Even in October 1905, the moderate opposition – the Constitutional Democrats or KaDety – were prepared to welcome the tsar’s proposals and accept the offer of a constitutional monarchy. But the moderate democrats had been undermined by the years of prevarication and delay. The momentum now was with the revolutionary extremists, men like Lenin and Trotsky, who demanded the whole tsarist system be swept away. Trotsky’s memoirs mock the regime’s attempt at reforms:
The onslaught of the revolutionary11 proletariat turned us Marxists from a so-called ‘political fiction’ into a powerful reality … and the tsarist autocracy, in its utter confusion, began to make concessions … When the tsar issued his manifesto, those liberals all shouted, ‘Victory!’ But we said, ‘No! it’s only half a victory. The tsar is still there with his army; he can still take back what he’s conceded or promised to concede.’ The tsar’s manifesto is nothing more than a scrap of paper. Here it is – crumpled in my fist! Today they’ve issued it – tomorrow they’ll tear it into pieces, just as I am now tearing up this ‘paper freedom’ before your eyes!
Trotsky’s dismissal of ‘those liberals’ reflects the final separation of the opposition into its constitutional and extremist branches – the ‘liberals’ who were prepared to cooperate with the tsarist vision of a constitutional monarchy were reviled as bourgeois, capitalist lackeys by the Marxist Social Democrats – Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. They demanded the complete destruction of the old order and the transfer of absolute power to the forces of the socialist revolution.
When the uprising’s momentum petered out in 1906, Nicholas’s ever-fluctuating intentions once again betrayed the moderate opposition. His long awaited constitution, issued on 23 April, reversed many of his concessions. It gave the tsar a veto over the decisions of the Duma and announced that the emperor would retain ‘supreme autocratic authority’. Freedom of speech was severely regulated and the Tsar held the right to appoint ministers and dissolve the Duma. Witte suggested Nicholas had agreed to a parliament and a constitution only because the events of 1905 had scared him into it:
His Majesty is afflicted12 with a strange nearsightedness. He experiences fear only when the storm is actually upon him, but as soon as the immediate danger is over, his fear vanishes. Thus, even after the granting of the constitution, Nicholas considered himself an autocratic sovereign in a sense that might be formulated as follows: ‘I do what I wish, and what I wish is good. If people do not see it, it is because they are plain mortals while I am God’s anointed.’ He usually ends in a puddle of mud … or a pool of blood.
When elections in April 1906 produced a left-wing majority demanding further reforms (including the transfer of all agricultural land to the peasants), Nicholas ordered the dissolution of the Duma after just 73 days. He dismissed Witte and appointed a tougher prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin. Stolypin agreed to fix the election rules to guarantee a right-wing majority, but he resisted the tsar’s demands to abolish the Duma completely. Nicholas expressed his annoyance in a letter to his mother:
A stupid delegation is coming13 over from England to see liberal members of the Duma. Uncle Bertie told us he was very sorry but he couldn’t stop them coming. It’s the fault of their famous English ‘liberty’, of course. I bet they’d be pretty angry if we sent a delegation to the Irish to wish them success in their struggle against their government … It wouldn’t be so bad if everything that was said in the Duma stayed within its walls. But every word comes out in the papers, which everyone reads, and now the people are starting to get restive again. I get telegrams from all over the place asking me to dissolve the thing, but apparently it’s too early for that. Just let them do something really stupid, though, and Whack! they’ll be gone!
Over the next five years, Stolypin would govern Russia with a combination of ruthless repression and dogged attempts at reform. He introduced legislation to improve the rights of the peasants and help them acquire the land; but he also stepped up the executions of the regime’s opponents; the hangman’s noose became known as ‘Stolypin’s necktie’. As unrest abated, the Russian economy recovered: industrialisation and capitalism began to take root; the railways carried prosperity to the people; state finances revived and living standards rose. The period between 1905 and the First World War was a brief golden age for Russian industry, with factory output growing by 5 per cent per annum. The population of St Petersburg swelled as it became an important centre of metalworking, textiles and shipbuilding. In the south, the iron and steel industries boomed. Output of coal more than doubled, and the expansion of oil extraction in the Caucasus brought prosperity to Baku and other cities.
But Stolypin’s efforts did not save the monarchy, or himself. Tsarist Russia’s last attempt at political liberalism came to a bloody halt on 5 September 1911. By then, the prime minister had received threats against his life and suffered at least one assassination attempt; but he ignored his bodyguards’ advice to stay away from public events and declined to wear a bulletproof vest. On that Tuesday evening, he attended a production of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan at the Kiev Opera House. During the entr’acte, Stolypin sat in his private box, chatting to the tsar and his two eldest daughters, Olga and Tatyana, who were in the box next to his. Below them, in the front row of the stalls, an anarchist revolutionary named Dmitry Bogrov had been watching. He walked up to the prime minister and fired two quick shots, hitting him in the arm and the chest. Witnesses say Stolypin rose from his chair, unbuttoned his gloves and calmly removed his jacket to reveal his white shirt stained red with blood. With the fatal bullet lodged in his chest, he sank down again, muttered the words, ‘Happy to die for the emperor’ and made the sign of the cross over Nicholas and the royal party. Stolypin was taken to the Kiev central hospital where he survived for another four days. The tsar visited several times and reportedly begged Stolypin to ‘forgive’ him. Those words, and the fact that Nicholas ordered the curtailment of the judicial investigation into the shooting, gave rise to rumours that the prime minister’s assassination had been ordered not by the revolutionaries but by conservatives in the royal entourage who wanted to put an end to Stolypin’s programme of liberal reforms. It emerged that the assassin Bogrov had had contacts with senior figures in the tsarist secret police, but he was executed before he could be properly questioned.
Stolypin was buried in Kiev’s Monastery of the Caves. His death signalled the end of reform and the return to reaction. The cataclysms of the next decade meant all thoughts of reform would be put away for many years to come.
fn1 Even the choice of party names reflected Lenin’s unscrupulous pragmatism. The split at the 1903 Congress originated in a disagreement about narrow personnel issues, and Lenin won that vote by a slim margin. He immediately appropriated the name of Bolshevik, despite his faction holding a minority of the delegates.