What Was the October Manifesto?
On 17 October 1905 (30 October N.S.), the Vysochaishe utverzhdennaya was published in the Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik — a document of three hundred and forty-six words, signed in the imperial palace at Peterhof by Tsar Nicholas II and countersigned by the chairman of the Council of Ministers Sergei Yulyevich Witte, granting “the firmament of civic liberty” — the “established principles of personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association.” It also declared that the State Duma would be created as the legislative chamber of the empire and that no law would take effect “without the consent of the State Duma.” The autocracy, in form, ended on 17 October (Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2004; Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990).
The document was issued on the eleventh day of the all-Russian general strike.
The October Strike
The October general strike began on the morning of 10 October 1905 in Moscow and the Petrograd railway workshops, spread to Baku, Odessa, Kharkov, and Warsaw on the 11th, and by the 14th had closed 1,568 enterprises in Petrograd and 956 in Moscow, with 1.2 million workers on strike in the capital. The Moscow–St Petersburg railway was down, the gas works in St Petersburg were down, the printers of the metropolitan dailies were out, and the first independent soviet newspaper, Izvestia, appeared on 13 October, edited by the Menshevik Nikolai Trotsky from the building of the Polytechnic Museum. On 14 October Nicholas wrote to the Minister of War Rediger: “Society is revolting and is asking for the dismissal of the government and other concessions.” The response was the Manifesto (Surh, 1905 in St. Petersburg, 2009).
The drafting
The draft was the work of Witte and a small circle: the conservative publicist Prince S. E. Trubetskoy, the zemstvo leader Prince D. I. Shakhovskoy, and the legal scholar M. M. Kovalevsky. Witte, who had returned from Portsmouth on 25 August and who had been appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers on 19 October, presented the document to the Emperor. The Petrograd garrison, under General Sergei Gerngros, was told that a refusal to put down the strike by force would be accepted. Gerngros, the Chief of the General Staff, told Nicholas that the troops were no longer reliable. On 17 October the Cabinet Council met in the palace at Peterhof and the document was signed (Pipes, 1990; Ascher, 2004).
The aftermath
On the day of publication, the whole of the imperial guard and some twenty-five regular infantry regiments were sent to the capital. The Union of the Russian People — the Black Hundreds — held counter-demonstrations, and pogroms began in Odessa on 18 October, in the Polish provinces on 20 October, and in Kishinyov on 25 October. The pogroms would, in the next seven weeks, kill an estimated 2,200 to 3,200 Jews and wound at least 1,500 more. The Moscow soviet led by K. A. Timiriazev, the Moscow banker Rudolf Klein, and the lawyer Nikolai Vishnyak continued the strike. The October general strike ended on 21 October (Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews, 1986; Pipes, 1990).
The implementation
The Fundamental Laws of 23 April 1906 — published in Volume 27 of the Polnoye sobranie zakonov Rossiyskoy Imperii — created a State Duma and a State Council and reserved to the tsar the powers of foreign policy, war, peace, and supreme administration. The first Duma met in the Tauride Palace on 27 April 1906 and was dissolved on 8 July 1906 after 72 sitting days. The second Duma (20 February – 3 June 1907) was dissolved by the manifesto of 3 June 1907 (the “Third of June Coup”), which changed the electoral law and reduced the representation of the peasantry, the workers, and the non-Russian nationalities. The third Duma (1 November 1907 – 9 June 1912) and the fourth (15 November 1912 – 6 October 1917) sat for their full terms (Pipes, 1990; McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia, 1988).
The October Manifesto and the constitution
The Manifesto of 17 October did not, in technical terms, give Russia a written constitution. That was provided by the Fundamental Laws of 1906. The Manifesto’s “principles” — civil liberties, the Duma, the limitation of autocracy — were, however, the basis of all later Russian constitutional discourse. The Provisional Government of February 1917 declared itself the legal successor of the Manifesto’s principles; the Soviet constitution of 1918 was written as their antithesis. The Manifesto remains, in Russian constitutional historiography, the moment when the imperial autocracy accepted, in writing, that it would no longer be the only source of law (Freeze, Russia: A History, 3rd ed., 2009).