What Was the Russian Revolution of 1905?
The Russian Revolution of 1905 began on 22 January (9 January old style) with the massacre of peaceful workers in St Petersburg, the first political crisis of the new century, and it ended with the suppression of the Moscow December uprising of 1905 and the agricultural unrest of 1906. In between, the autocratic system of the Russian Empire came closer to collapse than it ever had — closer, indeed, than at any point in the imperial period except February 1917 (see Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2004; Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990).
The opening of the revolution
The revolution opened with the events of 9-22 January 1905 in St Petersburg. A priest of the Orthodox Church, Father Georgy Gapon, had organised a workers’ association in the Putilov works; on 7 January he had been dismissed, and the workers had been called out on strike. The strike spread from the Putilov to the other great works of the capital. On 22 January, a delegation of workers, women, and children marched to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the Tsar, asking for civil liberties, the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, an end to the war with Japan, and a Constituent Assembly. The marchers were met by the soldiers of the Petersburg garrison at various points along the route. The soldiers fired. Estimates of the dead range from 200 to 1,000, of the wounded from 800 to several thousand.
The massacre of 22 January was the trigger for a much larger wave of unrest. The next week, the strike spread to Moscow, the Baltic provinces, Poland, the Caucasus, the Volga. By the end of January, about 440,000 workers were on strike. The peasant unrest, which had been going on since the 1860s but had intensified in the wake of the 1861 Emancipation, became a more general agrarian movement. The army and navy were affected: the battleship Potemkin mutinied in June 1905; the Sevastopol’ mutiny of November 1905 was the largest mutiny in the imperial period; about 80 per cent of the imperial armed forces experienced some form of mutiny between January and October 1905 (Ascher, 2004).
The soviets of 1905
The revolution produced a new institution: the soviet (council) of workers’ deputies. The first soviet was the St Petersburg Soviet, established in October 1905, with about 562 deputies from 96 factories, 41 workshops, and 8 political parties. The St Petersburg Soviet was led by the Menshevik Khrustalev-Nosar and the Bolshevik Trotsky; the latter was elected chairman in December 1905, after the arrest of Khrustalev. The soviets were the political innovation of the 1905 revolution, and the 1917 revolution was, in effect, a revival of the 1905 institution (Anweiler, The Soviets, 1974).
The October general strike and the October Manifesto
The peak of the revolution was the all-Russian political strike of October 1905. The strike began with the Moscow printers’ strike of 19 September, spread to the railway workers of the Moscow-Kazan railway, and by mid-October had closed the railways, the post and telegraph, the hospitals, and the universities. The Petrograd Soviet, in its first decree, called for the establishment of a provisional government and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.
The October strike brought the autocratic system to the verge of collapse. The Minister of the Interior, Aleksandr Bulygin, was replaced by Sergei Witte, the former finance minister and the architect of the 1897 gold standard. Witte advised Nicholas II that the regime had two options: to rule by force and to provoke a civil war, or to grant a constitution. Nicholas II chose the constitution. The October Manifesto of 17 (30) October 1905, drafted by Witte and signed by the Tsar, granted civil liberties and promised a State Duma elected on a wide franchise. The Manifesto was the first written constitution of the Russian Empire (Pipes, 1990).
The suppression of the revolution
The October Manifesto split the opposition. The Constitutional Democrats, the liberal intelligentsia, and the zemstvo leaders accepted the Manifesto as a first step; the Bolsheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the more radical trade-unionists denounced the Manifesto as a fraud and prepared for a further wave of unrest. The Moscow December uprising of 1905 was the most serious: 360 barricades, several thousand fighters, and about 1,000 dead and 3,000 wounded on both sides. The uprising was suppressed by the Semyonov Guards, and the revolution petered out in the new year.
The repression was severe. The Stolypin field courts-martial, set up by decree of 19 August 1906, dealt summarily with accused revolutionaries: of the 1,103 capital sentences in 1906-1907, about 685 were carried out. The pogroms in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, the repression in Poland, the renewed war against Finland, the closure of the labour press, and the exile of thousands of political dissidents were the price the autocratic system paid for surviving (Ascher, 2004).
The aftermath
The revolution of 1905 was, in a literal sense, a failure: the autocratic system was preserved, and the regime was not overthrown. But the revolution’s political effects were far-reaching. The October Manifesto was the foundation of the Fundamental Laws of 1906 and of the State Duma; the soviets were the institutional model of 1917; the 1905 crisis of the army was the practical model of 1917; the Menshevik and Bolshevik parties were the same parties that fought the 1917 revolution. The revolution of 1905 was the rehearsal for 1917 (Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).