The Revolution of 1905: A Short History - Softcover

Ascher, Abraham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804750289 ISBN 13: 9780804750288

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2004

Synopsis

This is a concise history of the Revolution of 1905, a critical juncture in the history of Russia when several possible paths were opened up for the country. By the end of that year, virtually every social group had become active in the opposition to the autocracy, which was on the verge of collapse. Only the promise of reform, in particular the formation of a parliament (Duma) that would participate in governing the country, enabled to old order to survive. For some eighteen months the opposition and the Tsarist regime continued to struggle for supremacy, and only in June 1907 did the government reassert its authority. It drastically changed the relatively liberal electoral law, depriving many citizens of the vote. Although the revolution was now over, some institutional changes remained intact. Most notably, Russia retained an elected legislature and political parties speaking for various social and economic interests. As a result, the autocratic system of rule was undermined, and the fate of the political and social order remained uncertain.

About this title

About the Author

Abraham Ascher is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Graduate Center, City University of New York. His recent works include The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford, 1988), The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored (Stanford, 1992), and P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, 2000).

From the Back Cover

This is a concise history of the Revolution of 1905, a critical juncture in the history of Russia when several possible paths were opened up for the country. By the end of that year, virtually every social group had become active in the opposition to the autocracy, which was on the verge of collapse. Only the promise of reform, in particular the formation of a parliament (Duma) that would participate in governing the country, enabled to old order to survive. For some eighteen months the opposition and the Tsarist regime continued to struggle for supremacy, and only in June 1907 did the government reassert its authority. It drastically changed the relatively liberal electoral law, depriving many citizens of the vote. Although the revolution was now over, some institutional changes remained intact. Most notably, Russia retained an elected legislature and political parties speaking for various social and economic interests. As a result, the autocratic system of rule was undermined, and the fate of the political and social order remained uncertain.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Revolution of 1905

A Short HistoryBy Abraham Ascher

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5028-8

Contents

Preface.......................................................ix1. The Old Regime Under Siege.................................12. The Assault on Authority...................................393. The General Strike.........................................674. The Days of Liberty and Armed Uprising.....................905. Implementing Reform........................................1126. The Duma...................................................1317. A New Government Takes Command.............................1608. Coup d'tat................................................187Conclusion....................................................211Suggested Reading.............................................219Index.........................................................223

Chapter One

The Old Regime Under Siege

THE FRAGMENTED SOCIETY

On the eve of the Revolution of 1905, Russia appeared to many of its subjects to be divided into two irreconcilable camps: one favored the maintenance of the autocratic system of rule; the other was committed to rule by the people. But in fact the state of affairs was much more complicated since both camps were highly fragmented. True, Tsar Nicholas II, the leader of the conservative forces, insisted that in keeping with longstanding traditions his orders must be obeyed "not merely from fear but according to the dictates of one's conscience ... [which are] ordained by God himself." Yet serious conflicts of interest among his supporters as well as differences over how to handle the growing popular discontent partially explain the authorities' failure to pursue farsighted and consistent policies. At the same time, opponents of the old order disagreed sharply among themselves on the political, economic, and social changes that Russia must undergo to modernize the country along Western European lines. Only by keeping in mind the fragmentation of Russian society can one understand the complexity and ambiguous outcome of the turbulence that engulfed the country in the years from 1904 to 1907, which actually constitute the full span of the revolution and which will be the focus of this book.

The tsar sought to impose his will on the vast empire of some 129 million people through an imperial bureaucracy, which served at the sovereign's pleasure and whose reach extended to the lowest level of local affairs. Although the ruler obviously could not control all activities in his realm, on issues about which he cared deeply, however trivial, his word could not easily be ignored. Moreover, his power could not be counterbalanced by public institutions. Created at the initiative of the state, these institutions were much weaker than their counterpart in Western Europe, and most of them were to a substantial degree beholden to the state. Indeed, the principle of freedom of association was not recognized; very few laws had been enacted regulating public meetings or the establishment of private societies. All gatherings of groups of a dozen or more people were suspect and required police approval. No public lectures could be delivered without formal permission by the police, which generally declined to issue permits. The organs of local self-government (elected zemstvos and city councils), established in the 1860s, were creations of the authorities in St. Petersburg, and during the era of counterreform that began in the 1880s their functions and powers steadily eroded. The senior administrators of the Orthodox Church, a powerful institution in a country where the vast majority of the population was deeply religious, were servants of the state, appointed by the tsar.

The government went to great lengths to prevent the emergence of an organized opposition to the autocratic regime. For one thing, it sought to shape public opinion by censoring books, periodicals, and newspapers. For another, it maintained a system of police surveillance, and arbitrarily meted out severe punishment (internal exile or imprisonment) to anyone considered "seditious," a term defined very broadly. The political police (composed of the okhrana and the more secretive Special Section, both distinct and autonomous forces within the Department of Police) placed agents in educational, social, and political institutions as well as in factories to keep an eye on actual and potential dissidents. And yet, ironically, despite Russia's deserved reputation as a repressive police state, the police force was not notably efficient, primarily because the state lacked the means and personnel to create an effective security force, or, for that matter, an effective administration. Corruption and other forms of dishonesty on the part of police officials as well as other civil servants were systemic, and this, in turn, undermined respect for public authorities.

Ultimately, of course, the reputation as well as the viability of an autocratic regime depend on the political sagacity and competence of the ruler. It was Russia's misfortune that Nicholas II, who ruled from 1894 to 1917, possessed few qualifications to govern a powerful nation, least of all during periods of crisis. Although moderately intelligent and a man of personal charm, he showed little serious interest in politics and lacked the drive and vision to take charge of the government, to familiarize himself with the workings of the administration, and to instill a sense of purpose and direction in the ministers and bureaucracy. He was also a narrow-minded, prejudiced man, incapable of tolerating people who did not fit his conception of the true Russian. In a country in which close to half the population belonged to various minorities, such an attitude of the sovereign inevitably provoked widespread resentment.

At the time he ascended the throne, Nicholas was an unknown quantity to society at large, a fact that encouraged many enlightened people to hope that the new ruler would adopt policies more liberal than those of his father, Alexander III. But Nicholas quickly disabused the optimists by announcing to a delegation representing the nobility, the zemstvos, and the cities that they were entertaining "senseless dreams" of participating "in the affairs of internal administration." He intended, he said, to "maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as did my unforgettable father." This statement, it is worth noting, was made at a time when absolutism in Central and Western Europe had either been replaced by limited monarchies of varying types or by republican polities.

It was not until 1902 that Tsar Nicholas found a man in whom he had full confidence to serve as his preeminent minister in the government. That man was V. K. Plehve, who assumed the post of minister of internal affairs. Highly intelligent and devoted to the preservation of absolutism, Plehve had few compunctions about using force to crush critics of autocracy, though at times he also favored more subtle approaches. He acquired the reputation of being the most reactionary and wiliest statesman of late-imperial Russia.

Plehve's powers were immense. The Ministry of Internal Affairs was composed not only of various branches of the police but also of separate departments responsible for economic affairs in the countryside, the mail and telegraph services, non-Orthodox religions, censorship, and the penal system. The governors of the provinces reported to the minister of internal affairs, who also exercised substantial authority over the zemstvos and city councils. It is no exaggeration to say that hardly any aspect of domestic policy remained outside the jurisdiction of Plehve's department.

Although Plehve devised some measures to conciliate the growing opposition, he did not favor granting any class or social group in society a genuine voice in government, for he considered both the masses and the educated groups inadequately trained for such a role. Obsessed with the maintenance of order and stability, he could not tolerate the slightest expression of criticism of the authorities. Nor was he capable of distinguishing between moderates who were loyal monarchists but favored gradual liberalization of the country's political institutions and radicals who advocated a fundamental reordering of society. To root out all opposition to the prevailing order, he ordered extensive police searches and stepped up the policy of Russification-the imposition of Russian culture on the minorities-throughout the empire. He directed his fire in particular against the zemstvos, ordering their employees summarily arrested, regularly overturning decisions of their assemblies, frequently refusing to confirm in office representatives elected by the zemstvo assemblies to serve on their boards, and prohibiting zemstvos from even discussing such topics as universal education.

Neither Plehve, the tsar, nor most of the other men in positions of authority understood that the growing agitation for reform, far from being a passing phenomenon, had deep roots in Russian society. Ever since the early nineteenth century, many among the intelligentsia (writers, philosophers, political activists, and artists) had taken a critical stance toward the prevailing order. Their motives and aims varied, but they were united in the belief that the country's backwardness as compared to Western Europe was unacceptable. The various mass movements committed to political change that emerged in the early twentieth century owed their programs-or, perhaps more accurately, their ideologies-to the intelligentsia, but at the same time none of these ideologies would have attracted a large following without the profound economic, social, and cultural changes that occurred after the 1860s, many of which the government itself initiated.

Russia's humiliating defeat on her own soil during the Crimean War (1853-56) had amply demonstrated that the country's economic and social backwardness had sapped its national strength. To a large extent, that defeat prompted the government to undertake the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, which abolished serfdom, created the zemstvos, established the rudiments of the rule of law, and modernized the army. But by the 1880s and 1890s it was clear that by themselves these reforms, however far-reaching, could not maintain Russia as a European power such as it had been early in the nineteenth century. To regain its position as a significant actor in the international arena, the country would have to be modernized economically; that is, it would have to embark on a program of rapid industrialization. But the men in authority did not understand the implications of such a course. They deluded themselves into believing that they could modernize the country economically without altering the traditional social and political order.

No one fostered the illusion more fervently than S. Iu. Witte, the brilliant architect of Russian industrialization. A man of broad experience in the civil service and in private business, Witte became head of the Railway Department of the Ministry of Finance in 1889. He was so effective that three years later, at the age of forty-three, he was appointed minister of finance, and this marked the beginning of a fourteen-year period of extraordinary influence at the highest echelons of government.

Witte contended that if Russia, a latecomer to industrialization, was to make rapid progress in modernizing the economy, the state would have to play a large role in stimulating the process. He therefore launched an array of interrelated programs, the main purpose of which was to amass capital investment. Among other things, he promoted foreign loans and investments, established confidence in Russia's financial system by adopting the gold standard, placed extremely high tariffs on foreign industrial commodities, and substantially raised the rates of taxation. A large share of the financial burden for these programs fell on low-income groups, especially the peasants, who had to pay high prices for manufactured goods and absorb the high indirect taxes on such items as tobacco, sugar, matches, and petroleum.

The state also participated directly in the nation's economy to an extent unequaled in any Western country. For example, in 1899 the state bought almost two-thirds of all metallurgical production. By the early twentieth century it controlled some 70 percent of the railways and owned vast tracts of land, numerous mines and oil fields, and extensive forests. The national budgets from 1903 to 1913 indicated that the government received more than 25 percent of its income from various holdings. The economic well-being of private entrepreneurs thus depended in large measure on decisions by the authorities in St. Petersburg. This was a major reason for the relatively timid approach to politics of a substantial sector of the Russian middle class prior to 1905.

Russia's economic progress during the eleven years of Witte's tenure as minister of finance was, by every standard, remarkable. Railway trackage virtually doubled, coal output in southern Russia jumped from 183 million poods in 1890 to 671 million in 1900 (1 pood equals 36.11 pounds). In the same region, the production of iron and steel rose from 8.6 million poods in 1890 to 75.8 million in 1900. Also, between 1890 and 1900 the production of cotton thread almost doubled and that of cloth increased by about two-thirds. By 1914 the Russian Empire was the fifth industrial power in the world, though labor productivity as well as per-capita income still lagged far behind those in Western Europe.

These vast changes forced the authorities to take stock of some of their most cherished beliefs. Until 1905, senior government officials almost without exception contended that relations between employers and workers would be patriarchal in character, comparable to the relations between landlords and peasants, and that there was therefore no reason to fear trouble from below. The truth is that even though in the late 1890s the total number of industrial workers was only about 3 million (2.4 percent of the country's population) there were already signs of working-class militancy that in some respects surpassed the militancy of workers in the West. There were several reasons for this. Because of the heavy state involvement in economic development and the adoption of the most advanced forms of production and factory organization, Russia's manufacturing economy was more heavily concentrated than those of Germany and the United States, usually singled out as the pathfinders in this regard. The existence of large factories was a boon to labor organizers and political militants, who could easily reach sizable numbers of workers resentful of the harsh conditions at the workplace.

Moreover, the "disciplinary paternalism" that governed relations between factory owners and workers placed the latter in an extremely disadvantageous position. Collective resistance to the employer was considered tantamount to an uprising against the state, punishable by fifteen to twenty years of hard labor. A strike for higher wages could result in prison sentences of three weeks to three months for agitators and seven days to three weeks for participants. Conditions for factory workers were grim. After 1897 workers normally toiled eleven and a half hours a day, five days a week and somewhat less on Saturdays. Their wages were exceedingly low, and since many of them returned for part of the year to their villages to work in the fields, they were housed in large, unsanitary barracks during their service at factories. Finally, employers and their managers condescended to the laborers, addressing them in the familiar "thou," searching them for stolen goods at the end of the workday, and imposing fines on them for infractions of the intricate "Rules of Internal Order." Any act of insubordination was punishable by a fine. It seemed to many workers that they were treated as "servants and slaves."

It did not take long for Russian workers to disprove the government's claim that they were content and would remain docile. Between 1862 and 1869 six strikes and twenty-nine "disturbances" took place; from 1870 to 1885 the average number of annual strikes rose to twenty and the number of disturbances from three to seventy-three. Then, with the intensification of economic development, labor unrest continued to rise rapidly. Between 1886 and 1894 the annual average number of strikes was thirty-three; between 1895 and 1904, one hundred seventy-six. During the massive strikes in 1896 and 1897 in the textile mills of St. Petersburg, workers revealed an unprecedented degree of sophistication, unity, and discipline. There could no longer be any doubt about the Russian workers' ability to act forcefully to advance their interests. The strike movement reached it highest level in the period before Revolution of 1905 in 1903, when 138,877 workers engaged in 550 work stoppages.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804750289
• ISBN 13: 9780804750288
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248