The Russian Revolution of 1905

Centenary Perspectives

Anthony J. Heywood, Jonathan D. Smele

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134253296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

2005 marks the centenary of Russia's 'first revolution' - an unplanned, spontaneous rejection of Tsarist rule that was a response to the 'Bloody Sunday' massacre of 9th January 1905. A wave of strikes, urban uprisings, peasant revolts, national revolutions and mutinies swept across the Russian Empire, and it proved a crucial turning point in the demise of the autocracy and the rise of a revolutionary socialism that would shape Russia, Europe and the international system for the rest of the twentieth century.

The centenary of the Revolution has prompted scholars to review and reassess our understanding of what happened in 1905. Recent opportunities to access archives throughout the former Soviet Union are yielding new provincial perspectives, as well as fresh insights into the roles of national and religious minorities, and the parts played by individuals, social groups, political parties and institutions. This text brings together some of the best of this new research and reassessment, and includes thirteen chapters written by leading historians from around the world, together with an introduction from Abraham Ascher.

1
Introduction

Abraham Ascher

As the title of this volume on the Russian Revolution of 1905 suggests, the book is intended to provide readers with new perspectives on what is generally considered to have been one of the critical junctures in modern Russian history and, in many ways, in the history of the twentieth century, aptly termed the ‘age of extremes’. Initially prepared as papers for the XXXth Annual Conference of the Study Group on the Russian Revolution (at Nottingham, United Kingdom, on 3–5 January 2004), all the contributions except one were extensively discussed by a group of some forty scholars and then revised to take into account various criticisms and suggestions. The result, in my view, is a collection of highly interesting and stimulating chapters that shed light on an event that is still insufficiently understood.

My task in this introduction, it seems to me, is to help students of history derive maximum benefit from reading the book. I could best do this, I thought, by pointing out some of the scholarly controversies surrounding the Revolution of 1905, by showing how the essays fit into these interpretations and by raising general questions about them. Above all I would like to emphasize how the chapters collected here demonstrate that the discipline of History is not a closed book but, rather, an endless debate about the past.

Actually, the Revolution of 1905 has been a highly controversial topic from the moment it ended. Even the duration of the upheaval has been a bone of contention, and that is not surprising because this touches on all the questions in dispute. It is arguable that the event’s proper title should be ‘The Revolution of 1904–07’, which, admittedly, is rather cumbersome. But a strong case can be made that the upheaval began late in 1904, when liberals, dismayed by the country’s military defeats at the hands of the Japanese, engaged in widespread agitation against the autocracy, and that it did not end until June 1907, with the dissolution of the Second State Duma (the elected chamber of deputies). Historians who tend to downplay the agitation of 1904 and the conflicts in the two dumas, in 1906 and 1907, do so because they believe that it was not the liberals but the workers and, to a lesser extent, the peasants, who played the critical role in the revolution – two groups that were especially active in the opposition to the old order in the year 1905 itself. But there are two other reasons for the differing interpretations of the revolution: the incredible complexity of the events that comprised the upheaval; and the ambiguity of the outcome of 1905.

In the Soviet Union the standard interpretation of the revolution was based on comments Lenin made in 1920. He referred to it as a ‘dress rehearsal’, without which the ‘victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible’.¹ Lenin’s aim, clearly, was to suggest the inevitability of 1917, since a dress rehearsal is always followed by the first performance. Furthermore, Lenin insisted that the upheaval began with Bloody Sunday on 9 January 1905, when government troops shot at peaceful demonstrators, killing 130 of them and wounding 299. He also contended that the proletariat was the driving force of events and that the Moscow uprising in December that year, led by the Bolsheviks and harshly crushed by the government, was the high point of the upheaval. In Lenin’s view, the intransigence of the ruling class precluded any outcome other than the one that occurred – the defeat of the revolution. Lenin’s analysis became the principal interpretation of 1905 in the Soviet Union and guided the work of Soviet historians for over seventy years. And the literature on the subject was vast: a scholarly bibliography of 1905 that was published as early as 1930 ran to 715 pages.²

In the West, there has also been strong interest in the revolution, especially during the past four decades or so, but the interpretations have been diverse. Broadly speaking, there have been four Western approaches. Social historians in the West and most historians on the left have been more subtle and open-minded than those who have followed the Leninist line, but they also tend to argue that the masses, and in particular the working class, were at all times the driving force of the revolution. Moreover, many of them also consider Bloody Sunday to have been the starting point of the upheaval and view the armed uprising in Moscow as one of its high points. Finally, these historians tend to dismiss as totally inadequate the concessions by the government and reject the possibility of Russia’s peaceful transformation into a constitutional monarchy on the Western model.³

By contrast, conservative writers – and this would include some Russian émigré scholars and former tsarist officials – insist that it was the radicalism and intransigence of the opposition at every turn of the upheaval that undermined the chances of a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Only a monarchical order with a powerful tsar could maintain the Russian Empire as a viable state, they argue. Nicholas II, in this interpretation, had no choice but to act as he did.⁴

It has also been suggested – and this is the third Western interpretation – that there was no revolution at all in 1905.⁵ Certainly, an orthodox Marxist might well dispute the designation, for political power was not transferred from one social class to another. Non-Marxists, who define a revolution as a fundamental change in the system of legality, might also hesitate to use the term, since the tsar’s authority remained paramount, even though it was clearly reduced by the establishment of an elected parliament that exercised some legislative power. Yet it is understandable that the term should have been adopted by contemporaries and retained by political activists as well as historians. From mid-1904 until late in 1905, there occurred an assault on tsarist authority from below that was so massive, potent and successful that, to all appearances, the old regime was disintegrating. Civil order broke down and for several months the government seemed incapable of little more than biding its time until the outbursts of defiance, generally unplanned and unorganized, had spent themselves. So effective a challenge to the state’s monopoly of power, even though temporary, may justifiably be characterized as a revolution.

The last interpretation I want to consider might be termed, for want of a better description, as broadly ‘liberal’.⁶ It depicts the revolution not as an event that made any one path of development inevitable, but rather as a critical juncture that opened up several alternative paths. Under intense pressure, initially from liberals among the nobility and professional classes for political change and then from other social groups – workers, peasants and national minorities – who were additionally interested in economic and social change, the autocracy appeared to suffer a loss of nerve. For an entire year, beginning in the autumn of 1904, the government oscillated between accommodation and repression; but neither policy succeeded in ending the unrest. On the contrary, the government’s inconsistency was taken as a sign of weakness by the various groups within the opposition, encouraging them to step up their agitation. Indeed, had the opposition groups been able to collaborate fully, the outcome might have been quite different.

During the general strike in October 1905 – the high point of the revolution in the ‘liberal’ interpretation – the pressure from the mass movements became so acute that it drove the autocracy to the verge of collapse, and to many it now seemed possible that the old regime might actually be overthrown. Even though that prospect did not materialize, some institutional changes introduced during the period of unrest survived the failure of the revolution. Most notably, Russia retained an elected legislature with some real powers, as well as political parties speaking for various social and economic interests. In addition, despite many restrictions, trade unions, which had been legalized during the upheaval, continued to exist and there was considerably more freedom of expression after 1905 than had prevailed before that year.

This approach to the study of 1905, which stresses complexity and ambiguity, might seem to deprive the revolution of some of its excitement by not linking it directly to the more momentous revolution of 1917. Such an approach, however, yields better – and ultimately more exciting – history: it is closer to what actually happened. The individuals who participated in the mass movements of 1905 did not believe that they were merely preparing the way for the real event at some future date. They were trying to bring about far-reaching changes then and there. Furthermore, it is not certain that these endeavours were necessarily doomed to fail. On several occasions, the authorities considered daring reforms that at an earlier stage of the revolution would have satisfied enough of the opposition’s demands to have brought the unrest to an end. However, the tsar and his advisers always offered concessions that were too niggardly; and they were always offered too late. There were also several fairly elaborate attempts to restore political stability by bringing liberals into the government, but in the end the differences between the authorities and the opposition proved to be too deep. The revolutionary period from 1904 to 1907 might even be designated as one of missed opportunities to end the upheaval by peaceful means.

Since 1991, Russia has found itself in the throes of yet another upheaval, one that has also been inspired to a considerable extent by the ideals that had animated much of the opposition in 1905: the rule of law, government by the people, individual rights and respect for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities. Thus, though aborted, the Revolution of 1905 may be said to have initiated a process of political, economic and social change that still has not run its full course. Even now, as I write these words in September 2004, President Vladimir Putin is taking steps to undermine some of the democratic reforms introduced after the collapse of Communism in 1991. It almost seems like a replay of the tsar’s arbitrary measures in 1907, when he reneged on many of the reforms introduced in 1905 and 1906. The supporters of a liberal and democratic Russia continue to hope and believe that Mr Putin’s measures will prove to be only a temporary defeat for their cause.

If one takes such a long-range view of Russian history, then the Revolution of 1905 can be seen not simply as a failure or as an event that was important because it led inexorably to 1917. On the contrary, 1905 should be viewed as an upheaval that opened up new possibilities for the country that were suppressed by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. After all, most countries undergoing transitions from absolutism to constitutionalism endured long periods of conflict; the path to what is generally referred to as modernity has rarely been smooth, almost never without many zigzags and major catastrophes. Just think of France from 1789 to 1905 (when the Chamber of Deputies passed a law separating church and state), Germany from 1848 to 1949, and the United Kingdom, long ago, in the seventeenth century.

It was with these thoughts that I examined the chapters prepared for this volume. More specifically, I asked myself several questions that may serve as guides: How did the chapters conform to, or modify, the five broad interpretations of 1905 I discussed above? Did they examine issues previously ignored or slighted? Did they offer new approaches? Were they based on sources not previously examined or previously available? Or did they perhaps reinforce positions advanced by other historians? And, finally, did they raise issues that in the end may be unanswerable but are nonetheless worthy of discussion?

The first thing I noticed was that seven of the chapters deal with developments in the provinces or among national and religious minorities – subjects that, it is fair to say, have not received sufficient attention in previous studies of 1905. Three focus on the liberals, who were so important throughout the upheaval that they deserve further scrutiny. One of these, the perceptive chapter by Anthony Heywood, concentrates on the liberals’ activities outside the two capitals (St Petersburg and Moscow), in Kiev (Kyiv), and, in addition, touches on the political conduct of socialists in that city. Two chapters focus on the question that sociologists like to call ‘human agency’: I am referring to those devoted to Lenin and Trotsky. One is on military developments in Manchuria and their very important impact on a major participant in the events of 1917. Finally, the chapter by Anna Geifman suggests that a psychohistorical approach should be applied to the study of radicalism and revolutionary extremism. These categories are not perfect; there is, necessarily, a fair amount of overlap and some chapters deal with several aspects of the revolution. I want to emphasize that my comments on the contents of this volume are made in a friendly spirit and are designed to encourage discussion of difficult issues to which there are no easy answers.

Let me start with Professor Anna Geifman’s thoughtful and interesting chapter. In emphasizing that Russian terrorists were psychologically impaired she has offered a novel approach to the study of early twentieth-century extremism in Russia. Additionally, of course, this is a subject that is relevant to present-day developments in many parts of the world. I myself think that the psychohistorical approach can be instructive in seeking to understand the extremists and, in particular, the terrorists; the few I have examined in detail were very troubled people. And it seems to me that Geifman is probably right in suggesting, by means of a quotation from Walter Laqueur, that ‘objective circumstances per se are not a sufficient’ condition for the escalation of violence. But I do have some doubts about the second part of the statement she quotes: that objective circumstances may ‘perhaps not be … a necessary condition’ for terrorist violence. Here I would raise several questions: Why was there so much more terrorism early in the twentieth century in Russia than elsewhere in Europe? Why so much more terrorism after 1905 than before that year? In this connection, a point made by Antii Kujala in his excellent analysis of conditions in Finland – a subject, by the way, that is too often slighted in Western studies of late Imperial Russia – is especially pertinent. Kujala points out that political assassinations in Finland were ‘quite rare’ prior to 1904 and became more frequent in the years from 1904 to 1908. Incidentally, immediately after the words quoted by Geifman, Professor Laqueur qualifies his own generalization. He states that ‘The formation or existence of a revolutionary party needs definite ideological objectives and also a certain personality type.’⁷

I would also suggest that Professor Geifman may be exaggerating a bit in asserting that the terrorists were, to use a term she quotes from the novelist Andrei Bely, ‘half-cracked’. The terrorists of early twentieth-century Russia by and large attacked people who occupied positions of authority or were in some way allied with the authorities: senior officials, senior military officers, policemen and capitalists. They did not, to the best of my knowledge, deliberately engage in random killings, although innocent civilians were often victims because they happened to be near the targets of attack. Can it therefore be said that the terrorists in Russia, however misguided and immoral they may have been, were as irrational as the term ‘half-cracked’ implies? The psychohistorical approach can be helpful in understanding extremists, but if it is applied without careful qualifications we run the danger of trivializing the deep social, political and economic conflicts and tensions in Russia early in the twentieth century, which, I am sure, was not Professor Geifman’s intention.

The chapters on the provinces and minorities remind us once again that although developments in St Petersburg and Moscow were of fundamental importance in determining the course of the revolution, the upheaval was truly national in scale. This is demonstrated by Beryl Williams’s informative and wide-ranging study of the latest literature on the causes of 1905, in which she also raises a challenging question about how to understand the upheaval. Can it be best understood by applying the general explanation of revolutions offered by Alexis de Tocqueville, who contended that they break out when economic conditions are on the upswing? Or are revolutions better explained by Karl Marx’s claim that ‘increasing misery’ impels the masses to rebel against the prevailing political and social order? Dr Williams pays special attention to the claims of scholars who have argued over the past two decades or so that peasants in Russia were not as deprived economically as had previously been widely assumed and that ‘nationality mattered more than class in the ethnically divided areas of the south, particularly in the Caucasus but also in Ukraine’. Moreover, these scholars contend that Russia was ‘catching up fast’ in industrializing the country and that ‘over all, things may well have been improving, not getting worse’.

Professor Jam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on style
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Psychohistorical approaches to 1905 radicalism
• 3 1905: The view from the provinces
• 4 The 1905 Revolution in Russia’s Baltic provinces
• 5 Finland in 1905: The political and social history of the revolution
• 6 Revolution and revolt in the Manchurian armies, as perceived by a future leader of the White movement
• 7 Retrospectively revolting: Kazan Tatar ‘conspiracies’ during the 1905 Revolution
• 8 Peasant protest and peasant violence in 1905: Voronezh province, Ostrogozhskii uezd
• 9 Jews and revolution in Kharkiv: How one Ukrainian city escaped a pogrom in 1905
• 10 Socialists, liberals and the Union of Unions in Kyiv during the 1905 Revolution: An engineer’s perspective
• 11 Kadet domination of the First Duma and its limits
• 12 Lenin and the 1905 Revolution
• 13 Leon Trotsky and 1905
• 14 The 1905 Revolution on Tyneside
• Index