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Episode 10.37: The General Strike

To get started this week, I do want to remind everybody that we are on a countdown to the big book finishing hiatus, wherein I will temporarily suspend the podcast and pour everything I have into Citizen Lafayette. So after today’s episode, I will have two more for you. The last episode wrapping up the Revolution of 1905 will post on April the fifth. Now, I know that this is not exactly a great time to be depriving you of your favorite podcast, but, um, it’ll be that much sweeter when I get back?

So we open this third to last episode with the official end of the Russo-Japanese war, the end of the great foreign debacle that had precipitated the domestic revolution. As I said at the beginning of last week’s show, Sergei Witte led a delegation to Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the summer of 1905, where, with the help of the American intermediaries, most especially president Theodore Roosevelt, they negotiated with their Japanese counterparts.

The tsar had sent Witte off with instructions to play hardball with the Japanese. And though Witte personally would have been much more compromising, he did the best he could to do as he was bidden. And he did rather well, considering that Russia had lost every battle and then lost the war. What Witte had going for him was that Japan, for all their victories, was really no better off than Russia at this point. All of the initial assumptions the Russians had made about Japan’s weaknesses were true: they were a collection of islands with a tiny population compared to Russia, and the war had taxed their people and their economy to the max. And the new form of modern industrial warfare, with its resulting industrial scale carnage, had hit them very hard. In the summer of 1905, the Japanese were in extreme one more victory like that, and we are ruined territory. Long story short, they were as eager to end the fighting as the Russians were. So through a mix of charming his American hosts and threatening to the Japanese that Russia was ready to pour 500,000 more men in into Manchuria, Witte managed to keep the resulting Treaty of Portsmith as non-punitive as possible for Russia. The Russian Empire gave up its claims to the Liadong Peninsula and southern Manchuria, but they kept control of the Chinese Eastern Railway that serviced Vladivostok. Most importantly, at least from the Russian perspective, they would pay no monetary indemnity or reparation. Instead, they ceded the southern half of Sakhalin Island to Japan.

When signed, the treaty of Portsmouth ended the Russo-Japanese War, and news reports of its contents were the first good news to come out of the far East and like a year and a half. The Russian public was thrilled to learn the war was finally over. Sergei Witte added luster to his reputation as a wonder boy.

With the war ending and the Bulygin constitution promulgated, there was hope in the halls of the imperial palace, that the worst was over. As part of an attempt to affect a final settling of things, General Trepov — remember, he’s the guy who had been brought in to run St. Petersburg after Bloody Sunday, who had then been given control of the national police, and was so personally trusted by Nicholas that Witte called him the real dictator of Russia. Well anyway, Trepov proposed to grant a measure of freedom to the empire’s universities. Specifically, he proposed lifting the heavy handed controls that had been enacted in 1884 during the reactionary response to the assassination of the tsar liberator. Lifting these rules would allow the university’s more autonomy and self-direction, especially on matters relating to freedom of speech and assembly. Trepov’s theory was that by allowing some free speech on campus that moderates and liberals would be satisfied and drift away from the radicals. It would also allow those radicals to blow off their last bit of steam, hopefully breaching to a dwindling audience no longer drawn in by the romantic allure of listening to dangerous banned speech. With university set to start a new academic year under these freer conditions, the students and professors who had walked out during the wave of protest returned to campus. But far from releasing some harmless steam, the freedoms now granted to the universities triggered the great explosion that blew a hole in the side of the ship of state.

As soon as they were back in session, student groups, working with friends and comrades in the various underground revolutionary groups, started holding meetings. Lots of meetings. Practically every night at every university on a variety of topics and featuring a variety of speakers. They talked about political tactics and organization, they discuss the land question, economic conditions, the workers, political and economic philosophy. Through September 1905, practically every available university lecture hall and theater was filled to capacity at every opportunity. The thing that made these meetings so important was that though they were organized by students and held on campus that were attended by the whole community. Workers would show up, middle-class professionals, women, soldiers. Thousands people at a time were showing up to these things. Trepov’s big idea was that these meetings would be an inconsequential release valve. Instead, they pumped a massive quantity of radical energy back out into the population. Workers and professionals who attended the meetings then carried the message back to their friends and family and coworkers. Reflecting back on events, both revolutionary and members of the tsar’s own government agreed that the general strike of October 1905 was born in the mass meetings movement of September 1905.

Nobody planned the general strike. Even the organizers of the Union of Unions, which was explicitly about coordinating activities of different professional groups, only mused wistfully that though a general strike might be great, they couldn’t actually pull it off. Nobody even recognized at the time what historians now point to as its origin point. On September the 20th, 1905, printers and Moscow went on strike. A strike by a single group in a single city was a common enough occurrence these days, and these printers were mostly upset about workplace conditions. But from this little spark grew the greatest economic conflagration in the history of the Russian Empire. You see, the workshops of the printers were physically right next to Moscow University, and there had already been a lot of cross contact between the two groups all through September. When the printers went out on September the 20th, they were almost literally bumping into the people attending the ongoing university meetings. And pretty soon street meetings, orations and lectures were starting up unprompted as the two forces merged. Moscow police responded by attempting to clear the streets, which was only marginally successful, and mostly what that did was lead the printers in St. Petersburg to call a three-day solid area strike. But even with a strike now in the two main cities of the empire, it still seemed confined to a single industry and limited in scope. On October the first, the Moscow Okhrana was reporting to their superiors that all was well. It was contained. There was no further chance of spreading.

But then came a random, totally coincidental, but incredibly momentous death. On October the third, just a few days after the authorities were predicting that the printer strike was contained, Prince Troubetzkoy, the liberal noble leader of the zemstvo, dropped dead in Moscow with the age of 43. His death was the last and perhaps greatest contribution he made to the cause of liberal reform. Troubetzkoy was a particularly revered figure among educated professionals and zemstvo constitutionalists and the liberal intelligentsia. His death was a shock, and his funeral turned quickly from solemn mourning into political rally. People from all classes filled the streets of Moscow, praising Troubetzkoy and denouncing the regime he had spent his life trying to reform. After the funeral, a group of students were walking to another meeting when they were attacked by kossak cavalry guards, who beat the students and arrested about 20 of them. This unprovoked attack on Troubetzkoy’s mourners outraged public opinion. Tempers were now running very high among students, professionals, journalists, and workers.

And that is when the Union of Railroad Employees and Workers entered the picture and blew the whole thing wide open.

The railroad union had been set up back in April as a part of the organizing that had resulted in the Union of Unions. But what made this particular union unique was that it covered both employees and workers. That meant both educated employees of the railroads like engineers, accountants, clerks, and lawyers, and working class laborers. In theory, it represented up to 750,000 people working in the railroad sector from all walks of economic life. The central committee of this union, recognizing their potential strength and the critical role that railroads played in the economy, had been kicking around the idea of a mass strike since at least July 1905, but conditions just never seemed right. And they had, of course been tracking the printers workers strike with interest, but it was the events around Troubetzkoy the funeral that led them to conclude that conditions were now right. And they were right. On October the fourth, the central committee of the Union of Railroad Employees and Workers announced that they were going on strike, and would remain on strike until the tsar called a real constituent assembly to actually reform the Russian Empire.

By October the sixth, stoppages on the railroads were popping up all over. Service slowed, and line stopped. First here, and then over there. It was hard for either the railroad union or the authorities to know whether the strike would spread and grow or stall out and die. But by October the 10th, the strike had fully consumed Moscow, and rail service in the ancient capital shut down. Being one of the principle transportation hubs of the empire, this meant that service halted anywhere that needed to come or go through Moscow, whether the workers were on strike or not. And with nothing else to do, most of those workers connected to the Moscow rail quit working. As Moscow ground to a halt, a meeting at the University of St. Petersburg, which was attended by as many as 30,000 people, got all fired up and were ready to embrace those magic words that had seemed inconceivable just a few weeks earlier: general strike. In the second week of October 1905, employees and workers from all industries, classes, and regions stopped showing up for work. All of a sudden, all at once. The entire Russian empire screeched to a grinding halt. The shared demand of the strikers was simple: real, actual political reform. The end of autocracy.

A lot of credit for the rapid spread of the strike and its simple demands goes to the Union of Liberation. This had long been their dream: a massive popular front to secure democratic reform and the constitution. And now all that organizing was paying off, as affiliated sections of the Union of Unions walked off the job. But even at this critical zero hour, they were still simply trying to catch up with events. As we have seen so often, the real challenge for any revolutionary organization is not so much to strike the first spark of the revolution, but to recognize when the fire has already started.

The other revolutionary groups had struggled with this all year. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs had all been caught flat footed by 1905, and even as the great climax of 1905 was building up a head of steam, they were all slow to recognize what was happening. The Moscow Bolsheviks didn’t publicly endorsed the general strike until October the 10th; their comrades in St. Petersburg waited until October the 12th. Their stated objection was the limited demands of the strikers, but perhaps more importantly, they objected to the fact that they themselves were not leading it. The Mensheviks, on the other hand, rushed in and embraced the general strike. Their whole theory of revolution was that at this stage in history, the working classes needed to help the liberal bourgeoisie stage the first revolution, which would democratize the state and create the political freedoms necessary for the open mass organization of the working class. Only after that had been accomplished could they stage the second socialist revolution, and usher in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Meanwhile, the tsarist regime was itself again slow to recognize what was happening under their feet. They responded to this renewed burst of opposition with their usual mix of vacillation and procrastination. During September and October, the tsar spent most of his days hunting. But with the sudden declaration of the general strike, it sure seemed like they ought to do something. Just sitting around hoping the problem would resolve itself was no longer tenable. So Nicholas did something he really did not want to do. He asked Sergei Witte for advice. It is clear from the comments of both men that Witte and Nicholas did not like each other on a personal level. Witte thought Nicholas weak, indecisive, and shallow, which… fair. Nicholas thought Witte arrogant, overbearing and ambitious, which… also fair. Resignation from the Ministry of Finance back in 1903 had been a great personal relief for the tsar. And though Witte had been conspicuously hanging around waiting to be recalled all through the crises of 1904 and 1905, the first real job he had been given was negotiating an end to the war with Japan. But Witte returned home from that trip having negotiated a shockingly good peace treaty, and voices inside the Imperial Palace, including those Nicholas trusted, were telling him that the time had come to recall Witte. So on October the ninth, for the first time in a long time, the tsar invited Witte in for a personal meeting to advise him. After two years in the wilderness Witte was back.

Witte’s reputation was also riding high outside the halls of imperial power. He was known to be the one ministerial level official who might actually be bargained with. Before Witte was even given any new official authority, a delegation of the union of railroad workers met with them and said, this strike is for real, and we demand political reform. The Bulygin constitution is simply not enough. But Witte’s first contact with the domestic crisis only deepened the conflict. He told the delegation, first end the strike, and then we will talk. And the delegates heard Witte saying loud and clear, give up all your leverage before you negotiate. This posture made the moderates on the union central committee, who had been hesitant about all this, recognize that really they had no friends inside the government. So they all broke decisively in favor of continuing the general strike until their demands were met. The counter proposal to the government was, actually, how about this: first, you give us what we want, and then, we stopped striking.

But it’s not like anything anyone else in the government was doing wasn’t also making things worse. Hard-line conservatives argued that the strikers needed to be crushed with an iron fist. On October the 12th, Nicholas heeded this advice and ordered General Trepov to take all action necessary to break the strike, quote, not stopping with the application of force. On October the 13th, all public meetings were banned unless approved by the government. Then, on October the 14th, a proclamation was posted all over St. Petersburg warning the public that they had better heed these bans. The proclamation ominously warned that the rifles of the soldiers would contain bullets, not blanks. But this too backfired, as it struck exactly the wrong intimidating tone. It seemed to say to everybody that the tsar was happy to have another Bloody Sunday, if need be. And it also, by the way, only confirmed the common conspiracy theory that Bloody Sunday had been deliberate, not an accident. So all this proclamation did was remind the people that the tsar, was not the protector of the people, but their greatest enemy. Rather than cowering in fear, 40,000 people poured out into the streets of St. Petersburg in defiance, filling every theater and auditorium. In the face of this bold disobedience, the government… blinked. It turns out they did not want to risk another Bloody Sunday. Their bluff had been called. The rifles really did contain blanks.

By October the 16th, 1905, the Russian Empire was effectively shut down. It ground to a halt. Trains did not run. Telegraphs could not be sent. Businesses were closed and boarded up. Factories stopped running. In every major urban center economic activity ceased, and people just stayed home. It is estimated that more than two million people refuse to go to work until their political demands were met. This was a sudden and shocking cessation of activity and led to very real consequences: there was food scarcity, medicine supplies started to run low, at night there was no electricity, crime began to rise. But these hardships were born with the kind of jubilant defiance. And in the main, the general strike seems to have been fairly peaceful. There were no riots or barricades or armed uprisings, just a mass refusal to work, and a prevailing sense in communities across Russia that through solidarity and mutual aid, they would get through this struggle together. The principal form of recreation was to attend even more meetings, where people could get news and hear speeches and receive information, and the radicalization of everybody increased exponentially.

In the midst of all of this, the Mensheviks in St. Petersburg organized round the clock among the workers to create a cross industry workers council to manage the strike, a soviet of workers deputies, like the one that had been set up in Ivanova during the summer. The Bolsheviks held themselves aloof to this organizing, but for the Mensheviks, this was all playing out perfectly. The time was now to start organizing a broad based labor party that could compete, and then triumph in the atmosphere of political freedom that was surely on the way. On October the 13th, they organized about 40 workers who self declared themselves to be a central strike committee. This committee then issued a call for workers to send delegates from their factories, roughly one per 500 workers. Over the next few days, these delegates were elected and started gathering at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University. And on October the 17th, these delegates, eventually there were 562 in all, elected a 50 person executive committee to manage their affairs. The St. Petersburg soviet then took on a number of tasks, pressuring factories still trying to stay open to close, imploring workers off the job to stay off the job. But they also took on other tasks that drifted them into the waters of self-government: for example, taking responsibility for ensuring a fair and equitable distribution of food. They allowed grocery stores to stay open and deliveries to continue under their watchful eye. To promote their authority and spread their message, they started printing a newspaper called Tidings, which became a critical conduit for spreading news, information, and propaganda. The example of the St. Petersburg Soviet was quickly picked up elsewhere, and at least fifty other cities soon had their own worker soviets. As we’ll discuss next week, the most passionate force behind the St. Petersburg soviet, who became the leading editorial voice of Tidings, and who drafted many of the executive committee decrees, was the one socialist of future note who actually played a real role in 1905: Leon Trotsky.

But one of the critical things that made the general strike of October 1905, so successful was that it was not just the workers, it was a general strike. Indeed, one of the big things that made the government hesitate to solve their problems with bullets and grapeshot was that they were not just dealing with grubby faceless workers anymore. All those members of the professional unions were on strike too; lawyers and doctors and veterinarians and professors. So respectable middle-class professionals were also out there in the streets. They were also attending meetings and walking off the job. And though conservatives did not like their uppity pretension, they recognize the clothes and the educations and the general social comportment of these professionals. So they hesitated to just start killing people, because there were like, real human beings mixed in with the dirty mobs.

At the same time, the leaders of the business community, far from begging the tsar to do whatever it took to end the strike, were out there, raising money for the strikers and pledging to pay wages even while the workers weren’t working. They absolutely smelled blood in the water and they were eager to leverage this mass work stoppage to get the political concessions they craved. Wealthy and respectable parts of society opened their homes and cupboards to hard-pressed workers, providing food and medicine and shelter as the general strike deepened in the middle of October. The general strike was made possible by cross-class solidarity. Everyone joined in together. The workers shutting down the economy and providing visible numbers, the middle and upper classes, providing political cover and economic support. To say nothing of the fact that their own withdrawn labor shut down the courts in the banks and other essential components of the empire. It was the whole of Russia uniting against an isolated tsarist regime that they all hated equally.

With the empire ground to a halt, Sergei Witte drafted a memo to the tsar outlining two available options. Option number one would be a manifesto declaring the adoption of a new slate of reforms that would effectively supersede the Bulygin constitution. This manifesto would promise new political and civil rights and a complete reordering of the government. Witte proposed creating a unified ministry under a single prime minister, who would be principally responsible for the affairs of state. As it stood now, each minister reported individually to the tsar, who I’ve hopefully established by now was a very busy bee who also managed to never get anything done. This new unified ministry would work alongside an elected duma, who would have the power to reject or approve new laws. This last bit was a huge concession an admission that all power did not in fact, reside solely with the tsar.

Now, Witte was not a democrat, or an idealist. He’s a technocrat, and the cynical one at that. The primary purpose of this manifesto was to entice the liberal opposition to break with the radicals and the socialists by promising them some capital G capital Good government. Witte told the tsar these concessions were the cheapest and surest way of ending the ongoing crisis while retaining as much authority as possible for the tsar. Option number two, Witte said, was for the tsar to appoint a dictator empowered to take necessary steps to force the people to accept the maintenance of the status quo. In other words, a bloodbath.

The tsar was deeply unhappy about the reforms Witte proposed. He believed it was his sacred duty to retain the divine principle of absolute autocracy that had been passed down to him from his ancestors and which originated from god. He was also deeply suspicious of Witte, who would surely assume the mantle of prime minister. As he scornfully put it, Nicholas did not like the idea of sharing power with a glorified railroad clerk. The tsar attempted to push back and say, well, we can have this unified ministry, but I’ll remain the head of it. To this, Witte replied with all of the diplomatic language he could muster that the plan wouldn’t work without a prime minister. Because he couldn’t come right out and say, your majesty, removing you from the equation is actually one of the most important things in this reform package. Getting you out is how we convince people to buy in.

Around the halls of the Imperial Palace, even inside the Romanov family, a consensus formed that Witte’s reforms were the only way to go. The whole empire was shut down. They needed to salvage what they could and regroup. But Nicholas was still not convinced, and it took a meeting with his cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas, to finally break him. Tsar Nicholas and Grand Duke Nicholas shared a name, but were physically complete opposites. The tsar was small and slight. The grand Duke was huge and strapping, probably a good six and a half feet tall. A committed conservative, trusted by the tsar and well-liked by all his relatives, Grand Duke Nicholas was currently the best candidate, maybe the only candidate, to serve as dictator if the tsar actually decided to go with option number two. But before the tsar even called the grand duke to sound him out about this potential dictatorship, the grand duke himself had already concluded that Witte’s reforms were the only way to save the tsar, his family, and the empire.

And we don’t know exactly what happened in the subsequent private meeting, it was just the two of them, but on his way into meet the tsar, Grand Duke Nicholas brandished a pistol, and said that he would threaten to blow his own head off on the spot if the tsar didn’t accept Witte’s proposal. So whatever happened in there, it was enough. After this private meeting with his cousin, Tsar Nicholas announced that he was ready to go with option number one. The manifesto promising new political reform should be drafted and issued at once. This was a huge moment for the tsar. It meant admitting that absolute autocracy was dead. He did not like it, but that did not matter, because he was left with no choice.

On October, the 17th, 1905, proclamations went up everywhere announcing the promulgation of what history has come to call the October Manifesto. The manifesto itself was brief and to the point: the empire would be reformed. Really reformed. People would henceforth be granted freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association. There would be an elected duma who must consent to laws before they were enacted. There would be a newer and better ministry. The manifesto did not elaborate much on the details — those would have to be worked out by Witte and his new ministry in the months to come — but what was being laid out appeared for all of the world to be a stunning capitulation by the tsar. Autocracy was… over? They had… won?

The October Manifesto was the first time since all of this had begun that the tsar’s response actually seemed in touch with events. That he announced something that was actually better than expected, when he finally got ahead of the curve. The October Manifesto was considered by practically everyone to be a decisive and historic moment for Russia. And the mood of the empire abruptly shifted as people went crazy in celebration. People poured into the streets. In Moscow, they sang La Marseillaise. In St. Petersburg, they flocked to the Winter Palace to cheer the tsar, marking a happy symbolic end to the solemn procession, they had not been allowed to complete on Bloody Sunday. The Union of Liberation patted itself on the back for a job well done, because they had done it. Look, a cross class popular front that had forced political reform. Now, did this fall short of a democratic constitution written by and for the people? Yes. But was it still a huge victory? Yes.

But not everybody was celebrating. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs all suspected that this was just more BS from the authorities. Even Pavel Milyukov, the leader of the radical democratic faction said, nothing changes. The war continues. But the war would be advancing to a new front. Even Milyukov could admit that. The workers, meanwhile, were more than happy to return to work and restart the economy. The general strike had been brief and victorious and there seemed no need to prolong it. Socialist agitators made one stab at trying to convince the people to stay on strike and demand even more, but it was hopeless. On October the 18th, the executive committee of the St. Petersburg soviet voted to end the strike because the workers had already voted with their feet to return to work. But crucially, the soviet did not disband itself. They simply prepared to advance to that next front in the war.

Next week, we will advance with them into the uncertain new world of political freedom. A partial amnesty accompanied the October Manifesto that would pave the way for most of our revolutionary émigré s to finally return to Russia: Lenin and Krupskaya, and Martov and Pyotr Struve and Victor Chernov. They were all ready to test the new waters of freedom that had allegedly been promised, and not allow the regime to backslide on promises that they had clearly made under duress. Suspicions about the tsar’s real motives turned out, eventually, to be entirely well-placed. Nicholas had made these concessions under duress, and he would turn on them as soon as he could. But that was for later. For now, he was forced to put his empire in the hands of a glorified railroad clerk named Sergei Witte.