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Episode 10.38: The Days of Freedom

The October Manifesto was a watershed moment in the revolution of 1905. The climax of all the opposition, protest, demonstrations, strikes, mutinies, and bloodshed that had engulfed the Russian Empire since the summer of 1904. For all the disparate and sometimes contradictory hopes, dreams, and motivations animating the people of the empire — the beleaguered workers, land hungry peasants, resentful intellectuals, ambitious liberals, angry minority nationalities — they had all come together to share a demand for an end to absolute tsarist autocracy. Tsar nicholas. the Second spent 18 months trying every which way to avoid giving into that demand, but the general strike of October, 1905 finally forced him to do what he swore he would never do: share power with his people.

The months after the proclamation of the October Manifesto are called the Days of Freedom, when everyone tested the boundaries of what this new world of political liberty looked like. And as they soon discovered, there was, in fact, an edge to that world, an edge that was always threatening to close back in on them. And as we’ll see by the end of today, the name the Days of Freedom rings with a darkly ironic tone.

But in the early days, it was not darkly ironic. It was joyfully earnest, though there was not yet clear guidance on what was meant by freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association, many people took it to mean that they now enjoyed freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association. The number of newspapers and publications exploded, with everyone acting like there were no longer rules on what could be expressed. The meeting’s movement that had surged up from the universities in September and October now spilled out everywhere. Groups, parties, associations, clubs, organizations, impromptu assemblies, they could be found at practically every hour of every day, in theaters assembly halls, gymnasiums, schools, and open air parks, Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg, site of major casualties on Bloody Sunday, now hosted every would be rabble-rouser who could find a soapbox to stand on. In Poland and the Baltic provinces and the Trans-Caucuses, newspapers and speakers proudly wrote and spoke in their own native languages, shrugging off years of official Russification. A few days after the October Manifesto, the government announced an amnesty for various prisoners and exiles. Those who had been punished for political crimes that were no longer crimes would be allowed to walk free again. And this meant that the likes of Lenin and Krupskaya, and Pyotr Struve, and Martov, and Victor Chernov and all their émigré comrades could, if they wanted to, come back to Russia. Many eagerly packed their bags, but many also had grown accustomed to their émigré lives in Paris and London and Geneva, and elected to remain in comfortable exile.

With these freedoms now claimed, and a representative state duma set to be elected, most of the leaders of the opposition quickly got down to the business of building political parties, which they had never been allowed to do before. The most important of these new political parties was the constitutional democrats known to one and all as the Kadets. Drawing mostly from the ranks of the educated professional classes — doctors, lawyers, journalists, and teachers — the Kadets represented the organized culmination of the Russian liberal tradition. They were the new home for democratic reformers, zemstvo constitutionalists, and anyone who looked with longing on the political culture of the west. These liberals and democrats had initially started organizing themselves in the summer of 1905 to contest the elections that would have been held under the Bulygin constitution, but as the political climate abruptly shifted in the fall, they convened for a founding congress that was held from October the 12th to October the 18th, right smack dab in the middle of the general strike. The Kadets would take the October Manifesto as a mere starting point for further reform. It was a good start, but they wanted more: a real legislative parliament, universal suffrage, strong, defined civil rights, and local self government including autonomy for Poland, Finland, and other non-Russian parts of the empire. To curry favor with the lower classes, the Kadets would also advocate labor reforms like an eight hour day, and land redistribution for the peasants, but for the most part, their aims were liberal, political, and democratic. At the founding congress, they elected Pavel Milyukov to be chairman of the party, and Milyukov was now emerging is one of the most important political leaders of postOctober Manifesto Russia.

But not everybody in the liberal camp wanted to keep pushing. A smaller but still influential group of more conservative liberals formed an association called the Party of October 17, more commonly known as the Octoberists. Their aim was quite the opposite of the Kadets. Where are the Kadets wanted to push things further, the Octoberists wanted to stop right here and consolidate. Led, composed, and funded mostly by land owners, manufacturers, businessmen, and technocratic officials, they had been principally exasperated with the tsar’s poorly run government and ineptly unaccountable bureaucracy. But that did not mean they wanted democracy. They knew that whatever the new limits of political freedom, participation, and representation turned out to be that they would have a place in it. And thus, they had little interest in growing the political pool still further. Certainly they did not want to see their own wealth, power, and influence threatened by upstart democrats and socialists. But more than anything else, they favored a quick return to order after the deeply unsettling chaos of the past two years.

Meanwhile on the other end of the political spectrum, well to the left of the Kadets, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was now engaging in their own more or less open recruitment and party building. And they were trying to prepare for the second socialist revolution now that the first democratic revolution seemed well nigh at hand.

There was hope among both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks that their past differences could now be set aside. Lenin and Krupskaya returned to St. Petersburg in early November, and though they were under constant police surveillance, they were not hindered or arrested. Martov also returned to organize with the Mensheviks, and both of them would start newspapers that allowed them to have their words published legally for the first time. And though bitterness lingered, both men anticipated an eventual reunification of their party. In cities across the empire, previously independent Bolshevik and Mensheviks committees started to merge back into single groups. And in late 1905, it looked like the feuding that had divided them for the past few years would end in an amicable reconciliation.

It was no more clear the leaders inside the government than it was to leaders outside of the government what the limits of political freedom would now be. Loyal Octoberists were probably fine, but were they really going to let avowed revolutionaries like Lenin just say whatever he wants?

And this was just one of the many problems that was now left to Prime Minister Sergei Witte to resolve. And despite his previous grumbling that when there was a mess to be cleaned up they always called Witte, he had asked for this job. He designed the role of prime minister with himself in mind. But this was a mess unlike any other the Russian empire had faced. When he assumed his new role was prime minister, Witte’s to- do list was staggering: get the immediate social crisis under control, demobilize a million or so of soldiers now that the Russo-Japanese war was over. Secure a badly needed foreign loan to shore up the regime’s finances. Draft a new constitution for Russia that would be satisfactory enough to dodge calls for a real democratic constituent assembly, and hew to public expectations of the October Manifesto while also maintaining political and economic order. He had to get the workers working again, the trains running again, the peasants settled down. And he had to do all of this with very little support. Conservatives hated his guts for forcing on the tsar these reforms that betrayed the eternal truth of divine autocracy, and liberals did not trust him because they correctly identified Witte as a cynical technocrat rather than a truly progressive democrat. And it goes without saying that SRs and Bolsheviks would have been happy to roll a bomb under his chair. And on top of all of that, Witte was working for a tsar who had made him prime minister under duress, and who would constantly go behind his back to issue his own contradictory orders and just generally undermine Witte’s authority.

But Witte did try to form a new government that represented the spectrum of at least the socially respectable parts of political opinion. After the October Manifesto, all the old ministers were dismissed from service, and Witte was allowed to draft a new ministerial cabinet, and he asked many of the most prominent members of the liberal opposition, including the radical democrat Pavel Milyukov to join this new ministry, to form a kind of unity government. But the liberals uniformly refused. They remained deeply suspicious of the tsar’s intentions, and they refused to sacrifice their own standing with the people by allowing themselves to be used as disposable window dressing. And Witte did not make it easy for them to overcome their suspicions. He also had to placate conservatives and did so by appointing an arch reactionary named Pyotr Durnovo to be minister of the interior. Putting such a heavy reactionary hand in charge of the police and the gendarme and the Okhrana brought some comfort to the tsar, but it seemed proof positive to liberals that the regime could not be trusted. So they all turned Witte down, and so in drafting the rest of his cabinet, Witte could only rely on substandard career bureaucrats, who were themselves hardly committed to Witte’s project even if they were capable of accomplishing it.

To make Witte’s life even more difficult, he also had to deal with a rash of fresh upheavals in places that had gone through 1905 in relative peace, and which took the October Manifesto not as a signal to cool down, but instead to get fired up. There was, for example, a sudden eruption of peasant disorder in areas that had thus far not seen much action. Starting on October the 23rd, for example, a group of about 2000 peasants in Ukraine started knocking off estates one by one, doing the usual routine of breaking in, looting the premises, and burning records and buildings. And this was just the biggest of a string of something like 800 such flare ups all over the empire all through October and November. Some of them went so far as to see peasants seizing and claiming land from absentee landlords, and promising to hold it temporarily, by which they meant until the new state duma recognized their claims.

Often the peasants now rising up did so under that same ever-present belief that the tsar was with them, that he had signaled in the October Manifesto how much he wanted his people to be happy and free, and that it was fine to attack the landlords and local officials who had treated them so badly. In response to this continuing unrest, Witte finally killed the universally hated redemption payments that the villages had labored under since emancipation. On November the third, Witte’s government announced that in 1906, the redemption payment would be half of the normal amount. And then on January the first 1907, all remaining redemption debts would be canceled.

But even more alarming than the peasants was a growing surge of disobedience and mutiny in the ranks of the army and navy. For most of the Revolution of 1905, both the army and the navy had stayed loyal, and though we talked about the mutiny on the Potemkin two episodes back, that had been an isolated incident. But with the October Manifesto seeming to confirm the breakdown of traditional authority, disobedience and defiance in the ranks started to grow. The first and most disturbing of these was a mutinous uprising in Kronstadt, the critical naval base perched on an Island in the Gulf of Finland that protected St. Petersburg, and which was the home of the late lamented Baltic Fleet. On October the 26th, something like three to 4,000 soldiers and sailors rose up demanding more pay, less service time, and better rations. They rampaged around the island wreaking havoc and had to be put down by a force of loyal troops from the capital, leaving 24 dead, 72 wounded, and hundreds of arrested by the time the sun set on October 27th. Over the next few months, lesser incidents in the ranks kept popping up. More than 200 mutinies of various shapes and sizes were noted, though most of them took the form of passive disobedience to deplorable conditions, or intolerable treatment by officers. The most overtly political incident was a brief mutiny of a few naval crews based in Sevastopol in late November, which raised the red flag of rebellion and demanded a real democratic constituent assembly. But their mutiny fared even worse than the Potemkin. No other ships in the fleet joined in, and after a few hours of being shelled by much larger and stronger ships, they surrendered, and 1600 men were arrested. Afraid that they were losing their all important grip on the military, Witte’s government announced in early December a series of improvements that address the most common demands. And from now on, the soldiers and sailors would be paid more, eat better, and have shorter enlistment times.

But now we need to pivot. Because not everybody wanted to keep pushing, to test the limits of freedom, or even at a minimum, be satisfied with the gains that had been made. Plenty of Russians hated the October Manifesto and they wanted things to go back to the way that they were before. If you’ll remember from two episodes back, we introduced the Black Hundreds, reactionary groups who were motivated in 1905 not by dreams of liberty and equality, but by loyalty to the old regime. The Black Hundreds now formed the core of a violent reactionary backlash triggered by the October Manifesto and the Days of Freedom. Watching a bunch of disrespectful kids, iffy liberal intellectuals, repulsive socialists, and sinister Jews openly celebrate in the streets made their blood boil. So just about every big public celebration of the October Manifesto was met with a violent counter-attack by either organized Black Hundreds or just random reactionary street fighters.

For example, on October the 18th, the first day of the Days of Freedom, exultant demonstrators in Moscow went around to the main city jails, demanding that political prisoners be released. Among those leading this demonstration was Nikolay Bauman, that infamous Bolshevik organizer whose scandalous role in the suicide of a fellow comrade had contributed to the early split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Well, the demonstrators that Bauman was helping to lead were attacked by reactionaries, and in the ensuing fighting Bauman himself was… beaten to death with a steel pipe. And that is how Nikolay Bauman’s past unsavory conduct became buried under a mountain of mythmaking, as he was instantly celebrated is the first great Bolshevik martyr to die for the cause. His funeral procession through the streets of Moscow drew tens of thousands of mourners, and was turned into a great big show of force, with armed Bolsheviks students and workers escorting the coffin to its final resting the place.

But unquestionably the main target — purposefully the main target — of the post-October Manifesto reactionary backlash was Jews. Among resentful conservative Russians it was taken as a simple matter of fact that the Jews were to blame for all this. The principle revolutionaries were all Jews. The principle funders of the revolution were all Jews. This whole thing was a great big Jewish plot. That infamous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which originated from Russian presses in 1903 now gained new circulation and currency in 1905. In the weeks after the October Manifesto, there was a run of close to 700 documented anti-Jewish pogroms across the Russian empire. Jews were the principal victims of attacks by the Black Hundreds. They would rampage through Jewish neighborhoods, destroying property, burning homes, beating people, murdering people. The worst was down in Odessa, already the site of major street fighting back in July. An orchestrated assault on the Jewish community ended with 800 dead, 5,000 wounded and a hundred thousand left with nowhere to live after their homes were destroyed. The Odessa pogrom was enabled by the police and other local authorities who funded, armed, protected, and even delivered vodka to the attackers.

The support given by the authorities to this anti-Semitic violence was not just random local initiative. It was policy at the highest levels of the Imperial government. Tsar Nicholas was himself as viciously antisemitic as he was generally racist, and when he and his family complained that real Russians were loyal, and only alien elements, foreign elements, urban elements were against them, the Jews are more or less who they were talking about. And so antisemitism was positively encouraged as a matter of policy. They used hatred of the Jews to redirect the angry passions of Russians away from the tsar and towards the Jews. In St. Petersburg, the police operated a secret press that produce mass quantities of antisemitic literature and pamphlets. This literature called on true Russians, and I’m quoting now, to rise and exterminate foreigners and Jews. Though he denied it at the time, later records show that General Trepov, now Nicholas’s right-hand man and chief advisor, was personally editing these anti-Semitic diatribes. Sergei Witte eventually found out about the printing press and shut it down, believing the whole project to be enormously counterproductive, but the tsar personally intervened to protect those involved from further punishment.

Eventually these reactionary forces were organized into their own political party called the Union of the Russian People. The self-proclaimed defenders of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, the URP was violently opposed to liberalism, socialism, and most especially the Jews. And we can, with the help of hindsight, describe them as a Party of proto-fascist reactionary nationalists. Tsar Nicholas loved the Union of the Russian People. He met with their leaders, happily wore a badge they gave him, he believed them proof that real Russians were indeed behind him. He directed his more than willing Minister of the Interior Durnovo, who had already spent 70,000 rubles funding anonymous anti-Semitic screeds, to funnel money and arms to the URP. The union never had the same kind of support in elite circles that the other new political parties did, and they drew their membership mostly from the ranks of the resentful lower middle classes: small shopkeepers and merchants, low-ranking officials, conservative artisans, and of course, policemen. The URP enlisted anyone who felt threatened politically, economic, or culturally by this new order, a new order that was being imposed on them by the disgusting upstart dregs of society: Jews, intellectuals, students, liberals, and socialists. And the URP did not turn out to be a small party. By the end of 1906, they boasted 300,000 members in a thousand branches across the empire. And when it came time for the tsar to go all in on reaction, he did not want for willing soldiers.

The Days of Freedom really can be numbered in days. The assertions of complete liberty that prevailed in the uncertain weeks after the October Manifesto eventually found pushback not just from gangs of Black Hundreds, but from the official authorities. Among the first to discover the limits of the Days of Freedom was the St. Petersburg soviet. Initially formed to be leaders of the general strike, the St. Petersburg soviet continued to meet even after the strike was called off. And among the most active leaders was now 26 year old Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, remember, had been among the few revolutionary émigré s to return to Russia after Bloody Sunday. He spent the next few months teamed up with a Bolshevik organizer named Leonid Krasin, first operating in Kiev, and then St. Petersburg. Trotsky did his organizing, theorizing, and strategizing under various assumed names and living in various safe houses, including at one point living as a fake patient in an eye hospital, admitted under a false name by a sympathetic doctor. Feeling the Okhrana was closing in on him though, Trotsky skipped over to Finland during the summer, but came racing back to St. Petersburg in October when the general strike got rolling. He showed up in the capital just as the St. Petersburg soviet was being organized. Already a gifted writer, Trotsky now found his voice as a tremendously self-confident public speaker. He earned the immediate trust to the leaders of the soviet and became one of its guiding lights, editing their newspaper, and drafting their declaration.

Trotsky was no great fan of the October Manifesto. He welcomed the new freedoms as a helpful baby step, but rejected the notion that it was nearly enough. He warned both the workers and his fellow intellectuals to submit to neither the wolf’s snout of Trepov nor the fox’s tail of Witte.

So rather than disbanding at the end of the general strike, the St. Petersburg soviet continued to meet. They enjoyed enough perceived authority in the working class population of the capital that the city officials and administrators started dealing with them as if the soviet was an official part of the government. They also started forming their own self-regulated militias, who organized patrols of the working class neighborhoods both to generally keep order, but also to protect themselves from reactionary Black Hundreds.

But the soviet was not interested in maintaining a strictly defensive posture. The St. Petersburg workers had supported the democratic political cause. I mean, they have been the ones dying in the streets during Bloody Sunday. But they had always been driven first and foremost by the miserable workplace conditions they endured every day, and they now want one of those miseries addressed. And they did not want to sit around waiting for some duma to eventually form a committee to eventually investigate labor conditions. Within a week of the October Manifesto, the soviet voted to unilaterally, and of their own authority, enforce an eight hour day in all St. Petersburg factories. Any employer who tried to resist would be targeted for strikes and other demonstrations. Now some, including Trotsky, suggested this may be going too far, too fast. The SR leader, Victor Chernov, heard about the eight hour day movement and said, hey, we haven’t even finished off the autocracy yet. You’re going to have to wait.

But the warnings went on heated. Look what they had just accomplished with the general strike. Why couldn’t we get more? Why shouldn’t we get more?

But as it turned out, the October general strike had worked so well because its political demands had been shared by owners, bosses, businessmen, and managers. And let me tell you, demands for an eight hour day were not similarly shared by that group. As soon as the workers tried to move on to such economic demands, the class alliance that had so recently broken the tsar fell apart. The soviet said they would start enforcing the eight hour day on October 31st. Well, on November the first owners retaliated with a lockout. Suddenly a hundred thousand workers could not get to work, even if they wanted to. And frankly, support for the eight hour day campaign wasn’t nearly as strong outside the soviet as it was inside the Soviet. Coming hot on the heels of the general strike, many workers did not believe they could survive another prolonged period without wages. Undaunted, the soviet punched forward, and simultaneously called another strike that would demand more political reforms, reforms that for example, the newly formed Kadets were themselves in favor of. But the liberal professionals and intelligentsia were not eager to join in on this, because look, we just won the national duma, and that’s the next arena that we’re going to fight in. We’re sympathetic, but this is simply neither of the time nor the place,

So by the second week of November, the soviet had to admit defeat. On November the seventh, the political strike was called off for lack of any support, and then on November the 12th, they admitted that they had misread the mood of the population, and ended the campaign for an eight hour day. Some concluded that they would in fact have to wait to see how things went in the Duma. Others concluded that strikes were no longer good enough, and that far from sitting back, far from waiting and seeing, they needed to charge forward aggressively, pistols and bombs in hand.

Throughout 1905, the Bolsheviks in particular had become major proponents of an armed insurrection. It’s part of what came to distinguish them from the Mensheviks, who were always more committed to peaceful party building among the working classes. The bulk of Lenin’s letters to agents in Russia during 1905 implored them to prepare for this glorious eventuality. He recommended stockpiling weapons training with firearms, and he helpfully sent along everything he knew about the tactics of street fighting, which he learned from books. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in the first week of November, Lenin continued this line, exhorting his colleagues to be ready to take the next step and make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause. Now there was little to no chance that an armed uprising was going to be successful. The attempt to stockpile weapons had resulted only in a few thousand rifles and revolvers. Most people had no experience as soldiers or as fighters. Their numbers in any one location were few. But after the October Manifesto, they started talking themselves into taking that next glorious step. And there’s a famous retort from Lenin when one comrade voice concerned that an uprising wasn’t going to work. Victory. Lenin said, that for us is not the point at all. We should not harbor any illusions. We are realists. And let no one imagine that we have to win. For we are still too weak. The point is not about victory, but about giving the regime a shake, and attracting the masses to the movement. That is the whole point. And so to say that because we cannot win, we should not stage an insurrection, that is simply the talk of cowards, and we have nothing to do with them.

By the end of November, just as these radical revolutionaries were talking themselves into running forward at full speed, conservative reactionaries inside the regime decided the time had come to really push back, to bring the Days of Freedom to an end. In particular, the St. Petersburg soviet had been tolerated for long enough. On November 26th, police and gendarmes pushed their way into the headquarters of the Free Economic Society, which the soviet had been using for their meetings and arrested all the principal leaders of the central committee, though Trotsky managed to avoid their detection. The next day, the remaining delegates argued over what to do, and Trotsky stood up to encourage them to just keep going, elect new leaders. The soviet was not this person or that person, it was all of them together. The delegates promptly elected Trotsky to join two other comrades in an executive triumvirate. But his tenure did not last long. Just a few days later, the various revolutionary parties supported by the soviet published what was called the Financial Manifesto, an open call to start the government of money by staging a tax strike.

And this was too much for the government. Whatever freedom of the press and assembly meant, it did not mean this.

Trotsky was leading a meeting of the soviet on December the third when police showed up with arrest warrants. Apparently, the defiantly cheeky Trotsky made the officer wait to announce the warrant until the chair recognized him, and then, when the officer finished speaking — finished reading an arrest warrant — Trotsky said, thanks very much, and we’ll take it under further advisement, next item of business. The officer had to leave in a huff, go get soldiers, and then come back in. As the soldiers pushed their way into the building, Trotsky called on his comrades to show no active resistance, to give the soldiers no excuse to fire. And so, they went peacefully. And with that, trotsky, the executive committee, 200 other delegates, and all of the editors of the newspapers who had published the Financial Manifesto were all arrested. The St. Petersburg Soviet had lived for just about seven weeks, and it was now effectively dead.

The most immediate consequence of the government’s cracked down on the St. Petersburg soviet was that it triggered the biggest armed insurrection of the Revolution of 1905. And it didn’t take place in St. Petersburg at all. It is the Moscow uprising.

When they learned that the St Petersburg Soviet had been broken up, revolutionary leaders in Moscow decided the time had come to go all in on live free or die. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs, now all working together, started making bombs, distributing arms to militant students and workers, and studying maps of the city to determine where to build the barricades. As a prelude to this uprising, they called for a city-wide general strike to begin on December the seventh. About 80,000 workers joined in this strike, and in short order, public transportation and electricity were shut down, soon followed by all the theaters, school, banks, and shops. And the first two days were peaceful, but on December the ninth, real fighting began. Soldiers and police showed up at a technical school, where about 500 students and workers, plus another hundred armed militants, had congregated. When those inside refused orders to leave, the soldiers broke out some light artillery and just started shelling the building, killing dozens inside. The firing kept up even after those inside attempted to surrender. And this is the moment the Moscow strike transformed into the Moscow uprising.

Now only about 2000 actual committed fighters were involved, but for the next 10 days, they erected barricades in the outer boulevards and made fortresses of the working class factory districts. Then they engaged in running urban guerrilla strikes at police and soldiers patrolling the streets. On December the 10th, SRs bombed the Moscow Okhrana headquarters. The response from the governor general of Moscow was slow and sluggish, and his principle strategy seemed to be to beg St. Petersburg to send reinforcements because he did not trust the Moscow garrison to aggressively fight back. By December the 12th, the insurrectionaries had secured their own home districts, and all but one of Moscow’s railroad stations. The point may not have been victory, but suddenly victory seemed well within their reach.

Now had the rebels advanced and attack the Kremlin and the central government offices, they might have taken their insurrection to a whole new level, but they were unwilling to leave the relative safety of their home neighborhoods. This allowed crucial time for the reinforcements from St. Petersburg to finally arrive, putting in at that one railroad station the rebels had failed to capture. The 1500 soldiers who now dispersed into the streets did so under orders to just open fire on any group of three or more people. If a sniper rifle appeared in a building window, orders were to just shell the building with artillery. Soon the rebels were in full retreat, and falling back into their last stronghold, the working class district of Presnya. Rather than storm Presnya head on, the army sat back and began indiscriminate shelling on December the 17th, reducing most of the neighborhood to rubble. The next day, soldiers advanced under orders to show no mercy and make no arrests. On December 19th, the leaders of the uprising admitted defeat, called off the insurrection, and fled from the city as best they could.

When the smoke cleared after 10 days of fighting a thousand Muscovites lay dead. The vast majority of them innocent bystanders, either killed by jumpy soldiers who couldn’t tell the difference between rebel and civilian, or people who just happened to be in buildings when they were shelled. Over the next two weeks, the body count rose still higher as police and soldiers carried out aggressive mop-up operations, involving summary arrests, floggings, and executions. By New Years, Moscow was quiet. Smoldering, shattered, bloody, but quiet.

The Moscow uprising of December 1905 was a failure. It did not even become a victory is not the point way of attracting the masses to further revolutionary action. And to the extent that it shook the regime, it created a political consensus that extended as far as the Kadets that order really did need to be restored. Witte himself threw up his hands and later said the Moscow uprising was the moment he lost all his influence with the tsar, and Witte himself now backtracked, supporting policies designed to meet the challenges he faced not with reform, but with force. The tsar remarked on this shift in a letter just a few weeks later, staying of his prime minister, as for Witte, since the happenings in Moscow, he has radically changed his views. Now he wants to hang and shoot everybody. I have never seen such a chameleon of a man. That naturally is the reason no one believes in him anymore. Not that the tsarbelieved in him in the first place

Next week will be our last episode of Part One of our series on the Russian revolutions, and we will bring the Russian Revolution of 1905 to a close. As elections for the first state duma were held in the first few months of 1906, the government pursued violent punitive measures to end the Days of Fredom. Cities, districts, villages, and regions that had remained unruly were as likely to meet soldiers as they were candidates for office. And the empire witnessed tens of thousands of floggings, arrests, exiles, and executions. And this would be the soil within which the very fragile green shoots of constitutional government in Russia would attempt to grow.