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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.40: Relaunch and Recap

Welcome back. It’s good to be back. I survived. Hero of Two Worlds is turned in, and it’s time to get back to the great locomotive of history we call the Russian Revolution. Now, since it has been eight long months since we’ve done this, uh, me writing episodes and you’ve listening to them, we are going to start Part Two of the series by recapping our story so far.

Where did we leave off? How did we get there? Who are we talking about? What on earth happened? So I went back through episodes 10.1 to 10.39 and pulled out the events and characters and themes and turning points that climaxed with the Revolution of 1905, a revolution, which in retrospect, turned out to be merely the dress rehearsal. If you’re listening to this after having set the show down for a while, hopefully you will appreciate this little recap. If it’s two years in the future or whatever, and you’re someone just happily bingeing the entire completed series, first of all, hello from the past, it’s nice to have you with us, uh, you might be able to skip this, but you also might find it a helpfully concise summary as we transition from 1905 to 1917 and beyond.

We started this series with a brief primer on Marxism and anarchism, two of the new ideological programs that emerged from the mid 19th century attempt to answer the social question. Our previous 18th and early 19th century revolutions may have addressed the political question, and provided answers like: constitutions, declarations of rights, national independence, and participatory self-government. But the social question about poverty, inequality, exploitation, degradation remained unanswered, especially as industrial capitalism exploded outward and transformed societies throughout the world. For many activists, philosophers, and theorists, political rights and constitutions were great, they were necessary, but they did not go nearly far enough to address that huge problem of an emerging modern world driven by rapidly advancing technology and industrial economics that were creating at least as much misery and poverty as happiness and wealth — probably, one suspects in the mid 19th century, quite a bit more.

So we started with Karl Marx and his wingman, Friedrich Engels, who produced voluminous observations about how society functions. Combining those three pillars of Marxism — classical German philosophy, French socialism, and British economics — Marx and Engels said the mode of economic production of a society defined its social and political relations, while those social and political relations then looped back around to reinforce the economic mode of production Marx also snagged dialectical reasoning, right, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis trinity from Hegel and applied it to the course of human history, creating what has been dubbed dialectical materialism, or historical materialism, which says among other things, that class conflict is the driver of history. As the development of productive forces inevitably leads to clashes over who controls the economic means of production, and who controls the political state apparatus. This is, for example, what they believed the French Revolution was all about: a rising class of bourgeois capitalists tossing off the anachronistic yoke of the feudal Ancien Régime. The work of Marx and Engels would become the ürtext for many of our future Russian revolutionaries, and so if you want to refamiliarize yourself with the theories, by all means, please go back and have a re-listen to those episodes. But we also talked about Mikhail Bakunin, and the anarchists, who emerged right alongside Marx and Engels. The anarchist diagnosis was that the coercive power of a parasitic and wholly unnecessary state was the principal obstacle to a just and free world. The anarchists wanted to fulfill what they believed was the thus far unfulfilled promise of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Because there was no liberty, nor equality, in a world still defined by rapacious economic exploitation. And certainly there was no fraternity. As Bakunin’s sarcastically said, I ask you whether for fraternity is possible between the exploiters and the exploited. I make you sweat and suffer all day, and when I have reaped the fruit of your suffering and your sweat, at night, I say to you: let us embrace. We are brothers!

Bakunin detected even in Comrade Marx’s politics an authoritarian tendency that he didn’t like, and he said of this, liberty without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality. Marx, Engels, Bakunin and their respective followers then got into acrimonious debates with each other about things like: do the peasants have revolutionary potential, which will remain an ongoing topic of debate all through the Russian revolutions. In the process, they would also introduce one of the defining features of left wing revolutionary politics, personality conflicts and disputes over doctrinal minutia, leading to denunciations, fractures, resentments, expulsions, and counter-expulsions. And so the attempt by the founders of the First International to forge a grand coalition of socialist forces ended with everyone accusing everyone else of doing it wrong, and forming their own breakaway splinter faction. This would become a recurring pattern, which would always ensure that the only group, the People’s Front of Judea hated more than the Romans was the judean People’s Front, and don’t even get them started about the Judean Popular People’s Front.

So after this intro to Marxism and anarchism, we moved on to a general history of Russia. We talked about the origins of modern Russia back in the eight hundreds. The princes of Moscow become the tsars of Russia and then expanded towards a multinational empire, which after centuries of expansion, conquest, and absorptions from Ukraine to Siberia and from the Arctic circle to the Black sea, forged a giant Russian empire that was multiethnic and multinational with dozens of languages and religions all under the umbrella of the Russian tsar.

Then beginning with Peter the Great and the move from Moscow to St. Petersburg, and then later with the arrival of the enlightened despot Catherine the Great, we got into the ongoing debate about westernization, whether Russia should be looking west for ideas and models and technological improvements, or whether Russia was on its own unique path as the third Rome, straddling the divide between Europe and Asia. This is a debate that was still ongoing right through 1905 in the halls of power, intellectual salons, and revolutionary committees.

And coming out of the age of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, a young generation of western-looking Russian liberals came back from those wars looking for a constitution, and political rights, and the emancipation of the serfs. This led to the Decemberist uprising in 1825, whose failure sent Russian liberalism into abyeance and called forth a new uniquely Russian ideology that would guide the tsars for the next century, an ideology built on its own three pillars, orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. That is, the combination of Orthodox Christianity, absolute political dictatorship, and the supremacy of the Russian national language and culture to govern their multi-ethnic empire. This was a theory of Imperial absolutism to stand against dangerous imports from the West like political rights and constitutions and representative assemblies. To enforce this reformulated brand of absolutism, they created the infamous Third Section, a political police to monitor subversives at home and abroad.

But despite trying to hold the line against western quote, unquote progress, Russian failures in the Crimean war in the mid 1850s laid bare how far Russia was quote unquote falling behind the rest of Europe. The whole absolute dictatorship founded on the superiority of the army shtick doesn’t really work if your army, and the economy that supports it, has become an archaic shambles. So in response, Tsar Alexander the Second approved a slate of major reforms spearheaded by a clique of not-quite-liberals who wanted to rejuvenate the empire through a program of enlightened despotism. The two biggest and most consequential reforms being the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and the creation of the zemstvo, elected local assemblies with some limited administrative authority in 1864.

Emerging alongside those top-down reforms of the 1860s was a new generation of social critics, revolutionaries were formers and idealists. Mostly students and young professionals, both men and women, they were inspired by Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done, and they subsequently bucked conventional customs and morality. These hippie punk nihilists embraced the theory of narodism: faith not in the tsar, but in the people of Russia. They regarded the common Russian people as the embodiment of simple timeless virtue who were unjustly exploited and oppressed by the parasitic tsar. This movement lead to the infamous Going to the People of 1874, where those idealistic students flocked to the countryside to enlighten the people and teach them how to be free, and the people were like, who are you, get out of here. So, this is when they went to the people and the people sent them back.

The failure of the Going to the People disillusioned some of these idealistic radicals right out of the movement, but others simply changed tactics. They formed a new party called Land and Liberty on the premise that the people were too hopelessly ignorant, superstitious, and oppressed to throw off their own chains. Enlightened intellectual revolutionaries needed to do it for them. They believed that for all its pageantry, trappings, and megalomaniacal assertions, the tsarist apparatus was actually quite small and flimsy. So they decided to focus all of their attention and energy on destroying that apparatus. Once the tsar and his minions were gone, and there weren’t that many of them, the people would realize they never actually needed them in the first place. I mean, after all, what had the tsar ever done for the Russian villagers except gobble up the fruits of their labor? With this in mind, in the late 1870s Land and Liberty underwent an internal shakeup, with most of its members reorganizing themselves as a new group called People’s Will to wage a relentless terrorist campaign of assassinations and bombings. And finally, after many attempts and many other assassinations, People’s Will managed to blow up Tsar Alexander the Second with a bomb on March the first, 1881. This, of course, led to a glorious new dawn for the people of Russia… yeah, just kidding, it was the permanent end of all reform, a hard reactionary turn, the arrival of the far more ruthless Okhrana to replace the Third Section, and the total destruction of People’s Will as a viable organization.

But from the explosion of People’s Will, we find a little escape pod shooting away containing a few former Land and Liberty members who had gotten out after opposing the terrorist campaign. In this escape pod, we find Grigori Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, Pavel Axelrod, and Leo Deutsch. In 1882, they organized themselves in Switzerland under the exciting new theories of a scruffy German exile holed up in the British library named Karl Marx. They called themselves the Emancipation of Labor Group and they were the first explicitly Russian Marxist organization in existence. But organization kind of goes too far, it was just the four of them engaged in an isolated attempt to apply Marxist theories, analysis, and the force of historical materialism to Russia. Engaging in a running battle with narodists and anarchists, who thought it was crazy to try to apply theories best suited for advanced industrial economies to backward and agrarian Russia.

But then things suddenly changed in the early 1890s. Sergei Witte arrived in the tsar’s ministry as first head of railroads, and then minister of finance. He convinced the government that Russia needed to revive its modernizing push. They needed to invest in mining, manufacturing, shipbuilding, and more than anything else railroads. The British and French and Germans were all way ahead of them, and Russia risked falling into permanent great power irrelevance if they didn’t keep up. The sudden and energetic arrival of industrial modernization to Russia in the 1890s had been predicted by Plekhanov and the Emancipation of Labor Group as they were working from Marxist historical materialism, and it made them seem like prophets who had found the one true doctrine.

Their work then inspired a new generation of Marxists inside Russia. People like Lenin, his future wife Krupskaya, Julius Martov, Pyotr Struve, Arkadi Kremer — all of whom were in their early to mid twenties when the so-called Witte boom got started in the 1890s, and suddenly Marxism seemed very relevant to Russia indeed. But one of the key points we need to make about these early Russian Marxists is that they really believed historical materialism to be an objective and scientific description of the course of history, that it was as predictive as it was descriptive. But they weren’t idiots, and they knew the Russian empire at the turn of the 20th century even with the Witte boom and the arrival of industrialization was still incredibly medieval and agrarian. To get to the socialist revolution they wanted, Russia was going to have to pass through some kind of bourgeois capitalist mode of production to reorganize the empire politically and economically, creating the proletariat necessary for the socialist revolution, and also unlock all the bourgeois democratic institutions like constitutions and civil rights that would allow them to operate freely and out in the open. Because all of them expected the coming socialist revolution to be a mass democratic uprising, not some tiny neo-Jacobin vanguard thing. So Lenin and his comrades embraced the doctrine of two revolutions, that capitalist industrialization with all its requisite transformative miracles and horrors must be embraced rather than resisted, it was the only way forward. First, there had to be a democratic revolution by the new capitalist bourgeoisie who would overthrow out the medieval tsarist apparatus, and then we can move forward with the socialist revolution towards the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Now this whole theory was roundly condemned by neo-narodists, who were starting to come back to life in the mid 1890s after the failure of People’s Will and form new groups that would eventually become known collectively as the Socialist Revolutionaries, or as we call them, the SRs. They didn’t really want to embrace or hasten the arrival of western industrial capitalism, which they read Marx too, and were like, this is terrible, we don’t want this here, and they wanted to fight it off at all costs. They believed that the ancient culture and organizational structures of the Russian villages made them uniquely suited to move directly onto an agrarian form of socialism without the need to import the dehumanizing industrial horrors of the west.

In 1894, all of these revolutionaries, whatever their stripes or intentions or theories, received the same gift when Tsar Nicholas the Second ascended to the imperial throne. Like Louis the 16th, Nicholas was not a bad person, per se. He loved his family. He loved his children and he even took his job seriously. But he was just not the man for that job. He was absolutely committed to sticking with orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. He told even the most cautious reformers amongst his subjects to not engage in “senseless dreams.” He was not going to engage for one second with modern modes of politics. This stubborn resistance to change as the Russian empire moved from the 19th century to the 20th century was only going to make the case for revolution even stronger and more alluring. Nicholas was also weak willed, close minded, and lived in a bubble only slightly less manufactured than the Truman Show. The revolutionaries could not have asked for a better opponent.

But meanwhile, those revolutionaries were jockeying for position, and trying to rev up the growing industrial working classes and the perennially oppressed Russian villagers into a force that could overthrow the tsar. But they also seem to fight amongst themselves as much as they fought against Nicholas. The Marxists formed the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, but quickly fell into fighting between orthodox Marxists, like Proudhon and Lenin, who made their base in the newspaper Iskra, and various revisionists, legal Marxists, and economists, who either wanted to eschew revolution entirely or focus on the material needs of the workers as an end unto itself.

Also in this mix, we find Arkadi Kremer in the Jewish Labor Bund, who had their own specifically Jewish approach to everything. At the Second Party Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party in 1903, Lenin politicked his way into imposing his vision on the party, even icing out his old friend Martov over the issue of how to define party membership, leading to the famous split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

The SRs had their own disagreements about whether they should attempt to go to the people again and create a groundswell democratic uprising, or continue to focus on vanguard style elite terrorism, the latter faction forming the Sr combat organization to plot and carry out assassinations of police and government officials. A campaign orchestrated, as you’ll recall, by Yevno Azef, who was himself a double agent in the employ of the Okhrana.

Now the efficacy of terrorism would remain a source of much debate, but the SR combat organization’s successful assassination of the minister of the interior led to the appointment of an arch conservative to replace him, and everybody hated that guy, driving even super conservative liberal reformers into the arms of the revolutionary opposition, and then when the combat organization killed that guy, the tsar appointed a more liberal minister of the interior in 1904, which raised everyone’s hopes that Nicholas was finally getting it, and was finally giving up on hard line conservatism and reform was on the way. When those hopes were dashed, well, the revolution of 1905 is right around the corner, isn’t it.

Now this brewing domestic crisis may not have gotten out of hand, had not the tsar simultaneously and accidentally gotten himself entangled in a foreign crisis, a war with Japan. Russian foreign policy had been looking east for years. Not thinking China or Japan posed much of a military threat, they provocatively annexed Manchuria, and then Port Arthur. Except the Japanese really super did pose a military threat to Russia, and after the Russians insulted Japanese ambassadors with high handed stupidity, the Japanese launched a surprise attack in February, 1904, starting the war Nicholas never thought would happen because he did not wish it. A wave of patriotic enthusiasm in Russia quickly gave way to disillusionment, anger, and shock as all the news from the war front was nothing but mistakes and debacle and defeats. By the summer of 1904, the Russian empire was entering a major political crisis.

So that brings us to the end final run of episodes in Part One, the Revolution of 1905 itself. It unfolded in a series of stages, each of which found the tsar and his chief advisors steadfastly and resolutely right behind the curve and scrambling unsuccessfully to keep up with events.

The first phase was defined by the defeats in the far east, which led to widespread calls for reform from liberals and zemstvo constitutionalists, many of whom joined the underground organization, the Union of Liberation, which aimed to create a broad anti-tsarist coalition that would include everyone who wanted to see the end of raw despotic autocracy, from SR terrorists to extremely cautious reformers in the liberal nobility. This movement included a banquet campaign modeled on the French Revolution of 1848, and resulted in the tacitly condoned Zemstvo Congress in November, 1904, which was regardless at the time as something akin to the Estates-General of 1789. Except in response, the tsar offered only the flimsiest of vague promises, and mostly just planned to re-introduce his autocratic regime once he won this damned war against the Japanese.

The second phase was defined by Father Gapon and the St. Petersburg workers. Angry over terrible conditions and themselves sensing an opportunity to have their complaints addressed, the St. Petersburg workers began seriously organizing in late 1904 and then staged a mass precession to present the tsar with their grievances and beg him for help. Instead, on January the eighth, 1905, they walked in to the Bloody Sunday massacre, which is widely regarded — though I think a bit erroneously — as the beginning of the Revolution of 1905.

But though I personally think the revolution was already well underway at that point, the Bloody Sunday massacre was a huge event. It was a major event. And it kicked off the third phase of the revolution. Immediately after Bloody Sunday, a wave of protests and strikes swept Russia in February 1905, that included workers and professionals and intellectuals and revolutionaries, many of them coordinating through the underground Union of Liberation. They sent in petitions, they made speeches, and published pamphlets, all of which were demanding reform, real reform, political reform. They wanted constitutions and rights and guarantees. The tsar answered this wave of protest with the February edicts, where the tsar said, fine, some real reform is coming, maybe even a nationally elected duma, fine, whatever, go away. The February edicts raised everyone’s hopes once again, just so that they could be dashed against the rocks as quickly and as stupidly as possible.

Now, things hovered in a kind of uncertain state until May 1905, the beginning of the fourth phase of the revolution. The tsar procrastinated on implementing the February edicts in the hope that the war would turn around and he could get a handle on his domestic problems. But around May Day, a new set of strikes broke out. This new wave of strikes and protests were more centrally planned and organized by agents of the Union of Liberation and the Marxist social democrats. These new strikes witnessed, among other things, the first workers soviet, a governing council to administer striking workers. Professional unions also came together to form the Union of Unions, and they elected a liberal dissident sometimes professor and sometimes exile named Pablo Milyukov as their president.

Now the tsar hoped he might be able to sneak out of all these domestic troubles if his foreign troubles might end, and then his foreign troubles ended in a very monkey’s paw wish kind of way. At the Battle of Tsushima, the Japanese navy sank the Russian fleet that had sailed halfway across the world, carrying the last best hope of winning the war. And when they sank, they took Nicholas’s last best hope of maintaining the political status quo in Russia with them.

So by the summer of 1905, Nicholas has to cave. And he directed his prime minister to draft what became known as the Bulygin constitution in August, 1905. And this defined, I think, what are we on, the fifth phase of the revolution? The Bulygin Constitution involved elections and a national duma and a bunch of stuff that would have seemed visionary in November 1904, and would have probably avoided everything that happened in 1905 had they done it in November, 1904, but which now fell way short of the mark. There was, for example, going to be roughly 7,000 voters for the entire 1.5 million people living in St. Petersburg. That’s just not good enough anymore. Units in the army and navy started mutinying, like on the Battleship Potemkin.

But not everybody was against the tsar. And we started to see the arrival of the Black Hundreds in the summer of 1905. Armed proto-fascist groups fighting for orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, rather than against it, and low grade civil war conditions prevailed in most major cities in the empire.

This gave way to the sixth, and you might call final, phase of the Revolution of 1905 proper. The light freedoms granted as a concession over the summer of 1905 allowed students returning to school in September to begin the mass meeting movement, where they use their university meeting halls to host overtly political lectures and rallies to continue the push for greater political reform. In Moscow, the mass meeting movement ran into a strike by the Moscow printers, which became the first spark of the new wave of strikes that accelerated dramatically when the railroad employees and workers went on strike, effectively bringing the empire to a screeching halt. Once this happened, unions and workers in every major city followed suit. They went on strike, and they were soon joined by white collar professionals like lawyers and doctors, who saw this as the moment to force the tsar to accept civil rights in the constitution. The general strike of October 1905 successfully forced the tsar to recall Sergei Witte to government service, and then published the October Manifesto, which dramatically expanded political freedom and participation, and promised a nationally elected duma. The October Manifesto made it feel like the Revolution of 1905 was going to be a resounding success for the revolutionaries. This was it. We have finally won.

But the deliriously happy Days of Freedom that followed over the winter soon turned into a darkly ironic joke. Yes, there would be a duma and elections, but in January 1906, the tsar launched the punitive expeditions. Military column sent through areas of unrest with orders that arresting people simply wasn’t enough. Tens of thousands of people were executed, wounded, or exiled. Homes and sometimes entire villages were destroyed. And despite the promises made in the October Manifesto, something like 70% of the Russian Empire would be operating under emergency martial law by the spring of 1906.

This was the environment in which the elections for the first national duma were held. The tsar hoped his critics and enemies had now been beaten into place, and he continued to live under the fantastical fantasy that the vast majority of real Russians actually loved him. But instead of the election produced a resounding victory for the Kadets, the constitutional democrats who had run on a platform of using the duma to advance more reform and challenge the tsar as a unified political opposition. Conservatives of all stripes were wiped out. The tsar was shocked and passed.

So facing an almost certainly hostile duma, the tsar ordered the Fundamental Laws of the empire to be hastily rewritten, right on the eve of the first meeting of the duma. Known informally as the Constitution of 1906, though constitution was not a word you used around Nicholas, the quote unquote reforms ensured that almost all power remained with the tsar. And to make double sure, they also reformed the council of state and turned it into a handpicked upper legislative house that would have to consent to anything the duma might try to do. Sergei Witte then secured a massive foreign loan that ensured the tsar would not need to ask the duma for new taxes or any financial reforms that might tend to give them leverage over him. Having secured this much needed loan, Witte was then forced back out of the government on the eve of the duma’s first session at the end of April 1906.

So that brings us to the end of episode 10.39. That’s when I decided would be a good place to leave it. Specifically, we left off on April the 27th, 1906, which was set to be the first session of a nationally elected duma. The fruits of the Revolution of 1905, which had seemed so ripe in October, now looked quite rotten. Bound by the new Fundamental Laws, checked by the new state council, and with police and censors and the Okhrana still swarming around, the new duma found itself in a straight jacket. Once again, expectations of liberals and reformers and revolutionaries were set to be dashed.

But for what it’s worth, Tsar Nicholas was no happier. He remained as discontented, arrogant and blind as ever. He would never reconcile himself to the Revolution of 1905, never accept its quote unquote verdict, and mostly he looked forward to a day when he could sweep it all aside.

So, the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1905 saw everyone growing bitter and dissatisfied each in their own ways. Conservatives, liberals, socialists, narodists, reactionaries, none of them were happy.

And next week we will begin to talk about all of the wonderfully specific ways their mutual unhappiness manifested.

So, I hope that this recap has helped. It certainly helped me. I hope that maybe along the way you were like, oh yeah… oh yeah — oh yeah, I remember that.

Now looking ahead, I’ll be able to do three more new episodes before I have to immediately duck out again to finish editing Hero of Two Worlds, but that’s kind of perfect timing because it will allow us to spend the next three episodes on the first sessions of this nationally elected duma, and Nicholas’s growing rage at their impertinence. It will also allow us to introduce Pyotr Stolypin, who will be replacing Sergei Witte in the role of the only smart guy in a room full of imperial dunces. All of which will build up to the top down coup of 1907, where the tsar and Stolypin will do their very best to put all of this Revolutionary nonsense behind them once and for all.