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Episode 10.36: the Bulygin Constitution

So things are going great for Tsar Nicholas. The war with Japan he did not believe would ever happened because he had not wished it had gone ahead and started anyway. And then, despite all the hubris Russia could muster, the war he had not wished for turned into a non-stop string of humiliating defeats. Once the stark naked reality of the regime’s inept overconfidence had been laid bare, the tsar and his ministers faced a sudden assault on their legitimacy, an assault launched first by the educated intelligentsia, then aggrieved workers, and now included Nicholas’s beloved peasants. In 1904 and 1905, the tsar and his ministers had been faced with two great crises, one foreign, and one domestic, and they had failed to meet either challenge. The common denominator in both cases was the blithe inability of the regime to comprehend the problems they faced, living as they did in a hermetically sealed imperial bubble, which reality was not allowed to penetrate. They believed themselves strong, when really they were weak. They believed themselves loved, when really they were hated. They believed themselves brilliant, when really they were inept. Ministers, senior officials, and high ranking military officers held their jobs thanks to connections or loyalty, rather than talent and expertise. Not only were they incapable of properly cleaning up a mess, they were incapable of understanding that they themselves had made the mess in the first place. It must be someone else’s fault, a few malcontents intellectuals too smart for their own good, or some uppity students who should shut up and go back to class, or some ungrateful workers who complained all the time because they were lazy and selfish. And because the halls of imperial power were full of racist xenophobia, they of course also blamed foreigners and Jews.

When reality did penetrate their hermetically sealed imperial bubble, say with the fall of Port Arthur or Bloody Sunday, their response was always far too little and far too late, by which point, these far too little and far too late solutions only antagonized the situation because they were so obviously too little, and so obviously too late. And so Nicholas and his ministers could just never catch up to the curve. And today’s episode is about them continuing to not catch up to the curve. Some of them continuing to insist in the face of everything that we’ve been talking about, that Russia’s problems weren’t nearly as big as they were being made out to be. And besides, it wasn’t their fault.

So to pick back up where we immediately left off last week, the Battle of Tsushima ended the crisis abroad. It brought to a close a string of humiliating defeats with the mother of all humiliating defeats. The war was over. Russia had lost.

The tsar convened a council of his most trusted advisors and senior generals, and they decided to accept an offer from US President Theodore Roosevelt to broker a treaty between Russia and Japan. To handle negotiations, the tsar called upon Sergei Witte, who, remember, had been in charge of far east diplomacy until the ministry elected to bumble its way into a war witte had tried to tell them not to bumble into.

Witte had been expecting that the massive crises of the past twelve months would lead to him being recalled to a position of real influence and authority, and was disappointed and a bit grumbly that his assignment was now to go negotiate an end to the war that he would have avoided entirely. And he said, where there is a mess to be cleaned up, they always call Witte.

But he took the assignment, and let a delegation to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. By way of final instructions, the tsar came back around to his usual place of benighted hubris, telling Witte to play hard ball, make no territorial concessions, agree to no reparations, and accept no limits on Russian activity in the Pacific.

Now, as we’ll see next week, Witte is going to do the best that he can, and he does have a few aces up his sleeve. But it’s like, your majesty, we lost.

A critical mistake the regime then made at this juncture was that they didn’t tell anybody they were going to negotiate a peace. In an effort to protect Russia’s honor, they kept the negotiation secret from the public. And to keep this bluff going, they did not stop calling up reservists even after news of the Battle of Tsushima made the rounds. So across the empire, families were learning that the Russian navy had been sunk as they continued to watch their friends and family and loved ones get called up for service. And called up to do what, exactly? Die for a pointless war that cannot be won apparently. So the general incredulous fury spreading across the empire down to its deepest roots only intensified. The regime simply did not recognize how much lying about everything and a ham-fisted effort to protect their image was doing even more damage to that image than publicly admitting that the war was over.

And this had some direct consequences. Within a week of Tsushima, the governor of Moscow province invited peasant communities in the region to come together and issue a statement saying that they supported both the tsar and the war effort. Instead, representatives of these communities took the opportunity to get together and form the All Russian Peasants Union, the germ of the first organization of peasants that was national in scope. This new union had little interest in issuing subservient declarations in support of a regime they believe now to be a colossal failure.

Of even greater historical interest, the Battle of Tsushima also happened to coincide with the single longest strike of the Revolution of 1905 so far. The industrial city of — and bear with me here — Ivanovo-Voznesensk lay about 200 kilometers northeast of Moscow. It was home to about 80,000 people, and was a major center of textile production. Now, thus far, the workers of Ivanovo had taken almost no part in events, even after Bloody Sunday the city had only seen one small and fleeting demonstration. But on May the 12th, a strike began that was called in the midst of the May Day strikes that we talked about last week, and it began spreading was surprising rapidity. Within short order, 32,000 workers had walked off the job, and every factory in the city shut down, leading to the whole labor force being on strike, about 70,000 workers. And their initial demands were basic workplace things: an eight hour day, a minimum wage, nurseries for their kids, pensions, the right to assembly, the right to sit down on the job.

But because there were so many different factories involved in this, the striking workers elected a single council of 151 leaders to handle negotiations with the bosses and political officials. And when things had gotten out of hand, those bosses and political officials had split the scene, as had the overwhelmed local police force. This meant that there was no effect of local government in place. So the worker’s council assumed responsibility, and thus did the worker population temporarily wind up self-policing, and self-governing itself. This unplanned and improvised assumption of political responsibility meant that, in retrospect, the Ivanovo worker’s council gets to go down as the first soviet in Russian revolutionary history. Now, soviet itself is not a magical word, it’s just the word for council, but come 1917, it’s going to take on far more significant revolutionary connotation.

Now the workers of this quote unquote first soviet did not assign themselves this mantle, nor have a self-conscious awareness that they were drawing up a blueprint for revolutionary worker takeovers of local government. It was just something that they did. The solidarity of the Ivanovo workers was remarkably high, and despite a tax and strikebreakers descending on them, to say nothing of the trials of life without work and wages, they held out from mid May all the way to mid July. Now eventually most were compelled by necessity to return to work, and then a few concessions from the owners brought back everybody else. But it was the longest strike in Russia so far. More importantly, for Russian revolutionary history, though, it would carry forever the hallowed glow of being the first soviet.

Meanwhile, back in St. Petersburg, in the wake of the disastrous battle of Tsushima, with more strikes popping up everywhere, as we just talked about, peasant unrest growing now that the weather was warming up, the representatives of the zemstvo liberal movement decided to try one more time to impress upon the tsar the need for real political reform. They asked the tsar to meet with a delegation led by Prince Troubetzkoy, who I’ve mentioned only in passing, but he was the Russian liberal noble par excellence. He was inner circle Russian nobility, while also being one of the principle leaders of the zemstvo movement, going all the way back to the 1890s. On June the sixth, the tsar met this delegation and Troubetzkoy delivered a message that was suitably abject, declaring that he knew the tsar only wanted what was best for his people, but what the people now needed was to be heard. He said, we’re falling into anarchy. Most Russians opposed this kind of anarchy, but frankly, the unaccountable bureaucracy is the chief cause of that anarchy. So something has to be done. Most especially, the tsar must consider convening a national duma, that would be elected, not on the basis of the old privileged estate, but of the whole empire together as one. Nicholas could not be the tsar of this or that estate, he had to be the tsar of everyone.

To the liberals delight, the tsar, heard all this and said, yes, yes, I know, we’re working on it. As I promised we would back in February, I will call a national duma. Rest assured.

Troubetzkoy and the liberals thus left feeling pretty good. It would be the last time they attempted to work with the tsar.

And Nicholas was not lying about this, he was telling the truth. He had ordered Minister of the Interior Bulygin to begin looking into ways elected representatives might be brought into the government. Now, Bulygin was no liberal and undertook this job mostly with the idea of producing something that would look good enough to calm the waters. His practical objective was simply defuse the revolution, especially because the tsar’s reputation was now in tatters both at home and abroad. Those French bankers who had been mighty upset after Bloody Sunday were positively losing faith after the Battle of Tsushima. The tsar had to prove he could stabilize the situation. That meant at least giving the appearance of reform.

But this minimum goal was too much for Nicholas and other conservatives at court. So the tsar encouraged these conservatives to draft their own counter-proposal to whatever Bulygin might produce. And these conservatives were operating on the basic assumption that this quote unquote revolution was the work of a few malcontents and disruptive foreigners. Why are we capitulating to them, they’re like a couple of drops in an ocean. Enconsed as they were in the hermetically sealed imperial bubble, they just did not grasp how widespread the problem actually was, nor what it was going to take for them to survive.

But I must say that while they were wrong, they were not totally wrong. I mean, we’ve understandably been talking about the revolutionary opposition, but there were a lot of loyalists out there, and I don’t just mean nobles and landlords and members of the bureaucracy. I’m talking about openly reactionary peasants, workers, shopkeepers, and merchants who believed in orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality just as fervently as Nicholas did. These people existed, there were a lot of them. So, as the Revolution of 1905 kept advancing, this reactionary part of the population started forming their own groups that soon became collectively known as the Black Hundreds.

The Black Hundreds were reactionary street fighters who would attack anything they thought threatened the regime. They would attack striking workers, or find well-to-do liberals and beat them up, and as supporters of the regime, they usually operated with the tacit permission, if not active assistance, of the police authorities. The Black Hundreds were particularly prominent in the multi-ethnic parts of the empire, and they stood up as violent Russian nationalists and Orthodox christian supremacists, who felt it was their duty to beat back the insolent minority nationalities and aberrant believers of heretical religions. And this of course really came together around anti-Semitism, as the Black Hundreds identified the Jews as being the cause of all of this turmoil. And they would always be on the front lines of attacks on Jewish communities.

The regime, of course, welcomed this support, and were appreciative of the fact that somebody was pushing back. But what really allowed the tsar some breathing room was the continued loyalty of the military. Had the army turned on him at any point, as many and the regime feared they might after Bloody Sunday, the revolution would have been over, they would have all been overthrown. But for a variety of reasons, including that natural conservatism of the peasants who formed the rank and file, the army continued to reliably follow orders, even if morale was starting to crash.

Now in the navy, things were a bit different — not completely different, but at least a little different. Noticeably different. Given the more industrial skills needed to man modern ships, the navy tended to recruit from the skilled urban workers, the group that tended to be on the radical edge of the workers movement. So inside the Russian navy, there were pockets of avowed socialists and revolutionaries. Now you might be thinking, hey, wait, hasn’t the entire Russian navy been sunk by now? And the answer is… no, not yet. The Pacific fleet had been sunk. The Baltic fleet had been sunk. But there was still a fleet in the Black Sea based out of Odessa. And indeed that Black Sea fleet had one of the newest and best ships and the whole navy, the Battleship Potemkin.

In mid June, the Potemkin was out on a firing exercise. All the best officers and experienced sailors had been transferred to the Pacific, leaving behind lower quality officers and mostly raw recruits. And tensions on board, the Potemkin during this training exercise were starting to run high between aggravated sailors and irate officers about conditions and treatment. Finally, things came to a head on June the 14th when the crew was served rancid meat. That proved to be the last straw. They complained bitterly, refused to eat, and sent a deputation to confront the captain. In the ensuing showdown, the executive officer pulled out his pistol and killed the leader of this deputation. But instead of scaring the crew back into submission, it triggered a violent mutiny. In the ensuing conflict, seven officers, including the captain, were killed. Other officers were thrown overboard, the rest were locked up in closets. The executive officer was thrown overboard and then shot. The sailors then raise the red flag and sailed into Odessa on June the 15th, which as it turned out, was currently in the grip of its own major revolutionary clash.

So tensions in Odessa had been rising steadily since April. There had been repeated strikes amongst the artisans and small businesses and shopkeepers, and also unrest amongst the dock workers. Dock workers, who you might remember, had been already into radical literature all the way back when young Trotsky was cutting his teeth as a revolutionary agitating amongst them back in 1896. In the last decade, Odessa had been a city where SRs and Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and the Union of Liberation had all done very well. By mid-1905, street clashes started to increase in frequency, pitting police backed up by gangs of Black Hundreds fighting against socialist agitators and radicalized workers. The Potemkin mutineers were connected to those fighting in the streets of Odessa, and it is no coincidence that these two events coincided. The Potemkin sailed into Odessa on June the 15th, flying the red flag of revolution, and understandably terrified the authorities, who declared outright martial law. Over the night of June the 15th and June the 16th, there were major battles in Odessa, and much of the city caught fire, either by arson or accident. That Potemkin offered to put its heavy guns at the disposal of the people, but in the ensuing fighting, they only fired once on a theater that was being used as a headquarters for the authorities, and they missed. They didn’t fire another shot. Meanwhile cavalry and infantry units were proving too much for the outnumbered insurrectionists, many of whom around the port were driven into the water where they drowned. When morning arrived on June 16th, much of central Odessa was on fire, and something like 2000 people had been killed. It was by far the worst fighting since the Revolution of 1905 had begun.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Black Sea fleet then sailed into Odessa to demand the Potemkin surrender, which she refused to do, instead of calling on the seamen of all the other ships to follow their lead and mutiny. But either from a lack of will, or a lack of desire, or a major clampdown from their officers, the sailors of the other ships did not heed the call to rebellion. So hoping they might trigger a fleet-wide insurrection, the Potemkin found itself sailing alone. But she was still the fastest ship with the best guns, and the admiral in charge of the rest of the Black Sea fleet did not want to tangle with the Potemkin directly. On June the 18th, the Potemkin sailed out of Odessa unmolested, and after sailing around for a bit, were eventually allowed into a Romanian port, where they half-scuttled the ship and were granted asylum by the independent Kingdom of Romania.

So the mutiny of the Potemkin was a dramatic event, and of course produced arguably the greatest silent film of all time, but it did not lead to anything more than just being another horribly troublesome, embarrassing incident or the government.

Now, though, this seemed like another revolutionary near miss, the tsar proceeded to take meetings with delegations and conservatives and the last week of June, and he started telling them that they had nothing to worry about with the coming reforms. This news sounded alarm bells inside the camp of the liberals, and they concluded that the tsar had not been straight with Troubetzkoy. And his apparent duplicity and backtracking, which probably came down to the tsar. Just wanting to please the people who were in front of him, were pushing more and more people into the ranks of we need a revolution. In a meeting of the Union of Unions, they resolved that quote, all means are legitimate against the frightful menace that is posed by the very fact of the continuing existence of the present government. All means should be employed.

There was then another major development, this one, a major development in the history of Russian liberalism. On June the 16th, representatives of the local town councils, the municipal duma, convened in Moscow. 126 delegates representing 87 different towns resolved on a package of political and economic reforms that included full universal suffrage, and they wanted to include women in that. But more importantly, while this assembly of city councilors met, they were invited to send a delegation to the next zemstvo congress that was being held at the beginning of July, which these councilmen readily agreed to.

So the municipal duma and the provincial zemstvo were the two political institutions in the Russian Empire that had some kind of elected representative element, and which wielded some actual authority at the local level. At a shared congress on July the sixth, seventh, and eighth, they merged into one national movement. And that was going to turn out to be a big deal. Convening now in the wake of the Battle of Tsushima, the ongoing strikes, the fighting in Odessa, the Potemkin mutiny, and now these leaks coming out of the ministry that whatever the tsar planned to concede was going to be horrendously inadequate, they resolved to preempt the tsar’s announcement by publishing their own draft plan for a new fundamental law of Russia.

This draft outlined extensive civil liberties, respect for the rule of law, a bicameral legislature with the lower house being elected by universal suffrage, though by this point they had forgotten about the women. Basically, it amounted to a western style constitutional monarchy.

This congress was allowed to convene and do its work without being arrested. But plenty of people inside the ministry, both among the practical moderates and the rigid conservatives, were awfully worried that what they were watching here was the national assembly form right before their eyes. That if the regime didn’t handle the rollout of their own concessions properly, that this congress might just self-declare itself a national assembly, just as the Third Estate had done in June of 1789.

So with the people having pretty clearly laid out what they want, let’s go back to the hermetically sealed imperial bubble in St. Petersburg and see what the gang is cooking up. By the end of July, Bulygin’s committee and that shadow conservative committee produce drafts of what a new representative institution might look like, some kind of new representative national duma. To reconcile the two drafts, the tsar personally chaired a conference composed of all the head ministers, senior military officials, and members of the council of state. They met for five long sessions between July the 19th and July the 26th, with two main questions in front of them: what can this new duma do, and who makes up its membership?

The conservatives walked in still believing that they really shouldn’t be giving an inch, and they suggested a body whose members would not be elected, but rather appointed by the tsar, and who would only be allowed to consult, not wield any real power. To this, the moderates, led by the minister of finance, said, if we announce some tsar-appointed rubber stamp, what are we even doing here? We’re trying to shut down a revolution and that ain’t going to do it. This, the tsar reluctantly agreed with. He also conceded the point that at a minimum the Duma needed to have some kind of role in taxation, because in the wake of the losses in Japan and all this domestic disorder, taxes were going to have to go up, and buy in from the people paying the taxes was going to be essential. Plus, this was all now being composed with an eye on satisfying those French bankers, who, as I said, were leaning hard on the tsar to guarantee the regime’s financial stability. And that was also going to require elections, not just appointments.

But the conservatives regrouped, understanding that the duma could be kept in a subservient position regardless of its formal powers as long as its membership was controlled. So they argued for a body that heavily weighted towards “real” Russia. They said that voting should go through the traditional estates, and extra preference should be given to real Russians, namely the nobility, and the peasants the tsar was well disposed to this idea as he too shared the belief that real Russians were with him, in something of a no true Scotsman fallacy. If you were a real Russian, you supported the tsar, and if you were against him, then you must not be a real Russian. Against this proposal to have the duma only represent the nobility and the peasants, the moderates attempted to argue that if they purposefully shut out urban intellectuals and the workers, that the crisis was not going to be diffused, it would only be exacerbated. But they weren’t really winning this point, and plus, none of them were democrats and they all plan to use land and property holdings is the basis for suffrage anyway.

So a compromise was reached. Voting would take place through multiple curia — curia named after the old Roman voting blocks — with the first one being large landowners, second being urban and town dwellers with minimum property holdings or who paid particularly high rent, the third curia was peasants who had a share in communal land, and then each of the 16 major cities would have their own rules that involved even higher property and tax requirements specifically designed to deny the vote to most of the population of those most turbulent urban areas. These elections would then be further controlled by multi-stage elections, and for that peasant curia, there was a long and cumbersome four-stage process designed to weed out anyone who might actually speak for the common families.

After all these debates, a final draft was composed, which included even more watering down of the duma’s power. And though they were allowed to participate in certain affairs and there would be elections, the tsar was clearly left with the ability to ignore them anytime he wanted to. So this Bulygin constitution, as it came to be known even though Bulygin himself took little part in the actual debates, did not address any of the prevailing demands to an almost comical degree. But none of them knew how far off the mark they were. Minister of the Interior Bulygin was quite pleased, and he said, surely this will sate the liberal wolves, while leaving the conservative birds whole.

But the liberal wolves were really not sated. The Bulygin constitution was published on August the sixth, and was met with uniform hostility. Not only was the new duma not a true national assembly with any real power, but look at who was disenfranchised entirely: anyone under the age of 25, with students being specifically excluded, anyone who served in the armed forces, all women, all urban workers, and almost the entirety of the urban intelligentsia that didn’t happen to be independently wealthy. Newspapers then published little bits of math showing that Moscow with a population of a little over a million, had just 12,000 voters. St. Petersburg with a population of a little under a million and a half had just 7,130 voters. At the final stage, the 412 delegates to the state duma were going to be elected by a mere 7,591 qualified electors.

Comparing this to the various petitions and resolutions floating around out there, including that draft of a new fundamental law for Russia, the Bulygin constitution was hopelessly inadequate. Now had this been unveiled back in December of 1904, it would of been hailed as an enlightened and glorious response from the tsar, the dawning of the new age of freedom, but in August 1905, it was scornfully derided for addressing no key points of contention, satisfying no demands, and utterly ignoring political social and economic reality. The only question for the liberals who did qualify to vote was, do we boycott this, or do we participate in the election specifically with the tactical aim of using the duma as the next headquarters for our continued demands for reform.

But, funny thing about those elections, they never happened, and the Bulygin constitution was almost instantly reduced to being a mere historical footnote. Not the capstone or end of anything, but simply further proof of the tsarist regime’s woefully inadequate and tardy responses to events, because as plans for the first election were being laid in September 1905, a workers’ strike broke out. Now strikes like this had been popping up off and on all year, so at first it didn’t seem like a big deal, but then it grew, and it spread, and suddenly it was everywhere. The tsar and his ministers, who very briefly believed that they had finally gotten out ahead of things, were now staring down the general strike of October 1905, a general strike which was going to smash the hermetically sealed Imperial bubble of willful denial once and for all.