This week’s episode is brought to you by… nobody, again. But again, I’ll use this suddenly empty ad space to encourage you to think about how to support people who are being hit much harder than I am: musicians, artists, writers, and podcasters, individual direct donations and sales could mean the world of difference to them. They all have Patreons and Venmos and PayPal accounts. There’s also your favorite local businesses. Order food from them, order books from them, order whatever from them. If you have some disposable income, if your job and your paycheck are unaffected, honestly, this is the time to increase your budget for arts and entertainment and getting takeout and just impulsively buying things. It’s not self-indulgent at this moment to buy art or albums or get dessert with the takeout order, it is an act of social solidarity. Then there’s the critical infrastructure for those who are really struggling: local food banks need more money, domestic abuse shelters need more money. To say nothing of the people closest to you, your friends and family? Lots of times you ask somebody how they’re doing and the instinctive response is to say, oh, it’s fine. Everything’s fine. Because we all have our pride. People don’t want to feel like a burden, but ask them again. Say, no, really, how are you doing? You might hear some things. Things you might be able to help with.

And if you need help, please, we are in a moment where, I’m sorry, but shame is canceled. The habit of pretending like everything is fine and we don’t need help no matter what is unhealthy in the best of times and these are not the best of times. So there’s no shame in asking for help because shame is canceled. I just canceled it. So if you can help, look for ways to help. If you need help, ask for help. Asking for help sucks. Believe me, I know. But relying on each other is not weird and abnormal, it’s literally how humans were built to survive. And it’s how we’re going to survive.

So this is my last new episode before I take a long break, and it feels weird to be leaving in the middle of all of this. I’m not trying to abandon ship here. Uh, I’m not going anywhere, I don’t want any of you to go anywhere. I just want us all to get back together happier and healthier in six months. So while I’m gone, please look out for each other, and godspeed.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.39: The End of Part One

We have come to our final episode of Part One of our series on the Russian revolutions. By the time you are listening to this, I am already on podcasting hiatus and working full-time on Citizen Lafayette. When I look back on what we’ve done so far in the Russia series, it’s pretty clear Part One can itself be divided into four subsections: episodes one through eight were intro to Marxist and anarchist theory; episodes nine to fifteen were a general history of Russia that took us through the assassination of the Tsar Liberator in 1881; episodes 16 to 31 were a far more detailed accounting of the events and personalities that led up to the Revolution of 1905, a section that ended with the beginning of the Russo-Japanese war. And then finally, these latest episodes, 32 to 39, cover the Revolution of 1905 proper. Today’s episode closes down all those arcs and concludes Part One. When I return from hiatus, we will do Part Two on the Revolution of 1917 and resulting civil war, which I have no reason to believe won’t be at least as long as part one. So you’ll have that to look forward to.

But first we need to wrap up the Revolution of 1905, which we started in 1904, and are now ending in 1906. And what we talk about here today could of been the end of it. The end of all of it. No Part Two to look forward to. We have in front of us a perfectly realistic and believable story about how an archaic medieval autocracy resisted all pressure to reform itself until its humiliating failures abroad, let loose the Pandora’s box of revolution at home. Then, after a year of exhilarating chaos, that archaic medieval autocracy gave up the ghost and transformed into a modern constitutional monarchy. This is a story we’ve heard before. True there was little chance of Russia transforming into the kind of real parliamentary system that prevailed in the United Kingdom, or god forbid, a true republic like in France, but certainly the Russian Empire could have wound up sitting alongside its imperial cousins in Germany and Austria, empires that accepted a kind of neo-absolutist constitutional system.

And that is basically why I have chosen to end Part One here in the spring of 1906. Because in the spring of 1906, it still looked like that was the story. Elections are going to be held, a representative national duma will meet, the tsar is accepting the rule of law and civil rights. But that is not the story of the Russian revolutions. Because Tsar Nicholas never accepted that which he had been forced to accept under duress in 1905. And as soon as he could, he planned to undo as much as he could. And that undoing of what had been done is how we will begin Part Two. It’s why it’s not the Russian revolution singular, but Russian revolutions, plural.

The project of undoing what had been done was already well underway. It was being signaled nd foreshadowed almost as soon as the ink was dry on the October Manifesto. Liberal fears that the tsar was not actually committed to the promises he had made were entirely justified. And what we will see here today as we talk about events between December 1905 and April 1906 is Nicholas and his personal advisors doing everything in their power to adhere to the letter of the October Manifesto while completely undermining its spirit. They wanted to sabotage any effort to have the October Manifesto mean what everybody thought it meant. An end to absolute autocracy.

Prime Minister Sergei Witte was caught in the middle of this, and his position as alleged head of the government was routinely undermined by the tsar, who preferred to take direct counsel from, and give orders to, men like General Trepov and Minister of the Interior Durnovo, who were as hostile to liberal reform as Nicholas was. The tsar’s behavior undermined Witte’s credibility with everyone, as no one could be sure that promises Witte made wouldn’t be contravened by the tsar. Witte soon grew dispirited, exhausted, and then after the Moscow uprising, ready to let the reactionaries and conservatives have their way before the year 1905 was even over, both Witte and the tsar were casually telling people, oh yes, the October Manifesto will be adhered to. But just so you know, it is a free gift from an autocrat to his people, like Louis the 18th’s charter of government, it’s not a real constitution that binds the tsar’s divinely absolute authority.

These were very confusing signals to the cohort of political leaders who thought they had just been freed from their repressive political shackles by the October Manifesto. Their fears and doubts intensified as they watched the forces of reaction steamroll around the empire. We talked last week about the violent reactionary backlash after October 17th, most of which was self-organized or had some help from local officials and police. But after the Moscow uprising in mid December, the reactionary backlash took on a much larger and more repressively bloody form. And we call that form the punitive campaigns.

The punitive campaigns were like a smaller and more restrained version of the infernal columns that were sent out into the Vendée during the French Revolution. Army columns marching around, ruthlessly pacifying the countryside under orders to show no mercy. Surveying an empire that was still beset by lawlessness and disorder and threats of armed insurrection, the tsar and his closest advisers concluded that to get the people back into line, the carrot of the October Manifesto would have to be paired with a stick. And that stick would be wielded by the army.

So over the next few months, ten distinct punitive expeditions were organized and deployed to particular hotspots around the empire from the Baltic provinces all the way to Siberia. The smallest of these expeditions involved just a few hundred men, the largest close to 20,000. The point was to root out agitators and threats, punish those guilty of lawlessness, but more than anything else to intimidate the people back into line. Commanding officers were told by the minister of the interior, arrests alone will not achieve our ends. Shoot anyone who resists, and burn their homes.

The punitive campaigns cut a deadly swath of destruction. Wherever they appeared, they doled out floggings, forced exiles, and summary executions. Thousands were hanged without trial, peasants were beaten mercilessly, women were raped, homes were destroyed, sometimes entire villages razed to the ground. It was in effect a campaign of deliberate state terrorism meant to break the will of the people. The largest campaign through the Baltic provinces left 1200 dead and villages everywhere in flames, at which the Tsar expressed his delight to the commander for a job well done. In all, somewhere between 30 and 40,000 troops were involved in these punitive campaigns, and when we add their work to the grab bag of local police crackdowns, we find some grim totals for the period between the October Manifesto and the convening of the First Duma in April. 15,000 people executed. 20,000 non-fatally shot or otherwise wounded. 45,000 deported or exiled, and 70,000 arrested. By the spring of 1906, something like 70% of Russia was living under some kind of emergency law that suspended regular legal rights. If this was meant to be the founding of a new post-revolutionary era of social harmony, I’m reminded of a quote I used in the Storm Before the Storm, that piece of graffiti that appeared on the rebuilt Temple of Concord after the Senate’s violence impression of the Gracchi: a work of mad discord produces a temple of Concord.

Besides these military campaigns, there was also a general crackdown on political activities. Police swept through all the big cities targeting anyone deemed a threat to the regime, arresting and jailing thousands, including, for example, a young activist named Alexander Kerensky. They also went after all those newspapers that had sprung up in the Days of Freedom. The regime now wanted to restore some measure of censorship by invoking Article 129 of the criminal code, which prohibited inciting the people in print or deed. The article was now interpreted to include any attack whatsoever on the tsar, which nearly every single paper out there contained. So, through these early months of 1906, editors and police played a game of cat and mouse with publishers, rapidly opening and closing papers under different names, or flooding the streets with copies before the censors could stop the physical additions from spreading. In some cases, publishers hired a quote unquote responsible editor, whose name would go on all of the legal paperwork and whose job it was to literally go sit in jail whenever the police came round.

With the police cracking down on freedom of speech and the press, and the punitive campaigns rampaging through the countryside, Russia got ready to hold an election.

Obviously everyone was now just a wee bit unclear how much freedom they were actually to be allowed. On the one hand, the election had not been canceled, but on the other, the jails are filling back up, and unfortunate souls are swinging from trees. By February 1906, there was no guarantee that sticking your neck out wouldn’t result in the tsar slipping a noose around it.

But these fears turned out to be mistaken, because the tsar had committed to adhering to the letter of the October Manifesto. He had promised his people an elected duma, and so his people would be allowed to elect a duma. This duma would even be chosen by more democratic electorate than the now defunct Bulygin constitution would have allowed. There were still minimum property and tax requirements, but the total electorate now expanded to somewhere between 20 and 25 million people. These voters would elect 524 delegates through multi-stage elections in four curiae. First, landowners; second, peasants; third, town dwellers; and fourth, workers from a factory of more than fifty employees. But the 524 delegates set to be elected were distributed disproportionately, so that the elected delegates from each of these various curiae shook out to one for every 2000 landowners, one for every 4,000 town dwellers, one for every 30,000 peasants, and one for every 90,000 workers. This disproportionate weighting does not even account for all of those explicitly excluded: women, servants, students, agrarian wage workers, urban workers from smaller job sites, they were all excluded.

So yes, there would be elections. Yes, there would be a representative assembly, as had been promised by the October Manifesto. But the tsar and his advisors believed they had created a system that would produce a conservative, docile, and loyal duma, and they would find themselves very disappointed.

The elections were set to unfold in stages between February and April, so we will now turn our attention to the parties preparing to contest those elections. Now the groups we’re about to talk about were not the only parties there were lots of little sub-parties and local groups and independent associations; to say nothing of candidates, simply running as individuals not connected to any party. So what we’re going to talk about here are the biggest political parties now in existence, but just so you know, they’re not the only political parties now in existence. And I want to do this by moving from the far right to the far left.

Staking out the far right we have the proto-fascist Union of the Russian People. They were faced with the immediate dilemma of whether to even run in the elections. Their whole thing was that they hated all this liberal garbage. Elections, democracy, participatory government, yuck! They wanted to go back to how things had been before, to orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Running in an election was a betrayal of that belief. But because of the tsar himself had called for the election, they felt obligated to be of service and run for office. If they won, they would at least be able to ensure the duma would be as sycophantic and weak as possible. But again, while the URP was the largest conservative party, they weren’t the only one. And as the elections got going, all of them tended to get together to form united conservative blocks, to elect the most reactionary slate of delegates possible.

Next, we have the Octobrists, that reform group of conservative liberals. Representing big land owners, manufacturers, businessmen, and cautious intellectuals, they had been the one group who had been pretty happy with the Bulygin constitution. And before that, they had been the people in the minority of delegates at that watershed All-Zemstvo Congress in November 1904 who had successfully fought to keep the words “constitution” and “parliament” out of the 10 point list of demands they sent to the tsar. The only reason these cautiously conservative reformers even wound up in the opposition during 1905 was because of the regime’s, intransigent belief that anything to the left of pure absolutism amounted to revolutionary treason. Even now, they struggled with the question of whether to support Witte’s government. They wanted to support the government, but the punitive campaigns were a bit yikes in terms of basic morality, even for a Group who tended to prize order over liberty. But they also suspected that if Witte fell from power, that he would likely be replaced by Durnovo, who the tsar clearly preferred, and who would be hostile even to the simplest of reforms. The Octobrists managed to found local branches in 36 different provinces, and though reliable numbers are hard to come by, they probably had 24 to 40,000 active members by the time of the elections of 1906.

Those numbers made them only about a quarter of the size of the party who would dominate the elections of 1906, a constitutional democrats, aka, the Kadets. The Kadets were by far the finest run, most energetic, and best funded of all the new political parties. Drawing as they did from the educated professional classes, their leaders and organizers were all lawyers and journalists who were adept at the art of public persuasion. The Kadets were also the party most excited about the idea of winning control of a representative duma, because such a representative assembly is the natural home for such modern professional middle-class liberals. With plenty of wealthy members and supporters keeping them flushed with cash, the Kadets started up daily newspapers in more than 50 different cities to push their issues and candidates, and they founded more than a thousand different local branches, soon expanding to over a hundred thousand active party members.

But those are the people who join the Kadets had all been united in the fight against autocracy, now that the question had become, what do you want, rather than what don’t you want, riffs began to appear. Rightwing Kadets wanted a constitutional monarchy with suffrage limited by property requirements — essentially what they believe the October Manifesto had established. Leftwing Kadets on the other hand wanted a real democratic republic, with wide open universal democratic suffrage, including giving women the right to vote. They saw the duma as the logical place to keep waging the unfinished war for freedom and democracy. Though in this first campaign, they did acknowledge that running on a platform of we want a democratic republic would likely cause more trouble than it was worth. So they resigned themselves to supporting a mere constitutional monarchy.

But even with all their energy funding and commitment, the leaders of the Kadets still went into the elections pessimistic about their chances. I mean, is the tsar really going to let us win?

To the left of the Kadets were the various socialist parties. The most prominent of which was of course, our old friend the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The socialists were hostile to the duma and believed it an empty vessel, a ship that wouldn’t take anyone anywhere. But predictably, there was a split between the Bolshevik and Mensheviks wings of the party about what to do. Lenin and the Bolsheviks called for an active boycott, not just passive non-participation, but a vocal campaign denouncing the elections as useful only to those who would betray the revolution. Lenin’s simple axiom was that to be for the duma was to be against the revolution, and to be for the revolution was to be against the duma.

Meanwhile, the Mensheviks decided to actively participate in the first round of the election, where something resembling democratic voting took place. This first round would be a great opportunity to expand their ranks and make further connections between socialist leaders and working class voters. But once the election moved on to the second stage, the Mensheviks would join the boycott, and denounced the duma as an undemocratic farce.

Given that the urban working classes would be so thoroughly underrepresented in the final slate of delegates, it wasn’t hard for the socialists to make the case to labors that these elections were a pointless sham; that they shouldn’t place their hopes in the duma, but in themselves, in organizing, agitation, strikes, and ultimately, if need be, insurrection. They had every right to claim that most of what had been achieved in the Revolution of 1905 had been thanks to the direct action of the working classes. Why now participate in an empty ritual that is going to hand the keys over to a bunch of well-dressed liberals who never cared about working class issues anyway? So turnout among the workers in the election of 1906 was pretty low.

And then finally, out on the very furthest edge, we have the SRs, who were even more hardcore about their hateful disdain for the duma than even Lenin. Where Lenin recognize the duma’s existence, even if just to attack it, the SRs decided to not even acknowledge it, to just pretend like it wasn’t happening. Their stance is best summed up by one member who said, and I’m paraphrasing here, let the duma be dominated by the Black Hundreds, we don’t care. That will be better. That way, there will be no mistaking what it really is. So instead of joining the political campaign, the SRs ramped up their assassination campaign. But this stance did put stress on the party. There was a minority of voices inside the socialist revolutionaries who argued that maybe the time had calmed to start setting aside terrorism. Meanwhile, another minority of voices, soon dubbed the maximalists, believed that they should actually take terrorism even further, to expand their target list beyond just state officials, to landlords, and businessmen, and bankers. In any case, the SR combat organization, which was still being led by police agent Azev, was busier than ever in 1906. And they would elect no members to the duma, but they would claim 82 assassinations over the course of the year, though the regime put that number at over a thousand, because they included innocent bystanders killed by bombs or in shootouts, which the SRs did not.

So the elections, in two stages, ran from February to April 1906. With the campaign unfolding against the backdrop of the punitive campaigns and the attacks on the press and the police sweeps in the cities — to say nothing of the tsar saying, oh yes, I’m still an absolute autocrat, and technically I can rescind anything I want, anytime I want — everyone to the left of the URP half expected to wake up one morning and find the campaign had been canceled. But though there was some light meddling by hostile local officials and conservative clergyman, mostly the campaigns were allowed to run unhindered. The parties also went into the campaign afraid that nobody out there would really care, that Russian democracy would star from lack of interest. But to the delight of liberals, and the dismay of conservatives, it turns out the population was excited about the election. Not just dedicated political activists here, but regular folks who were enthusiastic about the idea of actually participating in their own government. And this enthusiasm would show itself in the shocking final results.

The first set of elections started wrapping up by mid-March, and the returns surprised everyone. Even under the disproportional system devised by the regime, the Kadets and other liberal progressive parties were sweeping into office. Conservative parties had been sluggish and unenthusiastic about the election, and it showed. They were getting killed everywhere. Even the leadership of the Kadets were shocked at how many seats they were winning, especially out in rural areas, which had never been liberal strongholds. Even when peasants didn’t vote for officially endorsed Kadet candidates, they voted for people clearly promising to vote with the opposition when the Duma convened. Conservatives grumbled that the peasants were just a herd being led around by a few liberal orators, but those are some pretty sour grapes. I mean, the conservatives had always planned on the peasants being a herd led by them.

But the revolution of 1905 had had an impact on the psychology of the peasants. They were less docile and more demanding than they had ever been. When the final totals were counted, the Kadets won 189 seats, by far the most of any single party. They were joined by another 150 or so delegates either not aligned with any party, or who came from a smaller liberal party, but who planned to support the Kadets. Meaning that when the duma convened, nearly 350 delegates would be voting with the liberal opposition, and by opposition, we’re describing delegates who expected more, not less, out of post-October Manifesto Russia. Conservatives, meanwhile, numbered maybe 10% of the delegates, with exactly 0% coming from the far right. Pavel Milyukov, the chairman of the Kadets, was suddenly riding high, declaring triumphantly that they were now on the verge of forcing the tsar to accept a real parliamentary democracy.

The government was of course shocked by the results of the election. They had not been expecting this, and Witte’s days in power were now clearly numbered. But there was a big but to all of this. While the elections unfolded, the tsar and his advisors work diligently on plans that were going to make a mockery of the spirit of the October Manifesto, while sticking cynically to its strict letter. And now that it looked like there was going to be a massive liberal majority in the duma, the regime rushed to complete their plan to render that duma as toothless and irrelevant as possible.

Just as the elections for the duma were set to begin in February, the tsar personally chaired a series of meetings where it was decided that the duma would not be the only assembly now involved in lawmaking. They decided to take the State Council, currently an advisory assembly of notables and senior officials and make it a co-equal upper house to balance the duma, which would now be merely a lower house. This was the role that had originally been envisioned for the state council when it was first created by Speransky, the father of Russian liberalism, all the way back in 1810, which we talked about way back in episode 10.11. The reformed state council would have 198 members, half of whom would be directly appointed by the tsar, while the other half would be elected from groups of nobles or clergyman or senior zemstvo members, guaranteeing a conservative and loyal body that could check anything the duma might think about getting up to, because the state council would need to consent to legislation before it could be passed, and it too could deliberate and submit bills and resolutions to the tsar. So the Duma was not going to be the only game in town.

Elevating the state council was just one small part of a larger plan. After the October Manifesto, there was clearly a need to codify the new legal and political rules that the empire was going to operate under. Russia needed something that would resemble a constitution without actually being a constitution, because those are, would never consent to anything called a constitution. So even though the result of all this is called the Constitution of 1906, the whole idea was to avoid using that hateful and dangerous word. Instead, what they did was revise the Fundamental Laws of Russia. The Fundamental Laws were a great omnibus of law that had been collected and published for the first time back in 1835. The point of their revisions were to lock into place this new not-a-constitution to pre-empt the incoming duma from messing around in constitutional affairs. Because one of the things baked in to the Fundamental Laws was the only the tsar was allowed to revise or change them. The duma would be forbidden to even speak of it.

Drafts of various new rules and procedures and refined powers for the tsar were kicked around in the early months of 1906, and then finally settled at a series of meetings between April the ninth and April the 12th just as as the duma was about to convene. And once you start reading through it, the elevation of the state council to co-equal branch of government seems practically superfluous, because in this new era of quote unquote shared power, the tsar would have a universal veto over all proposed legislation, unlimited and with no appeal. He would also have sole control over foreign policy, making international treaties, declaring war, settling peace. He would have sole power over the military with no oversight whatsoever. He could declare states of emergency that would suspend regular law. He would rule by simple decree whenever the duma was not in session. He would appoint and dismiss all ministers, bureaucrats, officials, and judges as he saw fit, without advice or consent from any other branch of government. He retained discretion over budgets and financial matters through the flimsy cover that if the state council and the duma voted for different budgets, the tsar could pick which one he wanted, and the state council would surely just present whatever the tsar wanted. Finally, the tsar could dissolve the duma anytime he wanted for any reason he saw fit. The only stipulation was that in the dissolution decree, he had to fix a date for another election.

When the changes to the fundamental laws were announced, the duma suddenly went from looking like the core of a new constitutional government to looking like a fig leaf for the same old absolutest autocracy. Fear that the elections would be canceled soon turned to anger that maybe the elections didn’t matter at all.

Adding to the frustrated anger of the incoming delegates was the announcement that Prime Minister Sergei Witte had just secured a massive new foreign loan. As we’ve talked about, it was widely understood that for a duma to be successful, it would need to have some control over taxing and spending. That was the minimum acceptable baseline of good reform government. But in the early months of 1906, Witte worked tirelessly to buy the tsar some financial independence from the duma. The empire was facing massive budget deficits into the foreseeable future thanks to the cost of the war, and Witte lobbied the international banking community, especially their diplomatic ally France to bail the tsar out. Ultimately, French policymakers determined that the risk of Russia defaulting on this debt was less than the risk of what might happen if they didn’t shore up the regime at this critical moment, and that is, the shaky tsar being toppled by further revolution. So in April, Witte successfully assembled a consortium of banking houses to float Russia a two and a quarter billion franc loan, half of which came from French banks, the rest from British, Dutch, Austria, and Russia’s own home grown financiers. This would be enough to get the regime through about a year without needing to ask the duma for anything, taking away a hugely crucial bit of leverage that they might have. Milyukov and the other Kadet leaders pounded the table over this betrayal.

Securing the foreign loan turned out to be Sergei Witte’s last act in government. The tsar had been forced to recall him back in October, but since then, Witte’s work had been exhausting and demoralizing, which he had done mostly friendless and alone. So once the Fundamental Laws had been revised, and the foreign loan was secured, and the people had been beaten back into place by the punitive campaigns, the tsar felt safe letting Witte go, his singular genius no longer considered essential to saving the empire. On April the 22nd, Witte officially resigned as prime minister after less than six months in office, though, he harbored some hope of coming back and being Russia’s savior once again, to be the only man of genius in a room full of imperial dunces, it never happened. He was done. He was out.

Sergei Witte had done as much as anyone, perhaps more than anyone, to define what the Russian Empire looked like on the eve of her great revolutions. Maybe if the tsar had listened to Witte more, Russia could have avoided those revolutions. But we shouldn’t go too far down that counterfactual road. Witte himself was usually so fixated on the technocratic aspects of his work — progress, modernization, industrialization — that he rarely stopped to wonder about the effect it might be having on the population. Even his appeals to treat workers better were always perfunctory, half-hearted, and only offered as a practical means of avoiding uprisings more than out of any real conviction that the lives of the workers and peasants actually mattered. Witte measured the health of the empire in miles of railroad track, units of factory production, and metric tons of coal. He was in this way, a kindred spirit of his scientifico contemporaries over in the Mexican Porfiriato. And they would all leave Russia and Mexico in almost exactly the same place at exactly the same time: lots of miles of railroad track, lots of foreign investment, lots of new factories, lots of well-run mines, a giant social revolution on the horizon.

Out of power, Witte retained a seat in the council of state, but he would never again be recalled to offer real authoritative advice. He would die in February 1915 at the age of 65, his last stab at influence coming a year earlier, when he attempted to warn the tsar not to enter World War I. And this is a final fitting epitaph for Witte’s place in Russian history: offering something resembling practical advice to an eternally closed mind.

And that’s a good place to leave it. Specifically, we’re going to leave off on April the 27th, 1906, the first day that an elected national duma convened. The fruits of the Revolution of 1905 were finally ripening.

Except these fruits were not looking so ripe after all. In fact, they were looking downright rotten. Bound by new Fundamental Laws, checked by this state council and with police and censors and the Okhrana still swarming around, the new duma found itself operating in a straight jacket. On April the 25th, Pavel Milyukov addressed his fellow Kadets with a rousing speech: like thieves and the dead of night, he said, all the specialists on state law organized and staged a coup against the people. That which we read in the newspapers today is a fraud, a fraud against the people. And we must immediately the answer that fraud. But even if they were fired up and ready to fight, what could they do? They were even forbidden to speak about the Fundamental Laws. And outside this narrow band of elected liberals and democrats, the rest of Russia found itself in a similar place. Workers who had gone out on strike expecting better conditions, peasants who had seized land, and believed the days of landlords were over, women who hoped they might be treated as equals, minority nationalities who wanted autonomy, freedom and respect. The revolution of 1905 had been exhilarating. It had broadened horizons, elevated consciousnesses, taught people to believe in themselves. It led them to expect positive change. But instead of their hopes and expectations being met, they were all instead gripped by a tightening vice of re-entrenching autocracy. All those elevated expectations are going to be dashed first here, then there, then everywhere. Now the tsarist regime would not be without its forward-thinking reformers, men who dared to try new ideas. And so when we come back, we’ll talk all about Pyotr Stolipen, who kind of assumed the mantle of the only man of genius in a room full of imperial dunces that had been vacated by Sergei Witte. But Tsar Nicholas himself will remain as disconnected, arrogant, and blind as ever. He would never reconcile himself to the alleged verdict of the Revolution of 1905.

So the years after the Revolution of 1905 saw everyone growing bitter and dissatisfied in their own ways. Conservatives, liberals, socialists, narodists, anarchists, reactionaries — none of them were happy, whether they thought things had gone too far or things had not gone far enough. And for those who believe that things had not gone far enough, they were in the cafes and the salons and the workshops and the villages. They talked, they griped, they vented, and they planned. And so the Revolution of 1905 would not be the Russian revolution. It would instead go down in history as merely the dress rehearsal for the Russian Revolution. .