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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.44: Bolshevik Bank Heist

Hello, I’m back again. This time, really back. Really back for good. We closed out the last episode with Stolypin’s Coup in June 1907, which means we have officially enter the liminal space between the Revolution of 1905 and the Revolution of 1917. These years were defined by revolutionary retreat and reactionary retrenchment. So we’re going to work through this period with everybody, with the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the SRs and the liberal Kadets; also Stolypin and the newly quote unquote reformed Dumas; the Romanovs, Nicholas and Alexandra and their new BFF Rasputin. That way we will have a good handle on where everybody was at physically and mentally and emotionally heading into the Revolution of 1917.

Today though, we are going to connect with our old friends in the RSDLP, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. And hopefully, have a fun little episode focusing on one particularly fun little episode, the Tiflis bank robbery, a robbery that made headlines worldwide, and helped carry the Bolshevik Menshevik divide right to the breaking point. And it was masterminded by Georgian Bolshevik running a small cadre of armed revolutionaries in the Caucuses who was born with the name… okay. I’m not even going to try to pronounce that, but he was known principally by a variety of aliases: he was called Soso, as in, the famous Soso; he was called Koba, as in Comrade Koba, but we all know him today as… Joseph Stalin.

Now, since the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks at the Second Party Congress back in 1903, the members of the RSDLP had been operating in a space somewhere between separation and divorce. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks argued and disagreed about everything, but they argued with each other to win the debate and impose their vision on a unified party. Neither yet wanted a formal divorce. Now, we’ll talk about this even more next week, but for the purposes of today’s episode, I am going to touch on two issues in particular.

The first has nothing at all to do with today’s episode and everything to do with cleaning up a mess I made in the last episode. Because when I was talking about the differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks about their attitude towards the Second Duma, with the Mensheviks supporting running candidates and the next elections. Well, the Bolsheviks favored boycotting those elections. That is all true. But I took that Bolshevik position, summarized it, paraphrased it, and then put it in Lenin’s voice because Lenin was the leader of the Bolsheviks. But the thing is, that was not actually Lenin’s position, lenin was not actually supporting a boycott. And alert listeners Alex and Felipe both wrote me to say, correctly, that I mis-characterized Lenin’s position and provided among other things an article Lenin wrote in August 1906 called The Boycott, making it clear that Lenin personally was not in favor of continuing the boycott despite the prevailing opinion of his fellow Bolsheviks. Lenin was an extremely practical guy, and willing to embrace whatever tactics and strategies best fit the moment, legal or illegal, armed or peaceful. In the summer of 1906, after the dissolution of the First Duma and the failure of various military mutinies and strikes to coalesce into a renewal of a mass uprising style revolution, Lenin concluded the party had to engage with the duma because it was the best available arena for them to fight in. And they simply didn’t have the force or power necessary to make a boycott count for anything. Both Lenin and Trotsky would later say that boycotting elections to a bourgeois parliament is only smart when you have a mass movement uprising ready to swamp that bourgeois parliament and replace it, which they did not have at the moment.

So Lenin argued, and I’m quoting him directly now, “the dissolution of the duma has now clearly demonstrated that in the conditions prevailing in the spring of 1906, the boycott, on the whole, was the right tactic and advantageous.” But then he goes on to say, “the time has now come when the revolutionary Social-Democrats must cease to be boycottists. We shall not refuse to go in to the Second Duma when, or if, it is convened. We shall not refuse to utilize this arena, but we shall not exaggerate its modest importance; on the contrary, guided by the experience already provided by history, we shall entirely subordinate. The Struggle we wage in the Duma to another form of struggle, namely strikes, uprisings, etc.” So that’s Lenin in August of 1906 making his position perfectly clear: he believes some conditions pointed to a strategy of boycott, others to a strategy of not boycott, and heading into the elections for the Second Duma, Lenin’s position was they should not boycott the election. So apologies to Lenin, and apologies to all of you for that mistake, and thank you to Alex and Felipe for correcting me.

The other issue we need to talk about today very much pertains to today’s episode, and that is the issue of expropriation. Expropriation, as I said, last time is a fancy word for bank robberies. Mensheviks like Martov, Plekhanov, and Axelrod opposed expropriations as little more than lawless banditry that was unbecoming and counter-productive. They believed that with Russia headed towards legal politics that they needed to leave all of that violent, illegal criminality behind for PR reasons, sure, but also because armed gangs tended to be full of mere gangsters working for themselves, not the revolution, and they also happened to be easy points of access for government spies and agents provocateur, hoping to lead the party to ruin and discredit. Now Lenin, for the moment, emphatically disagreed with this. He, as I said, was a practical man. .And the party needed money to survive. During the revolutionary upswing of 1904 and 1905, the RSDLP had gotten a lot of donations and funding from liberal magnates and businessmen because they were all kind of on the same side, fighting tsarist autocracy. Those wealthy and ambitious businessmen saw the socialist revolutionaries as providing useful pressure in their own fight for political power. But now that the October Manifesto had been proclaimed, and there were dumas and elections and everything, that funding dried up, and Lenin did not think the party could afford to turn its back on expropriation.

So despite Menshevik opposition — and that means formal party opposition, because the Mensheviks won control of the central committee of the party at the Fourth Party Congress in April 1906 — Lenin and a group of senior Bolsheviks just kept on doing their own thing, through a not officially acknowledged group called Bolshevik Center. And it was not officially acknowledged because there were party rules banning such independent committees. Based in Finland, Bolshevik Center included Lenin himself, and also the number two Bolshevik, a guy named Alexander Bogdanov, who would soon challenge Lenin for control of the Bolshevik faction, and then probably the third most prominent Bolshevik, Leonid Krasin, an engineering genius living a double life. By day Krasin was a prosperous and well-connected engineer working for various industrial enterprises, by night, he was a committed Bolshevik revolutionary, whose principle obsession and occupation was bomb making. And just to highlight the kind of underground cooperation that often went on between all the revolutionary groups, despite their doctrinal differences, the bombs used by the SR terrorist to try to kill Stolypin in the summer of 1906 were manufactured and given to them by Krasin .

So despite the Mensheviks opposition, Bolshevik Center just kept right on approving and organizing robberies and other criminal fundraising activities under the banner of expropriation. And they had some really good groups out there. Loyal and reliable, doing excellent work, providing the party desperately needed funds. This was true especially down in Georgia.

Now socialists and Marxists down in the Caucuses were mostly Mensheviks. But there was one highly capable bullshit group called The Outfit, performing splendid revolutionary service. The leader of the outfit was the famous Soso, Comrade Koba, and much, much later, Joseph Stalin. So, let’s talk about Stalin.

First of all, just to make this easy on all of us, I’m just going to refer to him from here on out as Stalin, even though that is not the name he was known for during this period, he did not adopt the name Stalin until at least 1912 but just to keep things simple, let’s call him Stalin. And then also, most everything that follows here in today’s episode comes from either Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore, or Volume One of Steven Kotkin’s very extensive Stalin biographies in case you’re interested in more about the adventures of young Stalin.

Stalin was born in 1878 in the Tiflis governance of Georgia, in an ethnically diverse community of mostly Georgians, Armenians, and Jews, Orthodox Christians, and Turkish Muslims. His father was a cobbler at the time of Stalin’s birth, and he owned a shop supplying the local army garrison. But business suffered, and he was an occasionally violent alcoholic, so Stalin’s mother left him in 1883, and then spent the next decade bouncing around various homes and occupations, in and out of contact with her estranged husband.

Stalin’s first stable schooling was at a church school in 1888, where he displayed two permanent features of his personality: he was very smart, intelligent, and he was interested in theater and poetry, but he was also recklessly rebellious, defiant, and got into a lot of fights. In 1894, at the age of 15, his mother secured him a spot at a seminary in Tiflis, the capital city of Georgia, which was an even more cosmopolitan city. And just to be clear about this, we don’t call it Tiflis anymore; it’s Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

At first, stalin excelled academically, and seemed to be on track to become a priest. But his rebellious defiance got the better of him. He joined underground reading circles and fell in with teenage student radicals. So even though he read a lot, including Chernyshevsky and Marx, they were the wrong books if you want to become an Orthodox priest, which Stalin didn’t really want to do anymore, because among other things, he’s now an atheist. So he stopped applying himself as a student. He stayed in seminary until 1899, when, at the age of 21, he either quit or was expelled; it’s not entirely clear what the circumstances were, whether it was over unpaid tuition or some other new infraction piled on top of all his other old infractions. But whatever it was, in 1899 Stalin was all done seminary and all done formal education.

After leaving seminary, he got a steady job working at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory doing some mundane tasks, but he was mostly interested in the underground branch of the recently formed Russian Social Democratic Labor Party he’d just joined. He was now educated enough on radical politics and Marxist economics that he was teaching others as much as he was teaching himself, but he never did stop teaching himself, and Stalin is mostly a self-taught revolutionary.

Over the next two years, he participated in demonstrations. Strikes and May Day events, including the storming of a prison to protest the arrest of strike organizers that left 13 dead. In March, 1903, he was finally arrested and tossed in prison himself. He spent a stint in solitary confinement, but then in late 1903 was sent into administrative exile in Siberia. But he did not stay there very long. He tried to escape once, but turned back after nearly freezing to death and then escaped a second time, this time for good, and made it successfully back to Tiflis in January 1904.

His surprisingly easy escape, coupled with his growing militancy and constant proposals for daring action, led several of his comrades to whisper that Stalin was now an Okhrana agent provocateur. But that was not true. Siberia, as we know, leaked like sieve, and Stalin was just Stalin; he was all dash, bravado, and militancy.

When he got back, the RSDLP had split in two, and Stalin’s attitude and comportment — that is, he was an absolutely committed full-time revolutionary — led him to align with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. And Stalin is one of those loyal agents that Lenin and Krupskaya cultivated after the split with the Mensheviks.

So from here on out, Stalin no longer has a day job. He’s a full-time revolutionary. He couch surfed among friends and comrades, dressed shabbily, and was devoted to the revolution morning, noon, and night. But he was also one of only a handful of Bolsheviks in Georgia. Most of the region’s socialists went to the Mensheviks.

When the Revolution of 1905 broke out, it first hit Georgia by way of a bloody ethnic conflict between Armenians and Azeri Turks, the so-called Tartars, who embarked on mutual massacres in February 1905 that left something like 2000 people dead. Stalin and other socialist groups formed armed brigades, mostly to try to keep the two groups separate, because it was a drag on the revolutionary effort against the tsar, and they suspected that the authorities encouraged and fermented all of this ethnic conflict for just that very reason.

Stalin spent the spring of 1905 fighting a losing battle against the Mensheviks for control of the various socialist groups in the region, and did not find a home base until he landed in the mining colony of Chiatura. There, 3000 truly oppressed workers labored under terrible conditions producing about half the world’s magnesium. Chiatura became a Bolshevik stronghold, as Stalin armed a motley array of workers and gangsters and revolutionary partisans. This is also when he first started regularly working with a woman named Patsia Goldava, a young revolutionary who would be with him for the next several years.

Chiatura was used as a base for guerrilla attacks and spreading propaganda, but Stalin also ran a protection racket over the local mines and businesses to quote unquote, protect them as long as Stalin got paid. Now, since many of the owners were themselves opposed to the tsar’s authority, both over their businesses and the region generally, Stalin didn’t have to press too hard for these payoffs, they willingly gave him money, and he even stayed in the homes of some of the biggest industrialists in Chiatura while waging his revolution.

So, also joining Stalin’s group was an old friend who wound up kicked out of the same seminary of Stalin in 1901. Now his name too is also a mess to pronounce, but luckily everybody came to call him Kamo.

Kamo is not an intellectual revolutionary. He is usually described as a credulous simpleton who could not learn Russian nor Marxism, despite Stalin’s efforts to tutor him. After being expelled from the seminary in 1901, he joined Stalin’s underground group and served as an enforcer, a robber, and a hatchet man. As he gained experience, Kamo also became the principle trainer of new recruits. He also discovered he had a flare for disguise, and he enjoyed brazenly passing unnoticed on smuggling runs or intelligence missions. He was also violent, and utterly devoted and loyal to Stalin and the revolutionary cause, and he was far more inclined to cut throat than argue the finer points of Marxist doctrine, which he didn’t care much about anyway.

So the rest of the revolutionary year of 1905 in Georgia was all bombings and assassinations and fighting in the street between revolutionaries and police and Cossacks. It was really, truly open revolutionary warfare down there. And the revolutionaries were clearly winning this war; by October the authorities only controlled really central Tiflis with various revolutionary military groups controlling the rest of the city and practically the whole rest of Georgia.

Stalin moved back to Tiflis himself and started living with the three sisters of one of his comrades in a dressmaking shop they operated serving the top men and women of local society; we’re talking mostly here about the wives of the military officers. So while they were getting fitted for dresses Stalin and company planned their assassinations and raids and bank robberies in the next room. All three sisters were sympathetic to the cause, and Stalin and the youngest sister, a woman named Kato, fell in love. She would soon become Stalin’s first wife.

After the high tide of revolution started to recede at the end of 1905, Stalin and his gang were hit with two punches. First, the October Manifesto seemed like a pretty big win for the liberal revolutionaries and the industrialists, the ones who had been sort of covertly supporting Stalin, and they withdrew their support. But then in January came the reactionary punitive expeditions, which were particularly brutal in Georgia with army columns reconquering the region by force, burning and killing and marauding, and breaking the back of the revolutionary groups.

And though the revolutionaries managed to knock off one of the senior generals with the old grenade in the lap trick, by February and March 1906, both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were driven deep underground in Georgia.

So from his heyday in 1905, Stalin was now left to reorganize a group of just about a dozen remaining hardcore loyalists, a mix of young men and women. Officially, they called themselves the Technical Group of the Expropriators Club, but informally became known simply as the Outfit. This Outfit included still Patsia Goldava, and also two of her friends, Anneta and Alexandra, who were all adept smugglers and gunfighters. The Outfit spent all of 1906 living an existence of gangsters and bank robbers, knocking off trains and stagecoaches, robbing banks and pawn shops, extorting protection money from businesses, and getting in shootouts with anybody who tried to stop them. And they were quite successful. And also, unlike other groups who did devolve into mere banditry, Stalin and the Outfit remained committed revolutionaries. They forwarded practically all the loot to Lenin in Finland, while they themselves lived in poverty.

In April, 1906 Stalin attended the Fourth Party Congress in Stockholm, and was generally disdainful of the effete intellectuals he encountered, which contrasted with his own rough and tumble real revolutionary activity. These men and women he met thought about revolution; Stalin actually waged revolution. And it’s true. Stalin was cut from an entirely different cloth. He was smart. But he was a man of action, not an intellectual. The tool of his trade was the pistol, not the pen.

In the fall of 1906, Bolshevik Center wanted to do some more fundraising, and decided maybe they wanted to do something really big. And by the spring of 1907, Stalin had indicated that there was a juicy target: a recently opened ranch of the state bank in downtown Tiflis. In April 1907, a couple of the women in the Outfit successfully smuggled in bombs and grenades made by Krasin. Meanwhile, Stalin had suborned two key inside accomplices: one of them, a bank clerk; the other, an old friend from back home now working as a clerk in the local post office who was privy to the secret schedules about movement of money. That guy then tipped off Stalin that a large shipment of cash was due to be transferred via stagecoach on June 13th, 1907.

Stalin then went off to the Fifth Party Congress, which we’ll talk more about next week because it is pretty consequential, but while there, and in other meetings with Lenin in Berlin, he got the go ahead to carry out the biggest bank heist yet. Neither Lenin nor Stalin paid any attention to the verdict of the Fifth Party Congress, which was a ban, a complete ban, on all future expropriations.

Intense planning then went on in the dress shop where Stalin lived, and in the home of the mother of one of Stalin’s closest comrades, who was herself a sympathetic co-conspirator. This was going to be a big job — the biggest ever — and outside the core members of the Outfit, they also brought in other hired guns, either mercenary gangster bandits, or willing accomplices from among other revolutionary groups like the SRs. But there were some hiccups along the way. The guy who was supposed to leave the operation on the ground got arrested, and then, when they gave the job to Kamo, he was placing fuses and a couple of bombs in May of 1907 and one of them exploded in his face. It did not kill him, but it badly damaged one of his eyes and put him in bed for a month. But he swore that he would be ready when the time came. And he was. Because if there’s one thing about Kamo that everybody agreed on, from his revolutionary comrades to German police officers, is that Kamo had incredible tolerance for pain.

At 10:30 AM on June 13th, 1907, the main square of Tiflis was packed. There were tons of people, merchants, porters, men, women, and children, there always were. On this particular day, the crowd was augmented by two additional groups: first, there was a policeman or Cossack on every single street corner. They were quite visible. But there was a second group, intentionally invisible. Bunch of otherwise unremarkable people dressed as peasants milling around; two women, Anneta and Patsia, both core members of the Outfit, loitered around not drawing any attention to themselves; and inside a tavern located right off the square, about two dozen mean looking dudes had taken over the joint. One fellow revolutionary who was not in the plot was spotted and invited in for a drink, and then he noticed that armed men were at the door, letting people in, but not letting them out.

Kamo, meanwhile, master of disguise that he was, paraded around the square in a horse drawn carriage dressed like an acting like a cavalry captain.

Then, right on schedule, Patsia spotted a little convoy coming down the road towards the square.

She gave the signal to Anneta, who then signaled the men inside the tavern. They finished their drinks, mounted up, and then spread out into the crowd of the square.

Then right on time, a stage coach bearing an incredible amount of money entered the square. It was followed by an open carriage filled to the brim with armed police officers and soldiers. Two Cossaks rode in front of this group, two Cossaks behind with another one off to the side. Inside the main carriage was a cashier and accountant and two armed soldiers.

The carriages crossed the square in the less than a minute and approached the turn off to the bank. One guy in the crowd, nonchalantly reading a newspaper, lowered it. And that was the signal.

From out of the crowd, a handful of otherwise unremarkable looking peasants moved towards the stagecoach. They reached into their pockets and pulled out grenades, then they lobbed them under the wheels and horses. Massive explosions rocked the square. They killed the horses, the men, and apparently blew out windows and toppled chimneys. People freaked out, they panicked and ran — those not killed or wounded in the blasts, mind you — and then armed men and women stepped forward with pistols and opened fire to finish off the soldiers and guards and the wreckage of the carriages.

Other gunmen marking the police officers who were standing guard at the various street corners, opened fire on their marks and killed those officers. Witnesses then say at least six more grenades were lobbed or when off. It was all just noisy, destructive chaos, with people screaming and dying and getting shot.

Now just as our revolutionary expropriators are about to converge on the stagecoach with the cash in grab the loot, one of the horses who managed to live through all of this and was still connected to the stagecoach suddenly bolted, dragging the coach behind it. One member of the gang chased it and threw a grenade, blowing the horse up, and stopping the coach. But that dude was blown backed by the force of the explosion and stunned unconscious. So another guy had to run up and grab the loot and while he was stumbling out, he was helped by one of the women in the Outfit, though, I do not know which one it was. Then Kamo wrote up firing his pistol in all directions and waving at them to load the cash into his carriage. They tossed the cash in and he wrote off while they fled on foot.

On his way out of the square, Kamo past the police unit coming in and looking like a cavalry captain, he barked at them, the money is safe, get to the square. It was not until much later that they realized they had been had.

Kamo successfully made it to the planned safe house where he offloaded the money, changed clothes and left while a husband and wife team sewed the bundles of bills into a mattress. Patsyia then arrived having successfully gotten out of the square, and called for young porters to take the mattress to another safe house across the river. From there, they took it and deposited it on the couch of the director of the observatory where Stalin used to work, where it just sat. On a couch. With the director not suspecting a thing, and no one else thinking that the money might be there.

Back in the square meanwhile, one of the revolutionary expropriators changed into the uniform of a teacher and came back to survey the scene. And he saw carnage. The whole square was blown to hell, with what was later pegged at 40 dead and 50 wounded.

Meanwhile, none of the robbers, none of the revolutionary expropriators were caught. None of them were killed. The guy who was knocked unconscious, he just got up and walked away. They all got away. They got away with the money. It was, all in all, a huge success. And all it had cost them was a bunch of innocent bystanders killed.

Stalin, who had either watched this from the outskirts, or who had been waiting at a train station in case it all went bad, triumphantly returned to the dress shop apartments that night, even though it was right around the corner from what was then, at that moment, the biggest crime scene in the world. He was exuberant. He had attempted the biggest job of his life and pulled it off. It was a huge success. He lost nobody. Well, except for all the innocent bystanders.

The Tiflis bank heist had a number of major repercussions. It made headlines worldwide from London to Paris to New York. Public opinion, up to and including various socialist parties and leaders throughout Europe, were aghast at the injury and death toll. This included the Mensheviks and huge swaths of the rest of the party membership.

But the thing is, at least right after the bank heist, nobody knew who did it. Stolypin’s interior ministry assigned a special detective unit to investigate, but for months, nobody knew who had done it. Polish nationalists? Some lone anarchist cell? Armenian partisans? SRs? Social-Democrats? Since literally all the suspects got away, the police had nothing to go on. And Stalin and the gang did not publicize their involvement because it would of gotten them in big trouble with the party… which it did, when the party found out it was them.

Later, Kamo and one of the women from the Outfit — although again, I don’t know which one it was, unfortunately — retrieved the money from the observatory and smuggled it to Finland, using a phony passport and credentials provided by a sympathetic Georgian prince, showing them to be a young newlywed couple. Kamo then stayed with Lenin and Krupskaya in Finland for the rest of the summer.

Now a big open question too, is exactly how much they wound up stealing. It was somewhere between 250 and 350,000 rubles, which reckoned in today’s money is somewhere between three and $4 million. This is a lot of money. But when they opened the satchels and started to look at it, there was a big problem. Most of it was in 500 ruble notes, all of which were bearing serial numbers, which were known to the authorities. So you can’t just take one of these notes to any old bank and not expect to get arrested when you present it to the teller.

Now probably about 91,000 rubles worth was in unmarked small bills. But these big bills, these 500 ruble notes were practically unusable unless they figured out some kind of strategy for cashing them in. Krupskaya said later in her memoirs, the money obtained in the Tiflis raid was handed over to the Bolsheviks for revolutionary purposes, but the money could not be used. It was all in 500 ruble notes, which had to be changed. This could not be done in Russia as the banks always had lists of notes in such cases. But she also said the money was badly needed, so they’re going to have to figure something out.

Kamo took the untraceable bills and proceeded to travel around to Paris and then Belgium and then Bulgaria, buying more arms for future expropriations before landing in Berlin, where he met with an émigré Bolshevik doctor to finally get his eye properly checked out. But this guy, completely trusted at the time, turned out to be an Okhrana double agent. He alerted his handlers that he was currently in contact with one of the ringleaders of the Tiflis bank robbery, the first inkling the authorities had about who did the job.

They contacted the German authorities who detained Kamo and found fake passports and a bunch of explosives, which was more than enough to arrest and hold him. When Kamo was arrested, Leonid Krasin sent word that he should fake insanity, which Kamo did. Famously faking insanity for three full years, doing all kinds of crazy stuff like eating his own feces, refusing to sleep, and talking to a pet bird he somehow managed to capture and tame. The Germans literally tortured him with like, hot needles under the fingernails and stuff like that to break his act and prove that he was faking, but Kamo never broke, because he had this insane tolerance for pain. Extradited back to Russia, he wound up in a prison, mental asylum, where he escaped in 1911, and immediately went back to planning more bank robberies.

Now, as I said, Kamo’s arrest at the end of 1907 was the first time the authorities realized that this was a Bolshevik bank heist. It was the first moment everybody realized it was a Bolshevik bank heist. Lenin quickly concluded that the Finnish authorities who had been sort of tolerating his presence might very well conclude he had gone too far, so he and Krupskaya headed back to Switzerland, and Lenin made his way to a train station trying to avoid checkpoints by crossing an iced over lake and nearly drowned when the ice started to give way, which led Lenin to say that it would of been a really stupid way to die.

By the end of 1907 and beginning of 1908, the Bolsheviks made one good attempt to cash out the marked bills. They settled on a plan for agents in various European capitals outside the Russian Empire to take small amounts of these bills and just hope they could get away with it or at least enough of them could get away with it. Krupskaya said the money was badly needed. And so a group of comrades made an attempt to change the 500 ruble notes simultaneously in various towns abroad. But the informer doctor in Berlin was told of the plan, and he told the Russian authorities who then turned around and told everybody in Europe to please be on the lookout for criminals trying to cash the Tiflis bank notes. In January, 1908 they tried it, and it failed. Bank managers across Europe had been alerted to be on the lookout for 500 ruble Russian notes, then everyone who tried to bring some in, whether in Stockholm or Geneva or Paris was arrested.

As you can imagine, all of this caused further ruptures between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Martov and his compatriots were furious when they found out the Bolsheviks were behind it. They spent years conducting their own internal investigation, interviewing Stalin’s accomplices like the post office clerk and the bank clerk. And though never officially kicked out of the party, Stalin does appear to have been expelled from the Georgian local party, which was run by his enemies the Mensheviks. He then departed his homeland, basically never to return.

Lenin, meanwhile, had been careful enough about his own involvement that nothing solid could ever be pinned on him. But the whole incident marked the end of his support for expropriations, and this led to a split among the Bolsheviks, because Karsin and Bogdanov both wanted to keep going with this stuff, and they were furious at Lenin for playing dumb and then backing off of future projects. So it was just fractures inside of fractures inside of fractures.

Finally, most of the rest of the bills, all those 500 ruble notes, wound up being burned. All of that, just to make a little fire.

That’s the story of the Tiflis bank robbery.

Next week, we will come back to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and talk more about what went on at the Fifth Party Congress, and how that was supposed to be a moment of final unification, and instead, really set the stage for their final divorce as everybody settled back into being émigré s in the reactionary period after the Stolypin reforms. It was also at this Fifth Party Congress that Trotsky, who had been arrested and sent into exile, finally returned. And he was now ready to pitch his comrades on a new theory he had developed: a theory of permanent revolution.

 

 

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Episode 10.42: The Stolypin Reforms

So last time we introduced the first nationally elected duma in Russian history, and it did not go well. There were fundamental disagreements about the role the duma was meant to play in the new post-revolution of 1905 political order, what its relationship with the government and the Tsar would be, the scope of its power and responsibilities, the limits on its power and responsibilities. And we wrapped up last week with the tsar and his advisors concluding that their differences were irreconcilable, and so they dissolve the first duma on July eight, 1906.

Despite tsarist fears and Kadet hopes that this would trigger a renewal of mass revolution, it did not trigger a renewal of mass revolution. And there were lots of different reasons for this. There was a kind of general exhaustion from the last two years, unemployment was a big worker problem at the moment, which made people hesitant to walk off the jobs they would probably immediately lose. It also happened during harvest time so out in the rural areas the peasants were literally physically busy. And also, there was the fact that the duma as an institution had not been abolished. There would be new elections. There would be a second duma. But a big part of the reason there was no revolution of 1906 is the new prime minister of the tsar appointed at the same moment he dissolved the first duma, and that is Pyotr Stolypin.

Pyotr Stolypin was born in April, 1862. The Stolypins has had been prominent nobles in the service of the tsars dating back to the 1500s. His mother was the daughter of a prominent general who later served as governor of Warsaw, his father was an artillery general during the Crimean War, the governor of Eastern Rumelia, and who would later be appointed commandant of the Kremlin Palace guard. Stolypin had extended family scattered throughout the imperial service right up to the inner circle of the court. But though incredibly well connected, Pyotr Stolypin himself would come to the inner circle of power as something of an outsider. He grew up on his rural family estates rather than in the heart of St. Petersburg and Moscow, and he would always be far more attached to manor life out in the country rather than palace life in high society. In 1881, so just after the assassination of the Tsar Liberator, a 19-year-old Stolypin went off to university in St. Petersburg, where he most certainly did not get wrapped up in radical student politics. He was a diligent and intelligent young noble, studying hard so he could one day govern the empire, not overthrow it. While a student, he married a young noblewoman named Olga Borisnova, who was herself, the daughter, sister, cousin, or niece of influential and high ranking members of the imperial apparatus. In 1885, Stolypin graduated and embarked on the same life in state service that his family had lived for four centuries.

In 1889, the now 27-year-old Stolypin was appointed to a position in Kovno, now Kaunus, in Lithuania. He would live and work there with his family for the next 13 years and be steadily promoted up the ranks. While in Kovno, he encountered in microcosm most of the challenges currently facing the Russian Empire: the substandard condition of the peasants, the low productivity of their agricultural system, the poor quality of their administration, the always tense relationship between the Russian administrators and the national minorities. In Kovno, Russians were only about 5% of the population, the peasants were mostly Lithuanian their hereditary lords mostly Polish.

Stolypin’s early formative service in the 1890s also landed right smack in the middle of Sergei Witte’s push for modern industrialization, so Stolypin also encountered the new problems posed by the rising population of an urban working class. So Stolypin personally witnessed a population that was kind of miserable and depressed. Alcoholism was rampant, people were always right on the verge of starvation and destitution, and always right on the verge of rebellion and revolution.

Now during these years in Kovno, Stolypin also observed alternatives to the archaic and anachronistic modes of production he was administering. Kovno was very close to the border with the German Empire, and right on the new rail line that was linking St. Petersburg to Berlin. Stolypin toured German territory and was impressed by what he saw both economically and politically. He saw modern scientific farming techniques and machinery and technology. He saw rationally organized estates. And most especially, he witnessed the role he believed individual ownership played in incentivizing work and increasing agricultural productivity. He observed people who went about their business fitter, happier and more productive. He also observed how this satisfied peasantry in the German empire formed a solid conservative bulwark supporting the kaiser. They were not throwing bombs or burning down estates, at least not that he could see. Stolypin would then come back to the Russian territory and see nothing but backwardness all around him. He desired change and reform. He believed that there was nothing happening in neighboring Germany that could not be brought over to Russia, even if the ultimate Russian version of all of this must be rooted organically in Russian history and culture.

Stolypin spent 13 happy and productive years in Kovno until the tsar appointed him governor of the province of Grodno in May of 1902 in what is today Belarus. Stolypin was only weeks past his 40th birthday, and I can’t tell if he was straight up the youngest governor ever appointed, or if it was just notable how young he was to earn this appointment, but in any case, he was very young to get this job, and it spoke both to the quality of his work and the quality of his connections. The appointment came just as the recession that followed the Witte boom was setting in, and when poor harvests were sparking an agricultural crisis and a wave of peasant unrest in the spring and summer of 1902, and we talked about that unrest in episode 10.30, in the context of the SRs becoming convinced that the peasants were no longer just a docile sack of potatoes, but a potentially viable revolutionary force. And though he sat on the other side of the political lines, Governor Stolypin happened to agree with them. So administering one of the areas that was affected by all this unrest in 1902, Stolypin wrote a detailed report to his superiors describing the situation in his province and recommending potential solutions. Stolypin was not of the opinion that this was just a bunch of crazy people running amuck, nor that it was the result of outside agitators or Jews coming in and stirring up trouble where none would have otherwise existed. There were very real problems out there that the authorities needed to address. The condition of the peasants had to be improved. The land must be made more productive. The people made more prosperous. The state could involve itself in very practical ways by helping the peasants buy more land and buy new equipment. The state should encourage the consolidation of holdings from the ancient strip system, where a family held bits of land scattered all over a commune’s territory, and allow for the consolidation of that property to reduce labor and maximize efficiency.

Stolypin argued that obviously this would have social and economic benefits — the people would become healthier and wealthier — but it would also have political benefits. Those SRs and socialists and anarchists who are being blamed for stirring up all this trouble? Well, no one’s going to listen to them if they are pitching revolution to a bunch of happy peasants with full bellies and a plot of land to call their own. He also recommended a similar attitude towards the new urban workers: improve conditions, increase pay, lower hours, take an actual interest in the quality of their lives, and poof! No more problem with radicals and revolutionaries.

So looking at Stolypin’s report from Grodno, we already see the hallmarks of his coming reform program. His superiors were impressed with his recommendations, especially because they were presented as, how can we make the tsar and his empire stronger and more stable, not how can we turn the world upside down? This too, would be a hallmark of the Stolypin reforms.

So, he was quickly promoted to the governor of Saratov, a bigger, more important, and more difficult job. You may remember Saratov from Episode 10.21, as it was one of the geographic origin points of the SRs. Saratov was a province defined by enormous inequality in the distribution of land, roughly a thousand families owned about half of all of the land, while everyone else owns the other half.

Now Stolypin had just taken over in 1904, when the cascading failures at home and abroad swept the empire towards the Revolution of 1905, and like all other provincial governor Stolypin grappled with worker strikes, peasant rebellions, subversive socialist literature, SR bombers, as well as violent reactionary groups coalescing into what would become the Black Hundreds, all of which blew up massively during the wave of protest following Bloody Sunday in early 1905.

Stolypin navigated the Revolution of 1905 better than most of his colleagues, which was especially noteworthy given that he was governing a province more naturally prone to revolutionary unrest. The revolution of 1905 only strengthened Stolypin’s conviction that all this unrest and rebelliousness and violence was being caused by real material grievances and understandable peasant and worker anger at mistreatment, mismanagement, exploitation, and corruption. Even if the tsar managed to survive these upheavals by beating everyone back into line, that still did not address the underlying social and economic issues. And unless those issues were addressed, this would just keep happening, and Russia would keep descending until it became an embarrassing and chaotic third rate power full of miserable people killing each other and burning each other’s houses down.

But though Stolypin understood that the use of repressive force only addressed the symptoms, not the underlying disease, that did not mean he was against using repressive force against rebels and revolutionaries. Far from it. When the general strike hit in October 1905, Stolypin declared martial law, and promised to meet violence with violence. And he did not personally shrink from a fight. Stolypin was a big dude, physically imposing; he was tall and barrel chested. And as governor he was known to wade into crowds of demonstrating workers, demanding that they remain calm and orderly, apparently unconcerned about his own personal safety. And, as often as necessary, the forces under his command did meet violence with violence. So his combination of strong physical repression and active work addressing grievances meant that by the time the chaotic year of 1905 ended, Stolypin could look back and note with pride that Saratov had not been engulfed by as much revolutionary upheaval as provinces even immediately adjacent to it. This was also noted by his superiors in St. Petersburg, including the tsar, who read Governor Stolypin’s reports with interest and made approving notes in the margins.

By the spring of 1906, Stolypin was 43 years old and a rising star in the imperial government. But though he believed he had a bright future ahead of him, even Stolypin was shocked when the tsar appointed him minister of the interior in April 1906, responsible not just for the administration and security of a single province, but the entire empire. Stolypin very briefly attempted to argue he was too young and inexperienced for the post, but you don’t actually say no to an appointment like that, so he did not.

But he did stand out in the government. He was quite a bit younger than everybody else, and he had also spent his entire career out in the provinces, both doing his job, or living and managing his estates. And he took some pride in this. He said, the fact that I have been a provincial governor for a short time has not made me into a bureaucrat. I am a stranger to the Petersburg official world. I have no past there, no career ties, no links to the court. He believed that he could see what they could not, and he hoped that he could make them do what they must.

Arriving in St. Petersburg on the eve of the First Duma in April, 1906, Stolypin was just settling into his new job when the First Duma earned it moniker as the Duma of National Anger. Now, Stolypin was obviously sympathetic to the need for wide ranging reform. But he disagreed vehemently with the duma on the purpose, the method, and the nature of those reforms. Because we must be very clear here: Stolypin was not a democrat. He was not a constitutional liberal. He may not have been a blithe and reactionary defender of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, but he was there to defend it. That was the alpha and omega of his entire program. So Stolypin detested the Kadets, who wanted to put themselves in charge of a parliamentary democracy and turn the tsar into some figurehead. He did not think such a system could possibly work in Russia, and said it was dangerous madness to try to import such western political ideas, as he put it, to attach a foreign flower to Russian roots. So despite his willingness to import modern farming techniques and technologies, Stolypin was an autocratic russophile. He was not a liberal westernizer. He believed Russia was on its own unique path, with its own unique culture and history, and that any true answer to what ailed the empire was going to have to be imposed by the legitimate power and authority of the tsar. Stolypin was thus, in terms of that fit in with all of the other revolutions that we’ve studied, an agent of enlightened despotism.

But he was fundamentally a practical guy, and Stolypin believed that the new duma did have a role to play in a post-reform empire, just not the role that Kadets envisioned for it. So unlike his colleagues, he made an effort to engage with them, and it quickly became clear that among other things, Stolypin was a remarkably good public speaker, a heretofore completely unnecessary political skill. Stolypin could make himself heard in the sometimes unruly den of the duma.

As we saw last week, he also made a stab at organizing a new compromise government, but his hostility too, the democratic ambitions of the Kadets meant that he did not want Kadets anywhere near the actual levers of power so the talks went nowhere. After 73 days, even the practical Stolypin recommended the tsar dissolve the duma and try again next year. When the government made this momentous recommendation, Prime Minister Goremykin acknowledged the failure of his own approach and he tendered his resignation. The Tsar then turned to young Stolypin and named him prime minister with a brief to do… all of it! All that was necessary, all that could be done. All that must be done.

So Stolypin was young when he was appointed governor and he was young when he was made minister of the interior. And now he was crazy young to be leading the government of the entire Russian empire. But he believed he knew what ailed that empire. Believed that he knew the cure. And he had the energy and talent to administer that cure. So, he got to work.

Stolypin became prime minister at an extraordinarily precarious moment. It was entirely possible the hurricane of revolution was about to whip back up. One of the reasons the tsar trusted Stolypin is he had proven he was not a soft man who could be pushed around, or who thought compromise meant giving away the farm to liberals, democrats, and socialists. And indeed, Stolypin’s attitude was first, they would pacify and suppress all violent antagonism, and then, he would carry out reform. Peace and good order were the essential pre-requisites of imperial renewal. Stolypin assured the tsar that they would prove they were strong and not weak, that that was the first order of business. That their reforms were not coming because they were buckling under pressure, but being delivered from an unassailable position of strength. That it was their choice to do this, not the revolutionaries. And then shortly after becoming prime minister, Stolypin gave an interview for the foreign press where he said, the revolution must be suppressed. And only then will it be possible to establish the definitive and firm basis for the future regime.

And this was not hypothetical. Because though we know from a historical vantage point that there would be no revolution of 1906, Stolypin and his ministers did not know that the revolution wasn’t really starting back up. The Kadet delegate had just called for mass resistance in response to the dissolution of the duma. Mutinies started breaking out in both army and naval units. Union leaders were calling for strikes. And as we briefly discussed last week in May and June and July, peasant unrest had broken out all over the empire. And certainly the most active revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and especially the SRs, were as active as ever. So all through the summer of 1906, local police reported the discovery of homemade bombs and bomb making material. Thousands of pounds of dynamite, thousands of pistols and rifles, hundreds of thousands of cartridges. Political terrorism was alive and well, and anyone who worked for the state, from a police patrolman all the way up to the tsar himself, was the target for assassination. So when I say that the hurricane of mass revolution did not return in the summer of 1906, the sudden tornadoes of revolutionary violence were hitting as regularly as they had for the last decade.

As the new prime minister Stolypin was himself of course now a prime target. And they almost got him, just a few weeks into his tenure in office, the first of a few times they almost got him.

On August 12th, 1906, Stolypin was at one of his summer homes. It was a Saturday afternoon and he spent the morning welcoming petitioners and guests. Three SRs showed up holding suitcases, and they tried to blend in with the crowd. When a guard noticed one of them acting suspicious and asked to inspect his briefcase, the three men shouted some revolutionary slogans, hurled their suitcases on the ground, all three of which were jam packed with bombs, triggering a massive explosion. This explosion killed somewhere between 27 and 32 people, depending on what source you read; the three bombers, now suicide bombers, of course included in that number. The total injured was somewhere between 30 and 70, some by the blast, and some by the later collapse of part of the house. Two of Stolypin’s six children were among the injured, and while you will sometimes see it said that his 15 year old daughter was killed, that is erroneous, she lived through it. The prime minister himself only received some superficial cuts to the face, and after seeing to his own children, he organized a relief effort and response to the wounded. In the end, this attempt on Stolypin’s life only enhanced his reputation for personal coolness and bravery in the press, amongst his fellow ministers, and with the tsar personally, though he did accept an invitation from the tsar to henceforth live with his family in the Winter Palace for all of their safety.

Stolypin did not respond to the bombing and reports of further plan terrorist activity by being chill and cool about it. First pacification, then renewal. On August 19th, Stolypin and his government invoked Article 87 of the revised Fundamental Laws, which allowed the Tsar to rule by decree when the duma was not in session. So they used this to issue a decree establishing a system of field courts marshal to combat terrorists. The idea was to expedite cases where suspects were caught red-handed committing violent crimes or plotting to commit violent crimes. Say someone pulls out a gun and start shooting at a police chief or something, and is immediately wrestled to the ground and arrested. In these cases, the authorities could bypass the normal judicial system. Within twenty-four hours of the arrest, the suspect would be transferred to a military garrison. There, they would face a closed door hearing within 48 hours of that transfer, though this was mostly a sentencing hearing, rather than a trial in any meaningful sense, because their guilt was already established beyond doubt. Within 24 hours of that hearing, the sentence would be carried out. This was all supposed to be over in less than a hundred hours from initial arrest to final punishment. It was purposely designed to be swift and brutal, and over the next eight months, the authorities used these courts marshal to execute about 1100 people, with another thousand or so sent into either exile or imprisonment. As hanging was the mode of execution, the noose soon earned the nickname Stolypin’s necktie.

But this was just one specific and targeted arm of a wider blanket of repression. Huge swaths of the empire still lived under some kind of emergency law, up to and including full-blown martial law. In these areas, all of the decrees and promises and rights and constitutions of the last 18 months were entirely theoretical. Local officials were empowered to act as they saw fit to shut down subversives, search homes and businesses, and arrest people whenever they believed state security or public order were threatened, both conditions kept purposefully vague. At the national level, Stolypin enforce stricter codes of censorship on newspapers and journals, especially targeting those who had printed the manifesto calling for rebellion after the closing of the first duma the rate of book banning rose dramatically, as did searches for subversive material. But this continued to be a never-ending losing battle, as the censorship office, never had the staff to actually handle the flood of material being smuggled into the country on a daily basis.

On the political front, the assemblies and gatherings were closely monitored and broken up anytime they were suspected of being even remotely subversive. Stolypin withdrew legal recognition from the Kadets as an official political party, preventing them from holding congresses and assemblies and meetings. He also issued orders down the chain of bureaucratic command that anyone connected to the Kadets or some other opposition party was to be purged from the bureaucracy. Now this resulted in a few people getting the boot, but mostly it had the chilling effect Stolypin intended: forced to choose between their jobs and associating with liberals and leftists, most chose to keep their jobs.

So that’s the repressive part of Stolypin’s program. He was deadly serious about combating political terrorism as swiftly and as harshly as possible. But at the same time, he did want to avoid truly mass indiscriminate repression, which he thought would be counterproductive, and in a circular letter to his subordinates, he said, the struggle being carried out is not against society, but society’s enemies, therefore indiscriminate repression can not be approved. He hoped to prove this by moving quickly and forcefully to enact political and economic reforms that would release all the existing tension, and he further said in that same letter, the government firmly intends to enable old and unsatisfactory laws to be repealed or amended in a legal manner. The old order will be renewed. So while he had no qualms about distributing Stolypin neckties to political terrorists, for everyone else, he promised renewal, reform, and a brighter future so that in that brighter future, there would be no more need for Stolypin neckties.

So we will end today by looking at the core components of the Stolypin reforms, which started rolling out in the autumn of 1906, all of which were enacted under the same Article 87 that allowed the tsar to rule by decree. There’s a lot to the Stolypin reforms and they unfolded in stages over many years, so I want to focus here on the most notably specific parts of the plan, as well as take some notice of the overarching goals these specific reforms were meant to achieve, the biggest and most important of which without any question was finally solving the land question.

The land question had been lingering since the emancipation of the surfs in 1861. When the peasants were legally freed, not much else changed. The way the communes organized and doled out their land, the farming methods they used, the way that they were still legally and socially a subordinated class; basically the old medieval system remained intact. Huge estates owned by a few nobles, or land owned communally by villages worked archaically inefficiently by peasants given little real motivation to produce more, better, or faster. The only thing that had really changed since 1861 was that the population had increased by about 40%, leaving less land to service and feed almost half again, as many people. It was little wonder there was so much misery famine and revolution. Stolypin believed he had the answer to the land question that had vexed the empire for the last 45 years: he wanted to abolish the old communal villages, and create a new population of respectable and self-confident independent farmers.

On November 9th, 1906 Stolypin’s government issued a momentous decree that created a path to mass individual ownership of land; to make it the rule, rather than the exception. Now the way that land previously had been distributed was village assemblies would assign families in the commune to work various strips of land, purposely doled out in scattered plots so that everyone got equal shares of the good land and the crummy land. Peasant families would now be allowed to take the lands that they currently held, remove it from the commune, and claim it as individual private property. This transformation of communal property to private property was then meant to be a precursor to a process of taking all the scattered strips, swapping them around, so that a family would not own strips scattered here and there, but a unified plot of property. Stolypin was convinced this process of privatization and consolidation would dramatically improve productivity and prosperity. The peasant families would be incentivized to work harder and smarter, because they would directly and personally reap the benefits of their labor and efforts. Stolypin also planned to augment the amount of land available by purchasing property from largest estate owners and making it available for individual families to purchase using affordable lines of credit. And this was just one part of a program to help the peasants make the transition, which would also include programs to promote the adoption of modern techniques and equipment. This was not going to happen overnight, but Stolypin believed that in a generation or two the Russian Empire would be built on a population of independent proprietors working their own land each for their own individual profit. He was convinced this would make them more productive and more prosperous, eliminating material deprivations and social inequalities and psychological resentments that had so badly undermine the legitimacy of the existing regime.

Now such a major restructuring of the economic system of the empire would also require restructuring the political and administrative apparatus, because all those peasant communes Stolypin planned to break up had been totally disconnected from the rest of the political system for centuries. At the hyper-local level villages, were essentially autonomous, and since the vast majority of the population lived in a peasant village, this meant that the vast majority of the population of the empire, for all practical purposes, lived outside the tsarist apparatus. Their lives were controlled mostly by village elders and village councils, and the central imperial apparatus that governed the empire simply did not penetrate that far down. This was not going to cut it in Stolypin’s world of independent and self-confident small farmers, especially because Stolypin recognized as much as the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the SRs that prosperous individual landowners would become the leading edge of a democratic revolution if they were denied a political role in the system, or if they were abused by incompetent or corrupt officials without any ability to redress their grievances. So along with the land reform came a restructuring of how local government functioned. And this restructuring was meant to express one of the driving aims of Stolypin’s wider reform project: to eliminate all lingering distinctions between the old medieval estates, the legal and social distinctions between nobles and peasants, privileges for the former, restrictions on the latter, all of that had to be abolished, because if the new class of individual proprietors was left in a state of legal subordination, that would only invite revolution.

So Stolypin planned to end the policy of village autonomy, and instead integrate everyone fully into the larger imperial system of administration. He planned to form hyper local zemstvos to allow his new population of equally dignified, independent farmers a place to air their grievances and debate local issues so that the government could be made aware of those issues and respond to them in a timely manner. This would allow everyone to feel like they were being treated with equal dignity and respect and that their voices were being heard. This would turn the new farmers from sullen and resentful and oppressed peasants into supportive defenders of the political order. Stolypin’s reforms would also eventually include the judicial system, which would be reformed to make everyone equally subject to the same laws and processed by the same courts, which was still not happening. And really, everywhere you look in the Stolypin reforms, it’s all about erasing the distinctions between the old medieval estates, and turning nobles and peasants into equal legal citizens, not living in two separate worlds, but in one unified empire.

So those are the big pieces of the Stolypin reforms, the initial efforts he made to start renewing the empire. And in a way, Stolypin is trying to do the same thing that the socialist he’s fighting against are trying to do: eliminate legal and social and material inequality. But he’s taking a completely different path. Not by collectivizing, but by individualizing. By emphasizing individual property and civic equality as individuals, rather than communal prosperity as a part of a collective. And he believed if he saw his reforms through to the end that he would eliminate all of the revolutionary energy that was coursing through the empire.

He also worked quickly because he was hoping to be able to get all this done before the next election for the Second Duma, which was fast approaching in February, 1907. Stolypin hoped the second batch of delegates would be more cooperative than the first, but as we will see next week, he will be disappointed. And thus, while we have talked about Stolypin’s reforms and Stolypin’s neckties, and the Second Duma is going to end with another bit of Russian history, he gets to take ownership of: Stolypin’s coup.

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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.

 

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. .

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by nobody. There is no add on this week’s episode as a result of the ongoing coronavirus, social and economic catastrophe ad placements are being canceled. So here I am doing this week’s episode for free. Gonna do the next one for free too. Which is, you know, not ideal, but look, me and Mrs.

Revolutionary had already budgeted for 2022 involve a six month break of me putting out new episodes. So all that’s really happening here is that the ad revenue blackout is starting two weeks earlier than expected. So while I am not thrilled about this, we’re honestly, we’re pretty okay. And we are very okay.

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All of these people have Patriots and Venmos and PayPal accounts. If they are performers, they are probably on zoom. So go seek them out. And that’s without even getting into the collapsing fabric of our local communities, right? Independent bookstores, your favorite coffee shop, restaurant bar. Those guys are probably trying to survive through takeout orders and deliveries.

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Episode 10.38: The Days of Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Episode 10.37: The General Strike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.