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1905 Russian Revolution
by Michael G. Livingston / May 2005 issue of
Socialist Action
For the Russian revolutionaries of 100 years ago, the 1905 revolution
was a rich learning experience. Years later, Lenin referred to 1905 as the
“dress rehearsal for the October Revolution” of 1917. And while it was not
a dress rehearsal in the sense that 1917 exactly replayed 1905, it was one
in the sense that the Marxist revolutionaries learned an enormous amount,
developed their political theory and organizing skills, and emerged
as a distinct and potent political current.
Even a little study of the history of the 1905 revolution yields
enormous benefits to serious activists one hundred years later.
The 1905 revolution actually lasted three years. Starting in late 1904, it exploded in
January of 1905 , reaching a high point in October, November, and December
of that year. In 1906 and 1907 a counterrevolution took place, including
trial and imprisonment of activists, closing of newspapers and
unions, and assassinations. The revolution can be considered to have
been thoroughly defeated by mid-1907 when the second Duma (the Russian
parliament established as a concession to the revolution) was dissolved.
Leon Trotsky was an active participant in the 1905 revolution and
main leader of the unique organization that emerged out of the
revolution—the St. Petersburg Soviet, or workers council. He also wrote one
of the first histories of the revolution, still probably the best. (The
book was first published in German in 1909, when Trotsky was in exile in
Vienna, although it contains material he was writing, and speeches he was
making, in the thick of the events.)
Trotsky’s “1905” is both a scholarly history of the events of that
year and a dramatic first-person account. What is more, Trotsky’s book is a
political
summing-up of the revolution that contains many lessons for serious
revolutionaries.
Protests follow war
with Japan
“On the other hand, the logic of the class struggle does not exempt
us from the necessity of using our own logic. Whoever is unable to admit
initiative, talent,
energy, and heroism into the framework of historical necessity has
not grasped the philosophical secret of Marxism. But conversely, if we want
to grasp a political process—in this case, the revolution—as a whole, we
must be capable of seeing, behind the motley of parties and programs,
behind the perfidy and greed of some and the courage and idealism of
others, the proper outlines of the social classes whose roots lie deep
within the relations of production and whose flowers blossom in the highest
spheres of ideology”
(p. 37; all quotes are from the 1971 Vintage edition of Trotsky’s “1905”).
Trotsky begins 1905 with four chapters on the history of Russia,
including a history of the tsarist autocracy (the Russian monarchy headed
by the Romanov
dynasty), a history of capitalist development in Russia, a history
of the peasantry and the agrarian question, and a chapter on the driving
forces of the
revolution. Above all, these chapters show how Trotsky and other
Social Democrats (the name at the time of the party of revolutionary
Marxists) grounded their politics in an analysis of the reality of their
country.
Trotsky then turns in the fifth chapter to the events of the last
four months of 1904, when the revolution really started. In response to a
severe military
defeat at the hands of Japan in early 1904 and the negative effects
that the Russo-Japanese war had on the economy, criticism of rule by the
tsar increased.
In response, Tsar Nicholas II made several minor political
concessions, which slightly opened the political system. A wave of protest
then poured forth. Much of this
protest was initiated by liberals, who convened a zemstvo congress in early
November 1904. The congress adopted
a 10-point program calling for
cosmetic changes in the autocratic system of rule in Russia—but it
dared not even call for an elected parliament. The congress also initiated
a banquet
campaign that started on Nov. 5, 1904, and ended on Jan. 8, 1905.
(For a number of details in this review I have relied on Abraham
Ascher’s "The Revolution of 1905: A Short History" [Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004]. While Trotsky supplies many facts
and details, he wrote his book for an audience that was much more familiar
with events than we are today. Consequently, the reader of Trotsky’s
classic needs to acquire some
background on the revolution from other sources.) The banquet campaign consisted of
dinners or banquets in which the attendees passed resolutions or drafted
petitions that were sent to Tsar Nicholas. Because these were “private
dinners” and not political meetings, the participants circumvented
government
control. The campaign generated an enormous outpouring of criticism
against the government. Most of the dinners included speeches on the need
for reform in the autocracy, so they were also educational events. Bloody Sunday: Troops massacre petitioners
“…the course of the class struggle is not determined by political ideology”
(p. 190).
The banquet campaign ultimately led nowhere. It was replaced and
overshadowed by an event that precipitated the revolutionary upheaval of
1905—Jan. 9, 1905, known immediately afterwards and forever as
Bloody Sunday. The events leading up to Bloody Sunday have a curious
history.
While the ineffective liberal campaign was bumbling on, growing
opposition was building in the working class. In the summer of 1903 in St.
Petersburg a
bizarre figure, a priest named Father Gapon (with encouragement from
the tsarist police), had established an organization called the Assembly of
the
Russian Factory and Mill Workers. It was meant to be a “peaceful” workers’
organization, instead of the radical kind being organized illegally by
socialists.
By January 1905, the Assembly had between 6000 and 20,000 members.
The Assembly organized social and educational events for workers. Further,
it was a “police union,” an officially sponsored union under the control of
the authorities. Gapon himself received a monthly subsidy of 100 rubles (a
large sum of money at the time) from the police.
Gapon was intelligent, handsome, articulate, and cunning. He had
little political understanding and was primarily motivated by personal
ambition. His
dedication to himself far exceeded his dedication to the people he
sought to organize. He was constantly maneuvering between the workers and
the police
officials in an effort to increase his own power.
On Jan. 3 workers at one factory in St. Petersburg went on strike.
The strike spread rapidly, reflecting the widespread dissatisfaction in the
working class.
By Jan. 7 between 100,000 and 140,000 workers (between half and
two-thirds of the industrial workforce) in St. Petersburg had gone out on
strike.
Gapon seized on the opportunity—he immediately supported the strike
and organized a demonstration for Sunday, Jan. 9. Thus, unwittingly, the
police-sponsored union became a vehicle for genuine working-class protest.
The demonstrators were to present a petition to the tsar. The
petition, drafted by groups of workers, contained a number of political
demands, including
calls for democracy, the right to strike, and the eight-hour day.
Approximately 100,000 people gathered for the peaceful
demonstration, including many women and children, on the morning of Jan. 9.
As they approached the Winter Palace, they were ordered to disperse.
Because of the
size of the crowd, most could not hear the order. The troops of the
St. Petersburg garrison, which had been reinforced in anticipation of the
demonstration, were ordered to open fire. Over 130 people were killed and
around 300 seriously injured.
The workers were enraged. On the day after Bloody Sunday the strike
continued in St. Petersburg and spread throughout the empire to all major
industrial centers. Trotsky counted strikes in 122 localities, a number of
mines, and 10 railways. In all, between 500,000 and 1 million workers went
on strike during January 1905. By
the end of January the strike wave had subsided somewhat—but the revolution
had started. Gapon escaped the
country and essentially ceased to be a political actor in the unfolding
drama. (He was
assassinated in 1906 by Socialist Revolutionaries—the order came
from the head of the SR combat organization, who in fact was a police
agent.)
The Social Democrats (both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) had played
little part in the banquet campaign of the liberals or in the unexpected
Jan. 9 demonstration. Now the
Marxist socialists threw themselves into organizing unions and strikes, and
agitating for democratic reform.
Many of the workers’ strikes were political—that is, they were not
focused on immediate workplace demands but on political demands such as the
right to strike, freedom for workers arrested since the start of January,
the eight-hour day, and political democracy. The strikes were at first spontaneous and unorganized, but
soon, under the leadership of Social Democrats and
Socialists Revolutionaries, they became well organized and
disciplined.
While the socialists were organizing the working class and making
radical demands against the monarchy and against the interests of the capitalists,
the liberals launched another petition drive between February and July of
1905 in response to Tsar Nicholas’s call for ideas on how to improve the
empire (an effort to derail the revolution with “dialogue,” and the
liberals were happy to join in the attempted derailment). Petitions flooded
the capital, with a variety of political demands. Meanwhile, the country
had moved to the left, and revolution was in the air. Just as the revolution had started in earnest,
so had the counterrevolution. Shortly after Bloody Sunday an organization
called the Black Hundreds appeared in many cities and towns. The Black
Hundreds strongly
defended the Romanov monarchy and, like a proto-fascist movement,
engaged in violence, killing and beating workers, peasants, Jews, and
anyone
suspected of supporting reform. They were essentially death squads
organized by wealthy right-wing Russians, although they also had close ties
to local government and police forces.
How high up the government hierarchy the organization of the Black
Hundreds went is still not clear. What is clear is that the government
always looked the other way when the Black Hundreds were committing their
terrorist actions, and that local police and troops often joined them. In
addition to the Black Hundreds, the government’s police and military forces
carried out massive direct political repression against strikers and
protesters.
The revolutionary
mass strike
“In struggle it is extremely important to weaken the enemy. That is
what a strike does. At the same time a strike brings the army of the
revolution to its feet. But neither
the one nor the other, in itself, creates a state of revolution.”
“The power still has to be
snatched from the hands of the old rulers and handed over to the
revolution. That is the fundamental task. A general strike only creates the
necessary preconditions; it is quite inadequate for achieving the task
itself” (p. 102).
The revolution that had been simmering during the spring and summer
boiled in the fall. The universities opened their doors to political
meetings. A meeting-mania swept through the major universities. The meetings were attended by women and
men workers, secondary school students, and university students.
The attendees listened to political talks and debated political
programs and tactics.
On Sept. 19 typesetters in Moscow struck, demanding a shorter work
day and to be paid a higher piecework rate—including being paid for
punctuation marks. The strike quickly spread to other print shops in
Moscow, then to other industries. The strike appeared to be dying out on
Oct. 1.
The next day the St. Petersburg typesetters went out on a three-day
sympathy strike. Sympathy strikes were also staged in other areas of the empire, but all the strikes were
petering out by Oct. 5. But in revolution, appearances are deceptive.
The rail workers in Moscow called for a general strike on Oct. 7.
The next day, rail workers around the country moved to form a national
union. And the day
after that, the new union formalized and publicized their strike
demands: an eight-hour day, civil liberties, amnesty for all political
prisoners, and a constituent assembly to write a democratic constitution.
The strike spread through the entire empire, bringing the economy to a
halt. The government
unleashed its harshest campaign of political repression up to that
time. The revolutionary mass strike was born and the working class was now
leading
the revolution.
Since repression against the strike did not seem to be succeeding,
on Oct. 17 the government issued a manifesto outlining reforms planned for
the coming
months, including an elected parliament, or Duma. Political parties of all persuasions
were now organized or came out from the underground. The liberals’ party
was known as the Cadets (an abbreviation for Constitutional Democrats).
They viewed Oct. 17 as a victory and started to negotiate with the tsar,
but they were not in control of events.
The working class, led by socialists, was in control.
The St. Petersburg
Soviet
“The Soviet organized the working masses, directed the political
strikes and demonstrations, armed the workers, and protected the population
against pogroms. … The secret of
this influence lay in the fact that the Soviet grew as the natural organ of
the proletariat in its immediate struggle for power as
determined by the actual course of events” (p. 251).
On Oct. 13 a strike committee, made up of about 40 “deputies” or
representatives who had been elected by workers in St. Petersburg, was
formed. The committee, initially a product of work by serious activists
from
the Menshevik wing of the Social Democratic Party, called on all
factories in the city to elect deputies, one deputy for every 500 workers.
On Oct. 17, the Soviet of Workers Deputies elected an executive
committee of 50 people. The executive committee, in which Leon Trotsky and
his co-thinkers played the key role from the beginning, made the day-to-day
decisions for the Soviet. Major questions were debated and voted on by the
whole Soviet. The first officially
elected chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet was G.S. Khrustalev-Nosar,
but the moving spirit and main author of the Soviet’s directives and
resolutions was Trotsky.
By the end of October, the St. Petersburg Soviet had taken over many
of the functions of the local government, in addition to coordinating the
general strike. Soviets of Workers’ Deputies were also elected in as many
as 50 other major cities of the Russian empire; Soviets of Peasants’
Deputies and of Soldiers’
Deputies were also formed.
A situation of dual power developed—two governments were seeking to
rule Russia. One was the monarchy supported by the wealthy landlords and
capitalists; the other was the Soviets, supported by the workers and
peasants. A clash was inevitable.
The 50 days from Oct. 13, when the St. Petersburg Soviet was
established, until Dec. 3, when a meeting of the St. Petersburg Soviet was
arrested by
government troops, were known as the “Days of Liberty.” The Soviets
organized the nationwide general strike and set up soup kitchens for the
hungry and unemployed. They instituted freedom of the press and protected
people from pogroms and the Black Hundreds. Finally, on Oct. 31 the St. Petersburg Soviet declared that the
eight-hour day was to be instituted in all
factories by revolutionary methods (strikes and walkouts).
Strikes occurred repeatedly through October, November, and December.
Peasant uprisings—occupations of landed estates and destruction of the
manor houses of the nobility—took place in thousands of villages. In the
military, several insurrections took place, pitting one part of the
military against another.
Perhaps the most important military uprising occurred on Nov. 11 in
Sevastopol on the Black Sea, where a major revolt occurred in the Russian
Fleet, made famous by the mutiny on the Battleship Potemkin. The government
reacted with greater and greater violence.
On Nov. 26 Cossacks surrounded the building where the St. Petersburg
Soviet was meeting and arrested
Khrustalev-Nosar along with several other deputies. The Soviet immediately elected a new
three-person presidium. At that point Trotsky officially became
chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet.
The government started to attack newspapers and arrest editors. The
Soviets in various parts of the empire started to prepare for an armed
insurrection against the government. Then, as we have said, on Dec. 3 the
military surrounded the building where the St. Petersburg Soviet was
meeting of the Soviet and arrested everyone.
Repudiating the foreign
debt
One important point: on the day before the St. Petersburg Soviet of
1905 was suppressed, it passed a resolution repudiating the country’s
foreign debt. It
declared, “The autocracy never enjoyed the confidence of the people
and was never granted any authority by the people. We have therefore
decided not to allow repayment of loans incurred by the tsarist
government….”
The response of the French capitalists three months later was to
loan the tsarist government another three-quarter million francs. British
and French
capital were only the two largest sources of blood-sucking
investment in Russia by the capitalists of the wealthier countries.
A dozen years later, in February 1918, after the victory of the
working-class revolution in November 1917, the Soviet government canceled
all of Russia’s
debts to foreign banks and investors. Revolutionary Russia never
repaid those debts. As Trotsky said, the bankers “were warned in ample
time.”
Almost every country in the “developing” world today—burdened by
debts, usually contracted by corrupt and dictatorial neo-colonial regimes
at the expense of the impoverished majority—could benefit by following the
example set by the Russian workers of 1905 and 1917.
Armed insurrection
in Moscow
From the onset of the general strike in October, St. Petersburg was
the center of the revolution. The center now shifted to Moscow.
The Moscow Soviet had formed much later than the one in St.
Petersburg, finally getting organized in mid-November. The Soviet in Moscow
was dominated by Bolsheviks. After holding a series of open public meetings
to discuss tactics, the Moscow Soviet called for a general strike to begin
on Dec. 7.
The Soviet also began preparations for an armed uprising. The strike
paralyzed the city and tensions mounted. On Dec. 9 the army surrounded a
meeting of some 600 people (100 of whom had small arms). After waiting two
hours, the military stormed the building, using heavy artillery to destroy
much of it. The strikers, massively outnumbered, surrendered. The military
continued shooting them after they had been captured (the same kind of
thing we have seen in the recent suppression of Falluja).
An urban guerrilla war now broke out, with small groups of workers
firing small arms at heavily armed troops with artillery. The troops
shelled any building from which a shot was fired and fired upon any group
of three or more civilians. (Again, the same methods being used in Iraq.)
Finally, on Dec. 16 the military surrounded the working-class
district of Krasnaya Presnya, and after intensive shelling from 16 heavy
artillery pieces, the troops started a brutal slaughter of both combatants
and noncombatants. Thousands of workers were killed (about 25 percent of
those killed were women and children).
For all intents and purposes, the revolution had been defeated. The
government immediately started executing people without trial,
interrogating and arresting workers and students, and torturing and
imprisoning anyone they suspected of political activism.
Lessons from the struggle
“The preconditions for revolutionary victory are forged in the
historic school of harsh conflicts and cruel defeats” (p. 56).
Trotsky and the other leaders of the Soviet were tried after months in
prison. Trotsky spent his time in prison studying, writing essays, and
preparing his
book about the revolution. On Sept. 19, 1906, Trotsky and the others
were brought into court. His speech before the court, defending the Soviet
and the
revolution, became widely popular among the masses of workers.
Afterwards, Trotsky was sentenced to internal exile, from which he
escaped. (His dramatic account of this is included toward the end of his
book “1905.”)
While Trotsky was in prison, elections for the first Duma were held
from the end of February to mid-April 1906. The first Duma was dominated by
the liberal Cadets because most of the left parties boycotted the
elections. The first Duma accomplished little and was soon dissolved by
Tsar Nicholas, who called for new elections (with a more restricted voting
system).
The second Duma convened on Feb. 20, 1907. Despite a number of
efforts to ensure victories for conservative candidates, the second Duma
was more radical than the first, with a substantial representation of left
parties, who decided not to boycott the elections the second time around.
A struggle between the Duma and Nicholas Romanov’s autocratic regime
continued for several more months until the tsar dissolved the second Duma
on June 3, 1907, arresting many of the deputies. This marked the final end
of the first Russian revolution.
All of the left forces in the revolution, including both wings of
the Social Democrats (the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks) and the Socialist
Revolutionaries, made mistakes. But they also did many things well and
learned very quickly.
One of the first lessons was the importance of the political mass
strike and the formation of workers councils (Soviets) as instruments not
of a single political party or union but as representative bodies of the
entire class. This lesson was communicated in a number of ways by several
revolutionaries, the two most important being Trotsky himself (in his book
“1905” and other writings from the period) and Rosa Luxemburg.
Luxemburg published “The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the
Trade Unions” in 1906, shortly after the revolutionary events described by
Trotsky. Her goal was to communicate the political lessons of the Russian
Revolution to Marxists in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
A second lesson of the revolution took longer to be assimilated by
the Social Democrats because it went against one of their fundamental
assumptions about revolution in a “backward” country such as Russia (while
backward, it was the seventh most industrialized country in the world at
the time, as
measured by industrial output). That lesson was expressed in
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
While this theory was developed and presented by
Trotsky and his co-revolutionist Parvus during the early days of the
revolution, Trotsky’s first full statement of the theory was published in
1906 in his
work “Results and Prospects.”
Up to 1905, most Marxist revolutionaries in Russia believed they
were fighting for democratic government under a capitalist economy. In
other words, they
thought of themselves as fighting for a bourgeois revolution against
the strong surviving elements of feudal landlordism still prevalent in
Russia. Later,
after the economy had developed under capitalism, they would struggle
for a socialist revolution.
Trotsky’s genius was to realize that the historical development of
social classes and capitalism in Russia had in fact been different, that an
anti-feudal,
anti-monarchical, democratic revolution would not be led by capitalists—because
the capitalists were linked with the feudal landlords and the monarchy and
feared the newly emergent working class and the rebellious peasantry.
It turned out that the necessary measures to modernize Russia, which
socialists had expected the capitalists to carry out through a “bourgeois
democratic” revolution, could only be achieved by the working class taking
power. But once in power, the workers would carry out not only democratic
measures to free their peasant allies from feudal landlordism, and free
all of Russia from monarchical rule, but also socialist,
anti-capitalist measures to meet the needs and interests of the working
class.
Of course, Trotsky (and later Lenin and the majority of Bolsheviks
who adopted Trotsky’s perspective and went on to carry out a combined
“bourgeois-democratic” and socialist revolution in Russia in 1917) realized
that the revolution would not survive and succeed unless it spread to
western Europe, forming a United Socialist States of Europe and Russia.
One hundred years after the 1905 revolution, there is much that
serious activists in North America can learn from that history.
Assimilating the history of the first Russian revolution (and of other
revolutions and struggles for social justice) will help us create our own
revolution. Trotsky and Lenin, and many of the other revolutionaries of the
time, knew that it was harder to make a revolution in an advanced
capitalist country, such as Germany or the U.S., than it was in a backward
capitalist country, such as Russia or China. There is much we need to learn
because there is so very much that we need to do. Trotsky gave us a model;
he learned by doing.
Works by Trotsky on the 1905 Revolution:
“1905” by Leon Trotsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1971).
Originally drafted during and immediately after the revolution, this book
was completed in Vienna in 1908-1909 and published in Germany in 1909; the
Vintage edition (now out of print) is the only available translation in
English.
In addition to the preface to the German edition and to
the first and second English editions (all written by Trotsky), the Vintage
edition contains four
“annexes” with political articles that Trotsky wrote on
the revolution, descriptions of the trial of the Soviet deputies and
Trotsky’s speech to the court, excerpts from letters he wrote in exile, and
his account of escape from exile.
“The Permanent Revolution, and Results and Prospects” by
Leon Trotsky (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1969). “Results and Prospects” was originally published in 1906 and
was the first full exposition of the theory of permanent revolution, which
had guided Trotsky’s actions during the 1905 revolution and he refined as a
result of the experience. “The Permanent Revolution” is a longer work,
written in the late 1920s, defending the theory from attacks on it by
Stalin and his associates in the Soviet bureaucracy.
See also Trotsky’s chapters on the 1905 revolution in
his autobiography, “My Life,” as well as his discussion of the theory of
permanent revolution in the remaining chapters of that work; also,
Trotsky’s "Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution," in
"Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1939-40."
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