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7. La guerra ruso-japonesa y la revolucin rusa de 1905

* Creacin del estado de Rus, centrado en Kiev, por Rurik en el siglo IX (862)

* Conversin al cristianismo ortodoxo en el siglo X (989)

* Invasin de los ttaros en el siglo XIII (1237)

* La Horda de Oro y los dos siglos de dominacin mongola (1240-1480)

* Traslado del centro poltico a Gran Ducado de Mosc

* El Gran Duque Dmitry Donskoy derrota a los ttaros en la batalla de Kulikovo (1380)

* Ivn el Terrible (1462-1505) se convierte en el primer zar (emperador)

* Mijail Romanov, fundador de la dinasta, es coronado zar en el siglo XVII (1613)

* Los Romanov gobiernan Rusa durante 300 aos, hasta el siglo XX (1613-1917)

* Cdigo de 1649 refuerza la servidumbre campesina (los siervos podan ser vendidos)

* La comuna campesina (obshchina, mir) y el reparto peridico de las tierras

* Revueltas campesinas dirigidas por Stenka Razin (1670) y Emelian Pugachev (1773-5)

* Catalina la Grande (1762-96) y expansin al Mar Negro a costa del Imperio Otomano

* Invasin napolenica, batalla de Borodino e incendio de Mosc (septiembre 1812)

* Revueltas de los oficiales decembristas (26 diciembre 1825)

* Revuelta de noviembre 1830 en Polonia

* Controversia entre los occidentalistas (zapadnik) y los eslavfilos (183648)

* Rusia enva tropas para aplastar la revolucin en Hungra (1849)

* Guerra de Crimea contra Rusia (octubre 1853 / marzo de 1854 - febrero 1856)

* Abolicin de la servidumbre por el zar Alejandro II con amortizacin (1861)

* Los campesinos no pueden ser vendidos y pueden casarse con quien quieran

* Los campesinos pueden abandonar la aldea, preso solo con su consentimiento

* Los campesinos pueden adquirir bienes, dedicarse al comercio y entablar demandas

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* La comuna rural debe cobrar las amortizaciones y el impuesto de capitacin

* Comuna rural expeda pasaportes que los campesinos necesitaban para desplazarse

* Los campesinos recibieron minifundios que condujeron a hambrunas peridicas

* El levantamiento polaco de enero 1863

* Introduccin de los zemstvos como rganos de gobierno local (1864): nobleza

* Reduccin del periodo de servicio militar de 15 a 6 aos y creacin de milicia (1874)

* Los Narodniks (Populistas) bajan al pueblo (1874-5)

* Formacin de Zemlya i Volya: Tierra y Libertad (1876): eslavfilos de izquierda

* La guerra ruso-turca (1877-78) y el congreso de Berln (1878)

* Escisin de Tierra y Libertad (1879): Reparticin negra y La voluntad del pueblo

* Asesinato de Alejandro II por La voluntad del pueblo (13 marzo 1881) a

* Reino del zar Alejandro III

* Formacin en Ginebra del Grupo para la Emancipacin del Trabajo (1883)

* Hambruna de 1891-2: medio milln de muertos, mayormente de clera

* Sergei Witte ministro de finanzas (1893): industrializacin y proteccionismo

* Rusia se incorpora al patrn oro, aumento de los impuestos indirectos

* El estado era dueo del 68% de los ferrocarriles para 1912

* Entrada de capitales extranjeros, sobre todo franceses, y concesin de prstamos

* Alto nivel de concentracin industrial: en las ciudades prevalecen grandes empresas

* Muerte de Alejandro III y reino del zar Nicols II (18941917)

* Ley limitando la jornada laboral mxima a 11,5 hs. diarias (2 junio 1897)

* Penalizacin legal de huelgas y sindicatos con 8 meses de prisin a exilio de por vida

* Plejanov, La concepcin monista de la historia contra Mijailovsky (1894)

* Creacin del Bund en la Zona de Asentamiento juda (1897): autonoma cultural

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* Primer Congreso del Partido Obrero Socialdemcrata de Rusia (POSDR) (1898)

* Lenin, El desarrollo del capitalismo en Rusia (1899)

* Sindicalismo amarillo patrocinado por el oficial de polica Zubatov desde 1901

* Creacin del Partido Socialista revolucionario (eseristas) por Vctor Chernov (1902)

* Lenin, Qu hacer? contra el economismo (1899) y publicacin de Iskra (1900)

* Vyacheslav con Plehve ministro del interior (abril 1902)

* Segundo Congreso del Partido Obrero Socialdemcrata de Rusia (POSDR) (1898)

* Escisin entre bolcheviques (mayora), liderados por Lenin, y mencheviques (1903)

* Creacin de la Unin de Liberacin por Pyotr Struve (1904): primer partido liberal

* La guerra ruso-japonesa (8 febrero 1904 5 septiembre 1905)

Trotsky : Una poblacin de 150 millones de personas, 5.400.000 kilmetros cuadrados de

tierra en Europa, en Asia 17.500.000. La industria ms concentrada de Europa basada en
la agricultura ms atrasada de Europa, y un estado a medio camino entre el absolutismo
europeo y el despotismo asitico. Las ciudades pasaron de ser centros administrativos a
ser centros industriales, sin transitar el camino del artesanado y de los gremios. El
proletariado, por ende, no tena races artesanales sino que provena directamente del
campesinado. Una burguesa compradora, en gran parte directamente extranjera, o bien
ligada a los subsidios del estado absolutista y por ende polticamente cobarde. Un estado
parasitario que consuma una enorme proporcin de la riqueza social en gastos militares.
Una intelectualidad desclasada y radicalizada. Una enorme miseria y descontento
campesino y una opresin feroz de las minoras nacionales. Ausencia de una base de
sustentacin social para la democracia burguesa.

* La flota japonesa ataca a la rusa en Port Arthur (Manchuria) (8 febrero 1904)

* Asamblea de Obreros de Talleres y Fbricas de San Petersburg (15 feb. 1894) Gapon

* Asesinato del ministro del interior Plehve por un eserista (28 julio 1904)

* Campaa de banquetes (5 noviembre 1904 8 enero 1905)

* Congreso de los zemstvos celebrado en San Petersburg (6-8 noviembre 1905)

* Demandan amnista, libertades democrticas y un parlamento legislativo electo

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* Decreto otorga algunas libertades pero sin parlamento (12 diciembre 1904)

* La huelga de obreros de la fbrica Putilov en San Petersburg (3 enero 1905)

* El Domingo sangriento (9/22 enero 1905): Manifestacin reprimida: 130 muertos

* La peticin inclua libertades democrticas, gobierno parlamentario, igualdad ante la ley,

separacin de la iglesia y el estado, abolicin de las amortizaciones campesinas y de los
impuestos indirectos, fin de la guerra, eleccin de comisiones de fabrica, derecho a huelga
y jornada laboral mxima de 8 horas diarias.

* Designacin de un nuevo ministro del interior A.G. Bulygin (18 enero 1905)

* Decreto convocando una asamblea consultiva (Duma de Bulygin) (18 febrero 1905)

* Derrota del ejrcito ruso en la batalla de Mukden (20 febrero - 10 marzo 1905)

* Creacin de 72 sindicatos en San Petersburg y 91 en Mosc en 1905

* Pavel Miliukov forma la Unin de las Uniones profesionales (8 marzo 1905)

* Formacin del primer soviet en Ivanovo-Voznesensk (15 marzo - 18 julio 1905)

* Origen de los soviets en comits de delegados de huelgas generales a nivel ciudad

* Hundimiento de la flota rusa del Bltico en la batalla de Tsushima (28 mayo 1905)

* Motn de los marineros del acorazado Potemkin (14-24 junio 1905)

* Masacre de Odesa (16 junio 1905): 20.000 tropas matan 2.000 civiles

* Revueltas en Polonia, el Cucaso y las tres provincias Blticas

* Huelga general en Varsovia (14 enero 1905): 93 muertos

* Asamblea constitucional de la Unin Campesina Panrusa (31 julio-1 agosto 1905)

La asamblea pidi la abolicin de la propiedad privada de la tierra, la confiscacin sin

indemnizacin de todas las tierras que eran propiedad de la iglesia, la familia imperial, y el
zar, la confiscacin (en parte con y en parte sin indemnizacin) de las tierras que eran de
propiedad privada, y la eleccin de una asamblea constituyente. Sin embargo, rechaz una
resolucin bolchevique en favor de una repblica democrtica, un reflejo del hecho de
que el sentimiento de monrquico segua siendo fuerte en el campo.

* Congreso de los zemstvos y concejales (6-9 julio 1905): monarqua constitucional

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* Constitucin de Bulygin (6 agosto 1905): Duma consultiva y voto censitario

* Decreto sobre la autonoma universitaria (27 agosto 1905): asambleas obreras

* Tratado de Portsmouth: fin de la guerra ruso-japonesa (15 septiembre 1905)

* Huelga de tipgrafos en Mosc y de los ferroviarios (20 septiembre 4 octubre 1905)

* La huelga general de octubre y el "Manifiesto de Octubre" (17 octubre 1905)

* El Soviet de diputados obreros de San Petersburgo (13 octubre - 3 diciembre 1905)

* Soviet: consejo de diputados (delegados) obreros electos por asamblea

* El soviet elige un Comit Ejecutivo, publica un peridico y crea una milicia (6.000)

* Presidido por Jrustalyev-Nosar y dirigido de facto por Leon Trotsky

* Gobierno de Sergei Witte (17 octubre 1905 22 abril 1906)

El Manifiesto de Octubre promete crear una monarqua constitucional: se compromete a

garantizar las libertades civiles (por ejemplo, libertad de expresin, prensa y reunin) y a
crear un cuerpo legislativo (Duma), cuyos miembros seran elegidos popularmente y cuya
aprobacin sera necesaria antes de la promulgacin de cualquier legislacin.

* Creacin del Partido Constitucional Democrata (kadete) por Pavel Miliukov (octubre)

* Creacin de la Unin de 17 de octubre (octobristas) por Alexander Guchkov

* Los octobristas se oponan a elegir una Asamblea Constituyente y a huelgas polticas

* Creacin de la Unin del Pueblo Ruso antisemita por Alexander Dubrovin

* Ola de pogroms: 876 judos mueren en 690 pogroms en octubre-noviembre 1905

* Ola de motines: 211 motines en el ejrcito entre octubre y diciembre 1905

* Motn de la Flota del Mar Negro en Sebastopol (1 septiembre 1905)

* Motn de la Flota del Mar Bltico en Kronstadt (26 octubre 1905): 24 muertos

* Decretos otorgando una amnista parcial y autonoma a Finlandia (21 octubre 1905)

* Abolicin de la censura (24 noviembre 1905)

* Introduccin de la jornada de 8 hs. por el Soviet de St. Petersbug (31 octubre 1905)
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* Lock-out patronal y huelga general fracasada en St. Petersbug (1-7 noviembre 1905)

* Arresto del presidente del soviet Jrustalyev-Nosar (26 noviembre 1905)

* Manifiesto financiero del soviet llama a no pagar impuestos (2 diciembre 1905)

* Arresto del Comit Ejecutivo del soviet y de 200 diputados (3 diciembre 1905)

* Insurreccin de Mosc (bolcheviques) (7-17 diciembre 1905): 1.100 muertos

* Expediciones punitivas: 1.170 muertos en las provincias Blticas desde diciembre

* Nueva ley electoral ampla el sufragio (11 diciembre 1905): 4 curias (voto calificado)

* Elecciones a la 1 Duma boicoteadas por la izquierda (marzo 1906): 37% kadetes

* El gobierno francs otorga un prstamo a Rusia (16 abril 1906)

* Cada de Witte y gobierno de Ivan Goremykin (5 mayo - 21 julio 1906)

* Publicacin de la Leyes Fundamentales del Imperio (23 abril 1905): autocracia

La Duma que se cre tena dos cmaras en lugar de una, y slo los miembros de una de
ellos deban ser elegidos popularmente. Adems, la Duma tena un control limitado sobre
el presupuesto y ninguno en absoluto sobre la rama ejecutiva del gobierno. Adems, los
derechos civiles y los derechos de sufragio concedidas por las Leyes Fundamentales eran
mucho ms limitadas que los prometidos por el Manifiesto de Octubre. El zar conservaba
un poder de veto sobre todas las medidas legislativas, as como el control de la
administracin del Estado, de la poltica exterior, de las fuerzas militares y del
nombramiento de todos los ministros. El zar tena el derecho de imponer la ley marcial o
estado de emergencia en las regiones acosadas por los disturbios. Si la legislatura no
aprobaba un presupuesto al inicio del ao fiscal, el presupuesto anterior se mantena en
vigor. Por ltimo, el zar conservaba la facultad de disolver la Duma a discrecin, la nica
condicin era que el ucase de disolucin debe indicar cuando las nuevas elecciones se
celebraran y cuando la nueva Duma sera convocada. La nueva "constitucin" podra ser
revisada slo por iniciativa del zar.

* La primera Duma (abril-julio 1906)

* Ola de rebeliones campesinas (mayo-junio 1906)

* Decreto legalizando los sindicatos (4 marzo 1906): solo renen un 10% de los obreros

* Creacin de un soviet de desempleados en St. Petersburg (marzo 1906)

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* Pogrom de Bialistok en Polonia (14-16 junio 1906): 88 muertos

* 149 motines en el ejrcito de mayo a julio 1906

* Motines en Sveaborg (Helsinki), Kronstadt y Reval (Tallinn, Estonia): 45 ejecuciones

* Disolucin de la primera Duma debido a la cuestin agraria (9 julio 1905)

* Gobierno de Pyotr Stolypin (9 julio 1906 18 septiembre 1911)

* Ley de consejos de guerra (19 agosto 1906): 1.144 ejecuciones (corbata de Stolypin)

* Reforma agraria de Stolypin (noviembre 1906): disolucin gradual de la comuna

* La segunda (20 febrero-3 junio 1907), tercera (1907-12) y cuarta Duma (1912-17)
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Circa 862: Rurik, a semi-legendary Scandinavian warrior, establishes Rus state at Novgorod

882: Oleg moves capital to Kiev, in present-day Ukraine

988-9: Grand Duke Vladimir I becomes Eastern Orthodox

1169: Prince Andrei Bogolubski moves capital to Vladimir, near Moscow

1237-1240: The Mongols (Tatars) under Batu Khan invade Russia

The Mongol invasions of 1237, which marked the beginning of two centuries of foreign
domination (1240-1480), deepened the isolation of Rus from Western Europe

Circa 1271: Moscow becomes capital of Grand Duchy of Suzdal-Vladimir

Moscows proximity to the headwaters of four major rivers - the Oka, Volga, Don, and
Dnieper - facilitated commerce with various parts of Russia. Close also to several major
overland routes, Moscow evolved into a natural depot for refugees fleeing the declining
Kievan region, which was repeatedly attacked by Tatar hordes.

1380: Dmitri Donskoi defeats Tatars (battle of Kulikovo) takes title Grand Duke of Moscow

1462-1505: Ivan III (the Great) begins annexing surrounding areas, builds autocratic state;
religious leaders proclaim Moscow "the third Rome"heir to Rome, Constantinople

1547-84: Ivan IV the Terrible, first czar; expands autocracy, begins annexation of Siberia

1589: Russian Orthodox Church becomes independent of other orthodox churches

15981613: Time of Troubles, Poland invades Russia

1613: Michael Romanov becomes czar, founds dynasty that rules 300 years until 1917

Serfdom, an institution that had largely disappeared in Central and Western Europe by the
sixteenth century, became firmly entrenched in Russia in 1649 when a new Code of Law
reaffirmed the subservient condition of peasants. Serfdom was not abolished until 1861.

Russian serfdom both resembled its Western counterpart and yet contained features
characteristic of slavery, under which some human beings were the property of their
masters. Russian peasants were serfs in that they could not move from one location to
another without formal permission. In return for a plot of land, serfs in Russia had to pay
either a quit-rent (obrok) or work for the landlord for a specified number of days -
normally two or three - each week (barshchina, comparable to the corve).
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Unlike a slave, however, the Russian serf retained a measure of civic individuality. He was
a taxpayer, he was entitled to a plot of land, he could not be arbitrarily converted into a
household worker, and he could not be deprived of his personal belongings by violence.
Under certain circumstances, the serf was legally entitled to lodge a complaint with the
authorities about levies or labor that landlords sought to impose on him.

But the Code of 1649 contained some provisions that gave the landlord the right to treat
his serfs as property. For example, if a nobleman or any of his relatives or servants killed a
peasant of another noble, the master of the guilty party had to hand over as
compensation the best peasant under his authority together with the peasants wife,
children, and property. More important, landlords eventually secured the right to sell their
serfs to another landlord with or without land and without keeping intact the serfs family.
The landlord also decided on whether or not his serfs might marry and served as a judge
in his domain with the power to order serfs to be flogged, imprisoned, or exiled to Siberia.

The life of peasants was dominated by the commune (mir), an institution unique to Russia.
Apparently founded in the fourteenth century, the commune in time came to regulate the
local affairs of the villages. Its officials, elected by peasant householders, maintained
order, regulated the use of arable land, and assumed responsibility for the collection of
taxes imposed by the state. About 80% of the communes periodically redivided the land
among villagers to maintain an equality of allotments assigned to peasant families, whose
size would naturally vary over the years. Late in the 18th ct., each male peasant on obrok
had an average of 14.5 hectares, including 4.3 hectares of arable, and each male on
barshchina had 11.5 hectares, including 3.3 hectares of arable. There was no tradition of
private landownership among the bulk of the countrys population. This and the vagaries
of Russias climate explain the low level of productivity and low standard of living.

1653: The reforms of Patriarch Nikon trigger the Raskol (schism) of the Old Believers

1670-71: Stenka Razin rebellion (Cossack led peasants against boyars and landlords)

1696-1725: Peter I (the Great) Russia's first emperor; creates modern European power;
promotes Western culture, builds new capital, St. Petersburg

1700-21: Great Northern War against Sweden; Russia becomes a major European power.

172562: Era of palace revolutions.

1762: Emancipation of the gentry: Henceforth, nobles no longer owed any service to the
state and, except during wartime, they could resign from the army and the civil
administration. They now also enjoyed the privilege of traveling abroad freely and could
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enter the service of foreign powers. But it would be wrong to conclude that nobles were
now citizens in the Western sense of the word. The authorities could still inflict corporal
punishment on them and could with immunity confiscate their hereditary estates.

176296: Catherine II (the Great) turns Russia into one of strongest powers in Continental
Europe at the expense of the Ottoman Empire (Crimea and the shores of the Black Sea)

177375: The Pugachev rebellion.

Emelian Pugachev, an unruly Don Cossack who spent several years in the imperial army
and fought in a number of campaigns in Poland and Turkey, had been imprisoned for his
refusal to remain in the army after having contracted a serious illness. He escaped, settled
in the territory of the Iaik Cossacks, an area east of the Volga river, where the local
population had for some time been waging a struggle to maintain their autonomy.
Pugachev gained support from these Cossacks and then enlisted support from other
disaffected elements, notably peasants and Old Believers. In 1773 he proclaimed himself
to be Tsar Peter III, Catherines husband. He then proceeded to assemble a following of
some thirty thousand men, whom he organized into a fierce though ragged army. His
announced aims were simple: the elimination of rule by landlords and government
officials, an end to serfdom, and the abolition of taxes and military service. In July 1774
the pretender stormed the important city of Kazan, and although he did not capture it he
did burn much of the town to the ground. At this point, Pugachev held a large swath of
territory in eastern Russia and it seemed likely that he might attack Moscow itself.
Catherine amassed a large army, which in the fall of 1774 the army crushed the
insurgents. Pugachev, betrayed by his comrades, was taken prisoner and hauled to
Moscow in a cage. He was executed on 11 January 1775. He was then strung on a pole,
and sections of his dismembered body were put on public exhibition before being burned.
Pugachevs rebellion claimed the lives of 20.000 insurgents and 3.000 officials and nobles.

1785: Charter of the Nobility stipulates that no noble was to be deprived of his honor, life,
property, or title without a trial by his peers. If a nobleman was found guilty of a serious
crime, his hereditary estate would not be confiscated, as had been the practice, but would
go to his heirs. Henceforth, nobles were exempt from corporal punishment, the poll tax,
and the obligation to billet troops in their homes. Finally, the nobles of each province
could now form a corporation headed by a general assembly and provincial marshal of the
nobility. The assemblies, to meet every three years, were entitled to petition the crown,
the senate, and various officials for redress of grievances and for specific administrative
measures, but petitions had to be limited to matters of concern to the local nobility. The
authorities in St Petersburg pointedly did not make any provision for a national
organization of nobles, which potentially could challenge the central government.
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1790: Publication of Radishchevs A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow.

180125: Reign of Alexander I.

1812: Napoleon invades Russia; winter and Russian resistance nearly annihilate his army.

Napoleons plan for an independent Poland would deprive Russia of lands she had
acquired during the recent partitions of that country. Another important source of friction
was Russias unwillingness to honor the Continental System, the economic blockade that
Napoleon had mounted against Great Britain and that he expected other European states
to follow. The system was so detrimental to Russian exporters and landlords that they
persistently disregarded it, so Napoleon decided to invade Russia.

7 September 1812: Battle of Borodino

On 7 September a Russian force of 112,000 met a French army of 130,000 near Borodino,
about seventy-five miles south-west of Moscow. Although the fighting lasted only one
day, the bloodletting was savage. The Russians lost 58.000 men and the French 50.000,
including 47 of their best generals. The outcome can only be described as uncertain, for
though the Russians withdrew again, their morale was high and their retreat orderly.

15 September 1812: Fire of Moscow

26 December [O.S. 14 December] 1825: Decembrist revolt.

Russian army officers led about 3,000 soldiers in a protest against Nicholas I's assumption
of the throne after his elder brother Constantine removed himself from the line of
succession. Because these events occurred in December, the rebels were called the
Decembrists (Dekabristy). This uprising, which was suppressed by Nicholas I, took place in
the Senate Square in Saint Petersburg. 70 dead, 5 executions, 31 life exiles to Siberia.

182555: Reign of Nicholas I.

1830: November Uprising in Poland, inspired by the 1830 revolutions in Western Europe

The fighting lasted about eight months, but in the end the Russian forces won, though the
victory was not due solely to military superiority. To split the Polish opposition, Tsar
Nicholas in May 1831 issued a ukase lightening the economic burden on Polish peasants,
many of whom now became indifferent to the insurrection. This explains the peculiarity
that peasants in the western borderlands of the empire enjoyed better conditions than
those in the heartland. Nicholas treated the defeated Poles with great severity. Many of
the leaders of the insurrection were banished from their country, the land of about one
tenth of the nobility was confiscated and handed over to Russian generals and officials.
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183648: Westernerizers (zapadnik: occidentalistas)Slavophiles controversy.

1848: Revolutions in Europe.

October 1853 February 1856: Crimean War:

The international crisis that erupted in 1853 into the Crimean War was outwardly due to
the protection of Christians and Christian churches in Turkey, specifically in Palestine.
Since pilgrimages to the Holy Land were made more frequently by individuals of the Greek
Orthodox faith than of any other, the Christian sanctuaries there were largely supervised
by the Orthodox Church. But in 1842 the French renewed their interest in the Near East
and also began to make claims as guardians of the Holy Places. Louis Napoleon sought to
follow the example of his uncle, Napoleon I, by enhancing Frances influence abroad. In
particular, the French government now demanded to be given the key to the great door of
the Church of Bethlehem and the right to replace the Latin star marking the birthplace of
Christ that Greeks had allegedly stolen in 1847. The Russians, on the other hand, warned
the Turkish authorities that they would not tolerate concessions to the French. Unwilling
to offend either the Russians or the French, the Turks at first prevaricated and then, in
1852, promised both sides that they would accede to their wishes, a duplicitous move that
did not deceive anyone for very long. Enraged, Louis Napoleon in December 1852 put on a
show of naval force in Turkish waters and forced the Turks to yield to his wishes.

At this point, Tsar Nicholas made his first major miscalculation. He mobilized two army
corps in the expectation that Austria would come to his support. After all, in 1849, when
Austria faced widespread domestic unrest, Nicholas had sent Russian troops to help the
Austrian government put down the revolution. It was only natural, the tsar thought, that
Austria would reciprocate now that Russia needed help. He also believed that a firm
stance by him and his assumed ally would force Turkey to give in to his demands. He now
called on Turkey to agree to a secret alliance with Russia that would guarantee not only
the privileges of the Orthodox Church with regard to the churches but also grant Russia
the right to act as protector of all Orthodox subjects (about two million) in Turkey. Not
only Turkey but the European powers were appalled by Russias demand, which they
rightly considered to be a violation of Turkeys sovereignty. They feared that Russias real
goal was to establish a protectorate over Turkey. Great Britain urged Turkey to reject
Russias more extreme demands. When it did, the Russians invaded the Danubian
principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (in July 1853), though they were soon forced by
international pressure to retreat from them. Both France and Great Britain came to
Turkeys aid; Prussia remained neutral and Austria adopted an anti-Russian stance, going
so far as to occupy the very principalities that Russia had coveted.
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Early in 1854 the war began in earnest with Russia ranged against Turkey, Britain, and
France. Even though the Russians scored some victories, the war proved to be a fiasco for
all the belligerents but most of all for the Russians, who were unable to defend their own
territory. The most intense battles were fought in the Crimea and despite many blunders
the Western generals succeeded in capturing Sevastopol (in September 1855), a major
naval station on the Black Sea. This was a devastating blow, but it was not until four
months later, when Austria threatened to enter the war if Russia did not immediately
agree to negotiate peace on previously stipulated conditions, that the authorities in St
Petersburg decided to end hostilities and to attend a peace conference. Bad judgment and
incompetence had characterized the Russian war effort from the beginning: the Christians
in the Turkish empire did not rise up in arms; the existing railway lines were incapable of
transporting in a timely fashion the men and ammunition to the war zone; Russias
weapons were much inferior to those of France and Britain; and the Russian commanders,
some of whom were thoroughly corrupt, turned out to be even more prone than their
opponents to make catastrophic blunders. Russian losses in men and equipment were
horrendous; according to an estimate that includes deaths from disease, about 600,000
soldiers died during the three-year conflagration. There could be no doubt that Russia was
in almost every respect a country that lagged far behind the rest of Europe.

Under the circumstances, Russia fared better than might have been expected at the Paris
Peace Conference in 1856. The allies did retreat from all the Russian territory they
occupied, but Russia had to cede to Moldavia a strip of southern Bessarabia bordering on
the Danube. Turkey retained suzerainty over Moldavia and Wallachia and all the
signatories promised to respect the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire and to
refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Turkey, which, in turn, agreed to establish
religious and legal equality for all its subjects (including specifically all Christians). Finally,
the delegates at the peace conference agreed that the Black Sea would be neutralized;
that is, it would be open to merchant ships of all nations but not to warships of any. Thus,
neither Russia nor Turkey would be allowed to send its navy into the waterway, a
restriction that would become a major issue over the next half century.

185581: Reign of Alexander II.

1856: Alexander II announces intention to abolish serfdom for military reasons

The Crimean War had made it clear that serfdom was undermining Russias military
prowess. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Russian empire maintained the
largest standing army in Europe, in all some two and a quarter million men. So large a
force was considered necessary because of the long, exposed frontiers, the absence of a
railway network enabling the rapid movement of troops from one region to another, and
 14

the lack of trained reserves. But even that huge army proved to be insufficient during the
Crimean War because a sizable portion of it was stationed, for security reasons, in the
Kingdom of Poland and along the Galician frontier. The government therefore drafted a
large number of raw recruits, but it could not find enough men capable of serving as
officers in the enlarged army. When Sevastopol, a major naval station on the Black Sea,
came under threat, the high command could muster only 100,000 trained men for the
citys defense. It also turned out that the Russian economy could not produce an adequate
supply of equipment for the army. And when the war ended, Russia faced a serious fiscal
crisis: in 1857 alone, the treasury had a deficit in excess of seventy-five million rubles,
almost all of which could be traced to the increased outlay necessitated by the Crimean
conflict.

The most plausible solution to the crisis was to emulate the practice of the European
countries that maintained a relatively small standing army and a trained strategic reserve
that could be called into action in time of war. But so long as serfdom existed such a
course was out of the question. It would have meant training a large number of serfs in
the use of firearms and military tactics and then discharging them without any guarantee
that they would find productive employment. The potential threat to public order was so
obvious that the government believed it had no choice but to adopt a more radical
alternative, the abolition of serfdom.

But there were other reasons for adopting that alternative. The peasants themselves had
made clear their desire for emancipation. During the thirty years of Nicholas Is reign more
than six hundred peasant revolts broke out. Most of them were relatively minor and could
easily be contained, but increasingly Tsar Alexander II as well as many nobles came to
believe that they had more to fear from inaction than from emancipation. As Alexander II
put it in 1856, It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin
to liberate themselves from below.

1861: Emancipation of the serfs.

About three-quarters of the roughly 74 million people in Russia were in bondage either to
the state or to landlords. The lot of the landlord serfs, about 55% of all peasants, was not
much different from that of chattel. The state peasants were those who lived on state
property that was administered by the treasury. Economically, they were better off than
the landlord serfs, and the control that bureaucrats imposed on them was less harsh than
that of the nobles. The common feature of the state peasants and landlord serfs was that
all were tied to the land; they could not freely move from their place of abode.
 15

Although the emancipation decree of 1861, which initially applied only to the landlord
serfs - state peasants were emancipated five years later - was not as far reaching and
generous as the peasants had hoped, it was a reform of the greatest importance. It began
a process that by 1866 had changed the legal condition of the great majority of Russian
subjects. It outlawed the sale of human beings and prohibited the arbitrary transfer of
men and women from field work to house work; peasants were now free to marry
whomever they wished; they could acquire property, become traders, and were granted
the right to bring actions to court. From the standpoint of the peasants, the principal
drawback of the decree was that it did not give them enough land; at best, it offered them
as much land as they had worked before the reform and in many instances they received
less. The peasants were also forced to pay to the government redemption dues, which
were calculated by capitalizing the obrok and the obshchina at six percent, over a period
of 49 years. In the meantime the government gave the landlords interest-bearing bonds
covering about three-quarters of the total value of the dues, which was in many instances
more than the value of the land that was handed over to the peasants. In other words, the
peasant had to pay for the redemption of his person.

The commune was not only preserved but strengthened. Most notably, the Assembly of
the Commune took over the bulk of the public law powers previously exercised by
landlords; it also supervised and guaranteed the redemption payments as well as the
collection of the poll tax and it issued the passports peasants needed if they wished to
leave their area of residence even for a temporary period. These powers of the mir were
in addition to the ones it had exercised before the emancipation.

Over the next few decades, economic conditions for most peasants deteriorated. One
reason for this was the sharp rise in the peasant population, which increased from 50 to
79 million in the years from 1860 to 1897. The inevitable result was that the size of
individual land allotments shrank from an average 14.4 hectares in 1877 to 11.3 in 1905.
The average tax on the peasants land, moreover, was ten times as high as on the nobles
land. Agriculture remained extremely backward, in large measure because of the periodic
repartition of the land, which discouraged innovation. In Germany, for example, one
desiatina of land yielded 128 poods (one pood equals 36 pounds) of wheat in the summer
and 104 poods in the winter. In European Russia, the comparable figures were 64 and 41
poods, respectively. Periodic famines, caused by inclement weather, only added to the
woes of the peasantry. The death rate in Russia was almost double that in Britain.

One of the consequences of the abolition of serfdom was the decline of the nobility or
dvorianstvo, which in 1897 amounted to 1.5% of the population, though of these over
28% were Poles. From 1861 to 1905, the nobility surrendered about one-third of its land.
 16

186164: Formation of the first Zemlya i volya (Land and Freedom) Herzen y Chernishevski

January 1863: Polish uprising; trial and exile of Chernyshevsky.

1864: Introduction of local government and judicial reforms, including open and public
trials and a jury system.

Another major reform introduced in 1864 created an entirely new system of local self-
government. The measure provided for the election of local organs of self-government,
known as zemstvos, at the county (uezd) and provincial levels. The elections were not
democratic as we understand the word. The population was divided into three classes, or
colleges - nobility, townsmen, and peasants - and the number of representatives they
could send to the zemstvo was based on the value of the property owned by each group.
Also, the county zemstvos elected the delegates to the higher, provincial zemstvo, a
further dilution of democratic principles. As a result, nobles and government officials, who
represented a small minority of the population, were a decisive force in the organs of self-
government. In 1865, for example, they constituted 42% of the delegates in the district
assemblies and 74% in the provincial zemstvo assemblies.

Nevertheless, the zemstvos were, as nearly all scholars agree, remarkably effective in
improving general conditions on the local level. They played a decisive role in the
construction and maintenance of roads and hospitals, supervised local educational
institutions, encouraged economic development, administered prisons, and saw to the
building of new churches. To carry out these functions the zemstvos employed a growing
number of trained experts - doctors, veterinarians, agronomists, statisticians, teachers,
engineers - who, known as the third element, had become by the end of the nineteenth
century an influential force in public life. To prevent the zemstvos from challenging the
central authorities, the government had taken the precaution of prohibiting them from
considering matters of national concern.

1866: Karakozovs attempt to assassinate Alexander II.

186674: The White Terror; further development of populist revolutionary theory.

1874: Military reforms. The decree reduced the period of service from 25 to 6 years,
created a reserve and a militia, and introduced a more humane system of discipline.

1874 and 1875: The going to the people movement.

1876: Formation of the second Zemlya i volya (Land and Freedom). They admitted a
possibility of a special, non-capitalist way of development of Russia, with peasantry as its
basis.
 17

24 April 1877 3 March 1878: Russo-Turkish War

In 1877 Russia became embroiled in yet another conflict with Turkey, the fourth in the
nineteenth century, over control of the Balkans, where large numbers of Christians were
under the domination of the Turks. This time the Russian forces generally fought well and
in March 1878 imposed upon the Turks the Treaty of San Stefano, which radically changed
the boundaries in the Balkans. Russia annexed southern Bessarabia and the important
cities of Batumi in Transcaucasia and Kars in eastern Anatolia. Turkey was obliged to
accept the full independence of Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro and the autonomy of
Bulgaria, which became a principality dominated by Russia. However, Russia could not
enjoy the spoils of victory for more than a few months. In July 1878, the great powers,
most notably Austria-Hungary and Great Britain, forced the tsar to accept some important
revisions of the Treaty of San Stefano. Although Russia retained the lands it had annexed,
Bulgaria was substantially reduced in size and Austria-Hungary took control of Bosnia and
Herzegovina. Once again, Russia was humiliated.

March 1878: Vera Zasulich attempted to assassinate General Trepov, the police chief of St
Petersburg, and succeeded in wounding him seriously, but she was acquitted by the jury.

1879: Zemlya i volya splits over question of terror; formation of Cherny peredel (Black
Repartition, Plekhanovs group) and Narodnaya volya (Peoples Will).

13 March 1881: Alexander II assassinated by Narodnaya volya.

188194: Reign of Alexander III. He owed his political ideas to one of his tutors,
Constantine Pobedonostsev, at one time a professor of civil law at Moscow University and
from 1880 to 1905 chief procurator of the Most Holy Synod. Counter-Reform.

The government made various efforts to reduce the number of students from the lower
classes, already quite small, who attended high schools and universities. It raised
educational fees and it encouraged educational administrators to sift out from the pools
of applicants those who were likely to be politically unreliable. At a time when only 21%
of the population could read and write, the number of students in various types of high
schools declined over a period of thirteen years (1882 to 1895) from 65,751 to 63,863.

Jews were especially suspect and therefore placed under special restrictions. Not only
were they ineligible to serve as deputies in the zemstvos and urban legislatures, but in
1887 the government set specific quotas on the number of Jews who could attend
secondary schools or institutions of higher learning (numerous clausus): in the Pale of
Settlement, where most Jews lived, they could not exceed 10% of the student body and
outside the Pale the figure was 5%. They could not be army officers or civil servants.
 18

14 August 1881: Statute of 1881: Alexander III enacted a statute enabling the government
to impose emergency regulations in any region of the empire. The statute provided for
two kinds of special measures, Reinforced Security (Usilennaia Okhrana) and
Extraordinary Security. The first could be imposed by the minister of internal affairs or a
governor-general acting with the ministers approval; the second only with the tsars
approval. Under Reinforced Security, officials could keep citizens in prison for up to three
months, impose fines, prohibit public gatherings, exile alleged offenders, transfer blocks
of judicial cases from criminal to military courts, and dismiss zemstvo employees. Under
Extraordinary Security, a region was placed under the authority of a commander-in-chief,
who was empowered to dismiss elected zemstvo deputies and even to dissolve zemstvos,
to suspend periodicals, and to close universities for up to one month. Widely used in 1905

1883: Formation in Geneva of the Group for the Liberation of Labour. Plekhanov publishes
Socialism and the Political Struggle (1883), and Our Differences (1885) against Populism.
The other leading members were Vera Zasulich and Pavel Axelrod.

1891-2: Russian famine of 1891-2: by the end of 1892 about half a million people died,
mostly from cholera epidemics triggered by the famine

1893: Sergei Witte becomes Minister of Finance, architect of Russian industrialization.

Witte contended that if Russia was to make rapid progress in modernizing the economy,
the state would have to play a large role. He therefore launched an array of programs to
amass capital investment. He promoted foreign loans and investments, established
confidence in Russias financial system by adopting the gold standard, placed extremely
high tariffs on foreign industrial commodities, and substantially raised the rates of
taxation. A large share of the financial burden for these programs fell on low-income
groups, especially the peasants, who had to pay high prices for manufactured goods and
absorb the high indirect taxes on such items as tobacco, sugar, matches, and petroleum.

The state participated directly in the nations economy to an extent unequalled in the
West. In 1899 the state bought almost two-thirds of all metallurgical production. By the
early twentieth century it controlled some 70 % of the railways and owned vast tracts of
land, numerous mines and oil fields, and extensive forests. The government received more
than 25 % of its income from various holdings. The economic well-being of private
entrepreneurs thus depended in large measure on decisions by the authorities in St.
Petersburg. This was a major reason for the relatively timid approach to politics of a
substantial sector of the Russian bourgeoisie prior to 1905. By 1914 the Russian Empire
was the fifth industrial power in the world, though labour productivity as well as per-
capita income still lagged far behind those in Western Europe.
 19

18941917: Reign of Nicholas II.

18941901: Programme of intensive industrialization.

Always a major factor in the national economy, the state assumed an especially large role
in stimulating industrialization. The government not only placed high tariffs on foreign
commodities and encouraged foreign investments and loans to Russian industrialists but
also became directly involved in the economy. By 1912, when Russia was the fifth
industrial power in the world, the state owned 68% of all railways; by 1899 almost one-
third of all metallurgical products were bought by the state; from 1903 to 1913 the
government received over 25% of its income from its various holdings rather than from
taxes. Another important characteristic of Russian industrialization was the prevalence of
very large enterprises. In 1866, 43% of the workers in the cotton industry were employed
at plants with more than one hundred employees; in 1877, 51%; in 1894 72%. The
proportion of workers employed in factories with more than one thousand employees was
three times as large in Russia as in Germany, generally considered to be the pace-setter in
industrial concentration. Workers constituted 2.4% of the total population in the early 20th
ct. Until 1897, a working day of thirteen hours was the norm; that year the working day
was shortened to eleven and a half hours. Trade unions and strikes were forbidden.

By the early twentieth century Russia comprised one-sixth of the earths surface (it was
almost three times the size of the United States) and was populated by some 130 million
people, around 55% of them not ethnically Slavic; there were more than 150 minorities.

Russia in 1900 had a population of nearly 130 million. In 1897 less than 13% of the
population of European Russia lived in towns, as against 41% in France, 54% in Germany,
and 77% in Great Britain. Peasants still comprised some four-fifths of the total population.
Their economic situation was miserable. Crop failure led periodically to disastrous famines
and epidemics, such as the one of 1891-2. In the forty years that followed the
emancipation of 1861, the rural population increased by more than two-thirds, but this
was accompanied by only a marginal rise in the productivity of peasant farming. The
peasants had been allocated insufficient land and had been forced to pay for it at an
inflated price; these redemption dues, added to heavy taxes, imposed a burden far
heavier than they could be expected to bear. According to the 1897 census only 25% of
men and 10% of women outside the cities were literate. The commune (obshchina, mir).

The industrial workers: The total number of industrial workers was only about 3 million
(2.4 % of the population) According to official statistics a total of 2.2 million workers were
employed in mining and manufacturing industries in 1900. If one includes those not
subject to the factory inspectorate, a figure of approximately two and a half million is
 20

obtained. To this one may add another half a million employed in transport and
approximately 300,000 building operatives in urban areas, making 3.3 million in all. This
represented 2.5% of the total population of 129 million in 1897. But the industrial workers
were concentrated in key centres from which, if they acted in an organized manner, they
could exercise an influence out of all proportion to their numerical strength. It was largely
through them that new ideas penetrated into the countryside, shaking it from its ancient
slumber. In the early stages of industrialization peasants were employed in the factories
on a seasonal basis. In the early 1900's an official investigation ascertained that 18% of the
workers in the Moscow area returned annually to help with the harvest, while 30% still
owned an allotment of land. The average for the whole country was 28%.

A law of 2 June 1897 limited the maximum length of the working day for adult males to
11.5 hours (10 hours on Saturdays and the eve of 12 official holidays). Night work was
limited to 10 hours. Prior to 1906 any independent labour organization, such as a trade
union, was expressly forbidden, by law. The penal code laid down that members of any
association which sought 'to incite hatred between employers and workers, or to foment
strikes' were liable to penalties ranging from eight months imprisonment in a fortress to
exile for life. If the organization were deemed particularly dangerous (if, for example, it
comprised two or more 'circles' under a central directing authority, or if it incited men to
violence), its members could be sentenced to a maximum of six years hard labour.

Until 1905 a strike, even if unorganized, was also a penal offence, for which those held
responsible could be detained for a period of eight months. These laws were interpreted
flexibly. In August 1897 the Ministry of the Interior advised provincial authorities not to
institute judicial proceedings against strikers, but to banish them to their place of
domicilea measure that had adverse results even from a narrow security point of view,
since the men punished in this way carried the idea of revolt into the villages.

November 1892: Polish Socialist Party (P.P.S.) founded (Jzef Pisudski)

1893: Social-Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland (S.D.K.P.) (Rosa Luxemburg)

1894: Plekhanov publishes On the Question of the Monist View of History against
Mikhaylovsky. The censor had cause to regret his error: the first edition was sold out
within three weeks, and for some time the work served Russian radicals as a standard
textbook. It was a skilful popular exposition of the precepts of Marxist dialectical and
historical materialismthe first occasion that these doctrines had been set before the
general Russian public.

1894: Lenin publishes What the Friends of the People are and how they fight the Social-
Democrats?, where he denounced the Populists as 'petty bourgeois'.
 21

October 1897: The Bund formed in the Jewish Pale of Settlement ("Zona de residencia")

18971900: Lenin in Siberian exile; perturbed by revisionist tendencies in Social

Democratic movement.

1-3 March 1898: First Congress of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), Minsk

1899: Lenin publishes The Development of Capitalism in Russia

1 December 1900: First number of Iskra

190105: Economic slump; agrarian and industrial unrest.

1901: Zubatovshchina, or yellow unionism sponsored by the police. Dropped in July 1903.

In 1901, the government adopted an experiment in police unionization known as

Zubatovshchina. The scheme was the brainchild of S. V. Zubatov, a police officer. Zubatov
envisioned the evolution of the tsarist regime into a social monarchy, whose authority
would be strengthened immensely by its assumption of the role of mediator in the
struggle between capitalists and workers. Under his aegis, government officials organized
a series of police unions in several major cities that submitted demands to their
employers, who were pressured by police agents into making concessions to the workers.
Initially, workers appeared to be rallying around the monarchy in response to Zubatovs
enticements, but in July 1903 one of the police unions was believed to have been the
moving force behind a general strike in Odessa, the first work stoppage of such
dimensions in Russia. Alarmed at this dangerous turn of events, the authorities dismissed
Zubatov and ended his experiment. But in 1904 the minister of internal affairs, Plehve, in
to defuse the protest movement of the working class, permitted a priest in St. Petersburg,
Father Georgii Gapon, to revive police socialismwith results far more explosive.

1902: Foundation of Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs) led by Viktor Chernov

The SRs believed that, since most people in Russia had been exposed to the egalitarian
principles of the commune, the country could attain socialism without passing through the
stage of full-blown capitalism. The party advocated the transfer of all land to peasant
communes or local associations, which in turn would assign it on an egalitarian basis to
everyone who wished to earn their living by farming. Industry would be similarly
socialized. The SRs regarded political terror as necessary to bring about the dismantling of
the autocratic regime and their Combat Organization targeted government officials.

1902: Publication of Lenins What is to be Done? against Economism and revisionism.

Theory of a centralised vanguard party plus a peridico poltico central para toda Rusia.
 22

April 1902: Vyacheslav von Plehve is appointed Minister of the Interior, following the
assassination of Dmitry Sipyagin, with control over the police, censorship, etc.

30 July 23 August 1903: Second Congress of RSDLP held in Brussels and London (24
das!); split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

Debate on Party organization: Martov wanted to substitute for Lenins wording personal
participation in one of the partys organizations the phrase regular personal support
under the guidance of one of [the partys] organizations.

July 1903: Creation of the liberal Union of Liberation by Struve; disbanded in October
1905, after the creation of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets).

1904

January 1904: Creation of the Union of Liberation, first liberal political group in Russia.

The Union of Liberation (Soyuz Osvobozhdeniya) was founded in St. Petersburg in January
1904 to be a covert organization working to replace absolutism with a constitutional
monarchy. Originally the creation of liberal nobility, it soon was dominated by middle-
class, professional people, who gave the union a new militancy.

8 February 1904 5 September 1905: Russo-Japanese War

The basic cause of the war lies in the imprudent policies of expansionism in the Far East
that were pursued by various senior officials and influential men at court. When a Russian
speculator and adventurer, A. M. Bezobrazov, unexpectedly received a concession from
the Korean government to cut timber on the Yalu and Tumen rivers, the Japanese
government became alarmed because this threatened its long-range plans of expansion.
To avoid conflict, the Japanese proposed an arrangement whereby Russia would be
granted predominance in Manchuria in return for Japans predominance in Korea. In
January 1904 Tokyo pressed for a speedy reply to its proposal. Neither Tsar Nicholas nor
his chief ministers wanted to go to war, but the monarch was too weak to resist the
importunities of Bezobrazov not to yield to Japans overtures for compromise.

8 febrero 1904: La flota japonesa ataca la flota rusa anclada en Port Arthur (Manchuria).

Not receiving any reply to their proposal, the Japanese on January 26 launched a surprise
attack on Russian ships at Port Arthur and Chemulpo. In one blow the Japanese managed
to put out of action over half the Russian fleet in the Yellow Sea, suffering very minor
losses. Within a few weeks, the Japanese landed troops in Chemulpo and strengthened
their forces in Korea, which then drove the Russian outposts back beyond the Yalu River.
 23

15 February 1904: Ministry of Internal Affairs approves the charter of Gapons Assembly

The priest Gapons schemes to help the poor in the capital came to the attention of the
Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, who urged the Committee of Ministers to take an
interest in his work. Zubatov began to send the priest a monthly subsidy of one hundred
rubles (a substantial sum at the time), and in the summer of 1903 Gapon founded the
Assembly of the Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg. He had
secured Zubatovs agreement to minimize police involvement in the organization as well
as to allow members to play a more active role in determining its work than in other
police unions. The assembly did not intervene in labor disputes, concentrating instead on
organizing dances, concerts, and lectures, and other projects for self-improvement. Gapon
deliberately restricted the assembly to activities that were politically innocuous. According
to the charter, only workers of undisputed Russian origin and of the Christian faith could
join the assembly. Gapons organizational skills were outstanding. 150 people attended
the opening ceremony of his assembly on April 11, 1904; within five months he had
established a total of 9 branches with a total membership of 5,000, and the estimates of
the assemblys membership in January 1905 range from 6,000 to 20,000.

28 julio 1904: Asesinato del ministro del Interior Plehve por un militante SR.

It took Tsar Nicholas more than a month to decide on Plehves successor. On 26 August,
he announced the appointment of Prince P. D. Sviatopolk-Mirsky as minister of internal
affairs. Mirsky committed himself to a series of reforms, such as granting additional
powers to the zemstvos, reducing restrictions on the press, and the pursuit of more
enlightened policies toward national minorities, and he dismissed several of the more
notorious hard-liners from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The liberals decided to put the
new minister of internal affairs to the test by convening a zemstvo congress in St.
Petersburg early in November 1904.

October 1904: The Union of Liberation adopts a more militant program

The Union of Liberation gave expression to this new combativeness in a three-point

strategy adopted in October 1904. First, the union would persuade the zemstvos, local
councils established by Tsar Alexander II, to ask the throne to grant a constitution. Second,
it would stage a series of banquets, ostensibly to celebrate the 40th anniversary of
Alexander II's reform of the law courts, but actually to push for liberal political ideals.
Third, it would support the formation of unions and their amalgamation into a union of
unions. Encouraged by the Union of Liberation's example, many liberal groups passed
resolutions demanding a constitution. In time, the leadership of the liberal movement
passed to the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party led by Pavel Milyukov.
 24

11 October 1904: Protest meetings of university students in Saint Petersburg:

A meeting of students at the Polytechnical Institute expressed its lack of confidence in the
government and demanded an end to the war and the convocation of a constituent
assembly on the basis of universal suffrage. In the next two months, similar meetings
were held at other universities in the capital and in Moscow, Kharkov, Odessa, and Kiev.
At one demonstration, on 28 November in St. Petersburg, the police charged the crowd
and beat students cruelly, but on the whole the zemstvo campaign proceeded peacefully.

5 November 1904 8 January 1905: Banquet campaign as in France in 1847-8. In all, 38

banquets were held in 26 cities.

6-8 November 1904: Congress of the zemstvos: Adopted resolutions demanding amnesty
for political offenders, civil freedoms, and a representative assembly with legislative
powers, without, however, pronouncing the sacramental word constitution.

The government was expected to prohibit this meeting, whose organizers had made clear
their intention to take up political issues that transcended local matters, legally the only
area of competence of zemstvos. But after some hesitation, Mirsky indicated that he
would order the police to wink at the proceedings so long as the delegates met in
private quarters for a cup of tea. At the same time, he ordered officials to suppress all
news about the congress, though he himself wanted to be informed about the outcome of
the discussions. Despite the news blackout, politically sophisticated people generally knew
that the zemstvo representatives were meeting in the capital. More than five thousand
telegrams from all over the empire arrived at the congress urging the delegates to press
for fundamental changes in the unbearable state of affairs. Soon major newspapers
ignored government restrictions and published reports on the congress. The wall of
censorship was now widely pierced.

The 103 delegates to the zemstvo congress voted a ten-point resolution that called for a
fundamental reordering of Russias institutions, though there was some opposition to the
tenth point. The first nine points condemned the prevailing state system as abnormal
and arbitrary and proposed that officials be placed under the law and that the
government grant civil liberties and abandon the estate principle in the election of
deputies to local organs of self-government, which assigned an inordinate proportion of
deputies to the gentry, merchants, and clergy. Such organs, moreover, should be
established in all regions of the empire. Point 10 asked for a popular representative body
that would participate fully in running the affairs of state, that is for a parliament with real
powers to legislate. The resolution did not contain the word constitution, which was
anathema to the authorities. Constitutional monarchists.
 25

12 December 1904: Ukase (decree) enacts reforms but without an elected assembly

The ukase (decree) of 12 December 1904, which Witte drew up for the tsar, instructed the
Committee of Ministers to draft legislation granting greater freedom of the press and of
religion, more rights to the peasants, and government insurance for the workers
measures proposed by both Mirskii and the zemstvists; but the ukase said nothing about
an elected assembly. Clearly, the tsar and most of his ministers were not prepared to
accede to the basic demands of the reformers.

December 1904: Gapons Assembly clashes with the management of the Putilov plant

Late in 1904, when the liberal movement was moving into high gear, Gapon intensified his
efforts to turn the assembly into a powerful organization. He went so far as to hold secret
discussions with several of his associates on the desirability of drafting a petition, possibly
containing political demands, that would be submitted to the tsar on the occasion of a
new military defeat or perhaps on 19 February 1905, to commemorate the emancipation
of the serfs in 1861. But a series of unexpected events at the Putilov plant, a large
armaments and shipbuilding factory in the south-western section of St. Petersburg, led
Gapon to change the timing and to some extent the focus of the petition. Many workers
at the plant belonged to the assembly and when, in December 1904, four of them were
arbitrarily dismissed by the director, S. I. Smirnov, who had displayed strong hostility
toward Gapons organization. At first, Gapon thought that the issue could be settled
amicably, but the administration of the factory refused to reinstate the four workers.
Gapon concluded that he had to insist on their reinstatement to retain the prestige of the
assembly among the membership and among workers in general. On 3 January 1905 the
workers at the Putilov plant decided to go on strike, which Gapon immediately supported.
The strike spread to other factories with remarkable speed, which suggests that the
dismissals were only the spark that ignited the flame. By 7 January 1905, about two-thirds
of St. Petersburgs factory workers100,000 people at 382 enterprisesstopped work.

1905: Una poblacin de 150 millones de personas, 5.400.000 kilmetros cuadrados de

tierra en Europa, en Asia 17.500.000. La industria ms concentrada de Europa basada en
la agricultura ms atrasada de Europa, y un estado a medio camino entre el absolutismo
europeo y el despotismo asitico. Las ciudades pasaron de ser centros administrativos a
ser centros industriales, sin pasar por el camino del artesanado y de los gremios. El
proletariado, por ende, no tena races artesanales sino que provena directamente del
campesinado. Una burguesa compradora, en gran parte directamente extranjero, o bien
ligada a los subsidios del estado absolutista y por ende polticamente cobarde. Un estado
parasitario que consuma una enorme proporcin de la riqueza social en gastos militares.
Una intelectualidad desclasada y radicalizada. Ausencia de base para la democracia.
 26

The principle of freedom of association was not recognized; all gatherings of groups of a
dozen or more people required police approval. No public lectures could be delivered
without formal permission by the police, which generally declined to issue permits.

3 enero 1905: Inicio de la huelga de los obreros de la fbrica Putilov en San Petersburgo.

El 3 de enero de 1905, estall la huelga en la fbrica Putilov. El 7 de enero, el nmero de

huelguistas se elevaba a 140.000. La huelga alcanz su apogeo el 10 de enero. El 13 se
volvi al trabajo. El movimiento econmico, que tiene por causa un motivo ocasional, se
extiende, arrastra a decenas de millares de obreros y se transforma por consiguiente en
un acontecimiento poltico. A la cabeza del movimiento se encuentra la Sociedad de
Obreros de Talleres y Fbricas de San Petersburg, organizacin de origen policial. Los
radicales, cuya poltica de banquetes ha entrado en un callejn sin salida, arden de
impaciencia. Se hallan descontentos por el carcter puramente econmico de la huelga y
empujan hacia delante al conductor del movimiento, Gapn. La socialdemocracia pasa a
primer plano. Es acogida con manifestaciones hostiles, pero pronto subyuga a su
auditorio. Sus enseas se convierten en las de la masa y quedan fijadas en la peticin.

The workers initially focused on economic issues, but to maximize their support they
quickly began to voice political demands. Gapon wasted no time in exploiting the mood of
militancy; on 5 January 1905, he raised the question of preparing a petition to be
presented to the tsar by a large, peaceful procession through the streets of St. Petersburg.
Gapon informed the city governor of his intentions, and neither he nor any other official
tried to deter the priest from his scheme, which turned into the most momentous event
of the revolution, known in history as Bloody Sunday.

22 enero 1905 [O.S. 9 enero 1905]: Domingo sangriento: manifestacin y peticin

El calendario juliano estaba atrasado 13 das en relacin al gregoriano

De acuerdo con la resolucin adoptada en comn, el avance hacia el palacio fue pacfico:
no se cantaba, ni se llevaban banderas, ni se pronunciaban discursos. Los manifestantes
iban endomingados. En algunas partes de la ciudad llevaban conos y oriflamas. En todas
partes tropezaron con las tropas. Suplicaron al ejrcito que concediese el paso,
imploraron, intentando rodear los destacamentos o atravesarlos. Los soldados dispararon
durante toda la jornada. Los muertos se contaron por cientos, los heridos por miles. No
pudo establecerse su nmero exacto, pues la polica retiraba los cadveres durante la
noche, hacindolos desaparecer secretamente.

Manifestacin pacfica de cerca de 100.000 obreros rusos con sus hijos, para presentar
una peticin al zar, es ahogada en sangre. 130 muertos, 299 heridos de gravedad.
 27

Petition Prepared for Presentation to Nicholas II:

Let everyone be free and equal in his voting rights, and to that end order that elections to
the Constituent Assembly be conducted under universal, secret and equal suffrage. This is
our main request, everything is based on it. But no single measure can heal all our
wounds. Other measures are necessary, and we, representing of all of Russia's toiling
class, frankly and openly speak to you, Sovereign, as to a father, about them.

The following are necessary:

I. Measures against the ignorance of the Russian people and against its lack of rights

1. Immediate freedom and return home for all those who have suffered for their political
and religious convictions, for strike activity, and for peasant disorders.

2. Immediate proclamation of the freedom and inviolability of the person, of freedom of

speech and of the press, of freedom of assembly, and of freedom of conscience in matters
of religion.

3. Universal and compulsory public education at state expense.

4. Accountability of government ministers to the people and a guarantee of lawful

administration.

5. Equality of all before the law without exception.

6. Separation of church and state

II. Measures against the poverty of the people

1. Abolition of indirect taxes and their replacement by a direct, progressive income tax.

2. Abolition of redemption payments, cheap credit, and the gradual transfer of land to the
people.

3. Naval Ministry contracts should be filled in Russia, not abroad.

4. Termination of the war according to the will of the people.

III. Measures against the oppression of labor by capital

1. Abolition of the office of factory inspector.

2. Establishment in factories and plants of permanent commissions elected by the

workers, which jointly with the administration are to investigate all complaints coming
 28

from individual workers. A worker cannot be fired except by a resolution of this

commission.

3. Freedom for producer-consumer cooperatives and workers' trade unionsat once.

4. An eight-hour working day and regulation of overtime work.

5. Freedom for labor to struggle with capital [i.e. to strike]at once.

6. Wage regulationat once.

7. Guaranteed participation of representatives of the working classes in drafting a law on

state insurance for workersat once.

The massacre of Bloody Sunday electrified public opinion. A vast strike movement spread
throughout the country. The following day, on 10 January 1905, some 160,000 workers
stayed away from their jobs in St. Petersburg. Very quickly, the strike movement spread to
Moscow, Riga, Warsaw, Vilna, Kovno, Tiflis, Baku, Batum, and the Baltic provinces, to
mention only the major regions affected by the unrest. All told, some 414,000 people
within the empire participated in the work stoppage during the month of January 1905.
Bloody Sunday activated the working class to a degree unprecedented in Russian history.

In St. Petersburg the authorities closed down all branches of Gapons organization and
asked factory owners to supply lists of unreliable workers, who were to be exiled. Gapon,
who had played a key role in stoking the upheaval that spread across the Russian Empire,
now became a rather pathetic figure without any influence on the future course of the
revolution. He escaped to the West, where he denounced the beast-Tsar and his jackal-
ministers and declared himself a convert to revolutionism. In the fall of 1905, Gapon
returned to St. Petersburg and performed yet another volte-face; he abandoned his
extremist views and established contact with the government. Witte, now prime minister,
was pleased with this turn of events but, fearing the priests influence, saw to it that
Gapon was given 500 rubles on the promise that he would leave Russia immediately.
Gapon did just that and once again aroused the enmity of the radicals for speaking
favorably of Witte as the only man who could save Russia from the abyss. Within weeks,
Gapon was back in St. Petersburg determined to resurrect the assembly. When the police
blocked that plan, he conceived of a series of intricate maneuvers to secure permission
from the police to reestablish his organization. On 28 March 1906, Petr Rutenberg and
other SRs lured Gapon to a cottage in a small town near the Finnish border and killed him.

18 January 1905: Sviatopolk-Mirsky resigns as minister of internal affairs. The tsar

replaced him with A. G. Bulygin, but the real head of the government was General Trepov.
 29

On 11 January General D.F. Trepov was appointed governor-general of St. Petersburg and
on 21 May 1905 he assumed the additional post of assistant minister of internal affairs. In
effect, Trepov now took charge of police affairs throughout the empire. Alexander Bulygin
exercised little authority, and Trepov often made policy without even consulting Bulygin.

17 febrero 1905: Asesinato del gran duque Sergei Alexandrovich, gobernador de Mosc y
to del zar, por un militante SR.

18 February 1905: Ukase (decree) calls for the convocation of a consultative assembly.

The assembly would not have the power actually to pass legislation, but it was still a
concession to public opinion. In addition, the decree instructed the Council of Ministers to
examine suggestions by private persons or groups for "the improvement of the
organization of the state and the betterment of public welfare." For about four months
roughly from late February until July 1905organizations of various kinds, but most
notably zemstvos, city councils, and cultural and professional societies, engaged in a
petition campaign in response to the tsars request for ideas on how to improve the
state. Hundreds of meetings were held throughout the empire to discuss reform proposals
and to adopt resolutions that were dispatched to the minister of internal affairs. The
newspapers carried accounts of the meetings and thus publicized the grievances and
demands that were being voiced by growing numbers of people. Instead of curbing
unrest, the monarchs ukase proved to be a catalyst that mobilized masses of people who
had not previously dared to express opinions on political issues.

18 febrero 1905: Un primer manifiesto gubernamental promete convocar a los

representantes de la poblacin para participar en la elaboracin y en la discusin
preparatoria de las propuestas legislativas.

20 February-10 March 1905: Derrota del ejrcito ruso por el ejrcito japons en Mukden.

With the defeat of the Russian Manchurian Army in the battle of Mukden, the Russian
forces were driven out of Manchuria for good.

12-27 abril 1905: III Congreso del Partido Obrero Socialdemcrata Ruso (POSDR) en
Londres reuniendo nicamente a los delegados bolcheviques.

15 February 1905: Revocation of two official circulars of 1897 punishing strikers.

Industrial strikes in 1905 were so numerous and involved so many people that it was no
longer possible to arrest instigators of work stoppages or to exile strikers to their native
villages. Also, the government finally grasped the foolishness of sending strikers back to
the countryside, where they could stir up unrest among the peasantry. To no avail.
 30

Strike wave of 1905:

Strikes occurred most often in the first and last quarters of the year. During the three
months from January to March 1905, more than 20 times as many workers participated in
work stoppages in Russia as went on strike in any one year from 1895 to 1908 in Germany,
the United States, and France. According to officials who monitored only 70 % of the
industrial labor force, in January 1905 some 414,000 workers were on strike and in
February, 291,000. In March and April the number declined to 72,000 and 80,000
respectively, but in May it rose to 220,000, in part because of the celebrations on 1 May.
In June and July the number of strikers decreased to 142,000 and 150,000, respectively. In
the summer months of August and September, the strike movement declined again:
78,000 and 36,000. In October it rose to its peak, 481,000, and it remained high in
November (323,000) and December (418,000). Altogether in 1905, 13,110 establishments
were affected by work stoppages. More than 2.5 million working days were lost.

Movement toward unionization:

In the spring of 1905 workers began to establish trade unions in defiance of the law. All in
all, by the end of September 16 unions were formed in the capital, 24 in Moscow, and a
few others in scattered parts of the empire. During the last three months of the year, 57
unions appeared in the capital and 67 in Moscow.

The intelligentsia also formed unions, though strictly speaking that was a misnomer.
Although composed of individuals with similar professional interests, the unions of the
intelligentsia directed most of their efforts not at obtaining improved economic conditions
but at abolishing the autocracy. Lawyers in St. Petersburg took the lead when they met, in
defiance of police directives, on 30 January 1905, and by late April no less then 14 national
professional unions had been established representing physicians, journalists, engineers,
pharmacists, academicians, accountants, agronomists, veterinarians, teachers, railway
employees, and zemstvo activists as well as people advocating equality for women and
Jews. The membership of these unions ranged from 1,500 to 7,500.

8-9 May 1905: Formation of the Union of Unions (Milyukov)

On 8-9 May 1905, 60 delegates from the 14 unions attended a congress in Moscow and
founded an umbrella association, the Union of Unions, which served as a connecting link
between liberals and revolutionaries. It advocated the abolition of the existing political
regime and the transfer of power to the Constituent Assembly, which was to be elected by
secret ballot on the basis of direct universal suffrage with equal representation. Its
strategy was a fusion of liberal tactics with the threat of revolution. Pavel N. Miliukov, a
leading liberal, was the chairman of the Union of Unions.
 31

At the Union of Unions second congress in June 1905, Milyukov wrote the resolution
(adopted by the delegates) that called for the most radical measures to topple the regime:
All means are now legitimate against the frightful menace that is posed by the very fact
of the continuing existence of the present government, and all means should be
employed. Two months later, in August 1905, the Union of Unions Central Committee
voiced its support for a general strike directed specifically at the achievement of political
goals. It also rendered financial aid to participants of armed uprisings in December 1905.
Serious disagreements arose in the Union of Unions between the radical wing, which
supported a revolution to overthrow the autocracy, and the liberal leaders, who favored
conciliatory policies. Miliukov, fearful of a split within liberalism, began to distance himself
from the union. In fact, his change of tactics merely delayed the split between Kadets and
Octobrists. By late 1906 the union was disbanded.

15 mayo 1905: Formacin del primer Soviet, de 151 diputados, en Ivanovo-Voznesensk.

The distinguishing feature of the earliest soviets is that they represented not only people
from one factory or trade but a wide range of workers in a variety of plants in one
geographical region, generally in an entire city. Their purpose was to provide unified
leadership for workers and to serve as strike committees; gradually many of them evolved
into organizations that fused the struggle for economic and political change.

An organization considered to have been the first soviet (even though it did not adopt that
name) appeared in mid-May 1905 in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a city of 80,000 inhabitants in
the central Russian industrial region. Known as the Russian Manchester, Invanovo-
Voznesensk was a center of the textile industry, one in which conditions of work were
especially harsha fourteen-hour workday was common. In an attempt to secure better
conditions, workers at one factory went on strike on 12 May; within a few days some
thirty-two thousand other workers joined the strike and every factory was closed. When
the workers submitted a list of 24 demands to the district factory inspector, the inspector
suggested that deputies from individual plants be elected to conduct negotiations for
them all. The workers agreed after the authorities promised not to arrest the deputies. On
15 May 1905, the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Assembly of Delegates (composed of 151 deputies)
was born, and it quickly elected a presidium to act as an executive.

For the first three weeks of the strike there was no violence in Ivanovo-Voznesensk,
because the assembly quickly succeeded in establishing its authority over the citys labor
force and took measures to avoid disturbances. Most notably, it created a militia charged
with forestalling clashes between strikers and Black Hundreds as well as between strikers
and strikebreakers and with keeping workers in remote factories informed of the
assemblys decisions.
 32

Late in May 1905 relations between strikers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk and the authorities
began to deteriorate, because the governor prohibited a mass meeting called to protest
the use of strikebreakers. The workers held their meeting anyway and were attacked by
Cossacks; several workers were killed and many were arrested. Infuriated, workers threw
stones at buildings and policemen, tore down telegraph poles and wires, looted factories
and liquor stores. The governor received authorization to place the city under Reinforced
Security and ordered Cossacks to conduct extensive searches. After 47 days, a group of
workers gave up and returned to their jobs with a vow to resume the struggle as soon as
they regained their strength. Most continued the strike, but after the employers made
very some modest concessions they, too, began to drift back to the factories and by 18
July 1905 the strike ended. The assembly, acknowledging defeat, disbanded.

But the labor unrest in Ivanovo-Voznesensk was an historic event. Outside the Kingdom of
Poland, it was the longest and most disciplined strike between January and October 1905.
Moreover, the assembly in Ivanovo-Voznesensk as well as in Kostroma, where an
assembly was also formed on 6 July 1905, marked a new development in workers
organizations. No one planned the formation of the assembly and no one had defined its
functions and goals. The assembly made its appearance because workers were looking for
a practical way of dealing with a work stoppage of major proportions.

Originally interested in economic concessions for workers, the assembly in Ivanovo-

Voznesensk within short order assumed certain police powers, which was even more
threatening to the authorities than the demands for freedom of speech and assembly. The
evolution of this first soviet shows the difficulty of attempting to draw a firm distinction
between workers economic and political demands. Workers could not avoid politics.

27-28 (14-15) mayo 1905: La casi totalidad de la flota rusa del Bltico enviada a Japn es
barrida por la flota japonesa en la batalla de Tsushima.

The Tsushima battle effectively ended the Russo-Japanese war in Japan's favor. It was
fought in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and southern Japan. The Japanese fleet
under Admiral Tg Heihachir destroyed two-thirds of the Russian fleet, under Admiral
Zinovy Rozhestvensky, which had traveled over 18,000 nautical miles (33,000 km) to reach
the Far East. The Russians suffered 4,380 killed and 5,917 captured, as against 117
Japanese dead. The Russian navy lost all of its battleships, most of its cruisers and
destroyers, while the Japanese lost only three torpedo boats.

14-24 June 1905: Mutiny in the battleship Prince Potemkin: For 11 days it sailed the Black
Sea in the hands of its crew, until it was sought sanctuary in a neutral port.
 33

Because the operation of modern warships required skilled personnel, the navy recruited
a fairly large proportion (29%) of its men from the cities, the main centers of radical
agitation. By mid-1904 disaffection had become apparent among the Black Sea Fleet,
where some sailors in Sevastopol formed a revolutionary organization that acquired a
degree of influence in the radical political movement in southern Russia. This organization
talked of staging a mutiny throughout the fleet, though nothing came of the plan. But on
14 June 1905, an incident on the battleship Potemkin, patrolling in the Black Sea to test its
guns, triggered a mutiny that resulted in carnage in Odessa more severe than that of
Bloody Sunday. The men on the ship, some of whom were revolutionaries, were provoked
to mutiny by the mindless conduct of several senior officers. Meat that was to be served
to the sailors turned out to be rotten and when the men complained, the executive
officer, Giliarovskii, in a fit of rage shot and killed the sailors spokesman, G. M.
Vakulenchik. At this several of Vakulenchuks companions grabbed the commander, threw
him overboard and shot him. Other members of the crew quickly joined the fray, killing 4
or 5 officers, and under the leadership of the noncommissioned officer A. N. Matiushenko
seized control of the ship. The Potemkin then set sail for Odessa, where for about two
weeks strikes and demonstrations had been almost daily events and violent clashes
between workers and Cossacks had broken out sporadically. By the time the Potemkin
arrived in the harbor during the night of 14 June a mass uprising seemed to be imminent.

Though astonished by the appearance of the ship, the strikers and demonstrators warmly
welcomed the mutineers. When a group of Cossacks and policemen arrived at the harbor,
a red flag was raised as a signal for sailors on the Potemkin to fire. The Cossacks and
policemen immediately retreated, whereupon the sailors invited representatives of local
radical groups on board to discuss concerted action against the authorities. The mutineers
then placed the body of the slain Vakulenchik, surrounded by a body guard, in a
prominent place in the harbor. This attracted a large crowd, which after a few hours, for
reasons that are not clear, began to loot warehouses, carrying anything they could find.
They also began to set fires, and soon the entire harbor area was ablaze.

16 June 1905: Odessa massacre (20,000 troops kill 2,000 civilians)

Alarmed by rumors about the likely spread of the mutiny to other ships, the government
placed Odessa under martial law and Tsar Nicholas directed the governor-general of
Odessa, I. S. Kakhanov, to take the most decisive measures to suppress the uprising.
Early on 16 June, the army arrived in force and shortly after midnight the troops began to
shoot indiscriminately into the crowd. Unable to escape, many people jumped into the
sea, where they drowned, and many others perished in the flames. The shooting lasted
several hours, 2,000 people died and 3,000 were seriously injured.
 34

Dazed by the massacre and demoralized and intimidated by the sight of large numbers of
soldiers (about 20,000 in all), the workers of Odessa became quiescent and many people
tried to flee the city. By 20 June, factories began to operate again and most shops were
open. In the meantime, 18 on June the Potemkin set out to sea, hoping to spark mutinies
on other ships, but the response was tepid. Totally isolated, the ship sailed toward the
Romanian port of Constanza in search for supplies and fresh water. The Romanian
authorities turned down the request, offering instead safe refuge in return for
surrendering the ship. After some hesitation, the men on the Potemkin accepted the offer.

National oppression: The minorities in the borderlands:

Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II embarked on a policy of ruthless Russification not only
to assert the supremacy of the Great Russians but also for reasons of security. Heavily
concentrated on the borderland, the minorities were considered a potential danger in
time of war. As soon as the central government was weakened in the days after Bloody
Sunday, the governments policies on the national question were shown to have failed.
National sentiment was strong among the minorities, and in several outlying regions of
the empire the struggle was particularly ferocious, most notably in 1) the Polish kingdom,
2) the Caucasus, and 3) the Baltic provinces (Estland, Livland, and Kurland).

1) Poland

The people of the Polish kingdom had been under Russian control since the partition of
Poland (1772-95) and subjected to Russification after the late 1860s. Although the 11.3
million people in the Polish kingdom constituted only 7.9 % of the empires population,
their industrial output amounted to about 25 % that of the entire country. For some time,
the metallurgical and textile industries in Poland had benefited from the protective tariff
imposed by the tsarist government as well as from the lucrative markets in Russian Asia.
But the economic benefits were offset by the heavy-handed domination by the tsarist
government. The government in St. Petersburg did not permit the Poles to form zemstvos
or city councils and tried in numerous ways to hamper the development of Polish culture.
It prohibited the teaching of Polish or the Catholic religion in the schools; it mandated the
use of the Russian language in all public institutions, and it refused to employ any person
of Polish origin or of the Catholic faith in government positions.

The war in the Far East had a devastating impact on the Polish economy, and by late 1904
the mood of the country was decidedly tense. On 14 November 1904, the PPS organized a
mass demonstration in Warsaw that was accompanied by a good deal of violence. Then,
on 13 January 1905, within four days of Bloody Sunday, major strikes broke out in Warsaw
and d, and the strikers immediately raised political as well as economic demands.
 35

In d they called for an end to the autocracy and to the war and asked for an eight-hour
workday and a raise of no less than 166 %. Angered by the rejection of these demands,
workers attacked soldiers with stones and sometimes with guns, and in the ensuing
scuffles the Poles suffered numerous casualties. There was considerably more violence in
Warsaw, where workers staged a general strike on 14 January 1905. Initially, peaceful
demonstrations were held, but the presence of large numbers of troops in the city made
clashes virtually inevitable. On 16 January alone, some 60,000 cartridges were fired at
demonstrators in Warsaw. Within a 3-day period, 64 civilians were killed and 69 wounded
(of whom 29 eventually died). On 17January, the government placed Warsaw under a
state of siege; nevertheless workers in the city periodically engaged in massive strikes.

By February 1905, the protest movement had spread to Polish educational institutions,
where the major cause of discontent was Russification. Students at Warsaw University and
the Polytechnical Institute, as well as pupils at high schools and even at some elementary
schools, stopped attending class and joined street demonstrations. Disorder spread to
smaller cities and towns, and from May to November 1905 Poland was on the verge of
civil war. For the tsarist government, unrest in Poland was extremely burdensome, for it
felt obliged to maintain an army of some 300,000 men in Poland at a time when every
soldier was needed at the front in the Far East.

2) Georgia and the Caucasus (peasant uprising)

Even before the outbreak of the revolution, the structure of authority had collapsed in
Guria, a small area in western Georgia bordering on the Black Sea and Turkey. Early in
1903, many peasants, acting under the influence of Social Democrats, stopped paying
taxes. The harsh countermeasures by the authorities were futile; the peasants simply
boycotted all government institutions. Shortly after Bloody Sunday, however, the protest
movement spread to areas bordering on Guria and to other parts of Transcaucasia (the
region to the south of the Caucasus, including Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia). In
numerous localities, peasants began to ignore the directives of the authorities and
engaged in violent attacks on officials, nobles, and clergymen. When it became evident
that the army could not stop the unrest, a revolutionary peasant committee announced its
seizure of power in Georgia. It abrogated all taxes as well as obligations to landlords and
the clergy, and it confiscated state and private lands, which were distributed to peasants
without compensating the owners. In addition, the committee established a system of
obligatory and free education for children, urged peasants in the villages to create organs
of self-government, and demanded the convocation of a democratically elected
constituent assembly, the teaching of Georgian in every school, and the use of the
Georgian language in the conduct of official business.
 36

On 18 February 1905, the government placed Georgia under martial law and dispatched
General A. M. Alikhanov-Avarskii with 10,000 troops and several pieces of artillery to
quash the uprising. For four months Alikhanov held his fire, because he was outnumbered
by the rebellious peasants and feared his troops would fraternize with them. In July he
withdrew his forces completely, only to return in October to assault the insurgents. But it
was not until January 1906 that the insurrection in Georgia was completely crushed.

3) The Baltic provinces

The ferocity of popular unrest in the Baltic provinces in 1905 is explained by the fact that
the national movement nurtured resentments of two kinds. On the one hand, the imperial
government insisted on the use of the Russian language in most classes in the schools and
encouraged the Orthodox Church to convert the local population, which to a large ex- tent
was Lutheran. On the other hand, the local nobility, who owned a disproportionate share
of the land, and the persons who occupied most of the managerial posts in the factories
were overwhelmingly of German extraction. Germans also held most of the important
positions in the local organs of government, the police, the courts, and the educational
institutions, and tended to treat the Latvians and Estonians with contempt.

As soon as word of Bloody Sunday reached Revel (Tallinn, capital of Estonia) virtually all its
15,000 workers went out on strike, setting forth economic demands very similar to those
of workers in St. Petersburg. There was relatively little violence, and the workers managed
to wrest some concessions from employers. In Riga (the capital of Latvia), however, the
strike that began on 13 January 1905 was marked by violence, because the governor-
general, A. N. Meller-Zakomelskii, was especially brutal in dealing with demonstrators.
During one skirmish alone soldiers fired into a crowd, killing 70 and injuring about 200.

Worker unrest continued in the Baltic provinces for much of 1905 and soon spread to the
countryside, where the Germans were even more prominent than in the cities. Some
1,500 nobles, most of them German barons, owned about 2.5 million desiatinas of land,
whereas 1.3 million Latvian peasants owned approximately 2 million desiatinas. Many of
the poorer peasants owned between 0.5 and 5 desiatinas and could eke out a living only
by becoming agricultural laborers. On several occasions, these agricultural workers
engaged in strikes and in other forms of protest. They refused to pay taxes and rents,
boycotted Russian administrative offices, and attacked the castles and estates of German
barons. Because of a shortage of troops, the barons assembled their own military forces,
and by the summer of 1905 bloody clashes between them and the rebellious peasants had
turned into a civil war. In the fall, the government imposed martial law, which only
provoked more attacks on private estates. Toward the end of the year, Russian troops
entered the Baltic region in force and crushed the peasants and workers movement.
 37

In Belorussia and the Ukraine nationalist movements were relatively docile, though people
began to demand that local languages be adopted in the schools and in institutions of
higher learning. In Finland, the opposition to the tsarist policy of Russification had been
intense for some years and reached a high point late in 1905, when the country literally
became paralyzed. The tsar in November beat a hasty retreat. He issued a manifesto
suspending earlier measures (especially the manifesto of 1899) that had stripped the Finns
of autonomy. The Finns had won a major victory, but the unrest continued because by
now a growing number of people demanded independence, which they won in 1917.

Peasant unrest

Unrest in the countryside in 1905 became very intense; more than 3,000 incidents of
unrest involving peasants occurred throughout the empire. The first major disorder in the
countryside broke out in Dmitriev (Kursk gubernia, in the border with Ukraine) in mid-
February 1905 and spread quickly to the neighbouring regions in the provinces of Orel and
Chernigov. During the first few months of 1905 there were relatively few incidents of
disorder in the countryside: 17 in January; 109 in February; 103 in March; 144 in April. In
May, when the thaw had set in, the number grew substantiallyto 299. It remained high
for two more months: 492 in June and 248 in July. In August and September, when
peasants were preoccupied with reaping the harvest and sowing the winter crop, the
number declined to 155 and 71. In October it rose sharply (to 219), and in November and
December reached the highest levels of the year796 and 575, respectively.

In the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus, peasant unrest was directed at governmental
authority, but in European Russia most of the disorderslightly more than 75 % of all
incidentswere directed at landlords estates. For the rest, peasants in European Russia
attacked the clergy (less than 0.5 % of the disorder), kulaks (about 1.4 %), and merchants,
usurers, and liquor stores (roughly 8 %). In slightly less than 15 % of the incidents did
governmental authorities bear the brunt of the peasants rage. It is noteworthy that the
rhythm of the peasant movement was different from that of the labor movement. The
months of greatest labour unrest, January, February, and October, were not the months
of greatest peasant unrest, although the last two months of 1905 witnessed a
considerable amount of disorder in both the industrial and the agrarian sectors of the
economy. Had the two protest movements developed simultaneously throughout 1905,
the autocracy would have found itself in an even more precarious condition than it did.

The peasants took part in the petition campaign, asking for the transfer of all state and
landlords land to the peasants; the convocation of a democratically elected constituent
assembly; the granting of civil liberties; the extension of local self-government, and the
liberation from prison of all political dissenters.
 38

A tsarist official unwittingly took an initiative that opened the way for the establishment
of a mass peasant organization. The governor of Moscow City urged some peasants to
issue a statement in support of the war. A number of peasants responded to the appeal by
holding a peasant congress in May 1905 in Moscow, but the gathering showed no interest
in the governors patriotic project. Instead, under the influence of reports about the
formation of unions by the intelligentsia, the peasants congress announced plans for the
creation of an All-Russian Peasants Union, which was to take up larger economic and
political issues. The congress called for the election of representatives in each guberniia,
uezd, and volost to attend a meeting that would set up the new organization.

31 July - 1 August 1905: Constitutional Assembly of the All-Russian Peasants Union

On 31 July and 1 August 1905, the Constitutional Assembly of the All-Russian Peasants
Union met secretly near Moscow, attended by more than 100 delegates from 22
provinces. The assembly called for the abolition of private property in land, the
confiscation without compensation of all lands owned by the church, the imperial family,
and the tsar, the confiscation (partly with and partly without compensation) of privately
held lands, and the convocation of a democratically elected constituent assembly. But it
rejected a Bolshevik resolution in favour of a democratic republic, a reflection of the fact
that sentiment for a monarchy was still strong in the countryside. Finally, the assembly
elected a Bureau of Assistance, which was to serve as the unions Executive Committee.

16 June 1905: First national Congress of City Council Representatives

At the first national Congress of City Council Representatives, attended by 126 delegates
from 87 towns, the constitutionalists secured the endorsement of the four-tail suffrage
(that is, a suffrage that was universal, equal, direct, and secret, though limited to males),
which marked a significant shift to the left of this sector of public opinion. Another sign of
the delegates leftward drift was their condemnation of police brutality while refusing to
criticize revolutionary terror. Finally, they accepted an invitation from the organizing
bureau of the zemstvo movement to attend a congress on July 6 in Moscow.

6-9 July 1905: Congress of Zemstvo and City Council Representatives: Draft constitution

The congress, attended by about 200 people, published a draft constitution, or

Fundamental Law of the Russian Empire, which provided for the rule of law, civil
liberties, freedom of association, and the creation of a bicameral legislature, one branch
of which was to be elected by every citizen of the male sex. The draft did not advocate
the abolition of the monarchy, but it did propose a sharp curtailment of the tsars powers,
since it stipulated that the legislature was to control the finances of the state and that no
proposal could become law without its approval. (liberals: constitutional monarchy)
 39

6 August 1905: Tsar's manifesto plans for a consultative Duma (Bulygin Duma never met)

The Bulygin Constitution provided for an elected State Duma whose functions would be
consultative; the government would be free to enact laws with the approval of only the
State Council, an upper chamber to be composed of dignitaries appointed by the tsar. The
legislature was to be chosen on the basis of a highly restricted suffrage and the elections
were to be indirect, in several stages. In St. Petersburg, for example, out of a population of
approximately 1.4 million, only 7,130 people would be able to vote for electors in the first
stage of the elections; in Moscow, 12,000 out of 1.1 million; in Tsaritsyn, 542 out of
85,000. Industrial workers were almost completely disenfranchised. The Bulygin Duma
was never convoked. It was swept away by the October general strike, which compelled
the tsar to issue the Manifesto of 17 October 1905, promising a legislative duma.

27 August 1905: Decree on university autonomy: meetings campaign

On 27 August, the government issued a decree restoring to universities and advanced

institutes the autonomy they had been deprived of in 1884. Councils of faculty members
could now elect the rector and the deans. The councils also assumed authority over
educational matters and student affairs. For example, they could permit students to hold
meetings on school grounds and, in the event of a disorder, could close down the
institution. Courts of professors were established to rule on student infractions of
disciplinary codes. General Trepov, the arch-reactionary, was the moving spirit behind the
granting of autonomy. His strategy misfired completely. Initially, students showed little
interest in Trepovs concession and insisted that until the political system was
fundamentally liberalized the institutions of higher learning should not be reopened.
However, at a meeting of students in September representing 23 institutions from all the
empire it was decided to adopt a proposal by the Menshevik F. I. Dan that students should
abandon the strike, not to pursue their studies but rather to open the universities to the
people for mass meetings. At one institution of higher learning after another throughout
the empire, people thronged to meetings that were blatantly political. In addition to
university students, workers, soldiers, women, and secondary-school pupils attended. The
organizers of the meetings also attended to practical matters. They openly collected
money for strike funds and for the acquisition of weapons. Some speakers urged their
listeners to prepare for an armed uprising and for terrorist actions against the authorities.
Invariably, the meetings would end with shouts of Down with the autocracy. 4,000
people attended meetings at the University of Kazan on 20 September; 2,000 at the
Polytechnical Institute in St. Petersburg on 1 October; about 13,000 at St. Petersburg
University on 5 October; 4,000 at the University of Kiev on 9 October; and 10,000 at the
University of Odessa on 9 October 1905.
 40

Even the Orthodox Church, presumed to be a solid pillar of the autocracy, had to contend
with serious rebellions in its religious schools. In the spring, unrest had erupted at only 3
seminaries, where discipline and living conditions were especially harsh. But now, in the
fall, strikes broke out at 48 of the countrys 58 seminaries, many of them severe enough to
prompt officials to close the schools for prolonged periods. The seminary students
submitted demands that echoed those of students at secular institutions. They asked for
better food, the abolition of the harsh disciplinary system, the transfer of libraries to their
control, and the introduction of a secondary-school course of studies that would prepare
them for admission to secular institutions of higher learning. The last point underlines the
unwillingness of many students at the seminaries to prepare for the priesthood. They
attended church schools mainly because they had no other way to obtain an education.

1 September 1905: Treaty of Portsmouth formally ended the Russo-Japanese War.

Under the Treaty of Portsmouth signed on 29 August, the Japanese obtained control over
the Liaotung Peninsula, including Port Arthur and Dalny (Dairen), and one half of Sakhalin,
as well as preponderant influence in Korea, but Russia did not have to pay an indemnity.

The General Strike wave of October 1905 and the October Manifesto (Oct. 17)

20 September 1905: Printers strike in Moscow (tipgrafos)

At the height of the meeting epidemic, a wave of labor unrest erupted unexpectedly and
within a few days shook the autocratic regime to its foundations. The first signs of labor
unrest appeared on 20 September 1905, when the printers in Moscow went on strike in
what seemed to be a routine dispute over wages and working conditions. It was initially a
peaceful affair, but since the printing works were near the university, the strikers came
into contact with students and soon began to take part in street meetings devoted to
politics. Attempts by the police to clear the streets resulted in some violence, prompting
printers in St. Petersburg to stage a three-day strike in solidarity with their comrades.

3 October 1905: Students at Trubetskois funeral whipped by Cossacks

4 October 1905: General strike of the railway workers breaks out

A strike movement of vast dimensions began at the instigation of the Central Bureau of
the All-Russian Union of Railroad Employees and Workers, formed in April 1905, with a
potential constituency of 750,000 workers. It upheld as the convocation of a constituent
assembly and the attainment of political and civil rights for the people. The unions second
congress in July decided, to agitate for a general strike of railway workers in support of the
organizations aims and to call such a strike whenever conditions seemed propitious.
 41

The general strike of all the railways began on 4 October 1905, triggered by controversial
changes in the rules governing the pension fund that the authorities wished to introduce.
By October 10, service in Moscow stopped completely, and since Moscow was the hub of
the entire railroad system, the strike there had enormous impact on transportation
throughout the empire. The strikers sent delegations to Witte to persuade him to support
of a constituent assembly and economic concessions. Wittes response that the strike
would have to end before discussions about reform could be undertaken drove the
congress, some of whose delegates had been reluctant about a general strike, fully over to
the side of the central bureau. The railway workers in St. Petersburg gave their unanimous
support to the strike, and by 16 October 1905 it had spread to every line in the country.
On 17 October 1905 the railroad workers strike became general.

Meanwhile, on 11 October mass meetings at the University of St. Petersburg, totalling

about 30,000 people, adopted a resolution to join the all-Russian railway strike, and within
the next few days industrial workers, telegraph operators, salesmen, pharmacists, and
employees of private banks, government offices, and at city utilities failed to show up at
work. University students as well as high school students stopped attending class. Even
the Imperial Theater, private theaters, and the Mariinskii Ballet closed their doors. Food
stores opened only for three hours a day. By 16 October 1905, virtually every urban center
in the empire was affected by the October general strike. More than two million workers
and other employees joined the general strike. The empire was paralyzed.

13 October 3 December 1905: Soviet of St. Petersburg (consejo de diputados obreros)

On the evening of 13 October 1905, about 40 deputies, which grew in a few days to 226
representatives from 96 factories and 5 unions, met at the Technological Institute to set
up a strike committee to provide unified direction for the movement now engulfing the
entire city. The newly formed committee called on all factories to elect deputies, one for
every 500 workers, for a total of 562. On 17 October 1905, the Soviet of Workers
Deputies (Sovet rabochikh deputatov), elected an Executive Committee of 50, which made
the major decisions, although some issues were publicly debated and voted on by the
entire soviet. The soviet elected as chairman G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar, a left-liberal lawyer,
but Leon Trotsky (L.D. Bronstein) became its de facto leader. The St. Petersburg Soviet
became the headquarters of the general strike, keeping people informed of developments
in the work stoppage by means of a newspaper that had a run of 35,000 to 60,000 copies.
The soviet also directed food stores to open during specified times of the day, and it
proclaimed freedom of the press. Most importantly, it set up its own militia, arrogating to
itself powers normally exercised by a governmental authority (dual power).
 42

In all, workers in some 40 to 50 cities formed local soviets in the fall of 1905; in addition,
soldiers and peasants established their own councils in several regions, bringing the total
to about 80 soviets. The activities of these soviets varied considerably. Several acted
primarily as strike committees, while a few in the mining districts of the Urals and the
Donets Basin (eastern Ukraine) concentrated on preparing for an armed struggle. In most
of the soviets, Social Democrats predominated: in Odessa, Kiev, and Baku, and in the
south of Russia generally, the Mensheviks had the upper hand; in Moscow, Kostroma, and
Tver, and in the cities of the Donets Basin, the Bolsheviks were ascendant.

17 October 1905: October Manifesto + Sergei Witte Chairman of the Council of Ministers

17 October 1905 22 April 1906: Sergei Witte is Chairman of the Council of Ministers

The reform that Witte had in mind was an imperial manifesto granting civil and political
rights to the people and providing for the establishment of a unified ministry headed by
a prime minister who would have primary responsibility for running the government.
Under the prevailing system, each minister reported directly to the tsar, an arrangement
that made it possible for ministers to pursue contradictory policies. Witte was confident
that these concessions would succeed in detaching the moderates from the opposition.

The Manifesto of 17 October 1905 stated that the government would grant civil liberties
such as personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and the right of
association, and it promised that in the future no measure would become law without the
approval of an elected State Duma. It succeeded in stopping the October general strike.

Three new political parties: Kadets, Octobrists and the URP

The general strike and the October Manifesto gave rise to three new political parties. The
Constitutional Democratic Party or Party of Peoples Freedom, known as the Kadets, held
its founding congress in Moscow during the general strike (12-18 October 1905). Later, in
November 1905, Shipov and Guchkov formed the Union of 17 October (Octobrists), which
spoke for conservative liberalism. Finally, the ultraconservatives founded the Union of the
Russian People (URP) to activate the masses to defend the old order.

The Constitutional Democratic Party or Kadets (Pavel Miliukov)

The Kadet Party was essentially a movement of professionals and liberal landowners who
subscribed to the political views of the zemstvo constitutionalists and the Union of
Liberation. The professional class predominated in the partys leadership. It never
attracted many workers or peasants, nor did it succeed in gaining a foothold in
commercial and industrial circles. By January 1906 it had 100,000 members.
 43

The Kadet program called for a democratic system of government, the rule of law, a
progressive system of taxation, an eight-hour workday, and the distribution, insofar as is
necessary, of land alienated from private landlords and paid for by the government at
equitable, not market, prices. Whether the monarchy should be retained was left open.
The Kadet leaders hoped, on the one hand, to steer a course between revolution and
reaction and, on the other, to preserve the unity of the opposition.

The Union of 17 October or Octobrists (Alexander Guchkov):

To the right of the Kadets stood the Union of 17 October, which relied for its support on
commercial and industrial interests in the cities and the moderately conservative nobility
in the provinces. Not until late in 1906 did A. I. Guchkov, a wealthy Muscovite industrialist,
succeed in imposing an organizational structure on the union thereby transforming it into
a party. Opposed to the arbitrariness of the autocracy and bureaucracy, the Octobrists
were generally content with the October Manifesto. They considered additional reforms
desirable and believed that they could be achieved through the State Duma, i.e. they
opposed to call for a Constituent Assembly. Unlike the Kadets, the Octobrists were strong
supporters of the monarchy, and they tolerated and even sanctioned repressive measures
against revolutionaries. The Octobrists supported the right of workers to form unions and
to strike over economic issues, but condemned attempts to make union membership or
participation in strikes compulsory, and they repudiated political strikes. The Octobrists
favored various measures to aid the peasants economically and were prepared, in cases
of state sig- nificance, to support the alienation of some private lands if these measures
proved to be insufficient. Nationalism was a key element in Octobrist political outlook.
Guchkov opposed political autonomy for Poland as well as all schemes to decentralize the
legislative tasks of the government, though he did favor civil liberties and cultural
autonomy for minorities. He was prepared to make an exception for Finland, which, he
believed, should retain its autonomous status so long as it remained part of the empire.
Late in 1905 and for about two years thereafter, the Octobrists commanded too little
mass support to play a major political role

The Union of the Russian People (URP) (Alexander Dubrovin) Anti-Semites

Early in November 1905 A. I. Dubrovin, having concluded that a mass party of the right
was necessary to counter the left and the liberals, established the Union of the Russian
People, which, despite its very small following, became the most important of all the right-
wing organizations. It was not upper-class, but made up of lumpenproletarians as well as
some disgruntled members of other classes, and that the leaders of the movement
regarded themselves as spokesmen for a particular middle-class stratum whose position
was especially precarious and threatened by the revolution.
 44

The single most important feature of the URPs ideology was anti-Semitism, derived
mainly from two spurious documents that until 1919 were hardly known outside Russian
right-wing circles, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Rabbis Speech. According to
these two works, the elders of international Jewry were engaged in an international
conspiracy to take control of Europe and Russia by means of revolutions staged by
Christians against their own leaders. Some URP leaders advocated mass slaughter of the
Jews to solve the Jewish problem, but in its official pronouncements the URP urged the
authorities to do everything in their power to encourage Jews to emigrate to Palestine.
The Jews who remained in Russia should be regarded as foreigners but without any of
the rights and privileges extended to all other foreigners. The union regarded only Great
Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians as native Russians, defined in the official
organ as people whose father and mother, grandfathers, and forefathers were born in
Russia, chose the Orthodox religion as their own, and chose the Russian language. All
other national groups within the empire were aliens who did not merit rights equal to
those of the natives and must not be granted political or cultural autonomy.

The URP engaged in a massive propaganda campaign, bombarding the tsar with messages
of loyalty, and on occasion, organized street demonstrations, in most cases not well
attended. The URP also organized armed squads that assassinated political leaders of
the opposition. The tsar looked with favor on the union and formally received its
delegates, including Dubrovin, at his court in Tsarskoe Selo to listen to their expressions of
loyalty. He also accepted the gift of two URP badges, one for himself and one for his son.

Wittes conciliatory gestures:

21 October 1905: Ukase (decree) granting amnesty to some political prisoners

On 21 October 1905 a ukase was issued granting amnesty to various categories of political
prisoners and reducing the punishments of others. The opposition was not satisfied, but
the ukase did lead to the release of many political prisoners; 1,511 in Warsaw alone.

21 October 1905: Ukase (decree) restoring Finlands autonomy

Then, on 22 October 1905, Wittes government issued another manifesto abolishing all
measures taken since 1899 in violation of Finlands legal system, thus restoring the rights
that the Finnish people had enjoyed during the period of autonomy.

Late in November 1905: Ukase (decree) enlarging the Pale of Settlement

Late in November, in another conciliatory gesture, the government added 133 Russian
towns to the list of places where Jews were permitted to reside.
 45

Late October-November 1905: 876 Jews killed in 690 pogroms (mostly Ukraine)

Although Jews were the principal focus of the pogroms, they were not the only ones to
come under attack. The rampaging mobs also targeted the intelligentsiaanyone, in fact,
who was presumed to have participated in the movement to extract the Manifesto of 17
October 1905 from the tsar. The pogroms began on 18 October 1905, the day after the
concession was made. After seven days the mobs largely ran out of steam, but sporadic
incidents continued until late November. When Jews in Kiev were accused of having set
fire to the Golosoeevskaia Monastery and murdering all the monks, rioters destroyed
stores in the Jewish bazaar, killed 12 people, and injured 44. All in all, 690 anti-Jewish
pogroms occurred, primarily in the south-western provinces; 876 people were killed and
between 7,000 and 8,000 injured.

23 October December 1905 and May August 1906: Peasant Uprisings

On 23 October 1905 large-scale disorders broke out in Chernigov (Northern Ukraine),

when about 2,000 peasants plundered several landlords estates. The unrest spread,
reaching its climax in November (when there were 796 major and minor incidents), by
which time the turbulence in the cities had already receded. Altogether, 478 districts in
the 47 provinces of European Russia were affected, as well as parts of Caucasia, the Baltic
provinces, and Poland. Peasants cut down timber, refused to pay taxes, and took grain
from estates; and agricultural workers staged strikes. In addition, in Tambov alone, 130
estates had buildings burned down. It was also common for peasants to seize land for
temporary usethat is, until the State Duma, expected to meet soon, approved the
seizures. Although violence against individuals increased, it was not widespread, in part
because landlords made their escape before the arrival of the marauding peasants. The
unrest subsided late in 1905, only to resume with renewed vigour in the period from May
to August 1906. By the time the revolution ended in 1907, the empire had endured the
most intense wave of agrarian upheaval since the Pugachev peasant rebellion of 1773-75.

Peasants had lost faith in the government, which throughout 1905 had paid little attention
to them. Nor was the October Manifesto addressed to their immediate concerns. In a
manifesto of 3 November 1905, the government reduced by one-half the redemption
dues for almost all peasants as of 1 January 1906, and promised total elimination of such
dues by 1 January 1907. The government also announced that the Peasants Bank would
soon provide more assistance to those with small holdings who wished to buy land. But
these modest concessions did not meet the peasants expectations.

Late October mid-December 1905: Wave of mutinies in the army and navy

211 mutinies in the Russian army alone between late October and mid-December 1905
 46

26-27 October 1905: Kronstadt mutiny in the Blatic Fleet (24 dead and 72 wounded)

The first mutiny occurred in Kronstadt, on 26-27 October 1905, when 3,000 to 4,000
soldiers and sailors armed with rifles staged a riot. They plundered some 120 shop and a
few private houses, attacking units that had not joined the riot. The mutineers asked that
they be granted the rights of citizenship (including the rights of association and of free
speech), claiming that the October Manifesto accorded such rights to all the people. Other
demands included the reduction in their term of service, a minimum salary of six rubles a
month, and better food and clothing. They also asked to be allowed to attend meetings, to
spend their free time as they chose and to buy alcoholic drinks without restrictions. The
authorities dispatched loyal troops from St. Petersburg and Pskov, and by late 27 October
they crushed the rebellion, leaving 24 killed and 72 wounded.

11- November 1905: Sevastopol Mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet

The most dramatic and clearly politically motivated mutiny took place in Sevastopol, a
naval base in the Crimea, where a 38-year-old lieutenant, Pyotr Schmidt, attracted a
sizable following among disaffected sailors and radical workers. By November 1905, the
cruisers Svirepy and Ochakov as well as several smaller boats had fallen under the control
of mutineers, who called on Schmidt to assume command of the rebellion. He proclaimed
himself commander of the fleet, raised the red flag on all ships under his command, sent a
telegram to the tsar demanding the immediate convocation of a constituent assembly,
and formulated a grand plan to seize control of the entire fleet at Sevastopol and to
secure the isthmus leading to the Crimea against outside forces. Schmidt also ordered the
arrest of officers opposed to his rebellion and threatened to hang them if the government
tried to quell the rising. Admiral G. P. Chukhnin, commander of the fleet in Sevastopol,
now unleashed an attack on the ships supporting Schmidt, and after artillery fire put the
Ochakov out of commission the mutiny collapsed within a matter of hours. Chukhnins
forces arrested 600 men together with Schmidt and then freed 20 officers held by the
rebels. Early in 1906, Schmidt and three of his accomplices were court-martialed. The
tribunal sentenced all four defendants to death; on 6 March 1906 they were shot.

6 December 1905: Wittes government announces a series of military reforms

On 6 December 1905, the government decided on a series of military reforms. It increased

pay and meat rations, provided servicemen for the first time with tea and sugar, and
promised to abolish forced labour by soldiers in the civilian economy. The government
also reduced the period of service, from 4 to three 3 for infantrymen, 5 to 4 years for
cavalrymen, and 7 to 5 years for sailors. Finally, Wittes government removed a major
source of discontent by speeding up the demobilization of reservists.
 47

The elite corps, the Cavalry and Cossacks, were virtually untouched by mutiny, but one-
third of all infantry units experienced some form of disturbance, and the navy was so
riddled with unrest that the government feared that it could no longer be relied on to
carry out its mission. The 13 regiments of the Guard Corps, elite soldiers who received
special privileges, remained almost completely immune to disorder. Moreover, in late
1905 and early 1906, the government activated some 100,000 Cossacks, who were given
generous grants of money and whose privileges were confirmed by special charters issued
in the tsars name.

18 October-early December 1905: The Days of Liberty (10 weeks) and the armed uprising

24 November 1905: Wittes government abolishes censorship

On 24 November 1905 Wittes government formally abolished preliminary censorship of

periodicals. No publication was to be suppressed without juridical proceedings.
Attendance at public meetings became even more common than it had been after the
granting of autonomy to institutions of higher learning in late August. The number of labor
unions increased dramatically throughout the country. Political parties of all persuasions
stepped up their organizational activities and increased their membership numbers. But
politically the most dramatic development during the Days of Liberty was the vast
expansion of operations by the soviets. The pacesetter was the St. Petersburg Soviet.

The St. Petersburg Soviet (Trotsky)

The soviet sent directives to government agencies such as the postal service and the
railroads, sponsored collections for unemployed workers, distributing 30 kopeks a day to
needy adults and 10 to 15 kopeks to children, and set up several inexpensive dining halls
for the unemployed and their families. But the boldest undertaking of the St. Petersburg
Soviet was the establishment of its own militia. By mid-November 1905, the soviets
militia numbered about 6,000 men, who had at their disposal revolvers, hunting guns,
knives, and heavy spades. In addition, about 300 workers belonged to a special militia of
self-defense, small groups of which patrolled the streets every night from 8 PM to 6 AM
to protect merchants and residents. Some armed militiamen were posted outside the
soviets meeting place, the Free Economic Society, where deputies gathered almost daily.
The soviet took it upon itself to demand that the government issue a general amnesty for
all categories of political prisoners, send the army out of the city, end the state of siege
everywhere in the empire, and hold a democratic election for a constituent assembly. It
also sent delegates to other cities and regions of the country to establish contact with
local soviets and various workers organizations, and it maintained close relations with the
All- Russian Peasants Union. (dual power)
 48

31 October 1905: Introduction of the 8-hour workday by the St. Petersburg Soviet

When workers in several large enterprises in the capital decided on their own initiative to
introduce the eight-hour workday, the soviet supported them. Most deputies in the soviet
voted for the following resolution: On 31 October, the 8-hour day is to be introduced by
revolutionary means in all factories. Both wings of the Social Democratic movement
supported the decision. We are not yet done with absolutism, said V. M. Chernov,
leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and you want to take on the bourgeoisie.

The government and many employers responded with a massive lock-out, and early in
November 1905 more than 100,000 workers were affected. The lockout was an
unprecedented instance of collaboration by the employers, the result of their conviction
that defense of their interests now required a unified stand. Within short order, the
Association of Manufacturers and Factory Owners, representing 150 companies that
together employed more than 100,000 people, was formed. The association decided not
to pay workers for days lost during strikes and to close down their plants if workers tried
to introduce the eight-hour workday on their own.

1-7 November 1905: The St. Petersburg Soviet organizes a general political strike (defeat)

Relations between soviet and government also turned sour as a result of a feud over the
court-martial of several hundred soldiers and sailors who had mutinied in Kronstadt and
over the governments decision to impose martial law on Poland. On 1 November 1905,
the St. Petersburg Soviet voted in favor of a general political strike to protest the
governments actions. Few workers outside the capital heeded the call to leave their jobs.
In the capital itself, some 100,000 people participated in the strike, but within a few days,
even they began drifting back to their jobs. Moreover, large sectors of the liberal
intelligentsia refused to support the new strike. In their view, the opposition should now
devote its energies to preparing for the elections to the State Duma. By 4 November, a
majority of the Executive Committee of the soviet realized that the strike was a failure and
voted, 9 to 6, to end it as of 7 November 1905. This was the soviets first major defeat.

26 November 1905: Arrest of the president of the soviet, G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar

At noon on 26 November 1905, infantrymen and Cossacks surrounded the headquarters

of the Free Economic Society and arrested the president of the soviet, G. S. Khrustalev-
Nosar, together with several deputies. The soviet immediately elected a new presidium of
three men, among them Trotsky. On 27 November 1905, the presidium passed a
resolution calling on its followers to prepare for an uprising.

2 December 1905: Financial Manifesto of the St. Petersburg Soviet (Parvus)

 49

Signed by the soviet, the RSDLP, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the All-Russian
Peasants Union, and the Polish Socialist Party, the Financial Manifesto of 2 December
1905 called on the people not to make any further redemption payments or other
payments to the Treasury and to demand all wages in gold or gold coin. It also urged the
populace to withdraw all deposits from banks and to accept only gold. The authors of the
manifesto assumed that the government, deprived of an adequate supply of gold, would
lose its credit rating and would therefore not be able to secure vitally needed loans.

3 December 1905: Arrest of the soviets Executive Committee and 200 deputies (Trotsky)

The deputies of the soviet who escaped arrest formed a second soviet and elected a new
Executive Committee, headed by Parvus, which called for a general political strike to begin
on 8 December 1905. The workers did not respond in very large numbers. Although the
Union of Unions endorsed the strike, relatively few members of the intelligentsia did so.
Neither the banks nor the zemstvo and municipal institutions stopped functioning. On 19
December 1905, the Executive Committee called off the strike. In the meantime, the
center of gravity of the revolution had shifted from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

7-17 December 1905: The Moscow Uprising (1,100 dead)

Moscows population of 1.1 million was 340,000 less than St. Petersburgs (1,430,000).
Heavy, large-scale industry was much more prevalent in St. Petersburg than in Moscow.
Steelworkers far outnumbered textile workers in St. Petersburg, whereas in Moscow the
opposite was the case. Also, a significantly higher percentage of the plants in St.
Petersburg than in Moscow employed at least 500 workers.

The Moscow Committee, the main organization of the Bolsheviks in Moscow, was the
driving force behind the uprising. About 13 people nominally belonged to the committee,
but the principal decisions were made by 3 intellectuals, Martyn Liadov, Mikhail Vasilev-
Iuzhin, and Virgilii Shantser (Marat). Early in December 1905, no more than 1,000
militiamen were armed and few had more than the most rudimentary military training.
The revolutionaries knew that the outcome of an insurrection would hinge on the conduct
of the army. On 2 December 1905 they were greatly encouraged by reports of a mutiny in
Moscow. Between 200 and 300 soldiers of the Rostov Grenadier Regiment had held an
unauthorized meeting and had elected a committee to lead what amounted to a mutiny.
They prepared a list of 37 demands, most of which dealt with conditions in the army, and
a day later there were reports that 3 other units of the Rostov Grenadiers were about to
join the mutiny. The authorities ordered the arrest of a few officers and dispatched to
Moscow two regiments of infantry guards and one brigade of artillery. On 4 December
1905, loyal soldiers arrested 57 leaders of the military revolt, which quickly fizzled out.
 50

7-17 December 1905: The December Armed Uprising of 1905 in Moscow (1,100 dead)

On 6 December 1905, the Moscow Soviet, attended by about 120 deputies, issued an
official appeal to all workers to begin a general political strike at noon the following day.
For several days it seemed as though the advocates of an armed uprising had accurately
gauged the governments fragility in Moscow. Local authorities failed to move forcefully
against the insurrection. It seemed that Admiral F. V. Dubasov, the recently appointed
governor-general of Moscow, was not up to handling the growing unrest. The admiral had
under his command about 6,000 soldiers, 2,000 policemen, and a division of gendarmes, a
force large enough to quell an insurrection quickly in open battle. But out of fear that his
men might not be reliable, Dubasov withdrew them from the streets. At this early stage,
Dubasov did take some measures to contain the uprising: he placed Moscow under a state
of Extraordinary Security, and he arrested two important Bolshevik leaders, Vasilev and
Shantser (as well as the heads of the Menshevik printers union), a severe blow to the
insurrection. Other than that, the governor-general confined himself to urgent pleas for
reinforcements from St. Petersburg, which did not arrive until 15 December 1905.

The economy of Moscow ground to a virtual stand- still. By the second day of the strike,
more than 80,000 workers had left their jobs, the largest strike by far in the citys history.
Shopkeepers also closed their doors. By the evening of 7 December 1905, public
transportation had stopped, and there was no electricity. A majority of public institutions,
including the city government and the provincial and district zemstvos, were also closed.

During the first two days of the strike only scattered violence broke out. Then, on 9
December 1905, the first major clash occurred at the Fiedler Academy, where some 500
people and 100 armed militiamen were attending a meeting of the railway union. At 10
PM troops surrounded the building and ordered those present to surrender and give up
their weapons. At the expiration of the grace period, the infantrymen opened fire and
advanced to storm the academy; for the first time, they made use of light artillery. After
initially refusing to give up, the militiamen decided to yield to the superior forces, but the
soldiers showed no interest in ending the confrontation peacefully. They killed at least 5
revolutionaries, wounded 16, and arrested one 120 as they emerged from the academy.
Muscovites now came to the aid of the militia by erecting barricades, and on 10 December
Socialist Revolutionaries threw two bombs at the headquarters of the Moscow Police.

In the Presnia District, the center of the textile industry and of an especially militant sector
of the working class, the local soviet assumed full powers of government and kept the
insurrection going longer than anywhere else. The District Combat Committee,
commanded all the militiamen in the area estimated at between 200 and 600. Dubasov
began to use artillery fire against the Presnia insurgents with deadly effect.
 51

On 15 December 1905 the tide began to turn decisively against the Moscow insurgents.
The help from St. Petersburg arrived in the form of the Semenovskii Regiment, 1,500
troops commanded by Colonel G. A. Min, who had no scruples about shelling civilians. By
the time he arrived, Presnia was the primary center of resistance; the unrest in much of
the rest of Moscow had subsided. On 16 December 1905, the Moscow soviet voted to call
on their followers to stop fighting in three days.

1,059 Muscovites were killed in the December uprising. Of these, 137 were women and 86
were children. 25 policemen and 9 soldiers lost their lives. The end was marked by a brutal
crackdown. There were numerous executions, without judicial proceedings, of workers
and students on the mere suspicion of their having taken part in the rising. Hundreds of
others were arrested, and many of them were brutally beaten by their captors.

Most prominent liberals and moderates criticized the Moscow uprising. The Octobrist N. I.
Guchkov (brother of A. I. Guchkov) went so far as to offer a toast of gratitude to Governor-
General Dubasov for having crushed the rebellion. Some Kadets, who stood to the left of
the Octobrists, now abandoned the tactic of solidarity with the socialists because the
latter had shown that they were interested in social as well as political revolution.
Miliukov condemned the childish goals of armed uprising and a democratic republic.

The punitive expeditions (state terrorism):

At least ten punitive expeditionary forces were dispatched to various parts of the empire.
Major General A. A. Orlovs force in the Baltic provinces appears to have been the largest,
consisting of three infantry regiments, fourteen cavalry squadrons, four heavy guns, and
twenty machine guns. Colonel A. K. Riman, whose task was to wrest control of the
Moscow-Riazan railroad from the rebels, commanded the smallest force, a single infantry
detachment. The orders to each commanding officer were simply to apply measures he
considers necessary to restore order; the commanders understood that these words
granted them carte blanche and that they would not have to answer for any excesses
committed by their men. Punitive expeditions wreaked the greatest amount of havoc in
the Baltic provinces, large portions of which had been taken over by rebels. Under the
leadership of Lieutenant General V. U. Sollogub, an army of nineteen thousand men
unleashed an unspeakable reign of terror. In their sweep through the Baltic region, troops
summarily executed numerous citizens and mercilessly flogged peasants and workers,
men, women, chil- dren, and even the elderly. 1,170 people were killed in the Baltic region
between December 1905 and late May 1906. Punitive expeditions also operated in the
Ukraine and the Caucasus, and although these were not on the same scale as in Siberia
and the Baltic provinces, the brutality was comparable.
 52

Two other aspects of the governments policy of repression should be noted. First, the
authorities vastly increased the number of regions placed under exceptional laws. By the
spring of 1906 about 69 % of the provinces and regions of the Russian Empire were totally
or partially subjected to one of the various emergency codes. This development stood in
stark contrast to Witte public declaration of 17 October that he would seek to eliminate
the exceptional laws. Second, on 6 December 1905, the tsar signed a ukase that granted
governors and commanders in any region not under exceptional laws the right to issue
permits to wealthy landowners to form militias with their own funds. A large number of
semi-independent armed forces sprang up in the countryside early in 1906 and played a
significant role in the campaign against agrarian unrest. There are no precise figures on
the number of victims during the campaign of repression. Thousands of people were killed
The jails overflowed with political prisoners, estimates ranging from 20,000 to 100,000.
The governments repressive policies were highly effective. Within about four months, the
revolutionary movement was in retreat everywhere. Individual Terrorism by the S.R.s
(partisan war) and expropriations (armed robberies) by the Bolsheviks.

11 December 1905: New electoral law (wider franchise)

Issued on 11 December, at the very time of the Moscow uprising, the new law was more
liberal than Bulygins, although it did not meet the demands of the opposition for a four-
tail suffrage. But it vastly increased the number of eligible voters, so that somewhere
between 20 and 25 million male citizens over the age of 24 could cast ballots. Eligibility
depended on the ownership of property or the payment of taxes, and the population was
divided into four curiae: landowners, peasants, town dwellers, and workers. The
landowners curia chose electors to provincial electoral assemblies in two stages; the
peasants chose them in three stages; town dwellers in two stages; and workers voting in
designated industrial enterprises employing more than fifty workers in two stages. At the
provincial electoral assemblies, where the final choice of Duma deputies was to be made,
electoral power was distributed unequally: peasants represented 42.3 % of the electors,
landowners 32.7 %, town dwellers 22.5 %, and workers 2.5 %. This worked out to one
elector for every 2,000 landowners, 4,000 urban dwellers, 30,000 peasants, and 90,000
workers. Thus, the vote of one landowner was equal to that of 3 town dwellers, of 15
peasants, and of 45 workers. Women, some 7 million agricultural workers, 3 and a half
million servants, 2 million day laborers, 1 million construction workers, 1 million
employees in commerce, students and persons in active military service, and a few other
small groups were not represented at all. Under this arrangement, peasants were bound
to elect a very substantial portion of the Duma, since they constituted well over 70 % of
the total population. Even under the restrictive electoral law of 11 December 1905, the
population elected a Duma overwhelmingly hostile to the old order.
 53

20 February 1906: Law on the reformed State Council signed by the tsar

The project for the reformed State Council was thoroughly conservative. It transformed
the State Council into a legislative body with powers equal to those of the Duma. A
measure introduced in the Duma would be sent to the tsar for his consideration only if
both houses had voted in its favor. Half the 198 members were to be appointed by the
tsar and, of course, they could be relied on to do his bidding. The remaining 98 members
of the new council were to be elected by various social groups according to the following
formula: the dvorianstvo (nobility) would elect 18; the provincial zemstvo assemblies, 34;
large landowners in provinces without zemstvo assemblies, 22; the Orthodox clergy, 6; the
Academy of Sciences and universities, 6; the commercial and industrial class, 12. On 20
February 1906 the tsar signed the documents enacting into law these proposals, but only
after making a change of his own. He added one word to the description of his supreme
authority; it became supreme autocratic authority, a stark reminder to the country that
Nicholas did not believe that he had yielded any of his prerogatives.

March 1906: Elections for the first Duma

Boycotted by Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and S.R.s, the elections yielded a great triumph for
the Kadets, who received 37 % of the deputies and formed a block with the trudoviks. The
Kadets dropped the demand for a democratic republic in favor of the more moderate
demand for a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy.

16 April 1906: Foreign loan granted to the Russian government by the French banks

The French government concluded that, however risky, a loan was justified, because it
would bolster the alliance with Russia and prevent a rapprochement between Russia and
Germany. The contract for the loan, the largest ever for Russia, was signed in Paris on 16
April 1906 (Western calendar). A consortium of French, British, Austrian, Dutch, and
Russian banks advanced a total of 2.25 billion francs at 5 % interest. The French banks
assumed the largest share of the loan, almost one-half. For Witte, this was a great
personal triumph, as even Tsar Nicholas grudgingly acknowledged. The loan stabilized the
countrys finances and made it possible for Russia to remain on the gold standard. It also
provided the government with the wherewithal to carry out its functions for about a year
without regard to the wishes of the Duma. It was for this reason that Witte was
determined to secure the funds before the legislature met.

22 April 1906: Sergei Witte dismissed: Ivan Goremykin is prime minister until 21 July

23 April 1906: Ukase (decree) ordering the publication of the Fundamental Laws
 54

The tsar ordered the publication of a new compilation of the Fundamental Laws
essentially a codification of all laws of the empirethat further demonstrated his
determination to renege on certain basic commitments he had made in October 1905. The
new constitution could be revised only on the tsars initiative. It stipulated that the tsar
retained a veto power over all legislative measures as well as control of the states
administration, foreign policy, the military forces, and the appointment of all ministers.
Moreover, the monarch had the right to impose martial law or states of emergency on
regions beset by unrest; he alone could pardon convicts and commute penalties handed
down by courts; he alone could issue a general forgiveness to criminals; and he
remained the Head of the Church, which he administered through the Most Holy Ruling
Synod. Finally, the tsar retained the authority to dissolve the Duma at his discretion; the
only condition was that the ukase of dissolution must indicate when new elections would
be held and when the new Duma would be convoked. The decrees of 20 February 1906 on
the reformed State Council were incorporated into them, making it impossible for the
Duma to revoke those measures. If the legislature failed to adopt a budget at the
beginning of the fiscal year, the previous budget would remain in force. The list of civil
rights was quite modest: the Fundamental Laws provided for due process, the inviolability
of private property, freedom of the assembly, freedom of expression (within the limits
fixed by law), freedom of association (for purposes not contrary to laws), and freedom
of religion, although the conditions under which [the people] may avail themselves of
this freedom are determined by law. When the Duma was in recess, the government
could govern by decree, which would become a dead letter if not passed by both houses
of the legislature within two months after they reconvened.

27 April 8 (21) July 1906: First State Duma

3 May 1905: The Duma adopted an Answer to the Throne calling for a liberal
constitutional monarchy with paramount authority vested in the Duma, agrarian reform
that included the compulsory alienation of private land, radical changes in the authority of
the State Council, the establishment of ministerial responsibility, and amnesty to all
political prisoners (the last three went beyond the bounds of the Dumas authority as
defined in the Fundamental Laws, according to which only the tsar had the right to take
the initiative in proposing such changes). The Prime Minister Goremykin delivered an
official response to the Answer in the Duma. He announced that the deputies proposal
on the agrarian question was absolutely inadmissible because it would violate the
principle of the inviolability of property. Nor could the cabinet agree to the establishment
of a ministry enjoying the confidence of a majority of the Duma, the abolition of the State
Council, the elimination of various legal limitations placed on the Duma, or the granting of
amnesty to political prisoners. The government would not even consider these measures.
 55

In reply to Goremykins address, the Duma adopted a resolution declaring its lack of
confidence in the government and demanding its immediate resignation and replacement
by a cabinet enjoying the confidence of the State Duma. The men in authority, who could
not abide the idea of sharing power with any elected institution, just ignored them.

Early May June 1906: Agrarian unrest (1,600 incidents in 3 months)

Serious peasant disorders began early in May and subsided in July 1906. In scope and
intent the agrarian unrest that began in May 1906 and lasted for three months was
comparable to the turbulence in the countryside during the last three months of 1905.
Close to 1,600 episodes of disorder broke out in both periods, and the primary goal of the
rebellious peasants remained constantto obtain more land. But the unrest of 1906
tended to be less violent, although some looting and arson did take place. Most notably,
only in 1906 did the peasant question become a central issue in the unfolding of the
revolution. The dramatic confrontations of the previous yearBloody Sunday, the general
strike in October, the December uprising in Moscowand the political reforms, such as
the October Manifesto, resulted from the actions of workers or liberals.

The immediate background to the upsurge of agrarian unrest in May 1906 was another
poor harvest, the second in a row. Because food re-serves were extremely low, a serious
famine struck the Volga regionwith a population of approximately twenty millionwith
particular ferocity, and without the emergency aid of the Red Cross and zemstvo activists
a very large number of peasants would have perished.

The peasant movement was most intense in the black-earth regions of the central Russian
provinces, where serfdom had been most highly developed prior to 1861. The unrest was
also intense in the Baltic provinces, where the nobility of German extraction owned a vast
proportion of the arable land. Peasants refused to pay taxes, and they joined unions
formed in response to the appeals of the All-Russian Peasants Union, the organization
created in July 1905 that pushed a radical economic and political program. By the end of
1905, the union had some 470 local branches, with an estimated membership of 200,000,
operating under 12 provincial committees and 4 interprovincial committees. The
government arrested many of the unions leaders in late 1905.

The most dramatic form of political action by peasants was the creation of local
institutions of self-government, or peasant republics. The Markovo Republic in
Volokalamsk District, only 100 miles from Moscow, lasted longer than most, from 31
October 1905, till 18 July 1906. It incorporated six villages, and the local peasants refused
to pay taxes and rents or report for army service. Generally, the republics came to an end
as soon as army units appeared to repress them.
 56

17 April 1906: Regulations against the Rise of Strikes by Agricultural Workers.

There was less destruction and burning of landlords estates, which had been a distinctive
feature of the unrest in 1905. Now, in 1906, peasants focused more on such actions as
carting off of hay, illegal felling of timber, unlawful grazing on meadows, and the refusal to
pay taxes. In addition, a major form of unrest in 1906 was the agricultural strike, a weapon
whose effective use requires a considerable degree of restraint, political sophistication,
and organization. Peasants resorted to strikes in 1906 to avoid the severe repression they
had endured in the late 1905. Fearful that the new weapon would pose a serious danger
to the national economy, the Council of Ministers on 17 April 1906, issued Regulations
against the Rise of Strikes by Agricultural Workers. Anyone instigating a strike would be
subject to imprisonment for a period ranging from six months to one year; anyone guilty
of damaging property during a strike would face imprisonment for three to six months;
and anyone who took the initiative in organizing agricultural workers for collective action
would be subject to a prison term ranging from sixteen months to four years. These were
harsh measures, but their deterrent effect was slight.

Applying the same repressive measure it had used so effectively in 1905 was not an option
for the government. Soldiers and policemen could stop peasants from looting, but it was
much more difficult for them to force peasants to work. The events in the village of Turii in
southwest Russia are a case in point. After a strike that lasted three weeks, the authorities
summoned a squadron of Ingush soldiers, who immediately arrested strikers and beat
them mercilessly. But still no one went to work and the village came to a standstill. To
escape the beatings, many peasants fled to the woods. When the managers of the estates
realized that the use of soldiers did not work, they accepted the conditions of the workers
and the strike ended. In a fair number of regions, agricultural strikes ended peacefully,
and it was not uncommon for workers in the villages to score at least partial victories.

Industrial unrest

The industrial proletariat, which had been a critical force in the protest movement during
the last three months of 1905, played a secondary, though not insignificant, role in 1906.
The strike movement declined in the face of government repression, economic privation,
and sheer exhaustion. From a high of well over two million people on strike in October
1905, the movement by February and March had declined to roughly 27,000 and 51,000
respectively. In April 1906, the number of strikers in industrial establishments rose to
220,000 and the figure stayed high for the next three months: 157,000; 101,000; and
169,000. Workers emphasized political demands in over 40 % of the strikes during the
months from May through August, and economic demands in the rest, a clear indication
that the spirit of activism among urban worker had not been extinguished in 1906.
 57

4 March 1906: Ukase legalizing trade unions: Growth of unionization

The government legalised economic strikes and trade unions by Ukazes of 2 December
1905 and 4 March 1906. Workers quickly took advantage of the law on trade unions that,
for all its limitations, legalized a range of union activities. During the next 15 months 59
unions were legally recognized in St. Petersburg, and another 17 remained unregistered;
in Moscow, 64 were officially sanctioned, and 11 remained unregistered. The 42 unions in
the capital on which figures are available attained a peak total membership of 55,000; in
Moscow the high (also for 42 unions) was 52,000. True, the movement incorporated only
a small share of the workforce9 % in St. Petersburg, and 10 % in Moscow but these
are nevertheless impressive statistics; in Germany in 1907 only about 22 % of all industrial
labourers belonged to unions. In the Russian Empire as a whole in 1907, the membership
of the 273 registered unions came to over one hundred six thousand. There is no hard
information on the size of the remaining 631 unions, but it is likely that by early 1907 the
membership of all the unions exceeded 300,000.

Rise in unemployment

On one issue that affected workers with special force in 1906unemploymentthey

exhibited a notable degree of activism: they launched the first campaign ever in Russia to
secure relief from the authorities. The rapid rise of unemployment was pervasive in the
cities in 1906. The precise numbers are in dispute: the highest estimate for St. Petersburg
is 40,000, the lowest 15,000. The estimates for Moscow range from 20,000 to 23,000; in
Odessa more than 12,000 were without work. Statistics for other cities are hard to come
by, but there is no doubt that the number of unemployed had risen sharply in many of
them. The estimate of the total number without work in the entire empire ranges from
one hundred 29,000 to 300,000out of a total industrial force of at most three million.
Because of widespread famine in the countryside, a return to the villages was for many of
the unemployed not a realistic option.

March 1906: Creation of the Soviet of the Unemployed in St. Petersburg

In early 1906, at the 24 canteens in the capital that provided free dinners to more than
9,000 people, informal meetings were held to discuss actions that might be taken to deal
with the crisis. Two ideas emergedto form a soviet of the unemployed, and to ask the
City Council to set up a public-works program. After several meetings, men and women at
some canteens elected representatives to a Soviet of the Unemployed to apply pressure
on local officials in their behalf. On 28 March 1906 a delegation from the soviet of fifteen
people appeared at the building of the City Council to lobby for the petition.
 58

Shortly after the meeting with the Soviet of the Unemployed, the St. Petersburg City
Council voted to form a commission, to include some workers representatives, and to
implement a public-works program. It assigned 500,000 rubles to the program and
allocated additional funds for public relief. By mid-July 1906 some public-works programs
began to operate, though not on the scale demanded by the Soviet of the Unemployed. By
October close to four thousand people had obtained work. In addition, the City Council
provided funds that enabled the soviet to administer a total of 32 canteens, at which more
than 16,000 people were given free meals each day. Furthermore, rent subsidies were
given to several thousand families; in all, about 36,000 people benefited from the
councils aid. In the fall of 1906, however, the program declined precipitately, in large
measure because of a drift to the right by the authorities, who approved ever smaller
amounts of money for public works and aid to the needy. To make matters worse, bitter
quarrels between leaders of the soviet over the mishandling or misappropriation of funds
weakened the organization, which continued to function until late 1907 but was never
again as influential as in the spring of 1906. Organized movements of unemployed
workers made their appearance in at least ten other cities, including Moscow, Kharkov,
Tiflis, Baku, and Saratov, and each made demands similar to those of the Soviet of the
Unemployed in the capital. Invariably, city councils pleaded insolvency and delayed as
long as possible before granting any aid to the indigent. Still, in Moscow, Tiflis, and
Saratov and in a few other cities modest public-works programs were established, and
some help was given to canteens to provide free meals to the unemployed.

10-25 abril 1906: IV Congreso de unificacin bolchevique-menchevique del POSDR, en

Estocolmo.

1416 (13 O.S.) June 1906: Biaystok pogrom (88 people killed)

Bialystok was a city of about 44,000 Jews and 21,000 gentiles in Grodno Province (now
Poland). On 14 June 1906, two Christian processions took place; a Catholic one through
the market square celebrating Corpus Christi and an Orthodox one through Biaystoks
New Town celebrating the founding of a cathedral. The Orthodox procession was followed
by a unit of soldiers. A bomb was thrown at the Catholic procession and shots were fired
at the Orthodox procession. A watchman of a local school, and three women Anna were
wounded. Witnesses reported that simultaneously with the shots someone shouted Beat
the Jews! After the pogrom, a peasant who was arrested for unrelated charges in the
nearby town of Zabudw confessed that he had been paid a substantial amount of money
to fire on the Orthodox procession in order to provoke the pogrom. The explosion erupted
on 1 June 1906 in the form of an anti-Jewish pogrom in 88 people were killed (6 of them
non-Jews) and about 700 were wounded, and 169 shops and houses were plundered.
 59

May-July 1906: 146 Mutinies in the army in three months

Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries published 30 newspapers addressed to

soldiers, and between 20,000 and 30,000 men in uniform belonged to those organizations.
In the 149 mutinies that broke out between May and July 1906, political demands figured
prominently in at least 43, though very few involved violence. Among other things, the
men demanded an end to the use of troops in police actions, the granting of freedom of
assembly to civilians and soldiers, and the implementation of all demands brought forth
by the State Duma. As in 1905, the mutineers called for improvements in their
conditionsthey wanted higher pay and better food, better clothing and medical
treatment, and free transportation while on leave, to mention only a few. By March 1906,
30 of the empires 78 provinces were entirely ruled by officials exercising special powers;
in another 30 provinces sizable regions were administered under emergency rules.

The agrarian question in the first Duma

In the end, Goremykins government came to grief over the agrarian question, i.e. the
struggle over the disposition of the nobilitys land. The central premise of the Kadet
proposal was to provide land for the landless and to increase the allotments of land-
starved peasants. This was to be accomplished by distributing state udel (holdings of the
imperial family), cabinet (private imperial property), and monastic and church land, as well
as privately owned land, which was to be confiscated at state expense, to the extent
necessary, with compensation of the present owners at just price. But some lands were
to be exempt: for example, estates that possessed a generally useful significance and
public lands that served a social, sanitary, [or] educational purpose. The Trudoviks
introduced a Land Socialization Bill that stipulated that ultimately all land (including its
minerals and waters) was to be handed over to the people, but only to those who worked
the land with their own labor. The Trudoviks differed among themselves over the
questions of compensation to landowners and in the end settled on a compromise,
according to which the state, not the peasants, would compensate the owners, who
would be deprived of all land that they could not farm on their own. On 19 May 1906, the
government reiterated its opposition to compulsory expropriation. The deputies drafted
an Appeal to the People on the agrarian question. After charging the authorities with
having undermined the faith of the people in a solution of the agrarian question by
legislative means, the appeal assured the people that the Duma was working on an
agrarian proposal calling for some expropriation of private property. Goremykin and
Stolypin now advised the tsar to dissolve the legislature. Nicholas agreed and also agreed
with Goremykins recommendation that he step aside as prime minister, to be succeeded
by Stolypin.
 60

9 July 1906: Dissolution of the first Duma and appointment of Stolypin as prime minister

9 July 1906 - 18 September 1911: Pyotr Stolypin Prime Minister

Early Sunday morning of 9 July 1906 policemen and soldiers surrounded the Tauride
Palace with instructions not to permit anyone to enter the building, not even to pick up
personal belongings. At the same time, the government distributed two documents
throughout St. Petersburg: a ukase ordering the dissolution and setting 20 February 1906
as the date for convoking a new Duma as well as a manifesto explaining the action. St.
Petersburg was placed under Extraordinary Security, which meant that anyone offering
resistance to the authorities would be subject to trial by a military court. The city governor
of St. Petersburg prohibited all meetings, processions, displays of flags, and public singing,
as well as the distribution of unauthorized appeals or proclamations.

9 July 1906: Vyborg Manifesto

The Kadet leadership summoned a meeting of legislators in Vyborg, Finland, where the
Russian police had no jurisdiction and where the local authorities were less repressive. At
about 9:00 PM of the day of dissolution 185 deputies, slightly more than one-third of the
chambers total membership, arrived at the Hotel Belvedere. The deputies adopted a
manifesto entitled To the People from the Peoples Representatives, which denounced
the governments action and called on citizens to offer passive resistance by refusing to
pay taxes or to serve in the military. The rump Duma did not advocate an armed uprising,
as the soviet had done eight months earlier, but the Vyborg Manifesto was nevertheless a
radical step in that it urged the people to defy the law. Less than a week after the meeting
in Vyborg, the Kadets themselves in effect conceded that they had misjudged the national
mood and began to back away from the manifesto. On 15 July 1906 the central committee
met at Miliukovs dacha in Terioki and voted not to adopt the manifesto as official policy
and not to continue distributing it to the population.

15-20 July 1906: Mutinies in Sveaborg, Kronstadt and Reval (Tallinn): 45 executions

15-19 July 1906: Mutiny in Sveaborg (Suomenlinna fortress, Helsinki)

The troubles began in Sveaborg, where on 15 July 1906 a group of disaffected artillerymen
met with employees of the mine company on the island and a few other soldiers to
discuss plans for an uprising. But before they could carry out any of their plans, about 200
men of the mine company were arrested for some minor misdeeds, setting off a mutiny
by militants in the local garrison, who arrested two officers and seized control of several
fortifications. 3,000 soldiers and sailors joined the mutiny, which quickly spread to
Helsingfors (Helsinki), but many soldiers remained loyal to the government. Fierce fighting
 61

broke out among troops in Sveaborg and continued for 2 days, prompting the commander
of the Sveaborg fortress to inform his superiors that the situation was critical and that
he needed more troops to cope with the insurrection. Shortly, two companies of Finnish
infantrymen arrived in Helsingfors and almost immediately the tide began to turn in favor
of the government. During the night of 19 July 1906, the insurgents decided to surrender.
A fair number of rebels managed to escape, but hundreds were arrested.

19-20 July 1906: Mutiny in Kronstadt

In the meantime, violence erupted in Kronstadt, where on 19 July 1906, sailors, fired up by
exhortations from eleven 11 militants, initiated another mutiny. Emboldened by claims
that the uprising in Sveaborg was succeeding, that a decision had been reached by
political activists to stage an uprising throughout the country, and that four large warships
were joining the insurgents, the sailors struck at midnight: they secured the support of
sailors at various locations in the city, but most soldiers remained loyal to the government
and no warship joined the uprising. Within short order, men from the 94th Enisei
Regiment began to fire at the mutineers, who beat a hasty retreat. The insurgents one
triumph was their seizure of the Konstantin Fortress, but after four hours loyal soldiers
forced them to surrender. The entire disturbance in Kronstadt, from plotting to surrender,
lasted no more than 30 hours. The city was placed under martial law, loyal troops arrested
more than 1,600 mutineers, and immediately after the uprising had been put down,
military courts sentenced seven mutineers to death.

20 July 1906: Mutiny on the cruiser Pamiat Azova in Reval (Tallinn), capital of Estonia

The last mutiny took place on the cruiser Pamiat Azova, on 20 July 1906, but before the
day was out the loyal men on the ship overwhelmed the mutineers and regained control.
Late in the evening that day, two companies of infantry boarded the cruiser and arrested
the insurgents and all those considered unreliable, a total of about 200 sailors.

20-25 July 1906: Solidarity strike in St. Petersburg

An appeal was issued on 19 July 1906 in the name of the Soviet of Workers Deputies,
endorsed by the Central Committee of the RSDLP, calling on the workers to initiate a
general strike. When news reached St. Petersburg that the mutinies in Sveaborg and
Kronstadt had been quelled, Lenin wanted to rescind the appeal, but it was too late to
inform the local districts of the reversal. In the capital about one-third of the factories
were affected by the strike, and within a few days even it began to peter out. On 25 July
1906 the Executive Committee of the soviet urged workers to end the walkout. Two
divisions of soldiers were brought to the capital to crush the protest movement. 27
members of the St. Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP were arrested.
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20-25 July 1906: Solidarity strike in Moscow

Only in Moscow was there a protest movement of any significance, and even there it did
not amount to a serious challenge to the authorities. The newly formed Soviet of Workers
Deputies asked workers to begin a strike on 24 July 1906 in support of the slogan
Creation of a Constituent Assembly by Means of a Revolution, but the action seems to
have been effective only in the citys printing plants, all of which closed down. In other
enterprises, most workers ignored the call to strike; all in all, only about 30,000 people in
a total industrial workforce of about 160,000 laid down their tools. Within a day, as it
became evident that there would be no general strike, some men began to trickle back to
work and the Soviet of Workers Deputies, claiming that the partial action had been
useful, declared the strike ended at 2:00 PM on 26 July 1906. Turn to individual terrorism.

19 August 1906: Law on Field Courts-Martial (Ley de consejos de guerra) 1,144 executed

It applied to all areas under martial law or under Extraordinary Securityin effect, most of
the empire. It stated that whenever it was so obvious that a civilian had committed a
crime that no investigation was necessary, the case was to be handed over to a field court
composed of five military officers selected by the governor-general, the chief local
administrator, or individuals invested with comparable authority. Within 24 hours of his
arrest, the accused would appear before the court, which must conclude the trial within
two days. All the courts work must be conducted behind closed doors according to legal
procedures established for the military services. Once sentences had been handed down,
they immediately acquire the force of law and must be carried out within one day. Thus,
the entire process from start to finish would take no more than four days.

Virtually all leaders of society and most of the press denounced the law in the strongest
terms, and only one prominent figure in society, A. I. Guchkov, defended the measure.
Shipov, the grand old man of the Union of October 17, was so appalled that he resigned
from the party (split in the Octobrists).

In the period from 6 October to 6 November 1906, a total of 112 individuals were put to
death, somewhat below the monthly average for the eight months the law remained on
the books. By early February 1907 the total number of executions had reached 771. When
the law was allowed to lapse on April 19, 1907, it had taken a terrible toll: 1,144 men had
been executed, and 349 people had been sentenced to hard labour, 443 to prison terms
of varying periods, and 7 to exile. Only 71 of the accused were acquitted. The phrase the
Stolypin tie came to symbolize the ruthlessness of Stolypins regime.

Tsar Nicholas veto on Stolypins proposal to adopt reforms on the situation of the Jews.
 63

9 November 1906: Stolypins Agrarian Reform

The emancipation had freed the serfs, but it had also strengthened the commune. About
80 % of the communes periodically redivided land among villagers to maintain the
equality of allotments assigned to peasant families, the size of which would naturally vary
over years. Thus, there was no tradition of private landownership among the bulk of the
peasants, and so long as the peasants did not own the land they worked, they lacked the
incentive to modernize their farms and improve efficiency. Besides, because of the sharp
increase in Russias population from 1861 to 1905 (by some 40 %), the average allotment
assigned to peasants, in most cases not overgenerous to start with, declined by 25 %.

The ukase of 9 November 1906 was actually the capstone of a series of agrarian reforms
introduced in 1906. In August 1906 the government announced that it would make
available for sale to peasants a modest amount of land from the state, the tsars personal
holdings, and the properties of the imperial family. It also facilitated the purchase of land
by the Peasants Bank, which could then sell it to peasants on terms favorable to them.
Many landlords, frightened by the unrest and the possibility that their land would be
confiscated, were eager to sell, often at relatively low prices. But capitalists did not rush to
buy the land because they too feared confiscation, and peasants did not show great
interest in purchasing it because they expected all the land to be distributed to them free.
Between 1896 and late 1905, the Peasants Bank acquired 2,785 estates with 4.9 million
desiatinas; over the next 14 months, it acquired 7,617 estates with 8.7 million desiatinas.

On 19 September 1906 the government enacted a law opening up to colonization a

substantial amount of land that belonged to the crown in the Altay region in West Siberia,
where communes were not widely established. The next ukase on the agrarian question,
promulgated on 5 October 1906, provided for an extension of civil and personal rights to
the peasants, narrowing the distinction between them and other classes and thereby
conferring many of the attributes of citizenship on them. Peasants were now permitted to
work in administrative agencies of the state, to attend educational institutions without
prior permission from the commune, and to maintain their ties with their village
communities if they entered the civil service or some other profession. In addition,
peasants could now become members of another village community by acquiring land
there without forfeiting membership in their own community. They could move freely
from one region to another so long as they received the appropriate permits from their
new place of residence. The election of peasants to zemstvos no longer had to be
approved by the provincial governor. Finally, the peasants were freed from various
punishments previously imposed by the communal assembly and land captains for the
infraction of regulations.
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The key article of the ukase of 9 November 1906, the most far-reaching of all the agrarian
reforms, reads as follows: Every head of a peasant holding family allotment land by right
of communal tenure is entitled at any time to claim the appropriation as private property
of his due share of the said land. If no redistribution had been conducted during the
preceding twenty-four years, the peasant would receive all the land he was cultivating at
the time he requested separation from the commune. If redistribution had taken place
within that period, the peasant could still obtain the amount of land he was cultivating,
but only until the next scheduled re- distribution, at which time changes might be made in
the size of the individual holdings. The peasant was also guaranteed the use of the same
quantity of meadowland to which he had been entitled as a member of the commune.
Before the promulgation of the ukase, a peasant could leave the commune as owner of
the land he worked only with the approval of the communal assembly, a cumbersome
procedure that discouraged separation.

In addition, the ukase of 9 November 1906 made it easier for peasants to bring about
consolidated ownership of the strips into which land was divided and thus to dissolve the
commune. The strip system had been introduced centuries earlier to provide peasants
with an equal share of different types of land in the village. Because the strips were widely
scattered, the peasants were forced to spend a part of their working day walking from one
strip to another, a waste of time and energy that reduced productivity. Strip farming also
militated against the use of machinery. Prior to the reform of 1906, a unanimous vote of
the communal assembly was needed before any consolidation would be enacted; now an
affirmative vote by two-thirds of the assembly sufficed. Lenin said it would lead to the
creation of a peasant bourgeoisie. Kadet leaders disagreed about the desirability of
preserving the commune, but all of them opposed the ukase of 9 November 1906 because
Stolypin had bypassed the Duma by resorting to Article 87 of the Fundamental Law.

An examination of the reform process indicates that it was very slow to begin with and
had become markedly slower well before 1914. The number of applications reached its
high point in early 1909 and declined sharply thereafter. Some 508,00 households left the
commune in 1908, 580,000 in 1909, and 342,00 in 1910. In 1913 the number shrank to
135,000. By 1914, about 20 % of the peasants had obtained ownership of their land while
about 14 % of the land had been withdrawn from communal tenure. And strip
consolidation developed at an even slower pace. At best, then, the process would have
taken many years to reach completion.

January 1907: Elections to the Second Duma

The Kadets abandoned the demand for a responsible ministry, and replaced it with a call
for a ministry enjoying the confidence of the Duma, a much more moderate goal. Under
 65

the new formula, the cabinet would not have to consist of Duma deputies; it would be
composed of bureaucrats willing to work with the legislature. The Kadets previous aim of
seeking to transform the Duma into a constituent assembly was omitted altogether.

Given the authorities extensive intervention in the elections and harassment of the
opposition parties, the results can only be described as an ignominious rout for the
government. In fact, the Second Duma turned out to be far more radical than the first.
True, the Octobrists increased their strength from 13 to 44, and the extremists on the
right, without any representation in the First Duma, succeeded in electing 10 deputies and
could count on the support of some 54 from other factions. But the number of left-wing
deputies jumped from 111 to 222, with the Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries,
and Popular Socialists numbering 118 (as against 17 in the First Duma), and the other
party of the left (the Trudoviks) one hundred four. (The Popular Socialist Party, formed
after the dissolution of the First Duma, was represented by 16 deputies in the Second
Duma. Politically, the Popular Socialists stood between the Kadets and SRs.) The parties of
the center suffered a serious decline: 99 seats were won by the Kadets and their
adherents; in the First Duma these groups were supported by 185 deputies. The Muslim
group elected 30 and the Cossack group 17. The Polish Kolo raised its number of deputies
from 32 to 46. The nonpartisans suffered the steepest decline, from 112 to 50.

20 February 3 June 1907: Second Duma (103 days)

It soon became evident that the Kadet policy of preserving the Duma through moderation
was doomed from the start. The Octobrist deputies were more sharply than ever divided
into two camps: the left wing was close to the Kadets, especially on the question of the
field courts-martial; the right wing favored the dissolution of the Duma and the
promulgation of a more restrictive electoral law. Several Trudoviks were actually expelled
from the fraction for having voted with the Kadets on the agrarian question.

3 June 1907: Dissolution of the Second Duma; Stolypin alters electoral laws.

The crackdown affected the press, trade unions, and activists in the opposition
movement. Some statistics will suffice to indicate its magnitude. In Moscow alone, during
the first ten days after the dissolution officials fined eight newspapers for disseminating
false information and in the course of a year in St. Petersburg they closed down thirty-
nine of the 76 trade unions that had been established since the beginning of the
revolution. Total trade union membership in the capital dropped by some 40 %. And the
arrest of activists hostile to the government continued unabated. In St. Petersburg in the
month of June 1907 about 2,000 political arrests were reported, and similar roundups
took place in various provincial capitals.
 66

The essential features of Stolypins new electoral law can be briefly summarized. The size
of the Duma was reduced from 542 to 442, almost entirely at the expense of the outlying
regions of the empire. The Steppe and Turkestan regions; the vast Turgai, Ural, and
Iakutsk oblasts; the nomadic peoples of Astrakhan and Stavropol; and the Siberian
Cossacks lost their representation completely. The Duma delegations of the Poles,
Armenians, and Tatars were sharply reduced. Thus, the Poles, with a population of about
11 million, would elect 14 deputies, two of whom had to be Russian; in the Second Duma,
it will be recalled, the Polish delegation numbered 46. The roughly 6 million people of
Transcaucasia could elect 7 deputies, one of whom would have to be Russian. By contrast,
the province of Kursk, with a population of two and a half million, the vast majority
ethnically Russian, was assigned 11 deputies; the 3 million citizens (also overwhelmingly
Russian) of Tambov would elect 12. In addition, the law favored the affluent over the
masses: the peasants would choose only half as many electors (those who made the final
selection of deputies) as they had chosen in 1906, and the landowners a third more.

In the 51 provinces of European Russia, landowners would get roughly 49.6 % of the
electors, the urban population 26.2 %, the peasants 21.7 %, and industrial workers 2.3 %.
In slightly more than half these provinces, landowners by themselves selected a majority
of the electors, and in the remaining provinces they could obtain a majority by forming
alliances with one or another urban group. To reduce the election of liberals in cities,
eighteen of 25 urban centers were deprived of the right to choose their own deputies by
merging them with provincial constituencies. Women, men under the age of 25, students,
and soldiers and sailors in active service were not given the franchise. The system of
indirect voting was so complicated that the process resembled walking through a
labyrinth. The elections were to proceed in three different stages, and the electors who
survived the process would meet in the capital of the provinces to choose the deputies.

October 1907: Elections to the Third Duma

Stolypin had to be content with his handiwork, for the result was the kind of legislature
that he believed was needed to restore stable rule. Not only did the new, restrictive
electoral law by itself work to his advantage. Within days after the dissolution of the
Duma, local election committees began to apply a variety of dubious measures to reduce
the number of eligible voters even further. As a consequence, only about 19 % of the
eligible voters in 67 cities of European Russia (roughly 10 % of all the cities) participated in
the elections to the Third Duma, compared to 55 % in 1906. The total number of voters in
these cities dropped from 307,930 to 195,000. Even in some rural areas with sizable
numbers of large landowners, the registration lists declined by 30 to 40%. The reason for
these declines was again the arbitrary exclusion of voters considered unreliable.
 67

19071912: Third Duma

Since the Octobrists had by now swung decisively to the right, the government could
generally count on the support of about 300 deputies out of a total of 441. The social
group that now emerged as the dominant political force was the landowning nobility,
which was represented by 173 deputies, almost 40 % of the Dumas membership. These
noble deputies were elected by some 30,000 families, a fairly homogeneous group. The
rightists could also count on the support of the 53 deputies who were Orthodox
clergymena much larger contingent than in the two preceding legislatures and of the
one deputy who was a Roman Catholic priest. The autocracy that in 1905 and 1906 had
been forced to concede a constitution was strong enough in 1907 to violate the
constitution with impunity and to reassert its authority.

18 September 1911: Stolypin assassinated.

18-30 enero 1912: Prague Conference: Final split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

17 April [O.S. 4 April] 1912: Lena goldfield massacre; renewed industrial unrest

19121917: Fourth Duma

Aleksei Badayev, The Bolsheviks in the tsarist Duma, International Publishers, 1932.

In 1912 Badaev (born 1883) was elected deputy to the Fourth State Duma by the workers
of St. Petersburg. In November 1914, Badaev was arrested with the Social Democrat
faction of the Duma, and he was exiled to the Turukhan Region. After returning from exile
following the February Revolution of 1917, Badaev was elected from the Bolshevik list to
the Petrograd city duma. He took part in the October Armed Uprising in Petrograd. Badaev
was the author of the book Bolsheviks in the State Duma: Reminiscences (1929).

191216: Rasputin scandal; widening rift between government and society.

1 August 1914: Germany declares war on Russia.

1915: Nicholas II becomes Commander-in-Chief; relations between government and Duma

deteriorate; formation of Progressive Bloc.

5-8 septiembre 1915: Zimmerwald conference

20-30 abril 1916: Kienthal conference

29 December 1916: Murder of Rasputin

Lenin: Tesis de abril de 1917: Las tareas del proletariado en la revolucin actual.