Dominic Alexander continues his series on revolutionary change in history by looking at the founding of Russian socialism 

Until the 1890s, the revolutionary political movement in Russia was still in an embryonic stage. Even in the early 1890s, the dividing lines between Marxist groups and the Narodniks were not yet clear for many, as the latter had often ‘adapted’ Marxism for their own programme, with some recognising, to a degree, the importance of the working class.¹ The small Marxist circles of the 1880s, whose major figure was Georgi Plekhanov, had little connection to workers, and were seen as scant threat to the authorities, who allowed ‘legal Marxism’ to grow as a useful opponent to Narodism.

This situation changed in the course of the 1890s, firstly in Poland where a workers’ movement had arisen, and where Jewish socialists were at the forefront.² The Jewish socialist Bund organisation would become one of the largest and most important left organisations in Russia. Plekhanov advocated a turn towards agitational work by the social democrats (as the revolutionary socialists were then known) in 1891, but he and his circle were unable to make that transition in practice, and it was younger social democrats, like Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin) and Nadezhda Krupskaya in Petersburg who pioneered mass agitation to factory workers. A few months after their first efforts, which led to the arrest of most of their group in 1896, a mass strike broke out among textile workers in the city in which the social-democrat circle played a central role.

Strikes, which had been rare in the 1860s, increased in frequency in the years to 1885, and again from an average of 33 between 1886 and 1894 to 176 between 1895 and 1904.³ Mass strikes showing high degrees of organisation and discipline made an appearance towards the end of the 1890s. The social democrats grew alongside these, recruiting workers into their ranks, previously almost exclusively populated by intellectuals. There were many difficulties, both practical and theoretical, in turning the groups of social democrats into a coherent revolutionary party, but the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was founded in 1898. 

The formal unity of this organisation masked profound differences among its members over perspectives and strategies. The party split at its second Congress in 1903 between Lenin’s Bolsheviks (‘majority’) and Julius Martov’s Mensheviks (‘minority’), although at local levels, activists from both sides would continue to work together for years to come. The essence of the split was about the nature of the party, whether it should be strictly revolutionary (Bolsheviks), or a broad class-based alliance of a range of perspectives (Mensheviks).

Meanwhile, a lull in worker militancy at the end of the 1890s gave way to a renewed wave of unrest, sparked in part by a renewal of the student movement. A general strike in Kharkov in 1900, in which social democrats played a central part, raised political demands, and the following year, workers and students marched together in many cities. Clashes with the military followed in some areas. In 1902, a railway strike in Rostov-on-Don turned into a general strike throughout the city, with social democrats addressing workers at mass meetings. The movement only grew from there, with mass strikes in 1903 spreading beyond single cities to embrace the whole of Ukraine and Transcaucasia. Troops were required to supress the workers’ revolutionary demonstrations.⁴ Workers were now the leading social group in opposition to Tsarism.

The state and the Tsar were aware of their weakening hold over Russia, and tried to shore up support through the policy of Russification: increasing persecution of Jews, removing autonomy from the Finnish province, banning education in minority languages, and non-Russian civil-service employment. All this was meant to rally Great Russian chauvinism around the Tsar, but, of course, the most obvious impact was to entrench resentment and opposition among minorities.⁵ This would have serious consequences for the Tsarist state, and indeed as early as 1903, its authority broke down entirely in a remote rural area of Georgia, Guriia, with peasants refusing to pay taxes or recognise judicial authority. It was the local social-democratic committee which ended up stepping into the governing role.⁶ Guriia became a rallying cry for peasants in the Caucasus during the 1905 revolution, when similar events spread across the region, and thousands of troops had to be sent in to restore the state’s authority in February, but the region wasn’t settled until January 1906.

The state recognised the danger that was brewing in the cities, and did not rely purely on repression and force in its attempt to maintain control. The most notorious effort came from an agent of the secret police, the Okhrana, called Sergei Zubatov, who had acted as a spy in revolutionary organisations. He formed state-sponsored trade unions meant to limit workers’ demands to purely economic issues, and prevent trade-union militancy from becoming political. Zubatov unions were formed in Moscow in 1901, and in 1902 were able to organise a 50,000-strong loyalist demonstration of workers before the Kremlin. However these police unions quickly overspilled their intended bounds, and in 1902, a strike led by Zubatov unions in Odessa became a city-wide political strike.⁷ This own goal led to Zubatov’s exile, but while initially the police unions were disbanded, they were soon re-introduced, to play another unexpected role in sparking Russia’s first revolution in 1905.

Leaping into war … and revolution

Just as the wave of modernisation that began with the emancipation of the serfs in 1861-3 had been sparked by Russia’s humiliation in the Crimean War, so the context of the 1905 Revolution was another abject military defeat. The Russo-Japanese War was the direct result of increasing imperial tensions over China, which involved all the great powers, each of which had ambitions to gain valuable stakes in that great, but politically weakened civilisation. Russia was desperate to develop its territories in eastern Siberia, and to gain a viable all-year port on the Pacific coast, but this clashed with Japan’s ambitions to expand into Korea and north-east China.

It was also widely suspected that the Russian government wanted a war it thought it could win easily in order to distract from domestic problems. The arrogance of the Tsarist government in its dealings with Japan provoked the latter into a surprise attack on Port Arthur in February 1904, which the Russians had leased from China and fortified.⁸ Japan thereby gained command of the sea at the outset, and Russia was attempting to fight a war on the extreme edge of its undeveloped Siberian possessions. The Russian Baltic fleet sailed around the world to meet the Japanese, only to be destroyed in a single battle in May 1905.

However, even before that crushing defeat, Russia had already risen in revolution. The very first beginnings of this came in the Putilov engineering works in St Petersburg in December 1904, where four workers were sacked for their membership of a police union. Workers in the factory asked for help from their ‘union’ to reinstate their fellows, and the Zubatov union, in order to maintain credibility, had no choice but to come to their aid. This was the contradiction which these false unions could not survive; when the rank and file of the workers insisted on militant action, their leadership had no choice but to follow or be broken. The workers then turned to other factories in search for solidarity, and soon mass meetings were being held, with social-democratic speakers, which aired wider grievances.⁹ The figure who was thrust into the forefront of this movement was a police agent, Father Georgy Gapon, a prison chaplain by profession.

Gapon was concerned to stop the workers from extending their demands into the political sphere, but encouraged ambitious economic demands, including an eight-hour day, a near-doubling of the minimum wage, and improvements in working conditions. The leaders of the union and Gapon also consulted the police when planning a humble workers’ demonstration to present a petition to the Tsar. The idea was that this would be a conspicuously loyal march, enabling the Tsar to play a traditional paternalistic role by granting some minor reforms for his people. The Tsarist state was not concerned about conflict between manufacturers and workers, so much as diverting the workers away from conflict with the state.

Liberal and conservative historians are generally quick to claim that revolutionaries had no influence on the Gapon demonstration.¹⁰ In fact, however, Petersburg social democrats, largely of the Menshevik faction, convinced the workers to insert a whole series of political demands into the petition, including freedom of assembly for workers, freedom of speech, an end to the war with Japan, and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly.¹¹ Gapon encouraged the workers to tear up leaflets distributed by the social democrats, but already the movement was sliding out of his control.

General strike

The strike which had begun at the Putilov works on 3 January had spread into a general strike of the whole of St Petersburg by 7 January, involving not only the large factories, but also many small workshops, with as many as 150,000 strikers, even according to state estimates. Concerns about this unprecedented militancy, and paranoid suspicions in the Ministry of War that Japanese agents were stirring up the people, probably contributed to the decisions made by the authorities in the events that followed.

On the day of the demonstration, which was festooned with portraits of the Tsar, holy icons and church banners, 200,000 workers marched to the Winter Palace. It what must be one of the most catastrophic decisions ever made by an authoritarian state, troops were ordered to fire on the demonstrators. There were several instances of such attacks on the peaceful crowd, and estimates of casualties differ widely, but at least as many as a thousand people were killed or wounded, and certainly the authorities made efforts to conceal the number of dead afterwards.

Father Gapon himself was shaken out of his loyalty to the Tsar, declaring to a meeting the same evening that ‘We no longer have a Tsar’, and that soldiers were freed from obligations to obey ‘the traitor, the Tsar, who had ordered innocent blood to be spilt’.¹² Bloody Sunday, as it was soon called, not only shook Gapon’s allegiances, but snapped the traditional deference of Russian peasants and workers to the Tsar. It would be much easier from now on for socialists of all varieties to get the people to listen to revolutionary propaganda.

Indeed, after Bloody Sunday, the strike wave spread rapidly outside St Petersburg, by February into the Caucasus, and the Urals and Siberia the next month, taking in as many as 122 towns and localities, as well as the railways, through which, of course, the wave itself spread.¹³ In these conditions, industrialists went into opposition to the state. As Trotsky put it, capital ‘was disillusioned with the panacea of police repression, which is like a rope that lashes at the living bodies of the workers with one end and whacks the industrialists’ pockets with the other; and so it arrived at the solemn conclusion that the peaceful course of capitalist exploitation needed a liberal regime.’¹⁴

This liberal turn by a section of the bourgeoisie wouldn’t last that long; by the time the workers’ movement reached a peak at the end of 1905, that section had been frightened enough to scuttle beneath the protection of the Tsarist state once more. This was the position of the capitalist class in Russia: lacking a mass base of its own, and facing class struggle from below, it did not have the strength or courage to challenge the aristocratic state and could only advance the most timid form of liberalism. It might be reflected that this is a recurring pattern with middle-class liberalism in the face of power from above, and a working class below.

However, the strike wave tailed off as imprisonments, executions and general police repression took their toll on the morale of the workers.¹⁵ In addition, the leadership of both factions of the social democrats was largely in exile, and operating illegally, with considerable internal argument about the nature of the coming revolution, and strategies for moving it forward. The strikes therefore lacked strategic and political direction. For the time being, political initiative passed from the working class to middle-class organisations, particularly those who had been rooted in the zemstvos. Mostly middle-class professional unions created the ‘Union of Unions’, amplifying calls for constitutional government and other reforms. None of the liberal activity amounted, however, to sufficient force to move the Tsarist state.

Nor did the Populist agitation have more effect than supplying outrage to the opponents of revolution. The main populist groups had merged into one organisation in 1902, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and still regarded the peasantry as the main revolutionary force, alongside industrial workers. Some tendencies within the party drifted towards liberalism, but elements were also committed to terrorism as a strategy. This resulted in the assassination of the Governor-General of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Deeply reactionary, and close to the Tsar, in 1891, he had expelled the city’s 20,000-strong population of Jews, amid pogrom-like scenes. He was also ruthlessly repressive of student political activity. As awful a figure as the Grand Duke was, his assassination did nothing useful for the revolutionary cause.

Of the Marxist revolutionaries, Trotsky, operating in hiding in Kiev, in contact with Bolsheviks, but formally aligned with the Mensheviks at this time, and Lenin, still in exile, were advocating the organisation of an insurrection. However, most social-democratic opinion followed the Mensheviks’ mechanical view that the revolution was bourgeois and so had to be led by the liberals. A leading Menshevik asserted that ‘political calculation will prompt our bourgeois democracy to act in the same way in which, in the past century, bourgeois democracy acted in western Europe.’¹⁶ The mistake was to assume that historical development follows a linear, deterministic pathway, rather than changing direction according to historical context. Capitalism’s impact on class structure changes over its development.

In Russia, this meant a much larger, more concentrated industrial working class, and a much smaller class of small industrialists and petty bourgeois. In these conditions, the nature of the class struggle was quite different from that of eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Europe, with large capital far more frightened of workers’ militancy, and more accepting of authoritarian rule. Liberalism was therefore weak, and incapable of performing the revolutionary role the Mensheviks’ schematic understanding of Marxism allotted to it. 

Ever since 1917, conservatives and liberals have spun elaborate interpretations of the Russian revolution that argue that Russian liberalism could have succeeded, if only … this, or that, factor had or had not intervened. Russian history, however, is the first proof that as it develops, and engulfs more of the world, capitalism cannot sustain political liberalism. More often than not, capitalism in later developing counties has led to various kinds of authoritarian rule to protect property. Trotsky observed: ‘For the proletariat democracy is in all circumstances a political necessity; for the capitalist bourgeoisie it is in some circumstances a political inevitability.’¹⁷

Revolution revives

Despite a downturn after March 1905, the rhythm of the revolution soon returned to workers’ actions. This followed the Japanese destruction of the Russian Baltic fleet at the Battle of Tsushima at the end of May. The weakness and incompetence of the Tsarist state was revealed in its humiliating defeats to Japan, encouraging unrest to grow once again. In June, sailors on the battleship Potemkin stationed in the Black Sea mutinied against their sadistic officers, shooting or imprisoning them, and raising the red flag over this flagship of the fleet. The mutiny coincided with mass demonstrations and strikes in Odessa, to where the Potemkin mutineers sailed, and joined in common cause. The ship’s guns were able to hold off the authorities’ troops from the city for a time, until the army arrived in force. The result was a deadly massacre with perhaps two thousand killed, and three thousand wounded, a worse toll than Bloody Sunday.¹⁸ The Potemkin left Odessa to try to stir mutiny in the rest of the Black Sea, ultimately having to flee to Romania.

These events became iconic due to Eisenstein’s classic 1925 film, but at the time, they were, for the Tsarist regime, an ominous sign of its fragility. Additionally, unrest in the countryside was growing from May, with peasants invading estates, burning records of their rents and obligations, seizing livestock and grain, but rarely attacking the landowners themselves. This movement peaked in July and receded during the harvest period.¹⁹ Most worryingly for the state, unrest spread among soldiers, precipitating the decision to make peace with Japan. 

The Tsarist state reacted partly with some mild concessions to demands for reform, in particular agreeing a Duma, or parliament. This was to be consultative only and have a highly restricted electorate. Mass opinion was more outraged than mollified by such compromises, which transparently were meant to concede nothing of substance. Liberal opinion welcomed them, however, to ridicule from revolutionaries.

Other parts of the state engaged in rather more vicious attempts to supress and divide the revolutionary forces. These included pogroms, often actively organised by the Okhrana and police agents, doubling down on attacks on Jewish communities, but also other national and religious minorities, students and any kind of political radical. Reactionary states had long relied on lumpen elements to provide violent opposition to dissent, with ‘Church and King’ mobs in eighteenth-century England being one of the earliest modern examples, but a chilling new kind of organisation appeared in Russia now: the Black Hundreds. These were paramilitary gangs who were the direct ancestors of the post-World War I fascist gangs of Italy and Germany. Fascism as a street force was the invention of the Tsarist state.

At the beginning of September 1905, a peace treaty was signed with Japan, in which Russia lost Port Arthur, and a wider sphere of influence in the region. However, the internal situation had not improved, and the state remained caught between contradictory conciliatory and repressive actions. Thus, in September, the police were pursuing a savage campaign of repression, while at the same time, open popular meetings were being tolerated in the university campuses. The thinking was that if the students were allowed some freedoms, their radical fervour would soon ebb.²⁰ Trotsky wrote about these meetings that the ‘revolutionary word had escaped from underground and was filling the university halls, lecture rooms, corridors and quadrangles. The masses were greedily taking in the slogans of revolution … The unorganised, accidental crowd … showed a moral discipline and a political sensitivity which amazed even bourgeois journalists.’²¹

Ebbing and surging

At these meetings, the liberals and right wing failed to convince the crowds, while social democrats connected well with the popular mood, but did not expect any mass action to follow soon. Not for the last time, the revolutionaries were caught by surprise when events accelerated. First, printers in Moscow went on strike on 19 September for shorter hours and better pay rates, and by five days later, fifty printing works were on strike. The strike then spread to the city’s bakers. The authorities resorted to clumsy attempts at repression, including calling in Cossack troops to storm a bakery, but the strike spread further throughout the city. On 2 October, printers in Petersburg went on a three-day strike in solidarity with those in Moscow, but the factory and plant strikes were appearing to ebb, and events in Petersburg also drifted towards calm.

The railway union had up to this point been trying to restrain its members, as the leadership was intending a strike in January, but now the union decided on a trial test of its strength ahead of that plan. All the lines around Moscow rapidly came out on strike. The railway workers in Petersburg then held a congress and declared political aims for the strike: an eight-hour day, civil liberties, an amnesty and a Constituent Assembly. From there, the strike wave began to spread through the country, and political aims superseded purely economic ones. Aggressive tactics were used when the strike faced resistance: ‘it did not hesitate to disrupt lines, break signals, overturn engines, put obstacles across the lines or place railway carriages across bridges … it halted goods trains wherever it found them.’²² Soon all railway lines across the country were shutting down, and thus food supplies to the cities like Moscow were interrupted: prices rose, banks closed, the financial system seized up, and shares crashed in value.

On 10 October, a political general strike was declared in Moscow, and other cities began to follow suit, with the general strike reaching Petersburg on 13 October: ‘industrial life and in many places commercial life, collapsed everywhere. School and universities closed down. “Unions” of the intelligentsia joined the strike of the proletariat. In many places juries refused to sit, lawyers to plead, doctors to attend patients. Justices of the peace closed down their courts.’²³ Mass meetings were held, and the authorities sent Cossacks to attack them, so workers responded by building barricades, and seizing gun shops to arm themselves. Further street clashes ensued. Soldiers were able to overwhelm the barricades in some cities like Odessa, but the authorities were in a state of panic, with officers publicly declaring that a third of the troops were with the people.

¹ Tony Cliff, Building the Party: Lenin 1893-1914 (London: Bookmarks 1986), p.6.
² ibid. p.46.
³ Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, p.6.
⁴ Cliff, Building the Party, pp.96-7.
⁵ Ascher, Revolution of 1905, p.13.
⁶ ibid. pp.49-50.
⁷ ibid. p.150.
⁸ Sumner, Survey, pp.272-4.
⁹ Cliff, Building the Party, pp.151-2.
¹⁰ Ascher, Revolution of 1905, p.25.
¹¹ Cliff, Building the Party, p.153.
¹² ibid. p.153.
¹³ Trotsky, 1905, p.69.
¹⁴ ibid. p.68.
¹⁵ Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (London: Verso 1954/2003), p.98.
¹⁶ ibid. p.99.
¹⁷ ibid. p.99.
¹⁸ Ascher, Revolution of 1905, p.58.
¹⁹ ibid. pp.52-3.
²⁰ ibid. pp.63-4.
²¹ Trotsky, 1905, p.71.
²² ibid. pp.73-4.
²³ ibid. p.78.