Continuing on in the series, Dominic Alexander explores the solidification of the soviets and the rise of the Bolsheviks

Part 1: The English Revolution begins
Part 2: The English Revolution: the first civil war
Part 3: The English Revolution Completed
Part 4: The French Revolution: the road to revolution
Part 5: The French Revolution: Revolution and the Sans Culottes
Part 6: How the Great Revolutions happened, France: Rise and fall of a popular republic
Part 7: The age of revolutions: Aftershocks of the French Revolution
Part 8: The nineteenth-century age of revolutions: betrayal to red revolution 1830-1849
Part 9: The nineteenth-century age of revolution: the Paris Commune and the conservative capitalist European order
Part 10: The course of Russian history
Part 11: Revolution arrives in Russia

A new, major revolutionary organisation had meanwhile risen from the strike wave: the soviet. The idea of workers’ delegates meeting together had appeared as early as January, but the print workers’ strike in October was the impetus to create a co-ordinating body for the various workplaces involved in the action. The first meeting of the emerging Soviet of Petersburg was on 13 October, in the Technological Institute, although initially delegates came only from the Nevsky district. By a unanimous decision, the body called for a political general strike and the election of further workers’ delegates. It adopted a determinedly revolutionary stance from the outset, organising print workers’ detachments to take over presses in order to publish their bulletin. They also helped to organise the postal and telegraph strikes.^xxxv 

The Soviet rapidly gained authority among workers. A call from one deputy on 15 October to a textile factory which was not yet on strike was responded to immediately, and the rest of the city’s textile factories were out the next day. It was the fact that the Soviet was formed not by one faction or another, but represented the workers broadly which gave it this weight, as well as its thoroughly democratic character. Trade unions, strike committees and even professional associations like the Union of Unions voluntarily placed themselves under the Soviet’s authority and respected its decisions. An attempt by the authorities to disperse it simply led to the Soviet relocating and regrouping. 

Soviets began to form in other cities too, notably Moscow. While in Petersburg, the local Bolshevik leaders stood aloof, much to the exiled Lenin’s disgust, Bolsheviks took the lead in Moscow, Tver and the soviets of the Donets basin, while Mensheviks were predominant in Odessa, Kiev, Baku and elsewhere.^xxxvi Nevertheless, the overriding character of the soviets was their function as united fronts of the revolutionary strike movement. They certainly cemented the role of social democrats as the leaders of the working class, not least for figures like Trotsky, who took a prominent position in the Petersburg Soviet. 

Printing the Soviet’s newspaper was a tricky issue with police repression still bearing down hard, but there was widespread willingness among printers to co-operate. Going to one radical printer for the second issue, the Soviet delegation was met with some reluctance from the management: ‘The situation  was still confused and no one could tell what the consequences of printing a revolutionary publication might be.’ However a suggestion was made:  

‘“Now if you were to arrest us,” hazards someone from the management. 

“You are under arrest,” is the reply. 

“By force of arms,” adds another volunteer, pulling a revolver out of his pocket. 

“You’re under arrest! All under arrest!” … Work begins …’^xxxvii 

On another occasion, a manager objected that since the power was cut off due to the strike, printing couldn’t happen, so a Soviet delegate simply contacted the relevant power station. Electricity was restored, and ‘the management’s faces reflect a respectful surprise.’^xxxviii These stories are just some illustrations of the authority the Soviet gained in a short time. 

October Manifesto 

In this febrile situation, the Tsar’s government issued the October Manifesto, which promised an elected assembly and some civil rights. The Russian working class had won a major victory, and this ‘was a demonstration of the proletariat’s hegemony in the bourgeois revolution, and at the same time, of the hegemony of the towns in an agricultural country.’^xxxix However, a general strike only creates the necessary conditions for revolution; on its own, it cannot dislodge state power. Thus, even at this moment of concession, the state was preparing to hit back with the violence of the Black Hundreds and pogroms. 

There is no question about the state involvement in these, as police clearly aided and abetted pogromists. Jewish communities were the main, but by no means exclusive victims. In a few weeks, almost a thousand people were killed, and seven to eight thousand injured, according to a low estimate,^xl but others estimated up to four thousand killed and 10,000 maimed in a hundred towns.^xli There was some significant resistance, as defence militias were formed, and were sometimes able to prevent the violence. Later, during the trial of Soviet leaders, it was revealed in court that the Petersburg Soviet had, in fact, prevented a pogrom in that city from taking place.^xlii 

As a result, Trotsky went on to conclude, the revolutionary movement needed to learn to organise the discontented countryside into its forces, and develop links with the soldiers to provide armed force with which to confront the state, and defend against the proto-fascist gangs of the pogromists. The pogroms were, however, only a beginning to the state’s fightback against the revolution. Trotsky concluded at the time that the October manifesto would prove to be not the beginning of constitutional rule by the Tsar, but rather ‘a prologue to martial law’.^xliii In this, he was very close to the mark. 

While it is true that the general strike lost some momentum after the issuing of the October Manifesto, the Petersburg Soviet retained its authority and influence over the workers, and itself officially ended the general strike on 21 October, thus retreating in good order. Liberal groups had certainly cooled in their support for the struggle, and manufacturers, who had tolerated or even supported the strikes, for example by refusing aid from the Cossacks or even by continuing to pay wages, had quickly withdrawn their tolerance. Even so, employers were forced in many cases to grant higher wages or reduced hours, even as the strikes ended. Then at the end of October, a mutiny began at the naval base in Kronstadt, near Petersburg. 

Although this was soon crushed, the Soviet began a massive campaign for the soldiers and sailors subject to court martial, which once again brought all the large factories in Petersburg to a stop, demonstrating that the retreat at the end of October had not seriously damaged the workers’ capacity for action. It was the government that backed down, allowing civil, jury trials for the mutineers, and the Soviet ended the strike with that victory.^xliv Some wished to continue until further goals were achieved, but there was a recognition that the strikes elsewhere in Russia were winding down, and the city could not stand alone. However, the November strike had made its point, and the Soviet continued to appeal to the military rank and file, issuing a manifesto to the soldiers. The government then abandoned the martial law it had imposed on Poland, after the Łódź workers’ insurrection in June, showing it was wary of using only repression to end the revolution, just yet. The Soviet’s actions also showed what a powerful institution it could be for harnessing and directing workers’ militancy to the greatest effect. 

Slightly preceding and overlapping with the November strike was worker agitation for an eight-hour day. The Soviet leapt in to support the demand, while workers decided to implement it in their own workplaces by their own actions.^xlv Since such measures were spreading through different parts of the city, the Soviet called for the campaign to be general, giving workers 24 hours to prepare. In one district, the workers, having completed eight hours, ‘left their workshops and went out into the streets carrying red banners and singing the “Marseillaise”,’ sweeping up workers in other factories as they went.^xlvi Initial success in this movement was made difficult to maintain when the November strike broke out as well. While employers had been conciliatory at first, the state stepped in to close its own factories, and rallied private capitalists into a determined lockout. By 12 November, the Soviet had to retreat on the issue, particularly since Petersburg was by this point isolated in the struggle. 

For many historians, this was all, of course, an overreach and a mistake, particularly as the agitation was not supported by contemporary liberals.^xlvii This view, of course, ignores the logic of the revolutionary situation. As Trotsky put it: if the Soviet ‘had begun calling on the masses to turn back’, guided by ‘“realistic” considerations’, then ‘the masses would not have obeyed it’. Instead, the Soviet led the struggle, and confirmed its authority and importance to the movement. The eight-hour day campaign was defeated, but it became a realistic goal for millions of workers, which it hadn’t been before. Sometimes defeats are necessary for further advances. The Soviet concluded: ‘We may not have won the eight-hour day for the masses, but we have certainly won the masses for the eight-hour day’.^xlviii 

Repression and the Duma 

November also saw a Peasant Congress assembly in Petersburg, which expressed support for the Soviet, and a new naval mutiny in Sevastopol, but the latter was suppressed, and the Moscow peasant delegates were arrested on 14 November. The government also suppressed sporadic peasant actions in the countryside with brutal force. Even as the government’s confidence in using repression increased, the Soviet was still gaining support and receiving appeals from various parts of the country. One old Cossack asked for its help against his unjust treatment by a great nobleman, addressing his letter simply to ‘The Workers’ Government, Petersburg’.^xlix Peasant support for the Soviet noticeably increased in November, while new layers of previously unorganised workers, from servants and janitors to cooks and waiters began to organise and hold meetings. The Soviet issued a financial manifesto on 2 December, calling on peasants to refuse to pay redemption payments any further, and for other actions to undermine the state’s fiscal capability, at the same time as peasant uprisings began to increase in breadth and intensity. 

Although there was considerable dissension and unrest within the army, landowners had rallied decisively behind the state, which was still able to muster sufficient reliable forces to begin to engage in a campaign of repression. On 3 December, the Petersburg Soviet was surrounded and its delegates all arrested. The Moscow Soviet endorsed the Financial Manifesto on 4 December, and called for a political general strike. There was an attempt at a general strike in Petersburg, but it subsided after a few days, and it was in Moscow that a major strike began, leading to clashes with troops, and soon an armed insurrection by the workers. Despite notably heroic efforts, and dogged resistance, this was eventually put down, leaving some thousand people dead. There was fighting in some other cities also, although none on the same scale as Moscow. 

Some historians see the 1905 Revolution as continuing on until 1907, when the Tsar forcibly dissolved the second Duma. However, between the end of the Petersburg Soviet and the period of the first two Dumas, there was simply a kind of phony war between the Tsarist state and liberal opinion over whether the constitutional regime promised by the October Manifesto would be allowed to take shape or not. Socialists suspected all along that such a dispensation would not be long tolerated by the state, when there was no revolutionary force in motion to force acceptance of it, and they were quite correct. Serious unrest continued to break out through 1906 and into 1907 in the cities, the countryside and even within the army, but the state remained in control. The Tsar’s government did allow elections to a Duma, as promised, but it had very limited authority, and no real purchase on government. 

Despite a complex and highly restrictive franchise, the Tsar found the first Duma to be unmanageable, with the Kadet Party (Constitutional Democrats) being the leading force within it. Despite the Kadets’ wish to make the Duma work, and avoid confrontation, the Tsarist government had no real wish for it to succeed, and treated it with contempt from the start. The first Duma lasted from 27 April to 8 July, 1906. The second Duma was designed by the government to be more conservative than the first, but the revolutionary parties, which had largely boycotted the first, participated this time, and won substantial representation, mostly at the expense of the Kadets. From the moment this second Duma was convened, the government looked for an excuse to dissolve it, which it did after 103 days on 3 June 1907. The post-1905 saga of the first two Dumas proved one thing: Russia had no capable bourgeois opposition to the Tsarist autocracy. If there was to be a successful revolution, it would be led by the working class, but the peasantry would also be crucial, if the state’s control of the army was to be broken. 

Revolutionary controversies 

Although Trotsky still formally belonged to the Menshevik faction, he roundly criticised Menshevik theorists for insisting formalistically on the bourgeois nature of the Russian Revolution, and witheringly derided Russian liberalism for ‘its intrinsic shoddiness and concentrated imbecility’, which he ascribed essentially to the late development of capitalism in the country.^l Trotsky insisted that the ‘mere definition of the Russian revolution as a bourgeois revolution says nothing about its inner development’ which could lead to the proletariat achieving ‘its own political hegemony’.^li At this stage, Lenin’s formulation actually agreed that the Russian revolution was to be bourgeois, but looked to a democratic revolution led by workers allied with the peasants, also disdaining the liberals. He would change his mind on the possibility of socialist revolution after the February Revolution of 1917, and come round to Trotsky’s view.^lii The latter, in turn, would come round to Lenin’s conception of the need for a revolutionary party. 

In the 1906-7 period, there were still expectations that the revolutionary movement would surge again soon, but an international economic crisis from 1907 hit Russia hard, and reduced Russian workers’ capacity for struggle for some years. There followed a serious downturn for the revolutionary organisations, with Lenin decrying the impact on the Bolshevik Party as a ‘year of disintegration’. Continued illegality led intellectuals in particular to desert the organisation.^liii Worse, Okhrana agents were able to infiltrate even the higher district-leadership levels. 

Meanwhile, the Mensheviks were increasingly riven by disagreement. During the 1905 Revolution, many Mensheviks were driven leftwards by events, and at local levels, Bolshevik and Menshevik organisations even merged, but afterwards, the right tendencies of leaders like Plekhanov, Axelrod and Martov meant there was a push for co-operation with the liberal Kadets, leaving Trotsky isolated on the left.^liv The Mensheviks gradually disintegrated into a spectrum of factions. On the other hand, Lenin was having difficulty with an ultra-left current within the Bolsheviks led by Alexander Bogdanov, who had played a poor role in relation to the Petersburg soviet in 1905, and was now calling for preparations for a new armed uprising at exactly the worst time. Lenin was able to expel Bogdanov from the party in 1909, and win the arguments over Bolshevik participation in the now highly conservative Duma, as a platform for socialist propaganda. After this, Lenin was able to re-assert his leadership and turn the Bolshevik Party into a disciplined revolutionary group. 

In the 1912 Duma, the Bolsheviks succeeded in electing six deputies from working-class districts, (the electoral system minimised the weight of the votes of the poor), while the Mensheviks’ seven deputies came largely from middle-class votes.^lv The split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks became formal and final in 1912, just while the tempo of workers’ struggles was rising once more, but by this point the Mensheviks were on a clear path towards becoming a reformist party like the German SPD or even Britain’s Labour Party. Nonetheless, in practice, members of the two Russian groups still often worked together in provincial contexts even after the February Revolution of 1917. 

In 1910, the number of strikers had fallen to a low of 46,623, but in 1911 it rose to 105,110, while student unrest also began to grow once more.^lvi A massacre of striking workers in the remote Siberian Lena goldfields sparked demonstrations and protest strikes throughout the country. Showing that the lessons of 1905 had not been forgotten, workers immediately raised democratic demands, and political strikes spread. In 1913, mass strikes in Petersburg raised the demand for workers’ right to organise, as well as forcing the authorities to moderate punishment of workers arrested for striking.^lvii Revolutionary political strikes continued to break out right up to the beginning of the First World War. Even four days before war was declared, Petersburg was rent with revolutionary demonstrations, and workers were building barricades against the police and Cossacks.^lviii During these years, the Bolsheviks far outstripped both the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries in terms of influence within the trade unions, even in Petersburg where both the latter had been strong in 1905 and afterwards.^lix By the eve of the war, the Bolsheviks had become a mass, working-class party.^lx 

War and the betrayal of socialism 

The outbreak of war in 1914, and the betrayal of socialist internationalism by the leaderships of European workers’ parties, sent shock waves through the Russian socialist movement. Lenin and the Bolsheviks maintained a firm anti-war stance, but a wave of ‘social patriotism’, sadly including veteran socialists like Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich, tore the Mensheviks apart. The Social Revolutionaries also supported the Russian war effort, on the grounds of the peasantry’s patriotism.^lxi Trotsky had to break with his long-term mentor and collaborator Parvus, who became pro-war. Trotsky’s breach with the Mensheviks widened further, preparing the way for his eventual entry into the Bolshevik Party. Martov, although adopting an anti-war stance of a sort, was unwilling to part irrevocably with the bulk of pro-war Menshevik opinion. Nonetheless, by 1917, his group of ‘Menshevik Internationalists’ were operating independently of the rest of the party. A number of other prominent individuals, like Anatoly Lunacharsky and Alexandra Kollontai, drifted gradually towards the Bolsheviks. 

Lenin’s position was more uncompromising than most other anti-war socialists, calling for a position of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ in relation to all governments, and for the people to ‘turn the imperialist war into civil war’.^lxii Anti-imperialist positions were, for a time, unpopular, but as the bloody destruction of the war dragged on, those who had adopted intransigent anti-war positions emerged with much greater credibility than the ‘social patriots’. The splits and controversies of the war period meant that, by 1917, Trotsky was collaborating with Bolsheviks on a daily paper in New York, and as soon as news of the February Revolution reached him, he strove to return to Russia, arriving there finally on 4 May, 1917. 

In the course of the war years, the Bolshevik Party suffered constant police repression, infiltration and arrests of leading members, which over and again smashed the Petrograd committee for example. The workers’ movement had been dissolved by the patriotism of August 1914, however, as early as 1915, strikes and political demands were returning, particularly in Petersburg, now renamed Petrograd to remove the name’s German associations. The government even became worried that there were insufficient numbers of police or reliable soldiers to quell unrest.^lxiii  

Despite repression, the Bolsheviks grew rapidly in these years, and developed a particularly strong working-class district organisation in the Vyborg industrial area of Petrograd, while succeeding in maintaining a national organisation, unlike other revolutionary organisations. They were also able successfully to propagandise military units stationed in the city with a dedicated Military Organisation.^lxiv In 1916, there was a major strike in the Putilov works in Vyborg where, in addition to demands for a 70% wage rise, workers’ slogans included ‘Down with the Romanov monarchy’ and ‘Down with the war’.^lxv This was just one indication of how successful Bolshevik anti-war agitation had become. 

²⁵ Trotsky, 1905, p.69.
²⁶ Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (London: Verso 1954/2003), p.98.
²⁷ ibid. p.99.
²⁸ ibid. p.99.
²⁹ Ascher, Revolution of 1905, p.58.
³⁰ ibid. pp.52-3.
³¹ ibid. pp.63-4.
³² Trotsky, 1905, p.71.
³³ ibid. pp.73-4.
³⁴ ibid. p.78.
³⁵ ibid. p.87.
³⁶ Ascher, 1905, pp.71-2.
³⁷ Trotsky, 1905, p.116.
³⁸ ibid. p.117.
³⁹ Trotsky, 1905, p.80.
⁴⁰ Ascher, 1905, p.82.
⁴¹ Trotsky, 1905, p.107.
⁴² Ascher, 1905, p.150.
⁴³ Trotsky, 1905, p.127.
⁴⁴ ibid. p.132.
⁴⁵ ibid. p.140.