Since Gapon’s Assembly enjoyed official sanction, the workers had no reason to think that the planned demonstration would be anything but orderly and peaceful. But the government feared that a procession of tens of thousands of workers could get out of control and lead to a breakdown of public order. In the eyes of the authorities Gapon was not so much a police agent as a “fanatical socialist” who exploited police protection for his own revolutionary purposes. It was further feared that the socialists would take advantage of the unrest to press their own agenda.56 On January 7, Fullon appealed to the workers to stay away, threatening to use force, if necessary. The next day, orders went out for the arrest of Gapon, but he managed to hide.
That evening, January 8, Mirskii convened an emergency meeting of ministers and such high officials as happened to be on hand: a haphazard gathering to deal with what threatened to become a major crisis. It was decided to allow the demonstration to proceed but to set physical boundaries beyond which it was not to go. The Winter Palace was to be off limits. If persuasion failed to deter the workers, the troops deployed at these boundary lines were to shoot. There was a general sense, however, that force would not be required. The Tsar dismissed the strike of 120,000 workers and the planned demonstration as a trivial incident: on the eve of the massacre, he noted in his diary: “At the head of the workers’ union is some kind of a priest-socialist, Gapon.” Assured that the situation was under control, he departed for Tsarskoe Selo, his country residence.
Fullon, who had responsibility for the city’s security, although a professional Gendarme, was a gentle, cultivated person who, according to Witte, disliked police methods and would have been better employed running a girls’ boarding school.57 Implementing decisions taken the previous night, he placed armed troops at several key points in the city.
By the time Gapon’s workers began to gather Sunday morning at the six designated assembly points it was evident that a confrontation had become unavoidable. The demonstrators were in the grip of a religious exaltation and prepared for martyrdom: the night before, some had written farewell letters. The marching columns looked like religious processions, the participants carrying ikons and singing hymns. As the groups advanced toward the city’s center, bystanders took off their hats and crossed themselves; some joined. Church bells tolled. The police did not interfere.
7. Bloody Sunday.
Eventually, the demonstrators ran into army pickets. In some places the troops fired warning shots into the air, but the masses, pushed from behind, pressed on. The soldiers, untrained in controlling crowds, reacted in the only way they knew, by firing point-blank at the advancing crowd. The worst altercation occurred at the Narva Gate, in the southwestern part of the city, where Gapon led the demonstrators. The troops fired and the crowd fell to the ground: there were 40 dead. Gapon rose to his feet and cried: “There is no God anymore, there is no Tsar.” Massacres occurred also in other parts of the city. Although journalists spoke of 4,600 killed and wounded, the best estimate is 200 killed and 800 injured.* Immediately, disorders spread throughout St. Petersburg. In the evening, there was much looting, especially of shops carrying liquor and firearms.58
Bloody Sunday caused a wave of revulsion to sweep across the country: among the masses, it damaged irreparably the image of the “good Tsar.”
Mirskii received his walking papers on January 18 without so much as a word of thanks: he was the first Minister of the Interior since the post had been created a century earlier to be let go without some honorific title or even a medal.59 His replacement, a colorless bureaucrat named Alexander Bulygin, also resisted as long as he decently could the honor of being named minister. Real power now passed into the hands of D. F. Trepov, who took over from Fullon the post of governor-general in the capital. A dashing officer, he had the complete confidence of Nicholas, who appreciated his candor and lack of personal ambition: in the months that followed, Trepov would exert a rather beneficial influence on Nicholas, persuading him to make concessions that he would rather have avoided.*
In the wake of Bloody Sunday protest meetings took place throughout Russia: zemstva, municipal councils, and private organizations condemned in the sharpest terms the government’s brutality. The workers responded with strikes. In January 1905 over 400,000 workers laid down their tools: it was the greatest strike action in Russian history until that time.60 University students left their classrooms; in some localities the unrest spread to secondary schools. On March 18, 1905, the authorities ordered all institutions of higher learning closed for the rest of the academic year. The released students swelled radical ranks. Disturbances were especially violent in the borderlands. On January 13, in the course of a general strike in Riga, Russian troops killed 70 persons. The following day, during a strike in Warsaw, 93 people lost their lives; 31 more were killed there during May Day celebrations (April 18).61 The worst massacres occurred in mid-June in Odessa, where striking workers were joined by the crew of the mutinous battleship Potemkin. Here 2,000 are said to have died and 3,000 to have been gravely injured.62 In many localities, criminals took advantage of the breakdown of order to ply their trade. In Warsaw, for example, Jewish gangsters disguised as “anarcho-Communists” broke into affluent residences, “expropriating” money and whatever else struck their fancy.63
Russia stood on the edge of an abyss. It seemed as if the country was boiling over from anger, envy, and resentments of every imaginable kind which until then had been kept contained under a lid of awe and fear. Now that the population had lost respect for the government, there was nothing to hold society together: neither civic sense nor patriotism. For it was the state that made Russia a country, not vice versa. It was a horrifying spectacle to many Russians to see how tenuous the bonds holding the Empire together were and how powerful the divisive passions.
As was its custom in such cases, the government’s first (and often last) reaction to a domestic crisis was to appoint a commission to investigate its causes, which in this instance were worker grievances. Chaired by Senator N. V. Shidlovskii, the commission took the unprecedented step of inviting factory workers to send representatives. In the second week of February 1905 elections were held in St. Petersburg factories, in which 145,000 workers cast ballots: the delegates they chose in turn picked representatives to the commission. Despite its dramatic beginning, the commission accomplished nothing because the workers posed conditions which were found unacceptable, whereupon it was dissolved. Even so, it was of considerable historic importance. Not only were these the “first free worker elections ever” held in Russia,64 but “for the first time in Russian history there was an elected representation of a large body of workers … and not merely workers in separate factories.”65 By recognizing workers as a distinct social group, with its own interests, the government laid the foundations of what later in the year would emerge as the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies.
The turmoil, verging on civil war, confounded and paralyzed Nicholas. He could not for the life of him understand why people would not be content with the lot which destiny had assigned them, as he was: after all, he carried on even though he derived no enjoyment from his difficult and often tedious responsibilities. (“I maintain autocracy not for my own pleasure,” he told Sviatopolk-Mirskii, “I act in its spirit only because I am convinced that it is necessary for Russia. If it were for myself, I would gladly be rid of it.”66) In the first decade of his reign he had faithfully followed in the footsteps of his father: but Alexander had not had to contend with a country in rebellion. Nicholas’s inclination was to quell the unrest by force. The police, however, were pitifully inadequate to the task, while the bulk of the army, over one million men, was thousands of miles away fighting the Japanese. According to Witte, the country was virtually depleted of military forces.67 There was no alternative, therefore, to political concessions: but just how little one could get away with was unclear. Nicholas and his confidential advisers were torn between the realization that things could not go on
as they were and the fear that any change would be for the worse.
Some officials now urged the Tsar to expand on the promises made in the December 12 edict. They were joined by industrialists who worried about a breakdown of production. Among the events that softened Nicholas’s opposition to further concessions was the murder on February 4, 1905, at the hands of a terrorist, of his uncle, the Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, a friend and confidant.
On January 17, Nicholas met with A. S. Ermolov, the Minister of Agriculture and State Properties, an experienced and wise official. The advice which Ermolov proffered, first in person and then in a memorandum, made a strong impression on him and seems to have been the main inspiration behind the important legislative acts of February 18.68 Ermolov depicted Russia as a country on the verge of revolution. To prevent collapse, two measures had to be taken without delay. A cabinet of ministers had to be formed to give the government the necessary unity and the ability to coordinate policy in face of the opposition, neither of which was possible under the existing system.* Concurrently, a Land Assembly (consultative in nature) had to be convened of representatives of all the Tsar’s subjects without distinction of social rank, religion, or nationality. Only such a body would enable the Tsar to establish direct contact with the nation: after the November Zemstvo Congress, in which the gentry dominated, one could no longer hope to rely on that class, the monarchy’s traditional support. Ermolov assured Nicholas that he could trust his people. “I know,” he wrote,
that Your Majesty also hears from his closest advisers different voices. I know the opinion exists that it is dangerous to convene the nation’s representatives, especially at the present troubled time, when passions have been stirred. There is the fear that at a gathering of such representatives voices may resound calling for a fundamental change in the ancient foundations of our state system, for limiting tsarist authority, for a constitution; the fear that the Land Assembly may turn into a Constituent Assembly, the peasantry raise the question of a Black Repartition.
†
that the very unity of the Russian land may be challenged. That such voices may indeed be heard in such an Assembly cannot be denied. But, on the other hand, one cannot help but feel confident that in an Assembly where all the classes of the population will be represented, where the views and spirit of the people will find true reflection, these individual voices will be drowned out by the vast majority which remains faithful to national traditions, to the native foundations of the Russian state system. After all, such voices resound now, too, and now they are the more dangerous because the silence of the masses offers them no refutation. No, Your Majesty, there is nothing to fear from such phenomena, and they represent no real danger.
69
In effect, Ermolov was proposing to isolate the intelligentsia by bringing into the political process the silent majority. The alternative, in his opinion, was a massive peasant uprising such as Russia had not seen since Pugachev’s rebellion in the reign of Catherine the Great.
Impressed by these arguments, Nicholas told Bulygin the next day that he was prepared to consider a representative body to discuss drafts of legislative bills.
On February 18, Nicholas signed three documents. The first was a manifesto urging the population to help restore order. The second was an invitation to the Tsar’s subjects to submit “suggestions” “on matters concerning the improvement of the state and the nation’s well-being.” The last was a “rescript” to Bulygin informing him that the Tsar had decided to “involve the worthiest men, endowed with the nation’s confidence and elected by the people, in the preliminary working out and evaluation of legislative bills.”70
While experts were drafting the proposal for an advisory (zakonosovesh-chatel’naia) assembly or Duma, across the country hundreds of meetings took place to draw up petitions. The response to its invitation exceeded anything the government had anticipated:
The newspaper carried accounts of the meetings and thus publicized the grievances and demands that were being voiced by a growing number of people. Instead of curbing unrest, the monarch’s ukase proved to be [the] catalyst that mobilized masses of people who had not previously dared to express opinions on political issues. Dominated by liberals and liberal demands, the petition campaign really amounted to a revival, in more intense form, of the liberal offensive of the fall and winter of 1904–5.
71
The liberals seized the opportunity offered by the February 18 edict to press their program, resuming the banquet campaign in the guise of a “petition campaign.” It was now possible, not only at private gatherings but also at public assemblies, to demand a constitution and a legislative parliament. The zemtsy held their Second Congress in Moscow in April 1905: the majority of the delegates would be satisfied with nothing less than a Constituent Assembly. Various professional associations met and passed resolutions in the spirit of the Union of Liberation. The bureaucrats, fearful of the effect of the manifesto on the village, tried to keep it out of peasants’ hands, but the liberals foiled them, using provincial and district zemstva to distribute it in hundreds of thousands of copies. As a consequence, in the spring of 1905, 60,000 peasant petitions flooded St. Petersburg.72 (Except for a handful, they remain unpublished and unstudied.) The petition campaign inadvertently contributed to the politicization of the village, even though the peasants’ cahiers seem to have dealt mainly with land and related economic matters.*
It was in the course of the petition campaign that the liberals created their third and most powerful national organization, the Union of Unions, which was to play a decisive role in the climactic stage of the 1905 Revolution. The Union of Unions (Soiuz Soiuzov) was the most radical of the liberal organizations, standing to the left of both the Zemstvo Congress and the Union of Liberation. The decision to create this body was taken at the October 1904 congress of the Union of Liberation: its mission was to broadcast the liberal message to the mass constituency of professional people as well as white- and blue-collar employees in order to involve them in the political struggle. The intention was for the professional and trade associations formed under the Union’s auspices not to serve their members’ special interests, but to involve them in the campaign for political freedom. V. A. Maklakov, a prominent liberal, recalls that the Union of Lawyers, of which he was a member, did not promote the collective interests of its members or the cause of law, but used the prestige of the legal profession to add to the clamor for a parliament and a constitution.73 The same held true of the other unions. The movement for the formation of such unions accelerated significantly after the publication of the February 18 manifesto. In addition to the Union of Lawyers, unions were formed of Medical Personnel, Engineers and Technicians, Professors, Agronomists and Statisticians, Pharmaceutical Assistants, Clerks and Bookkeepers, Journalists and Writers, Veterinarians, Government, Municipal, and Zemstvo Employees, Zemstvo Activists, and School Teachers. Separate organizations were set up to work for the equality of Jews and of women.74 The Union also organized mass associations: its outstanding success was in setting up the All-Russian Union of Railroad Employees and Workers, the largest labor organization in the country. Later on, it was instrumental in forming the Peasant Union. All the member unions adhered to a minimum program calling for the replacement of autocracy with a constitutional regime and full civil rights for the population. On other issues, such as the Constituent Assembly, they showed considerable divergencies.75 On May 8, 1905, a congress of fourteen unions organized by the Union of Liberation in Moscow federated into the Union of Unions under the chairmanship of Paul Miliukov. Miliukov, the leading figure in the liberal movement, by this time was a liberal only in name because he was prepared to use any means, including the general strike, to topple the autocracy. In the next five months, the Union of Unions virtually set the course of the Russian Revolution.
The news from the Far East went from bad to worse. In February 1905, the Russians fought the Japanese for Mukden, a Manchurian city that Kuropat
kin had vowed never to surrender. It was a ferocious engagement in which 330,000 Russians battled 270,000 Japanese. After losing 89,000 men (to 71,000 of the enemy), Kuropatkin decided to abandon the city.
As if this humiliation were not enough, in May came news of the worst disaster in Russian naval history. The Baltic Fleet was sailing off the east coast of Africa when it learned of the surrender of Port Arthur. Since his mission was to relieve Port Arthur, the fleet’s commander, Admiral Z. P. Rozhestvenskii, requested permission to return to his home base. The request was denied. Joined by the Black Sea Fleet, which had sailed through the Suez Canal, he reached the China Sea and headed for Vladivostok by way of the Strait of Tsushima between Korea and southern Japan. Here a Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo lay in wait. The Russian vessels were more heavily armed but slower and less maneuverable. Togo also had the benefit of superior intelligence. The engagement fought on May 14/27, 1905, was an unmitigated disaster for the Russians. All their battleships and many auxiliary vessels were sunk and most of the remainder captured; only a few managed to escape under the cover of darkness. Rozhestvenskii himself was taken prisoner. Tsushima ended any hope the Imperial Government may have had of staving off constitutional reforms by a glorious military victory.
8. Paul Miliukov, leader of the Constitutional-Democratic Party.
Nicholas’s immediate reaction to Tsushima was to designate Trepov Deputy Minister of the Interior with extensive police powers, which, according to Witte, made him “unofficial dictator.”76 He also resolved to seek peace. The difficult mission was assigned to Witte, who in June left for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the peace talks were to take place under the patronage of the U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.
The Russian Revolution Page 6
