in turn, killed seven officers. Flying under the red flag of revolution, the sailors sailed the ship that evening to the port of Odessa in the Ukraine. The funeral two days later for their fallen comrades turned into a city-wide protest, resulting in government troops firing into the crowds. As the Potemkin set out to sea, Nicholas II dispatched a number of ships to intercept it to force its surrender. But when the Potemkin declined to surrender, these crews refused to open fire. The Potemkin finally reached Romania where its crew gave up the ship and sought asylum.
The Russo-Japanese War was finally concluded in September 1905 with the Treaty of Portsmouth (in New Hampshire). Despite its humiliating defeat, Russia won an honourable peace due to Sergei Witte, the Tsar’s ex-finance minister. For his efforts, Witte, who had been out of political favour, returned to the fold and was appointed prime minister.
Nicholas II donated large sums of compensation to the victims of Bloody Sunday and their families but it was not enough – this massacre sparked the 1905 Russian Revolution. Workers and peasants, no longer feeling constrained by the law or loyalty to the Tsar, staged protest marches and strikes throughout the empire. In the countryside, peasants forcibly ejected landowners from their estates; and in cities and towns, workers formed councils of elected workers – or, to use the Russian word, ‘Soviets’.
By October the country was crippled by a general strike. Finally, under such pressure, the Tsar was forced to listen. Taking heed of Witte’s advice, Nicholas II issued the ‘October Manifesto’ on 30 October 1905:
The disturbances and unrest in St Petersburg, Moscow and in many other parts of our Empire have filled our heart with great and profound sorrow … Fundamental civil freedoms will be granted to the population, including real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association.
It was, in effect, an end of the Tsar’s autocracy and the beginning of a constitutional monarchy. Its promise of civil liberties – freedom of speech, press, and assembly – a broad franchise, and a legislative and elected body (the Duma or national parliament) was revolutionary. Laws could now only be passed with the approval of the Duma. The manifesto promised ‘universal male franchise’ to the Duma. Autocracy, it seemed, was to give way to democracy and a sharing of power between the Tsar and his parliament.
The manifesto worked to a degree. The strikes were called off and new political parties, the conservative Octobrists and the Constitutional Democrats (known colloquially as the Kadets) emerged, both supporting the manifesto and determined to use it as a platform for wholesale constitutional reform.
The ‘Soviets’
In October 1905, the strike committee of St Petersburg formed a council of workers, or a ‘Soviet’, to negotiate with the employers and, if necessary, organize strike action. Although it consisted mainly of Mensheviks, the Soviet was not affiliated to any particular party. One radical, Leon Trotsky – who described himself as a ‘non-factional social democrat’ allied to no specific party – was initially its vice-chairman, then chairman. (In fact, Trotsky was for many years closer to the Mensheviks before eventually joining Lenin’s Bolsheviks.) Trotsky scotched the Soviet’s objective of staging a mass strike for fear of handing the government an excuse for greater repression.
Over forty other Soviets sprung up across the empire. But within a couple of months, Nicholas II felt confident enough to suppress the St Petersburg and Moscow Soviets and arrest its leaders. Trotsky, along with other leaders, was arrested, tried and sentenced to exile in Siberia; although he managed to escape and made his way back to London. Nicholas had successfully dealt with the Soviets. It would be twelve years before the workers felt empowered enough to form another.
Pyotr Stolypin
The democratic aspirations of the October Manifesto did not last – the following May, the Tsar issued a revision to the Fundamental Laws, originally issued in 1832, which formalized the new Constitution and the establishment of the Duma but also retained the Tsar’s ‘supreme sovereign power’. Nicholas declared that he would appoint the government (not the people) and reserved the right to dissolve the elected Duma at any time and rule by emergency decree, as well as the right to veto any law passed by the Duma. The Okhrana, meanwhile, retained their oppressive presence.
Nonetheless, elections took place and the first Duma went ahead, meeting on 10 May 1906. Dominated by ministers sympathetic to the peasantry, its demands were too radical for the Tsar and, on 21 July, he responded by dissolving it. On the same day, he appointed Pyotr Stolypin his prime minister.
Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin
Stolypin’s objective was to do away with the peasant communes, which were essentially too backward and liable to stir unrest, and to encourage the peasantry to set up as independent farmers, loyal to the regime. In November 1906, Stolypin abolished the redemption dues that had so hindered the Russian peasant since the Emancipation Edict of 1861. It was, to use Stolypin’s phrase, a ‘wager on the strong and sober’; an attempt to end political unrest among the peasants. But agrarian reform went hand-in-hand with repression – many leading revolutionaries were executed on the orders of Stolypin, victim to the hangman’s noose or, as it became known, ‘Stolypin’s necktie’, while the ‘Stolypin wagon’ exiled vast numbers of political opponents to Siberia.
The second Duma, instituted March 1907, blocked Stolypin’s reforms but the prime minister was not to be denied. With the Tsar’s backing, he managed to have the Duma dissolved within three months. He got the backing of the Octobrists and changed the voting system, thereby ensuring a reduced peasant voice and a greater return of conservative and moderate members. He then managed to form a third Duma, November 1907, one that was decidedly tsarist.
Stolypin may have pushed his reforms too far, thereby earning the disapproval of the Tsar. Indications were that the prime minister was about to be dismissed. On 14 September 1911, Stolypin was shot while attending the opera in Kiev with the Tsar and his two eldest daughters. As he fell, he yelled out, ‘I am happy to die for my Tsar’, and blessed the Tsar with a sign of the cross. Rumours persisted that the assassination had been officially sanctioned, and that Nicholas’ secret police had allowed Stolypin’s assassin, Dmitry Bogrov, easy access to the opera house. As he lay dying in hospital, the Tsar, kneeling at his bedside, begged Stolypin’s forgiveness. The prime minister died four days later on 18 September. Nicholas halted the investigation into the incident and Bogrov, who, it turned out, was an agent of the Okhrana and a revolutionary, was hastily hanged before being properly interviewed. With Stolypin’s assassination, Russia’s programme of reform came to an immediate and abrupt end.
Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia
Since the revolution of 1905 and particularly the events of Bloody Sunday, Nicholas II had become a reviled figure overly influenced, it seemed, by his wife the Empress Alexandra. The Russian people never took to the Empress, granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria. They found her aloof and, as a German, doubted her loyalty and resented her relationship with Grigory Rasputin, a starets, a wandering faith healer. Rasputin managed to maintain an influence over the royal family by his mysterious knack of treating the Tsar’s haemophiliac son, Alexei, heir to the Romanov throne. Only Rasputin, it seemed, could stem the poor boy’s bleeding. Protected by the Imperial Family, Rasputin enjoyed a debauched lifestyle that further
