lie dead in the drifts. This is Bloody Sunday.
The impact is incalculable. It unleashes a sea change in popular attitudes. That evening, Gapon, his world view shattered, ‘red hot’, Krupskaya will recall, ‘from the breath of the revolution’, fulminates to a crowd of survivors: ‘We have no Tsar!’
That day accelerates revolution. Information travels the sprawl and spread of the railway lines, racing across its territories in the company of the trains, and it brings fury with it.
Strikes rage across the empire. They are embraced by groups new to such actions – clerks, hotel maids, cab drivers. More confrontations follow, and more deaths – 500 in Lodz, ninety in Warsaw. In May, a mutiny over spoiled meat shakes the battleship Knaz-Potemkin. Further revolts come in November, in Kronstadt and Sebastopol.
The regime is frantic. It experiments with combinations of concession and repression. And the revolution provokes not only bloody official crackdowns, but the traditional ultra-right sadism quasi-sanctioned by the state.
Only two years previously, the Bessarabian city of Kishinev suffered the first pogrom of the twentieth century. For thirty-six hours, marauding bands, untroubled by the police and blessed by Orthodox bishops, practised butchery. Jewish adults and children were tortured, raped, mutilated, killed. The tongue of a toddler was cut out. Murderers emptied out the disembowelled bodies of their victims and stuffed them with feathers. Forty-one people died, almost 500 were wounded, and, a journalist observed, most Gentile citizens expressed ‘neither regret nor remorse’.
Amid the anguish, many claimed that the Kishinev Jews had not resisted hard enough. This supposed ‘shame of passivity’ provoked soul-searching among Jewish radicals. So now, in April 1905, when the Ukrainian Jews of Zhitomir get word of an impending attack, the response is defiant: ‘We will show that Zhitomir is not Kishinev.’ And when, indeed, they fight back against the murderers, limiting damage and death, the Zhitomir defenders inspire the Jewish Bund to declare that ‘the times of Kishinev have gone forever’.
Almost instantly, this proves horrifyingly wrong.
Prominent in the Zhitomir attack were the Black Hundreds, an umbrella name for various cells of proto-fascist ultra-reactionaries, which sprang up out of authoritarian outrage at the 1905 revolution. They are apt to sprinkle a few populist calls, such as for land redistribution, atop fervour for an autocratic tsar – Nicholas II is an honorary member – and murderous spite against non-Russians, most particularly Jews. They have street-fighting thugs, and plenty of friends in high places, parliamentary deputies like Alexander Dubrovin and Vladimir Purishkevich. Dubrovin is leader of the Union of the Russian People (URP), an advocate of extreme racist violence, a doctor who gave up medicine to fight the creep of liberalism. Purishkevich is the URP’s deputy chair. Flamboyant, fearless and eccentric to the point of derangement, characterised by the author Sholem Aleichem as an ‘atrocious villain’ and ‘high-strutting cockerel’, he is a devout believer in God-sanctioned autocracy. Indeed, some Black Hundreds – such as the sect known as the Ioannity – spice their race-hate with ecstatic religiosity, directing the enthusiasms of Orthodoxy against ‘Christ-killers’, fever dreams of blood-drinking Jews, icons and eschatology and mysticism in the service of depravity.
In October the Black Hundreds commit mass murder in the cosmopolitan city of Odessa, butchering more than 400 Jews. In the Siberian city of Tomsk, they stop up all entrances to a building where a meeting is taking place, set it alight and gleefully burn their scores of victims alive. They throw petrol on the flames. A teenage boy, Naum Gabo, escapes with minutes to spare to witness the depredation. Years later, an elderly man, by then a leading sculptor of his generation, he will write, ‘I do not know if I can convey in words the horror that oppressed me and seized my soul.’
This is the Black Hundreds’ carnival, but they will continue with the work for years.
And while reaction is on its violent march, the tsar still flounders, groping for compromise. In August 1905 he announces a consultative parliament, a Duma. But its complex franchise favours the rich: the masses remain unappeased. The Treaty of Portsmouth ends the Russo-Japanese War, and is merciful to Russia, given the circumstances. Nevertheless, the state’s authority has been crushed abroad and at home, among all classes.
Insurgency has strange triggers. In Moscow, October 1905, a matter of punctuation sparks the final act of the revolutionary year.
Moscow printworkers are remunerated per letter. Now, in the Sytin publishing house, they demand payment for punctuation, too. An arcane orthographic revolt that prompts a wave of sympathy strikes. Bakers and railway workers join in, some bankers as well. Dancers with the Imperial Ballet refuse to perform. Factories and shops close, trams stand still, lawyers refuse cases, jurors to hear them. Rolling stock is motionless on the railways, the iron nerves of the country frozen. A million troops are stranded in Manchuria. The strikers demand pensions and decent pay and free elections, an amnesty for political prisoners, and, again, a representative body: a Constituent Assembly.
On 13 October, at Menshevik instigation, about forty workers’ representatives, SRs, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks meet in the St Petersburg Technological Institute. Workers vote them in, one for every 500 workers. They name their gathering with the Russian word for ‘council’ – the Soviet.
In the three months before mass arrests put an end to it, the Petersburg Soviet spreads its influence, draws personnel from a wider pool, begins to assert extensive authority. It sets strike dates, controls telegraphs, considers public petitions, issues appeals. Its leader is the well-known young revolutionary Lev Bronstein, known to history as Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky is hard to love but impossible not to admire. He is at once charismatic and abrasive, brilliant and persuasive and divisive and difficult. He can be compelling and he can be cold, even brutal. Lev Davidovich Bronstein was the fifth of eight children born in a village in modern-day Ukraine to a comfortably off, non-observant Jewish family. A revolutionary by the age of seventeen, a brief narodnik flirtation took him to Marxism, and in and out of prison. The name Trotsky was borrowed from a jailer in Odessa in 1902. Once considered ‘Lenin’s cudgel’, he sided with the Mensheviks at the contentious 1903 congress, though he soon broke with them. During these, his ‘non-factional’ years, he and Lenin repeatedly exchange ill-tempered polemics on various issues.
The Marxists, almost all of the view that the country is not ready for socialism, are broadly agreed that a Russian Revolution can only be, must be, a democratic and capitalist one – but, crucially, that it could be a catalyst for socialist revolution in more developed Europe. For the most part, the Mensheviks are holding out for active bourgeois leadership in Russia, as befits a liberal revolution: until 1905’s debacle, therefore, they opposed taking part in any government thrown up by a revolution. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, contend that in the context of pusillanimous liberalism, the working class itself must lead the revolution, in alliance not with those liberals but with the peasantry, taking power, in what Lenin has called a ‘revolutionary–democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’.
Trotsky, for his part, already famed as an outstanding and provocative thinker, will soon develop a very distinct take, move in different directions on such questions, formulating theories that will come to define his contested legacy. At present he is deeply engaged in the workings of the Soviet, as participant and witness in this distinct, embattled kind of governance.
In the countryside, the 1905 revolution is chiefly manifest at first in illegal and ad hoc local activities, like felling state- or landlord-owned timber, and strikes among agricultural workers. But in late July, peasant delegates and revolutionaries meet near Moscow and declare themselves the Constitutional Assembly of the All-Russian
