On 17 October, the tsar, still reeling from the upheavals, reluctantly issues his ‘October Manifesto’, appointing the shrewd conservative Count Witte as premier. In a fillip to Russian liberalism, Nicholas concedes the principles of legislative powers for the Duma and limited suffrage for urban male workers. The same month sees the founding congress of the Constitutional Democratic Party, known as the Kadets.
A liberal party, the Kadets stand for civil rights, universal male suffrage, a degree of autonomy for national minorities, and moderate land and labour reform. The party’s roots include a certain strain of radical(ish) liberalism, though that wanes swiftly as the revolution retreats. By the end of 1906, their ambiguous republicanism will have mutated into support for a constitutional monarchy. The Kadets’ 100,000 members are mainly middle-class professionals: the party chair, Pavel Milyukov, is a pre-eminent historian. Another new party, about a fifth the size of the Kadets, the Octobrists, forms in supportive response to the tsar’s October Manifesto, attracts conservative liberals, and mostly comprises of landowners, cautious businesspeople and the moneyed. They support some moderate reforms, but oppose universal suffrage as a threat to the monarchy and themselves.
Dissent has its momentum: a second, more radical peasant congress meets in early November. In the central provinces of Tambov, Kursk and Voronezh, in the Volga, in Samara and Simbirsk and Saratov, around Kiev and in Chernigov and Podolia, peasant crowds attack, sack, often burn manor houses, and loot their estates. Revolutionary ideas spread like electricity along roads and along those conductive railway tracks. Soviets are formed in Moscow, Saratov, Samara, Kostroma, Odessa, Baku, Krasnoyarsk. In December, the Novorossiysk Soviet deposes the governor, and, briefly, runs the city.
In Moscow on 7 December the general strike becomes an urban insurrection, backed by the SRs and Bolsheviks – in the latter case out of agonised solidarity, rather than any great faith in the likelihood of its success. For days the ring of the outer city is in revolutionary hands. Workers throw up barricades across the streets and Moscow is wracked by guerrilla fighting.
At last news that loyalist Semyonov Guards are coming from St Petersburg buoys the counterrevolutionary volunteers. They bombard the insurgent textile workers in the Presnya district with artillery. In these, the uprising’s death throes, 250 radicals are killed. The revolution dies with them.
January 1906, in the chilling words of Victor Serge, is ‘a month of firing squads’. A wave of orchestrated pogroms shakes the country. The American Jewish Committee collates evidence of a staggering upswell of racist violence, taking perhaps 4,000 lives.
Resistance does continue, including assassinations. In February 1906, at the railway station in the town of Borisoglebsk, a twenty-year-old Socialist Revolutionary named Maria Spiridonova guns down the local security chief, a man notorious for his savage repression of the peasants. She receives a death sentence, commuted to hard labour in Siberia. At each stop on the journey to the penal colony, Spiridonova emerges to address crowds of sympathisers. Even the liberal press, no fan of the SRs, publishes her letters. She tells of her torture at her captors’ hands. Her mistreatment becomes a cause célèbre.
But the state’s punitive expeditions spread out from the cities to reassert its authority, and the resilience of the radicals ebbs. By the time the revolt is finally put down, 15,000 have died – the great majority revolutionaries – and 79,000 are in prison or exiled. Pyotr Stolypin, governor of Saratov, earns infamy for his recourse to the gallows. The hangman’s noose becomes known as ‘Stolypin’s necktie’.
‘Better’, one workers’ slogan has it, ‘to fall a pile of bones than live like slaves.’
The rubble of the 1905 defeat and the subsequent repression put paid to any naivety about the regime’s goodwill, any residual faith in the tsar, and, for radicals, any hope of collaboration with ‘census society’, as the propertied classes and liberal intelligentsia are known. For most of that layer, the October Manifesto proves sufficient to justify capitulating, and the workers learn that they are alone.
What that knowledge stokes among the most ‘conscious’, the small, growing group of worker–intellectuals, autodidacts and activists, is an implacable class pride. A trenchant sense of culture, discipline and consciousness, of outright irreconcilability with the bourgeoisie. From now on from below come escalating calls not only for economic improvements, but also for dignity. One indignant grassroots soldiers’ song is clear in these priorities:
Sure we’d like some tea
But give us with our tea
Some polite respect
And please have officers
Not slap us in the face.
Soldiers and workers demand to be ‘respectfully’ addressed, in the courteous second-person plural, vy, rather than as ty, the singular, which is deployed from a position of authority.
In this fraught and protean political culture, the pride and shame of the oppressed are inextricable. On the one hand, there is the furious scolding one Putilov worker gives his son, when the young man ‘allows himself’ to be beaten by military officers for speaking positively of the Bolsheviks. ‘A worker should not endure a blow from a bourgeois,’ he shouts. ‘ “You hit me? – There, take one back.” ’ On the other hand there is the disgust one activist, Shapovalov, feels at his own impulse to cower, to avoid meeting his boss’s gaze. ‘It was as if two men were living inside of me: one who for the sake of the struggle for a better future for the workers was not afraid of sitting in the [jail of the] Peter and Paul Fortress and in Siberian exile: and another who had not fully liberated himself from the feeling of dependence and even fear.’
In reaction to such ‘slavish feelings’, he nurses a furious honour. ‘I came to hate capitalism and my boss … even more intensely.’
In March 1906, the grudgingly promised Duma meets. By now, though, the tsar’s government feels strong enough to clip the parliament’s already weak wings. Together, the Kadets, the Social Democrats – as the Marxists are known – and the narodnik Socialist Revolutionaries have a majority: the resulting programme of agrarian reform is anathema to the regime. Which, on 21 July 1906, therefore dissolves the Duma.
Radical attacks on government officials continue, but now the tide is with reaction. Peasants are tried under military law, to allow the death penalty. The tsar replaces the able Witte with the ruthless Stolypin, he of the ‘neckties’, sower of more bones. In June 1907, Stolypin peremptorily dissolves the follow-up Second Duma, arrests the Social Democratic deputies, restricts the vote, favouring property owners and nobility, and slashes non-Russian representation. It is on this rump franchise that the Third Duma is elected in 1907, and the fourth in 1912.
To modernise agriculture, the regime wants to break up the mir, the commune, and create a layer of smallholders. Stolypin gives peasants the right to buy individual plots. Progress is slow: still, by 1914 – three years after the assassination of Stolypin himself – some 40 percent of peasant households will have abandoned the mir. Only a few, though, will ever make it as small farmers. The poorest are instead forced to sell their tiny holdings, becoming agricultural labourers or migrating to the cities. Stolypin cracks brutally down on the peasant movement, leading the SRs to refocus somewhat toward work in cities.
This is hardly, though, a fertile arena. Around 1907–08, a new landscape of repression emerges. Strike rates are slashed. Revolutionaries are forced into miserable, defeated exile. By 1910, membership of the RSDWP collapses from 100,000 to a few thousand. Lenin, in Geneva and then Paris, clings to a pitiful optimism, managing to interpret any scrap – an economic dip here, an uptick in radical publications there – as a ‘turning point’. But
