By Matija Šerić

On Sunday, 9 January 1905, the revolution began when the army opened fire on a procession of peaceful demonstrators led by Father Georgy Gapon in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The shooting killed innocent civilians, including children and women. The event entered history as Bloody Sunday. Strikes and protest marches immediately broke out throughout the Russian Empire. In the following weeks, the Tsar lost control of Georgia and Poland. Among Russia’s factory workers, he became hated, and even industrialists at first approved of the demonstrations.

Opponents of the regime emerge from the underground

When the press began to criticise the government, Nicholas II launched an investigation into the reasons for public dissatisfaction. The prestige of the monarchy was further undermined by news from the Far East. In February 1905, Russian land forces suffered a heavy defeat at Mukden; in May the Baltic fleet was annihilated in the Battle of Tsushima. The Russian Empire lost the Russo-Japanese War. The myth of the regime’s invincibility evaporated, and banned political parties emerged from the underground. The two largest were the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The former were Marxists who wanted the urban working class to lead the struggle against the monarchy; the latter were agrarian socialists who relied on the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Both parties sought to overthrow the Romanov dynasty. Liberals also organised, founding the Constitutional Democratic Party in October 1905. Everyone wanted to bring down autocracy.

The Tsar slowly gives way

Workers established strike committees, peasants began illegally using the forests and pastures of the gentry and took over arable land. Sailors of the Black Sea Fleet mutinied, and the battleship Potemkin sailed to Romania. Soldiers returning from the Far East staged uprisings along the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway. In September 1905, St Petersburg Marxists founded a soviet (council) of workers’ deputies. It was elected by the workers and employees of a local factory and became an organ of revolutionary local self-government.

Tsar Nicholas II finally accepted Sergei Witte’s advice to issue the October Manifesto, in which he promised “civil liberty on the principles of the genuine inviolability of the person, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and association”. Elections for the Duma would be held, and adult men of all estates received the right to vote. No law could come into effect without the Duma. It seemed that autocracy was finished.

Elections for the Duma are announced

The Manifesto served as a release valve for the hostility of the urban middle class and allowed Nicholas II to suppress the open rebellion. Many liberals called for support for the Tsar. Leaders of the St Petersburg Soviet were arrested, including Leon Trotsky. In December 1905, the Moscow Soviet launched an armed uprising led by the Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries, but it failed. Loyal army units were then sent to various cities to fight other rebel organisations and social groups. Once order was restored, Nicholas II issued the Fundamental Law and called elections for the Duma. According to its terms, he retained the right to appoint the government without restrictions, to dissolve the Duma at will, and to rule by decree under a state of emergency. Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Constitutional Democrats condemned these provisions.

The Tsar manages to stay on the throne

Between 1905 and 1906, peasantry across the empire rebelled. Nicholas II stayed on the throne only because he still had many regiments available that he had not sent to the Far East due to the defeat. He narrowly escaped being overthrown. In April 1906, the first Duma convened. The largest group of deputies were peasants unaffiliated with any party. But contrary to the Tsar’s expectations, they demanded an unconditional transfer of land from the gentry to the peasantry. The Tsar responded by dissolving the Duma.

Among the parties, the Constitutional Democratic Party held the most seats. Its leaders were so angered by the dissolution that they fled to the Finnish town of Viborg and called on citizens to refuse to pay taxes or serve in the army until parliamentarism was restored. Nicholas boldly defied them and held new elections. To his misfortune, the second Duma, which convened in March 1907, was also full of radicals. Nicholas therefore asked the Minister of the Interior, Pyotr Stolypin, to form a government and write new election rules that would increase the influence of the gentry at the expense of the peasantry in the third Duma.

The assassination of Stolypin

Socialist Revolutionary Dmitry Bogrov assassinated Stolypin in September 1911 in Kyiv. Rumours circulated that the Okhrana, the secret police, had helped Bogrov get close to the prime minister — even that they had the Tsar’s tacit approval. Whatever the truth, the Tsar returned to a policy of minimal cooperation with the Duma. Yet Tsarism could no longer govern as before. Opposition was no longer limited to revolutionary activists.

In the 19th century, education expanded unusually: many secondary schools and universities were founded, whose students were intensely hostile to the regime. Young people were irritated by the imposed teaching methods and discipline. This discomfort did not disappear with age. They viewed the Tsarist order as a humiliating peculiarity from which Russia needed to break free. Journalists and publicists enjoyed far greater freedom, and newspapers ranged from proto-fascist on the far right to Bolshevik on the far left. Although the Okhrana shut down publications that openly advocated rebellion, the press was consistently anti-government. Trade unions, religious teachers, and other groups joined them.

Lenin emerges as the loudest opponent of the regime

Repression kept the dynasty in power for a while longer, but it strengthened the determination of revolutionaries to resist any watering down of their ideas. At the beginning of the new century, Marxists were the most popular among intellectuals. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was founded in 1898 but soon became plagued by factional splits, particularly among émigrés. The Bolshevik faction was led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

In his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done? he argued that the party must act as the vanguard of the working class. He insisted that party members be disciplined and loyal to doctrine. The party, in his view, had to be strictly centralised. Because of his theories, the second party congress in 1903 was disrupted. His controversial reputation was confirmed in 1905 when he proclaimed that, after the Romanovs were overthrown, there should follow a “temporary revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”, predicting that terror would be necessary.

Disagreements on the left

The Mensheviks (the other faction) disagreed, holding that Russia needed to undergo a bourgeois revolution and complete the development of capitalist society before transitioning to socialism. They wanted a more loosely organised party, unlike the Bolsheviks. The Socialist Revolutionary Party, led by Viktor Chernov, believed that Russia could move directly to socialism without the capitalist phase. They valued the peasantry, seeing it as embodying egalitarian and social values essential to socialism. The Russian Social Democratic Party was another serious contender. These were the most significant parties.

Rasputin dominates the imperial court

Tsarism was already in deep crisis. The people respected the Tsar personally, but he lacked a clear vision for Russia’s future and wasted energy on daily political affairs. He was believed to be heavily influenced by his wife, Alexandra. He surrounded himself with advisers, including various mystics and charlatans. His favouring of the Siberian “holy man” Grigori Rasputin was widely known. Rasputin, protected by the imperial couple, gambled, debauched, and schemed in the capital. The Romanovs’ reputation fell even further.

Nicholas did not completely isolate himself from his people: the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty was celebrated in 1913, and a film about the Tsar was shown in cinemas. But he did not trust politicians, workers, or intellectuals. He was out of sync with the times.

A deceptive calm

However, the immediate danger to the regime subsided. Imperial subjects accepted that the Okhrana and the army were too strong to challenge. Peasant unrest weakened. Student protests dwindled. National resistance in non-Russian regions virtually disappeared. Professional societies acted cautiously to avoid crossing government boundaries. The workers’ movement was temporarily hindered, but workers did not give up and occasionally clashed with law enforcement.

In April 1912, police opened fire on striking miners at the Lena goldfields in Siberia. Demonstrations in support of the miners erupted in other regions as well.

June 1914

A second wave of unrest appeared in June 1914 in St Petersburg. The main causes were low wages, poor working conditions, and political repression. The return of strikes and demonstrations showed that the Tsarist system was under pressure. But the Tsar responded by strengthening monarchical authority instead of seeking compromise with Duma deputies. He dissolved the Duma and wrote a new electoral law. Opponents could be sentenced to administrative exile in Siberia. A police state existed, though not a fully comprehensive one. Nicholas could have eased the situation by allowing the Duma to constitutionally limit his power. In that case, popular discontent would have shifted toward the upper and middle classes, i.e., toward political parties. But this did not happen.

An ocean of unresolved problems

Thus, on the eve of the 20th century, Russia faced serious problems related to the transformation of its economic, cultural, and administrative systems, as well as threats from foreign powers. Industrial capacity was growing, but not the number of scientists and experts needed to develop it. Agriculture was changing slowly. Living conditions in both villages and cities were shifting. Economic successes created new expectations because knowledge of the outside world spread.

Social conflicts persisted. Non-Russian peoples were discontented. The opposition was loud. The very definition of “Russia” became problematic because ethnic Russians lived throughout the empire. Large Russian enclaves existed in the Baltic region, Ukraine, and Baku. Poor peasants migrated to Siberia and the Russian provinces of Central Asia. There was no precise definition of Russia, and the government in St Petersburg did not wish to address this. With all these problems, Russia entered the First World War — which would change the country forever.

References:

Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia, 2014.

Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 1977.

http://aero-comlab.stanford.edu/jameson/world_history/A_Short_History_of_Russia.pdf

https://www.britannica.com/place/Russian-Empire

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/russian-empire