The Russian Revolution of 1905

This series has eight easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: A Murder Begins the General Eruption.

Introduction
The defeat of the Russo-Japanese War revealed the weaknesses of the Russian Czar’s autocratic rule. A decade before the revolution that replaced monarchy with communism, this one loosened the monarchy’s grip on absolute power. It also gave the Czar an opportunity to transition from absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. His grudging acceptance of reform and his limitations of it in intervening years doomed his rule.

Other, more democratic systems of government in other countries would survive the horrors of World War I; the Russian system would not. For the contemporary authors of this series, both the war and the Revolution of 1917 lay in the future.

The selections are from:

• Special article to Great Events by Famous Historians, volume 20 by Prince Peter Kropotkin published in 1914.
• Speech as Ambassador by Arthur Cassini.

For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

There’s 5.5 installments by Prince Peter Kropotkin and 2.5 installments by Arthur Cassini.

We begin with Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921). He was a Communist living in exile at the time he wrote this piece. Years later, after the 1917 Revolution, he returned to Russia and honor. He differed from Lenin and his Bolsheviks in that while Communism’s end goal was the elimination of all government and all property, Lenin believed an intermediate step was authoritarian dictatorship in order to guide society to that goal and Kropotkin rejected that step. Even though Kropotkin believed in an immediate end to all government, Lenin permitted a big funeral after his death. Mourners carried anti-Bolshevik signs and prominent Anarch-Communists made anti-Bolshevik speeches. This was the last time that opposition speech was permitted in Communist Russia until Gorchov’s Perestroika of the 1990’s. After Kropotkin’s funeral his supporters were quickly suppressed. As the author wrote this piece, all of this lay in the future.

Time: 1905
Place: Russia

Events in Russia are following one another with that rapidity which is characteristic of revolutionary periods. On the 10th of August, 1904, the omnipotent Minister of the Interior, Von Plehve, was killed by the revolutionary Socialist, Sazonoff. Plehve had undertaken to maintain autocracy for another ten years, provided that he and his police were invested with unlimited powers; and having received these powers, he had used them so as to make of the police the most demoralized and dangerous body in the State. In order to crush all opposition, he had not recoiled from deporting at least 30,000 persons to remote corners of the Empire by mere administrative orders. He was spending immense sums of money for his own protection, and when he drove in the streets, surrounded by crowds of policemen and detective bicyclists and automobilists, he was the best-guarded man in Russia — better guarded than even the Czar. But all that proved to be of no avail. The system of police rule was defeated, and nobody in the Czar’s surroundings would attempt to continue it. For six weeks the post of Minister of the Interior remained vacant, and then Nicholas the Second reluctantly agreed to accept Sviatopolk Mirsky, with the understanding that he would allow the little local assemblies, or zemstvos, to work out some transitional form between autocracy pure and simple and autocracy mitigated by some sort of national representation. This was done by the zemstvos at their congress in November of last year, when they dared to demand “the guaranty of the individual and the inviolability of the private dwelling,” “the local autonomy of self -administration,” and “a close intercourse between the Government and the nation,” by means of a specially elected body of representatives of the nation who would “participate in the legislative power, the establishment of the budget, and the control of the Administration.”

Modest though this declaration was, it became the signal for a general agitation. True, the press was forbidden to discuss it, but all the papers, as well as the municipal councils, the scientific societies, and all sorts of private groups discussed it nevertheless. Then, in December last, the “intellectuals” organized themselves into vast unions of engineers, lawyers, chemists, teachers, and so on — all federated in a general Union of Unions. And amid this agitation, the timid resolutions of the zemstvos were soon outdistanced. A constituent assembly, elected by universal, direct, and secret suffrage, became the watchword of all the constitutional meetings.

The students were the first to carry these resolutions in the street, and they organized imposing manifestations in support of these demands at St. Petersburg, Moscow, and in all the university towns. At Moscow the Grand Duke Sergius ordered the troops to fire at the absolutely peaceful demonstration. Many were killed, and from that day he became a doomed man.

Things would have probably dragged if the St. Petersburg working men had not at this moment lent their powerful support to the young movement — entirely changing by their move the very face of events. To prevent by any means the “intellectuals” from carrying on their propaganda amid the working men and the peasants had been the constant preoccupation of the Russian Government; while, on the other side, to join hands with the workers and the peasants and to spread among them the ideas of Freedom and Socialism had always been the goal of the revolutionary youth for the last forty years — since 1861. Life itself worked on their side. The labor movement played so prominent a part in the life of Europe during the last half-century, and it so much occupied the attention of all the European press, that the infiltration of its ideas into Russia could not be prevented by repression. The great strikes of 1896-1900 at St. Petersburg and in central Russia, the growth of the labor organizations in Poland, and the admirable success of the Jewish labor organization, the Bund, in western and southwestern Russia, proved, indeed, that the Russian working men had joined hands in their aspirations with their Western brothers.

Father Gapon succeeded in grouping in a few months a considerable mass of the St. Petersburg workers round all sorts of lecturing institutes, tea restaurants, cooperative societies, and the like; and he, with a few working-men friends, organized within that mass and linked together several thousands of men inspired by higher purposes. They succeeded so well in their underground work that when they suggested to the working men that they should go en masse to the Czar, and unroll before him a petition asking for constitutional guaranties as well as for some economical changes, nearly 70,000 men took in two days the oath to join the demonstration, although it had become nearly certain that the demonstration would be repulsed by force of arms. They more than kept their word, as they came out in still greater numbers — about 200,000 — and persisted in approaching the Winter Palace not withstanding the firing of the troops.

This led to the tragedy of “Red Sunday,” or Vladimir Sunday. It is now known how the Emperor himself, concealed at Tsarskoe Selo, gave orders to receive the demonstrators with volley-firing; how the capital was divided for that purpose into military districts, each one having at a given spot its staff, its field telephones, its ambulances. The troops fired at the dense crowds at a range of a few dozen yards, and no fewer than from 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 men, women, and children fell the victims of the Czar’s fears and obstinacy.

Arthur Cassini begins here.

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