A People's Tragedy (40 page)

And indeed in the following weeks tens of thousands of reform petitions were sent in to the Tsar from village assemblies, army regiments, towns and factories. Like the
cahiers,
the letters of grievance of 1789, they gave expression to the evolving language of political and social democracy. But their demands were far too radical for Nicholas.

Most of them called for a national parliament with sovereign rights of legislation. Yet the sort of assembly which the Tsar had in mind — and which Bulygin finally presented for his signature on 6 August — was a purely consultative one elected on a limited franchise to ensure the domination of the nobles. This was to be a king's parliament, like the
Zemskii Sobor
of the seventeeth century, which was compatible with the preservation of the Tsar's own personal rule. Its main purpose, as Nicholas saw it, would be to inform him of his subjects' needs and thus enable him to rule on their behalf without the mediation of the self-aggrandizing bureaucracy.48

The Bulygin Duma was yet another example of too little too late. Six months earlier it would have been welcomed, and enabled the government to regain the political initiative. But now all but the most moderate reformers found it quite unsatisfactory.

The liberal newspapers, having carefully scrutinized the complex provisions of the new electoral law, claimed that less than I per cent of St Petersburg's adult residents would qualify for the vote, while in many provincial cities the proportion would be even tinier.

Despite their criticisms, the liberals chose not to boycott the Duma elections. But the Social Democrats and the radicals in the Union of Unions were now more determined than ever to use mass civil disobedience to pressurize the government into making further concessions. The culmination of their efforts was the general strike of September and October, the first general strike in history, which forced the reluctant government to concede real political reforms.

During 1905 there was a marked increase in the level of organization and militancy of the workers' strikes and protests. This was partly the result of the socialists taking over the labour movement. But it was also — and probably much more so — the result of the workers themselves becoming more class conscious and violent as their conflicts with employers and police became more bitter and intense. Gorky noted the workers'

growing aggression after witnessing a clash on Znamenskaya Square in St Petersburg in early September. An officer struck a soldier in the street, and an angry crowd of workers gathered to defend the soldier. They tore the epaulettes from the officer's uniform and, so Gorky thought, would have killed him too had it not been for the timely intervention of the police and Cossacks. 'The crowd conducted itself with remarkable simplicity and openness,' Gorky wrote to Ekaterina, 'they said and chanted everything they wanted right there and then in front of the police and in general displayed a great deal of moral strength and even tact. There is a world of difference between this crowd and the supplicant people of 9 January.'49

Not all the violence in the cities was the result of the growing militancy of the labour movement. There was a marked increase in all forms of violence, from muggings and murders to drunken riots and vandalism, as law and order broke down. Indeed, as the police withdrew from the scene, so the public added to the violence by forming groups of vigilantes and lynching criminals in the streets. Every day the press reported dozens of these cases of 'mob law'
(samosud),
along with robberies and murders. Mobs of a different kind went round the streets beating up students and well-dressed passers-by.

There were pogroms against Jews. In short, the whole country seemed locked into a downward spiral of violence and anarchy. As the US Consul in Batumi reported:

[Russia] is permeated with sedition and reeking with revolution, racial hatred and warfare, murder, incendiarism, brigandage, robbery and crime of every kind ... As far as can be seen we are on the high road to complete anarchy and social chaos . . . One of the worst signs is that the public under this long reign of anarchy and crime is growing callous and the news of the murder of an acquaintance or friend is, by the bulk of the population, received with indifference whilst cases of brigandage are looked upon as being quite in the ordinary course of events.50

Because of the preoccupation of many historians with the organized labour movement

— and their seduction by the Soviet myth of the armed workers on the barricades — the role of this everyday criminal violence in the revolutionary crowd has been either ignored or, even more misleadingly, confused with the violence of industrial war. Yet the closer one looks at the crowds on the streets, the harder it becomes to distinguish clearly between organized forms of protest — the marching workers with banners and songs — and criminal acts of looting and violence. The one could easily — and often did — break down into the other. It was not just a question of 'hooligans' or criminals joining in labour protests or taking advantage of the chaos they created to vandalize, assault and loot. Such acts seem to have been an integral element of labour militancy, a means of asserting the power of the plebeian crowd and of despoiling and destroying symbols of wealth and privilege. What the frightened middle classes termed

'hooliganism' — mob attacks on the well-to-do and on figures of authority, looting and vandalism, drunken brawling and rioting — could just as easily be categorized as

'revolutionary acts'. And in part that is what they were: the revolutionary violence of 1905—17 was expressed in just these sorts of act. It was driven by the same feelings of hatred for the rich and all

figures of authority, by the same desire of the poor and the powerless to assert themselves and claim the streets as their own. From the perspective of the propertied there was very little to distinguish between the 'rough' and 'rude' behaviour of the

'hooligans' — their cocky way of dressing, their drunkenness and vulgar language, their

'insolence' and licence' — and the behaviour of the revolutionary crowd.51 Even the most organized labour protests could, on the slightest provocation, break down into violence and looting. It was to become a major problem for all the revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks in particular, who tried to use the violence of the crowd for their own political ends. Such violence was a double-edged sword and could lead to anarchy rather than controlled revolutionary force. This was the lesson the Bolsheviks would learn during the July and October Days in 1917 — outbursts of violence which were far removed from the Soviet image of heroic proletarian power.

If, however, there was some genuine inspiration for the Soviet myth of the factory worker, gun in hand, fighting for the revolution on the barricades, then that was the general strike of 1905. For it was the classic example of a spontaneous yet disciplined uprising of the working class. It began on 20 September with a walk-out by the Moscow printers — the most educated group of workers — for better pay and conditions. The strikers made contact with the students and held a mass street demonstration, which was attacked by the police. The workers threw stones at the police, smashed shop windows, overturned benches and knocked down trees to make barricades. By the start of October the printers of St Petersburg and several other cities had come out in solidarity with their comrades: middle-class homes went without their newspapers for several weeks.

Then the railway workers came out on strike. The Union of Railway Employees and Workers was affiliated to the Union of Unions, which had been discussing the idea of a general political strike to further its campaign for political reform since the summer. By 10 October virtually the entire railway network had come to a halt. Millions of other workers — factory, shop and transport workers, bank and office employees, hospital staff, students, lecturers, even the actors of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg —

came out in support of what had become in effect a national strike against the autocracy.

The cities were brought to a standstill. All transport stopped. The lights went out at night. Telegraphs and telephones ceased to work. Shops were closed and their windows boarded up. Food became scarce. Robberies and looting exploded out of control. The gentry and the bourgeoisie took fright at the breakdown of law and order. When the Moscow water system began to malfunction there was panic; rumours spread that the strikers had deliberately contaminated the water. Workers, students and professionals joined together in demonstrations against the authorities. Many ended in the hasty building of barricades and in violent clashes with the police and Cossacks. The political demands of the demonstrators were

remarkably uniform — the convocation of a constituent assembly elected by universal suffrage — which was a sign of the co-ordinating role played by the Union of Unions as well as the increased discipline and organization of the workers themselves.52

This last had much to do with the Petersburg Soviet. The word 'soviet' means 'council'

in Russian and the Petersburg Soviet was really no more than an
ad hoc
council of workers established to direct the general strike. It owed its origins partly to the Union of Unions, which first came up with the idea, and partly to the Mensheviks, who took the lead in organizing the workers at factory level. On 17 October 562 factory deputies, most of them metalworkers, assembled in the building of the Free Economic Society and elected an executive of fifty members, including seven delegates from each of the three main socialist parties (Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and SRs). From the beginning it assumed the tatus and form — which it would assume again in 1917 — of a workers'

government and an alternative source of power to the tsarist authorities. It organized the strikes, published its own newspaper,
Izvestiia,
which the workers eagerly read, established a militia, saw to the distribution of food supplies, and by its example inspired workers in fifty other cities to set up Soviets of their own. The Mensheviks dominated the Petersburg Soviet. They saw it as the embodiment of their ideology. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, were mistrustful of working-class initiatives and hostile to the idea of the Soviet as an independent workers' council, although this no doubt had something to do with the fact that they themselves had very little influence over it. Not even Lenin, who returned from exile in early November, got to speak in the Soviet, although there is still a desk in the building that housed the workers' council with a plaque on it claiming that he did.53

The nominal chairman of the Soviet Executive was the lawyer (and future Menshevik) G. S. Khrustalev-Nosar. But Leon Trotsky was the real force behind it. He framed its resolutions and wrote the editorials for
Izvestiia.
After Khrustalev-Nosar's arrest on 26

November, he also became its chairman. Trotsky had been the first of the major socialist leaders to return from exile after Bloody Sunday. He lived under various guises, including that of a patient in an eye hospital, where he had written revolutionary proclamations from his bed as the nurses gave him foot-baths. During the general strike he had emerged in the Soviet under the name of Yanovsky, the village where he was born. His support for a working-class insurrection and his brilliant journalistic attacks on the liberals had certainly brought him closer to the Bolshevik wing of the Social Democrats since the great party schism of 1903. Yet in essence he remained a revolutionary Menshevik and, as George Denike later recalled, it was he more than anyone else who 'stood for Menshevism' at this stage.54

The Tsar's advisers now looked to Count Witte to save the country from disaster. Yet Nicholas himself remained quite impassive. He spent most of his time that autumn hunting. 'The tragic aspect of the situation', remarked a courtier in his diary on I October, 'is that the Tsar is living in an utter fool's paradise, thinking that He is as strong and all-powerful as before.' On 9 October Witte was finally received in the Winter Palace. With brutal frankness he told Nicholas that the country was on the verge of a cataclysmic revolution which would 'sweep away a thousand years of history'. The Tsar had one of two choices: either to appoint a military dictator or introduce major reforms.

Witte outlined the needed reforms in a memorandum arguing for a Manifesto, which he had brought with him: the granting of civil liberties; a constitutional order; cabinet government; and a legislative Duma elected on a democratic franchise. It was in effect the political programme of the Liberation Movement. His aim was clearly to isolate the Left by pacifying the liberals. He stressed that repression could only be a temporary solution, and a risky one at that, for the loyalty of the armed services was in doubt and if they were used to put down the general strike they might fall apart altogether. Most of the Tsar's senior military advisers agreed with Witte, as did Trepov, the Governor of St Petersburg, whose influence at court was now paramount. Nicholas remained unconvinced and asked his uncle, the Grand Duke Nikolai, to assume the role of dictator. But the Grand Duke, an excitable and outspoken man, took out a revolver and threatened to shoot himself there and then if the Tsar refused to endorse Witte's memorandum. The Empress would henceforth always blame the Grand Duke for Russia's 'constitution'. His
coup de theatre
was certainly the decisive factor in her husband's change of mind, for the Grand Duke was the one man capable of playing the role of dictator and it was only when he took the side of reform that it finally dawned on the Tsar that repression was no longer an option and he agreed to sign the Manifesto.

'My dear Mama,' he wrote to the Empress Maria two days later on 19 October, 'you can't imagine what I went through before that moment . . . From all over Russia they cried for it, they begged for it, and around me many — very many — held the same views . . .

There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for.'55

From the start, then, the Tsar was reluctant in the extreme to play the role of a constitutional monarch. The image of Nicholas as an 'enlightened Tsar' who 'introduced democracy to Russia' could not be further from the truth, although it is one that apologists for the tsarist regime as well as peddlers of nostalgia in post-Soviet Russia would have us accept. For an autocrat like Nicholas, who saw himself as ruling from the throne in the good old Byzantine tradition, there could have been no deeper humiliation than to be forced by a bureaucrat like Witte (who was merely a 'businessman' and, moreover, a former railway clerk') to grant his subjects the rights of citizenship. Not even the