Some of the liberal leaders in the intelligentsia and the gentry began to think that time had come to organize in a more political fashion. For decades they had hoped that the zemstvos would evolve into a system of representation of the public or that new, more liberal measures would come from the government that would replace arbitrariness with basic rights and consultation of the people in some form. None of this transpired, but the zemstvos did provide a forum in which many liberal noblemen and others learned to deal with the innumerable local issues that gave them experience with public life and with the government’s unwillingness to share power to any large extent. By 1901 they had given up, for the government refused to budge, and a small group of liberal activists formed an underground group, the Union of Liberation. Opposed to terror and revolutionary methods, they decided that only an illegal group could get beyond specific issues and conduct the needed discussion and supplement publications smuggled in from abroad.
By 1904 networks of activists of varying persuasions covered the Russian interior’s major cities, and on the western and southern fringes nationalist and socialist groups among the Poles, Jews, Georgians, Armenians, and others added another dimension of instability. Then on January 27 (February 9), 1904, the Japanese navy attacked the Russian base at Port Arthur and sank most of the Russian squadron. Russia was now at war with Japan on the other side of the globe from St. Petersburg. The only line of communication was the Transsiberian Railroad, much of it still a single track and not all of it completed. The Russian army, far from its bases and lumbered with elderly generals, suffered a series of further defeats through the year. In July an SR terrorist assassinated Plehve, and Nicholas appointed the more tolerant Prince Petr Sviatopolk-Mirskii in his place. The appointment came unexpectedly and in large part was owed to the efforts of Nicholas’s mother, the dowager Empress Maria. At the same time as Sviatopolk-Mirskii seemed to move toward some mildly liberal measures, another crisis was brewing in St. Petersburg.
The police in the capitals had long been frustrated by the success of the Social Democrats and the SRs among the workers of the city. In spite of continuous arrests they seemed to be making modest progress and alarmed the authorities by their dogged persistence and the readiness of workers to listen to them. Then the head of the political police for Moscow, Sergei Zubatov, had the idea of building a labor union controlled by the police. It would provide some modest social services to the workers to alleviate their conditions while inculcating in them loyalty to the Orthodox Church and the tsar. In St. Petersburg the leader of the union was father Georgii Gapon, who quickly came to enjoy the enthusiastic support of the workers and pose a serious threat to the revolutionaries. Thus when a spontaneous strike broke out at the huge Putilov machine works on the southern fringe of the city, Gapon was in a dilemma. The policy of the police unions was to oppose strikes (seen simply as violations of public order in Russian law), but if he chose that path he knew he would lose the support of the workers to the radicals. He chose to go along with the strike but conceived the idea that the workers should present their grievances to the tsar himself. Gapon assumed that the tsar would listen and do something, which would appease the workers and settle the strike. As the workers approached the Winter Palace in the snow on January 9/22, 1905, the response of the government, nervous about the unrest in the city, was to line up soldiers in front of the palace and order them to open fire on the unarmed crowd. Over a hundred were killed and many more wounded.
Within a few days workers all over the country, from Poland to Siberia, went out on strike by the hundreds of thousands. These were spontaneous movements with no unions, no strike pay, and virtually no leadership. The police union was immediately discredited, and the revolutionary parties were swamped, as they had only a few thousand activists in the whole country.
The Revolution of 1905 that ensued was an extraordinarily complex event. The urban strike movement was enormous, especially considering the lack of experience at such actions on the part of almost all workers, and the inadequacy of organizational structures. In the villages for the first time peasant unrest became widespread enough to provoke massive campaigns of military repression, even if SRs and others still found it extremely difficult to actually organize the peasants. Most of the non-Russian areas experienced the same upheavals as the interior of the country, with nationalist or socialist forces predominant in different areas at different times. The liberal middle classes generally supported all these upheavals, if only passively, and solidly blamed the government for the bloodshed. The government found itself extremely isolated, though Tsar Nicholas tried to hold on to the fantasy of the loyal peasantry corrupted by the intelligentsia and the Jews.
To complicate everything, the war with Japan continued and went from bad to worse. In the spring the Japanese inflicted a major defeat on the Russian army at Mukden. To replace the lost Far Eastern squadron, the navy sent the Baltic Fleet on an epic voyage around Africa and Southern Asia to the theater of operations. There it encountered the Japanese navy at Tsushima in May 1905, and was almost entirely destroyed. At this point, Nicholas and his government realized that they had no option but to make peace, and with Theodore Roosevelt as intermediary, the peace was signed at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 23 (September 2), 1905. Russia lost the base at Port Arthur and the southern half of Sakhalin Island, but kept its Manchurian railroad and its buildings in Harbin.
These events took place against a background of rapidly growing unrest. In the spring nearly a million workers struck for greater or lesser times in St. Petersburg alone. Some of these were political strikes, but most were about wages and particularly about condescending and rude treatment at the hands of the factory administrations. Peasant seizure of land and attacks on the houses of the nobility reached a peak over the summer and spread throughout central Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic provinces, and Caucasus. In Georgia whole areas were out of control of the government, and bandits flourished alongside peasant rebels. Starting in Baku, Armenians and Azeris attacked one another, killing thousands. In the Baltics the ethnic antagonism of German landlords and Latvian and Estonian peasants added extra viciousness to the violence, and Russian Cossacks were put in the position of defending Baltic German nobles. The high point of the summer of 1905 was the mutiny of the sailors on the battleship Potemkin, later immortalized in Sergei Eisenstein’s film. The sailors demanded better conditions and an end to autocracy, supporting strikers in Odessa before they sailed off to internment in Rumania. This and other military mutinies, continuing into 1906, kept the government at bay.