In August Nicholas, under pressure from his government and his mother, issued a manifesto conceding a representative legislature, but with very limited powers. The manifesto had no effect, and in the autumn the strike movement in the cities resumed with even greater force. In October the strikes turned into a general strike, now a political strike directed against autocracy with calls for a democratic republic. In the absence of other organizations, the St. Petersburg workers began to form councils (in Russian, soviets) at the factory level and then came together to form a city soviet. The Social Democrats were dubious about the soviets at first, but the Mensheviks realized their potential. The most vigorous leader in the St. Petersburg soviet of workers’ deputies was Leon Trotsky, a vivid and powerful orator and one of the main leaders of the Mensheviks. Lenin and his followers quickly jumped on the bandwagon. Finally on October 17/30 the tsar conceded that Russia would have to have a representative legislature, to be called the Duma, and some sort of constitution. The general strike came to an end, but Lenin and the Bolsheviks wanted to keep pushing the revolution farther. The result was an insurrection in the factory districts in the west of Moscow in December 1905, suppressed with considerable force by the army and police.
The October Manifesto changed Russian politics completely, perhaps more so than Nicholas had intended. Witte now came back to power in the new office of Prime Minister. Liberal and conservative groups began to form parties, and some of the revolutionaries came at least partially out of the underground. The new parties founded newspapers and enrolled members, preparing for the elections. The beginnings of mass politics brought more sinister forces as well in the form of the Union of the Russian People and many lesser groups of the same type. These were the “Black Hundreds,” devoted to autocracy and Orthodoxy and proclaiming the Jews the source of all of Russia’s problems. Intensely nationalistic, they opposed equality for all the national minorities, but singled out the Jews for bloody pogroms which they believed would put an end to revolution, in their mind the work of the Poles and the intelligentsia, but most of all the Jews. Two Jewish deputies to the Duma fell victim to their terror as well as hundreds in the pogroms. At least four hundred Jews died in the Odessa pogrom alone. While ineffective at combating revolution, the Black Hundreds added another element of violence and chaos to Russian politics.
The government had promised Russia a constitution, and Witte and the ministers produced one that the tsar would agree to. This was Russia’s first constitution, the Fundamental Laws, written by Witte and other government officials and proclaimed on the opening day of the new Duma – April 27, 1906. In the new structure, the Duma was to pass laws, and if the Council of State agreed, they were sent to the tsar for his approval, without which they were not valid. The Council of State became an upper house, appointed by the tsar mainly from the great dignitaries of the state but with some representatives of the nobility, businessmen, and the universities. Rather inconsistently the document proclaimed the tsar an autocrat, but he now had to make laws through the Duma. His power remained predominant, for the Fundamental Laws reserved to the tsar foreign policy, the power to make war and peace, command of the army, and all administrative appointments. For the first time the tsar had something like a cabinet with a prime minister (Witte at first), but the ministers were all responsible to the tsar, not to the Duma.
This was a highly conservative constitution, though not as odd in the Europe of 1906 as it later seemed. The concentration of military and foreign policy power in the hands of the monarch was also a feature of the German and Austrian constitutions, and even in Sweden the ministers were still responsible to the king, not the parliament. What made the Russian system more distinctive was the failure of the cabinet to emerge as a united force (results depended on personalities) and the complex system of electoral franchise for the Duma. The Duma was elected not simply from regions or with property qualifications for voting, but by a complex of regional districts, indirect voting, and the curial system. For each social group (peasants, townspeople, workers, nobles) there was a curia, and the voters cast their ballots within a curia. Still believing in the loyalty of the peasantry and its social conservatism, the elections to the first Duma that took place in winter 1905–06 were based on a distribution of seats that favored the peasantry. Nicholas was convinced that only the upper and middle classes opposed autocracy, but the peasants were on his side.
The outcome of the elections presented the government with a Duma that was impossible to work with. Boycotts by the revolutionary parties meant that the liberals, the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats, officially the Party of Popular Freedom), were the largest party in the Duma, while the peasants, only slowly moving into parties, were the largest group. For the Kadets, the government’s concessions to constitutionalism were far too small, and the peasant deputies surprised everyone by voting for any measure that would give them land. Many did express loyalty to the tsar, but they also wanted the land, something Nicholas and Witte had not bargained on. Nicholas dissolved the Duma in July, hoping new elections would prove more favorable. Witte resigned, and his replacement was Petr Stolypin, a former provincial governor with a reputation for crushing rebellion but also for an interest in reform. The first sign of the latter was the law he sponsored in the fall of 1906 allowing peasants to leave the village community and set up independent farms.
The strike movement and the rural disturbances gradually died down in the course of late 1906. Stolypin sent out punitive battalions into the countryside to repress peasant rebels, with executions carried out on the spot. The elections to the second Duma, however, did not produce the results that Stolypin and the government hoped for. If anything, the new Duma was even more radical than the first. The peasant deputies were now organized into the “Labor Group” that demanded all land for the peasantry. Finally on June 3, 1907, Stolypin dissolved the Duma, and there was virtually no reaction from the public. The revolution had spent its force.
The 1905 Revolution had been a bloody affair, with some fifteen thousand killed, most of them peasants executed or simply killed during government reprisals in the countryside. Several thousand revolutionaries were also executed, and many workers perished in conflicts over strikes or in the various insurrections. Some landowners in the countryside suffered as well, and much property was destroyed. In late 1905 an “All-Russian Peasant Union” had come into existence, which enrolled several hundred thousand members and demanded the surrender of all the land to the peasantry. The Union tried to avoid violent tactics, but its members grew increasingly radical into 1906 and allied with the Labor Group in the Duma. The Peasant Union too was suppressed. The most important outcome was the radical change in Russian politics. The virtual disappearance of censorship and the elections to the Duma and its debates took politics from the halls of the court and the offices of the bureaucracy into the public, even into the streets for the duration of the revolution. Whole social classes began to think differently: the nobility stopped flirting with liberalism and quickly united behind slogans of autocracy, nationalism, and preservation of the social order. The urban middle and working classes lost their passivity and began to participate in political action and to support some of the more radical parties. The businessmen formed small parties of their own and lobby groups, the peasantry heard the speeches of the Peasant Union activists and the SRs, and learned to vote for its interests in the land issue. The various national minorities now had active political parties: in Georgia the Mensheviks combined socialism with nationalism to become the far and away strongest force. In Latvia the Social Democrats allied with the Bolsheviks and dominated the labor movement. In Poland all the political parties came out into the open, and the National Democrats competed with some success against socialist groups for the allegiance of the workers. Among the Muslim peoples of the empire, the progressive intelligentsia put up candidates for the Duma and won, going on to form a Muslim Duma group that united Tatars, Bashkirs, Crimeans, Azeris, and North Caucasus mountaineers to press for equal status. Like many of the autonomist groups, they allied with the Russian Kadets and participated actively in Duma debates.