fn7 Jews played a prominent role in the Social Democratic movement, providing many of its most important leaders (Axelrod, Deich, Martov, Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, just to name a few). In 1905 the Social Democratic Party in Russia had 8,400 members. The Bund, by contrast, the Jewish workers’ party of the Pale, had 35,000 members.
fn8 The alias and pseudonym ‘Lenin’ was probably derived from the River Lena in Siberia. Lenin first used it in 1901.
fn9 The merchants of Yaroslavl’ had a long-established reputation, stretching back to the Middle Ages, for being much more cunning than the rest.
fn10 For the Marxists of the 1890s ‘propaganda’ meant the gradual education of the workers in small study groups with the goal of inculcating in them a general understanding of the movement and class consciousness. ‘Agitation’ meant a mass campaign on specific labour and political issues.
fn11 The First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was held in 1898. This founding moment in the history of the party, which in nineteen years would come to rule the largest country in the world, was attended by no more than nine socialists! They met secretly in the town of Minsk, passed a declaration of standard Marxist goals, and then, almost to a man, were arrested by the police.
Chapter 5
fn1 The Orthodox Church, which had recently excommunicated Tolstoy, forbade the starving peasants to accept food from his relief campaign.
fn2 As he would throughout his life.
fn3 For this Struve was treated by the government as a defeatist. He was even approached by a Japanese spy.
fn4 It was organized by Boris Savinkov (1879–1925), who was later to become a minister in the Provisional Government.
fn5 At the end of January Gapon turned up in Geneva, where he fell in with the revolutionaries in exile. Their theoretical disputes were above him and, seduced by international fame, he soon left for London to write his autobiography. Having made himself a celebrity, Gapon had no more use for the revolutionary movement. In December he returned to Russia, where he supported the Witte government and even co-operated with the secret police against the socialists. In March 1906, for reasons that are unclear, he was brutally murdered by agents of the secret police, including his closest associate, who on 9 January had rescued him from the massacre at the Narva Gates.
fn6 The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks probably had something in the region of 10,000 members each by the end of 1905, although at this early stage party membership was not clearly defined. There are no reliable figures for SR party membership in 1905. But in November 1906 there were 50,000 members, compared with a total of 40,000 members for the two Marxist factions.
fn7 Since the professions had taken the lead in forming these unions, other blue-collar unions, even in Communist Russia, continued to be called ‘professional unions’ (profsoiuzy) rather than trade or industrial unions.
fn8 In 1893, when he was working in the Department of Police, Durnovo had ordered his agents to steal the Spanish Ambassador’s correspondence with his prostitute mistress, with whom Durnovo was also in love. The Ambassador complained to Alexander III, who ordered Durnovo’s immediate dismissal. But after Alexander’s death he somehow managed to revive his career.
fn9 The name was a derogatory one, adapted from the term ‘White Hundreds’, which was used in medieval Russia for the privileged caste of nobles and wealthy merchants. The lower-class types who joined the Black Hundreds were not in this class, hence their ironic nomenclature.
fn10 Among them, ironically, was A.A. Zarudny, who in 1917, as the Minister of Justice in Kerensky’s government, would imprison Trotsky on charges of state treason.
fn11 F. I. Dan and E. I. Martynov had also broken with this old Menshevik view (which went back to the 1880s). Their theory of the ‘unbroken revolution’, which they advanced in the newspaper Nachalo during the autumn of 1905, differed little from that of the ‘permanent revolution’.
Chapter 6
fn1 Lvov was taken ill on the way to Vyborg and had to return to St Petersburg. So he never signed the Manifesto, although he clearly sympathized with it.
fn2 Like all Great-Russian nationalists, Stolypin counted the Ukrainians and Belorussians as bearers of the Russian national idea.
fn3 This last cultural aspect was a crucial one — and itself a sign of the mountain to be climbed — for the introduction of a constitutional order in a country such as Russia which then (as today) had no real traditions of constitutionalism. Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a pre-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society — and the state itself — into the values and ideas of liberal constitutionalism.
fn4 The parties of the Right (the Nationalists and the Rightists) had 154 deputies in the Fourth Duma, those of the Centre (Octobrists and Centre Group) 126, and those of the Left (Kadets, Progressists and Socialists) 152.
fn5 Tsushima was the site of Russia’s biggest defeat in the war against Japan.
Chapter 7
fn1 The largest department store in Moscow.
fn2 Zinovy Peshkov (1884–1966) was the brother of Yakov Sverdlov, the Bolshevik leader and first Soviet President. After recovering from his wound, he enlisted in the French military intelligence. He supported Kornilov’s movement against the Provisional Government. In 1918 he joined Semenov’s antiBolshevik army in the Far East and then Kolchak’s White government in Omsk. In 1920 he was sent to the Crimea as a French military agent in Wrangel’s government and left Russia with Wrangel’s army. He later became a close associate of Charles de Gaulle and a prominent French politician. What is strange is that until 1933 Peshkov maintained good relations with Gorky in Russia, and that Gorky knew about his intelligence activities. See Delmas, ‘Légionnaire et diplomate’.
fn3 The big metal factories of Petrograd, to cite the most extreme example, enjoyed a five-fold increase in profits during the war.
Chapter 8
fn1 It was rumoured that Protopopov had promised each policeman 500 roubles for every wound he received from the crowd.
fn2 People said the same thing in 1989 after the East German authorities had shot at the demonstrators in Leipzig. Crowds are afraid of the threat of bloodshed but emboldened after it occurs.
fn3 The Inter-District group, or Mezhraionka, was a leftwing faction of the Social Democrats in Petrograd. It favoured the reunification of the Menshevik and Bolshevik wings of the party. Trotsky and Lunacharsky belonged to it until the summer of 1917, when they joined the Bolsheviks.
fn4 Lvov, Kerensky, Nekrasov, Tereshchenko, Konovalov and Guchkov.
fn5 Several US eagles were also taken down mistakenly.
fn6 According to an opinion poll in 1995, only 7 per cent of the Russian people favoured the return of the monarchy.
Chapter 9
fn1 For the Social Democrats, steeped in Marx’s writings of 1848–52, Bonapartism meant Napoleon III rather than Napoleon I.
fn2 Not surprisingly, many of the squires had left their fields unsown.
fn3 The nationalist leadership was also largely derived from these groups. In the Ukraine, for example, the main leaders of the nationalist movement were Vinnichenko (the son of a peasant), Hrushevsky (the son of a minor official), Doroshenko (the son of a military vet), Konovalov and Naumenko (both the sons of teachers), Sadovsky, Efremov, Mikhnovsky, Chekhovsky and Boldochan (all the sons of priests).
fn4 According to General Polovtsov, some of the soldiers thought the International was some sort of deity.
fn5 Valentinov, who knew Lenin well in Switzerland, wrote: ‘He would never have gone on to the streets to fight on the barricades, or stand in the line of fire. Not he, but other, humbler people were to do that … Lenin ran headlong even from émigré meetings which seemed likely to end in a scuffle. His rule was to “get away while the going was good” — to use his own words — meaning from any threat of danger. During his stay in Petersburg in 1905–6 he so exaggerated the danger to himself and went to such extremes in his anxiety for self-preservation that one was bound to ask whether he was not simply a man without personal courage.’