In the 1890s, the first Marxist exiles arrived in Siberia. Lenin spent three years (1897-1900) in Eastern Siberia, at Krasnoyarsk and in the village of Slushenskoye, described by one writer as “a typical Siberian backwoods village, five hundred versts from the railway, with a tiny primary school and six pubs.”635 At the end of 1903, Stalin was exiled to the tiny Buryat village of Novaya Uda.
The Russo-Japanese War had been intensely unpopular, and every new and costly defeat increased the popular rage. Anti-war demonstrations in St. Petersburg were echoed across the land. “Conditions in Russia are overshadowing the war,” wrote The New York Times on June 6, 1905. “There is fear of revolution.”636 Indeed, the “short victorious war” to stem its tide was proving ingloriously short and hastening the day. In Siberia, the discontent was perhaps even greater than elsewhere. It had borne the brunt of the costly and unsuccessful conflict, which had exposed it directly to attack, and in Central Siberia had led to famine, since food shipments normally meant for the interior had been diverted to the front. Inadvertently, the war had also fostered literacy in the countryside, as the demand for newspapers in the villages increased. Those who read the latest news could also read the latest revolutionary pamphlets, which often seemed to articulate their malaise.
With the war on their list of grievances, just three weeks after the fall of Port Arthur, on Sunday, January 9, 1905, columns of workers and their families, led by a priest and carrying placards, icons, and banners, marched in a peaceful protest to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to present a petition to the tsar. A phalanx of troops moved to cut them off, ordering the assembly to disperse. When the marchers refused, they fired point blank into the crowd. On “Bloody Sunday” (as it came to be known), hundreds were killed and wounded; and the day marked the beginning of the Revolution of 1905. In the following weeks disorders spread through the empire, with riots, strikes, and a mutiny on the Potemkin, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. Socialist Revolutionary assassins also killed Grand Duke Sergey and Count Shuvalov, the military governor of Moscow.
Russia’s humiliating defeat in the war heightened the crisis. There were mutinies by troops returning along the Trans-Siberian, and the railway repair shops became hotbeds of unrest. In the tumult, Witte’s relative triumph over the Japanese at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was scarcely remarked. Toward the end of October all the main Russian cities were paralyzed by a general strike. Junction towns became the principal seats of revolutionary ferment. Propaganda leaflets appeared in profusion; there were strikes and demonstrations at Tomsk, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Chita, and elsewhere; many protesters were shot by government troops. Peasant uprisings occurred in most of the southern regions of Siberia. In December, open revolt broke out in Moscow.
A few years before, Marxist organizations had been formed in various Siberian cities and had begun to coordinate their activities. Although rival ideologies emerged, Siberian Marxists as a whole were scornful of the Social Democratic Party’s split into Bolshevik and Menshevik, and to some degree their relative isolation had kept them pure. They had sent delegates to both the Bolshevik Third Party Congress in London, and its Menshevik counterpart in Geneva, but within their own ranks at least affirmed their essential solidarity. Together, they worked to undermine the tsarist regime.
In response to all this turmoil, Nicholas vacillated, as was his wont. In March 1905, he issued a manifesto reaffirming the autocracy, but this went over so badly that in August he felt obliged to announce the eventual formation of a parliament – though not on the basis of universal suffrage. By October, Soviets (or councils of workers) had begun to spread from St. Petersburg to other villages and towns, including Krasnoyarsk and Chita. On October 17, as a device for buying time, the tsar issued a proclamation granting broad constitutional rights to the people and establishing a representative legislature, or Duma, after the fashion of a constitutional monarchy. This shrewd maneuver (concocted by Witte) won over the professional middle class and left the more radical demands of the Soviets without broad support. Their call for a general strike failed and many ringleaders were arrested. A few months later, in January 1906, Nicholas felt secure enough to revise his manifesto in such a way as to emasculate its original thrust, giving him the power to dissolve the Duma at will. The First Duma, in fact, was quickly dismissed; as was the Second, as arrests, secret trials, and banishments resumed in greater volume than before.
In 1906, Pyotr Stolypin was appointed Minister of the Interior and then prime minister, a post he held until 1911, when he was assassinated at the opera. During his tenure, he sought to use agrarian reform as a buffer against revolution by abolishing communal land tenure and by subsidies to peasants from the Peasants’ Land Bank. His goal was “to make every peasant a proprietor and give him the chance to work quietly on his own land, for himself.”637 To relieve the land hunger in European Russia, he encouraged internal colonization by further migration to Siberia. Conditions in Siberia favored the strong. “Throughout the Empire,” writes one historian, “peasant agriculture was being transformed into independent farming, and that economic change was accompanied by social consequences. A thaw was attacking the frozen agricultural system of communal tenure and extensive cultivation, as well as the apparent moral inertia of the Russian village. Siberia was leading the way.”638 Stolypin hoped that those peasants who could not make a go of it would be absorbed by the developing industry.
In the cities, the government attempted to counteract the Labor movement by instituting “legal” trade unions, each controlled by a government representative and infiltrated by the secret police. These for a while served their purpose of pacifying discontent by engendering the hope of some redress of workers’ grievances; at the same time they were used to identify agitators, who were deported by administrative order to Siberia or other outlying provinces of the empire. A number of future Bolshevik leaders – among them Ordzhonikidze, Frunze, Dzerzhinsky, Sverdlov, and Kuibyshev – were also exiled to Siberia at this time, and were scattered from the Ob to the Yenisey to the province of Yakutsk.
Although Trotsky later described the Revolution of 1905 as “a dress rehearsal for 1917,” a world of political development (or regression) was to take place in the intervening years.
The unrest ebbed and flowed. On November 28, 1910, Yegor Sazonov (the assassin of Plehve) committed suicide in the men’s prison of Gorni Serentui to protest the conditions of his incarceration. When his suicide became known, mass demonstrations took place in nearly every city of Russia. In Moscow, thirty thousand students marched. In January 1912, workers at the Lena goldfields, the site of vast gold-dredging operations, staged a protest against conditions at the mines. Troops were sent in, and on April 4, 1912, the demands of the strikers were met with volleys of rifle fire that left 270 miners dead and another 250 wounded. This massacre inspired a tidal wave of sympathy strikes. There were also peasant uprisings, also crushed by soldiers, in most of the southern regions of Siberia. At a conference in Prague in the same year, the Social Democratic Party confirmed its split into Bolshevik and Menshevik. Two years later, “the lights went out all over Europe” and the entire continent was engulfed in World War I.