The blood had barely dried before a wave of strikes broke out in the Empire’s major cities, especially in the west where the leading anti-Tsarist organisation was the Jewish Bund. The Bund “threw its entire apparatus into the building of the revolution […] it put itself at the centre of the revolution and was largely recognised for it”.7 As a result its membership leapt to approximately 40,000. In Lodz, where nearly a third of the population was Jewish, it created nine new trade unions and organised radical student groups. The entire province of Lodz, which included other large towns, was soon brought to a standstill as over 100,000 workers took strike action to demand a democratic Constituent Assembly. Later, when the revolutionary tide receded, Tsarist and anti-Semitic groups would take their revenge on the province in a series of pogroms from which many fled to the US (where Bundists working in the heavily sweated New York garment trades helped form the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, one of the largest and most militant American labor unions).
The unrest was not confined to the cities. The sailors of the Black Sea Fleet Battleship Potemkin mutinied, cast off their officers and sailed to the revolutionary hotbed of Odessa. There they joined with striking workers before the Tsar’s forces moved in and carried out the infamous massacre on the Odessa Steps. Peasants, scenting the weakness of the traditional landowning class, staged rent strikes and illegal land seizures. By summer nearly 3,000 houses were destroyed and “Witnesses spoke of the night sky lit up by the blaze of burning manors and lines of horse-drawn carts moving along the roads, loaded with plundered property”.8
In 1905-06 a rural revolution escalated across the Empire, with peasant unions and cooperatives springing up to take power from the landowners and their enforcers, the Land Captains. In Markovo and Suny autonomous “Republics” were proclaimed that constituted “free territories” of peasant self-rule. Some of these established new schools, food cooperatives and reading clubs. But not all peasant rebellion was progressive. Class violence was cathartic but undisciplined. The SRs worried that without a firm socialist consciousness to guide it the peasant revolution would peter out in vandalism and theft. Victor Chernov wrote in the SR journal in May 1905 that the party’s slogan should not be simply to “take the land” but to socialise it. He urged that after peasants took possession of the fields they ensured they were ploughed by the commune in an organised manner. He insisted:
The possession of the land, however, should consist not in the arbitrary seizure of particular plots by particular individuals, but in the abolition of the boundaries and borders of private ownership, in the declaration of the land to be common property, and in the demand for its general, egalitarian and universal distribution for the use of those who work it.9
A giant step towards the “abolition of boundaries and borders of private property” was taken in July 1905 when the first congress of the All-Russia Peasant Union was held in Moscow, attended by over a hundred peasants from the provinces of European Russia, as well as delegates from the SRs and the RSDLP. The congress passed a resolution demanding the convocation of a Constituent Assembly elected by direct and universal suffrage, which would then finally settle the land question on an equitable basis.10 The peasants, through a mixture of their own independent initiative and the political direction of the SRs, had entered the political arena.
The parallels with the land and estate seizures of the Zapatistas, and before them of the rural guerilla campaigns of the Nicaraguan Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nationale (FSLN or Sandinistas) and the El Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in the 1980s, are striking. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas adopted a strategy known as “Prolonged Popular War” (GPP). The GPP was centred on the central mountain zone of the country and focused on building a popular peasant support base in preparation for rural guerilla warfare. In opposition to this strategy, Marxist intellectuals such as Jamie Wheelock–the aspirant Lenin of the FSLN’s “Proletarian Tendency”–argued that economic development had turned Nicaragua into a nation of factory workers and wage-earning farm labourers, and that a revolutionary strategy should be based on the working class and led by a vanguard party.
This was a dead end in a country like Nicaragua. A third faction sought to fuse the best elements of the opposing strategies. This Insurrectional Tendency, led by Daniel Ortega, his brother Humberto and Victor Tirado Lopez, called for tactical alliances with non-communist democrats in a Popular Democratic Front against the Somoza regime. It did not shy away from attacking the National Guard directly and it fought bravely to defend its own territory. But at the same time it built up support in the towns and in the capital Managua (as much as, in 1956-58, Castro’s July 26th Movement and the guerilla forces of the Sierra Maestre worked in tandem with trade unions and other democratic forces in Santiago, Santa Clara and Havana). This flexible, inclusive popular front tactic led to the erosion of Somoza’s internal support and the eventual triumph of the Sandinistas in July 1979.
Russia in 1905 saw a similar level of alienation between government and people. A combined wave of rural, urban and military rebellion was clearly a precursor to revolutionary upheaval. In September 1905, Moscow printers came out on strike and immediately linked up with radical students making wider political demands. In October a variety of strikes by transport workers, bank workers, hospital staff, academics and telegraph operators all merged into one mass strike against the structures of the autocracy itself. On 25th October all railways across the Empire ground to a halt. Moscow and St Petersburg were plunged into nightly darkness as electricity failed. As strikers fought police and Cossacks on the streets, their separate demands coalesced into the call for convocation of a Constituent Assembly–a national Parliament–elected by universal suffrage. This was no economic strike. The workers had transcended that limitation without the assistance or leadership of professional revolutionaries.
They had done more. The workers of St Petersburg had created a “Soviet” (Russian for council) of workers’ representatives from the different industries, factories and offices taking part in the strikes, to oversee and coordinate activity. The St Petersburg Soviet, and the entire Soviet movement so central to the 1905 and 1917 Revolutions, began on 17th October, 1905 when 562 factory delegates assembled in the Free Economics Institute and elected a central committee of fifty people, which included seven delegates each from the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks and the SRs. The radical Menshevik lawyer Krustelev-Noser was elected Chair, with fellow Menshevik Trotsky and the SR Nicholas Avksentiev as Vice-Chairs. The Soviet was far more than a strike committee. It had its own newspaper, and it ensured that food and other essential supplies were distributed throughout the city.11
Within two weeks Soviets had sprung up in nearly every city across the Empire. It was the beginning of the revolution the Bolsheviks claimed to predict and support. Yet as Marcel Liebman admits, the Bolsheviks met the creation of the Soviets with “scepticism, incomprehension, and even sometimes outright hostility”. This was not surprising given that its origin and conception not only “clashed with the political creed of Lenin’s supporters”, but complimented that of the Mensheviks, whose goal was to create “a party that should be as large as possible and in which workers’ initiative and spontaneity should be given full play”.12