Some can assassinate a spy or blow up a police station. Others can attack a bank to expropriate funds for insurrection. Let every squad arm, if only by beating up police. The dozens of sacrifices will be repaid with interest by producing hundreds of experienced fighters who will lead hundreds of thousands tomorrow.18
This had no relevance at all to working-class activists within Russia struggling to build a viable political machine, run strike committees and influence the Soviet.
Armed revolution began and ended in Moscow. On 3rd December the leaders of the St Petersburg Soviet were all arrested and the Soviet disbursed. The workers of St Petersburg did not rise in its defence. On 12th December barricades were erected throughout Moscow and the railway stations and bridges were seized. But the rebels did not march on the Kremlin, preferring instead to put defences around working-class areas like the Presnia district that the authorities could afford to bypass whilst they re-took the strategic points. And, crucially, the army did not revolt or disobey orders to crush the insurrection. On 15th December, after fierce fighting throughout the city, the Moscow revolt ended with the almost total destruction of the Presnia district under heavy shelling. Thousands of workers were killed, including many children, and the socialist parties were once more made illegal. For Lenin, for whom “victory does not matter”, this was beside the point. He slipped quietly out of Russia as soon as defeat was obvious.
In the strictest sense, the 1905 Revolution failed.19 It failed because it did not replace autocracy with a fully functional liberal-democratic regime. Had all opposition parties been united on that goal it might have been achieved. But despite the mutiny on the Potemkin and some instances of refusal to obey orders, the prerequisite for a successful revolution–the subversion and dissolution of the army and navy, whose lower ranks comprised mainly peasant conscripts–had not occurred. Nevertheless, the political landscape of Tsarist Russia was irretrievably altered. Despite political repression after 1905 and the gerrymandering of the franchise and powers of the Duma, the genie could not be put back in the bottle. The Tsar had been forced by mass pressure to cede some of his absolute prerogatives, the disaffected working class and middle class had experienced political and intellectual freedom they would not soon forget, and the Duma, though not an “executive” in the Western sense, provided opportunities for legal oppositional activity.
There were other openings. The press was less censored and civil society less shackled. In March 1906 the first legal Russian Trade Union Congress met in Moscow. Although there were only approximately 245,000 trade union members across the entire Russian Empire, these were tightly concentrated–about a quarter in Poland and the Caucasus, with an estimated 52,000 in St Petersburg, 48,000 in Moscow, 12,000 in Baku and 10,000 in Odessa.20 Many of these were the Jewish working class organised by the Bund. Now the unions advised their members to exploit whatever new legal opportunities existed to organise and grow.
One of the most important results of the new political freedom was the formation of the Constitutional Democrats. The party par excellance of bourgeois liberals, the Constitutional Democrats–or Kadets as they were henceforth known–formed in October 1905 in response to the issuance of the October Manifesto. Its membership was a wide and not always cohesive assortment of the leading bourgeois professions. Progressive academics such as Miliukov wished to democratise the Russian state, but “liberal” landowners, though ostensibly in agreement, were equally concerned to protect their property. Not surprisingly the Kadets could not agree on a meaningful social programme, preferring instead to focus on constitutional reform, universal suffrage, civil rights and increased autonomy for the territories of the Russian Empire. If the Kadets were the relatively enlightened liberals of Russian politics, then the Octobrist Party, formed at the same time, were its Tories. Based on the richer landowners, businessmen and senior government officials, the Octobrists did not support universal suffrage and only wished for limited reform of the autocracy as a means to defend their class interests.
The RSDLP also evolved. Under the pressures of revolution, with a radicalised working class taking matters into its own hands and creating proto-revolutionary organs like the Soviets, many of its activists simply ignored the factionalism of their leaders and begun to work together as they had done before 1903. Lenin himself wrote in 1905, “It is no secret that the vast majority of social democratic workers are exceedingly dissatisfied with the split in the party and are demanding unity”.21 With a new political situation calling for new strategies, the full RSDLP met in Stockholm between 23rd April and 3rd May 1906 at a “unity congress”. Significantly, it was at this congress that the Jewish Bund, led by Mark Liber and Abraham Gots, returned to the RSDLP, and put itself behind the general political programme of the Mensheviks.
The key issue at the Congress was whether to prioritise underground conspiratorial work, as the Bolsheviks wished, or legal trade union organising and working within the Duma, as the Mensheviks desired. Axelrod urged the party drop its boycott of the Duma, which had led to the RSDLP not standing in the first round of elections. He described the Bolshevik policy of violent insurrection as “a conspiratorial-insurrectionary mixture of anarchist and Blanquist tendencies, dressed up in the terminology of Marxism”.22 A large majority of the congress agreed to contest the second round of Duma elections. Lenin, surprisingly, sided with the majority. As the revolutionary tide receded he saw in the Duma new opportunities for propaganda, and he formed a temporary alliance with the Mensheviks to agree that approach.
Lenin’s biggest setback at Stockholm was the overwhelming condemnation of the Bolsheviks’ most notorious policy–the “expropriations” (armed bank robberies) used to fund the separate Bolshevik political organisation within the RSDLP. The Congress unreservedly condemned the expropriations and demanded that they cease. Lenin gave vague assurances this would happen but had no intention of giving up a source of funding for his shadow structure within the RSDLP. Nor would he abandon those Bolsheviks who carried out the actions (including the notorious Georgian bandit “Koba”, later to take on the revolutionary alias “Stalin”). As a result of these defeats, Lenin’s authority took a severe blow and the Bolsheviks were reduced to three seats on the party Central Committee to the Mensheviks’ seven.
But the most serious and existential threat to the revolutionary left–whose central message was that it offered the only possible response to an immovable, autocratic semi-feudalism–was that presented by the policies of the last great statesman of Tsarist Russia, Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minster from 1906 to 1911. As Governor of Grodno Province, Stolypin had set up field court martials to arraign and summarily execute peasants who participated in land seizures during the 1905 Revolution. As Prime Minister he oversaw a ruthless suppression of radical parties and trade unions during 1907 which jailed up to 60,000 people. Despite this, he was intelligent enough to see that only innovative and meaningful reforms would provide the autocracy with the social base it needed to survive future challenges.
Stolypin’s agrarian reforms were designed to abolish the powers of the communal Mir–which for all its flaws allocated strips of land according to familial and social criteria in the manner of the Open Field System long-since vanished in England and France–in favour of private land holdings. To assist the process, he created a Peasant Bank to make loans to peasants who wished to remove themselves from the Mir and own their own plots. This was accompanied by other measures to tie the peasants to Russian capitalism. Stolypin proposed, but never fully implemented, an extension of legal rights including participation in the Zemstvos based on individual property ownership, a reformed police force and improved local schooling. He was described by a contemporary as “an enlightened absolutist”23 who combined far-sighted practical reforms with autocratic methods. But these methods lost him the support of the Kadets, whilst conservatives saw him as a provincial upstart who wished to overturn the accepted rural order.