The liberals seized the opportunity offered by the February 18 edict to press their program, resuming the banquet campaign in the guise of a “petition campaign.” It was now possible, not only at private gatherings but also at public assemblies, to demand a constitution and a legislative parliament. The zemtsy held their Second Congress in Moscow in April 1905: the majority of the delegates would be satisfied with nothing less than a Constituent Assembly. Various professional associations met and passed resolutions in the spirit of the Union of Liberation. The bureaucrats, fearful of the effect of the manifesto on the village, tried to keep it out of peasants’ hands, but the liberals foiled them, using provincial and district zemstva to distribute it in hundreds of thousands of copies. As a consequence, in the spring of 1905, 60,000 peasant petitions flooded St. Petersburg.72 (Except for a handful, they remain unpublished and unstudied.) The petition campaign inadvertently contributed to the politicization of the village, even though the peasants’ cahiers seem to have dealt mainly with land and related economic matters.*
It was in the course of the petition campaign that the liberals created their third and most powerful national organization, the Union of Unions, which was to play a decisive role in the climactic stage of the 1905 Revolution. The Union of Unions (Soiuz Soiuzov) was the most radical of the liberal organizations, standing to the left of both the Zemstvo Congress and the Union of Liberation. The decision to create this body was taken at the October 1904 congress of the Union of Liberation: its mission was to broadcast the liberal message to the mass constituency of professional people as well as white- and blue-collar employees in order to involve them in the political struggle. The intention was for the professional and trade associations formed under the Union’s auspices not to serve their members’ special interests, but to involve them in the campaign for political freedom. V. A. Maklakov, a prominent liberal, recalls that the Union of Lawyers, of which he was a member, did not promote the collective interests of its members or the cause of law, but used the prestige of the legal profession to add to the clamor for a parliament and a constitution.73 The same held true of the other unions. The movement for the formation of such unions accelerated significantly after the publication of the February 18 manifesto. In addition to the Union of Lawyers, unions were formed of Medical Personnel, Engineers and Technicians, Professors, Agronomists and Statisticians, Pharmaceutical Assistants, Clerks and Bookkeepers, Journalists and Writers, Veterinarians, Government, Municipal, and Zemstvo Employees, Zemstvo Activists, and School Teachers. Separate organizations were set up to work for the equality of Jews and of women.74 The Union also organized mass associations: its outstanding success was in setting up the All-Russian Union of Railroad Employees and Workers, the largest labor organization in the country. Later on, it was instrumental in forming the Peasant Union. All the member unions adhered to a minimum program calling for the replacement of autocracy with a constitutional regime and full civil rights for the population. On other issues, such as the Constituent Assembly, they showed considerable divergencies.75 On May 8, 1905, a congress of fourteen unions organized by the Union of Liberation in Moscow federated into the Union of Unions under the chairmanship of Paul Miliukov. Miliukov, the leading figure in the liberal movement, by this time was a liberal only in name because he was prepared to use any means, including the general strike, to topple the autocracy. In the next five months, the Union of Unions virtually set the course of the Russian Revolution.
The news from the Far East went from bad to worse. In February 1905, the Russians fought the Japanese for Mukden, a Manchurian city that Kuropatkin had vowed never to surrender. It was a ferocious engagement in which 330,000 Russians battled 270,000 Japanese. After losing 89,000 men (to 71,000 of the enemy), Kuropatkin decided to abandon the city.
As if this humiliation were not enough, in May came news of the worst disaster in Russian naval history. The Baltic Fleet was sailing off the east coast of Africa when it learned of the surrender of Port Arthur. Since his mission was to relieve Port Arthur, the fleet’s commander, Admiral Z. P. Rozhestvenskii, requested permission to return to his home base. The request was denied. Joined by the Black Sea Fleet, which had sailed through the Suez Canal, he reached the China Sea and headed for Vladivostok by way of the Strait of Tsushima between Korea and southern Japan. Here a Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo lay in wait. The Russian vessels were more heavily armed but slower and less maneuverable. Togo also had the benefit of superior intelligence. The engagement fought on May 14/27, 1905, was an unmitigated disaster for the Russians. All their battleships and many auxiliary vessels were sunk and most of the remainder captured; only a few managed to escape under the cover of darkness. Rozhestvenskii himself was taken prisoner. Tsushima ended any hope the Imperial Government may have had of staving off constitutional reforms by a glorious military victory.
8. Paul Miliukov, leader of the Constitutional-Democratic Party.
Nicholas’s immediate reaction to Tsushima was to designate Trepov Deputy Minister of the Interior with extensive police powers, which, according to Witte, made him “unofficial dictator.”76 He also resolved to seek peace. The difficult mission was assigned to Witte, who in June left for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where the peace talks were to take place under the patronage of the U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt.
Sergei Witte was late Imperial Russia’s most outstanding politician. It would strain the word to call him a statesman, because he was rather short of political vision. But he did have the talent—rare in Russia where government and opposition were equally prone to lock themselves into doctrinaire positions—of practicing politics as the art of the possible, content, when making or recommending policies, to settle on the lesser of evils. Like many successful politicians, he was an opportunist skilled at pursuing his private interests in the guise of public service. No one was better suited to steer Russia through the revolutionary storms: he had a remarkably acute political instinct and energy to spare. Unfortunately for Witte, and possibly Russia, Nicholas disliked and mistrusted him. The diminutive, exquisitely mannered Tsar could not abide the rough, overbearing minister who had married a divorcée of dubious reputation, chewed gum, and was rumored (wrongly) to be a Freemason.
Witte descended from a Russified Swedish family. He began his career in the Railroad Department of the Ministry of Commerce. His early politics were nationalist and pro-autocratic: after the assassination of Alexander II he joined the right-wing “Holy Brotherhood,” which planned to turn the weapon of terrorism against the terrorists. In his view, Russia had to have a strong and unlimited monarchy because over one-third of her population consisted of “aliens.”77 But he was willing to come to terms with the opposition and always preferred compromise to repression. He had uncommon managerial talents and advanced rapidly: in 1889 he was placed in charge of State Railways and in 1892 was appointed Minister of Finance. He formulated and implemented ambitious plans for the industrial development of Russia, and was instrumental in securing loans from abroad, a good part of which went into constructing railways and buying out private railroad companies. His policies of forced industrial growth aroused the enmity of diverse groups: the landed gentry and the officials of the Ministry of the Interior in particular, who thought that he was subverting the country’s agrarian foundations.