The law makes provisions for such disorders and subjects those guilty of violating public order to imprisonment for 7 days and fines of up to 25 rubles. If such disorders involve a large crowd which ignores police orders to disperse, the participants are subject to terms of imprisonment for up to one month and fines of up to 100 rubles. And if the disorder has to be quelled by force, then those guilty are subject to terms of imprisonment of up to three months and fines of up to 300 rubles.
On February 8, the police are obliged to preserve peace in the same manner as on any other day of the year. Should order be disturbed, they are obliged to stop the disturbance at any cost. In addition, the law provides for the use of force to end disorders. The results of such a clash with the police may be most unfortunate. Those guilty may be subject to arrest, the loss of privileges, dismissal and expulsion from the university, and exile from the capital. I feel obliged to warn the student body of this. Students must respect the law in order to uphold the honor and dignity of the university.3
The tactless admonition infuriated the students. When on February 8 Sergeevich mounted the speakers’ rostrum, they booed and hissed him for twenty minutes. They then streamed outside singing “Gaudeamus Igitur” and the “Marseillaise.” The crowd attempted to cross the Palace Bridge into the city but, finding it blocked by the police, proceeded instead to the Nikolaev Bridge. Here more police awaited them. The students claimed that in the ensuing melee they were beaten with whips, and the police that they were pelted with snowballs and chunks of ice.
Greatly excited, the students held during the following two days assemblies at which they voted to strike until the government assured them that the police would respect their rights.4 Up to this point the grievance was specific and capable of being satisfied.
But the protest movement was promptly taken over by radicals in charge of an illegal Mutual Aid Fund (Kassa vzaimopomoshchi) who saw in it an opportunity to politicize the student body. The Fund was dominated by socialists, some of whom would later play a leading role in the revolutionary movement, among them Boris Savinkov, a future terrorist, Ivan Kaliaev, who in 1905 would assassinate Grand Duke Sergei, the governor-general of Moscow, and George Nosar (Khrustalev), who in October 1905 would chair the Petrograd Soviet.5 The leaders of the Fund at first dismissed the strike as a “puerile” exercise, but took charge once they realized that the movement enjoyed broad support. They formed an organizing committee to direct the strike and dispatched emissaries to the other schools with requests for support. On February 15, Moscow University joined the strike; on February 17, Kiev followed suit; and before long all the major institutions of higher learning in the Empire were shut down. An estimated 25,000 students boycotted classes. The strikers called for an end to arbitrary discipline and police brutality; they posed as yet no political demands.
The authorities responded by arresting the strike leaders. More liberal officials, however, managed to persuade them that the protests had no political purpose and were best contained by satisfying legitimate student grievances. Indeed, the striking students believed themselves to be acting in defense of the law rather than challenging the tsarist regime.6 A commission was appointed under P. S. Vannovskii, a former Minister of War, a venerable general with impeccable conservative credentials. While the Commission pursued its inquiries, the students drifted back to classes, ignoring the protests of the organizing committee. St. Petersburg University voted to end the strike on March 1, and Moscow resumed work four days later.7
Displeased by this turn of events, the socialists on the organizing committee issued on March 4, in the name of the student body, a Manifesto that claimed the events of February 8, 1899, were merely
one episode of the regime that prevails in Russia, [a regime] that rests on arbitrariness, secrecy [bezglasnost’] and complete lack of security, including even the absence of the most indispensable, indeed, the most sacred rights of the development of human individuality …
The Manifesto called on all the oppositional elements in Russia to “organize for the forthcoming struggle,” which would end only “with the attainment of its main goal—the overthrow of autocracy.”8 In the judgment of the police official reporting on these events, this Manifesto was not so much the expression of student disorders as a “prelude to the Russian Revolution.”9
The episode just described was a microcosm of the tragedy of late Imperial Russia: it illustrated to what extent the Revolution was the result not of insufferable conditions but of irreconcilable attitudes. The government chose to treat a harmless manifestation of youthful spirits as a seditious act. In response, radical intellectuals escalated student complaints of mistreatment at the hands of the police into a wholesale rejection of the “system.” It was, of course, absurd to insinuate that student grievances which produced the university strike could not be satisfied without the overthrow of the country’s political regime: restoring the 1863 University Statutes would have gone a long way toward meeting these grievances, as most students must have believed, since they returned to classes following the appointment of the Vannovskii Commission. The technique of translating specific complaints into general political demands would become a standard procedure for Russian liberals and radicals. It precluded compromises and partial reforms: nothing, it was alleged, could be improved as long as the existing system remained in place, which meant that revolution was a necessary precondition of any improvement whatsoever.
Contrary to expectations, the Vannovskii Commission sided with the students, placing the blame for the February events on the police. It concluded that the strikes were neither conspiratorial in origin nor political in spirit, but a spontaneous manifestation of student unhappiness over their treatment. Vannovskii proposed a return to the 1863 University Statutes, as well as a number of specific reforms including the legalization of student assemblies and zemliachestva, reducing the amount of time devoted to the study of Latin, and abolishing the Greek requirement. The authorities chose to reject these recommendations, preferring to resort to punitive measures.10
On July 29, 1899, the government issued “Temporary Rules” which provided that students guilty of political misconduct would lose their military deferments. At the time of publication, it was widely assumed that the measure was intended to frighten the students and would not be enforced. But enforced it was. In November 1900, after a year and a half of quiet, fresh university disturbances broke out, this time in Kiev, to protest the expulsion of two students. Several universities held protest meetings in support of Kiev. On January 11, 1901, invoking the July 1899 ordinance, Bogolepov ordered the induction into the army of 183 Kievan students. When St. Petersburg University struck in sympathy, 27 of its students were similarly punished. One month later, a student by the name of P. V. Karpovich shot and fatally wounded Bogolepov: the minister was the first victim of the new wave of terrorism which in the next few years would claim thousands. Contemporaries regarded Bogolepov’s measures against the students and his assassination as marking the onset of a new revolutionary era.11