The year 1905 defies succinct summary, in part because the situation changed so radically from month to month, even week to week, in part because each of the various historical actors—workers, peasants, soldiers, liberal intelligentsia, radical political parties, national minorities, students, even clergy—followed a distinct trajectory even if at times displaying a modicum of coordination. Still, whatever its vicissitudes, 1905 was a watershed in the history of late imperial Russia. By early 1906 these varied movements had driven their common enemy to grant a quasi-constitutional political order, based in principle on the rule of law and in some respects comparable to the troubled constitutional order in Germany. Hence it would not be amiss—though the point should not be overstated—to treat pre-and post-1905 Russia as having discrete historical characteristics.
What happened in 1905 to prepare Russia for change and what accounts for the limits of the change that occurred? Let us begin with the workers, whose January procession had transformed a liberal protest movement (which rarely transgressed the boundaries of civil disobedience) into outright acts of revolution. At issue is not who deserves more credit (or blame) for launching the revolution, workers or liberal professionals: each played an indispensable role and each encouraged the other. Rather, the task is to understand how labour’s clashes with the state drove the revolution in an ever more bellicose direction, forcing the authorities into moderate concessions such as creation of the ‘Shidlovskii Commission’ to hear the grievances of the workers’ elected representatives. In this classic example of ‘too little too late’, elections were held but the elected body never convened. As a result, the government not only augmented the frustration and anger of already embittered workers but also inadvertently provided them with their first large-scale experience of electoral activity (though a small number of factories had held elections in compliance with a 1903 law on factory elders). This electoral experience subsequently helped workers select and shape their own leadership and prepared them in the autumn for elections to the Petersburg ‘soviet’ (Russian for ‘council’). The latter was an extraordinary assembly of workers’ representatives, initially a city-wide strike committee, but soon evolving into what was virtually a shadow government, led for a while by the militant Marxist Leon Trotsky.
The fact that the soviet began as a strike committee shows that it was the strike movement above all that catapulted workers into the forefront in 1905. September was the key month, for it witnessed a nation-wide general strike, originating with Moscow printers but forming its central nervous system along the railway lines of which Witte had been so justly proud, with the old Moscow– St Petersburg line as the network’s spinal column. The strike gave birth to the Petersburg soviet in October, with other towns soon following the capital’s model. Although the term
Although a Peasant Union had already been formed in July, September was also a pivotal month for the peasant phase of 1905. In general terms, it was the absence of government troops—off fighting the Japanese on Russia’s eastern frontiers until the war ended in August, then slowly returning to central Russia on the politically inflamed railways—and the example of unpunished worker defiance that facilitated the appearance of peasant unrest. But more specifically it was the end of the harvest season that triggered September’s intense wave of rural upheaval, including the widespread theft and destruction of gentry property. The confluence of these two great streams—peasant rebellion and working-class militance—drove the government to make concessions sufficiently meaningful to split the liberation movement.
