This account of 1905 would be incomplete without a word about the national minorities. Russia’s previous expansion had extended Romanov rule into Ukraine, Poland, Bessarabia, the Baltics, Finland, Crimea, the Caucasus, Siberia, and Central Asia (the last two regions being special targets of internal peasant migration during this period). Like Austria-Hungary, Russia was truly a multinational empire, though one in which the dominant nation held a much greater numerical preponderance than did Germans in the Habsburg lands (according to Russia’s census of 1897, the population of 125 million included some 57 million ‘Great Russians’, plus another 22 million Ukrainians and 6 million Belorussians). At varying rates and intensity, minority discontent (in some cases reflected in massive emigration to America and elsewhere) was steadily mounting, especially once Alexander III had made coerced assimilation, though unevenly applied, official policy. Particularly aggrieved were Poles (whose rights were sharply curtailed after the 1863 uprising), Finns (whose status as a semi-independent grand duchy was subjected to major encroachments), and Jews (who though always subject to official discrimination, fell victim to a series of bloody pogroms in 1881–2 and most notoriously in Kishinev in 1903, and were exposed to a new series of discriminatory measures beginning with the infamous ‘May Laws’ of 1882). Poles, Finns, and Jews played particularly active roles in 1905, but other minorities, especially in Transcaucasia and the Baltic region (most notably the Latvians), also had significant nationalist, socialist, and liberal (sometimes all three simultaneously) movements. In the autumn of 1905 Jews were again the victims of pogroms (though the degree of government connivance remains uncertain).
Within certain limits, many Russian political groups, including liberals and Marxists, sympathized with the national and religious minorities and incorporated defence of their rights in their platforms, including in some cases the right to national autonomy and even independence. Marxists defended the right of nations to self-determination in principle (though just what constituted a viable ‘nation’ was always a thorny question), while urging their comrades among the national minorities to work for proletarian unity rather than secession and independence.
SRs, because they tended to favour a loosely organized, federal political system, found it easy to co-operate with the minorities. Kadets, however, increasingly vulnerable to the currents of Russian nationalism and generally wedded to the goal of a liberal but unitary state, tempered their sympathy for minorities with an uneasy hostility to the more radical demands, especially in the case of Poles and Ukrainians. Octobrists, whose statist nationalism was much more brazen than that of Kadets, were firmly opposed to most minority aspirations; that chauvinist spirit was increasingly apparent in the Octobrist-dominated Third Duma, especially in its measures to reduce Finland to the status of a mere province.
Constitutional Russia?
The apparent defeat of the revolution at the end of 1905 (in fact still far from a total rout) did not mean that the government felt sufficiently confident to risk rescinding its October promises. To do so, in any case, was to hazard the loss of the still less than solid support of Octobrists, many of whom were uneasy about becoming identified as a government party. In 1906 the government therefore kept its promise to hold elections for the lower house (the State Duma), to grant broader (though by no means unrestricted) rights of free expression and assembly, to allow workers to form unions, and to confer various other rights. The old State Council, formerly appointed by the tsar, was transformed into an upper house; one half was still appointed by the tsar, the balance elected from mostly conservative institutions on a very restricted and undemocratic franchise. Although imperial ministers were still appointed by the tsar, they were now allowed to function as a cabinet, with a chairman (in effect, a Prime Minister) whose power derived, personality aside, from his critical position between the other ministers and the sovereign.
