The Russian Revolution полностью

The agrarian revolt of 1905–6 involved surprisingly little personal violence; there is only one authenticated instance of a landlord being killed, although there are reports of the murder of fifty non-communal peasants who were particularly detested.¹³⁸ In some localities attacks on estates were accompanied by anti-Jewish pogroms. The principal aim of the jacquerie was neither inflicting physical harm nor even appropriating land, but depriving landlords and other non-peasant landowners of the opportunity to earn a livelihood in the countryside—“smoking them out,” as the saying went. In the words of one observer: “The [peasant] movement was directed almost exclusively against landed properties and not against the landlords: the peasants had no use whatever for landlords but they did need the land.”¹³⁹ The notion was simple: force the landlords to abandon the countryside and to sell their land at bargain prices. To this end, the peasants cut down the landlord’s forests, sent cattle to graze on his pasture, smashed his machinery, and refused to pay rent. In some places, manors were set on fire. The violence was greatest in the central Russian provinces and the Baltic areas; it was least in the western and southwestern regions, once part of Poland. The most prone to engage in it were village youths and soldiers returning from the Far East; everywhere, the city acted as a stimulant. In their assaults on landlord properties, the peasants did not discriminate between “good” and “bad” landlords—the estates of liberal and revolutionary intellectuals were not spared. Conservative owners who defended themselves suffered less than liberals with a guilty conscience.¹⁴⁰ As we shall see, the peasants had considerable success with their campaign to evict non-peasant landowners from the countryside.

In an effort to stem the agrarian unrest, the government in early November reduced the due installments of the redemption payments (payments for the land given the emancipated serfs in 1861) and promised to abolish them altogether in January 1907, but these measures did little to calm the rural districts.

In 1905 and 1906 peasants by and large refrained from seizing the land they coveted from fear they would not be allowed to keep it. They still expected a grand national repartition of all the non-communal land, but whereas previously they had looked to the Tsar to order it, they now pinned their hopes on the Duma. The quicker they drove the landlords out, they reasoned, the sooner the repartition would take place.

To Nicholas’s great disappointment, the October Manifesto failed to pacify Russia. He was impatient with Witte: on November 10 he complained that Witte had promised he would tolerate no violence after the Manifesto had been issued but in fact the disorders had gotten even worse.¹⁴¹

The government faced one more trial of strength, this time with the radical left. In this conflict, there was no room for compromises, for the socialists would be satisfied with nothing less than a political and social revolution.

The authorities tolerated the St. Petersburg Soviet, which continued to sit in session although it no longer had a clear purpose. On November 26, they ordered the arrest of Nosar, its chairman. A three-man Presidium (one of whose members was Leon Trotsky) which replaced Nosar resolved to respond with an armed uprising. The first act, which it was hoped would bring about a financial collapse, was an appeal to the people (the so-called Financial Manifesto), issued on December 2, urging them to withhold payments to the Treasury, to withdraw money from savings accounts, and to accept only bullion or foreign currency. The next day, Durnovo arrested the Soviet, putting some 260 deputies (about one-half of its membership) behind bars.¹⁴² Following these arrests a surrogate Soviet assembled under the chairmanship of Alexander Helphand (Parvus), the theoretician of “permanent revolution.”¹⁴³ On December 6, the St. Petersburg Soviet issued a call for a general strike to begin two days later. The call went unheeded, even though the Union of Unions gave it its blessing.¹⁴⁴

The socialists were more successful in Moscow. The Moscow Soviet, formed only on November 21 by intellectuals of the three principal socialist parties, decided to press the revolution beyond its “bourgeois” phase. Their followers consisted of semi-skilled workers, many of them employed in the textile industry, professionally and culturally less mature than their counterparts in the capital. The principal force behind this effort was the Moscow Bolshevik Committee.¹⁴⁵ The Moscow rising was the first occasion in the 1905 Revolution when the socialists took the lead. On December 6, the Moscow Soviet voted to begin the following day an armed insurrection for the purpose of overthrowing the tsarist government, convoking a Constituent Assembly, and proclaiming a democratic republic*