*Witte’s dismissal resulted from the Tsar’s dislike of him and Plehve’s intrigues. It occurred, however, as a result of a sudden illumination. Nicholas told Plehve that during a church service he heard the Lord instructing him “not to delay that which I was already persuaded to do”: V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past (Stanford, Calif., 1939), 225.
†On Azef, see Boris Nikolajewsky [Nikolaevskii], Azeff the Spy (New York, 1934). After Plehve’s murder, Azef’s reputation among revolutionaries grew immensely, and he managed to continue his double role until exposed by the director of the Police Department, A. A. Lopukhin, in December 1908, following which he fled to Germany and went into business. He died in 1918.
*Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 214–19; Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 363–66. The Social-Democrats, who wanted to lead the revolution on their own, stayed away, but Azef was present.
*George Gapon, The Story of My Life (New York, 1906), 144. The “intellectual Liberals” whom Gapon consulted are known to have been Ekaterina Kuskova, her common-law husband S. N. Prokopovich, and V. Ia. Bogucharskii (Iakovlev).
*KL, No. 2/3 (1922), 56, cited in Galai, Liberation Movement; 239. The official figure was 130 dead and 299 wounded: A. N. Pankratova et al, Revoliutsiia 1905–1907 gg. v Rossii: Dokumenty i materialy, IV, Pt. 1 (Moscow, 1961), 103, 811, note 12.
*Gapon fled abroad. He returned to Russia after the amnesty that followed the October Manifesto, and was killed by an SR on the orders of Azef. After January 9, all his unions were closed, despite worker protests.
*In pre-1905 Russia, there was no cabinet with a Prime Minister: the ministers reported to the Tsar separately and received from him personal instructions. On the reasons for this practice, see Chapter 2.
†“Black Repartition” was a peasant and Socialist-Revolutionary slogan that called for the abolition of the right of property to land and the distribution (“repartition”) of all privately held land among peasant communes. See Chapter 3.
*The first to call attention to this important source was F.-X. Coquin in F.-X. Coquin and C. Gervais-Francelle, eds., 1905: La Première Révolution Russe (Paris, 1986), 181–200. The invitation for the population to submit petitions was officially withdrawn on August 6, 1905, following the publication of the so-called Bulygin Constitution.
*Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese was to have grave consequences for the whole of Europe by lowering the esteem in which whites had been held by non-Western peoples: for it was the first time in modern history that an Asiatic nation defeated a great Western power. One observer noted in 1909 that the war had “radically reshaped” the mood of the Orient: “There is no Asiatic country, from China to Persia, which has not felt the reaction of the Russo-Japanese war, and in which it has failed to wake new ambitions. These usually find expression in a desire to assert independence, to claim equality with the white races, and have had the general result of causing Western prestige to decline in the East” (Thomas F. Millard, America and the Far Eastern Question, New York, 1909, 1–2). In a sense, the war marked the beginning of the process of colonial resistance and decolonization that would be completed half a century later.
*Galai, Liberation Movement, 262–63. The Union of Railroad Employees and Workers, the largest labor organization in Russia, with 700,000 members, had only 130,000 workers: the majority of its members were local hands, mostly peasants: Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets (New York, 1974), 269, note 53.
*Vitte, Vospominaniia, III, n. See Andrew M. Verner, Nicholas II and the Role of the Autocrat during the First Russian Revolution, 1904–1907, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1986, 370–76. Verner maintains that Witte misdated his first meeting with Nicholas and that it actually took place one day earlier (October 8), but this seems most unlikely, especially in view of the testimony of a third person, D. M. Solskii (Vitte, Vospominaniia, III, 25).
