January marks the 120th anniversary of the start of the 1905 Russian revolution, a movement shaped by the working class that shook the world’s then third most populous empire and bulwark of reaction on the global stage. CHRISTINE THOMAS draws out key lessons of 1905. The article is followed by a timeline.
Both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky described the 1905 revolution in Russia as a dress rehearsal for 1917. Although the mass revolutionary movement that exploded in January 1905 failed to defeat the Tsarist autocracy that sat atop the vast Russian Empire, it was an invaluable learning experience for the working class and the Bolshevik Party, in preparation for leading a successful revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and feudalism twelve years later. The role of the working class; how consciousness changes; the relationship between mass workers’ organisations and the revolutionary party; how the workers’ movement should relate to other social forces; the art of insurrection – all were posed in this ‘prologue’ to 1917.
“The working class”, wrote Lenin, in drawing a balance sheet of the struggle, “left its imprint on the entire revolution”. The political mass strike became a weapon of class struggle, not only realisable in the advanced capitalist economies of Europe such as Britain, France and Germany, but in semi-feudal Russia – where the working class comprised just ten percent of the population, and its organisations and struggles were outlawed and brutally repressed by the Tsarist regime. Until 1905 the campaign for democratic rights in Russia had been led by the liberal bourgeoisie; now the working class put itself decisively at the head of the struggle, drawing other social forces behind it, and fighting resolutely for its own class demands.
Up to four million workers were involved in strike action throughout the year, with more than half taking action on two occasions. From the ‘vanguard’ of metalworkers, concentrated in huge factories in St Petersburg, to the ‘rearguard’ of janitors and domestic servants, the strike waves swept up both experienced and inexperienced workers, crashing across the entire Tsarist empire of 130 million people, reaching not just the main industrial centres but the small towns and villages too.
Rising working class
As in 1917, the 1905 revolution was fuelled by repression and war. Humiliating and crushing defeats in a military conflict with Japan – a war for colonial territory that began with the Japanese attack on the Russian fleet in Manchuria in July 1904 – undermined and exposed the rottenness of the Tsarist regime, while the financial drain of war demanded ever greater sacrifices from already impoverished and brutalised workers and peasants.
Although still an overwhelmingly peasant country, of multiple nationalities bound in a ‘prison house’ of Empire under the Great Russian Tsar, rapid industrialisation at the end of the 19th century, financed by foreign capital, had drawn a layer of peasants from the land into large modern factories, where they began to feel their collective strength and become aware of their common interests as a class. In response to growing strike action at the turn of the century, especially in the south of the country, the Tsarist regime had tried initially to channel workers’ anger at low wages, long hours and appalling working conditions in a controlled, ‘safe’ and non-revolutionary direction through unions set up by the secret police. But when these also became an expression of workers’ militancy they were rapidly shut down.
The first strike action in January 1905, at the Putilov works in St Petersburg, was organised by a police-approved union led by the priest Father Gregory Gapon, whose main role had been to organise cultural and social activities. But in a situation where independent trade unions were banned, workers inevitably seized whatever tools were available as an outlet for their grievances. Across St Petersburg they joined Gapon’s Assembly of Russian Factory and Workshop Workers in their thousands. Most were inexperienced with no history of industrial struggle but some had been influenced by the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), founded seven years earlier, the Russian section of the Second International of socialist and workers’ parties.
The dynamic of strikes
Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP, wrote that in the course of 1905 “every month counted for a year”. Direct experience of mass struggle led to rapid shifts in workers’ consciousness, towards an understanding of their own collective power and of the political necessity to overthrow the Tsarist regime in order to realise their economic and political demands – although that awareness came about at differing speeds and tempos.
One key catalyst moment was 9 January – ‘Bloody Sunday’ – when 200,000 workers and their families marched to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to petition the Tsar for political and economic reforms. Their naïve illusions that the benevolent ‘father of the nation’ would respond favourably to their appeal for change were shattered as troops fired on the peaceful protesters killing and wounding at least 4,000 people. The revolution had begun. Despite repression, strikes spread like wildfire from St Petersburg to 122 towns and localities, mainly spontaneous and uncoordinated in character given the absence of authoritative and representative workers’ organisations, and often without clear demands.
The number of strike days lost in 1905 was 115 times that of the average over the previous decade. When workers in one industry, one city, or one area were taking a breath after an exhausting battle, others would be entering the struggle for the first time. In January, the metal workers were at the forefront of the strikes, textile workers entering the fray en masse in May. In October and November, in the words of Trotsky, a “social earthquake kept throwing up new strata whose very existence is hidden in times of peace” – cooks, domestic servants, laundry workers, prison wardens, even the artists of the Imperial ballet went on strike. While, according to Lenin, 40% of the total strikes between 1895 and 1904 had taken place in scattered villages, small industrial centres and towns, in January 1905 the big cities “woke up”. To begin with the centre, east, south and small towns were still sleeping, but they too were awoken as the movement unfolded.
In the ‘January upsurge’ – the initial awakening of the proletarian masses – the factory inspectors of the Tsarist Ministry of Trade and Industry recorded the strikes as being predominantly ‘economic’ in their goal, compared to October when they officially classified 328,000 out of 519,000 strikes as ‘political’. Of the strikes over economic and workplace grievances – wages, fines, bullying etc – a minority were won in January while in October the majority ended in victory. Localised strikes rapidly became generalised; so-called ‘economic’ strikes transformed into ‘political’ strikes. Demands included the eight-hour day, freedom of speech, assembly and association, an amnesty for political prisoners, and the formation of a Constituent Assembly – revealing the influence of Social Democrat slogans on the workers’ movement, notwithstanding their organisational weaknesses. In turn, strikes challenging governmental power gave an impetus to economic struggles amongst sections of workers who had not initially been drawn into battle. Just as the strike movement appeared to be in decline, such as in March or September, a new upsurge would break out, taking the struggle to a higher level.
The Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg summed up the movement in her 1906 pamphlet, The Mass Strike, writing: “Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting – all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another – it is a ceaselessly moving changing sea of phenomena”.
The birth of Soviets
Without mass organisations of their own workers instinctively moved to forge them in the heat of struggle. Initially individual factories formed workplace-based committees to conduct the strikes. However, as strikes became generalised within cities this raised the need for the creation of broader representative organisations that could coordinate action between the different workplaces. Thus the Soviet was born as an extended strike committee, with delegates democratically elected from individual workplaces in a particular geographical area. These were workers’ organisations without any history or tradition, growing organically from the objective necessity to unite workers in struggle, and rapidly gaining authority amongst the mass of workers.
The Soviets had no precedent in Russia, but the basis on which delegates were elected to them flowed from workers’ previous experience with the Shidlovsky commission – a tripartite commission of factory, government, and workers representatives proposed by the Tsarist regime in February 1905 to enquire into the causes of the January ‘discontent’. Although the commission never met, its specified election criteria – of one delegate for every 500 workers, with the workers employed in smaller industries banded together to elect delegates or ‘deputies’ – was adopted by the Soviet. Thoroughly democratic, the Soviet provided for the right of workers to recall their elected delegates at any time.
The first city-wide Soviet was formed in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in May but the most authoritative Soviet developed in St Petersburg, created to coordinate the October city-wide general strike; although the Soviet also played a central role in Moscow and became the main organ of struggle in as many as 50 cities and districts across the Russan empire. The St Petersburg Soviet rapidly grew from just 30-40 delegates at the beginning of October to 562 at its peak – representing around 200,000 workers. In the December uprising, the deputies to the Moscow Soviet represented 100,000 workers. Within just a matter of weeks the struggle had transformed the Soviets into mass workers’ organisations.
Bolsheviks and Soviets
Worker-Bolsheviks played an important role in Ivanovo-Voznesensk but more generally, accustomed to working in small clandestine groups under the conditions of Tsarist illegality and with their leaders, including Lenin, in exile, many Bolsheviks within Russia initially took a sectarian approach to the Soviets, dismissing these new organisations as glorified strike committees, composed of mainly ‘backward’ non-party workers – a rival to the more politically advanced revolutionary party for the support and allegiance of the working class. These Bolsheviks failed to see the crucial role that the Soviets could play, not just in unifying workers in strike action but potentially in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the Tsarist regime.
Led by Alexander Bogdanov, the Bolsheviks in St Petersburg went to the Soviet with an ultimatum – accept our full programme, including the necessity of a revolutionary overthrow of the Tsarist regime, or we leave. This was understandably rejected by the workers’ delegates, many of whom had only just begun to move into struggle on a mass scale and had not yet drawn the conclusion that a decisive uprising against Tsarism was necessary to win their economic and political demands.
The strength of the Soviet lay precisely in its potential to collectively organise the mass of the working class in St Petersburg and elsewhere, and thereby achieve a unity in action while still providing an arena for discussion and debate. Workers of all occupations – factory workers, artisans in small workshops, domestic, shop and office workers – were entitled to send elected delegates, regardless of their nationality, political awareness, or party affiliation. Only the proto-fascist Black Hundreds – which the regime used to carry out some of the most horrific pogroms during the revolution – were excluded. The young trade unions that sprang to life in the course of the revolution – amongst print workers, shop assistants, office clerks and others – also had representation, as did the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, three delegates from each political tendency.
Even in exile, Lenin understood that the Soviets were an opportunity for the revolutionaries to break out of their relative isolation from the broad mass of workers, to forge and deepen links with the masses, and to convince workers’ delegates, through discussion and common struggle, of the programme and tactics that were necessary to advance the revolutionary movement and overthrow the Tsarist regime. What was needed was not a binary choice of ‘Soviet or party’, ‘mass organisation or the revolutionary vanguard’, but a dialectical relationship between the two.
In the end the Bolsheviks did stay in the Soviet and their approach was eventually corrected after Lenin was able to return to Russia at the beginning of November. In the revolutionary ferment in society, notwithstanding their initial errors, the Bolsheviks grew from a few hundred in St Petersburg at the beginning of 1905 to 3,000 by the end of the year – and around 8,500 in the whole of Russia. The Mensheviks – who were more involved in the early stages of the formation of the Soviets, but saw them as organisations of ‘self-government’ rather than organs of a struggle for state power – experienced a similar growth in membership.
Dual power
“The Soviet”, wrote Trotsky in his book on 1905, “was the axis of all events, every thread ran towards it, every call to action emanated from it”. It drew into its orbit too the ‘professional intelligentsia’ – students, lawyers, accountants, teachers etc. As the October general strike paralysed the economy and disrupted the normal functioning of the Tsarist state, inevitably, some of those tasks began to fall to the Soviet itself. As well as organising, coordinating and spreading the strikes in the capital, the St Petersburg Soviet encouraged the building of trade unions and intervened in disputes between employers and workers. In order to print its newspapers the St Petersburg Soviet ‘seized’ printworks.
During the general strikes the Soviet would decide what could or couldn’t function, for example, giving permission to striking telegraph workers to issue telegrams with strike instructions, to railway workers to transport delegates to Soviet meetings, or to shops to open in order to feed striking workers. When the regime continued with press censorship, workers agreed to print only those newspapers that were uncensored.
So the mass strikes introduced elements of dual power both in the workplaces and more broadly in society. Trotsky explains how a letter addressed simply to ‘the workers’ government’ made its way to the St Petersburg Soviet. The Soviet was, in the words of Lenin, an “embryonic organ of state power”. But although the Soviets had succeeded in uniting workers with different experiences and class consciousness, had given them a sense of their power by bringing society to a halt during the October general strike, and had wrested concessions from the Tsarist autocracy in the form of a ‘manifesto’ promising democratic rights and a parliament (Duma) with legislative powers, the state apparatus still remained in the hands of the Tsarist regime.
The revolutionary movement had won a victory – but only a temporary one. Political prisoners still filled the prisons, workers were being shot and arrested, and the state was financing and whipping up the Black Hundred gangs and provocateurs to carry out brutal pogroms against Jews and other workers, killing thousands. The liberal bourgeoisie, which had been relatively sympathetic to the revolutionary movement, now expected it to come to an end after the October strike, with the workers at its head, had won the political changes the bourgeoisie were seeking. The revolutionaries, however, understood that behind the concessions the regime was preparing to reassert state control and crush the revolution. What was needed now, explained Lenin, was for the workers’ movement to take advantage of the democratic rights that had been won, with all their limitations, to prepare for a more favourable situation in which an insurrection – an organised seizure of power to overthrow the reactionary Tsarist state – could be carried out. Only this could lay the basis for the economic and political demands of the masses to be fully and sustainably met.
Programme for revolution
In 1905, Trotsky – who at the time was neither in the Bolshevik nor Menshevik faction of the RSDLP – played a guiding political role in the St Petersburg Soviet, becoming its chairman in December after the arrest of Georgy Khrustalev-Nosar, the first chairman. In his history of the 1917 Russian revolution, Trotsky wrote that “the Soviets are organs of preparation of the masses for insurrection, organs of insurrection, and after the victory organs of government”. The role of the revolutionary party was to fight in the Soviets to convince the masses to support a programme for taking power.
After October 1905, Lenin pushed hard for a programme of widening the struggle to involve broader layers of workers. It was necessary, he explained, for the Soviets to extend and deepen links with the peasantry – who from the summer had begun to rise up all over Russia, spontaneously seizing the landlords’ land, grain and cattle, and forming peasant committees and unions.
The workers also needed arms. This process had already begun during the October general strike when the St Petersburg Soviet organised workers’ militias to defend the strikers and the gains of the revolution against attacks by Black Hundred reactionaries and state forces. It was notable that there were no Black Hundred pogroms in the Russian capital where the militias were better organised. The next step would be for these organisations of self-defence, based on the mass organisations of the working class, to be transformed into fighting groups for the active overthrow of the regime in an insurrectionary movement to seize the levers of state power.
Most importantly, argued Lenin, the Soviets needed to forge stronger links with the mainly peasant-based army. Although there had been some skirmishes with state forces in October, soldiers had for the most part not fired on striking workers. Now the struggle was to win sections of the army over to the side of the revolution – intensifying agitation in the barracks, attracting soldiers to the workers’ meetings, and above all showing in practice that the revolutionary forces were serious about conducting a decisive battle to overthrow the Tsarist regime.
Toward insurrection
Insurrection was already inherent in the situation. As early as June a spontaneous naval mutiny had taken place on the battleship Potemkin in Odessa, the sailors appealing to striking workers for support. The mutiny, however, remained isolated and was brutally repressed. The Sevastopol mutiny in October was better organised and planned, with fraternisation between workers and soldiers and sailors in political meetings. But again, while some soldiers sent to crush the mutiny held their fire, it was eventually defeated after four to five days. Sporadic, disconnected insurrectionary uprisings could only end in defeat.
The Bolsheviks and revolutionary Social Democrats, through the Soviets and in their general agitation, did their best to ensure the movement avoided a premature clash with the regime in conditions that were not yet sufficiently favourable to the revolutionary forces. In October, for example, the St Petersburg Soviet cancelled a planned funeral procession for an activist killed by the Tsarist state forces, organising meetings instead. In November, the same Soviet called a general strike in the capital in solidarity with Kronstadt sailors, who were facing court martial, and against the declaration of martial law in Poland. According to Trotsky, participation in the strike was even greater than in October, this time involving many more workers from small and medium enterprises. The strike was victorious, resulting in martial law being lifted in Poland and reprieve for the Kronstadters. And the Soviet succeeded in limiting the strike to a demonstrative show of political solidarity, preventing workers from moving further towards an uprising that, given the balance of forces at that time, would have undoubtedly been brutally defeated by the Tsarist regime.
Dual power, however, could not last indefinitely. The regime itself was preparing for a decisive struggle to crush the revolution. Limited constitutional and political reforms – although satisfying the liberal bourgeoisie – had not been sufficient to stem the movement, nor had reaction succeeded in suppressing it. In December the regime moved towards arresting the Executive Committee and deputies of the St Petersburg Soviet. In Moscow the general strike called in response transformed into an armed uprising under impetus from below, including revolutionary ferment among sections of the army.
For nine days relatively small fighting forces, but with the support of the masses, rose up, building barricades and taking on those sections of the state that fired on the movement. But as Trotsky wrote, the forces of reaction, resting on the multi-millioned peasantry that had yet to move in its mass, were stronger than those of the revolution. The Moscow uprising, not the only one in the country but the one that went furthest, was drowned in blood, with at least 1,000 killed and many more injured.
Although some regiments had been won over to the side of the revolution, and had to be confined to barracks in Moscow, others vacillated or allowed themselves to be used to suppress the uprising. In the words of Trotsky it was defeated “by the bayonets of the peasant army”. This included the Semyonovsky guards regiment dispatched from St Petersburg where, unlike in Moscow, the masses were exhausted after the October and November strikes. The peasant movement itself was still in its initial stages and didn’t reach its peak until the summer of 1906.
The situation in December 1905 had not yet matured for a successful nation-wide armed uprising against the Tsarist regime. So should the revolutionaries in Moscow – who did not have sufficient political influence to hold back the masses – have stood back from the uprising? The Bolsheviks faced a similar dilemma in the ‘July days’ in 1917, but then they had gained the political authority to put themselves at the head of the movement and prevent it from a premature insurrection. To retreat without battle in 1905, wrote Trotsky, would have meant abandoning the masses to enemy fire, thus discrediting the revolutionary party in their eyes.
The defeat of the Moscow uprising marked the effective end of the 1905 revolution, although that was not clear to the leading revolutionaries at the time. Lenin thought that the movement could recover and rise again, as it had done at previous stages throughout that revolutionary year, and strikes did continue during 1906, but at a lower ebb. Although a difficult period of reaction set in from 1907 onwards, the workers’ movement began to recover and just twelve years after the 1905 revolution was defeated the Bolsheviks succeeded in leading the masses, through the Soviets, to overthrowing Tsarism and beginning the task of building a workers’ government. The profound experiences of 1905 helped pave the way for the success of 1917.
Character of the 1905 revolution
All of the political forces involved in the revolution in 1905 were agreed that its character was ‘bourgeois democratic’ – a revolution to throw off the ‘fetters of absolutism and feudalism’ as had happened in the bourgeois revolutions in the more advanced capitalist countries in the 17th and 18th centuries – laying the basis for the development of capitalism and creating the conditions in which the working class in Russia could strengthen its forces for the socialist revolution. This was unlike the capitalist countries of the West, where those conditions had already matured.
Disagreements arose, however, regarding which class would take the leading role in the revolution. The position of the Mensheviks – which became much clearer after the defeat of 1905 – was that because the revolution was ‘bourgeois democratic’ the liberal bourgeoisie would be the main force, and the revolutionary Social Democrats should do nothing that would frighten them, acting instead as a left-wing auxiliary or, as Lenin put it, ‘tail-ending’ the bourgeoisie.
Based on lessons drawn from the 1848 revolutions in Europe – when the liberal capitalists turned their backs on the masses and compromised with the old regimes – Lenin called for no trust in the liberal bourgeois and the total class independence of the proletariat. The development of the revolutionary processes in 1905 totally confirmed the correctness of Lenin’s position. In the first phase the liberal capitalists had put up with the workers taking mass strike action in the hope of winning democratic demands like the convening of a Constituent Assembly that would give them more say in the political process. But after the Tsar’s ‘October manifesto’, when the revolutionary struggle of the masses was moving in an insurrectionary direction, the ‘democratic’ capitalists sided with the forces of reaction, looking to come to an agreement with the very regime that was preparing to militarily crush the revolution.
The only ally of the proletariat, argued Lenin, was the peasantry, calling for the overthrow of Tsarism to be followed by a provisional revolutionary government – ‘the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’, which would enact a democratic programme, give land to the peasants, introduce the eight-hour day, etc, but would not go beyond the limits of the capitalist system.
Trotsky was in agreement with Lenin about the inability of the bourgeoisie in Russia to carry out the revolution, arising as it had so much later in the development of capitalism as a world system, and being so closely tied to the landlords and finance capital. But he felt that the ‘algebraic’ slogan of a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ was too vague, leaving the political relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry open to misinterpretation. The peasantry, explained Trotsky, by virtue of its relationship to the forces of production – scattered, isolated, and concerned with their own individual plot of land – could not play an independent role in the revolution but would follow either the lead of the proletariat or the bourgeoisie – the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ or the ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’.
In 1905 Trotsky was already developing his ‘theory of the permanent revolution’ in which he argued that coming to power after the revolution, the working class would not stop at the ‘democratic stage’ but be compelled to go further and implement socialist demands which challenged the capitalist system itself, even in an economically underdeveloped country like Russia. But the survival of a democratic workers’ state in Russia would be dependent on the carrying out of successful socialist revolutions in the more developed capitalist economies of the West.
After the experience of the February revolution in 1917, Lenin and Trotsky’s analysis converged. Arguing in particular against the ‘old’ Bolsheviks, including Josef Stalin, Lenin wrote in his Letters on Tactics in April of that year that anyone still speaking of a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry was tail-ending the bourgeoisie and should be consigned to the “archive of Bolshevik pre-revolutionary antiques”.
And yet after Lenin’s death the slogan was revived by Stalin to disastrous consequences in the 1925-27 revolution in China. Characterising it as a democratic national bourgeois liberation movement, the young Chinese Communist Party was consequently advised by the Comintern not just to subordinate itself to the national bourgeoisie but to dissolve itself into the national capitalist party the Kuomintang, whose leader Chiang-Kai-shek then turned on the Communists, drowning the revolution in blood. In the post-war period, in colonial and ex-colonial countries Stalinised Communist Parties continued to put forward a ‘stages’ theory of revolution – first the democratic phase, then at a later stage the socialist revolution – leading to terrible defeats most notably in Indonesia in 1965.