Compiled by MARTIN POWELL DAVIES. Dates are given in the old-style Julian calendar used in Russia at the time. This was 13 days earlier than the Gregorian calendar (adopted in Russia in 1918).
1890s
On the death of Tsar Alexander III in 1894, Nicholas II becomes the new – and eventually the last – Tsar of Russia, an autocrat ruling over an Empire of 130 million people, made up of multiple nationalities.
Accelerated by massive foreign investment, Russia experiences a rapid ‘combined and uneven development’, creating a new working-class, employed in large, modern factories – and open to revolutionary ideas – alongside a largely peasant population.
1900
First issue of the socialist newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), is published by Lenin.
Security chief Zubatov begins to trial state-sponsored workers’ societies to counter the effect of socialist and trade union agitation – nicknamed ‘police socialism’. In fact, they create welcome opportunities for workers to organise.
1901-1902
Strikes become more frequent, including a strike initiated by railworkers that broadens to over 200,000 workers across southern Russia and Transcaucasia. A strike rally of 40,000, led by socialists, is held in Rostov-on-Don. Localised peasant revolts and student protests against autocratic rule also become more frequent.
1903
Major strikes take place in cities across Southern Russia over wages and working hours, including in Baku, Tiflis, Elisavetgrad (Kropyvnytskyi), Odessa and Kiev.
The Tsar’s Minister of Interior, Plehve, responds to the growing movement with repression, disbanding Zubatov’s societies. By 1904, more than half of Russia, including most of its major cities, has been placed under emergency ‘protection’ powers to suppress any opposition to Tsarist rule.
The Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) splits unexpectedly into Lenin’s majority ‘Bolshevik’ faction and a minority ‘Menshevik’ faction, over the rules on Party membership and the make-up of the Editorial Board of Iskra. Trotsky originally sides with the minority but breaks with them in 1904 when the key political differences between the two become clear, above all over the attitude that a revolutionary workers’ party should take to the liberal bourgeoisie.
January 1904
3-5: The liberal-bourgeois opposition organises the first congress of the ‘Union of Liberation’, in St Petersburg, campaigning for a popularly elected national assembly. For some, this was framed as an advisory body to work alongside the Tsar, for its more radical members, as a parliamentary regime to replace Tsarist autocracy.
26-27: Japanese forces launch a surprise attack on the Russian Pacific fleet at Port Arthur in Manchuria (now Lushun, China), starting the Russo-Japanese war.
February 1904
In a reversal of policy towards ‘police socialism’, a priest, Father Gapon, persuades Plehve to allow him to organise the ‘Assembly of St Petersburg Factory Workers’. It only manages to attract around 1,000 workers in its early months but, by the end of 1904, has about 9,000 members and support in a majority of the city’s factories.
March-June 1904
Japan continues to win military victories in Korea and Manchuria, with the TransSiberian railway proving inadequate for transporting Russian forces eastwards.
Plehve alienates even ‘moderate’ liberals by refusing to recognise their elections as Chairs of several local ‘zemstvo’ councils, including the prominent Chair of the Moscow Provincial Zemstvo, Dmitri Shipov.
July 1904
15: Plehve is assassinated in a bomb attack mounted by a member of the Fighting Organisation of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, the SRs, which had formed in 1902.
August 1904
25: Tsar names Prince Peter Svyatopolk-Mirsky as Plehve’s replacement as Minister of Interior. He sets out to improve relations with the zemstvo liberals.
September 1904
22: The long-awaited Russian offensive begins at Shaho but is soon pushed back by Japanese forces, ending hopes of relieving the siege of Port Arthur by land.
30: A Conference opens in Paris bringing together the Union of Liberation, the Socialist Revolutionaries and a number of left nationalist groups. It agrees on a program to replace “the autocratic regime” with “a free democratic one based on universal suffrage”, as well as calling for “the right of national self-determination”, (although the different parties interpreted these phrases in different ways!)
October 1904
The Baltic Fleet finally starts its lengthy voyage – the larger ships sailing right the way around the southern tip of Africa – aimed at lifting the siege of Port Arthur. Russian naval competence is soon brought into question by the ‘Dogger Bank Incident’, when Russian warships open fire on British trawlers in the North Sea, somehow mistaking them for Japanese Navy torpedo boats!
Encouraged by what they perceive as a softening of the Tsar’s stance, the Union of Liberation launches a campaign of petitions and political banquets amongst the bourgeois, intelligentsia and professional associations, calling on the Tsar to enact a popularly elected national assembly that can draw up a democratic constitution.
November 1904
6-8: A Zemstvo Congress, originally proposed by Shipov to reassert zemstvo rights, meets in St Petersburg. The eleven theses agreed by the majority of the congress call for freedom of speech and press, assembly and association, and an ambiguously worded demand that “representatives of the people, in an independent elective institution, take their proper part in the exercise of legislative power”.
Lenin lambasts the Mensheviks for proposing the RSDLP reaches agreement with the Zemstvo-ists on participation in their ‘banqueting campaign’ and instead calls for the RSDLP to stress the need for independent mass organisation of the working-class, such as the workers’ demonstrations organised by the Party in Kharkov and Odessa.
December 1904
12: The Tsar responds to the liberals’ campaigning by issuing a ‘ukase’ (decree) instructing his Ministers to draw up proposals to reduce the number of cities being governed under emergency ‘protection’ powers, as well as relaxing some of the nationwide restrictions on the press and on national and religious minorities. However, no concession is given over creating any elected legislative institution and the Tsar warns that further challenges to his ‘autocratic State’ will not be accepted.
Reports of discontent amongst the masses nevertheless continue, including reservists refusing to be called up, protests by national minorities in Poland, Finland, and Transcaucasia, and strikes – including one of 50,000 workers in Baku, with RSDLP involvement, that successfully achieves both a wage increase and a nine-hour day.
The St Petersburg RSDLP splits into rival Menshevik and Bolshevik Committees, but both factions only have weak roots within the workers’ movement of the city, in contrast to Gapon’s well-supported Assembly of St Petersburg Factory Workers.
20: Port Arthur finally surrenders to Japan, in a significant setback for Russian Tsarist forces.
22: First issue of the Bolshevik newspaper ‘Vperyod’ (Forward) published in Geneva.
27: 350 workers meet at the giant Putilov Ironworks, all members of Gapon’s Assembly, and agree to send a delegation to management to demand the reinstatement of four dismissed colleagues and the removal of the foreman held responsible for the sackings.
January 1905
2: A meeting of 600 Putilov workers, together with Gapon, meets in the Assembly’s meeting hall in the Narva district of St Petersburg to hear its delegation report that management had refused their demands. The meeting agrees to send a further delegation the next day – Monday – but, if again rebuffed, to take strike action.
3: Almost the entire Putilov workforce walks out on strike. A further meeting at the Narva hall agrees to Gapon’s proposal that the strike demands are broadened to include a wage increase, an eight-hour day and free medical aid. The meeting also agrees to seek the support of workers in other factories to join the Putilov strike.
4: Gapon heads a delegation to Putilov management to present the new demands. 2,000 workers at the nearby Franco-Russian Shipbuilding Plant agree to strike too.
5: The strike widens further, now involving around 25,000 workers, all making similar demands to their management as the Putilov workers.
6: A public holiday. Mass meetings of Assembly members discuss how to generalise the strike action, and Gapon proposes they make a direct appeal to the Tsar to intervene through a petition that he has drawn up. Its demands show the influence of RSDLP agitation over previous years. They include: the release of political prisoners, freedom of speech and assembly, trade union rights, progressive taxation, an end to the war, the establishment of elected factory committees, a Constituent Assembly, and an eight-hour working day.
7: Strikers call out workers across the industrial districts of St Petersburg. By the end of the day, a big majority of the city’s 175,000 workforce are on general strike.
8: Gapon and his inner circle finalise plans for mass feeder marches to converge on the Winter Palace the following day, asking the authorities that he then be allowed to present the workers’ petition to the Tsar. A liberal delegation, including Maxim Gorky, meets with Count Sergei Witte, Chair of the Committee of Ministers, to appeal for the marches to be allowed to proceed. Svyatopolk-Mirsky instead agrees plans to ensure they are met with force, mobilising over 20,000 soldiers to support the police in dispersing the marchers.
9 ‘Bloody Sunday’: As planned, feeder marches set off from different workers’ districts aiming to converge together at Palace Square at 2pm. Gapon’s column of thousands of men, women and children progresses for over a mile from the Narva Hall before being ordered to halt. Troops fire, dispersing the march, leaving at least ten dead. The other feeder marchers are met with the same response. Tens of thousands of marchers, students and curious residents nevertheless make their way to Palace Square but are again dispersed by direct fire. Further deaths occur when troops move onto Nevsky Prospekt to clear the area. Official figures later record 130 deaths in total; journalists however record the names of 4,600 dead and wounded.
10: Troops and police patrol St Petersburg under the uncompromising command of General Trepov, and the city is soon placed under martial law. Father Gapon, now on the run, makes an angry speech to a liberal meeting denouncing the Tsar before, a few days later, fleeing the country. The workers, however, resolve to continue and widen their strikes. They are supported by students, 5,000 of them going on strike at the University. Previous hostility to the Bolsheviks among many workers in Gapon’s Assembly now disappears. Their leaflets and speeches are instead eagerly received. Workers’ strikes – supported by university and secondary school strikes too – now develop across Russia.
11: Strikes spread to Warsaw, Kharkov, Vilna, Kovno, and Helsingfors.
12: Strikes in Riga, Kiev, Voronezh, Mogilev, Libau, and Saratov.
13: Strikes in Lodz, Mitau, Perm, Minsk, and Smorgon. A mass demonstration in Riga, in support of the city’s already general strike, is fired upon, killing seventy.
14: Strikes on the Moscow-to-Brest Railway.
15: Svyatopolk-Mirsky replaced as Minister of Interior by more hardline Bulygin.
16-20: The strike wave spreads further to Borisov, Batum, Ekaterinoslav, Brest, Grodno, Bialystok, Tiflis, Samara, Narva, Kazan. At its peak, 160,000 workers are on strike in 650 factories across St Petersburg. Throughout Russia, the official factory inspectors’ reports record 444,000 workers on strike in January (the records do not cover all workplaces or provinces, so these figures are actually an underestimate) This is more than the combined number of strikers recorded for the whole decade from 1894 to 1904. But, by the end of month, the strike wave ends, workers unable to afford to stay out any longer.
To defuse the situation, the Tsar appoints Nicholas Shidlovsky as the head of a commission to investigate the cause of the labour unrest and announces that elected workers representatives will also be allowed to take part. Both RSDLP factions agree they will stand candidates as a platform to reach a wider workers’ audience, particularly as they are then able to address workplace mass meetings.
February 1905
4: Grand Duke Sergei, the Tsar’s uncle, is assassinated by a member of the SR’s Fighting Organisation. The Tsar soon leaves the capital for Tsarskoe Selo for safety.
7: The Battle of Mukden commences with Japanese attacks on Russian lines. The battle, using artillery on a scale never previously seen, ends later in the month with a clear victory for Japan. The Russian army withdraws from southern Manchuria.
18: Tsar Nicholas issues a new ‘ukase’ conceding the right of his subjects to petition him, and orders Bulygin to prepare legislation to set up an elected assembly that would at least be able to consult with the Tsar over legislative matters. However, rather than dampening down opposition, these concessions encourage it.
18: When Shidlovsky refuses workers’ demands, drafted by the Bolsheviks – to guarantee in advance the right to freedom of speech and assembly and for elected delegates to be able to meet with workers freely – they resolve to boycott further proceedings, and the Commission is dissolved.
Gapon, driven to the left by events, issues an appeal for all the socialist parties of Russia to agree on an armed uprising against Tsarism. Lenin welcomes the letter but calls for an agreement to be on the basis of a ‘united front’ – to “march separately but strike together” – and to build for a “popular uprising”, not individual terrorism.
Trotsky returns to Russia from exile, firstly to Kiev, where the RSDLP operate one of their underground printing presses, and then on to St Petersburg.
A new strike wave begins in St Petersburg and, once again, spreads to other cities. The factory inspectors record 293,000 individual strikers this month. Some actions achieve concrete gains, such as the nine-hour day won by railworkers in Southern Russia.
March 1905
The strike wave ebbs for now, the inspectors reporting 73,000 on strike in March.
Encouraged by events, some religious and national minorities set up their own political organizations, including Russian Jews and Transcaucasian Muslims.
Peasant unrest also starts to grow in a number of areas, including parts of European Russia, Poland and the Baltic provinces.
April 1905
105,000 workers are recorded as striking this month, with 75% categorised by the Tsarist Ministry of Trade and Industry as being “for political reasons”.
The Second Zemstvo Congress adopts a more radical policy than the November 1904 Congress, calling for a “representative assembly” to “establish the political law and order of the Russian Empire”.
The Third RSDLP Congress opens in London. The Menshevik faction boycott it, organising their own conference in Geneva. The Congress supports Lenin’s argument that Tsarism is only playing for time and will never peacefully concede the constitutional changes being campaigned for by the liberal-bourgeois opposition. To defeat reaction, the RSDLP must win mass support, so as to be able to successfully mount a revolutionary general strike and armed uprising.
May 1905
1-2: Despite the ban on unauthorized assemblies, attempts are made to openly organise May Day rallies, with protest strikes taking place on the following day, a Monday, in St Petersburg and other cities, including Saratov, Samara, Kharkov and Ekaterinburg. Strikes continue throughout the month, with the factory inspectors recording a doubling in the number of workers involved – rising to 221,000 in May.
8-9: The liberal-bourgeois-led ‘Union of Unions,’ bringing together professional associations and others campaigning for a constituent assembly, is established in Moscow with Pavel Milyukov – later to become the leader of the Kadet Party but now a leading light of the ‘Union of Liberation’ – selected as its president. The Central Bureau of Union of Railway Workers is one of the founding affiliates.
12: With worker-Bolsheviks playing an important role, a strike begins in the textile mill ‘twin-cities’ of Ivanovo-Voznesensk. It will involve over 40,000 men and women from the textile factories, but also railworkers and other trades, and last ten weeks, before eventually settling for limited wage increases. The strike committee becomes in effect the first example of a city-wide soviet, not just debating tactics and organizing action but controlling the press and organising a workers’ militia.
14-15: Having finally completed its seven-month voyage to the East China Sea, the Russian Baltic Fleet is decisively defeated by Japan at the Battle of Tshushima.
24: The Third Zemstvo Congress meets in Moscow and selects a group to meet with the Tsar, including Shipov and Prince Lvov. For the first time, the Tsar agrees to meet such a delegation but, when they meet on June 6, he proposes no concrete steps towards the assembly – or ‘Bulygin’ Duma – that he had promised in February.
June 1905
Strikes continue, with the inspectors reporting 156,000 striking workers in June. Some workers’ actions growing into revolts that include armed clashes with troops – for example, at Novorossiysk, Kharkov, Baku, Odessa, and Łódź (in Russian Poland) where police fire on a socialist-led workers’ march, killing ten people. Their funerals, held on June 7 and 8, become mass demonstrations of over 50,000 workers, which are again fired upon by Cossack cavalry. This sparks a general strike, street barricades and armed clashes with government troops – the ‘June Days of Łódź’. The Tsar declares martial law. By June 12, the revolt is crushed, with around 200 killed.
15: Following two days of street fighting between strikers and government forces, supported by Black Hundred reactionaries, Odessa is also placed under martial law. Troops shoot dead around two thousand people. That morning, the Battleship Potemkin (as later told in Sergei Eisenstein’s film) had arrived in the port flying a red flag, its crew having mutinied the day before. On June 16, after government troops fire on sailors who had come ashore to bury one of their comrades killed in the mutiny, the Potemkin fires at a theatre where military authorities are meeting, but misses. After failing to provoke a fleet-wide mutiny, the Potemkin flees to Romania.
July 1905
The factory inspectors report a further 153,000 striking workers in July.
Rural unrest begins to increase, for example in the Baltic provinces where Latvian anger is directed against the largely German landlords. The founding congress of an All-Russian Peasants Union, with a strong SR influence, is convened in Moscow, and it starts to establish branches in most of the provinces of European Russia.
The Tsar convenes a secret conference of his trusted circle to finally agree the form in which he will allow a State Duma to be established, whilst still maintaining autocratic power.
August 1905
6: The Tsar issues the law establishing the ‘Bulygin’ Duma which gives it only powers of “preliminary consideration and discussion of legislative proposals”, and excludes from the franchise all bar males who can meet strict property requirements, while totally excluding even those propertied men living in much of non-European Russia. No reform granting greater freedom of the press, speech or assembly is announced. Instead, headed up by Trepov, who is now Assistant Minister of Interior, repression is stepped up, including the temporary imprisonment of Milyukov and other leaders of the ‘Union of Unions’. However, a further ukase issued by the Tsar on August 27, aimed at preventing further student strikes by restoring university autonomy, now prevents police from intervening to stop student meetings on university campuses.
23: Following negotiations brokered in part by US president Theodore Roosevelt, and led on the Russian side by Witte, the Treaty of Portsmouth is signed, ending the war on terms that ceded control of Korea and much of South Manchuria to Japan.
September 1905
Different sections of the Tsar’s political opponents decide their response to the Tsar’s proposed Duma legislation. A majority of zemstvo and municipal duma delegates vote at their congress to support elections to the ‘Bulygin’ Duma. The Bolsheviks, unlike the Mensheviks, resolve to not only actively boycott the elections, but also to organise a general strike aimed at preventing them taking place.
Socialist students take advantage of the relaxation of restrictions on university meetings to assist workers in holding mass political meetings in campus buildings, starting in Kiev and St Petersburg and then spreading to other cities as well.
Several trade unions are now functioning openly, despite being officially prohibited. A printers’ strike begins at a Moscow printworks on September 19, initiated by the city’s Printers Union. It spreads to other printers and then widens further to become a city-wide general strike. It continues until the end of the month.
The factory inspectors’ records nevertheless indicate an overall lull in the national strike movement, with 104,000 striking workers in August and 38,000 in September.
October 1905
2: A three-day city-wide printers’ strike is called in St Petersburg in solidarity with the Moscow action. Workers at the Neva Shipyard also strike for several days, as do metalworkers at the Obukhovsky Steelworks, continuing until 10 October.
3: A meeting of workers’ deputies from the printing, engineering, cabinet-making, tobacco, and other trades votes to form an all-Moscow soviet.
7: Back in Moscow, Russia’s key railway hub, a new railworkers’ strike is called by the Union of Railway Workers. In a few days, all of the Moscow lines will have been brought to a halt. This marks the start of the ‘great October Strike’.
9: Delegates at a government-convened railway employees’ congress in St Petersburg demand an eight-hour day, a constituent assembly and an amnesty for political prisoners – and call for a nationwide rail strike to win them.
10: The new Moscow strike has now become generalised to include factory workers and many other trades. Both the city’s telegraph and rail connections are severed. The strike wave has also spread to Kharkov. Following armed clashes between striking workers and reactionary counter-demonstrators, martial law is declared.
12: The railworkers’ strike spreads to St Petersburg, even cutting off trains to the Tsar’s residence in Peterhof. Again, it soon develops into a general strike. Here, the strike committee is formalised into a soviet with one delegate being elected for every five hundred workers. At its height, the capital city’s soviet comprises over 500 elected deputies. The lawyer George Khrustalev-Nosar is its official chair, but its real political leadership comes from Leon Trotsky, one of its two vice-chairs.
14: As many as 50,000 gather in St Petersburg university grounds at mass meetings. The ‘Union of Unions’ joins the strike and recognises the city soviet’s authority.
15: The Government publishes an order forbidding higher education establishments from allowing outsiders at campus meetings. However, in most cities, it is ignored.
16: Finnish railworkers’ action completes the spread of the rail strike across the entire imperial network. A general strike is now in place in nearly all of the major cities, including Odessa, Kiev, Warsaw, Lodz, Riga, Libau, Poltava, Tiflis, Baku, Minsk, Homel, Vilna, Rostov-on-Don, Helsingfors, and Ivanovo-Voznesensk.
The factory inspectors report 519,000 striking workers nationally this month, of which they categorise 78% as being ‘for political reasons’. But, as they were excluded from the factory inspectors’ jurisdiction, several hundred thousand railworkers and employees in other small enterprises should also be counted to the numbers participating in this mass strike, showing its truly vast extent.
Local strike committees are compelled to broaden their activities, for example to include control of food supplies and the organisation of workers’ militia, although the St Petersburg Soviet remains the clearest example of embryonic workers’ power.
17: In an effort to defuse the growing threat and “quieting the life of the nation”, the Tsar issues his ‘October Manifesto’. For the first time it includes reference to “freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association” and grants legislative powers to a State Duma. This is recognised by the protest movement as a victory – and one won by the working-class action, not by the liberals’ lobbying. However, it is certainly not seen as an end to their struggle. As Trotsky puts it to a mass meeting at the University, “is the promise of liberty the same as liberty itself?”.
18: Protests take place in several cities demanding the immediate release of political prisoners. In Moscow, the authorities agree to do so. In Sevastopol, headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, workers, soldiers and sailors succeed in forcibly freeing from prison some of the men arrested for participating in the Potemkin mutiny.
19: Witte, appointed by the Tsar as Chair of a new Council of Ministers – in essence the Tsar’s Cabinet – invites Shipov, Guchkov, Prince Lvov and other recognised ‘moderate’ liberals to discuss becoming ministers. However, with Milyukov and his newly-formed Kadet Party in opposition, they do not accept ministerial posts.
19-20: The general strike in Moscow ends. The next day, over 100,000 join the funeral procession in the city for the Bolshevik Nicholas Bauman, murdered by a ‘Black Hundred’ reactionary, turning it into a mass anti-government demonstration.
20-22: In Odessa, reactionaries launch a vicious three-day anti-Jewish pogrom
21: The St Petersburg Soviet had initially resolved to continue the general strike. But with strikes now ending elsewhere, a mass return to work is enacted at noon.
26-27: Sailors and soldiers at the Kronstadt Naval Base mutiny, breaking into the arsenals and rampaging through the streets, before the revolt is put down and around 3,000 are arrested and threatened with court-martial.
November 1905
Lenin returns to Russia from exile. Revolutionary movements continue across different sectors and provinces. A further 758,000 striking workers are recorded in the factory inspectors’ figures for strikes covering the last two months of 1905.
The St Petersburg Soviet continues to meet and expand its influence. Following its initiative, around fifty other cities, not least Moscow, now operate elected soviets, built from the strike committees set up during the October action. At the initiative of the St Petersburg Soviet, the soviets begin to build united national links.
The Soviet calls a city-wide strike in support of Kronstadt’s mutineers and against the martial law imposed in Poland. Over 120,000 workers participate. The government is forced to withdraw the threat of executions and court-martial.
The Soviet had already shown its power in St Petersburg by ordering printers to refuse to print any newspapers that continue to submit copy to government censors. The government is now forced to retreat and officially ceases preliminary censorship. The Bolsheviks and other parties now openly print their newspapers.
In pursuit of the long-held demand for an eight-hour day, workers organised by the St Petersburg Soviet start to walk off the job when eight hours have been completed – but some employers respond aggressively with lockouts.
A further mutiny breaks out in the Black Sea Fleet based in Sevastopol, until the sailors are forced to surrender, with over 2,000 arrested. The leaders are executed. Other rebellions are reported amongst soldiers returning by train from Manchuria, particularly where troops are fraternising with revolutionaries and railworkers.
Amongst rising opposition to Tsarist rule in the Baltics, a general strike is called in Riga and three Baltic provinces are placed under martial law.
The Peasants Union now has over 200,000 members across 26 provinces. Its Second Congress, held in Moscow, shows that it is now forms the left-wing of the ‘Union of Unions’. It votes for a boycott of the Duma elections and for land to be transferred to the peasants, threatening to call a general agrarian strike if necessary.
Peasant unrest is reported from a number of provinces, chiefly in southern Russia. The Tsar sends troops to brutally put them down. In retaliation, General Sakharov is assassinated in Saratov by a Socialist Revolutionary on 22 November.
December 1905
2: The St Petersburg Soviet responds to the growing Tsarist counter-reaction – which had included the arrest of its own president, Khrustalev-Nosar, at the end of November – by issuing its ‘Financial Manifesto’, with the support of the Peasants Union, the RSDLP, the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Polish Socialist Party. It is then endorsed by the Moscow Soviet too. Its call for a refusal to pay any taxes or government debts is taken by the Tsarist government as a direct challenge to its power.
3: Durnovo, the latest Minister of Interior, orders the arrest of all the Soviet’s Deputies and Executive Committee. Around 250 are taken into custody, including Trotsky. In response, those leaders not under arrest, after debate within the RSDLP and SRs, call for a nationwide general strike to begin on 8 December.
7-8: The Moscow Soviet, alongside the rail, post and telegraph unions and the RSDLP, agree to start their general strike on December 7. 100,000 cease work, quickly stopping factories, trains, schools and municipal services. By the next day, 150,000 are on strike. The Soviet instructs strikers to try and fraternize with soldiers.
8: Workers in St Petersburg begin their strike too. However, participation is weaker than in November, workers fearing that the support for a nationwide insurrection required for victory was not forthcoming. Exhausted by months of struggle, the strike movement in the capital never develops into a wider uprising.
Nevertheless, the movement quickly becomes a nationwide general strike. In some cities, such as Novorossiysk, Krasnoyarsk, Chita and Kharkov, the balance of forces is sufficient for the workers’ soviets to take control. In cities like these, the strikes continue throughout December, but the rebellions are eventually defeated.
In Moscow, workers start to throw up barricades on the main boulevards, and the workers’ militia engage in guerilla attacks on government troops. Sporadic skirmishes continue for a week. However, by December 15, the government is able to start using reliable troop reinforcements to successfully suppress the uprising. With the death toll already at around one thousand, the Moscow Soviet has to concede defeat and officially calls off the attempted – but poorly prepared – insurrection.
At the end of December, the Putilov management closes the plant for three weeks, and, on re-opening, refuses work to those they have recorded as being known activists and organisers.
With the defeat of the revolutionary movement, leaders are arrested, meetings banned, opposition newspapers closed down, activists dismissed from their jobs.
Cossack and Guard units are sent along the Trans-Siberian railway to Chita and Krasnoyarsk, and into Southern Russia, Transcaucasia and the Baltic provinces – to terrorise the population into submission. Over 2,000 are hanged or shot in the Baltic provinces alone.
1906 and after
Strikes continue into the start of the year, but the employers go on the offensive, exacting revenge on the revolutionary workers with blacklisting of activists, mass dismissals and lockouts. The working day is lengthened, wages reduced.
A combination of repression and an industrial recession sees the number of strikers officially recorded by the Russian Factory Inspectorate fall from a total of 2.9 million – 164% of all workers – in 1905 (many workers will have taken action more than once) to just 47,000, 2.4%, in 1910, before a new upturn in the workers’ movement begins.
In the wake of the defeated movement, the RSDLP’s influence amongst the workers’ movement declines and Menshevik trends within the party are strengthened.
Tsar Nicholas retains his rights as “the supreme autocratic power” to appoint ministers and judges, command the armed forces, impose martial law and issue ‘ukases’. He does carry out his promise to institute a State Duma, but one elected with the restrictive franchise originally set out for the ‘Bulygin Duma’ in August 1905. As a safeguard, he insists that his trusted State Council can veto any legislation agreed by the Duma, and, if all else fails, he retains his own personal veto too.
By July, even the first Duma’s mild opposition is too much for the Tsar and it is dissolved. Another is convened and, once again, soon dissolved. A third Duma is then reconvened under a new electoral law that guarantees a reactionary majority.
Peter Stolypin, replacing Witte as Chair of the Council of Ministers, introduces a new agrarian policy which he describes as “banking on the strong ones”. It aims to create a point of support for the Tsarist regime in the village by allowing the richer ‘kulaks’ to buy up communal land. As Trotsky later writes, “in this attempt to substitute the kulak problem for the peasant problem, the counter-revolution was destined to break its neck”.
Discussing the ‘Principal Stages in the History of Bolshevism’ in his 1920 pamphlet, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder, Lenin summed up the period from 1905-07 as follows:
“All classes came out into the open. All programmatical and tactical views were tested by the action of the masses… The relations between the proletariat, as the leader, and the vacillating and unstable peasantry, as the led, were tested in practice”.
“The Soviet form of organisation came into being in the spontaneous development of the struggle. The controversies of that period over the significance of the Soviets anticipated the great struggle of 1917-20. The alternation of parliamentary and non-parliamentary forms of struggle, of the tactics of boycotting parliament and that of participating in parliament, of legal and illegal forms of struggle, and likewise their interrelations and connections – all this was marked by an extraordinary wealth of content”.
“As for teaching the fundamentals of political science to masses and leaders, to classes and parties alike, each month of this period was equivalent to an entire year of ‘peaceful’ and ‘constitutional’ development. Without the ‘dress rehearsal’ of 1905, the victory of the October revolution in 1917 would have been impossible”.