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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.35 Sinking Ships

When Tsar Nicholas issued his little collection of imperial edicts on February the 18th, 1905, he was no doubt hoping that this would be the moment the fever that had been raging since the summer of 1904 finally broke. He had heard his people, offered concessions, and directed his minister of the interior to come up with a workable plan to create space for popular participation in government. So having satisfied everyone, can the wave of protests and strikes and demonstrations and just general disorder stop now? Please? As your tsar I, uh, command it?

But the fever was not going to break, because what ailed Russia had not yet been properly diagnosed, nor were these concessions sufficient medicine. And, there were yet more pathogens to enter the body of tsarist autocracy, keeping it bedridden for the rest of the year.

While he was hoping these hopes, Nicholas was also praying to god for good news from the far east, an end to the humiliations and setbacks in the war against Japan. Nicholas was praying for something, anything that would balance the endless run of bad news. And for all this praying Nicholas… got you guessed it, further humiliations and setbacks. Specifically, just as the February Acts were being issued, the Russian army and Japanese army squared off at the battle of Mukden, which not only turned out to be a battle that served as something of a harbinger for what was to come in World War I just a few years later, but it was also straight up one of the largest land battles in military history up to that point. It featured about 340,000 Russians against 260,000 Japanese, their army now consolidated thanks to the fall of Port Arthur.

The battle of Mukden was not a single set piece affair, but raged for two weeks over extended lines with control of southern Manchuria at stake. Over the course of these grizzly weeks, the Russians took close to 90,000 casualties between killed, captured, and wounded. The Japanese rate was even worse, they suffered 75,000 casualties. So both sides suffered enormously, but in the end of the Russian army could not hold their line, and they fell back in chaotic and demoralized retreat.

But the Japanese by this point were exhausted themselves. Having endured way more casualties and expenses than they had anticipated before the initial attack on Port Arthur, they were now also facing overextended supply lines, and they were unable to pursue the Russians to finish the war right then and there. So, though, this was yet another defeat for Russia, it’s not like the empire of Japan was dancing around with a jaunty spring in its step. The war wasn’t over, and the Russian Baltic fleet now rechristened the Second Pacific Fleet was still chugging their way around the world, and on course for what the tsar hoped would be their divine destiny: to rescue Russia.

But while the defeat at Mukden did not yet end the war, it did lead to further piles of scorn being heaped on the tsar. In particular, the gruesome casualty rate lent further credence to accusations leveled at the regime that they were all incompetent and spending Russian blood and treasure with no plan or purpose. This latest arousal of outrage was then fed directly into a whirlwind of open political activity that had been stirred up by the tsar’s declaration that it was legal to petition the government, to make suggestions about how the state could be better run. So all over the empire, people got together to discuss what they should put into these petitions, especially liberals and reformists and constitutionalists from the professional classes, who would get together at the Free Economic Society, or houses of wealthier members, or at school halls, or in newspaper offices to discuss politics. Which technically, the tsar had not given them permission to do.

But what these open meetings did, in essence, was assert that along with the right to petition came an implied right to free assembly and freedom of speech. So, when the police authorities would come around to one of these meetings, they would just say, hey, we’re doing exactly what the tsar told us we could do, so buzz off. Now there were limits to this, obviously it’s not like the SRs could meet in a cafe and shout, hey, I’ve got an idea for reform. Let’s kill the tsar. But in general, political organizing and discussion was now tolerated, if for no other reason than the police simply didn’t have the resources to shut it all down even if they wanted to.

Now along with this asserted freedom of assembly and speech, came defacto freedom of the press, as journals and newspapers reported all these discussions, brazenly flouting the existing censorship laws that, again, the authorities were not actually strong enough to enforce. So, the traditional mechanisms of autocratic political repression were quite simply breaking down everywhere, and it really did seem like a new political era was dawning.

In the initial stages of this new era, most of these meetings, speeches, statements, and organizations were led by respectable liberal reformists, who were pitching respectable liberal reform. But just underneath the surface was the hand of the Union of Liberation, who were clearly becoming the most influential and potent of all of the underground revolutionary parties, largely because their whole mission was to forge a single monolithic anti-tsarist coalition. So they were happy to include all the other underground revolutionary parties, as well as above ground respectable liberals. So the Union of Liberation became a very necessary connective hub for all of the forces driving at revolution. And they weren’t just knitting together a coalition, they were also driving that revolution. Radical democratic members of the Union of Liberation were participating in all of these above ground liberal meetings and discussions, and they were always trying to get people to demand more, and push harder.

The most important of these was Pavel Milyukov, who had been on a speaking tour in the United States when the revolution broke out, and who arrived back in Russia in April, to hopefully be there for the founding of a new democratic constitutional monarchy for Russia. Milyukov spoke the language of democratic constitutional liberalism, which appealed to the constitutionalists, but he had also paid his dues as an enemy of the tsar. He had endured imprisonment and exile, just like the hardest core revolutionaries had, and they respected him for it. The SRs at one point actually asked him if he wanted to join their central committee, but he declined. They may have shared a single common goal — break the back of the autocracy and create a world of political freedom — but after that, they had very different visions about what the future of Russia ought to look like.

Many of these political gathering started out as improvised affairs, so the Union of Liberation worked to bring some order to it. They started organizing professional unions, which could act as political pressure groups. Now, this is something that had gotten going in the summer of 1904 when Mirsky had been brought in to the Ministry of the Interior, but after Bloody Sunday, professional organizing got going in a more systematic and open way. Soon, there was a union for lawyers, and one for doctors, and one for professors, also journalists, agronomists, teachers, veterinarians, pharmacists, and railroad employees. By May of 1905, there were 14 of these professional unions, including groups that were not directly linked to a profession at all but instead, a cause. For example, the Union for the Attainment of Full Rights for the Jewish People of Russia and the Union of Equal Rights for Women, the first organization dedicated fully to the defense of women’s rights as such, as opposed to the socialist or narodist programs that included gender equality amongst many other demands. The use of the word “union” here is a bit misleading — these were not labor unions, they were associations of professionals. And when they first started getting together, they drafted their own petitions to the tsar, which pounded mostly on liberal democratic political demands. But as members of the Union of Liberation were in the middle of all of this, there was also an effort to support the workers movement, and so, to include in their petitions demands for an eight hour day, better wages, pensions, and medical care to make sure that everybody stayed apart of the same anti-tsarist movement. We’re all in this together.

Speaking of those workers, as we saw last week, the initial wave of strikes kicked off by Bloody Sunday wound down by the end of January. But that was just the beginning of everything, not the end of anything. In St. Petersburg, the regime sought to establish a commission to investigate what happened on Bloody Sunday, and in a magnanimous gesture they wanted representatives of the workers to participate. These representatives were to be selected by nine electoral assemblies created specifically to perform this single task.

But socialists leaped at the opportunity to start influencing events, and they made sure to show up at these assemblies ready to do some influencing… and it worked. The St. Petersburg workers refuse to vote on representatives until the government guaranteed certain things, including the audacious demand that the findings of the commission be made public. When the government balked, the workers boycotted the election, and then the tsar decided to just shutter the whole commission and forget it. This made the workers angry, so just as the February Acts were being disseminated, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job yet again in protest. Now, these strikes were neither as long, nor as large as the great January strike, but it was proof that the situation was still incredibly volatile, and the workers were far from satisfied.

Elsewhere, the empire continued to be hit by sporadic strikes. So while January 1905 kicked off with something close to 500,000 workers walking off the job at some point, February saw 290,000 workers participating in some kind of strike action, often in areas that had not even been touched by the first wave. Now these strikes happened spontaneously and seemingly at random in terms of who and when and where and what industries were hit. In the first third of 1905, they were also often so spontaneous that it wasn’t until after the workers walked off the job that they attempted to formulate specific demands, most of which at this stage were still purely of the economic variety, right? Shorter hours, higher wages, safety standards, sanitation. But as the year progressed, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs and people from the Union of Liberation started making better and more stable connections to the working class leadership. And most importantly, they were feeding the workers, literature and news and pamphlets that joined these economic strikes to a wider political movement, and as 1905 progresses, we see a marked uptick in workers going on strike knowing in advance the demands they were striking for, and having democratic political things on that list.

The liberal intelligentsia, meanwhile, consistently expressed support for the workers, either out of genuine concern for their well-being, or simply enjoying the strategic value all this industrial disorder had for their own political reform project. Industrialists and manufacturers inside the reform movement for example, loved to tell their contacts in the Ministry of Finance that really what the workers wanted was political reform, and the economic concessions, which I think we can all agree would cripple the economy anyway, were of merely secondary concern.

The number of strikes slackened a bit in March and April, but even still close to 80,000 workers walked off the job in both of those months, even if it was only for a day or two. By mid April the regime was forced to conclude that an 1897 edict making striking a criminal act was simply unenforceable. They couldn’t arrest all the workers because soon enough there would be no labor force left. Not that the police could handle such an operation anyway. So I think we can add “right to strike” to a list of reforms that the regime was forced to accept in the face of political, economic, and social reality. They were even forced to admit that limited police actions targeting leaders was pretty counterproductive, because the standard punishment was to exile those working class leaders back to their home villages, which turned out to be a really great way to get the most radicalized voices to return home and start stirring up trouble amongst their friends, family, and neighbors back home, helping activate the thus far inert peasantry… and it is to the peasants who we now turn our attention.

The course of events in 1904 and 1905 had lead the regime to hope that the unrest would remain confined to the cities and the industrial areas, which were still very small pockets in the grand scheme of things. Nicholas and Alexandra were of course personally convinced that the real people of Russia, the good and noble peasants, continued to love them unconditionally. But just to be sure, the regime went out of its way not to spread the news of the tsar’s acts of February the 18th, which confirmed the right to petition. So unlike say the emancipation decree, which was read in every village church in the empire, the February decrees were really not. But the regime could not keep this information under wraps because the zemstvo liberals and others aligned with the political opposition out in the provinces sprang into action, and made it their business to spread the news far and wide. And while they may have been more temperamentally conservative, it’s not like the peasants didn’t have their own deep grievances they wanted the tsar to fix. We do not have enough land to support our families. The rent we pay for leased land is too high. The wages we receive for day labor is too low. Also, we would like access to timber and pasture land that is still being claimed as the exclusive preserve of the state and the nobility.

Adding to these longstanding complaints was a growing anti-war sentiment, and in the villages, this anti-war sentiment was not abstract, it was personal. The Russian army was primarily composed of peasant conscripts, so the lived reality of the Russo-Japanese war for the peasants was watching husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers taken off to go fight a war that was quickly revealed to be as pointless as it was incompetently led. And all the news of the death and destruction and the far east right up through the retreat at Mukden was then followed by more reservists being activated. And in the villages the attitude is what are you doing? Don’t send more of our boys off to die for nothing. End the war.

So compounding these factors, by the spring of 1905, many workers who had personally witnessed events of the previous winter were now coming back home with lurid tales of murder and revolution, and spreading around the ideas that had animated at all. This lead the peasants to start participating in these momentous events in two ways. First, village councils would get together and come up with their own petitions to send the tsar, featuring their own demands: more land, cheaper rent, higher wages — and, when they felt particular, purely bold, the biggest ask of all: take all that land is held by the state and the tsar and the nobility and transfer it to the people. But also influenced by local members of the rural intelligentsia, these petitions also routinely demanded a democratic national assembly, civil liberties and local self-government. These were the same kind of political demands that were now being tacked on to the worker petitions at the same time that they were being hammered in the press and by the zemstvos and by the various professional unions.

So on this front, political reform, all of Russia did seem to be speaking with one voice. But alongside this peaceful path of petition, plenty of peasants took a more aggressive approach, embracing the tactics that had been used during that sweep of rural unrest that had swept across southern Russia in 1902, which we talked about in Episode 10.30, and that was target large estates for looting and burning. These direct attacks on the local magnate was particularly heavy in the Volga region where the SRs had been making inroads, but it’s not like the SRs were some invisible hand guiding the peasants to revolution. Most of this, by the admission of the SR’s own agents out in the field, was spontaneous and self-directed. The common pattern was for peasants drawn from a cluster of villages around some particular estate to agree to congregate at that estate on a certain day. Then, numbering as many as 6 or 700, they would push their way in and loot the premises, making sure to locate the office where the debt and obligation records were kept and burn those in a giant pile. And then, as a grand finale, sometimes they would burn whole buildings to the ground. One of the earliest and most dramatic incidents was at an estate of Grand Duke Sergei’s in the Orloff province run by a notoriously cruel manager. Two weeks after the Grand Duke’s assassination, hundreds descended on this estate. They looted and redistributed whatever wasn’t nailed down, and then lit the place on fire. It took a contingent of regular army troops to break this all up.

But these direct attacks on the estates were not physically violent affairs. Managers and owners, even if they were hated, were told just to go stand off to one side and not get in the way. No one was being lined up against the wall and shot.

At least, not yet.

February, March, and April each saw a hundred or so such incidents across the empire. So this is not like the whole peasantry is now up in arms. But once the weather started warming up and the regime continued to flail, the number of these local insurrections increased out in the countryside.

These direct peasant actions led to a debate opening up inside the ranks of the SRs about the nature and utility of so-called economic terrorism. Some younger and more radical SRs argued that they needed to expand their target list beyond the narrow pool of political and police officials, because equally culpable in the people’s suffering and equally standing in the way of full agrarian socialism, were landlords and estate managers and bankers and industrialists. Just because you were technically a private citizen didn’t mean you weren’t a core cog in the apparatus of oppression. Plus, engaging directly against landlords and managers might actually bring on board peasants who are still struggling to accept that the tsar was not their benevolent and protective father. So on a practical level, it would be easier to radicalize the peasantry against local landlords than it was to radicalize them against the tsar.

This debate led to further arguments about how fast they should be moving now that the revolution appeared to be on. Most SR central committee members though, including their leading theorist, Victor Chernov, believed that decentralized agrarian socialism could only be accomplished after the political revolution was done, after the freedomless autocracy had been toppled. So even terrorist tactics had to reflect that single-minded political focus. Besides, killing hated members of the regime was one thing, but killing landlords and businessmen might, for example, spook liberal reformists into a reactionary posture too soon.

But those younger and more radical SRs were saying, no, we can do it now, we can do it all at once. We should attack and terrorize all the exploitive forces in society right now today, and start trying to seize and redistribute land. And this debate was the origin of the split inside the SRs, which lead to the more extremist SR Maximalists to break away and pursue their own faster, more violent and more direct route to agrarian socialism.

And while we’re here talking about these internal SR debates, I should mention that there were also internal debates inside the social democratic circles, especially along that Bolshevik-Menshevik divide. Lenin and his Bolsheviks argued that because the liberals and bourgeoisie in Russia were still pretty small and weak, that if the proletariat played a decisive role in toppling the tsarist regime, that they could win a powerful position inside the resulting democratic government. So much so that the period of quote unquote bourgeois rule that was implied by the two-stage revolution theory could be dramatically shortened.

And I’ll mention this in passing now, but we’re going to discuss it a lot more later, that Trotsky is already well on his way to articulating a theory of permanent revolution that will take this argument to its logical conclusion. To achieve this decisive place inside the post-autocratic government, the Bolsheviks also argued in favor of immediate armed insurrection, not just playing the peaceful game of petition and strikes and pressure and working for the liberals rather than alongside the liberals.

Martov and the Mensheviks, meanwhile, were far more in favor of holding off on the need for armed insurrection, and they planned to ride out the period of inevitable bourgeois liberal rule without trying to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat too soon. As a result, we find Mensheviks in Russia far more willing to collaborate with the liberals and the Union of Liberation throughout 1905. But these arguments among the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party members were largely being held in an émigré vacuum, and as we discussed last week, they were happening at such a distance that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks inside Russia were just improvising tactics and strategy at quite a remove from the alleged leaders of their respective parties.

So if we look back now over the course of the revolution so far, we find ourselves nearing the end of the fourth phase of the revolution. The first phase actually happened back in 1904, and was defined by the liberal opposition that culminated with the Zemstvo Congress of November, 1904. The second phase was defined by Father Gapon and his assembly, and culminated obviously with Bloody Sunday. The third phase was that wave of protest which culminated with the tsar’s February edicts, and now here the fourth phase is culminating in May 1905, when a number of currents converged simultaneously.

The first of these was the convergence of the workers movement and socialist agitation on May Day, 1905. May Day kicked off a whole new surge of worker strikes after the lull of March and April, and these were really important because it was the first time that the socialists managed to organize, and dare I say, lead the workers out of the factories. Up until now the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the SRs had always been hopping in to influence strikes after they had spontaneously broken out, but with May the first now declared International Workers Day, the socialist agitators planned events in advance and got the workers to go along with it. The strikes orchestrated in the first week of May then jolted the workers across the empire back to life and shot the number of strikers from the tens of thousands back into the hundreds of thousands. And then about a week after the May Day strike started, the Union of Liberation completed the next phase of their plan: joining together all the professional unions they had organized into a single force.

On May the eighth and ninth, 60 delegates representing fourteen unions voted to form a single union of unions. That’s what they call it, the Union of Unions. This new Union of Unions then elected Pavel Milyukov to be its chairman, which meant they were not here to be cautious and conciliatory. The Union of Unions was specifically organized to act as something like the public face of the Union of Liberation. Their objectives were overtly political and very radical, and they would push forever more audacious plans that were now being formed by the Union of Liberation, which included a call for truly universal democratic suffrage, and by truly universal, I mean, they were now arguing for women’s right to vote.

But if you know anything at all about the Revolution of 1905, you know the really big event of May 1905: the Battle of Tsushima.

While the regime grappled with domestic chaos, Tsar Nicholas had continued to pray for good news from the far east, prayers that had thus far gone unanswered. After the Battle of Mukden, all hopes and prayers now rested on the Baltic fleet, which had been redubbed the Second Pacific Squadron. Having departed in October 1904, this fleet of ships, plus an array of auxiliary boats, had been sailing around the world. And this Second Pacific Squadron included the largest and newest ships in the Russian navy: eleven battleships, plus cruisers and destroyers of various shapes and sizes, and they traveled around the tip of Africa to Madagascar, and then across the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, a third Pacific Squadron composed of lighter and older ships were also dispatched, taking the more direct route through the Suez Canal. Now, since our principle interest here is the effect of all of this on the Revolution of 1905, I am not going to do a play-by-play of this ignominious voyage of the damned, but if you are interested, there is such an entertaining play-by-play a bunch of you have sent it to me, they are very detailed and highly entertaining YouTube videos by navy history creator Drachinifel, which covers both the voyage of the damned and the resulting Battle of Tsushima.

The short version though, is that after seven months and 18,000 miles, the Russian fleet was finally approaching Japan in May 1905. Since their original mission to relieve Port Arthur had been mooted by the fall of Port Arthur, all the Russian Navy was trying to do at this point was push on to Vladivostok to regroup.

On May the 15th, they tried to sail through the straits of Tsushima, straits that were blocked by the whole Japanese navy, a Japanese navy that had spent the last few months relentlessly practicing for this very confrontation. They knew the Russian navy was coming, and they were going to stop them.

The essential Japanese strategy was to concentrate all their fire on one Russian battleship at a time, so, when the two fleets came into contact, that’s what they did. The Battle of Tsushima lasted all through the afternoon to the 15th, through the night, and then recommenced on the morning of the 16th. And while the whole thing is a very confusing mess, made more confusing by fog and mistakes and miscommunications, the final result was unambiguous disaster for the Russians. By the time the last small contingent of Russian ships surrendered on the morning of the 16th, almost the entire squadron had been sunk or scuttled, including all eleven battleships. So on May the 15th, this Russian fleet had carried with it the hopes and dreams and prayers of the whole Empire, and on the morning of the 16th, that Russian fleet simply did not exist.

Now, a few ships managed to break away from this debacle and they were either taken into custody by the Chinese, or a few arrived down in Manila and were taken into custody by the Americans. Only three Russian ships managed to complete the voyage to Vladivostok.

The Battle of Tsushima was a short, decisive, and devastating end to the Russo-Japanese war. It was the Russian Empire’s final humiliation in what had been a humiliating string of humiliations.

The Battle of Tsushima was an almost incomprehensible piece of news back in St. Petersburg. The tsar had gone into this war essentially by accident, and was so brimming with confidence at the outset that the whole of the empire was convinced that it would be quick and easy. Failures in the far east had then come so rapidly and seemed so incongruous with everybody’s expectations that it had shaken the core legitimacy of the tsarist regime. And despite all his praying, Nicholas now faced the unthinkable. There was no more hope. Russia was defeated. They lost the war. Through back channels, the tsar accepted an offer from US President Theodore Roosevelt to broker a treaty.

Now, obviously there’s never a good time to lose a war, but having news of the disaster at Tsushima arrive just as the revolutionary fever is rising in the spring of 1905… that meant that all the tsar’s problems were compounded to the point where he would be hard pressed to ever escape them.

Next week, in the wake of defeat abroad, Nicholas’s beloved absolute autocracy would find itself facing defeat at home.