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Episode 10.32: The Union of Liberation

So now we actually come to the revolution of 1905. Really, seriously, I’m not kidding. An honest to god revolution in this 10th and final series of the Revolutions podcast. Now if you know anything at all about the Russian Revolution of 1905, you know that its beginning is traditionally marked by Bloody Sunday in January 1905. But though Bloody Sunday is the dramatic jolt of revolutionary energy, where that which was rising up met that which was falling down, in retrospect, revolutionary energy had already been humming well beyond normal capacity all through the latter half of 1904. And this energy was not generated by Socialist Revolutionaries or Social Democrats or anarchists or narodists, but the liberals. Liberals who seem to be fulfilling their assigned historical destiny as ushering in that first revolution, the democratic revolution.

Russian liberals were as shocked as anyone to be leading the revolutionary charge in 1904, given how much they seem fated to a life of disappointed frustration. The heyday of the era of great reform back in the 1860s and 1870s was long since passed, even further away psychologically than an objective counting of years gone by. The 1880s had been as dismally repressive for liberals as it was for narodists and socialists and anarchists. Most of the progressive judicial reforms had been watered down over the years, leaving the same old unaccountable police state bureaucracy able to do what it wanted, when it wanted, to who it wanted. Newspapers and books could be legally published, but the censors made it nearly impossible to speak openly about political topics. And everyone went through the motions of life well aware that the Okhrana had spies and informants everywhere, that it wasn’t enough to watch what you said publicly, you had to watch what you said privately.

Meanwhile, the locals zemstvos, the most significant new political institution to emerge from that era of great reform, had seen their power and jurisdiction curtailed and fenced off, and then curtailed and fenced off some more. The local zemstvos still existed, and there were now thirty-four of them scattered across the empire, but instead of growing and spreading and making the state more democratic, they were aggressively pruned back. There was that brief flicker of hope upon the ascension of Nicholas the Second that things might get better, that things might change, but Nicholas told them all to give up their senseless dreams.

And so it went. Between the senseless dream speech of 1895, and the revolution of 1905, Russian liberalism continued to exist in a state of resigned dormancy, confined to private conversations among trusted friends and colleagues. By the turn of the century, liberalism came in three basic types: first were conservative liberals, who simply wanted the tsar to recognize the benefits of allowing his people, at a minimum, to have a consultative voice in how the empire was run; to their left were liberal constitutionalists, who genuinely wanted what most of their social and intellectual peers in the west had: a written constitution, a representative parliament with real legislative power, civil and political rights that were respected. These first two types of liberal were well-represented inside the zemstvos, though conservatives tended to outnumber constitutionalists. And then further to the left of the both of them, was a third group who came mostly from the ranks of the intelligentsia. They were more radically democratic. Not necessarily republican, but definitely believing that the people, not the tsar, should govern the empire, that Russia could not truly flourish until the Russian people had been set free.

What these three groups had in common was a hatred of the unaccountable police state bureaucracy under which they lived. Whatever stripe of liberal you were, you were sure to agree that the arbitrary and repressive bureaucracy was equal parts humiliating, degrading, and incompetent. It was this unaccountable alien thing that had inserted itself between the tsar and his people, and despite its own blindingly obvious ineptitude, it was able to maintain its power through intimidation, threats, and force. All of this was plain as day, but you could not say anything about it. You just had to sit silently while the imperial bureaucracy clunked along making a hash of everything and lashing out at even the most constructive criticism.

Thanks to that bureaucracy’s reactionary sense of self-preservation, democrats and liberals were not treated much differently than the most radical revolutionary communist; it was all the same to the police. And because of this attitude, more radical liberal voices tended to gain influence, because asking the tsar nicely for liberal reform clearly wasn’t ever going to work. And among those more radical voices we find Pavel Milyukov, who we talked about at the end of episode 10.20. Milyukov was a proponent of universal suffrage and representative constitutional democracy, and for his outspokenness on these issues, he had spent time in prison, in administrative exile, and ultimately working as a professor in Bulgaria in self-imposed exile. But he also earned a lot of admirers across the political spectrum for his principled resiliency on these issues. Also in this camp of radical democrats, we now also find Pyotr Struve completing his ideological journey from Social Democrat to Legal Marxist to radical liberal. Struve, remember, had been an active part of the social democratic underground in the 1890s, and when the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party officially formed in 1898, Struve was the one who had written their founding manifesto. But Struve was also among those embracing the possibilities offered by revisionist Marxism, and by the time his erstwhile comrades — Lenin and Martov, more stubbornly doctrinaire orthodox Marxists — came home from exile in 1900, their brief attempt to bridge their widening ideological divide ended in failure. They were simply too far apart on too many issues.

And so after simultaneously leaving, and being left by, the Social Democrats, Struve found himself briefly homeless politically. But he soon found the basis for common cause with the radical liberals and constitutionalists. Struve had always been passionate about the democracy part of Social Democracy, and so he fell in with frustrated constitutionalists who wanted to do more than just grumble and frustration for the rest of their lives. As a gifted writer with a radical bent, Struve was able to secure financing for a newspaper that would express liberal hopes and dreams for Russia. And just to condense a few further twists and turns, in 1902, Struve emigrated to Germany and became the publisher and editor and chief of a new newspaper called Liberation.

Liberation was not a legally sanctioned paper. It was as underground as Iskra and the SR’s paper, Revolutionary Russia. It had to be smuggled into the country and when it arrived, it competed with those more revolutionary journals for the hearts and minds of the politically minded intelligentsia. Under Struve’s editorial direction, Liberation took a different approach than the other two big underground papers. In Its first issue. Liberation announced that its primary purpose would be to join together all the forces that wanted to end tsarist absolutism. Liberation did not want to speak for the working class or the peasants or the bourgeoisie, it wanted to speak for the whole nation collectively, everyone from conservative liberals, the bomb throwing SRs. Thus, the liberation editorial line was simple: down with absolutist autocracy. Whether you want to do achieve this through reform or insurrection, evolution or revolution, the first and foremost goal must be to destroy the current bureaucratic police state that kept them all in chains. This left the door open for Social Democrats who believed in a two-stage theory of revolution, SRs who believed that the principle goal of their political revolution was to overthrow the tsar, and liberals who simply wanted the tsar’s powers legally constrained by a constitution.

Now, this editorial line could be frustrating for those liberal constitutionalists, like Milyukov, who wanted the paper to be more forthrightly, well, liberal constitutionalist. But Struve was adamant on the need to form a big tent anti-tsarist coalition to advance that cause. So the paper itself was a mix of news, editorials, and submitted correspondence, and plenty of contributors were anonymous dissenters from inside the state apparatus, who were able to provide juicy stories of sinister policies or routine incompetence that they witnessed every day. Including, for example, a leaked memo from Sergei Witte recommending that the tsar shutter the zemstvos once and for all. All of it made for very popular reading to a suitably outraged public. The arrival of Liberation in 1902 also happened to coincide with the arrival of the arch reactionary Plehve as the new minister of the interior, and his hardline attacks on anything the left of, like, divine right absolutism, helped Liberation gain a large following. Running, it seems to me, just behind Iskra in terms of total number of copies printed and distributed.

While Struve and his allies developed this strategic editorial line of a nationwide popular front combined in opposition to the tsar, they also formed their own underground organization to make this dream a reality. And this organization was dubbed: the Union of Liberation. But even here, the focus was entirely on the negative goal of destroying absolutism, rather than trying to promote any particular vision of what should replace it. Because once you started talking about what came next, any potential national coalition the Union of Liberation hoped to link together would instantly fracture apart.

So if you think back to Lenin’s argument about party membership and the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party needing to be narrow and restrictive, while the Union of Liberation defined its membership as broadly as possible. Are you opposed to absolutest autocracy, yes or no? If yes, then you’re in. So the Union of Liberation included a wide spectrum of beliefs: it included zemstvo constitutionalists, liberal academics and professional types, revisionist socialists, Legal Marxists, even more orthodox Social Democrats and SRs, who saw the utility of a political popular front at this stage and the revolutionary game. And thanks to the regime treating everything from tepid constitutionalism to radical anarchism as equally illegal, all of these people, who had all of these wildly divergent beliefs, actually did share a common cause.

But just as the Union of Liberation was formally coalescing in January 1904, the potential anti-tsarist coalition faced a major problem: the Russo-Japanese War. As we saw last week, the beginning of the war triggered a wave of patriotic flag-waving, and many liberals set aside domestic politics to embrace the war as a matter of national interest. Liberal leaders of the zemstvos now wanted to join together, not to attack the tsar, but to help him win the war. In particular, the zemstvo leaders believed that their decades of experience employing doctors and setting up hospitals would be of great service to the empire, and the zemstvo leaders approached the tsar and received his personal blessing to form an all zemstvo organization to coordinate a national effort to recruit doctors and provide health services for the army in the far east. But though this all zemstvo organization was not meant to be a hotbed of political opposition and liberal reform, it was still the first time the zemstvo had received permission to coordinate their activities beyond their own local jurisdictions.

So the patriotic mood that prevailed through the spring of 1904 confused the budding liberal opposition, and stymied their efforts to get united. Struve himself tried to distinguish between supporting the national war effort and supporting the regime that waged the war, but this was a muddled and unsatisfying position. But then, suddenly, all the Union of Liberation’s problems were solved when the news from the front lines was all bad, bad, bad.

Now, last week I probably oversold the one sidedness of the actual course of the Russo-Japanese War; that when it’s analyzed objectively and outside the domestic political context, the war was not quite so lopsided. But if I got carried away, it was just because I was thinking about it in its domestic political context. And so even if this is one of those cases where the final score didn’t exactly reflect how close the game was at times, the political reality back home was that all the news from the front lines was bad. And the consistency of the bad news was shocking and absolutely destabilizing to the regime. And the political climate back in Russia shifted as quickly as a blizzard following a heat wave. If the Union of Liberation took the patriotic beginning of the war to be one step back, then the bad news in the spring and summer of 1904 was like ten steps forward. Briefly knocked back on their heels, they now had to sprint just to keep up.

For years, the liberal argument had been that the regime is bureaucracy was hopelessly incompetent and held together by little more than paranoid cruelty. The fact that they were now getting hopelessly whipped in the far east was proof positive that they were right all along. And then when Plehve was assassinated in July of 1904 to exactly zero public expressions of regret, the liberals were further emboldened to press their case even harder. And it was this pressure that forced the tsar to go against his instincts and elevate the liberalish Prince Mirsky to be his new minister of the interior in late August. Mirsky, remember, carried with him the confidence of the zemstvo leadership, and he immediately promised less draconian policies, and more trust in the people.

As I said last week, Mirsky was genuinely worried that things were moving in a revolutionary direction and he wanted to head all that off. But this wasn’t just about avoiding revolution for him. He genuinely believed that the state would work better if it worked in harmony with the people, instead of simply imposing its will on the people.

As the center of acceptable political discourse moved left, more radical elements were then able to move in… a more radical direction. So Struve warned readers of Liberation not to be seduced by the mere whiff of reform that Mirsky’s promotion represented. The shifting times also led the Union of Liberation to joint even more radical parts of the political underground for even greater, and potentially revolutionary, coordination. Now, before the assassination of Plehve, a national anti-tsarist movement had been more theoretical than real, and the liberal constitutionalist had never really had to face the prospect of accepting or rejecting partnership with more radical organizations. But after Plehve’s death, this prospect now presented itself, and they answered an invitation from Finnish nationalists to attend a meeting in Paris of all anti-tsarist groups. The SRs also accepted this invitation, and sent among their delegates the unimpeachably dependable Yevno Azef, which is how the Okhrana learned all the details of who attended, and what was discussed. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party also voted to attend this conference, but when they realized the SRs would probably dominate, they pulled out at the last minute. But everyone else convened in Paris in mid September for what was officially called the Conference of Oppositional and Revolutionary Organizations of the Russian State, but later called simply the Paris Bloc.

They agreed to a common program of aggressive anti-tsarist agitation. And while the liberals at the conference, led by Pavel Milyukov, wanted to stick to demonstrations and petitions and trying to organize some kind of national assembly, the revolutionaries were talking about stockpiling weapons and who to assassinate. And while they differed on tactics, they all left this Paris meeting agreeing not to get in each other’s way, nor publicly denounce each other. They all really did share the same goal of toppling tsarist absolutism.

Now the Union of Liberation also had members inside most of the locals zemstvos, and after this Paris Bloc meeting, they started vocally pushing for an all zemstvo congress to address the need for political reform. The regime was clearly weak; it was staggering, it was disoriented. And to the happy surprise of the Union of Liberation, even more conservative zemstvo leaders supported this call for an all zemstvo congress. By October 1904, even the usually docile legal press was making the case for greater zemstvo participation in government. What’s wrong with Russians of talent, good will, and intelligence playing a role in public administration?

The zemstvo leaders then asked Mirsky for permission to hold such a congress, and caught between these emboldened liberals who he sympathized with, and his conservative boss, who was being very stubborn, Mirsky worked out a compromise whereby the congress would not receive official sanction, but they would be allowed to meet privately for, quote, a cup of tea. Mirsky would instruct the police not to interfere.

On November the sixth, 1904, 103 delegates representing all the local zemstvos convened in St. Petersburg. Now, one of the stipulations Mirsky had insisted upon in exchange for looking at the other way while they had this cup of tea, was that there would be a strict media blackout on the congress. They could meet, but who was there, and what they discussed was not supposed to be talked about out in the open. They were just supposed to tell Mirsky what ethey had talked about, and he would take it to the tsar for a response. But this news blackout induced something of a Streisand effect, because not only was the fact of the congress common knowledge, but the ministry of the interior insisting that nobody could speak about what happened in the congress only heightened public interest.

So as delegates departed for St. Petersburg, they were often escorted to the train station by happy cheering crowds who believed they were sending these guys off to participate in a great momentous affair, and hopes were high that it would be a historic moment in Russian political history, the beginning of a new era of great reform.

I have often seen the Zemstvo Congress of November 1904, compared to the convening of the Estates-General in 1789. And because this is the Revolutions podcast and we know a little bit about this stuff, I’d like to dwell on this comparison for a second, just for fun.

Now like the Estates-General, this was the first time in living memory that representative delegates from across the empire had been allowed to convene at the national level to discuss political matters. But unlike the Estates-General, it was still a private and officially unsanctioned affair. The Estates-General, meanwhile was the King officially calling his subjects together under his official auspices. So what I see here in the Zemstvo Congress of 1904 is something more akin to an alt history of the French Revolution, where Louis the 16th resisted calling the Estates-General, and instead, Jacques Necker made a nod wink agreement with the liberal nobles and Third Estate leaders to hold unofficial meetings, probably in the Palais Royale, or like, Lafayette’s house, which could then backchannel its considered opinion to the royal ministry.

And the fact that Nicholas did not follow Louis’s example speaks to one of the important differences in the crises that they faced. Louis was forced to officially convene the Estates-General because the monarchy was bankrupt, and the Paris banking community made convening the Estates-General a necessary precondition of granting the monarchy further bridge loans. And while Nicholas was facing a sudden popular backlash over an unpopular and badly managed foreign war, he wasn’t yet stony broke. Ironically, the same Paris banking community that had forced Louis over the barrel in 1788 was now keeping the tsar afloat in 1904. French loans were critical to the financial health of the tsarist regime, and the French were at this point far more worried that the collapse of the tsar would strengthen Germany than they were about using their financial leverage to insist on democratic reform.

So in 1904, the tsar was unpopular, facing a very real political crisis, and this elected assembly was meeting to discuss political reform, but it’s not quite the Estates-General who was 1789. But that said, I do think that this moment is important enough that I don’t think the Zemstvo Congress was a precursor to the revolution of 1905. I think the revolution is happening right now. Nobody knew it, but the Revolution of 1905 had already begun.

Over three days, and in meetings that were held at different private residences, the Zemstvo Congress debated reforms they wanted the tsar to adopt. And of the 103 delegates who convened, it’s reckoned that about two thirds were liberal constitutionalists, while only about one third were conservatives, who merely wanted the tsar to accept the principle of a consultative place for popular voices. The Union of Liberation had successfully gotten some of their men selected for the congress, and they were there to make sure that the reforms they demanded were as forthrightly constitutional as possible.

The final 10 point plan the congress came up with reflected this dynamic, and it included all the greatest liberal constitutionalist hits: equality before the law, freedom of religion and conscience, freedom of speech and the press, freedom of association, elected regional assemblies and an elected national assembly, and that these assemblies should participate in both lawmaking and budget oversight. In the midst of these recommendations, they also editorialized that above all they wanted an end to abnormal and arbitrary government. They wanted to free the tsar’s subjects from the whims of an unaccountable police and an arbitrary bureaucracy.

Now to appease the conservatives, this 10 point plan avoided using trigger words like constitution and parliament, but it was still plain that they were asking for a constitution and a parliament. And after three days they finished their work and they voted on this 10 point plan, and then transmitted it to Mirsky, who promised to take it to the tsar. No one was under any illusion that the tsar would accept the whole package, but it was meant to signal how far he was going to have to move to appease them.

So, as I just said, it was impossible to keep this out of the press. The people of the Russian Empire knew that it was taking place, and something like five thousand telegrams flooded into St. Petersburg declaring support or best wishes for the delegates. And all around the empire, municipal councils, social organizations, and business groups wrote and published their own supportive public calls for reform. Mirsky was obviously frustrated he couldn’t keep a lid on things, but he also believed that if he cracked down too hard that it would only make things worse.

After the conclusion of the congress, the Union of Liberation then took direct action to keep up the public drum beat in support of reform. Specifically modeling their efforts on the liberal opposition in France in 1847 and 1848, which they all knew from their history books, the Union of Liberation organized a private campaign of banquets that would skirt legal prohibitions on political meetings by billing themselves as merely private dinners. But even the cover story for these banquets sent a message, as they were allegedly convened to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the great judicial reforms of 1864.

The first of these banquets was held on November the 20th in St. Petersburg, and hosted 600 attendees, many of whom ranked amongst the most prominent members of the intelligentsia, the liberal nobility, and the reform minded officer corps of the military. The quote unquote toasts they offered were little more than political speeches supporting a constitution and civil rights and participatory government. And this kicked off a wave of such banquets. Over the next few weeks, 38 dinners were held in 26 different cities, all sounding the same call. And you had doctors, lawyers, engineers, landowners, journalists, military officers, and even reform minded bureaucrats from all over the empire repeating the call from the necessity of political reform.

Meanwhile, the press dutifully covered all these events as news stories that quoted from the speeches that were given — I mean, the toasts that were given — spreading reformist ideas far and wide. And it was noted that opinions that would have gotten you sent to Siberia six months earlier were now boldly spoken out in the open.

So that brings us to what could have been a satisfactory conclusion to all of this. Events had been moving very rapidly since the summer of 1904, and by December, expectations were high that the tsar was going to have to bend to public opinion. Mirsky was certainly working hard on him to acknowledge this political reality. I mean, the least you could do is put some elected people on the state council. And at this point, Mirsky is literally saying, sir, we either do this, or it’s gonna be a revolution, but to Mirsky’s dismay the tsar did not agree. He took his council not from the liberal Mirsky, but from conservatives in his family and his ministry, who said, we can’t agree to this, the principle of absolutism is simply too important. And so Nicholas went back to Mirsky reiterating the same position he had held since the senseless dream speech: I will never agree to the representative form of government.

But he did acknowledge that he would have to take some notice of events. So on December the 12th, the tsar issued a decree. It was the decree everyone had been waiting for, the tsar’s official response to this great national stirring for political reform, and it was… spectacularly underwhelming. It included a vague promise to strengthen the rule of law, to slightly ease up on press censorship, to expand the scope of the zemstvos, but only at the local level. People had been expecting a feast, and instead they were thrown a few peanuts. The severe mildness of the tsar’s “concessions” struck even conservatives out there in Russian society as not being nearly enough for the moment.

And then two days later, the tsar followed this up with a provocative counterbalance to his concessions. He condemned the press for irresponsibly inflaming national passions. He demanded the zemstvos take no more part in national affairs. Anyone who continued to participate in public calls for reform, especially those on a state salary, could expect to be punished in the future. This sent ripples of frustrated anger through the empire, and was greeted with downright ridicule from the population: who does the tsar think he is? Mirsky was devastated, and he said, “Everything has failed, let us build jails.”

Next week, Nicholas’s myopic misreading of the national mood would run headlong into events well beyond anyone’s control, as further disastrous news from the far east would combine with even greater public protests, as the liberal push for reform was now joined by mass worker demonstrations that would produce one of the most famous revolutionary moments in history: Bloody Sunday.