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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.34: The Wave of Protest

Bloody Sunday was a watershed moment in Russian history. As news of the massacre spread, Russians reacted with shock, horror, and anger. Bloody Sunday invited the whole empire to join an aggrieved reappraisal of the tsarist regime that was now failing as disastrously at home as it was abroad. And as if the truth itself wasn’t bad enough, rumor swirled the Father Gapon had served as a pied piper to lure workers into a murderous trap laid by Bloody Nicholas, the admittedly unfair nickname that had been hung on the tsar after his coronation, but which now seemed more apt than ever. Outside Russia, the rest of the world learned that the Russian army had murdered a bunch of peaceful demonstrators, and the international condemnations of the tsar were loud and uniform. Faith in the regime was at an all time low. Faith that this could end only with political and economic reform was at an all time high.

But the exact end result of all of this would depend a lot on how it was handled by the tsar and his ministers. And folks, let me tell you, they are not going to handle it very well at all.

As I mentioned last week, Nicholas reacted to Bloody Sunday like it was an unfortunate natural disaster. It was a tragic accident. To the extent that he believed that somebody might be to blame, he placed that blame on revolutionary agitators, agitators who had led his people astray. The response from the Empress Alexandra was even more obtuse: she wrote her sister saying in effect that she and Nicholas were the real victims. Her heart went out mostly to her husband, who was now bearing a terrible weight thrown on him by a few malcontents in the capital, even as the rest of the empire still loved them as ardently as ever. She wrote among other things, “Petersburg is a rotten town… not one atom Russian. The Russian people are deeply and truly devoted to the sovereign.” Such were the rationalizations inside the imperial family.

Meanwhile, back in St. Petersburg, all those workers who — let me just check, yep, are in fact, a bunch of Russians — were reeling from Bloody Sunday, but not at all broken. Because one thing Bloody Sunday did not do was end the workers’ strike. In the midst of all of Sunday’s drama, it was easy to forget the simple fact that their petition had never reached the tsar. Their demands were still unaddressed. So the workers woke up on Monday morning and still refused to do their jobs. And now they were joined by even more workers, people who had remained on the job thus far now quit in angry solidarity, and this included at the gas works and a critical power station. The general strike that had begun on January the third was not just ongoing, it was bigger than ever. Nothing had been solved. Everything was worse. And on top of that, Father Gapon had been forced to flee the country, taking with him the great idea that had previously animated the strikers, the tsar is good and he will help us.

To deal with the immediate problem of unrest in the capital, the tsar promoted General Dimitri Trepov to be the new governor general of St. Petersburg. A veteran cavalry officer, Trepov had been the head of the Moscow police since 1896. He was a staunch and reliable conservative, and had been a vocal critic of Mirsky’s liberal approach, saying that it would cause more problems than it would solve, and after Bloody Sunday, this seemed like a bang on assessment to Nicholas. So Trepov was moved to St. Petersburg to get the situation back in hand. Martial law now prevailed in the capital with police and troops patrolling unusually empty streets. Trepov also ordered the police to round up all known revolutionary agitators and suspects. Trepov proved to be a steady enough hand that his star was now on the rise. In a few months, he would be given the additional title of assistant minister for internal affairs, which put him in charge of the national police service. Along the way, he would become one of Nicholas’s most trusted personal advisors — and Sergei Witte, who remained politically sidelined despite his own self confident belief that he was the only man who could fix the empire, would soon be bitterly describing Trepov as the real dictator of Russia.

But the regime now had a lot more to grapple with than just St. Petersburg workers. Bloody Sunday triggered a vast wave of protests, worker strikes, street demonstrations, and demands for economic and political reform. This wave of protests spread through three principle channels: the workers, the intelligentsia, and this whole other can of worms that I’ve been giving short shrift to in the series so far, and that’s the minority nationalities on the periphery of the Russian empire. Poles, Finns, Germans, Armenians, Georgians, and Jews, who chafed under tsarist rule and who were after not just economic and political reform, but national liberation.

However, one channel that these mass protests in January and February 1905 did not travel through was the peasantry. Now, there were some exceptions here and there, but in the main, this political emergency was mostly an urban phenomenon, which did help Alexandra stay convinced that real Russian still loved them, because people who lived in cities, weren’t real Russians.

So in the industrial labor channel, between January the 10th and January the 20th, strikes broke out in more than 30 cities, and eventually included some 500,000 workers off the job. And that was more than every combined strike since the beginning of the tsar’s reign put together. These strikes were spontaneous and unorganized, and happened far too quickly at this stage for the revolutionary socialist agents to lead or direct them. The vast majority of these strikes were also peaceful, though in Saratov and Kiev, there were clashes with local authorities, probably due to the particularly heavy concentration of SRs in those two cities.

The worst incident was in Riga, Latvia, where a workers’ march on January the 13th was fired on by soldiers resulting in seventy deaths, some from gunfire, some who were trampled, and a bunch who drowned when they ran for cover onto a frozen river and the ice broke.

But in the main, we are not here talking about people throwing up barricades and storming fortresses. These were peaceful strikes, not insurrectionary uprisings, which is a good thing for the local authorities, because this was an unprecedented spread of urban unrest and they had no coherent plan for dealing with any of it.

Now, as I just mentioned, the SRs and the Social Democrats, be they Bolshevik or Mensheviks, were forced to play catch up. They had always been predicting a revolution would break out, and when it actually broke out, they were not expecting it. As we saw last week, their initial attempts to get in there and take over the workers’ movement in St. Petersburg had been rebuffed. But after Bloody Sunday, they did start having more success, because they were able to persuasively argue, you tried groveling to Bloody Nicholas and look where that got you. But the agents making that case to the workers inside Russia were now operating mostly independently from the senior émigré leaders who we’ve been talking about so far, right? Plekhanov and Martov, Lenin, Chernov, Struve. All of them elected to remain abroad, rather than rush home. They were all known to the Okhrana and would likely have been arrested the minute they stepped foot back in Russia, plus it was not at all clear this was the revolution they had been waiting for. It might all blow over before they even finish their travel arrangements so they elected to stay put. The only major exception to this was Trotsky, who concluded that he did not want to miss out on the action, so he shaved his beard, acquired a false passport, and traveled incognito to Kiev in February of 1905. And thanks to this, Trotsky will be much more directly involved in the Revolution of 1905 than the rest of his émigré comrades put together.

As events were moving too quickly for that émigré leadership to issue timely orders, the agents inside Russia had to improvise a response. But nearly everyone focused on ramping up their agitation efforts, to spread ideas and demands and promises, to radicalize the workers who were now well primed by Bloody Sunday to be radicalized, and most importantly, to tie the worker grievances to a socialist revolution. But at this point, they were neither of the leaders nor the principle organizers of anything. They were just along for the ride.

Spreading alongside these labor strikes was the second channel of unrest: the intelligentsia. And January and February 1905 saw a concurrent intelligentsia strike that included all the educated professionals we talked about in Episode 10.32, who had been pushing for political reform since the spring of 1904. Bloody Sunday now gave these reformers a bloody shirt to wave around and say, see, this is what we’ve been talking about. This isn’t just about a badly run war, but scandalous murderous ineptitude at home. We demand political reform. We demand elections and civil rights and a national assembly.

So all those same professional organizations and local zemstvo and union municipal councils that had supported the zemstvo back in the fall of 1904 issued new statements condemning the regime and demanding an end to autocracy. To back up these demands, they too refused to work. Students and professors walked out of the university classrooms together; lawyers refused to show up in court; all those statisticians and agronomists and clerks working for the zemstvo stayed home. Instead they held more meetings and more banquets, jeering the tsar and cheering reform. They also held fundraisers for the striking workers to try to link these two movements together. And of course, all of this was being covered by the press, and so the drumbeat call for reform spread, and the censor’s office was revealed to be ill-equipped to handle this much disruption to routine publishing habits. They simply couldn’t handle the flood of material. Successful censorship had always been based on fear of punishment leading to preemptory self-censorship, but now that fear was gone. And after Bloody Sunday, literate Russia was reading one message: shame on the tsar, we want reform.

The strikes and protests of labor and the intelligentsia then landed in the peripheral parts of the empire where it combined with the third channel of protest, the minority nationalities. I have not, as I said, fully developed this as much as I probably should have, and I’ll have to rectify that, but for now, let’s just say that in Poland, angry nationalistic sentiment was rooted in the original partitions of Poland, and had been hardened by years of abusive conflict with the Russian authorities. So when, for example, the wave of strikes reached Warsaw on January the 11th, it was infused with this extra burst of nationalist patriotism, and so there was more violence amongst the published strikers than there was amongst the Russians. Up in Finland, meanwhile, there was a well-organized revolutionary underground, just waiting to break loose. And remember I mentioned in passing in Episode 10.32, that it was Finnish revolutionaries who had brought the anti-tsarist groups together to form that Paris block back in September, 1904. And I just noted that one of the most violent clashes in these weeks was in Riga, Latvia. And there’s a reason for that.

Similar themes of national liberation existed among Armenians and Georgians down in the Transcaucasus, as calls for economic and political reform were joined by attacks on the foreign occupiers. For these minority nationalities in the multi-ethnic Russian Empire, liberation did not just mean liberation from tsarist oppression, it meant liberation from foreign oppression.

The people who attempted to fuse all this together into a coherent movement was… the Union of Liberation, who were perfectly positioned to unite all of these forces, intelligentsia, liberals and workers and radicals, socialists, nationalists, SRs, Social Democrats — all of the channels that were now erupting in protest. This was the stuff that a national popular front could be made of, and the Union of Liberation had been trying to achieve that since 1903. Nearly everyone now agreed that the first necessary step was sweeping democratic reform and an end to tsarist absolutism. That was a minimum plan they could all agree on. Now, whether you wanted to stop there or go further to the dictatorship of the proletariat or stateless agrarian socialism, that didn’t matter. For the moment they were all headed in the same direction, so they may as well all push together. And besides, it was taken for granted among the Marxist agitators that this was probably the beginning of that first bourgeois democratic revolution that would pave the way for the second socialist revolution, so helping the liberal constitutionalists tear down tsarist autocracy had always been a part of their plans.

But though the Union of Liberation was doing a good job fusing together radical members of the intelligentsia, they all still struggled to make contact with the working classes. Even though the workers were now willing, even eager, to listen to scathing attacks on the tsar, they were still suspicious of attempts to turn their legitimate economic and social grievances into ammunition for a political project they didn’t really care about. They were on strike to improve their miserable lives, to address hunger, disease, injury, overwork, and overcrowding. So for them, this was about an eight hour work day, better sanitation, medical facilities, better wages, an end to arbitrary fines, maybe pensions, collective bargaining, schools for our kids. That was their minimum plan, not a parliament or a constitution. But that said, as long as their minimum plan was addressed, they were for sure willing to turn out in support of political reform, and maybe, even political revolution.

These waves of strike and protest spread so fast that the tsarist regime could hardly keep up. And despite all their long standing paranoid tendencies, it does not seem that anyone had ever seen fit to draw up a coherent national plan of action if a large-scale revolution broke out. So there was confusion about what should be done. Lines of communication and jurisdiction were unclear. And few definitive orders were coming from the top, which is not great if you’re allegedly running a highly centralized police state. So provisional governors mostly charted their own paths, many of them invoking their authority to declare a security emergency that would suspend anything resembling civil rights, due process, or judicial accountability. In a few places, as I said, there was violence between police and protestors, but for the most part, things were peaceful. And who knows how far things would have gone if violence had erupted right then and there in January. Because nobody really had any idea what they were doing, and remember, the Russian army is still focused mostly on getting their butts kicked in Manchuria. They’re not in any position to impose empire-wide martial law.

So one of the reasons direction from the central government was lacking was because, well, first they were caught totally flat-footed, but also because the ministry was undergoing a shakeup. Responsibility for a crisis like this was under the purview of the minister of the interior, but Mirsky was now discredited with the tsar. So he handed in his resignation on January the 15th, a resignation which was accepted coldly, and without even a parting handshake, Nicholas had only ever appointed Mirsky under duress and had never been happy with his constant whining about the need to appease the liberal intelligentsia. And to replace Mirsky, the tsar elevated a conservative Moscow noble named Alexander Bulygin. But though Bulygin was a staunch supporter of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, and had spent the last few years adamantly opposing all liberal reform proposals, this was mostly through unexamined habit, rather than rabid reactionary fervor. And though the appointment of Bulygin was taken by that liberal intelligentsia as a sign that the tsar was going to attempt to retreat to traditional conservatism, Bulygin was not Plehve. He was not going to be that reactionary, and given the circumstances, it really wasn’t going to be possible to be that reactionary. But the change in leadership at the Ministry of the Interior in the middle of this crisis did hamper the ministry’s ability to provide leadership to the rest of the empire.

The regime did get a brief moment to catch its breath though, because these initial strikes had a shelf life. Even as their workplace demands went unaddressed and unmet by the bosses or by the tsar or by anybody else, the St. Petersburg workers had been on strike since January the third, and despite fundraising efforts by their new allies among the professional classes, they simply couldn’t go on not working. They would die. So inside the capital, workers started returning to their factories as early as January the 14th, just five days after Bloody Sunday, with almost the whole city having returned to work by January the 18th. And this was still as other strikes were getting going in other parts of the empire. But those later strikes, which began after the initial strikes in St. Petersburg ended, also had a shelf life. A permanent general strike was never sustainable. And by February the first, the wave of industrial strikes was over. And the revolutionaries were disappointed that things had petered out so quickly, but they did take heart that maybe this was the giant first step forward towards the revolution they so ardently desired.

But though the workers are now returning to their factories, it was not, oh, things are fine again, even in the myopic halls of the Romanov palaces. Even the staunchest conservatives agreed that there would be no getting out of this without some public concessions by the tsar. But this was going to have to be handled with care. The tsar was dealing with humiliation at home and abroad. They had to figure out how to navigate not just the immediate disturbances, but how to repair the regime’s long-term legitimacy.

Now through all of these discussions, Nicholas always kept a firm eye on the war with Japan, praying, literally praying, like, a lot, for good news. If defeat abroad had undermined his regime, maybe victory could save it.

But until that good news came in, there were three things that needed to be done simultaneously: calm the workers inside the capital, calm the empire generally, and calm the international banking community, because the minister of finance is now reporting that Bloody Sunday had sent Russia’s credit into free fall. So remember how I said that, unlike Louis the 16th, Nicholas wasn’t yet dealing with financial pressures? Well, now he is.

But even with all of this in front of him, at one point Bulygin was stressing the need for concessions, and Nicholas said, and I’m quoting here, “it’s like you’re afraid a revolution will break out.”

And Bulygin said, “your majesty, the revolution has already begun.” I mean, at least Louis understood something was amiss when he asked if it was a revolt and told “no sire, it’s a revolution.”

So the brain boxes inside the Ministry finally came up with a brilliant way to solve the problem of the St. Petersburg workers: the tsar would meet them face to face to express his concern and understanding. But that didn’t mean going to the workers, or even going to St. Petersburg, which was far too unsafe. No, what they decided to do was go out and pick thirty-four subservient and reliably docile workers and put them on a train to the imperial residence at Tsarskoye Selo on January 19th.

For Nicholas, this would be the first time he had come into direct face-to-face contact with the working class. And when he met them, he felt obliged to play the role that god had ordained for him: the stern but benevolent father. Nicholas read to these workers a pre-written address that turned out to be a paternalistic lecture about how they must not allow themselves to be led astray by evil revolutionaries, especially in a time of war. Then he said he felt terrible about what happened in St. Petersburg, but that he would be a generous father, and forgive everyone on all sides for what happened. And then he finished by saying, “I have heard your complaints and I will work to improve conditions for you. Now go home and tell your friends and coworkers that you have met me, that I forgive them all, and I will try to help you all.”

When they departed, the tsar and his ministers agreed that it had gone splendidly, and this would be a major turning point. But it really was not. This meeting was accompanied by no other public promises or declarations, the vast majority of people were scarcely aware it had even taken place, and when these thirty-four workers told people about their trip to meet the tsar, their friends and coworkers were incredulous — he forgives us? You have got to be kidding.

What everyone really wanted was a great big acknowledgement that something was going to change. The last thing they had heard from the tsar were some very vague promises back in November in response to the Zemstvo Congress, that were inadequate at the time and now seemed laughably inconsequential. Because since then, we’ve just had a bunch of bad news from Manchuria, including the fall of Port Arthur, then a general strike in St. Petersburg, then Bloody Sunday, then a nationwide strike. And still, nothing from the tsar. No official acknowledgement of any of these events. So the Russian people were just sitting there like Ted Knight in Caddyshack: well, we’re waiting. But Nicholas and his ministers were feeling the same unhurried lack of urgency that had gotten them into war with Japan. At one point to prove that they were in fact working on an official response, the tsar authorized the ministry to print minutes from their deliberations, which was a fairly unprecedented show of transparency for the tsar, and he figured it would appease the carping liberals, but instead it turned out to be quite the self-own, because these minutes showed in stark black and white, that the ministers were dawdling, petty, out of touch, and neither working hard, nor on issues that mattered.

Then on February the fourth, 1905, everything got upended again. Nicholas’s eldest uncle grand Duke Sergei, the effect of patriarch of the Romanov clan, was leaving his Moscow apartment in a carriage when a member of the SR combat organization threw a bomb inside. Sergei was blown to pieces, just like his father the Tsar Liberator. Nicholas was shocked and horrified. It really was a personal blow. Sergei had been a rock in Nicholas’s life. The tsar’s sadness turned to fury when he found out that the mood in the streets was not sympathetic or remorseful about the murder of a senior member of the imperial family, but instead muted silence, and even glee, that old Sergei who was mostly hated by the people, was dead. Nicholas was furious at how unsympathetic and downright mean everyone was being in this time of mourning.

And I do want to say, just before we wrap things up today, that there had been a lot of debate among the revolutionaries on the efficacy of terrorism, mostly on the strategic level. Whether it was really advancing the revolutionary cause, or inviting a reactionary blowback ala the 1880s. But one thing you have to grant in retrospect is the assassination campaign of the SR Combat Organization after 1902 did a lot to bring about the Revolution of 1905. At least, indirectly.

Because look, their first major kill was that Minister of the Interior in 1902, which lead the tsar to elevate Plehve, and Plehve turned out to be such an arch-reactionary that he drove conservative reformists into the ranks of the liberal opposition, and drove liberal constitutionalists in to the ranks of the revolutionaries. Then the SRs killed Plehve in 1904, which led directly to the arrival of Mirsky, which we now understand to be a major turning point that further advanced the political springtime that had opened up, and pushed events forward towards the Zemstvo Congress, and then ultimately to Bloody Sunday. And now here again, Nicholas is getting ready to publish concessions meant to calm the waters, and the assassination of his uncle made him so upset that he couldn’t help but mix these concessions with resentful admonishments of the people, admonishments that were going to screw up the tone that he was trying to adopt.

Now were other factors much more important in bringing about the Revolution of 1905? Yes, of course. The war, the buildup of anger in the working classes, bloody Sunday itself. But looking back and mapping out the course of events, the SR Combat Organization assassinations definitely played their part, and all the while these assassinations were being orchestrated by Yevno Azef, who was a paid police agent who could have been stopped at any time. It’s just wild how history works sometimes.

So after the death of Sergei, Nicholas finally got around to putting the finishing touches on the public pronouncements that were meant to address the rolling crises that had been ongoing since the spring of 1904. To his ministry’s dismay however, Nicholas took all their work, did some final editing himself, and then released some proclamations to the public on February the 18th without ever giving them a chance for one last look. So, they found out what the final results of all their deliberations were the same time everybody else did.

And those final results turned out to be three somewhat contradictory documents. The first was a longish manifesto that called on the people to rally around the principles of traditional autocracy. This is where Nicholas admonished everyone for behaving so disgracefully, and for following ill intentioned leaders who wanted to quote, “create a new government based on principles alien to our fatherland.” This defiant, stubborn, and resentful tone was not what anyone was expecting, but this was not a fatal error. It merely muddled the waters. Because alongside that manifesto, the tsar issued another decree that formally acknowledged the right to petition, that people were allowed to present proposals on how to improve lives and the working of the government. This was in fact, a big concession that the tsar would at least listen to them.

Then finally later in the day, he issued a third public document, a copy of an order to Minister of the Interior Bulygin to begin drafting a proposal that would allow for the most trustworthy people to elect representatives to participate in the initial planning of potential legislation. Basically a place where the petitions might be boiled down to concrete proposals. This one would all be very limited in scope, but it wasn’t nothing. Nicholas is retreating from pure absolute autocracy here. He’s going from truly stubborn in flexibility to saying, okay, fine. We’ll find a place for the people’s voices somewhere. But it was also very confusing, because the tone of the manifesto was very different from the tone of the other two decrees, and so suspicion and confusion were as much the reaction out there in the Russian Empire as the joyful embrace of the tsar’s political retreat.

The imperial acts of February the 18th, 1905 the set the tone for the next several months. The invitation to petition led to a flood of petitions. And it was taken by many as an opportunity to more formally and openly organize to discuss the empire’s problems and then submit proposals for reform. And if we keep going with our French Revolution analogies, this period resembles nothing so much as the invitation from Louis the 16th to his subjects to submit those cahiers de doléances, those grievance lists in 1788. And just like in 1788 and 1789, the petitions of 1905 would ultimately be crafted and positioned to advance the cause of… constitutional reform, which was favored by the professional classes. And like the leaders of the third estate, the liberal constitutionalists would soon be riding high.

In the midst of this swirl of brainstorming political reforms, Nicholas and the Russian Empire were dealt further devastating blows. Nicholas had prayed and prayed for good news from the far east, but instead, as we will see next week, Nicholas is going to get the worst possible news at the worst possible time.