III. Failing to Contain Revolution: January–October 1905

The Social and Psychological Contours of Revolution in Russia

Bloody Sunday—January 9, 1905, when soldiers shot down 1,000 of the 30,000 workers marching to present the Tsar a petition for labor and civil rights—was an appropriately Russian beginning to revolution. Not revolutionaries but Georgii Gapon, a radical priest who spoke the workers’ language and shared their social and political sensibilities, mobilized workers in unprecedented numbers: Gapon’s officially sanctioned Assembly of St. Petersburg Factory and Mill Workers had brought 110,000 out on strike between January 3 and January 8. It fit the workers’ vision of the social order that, having struck because of the efforts of factory management and government officials to shackle their organization, they sought succor from the Tsar. In the words of their petition, “we are . . . contemptuously treated. . . . We are enslaved, enslaved under the patronage and with the aid of Thy officials,” but “Thou reignest in order to bring happiness to Thy people.”¹ That liberals, whose banquet campaign of November and December was the spur to the workers’ petition, and revolutionaries were unaware of the ferment in the factory districts until planning for the march was under way testifies to the chasm between workers and polite society. The workers’ own alienation from educated Russia was expressed by the politically sophisticated members of Gapon’s organization who recoiled from the Union of Liberation after one fruitless attempt to obtain the liberals’ advice, by the more conservative workers who objected to presenting a petition because they believed they had nothing in common with the intelligentsia, and by the excited workers who on the eve of the march expelled from the Assembly’s meeting halls revolutionary “students” who could not pass for followers of Gapon. It was of course entirely characteristic of the regime’s attitude toward even nonviolent and naive challenges to the existing order that, rather than accepting the workers’ petition, it reinforced the Petersburg garrison with battalions from Pskov and Revel and perpetrated a massacre.²

Because of the social tensions that had been building for a decade, Bloody Sunday set convulsions surging through Tsarist society. More workers struck in January 1905 than in the ten years preceding, and some cities suffered small-scale replicas of the Petersburg massacre; by government count, troops killed and wounded about 100 in Riga, over 200 in Polish cities. Polite society denounced the regime at angry meetings and in open letters. Even the discrete and apolitical historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii, occasional advisor to the government and tutor to a Grand Duke, announced in class that Nicholas would be the last Tsar. That was almost Kliuchevskii’s last lecture, because students turned classes into political meetings and in February declared the universities on strike. Peasants in February began to attack gentry estates and expell the owners, and the incidence and violence of agrarian disorders mounted as the weather turned warm. The non-Russian peoples rose in both social and national rebellion; indeed, Bloody Sunday resonated more immediately and violently in Poland and the Caucasus than in the Russian heartland.³

Stunning in their sweep, the rebellions were as diverse—even divergent—as Tsarist society was illjoined. No one social group—not the workers who triggered the revolution, not the middle class liberals who provided the political focus for the first nine months of the year—drove the revolution, for none would have had the impact it did absent the action of all the others. Yet if the eruptions in working class, polite society, peasantry, and borderlands drew strength from each other, each group contributed to the revolution for its own reasons, and each moved to its own rhythm.

Least consciously revolutionary were the peasants, who attributed their rebellion to the will of the Tsar but followed in the wake of urban revolution. The rise and fall of peasant disorders trailed the strike curve by a month (see Table III-1), and the crucial determinant of peasant rebellion was proximity to centers of urban disorder: the closer and earlier the strikes, the sooner agrarian disturbances commenced. News of working class disorders reached peasants from kin in the cities, from rural factories, from travelers, and from newspapers and revolutionary leaflets. But peasants did not consciously emulate workers. Village readers and their audience purported to find in the printed words that came into their hands the Tsar’s command to seize land. Within a month after Bloody Sunday there were rumors that the Tsar had authorized land seizures, and peasants acted on these rumors at a quickening pace.⁴

TABLE III-1. Workers on Strike, as Reported by the Factory Inspectorate, and Peasant Disorders, as Recorded by the Department of Police and Central Newspapers, January-October 1905

SOURCES: V. E. Varzar, Statistika stachek rabochikh na fabrikakh i zavodakh za 1905 god, Spb., 1908, p. 5 and “Prilozheniia,” p. 102; Varzar, Statistika stachek rabochikh na fabrikakh i zavodakh za trekhletie 1906-1908 gg., Spb., 1910, “Prilozheniia,” pp. 67, 72; S. M. Dubrovskii, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie v revoliutsii 1905-1907 gg., M., 1956, p. 42.

These are the conventional figures and identify trends. However, the number of workers who struck in all of 1905 was 80 percent higher than reported by the Factory Inspectorate, which did not have jurisdiction over mines, railroads, and miscellaneous other industries. The figures on peasant disorders were compiled by Dubrovskii and Grave in the mid-1950s; since then, examination of local archives—still incomplete—has increased the known peasant disorders for the years 1905-1907 by 150 percent. See A. S. Amalrik, “K voprosu o chislennosti i geograficheskom razmeshchenii stachechnikov v Evropeiskoi Rossii v 1905 godu,” IZ, v. 52, 1955, pp. 142-85; and M. S. Simonova, “Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie 1905-1907 gg. v sovetskoi istoriografii,” IZ, v. 95, 1975, pp. 210-12. Figures for political strikes are misleadingly high because the Factory Inspectorate classified as political all strikes with mixed motives, sympathy strikes, and strikes with no declared motives. For the entire year, only 57% of workers counted as political strikers were involved in strikes that were specifically and exclusively political. See Varzar, Statistika . . . 190$, pp. 31-32, 35, 37, 43.

The connection between urban and rural rebellion was thus mediated by the peasant view of the social order. Peasants had a strong sense of justice, and of themselves as victims of injustice, but they did not think of themselves as capable of effecting change. Nor could they, since dependence on external forces—on nature, on local officials and the gentry—was the defining element of their social lives. However, peasants were quite sensitive to fluctuations in the forces that controlled them, and when the power of gentry and officials appeared to have weakened, peasants did not hesitate to implement their own vision of a just society. But because they were dependent, they projected an external authority—a pretender, a golden charter, a genuine edict or newspaper article esoterically interpreted—to justify their acts.⁵ The more prolonged and severe the urban disorders, the greater the peasants’ propensity to conclude that justice could be attained and to create fictive authorization to do so.

Through much of 1905, the same psychology underlay the workers’ movement: workers could not conceive of politics as a system of ends and means or of an alternative to the authority of the Tsar, but they had a strong urge to attain justice when they believed obstacles had been eliminated. Bloody Sunday set off a massive wave of strikes, but there was an enormous disparity between that causative event and the demands over wages and hours, decent treatment, and the right to choose representatives for negotiations that striking workers so often made. Even the many workers whose explicit motivation for striking was solidarity with victims of the massacre could not articulate what they wanted. Some of these “political” strikers beat up revolutionaries who attempted to impose explicit political goals, and for good measure beat up other members of educated society who passed by at the wrong moment.⁶ Appropriately, Gapon’s followers put in words the disorientation that such behavior reflected. When soldiers stopped shooting at Gapon’s column, Gapon rose and muttered half to himself, “There is no God any longer. There is no Tsar,” and the workers around him took up the refrain. This was more than a figure of speech. In the last few days before the march, Gapon in addressing the throngs of his followers had inserted into his litany of question and response, “What if the Tsar refuses to hear us out?” and the workers had chorused, “Then we have no Tsar.”⁷ In the Russian popular tradition of denying Tsars who too obviously failed in their function of ensuring justice, the Gaponovite workers concluded that there was a void at the center of their social universe. Not all workers leaped to such apocalyptic conclusions, or abjured the Tsar so vehemently, yet the psychology of the Gaponovites is evident in the massive and angry, but unfocused and inarticulate, strikes that followed January 9. There may no longer have been a Tsar, but neither was a pretender immediately at hand.

The rhythm of the post-January strikes reveals that workers, like peasants, were governed by forces outside their control, though by mid-year there were signs of a gathering purposefulness. After falling precipitously through March, strikes increased again in the summer. The amplitude of the second strike wave was of course due to the surrounding turmoil (the powerful demonstration effect of their own strikes among other things), which gave workers a new conception of what was possible. But the timing of the summer strikes had little to do with politics: May, June, and July had always been the strike season in Russian industry.⁸ However, the revolution did extend the strike season somewhat. Because their expectations were high, revolutionaries concluded that the May Day strikes and demonstrations had failed. In fact, the surge of strikes in April was due largely to the May Day events in Poland (where May Day arrived, via the Gregorian calendar, on April 18). Though May Day was not impressive elsewhere, political strikes were nevertheless the leading edge of the movement, and lasted into August. Moreover, summer brought particularly impressive examples of working class radicalism and capacity to organize—a general strike led by a city-wide strike council in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in May and June, insurrection in Lodz in June.⁹ Still, through September the seasonal cycle rather than politics determined the modulations of worker activism.

In contrast to peasants and workers, European Russians— revolutionaries, liberals, moderates, even conservatives—knew what they wanted and not only responded to opportunity but also sought to overcome obstacles. They had, in other words, programs and tactics. Despite their differences, their goals were located on a common spectrum and were explicitly political: they wished to replace autocracy with a constitutional monarchy or a democratic republic and to reorder relationships among social groups. If statistics on the political activities of educated Russians (petitions and resolutions, meetings secret and public) were available, they would probably reveal either little month-to-month variation, or a steady ascending trend; measures of liberal and radical activism would certainly not reveal the wild oscillation characteristic of worker and peasant activism. In short, Europeanized liberals and revolutionaries engaged in a different kind of politics and a different sort of revolution than workers and peasants. Revolutions so different in character did not easily meld. The disjunction at the heart of the revolution was a major problem for the revolutionaries, who were not fully aware that they had more in common with liberals than with the lower orders. Revolutionaries engaged in a modern political calculus, but they did not always calculate correctly.

The most important feature of the revolutionary movement was its growth: revolutionaries became for the first time a major presence in the cities. From something on the order of 5,000 members on the eve of 1905, the combined strength of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries reached approximately 25,000 during the course of the year. Counting the non-Russian parties—the Bund, the Polish Social Democrats (SDKPiL) and Polish Socialists (PPS), the Latvian Social Democrats, and the many other small parties—the total number of organized revolutionaries may have hit 70,000 by the end of the year.¹⁰ Revolutionaries spoke to countless meetings and flooded the cities with handbills. They helped to organize, or at least assisted, unions and factory committees that, born during the strikes, provided a working class leadership. So far as their audience was concerned, the practical differences among the revolutionary parties were minor. Though Bolsheviks and Mensheviks insisted that Socialist Revolutionaries should confine their activity to peasants, SRs were quite active in the cities; though Mensheviks were more interested in unions than were Bolsheviks, Bolsheviks too found unions to be convenient bodies for mobilizing working class support. Together, the parties reinforced revolutionary sentiment in the factories and villages, and they provided some organizational stiffening to the mass movement. They did not, however, direct the masses; worker and peasant activism fluctuated independently of the revolutionaries.

The messages the revolutionary parties broadcast were equally undifferentiated, at least from the point of view of the recipients. All revolutionaries agreed that Bloody Sunday signalled the beginning of revolution, all asserted that revolution must logically culminate in an insurrection that would topple the autocratic regime, all believed a general strike was an appropriate prelude to insurrection. The competing doctrinal nuances—and there were many—were of interest only to the revolutionaries themselves, and at that chiefly to the emigré leaderships. SRs considered technical planning for an insurrection a matter of course, while Bolsheviks harped on the need for planning, because Mensheviks insisted that the insurrection could not be planned in advance and that revolutionaries should concentrate on intermediate tasks that would foster revolutionary consciousness. As a practical matter, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs all realized that insurrection could not be scheduled in advance or its outcome foreseen, all (at least at the local level) made some preparations for insurrection, though the plans they laid were wholly irrelevant.¹¹ Nevertheless, the revolutionaries’ common insistence on the need for insurrection and the utility of a general strike did have a cumulative impact on the working class.

Through October, liberals did more than revolutionaries to shape the revolution: liberal organizations had a larger membership than did the revolutionary parties, they came close to saturating polite society, and so they influenced the regime itself. Leadership of the liberal movement shifted in 1905 from the Union of Liberation to unions of professionals—doctors, lawyers, journalists, professors, bookkeepers, engineers, statisticians, and the like, and (the one professional union to include workers and to be led by SRs as well as liberals) “railway workers and employees.” The first of these political unions emerged from the banquet campaign of November and December 1904; in May 1905 fourteen of them formed the Union of Unions, which (not counting the railway union) by August had 50,000 and by October 100,000 members. In late April the railway and engineers’ unions concluded that a general political strike was the best means to attain their goals—an end to the war, a constituent assembly—and in June the Central Bureau of the Union of Unions began discussing the organization of a general strike. Even moderates outside the professional unions became better organized and, following the lead of the Union of Unions, moved steadily to the left. A series of congresses of the Union of Liberation and the zemstvos mobilized the liberal and moderate nobility behind a demand for a parliamentary regime, and in July a zemstvo-city council congress met in defiance of a government ban and called on local zemstvos to hold mass political meetings. Local zemstvos defied orders to disperse and helped peasants draw up petitions of grievances. By midsummer, of course, zemstvo liberals were not only drawing strength from the mass movement, they were also increasingly wary of peasant rebellion and were seeking to direct peasant discontent into nonviolent political channels.¹²

The explosion of social and political animosity shook the regime’s morale, which had been none too firm even before Bloody Sunday, and the resulting irresolution in official circles provided space for the opposition to organize. The government deployed troops against workers and peasants and declared martial law in one city and province after another, but that was an involuntary reflex, not policy. The government groped desperately for measures that would reconcile Russians to autocracy, but every gesture of Imperial benevolence produced results opposite to those intended. On February 18 the Tsar, yielding to the counsel of well-intentioned advisors, promised to convene an elected assembly for “preliminary discussion of legislation,” but insisted that “the fundamental laws of the Empire” (i.e., autocracy) were inviolable. On the same day, the Tsar permitted individuals and institutions to submit petitions to the government (this provided semi-legal cover for the work of the white-collar unions, the various opposition congresses, and the presentation of petitions by peasants) but blamed the disorders on evil people bent on imposing alien institutions on Russia and called on Russians to “stand firm around Our Throne . . . and support autocracy.” The initiatives of February 18 having no salutory effect, the regime abandoned the effort to fashion a policy to deal with the crisis. Over the next few months, opposition congresses were tolerated but not heeded, liberal leaders arrested and then released. The government was reduced to hoping that at some point the storm would subside. For his part, the Tsar received both liberal and reactionary deputations and gave every appearance of assenting to the suggestions of them all.¹³ As always, the irresolution of the regime and the boldness of its enemies intertwined with and reinforced each other.

The one firm decision that civil disorder compelled the government to take was to seek peace with the Japanese. The immediate spur to negotiations was the destruction of the Russian fleet at Tsushima on May 14; until then, Nicholas had rejected all suggestions of a negotiated settlement. Loss of the fleet necessitated a reassessment of the strategic situation, but when the Tsar conferred with his military advisors on May 24, they stressed not just the military but also the domestic imperatives for peace: it was politically dangerous to attempt to mobilize more reserves; it was in fact advisable to call up more cossack regiments to combat domestic disorders; the conclusion of peace might restore calm to the empire. The Tsar decided to seek peace not on those grounds, but in order to forestall Japanese encroachment on Russian territory. He professed not to be alarmed by the extent of the disorders, but his was the equanimity of a dull mind. His military advisors understood that the measures that might bring the war to a successful conclusion would aggravate the domestic crisis, that the war was therefore unwinnable, and that the regime’s principal task was to quell civil disorders.¹⁴

Soldiers under Pressure

Shortly after Bloody Sunday, Minister of Agriculture Aleksei Ermolov put bluntly the crucial question for the survival of the Tsarist regime. He was the first, on January 17, to urge the Tsar to convene an assembly of elected representatives. The troops had held firm on January 9, observed Ermolov, but would their numbers be sufficient when disorders spread from the cities to the villages? And, he asked, would discipline hold against the imprecations of the victims? After all, soldiers were being asked to shoot their own people. Responded Nicholas: “I understand that the position of the government is impossible if it relies only on the army. “¹⁵ Within weeks, it was evident that the regime could rely on nothing else and that, Ermolov’s fears not withstanding, soldiers were most reliable when shooting civilians.

By 1905, the army had a well-practiced routine for dealing with civil disorders. As soon as the scope of the unrest became clear, garrison commanders issued or updated their directives on the disposition and proper use of troops to contain civil unrest. In cities, units secured specified factories, public utilities, and private and public institutions. One or two companies per battalion reinforced local police on a revolving basis, while troops not otherwise engaged were kept on stand-by alert. Rural areas were more difficult to police. Since there were not enough troops to maintain more than a token presence in any one district, mobile columns of infantry and cavalry periodically showed the colors and hastened post factum to the scene of agrarian disturbances. If landlords could bring enough pressure to bear, small detachments— often no more than ten men—might be left to prevent attacks on an estate, but this immobilized a part of the government’s already overburdened forces.¹⁶

If the routine was familiar, the scale of operations against civilians was not, and severely strained available manpower. The Ministry of War reported that between January and the end of October troops assisted civil authorities 2,699 times, the units so deployed adding up to 15,297½ companies (the equivalent of almost 1,000 regiments) and 3,665½ cavalry and cossack squadrons (roughly 700 regiments), or on the order of 2 million men.¹⁷ In fact, as of September 1905 there were only about 700,000 soldiers (many of them noncombatants) in European Russia; that included twenty-six second-line cossack regiments* mobilized between March and August specifically for use against civilians.¹⁸ What the Ministry of War figures tell us is that men and units shifted repeatedly from one assignment to another. The experience of the 24th Lubensk dragoons, quartered in Kishinev, was typical. The regiment was permanently at the disposal of the city’s police, but it also sent detachments outside the city. On February 18, one squadron went to Elizavetgrad, returning to Kishinev on March 21. Another squadron spent March 27 to May 3 in Akkerman. From March 31 to April 5, half a squadron operated against peasants around Kishinev. From April 24 to April 27, two squadrons took to the field against a peasant disturbance. Two more squadrons rode against the peasants between July 19 and August 25. To carry the story to the end of the year: one squadron went to Elizavetgrad on November 27 and did not return until the following summer, while on December 8 another squadron began operations in the countryside that continued into the spring.¹⁹ Elements of this one regiment assisted civil authorities outside Kishinev nine times during 1905, while within the city patrols and crowd control were a permanent assignment.

Soldiers did not attack civilians every time they left the barracks. Ordinarily, in fact, they arrived on the scene too late to be of use, or were required to do no more than stand ready for action. The Main Staff of the Ministry of War complained, for instance, that from January 1 through June 11 troops were sent out at civilian request 1,390 times, but took action against disorders only 240 times. Generals claimed to believe that civilian officials were reacting hysterically to imagined dangers. The generals complained, too, that governors filed requests for military assistance through improper channels—through the Ministry of Interior, for instance, which applied pressure directly on the Ministry of War, rather than through the military district command—and that troops were being handed over to civilian officials of inferior rank.²⁰ These plaints echoed the military resentments of earlier years; even in the midst of revolution, Tsarist generals were reluctant to admit that a well-advertised readiness to use troops was all that preserved the regime, and that 240 engagements in half a year was evidence of an unprecedented civilian willingness to take on even the army. Yet if civilian officials were more in touch with political reality, the generals’ grumbling was understandable. There were certainly times when troops marched to no purpose, and whether needed or not soldiers were under tremendous pressure. In September, Assistant Minister of Interior D. F. Trepov, in charge of the empire’s police and not at all hesitant to employ troops for punitive purposes, admonished the governors:

It is apparent from the reports coming into the military that units placed at the disposal of civil authorities are at times called out without real need and are often employed in ways other than those for which they are intended.

Considering that such use of military units will lead to the complete exhaustion of the latter, and that forcing continuous replacement of the units dispatched makes it impossible for the military to ensure proper training and indoctrination of the troops, I request that you resort to the use of troops placed at your disposal only in cases of genuine necessity.²¹

Repeated forays not only exhausted the men, they also jeopardized unit cohesion. Soldiers from a single unit were parcelled out among different factories, or strung out over miles of rural roads. Grateful gentry and factory managers occasionally provided for the men (more frequently, for the officers) guarding their property, but that was not the rule. Even civil authorities often made no provision for quartering and feeding the troops, who were left to sleep in factory corridors or open fields and were reduced to eating the worst of gruel (inadequate money for supplies became even less adequate when divided among small detachments). The command system broke down as NCOs became the commanders on the spot; NCOs were utterly unable to squeeze provisions from civil authorities.²² Missed training was the least of the army’s problems. The real question was whether units so overburdened and so fragmented could continue to function.

How the soldiers reacted to events around them and to their duties as an occupying force in their own land depended principally upon the level of violence in their vicinity. So long as soldiers were not themselves in physical danger, the never-ending details in aid of civil authorities progressively weakened military discipline and breached the barrier between soldiers and civilians. An ex-soldier recalled later that standing guard at factories at first simply bored the men, but that they gradually became interested in what was going on around them—who was striking, for instance, and why. Some officers noticed the change. The commander of the 116th Maloiaroslavl infantry in Riga, for instance, observed that

enlisted men guarding factories and other institutions are not maintaining the strict order of military service, do not have a military bearing, make friends and converse with the workers. . . . [Soldiers] stroll about in the factory yards as if at home. . .²³

What was true in Riga was true in other cities, and in the countryside as well. To take but one example: in Chernigov Province, a company of soldiers (reserves, as it happened) posted on an estate became friendly with the peasants against whom they were supposed to be offering protection, so the landlord requested that the unit be withdrawn. Fraternization with the peasantry was indeed a problem, since, as Teprov pointed out to Minister of War Rediger in June, reserves often served in their native provinces and “are called upon to act against their fellow villagers.”²⁴

The reasonableness of the soldiers’ behavior should not mislead us: there was more to the erosion of discipline than the fact that soldiers had both an opportunity for and an interest in fraternization. Their hearts may have been on the side of workers and peasants, but there were serious obstacles to any display of sympathy. As a revolutionary working in the army reported at mid-year, soldiers believed that justice was on the side of the workers, but “barracks discipline makes itself felt— everyone fears that he will stand alone, that no one will support him.”²⁵ Furthermore, soldiers resisted drawing political conclusions from the events they witnessed. Should a soldier be disciplined for expressing political convictions, he was shunned as an odd duck with whom association could only lead to trouble. Soldiers listened attentively to criticism of the barracks regime, but when talk turned to civilian affairs they clung to the belief that the good Tsar would eventually right the wrongs done by his ministers.²⁶

It was the persistence of established military routine, even in the midst of war and revolution, that made indiscipline and fraternization possible. The need for close supervision of soldiers was greater than ever—there were fewer officers per unit, units were widely dispersed, soldiers were exposed to subversion—yet officers remained as distant from their men as in languid years past. The regimental economy, too, functioned as it always had. In the summer and fall of 1905, regimental commanders sent their men off to earn money harvesting (leading Trepov to complain that Kharkov had been stripped of soldiers). Railroad troops’ found work year round in the depots, even in those to which they had been sent to prevent strikes. The men of the 249th Maikop reserve battalion in Stavropol continued through the summer to produce goods for civilians in the battalion shops, their commander hired them out to unload freight, and they set off on their own if they could find work that allowed them to turn over at least five rubles to the battalion.²⁷ Difficult as it is to credit that commanders sent their men out to work alongside the very workers and peasants whose disorders the army was hard pressed to contain, that is what happened. The officers’ habit of treating soldiers as a labor resource was unshakeable, their incomprehension of their men profound.

Exposed so carelessly to the agitation in civilian society, soldiers gradually shed their fears and inhibitions. Indiscipline reached a minor peak in the middle of the year. Fraternization with workers and peasants was reported with special frequency in June and July, and in a few cities (Smolensk, for instance), soldiers joined in large public meetings. Talk of impending mutinies was heard at some of the summer encampments (outside Moscow, for one), and many soldiers slipped out of camp at night for meetings in forests and ravines. The Main Staff of the Ministry of War had to order—so slow were officers to understand what was happening—that camp commanders mount special patrols to keep the soldiers in camp.²⁸ Regimental chaplains reported that soldiers were losing religion—if discipline rested on religious sentiments, indiscipline necessarily meant irreligion—and that soldiers no longer heeded sermons on current events.²⁹

June and July saw, too, the first significant cluster of mutinies. The most famous mutiny of the year, on the battleship Potemkin, began on June 14, and within the next month and a half there were at least ten others. Mutinies by sailors in Libava and soldiers at the Ust-Dvinsk fortress (near Riga) were serious affairs lasting several days. The rest were in themselves of little consequence, and were scattered all over the map: sappers in Kiev presented a list of demands, an infantry regiment in Sukhum prevented the arrest of a soldier, a rifle company in Samarkand refused to go to the firing range until a soldier was released from the lockup, and so forth.³⁰ But by midsummer, soldiers in noticeable if not yet threatening numbers were beginning to defy their officers.

Yet if discipline had frayed, it did not snap. Into autumn, soldiers overwhelmingly obeyed direct orders to stand watch over factories and estates and to disperse mobs, for they had as yet no reason to believe they could escape punishment if they disobeyed. Moreover, indiscipline was most likely when soldiers were not in a stressful situation. Under stress, they were far more likely to release tension through violence against civilians than by bucking discipline. In May and June, as several hundred thousand soldiers entrained for Manchuria, the strain of garrison duty, anger over continuation of the war, and the soldiers’ latent anti-Semitism issued in a series of pogroms. In Minsk, soldiers about to leave for the front attacked Jews in a two-day rampage, and there were similar pogroms in Narva, Brest-Litovsk, Siedlce, and Bialystok. Before soldiers climbed on troop trains in Kiev, they beat to death two Jews distributing revolutionary handbills at the station.³¹

The pogroms had a specific catalyst, imminent entrainment for the front; though they involved regulars as well as reserves, they were in effect the culmination of the mobilization disorders of 1904. Other situations constantly provoked soldier violence against civilians. As an order of September 2 to the Warsaw military district put it, too frequent use of troops, often without clear purpose,

leads only to their being jeered by the mob and is in itself enough to embitter both sides. Once troops have been called out, they must act . . . energetically, so that the mob respect the troops as a force. Acting resolutely in every instance will, perhaps, produce excessive casualties, but this is inevitable.³²

The order not only pinpointed the source of the emotional pressure on soldiers, it sanctioned the discharge of tension against civilians.

Soldiers suffered from more than taunts, of course. Especially in the borderlands, where national hatred of the Russian interlopers amplified social antagonisms, soldiers came under repeated attack for no other reason (albeit, not necessarily a bad one) than that they served the Tsarist government. In the Baltic provinces, in Poland, in the Caucasus, civilians threw bombs at patrols and ambushed lone soldiers. Soldiers naturally responded in kind. In Lodz, spiraling civilian ambushes and unprovoked military assaults on civilians culminated on June 10 in a workers’ insurrection and vicious reprisals by soldiers, who cornered and gunned down civilians in their apartments; between 250 and 300 civilians died, another 700 were wounded.³³ In Tiflis, following a series of demonstrations at the city council, cossacks were called on August 29 to clear the building. Responding to verbal abuse alone, they opened fire on the crowd sitting in the council chambers, killing (according to a semiofficial account) 39 and wounding up to 70. The cossacks sustained a few injuries because they were caught in their own crossfire.³⁴

Massacres akin to those in Lodz and Tiflis were generally confined to the borderlands, at least between Bloody Sunday and October. Everywhere, however, there was a persistent undertone of barely suppressed rage. The principal perpetrators of violence were the cavalry— the cossacks above all—who had most frequently to face angry mobs of peasants, workers, and students. The behavior of the cossacks was such that they were despised even by the public whom they were ostensibly protecting. In Saratov Province, where cossacks took the field against particularly severe agrarian disturbances in June and July, the provincial zemstvo (representing those most threatened by peasant rebellion) attempted to file a complaint against the cossacks with the Ministry of War. In August, the Smolensk city council pronounced the quartering of cossacks on civilians illegal, suspended the payment of money to provision the cossacks, appealed to soldiers to be less violent, and discussed organizing a city militia for the defense of the public.³⁵ From all over Russia there were reports of unprovoked cossack assaults on civilians— sometimes against demonstrators, but almost as often against civilians whose only offense was to be on the streets when cossacks were about.

The soldiers’ violent reaction to civilian taunts and assaults is understandable, it served the government’s purposes, but it, too, was a species of demoralization. The excess of zeal that soldiers displayed in Lodz on June 10 may have gratified officers, but the fact that when the firing was over soldiers turned to looting, and that two nights later overwrought soldiers, mistaking shadows for insurgents, tore down the wall around their barracks and loosed a volley into the dark, ought to have caused concern.³⁶ The behavior of the cossacks at the Tiflis Duma was not a model of discipline, either. And even cossacks occasionally complained about being sent against every disorder and every demonstration—not out of sympathy with workers and peasants, but because they were overworked. Both the manner and frequency with which soldiers were deployed against civilians strained the army’s cohesion. Nevertheless, the soldiers did their job: cossacks put a temporary end to peasant disorders in Saratov Province, soldiers broke the back of the workers’ movement in Lodz and in so doing may have forestalled similar explosions in other Polish cities. Yet the endless patrols, the posts at factories and on estates, the cossacks, even the occasional bloodbaths, did not check the revolution.

The Potemkin and the Revolutionaries: Mutiny Misunderstood

The onset of revolution awakened the revolutionaries’ interest in the army, but occasioned no reexamination of earlier assumptions. For instance, both Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats continued to look for support first in the officer corps. Georgii Plekhanov for the Mensheviks and Aleksandr Bogdanov for the Bolsheviks urged that officers be recruited as the revolution’s technicians. Sergei Mstislavskii, the librarian of the General Staff Academy and an SR, made contact with a group of liberal officers in the higher military schools in Petersburg early in 1905, and the SRs put the most radical of them to work on the technical planning for an insurrection in the capital. The insurrection that revolutionaries anticipated was civilian rather than military, but they hoped that sympathetic officers would provide leverage over large bodies of soldiers. As Mstislavskii wrote later, “There was no great zeal for work with soldiers. . . . The question was framed as follows: if we have the officers behind us, we will thereby get the soldiers, too—officers will be able to bring them out for the people’s cause ‘on command’.”³⁷ Plekhanov subscribed fully to this view, arguing in February that the outcome of an uprising depended upon the behavior of the army, and that soldiers would follow the lead of their officers.³⁸

Revolutionaries frankly doubted their ability to sway soldiers. When Bogdanov at the Bolshevik Third Congress in April 1905 urged that an all-out effort be made to win over selected units, a certain Rybkin, delegate from Baku, responded: “I think it is almost impossible to put propaganda among soldiers on a proper footing. It will hardly be possible to effect the transfer of a unit to our side, as comrade Bogdanov suggests.”³⁹ To judge from the absence even of the words “army” and “soldiers” from the resolutions of the Third Congress, Rybkin expressed the Bolshevik consensus. Likewise, the Menshevik Conference of Party Workers, also meeting in April, declined for “lack of time” to discuss a resolution on agitation in the army.⁴⁰ Social Democratic publicists did urge that, even though peasant conscripts might be unreceptive to revolutionary propaganda, some attention be paid to soldiers, if only because the army could thwart the revolution. And revolutionaries did crank out many leaflets for soldiers. As a Bolshevik observed of these leaflets in June, however, “one gets the impression that they were written because it would be sinful not to, but the authors themselves do not believe very strongly in their utility or expedience.”⁴¹

The activities of local revolutionary organizations reflected the prevailing scepticism about winning support in the army. A few SD organizations set up military organizations (as they were known generically) specifically to work in the garrisons, but their distribution suggests the low priority revolutionaries assigned to recruiting soldiers. Of the seventeen SD military organizations known to have existed as of June 1905, thirteen were in the Caucasus, the Baltic provinces, or in Poland and the adjacent areas of the Jewish Pale. The Bund and Latvian SDs were especially active in the barracks because they had proportionately larger followings among their peoples than did Russian SDs, and because Latvian and Jewish reserves were mobilized early and in large numbers in 1904. In Poland and the Caucasus, soldiers were the only sizeable Russian element to which Russian revolutionaries could devote their energies, while the mobilization of native reserves provided native revolutionaries an ideal entree to the barracks.⁴² Through the middle of 1905, the Russian parties—SRs as well as SDs—had scarcely any contact with soldiers in the empire’s heartland, except by way of leafletting. Only the special conditions of the borderlands induced revolutionaries to attend seriously to the barracks.

Though revolutionaries did not trust agitation to neutralize the army, they were not on that account prepared to foreswear revolution. They hoped instead to overcome the regular army with a “revolutionary army.” “Revolutionary army” was a term vague enough to cover all elements of the population that opposed the regime, but ordinarily it connoted urban and rural guerrilla groups (in the training and leadership of which radical officers might prove of use). All the revolutionary parties, Mensheviks most definitely included, exhibited a lively interest in the technique and tactics of street and barricade fighting, but few believed that urban guerrillas could achieve a conventional military victory. They expected, rather, that hard fighting would demoralize the troops. As Lenin argued in January, if the army encountered armed resistance from the proletariat, soldiers would understand that they were being used criminally against their own brothers, would begin to waver, and would eventually come over to the revolution.⁴³ This vision was not unique to Lenin, but its broad currency did not make it any more accurate.

The revolutionaries’ scepticism about their ability to foment revolution in the armed forces was legitimate, but as the Potemkin mutiny demonstrated, they did not know what to make of military rebellion even when it was thrust upon them.⁴⁴ During the winter of 1904-1905, the SD and SR sailor circles in the Black Sea Fleet merged into a single organization independent of the civilian revolutionary parties. Autonomy resulted from arrests that wiped out the civilian organizations in Sevastopol, the SDs until spring, the SRs until late 1905. In the absence of civilians, sailors established a “sailors’ central” (matrosskaia tsentral’ka) of representatives from the circles of both parties. By the time sailors reestablished contact with the SDs in the spring, there were groups of revolutionary sailors on every ship in the fleet, the sailors’ organization was far larger than the civilians’, and it was running off its own proclamations. The sailors were also plotting insurrection. The idea of a fleetwide mutiny began to take shape after Bloody Sunday and the widely (but falsely) rumored hanging of forty sailors for mutiny in the fleet sailing toward disaster at Tsushima. By May, the “sailors’ central” had formulated a plan that was widely discussed in the barracks and approved by consensus: when the fleet put to sea for summer exercises, sailors would seize the ships and sail either to Odessa or the Caucasus to promote revolution. As sailors from the battleship Potemkin wrote the Sevastopol SDs in May,

the limits of patience have, at last, been crossed, and the Russian people has at long last understood all the injustice of Tsarism and is trying with all its might to untangle and cast off the fetters that have ensnared it. But it will probably not soon succeed; given the unfavorable conditions in which the people presently finds itself, much blood will be shed, and there will be many innocent victims, if no aid is forthcoming.

Seeing the lamentable state of our people, we sailors shudder with horror and indignation . . . and many of us are prepared to go all the way for the common weal. . . .⁴⁵

The Sevastopol SDs were less than enthusiastic about the sailors’ plans. The resolutions that civilians offered at meetings with sailors called for ending the war, overthrowing autocracy, and establishing a democratic republic, but these goals were somewhat distant: in their speeches, civilians stressed that while the revolution was developing rapidly in the cities, much remained to be done before an insurrection could be contemplated. Only after the people (meaning civilians) had taken up arms against autocracy, and after the army had joined the people, should the sailors mutiny. The sailors’ point of view was put succinctly by one of their leaders: isolated civilian risings were doomed to defeat, whereas the Black Sea Fleet could be taken over in its entirety and could serve as the nucleus for insurrection around the entire Black Sea littoral.⁴⁶

Civilian and sailor revolutionaries had very different views of the part that the Black Sea Fleet should play in the revolution, and the sailors refused to heed civilian admonitions. Sometime in early summer they asked that Petersburg and Warsaw be informed of their plans so that those cities could second the fleet’s initiative. The sailors not only vastly overestimated the influence that revolutionary organizations could exert, they greatly underestimated the Sevastopol Social Democrats’ disregard for the sailors’ plans. Sevastopol informed the SD emigré leadership (both Menshevik and Bolshevik) that the mood in the fleet was quite revolutionary—the sailors’ request that Petersburg and Warsaw be forewarned was used to illustrate the point—but did not bother to inform any other SD committees in the south that the fleet might mutiny. Evidently, because they did not believe a midsummer mutiny wise, they did not believe there would be a mutiny. Meanwhile, shortly before the Potemkin sailed, the “sailors’ central” put the finishing touches to its plan.

The events immediately preceding the Potemkin mutiny, and the mutiny itself, are well enough known. The Potemkin, newly commissioned, sailed alone on June 12 to test its guns before the summer exercises proper got under way. No mutiny was scheduled before the rest of the fleet put to sea. On June 14, sailors on the Potemkin protested against wormy meat. Both the worms and the protest being common occurrences in the fleet, it came as something of a shock when the captain and first officer threatened to shoot the instigators. That overreaction provoked a mutiny—the fact that so many sailors knew a mutiny was in the works must have been decisive—that cost seven officers their lives. Having mutinied, the crew of the Potemkin were confident that the rest of the fleet would support them. The Potemkin steamed for Odessa in order to contact civilian revolutionaries and through them inform the rest of the fleet of what had happened.

The Odessa SDs—Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Bundists—decided that with a battleship on their side they could safely urge continuation of a general strike and street demonstrations that had begun spontaneously a week earlier. They asked the crew of the Potemkin to put 300 or so sailors on shore to seize the city’s arsenals and public institutions and to call on the Odessa garrison to side with the people. The committee running the ship explained that sailors on land were not the military force they were at sea, and that if the most revolutionary went ashore, those left on board might begin to waver. They preferred to defer action until the entire fleet joined the mutiny. After this rebuff, the SDs lost contact with the Potemkin, while the crew became spectators to events in the city. On the night of the 15th they watched much of the harbor district burn (by official count, 1,260 people died in the fire that police set and at the hands of soldiers who blocked egress from the port). On the 16th, a burial party went ashore to inter a sailor killed during the mutiny, and the ship fired three blanks and two live rounds into the city when some members of the party were shot. On the 17th, the Potemkin sailed alone against the fleet, was joined by the battleship St. George and cheered by the crews on the other ships (suspected sailor radicals, and the most revolutionary battleship, had been left behind in Sevastopol), fled in panic from Odessa after a countercoup on the St. George the next day, and terrified officials all around the Black Sea littoral as it shuttled aimlessly to Romania and back. Low on fuel and water and demoralized, the crew finally accepted internment in Romania on June 25, the twelfth day of the mutiny.

The Potemkin mutiny was of course unique, not least in its long gestation. Revolutionary sailors demonstrated a stunning capacity for large-scale and sustained illegal organization, and they operated for years without detection (the Tsarist secret police knew so little about the background to the mutiny that they appealed to the French Sûreté Générale for information).⁴⁷ The sailors had both the resolve and the political vision required to organize insurrection. These conditions would not in their totality be replicated elsewhere. On the other hand, the inability even of so politicized a crew as that of the Potemkin to expand mutiny beyond their military enclave proved to be a persistent feature of military rebellion. Civilians claimed for themselves the function of supplying the larger political leadership, but their experience with the Black Sea Fleet put their ability to do so in question. Sailors and civilians had developed incompatible views of revolution, the Sevastopol SDs had persistently underestimated the sailors, the Odessa SDs had been unable to second the mutiny. There were, of course, extenuating circumstances: there was no precedent for the mutiny of a battleship, or for the planning and organization that preceded it, and civilian revolutionaries were harrassed by the police and confronted with numerous competing demands on their limited resources. Yet the dominant note in civilian-sailor relationships was the civilian revolutionaries’ fundamental misapprehension of sailors. It remained to be seen whether revolutionaries had learned anything from the mutiny.

Revolutionary leaders responded to news of the Potemkin mutiny with alacrity. The Bolshevik and Menshevik centers in Geneva dispatched emissaries to make contact with the ship and sent instructions to Social Democratic organizations in Russia urging that every possible advantage be taken of the opportunity that had presented itself. Articles in the Social Democratic and Socialist Revolutionary press offered tactical advice and stated the immediate objectives: with unwonted unanimity, Bolshevik, Menshevik, and SR leaders called on workers and Black Sea sailors to seize power in Odessa, form a local revolutionary government, and use the city as a bridgehead from which to extend the revolution.⁴⁸ The Potemkin mutiny was over before advice or emissaries arrived, but the emigré leaderships—alerted now to the revolutionary potential of the armed forces—issued a flood of appeals to soldiers and sailors to emulate the Potemkin and bid local organizations to step up their work in the army. The circular instructions sent out by the Geneva Bolsheviks called on Bolshevik organizations in Russia to apply themselves to work among soldiers and officers, upon whom the mutiny “should produce a stupendous impression”; a mid-July Bolshevik Conference of Northern Committees called for the formation of special groups for work in the army. In late summer, a Bund Congress called for intensive work in the army and the establishment of non-party soldiers’ organizations. The Menshevik leadership, too, appealed for increased work in the army. Local organizations issued numerous appeals of their own to soldiers, and in late June and July the number of local SD military organizations more than doubled—at least twenty-one were formed in that brief period, as against only seventeen before the Potemkin mutiny.⁴⁹ Revolutionaries on the scene in Russia grasped the import of the mutiny quite as well as their leaders in emigration.

It was one thing to understand that sailors, and maybe soldiers, too, could under certain circumstances mutiny, it was another to understand what those circumstances were—and revolutionaries got them wrong. Without exception, they continued to believe that the pressure exerted by the civilian revolution caused the armed forces to waver in their defense of, and then to revolt against, the Tsarist regime. Leaflets repeatedly appealed to soldiers to heed their consciences and cease shooting unarmed civilians, and revolutionaries sincerely believed that involvement in armed conflict with civilians would bring soldiers to their moral senses. A Bolshevik writing in Rabochii, the Central Committee’s paper inside Russia, in late summer made that point in articles addressed to a proletarian audience. Martov, the principal Menshevik commentator on military matters, counted on clashes between civilians and soldiers not just to activate the soldiers’ innate morality, but also to shake their morale. Barricades, he asserted, were more effective than a thousand proclamations: every time workers were able even temporarily to check Tsarist troops, the soldiers’ belief in the ultimate victory of the revolution—and their own willingness to revolt—increased. An SR writer made the same point: the principal obstacle to the army’s changing sides, or even remaining neutral, was the apparent weakness of the revolution. Hence, the best way to revolutionize the army was to step up the pace of civilian revolution.⁵⁰

It is worth stressing that revolutionaries made no distinction between a generalized revolutionary atmosphere—which certainly was a cause, though far from immediate, of the Potemkin mutiny, and which did contribute to the slackening of discipline in army units—and local pressure in the form of military involvement in suppressing or containing major demonstrations. Emigré writers treated the Potemkin mutiny not as an exception to but as an illustration of the general rule—despite the fact that they were well-informed on the background to the mutiny, and despite the fact that at almost the same time that the Potemkin mutinied, soldiers in Lodz responded to demonstrations and barricades by massacring civilians. The revolutionaries’ assumptions, initially plausible (and shared by Minister of Agriculture Ermolov), survived events that falsified them because they conformed to the prevailing sense of revolutionary propriety: in the early twentieth century, Russian revolutionaries could not conceive that developments not originating in the civilian masses could be genuinely revolutionary (SR terrorism was only a partial exception).

If the Potemkin mutiny did not alter the revolutionaries’ preconceptions, it did allow them, at least temporarily, to recognize that the army was a barrier to successful revolution—because it now seemed that the barrier could be surmounted. As Plekhanov wrote shortly after the mutiny, “The further the Russian revolution proceeds, the more obvious is the truth that for the revolution to triumph over the old order a part of the army must come over to the people’s side.”⁵¹ Other writers—Lenin, Martov, and lesser luminaries—said much the same thing, so long as there seemed to be a real possibility that regular units might change sides.

When it became clear that the army was not emulating the Potemkin, revolutionaries forgot the need for military support and lost interest in the army. The flood of commentary on the Potemkin and the army ended abruptly in August, while the number of SD military organizations formed in August and September fell to between three and five, as against the twenty-one set up in the preceding month and a half.⁵² Lenin’s changing use of the term “revolutionary army” illustrates the revolutionaries’ penchant for suppressing the unpleasant. Immediately after the Potemkin mutiny, and for the first time, Lenin included within the “revolutionary army” regular units that sided with the revolution, and until the end of July he continued to include soldiers in the revolutionary army. In August and September, however, Lenin gave the term an exclusively civilian context—usually proletarian partisan groups. Only in October, when soldiers began to mutiny in large numbers, did he again specifically include soldiers in the revolutionary army.⁵³

October: Did the Army Fail the Regime?

Revolutionaries misunderstood the Potemkin mutiny, but it did contribute to their midyear euphoria. June also brought the insurrection in Lodz, the prolonged textile strike (which had begun in May) in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and a great burst of peasant disorders. Local committees reported that revolutionary sentiment among workers and peasants was growing faster than the revolutionaries’ ability to organize it. That was the context in which the SR leader Mikhail Gots, writing in the same issue of Revoliutsionnaia Rossiia that contained two enthusiastic articles on the Potemkin mutiny, suggested that the revolution might be “permanent,” pushing beyond bourgeois reforms in Russia, spreading to Europe, and doubling back to fortify the Russian revolution.⁵⁴ Gots was not the only revolutionary to offer that entrancing vision. It appeared to many that it was time to join the separate strands of revolution into a full-scale assault on the autocracy.

In June and July, revolutionaries did begin to translate their aspirations into specific plans. SRs resolved in June to organize a post-harvest peasant rebellion as a prelude to an urban general strike, with a railroad strike paralyzing the government’s ability to move troops. The general strike, SRs believed, would provide an atmosphere propitious for insurrection. SDs tied their strategy not to the harvest, but to the elections for the consultative Duma, plans for which were officially announced on August 6. In early September, representatives of the Bolsheviks, Bund, and various national SD organizations resolved to disrupt electoral meetings and organize a general strike during the elections (set for mid-December); the strike, it was hoped, might turn into an insurrection, which the SDs affirmed to be the only means to overthrow autocracy. The Menshevik leadership favored participation in the elections in order to seize control of electoral meetings and elect a workers’ parliament, but many Menshevik committees in Russia preferred the more straightforward strategy of disruption and general strike.⁵⁵ The Union of Unions, too, decided to boycott the elections and press ahead with its plan for a general strike, but liberals outside the white collar unions took a different tack. The Union of Liberation, increasingly worried about anarchy, called for participation in the Duma as a means of turning it into a genuine parliament, and a congress of representatives of the zemstvos and city councils adopted an identical resolution.⁵⁶

Yet even as revolutionaries laid plans for a general strike and insurrection, even as the most cautious liberals continued to demand constitutional monarchy, revolution was slipping away. The number of striking workers counted by the factory inspectorate declined from over 150,000 in both June and July to 38,000 in September, while the number of peasant disorders in Grave’s and Dubrovskii’s count fell from 492 in June to 71 in September. That these conventional figures are low by a factor of two does not alter their implications: by September the worker and peasant movements were at their lowest ebb since the beginning of the year (see Table III-1). The Tsarist empire was far from calm, there were pockets of severe turbulence, but it appeared that the regime was well on the way to restoring order. That, at any rate, was the view of the diplomatic community. As the British ambassador reported on September 25 (St. Petersburg date), “Most of my colleagues have already left, and as I do not foresee any urgent questions arising that would require my presence here, I should be glad of a rest. “⁵⁷

Why disorders should have fallen so precipitously after July, and then so sharply reversed course in October, is a question that the literature on the 1905 Revolution has not addressed. Thousands of workers listened to revolutionary speeches in the universities in late September, but they did not always approve of what they heard, and in Moscow at least the workers were absent from the university halls until they began to go out on strike.⁵⁸ A conference of railway employees convened by the Ministry of Transportation on September 20 to discuss pensions heightened the expectations of railway workers, but the railway union issued its call for a general strike only after the strike movement was under way. The opening of the universities and the railway pension congress contributed, fortuitously, to the onset of the October general strike, but of course they had no bearing on the earlier decline of worker activism. The most likely explanation for the ebb and flow of the strike movement is the employment cycle. There was a normal summer lull and fall revival in some industries, and in the printing and baking industries, the first to go on strike in Moscow in September, strikes were linked directly to the resumption of hiring. The war-related industrial recession and the industrial upturn in the third quarter of the year exaggerated the amplitude of the seasonal hiring cycle.⁵⁹ The number of workers returning to industry in late summer and early fall 1905 was thus larger than normal, while recession and recovery exacerbated labor-management relations.

Workers who struck in late September and early October were, after nine months of revolution, far more determined to expand, organize, and politicize their strikes than they had been earlier in the year. This became clear in the late-September strikes in Moscow, which lit the fuse for the general strike. The initial strikes revolved around wages and hours, but other shops shut down out of sympathy; by early October, workers were setting up city-wide strike councils and demanding the right to choose representatives for collective bargaining and, more generally, basic civil liberties. Revolutionaries—Mensheviks in particular, though with Bolshevik and SR cooperation-helped to establish the strike councils, but the strikes were the workers’ own doing, and they were eager to organize.⁶⁰

By early October, too, the wave of strikes had rippled out to other cities. As in Moscow, even if they had specific economic grievances, the workers were at root acting in sympathy with or emulation of others already on strike, and had goals that were at least implicitly political. Sensing the momentum, the leaders of the All-Russian Railroad Union, supported by the Union of Unions, called for a general railway strike to begin on October 7 that was to achieve improvements in the lot of railroad workers, civil liberties, a political amnesty, and a constituent assembly. The workers’ response was electrifying. By October 12 traffic had stopped on all central lines, and within a few days had stopped in Siberia, Poland, and the Caucasus as well. As local depots shut down, factories allowed suit.

No one planned for a general strike in October, no one organized it, no one led it. Though they had issued the call and were the principal sponsors, the leaders of the Railroad Union were put out of action by arrests on October 9. The revolutionary parties opposed the general strike until it was well under way—the Petersburg Mensheviks were the first to support it, but not until October 11, and their support for a general strike was not crucial to its spread. The revolutionaries had contemplated a general strike not in October but some months later; they believed the working class was as yet insufficiently organized and that a premature general strike would disrupt their own plans. SRs and Bolsheviks believed that a general strike was no more than a prelude to insurrection, which alone could topple the autocracy but for which they were hopelessly ill-armed; on October 13 the Petersburg Bolsheviks finally assented to the general strike, but only as a transition to insurrection. Neither for the first nor the last time, the revolutionaries’ timetable and tactics proved irrelevant. Yet the revolutionaries, like the Railroad Union, had prepared the workers for a general strike by championing the idea for months and by helping to seed the empire with worker organizations that could build the strike from the bottom up.⁶¹

Impressed by the size and spontaneous organization of the strike, professionals joined in—not just the white collar unions in the Union of Unions, but also unaffiliated municipal employees. The Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party—heir to the Union of Liberation—which had earlier favored participation in the advisory Duma announced its support for the general strike on October 14. City councils gave tacit support, and sometimes more, as in Siberia where a few authorized committees of public safety. By the middle of the month, the strike had penetrated to the heart of the governing apparatus in Petersburg, as the staffs of the exchequer, the Senate, and all the ministries went out. On October 15, the employees of the State Bank, by a vote of all against 8, called for the immediate liquidation of the old regime and the establishment of a new regime by a constituent assembly.⁶² Quite apart from the effect of such declarations on government morale, the paralysis of the machinery of government was enough to unnerve even the most autocratic of rulers.

The general strike shattered government morale less because of its magnitude than because the army appeared helpless to deal with it. Determined to concede no more than an advisory Duma, the Tsar and his ministers yielded only when they concluded that the army could not save autocracy.

The army’s tasks in October were two, both familiar though both more urgent than ever before: preserving public order, and keeping the trains and other essential public services operating. To carry out these missions, the army had as of early October 720,000 men in the garrisons of European Russia, the total including 18,000 reserves mobilized beginning on October 1 to beef up infantry regiments in the Caucasus.⁶³ The bulk of the army was stuck in the Far East. Even after Russia and Japan signed the Peace of Portsmouth on August 25 (September 5), General Palitsyn, Chief of the General Staff, feared that the Japanese might deceive Russia; it was better, he felt, not to move the troops back to Russia with undue haste. In late September, now nervous about the renewed unrest, Palitsyn finally ordered General Linevich, Commander in Chief in Manchuria, to send back the sixteen regiments of XIII and I corps to reinforce the Moscow and Petersburg military districts. Elements of XIII corps pulled out of Harbin on October 14; they were at best weeks away from Europe, and in fact the railway strike halted the movement of XIII corps on October 15.⁶⁴ The regime had to deal with the October crisis with the troops already at hand.

The army operated in October as it had throughout the year, and as the strikes spread, clashes between soldiers and civilians mounted both in frequency and intensity. Soldiers clubbed and shot workers and students in Moscow from late September well into October, and by early October troops were dispersing mobs in Petersburg and a scattering of other cities. By the second week in October, troops were engaged everywhere. On the 11th, 12th, and 13th alone, troops broke up mobs in Riazan, Iaroslavl, Samara, Petersburg, Kursk, Moscow, Ekaterinoslav, and Kharkov, in some cases inflicting significant casualties.⁶⁵ In Ekaterinoslav on October 11, for instance, cossacks and infantry shot workers at the railway station, and then fired three volleys almost point blank at high school students who had set up barricades outside their school. Barricades went up in the factory district, too, but workers did not try to defend them. Instead, on the 12th and 13th military patrols were harrassed by bombs and potshots. The official count of the civilian dead during the disorders was twenty-eight (against one officer and one soldier killed), with an indeterminate number wounded.⁶⁶

The Tsar’s October 12 instructions to Trepov (in the latter’s capacity as Governor-General of St. Petersburg) to take more aggressive action to suppress public disorders signalled no change in government policy. Nor did Trepov’s October 14 instruction to the Petersburg garrison not to use blanks and not to worry about casualties affect the behavior of the troops. Nor was it really necessary for Trepov (in his capacity as Assistant Minister of Interior) to telegraph the governors on October 12 and 13 to “take the most severe measures, and not hesitate to use armed force.”⁶⁷ The authorities were already doing everything they could to control the streets. Whenever mobs formed—and as the general strike progressed, workers became increasingly aggressive—troops beat them back. If the mobs reformed, soldiers fired again.

Yet even as soldiers followed orders and fired on civilians, there were new signs of demoralization in the ranks. Demoralization was most obvious in small garrisons, where the physical and psychological strain was most acute. The behavior of the Revel garrison is a case in point. On October 13, half of the 3,000 soldiers in Revel left to reinforce the garrison in Petersburg. Of the 1,500 men remaining, 1,200 were either noncombatants or were tied up in guard details at public institutions, leaving only 300 to patrol the streets. Rumors that the entire garrison had left sparked mob violence on October 14. A few military patrols fired at looters, but most acquiesced in the looting, and some soldiers helped themselves to liquor that civilians overlooked. The guard post at the municipal gas works stood aside when civilians broke in to shut off the gas, and thus the city’s lights. A company sent to put out a fire at a theater looted the buffet, repaired to the fire house, and shared the liquor with an officer. Convinced that he lacked the military force to restore order, the local governor on the 15th yielded to the insistent demand of revolutionaries and the city council that he free political prisoners. However, just when it seemed that revolutionaries would take over the city, on October 16 a company marched to the market and, though there was no disorder (as even official accounts of the incident recognized), fired repeatedly and without warning. The commander of the 23rd Infantry Division reported that soldiers had killed and wounded 350 persons.⁶⁸

Even though an officer gave the initial order to fire in Revel, the soldiers willingly—even eagerly—perpetrated the massacre, and that reflected demoralization as surely as their earlier acquiescence in civilian disorders and their own looting and drunkenness. The Revel garrison was no longer under the control of its officers, and its behavior was no longer predictable. Elsewhere, demoralization appeared in the less obvious guise of an excess of zeal—as manifested, for instance, by the cossacks and infantry who slaughtered high school students in Ekaterinoslav. That was how soldiers responded to similar pressures throughout the year: when they were constantly on the street or on alert, when they were threatened with bodily harm by mobs or lone gunmen, they struck out at civilians. But the pressure was more intense in October than ever before, the demoralization correspondingly greater, and when the civilian pressure on soldiers eased, demoralization would be expressed in ways other than violence against civilians. The soldiers’ October rage was a prelude to mutiny.

Yet if demoralization in the ranks—which is more apparent in retrospect than it was at the height of the October strikes—was an early warning of future difficulties, the immediate problem for the regime was that the wholesale application of military force had no visible effect on the course of the strike. Soldiers could not drive workers back to factories and depots, students back to school, or civil servants back to their offices. Soldiers could not even clear the streets permanently. And they could not by themselves operate the railways or public utilities, though they tried. The five railroad battalions in European Russia (one of them in the Caucasus) could work no more than a handful of trains. They did manage to run a few trains between Moscow and Petersburg, and operated a few more at other depots. Technical troops, meanwhile, operated a few utilities: the water works in Moscow, the electrical power plant in Petersburg. This did not diminish the impact of the strike in the least.⁶⁹

The army’s ability to restore order was the principal topic for the Committee of Ministers—chaired by Sergei Witte, back from negotiating peace with the Japanese and the man to whom most in authority now looked to rescue the regime from its domestic crisis as well—when it met on October 12 to consider how to deal with the railway strike. Minister of War Rediger was far from reassuring. Rediger and Trepov reported that there were sufficient troops in the capital to suppress an insurrection (approximately a division of infantry was in the process of moving from Revel and Pskov to Petersburg to reinforce the nine Guards infantry and six Guards cavalry regiments in the city), but that it would be impossible to restore movement on the railroad, even between Petersburg and the imperial residence at Peterhof, where the Tsar was currently residing. Rediger further implied that the army was overextended and might be no more capable of controlling the streets than running the trains. He pointed out that most of the army was in the Far East, that the garrisons in Europe were weak, that prolonged employment of the army in a police capacity had disorganized the European regiments, and that reserves were becoming restive because they expected to be demobilized now that the war was over. The Ministers concluded—and reported to the Tsar—that there were not enough troops available to place striking railway lines under martial law, that is, not enough men even to guard the lines. When on October 13 the military and civil authorities in Moscow proposed that soldiers guard the stations and abandoned trains at least within the city limits, Trepov responded that there were not enough troops even for that.⁷⁰

The army’s obvious incapacity to restore rail and public services, and its apparent inability to put an end to urban disorders, profoundly disheartened the government and was a major—perhaps the crucial— consideration in the decision to issue the Imperial Manifesto of October 17 granting Russia civil liberties and a legislative assembly. The Tsar may have believed, as he wrote his mother, that he had two realistic options: “to find an energetic soldier and crush the rebellion by sheer force,” or “to give the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have all laws confirmed by a State Duma.”⁷¹ That was not, however, the assessment of his advisors, not even of Witte, who repeatedly urged the Tsar to choose between dictatorship and reform: Witte also told the Tsar that he did not believe military dictatorship was feasible. Trepov and Rediger had convinced Witte that the army was too demoralized and too weak.⁷²

By October 15, most of those who had the ear of the Tsar doubted that the army could do the job. Since August senior officials had been discussing how the government could achieve consistency in its policy and present a united front to the forthcoming advisory Duma. The discussions betrayed at first no sense of urgency, and centered on the establishment of a cabinet subordinate to a prime minister and bound to a single policy (rather than the existing system whereby ministers were responsible only to the Tsar and did not coordinate their actions). As the strikes spread in October, talk turned from cabinet government to constitutionalism, the more rapidly as confidence in the army faltered. The ministerial conference of October 12 that reported to the Tsar on the inability of the army to cope with the railway strike stated bluntly that a unitary government with a settled (but as yet unspecified) policy was the only way to end the crisis, and the Tsar assented on October 13, appointing Witte to head the government.⁷³ By this point, however, no one believed that reorganizing the government would restore order. Witte first broached to the Tsar the subject of constitutional reforms on October 9, and on October 13 the Tsar informed an official urging military repression that he was prepared to grant a constitution. On October 14, the Tsar asked Witte to draft an Imperial Manifesto announcing the constitutionalist reforms that Witte had been urging; on October 15 Witte and others presented the draft of what would become the October Manifesto, and many of the Tsar’s most trusted and conservative advisors—”almost everybody I had the opportunity of consulting,” wrote Nicholas—urged him to accede to the demands for a constitution.⁷⁴ By that date officials in the Imperial household were contemplating flight abroad, and the Tsar’s uncle and choice for military dictator, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, asserted that lack of troops ruled out a military dictatorship.⁷⁵

Hesitant to the end, Nicholas asked Trepov to look over the October 15 draft, and to determine whether it would be possible to quell the disorders without excessive bloodshed. On the 16th, Trepov assented to the Manifesto (adding by way of consolation that the Prussian constitution had not worked out so badly), and told the Tsar that the military alternative would inevitably involve loss of life. As Nicholas knew (because Trepov reported such things to him), the army had already killed a great many people. He certainly did not have in mind a specific threshold beyond which casualties were unacceptable. Rather, Nicholas seems to have hoped that Trepov would assuage his autocratic conscience, and he subsequently noted that Trepov’s reply “significantly eased the burden of the final decision.”⁷⁶ Yet whatever may have been in the Tsar’s muddled mind, it is clear that the decision to grant a constitution was made by Witte, Trepov, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, and the others who were—or like the Grand Duke might be—charged with seeing the regime through the crisis. Collectively and individually, these men pushed, prodded, and cajoled the Tsar because they were frightened. Never had so momentous a change in the Russian political system been rushed through in such haste. It had taken months to achieve cabinet government, just over a week to arrive at a legislative assembly and civil liberties. The Tsar’s advisors, like the Tsar himself, may have quailed at the thought of further carnage. But if Trepov, Rediger, Witte, and the rest believed that massive bloodshed was, even if unacceptable, nevertheless a possible alternative, they gave no hint of this in their discussions, and they certainly did not act as though they had confidence in the army. The failure of the army to cope with the October strike impressed upon them the futility rather than the feasibility of a military solution to the political crisis.

It does not follow from the ministers’ fears that the army could not have restored order and that the Tsar had no choice but to issue the October Manifesto. Soldiers in October as earlier in the year shot civilians with little hesitation, and they would have continued to do so. Indeed, in December soldiers would crush insurrection even though there were fewer of them and many had in the meantime mutinied. The only practical obstacle to military repression in October was that, scattered barricades aside, there was no insurrection to crush: there was no clear target against which to loose the army. Ironically, the absence of barricades disoriented revolutionaries as well. On October 16 and 17 the first signs of demoralization appeared among striking workers in Petersburg and Moscow. The government had given no sign of yielding to a mere general strike, and revolutionaries could see no way to turn the general strike into an insurrection. On October 17 the Bolshevik Central Committee told party activists in the capital that the strike was lost and that they should prepare to flee.⁷⁷ Loss of elan among revolutionaries and workers did not mean that the strike was about to end, but it does suggest that the government could have outlasted the workers. However, the Tsar and his ministers were demoralized because the principal prop of autocracy, the army, appeared to have failed them. Given so unsettling a turn of events, yielding to the demands of workers, professionals, and high-ranking civil servants suddenly seemed the reasonable thing to do. On the evening of October 17, the Tsar signed the Manifesto. Before retiring for the night, he wrote in his diary, “Lord, help us, pacify Russia.”⁷⁸

* After four years of active duty, cossacks spent eight years on call in their villages, four each in the second and third lines. When they were called back into service, second-and third-line cossacks formed new regiments.