John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Meanwhile, although the role of the Bolsheviks in the upheavals of 1905 was, in the opinion of E.H. Carr, “slight and undistinguished”, 17the Soviets–most especially the St Petersburg Soviet–plowed ahead with revolutionary activity. On 28th October it ordered that all shops and factories in St Petersburg be shut down or face “the people’s vengeance”. A few days later St Petersburg lay in darkness as electricity and telegraph systems were cut off and all courts, schools, restaurants and theaters were closed. With the German Kaiser offering him refuge and his chief advisors urging conciliation, Nicholas finally appointed Witte as Prime Minister.

For a brief period Witte held in his hands the concentrated power of the Tsar. He drew up and insisted the Tsar issue a proclamation known as the October Manifesto which, at least on paper, promised full civil and political liberties, an end to censorship, a consultative Duma (a Parliament) elected by universal male suffrage, and a Cabinet government under a still powerful but constitutional monarch. Nicholas had to declare that henceforth no laws emerging from his government, which would still be appointed by him, would be promulgated without the approval of the Duma. It was not the Constituent Assembly that Russian progressives had been demanding for decades, but it was a first step towards it.

The Soviet pressed on. It demanded a legally established eight-hour day, immediate pay rises in the industries of St Petersburg, an amnesty for all political prisoners and a promise of a full Constituent Assembly. A demonstration in the capital on 3rd November led to a bloody clash with the “Black Hundreds”, gangs of anti-left, anti-Semitic thugs who enjoyed the toleration of Court and police. On 8th November the naval base at Kronstadt, a socialist stronghold, mutinied and joined the Soviet. Tsarist forces arrived swiftly to crush it and after brief fighting the leaders of the rebellion faced summary execution. In solidarity the Soviet called another general strike.

Lenin was adamant that the working class should initiate its own revolution independent of bourgeois liberals who, he suspected, were content to stop at the October Manifesto and build from there. But it was not simply Lenin pushing for insurrection. The Mensheviks under Dan and Trotsky, intoxicated by the atmosphere of revolutionary defiance that animated the St Petersburg Soviet, also favoured armed revolt. It was a terrible misjudgment. The social democrats, with a few exceptions such as Martov and Axelrod, did not consider whether the mass of working people would actually support armed revolution, whether the military was sufficiently alienated from the regime to disobey its orders, or how an attempted insurrection immediately after the October Manifesto would splinter any prospect of a successful popular front in opposition to Tsarism.

For Lenin this was irrelevant. “To say that because we cannot win we should not stage an insurrection”, he wrote in November, “that is the talk of cowards”. Even before he returned to Russia he had written to the St Petersburg Bolshevik Committee: “Organise at once and everywhere fighting brigades among students, and particularly among workers. Let them arm themselves immediately with whatever weapons they can obtain–a knife, a revolver, a kerosene-soaked rag for setting fires”. Demanding “two to three hundred squads in St Petersburg in one to two months”, he urged,

Some can assassinate a spy or blow up a police station. Others can attack a bank to expropriate funds for insurrection. Let every squad arm, if only by beating up police. The dozens of sacrifices will be repaid with interest by producing hundreds of experienced fighters who will lead hundreds of thousands tomorrow. 18

This had no relevance at all to working-class activists within Russia struggling to build a viable political machine, run strike committees and influence the Soviet.

Armed revolution began and ended in Moscow. On 3rd December the leaders of the St Petersburg Soviet were all arrested and the Soviet disbursed. The workers of St Petersburg did not rise in its defence. On 12th December barricades were erected throughout Moscow and the railway stations and bridges were seized. But the rebels did not march on the Kremlin, preferring instead to put defences around working-class areas like the Presnia district that the authorities could afford to bypass whilst they re-took the strategic points. And, crucially, the army did not revolt or disobey orders to crush the insurrection. On 15th December, after fierce fighting throughout the city, the Moscow revolt ended with the almost total destruction of the Presnia district under heavy shelling. Thousands of workers were killed, including many children, and the socialist parties were once more made illegal. For Lenin, for whom “victory does not matter”, this was beside the point. He slipped quietly out of Russia as soon as defeat was obvious.

In the strictest sense, the 1905 Revolution failed. 19It failed because it did not replace autocracy with a fully functional liberal-democratic regime. Had all opposition parties been united on that goal it might have been achieved. But despite the mutiny on the Potemkin and some instances of refusal to obey orders, the prerequisite for a successful revolution–the subversion and dissolution of the army and navy, whose lower ranks comprised mainly peasant conscripts–had not occurred. Nevertheless, the political landscape of Tsarist Russia was irretrievably altered. Despite political repression after 1905 and the gerrymandering of the franchise and powers of the Duma, the genie could not be put back in the bottle. The Tsar had been forced by mass pressure to cede some of his absolute prerogatives, the disaffected working class and middle class had experienced political and intellectual freedom they would not soon forget, and the Duma, though not an “executive” in the Western sense, provided opportunities for legal oppositional activity.

There were other openings. The press was less censored and civil society less shackled. In March 1906 the first legal Russian Trade Union Congress met in Moscow. Although there were only approximately 245,000 trade union members across the entire Russian Empire, these were tightly concentrated–about a quarter in Poland and the Caucasus, with an estimated 52,000 in St Petersburg, 48,000 in Moscow, 12,000 in Baku and 10,000 in Odessa. 20Many of these were the Jewish working class organised by the Bund. Now the unions advised their members to exploit whatever new legal opportunities existed to organise and grow.

One of the most important results of the new political freedom was the formation of the Constitutional Democrats. The party par excellance of bourgeois liberals, the Constitutional Democrats–or Kadets as they were henceforth known–formed in October 1905 in response to the issuance of the October Manifesto. Its membership was a wide and not always cohesive assortment of the leading bourgeois professions. Progressive academics such as Miliukov wished to democratise the Russian state, but “liberal” landowners, though ostensibly in agreement, were equally concerned to protect their property. Not surprisingly the Kadets could not agree on a meaningful social programme, preferring instead to focus on constitutional reform, universal suffrage, civil rights and increased autonomy for the territories of the Russian Empire. If the Kadets were the relatively enlightened liberals of Russian politics, then the Octobrist Party, formed at the same time, were its Tories. Based on the richer landowners, businessmen and senior government officials, the Octobrists did not support universal suffrage and only wished for limited reform of the autocracy as a means to defend their class interests.

The RSDLP also evolved. Under the pressures of revolution, with a radicalised working class taking matters into its own hands and creating proto-revolutionary organs like the Soviets, many of its activists simply ignored the factionalism of their leaders and begun to work together as they had done before 1903. Lenin himself wrote in 1905, “It is no secret that the vast majority of social democratic workers are exceedingly dissatisfied with the split in the party and are demanding unity”. 21With a new political situation calling for new strategies, the full RSDLP met in Stockholm between 23rd April and 3rd May 1906 at a “unity congress”. Significantly, it was at this congress that the Jewish Bund, led by Mark Liber and Abraham Gots, returned to the RSDLP, and put itself behind the general political programme of the Mensheviks.