International

This months marks 120 years since the outbreak of revolution in Tsarist Russia. It actually began on January 9 1905, but, as this article shows, it carried on throughout the year. It became a titanic struggle and althought the working class were ultimately defeated, the events laid the foundations for the even greater revolution of 1917. We are republishing here an article by Jeremy Birch on 1905, first published in 1985…

EIGHTY YEARS ago the giant Russian Empire was shaken to its foundations. When the Tsar’s troops on ‘Bloody Sunday’ January 9 1905 fired on an unarmed, defenceless demonstration they provoked over the next twelve months, the largest revolutionary working-class struggle in the world.

Armed only with religious icons, 140,000 men, women and children filled with naive hopes and illusions, marched to the Winter Palace to implore the Tsar to intercede on their behalf against the capitalists and landlords. “Sire“, their petition pleaded, “we workers, our children and wives, the helpless old people who are our parents, we have come to you, Sire, to seek justice and protection.” With a terrible foreboding it concluded, “if you fail to hear our plea, we shall die here, in this square in front of your palace.”

1,000 did perish and over 2,000 were injured. But the first volleyshot shattered the workers faith in Tsarism for ever.

What was Russia like at the turn of the century? Much of it was still locked in medieval backwardness. 61% of the labour force still tilled the land in 500,000 scattered villages. One third did not even own a horse to pull their plough.

Massive state apparatus, secret police, political prisoners

The majority of Russians were illiterate and impoverished peasants. Crowning this remnant of feudalism within modern capitalist Europe, sat the Tsarist autocracy with its one million troops, its secret police and political prisoners.

But sleepy old Russia was being rudely awakened. Foreign capital pushed its way in and forced through the first phases of industrialisation that weak Russian capitalism was incapable of generating itself. So industry did not grow up gradually as in Britain, for instance. Mass production arrived in Russia ready-made, on the end of a pound note or a dollar bill.

These huge modern factories transplanted from Western Europe were then filled with raw peasant labour. All this meant that the Russian workers were not so set in their ways or conventional, but more able to respond with revolutionary action. By 1905 the Russian workers were 10 million strong, 3 million of them in factories.

It was against this background that Russian Socialists had to develop their perspectives for the coming revolution. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party had only really been formed in the years leading up to 1905 and within all its factions and groups, there was a general understanding that revolution would take place. The form of revolution, however, was open to debate.

Its Menshevik wing, dogmatically following what they saw as the letter of Marxism, declared the coming revolution to be a classical “bourgeois democratic” or capitalist revolution. Under the leadership of the liberal capitalists absolutism and landlordism would be cast out, land would be redistributed to the peasants and a modern, capitalist, parliamentary democracy ushered in.

Nothing progressive about Russian capitalists

Lenin and Trotsky, however, using the method of Marxism and applying it to Russian conditions, accepted that the country still waited on the tasks of the democratic revolution, but believed that only the workers and peasants could complete them.

European capitalism may have had its progressive period in 1789 or 1848, they argued, but there was nothing progressive about the Russian capitalists. They were too feeble compared to the strength of the Tsarist state. They had not even developed Russian industry. Now, with a growing working class, they were petrified of instigating any radical movement against the Tsar for fear, as Lenin explained, that the workers would “turn against the bourgeoisie the guns which the bourgeois revolution will place in their hands.”

Lenin saw the looming revolution leading to a “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry,” which would carry through the democratic revolution, instead of the capitalists. He anticipated that the revolution would directly inspire socialist revolutions in the more developed countries of Europe, which would then help the Russian workers to move on to socialist planning of industry.

Trotsky’s perspective was yet more precise. The working class, he felt, were the only consistently revolutionary force, and it must draw the peasants behind it in the struggle for power. But once having completed the democratic revolution, there could be no time gap before the implementation of socialist tasks.

The workers could never be satisfied with stopping at establishing democratic capitalism, they would immediately move on by the very methods of struggle and their conditions to expropriate big business.

But of course weak Russian socialism could only be consolidated and sustained by international socialism and the assistance of industrially advanced socialist countries in Western Europe. Hence the revolution, for Trotsky, would be a continuous, ‘permanent’ revolution.

The bloody debacle of the Russo-Japanese war

1905 put every theory to the test. The revolution received its inspiration with Tsarism fatally weakened by the debacle of the Russo-Japanese War. The two states had clashed in the imperialist scramble for China.

But in Russia’s defeat, all the rotteness and corruption of the autocracy and its generals had been exposed. In the final rout at Mukden in 1904, Russia lost 120,000 dead, wounded or captured. As with the Argentinian dictatorship’s defeat in the Falklands [in the war of 1982], the opposition was given the confidence to raise its head.

1904 closed with a campaign of banquets, petitions and resolutions by the liberal capitalists, and of more radical demonstrations by the students.

By January 3 1905 the massive Putilov metal works in St Petersburg was on strike over the sacking of four members of the Assembly of Russian Workers, trade union. Within a few days a city-wide general strike was in progress. It lasted a week, with ‘Bloody Sunday’ falling in the middle. The priest, Father Gapon, who led the march to the Winter Palace, had set up the union and for want of any other organisation the workers had joined. In fact, it was one of several police inspired unions, set up to trap militants.

Yet the Marxists felt compelled to join these unions, to win the workers within. Due to their influence and the mood of the masses, once the storm broke the union was out of the control of the state, and Gapon – an accidental leader – was carried along on the tide.

In January 1905, in the wake of Bloody Sunday, 444,000 workers struck, more than in the whole of the previous decade. All the main cities were affected. Throughout the early part of the year, disconnected strikes continued. In May, 200,000 struck. 70,000 workers stayed on strike from May to August in Ivanova-Voznesk, organised by the Bolshevik’s Northern Committee. Barricades appeared in a general strike and a 3-day battle with the police in Lodz, according to Lenin the Russian workers’ first armed action.

Russian peasants’ soviet

As the struggle spread, so Trotsky noted “every day brought new strata of the population to their feet and gave birth to new possibilities. Workers’ strikes, incessant meetings, street processions, wreckings of country estates, strikes of policemen and janitors and finally, unrest and mutiny among the soldiers and sailors.”

The peasants, after a summer of revolt, held their first congress of peasant representatives in August. Disturbances in the armed forces broke out, particularly in the Black Sea fleet, for example on the battleship Potemkin. In June it was moored at Odessa which was engulfed in a general strike. The crew mutinied and tried to rouse the rest of the fleet, but finally surrendered at a Rumanian port.

In the face of the broad sweep of the revolution, the Tsar’s Interior Minister Bulygin, in August offered an elected assembly (Duma), but only with the power to suggest laws. Before this phoney concession could be convened, it was cut across by the even more dramatic events of the Autumn.

Moscow printers struck towards the end of September, and other Moscow workers came out in sympathy. The railways began to stop. By early October 750,000 were involved in an all-Russia rail strike, paralysing the country. Their demands? An 8-hour day, civil liberties, an amnesty for political prisoners and a genuine constituent assembly.

This was a directly political battle. By October 10, Moscow was under a general strike, by the 13^th, so was St Petersburg. Within a week, nearly every major city was out. Even the dancers from the imperial ballet participated.

To organise the strike in St Petersburg a meeting was called of delegates from the various work place strike committees. Thus, the Petersburg Council (Soviet) of Workers’ Deputies was born, and its model was copied in many strikebound cities. The key Petersburg Soviet had one delegate for every 500 workers and an Executive of 22 worker delegates and 3 from each of the workers’ parties – the Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks, like the other parties, at first failed to grasp the importance of this workers’ assembly and insisted that it accept the Marxist programme or disand. Hence the Mensheviks may have held a numerical superiority, but in the main, Bolshevik policies predominated.

Characteristics of an alternative government

Even as the general strike finished, the Soviet was displaying the early characteristics of an alternative government. It was the only authority the workers obeyed. The Petersburg Soviet declared that no paper should be printed whose owner submitted it to the state censorship committee. The printers implemented this to the letter. So temporarily, in the sphere of censorship at least, the Soviet, not the Tsar, ruled.

“The Soviet,” wrote Trotsky “won the freedom of the press. It organised regular street patrols to ensure the safety of citizens. To a greater or lesser extent, it took the postal and telegraph services and railways into its hands.” In this atmosphere of relative freedom Lenin was able to return from exile. He appreciated at once the significance of the Soviet. He accepted the Petersburg workers’ own description of it as a “workers’ government“.

The liberal capitalists also understood the soviet threat. Here was the means by which the workers would go far beyond the struggle for democracy, and could challenge the rule of Tsarism, capitalism and all. For Russian liberalism the revolution had gone far enough.

On October 17, on behalf of the Tsar, Count Witte unveiled a constitutional manifesto promising a legislative Duma with a wider franchise. “The sacred crown of the Tsar’s absolutism bears forever the trace of the proletarian ‘s boot,” said Trotsky.

But as the workers had still not proved strong enough to overthrow the Tsar, Witte’s concession proved to be the means by which he won over the liberals to help in resisting the revolution, with the state forces of Tsarism intact.

Black Hundreds involved in anti-Jewish pogroms

The manifesto was followed by the unleashing of the forces of black reaction. The fascist Black Hundred gangs were let loose, with police connivance, on the Jews and on worker activists. In the worst pogrom, 300 Jews were killed in Odessa in October. Throughout Russia, 4,000 died in a hundred cities. At the same time, General Trepove issued the order “spare no bullets“.

But the workers and the soviet were not done yet. They pushed ahead with their own workers’ demands, distancing themselves further from the liberals. The Petersburg Soviet took over the leadership of the 8-hour campaign, successfully instructing workers to leave work after 8 hours, in defiance of contracts, etc.

In November, the workers struck back against the onset of reaction, in particular the imposition of martial law in Poland and Tambov province and the sentencing to death of sailors from the Kronstadt mutiny of late October.

Again the workers responded to the Soviet’s call for a general strike. At this stage “if anything still restrained the onslaught of reaction, it was only the fear of the revolution’s inevitable response,” commented Trotsky.

The government announced there would be no executions and martial law would be lifted. The strike ended. But a final settlement could not be far off. “The inexorable trend of the Russian Revolution,” wrote Lenin, “was towards an armed, decisive battle between the Tsarist Government and the vanguard, the class conscious proletariat.”

The autocracy felt strong enough by December to arrest the Petersburg Soviet Executive, including its president, Leon Trotsky, and to dissolve the Soviet with troops. The Soviet leaders may have wanted to postpone the decisive clash, but now they could not avoid it. Even at the risk of serious defeat, they could not allow this open challenge to go unanswered.

Moscow became the centre of the movement

The Petersburg Soviet called the workers to action once more. A general strike had already broken out in Moscow and was spreading to other towns. But after a year of leading the revolution of strikes and demonstrations, the Petersburg workers were tired. Their greater experience told them this time it was all or nothing.

Not confident of victory they backed away. The strike there began to crumble after four days. Moscow was the centre of the December events. The general strike went over to barricades and five days of all-out armed struggle.

The Bolsheviks had been instrumental in establishing and arming workers’ defence forces for this inevitable clash. They had hoped ro neutralise the Moscow garrison but failed. Indeed troops from every corner descended on Moscow, including the Semenov regiment from Petersburg where the workers were now inert.

A thousand died as the Moscow workers were defeated. On December 19 the city Soviet had to call the strike off. The December defeat really marked the end of the revolution, although strikes continued through 1906 and even into 1907. Tsarism had the confidence to dissolve the liberal-dominated Duma soon after it first met, and to restrict its successors still more.

The 1905 revolution was a mighty movement of the working class, a dress rehearsal for the 1917 socialist revolution, but temporarily, Tsarism escaped. The workers rose many times, but in too many uncoordinated and ultimately exausting skirmishes.

Marxism lacked the decisive authority that is needed, to bring together all the workers’ reserves of energy and courage on the same day, behind the same organisation. “Unfortunately“, said Lenin ” the peasants were too scattered, too isolated from each other in their actions, they were not organised enough.” In fact many peasants had illusions in the Duma solving the land problem.

1905 sketched out the future 1917 revolution

And in the end the army stood firm. Mutinies were rife “but what they lacked“, continued Lenin, “was persistences, a clear perception of aim.” Often the soldiers’ inexperience led to them releasing the reactionary officers they had just arrested.

But during 1905 the future course of 1917 was sketched out, and the clarity of the permanent revolution theory demonstrated. Liberal capitalism in 1905 had betrayed the revolution, and its own declared aims. Nothing more could be expected of it. The working class proved by their willingness to struggle and their ability to organise, especially in the soviets, that they alone could lead a successful revolution .

However, the 8-hour struggle proved that the battle for democracy, important as it was, would not be enough for them. Once roused to action they would naturally pursue their own demands, including revolutionary socialist demands. All that the Menshevik, Plekhanov, with his dread of frightening the liberals, could say of the December rising was “they should not have taken to arms. “

“On the contrary“, Lenin retorted “we should have taken to arms more resolutely, energetically and aggressively; we should have explained to the masses that it was impossible to confine ourselves to a peaceful strike and that a fearless and relentless armed fight was indispensable.”

The Mensheviks oposed the October 1917 Revolution, which Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks led. To Lenin, 1905 was “the prologue to the coming European revolution.”

Hardened and tempered like steel

1905 was a decisive turning point in the political preparation of the Russian working class for 1917. Without the experience of the first revolution, the October revolution of 1917 would not have taken place. Many of the army regiments used to crush the earlier revolution were to be in the forefront of the second revolution. The workers were hardened and tempered like steel in the forge of the 1905 events.

Probably the most valuable lesson of all – one the workers were to apply with such a decisive influence twelve years later – was the organisation of workers councils, or soviets. The soviets in 1905 and in 1917 were living organs of workers’ struggle. The soviet deputies were ordinary workers, on the wage of the workers and subject to immediate recall.

The soviet functioned as the only authority to which the workers would respond, so that in the course of 1917, especially when soldiers and peasants participated in the soviet, it became the foundation of a mass struggle: against Tsarism, capitalism and landlordism.

Workers in Britain need to study the experiences and struggles of workers internationally. 1905 was a defeat, but it proved to be a vital part of the political preparation for 1917. Political developments in Britain will not follow the same course as in Russia seventy or eighty years ago. But British workers are now going through experiences that are unprecedented in fifty years. Even the spokesmen of capitalism have admitted that after the miners’ strike, “things will never be the same“.

But it is important that workers today see their struggles in the context of the inevitable movement of society towards greater class struggle. Capitalism can offer no future to workers today, the miners’ strike in Britain may prove to be as important a watershed for the modern labour movement as 1905 was for Russian workers.

This article, by the late Jeremy Birch, was published in Militant on January 11, 1985, and the original can be found here. Jeremy was later a Labour councillor and leader of Hastings council in Sussex, up to his death in 2015.

The feature picture shows the members of the Petrograd Soviet, awaiting trial. The president, Leon Trotsky, is towards the left, holding a sheaf of papers.