(January 2025 marks 120 years since the 1905 revolution broke out across the Russian Empire. For this occasion, we publish here an article which originally appeared in 2005 in Revolutionary Perspectives 34 (Series 3) but had been previously unavailable on our site in text form.)
== Bloody Sunday: “A Momentous Lesson in Civil War”(1)
It is exactly 100 years since the 1905 revolution in Russia opened up the modern epoch of working-class history. It came at the end of a long period of relative social peace in Europe which followed the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune in May 1871. Although contemporaries did not realise it at the time, it began a period of working-class resistance which culminated in the victory of the October Revolution in 1917. As we have explained many times, the Russian October Revolution of 1917 itself gave the working class a real possibility for the only time in its history of overthrowing the world capitalist order. The story of how it was isolated to one huge but economically devastated territory, thus ending in a Stalinist tyranny, we have told elsewhere.(2) It is our task to combat all the lies that have followed from that defeat in the 1920's in order to keep alive the notion that the working class, however it may stand at any given time, is the one class which has the permanent potential of really changing society. That message is even more important today when we have also come through a long period of working-class retreat. Once again, an increasingly confident, if not arrogant, ruling class is inflicting more barbarism and more misery on a proletariat over which it believes it has total control. The 1905 Revolution is an important episode even for us today, since it, too, began from unpromising, and even reactionary, beginnings. We are thus devoting two articles to re-examining the significance of that movement which Trotsky dubbed in his work 1905 "a majestic prologue"(3) to the revolution of 1917. The actual soviets we will analyse in the second of our articles (https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2005-06-01/a-majestic-prologue-the-…). What we would like to concentrate on here is the origin of the strikes and the movement which culminated in the historic emergence of soviets by October 1905.
== The Revolution Starts on Unpromising Terrain
Most people know that the event which sparked off the 1905 Revolution took place on 22 January 1905 and came to be known as "Bloody Sunday". What many people (including apparently such writers as Tony Cliff)(4) often do not realise is that there was not one demonstration that day but several processions all involving thousands of workers, male and female with their children, converging on the Tsar's Winter Palace in the centre of St Petersburg from both north and south of the city. The correspondent for the London Times, hardly a supporter of the workers' cause, described what happened.
"A more perfect and lovely day never dawned. The air was crisp and the sky almost cloudless. The gilded domes of the cathedrals and churches, brilliantly illuminated by the sun, formed a superb panorama. I noticed a significant change in the bearing of the passers-by. They were all wending their way, singly or in small groups, in the direction of the Winter Palace. Joining in the stream of workingmen, I proceeded in the direction of the Winter Palace. No observer could help being struck by the look of sullen determination on every face. Already a crowd of many thousands had collected, but was prevented from entering the square by mounted troops drawn up across the thoroughfare. Presently the masses began to press forward threateningly. The cavalry advanced at a walking pace, scattering the people right and left. _
Event has succeeded event with such bewildering rapidity that the public is staggered and shocked beyond measure. The first trouble began at 11 o'clock, when the military tried to turn back some thousands of strikers at one of the bridges. The same thing happened almost simultaneously at other bridges, where the constant flow of workmen pressing forward refused to be denied access to the common rendezvous in the Palace Square. The Cossacks at first used their knouts, then the flat of their sabres, and finally they fired. The strikers in the front ranks fell on their knees and implored the Cossacks to let them pass, protesting that they had no hostile intentions. They refused, however, to be intimidated by blank cartridges, and orders were given to load with ball. The passions of the mob broke loose like a bursting dam. The people, seeing the dead and dying carried away in all directions, the snow on the streets and pavements soaked with blood, cried aloud for vengeance. Meanwhile the situation at the Palace was becoming momentarily worse. The troops were reported to be unable to control the vast masses which were constantly surging forward. Reinforcements were sent, and at 2 o'clock here also the order was given to fire. Men, women, and children fell at each volley, and were carried away in ambulances, sledges, and carts. The indignation and fury of every class were aroused. Students, merchants, all classes of the population alike were inflamed. At the moment of writing, firing is going on in every quarter of the city. _
Father Gapon, marching at the head of a large body of workmen, carrying a cross and other religious emblems, was wounded in the arm and shoulder. The two forces of workmen are now separated. Those on the other side of the river are arming with swords, knives, and smiths' and carpenters' tools, and are busy erecting barricades. The troops are apparently reckless, firing right and left, with or without reason. The rioters continue to appeal to them, saying, “You are Russians! Why play the part of bloodthirsty butchers?” Dreadful anxiety prevails in every household where any members are absent. Distracted husbands, fathers, wives, and children are searching for those missing. The surgeons and Red Cross ambulances are busy. A night of terror is in prospect." (From Readings in Modern European History, James Harvey Robinson and Charles Beard, eds., vol. 2, Boston: Ginn and Company, 1908, pp. 373-375)
Father Gapon, the leader of this demonstration, was in the pay of the secret police but he had been pushed further than his masters intended in drawing up the petition. He was wounded as he led a group of workers towards the Narva Gate, on the southern approaches to the city and miles from the Winter Palace. The Tsar, Nicholas II had retreated to his palace outside the city at Tsarskoe Selo but had left instructions that no workers were to reach the Winter Palace. The massacre which many Bolsheviks (and indeed other socialists) had predicted was thus prepared in advance. A peaceful crowd which was singing "God Save the Tsar" and carrying pictures of their "Little Father" had been persuaded by Gapon to support a petition to the Tsar. The full text of this petition can be read in the panel on this and the following pages.(5)
Readers can judge for themselves what the significance of this text is. We have reproduced it in full to underline the fact that it was not a direct emanation of the workers' struggles but a product of the left liberal intellectuals around Father Georgy Gapon. The petition lived up to its name. It literally begged Nicholas II to create the conditions for a better life but it was not a workers' document even if Trotsky thought it
"not only replaced the hazy phraseology of liberal resolutions with the incisive slogans of political democracy, but also filled those slogans with class content by demanding the right to strike and the eight hour day." (1905, p90)
The petition was hardly very revolutionary in any state other than an autocracy. The liberals had been told by Nicholas II at the beginning of his reign that their demand for representative government was "a senseless dream". Now they wanted to link the workers' demands for a better life to their own democratic programme. The main purpose of the petition was to draw on the wave of discontent then expressed by the strike of workers in the great Putilov factory in St Petersburg into the campaign for a constitution being waged by the liberals (who were on the verge of founding their own political party the Constitutional Democrats, or Kadets for short). However, it was also a programme in which every class of Russian society could find its own demands. As Trotsky also commented,
"its historical significance lies, however, not in the text but in the fact. The petition was only the prologue to an action which united the working masses."
In short, though it was a clever attempt by the bourgeois intelligentsia to get the workers and peasants to do the fighting and dying for their programme, it was doomed to fail as they had no real social or political basis for that programme. The demands for elections and constitutional freedom was, in the minds of the liberals (most of who would be regarded as conservatives in any Western European society, even at that time), the real issue. However, the demands to end redemption payments (which peasants had to pay for 57 years as a compensation to their former landlords for their "emancipation" from serfdom in 1861), redistribution of the land and an end to indirect taxes were all aimed at getting the support of the peasants. In fact, despite Trotsky's enthusiasm, the working class demands were more ambiguously represented. Gapon and his pals, under increasing pressure from the few Social Democrats who could get a hearing, could not get out of putting forward some workers demands such as the eight hour day and the right to strike, but these sat awkwardly with demands for representation for the capitalist class, whilst the talk of naval contracts only going to Russian firms smacked of the military nationalism then reigning amongst the bourgeoisie throughout Europe.
== The Condition of the Working Class in Russia in 1900
The document actually reveals little about the conditions of the working class in Russia. Trotsky, in his memorable work, 1905, announced that
"Our revolution destroyed the myth of the "uniqueness of Russia""
by which he meant that, for the first time, the class struggle in Russia began to take on the appearance of the class struggle in the rest of Europe. However, it had not appeared that way before 1904-5. This was the origin of the "myth" that Trotsky had spoken about. In 1899, Lenin had demonstrated, in The Development of Capitalism in Russia, that Russia was now a capitalist country, showing that a class of landless labourers formed a sizeable proletariat in both town and country, but the bulk of Social Democrats (Lenin included), still thought that the Russian revolution would be a bourgeois democratic rather than a proletarian revolution. However, the feebleness of the Russian bourgeoisie and the appalling conditions of exploitation of Russian workers in the Tsarist state were soon to confound these expectations.
Trotsky was preparing himself to revise this opinion when he clearly demonstrated that the Russian autocratic state had always been forced by outside military needs and pressures to constantly take the lead in developing the means of production. Thus by the mid-nineteenth century
"By the time our developing bourgeois society began to feel the need for the political institutions of the West the autocracy, aided by European technology and European capital had already transformed itself into the largest capitalist entrepreneur, the largest banker, the monopoly owner of railways and of liquor retail shops. In this it was supported by the centralised bureaucratic apparatus, which was in no way suited for regulating the new relations, but was perfectly capable of applying systematic repression with considerable energy.(6)"
Massive indirect taxation extorted surplus value from the peasants and artisans and the bulk of the state expenditure (above 80% in the eighteenth century and never below 50% even in the late nineteenth century) went on the military – not so much to fight foreign wars as to police the internal territory of the huge Russian Empire. The incapacity to fight more technologically advanced foreign foes was fully revealed in the Crimean War when Russia, despite fighting on home soil, despite facing an incompetent enemy (this is the Charge of the Light Brigade period in British military history!) and despite the enormous self-sacrifice of its serf army, still lost. Alexander II came to the throne in the middle of this war and, though no raving reformer, concluded that there was no alternative but to abolish serfdom from above "before it begins to abolish itself from below".
The abolition of serfdom in 1861 started the process of capitalist development in earnest as many peasants now became landless labourers and thus proletarians. Many gravitated to the towns over the next two generations as Russia went through a belated industrial revolution sponsored by the state and foreign (almost entirely French) capital.
This had enormous consequences for the nature of the development of Russian society. Not only did it stifle the formation of an indigenous entrepreneurial bourgeoisie but it ensured that capitalist development would be late and under the auspices of the state. This also had consequences for the nature of the Russian Empire's proletariat. Contrary to some historians the proletariat did form a significant portion of Russian society by 1905. Whilst most histories claim that only millions were proletarians, according to the 1897 census more than 9 millions were actually employed in mines, factories and transport. With their dependents the figure rises to over 20 millions which makes them 27.8% of the Russian population. They were, of course not classed by officialdom as “proletarian" or even "working class" but as "peasants" since Tsarism did not recognise the new category even in its 1910 census (where two thirds of the population of St Petersburg were classed as "peasants"!). There was a good degree of wishful thinking amongst the ruling class (including the man most responsible for that industrialisation, Sergei Witte) that Russia might industrialise but without creating a proletariat in the image of that troublesome class in the West.
They were not without some hopes in this direction. After all, in 1905, 40% of Russian workers had been born peasants. As these workers were much more tied to the land than their Western counterparts, many sent home money to pay the extraordinarily high taxes on peasant communal land and to pay the redemption dues which the peasants were still paying over half a century since their "emancipation" in 1861. Many returned for the summer to help bring in the harvest and most were illiterate. The chief educational experience they derived was still through the Orthodox Church which preached loyalty to the Tsar as the representative of God on earth.
However, this is only one side of the picture. In first place, the majority of the working class were, by 1900, second or third generation, and less dominated by a peasant past. Furthermore, the horrors of industrialisation which had hit Western European proletarians in the nineteenth century were still being visited on Russian workers in the early twentieth century. In most cases the situation was worse than that described by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1843-4. Single males lived in hostels which often had no sanitation, no heating and where even the right to a lice-ridden bed was only for the duration of the non-working time. Families often had no homes but often slept on the machinery of the factory in which they worked. This probably accounts for the low level of child labour in factories compared to the earlier period in Western Europe. Those under ten years tended to be left in the village with the grandparents. This meant that there was a preponderance of workers, aged between twenty and forty, of both sexes, in the St Petersburg and Moscow proletariat. It was a highly concentrated proletariat too, not only confined to a few geographical areas connected with mining, textiles and engineering such as Kharkov and the Donbass in the Ukraine, but also the two principal cities and the areas around them. In the cities, factories were modern in terms of the constant capital employed and with the latest in Fordist organisation with huge concentrations of workers. If the factories were modern, working conditions most definitely were not. The eleven-hour day for six days a week was the norm and wages could often be cut (there were extensive fines for the slightest misdemeanour). In a police state the slightest attempt at organisation or protest was often met with rifles and banishment.
The state consciously tried to keep the Russian workers in the same state of subservience as the peasants. In the village communities (the mir) after 1861 the committee of elders (starosti) were responsible for maintaining law and order, re-dividing the land and generally replaced the role of the landlord. For the state this was important as they had someone they could hold responsible and blame if there were any problems or disorder. From May 1901 it was decided by the Tsar's ministers that the same thing could be applied to workers. They had been worried that the delegates who the workers had elected during the increasingly frequent strikes (often at the request of the employers) were then almost always sacked by the same bosses. This went against the grain of a supposedly paternalistic society so they decided to pass a law in 1903 to impose starosti on the workers and the employers. Employers often refused to recognise them and the workers regarded them with suspicion. One Social Democratic leaflet summed up the attitude
"Comrades! We need no starosti and no lackeys of our masters; what we need are workers' organisations and workers’ societies. You see how they fooled us with starosti … We need freedom of association, of assembly, of speech and of the press.(7)"
The starosti also turned out to be useless in preventing a massive strike wave which broke out in Southern Russia in 1902-3, involving 225,000 workers. The rising tide of workers’ strikes and peasant revolts in this period prompted Plehve, the Minister of the Interior (Home Secretary) to ask for ten years in which he could use extreme brutality to crush the growing workers’ movement. At the same time, he also advised the Tsar that what would reunite the country would be a "short victorious war" to revive patriotic feeling. However, war needs preparation, not least amongst the population that is expected to fight it. The drive to find a warm water port in the Far East led to rivalry with Japan. The Russian ruling class were convinced that Japan was even more backward than Russia (an "intelligence failure" that would have done credit to the current CIA) and dealt provocatively with all the embassies the Japanese government sent to negotiate.(8) The Japanese thus launched a Pearl Harbor-type strike on Port Arthur in China where the Russian Pacific Fleet was based. With this destroyed, Japanese troops could pour into Korea to lay siege to Port Arthur and confront the Russian Army in Manchuria. A war that had begun without popular enthusiasm was turning into a nightmare for the Russian ruling class. Two of its most brutal defenders, Plehve and the Tsar's uncle Grand Duke Sergei were assassinated by Socialist Revolutionaries, but the increasing privation and inflation brought about by the war led to a revival of the very strikes and peasant disturbances the war was meant to end.
== The “Zubatovschina”
This was the background to the strike at the great Putilov Works in St Petersburg in December 1904. However, the Tsarist state was not yet too concerned as it still had other schemes to get control of the workers' struggles. In 1901, the rise of a new wave of struggle which saw workers turning towards the Social Democrats for the first time, and the failure of the starosti, led the Chief of Police in Moscow, Sergei Zubatov, to experiment with another technique to try to keep workers' demands on an economic level. He had set up the Society for Mutual Aid for Workers in Mechanical Industries in Moscow which turned out to be so successful that they were extended to other cities such as Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov and Minsk. At first, attempts by Social Democrats to get involved in them were repulsed as the still conservative workers did not want to politicise their struggle for better wages and working conditions. The police agents in the midst of the workers were so determined to maintain loyalty to the Tsar that they actually promised the workers that factories might be nationalised if employers did not cooperate with the societies.
As one Bolshevik historian put it
"Zubatov's agents went so far as to promise that the government would soon have the factories taken away from the employers and handed over to the workmen. The government they said was ready to do anything for the workers, if they stopped listening to the 'petty intelligentsia'. In some strikes the police actually supported the strikers, paid them relief money and so on.(9)"
The Bolsheviks had clearly understood that the aim of the Zubatov unions was to prevent the extension of the class movement and opposed them. However, as the waves of strikes and the crisis built up towards 1905 these unions suddenly acquired a different importance as they were one of the few legal ways in which revolutionaries could discuss with the working class without being arrested. Lenin was already worried that the Bolsheviks (and indeed all Social Democrats) had little impact amongst the working class in general and realised that the Zubatov unions might not actually fulfil their planned purpose for the regime. He saw that as the workers became more radical they would be forced into more political action. He thus urged the Bolsheviks to join the Zubatov unions and if possible take the lead in them. This was, at first, resisted by local Bolsheviks leaders for the very sound reason that their purpose was well-known. Their first attempts to influence them were also not welcomed and indeed before 1905 they had made little headway. This experience offers lessons for revolutionaries today. We have to understand that organisations which contain workers but which appear to have unpromising beginnings may actually be capable of development under the force of the class struggle. In certain circumstances of developing class struggle the apparent and the real are not always the same thing. What we need to see is what is actually happening in the underlying class struggle and try to keep in touch with it.
What had made it clear that Zubatovism was going to backfire was a strike led by Zubatov unions in Odessa in July 1902. It received solid support from virtually the whole city which led almost automatically to political demands for an end to police repression, etc. The strike then spread throughout Southern Russia in 1903 and Zubatov was sacked and sent into exile. However, some seeds for the immediate future had already been planted. Zubatov's plans had called for the election of factory-wide workers committees in Moscow:
"...chairmen were chosen by workers assemblies in many sections of the city, and these met regularly and formed a "council (soviet) of the workers in mechanical industries". This council was the highest level to which workers could turn with problems and grievances; it monitored compliance with legal regulations in factories and, if necessary, negotiated with factory inspectors. After the liquidation of Zubatov's society at the end of 1903, activity of the soviet stopped as well; some of its members were active in 1905 in establishing trades unions(10)"
Obviously these councils or soviets were hardly revolutionary, and disappeared by the end of 1903, but in the absence of a trades union tradition they were one of the few forms of struggle that Russian workers had to look to when the practical needs of coordinating a whole series of strikes over a wide range of industries and places became a burning necessity in the summer of 1905. If the Russian working class had had a strong trades union tradition it is unlikely that they have stumbled upon an entirely new form of organisation of representation for a mass society. As it was, the soviets, the bodies which came into being, united in a practical way both the economic and the political demands of the workers. However, the process of their emergence was to take several more months yet.
== The Consequences of Bloody Sunday
At the end of 1904, Zubatov might have disappeared but his agents still carried on his work. In St Petersburg the police union was called the "Assembly of Russian Factory and Workshop Workers", and was led by Gapon. He was able to tap into the very mixed class consciousness of the young working class in order to exclude Socialists from the movement and convince the workers that the Tsar was really on their side against the capitalists. The number of strikes in St Petersburg had been increasing at the end of 1904 and, when four members of Gapon's union were sacked, 12,000 workers downed tools on 3 January 1905. By 7 January, 140,000 Petersburg workers were on strike. In order to keep the anger of the workers in check, Gapon suggested the procession to the Winter Palace (carrying the petition mentioned above). Once their peaceful petition of supplication had been ripped to shreds by the sabres of the Cossacks, Gapon could announce that the Tsar was “a traitor" but the proletariat was already ahead of him.(11) A strike wave unprecedented in Russian history swept the country involving 122 towns and localities, several mines in the Donets Basin and ten of Russia's railways. More than a million workers were on strike at any one time. Both Rosa Luxemburg (who was in Russia at the time) and Trotsky noted how the strike wave developed along both economic and political lines, the one sometimes supplanting the other.
Luxemburg exaggerates the influence of Social Democracy within the workers struggles before 1905 to strengthen her case that the action went beyond Social Democratic ideas of an organised general strike (a debate she was having in the German Social Democratic Party) but she is basically correct when she says that the general strikes of January and February 1905:
"soon fell into an unending series of local, partial, economic strikes in separate districts, towns, departments and factories. Throughout the whole of the spring of 1905 and into the middle of the summer there fermented throughout the whole of the immense empire an uninterrupted economic strike of almost the entire proletariat against capital – a struggle which caught, on the one hand, all the petty bourgeois and liberal professions, commercial employees, technicians, actors and members of artistic professions – and on the other hand, penetrated to the domestic servants, the minor police officials and even to the stratum of the lumpenproletariat, and simultaneously surged from the towns to the country districts and even knocked at the iron gates of the military barracks.(12)"
It might have knocked but it did not get an answer. The military, despite the mutiny aboard the battleships Potemkin and Royal George, despite the disasters in the Far East, largely remained loyal to the Tsarist state, thus ensuring the ultimate defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1905. But this is to anticipate. Tsarism had basically lost control of Russia. Trotsky (writing at the time) was equally expansive in his description of the period after Bloody Sunday.
"Trade after trade, factory after factory, town after town are stopping work. The railway personnel act as the detonators of the strike; the railway lines are the channels along which the strike epidemic spreads. Economic claims are advanced and are satisfied wholly or in part, almost at once. But neither the beginning of the strike nor its end is fully determined by the nature of the claims made or by the forms in which they are met. The strike does not occur because the economic struggle has found expression in certain well-defined demands; on the contrary, the demands are chosen and formulated because there has to be a strike."
Or in short,
"After 9 January the revolution knows no stopping.(13)"
Employers mainly conceded all the demands the workers put in this period, but often this did not end the strike as fresh demands were made. The fact was that the murders which had taken place in Odessa and elsewhere in previous struggles in the 1902-4 period were also now being avenged. There were so many strikes at this time that many went unreported. However, all the strikes remained economic. Rosa Luxemburg made a virtue of this spontaneity by arguing that this was because “revolutions do not allow anyone to play the school master with them”. This is wonderful writing but ignores reality. What it describes is the fact that the strikes which followed Bloody Sunday had no political leadership and did not challenge the Russian state until October. Luxemburg vaguely recognises this by stating that Social Democrats should not worry about "the technical side" of the mass strike (i.e., planning one) but are instead:
"called upon to assume political leadership in the midst of the revolutionary period.(14)"
This is much closer to the truth about the relationship between the political party and the class struggle precisely but in reality the Social Democrats (of all factions) were actually very weak at the beginning of 1905. The strike itself helped them to overcome this weakness but by the time they were in a position to be more influential Tsarism has worked out a strategy for survival.
In the meantime it was the machinations of Tsarism that once again provided the workers with a means for organising themselves. In order to make a show of listening to the workers, the Tsarist Government set up two commissions. The most important was that of Shidlovsky, whose brief was to investigate “the causes of the dissatisfaction of the St Petersburg workers”. The commission only lasted two weeks, but it called for the elections of workers' representatives to take part, chosen by the workers themselves, who were divided into nine electoral divisions according to trade. The Social Democrats saw the potential of using these elections and campaigned, although the Mensheviks thought they were the beginning of something significant, while the Bolsheviks did not expect anything from them, but wanted to use the elections to reach more workers. They had learned the lesson of the Zubatov unions.
The Shidlovsky Commission of 400 workers representatives met on 17 February (2 March). Although only having about 10% of the delegates, the Bolsheviks' influence ensured that the workers submitted a list on non-negotiable demands which included freedom of speech and assembly, and release of arrested electors. Predictably the government refused the demands and three days later shut down the Commission.
"The real significance of the Shidlovsky Commission lay in another area; by electing deputies in the factories, it prepared the way for the soviets to represent the metropolitan working class.(15)"
Anweiler goes on to argue that “the strike movement was spontaneous in the true sense of the word”. In a sense he is correct. They were not started by parties (which were too weak) or by unions (which did not exist) but, as we have tried to show here, they did not come out of a clear blue sky. They were the product of definable tendencies in Russian working-class history. Because unions were illegal, because workers were faced with the oppressive power of a police state, the relatively young proletariat of the recently industrialised Tsarist Empire were faced with no organs of mediation to which they could take their immediate demands. Bloody Sunday proved that even the most basic of demands would be met with massacres even when the petitioners carried religious icons and pictures of the Tsar. Lenin wasn't exaggerating when he wrote three days after Bloody Sunday:
"The working class has received a momentous lesson in civil war, the revolutionary education of the proletariat made more progress in one day than it could have made in months and years of drab existence.(16)"
It was to make even more progress in the autumn of 1905