In October the Black Hundreds commit mass murder in the cosmopolitan city of Odessa, butchering more than 400 Jews. In the Siberian city of Tomsk, they stop up all entrances to a building where a meeting is taking place, set it alight and gleefully burn their scores of victims alive. They throw petrol on the flames. A teenage boy, Naum Gabo, escapes with minutes to spare to witness the depredation. Years later, an elderly man, by then a leading sculptor of his generation, he will write, ‘I do not know if I can convey in words the horror that oppressed me and seized my soul.’
This is the Black Hundreds’ carnival, but they will continue with the work for years.
And while reaction is on its violent march, the tsar still flounders, groping for compromise. In August 1905 he announces a consultative parliament, a Duma. But its complex franchise favours the rich: the masses remain unappeased. The Treaty of Portsmouth ends the Russo-Japanese War, and is merciful to Russia, given the circumstances. Nevertheless, the state’s authority has been crushed abroad and at home, among all classes.
Insurgency has strange triggers. In Moscow, October 1905, a matter of punctuation sparks the final act of the revolutionary year.
Moscow printworkers are remunerated per letter. Now, in the Sytin publishing house, they demand payment for punctuation, too. An arcane orthographic revolt that prompts a wave of sympathy strikes. Bakers and railway workers join in, some bankers as well. Dancers with the Imperial Ballet refuse to perform. Factories and shops close, trams stand still, lawyers refuse cases, jurors to hear them. Rolling stock is motionless on the railways, the iron nerves of the country frozen. A million troops are stranded in Manchuria. The strikers demand pensions and decent pay and free elections, an amnesty for political prisoners, and, again, a representative body: a Constituent Assembly.
On 13 October, at Menshevik instigation, about forty workers’ representatives, SRs, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks meet in the St Petersburg Technological Institute. Workers vote them in, one for every 500 workers. They name their gathering with the Russian word for ‘council’ – the Soviet.
In the three months before mass arrests put an end to it, the Petersburg Soviet spreads its influence, draws personnel from a wider pool, begins to assert extensive authority. It sets strike dates, controls telegraphs, considers public petitions, issues appeals. Its leader is the well-known young revolutionary Lev Bronstein, known to history as Leon Trotsky.
Trotsky is hard to love but impossible not to admire. He is at once charismatic and abrasive, brilliant and persuasive and divisive and difficult. He can be compelling and he can be cold, even brutal. Lev Davidovich Bronstein was the fifth of eight children born in a village in modern-day Ukraine to a comfortably off, non-observant Jewish family. A revolutionary by the age of seventeen, a brief narodnik flirtation took him to Marxism, and in and out of prison. The name Trotsky was borrowed from a jailer in Odessa in 1902. Once considered ‘Lenin’s cudgel’, he sided with the Mensheviks at the contentious 1903 congress, though he soon broke with them. During these, his ‘non-factional’ years, he and Lenin repeatedly exchange ill-tempered polemics on various issues.
The Marxists, almost all of the view that the country is not ready for socialism, are broadly agreed that a Russian Revolution can only be, must be, a democratic and capitalist one – but, crucially, that it could be a catalyst for socialist revolution in more developed Europe. For the most part, the Mensheviks are holding out for active bourgeois leadership in Russia, as befits a liberal revolution: until 1905’s debacle, therefore, they opposed taking part in any government thrown up by a revolution. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, contend that in the context of pusillanimous liberalism, the working class itself must lead the revolution, in alliance not with those liberals but with the peasantry, taking power, in what Lenin has called a ‘revolutionary–democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’.
Trotsky, for his part, already famed as an outstanding and provocative thinker, will soon develop a very distinct take, move in different directions on such questions, formulating theories that will come to define his contested legacy. At present he is deeply engaged in the workings of the Soviet, as participant and witness in this distinct, embattled kind of governance.
In the countryside, the 1905 revolution is chiefly manifest at first in illegal and ad hoc local activities, like felling state- or landlord-owned timber, and strikes among agricultural workers. But in late July, peasant delegates and revolutionaries meet near Moscow and declare themselves the Constitutional Assembly of the All-Russian Peasants’ Union. They demand the abolition of private property in land and its reconstitution as ‘common property’.
On 17 October, the tsar, still reeling from the upheavals, reluctantly issues his ‘October Manifesto’, appointing the shrewd conservative Count Witte as premier. In a fillip to Russian liberalism, Nicholas concedes the principles of legislative powers for the Duma and limited suffrage for urban male workers. The same month sees the founding congress of the Constitutional Democratic Party, known as the Kadets.
A liberal party, the Kadets stand for civil rights, universal male suffrage, a degree of autonomy for national minorities, and moderate land and labour reform. The party’s roots include a certain strain of radical(ish) liberalism, though that wanes swiftly as the revolution retreats. By the end of 1906, their ambiguous republicanism will have mutated into support for a constitutional monarchy. The Kadets’ 100,000 members are mainly middle-class professionals: the party chair, Pavel Milyukov, is a pre-eminent historian. Another new party, about a fifth the size of the Kadets, the Octobrists, forms in supportive response to the tsar’s October Manifesto, attracts conservative liberals, and mostly comprises of landowners, cautious businesspeople and the moneyed. They support some moderate reforms, but oppose universal suffrage as a threat to the monarchy and themselves.
Dissent has its momentum: a second, more radical peasant congress meets in early November. In the central provinces of Tambov, Kursk and Voronezh, in the Volga, in Samara and Simbirsk and Saratov, around Kiev and in Chernigov and Podolia, peasant crowds attack, sack, often burn manor houses, and loot their estates. Revolutionary ideas spread like electricity along roads and along those conductive railway tracks. Soviets are formed in Moscow, Saratov, Samara, Kostroma, Odessa, Baku, Krasnoyarsk. In December, the Novorossiysk Soviet deposes the governor, and, briefly, runs the city.
In Moscow on 7 December the general strike becomes an urban insurrection, backed by the SRs and Bolsheviks – in the latter case out of agonised solidarity, rather than any great faith in the likelihood of its success. For days the ring of the outer city is in revolutionary hands. Workers throw up barricades across the streets and Moscow is wracked by guerrilla fighting.
At last news that loyalist Semyonov Guards are coming from St Petersburg buoys the counterrevolutionary volunteers. They bombard the insurgent textile workers in the Presnya district with artillery. In these, the uprising’s death throes, 250 radicals are killed. The revolution dies with them.
January 1906, in the chilling words of Victor Serge, is ‘a month of firing squads’. A wave of orchestrated pogroms shakes the country. The American Jewish Committee collates evidence of a staggering upswell of racist violence, taking perhaps 4,000 lives.
Resistance does continue, including assassinations. In February 1906, at the railway station in the town of Borisoglebsk, a twenty-year-old Socialist Revolutionary named Maria Spiridonova guns down the local security chief, a man notorious for his savage repression of the peasants. She receives a death sentence, commuted to hard labour in Siberia. At each stop on the journey to the penal colony, Spiridonova emerges