The Russian Empire Threatened

Alongside the humiliating loss to Japan, revolution erupted in Russia in 1905, and the empire tottered on the brink of chaos. The mighty Russian Empire had concealed its weaknesses well: state-sponsored industrialization in the 1890s had made the country appear modern to outside observers, and Russification attempted to impose a unified national culture on Russia’s diverse population. Burdened by heavy taxes to pay for industrialization and by debts owed for the land they acquired during emancipation, peasants revolted in isolated uprisings at the turn of the century. Unrest occurred in the cities, too: in 1903, skilled workers led strikes in Baku; the unity of Armenians and Tatars in these strikes showed how Russification had made political cooperation possible among the various ethnicities. Growing worker activism, along with Japan’s victory, challenged the autocratic regime.

On a Sunday in January 1905, a crowd gathered outside the tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to march in a demonstration to make Nicholas II aware of the brutal working conditions they suffered. Nicholas had often traveled the empire, displaying himself as the divinely ordained “father” of his people; therefore, his “children” thought it natural to appeal to him for aid. Leading the demonstration was a priest who, unknown to the crowd, was a police informant and agitator. Instead of allowing the marchers to pass, troops guarding the palace shot into the trusting crowd, killing hundreds and wounding thousands. Thus began the Revolution of 1905, as news of “Bloody Sunday” moved outraged workers elsewhere to rebel.

In almost a year of turmoil across Russia, urban workers struck over wages, hours, and factory conditions and organized their own councils, called soviets. In June, sailors on the battleship Potemkin mutinied; in October, a massive railroad strike brought rail transportation to a halt; and in November, uprisings broke out in Moscow. The tsar’s forces kept killing protesters, but their deaths produced an opposition of artisans and industrial workers, peasants, professionals, upper-class reformers, and women, many demanding an end to discriminatory laws such as those firing women teachers who married. Liberals from the zemstvos (local councils) and the intelligentsia (a Russian word for well-educated elites) demanded the creation of a constitutional monarchy and representative legislature. They believed that the reliance on censorship and the secret police, characteristic of Russian imperial rule, marked the empire as backward.

The tsar finally yielded to the violence by creating a representative body called the Duma. Although very few Russians could vote for representatives to the Duma, its mere existence, along with the new right of open public debate, liberalized government and allowed people to present their grievances to a responsive body. Political parties committed to parliamentary rather than revolutionary programs also took shape. From 1907 to 1917, the Duma convened, but twice when the tsar disliked its recommendations he simply sent the delegates home. Nicholas had an able administrator in Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin (1863–1911), who ended the mir system of communal farming and canceled the land redemption payments that had burdened the peasants since their emancipation in 1861. His reforms allowed people to move to the cities in search of jobs and created a larger group of independent peasants.

Stolypin was determined to restore law and order. He clamped down on revolutionary organizations, sentencing so many of their members to death by hanging that nooses were nicknamed “Stolypin neckties.” Still rebels continued to assassinate government officials, and Stolypin himself was assassinated in 1911. Stolypin’s reforms promoted peasant well-being, which encouraged what one historian has called a “new peasant assertiveness.” The industrial workforce also grew, but more strikes broke out, culminating in a general strike in St. Petersburg in 1914. The imperial government’s refusal to share power through the Duma left the way open to an even greater upheaval in 1917.