A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

And indeed in the following weeks tens of thousands of reform petitions were sent in to the Tsar from village assemblies, army regiments, towns and factories. Like the cahiers, the letters of grievance of 1789, they gave expression to the evolving language of political and social democracy. But their demands were far too radical for Nicholas. Most of them called for a national parliament with sovereign rights of legislation. Yet the sort of assembly which the Tsar had in mind — and which Bulygin finally presented for his signature on 6 August — was a purely consultative one elected on a limited franchise to ensure the domination of the nobles. This was to be a king's parliament, like the Zemskii Sobor of the seventeeth century, which was compatible with the preservation of the Tsar's own personal rule. Its main purpose, as Nicholas saw it, would be to inform him of his subjects' needs and thus enable him to rule on their behalf without the mediation of the self-aggrandizing bureaucracy.⁴⁸

The Bulygin Duma was yet another example of too little too late. Six months earlier it would have been welcomed, and enabled the government to regain the political initiative. But now all but the most moderate reformers found it quite unsatisfactory. The liberal newspapers, having carefully scrutinized the complex provisions of the new electoral law, claimed that less than I per cent of St Petersburg's adult residents would qualify for the vote, while in many provincial cities the proportion would be even tinier. Despite their criticisms, the liberals chose not to boycott the Duma elections. But the Social Democrats and the radicals in the Union of Unions were now more determined than ever to use mass civil disobedience to pressurize the government into making further concessions. The culmination of their efforts was the general strike of September and October, the first general strike in history, which forced the reluctant government to concede real political reforms.

During 1905 there was a marked increase in the level of organization and militancy of the workers' strikes and protests. This was partly the result of the socialists taking over the labour movement. But it was also — and probably much more so — the result of the workers themselves becoming more class conscious and violent as their conflicts with employers and police became more bitter and intense. Gorky noted the workers' growing aggression after witnessing a clash on Znamenskaya Square in St Petersburg in early September. An officer struck a soldier in the street, and an angry crowd of workers gathered to defend the soldier. They tore the epaulettes from the officer's uniform and, so Gorky thought, would have killed him too had it not been for the timely intervention of the police and Cossacks. 'The crowd conducted itself with remarkable simplicity and openness,' Gorky wrote to Ekaterina, 'they said and chanted everything

they wanted right there and then in front of the police and in general displayed a great deal of moral strength and even tact. There is a world of difference between this crowd and the supplicant people of 9 January.'⁴⁹

Not all the violence in the cities was the result of the growing militancy of the labour movement. There was a marked increase in all forms of violence, from muggings and murders to drunken riots and vandalism, as law and order broke down. Indeed, as the police withdrew from the scene, so the public added to the violence by forming groups of vigilantes and lynching criminals in the streets. Every day the press reported dozens of these cases of 'mob law' (samosud), along with robberies and murders. Mobs of a different kind went round the streets beating up students and well-dressed passers-by. There were pogroms against Jews. In short, the whole country seemed locked into a downward spiral of violence and anarchy. As the US Consul in Batumi reported:

[Russia] is permeated with sedition and reeking with revolution, racial hatred and warfare, murder, incendiarism, brigandage, robbery and crime of every kind ... As far as can be seen we are on the high road to complete anarchy and social chaos . . . One of the worst signs is that the public under this long reign of anarchy and crime is growing callous and the news of the murder of an acquaintance or friend is, by the bulk of the population, received with indifference whilst cases of brigandage are looked upon as being quite in the ordinary course of events.⁵⁰