Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

Ever since the early 17th century, popular rebellions had periodically shown that Russia’s communities of joint responsibility, which the regime exploited for its own purposes, could also act as a forum for social unrest. Cossacks, non-Russians, and peasants were imperfectly reconciled with their status, and there were no intermediate institutions through which they could articulate their grievances. From time to time, they resisted discreetly, or even rebelled openly when they sniffed an opportunity.

With the rapid development of industry in the final decades of the 19th century, the conditions of popular unrest changed radically. During the second half of the 19th century, the various nationalities and social classes had been gradually drawn into an empire-wide social and political culture through the development of railways, military conscription, the spread of primary education and of newspapers. Many younger male peasants were now literate and had the experience of army life, factory labour, and travel on the rivers and railways. Some of them had come into contact with political ideas, on their journeys, through reading newspapers, or through the efforts of activists to reach them at their workplace. They had a fuller sense of how their own grievances and humiliations were experienced by others and of how they might act together to assert themselves as citizens and gain greater control over their own lives.

An urban working class appeared, concentrated in the largest cities. Many of them were peasants seeking new sources of income. When they came into the city, they would seek to create for themselves forms of social life familiar from the village. Many of them lived in zemliachestva (groups of workers from the same province) and worked in arteli, each with its own starosta (elder). They agitated to be treated politely by managers, that is, not as ‘serfs’, and to be allowed to elect worker representatives to mediate in disputes. SRs and SDs organized study circles, to teach workers the elements of socialism and give them experience of acting together to defend their interests. The government, however, regarded their demands, and the accompanying strikes and demonstrations, as political subversion.

The first mass workers’ movement was mobilized by an activist priest, Gapon, with the tacit support of the Metropolitan of St Petersburg. Gapon believed it would be best if the workers achieved their aspirations to civil freedoms and political participation through the action of the Tsar. He organized a workers’ demonstration in St Petersburg in January 1905 to present a loyal petition. The demonstrators requested the right to strike and to have a permanent committee of elected worker representatives in the factories. They also made political demands, for a constituent assembly and the rule of law. Unaccustomed to facing this kind of mass protest movement, the government got cold feet and at the last moment tried to ban the march, which went ahead anyway. Poorly briefed troops panicked, fired on the procession, and killed at least a hundred people.

News of the massacre, immediately dubbed ‘Bloody Sunday’, spread rapidly throughout Russia. Its resonance was especially powerful because most Russians, whatever they thought of their local bosses, regarded the Tsar as a benign ‘little father’. It prompted a surge of violent discontent among most social classes and ethnic groups. The socialist parties became involved in many of the protests, helping to organize them and give them political direction, but the demands being put forward were similar everywhere and derived from the universal desire for civil freedoms, greater self-government, and participation in politics both locally and at the centre. Peasants met in their village assemblies, and discussed national politics, sometimes with the assistance of a schoolteacher or political activist. Then they drew up petitions, still mostly couched in terms of loyalty to the Tsar. At the top of their list was the demand for an end to private landed property and the transfer to them of all non-peasant land, to be administered by their own communities. As a village in Vladimir province declared, ‘Land must not be a thing that can be traded. It must belong to the people, so that everyone has access to it and everyone can apply his labour and live off it.’ Then came demands for fairer taxation, universal free primary education, full civil rights, and a legislative assembly elected by all the people. What this amounted to was completing the agenda of the 1860s reforms.