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NEWS & LETTERS, November-December 2005EssayRussia's 1905 revolution has enduring legacyby Kevin Michaels The Russia of 100 years ago was a society difficult to imagine today. It was an empire stretching from Poland in the west to Manchuria in the east and comprised of many oppressed nations in between. The empire was ruled by an absolute monarch, Tsar Nicholas II, who was not only a political leader, but as head of the Orthodox church, a religious one as well. His rule was based on a small class of aristocratic landowners and the military officers drawn from that class. Nicholas was strongly devoted to the three traditional principles of Tsardom: autocratic rule, Orthodox Christianity and a belief in the superiority of the Slavic people. Although some of his predecessors had made efforts to reform the institutions of Russian society--the most thoroughgoing one being Alexander II’s liberation of the empire’s serfs from feudal bondage in 1861--Nicholas was a conservative and a true believer in the sanctity of his office, an institution that had not fundamentally changed since the time of Ivan the Terrible, Russia’s first ruler to assume the title Tsar. Although Russia in 1905 was predominantly an agrarian society with a rural population, capitalism had begun a relentless penetration into the economy. Investors drawn by the prospects of extremely low wages had built large factories in St. Petersburg, at the time Russia’s imperial capital, and a class of exploited workers drawn into the city from the countryside was steadily growing. These workers were looked to by the Russian Marxists as the strongest social force in the battle against the Tsar and his oppressive rule. The Marxists had emerged as the most vital tendency of Russia’s large and thriving revolutionary movement as populism declined from its traditional position as the country’s predominant radical trend. The populists--or Narodniki--were focused on the huge peasant class as Russia’s revolutionary force and employed terrorist tactics in their struggle. They even managed to assassinate the reforming Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an act which provoked a massive police effort of repression. Marx himself contributed to the debates within the nineteenth century revolutionary movement over the revolutionary potential of the peasant class. In the last decade of his life, Marx developed a profound interest in Russia. He studied the language and read deeply on economic and social questions concerning the vast country, taking a particular interest in the works of the revolutionary populist theorist Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Marx had long recognized the danger represented by the absolutist Tsarist government to the possibility of revolution in western Europe when the Russian army was used to put down the democratic revolution in Hungary in 1849 and had championed Polish freedom in the name of the International Working Men’s Association. In the course of his studies, Marx became increasingly convinced in the potential for a social revolution occurring in Russia itself. In correspondence with the exiled Russian revolutionary populist Vera Zasulitch and in one of his last published writings, the preface to the 1882 edition of the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, he discussed just such a possibility. One hundred years ago this year, the revolution in Russia Marx anticipated became a reality. A DRAMATIC YEAR OPENS In January of 1905, a priest of the Orthodox church named Father Gapon led a march of hungry and dissatisfied peasants to the gates of Tsar Nicholas II’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. They intended to present the Tsar with a petition of grievances from the masses of the Russian people, who were suffering from the oppression of the landlords in the countryside and the capitalists in the newly-built factories in the cities. The Tsar and his government were at the time on the verge of a serious defeat in the eastern reaches of the Empire at the hands of the rising military power of Japan. In no mood to open up discussion on Russia’s social question, the Tsar’s officers ordered troops to fire into the crowd and killed as many as a thousand. Word of the massacre spread quickly and the people of St. Petersburg revolted. After a long period of dormancy following the crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871, revolution had returned to Europe. 1905 unfolded as a succession of revolts and reactions. Strikes, the creation of councils of workers’ representatives, a mutiny among the sailors of the Black Sea naval fleet that was immortalized by the director Sergei Eisenstein in his film "Battleship Potemkin," and uprisings on the part of all the oppressed nations of the Tsarist empire were among the year’s events. One of the forms reaction took was a large number of murderous pogroms against the Jews of the Russian Empire. The massacres were stirred up by police agents and carried out by organized anti-semitic mobs called the Black Hundreds. A particularly large pogrom took place in Odessa in October. The revolution spread to the countryside as well, where the peasants--the majority of Russia’s population--lived and toiled in abysmally poor conditions. The American socialist William English Walling, who traveled to Russia with his partner Anna Strunsky in late 1905 to chronicle the revolution, described what took place all across rural Russia in his book RUSSIA'S MESSAGE: "Suddenly the latent class-hatred between the village and landlord broke out into a gigantic class war. The countryside from Poland to the Urals and from the Black Sea to the Baltic was lighted up within a few weeks by the fires of thousand of country mansions--in all some fifty million dollars of property was destroyed. Everywhere the movement was similar, since it was everywhere invited by a common situation and founded on the same peasant nature." Nicholas and his ministers, in addition to reacting with force in typical absolutist fashion, also realized that the severity of the threat confronting them gave them no choice but to yield some reforms. When the announcement of the creation of a strictly consultative representative body was rejected by the workers and peasants, Nicholas was forced to relent. The Tsar’s most liberal minister, Count Witte, convinced him of the necessity of letting elections for a representative body take place and in October, Nicholas released a statement granting basic, albeit strictly limited, liberal rights. The revolutionary year 1905 drew to a close with two events of enormous importance. In October, the St. Petersburg soviet of workers deputies carried out a massive general strike and in December, the Moscow soviet organized an armed uprising. The workers of the city built barricades and held off the Tsar’s Cossack troops for days before being ruthlessly put down. Although political and social unrest continued well into 1907 and inspired a kindred revolution in Persia, the Russian revolution had extinguished itself. IMPACT ON THEORETICIANS Much of the greatness of the events of the revolution of 1905 stems from their utter spontaneity. No one had anticipated the events, neither the agents of the Tsar’s secret police nor the leaders of Russia’s large and vibrant revolutionary movement. The meaning of those events, and their implications for the prospects of a successful revolution in Russia, were to occupy the work of three of the greatest Marxists of the Russian empire for years to come: Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky. Lenin, from exile in Switzerland, hailed the revolution and strove to clarify its immediate political implications for Russian Marxists. In his article "The Two Tactics of Social Democracy," he argued that it placed the slogan of "the democratic dictatorship of the peasantry and the proletariat" as the program for revolution. He castigated the Mensheviks, with whom he had broken only three years before, for their insistence that only a bourgeois revolution was possible and that Marxists had to limit all of their actions to support for Russia’s liberals in carrying out a strictly limited agenda of political change. Rosa Luxemburg, a leader of the Polish and German Marxists, drew on the experience of the strike waves of 1905 to hurl the challenge westward at the reformism of the German Social Democratic Party. In her pamphlet, THE MASS STRIKE, THE POLITICAL PARTY AND THE TRADE UNIONS, she sought to criticize the entrenched electoralism of the German party with the revolutionary potential of the general strike that had proven so powerful in Warsaw, St. Petersburg and along the Russian railways in 1905. It is with Trotsky’s name, however, that 1905 is most closely associated. He served as the president of the St. Petersburg soviet and helped to lead the October general strike. As a result of his activity, Trotsky was convicted by the Tsar’s courts and sentenced to exile in Siberia. Together with a now-obscure fellow Russian revolutionary named Parvus, Trotsky called his summation of 1905 the theory of permanent revolution, meaning that the bourgeois democratic tasks of the revolution could be carried out only by the proletariat. The revolution would end in success only if it was permanent, that is, if it did not stop at democratic goals but continued into a fully-fledged socialist revolution led by the urban workers. Trotsky’s original and daring thesis was rejected by almost the entirety of the Marxist movement of the time. While it did not play a great role in his thinking again until his battles with Stalin over the direction of the development of Russian society in the 1920s, the theory of Permanent Revolution elaborated in 1905 earned him a place among the universally recognized leaders of Russian Marxism. None of the three revolutionaries, however, despite their praise of the actions of the masses and their closeness to the events of the year, made a theoretical category out of the phenomenon of the St. Petersburg soviet. This new form of organized working class activity, which was to play such a central role when it reappeared just over a decade later, was strangely peripheral to the conclusions drawn by the three. Historians may say that the 1905 Revolution was a failure, but the events of that year have a greatness that even the passage of 100 years cannot diminish. Though the 1917 revolution was an event on a higher historic scale, an air of tragedy hangs over it because of the eventual degeneration of the advances won that year. In contrast, 1905 has a sense of openness and possibility, a sense that a new beginning had been undertaken after centuries of oppression and reaction. Lenin captured this aspect in a lecture on the events of 1905 he delivered in Switzerland in 1914, in which he said, "dormant Russia was transformed into a Russia of a revolutionary proletariat and a revolutionary people." Russia was truly transformed that year and the struggles its people threw themselves into opened up a century of worldwide revolutionary change. * * * Learn more about 1905 in ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION by Raya Dunayevskaya Includes: • "Two Turning Points in Luxemburg's Life: Before and After the 1905 Revolution" • "Trotsky's Theory of Permanent Revolution" Foreword by poet Adrienne Rich "The dialectic of revolution came alive before Luxemburg's very eyes in the 1905 [Russian] revolution" $12.95 To order, click here. |
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