By Paul Morris
THE YEAR 1905 started with a peaceful march led by a priest and ended with a workers’ insurrection, led by socialists. Though the revolution was put down, and its leaders tried and exiled, Russia was never to be the same again. The events of 1905 were a ‘dress rehearsal’ for 1917, when the workers at last seized power.
In 1905 the Russian Tsar was locked in a disastrous war with Japan and was taxing the bougeoisie to the hilt. The bourgeoisie were calling for a democratic constitution—albeit one in which the workers would have few rights. The workers and peasants were starving. Independent trade unions were banned. Instead the secret police set up puppet ‘worker’s societies’ controlled by a priest, Father Gapon.
Both the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party (RSDLP) were illegal and in exile. In January 1905 the workers of St Petersburg had had enough: they went on strike and took to the streets. Gapon led them in a march to plead with the ‘Little Father’ (as they called the Tsar) for a constitutional monarchy. They marched not behind union banners but crucifixes.
The Bolshevik agitators were booed at strike meetings and at the march, for suggesting that the struggle be linked up to the struggle for a democratic republic. Just 15 members of the RSDLP joined the march. As the 200,000 demonstrators approached the Winter Palace they walked into a hail of bullets. Hundreds died, thousands were injured. Bloody Sunday, 9 January 1905, was the spark that detonated the revolution.
Between January and October the struggles raged back and forth: in the cities, the countryside and in the socialist movement itself.
RSDLP activists returned from exile and were able to work more or less openly as the workers—reeling from the shock of the massacre, their illusions in Tsarism shattered—ditched Gapon and flocked to the RSDLP.
Within the party a series of debates that seemed, on the surface, to be about ‘organisation’, began to have an impact on the strategies of the revolutionaries and overlapped with the theoretical struggle over the ‘permanent revolution’ versus ‘democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants’.
The original Bolshevik/Menshevik split (1903) had been over Lenin’s insistence on a party of ‘professional revolutionaries’—a party of combat not a passive party of subs-collecting and reading rooms. Trotsky stayed with the Mensheviks then, but the debate over permanent revolution placed him to the left of the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks found it hard to adapt to the outbreak of struggle. On the ground they saw a straight line developing: strikes, insurrection, revolutionary government. But the workers threw up something that didn’t fit into this schema: the soviets. Starting off as cross-workplace strike committees, these councils of workers’ delegates started to run whole towns and cities once general strikes had shut down the power of the bourgeoisie.
While the Mensheviks enthused about the soviets—Trotsky became deputy leader of the Petersburg soviet—the Bolsheviks saw them as an attempt to construct ‘broad’, non-party organisations. Initially, therefore, the Bolsheviks tended to counterpose the party to them. It took a fight by Lenin to convince the Bolsheviks that the soviets were not inherently ‘anti-party’ but were actually embryonic forms of the workers’ government
The Mensheviks, meanwhile, were content to ride the tide of revolution. Right-wing Menshevik leaders like Felix Martov, who had opposed the workers taking extreme action for fear of frightening away the bourgeoisie, suddenly started calling for ‘permanent revolution’, only to just as suddenly ditch the idea in the wake of the defeat.
Trotsky himself played an exemplary role: leading the soviet, organising the general strike, converting workers to socialism by the thousand at daily mass meetings. But when the crunch came, in October 1905—though it proved his theory of permanent revolution right—it exposed the weakness of his understanding of revolutionary organisation.
As strikes, mutinies and peasant revolts gripped Russia in October 1905 the Tsar cracked under pressure. He issued a manifesto promising a constitutional monarchy with a parliament—the ‘Duma’—the vote for the capitalists and freedom of speech.
The militancy of the workers was already worrying the liberal bourgeoisie and the Constitutional Manifesto gave some of them the excuse to open negotiations with the Tsar. Meanwhile, exactly as Trotsky predicted, the workers began to add radical economic demands (such as the eight-hour day) to the revolutionary democratic struggle.
The Tsar seized his chance. A policy of concessions to the bourgeoisie was combined with repression against the soviets and mutineer sailors. This faced the soviets with a choice: insurrection or retreat.
Trotsky judged that insurrection in St Petersburg would be premature, because under the impact of repression the general strike had begun to crumble. Though Trotsky called for resistance to the last in the St Petersburg workers’ council, he was unable to launch an insurrection: he had no party of organised cadres, rooted in the working class and capable of turning words into action. The soviet was arrested, the delegates smashing their revolvers on the desks as they surrendered.
In Moscow, where the Bolsheviks ran the RSDLP, it was different. The workers’ movement was smaller there (and the reactionary middle class bigger). A city-wide soviet was not set up until very late (22 November), due to the Bolsheviks’ initial sectarian suspicion of them.
But in addition to the soviet, the Bolsheviks had built a party of at least 15,000 committed workers, who understood that a general strike poses the question of political power.
When news arrived that St Petersburg had been crushed, a general strike broke out in Moscow. Strikes on the railways stopped the army being sent in. The Bolsheviks launched an armed insurrection that was to hold out for 10 days in one part of Moscow (its tube stations are still called ‘Barricadnaya’ and ‘1905’).
In the end this too was crushed. One thousand workers were killed in Moscow, 14,000 died in pogroms and reprisals across Russia, 70,000 were sent to prison camps.
The Mensheviks swung violently to the right. The defeat, they declared, proved them right—the workers’ economic demands and strikes had driven the bourgeoisie out of the anti-Tsarist alliance.
The Bolsheviks emerged strengthened politically. Before 1905 the word ‘programme’, to all socialists in Russia, meant a list of static demands to be achieved once in power. But amid the struggle Lenin developed a new concept of the programme: an action programme to guide the revolution as it took place and to link the short-term demands of the workers to the strategic goal of workers’ power.
In the manifesto of the April Congress of the RSDLP we see spelled out for the first time in the twentieth century a revolutionary road to power: the general strike, the workers’ council, the workers’ militia, the armed insurrection.
In the aftermath of 1905 the Menshevik left, led by Trotsky, hardened its differences with the old Menshevik leaders. While in prison and exile Trotsky spelled out the strategic break in his book Results and Prospects. Far from proving the Mensheviks (or Bolsheviks) right, the spontaneous struggles linking the eight-hour day with the democratic republic showed it was pointless to go on thinking of socialism in terms of a ‘maximum’ (socialist) and a ‘minimum’ (democracy and reforms) goal.
However, the revolution also exposed the key weakness Trotsky was not to break with until 1917: spontaneism. He believed the spontaneity of the masses would overcome everything, whether it be the confusion of the Menshevik leaders or the maximum-minimum programme split. It was this failure to break with spontaneism that stopped Trotsky building a real party within the St Petersburg working class: in practice the soviet replaced the party.
Before 1905 the workers saw others as their liberators: the Tsar, Gapon, the bourgeois liberals. This was a society where women were the lowest of the low. Where workers weren’t allowed to speak to bosses until spoken to: 1905 changed all that. Here they were, debating out their destiny, with women in the vanguard.
While socialism was driven underground, key militants jailed or murdered, it could never be driven out of the heads of a militant vanguard who now fought to build a mass revolutionary party in preparation for the next storm.
