By late summer the strike wave appeared to have subsided. The conclusion of peace with Japan, the Bulygin Duma and a series of other concessions seemed to have brought it to a close. But this appearance was deceptive. The movement was far from exhausted. The September-October strike movement was sparked off not by the most experienced and advanced sections of the class, but by the more backward layers. The summer months saw a decline in strikes in the big factories, but an increase in strikes of the most downtrodden and oppressed layers of the class – sawmill and brickyard workers, slaughterhouse workers, spinning assistants, pharmacists, postmen, waiters, bakers, even domestic servants. The proletarian army was calling up its reserves. Wave after wave joined in the struggle. A new impulse came from the Moscow printers’ strike which led to a general strike in Moscow on 27 September. Beginning with a small dispute at the Sytin print works in Moscow, the printers’ strike spread to 50 print shops within a few days and then rapidly became general throughout the city.
Just when the movement in Moscow appeared to be dying down, there was a new upsurge in St. Petersburg. On 2 October, a sympathy strike of the printers was followed by a railway strike in Moscow on 6 October. The railway workers struck and elected delegates. By 10 October there was an all-out railway strike. By mid-October, three quarters of a million railwaymen were on strike. The strikes became general, involving Moscow, Kharkov, Revel, Smolensk, Łódź, Minsk, Petersburg, Vilna, Odessa, Kazan, Tiflis, and other major centres. On 16 October Finland joined in. The rail strike became 100 per cent, and the movement then spread swiftly to the post offices, telephones, telegrams, service employees, and professional workers. The strike rapidly took on a political character. This is what compelled the Tsar on 17 October to issue a manifesto prompted by Count Witte. Two days later the general strike came to an end.
The role of the strike in general is to make the working class aware of itself as a living social force. The general strike is the highest expression of this. Lenin was fond of quoting the words of a German song: “All the wheels stand still if your mighty arms so will!” By participating in the strike movement, especially where this achieves an active form with mass participation, the workers acquire a feeling of their own strength through unity. The strike is a levelling phenomenon, serving to bind together the most advanced, politically conscious workers with the broadest layers of the class, who are aroused in action from the inertia of ‘normal’ times. In the autumn of 1905, the revolution acquired an unprecedented sweep. At the head of the movement stood the proletariat, wielding its classical weapon of struggle – the general strike.
In its extent and acuteness, the strike struggle had no parallel anywhere in the world. The economic strike developed into a political strike, and the latter into insurrection. (LCW, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, vol. 31, p. 27.)
The working class, by making its power felt, drew behind it big sections of the middle class. The intelligentsia joined in the strike. “In many places juries refused to sit, lawyers to plead, doctors to attend patients. Justices of the peace closed down their courts.” (L. Trotsky, 1905, p. 111.) The strike was accompanied by mass meetings where the workers thrashed out tactics and discussed strategy and politics. Increasingly, soldiers began to participate in these meetings, expressing solidarity with the people. The workers were beginning to organise militias for self-defence, to combat pogroms and keep order. In some places, the workers’ fighting squads went onto the offensive. There were clashes with Cossacks in Yekaterinoslav and barricades in Odessa.
Under certain conditions a general strike can lead to the wresting of serious concessions from the ruling class. But in the given context of Russia in 1905 a general strike must necessarily lead to the seizure of power or else lead to defeat. The general strike posed the question of power, but, in and of itself, could not resolve it. For that, it was necessary that the movement should be guided by a revolutionary party prepared to set before itself the most advanced tasks. The rapid development of the forces of Marxism in Russia, and the ease with which they placed themselves at the head of the mass workers’ movement in 1905, can only be understood in the context of a politically virgin proletariat with no long history of reformist trade unions and parties. Very swiftly, the Russian Marxists were able to win over the best class fighters in the factories who in turn enabled them to play a dominant role in the mass movement. That revolutionary Marxism should have proven so successful in a backward country such as Russia seems to be a paradox. But the contradiction is more apparent than real. The very backwardness of Russia – that is to say, the belatedness of its economic and social development – meant not only that the social contradictions were sharper and more glaring, but also that the working class was entirely fresh and unencumbered by prejudices, routine and the kind of deadening conservative traditions that flow from the bureaucracy of the mass trade unions and reformist parties in the ‘advanced’ capitalist countries.
This fact largely explains the speed with which the Social Democrats passed from tiny propaganda circles to a mass force embracing hundreds of thousands in the space of just a few months. The Russian working class was politically virgin with no history of bourgeois or reformist organisations. Just as Russian industry did not have to pass through the long and painful process of organic development through manufacturing and handicrafts to large scale industry, so the Russian working class did not have to reproduce the slow and painful development of the British, French, and German workers, through a phase of trade unionism and reformism, but were able to move straight to the position of revolutionary Marxism. Dialectically, it transformed itself from the most backward to the most advanced class in Europe. Nevertheless, the winning over of the masses was not an automatic process. It demanded not only correct ideas and perspectives, but flexible tactics and the ability to connect with the living movement of the working class as it was in reality, and not in the imagination of sectarians.
To many of the Bolshevik activists, the question of insurrection was seen in exclusively technical terms, as an organisational question, a viewpoint which was connected to an exaggerated appraisal of the independent significance of the ‘apparat’ and an underestimation of the political side, the need to win the masses through patient propaganda and agitation. This, however, is precisely the main point. Each party had its own armed fighting detachments or militias, not only the Social Democrats, but also the Social Revolutionaries. The need to form fighting detachments was, in the given conditions, self-evident. But it had to be linked to the mass movement via the Soviets. In fact, without fighting detachments, soviets would be toothless ‘paper tigers’, but without the mass movement expressed in the medium of the elected soviets, the armed detachments could have had no significance. It was necessary to win the masses over in action, by means of timely slogans and correct tactics, to demonstrate in practice the superiority of Marxism on the basis of the concrete struggle and experience of the masses. In other words, the problem before the Party was to win over the mass movement and not to counterpose itself to it.
The whole question of the relationship of the Party and the mass movement can be reduced in the last analysis to the difference between the finished scientific programme of Marxism and the necessarily unfinished, incomplete, and contradictory movement of the masses. Whoever is incapable of finding a bridge between these two aspects will forever be incapable of building a mass movement. Naturally, Lenin explained, the Social Democrats will fight for influence within the Soviets, and attempt to win them over. But the broad base of the Soviets, representing the big majority of workers, not only the advanced layers, but even the most backward layers in the factories, Social Democratic and non-party, atheists and religious, literate and illiterate, skilled and unskilled, was a big plus in the revolutionary struggle against tsarism. Lenin was confident that, out of the experience of the struggle itself, the masses would, in time, draw the necessary conclusions and come to understand the validity of the Marxist programme. The duty of the revolutionary vanguard was to ‘patiently explain’, and not to present ultimatums to the masses. The method of Lenin recalls the revolutionary realism of Marx who pointed out that “one real step forward of the movement is worth a hundred correct programmes”.
In Russia, under the prevailing conditions, there was no opportunity for the creation of a mass reformist labour movement with a privileged labour aristocracy and an ossified bureaucracy at its head. The attempt to establish tame, government-controlled ‘Zubatov’ unions came to nothing. After 9 January, many of these unions became swiftly transformed by the masses into genuine organs of struggle. In all these events a key role was played by the Soviets. These embryonic organs of workers’ power began life as extended strike committees. The Soviets themselves first arose in the heat of the all-Russian October general strike. In the absence of well-established mass trade unions, the striking workers moved to elect delegates who began to come together in improvised strike committees, which were generalised to include all sections of the class. The creation of the Soviets in 1905 is a marvellous example of the creative genius of ordinary working people, once they enter the arena of struggle. Nowhere does the idea of soviets feature in the writings of the great Marxist thinkers prior to 1905. They were not foreseen in the pages of the Communist Manifesto, and they were not the creation of any political party, but the spontaneous creations of the workers in struggle, the product of the initiative and creative genius of the working class. In the first place they represented committees of struggle, assemblies of delegates drawn from the factories.[2]
There are many other examples.
The idea of elected plant delegates was already raised by the Shidlovsky commission. This gave the workers an initial experience. Thus, on 11 October when the strike reached St. Petersburg they spontaneously elected delegates, including some from the Putilov and Obukhov plants. The system for the election to the Soviets was as follows: there was one delegate elected for every 500 workers (this was the same formula as for the Shidlovsky commission). Small workshops combined to send a delegate. On 13 October the first meeting of the Soviet took place at the Technical Institute with 40 people present, some of these were ex-Shidlovsky delegates. A Menshevik (Zborodsky) chaired the first meeting. Thereafter the number of delegates increased continuously; there were 80 to 90 at the second meeting from 40 big plants. At the third meeting 226 were present from 96 factories and five trade unions. Also present at the meetings were three representatives each of the Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and Social Revolutionaries. In other words, the Soviet comprised of delegates from the shop floor, unions, and socialist parties. The Soviet proceeded to elect an executive committee of 22 members – two each from the seven city districts and two each from the four biggest trade unions.
The Petersburg Soviet was the most authoritative and influential in Russia. Very soon, the Soviet embraced practically the whole of the Petersburg proletariat, and set the tone for the rest of the country. At its peak the Petersburg Soviet gathered together 562 deputies from a total of 147 factories, 34 artisan associations, and 16 trade unions. 351 of its delegates were metal workers, the Praetorian Guard of the Russian proletariat. The Bolsheviks were represented on the executive committee by Khostolovksy and Bogdanov. But the leading political figure in the Soviet was undoubtedly Leon Trotsky. Throughout the October general strike and November lockout all eyes were on the St. Petersburg Soviet. Here was an extremely broad, democratic and flexible organ of struggle. In the course of the struggle, the Soviets gradually increased their functions and representative scope. Through the Soviet, the workers made use of the newly found, newly conquered freedom of the press by the simple expedient of taking over the printing presses. They compelled the introduction of the eight-hour day and even instituted workers’ control of production in some factories. They formed a workers’ militia and even arrested unpopular police officers. In addition to numerous other tasks the Soviet published Izvestiya Sovieta Rabochikh Deputatov as its public organ.
Following the example of St. Petersburg, workers took the initiative of forming soviets in other parts of Russia. By the autumn the Soviets had been set up in more than 50 other towns and cities including Tver, Kostroma, Kharkov, Kiev, Yekaterinoslav, Odessa, Rostov on Don, Novorossiysk, and Baku. The Moscow Soviet was only formed on 21 November. At its first meeting there were 180 delegates representing about 80,000 workers. It originally existed side by side with a so-called strike committee mainly composed of petty bourgeois elements dominated by SRs and assorted middle class ‘democrats’. However, by November this committee fused with the Soviet. In the great majority of cases the Social Democrats predominated, but the petty bourgeois democrats were also represented by the Social Revolutionary Party who, as we have seen, were present in the executive committee of the Petersburg Soviet.
In general, the consciousness of the masses develops slowly and unevenly. Although in a revolution it is enormously accelerated, the process of the awakening of the masses remains contradictory. Different layers draw different conclusions at different times. Thus, as late as November the Tsar was still receiving petitions from striking workers from the provinces begging him to intervene on their behalf. This shows not only the uneven development of consciousness, but also the colossal difference between Moscow and Petersburg and the provinces. The contradiction is still more glaring between the consciousness of the town worker and the peasants. The movement that began in the towns was beginning to spread to the villages. By the end of 1905 peasant disturbances had broken out in 37 per cent of European Russia, especially in the central Black Earth zone, Latvia, Southern Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine. An attempt was made to organise a Peasants’ Union in the summer. The peasants expressed their greetings for ‘our brother factory workers’. But in their consciousness the peasants lagged far behind the workers. The villages were still considerably influenced by liberal illusions, reflecting the half-awakened state of mind of the rural masses. Under such conditions the leadership of the Peasants’ Union fell into the hands of the Social Revolutionaries and liberals, a phenomenon which was repeated later in February 1917.
In Moscow, a soviet of soldiers’ deputies was set up and in Tver province a peasants’ soviet was formed. In Sevastopol, there were also sailors and soldiers present in the local workers’ soviet. But these were rare exceptions. The place where the revolution was beginning to penetrate the minds of the peasants was the army. Under the hammer blows of military defeats and the influence of the general revolutionary movement, the armed forces were in a state of ferment. Social Democratic influence was strong among sections of the sailors, traditionally the most working-class section of the armed forces. A mutiny in Sevastopol in November led by Lieutenant Schmidt was brutally suppressed by the tsarist authorities. However, a whole series of mutinies in the army posed the question of the military in an especially sharp form. This had a very great symptomatic importance, because the army was overwhelmingly peasant in composition. One of the principal weaknesses of the 1905 Revolution was the lack of a firm base among the peasants. The rural masses were lagging behind the towns and this fact proved a fatal weakness in the December uprising. Elements of a peasant-soldier revolt were present, but not on a sufficient scale to make a fundamental difference to the outcome. By the time the conflagration had spread to the villages the movement in the towns was already on a downswing.
From distant exile, Lenin greeted the formation of the Soviets which, in a brilliant anticipation, he characterised as embryonic organs of workers’ power:
I may be wrong, but I believe (on the strength of the incomplete and only ‘paper’ information at my disposal) that politically the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies should be regarded as the embryo of a provisional revolutionary government. I think the Soviet should proclaim itself the provisional revolutionary government of the whole of Russia as early as possible, or should set up a provisional revolutionary government (which would amount to the same thing, only in another form). (LCW, Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, vol. 10, p. 21.)
This, in essence, was what actually occurred in October 1917.
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Nor is this observation limited to the question of the Soviets. Marx derived his idea of what a workers’ state would be like from the Paris Commune of 1871, when the workers of Paris took power. The programme of the Commune was summed up by Marx in The Civil War in France, and later provided the basis for Lenin’s State and Revolution.