The centre of revolutionary activity passed from the town to the village. In April, 47 cases of peasant disturbances were registered; in May, 160; but by June the figure increased to 739. This was close to the highest figure for autumn 1905. Half of European Russia, especially the Volga area, where the tradition of Stenka Razin and Pugachev still burned in the memory of the muzhik, the central Black Earth zone, the Ukraine, Poland, Tambov, and other regions all were engulfed by the flame of revolt. Landlords fled their estates as strike committees were formed in villages by rebellious agricultural labourers. An inevitable consequence of peasant revolution was the upsurge in guerrilla actions – the classical mode of struggle of the peasantry. Such activities were particularly common in Latvia (the ‘forest brotherhood’) and Georgia (the ‘Red Hundreds’). This situation posed a mortal danger for the tsarist regime, which found its principal point of support in the class of feudal landowners, the main target of the concentrated rage and hatred of the dispossessed masses. There was yet another reason to fear the revolt in the villages. Immediately, the peasant revolution had an echo in the army, where the truculent mood of the troops, demoralised by defeat and aroused by the example of the workers in the towns, expressed itself in a new wave of mutinies and uprisings.

Under these conditions, the military policy of the Party still had a key role to play, and still more so its agrarian policy, as Lenin clearly understood. About 50 RSDLP committees had special military organisations and groups. On the party’s military organisation in Moscow, Piatnitsky writes:

A military technical bureau was attached to the Moscow Committee; this bureau was responsible for the invention, testing and production in great quantities, whenever necessary, of simple arms, including bombs; and with this the bureau was occupied all the time. The military technical bureau was completely isolated from the Moscow organisation, and was connected with the Moscow Committee only through the secretary of the committee. (O. Piatnitsky, Zapiski Bol’shevika, p. 104.)

The strongest of the military organisations, however, was in Petersburg. According to Leonard Schapiro, the Party still “maintained a wide network of organisations among the soldiers, and published some 20 illegal soldiers’ periodicals and newspapers”. (L. Schapiro, History of the CPSU, p. 99.) Some agitation was carried out in the army and navy with special publications like Kazarma (Barracks) and Soldatskaya Zhizn’ (Soldiers’ Life). The party conducted an energetic campaign among the army recruits, asking them not to fire on their brothers, but to come over to the side of the workers, bringing their arms with them. March 1906 saw the first Conference of Military and Fighting Organisations. But on the first day all the delegates were arrested. The first real conference took place on 16 November, 1906, in the relative safety of Tammerfors in Finland. Although Lenin certainly hoped that the movement in the villages might provide the spark that would reignite the revolution, he nevertheless argued continually for caution, against undue haste, against adventurism, seeing the dangers involved in premature and ill-prepared action. Lenin’s revolutionary optimism was always tempered with a healthy dose of realism, based upon a sober-minded appraisal of the situation. It would never have crossed his mind to launch the slogan of guerrilla war by a minority, as later became the fashion and led to defeat after defeat, especially in Latin America.

Like any other tactic, guerrilla war was always strictly subordinated to the needs of the mass movement of the working class. This did not mean that the Bolsheviks neglected work among other layers, such as the students and the peasants. On the contrary, the RSDLP attempted to conduct work among the peasants. Piatnitsky reports that in only eight months in 1906 the party’s illegal printing press in Moscow published four leaflets directed at the peasants with a total run of 140,000 copies, in addition to a further 20,000 copies of the party’s agrarian programme. The goal was still armed insurrection:

In 1906 and the first half of 1907, the entire work of the Moscow organisation was carried on with the approaching mass proletarian and peasant movement which would culminate in an armed struggle against tsarism. (O. Piatnitsky, Zapiski Bol’shevika, p. 106.)

Nevertheless, the Party’s influence among the peasants remained weak. Social Democratic propaganda found only a feeble echo among the peasants right up to 1917. The great majority of peasants, insofar as they possessed any political allegiance, looked to one or other of the ‘Narodnik’ parties – either the SRs, or, to an even greater extent, the Trudoviks. It was this layer that the autocracy was attempting to ensnare with promises of an agrarian reform. The First Congress of the Social Revolutionaries was held from 29 December, 1905, to 4 January, 1906. The political line was the usual eclectic mixture of utopian socialism (the idealisation of the peasant commune, the obshchina which would allegedly allow Russia to bypass capitalism and establish ‘socialism in one country’ in defiance of the laws of social and economic development) and ultra-leftism. The SRs had the illusion that the peasant commune could serve as the basis for socialism in Russia, not realising that it was the basis of tsarist autocracy, as the Trudovik Kerensky points out:

In demanding the ‘nationalisation’ or ‘socialisation’ of the land, the Narodniks had been certain that the peasants would easily shift from the communal to the cooperative system of land tenure. In actual fact, however, the peasant commune of that time had very little in common with the ideal commune as imagined by the Slavophiles and Narodniks. From the administrative standpoint, the commune was very convenient for police control – as Witte put it, for keeping the peasants under surveillance like little children – and also for collecting taxes, since defaulters were paid for by the rest of the commune on a pro rata basis. The authorities turned the commune into a bulwark of economic backwardness and gradually drained it of its vitality. Furthermore, compulsory membership in the commune was always a sore point among the peasants themselves. (A. Kerensky, Memoirs, p. 96.)

The tactical questions that concentrated the attention of Lenin and his collaborators at the time – boycott of elections, guerrilla warfare, etc. – were closely linked to the perspective for a revival of the revolution, and the possibility that the peasant movement might give an impulse to the movement of the workers in the cities. The apparently theoretical discussions at the Fourth Congress on the agrarian question were but a pale reflection of a stark reality. The peasants’ rebellion was on the upswing. Month by month the violent outbursts in the villages increased in number and intensity. For all these reasons, the agrarian question inevitably occupied a central importance in the activities of the State Duma.

In order to bring about the complete liquidation of the revolutionary movement, tsarism combined murderous repression with deceit, by offering a new electoral law which slightly increased the franchise, while still excluding more than 50 per cent of the adult population – women, all under 25 years, those in military service, workers in small factories, landless peasants, etc. On 23 April, the new electoral norms were published. The franchise was blatantly rigged in favour of the landlords. In the curiae, there was one landlord elector for every 2,000 population, while the ratio for the peasants was 1:7,000, and for the workers 1:90,000. In Perm province, for example, one landlord vote was equivalent to that of 28 peasants and 56 workers. The voting system was also indirect, with a complicated system of voting commissions (curiae) set up to ‘represent’ the different social estates – workers, peasants, landlords – voting for ‘electors’, who would then elect the members of the State Duma. In his memoirs, Kerensky says this about the electoral laws:

The new electoral law was complex, and it violated every canon of democratic procedure. Deputies were elected by provincial colleges consisting of delegates chosen separately by four groups (curias): landowners, the urban population, peasants, and, in a few districts, factory workers. One mandatory delegate to the Duma was elected by each curia, and the rest of the deputies were elected by the provincial college as a whole. (Ibid., p. 84.)

While the feudal landlords ruled the roost, the peasants were given a relatively privileged position vis-à-vis the workers. In typical Bonapartist fashion, the regime tried to lean on the peasantry (especially the rich, or ‘strong’ peasant) against the working class. The peasant representation in the Duma was therefore relatively high: around 45 per cent of the seats. This reflected the autocracy’s awareness of its own social isolation, and its overwhelming desire to gain a solid base of mass support in the more conservative layers of the rural population. For as long as anyone could remember, the Tsar had posed as the ‘Little Father’ – the Batyushka – of the People, an illusion which was traditionally shared by the Russian muzhik, who, in his hour of need, would sigh; ‘Bog vysoko; Tsar’ daleko’ (‘God is in heaven, and the Tsar is far away’). The diaries of Nicholas II show that he himself was convinced that the ‘People’ (i.e., the peasants) adored him – right up to the moment when they overthrew him and his dynasty. 9 January, 1905, drew a line of blood between the autocracy and the urban working class. The dream of erecting an impregnable bulwark around the monarchy in the shape of a loyal class of small peasant proprietors persisted and formed the very soul and substance of the Stolypin reaction. But by giving a voice – however distorted and tremulous – to the peasantry in the Duma, the autocracy unwittingly created a stick for its own back and provided a lever for the revolutionary socialist wing to exploit.

In addition to a rigged franchise, the rights of the Duma were severely restricted. Parts of the budget could not be discussed. Loans and currency were exclusively the competence of the Minister of Finance. The army and navy, of course, were under the personal control of the Tsar. The Council of Ministers, hitherto nominated by the monarch, was broadened to include an equal number of elected ministers, and, under the title of senate, was turned into an upper chamber with equal rights to the Duma! This gigantic swindle was the handiwork of Count Witte, who further displayed his usefulness to the Tsar by negotiating a sizeable loan from France.