The ancient Romans had a chilling way of describing the fate of conquered peoples: ‘Vae victis!’ – ‘Woe to the vanquished!’ The fate of the working people in every defeated revolution in history completely confirms this grim observation. The Russian revolution of 1905 was no exception. The regime sensed that the immediate danger had passed and stepped up repression. The democratic promises of October were rapidly consigned to the rubbish bin. A bloody regime of terror was everywhere unleashed – in the Baltic states, Poland, the Caucasus. Punitive expeditions spread terror through the villages, killing, raping, and burning houses.
Liberally plied with vodka, the Cossacks committed terrible atrocities against the peasant population. Women and girls were raped in front of their menfolk. Hundreds of peasants were hanged from the trees without any pretence of a trial. In all it has been estimated that the tsarist regime executed 15,000 people, shot or wounded at least 20,000, and deported or exiled 45,000, between mid-October and the opening of the first State Duma in April 1906. (O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924, p. 202.)
For months on end, the orgy of reaction raged on unabated. By April 1906, apart from the 15,000 who had been shot or hanged, a further 75,000 were languishing in tsarist prisons. Special trains manned by tsarist execution squads advanced slowly along the Moscow-Kazan railway line into the frozen depths of Siberia, exacting a frightful revenge on the workers. The Bolsheviks suffered proportionately more than other trends from this repression, as they had the greater number of militant revolutionary workers. Their organisation among the Siberian railway workers was virtually wiped out. Among those murdered was AI Popov, central committee member and leader of the revolutionary movement in Siberia. The following lines, written to his mother from the death cell, movingly convey the spirit of these fighters:
I leave this world of darkness and repression with complete peace of mind, giving way to other, younger forces. If we have achieved little, they will finish off what we started. I die fully convinced that our bodies will provide a firm foundation upon which will arise a better future for my long-suffering native land. (Quoted in Istoriya KPSS, vol. 2, p. 164.)
Under the hammer blows of reaction, the Social Democratic organisations were gradually being pulverised. Many activists were arrested or killed. Others had to go underground, change town, or flee abroad. In order to hasten the strangling of the revolution, the government utilised the services of special auxiliaries recruited from the ranks of the lumpen-proletariat, that “passively rotting scum” as Marx called them, which on more than one occasion has furnished material for the purposes of counter-revolution. The Black Hundred gangs spread terror in the villages, usually in the form of anti-Semitic pogroms.
Kerensky, who at that time was practising as a lawyer and occasionally acted for the defence of accused revolutionaries, recalls that:
Reprisals in the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution went on from late 1906 to the early part of 1909. After peasant and other uprisings had been crushed by punitive expeditions, it was a question of hunting out the remnants of revolutionary organisations – gangs, as they were called. The victims were handed over to military tribunals. It was a campaign of systematic judicial terror.
Many political cases were judged by district military tribunals. The chief military prosecutor at that time, General Pavlov, was a merciless man who expected the judges to fulfil their ‘duty’ without paying any attention to the arguments of the defence. Pavlov did not last long. Expecting attempts on his life, he took every precaution. He never left the Main Military Court building, where he had an apartment with a garden surrounded by a tall fence. That did not save him. He fell victim to a terrorist’s bullet in his own garden. But individual terrorism is impotent against the state. One reactionary official is replaced by another. The repression is further intensified.
A particularly savage revenge was inflicted on the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia, where the rising of the workers and peasants against the German landlords had a ferocious character. Starting in December, in the course of a six-month campaign, punitive expeditions killed 1,200 people, destroyed tens of thousands of homes, and flogged thousands of workers and peasants. At the end of 1906 and the beginning of 1907 the so-called Tukum Republic trial was held in Riga. Fifteen dragoons had been killed during an uprising in Tukum in 1905. Kerensky, who was one of the defence counsels, recalls what happened. A certain General Koshelev, one of the special military judges in the Baltic provinces, presided over the trial. He was a sadist who had a habit of studying pornographic photographs in court during the hearing of cases in which the accused could be sentenced to death. At the trial it soon became obvious that Koshelev was not interested in trying to establish the truth, but only in selecting 15 of the defendants to be killed as a retaliation for the dead dragoons. All 15 were hanged. The Tsar was delighted at the results of his Baltic expedition and commended his officers for “acting splendidly”. (A. Kerensky, Memoirs: Russia and History’s Turning Point, p. 76.)
Despite everything, it took fully 18 months to liquidate the revolutionary movement. It proved extremely difficult to extinguish the flame of revolt. No sooner had order been restored in one area, than the movement flared up elsewhere. New layers were constantly entering into struggle while others were abandoning the arena, exhausted and defeated. The general picture that was emerging was still unclear, and remained so throughout the course of 1906. At the start of 1906, the strike movement, though less than the last quarter of 1905, was still considerable. January-March saw 260,000 workers on strike. Significantly, two-thirds of these conflicts were political strikes. In the spring of 1906, there were symptoms of a new revolutionary upturn. The second quarter saw a further upswing of the strike movement – 479,000 workers out – more than even the summer of 1905. Again, there were both economic and political strikes. And not all of them ended in defeat. Out of 222,000 involved in economic strikes, 86,000 ended in victory, 58,000 ended in compromise, and only 78,000 were defeated. As late as the summer of 1906, it appeared that the strike wave, far from slackening, was gaining in intensity. In 1906 as a whole there were more than one million workers involved in strike action.
Did the December defeat in Moscow signify the decisive turning point in the destiny of the revolution? Was the general line of the movement ascending or descending? With the wisdom of hindsight, the answer seems obvious, but this was by no means the case at the time. The movement of the masses was far from uniform. The villages lagged behind the towns, and only began to move on a big scale in the course of 1906. The bloody repression in the villages did not prevent the emergence of new peasant movements – Saratov, Chernigorsk, Kharkov, Mogilev, one after the other entered the fray. One factor was precisely the return of sacked workers to the villages. The proletarianised ex-peasant, educated in the hard school of factory life and steeled by the experience of strikes and insurrection, served as a spur to the movement in the villages, providing the necessary leaven to his rural brothers and sisters. With the wisdom of hindsight (the cheapest of all forms of wisdom), these were only the after-echo of a movement which had already passed its peak. But this was by no means evident to those who were actively participating in the struggle at the time. Above all the most consistently revolutionary wing of the movement represented by the Bolsheviks were in no hurry to sign the death certificate of the revolution.
The working class also had other reserves. The national question, as foreseen by Lenin, rapidly came to the fore and acquired an extreme intensity. The burning sense of national injustice that had long smouldered beneath the surface burst into flame in Poland, Finland, the Caucasus, and the Baltic states. All this led Lenin to believe that the revolution had not yet exhausted its potential. To determine the precise nature of the situation, its inner dynamics and perspective, was of decisive importance for determining the correct tactics and slogans needed to preserve and strengthen the links between the masses and the proletarian vanguard. But this task, never straightforward, is rendered a thousand times more difficult in the heat of a revolution, when the moods of the masses can change with lightning speed. It was precisely this question – ‘through what stage are we passing?’ – which provoked the sharpest conflicts in the ranks of the revolutionaries in this period. Among the working class there were contradictory moods. Could the revolutionary wave in the countryside ignite again the movement in the towns? To this question no clear answer could be given. Lenin certainly regarded it as a possibility and worked out his tactics accordingly.