By the end of October the ferment in the villages had reached new levels, with 37 per cent of European Russia affected, especially the central ‘Black Earth’ zone, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. The wave of peasant discontent in turn spread to the armed forces. There was a series of mutinies in the army and navy, which underlined the importance of work among the soldiers and sailors. Alongside the legal mass work, the Bolsheviks also stepped up the material preparations for armed insurrection. Krassin was in charge of the military side of the work, penetrating the army and organising fighting groups. The local committees established specialised units to obtain arms. This work was stepped up in the autumn with the creation of underground bomb factories and arms dumps. Once again, Gorky played a key role in raising money for this work, which was partly funded by what was known as ‘expropriations’, or raids on banks conducted by armed groups under Bolshevik control. The objective conditions for armed insurrection were rapidly maturing.
Throughout the autumn, all eyes were fixed on St. Petersburg, the storm centre of the movement. But the workers in the capital, who bore the brunt of the conflict from January until November, were at the end of their tether. After the issuing of the October Manifesto, the liberal employers, who had previously appeared sympathetic to the revolutionary movement, and even paid the wages of striking workers, finally came out in their true colours. On 31 October, the St. Petersburg Soviet called a general strike around the struggle for the eight-hour day. But the bosses put up stiff resistance and the strike ended in failure. On 12 November, the Soviet called off the strike. This was the turning point. The October general strike really represented the last gasp of the movement in St. Petersburg. The November strike in Petersburg involved even bigger numbers of workers than in October. But this was really the last desperate effort of a working class gravely weakened by months of struggle. Sensing that the movement was beginning to run out of steam, the employers organised a lockout, while the police and troops moved to break up workers’ meetings by force. The November lockout revealed that the bosses were aware of the real situation. There were widespread repression, sackings and arrests. Fearing that the movement would disintegrate into a series of guerrilla disputes which could be crushed one by one, the St. Petersburg Soviet decided to beat a tactical retreat and, on 12 November, after a tense debate, called off the strike, in order to withdraw in a united and organised fashion.
The defection of the bourgeois liberals tipped the balance in favour of the reactionary camp. General Trepov was now virtual dictator of Russia. Fearing ‘anarchy’, the liberals clung to his coattails. By 26 November, the regime felt strong enough to arrest Khrustalyov-Nosar on the premises of the Soviet Executive. The Soviet responded with a Financial Manifesto, written by Parvus, calling for the non-payment of taxes and withdrawal of bank deposits to hasten the financial crisis of the regime. Even at this point, fresh new layers were entering the struggle every day: janitors, doormen, cooks, domestic servants, floor polishers, waiters, laundresses, public bath attendants, policemen, Cossacks – even the odd detective. Society had been stirred to the depths. But the increasing radicalisation of the formerly politically inert mass disguised the fact that the ‘heavy battalions’ of labour were now almost exhausted. The December strike in Petersburg was far less unanimous than in November, involving at most two-thirds of the workers of the capital. This fact indicated that the high point of the movement in Petersburg had been reached, and the revolutionary tide was beginning to ebb. On 2 December there was a mutiny of the Rostov regiment in Moscow. The following day, the St. Petersburg Soviet was arrested, including its chairman, Leon Trotsky.
The initiative now passed to the workers of Moscow. The mutiny of the Rostov regiment gave rise to hope that the garrison might come over. But the local Bolsheviks hesitated and, seeing that the movement did not spread, the troops quickly lost heart. In a couple of days the mutiny was crushed. This defeat depressed the soldiers and considerably reduced the prospect of them going over to the side of the workers. On the other hand, the mood in the factories of Moscow was reaching fever pitch. The workers were impatient for action. On 4 December, the Moscow Soviet passed a motion congratulating the soldiers on their uprising and expressing the hope that they would come over to the side of the people. But by the time the ink was dry, the soldiers’ revolt had been crushed. Lenin had repeatedly expressed his anxiety about a premature uprising. He recognised that the party’s forces were still weak, the fighting squads too unprepared, to take on the full might of the state. Above all, the massive reserves of the peasantry had only begun to enter the field of battle. More than once he expressed the hope that the final showdown between the workers and the regime should be put off till the spring. But Lenin understood very well that the revolution cannot be directed like an orchestra under a conductor’s baton. Krupskaya vividly conveys Lenin’s attitude: “In answer to a question about the timing of the uprising he said: ‘I would put the uprising off till the spring, but we shan’t be asked anyway’.” (NK Krupskaya, O Vladimirye Ilyiche, vol. 1, p. 132.)
About the Moscow uprising there has been a great deal of mythology, particularly created by the Stalinists. It is said that the initiative for the uprising belonged to the Bolsheviks. In reality, the Moscow uprising did not take place according to a definite plan. There was no direct order from the Central Committee. The initiative came from below – from the workers themselves. At the first Conference of fighting organisations of the RSDLP held in November 1906, a year after the uprising, the Central Committee’s representative, I.A. Sammer, dismissed the idea that the Central Committee had organised the whole thing, complaining that some comrades:
[H]ave too mechanical a conception of the circumstances which gave rise to the December uprising in Moscow and are painting too bold a picture of the role of the Central Committee in the calling of this uprising. The Central Committee, it seems, pressed a button and the insurrection burst forth. If the CC hadn’t done it, the uprising would not have taken place!
The leadership was, in fact, overwhelmed by events. Radov, the Bolshevik leader, later confessed in a moment of truth that the forces at the disposal of the Party were woefully unprepared: “We must now frankly acknowledge that in that respect our entire organisation and in part we, members of the Central Committee, were completely unprepared.”
That there was widespread support among the Moscow workers for the proposed action is not open to serious doubt. The Moscow workers, in contrast to the workers of Petersburg, were newly entering into the fray and impatient for action. A steady series of factory meetings pronounced for an insurrection. The mood of the factories affected the Moscow Soviet. The workers were pressing for action. The factories were in a tense mood of expectation, aware of the approach of the decisive moment. Zemlyachka recalls that when the Bolshevik local leaders got up to speak in the Soviet, the question was no longer in doubt; “it was written on the workers’ faces”. (Quoted in Istoriya KPSS, vol. 2, p. 136, pp. 141-42 and p. 137.) Only the factory delegates, wielding a red card, had a decisive vote. The parties, as elsewhere, had a consultative vote. When the vote was taken, a forest of calloused hands was raised, in favour of a general political strike on 7 December. The workers’ decision was unanimous. Under the circumstances, everyone knew that this was a vote for an uprising. The Menshevik right wing had reservations about the uprising, because of its effect on the liberals, but swallowed hard and decided to support it. The pressure from below proved irresistible. In fact, although the initiative came from the Bolshevik workers, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries also participated in the uprising. On 5 December, the Mensheviks proposed a general strike of the railway workers of Moscow. The vote in the Soviet was seconded by the railway workers, the postal workers, and the Polish workers in Moscow.
An attempt was made to organise solidarity action in Petersburg. The newly reconstituted St. Petersburg soviet called on the workers and peasants to second the Moscow general strike. Summoning up their last ounce of strength, the workers of St. Petersburg attempted to support their brothers and sisters in Moscow. On 8 December more than 83,000 in St. Petersburg came out. The railway workers also called a general strike. However, the attempt to organise such action in Petersburg did not achieve the desired result. The exhaustion produced by many months of uninterrupted struggle was too great. The workers had come out three times in nine weeks and were now tired of strikes. Against them was arraigned the might of the state and they had lost confidence in their own strength. After the failure of the strike, support from Petersburg was limited to the sending of arms. But it was already too late.
The initial spark for the uprising appears to have been a government provocation – troops were sent to disperse a couple of workers’ meetings. There were demonstrations and clashes between soldiers and militiamen. The first barricades were thrown up, and hostilities began in earnest. On 7 December the general strike began, involving more than 100,000 workers, increasing to 150,000 on the following day. On 7 and 8 December there were mass meetings and street demonstrations in Moscow with isolated clashes with the police and a general strike. The Moscow soviet published a daily paper, the Moscow Izvestiya, which attempted to draw the widest layers of the population into struggle. The leadership of the movement, however, showed itself to be unprepared for a decisive combat. There was vacillation at the decisive point when the general strike could have been converted into an armed insurrection. Meanwhile the regime was already preparing a counterstroke. On 8 December a mass meeting was broken up by the police and 37 people were arrested. Even then the Soviet did not react. In such circumstances, as Marx explained, indecision is fatal. In the words of the great French revolutionary, Danton, the first rule of insurrection is audacity, audacity and yet more audacity. In place of this there were vague calls in Izvestiya on 9 December “to continually preserve our forces in a state of extreme tension”. The Soviet was waiting for the troops to go over. There was in fact wavering among the troops but decisive action was needed for this to be translated into action. The workers instinctively tried to approach the troops, but fraternisation was not enough. Mere propaganda was a poor substitute for physical struggle, as Lenin put it. At this point, ‘propaganda of the deed’ was on the order of the day. Taking advantage of this hesitation the counter-revolution struck back on 9 December. In the course of the clashes there were many injured, killed, and arrested.
Only now did the masses realise the need for decisive action. There were not enough arms to go around, but the rebels counted on the support of the population and hoped that a sufficient number of the troops would go over to tip the balance in their favour. The workers’ militias immediately set about energetically disarming not only policemen but also soldiers to obtain weapons. The strike turned into an armed uprising, the masses participated in barricade building and clashes with police and troops. That the Bolshevik leaders were unsure of the capability of the Moscow leadership is shown by the decision of the Central Committee to send AI Rykov and MF Vladimirsky to Moscow to take charge of the situation. The fact that there were mistakes made is revealed by Lenin’s later comments. Answering Plekhanov’s famous remarks that “They should not have taken to arms!” Lenin said:
On the contrary, we should have taken to arms more resolutely, energetically and aggressively: we should have explained to the masses that it was impossible to confine ourselves to a peaceful strike, that a fearless and relentless armed fight was indispensable. (V.I. Lenin, Selected Works, English edition, Moscow 1047, vol. 1, p. 446.)
Only when the fighting had actually begun did Izvestiya give clear instructions to the fighting squads: “Don’t act in a mass, act as small units of 3 to 4 men, not more!” It also recommended against setting up barricades.
Don’t occupy fortified positions! Troops will always be able to take them or simply smash them with artillery! Let our fortresses be the alleyways and courtyards and all those places from which it is easy to shoot and easy to get away from! (Istoriya KPSS, vol. 2, p. 142.)
Workers were also advised to keep away from mass meetings. “We now need to fight and only to fight.”
Under the new conditions of street fighting, partisan detachments, linked to the mass movement and the general strike, clearly played a key role. The police and troops found themselves confronted with an invisible and omnipresent enemy. The great advantage was that the fighting squads, though small, enjoyed the support of the masses. On 9 and 10 December the first barricades were erected. Following the advice of the Soviet, the insurgents did not attempt to defend the barricades, but they served a useful purpose in slowing down the troops and hindering the deployment of cavalry. The soldiers were enveloped in a hostile environment where every block of flats was an enemy fortress; every doorway and street corner, a potential ambush. The soldiers and police would dismantle the barricades at night only to find them rebuilt by morning. Despite their overwhelming superiority in numbers and fire-power, the troops frequently found themselves in difficulties. More than once, the authorities must have held their breath at the sight of a city of one million inhabitants, the great majority composed of ‘the enemy’, locked in combat with an army of partially demoralised and unreliable troops. The Moscow proletarians fought like tigers. The fighting was particularly ferocious in the Presnya district, the centre of the textile industry. The peak of the armed insurrection was on 11 December. At one point the Moscow authorities were sufficiently alarmed to appeal for reinforcements. The government, still fearing an uprising in St. Petersburg, at first sent none.
Despite all this, the final outcome was never in doubt. Unless the troops came over, the workers were hopelessly outnumbered and out-gunned. The technical military side was woefully inadequate. In early December there were only 2,000 armed men and a further 4,000 militia men, but without arms. Of these, between 250 and 300 were in the Bolshevik militia, between 200 and 250 were Mensheviks, and about 150 SRs. In addition, the students, telegraph workers and other non-party groups also had their own militias. There were not enough arms to go around but they counted on the support of the population, and, hopefully, also of the troops. The militias had been set up with the main aim of preventing pogroms, a concrete question involving defensive struggle, and they were ill prepared for the task of going over to the offensive. To add to the problems, on 7 December the entire leadership was arrested. From the beginning it was clear the movement was poorly prepared and largely improvised. The fighting squads tended to concentrate on defending their own areas, instead of going onto the offensive. Despite the heroism of the Moscow workers, lack of arms, poor coordination, and absence of military skill began to tell at last. Once the barricades had been built, the unarmed populace could only play the role of onlookers. Their passive support boosted the morale of the fighting units and enabled them to hold out for longer than anyone had the right to expect.
On 13 December, the Moscow Mensheviks proposed calling a halt to the insurrection, but the Bolsheviks, under pressure from the workers, decided to continue. It is a debatable question to what extent the leaders were actually deciding events. The militias of not only the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, but also the SRs, were in no mood to give up the fight. As a result, the Bolshevik and Menshevik centres issued a joint declaration, Support the Moscow uprising!, appealing to the working class of Russia not to allow the government to put down the insurrection. But the situation had already decisively turned against the insurrection. The failure of the movement in Petersburg enabled the tsarist government to concentrate its forces on Moscow. The arrival of the Semyonovsky regiment on 15 December tipped the scales decisively against the insurrection. The irregular fighting forces of the insurgents were in no position to take on a frontal assault by the regular army. By 16 December, only one district, Presnya, still remained in rebel hands. That day the Soviet executive committee voted to end the strike. As an act of defiance, the Presnya Social Democratic district committee voted to end the strike only on the evening of 18 December. The gesture was to no avail. In the Presnya district there were about 350 to 400 armed militia men and 700 to 800 in the reserve – without arms – at the high point of the struggle. Red Presnya was bombarded into submission.
For two days and nights the Prokhorov cotton mill and the Schmidt furniture factories, which the workers had turned into fortresses with the support of the left-wing owners, were pulverised by artillery fire. The whole area was engulfed by flames. By nightfall of 17 December, Presnya fell to the government forces. Overwhelmed by superior forces, the Moscow leadership was compelled to call off the fighting on the 18th. On the following day, the general strike was also called off in order to prevent the further destruction of the cadres and to preserve all that was possible of the movement. The Moscow rising was at an end. The death toll, according to the Moscow Medical Union, was 1,059, of whom 137 were women and 86 children. The big majority were ordinary citizens. Casualties among fighting men on both sides were amazingly few. Only 35 soldiers were killed, including five officers. Then began the bloody chapter of mass arrests, shootings and deportations. Prisoners were shot down in cold blood. Workers’ children were taken to the police stations and beaten without mercy. Anyone who had sympathised with the workers’ cause was in danger. Nikolai Schmidt, the young manufacturer who had allowed the workers to use his factory as a base, suffered a tragic fate. Arrested after the uprising, he was barbarously treated by the police. They took him to the factory to show him their handiwork, pointing triumphantly to the bodies of the slaughtered workers. He was later murdered in prison.