The Moscow Soviet was formed on 21 November and at its first meeting there were 180 delegates representing about 80,000 workers. By the beginning of December the revolution had begun to penetrate the minds of the peasants in the army. Under the hammer blows of decisive military defeats – the battles of Yalu, Shalo and Mukden, and the fall of Port Arthur – in the war against Japan, and the influence of the general revolutionary movement, sections of the armed forces and the villages were now entering a state of ferment. Huge areas of European Russia were affected, especially the central “Black Earth” zone stretching from the Ukraine to the southern Ural mountains. However, the consciousness of the rural masses lagged substantially behind that of the towns and this proved a fatal weakness undermining the St Petersburg Soviet and the December, Moscow uprising. Although a wave of peasant discontent spread through the armed forces, the government was able to contain the mutinies that did occur. This confirmed that a major weakness of the 1905 Revolution was the lack of a firm base amongst the peasants; that the peasant-soldier revolts were not on a sufficient scale to make a fundamental difference to the outcome.
With the mutiny of the Rostov regiment in Moscow on 2 December, and the arrest of the St Petersburg Soviet on 3 December, the initiative passed to the workers of Moscow. However, the local Bolsheviks hesitated, and when the news that the soldiers of the regiment had seized weapons and thrown their officers out of the barracks, reached the Moscow Committee, it decided not to change its meeting agenda, and continued with the scheduled discussion on the agrarian question! This inaction was particularly reprehensible as the Rostov regiment, which held over half the machine guns then available in Moscow, was welcoming agitators, and representatives of the sapper regiment which guarded one of the Moscow arsenals, had approached the Soviet. The faint-heartedness of the Moscow Committee in not contacting the Rostov regiment, failing to attempt to bring it out of its barracks and link it with the Moscow Soviet, meant that in a couple of days the mutineers were demoralised, disarmed and confined to their barracks. This defeat effectively eliminated the prospect of organised units going over to the side of the workers. 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 that time the soldiers’ revolt had been crushed[68].
On the other hand, the workers in the factories of Moscow were impatient for action, and on 7 December, the Soviet voted unanimously for a general political strike. Under the circumstances, no matter what the subjective intentions, this was a vote for an uprising. The general strike began the same day as the decision was taken, involving more than 100,000 workers, increasing to 150,000 on the following day. On 7 and 8 December mass meetings and street demonstrations occurred in Moscow with isolated clashes with the police. The Moscow Soviet published six issues of a daily paper from 7 to 12 of December, the Moscow Izvestia Sovetov Rabochikh Deputatov (Bulletin of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies) which attempted to draw wider layers of the population into struggle, but made no direct mention of an armed uprising[69]. Only after the fighting had actually begun did Izvestia begin to give instructions to the fighting squads.
The Governor of Moscow – General Dubasov – with only 1,500 soldiers on whose loyalty he could count was, initially, confined to the centre of Moscow. Outside of this area the city was, de facto, in the hands of the Soviet. But Dubasov had been able to disarm and confine to barracks, those elements of the army on whose loyalty he could not rely. He also had a great stroke of luck. On the night of 7 December, the committee that linked the revolutionary parties, including the two foremost Bolshevik leaders, was arrested, leaving the movement overwhelmed by events. Dubasov was also lucky that the only railway line in and out of Moscow not brought to a halt by the strike, was the Nikolai line leading to St Petersburg, and which would bring the Semyovovsky regiment to his assistance. Revolutionaries in St Petersburg, lacked the arms, explosives, and expertise to break the Petersburg-Moscow rail link, and reinforcements loyal to the Tsar were successfully transferred to Moscow[70].
On 8 December, a mass meeting was broken up by the police and arrests made. The Soviet did not react because the Bolsheviks continued to wait for the troops to come over, but it was already too late for that. At this point, taking advantage of the hesitation, the counter-revolution struck back. On 9 December, a crowd was attacked by dragoons, and the building used for RSDLP meetings was surrounded by troops and machine-gunned. In the course of these clashes there were many injured, killed and arrested. On that evening, unorganised street crowds spontaneously set up the first barricades, and hostilities began in earnest. But by December 15 the superiority of the government forces was complete, and on December 17 the Semyovovsky regiment crushed the Presnya District, the last stronghold of the uprising[71].
Armed uprisings were not confined to Moscow[72]. There were, in fact, a whole series of armed uprisings – in Kharkov, Donbas, Yekaterinoslav, Rostov-on-Don, the Northern Caucasus, Nizhni-Novgorod and other centres. The national question also caused uprisings, in Georgia and the Baltic states in particular. There were uprisings too along the railway lines in the Donetsk region and Siberia where battles occurred at several stations, attracting the support of peasants in the surrounding districts. But the Moscow uprising did not succeed in re-arousing the proletariat of St Petersburg, which meant that the government could concentrate its forces on crushing the workers of Moscow, and then put down the local movements one by one. Despite being the starting point of the October strike, Moscow had been overshadowed by St Petersburg during October and November. The Moscow uprising in December 1905 was largely a matter of a few, small, lightly-armed guerrilla groups. The Moscow Bolsheviks were too late when it came to taking advantage of the mutinous movement in the garrison. In the course of the summer of 1906 the peasant outbreaks did, again, assume mass proportions but by that time the backbone of the working class movement had been broken so the peasant revolts could be put down one by one accompanied by mass hangings, the flogging of all the males in the village, rape, and police instigated pogroms of the Jews.
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Vasil’ev, M., Proletarian Revolution, Moscow 1919, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p169 – 170
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Pokrovsky, M.N., The Year 1905 – A History of the Revolutionary Movement, State Publishing House, Moscow, 1925, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p172. [Pokrovsky was a Party historian loyal to the Stalinist faction. It is now recognised that his history of 1905 was the commencement of the re-writing of events to play down the role of Trotsky – Deutscher, footnote, p135 The Prophet Armed]
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Vasil’ev, M., Proletarian Revolution, Moscow 1919, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p169 – 170
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Lenin, V.I., Lessons of the Moscow Uprising, Aug 1906, CW 11:171-178
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Glatter, P. and Ruff, P., op cit p166-167