The strike wave which gripped nearly all industrial areas throughout the spring and summer, took on an increasingly political character, but the end of July saw a sudden drop in the urban strike wave. During the summer there was a sharp decline in strikes in big factories, but a gradual increase in strikes amongst the most downtrodden and oppressed layers; workers in the smaller factories such as bakeries, brickyards, domestic servants, sawmills and slaughterhouses. A new impulse came from Moscow with a dispute at one print-works over whether the type-setters should be paid for setting punctuation marks. “The Bolshevik Moscow Committee immediately strained every nerve to turn the print strike into a general strike”[27].
The Committee was successful, the strike rapidly spread to other print-shops and factories and, within a few days, had become general throughout the city, spreading to the railways in and around Moscow, which started to grind to a halt on 6 October. The railways were the arteries of Russian industry and with their stoppage all major industrial activity, through necessity or sympathy, ceased. On 9 October a national conference of striking railway workers was held in St Petersburg where demands were made for an 8-hour day, civil liberties, amnesty for political prisoners and a Constituent Assembly. The strike movement was beginning to transform itself into a struggle to deprive the state of some of its power and give it to the people.
By 10 October, the entire Moscow region was in the grip of the strike which spread inexorably outwards along the railway lines in all directions, reaching the capital on the 13th. On that day the Mensheviks in Petersburg called for the creation of a revolutionary workers’ council. Delegates were elected on the basis of one delegate for every 500 industrial workers[28]. Small workshops were meant to combine, but numerical norms were not observed too strictly; in some cases delegates represented only a hundred or two hundred workers, sometimes even fewer:
“The Soviet … an organisation which … could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organisational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self control – and most important of all, which could be brought out from underground within twenty-four hours. … In order to have authority in the eyes of the masses on the very day it came into being, such an organisation had to be based on the broadest representation. … Since the production process was the sole link between the proletarian masses who, in the organisational sense, were still quite inexperienced, representation had to be adapted to the factories and plants”[29].
By mid-October, three quarters of a million railwaymen were on strike. On 16 October Finland joined in. The movement then spread swiftly to the post offices, telephones, telegrams, and professional workers. This compelled the Tsar, after consulting with his ministers, to issue the October 17 Manifesto. It was a successful ploy and on 21 October the general strike came to an end[30],[31]. Not only had the strike wave spread to include ever larger numbers of urban workers, the peasantry was slowly being drawn into such revolutionary activity as burning the landlord’s house, sharing out his grain stocks, etc. As would be expected, the peasant movement was both uneven geographically and lagged behind the town in revolutionary consciousness so their actions tended to be confined to their locality. Dimitrii Sverchkov has described how, for example, during the railway strike, white-collar staff often left their station by the last train owing to the danger of reprisals from the local peasants who saw the strike as an obstacle to their products reaching the towns[32].
At its peak, the St Petersburg Soviet gathered together 562 deputies from a total of 147 factories (the majority were metal workers, and these played the decisive role), [34] from workshops, 32 from the printing and paper industries, 16 from trade unions and 12 from the shop workers. The Executive Committee was formed on 17 October and consisted of 31 persons – 22 deputies and nine representatives of parties (three each from the two SD factions, and three from the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs)). Sverchkov (a Bolshevik) reported that Trotsky, Sverchkov himself, Bogdan Mirzodzhanovich Knuniyants (member of the St Petersburg Bolshevik Committee and a former technological student) and Pyotr Aleksandrovich Zlydniev (left Menshevik, a worker in a large factory), formed the core leadership of the St Petersburg Soviet with Trotsky the undisputed ideological leader[33]. The Soviet chairman was a lawyer with links to the Mensheviks, Khrustalev-Nosar, an indecisive man who kept his position by balancing on top of the momentous forces that the Soviet represented. Trotsky, Sverchkov and Zlydniev were later chosen as a trio to replace Khrustalev-Nosar after his arrest, but the leading political figure in the Soviet was undoubtedly Leon Trotsky[34].
Here was an extremely broad, democratic and flexible organ of struggle which gradually increased its representation and authority. Through the Soviet, the workers took over the printing presses to make use of the newly-gained freedom of expression, enabling the Soviet to publish its own newspaper, Izvestiya Sovieta Rabochikh Deputatov (Soviet of Workers’ Deputies’ News). It also formed an armed workers’ militia, initially for protection against pogroms, and even arrested (and in some cases executed) unpopular police officers. The Soviet represented practically the whole of the Petersburg proletariat but it was not all-inclusive. It did not, for example, allow representation to bourgeois-liberal or non-proletarian unions such as the ‘Union of Unions’, a federation of organisations and associations representing architects, doctors, economists, journalists, lawyers, professors, teachers and the intelligentsia generally[35],[36].
St Petersburg, was both the Russian capital and industrial centre, and as such was the national focus of the events of the last three months of 1905. In St Petersburg itself the Soviet was the lynchpin for these events. It was the greatest workers’ organisation ever seen in Russia – unique even by Western standards – and served as the model for Moscow, Odessa, and more than 50 other towns and cities[37]. This purely urban, proletarian organisation was the natural organisational focus and form of the revolution, as would be confirmed in 1917:
“The Soviet of Workers’ Deputies … represented approximately 200,000 persons, principally factory and plant workers, and although its political influence, both direct and indirect, extended to a wider circle, very important strata of the proletariat (building workers, domestic servants, unskilled labourers, cab drivers) were scarcely or not at all represented. It cannot be doubted, however, that the Soviet represented the interests of the whole proletarian mass. … Among the proletarian masses, the political dominance of the Soviet in Petersburg found no opponents but only supporters”[38].
The name “workers’ government”, which both the workers and the bourgeois press gave to the Soviet, expressed the fact that the Soviet was, in essence, a workers’ government in embryo, and this idea was developed by Trotsky in his ToPR. The Soviet represented the nascent power and revolutionary strength of the working class districts, counterposed to the power still retained by the military-political monarchy. It developed a programme of political democracy (universal suffrage, republic, workers’ militia, etc.) in opposition to Tsarist autocracy, and was a vital phase in the political development of the Russian proletariat[39].
Trotsky wrote most of the proclamations and manifestos of the Soviet and gained enormous popularity with the workers. Lunacharsky, who was one of Lenin’s close collaborators at the time, recalled that Trotsky “held himself apart not only from us but from the Mensheviks too. His work was largely carried out in the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and together with Parvus he organised some sort of separate group which published a very militant and very well-edited small and cheap newspaper, The Beginning”. And, he added: “I remember someone saying in Lenin’s presence: ‘Khrustalev’s star is waning and now the strong man in the Soviet is Trotsky’. Lenin’s face darkened for a moment, then he said: ‘Well, Trotsky has earned it by his brilliant and unflagging work’”[40]. Trotsky was just 26 on 7 November, and became president of the St Petersburg Soviet on the 23rd.
Of all the RDSLP leaders, it was Trotsky who was most prominent in 1905:
“… Trotsky undoubtedly showed himself, despite his youth, to be the best prepared. Less than any of them did he bear the stamp of … émigré narrowness of outlook which, as I have said, even affected Lenin at that time. Trotsky understood better than all the others what it means to conduct the political struggle on a broad, national scale. He emerged from the revolution having acquired an enormous degree of popularity, whereas neither Lenin nor Martov had effectively gained any at all”[41].
The advent of legal conditions created huge opportunities for the party press. Ten days after the Tsar’s October Manifesto, the Bolsheviks published the first issue of the paper Novaya Zhizn (New Life), their public face until its closure in early December. Its circulation rose to 80,000, a significant achievement for a party which only a few months earlier had been underground.
Trotsky had even greater success. On 13 November, in alliance with the St Petersburg Mensheviks, he took over the liberal paper Ruskaya Gazeta (Russian Gazette), changed the name to Nachalo (The Beginning) and turned it into a mass revolutionary daily paper. Its circulation reached a staggering half million by December! Whilst, theoretically, the organ of the Mensheviks, replacing the now defunct Iskra, the Beginning was, in practice, controlled by Trotsky; and the paper’s political line had nothing in common with that of the Menshevik leadership, being in de facto agreement with Lenin and New Life on all important questions relating to the activities of the Soviet. Trotsky in St Petersburg, and Lenin from Switzerland, constantly warned that the liberals would inevitably sell out.
Trotsky’s literary successes would continue after 1905. Funded by AA Joffe and MI Skobolev (the son of a wealthy oil magnate) Trotsky, in exile in Vienna, would produce his own newspaper, Pravda, from October 1908 until 1912. At its peak this had a circulation of over 30,000, of which anything from 500 to 1,000 copies of each number reached St Petersburg. The 1910 conference of the RDSLP, dominated by the Mensheviks and those Bolsheviks who believed in party unity, had made it the organ of the party so even local Bolsheviks sold it, much to Lenin’s annoyance, as the circulation of his own paper, ProletarII, in Petersburg was numbered in the few dozen[42]. In April 1912 Lenin appropriated the name and published his own Pravda, effectively killing Trotsky’s paper[43].
Lenin, returned to Russia on 4 November, convinced of the need for the immediate re-unification of the two wings of the RDSLP. The rank and file members demanded it, knowing from their own experiences that continuing the split would severely damage the party’s standing with the factory workers and retard the party’s growth. Lenin wrote: “… it is now possible not only to urge unity, not only to obtain promises to unite, but actually to unite – by a simple decision of the majority of organised workers in both factions”[44].
Under the impact of the revolution, the St Petersburg Mensheviks were far to the left of the Menshevik leadership in exile, and had moved even further to the left under the influence of Trotsky. By the autumn, the members of the two factions in Russia had had established a joint committee despite the initial differences concerning attitudes to the Soviet. Both The Beginning and New Life defended the restoration of unity. The Bolshevik Central Committee (CC), with Lenin present, passed a unanimous resolution to the effect that the development of the revolution had removed the basis for the split in the RDSLP. The Bolshevik CC and the Menshevik Organisational Committee had also established a federative structure and were negotiating unification. Both fractions were to call their own conference preparing the way for a unity Congress as soon as possible[45].
Later, after his arrest, Trotsky questioned whether accepting representatives of bourgeois liberalism and bourgeois democracy would have added to the Soviet’s strength. His reply was unequivocal, the role played by the bourgeoisie showed that the Tsar had only to promise a parliament (Duma) (with what Lenin described as the “most reactionary constitution in Europe”), to placate their opposition. The Soviet was duty-bound to remain a class organisation, an organ of struggle. Bourgeois liberal deputies would be absolutely incapable of strengthening the Soviet:
“The liberal petty-bourgeoisie and capitalists tolerated the first phase of the revolution. They saw that the revolutionary movement shook the foundations of absolutism and forced it towards a constitutional agreement. They put up with strikes and demonstrations, adopted a cautiously friendly attitude towards revolutionaries. However, after the October 17 Manifesto, which offered a deal between the liberals and the authorities, it seemed to them that all that was left to do was to put it into effect. A continuing revolution threatened to undermine that possibility. From then on the proletarian masses, united by the October strike and organised in the soviet, put the liberals against the revolution by the very fact of their existence. The soviet, on the contrary, believed that the main struggle lay ahead. Under such circumstances any revolutionary co-operation between the capitalists and the proletariat was out of the question”[46].
It was this last point that separated the RDDPP from the ToPR. For all its revolutionary ardour, Lenin’s perspective was the establishment of a bourgeois-democratic state. Trotsky saw that the vanguard of the revolution was the urban proletariat, the natural organisational form of the revolution was the Soviet, and the proletariat once having seized power, would not restrict its demands to those of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
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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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Sverchkov, D., op. cit. p112
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p104
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Woods, A., op. cit., p210 – 216;
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Glatter, P. and Ruff, P., The Decisive Days, in Revolutionary History, Vol 9 No 1 p107-111
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Sverchkov, D., op cit p114
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Sverchkov, D., op cit. p117 – 118
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Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p140
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Sverchkov, D.,op cit. p112
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Wolfe, B.D., op cit p318
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p104
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Trotsky, L.D., ibidp254
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Trotsky, L.D., ibid pix
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Lunacharsky, A., Revolutionary Silhouettes, London, 1967, p60-1
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Lunacharsky, A., ibidp60
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McKean, R.B. St Petersburg Between the Revolutions, Yale University Press, 1990, p54 and 59
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p49
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Lenin, V.I., The Reorganisation of the Party, Nov 1905, CW 10:37-8
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Woods, A., op. cit., p236 – 237
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p254