On 9 January 1905 – Bloody Sunday – in the early afternoon, a large crowd of about 200,000, led by the priest father Gapon, marched to the Winter Palace to petition the Tsar. The square was soon packed with workers, students, women, children and old people, many wearing their Sunday best. Some carried icons and church banners. There were no speeches. Everything was peaceful. However, troops were everywhere. The soldiers began firing. The dead were counted by the hundreds, the wounded by the thousands[6].
The January massacre had a most profound effect upon the Russian proletariat; a tremendous wave of strikes swept the country, spreading to hundreds of towns and localities, factories, mines and railways. The strike involved something like a million men and women. “For almost two months, the strike ruled the land”[7].
The movement swept through Poland, and from 14-20 January the Polish capital, Warsaw, was in the grip of a revolutionary general strike. The Baltic area was also caught up in the revolutionary current and, in Riga on 13 January, 15,000 workers marched in protest and 60,000 workers staged a political general strike. The movement cut across national lines: Armenian, Georgian, Jewish, Lithuanian and Polish workers expressed their solidarity with their Russian brothers and sisters, and fought against the hated Russian autocracy. A railway strike began in Saratov on 12 January, which quickly spread to the other railway lines, spreading the news of the revolutionary wave outwards to even the most backward provinces[8].
From exile in Switzerland, Lenin immediately (18 January) greeted the January events as the beginning of the revolution in Russia: “The working class has received a momentous lesson in civil war: the revolutionary education of the proletariat made more progress in one day than it could have made in months and years of drab, humdrum, wretched existence”[9]. Lenin was also to argue that “January 9, 1905, fully revealed the vast reserves of revolutionary energy possessed by the proletariat, as well as the utter inadequacy of the Social Democratic organisation”[10]. For example, the St Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP, which was Bolshevik dominated, had only reluctantly agreed to participate in the 9 January demonstration, and then only a small group of about fifteen from a membership of almost 1,000 turned up[11].
The impact of 9 January pushed the whole of the workers to the left, with the mood flowing strongly in favour of militant action and support for the RSDLP, and Bolshevik and Menshevik workers now commanded attention at factory gate meetings. Lenin was desperate to take advantage of the opportunities but believed all his efforts were floundering because of the amateurism, and disunity of the organisation largely resulting from the effects of the split[12]. Under the pressure of the mass movement, the Mensheviks in Russia moved rapidly to the left, creating unforeseen problems for the Bolsheviks. Dissatisfaction in the ranks of the St Petersburg RSDLP, and its supporters, with the bureaucratic methods of the local Bolshevik leadership, and its attitude to the developing mass movement, led to four of the six district organisations breaking away to join the Mensheviks[13].
In February 1905, Trotsky, aged only 25, was the first of the RSDLP leaders to return to Russia, reaching St Petersburg by the spring[14]. During the first months of his return, hiding from the secret police, Trotsky could do little more than write. He had a clear field, as none of the main leaders of either the Bolsheviks or Mensheviks returned to Russia until much later. Both Lenin and Martov returned after the October amnesty, Martov on 17 October and Lenin on 4 November15. By the summer, Trotsky was the best known name of the RSDLP due to a stream of articles, leaflets, letters, and (particularly) an appeal to the peasants. These included a series of newspaper articles against the notion that the liberals were the natural leaders of the revolution, and developed his idea that the working class were the decisive force in the revolution:
“Other groups in the urban population will play their part in the revolution only in so far as they follow the proletariat … Neither the peasantry, nor the middle class, nor the intelligentsia can play an independent revolutionary role in any way equivalent to the role of the proletariat … Consequently, the composition of the Provisional Government will in the main depend on the proletariat. If the insurrection ends in victory, those who have led the working class in the rising will gain power”[16].
Lenin was concerned with the less glamorous, but essential, problems facing the Bolsheviks: how to overcome their routine ways of working and how to establish links between their relatively small forces and the masses of workers who were moving into struggle. A key part of Lenin’s plan to re-vitalise and re-organise the majority members of the RSDLP was the convening of the Third Congress of the RSDLP in the name of the (Bolshevik) Central Committee[17]. The Mensheviks were invited to attend but stayed away and organised their own conference in Geneva. Lenin remained outside Russia devoting considerable time to the preparation and convocation of the Third Congress, and on 12 April 1905, the first Bolshevik-only Party Congress met in London. Lenin drew up nearly all the main resolutions and delivered a number of reports and speeches to the Congress. Considerable attention was given to the technical and organisational preparation for the overthrow of Tsarism, and there was to be a stepping up of the political, agitational and propaganda work, including paying special attention to work in the army, e.g. troops were to be contacted using leaflets, and a commission was established, under the control of the Central Committee, to formulate a programme of transitional demands specifically for soldiers. Nevertheless, it was agreed that especially at a time when events had raised the question of armed insurrection, the fundamental task facing the party was winning over the masses[18].
Lenin was determined to open up the party to young workers “boldly and widely, and again more widely and again more boldly without fearing them”[19], and he put considerable effort into confronting the dogmatism of the committee-men (who formed the majority of delegates to the Congress), whose natural reaction was against any demands for the workers to have a greater say in the running of inner-party affairs. These attitudes, which led to Lenin losing the vote on the resolution (actually moved by Bogdanov) On the Relations Between Workers and Intellectuals Within the Social Democratic Organisation, represented a strong conservative current within Bolshevism that Trotsky would have to face in the St Petersburg Soviet some seven months later[20].
Lenin appreciated the need for such people in building the party. The Bolshevik committee-men devoted their lives to the party, and had remained loyal to the revolutionary movement despite repeated arrests, imprisonment and exile. They provided the continuity of the movement, but their clandestine life style meant they had to be conservative in their behaviour to preserve their existence[21]. “The committee-man,” wrote Krupskaya:
“was usually a rather self-assured person. He saw what a tremendous influence the work of the committee had on the masses, and as a rule he recognised no inner-party democracy. ‘Inner-Party democracy only leads to trouble with the police. We are connected with the movement as it is’, the committee-men would say. Inwardly they rather despised the Party workers abroad who, in their opinion, had nothing better to do than squabble among themselves -’they ought to be made to work under Russian conditions’. The committee-men objected to the overruling influence of the Centre abroad. At the same time they did not want innovations. They were neither desirous nor capable of adjusting themselves to the quickly changing conditions”[22].
The events in St Petersburg stirred the provinces into action. On 1 May, workers struck in nearly 200 towns throughout Russia. The major strike, of some 70,000 workers, lasting over two months from 12 May, was in the Bolshevik stronghold of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a textile town known as the Russian Manchester. The strike committee leading this ‘first Soviet’ (which pre-dated that in St Petersburg), made many important political demands such as the 8-hour day and freedom of assembly, but did not attempt to pose the question of power. The relative roles of the two Soviets was discussed later by the Commission on the History of the October Revolution of the State Publishing House, which decided that the St Petersburg Soviet under Trotsky’s leadership not only exercised power but posed the question of transferring state power into the hands of the proletariat[23]. This difference in approach between the largely Bolshevik-controlled strike committee at Ivanovo-Voznesensk and the St Petersburg Soviet was confirmed by Zinoviev in his History of the Bolshevik Party[24] which, while omitting any mention of Trotsky’s role as leader of the St Petersburg Soviet, said “The Petersburg Soviet became an embryonic government. This was the reality of the matter: either this Soviet took power in its hands and dissolved the Tsarist government or the latter would dissolve the Soviet …”.
The increasing strength of the protests forced the Tsar to make a series of concessions; on 18 February, the Tsar issued his first Manifesto in which he hinted at a constitution and popular representation, and set in motion a separate manoeuvre intended to divide and disorient the working class. To defuse the growing militancy in the factories the government set up a commission headed by Senator Shidlovsky to investigate and identify the causes of the discontent among the workers. In an unprecedented move, it was announced that workers would be represented on the commission by means of elected delegates. The proletariat agreed overwhelmingly to participate, and this gave them the experience of electing plant representatives, experience they would use nine months later in elections to the Soviets.
On 6 August the Tsar issued a second Manifesto promising a parliament or Duma, and finally, following nation-wide political strikes, he issued his third Manifesto on 17 October promising a constitution, an amnesty for political prisoners and exiles, civil liberties and universal suffrage[25]. This October Manifesto by the Tsar, gained primarily through the actions of the workers, solved nothing fundamental, but it gave the liberals (increasingly worried by the rising militancy of the workers), a reason to unhook themselves from the revolution. As Lenin and Trotsky had foreseen, the bourgeoisie, which had all along been striving to strike a deal with Tsarism, now deserted the revolutionary camp. The big capitalists and landowners united in a reactionary bloc – the so-called “Octobrists” – which threw its weight behind the Tsar. At the same time, the “liberal” section of the bourgeoisie supporting the Constitutional Democrat Party, the “Cadets”, came out in favour of a so-called constitutional monarchy, providing a pseudo-democratic, constitutional, smokescreen for the bloody reality of Tsarist rule[26].
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Cliff, T.C., Lenin, Building the Party, Pluto Press, 1975, p149 – 153
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p81
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Woods, A., op. cit, p182 – 184
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Lenin, V.I., The Beginning of the Revolution in Russia, Jan 1905 CW 8:97-100
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Lenin, V.I., Should We Organise the Revolution? Feb 1905, CW 8:167-176
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Cliff, T.C., Lenin, Building the Party, Pluto Press, 1975, p155 – 156
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Lenin, V.I., A Letter to A. A. Bogdanov and S. I. Gusev, Feb 1905, CW 8:143-7
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Somov, From the History of the SD Movement in Petersburg in 1905 – Personal Reminiscences, quoted in Revolutionary History Vol 9 No 1 p58 – 60
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Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p110-116
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Trotsky, L.D., Iskra No 93, 17 March 1905, quoted in Deutscher The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p118-9
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Lenin, V.I., A Letter to A. A. Bogdanov and S. I. Gusev, Feb 1905 CW 8:143-7
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Lenin, V.I., The Third Congress of the RDSLP, April 12 April 27, April 1905, CW 8:359-449
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Lenin, V.I., A Letter to A. A. Bogdanov and S. I. Gusev, Feb 1905 CW 8:143-7
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Woods, A., op. cit., p199
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Woods, A., op. cit., p199 – 200
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Krupskaya, N., Memories of Lenin, Panther History, 1970, p125 and p124-5
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Sverchkov, D., At the Dawn of the Revolution 1925, quoted in Pete Glatter, A Revolution Takes Shape, Revolutionary History, Vol 9, No 1 p11-118
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Zinoviev, G., History of the Bolshevik Party, New Park Publications, London, 1973, p128
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Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p126-127
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Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p157 -161