After the massacre of 9 January, the movement in St. Petersburg temporarily ebbed, as the workers of the capital cautiously took stock of the position. The May Day demonstration in St. Petersburg was not a success, with only a few hundred turning out. Nevertheless, throughout the spring and summer of 1905, the pendulum swung continually to the left. While the workers of the capital temporarily stepped back to take stock of the situation, the more backward provinces were now being roused to struggle. On 1 May, 200,000 workers struck in nearly 200 towns throughout Russia. The events in Petersburg stirred the provinces into action everywhere. The textile workers were well to the fore. On 12 May, a general strike broke out in the Bolshevik stronghold of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a textile town with 70,000 workers, lasting 72 days. By this time the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Bolsheviks numbered more than 400. Negotiations were conducted by elected factory delegates who met in a ‘meeting of Representative Delegates’, a soviet in all but name. Out of 128 delegates (of whom 23 were women) about 30 were Bolsheviks.

The Ivanovo-Voznesensk Soviet kept order in the town, issued proclamations, set up a militia, and controlled the press, thus in practice imposing freedom of the press, speech, and assembly. Daily mass meetings enabled the mass of workers to learn and exchange experiences. The peasants in the surrounding districts looked hopefully towards the Soviet to which they directed petitions. The militant unity of the proletariat and peasantry was being forged, not in words but in deeds, by the movement of the workers themselves. From 23 May the local Party got out a regular bulletin on the course of the dispute. By the end of June, the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Bolshevik organisation had grown to 600 members, with 15-20 factory organisations. In the textile town of Łódź in Poland, the funeral of a worker killed by Cossacks turned into a mass political demonstration on 15 May with slogans such as “Down with tsarism!” and “Long live the revolution!” A wave of strikes and demonstrations swept through Poland and Lithuania, culminating in the 23 June general strike and uprising in Łódź, and solidarity demonstrations in Warsaw and Odessa.

The strike wave which gripped almost all the industrial areas throughout the spring and summer assumed an increasingly political character. Whereas in March, less than 30 per cent of strikes were political, between April and August the figure had risen to 50-70 per cent. Everywhere, the workers’ elected representatives to the factory committees and strike committees led the way. And all that a soviet is – at its inception – is an enlarged strike committee, an organ of struggle in the fight of the workers against the employers. The Soviets in Russia, those marvellously effective, flexible, and representative organisations of the workers, were not the invention of Lenin or Trotsky. Nowhere do they feature in the writings of Marx and Engels. They were the product of the inventive genius and initiative of ordinary working men and women. The Soviets were destined to play a central role in the whole development of the revolution, particularly during and after the great October strike.

Not only the urban workers but the peasantry was also gradually being drawn into the orbit of the revolution. Throughout the summer there were peasant disturbances and strikes of agricultural labourers in the Baltic area, the Ukraine, Don, Kuban, and the Caucasus. In some areas, the peasants virtually took over whole areas and ran their own affairs. The Mensheviks tried to use this as backing for their theory of ‘revolutionary self-government’. But the truth was that, unless the working class took power, such local outbreaks could only have an episodic character. While the Mensheviks looked towards the Zemstvo liberals, Lenin became increasingly convinced that the only possible ally for the workers in their struggle to overthrow the autocracy consisted in the peasantry, particularly the poor peasants. His vision of the revolution was that of the broadest possible movement of the workers and peasants, to overthrow tsarism, establish a provisional revolutionary government (democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry) which, without going beyond the limits of capitalism, would carry through the most radical and far-reaching democratic programme, first and foremost the confiscation of the big estates and the handing over of land to the peasants.

Up until 1905, the Party’s agrarian programme consisted of a series of limited demands which would alleviate the burdens on the peasantry, particularly the recovery of the otrezki, or ‘cut-off lands’, that is, the land which had been withheld from the peasants under the terms of the Emancipation of the Serfs Act of 1861. But now, the revolution in the urban centres was rapidly spreading to the villages. The general sentiment among the peasants was in favour of seizing the landlords’ estates. The old Party programme was hopelessly antiquated. Taking cognizance of the new situation in the villages where the Party had redrafted its agrarian programme to include the confiscation of all landowners’, government, church, monastic, and crown lands. The changed atmosphere in the villages opened up for the first time the possibility of social democratic work among the peasants.

Although the Party was still weak here, some circles were established in areas like Nizhegorod, Samara, Saratov, Kazan, and Tver. Lenin insisted on the establishment of purely Social Democratic groups in the villages, composed of farm labourers and rural proletarians. Only then would they seek agreements for joint work with other revolutionary-democratic groups. But the prior condition was not to blur over the distinction between workers and peasant small proprietors. An interesting pen portrait of the work of Bolshevik agitators in the villages is to be found in Sholokhov’s famous novel And Quiet Flows the Don, which describes how the Bolshevik Stockman organised a group of Cossacks around a poetry and literacy circle:

After long sifting and testing, a little group of the Cossacks began to meet regularly in Stockman’s workshop. Stockman was the heart and soul of the group and he worked straight towards a goal that only he fully understood. He ate into the simple understanding and conceptions like a worm into wood, instilling repugnance and hatred towards the existing system. At first he found himself confronted with the cold steel of distrust, but he was not to be repulsed. Even that could be worn away. (M. Sholokhov, And Quiet Flows the Don, p. 259.)

This ferment in the villages had important repercussions in the armed forces, which were overwhelmingly of peasant composition. However, as so often happened in the history of revolutions, the revolt flared up first in the fleet, with its more proletarian class makeup. The Party’s work among soldiers and sailors was even more difficult than work among the peasants. On the eve of the 1905 Revolution, there were only three organised Party groups in the armed forces. However, in the course of the revolution, this number increased to a total of 27 groups. (Istoriya KPSS, vol. 2, p. 90) Military defeats created an explosive mood of discontent in the ranks, making them ever more receptive to Social Democratic agitation. News of the annihilation of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, (14-15 May, 1905) had an especially electrifying effect on the sailors. As so often happens in naval mutinies, the leading role was played by the petty officers, normally drawn from the most able and intelligent of the sailors, whose close proximity to the officers gave rise to a deep-seated contempt for the latter. The tensions and conflicts aroused by the arrogance and incompetence of the naval officers became increasingly unbearable when they were related to matters of life and death, in time of war. Precisely such a clash between the petty officers and officers led to the outbreak of the famous mutiny on the battleship Prince Potemkin Tavrichesky on 14 June, 1905, immortalised in Eisenstein’s classic film The Battleship Potemkin.

The immediate issue was the bad food. But the underlying cause was the general discontent with the conduct of the war, and the piling up of unbearable contradictions over decades and generations. The Black Sea fleet had set out for the southern port of Odessa precisely when that city was in the grip of a general strike. No amount of military discipline and police surveillance could prevent the bacilli of revolution from reaching the ships anchored only a few miles away. The mutinying crew arrested all the officers, except the commander and six others who were killed. The sailors elected a committee from their midst which took the bold initiative of sailing into Odessa to appeal for support from the workers. A great crowd assembled around the corpse of the able seaman Grigory Vakulenchuk, killed by an officer. A massive demonstration took place, and mass meetings were held in which Social Democratic agitators participated. This showed both the strong and the weak side of the spontaneous, elemental movement of the masses. All the elements were present for a decisive linking-up of the army with the revolutionary people. But in the absence of a conscious leadership, the ‘floating republic’ could only have the character of an episodic development, which nevertheless was an anticipation of the going over of the soldiers and sailors to the side of the Soviets in 1917.

These events left the Odessa authorities thunderstruck. For a time, they did not know what to do. In practice, power was in the hands of the workers. But they acted with no clear perspective, no overall policy or plan. This allowed the authorities time to concentrate their forces against Odessa. A naval force was sent against the Potemkin, but the mutineers succeeded in escaping to Romania. The revolution in Odessa was brutally suppressed. The mutiny on the Potemkin therefore failed to lead to an insurrection, which was implicit in the situation. But it did not pass off without leaving its imprint. Terrified at the scale of the mass movement and the signs of inner decomposition in the armed forces, the government announced the holding of elections to the State Duma (parliament). Ten days later peace was concluded with Japan under humiliating terms. From a strictly military point of view, despite her earlier reverses, Russia had everything to gain from continuing the war. Japan’s reserves of men and money were nearly exhausted. Not the military strength of Japan but the threat of revolution at home led to the conclusion of peace. The rapid termination of the war was essential for the preservation of the autocracy.