Abstract
The December demonstrations in Moscow were followed a few weeks later by the dramatic events in the capital, which began with the dismissal of four workers at the Putilov plant and culminated in the shooting of more than 200 unarmed, peaceful demonstrators in front of Palace Square on 9 January. That fateful occurrence, etched in the annals of history as ‘Bloody Sunday’ ushered in the unprecedented disorders and upheavals of the revolutionary year, 1905. The immediate reply to Bloody Sunday was a nationwide movement of strikes and protests which impacted with particular severity on the peripheral regions of the Empire — Tsarist Poland, the Baltic provinces, Finland and the Caucasus. This was followed by a frenetic period of factory-level negotiations and by a number of investigative commissions of the kind established by senator Shidlovskii in Petersburg. The end of this particular chapter was marked by the publication in February of the ‘Bulygin Rescript’ which signified the first tentative step on the road to constitutional government. It was not enough to restore lasting stability however. The catastrophic naval defeat at Tsushima in May was a damning indictment of the autocracy and the government, and added fuel to the argument (advanced by both the Left, and by the grand coalition of bourgeois-liberal interests which had been forming since the turn of the year) that more fundamental political changes were needed.
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Notes and References
Hildermeier, Die Sozialrevolutionäre Partei, p. 254.
RR, no. 58 (January 1905), p. 15.
RR, no. 67 (May 1905), pp. 11–12; no. 68 (June 1905), p. 20. The former report provides some indication of the type of workers attracted to the PSR in Moscow. Party agitators preferred operating in the countryside because they considered themselves to be essentially village people. Many SRs here demanded weapons.
RR, no. 74 (September 1905), p. 26; Rapport 1907, p. 58.
Spiridovitch, Histoire du terrorisme Russe, pp. 216–17.
RR, no. 61 (March 1905), p. 13; Iskra, no. 93 (February 1905), p. 7 claims that the ‘revolutionary committee (from which the SD’s disassociated themselves) sent a letter threatening terror if their demands were not met’.
RR, no. 64 (April 1905), p. 12. See also Chemu uchit Saratovskaya zabastovka, Archive 521/II, and Iskra, no. 86 (January 1905), p. 5.
RR, no. 69 (June 1905), p. 19. Iskra, no. 90 (January 1905), p. 5.
RR, no. 59 (February 1905), pp. 15–16; Iskra, no. 86 (January 1905), p. 5. There were fierce disagreements between SRs and SDs about the aim and direction of this strike.
RR, no. 63 (April 1905), p. 13.
RR, no. 70 (July 1905), p. 19.
RR, no. 69 (June 1905), p. 19; no. 66 (May 1905), p. 14.
RR, no. 68 (June 1905), p. 21.
What follows is based on two reports in RR: no. 73 (August 1905), p. 21 and no. 74 (September 1905), p. 16. The biographies of eleven workers in the Odessa PSR were discovered in the PKS source. They comprised one merchant seaman, one joiner, one typographer, one railway technician, one fitter/boiler-maker, one builder, one patternmaker, one shop-assistant, one ‘unskilled worker’ and two ‘workers’. Six of the sample were Jewish, two Ukrainian.
See Spiridovitch, Histoire du terrorisme Russe, pp. 218–20.
RR, no. 72 (August 1905), p. 18.
Riga: RR, no. 75 (September 1905), p. 13; Kiev: RR, no. 75 (September 1905), p. 13; Bryansk: RR, no. 74 (September 1905), p. 19; Novozybkov: RR, no. 72 (August 1905), p. 19.
For the following see Rapport 1907. Contemporary accounts of SR activity during the October–December period in particular are almost wholly lacking. Revolyutsionnaya Rossiya ceased to appear after 15 October 1905 and its successor, Syn Otechestva was a legal paper with only a general populist direction and as such devoted little space to specific party activity. Recourse has therefore had to be made to a variety of retrospective accounts.
Rapport 1907, passim, pp. 216–17, 226, 234, 236, 249–50.
These are based on a survey of thirty-six urban and regional organisations. They tend to confirm the findings of Hildermeier and Perrie (see Bibliography) on the social composition of the party, namely that urban worker activists comprised about half the total in the party as a whole.
These included Dvinsk, Vitebsk, Khar’kov, Tiflis and Zlatoust. The Stuttgart report included Nikolaev and Ekaterinoslav in its list of strong urban organisations, but there is no information on membership figures for these two centres (Rapport 1907, p. 242). The term ‘organised’ workers was generally used by the SRs to imply something broader than ‘members’ but more precise than ‘sympathisers’. Membership was often limited to leading cadres and to the participants in propaganda circles. Caution is in any case appropriate where membership figures are concerned. There was considerable disagreement and confusion over what precise qualifications the party required for membership — some organisations appear to have made only the vaguest demands. (The same was undoubtedly the case with the other revolutionary parties.) For further information on this question, see the debates in Protokoly 1906, pp. 294–301; Protokol 1907, pp. 109–32.
The information on arrests is in Spiridovitch, Histoire du terrorisme Russe, pp. 502–3. For a further revealing and comprehensive account of the party’s disintegration see Protokoly pervoi obshchepartiinoi konferentsii PSR (Paris, 1908; hereafter Protokoly 1908). On the later history of the party, see pp. 275–86 of my doctoral thesis.
That is, the group of ‘legal populists’ who worked on the journal of that name. Three of its most prominent members, N. F. Annenskii, V. A. Myakotin and A. F. Peshekhonov, later collaborated on the SR legal newspaper Syn Otechestva in 1905 and attended the founding congress of the party. The legal populists established themselves as an independent Party of Popular Socialists in the spring of 1906, but never gained a mass following. For further details see Perrie, The Agrarian Policy of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party, pp. 160–7; Hildermeier, Die Sozialrevolutionäre Partei, pp. 145–50;
also A. F. Peshekhonov, Pochemu my togda ushli (Petrograd, 1918).
For a full bibliography and discussion of Maximalism see Hildermeier, Die Sozialrevolutionäre Partei, pp. 126–41. Also Perrie, The Agrarian Policy of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party pp. 153–60; Spiridovitch, Histoire du terrorisme Russe, pp. 392–413. The major work in Russian is by V. Chernov, ‘K kharakteristike maksimalizma’, in Sotsialist-Revolyutsioner, no. 1 (1910), pp. 175–307.
See also B. I. Gorev, ‘Apoliticheskiya i antiparlamentskiya gruppy’, in Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii v nachale XX-go veka (St Petersburg, 1914) vol. III, book V, pp. 511–23.
For the thinking of the Geneva group, see Vol’nyi diskussionyi listok — izdanie gruppy sotsialistov-revolyutsionerov, nos. 1–3, 1 May — 5 July 1905).
See, for example, this statement in Vol’nyi diskussionyi listok, no. 3 (5 July 1905), pp. 7–8: ‘To resolve this task [that is, the setting up of urban communes during the forthcoming revolution] it is by no means necessary to have on hand a developed socialist consciousness in the mass of the urban population: it is quite sufficient to have the energetic, daring initiative of a revolutionary-socialist minority, prepared for its historic role by an understanding of the fundamental principles of workers’ socialism and surrounded by the active sympathy of the masses, also prepared for revolution by their sufferings and in sympathy with the practical demands of socialism.’
Spiridovitch, Histoire du terrosime Russe, p. 395. Sokolov transferred his operations to Petersburg early in 1906 and founded an independent combat detachment in July. In August, the Maximalists were responsible for a failed attempt to kill Prime Minister P. A. Stolypin by blowing up his villa on Petersburg’s Aptekarskii Island and, in October, for a major bank robbery on the Fonarnyi Alley. Soon afterwards, Sokolov founded the ‘Union of SR Maximalists’. Some of the leading group were arrested in November, however, and Sokolov himself was taken on 1 December and executed the following day. In April 1907 there were more arrests, effectively destroying the Maximalists’ Combat Organisation. There were still workers calling themselves Maximalists in Petersburg, however, as late as 1910.
For a more detailed history of the Moscow Opposition, see Chernov, ‘K kharakteristike maksimalizma’, pp. 203–28 and Hildermeier, Die Sozialrevolutionäre Partei, pp. 131–3. The judgement on the calibre of its leadership is Chernov’s.
The Opposition accused the committee of ‘bossing about’ and of being a clique of rich and well-connected persons, indifferent to the needs of the worker membership (Chernov, ‘K kharakteristike maksimalizma’, p. 204).
The outlawing of private as opposed to state expropriations was a decision of the second party council in October 1906 and was ratified by the second ‘extraordinary’ congress in February 1907 (Protokoly 1907, p. 148). The Opposition had in fact been allocated a seat at the first party congress but the delegate had been forced to hide from the police and consequently missed all but the last session of the proceedings.
For the text, see Platforma, Archive 333. Relations between the Central Committee and the Opposition worsened further, owing to a quarrel over the sum of 45000 roubles, allegedly defrauded from the Opposition by the Moscow oblast organisation. The Opposition version of events can be found in two MSS in Archive 333, the former dated 29 May 1906. For the Central Committee’s account, see Chernov, ‘K kharakteristike maksimalizma’, pp. 223 ff.
Chernov, ‘K kharakteristike maksimalizma’, p. 220. The Maximalists first gained control of the Rogozh raion, then of the Executive Committee itself.
Ibid., pp. 215–16.
Ibid., pp. 225–8. For other (scanty) information on the Moscow PSR, see Archive 333.
Hildermeier lists eighteen affected organisations, namely Stavropol’, Ryazan’, Belostok, Pinsk, Grodno, Bryansk, Minsk, Vil’no, Vitebsk, Dvinsk, Ekaterinoslav, Chernigov, Kiev, Khar’kov, Vologda, Pskov, Arkhangel’sk and, of course, Moscow. There is also some evidence of Maximalist activity in Petersburg (see chapter 5 of the present work).
See the section on the North-West oblast’ in chapter 6 of the present study.
The Bezhetsa factory (Bryansk) organisation is an example of this last-mentioned course. See p. 155.
Chernov, ‘K kharakteristike maksimalizma’, pp. 175–84.
The phrase is Chernov’s.
See chapter 6 of this study.
For the psychology of such workers, see Mikhail Ivanovich, ‘Anarkhizm v Rossii’, in Sotsialist-Revolyutsioner, no. 3 (1911), pp. 75–94.
See above p. 144.
Spiridovitch, Histoire du terrorisme Russe, p. 233.
‘Statistika terroristicheskikh aktov’, in Pamyatnaya knizhka sotsialista-revolyutsionera, second issue (Paris, 1914). See also ‘Political and Economic Terror in the Tactics of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party before 1914’, in W. J. Mommsen and G. Hirschfeld, Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe (London, 1982).
‘Ustav organizatsii boevykh druzhin pri Spb. komitete PSR’, in Trud, no. 5, p. 9.
Rapport 1907, pp. 58–9.
For Petersburg terror see ch. 5 note 75 below; for the Saratov incident: ‘K grazhdanam g. Saratova’, archive 521/11
RR, no. 76, p. 21.
See n. 30 above.
For details see: Materialy III-go soveta partii, Archive 679.
See ch. 6, section entitled SRs in the Mal’tsev Industrial District (Bryansk) below.
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© 1988 Christopher Rice
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Rice, C. (1988). The SRs and the Revolution of 1905–7: An Overview. In: Russian Workers and the Socialist-Revolutionary Party through the Revolution of 1905–07. Studies in Soviet History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19252-6_5
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