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Reform, war and revolution

in its peasant traditions as to seek comfort in the goodwill of the tsar, a notion

that may still have seemed to be plausible at the dawn of Bloody Sunday, was

no longer adequate to the challenge faced by the r

egime.

Although workers at some St Petersburg factories were sometimes advised

by liberal and left-leaning lawyers and other educated well-wishers, revolu-

tionary activists representing the various socialist parties played almost no

role in the ﬁrst-stage elections to the commission that took place in the middle

of February. If for a brief moment, it appeared as if the government might

have out-manoeuvred the radical Left and recaptured some of its lost ground,

however, events were moving too fast and basic distrust was too great for the

government to hold on to its advantage. What it had succeeded in doing was

to promote ‘the ﬁrst basically free elections ever held in Russia by workers’,

but it then quickly managed to lose control of the process while providing

workers with multiple venues where they could nurture their growing politi-

cal sensitivities and feel the strength and empowerment that comes with open

debate, voting and unconstrained political sociability. In one of those unusual

sequencings that does seem to distinguish historical processes in modern

Russia, workers now found themselves the only social group in the coun-

try to have been granted a (relatively) democratic, if ephemeral, franchise

under a notoriously autocratic system. Not content to follow the marching

orders of the r

egime that had empowered them, Petersburg workers (from

whom workers in other parts of Russia were quickly gaining inspiration)

rejected the limitations that the government wished to place upon the new

commission, guaranteed its failure by boycotting its meetings and often aired

their grievances in language that called the entire political order into question,

thereby replicating but also dwarﬁng the paradoxes of the zubatovshchina.

Instead of becoming a step in the direction of co-optation, the Shidlovskii

elections actually contributed to what became the most important revolu-

tionary innovation to emerge from the labour movement in 1905 – the soviet

(sovet). Although the precise origins of the idea of a citywide representative

workers’ council are still a matter of some dispute, most historians of 1905

agree that the experience of electing factory delegates in February helped

pave the way for Petersburg workers to elect their own representatives to

the Petersburg soviet in October. The other important source of the con-

cept was, of course, the citywide strike committee, which was the nuclear

body from which the soviet developed, with few participants understand-

ing at ﬁrst that they were participating in the creation of a historically new

24 Schwarz, Russian Revolution,p.94.

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institution. While some Soviet historians have tried to trace the antecedents

of the Petersburg soviet a few months further back in time, to the Assembly of

Delegates (Sobranie Upolnomochennykh) that oversaw the Bolshevik-supported

(but not led) multi-factory general strike in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in May and

June, Solomon Schwarz has demonstrated that the two institutions were qual-

itatively different and that the Petersburg soviet was a ﬁrst of its kind, that is,

the ﬁrst in which the members saw themselves as being not only a local strike

committee, but an unauthorised instrument of local self-government, one that

dared to substitute itself for the ofﬁcially constituted authorities.

In fact, the Petersburg soviet was the direct result of the October general

strike that was launched on 8 October by Moscow printers and spread by

railway workers on the Moscow–St Petersburg line, a strike that, thanks to the

railway, soon fanned out into almost all the industrial centres of the Russian

Empire. The soviet’s origins were ‘spontaneous’ in the sense that unafﬁliated

Petersburg workers and not the revolutionary parties launched the initiative,

ﬁrst as a citywide strike committee (not without precedent) and then as a

claimant to local, and to some degree, since St Petersburg was the capital

city, even national, political authority (a phenomenon completely without

precedent in Russia, though somewhat analogous to the Paris Commune of

1871). To be sure, all the major revolutionary groups were fairly quick to

recognise the importance of the new organisation, though Bolsheviks – still

more committed to the tactic of armed uprising and ambivalent about strikes

at a time of revolution – more reluctantly so than others. They all – Bolsheviks,

Mensheviks, SRs – sought and achieved representationon the soviet’s executive

committee, with the nominal Menshevik but ultra-radical revolutionary Leon

Trotsky, as is well known, playing a very prominent role as the soviet’s vice-

president.

At least in St Petersburg, the brief period of the October general strike and

the soviet’s subsequent dominance of the city should be seen as the workers’

moment of greatest triumph in 1905. The Petersburg soviet virtually became

the governing body of that city for several weeks. However, the bloody sup-

pression of the armed uprising of Moscow workers in December 1905 marked

the end of the workers’ triumphant period, as those workers who went to the

barricades with SD, especially Bolshevik, support were crushed by artillery

ﬁre and the onslaught of loyal regiments hurried by train from St Petersburg

to Moscow. If the tsar’s belated but promising Manifesto of 16 October was

25 Schwarz, Russian Revolution, Appendix 11.

26 Trotsky’s own account of these events, though quite tendentious, still repays reading:

Leon Trotsky, 1905, trans. Anya Bostock (New York: Random House, 1971).

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extorted from him by the power of the labour movement,which was supported

in diverse ways by radicals and liberals alike, the defeat of the Moscow workers

and the near simultaneous arrest of the Petersburg soviet in December placed

the government in a much better position to minimise the actual concessions,

including workers’ rights, projected in the manifesto.

∗∗∗∗∗

Although labour unrest continued well into 1906,

workers would cease to

pose a serious threat to the Russian government until the labour movement

revived in the wake of the Lena Goldﬁeld massacre of April 1912. Nevertheless,

the 1905 Revolution did bear some palpable if limited gains for workers. This

included the government’s recognition for the ﬁrst time of their right, albeit

within very tight restrictions, to form ‘professional’ unions and, though only in

the private sector, to engage in non-political economic strikes, as well as their

right to elect their own delegates to the new Russian parliament, the Duma,

though under a very restricted franchise (rendered even narrower after Petr

Stolypin’s electoral coup of 3 June 1907).

As the country recovered from the throes of revolution, Russian industry,

with the aid of a newlyenergised commercial banking system, began to recover

from the setbacks it had undergone in the ﬁrst few years of the century. By 1910

industry was again experiencing a robust expansion, although at a growth rate

of 6 per cent per annum it fell signiﬁcantly short of the 8 per cent growth rate

of the 1890s. As the position of workers in the labour market became more

favorable, they grew less and less tolerant of management misconduct and

government repression.

Nevertheless, it took the massacre of some one hundred goldminers in the

spring of 1912 to resuscitate the still cautious labour movement. If in 1907–

11 the labour movement had largely restricted itself to legal, above-ground

activities, causing some Bolsheviks to level the exaggerated charge that the

trade unions’ Menshevik-oriented leaders were acting as ‘liquidators’ of the

underground Party, Lena ushered in a two-year period of militant strike activ-

ity and demonstrations, with workers often striking at a signiﬁcantly higher

rate than they had in the revolutionary year 1905. This unrest took place in

27 See Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Authority Restored (Stanford: Stanford Uni-

versity Press, 1992).

28 See G. R. Swain, ‘Freedom of Association and the Trade Unions, 1906–14’, in Crisp and

Edmonson, Civil Rights,pp.171–90;G.R.Swain,Russian Social Democracy and the Legal

Labour Movement, 1906–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1983); Bonnell, Roots,part3.AsSwain

points out, the actual restrictions placed on the unions were considerably greater than

those that had been contemplated by some government ofﬁcials in 1905. And in practice,

not surprisingly, the unions were subjected to constant persecution by the authorities.

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many parts of Russia and among virtually every category of worker, including

the unskilled and semi-skilled textile women of the CIR. But once again the

movement evolved most dramatically in St Petersburg, though in the summer

of 1914 it took on a particularly aggressive form in Baku. Politically, this worker

militancy worked to the tactical advantage of the Bolsheviks and, to a lesser

extent, the SRs, while working to the disadvantage of the more cautious and to

some extent disillusioned Mensheviks, who increasingly feared that workers’

irrational passions, which they saw as reﬂecting their close peasant origins,

were moving them in a direction for which Russia’s ‘objective’ conditions was

not historically ripe. Those passions, it was felt, had been aroused irrespon-

sibly by the Bolsheviks, and, to a degree that might prove counterproductive

or even worse, were threatening to turn back the clock on Russia’s progress

toward democracy. Some historians, most famously Leopold Haimson, have

suggested that Russian industrial centres were on the cusp of a new revolution,

or at least of violent, irrepressible conﬂagration, when the onset of the First

World War in the summer of 1914 put a temporary damper on worker unrest.

However, it must also be acknowledged, as does Haimson, that labour unrest

in the capital was dying down, at least for the moment, shortly before war was

declared.

Be that as it may, once the war had begun to go badly for Russia, there were

growing signs of the labour movement’s revival, especially in 1916. By the mid-

dle of February 1917, hungry St Petersburg (now ‘Petrograd’) workers, their

wages lagging far behind a spiralling wartime inﬂation, were again engaged

in signiﬁcant strike activity. This unrest included women textile workers and,

replacing drafted workers, recently recruited woman munitions workers, as

wellas the traditionally militant, male, metal- and machine-workers.By the last

days of the month they were joining with other elements of the urban popula-

tion, including sections of the military garrison, in increasingly confrontational

demonstrations that led directly to the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the

tsarist regime.

Almost immediately, Petrograd workers, having played so prominent a

role in the overthrow of tsarism, staked out their claim to a numerically

29 L. H. Haimson, ‘The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905–1917’, SR 23, 4

(Dec. 1964): 619–42,and24, 1 (March 1965): 1–22; for a somewhat different perspective,

see Robert B. McKean, St Petersburg between the Revolutions (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1990). On the Lena massacre itself, see Michael Melancon, ‘The Ninth Circle:

The Lena Goldﬁeld Workers and the Massacre of 4 April 1912’, SR 53, 3 (Sept. 1994):

766–95. For a recent evaluation of the storm over ‘Liquidationism’, see Alice K. Pate,

‘The Liquidationist Controversy: Russian Social Democracy and the Quest for Unity’,

in Melancon and Pate, New Labor History,pp.95–122.

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disproportionate role in determining the character and fate of the new order.

Working in co-operation with radical intelligenty among the SD and SR party

activists, they resurrected an updated version of the soviets of 1905, but this

time with the hot-blooded participation of soldiers from the local garrison,

many of whom lived in fear of transfer to the ﬁghting front. Similar soviets

quickly mushroomed throughout the empire.

Over the next few months, with the Petrograd soviet sharing ‘dual power’

with the new, unstable, and insecure Provisional Government, worker mili-

tancy escalated rapidly, often following its own trajectory with scant attention

to the desires of the left party leaders. Their militancy took many forms –

strikes, riots, factory occupations, the creation of increasingly deﬁant fac-

tory committees and, along with soldiers, participation in the organisations

and demonstrations of the revolutionary parties, though never in lockstep

with those parties. All of this uncontrollable activity added enormously to

the difﬁculties of the Provisional Government, which, even as its composition

moved leftward as moderate socialists agreed to assume cabinet positions, was

simply unable to satisfy unremitting worker demands under wartime condi-

tions. Hence when the Bolsheviks succeeded in overthrowing the Provisional

Government in October 1917 and dispersing the recently elected Constituent

Assembly the following January, they would do so with a great deal of working-

class support, though not for Bolshevik single-party rule but for a ‘soviet’

government consisting of a coalition of left parties and supportive of worker

democracy within the factory. For workers as for others, the ensuing Civil

War of 1918–21 was a period of bloodshed, hunger and, eventually, draconian

measures, including the militarisation of labour, the introduction of stringent

one-man management and the ending of truly free elections to the workers’

soviets, all inﬂicted upon what had been its own primary constituency by an

embattled, often desperate Bolshevik regime. Though indispensable to the

‘Reds’ in their life-and-death struggle against the ‘Whites’ in these years of

bloody warfare, workers emerged from the Civil War demoralised and, in

many cases, thanks to the damage suffered by Russian industry and the con-

sequent shortage of industrial jobs, declassed. Despite ﬂurries of activity and

even occasional resistance, workers now ceased to be a major independent

force in the country’s political life.

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Police and revolutionaries

jonathan w. daly

Soon after ofﬁcers of leading noble families rebelled in December 1825,

Nicholas I created the Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chan-

cellery and a uniformed gendarmerie to conduct censorship, oversee the

bureaucracy, keep track of the public mood and preserve state security. Dur-

ing the ﬁrst two decades of its existence, Nicholas’s security police were not

unpopular. At the end of Nikolai Gogol’s Inspector General (Revizor, 1836),

for example, the gendarme who announces the arrival of the true inspec-

tor appears as a symbol of justice. At any given moment during the sec-

ond quarter of the century, one or two dozen people – mostly ofﬁcials,

society women, writers, journalists and well-connected nobles – provided

sporadic, often gossipy information to the Third Section, sometimes quite

openly.

Aside from the Polish rebellion of 1830–1, the period from 1826 to 1840

witnessed almost no incidents of political opposition. The intelligentsia was

largely preoccupied with literary and philosophical issues. The execution of

ﬁve Decembrists and the exile to Siberia of over one hundred more in 1826

had surely diverted many from the path of active opposition. As the close

association between government and educated public began to break down, in

the 1840s, thanks to the expansion of education, increased European inﬂuences

and the wave of European revolutions in 1848, the police sought to maintain the

status quo, driving into internal or external exile prominent intellectuals like

Alexander Herzen and Fedor Dostoevsky. The Third Section was beginning

to inspire dread but still was not an efﬁcient security police institution. It was

generally well informed about the private social gatherings of social elites. It

could also make incisive assessments of the public mood, as when in early

1 See Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1961); P. S. Squire, The Third Department: The Establishment and

Practice of the Political Police in the Russia of Nicholas I (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1968).

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1855 it warned of war-weariness within the population and urged bringing the

Crimean War to a close.

In 1866 in the midst of the Great Reforms, which created an independent

judiciary and institutions of local self-government, a terrorist attempt against

Alexander II led to minor police reforms: the creation of a forty-man security

force (okhrannaia strazha) to protect the emperor and of special bureaus for

security policing (Okhrannoe otdelenie) and regular criminal investigation (Sys-

knoe otdelenie). Although the government appears to have intended earnestly

to combat both grave regular and political crime, the robust development of

political crime over the next several decades caused the lion’s share of resources

available for policing to ﬂow to the security bureau. Within a decade and a

half, it became the cornerstone of the security police system. Later in the year,

the Gendarme Corps was reorganised, its staff increased. Finally, in 1868 a net-

work of twenty-eight ‘observation posts’ (nabliudatel’nye punkty) was created

in fourteen provinces.

In 1869, before the onset of anything like systematic government repression,

Mikhail Bakunin and S. G. Nechaev, in their ‘Revolutionary Catechism’, urged

gathering rebels and brigands into a violent revolutionary force. Nechaev’s

People’s Revenge group, which advocated the systematic destruction of the

established social and political order and the physical annihilation of govern-

ment ofﬁcials, attracted many young people, four of whom he persuaded

in 1869 to murder a confederate.

The Nechaev conspirators were tried and

mostly exonerated, prompting the government in 1871 to empower gendarmes

to investigate state-crime cases and the justice minister in consultation with the

director of the Third Section to propose administrative punishments in these

cases. Until 1904, therefore, the majority of state-crime cases were handled

administratively.

The next opposition movement was non-violent. In spring and summer

1874, thousands of young idealists, dressed as peasants and some trained in

rustic craft and skills, set out to the countryside to bring light to,and learn from,

the peasantry. Russian educated youths had ‘gone to the people’. Hundreds

2 This chapter draws on my Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia,

1866–1905 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998)andThe Watchful State: Secu-

rity Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906–1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,

2004).

3 See I. V. Orzhekhovskii, Samoderzhavie protiv revoliutsionnoi Rossii (1826–1880) (Moscow:

Mysl’, 1982); P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880-kh godov

(Moscow: Izd. MGU, 1964).

4 On all the radical movements of this era, see Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History

of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia, trans. Francis Haskell

(New York: Knopf, 1960).

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were arrested and eventually tried, but the defendants won public sympathy.

Those who remained committed to political opposition either ﬂed abroad or

went ‘underground’. Among the latter, some remained covertly in villages;

others embraced political terrorism. The ﬁrst of these terrorist-conspirators,

calling themselves Land and Freedom, began in 1877 to carry out acts of

violence against senior ofﬁcials. When a jury acquitted Vera Zasulich, who

freely confessed to attempting to murder a prominent ofﬁcial in 1878, the

government deprived people accused of committing attacks on government

ofﬁcials of the right to a jury trial. The terrorists countered with more attacks

and the government with more emergency measures.

Yet the security police, using primitive methods of surveillance, were no

match for the terrorists: only in the 1870s did the police begin to build up

a registry of political suspects (the police in Vienna for a half-century had

been registering the entire population of the Austrian Empire). Moreover, the

terrorists formed a tightly organised, highly disciplined, though small, band

of almost religiously devoted crusaders who launched attack after attack.

In desperation the police arrested thousands of (mostly non-violent) young

radicals, thus alienating the educated publicwhotherefore occasionallyabetted

the terrorists. After several attempts, their organisation – now called People’s

Will – assassinated Tsar Alexander II in March 1881.

But the tide was already turning. In August 1880 a centralised police insti-

tution subordinated to the Ministry of the Interior, with authority over both

political and regular police forces, the Police Department, had replaced the

Third Section. Henceforth the security service was just another wheel in the

state machine. (The Gendarme Corps remained afﬁliated with the War Min-

istry,however.) InOctober a secondsecurity bureauwasestablishedinMoscow.

Grigorii Sudeikin, chief of the security bureau in St Petersburg and one of a

rare breed of professionally sophisticated gendarme ofﬁcers, penetrated the

People’s Will with informants and arrested several of its members by early

1881. While he failed to prevent the regicide, over the next two years Sudeikin,

his assistant, Petr Rachkovskii, and their key informant, Sergei Degaev, demol-

ished People’s Will, which, although using Degaev to help murder Sudeikin,

never fully recovered.

Several informants whose identities were discovered by revolutionaries

went on to occupy key positions in the police apparatus. In contrast to gen-

darme ofﬁcers, men with military training and an abiding sense of hierar-

chy and authority, erstwhile informants knew the revolutionaries’ mentality

5 See Jonathan W. Daly, ‘On the Signiﬁcance of Emergency Legislation in Late Imperial

Russia’, SR 54 (1995): 602–29.

639

Reform, war and revolution

intimately, making them their most dangerous adversaries. Rachkovskii had

worked brieﬂy as an informant in 1879, then virtually created a security bureau

in Paris, which he headed from 1884 to 1902. Sergei Zubatov, an informant for

the Moscow security bureau in 1886–7, rose to head that bureau and trans-

formed it into the heart and soul of the empire’s security system. Zubatov,

Rachkovskii and several others introduced into the system an inventiveness,

a vitality, an enthusiasm, and a spirit of adventure and iconoclasm previously

absent from Russia’s security service.

The government’s apparent inability to deal with the terrible famine of

1890–1 gave rise to underground organisations in the People’s Will tradition and

broad-based oppositional movements. Radical activists travelled to the famine-

stricken areas, where they educated, healed and fed people and agitated for a

revolutionary uprising. The peasants largely shunned them, however, driving

some in summer 1893 to found the People’s Justice party aimed at overthrowing

the monarchy. Co-ordinated arrests crushed the organisation.

The number of gendarme inquests into political crimes rose from 56 cases

involving 559 people in 1894 to 1,522 cases involving 6,405 people in 1903,an

increase of 1,259% and 608%, respectively.

Still, until the turn of the cen-

tury, the security police had revolutionary conspirators well under control.

Rachkovskii in Paris with a dozen informants kept abreast of developments

among the radical

emigr

es and occasionally arranged their arrest in collab-

oration with European police forces. The Police Department co-ordinated

the information sent in from provincial gendarme stations, mail interception

ofﬁces and the security bureaus in the imperial capitals and in Paris. It also

recruited informants on an irregular basis. Often this was done without much

genuine effort on the police’s part. For example, in 1893 Evno Azef, a brilliant

informant among leading Socialist-Revolutionaries, voluntarily offered his

services.

The Social Democrats enjoyed more success in the late 1890s because the

security service focused more on repressing Populists and neo-People’s Will

groups (though it also harassed the Marxists, especially in Moscow, prompting

them to adopt strict methods of secrecy), and thanks to a shift in tactics towards

agitation among artisans and workers,articulating their everyday concerns and

frustrations in order to incite their anger and channel it towards revolt. This

approach formed the core idea of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation

of the Working Class, created in St Petersburg in autumn 1895 to unite the

6 A. F. Vovchik, Politika tsarizma po rabochemu voprosu v predrevoliutsionnyi period (1895–1904)

(Lvov: Izd. L’vovskogo universiteta, 1964), p. 262.

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Police and revolutionaries

disparate Social Democrat circles.

Despite continuous repression, which

landed many experienced revolutionaries in exile, the movement helped pro-

voke and organise massive strikes in St Petersburg in 1896 and 1897, leading

many manufacturers unilaterally to shorten the regular work day in their fac-

tories to eleven and a-half hours. The government extended this concession

to the whole country in a law of 2 June 1897. Henceforth, however, the gov-

ernment would deal with strike instigators largely by administrative means,

not in the regular courts. The Police Department would also pay far more

attention to the labour movement.

Meanwhile, Zubatov was reforming the methods of security policing. Pro-

fessing a ‘profound love for and faith in his cause’, he imparted to several of his

prot

es in the security bureau an ardent commitment rarely encountered in

gendarme ofﬁcers. Zubatov’s closest assistant, Evstratii Mednikov, a clever Old

Believer of peasant stock, reﬁned the use of plain clothes police agents, called

surveillants (ﬁlery). Before the early 1880s, the gendarmes, despite their easily

recognisable blue uniform, were rarely allowed to undertake plain clothes

operations. At the Moscow security bureau, surveillants memorised the city’s

physicallayout, including restaurants, bars,factories, taxi stations and tramway

routes, as well as streets, alleys and courtyards, to enable them to manoeuvre

freelyaround suspects. During training, experienced agents accompanied fresh

recruits and taught them to recognise and commit to memory facial features

through systematic study of physiognomy and by poring over photographs of

revolutionaries. Finally, the novices learned to employ makeup and disguises.

Surveillants jotted down their observations in diaries, tens of thousands of

which are preserved in the police archives. They are generally little more than

a dull catalogue of pedestrian occurrences in the life of persons under surveil-

lance, yet security bureau clerks used them to prepare a welter of ‘ﬁnding

aids’, including weighty name and place registers and complex diagrams of

relations among opponents of the government. The number of such trained

surveillants in Moscow rose from seventeen in 1881 to ﬁfty in 1902, after which

the number ﬂuctuated between ﬁfty and one hundred. (After the turn of the

century, the St Petersburg bureau employed slightly more.)

To pursue radical activists out into the provinces, where the majority of

provincial gendarme authorities were ineffective, in 1894 a mobile surveillance

brigade (Letuchii otriad ﬁlerov) was created at the Moscow security bureau. As

a sort of moveable security bureau, it was designed to uncover distribution

7 See J. L. H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1963).

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