Russia: the early twentieth century

Nicholas II 

Nicholas II (1894-1917)

Nicholas succeeded his father in November 1894. Later that month he married the German princess Alix of Hesse (Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna). He and Alexandra were crowned at the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow on 14 May 1896. The coronation was marred by the deaths of more than a thousand people at the tragedy of the Khondynka Field. Nicholas was not responsible for the disaster, but his tin-eared response was a public-relations disaster.

His reign was a tragedly for himself and for Russia. In 1904 Alexandra at last gave birth to a male heir after four daughters - but the longed-for son was a haemophiliac. In her desperation, the tsarina turned to the holy man, Grigori Rasputin, and she came completely under his influence.

Opposition

The Russian government was confronted with an almost universally hostile intelligentsia (a Russian word), and the autocracy of Nicholas II was increasingly challenged by both revolutionaries and constitutionalists. In 1900 the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party was founded. In the 1880s many opposition movements became dominated by the ideology of Marxism.

In 1898 nine delegates from workers’ associations and Marxist discussion groups met at Minsk and formed the first ‘Congress of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party’. Most of the participants were well known to the secret police, the Okhrana, and were shortly afterwards arrested and imprisoned.

One leader was rapidly emerging. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk in 1870, the son of an inspector of schools for the province. Both his parents came from noble families. In 1887 his elder brother Alexander Ulyanov, was executed for his involvement with an abortive plot to assassinate the Tsar. When he enrolled as a law student at the University of Kazan he was drawn into another clandestine group calling itself the People’s Will. At this stage Marxism was only one of a number of revolutionary ideologies.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)
in 1916.
Public domain.

At university he read Das Kapital and he was expelled for his subversive views. But he then enrolled at St Petersburg university and qualified as a lawyer. In 1883 he arrived in St Petersburg. In the summer of 1895 he travelled to Switzerland, but returned to St Petersburg in the same year. In the winter he was arrested by the Okhrana for incitement to strikes. After a year in prison he was sentenced to three years in Siberia (1897-1900) where he married a fellow-revolutionary, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

In 1900 Ulyanov left Siberia, travelled to Europe and founded a revolutionary underground newspaper, Iskra (the Spark). In Iskra he argued that the workers on their own would never defeat capitalism – instead what was needed was a new type of party that would form the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’.

His thesis was outlined in What is to be Done (1902)  in which he insisted on the importance of centralisation, strict discipline, and ideological unity. In the same year he adopted the name Lenin, derived from the Lena river, as his revolutionary alias. At the second Congress of the Russian SDs in London in 1903, he secured acceptance of his views.

The occasion for the debate was the question of party membership. Julius Martov, a member of the Jewish Bund, argued that a party member must be prepared to work under the direction of one of the party organisations, while Lenin argued that the member must work in one of the party organisations. This apparently semantic point exposed two widely divergent views about the type of party the SDs were to be. 

Martov wanted a party with members who had scope to express themselves independently of the central leadership; for Lenin the need was for leadership, leadership and more leadership.’ Robert Service, Lenin. A Biography (2000), p. 154.

Lenin lost this particular vote but on a later item, which also concerned the question of party leadership and centralisation, he won a slender majority largely due to abstentions. He promptly dubbed his supporters 'majority-ites' (bolsheviki) and his opponents led by Martov (actually the majority) 'minority-ites' (menshiviki).  The two parties finally split in 1912.

The Russo-Japanese War

Russia and Japan had rival ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. In January 1904, a Japanese fleet under Admiral Tōgō attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in Manchuria and laid siege to the port. This was to the the Japanese way of declaring war - a tactic that was to repeated at Pearl Harbor in 1941. For the details of the war, see here.  

In February 1905 the two sides met at Mukden in Manchuria in one of the largest military encounters before the First World War. Russia was narrowly defeated.

The most humiliating event of the war the Battle of Tsushima, 27 May–28 May 1905 when the Japanese fleet under Admiral Togo, numerically inferior but with superior speed and firing range, shelled the Russian fleet mercilessly, destroying all eight of its battleships.

Russian soldiers retreat after the Battle of Mukden,
February 1905.

Bloody  Sunday

The news of the fall of Port Arthur in January 1905 led to a strike in St Petersburg, which in turn led to a petition to the tsar asking for political as well as economic reform. On 9 January the security forces opened fire on a peaceful crowd, killing 130 people. 

A Soviet reconstruction of Bloody Sunday

The Dumas

The result of ‘Bloody Sunday’ was a series of riots and strikes which forced Nicholas into concessions. On the advice of Sergei Witte, he issued on 17 October a manifesto announcing a Duma (Parliament), the extension of the franchise and the granting of real civil liberties. Witte became Chairman of the Council of Ministers. A constitution was issued on 23 April, providing for two chambers, but it came from the tsar who retained ‘supreme autocratic power’. Witte was kept on until he had secured a huge international loan to bail out the government and then dismissed. 

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Dumas were a disappointment. Nicholas set his face against reform, refusing to support the proposals of his Finance Minister, Pyotr Stolypin. When Stolypin was assassinated at the Kiev Opera House in 1911, the tsar was probably secretly relieved.

The first two Dumas were dissolved by the tsar because he saw them as too radical. After the 1907 electoral reform the third Duma, elected in November 1907, was largely made up of members of the upper classes and radical influences in the Duma had almost entirely been removed. The fourth Duma was in session at the outbreak of war. Whatever their limitations, however, the Dumas introduced the idea of constitutional and representative government. The most effective advocate for reform in the Duma was Pavel Milyukov, the leader of the liberal Kadet party. 

Another new movement was formed in this period. On 13 October the St Petersburg Soviet (Workers’ Council) was founded. It eventually came under the leadership of the Social Democrat Leon Trotsky (formerly Lev Davidovich Bronstein).  A Moscow Soviet was formed in November.

Summary: the political situation

1. The Bolshevik party formally separated from the Mensheviks in 1912 and launched its own newspaper, Pravda. This move coincided with a strike in the goldfields of the river Lena, an indication of growing militancy in Russia.  But though they had six deputies in the fourth Duma, the Bolsheviks were not seen as a significant political party. 
2. In spite of the obvious problems posed by defeat and a threatened revolution, Nicholas II set his face against reform, refusing to give his full support to his two most able ministers, Witte and Stolypin.
3. However, whatever their limitations, the Dumas introduced the idea of constitutional and representative government. The idea might have taken root but for the First World War