Above all, the popular upsurge led to the emergence of embryonic organs of revolutionary state power—the soviets, councils of elected representatives of working people. It was a dress rehearsal of what would culminate in victory 12 years later in October 1917, when the Bolshevik party led workers and farmers to take power and opened the road to the world’s first successful socialist revolution.

The tsarist monarchy in Russia had been the bastion of feudal reaction for all of Europe since the French revolution of 1789. By the opening of the 19th century its imperial subjects included Finland, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, and the peoples of Central Asia.

Although serfs were emancipated from direct feudal bondage in 1861 to become “free” peasants, much of the land remained in the hands of the royal family and the nobility. In addition the peasants were saddled with “redemption payments” to the landlords that far exceeded the value of the land they received—land they already lived on and worked as serfs. By the early 20th century Russia had emerged as an imperialist power. While the big majority of the population was the rural toilers, a small but important urban working class had developed, concentrated in St. Petersburg and a few other industrial centers.

The main currents in the working-class movement were the two factions resulting from a 1903 split in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party: a proletarian revolutionary party—the Bolsheviks—and the petty-bourgeois current known as the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks had been steadily building a revolutionary party rooted in the factories, circulating its newspaper Vperyod (Forward), and joining in working-class struggles and debates.

On Jan. 3, 1905, four workers were fired from an iron works in St. Petersburg. When the company refused to reinstate them workers struck, and sent delegations to other factories asking for support. Within a few days an estimated 174 workplaces involving 96,000 workers were on strike. Their demands included an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, abolition of forced overtime, double pay for overtime work, improvements in sanitary conditions, and medical aid.

The explosive character and spread of the strike was fueled by the oppressive social conditions. In 1904 the average workday in the factories was 11 hours, and 10 hours on Saturdays. The Russian monarchy’s war with Japan for dominance of Korea and Manchuria took its toll in working people killed and maimed. War-time inflation reduced real wages by 20 percent.

As the strike spread the workers’ demands became broader and more political: for a constituent assembly elected by a general vote; freedom of speech and assembly; an end to the war; abolition of redemption payments to landlords; amnesty for political exiles and prisoners; and compulsory state-funded education.

On January 9, some 150,000 striking workers and their families participated in a march to the tsar’s Winter Palace to deliver a petition for their demands. Georgi Gapon, a priest and leader of a pro-government trade union, headed the procession. Without provocation, the tsar’s troops gunned down workers carrying portraits of the tsar and Orthodox saints.

Reporting on the bloodbath from exile, V.I. Lenin wrote in the Bolshevik newspaper Forward, “The army vanquished the enemy by shooting prostrate workers. ‘We have taught them a good lesson!’ the tsar’s henchmen and their European flunkeys from among the conservative bourgeoisie say with consummate cynicism. Yes, it was a great lesson,” Lenin continued, “one which the Russian proletariat will not forget.”

Workers responded with a new strike wave that involved nearly 3 million and spread throughout much of the country. They seized weapons from government arsenals and in several encounters the soldiers refused to fire on the workers.

The tsar offered to establish a consultative assembly to report on constitutional reform but the strike wave spread. The monarchy was further weakened by the defeat in May of its Baltic Fleet, which sealed Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War.  
 
The Bulygin Duma
On August 6 the tsar decreed the establishment of the first Duma, a consultative body with no legislative powers. It was dubbed the Bulygin Duma for the tsar’s interior minister, who was tapped to head the body. Only the wealthy landlords and merchants could elect Duma members directly. The peasants did so through indirect elections. The working class had no right at all to elect Duma members.

The liberal bourgeois parties called for boycotting the Duma. In an article entitled “The Boycott of the Bulygin Duma, and Insurrection,” Lenin explained that class-conscious workers should support boycotting the Duma but with the aim of intensifying agitation for the overthrow of the monarchy and establishing a provisional revolutionary government.

A general strike began in late September with a walkout by printers in Moscow. They were joined by railway and telegraph workers who stopped all rail traffic and crippled the power of the government. Rising peasants burned 2,000 estates and distributed among themselves the food stocks the nobility had robbed from them. The revolutionary winds of October inspired struggles for self-determination among the oppressed nations—more than half of the empire’s population.  
 
Soviet of Workers’ Deputies
The most significant development was the emergence of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, composed of elected representatives from all factories. It was organized by the workers in several cities as an instrument of revolutionary struggle. The soviet increasingly acted as an alternative government and its leaders as organizers of the impending uprising.

At the end of October, in a further attempt to defuse the revolutionary onslaught, the tsar issued the October Manifesto. It promised basic liberties and a Duma based on a broad and general suffrage with legislative powers. The Petersburg soviet rejected it and issued an appeal to soldiers to join workers in preparation for the inevitable final showdown with the regime.

On December 3 elite troops surrounded the offices of the soviet and arrested its leaders. The defeat of an armed uprising in Moscow in mid-December brought the 1905 revolution to a close.

The Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks offered opposing perspectives on the significance of the soviets and their immediate implication for the revolutionary overthrow of tsarist despotism.

The Bolsheviks saw the soviets as potential institutions of revolutionary state power. They advocated conquest of power by the soviets and the establishment of a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.” The Mensheviks saw the soviets as simply organs of “revolutionary local self-government.” They rejected any immediate struggle that aimed to bring to power a revolutionary government of workers and peasants.

Behind this difference were counterposed views on revolutionary strategy. All Russian Marxists agreed that the central tasks of the revolutionary movement were those historically associated with bourgeois-democratic revolutions—overthrow of the monarchy and institution of representative government based on universal franchise; abolition of all vestiges of feudal servitude; and establishment of freedom of speech, press, and association.

The Mensheviks argued that since the tasks of the revolution were bourgeois-democratic, the working class should not play the leading role and should not go beyond what was acceptable to the bourgeoisie. They insisted it would be impermissible for Social Democrats to participate in a provisional revolutionary government should the toiling masses take power.

The Bolsheviks put forward a different orientation. In a July 15, 1905, article entitled “The Democratic Tasks of the Revolutionary Proletariat,” Lenin argued that while the bourgeoisie also desired political freedom, it feared that too radical a struggle against autocracy would result in the loss of its property; that workers would not stop at the democratic revolution but would aspire to a socialist revolution.

The task of the working class, Lenin wrote, “is to prod the bourgeoisie on, to raise before the whole people slogans calling for a complete democratic revolution, to start working boldly and independently for the realization of these slogans—in a word, to be the vanguard, to take the lead in the struggle for the liberty of the whole people.”

The experiences of the 1905 revolution provided invaluable political lessons in revolutionary politics. The strategic differences between the courses advocated by the two main currents in the workers movement would be fought out over the next decade. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks successfully led the workers and peasants of Russia to power, changing the world forever.  
 
 
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