Tsarist rule in Russia, 1905-14 Flashcards
What were the problems in the Russian Empire before 1905?
- Russia was huge, but there was very poor communication within the Empire. Furthermore, there were many different ethnicities within the Empire and Russian wasn’t everybody’s first language.
- 85% of the population lived in the countryside, but Russian agriculture was poor. Outdated methods meant low food production and frequent famines and infertile land meant that only about 5% of the land was used for farming.
- Russia was rich in oil and minerals but, in 1900, it wasn’t manufacturing much.
- Russia was an autocracy, run by a man who was despised by his own subjects. He kept order by using his Secret Police, Okhrana and the army helped the police to maintain law. The Orthodox Church also taught that disobeying the Tsar or opposing him was essentially opposing God’s will.
- Russia was heavily segregated regarding classes. The ruling and upper class was made up of the royal family and nobility. They owned about 25% of the land. and lived lives of luxury. Below them were the lesser nobles, Church leaders, military officers and top civil servants.
- Then came the commercial/working classes who were small in number in 1900 due to late developments in Russian Industry. They were shopkeepers, banked, factory owners and merchants. They could become very rich off of government loans and contracts. Then there was the working class, who were ex-peasants who moved from the countryside to find a better life in the city. They were known as the proletariats. They were very poor, with long hours, low wages, bad housing and food shortages. They resented their treatment by their employers, but they were forbidden from forming or joining trade unions. The peasants were the agricultural workers who were freed from their local landowners in 1861. Many were hungry and left to the cities.
What happened that led to Bloody Sunday and what happened during that time?
Bloody Sunday took place on the 22nd of January, outside the Winter Palace. The early twentieth century was a bad time for many proletariats. After the declaration of war on Japan they were forced to work longer hours in factories and the price of essential goods. such as food, in 1905 rose so fast that real wages declined by 20%. This was due to agricultural production decreasing. Furthermore, there was gross inequality and poverty in the Empire, shown by how the revolution was carried out primarily by striking workers. and the hard work in the factories seemed wasted as Russia was losing battle after battle to the Japanese, an Asian nation which would’ve been seen as inferior to the European Russians.
When four men were dismissed from Putilov Iron Works, Father Gapon, the leader of the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers (est. 1903), called for industrial action. Thousands of workers went on strike in St. Petersburg and in an attempt to settle the matter Father Gapon made a petition outlining the workers’ suffering and demands. He marched with a crowd of supporters to the Imperial Palace but they were shot at by the Okhrana and the police. Father Gapon had unwittingly began a revolution.
When did the Potemkin Revolt take place and what happened?
The Potemkin Revolt happened in June of 1905 when the crew on a battleship named Potemkin refused to eat rotten meat, which was crawling with maggots however considered edible by the ship’s doctor. There had been low morale and revolutionary fever amongst the naval ships in 1905 due to unrest at home and losses in the Russo-Japanese War. Captain Golikov had the crewmen lined up and asked them if they would eat the meat a final time, believing that the refusal was a revolutionary plot, and then brought on deck the ship’s marine guard which meant he planned to prepare a firing squad. One of the sailors on the ship named Matyushenko shouted ‘Enough of Golikov drinking our blood’ and the sailors ran to the weapons store room and took up arms against the aristocratic officers of the Tsar. Eighteen officers were killed, including Golikov.
The crew then sailed the Potemkin to the Odessa harbour. The Tsar ordered the Black Sea squadron to intercept the ship at Odessa harbour, however, sympathetic gunnery men refused to fire on the ship and one of the ships, St. George, had a crew mutiny which ended in them and Potemkin becoming sister ships. However, the rebellion was by a small group of revolutionaries and the ship quickly had a counter-coup which resulted with the Potemkin leaving Odessa Harbour and eventually sailing to Romania, where the crew surrendered to the local authorities in exchange for asylum.
Outline the events of the 1905 revolution.
- Workers went on strikes in industrial cities, such as St. Petersburg and Moscow. Workers in Russian factories, mines, and railways stopped working and demanded better pay.
- Peasants rebelled against landowners and tried to take more land for themselves, though, they were still loyal to the Tsar.
- The middle-class demanded a Duma to help make laws.
- National minorities demanded freedom from the Empire.
- In October of 1905, the railwaymen went on strike which paralysed the whole Russian railway network.
- Leon Trotsky and other Mensheviks established the St. Petersburg Soviet. These spread all over Russia.
Who were the political factions who opposed the Tsar at the beginning of the 20th century?
- The Constitutional Democrats were a non-violent, mainly middle-class group who sought a constitutional monarchy or even a republic.
- The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, or the RSDLP, was a socialist grouping formed in 1898 in Minsk which sought to unify all of the revolutionary groups in Russia into one party. It’s ironic that they split in 1903 into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
- The Social Revolutionaries were supported by the peasants, they sought to seize power through revolution.
Outline the promises/features of the October Manifesto.
After the Chief Minister Sergei Witte advised the Tsar to make concessions he announced the October Manifesto in the autumn of 1905.
- Russia would have a Duma
- Freedom of conscience
- Freedom of speech
- Freedom of meeting
- Freedom of association
- In future people wouldn’t be imprisoned without trial
- Laws had to be approved by the Duma
Some people didn’t believe the reforms didn’t go far enough, as the Duma was only a consultative body. Liberals and moderate socialists were pleased with the reforms, but the Constitutional Democrats, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and the Social Revolutionaries weren’t pleased with the reforms, believing they hadn’t gone far enough. The Cadets wanted a guarantee of a constituent assembly and a written constitution and the left-wing wanted more power for the peasants and proletariats.
Outline the rules established by the Tsar’s Fundamental Laws.
Passed in May 1906, the Fundamental Laws were an edict from the Tsar. They confirmed the October Manifesto but also asserting the Tsar’s powers over the Duma:
Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws allowed the Czar to rule by decree in ‘exceptional circumstances’ when the Duma wasn’t sitting.
The Council of Ministers answered to the Czar only and the Czar could appoint and dismiss ministers.
Furthermore, in April, Witte was forced to resign as Nicholas became increasingly influenced by conservatives. He was replaced by Ivan Goremykin who was an old-fashioned conservative who aimed to uphold as much of the Czarist autocracy as he could.
Why did the Tsar survive the 1905 revolution?
The revolution lacked leadership and a final goal. There were many different groups who wanted different things. The Tsar appealed to the middle-class, who didn’t want to depose the Tsar but subject him to the will of a parliament instead. The Tsar managed to appeal to certain parties, but not others, i.e. he separated his rivals. The October Manifesto was liked by many liberal politicians because it gave freedoms to people, such as the freedom of speech, and it stated that Russia would have a parliament for the first time.
Who were the main opposition groups to the regime before 1914?
- The Social Democratic Party was a party founded in 1898 made up of those who followed the ideas of Karl Marx. In 1903 the party split into two, with the Bolsheviks believing in a group of professional revolutionaries with total obedience to Lenin. The Mensheviks wanted a party with broad membership. Both parties believed in revolution and were supported by the proletariat. The Mensheviks were led by Yuly Martov.
- The Social Revolutionaries were established in 1901 by Victor Chernov and won support from the peasantry. They wanted Russia to remain largely agricultural but the land wasn’t owned privately but instead controlled by each village community. They believed in revolution and attacked Tsarism through assassination of ministers and officials.
- The Constitutional Democrats were founded in 1905 by Paul Milyukov. They wanted to strip the Tsar of power and make him a constitutional monarch. Some of the party members wanted to go further and make Russia a republic. They were non-violent and gained their support mainly from the middle-classes.
- The Octobrists were more moderate than the Cadets and they were satisfied by the October Manifesto, hence their name. They were also non-violent and were supported by the middle-classes.
Explain the attitude of the Tsar to the first four Dumas.
- In April 1906 the first Duma was elected. The middle-classes had more votes than the peasantry as Stolypin, the Minister of Internal Affairs, believed they’d cause less trouble for the Tsar. The Duma consisted mostly of Cadets and Social Revolutionaries who demanded more reforms, more power and laws passed to help workers. When the Prime Minister, Ivan Goremykin, refused they demanded his resignation too. When they passed a vote of no confidence in Ivan, the Tsar disbanded the first Duma after only a little over two months.
- The second Duma was established in February 1907. Following the dissolving of the first Duma, many Cadets were involved in writing the Vyborg Appeal. This criticised the government and demanded the non-payment of taxes or perform military service.
In response, these Cadets were forbidden from standing in the next election. This damaged the party and the public profile of the Cadets, who lost many seats in the election for the second Duma. Due to Ivan’s failure to control the Duma, he was dismissed and replaced with Peter Stolypin.
Russians hadn’t lost faith in the Duma. The turnout for the elections was that the SR won 37 seats, and the Mensheviks increased their number of seats significantly. The Cadets, although losing half of their seats, the Cadets were the second largest party. Therefore, the reformist parties were still strong in the Duma. The right also strengthened their position. The Octobrists doubled their number of seats and nationalist groups won more seats. This made the Duma hard to control as it was a battle between the reformists and nationalists. Eventually he reported that there was a plot to assassinate the Czar as an excuse to dissolve the Duma.
• The third Duma supported the Czar. Stolypin was determined to create a Duma which was pro-Czar, he did this by using Article 87 to radically change the rules on voting in order to weight it more towards the nobility and landowners (50% of final votes, up from 31%) and away from peasants (down from 42% to 23% and workers to just 2%.
In August 1915 the Fourth Duma voluntarily suspended itself to allow the government to concentrate on the war.
How did Peter Stolypin limit the power of the Duma?
- He rigged the elections, only allowing the wealthy and landowners to vote. They had far more influence than peasants and workers.
- The Fundamental Laws of May 1906 meant that the Duma had limited power to introduce laws and had no say in most government areas.
- When the Duma demanded more power to make changes, the Tsar disbanded them.
Outline Stolypin’s policies of repression and land reform.
- Thousands of revolutionaries were executed, exiles or imprisoned. This led to a reduction in terrorism and revolutionary activity. It also gave the hangman’s noose the nickname ‘Stolypin’s neck-tie’. During 1906, 1008 people were arrested, tried and executed for their part in the revolution and 21,000 were sent to prison camps in Siberia. Between 1907 and 1911 a further 1800 were hanged. Stolypin introduced Russification, a policy in which national groups had to accept Russian culture and language.
- Stolypin wanted to modernise agriculture to increase productivity and to encourage peasants to move to undeveloped areas in Russia. He also wanted to create a new class of peasants called Kulaks and to free up peasants to move to the cities to be industrial workers.
- Stolypin hoped Kulaks would be thankful to the Tsar. He abolished the peasant’s’ annual payments for their freedom and they could now borrow money from the government to buy their farms. 15% of farmers took the opportunity to become Kulaks- the rest were too poor- but very little actually did.
- Stolypin did little to improve the lives of industrial workers. Pay and living conditions were as bad as ever. He believed that the workers were secret revolutionaries, ready to spring at the word of other groups. He knew they were less loyal to the Tsar than other groups. Strikes rose between 1910 and 1914 to 8,000. Between 1906 and 1914 Russia experienced an industrial boom but little was done to help the conditions of workers. However, he did create a national health insurance scheme to pay sickness benefit to workers. Stolypin ordered them to be dealt with brutally, and he was eventually killed in 1911.
- Stolypin also began to introduce reforms in education, he tried to reduce the number of illiterates in Russia by making children attend school. Between 1904 to 1914 primary school numbers doubled and secondary schools quadrupled. He also made reforms in the military in order to prevent mutiny. He replaced Land Captains with Justices of the Peace.
Outline the events of the Lena Goldfield massacre and its impacts.
Continual industrial unrest increased during 1910-12. In 1912 the Lena Goldfields massacre occurred when approximately 200-500 unarmed striking miners, who worked 14 hour days for very little pay, were killed by troops. The company that the miners were working for got tired of the strikes and decided to arrest the leaders of the strikes on the 3rd of April. This resulted in thousands of unarmed workers marching on the administrative building on the 4th of April to petition for the release of their leaders. The shock of thousands of workers appearing caused police and army officers to order their troops to open fire on the crowd.
The shooting unleashed a firestorm of protest against the government and the company, including in the press and in the State Duma. Especially damaging were accusations of collusion between state and company officials aimed at using force to end the peaceful strike. Even groups normally supportive of the government levied a barrage of criticism. On a scale not seen since 1905, strikes broke out all over Russia and did not cease until the out-break of World War One.
Explain the features of the Vyborg Appeal.
The Vyborg Appeal was a proclamation signed by several Russian politicians, primarily Constitutional Democrats, after the dissolvement of the Parliament. Some of the members were outraged and travelled to Vyborg where they signed a manifesto, calling for ‘passive resistance’ which included evading taxes and defying conscription orders.
The Appeal was met with indifference, which allowed the authorities to silence the manifesto’s contributors, and the Cadets were banned from future Dumas.
List two features of Tsarist rule.
One feature of Tsarist rule was that the Tsar was an autocrat. He ruled by decree and made proclamations that his governors or ministers would implement. The bureaucratic organisations in Russia mainly acted as advisors.
Another feature of Tsarist rule was propaganda and the use of the secret police and army. The army was the largest peace-time army in the early 1900s, numbering 2.6 million. They helped the Okhrana, the secret police, maintain law and order. The secret police arrested any possible revolutionaries and tried them in special courts. Furthermore the Orthodox Church enforced the idea that the Tsar was a representative of God and disobeying him was a sin.
