In mid-April 1906, Witte resigned, mainly because he felt that the Tsar no longer showed confidence in him. Before leaving, he managed to obtain for Russia an international loan of 844 million rubles—the largest ever contracted up to that time by any country—which had the effect of stabilizing Russia’s finances, damaged by the war and revolution. It further freed the Crown for some time from dependence on the Duma, which was due to open shortly.146 He was replaced by Ivan Goremykin, a bureaucrat beloved by the Court for his slavish devotion. Appointed to the State Council, the upper house of the new parliament, Witte spent his remaining years (he died in 1915) dictating memoirs and hating Goremykin’s successor, Peter Stolypin.
The year 1905 marked the apogee of Russian liberalism—the triumph of its program, its strategy, its tactics. It was the Union of Liberation and its affiliates, the zemstvo movement and the Union of Unions, that had compelled the monarchy to concede a constitutional and parliamentary regime. Although they would later claim credit, the socialists in general and the Bolsheviks in particular played in this campaign only an auxiliary role: their one independent effort, the Moscow uprising, ended in disaster.
The liberals’ triumph, nevertheless, was far from secure. As events would soon show, they were a minority caught in a cross fire of conservative and radical extremism. Concerned like the conservatives to prevent revolution, they were nevertheless beholden to the radicals, since the threat of revolution was the only lever they had to prod the Crown into making still more concessions. Ultimately, this contradiction would cause their demise.
The 1905 Revolution substantially altered Russia’s political institutions, but it left political attitudes untouched. The monarchy continued to ignore the implications of the October Manifesto and to insist that nothing had really changed. Its supporters on the right and the mobs they inspired longed to punish those who had humiliated the Tsar. The socialist intelligentsia, for its part, was more determined than ever to exploit the demonstrated weakness of the government and press on with the next, socialist phase of the revolution. The experiences of 1905 had left it more, not less, radical. The terrible weakness of the bonds holding Russia together was revealed to alclass="underline" but to the government it meant the need for firmer authority, whereas to the radicals it signaled opportunities to destroy the existing order. Not surprisingly, the government and the opposition alike viewed the Duma, not as a vehicle for reaching compromises, but as an arena of combat, and sensible voices, pleading for cooperation, were vilified by both sides.
It is fair to say, therefore, that the 1905 Revolution not only failed to resolve Russia’s outstanding problem—estrangement between rulers and ruled—but aggravated it. And to the extent that attitudes rather than institutions or “objective” economic and social realities determine the course of politics, only unbounded optimists could look to the future with any confidence. In fact, Russia had gained only a breathing spell.
*Unless otherwise stated, dates for the period preceding February 1918 are given according to the Julian calendar in use until then (“Old Style,” or OS), which in the nineteenth century was 12 days behind the Western calendar, and in the twentieth, 13 days. From February 1, 1918, dates are given New Style (NS)—that is, according to the Western calendar, which the Soviet Government adopted at that time.
*Witte (Vospominaniia, II, Moscow, 1960, 218–19) says that in July 1903 Zubatov confided to him that Russia was in a revolutionary situation which could not be resolved by police measures. Zubatov also predicted Plehve’s assassination. This was betrayed to Plehve, who fired Zubatov and exiled him to the provinces. In March 1917, on learning of the Tsar’s abdication, he committed suicide.
*Witte’s dismissal resulted from the Tsar’s dislike of him and Plehve’s intrigues. It occurred, however, as a result of a sudden illumination. Nicholas told Plehve that during a church service he heard the Lord instructing him “not to delay that which I was already persuaded to do”: V. I. Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past (Stanford, Calif., 1939), 225.
†On Azef, see Boris Nikolajewsky [Nikolaevskii], Azeff the Spy (New York, 1934). After Plehve’s murder, Azef’s reputation among revolutionaries grew immensely, and he managed to continue his double role until exposed by the director of the Police Department, A. A. Lopukhin, in December 1908, following which he fled to Germany and went into business. He died in 1918.
*Shmuel Galai, The Liberation Movement in Russia, 1900–1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 214–19; Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 363–66. The Social-Democrats, who wanted to lead the revolution on their own, stayed away, but Azef was present.
*George Gapon, The Story of My Life (New York, 1906), 144. The “intellectual Liberals” whom Gapon consulted are known to have been Ekaterina Kuskova, her common-law husband S. N. Prokopovich, and V. Ia. Bogucharskii (Iakovlev).
*KL, No. 2/3 (1922), 56, cited in Galai, Liberation Movement; 239. The official figure was 130 dead and 299 wounded: A. N. Pankratova et al, Revoliutsiia 1905–1907 gg. v Rossii: Dokumenty i materialy, IV, Pt. 1 (Moscow, 1961), 103, 811, note 12.
*Gapon fled abroad. He returned to Russia after the amnesty that followed the October Manifesto, and was killed by an SR on the orders of Azef. After January 9, all his unions were closed, despite worker protests.
*In pre-1905 Russia, there was no cabinet with a Prime Minister: the ministers reported to the Tsar separately and received from him personal instructions. On the reasons for this practice, see Chapter 2.
†“Black Repartition” was a peasant and Socialist-Revolutionary slogan that called for the abolition of the right of property to land and the distribution (“repartition”) of all privately held land among peasant communes. See Chapter 3.
*The first to call attention to this important source was F.-X. Coquin in F.-X. Coquin and C. Gervais-Francelle, eds., 1905: La Première Révolution Russe (Paris, 1986), 181–200. The invitation for the population to submit petitions was officially withdrawn on August 6, 1905, following the publication of the so-called Bulygin Constitution.
*Russia’s defeat at the hands of the Japanese was to have grave consequences for the whole of Europe by lowering the esteem in which whites had been held by non-Western peoples: for it was the first time in modern history that an Asiatic nation defeated a great Western power. One observer noted in 1909 that the war had “radically reshaped” the mood of the Orient: “There is no Asiatic country, from China to Persia, which has not felt the reaction of the Russo-Japanese war, and in which it has failed to wake new ambitions. These usually find expression in a desire to assert independence, to claim equality with the white races, and have had the general result of causing Western prestige to decline in the East” (Thomas F. Millard, America and the Far Eastern Question, New York, 1909, 1–2). In a sense, the war marked the beginning of the process of colonial resistance and decolonization that would be completed half a century later.
*Galai, Liberation Movement, 262–63. The Union of Railroad Employees and Workers, the largest labor organization in Russia, with 700,000 members, had only 130,000 workers: the majority of its members were local hands, mostly peasants: Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets (New York, 1974), 269, note 53.