The Russian Revolution: People,Places,documents important in the 1905 Revolution

Father Georgiy Apollonovich Gapon (17 February [O.S. 5 February] 1870 — 10 April [O.S.28 March] 1906) was a Russian Orthodox priest and a popular working class leader before the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Georgiy Apollonovich Gapon was born February 17, 1870 (o.s.) in the village of Beliki, Poltava Oblast, Ukraine, then part of theRussian Empire. He was the oldest son of a Cossack father and mother who hailed from the local peasantry. Gapon's father, Apollon Fedorovich Gapon, had some formal education and served as an elected village elder and clerk in Beliki. His mother was illiterate but religiously devout and actively raised her son in the norms and traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church.

At the age of 23 Gapon took a job in Poltava as a zemstvo statistician, supplementing his income with money earned working as a private tutor. It was in this capacity that he met the daughter of a local merchant in a house in which he was giving private lessons. The family objected to a proposed marriage due to Gapon's limited employment horizons, however, and as a means of overcoming this obstacle he again sought to become a priest. He made an appeal to Bishop Ilarion of Poltava, apologizing for past behavior and promising to fulfill expectations of the church in the future. The bishop was moved by the appeal and interceded with the family, winning the couple permission to marry.

Gapon was placed on the fast track to priesthood, occupying a place as a church psalm reader for a year, followed by a pro forma promotion to deacon for just one day before being made priest of the Poltava cemetery church. Gapon's services were innovative and informal and his church rapidly grew in size, negatively affecting other more formalistic local churches, whose priests lodge complaints against him. Nevertheless, Gapon continued to enjoy the support of the bishop in his position and was largely satisfied with his station in life.

Gapon and his wife had two children in rapid succession, but his wife fell ill following the 1898 birth of the second child, a boy. She died not long afterward and Gapon decided to leave Poltava to make a new life in the capital city of Saint Petersburg. Bishop Ilarion made a strong recommendation to Konstantin Pobedonostsev, procurator of the Holy Synod, that Gapon be allowed to take the entrance examination to the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy despite his lack of the standard Seminary certificate.

Gapon's status as a student at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, one of the elite theological training institutions of the Orthodox Church, placed him in good graces with the Bishop Nikolai of Taurida, who permitted Gapon to live in a monastery near Sebastopol without having to take monastic vows.

Father Gapon, under the financial support of Colonel Motojiro Akashi of the Imperial Japanese Army organized the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St. Petersburg, which was also patronized by the Department of the Police and the St. Petersburg Okhrana (secret police). The Assembly's objectives were to defend workers' rights and to elevate their moral and religious status. He was the person to lead the industrial workers to the city of Russia during the year 1905 before bloody Sunday with courage. Only persons of Russian Orthodox denomination were eligible to join its ranks. Soon the organization had twelve branches and 8,000 members, and Gapon tried to expand activities to Kiev and Moscow. Gapon was not simply an obedient instrument of the police; cooperating with them, he tried to realize his own plans.

From the end of 1904, Gapon started to cooperate with radicals who championed the abolition of the Tsar's autocracy.

On January 22 [O.S. January 9] 1905, the day after a general strike burst out in St. Petersburg, Gapon organized a workers' procession to present a petition to the Tsar, which ended tragically (Bloody Sunday 1905). Gapon's life was saved by Pinchas Rutenberg, who took him away from the gunfire. He then became the guest of Maxim Gorky.

Following Bloody Sunday, Gapon anathematized the Tsar and called upon the workers to take action against the regime, but soon after escaped abroad, where he had close ties with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. 

Gapon soon revealed to Rutenberg his contacts with the police and tried to recruit him, too, reasoning that double loyalty is helpful to the workers' cause. However, Rutenberg reported this provocation to his party leaders, Yevno Azef (who was himself a secret police spy) and Boris Savinkov. On March 26, 1906 Gapon arrived to meet Rutenberg in a rented cottage outside St. Petersburg, and after a month he was found there hanged. Rutenberg asserted later that Gapon was condemned by the comrades' court. In reality, three S.R. party combatants overheard their conversation from the next room. After Gapon had repeated his collaboration proposal, Rutenberg called the comrades into the room and left. When he returned, Gapon was dead.

Bloody Wednesday refers to the events of 15 August 1906 in the (Congress) Kingdom of Poland, where the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party (OB PPS) carried out a series of attacks on Russians, primarily police officers and informants. This took place in the context of the Revolution in the Kingdom of Poland (1905–1907), and represented one of the biggest actions in the history of OB PPS.

"Warszawianka" is a Polish song written some time between 1879 and 1883. The title, a deliberate reference to the earlier song by the same title, could be translated as either "the song of Warsaw" or "the lady of Warsaw". To distinguish between the two, it is often called "Warszawianka 1905 roku" ("Warszawianka of 1905"), after the song became the hymn of demonstrating workers during theRevolution in the Kingdom of Poland (1905–1907), when 30 workers were shot during the May Day demonstrations in Warsaw in 1905.

The Russo-Japanese War (8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905) was fought between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. The major theatres of operations were the Liaodong Peninsula  and Mukden in Southern Manchuria, and the seas around Korea, Japan, and the Yellow Sea.

Russia sought a warm-water port on the Pacific Ocean for their navy and for maritime trade. Vladivostok was operational only during the summer, whereas Port Arthur, a naval base in Liaodong Province leased to Russia by China, was operational all year. Since the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, negotiations between Russia and Japan had proved impractical. Russia had demonstrated an expansionist policy in the Siberian far-east from the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century. Through threat of Russian expansion, Japan offered to recognize Russian dominance in Manchuria in exchange for recognition of Korea as within the Japanese sphere of influence. Russia refused and demanded Korea north of the 39th parallel to be a neutral buffer zone between Russia and Japan. The Japanese government perceived a Russian threat to its strategic interests and chose to go to war. After negotiations broke down in 1904, the Japanese Navy opened hostilities by attacking the Russian Eastern Fleet at Port Arthur in a surprise attack.

Russia suffered numerous defeats to Japan, but Tsar Nicholas II was convinced that Russia would win and chose to remain engaged in the war; at first, to await the outcomes of certain naval battles, and later to preserve the dignity of Russia by averting a "humiliating peace". The war concluded with the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by US President Theodore Roosevelt. The complete victory of the Japanese military surprised world observers. The consequences transformed the balance of power in East Asia, resulting in a reassessment of Japan's recent entry onto the world stage. Scholars continue to debate the historical significance of the war.

Russification is a form of cultural assimilation process during which non-Russian communities, voluntarily or not, give up their culture and language in favor of the Russian one.

In a historical sense, the term refers to both official and unofficial policies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union with respect to their national constituents and to national minorities in Russia, aimed at Russian domination.

The major areas of Russification are politics and culture. In politics, an element of Russification is assigning Russian nationals to leading administrative positions in national institutions. In culture, Russification primarily amounts to domination of the Russian language in official business and strong influence of the Russian language on national idioms. The shifts in demographics in favour of the ethnic Russian population are sometimes considered as a form of Russification as well.

Analytically, it is helpful to distinguish Russification, as a process of changing one's ethnic self-label or identity from a non-Russian ethnonym to Russian, from Russianization, the spread of the Russian language, culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions, distinct also from Sovietization or the imposition of institutional forms established by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union throughout the territory ruled by that party. In this sense, although Russification is usually conflated across Russification, Russianization, and Russian-led Sovietization, each can be considered a distinct process. Russianization and Sovietization, for example, did not automatically lead to Russification – change in language or self-identity of non-Russian peoples to being Russian. Thus, despite long exposure to the Russian language and culture, as well as to Sovietization, at the end of the Soviet era non-Russians were on the verge of becoming a majority of the population in the Soviet Union.

The St. Petersburg workmen's petition to the Tsar, January 22, 1905

The Russian Revolution : Socialism in Russia

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All political parties were illegal in Russia before 1914. The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party was founded in 1898 by socialists who respected Marx’s ideas. However, because of government policing, it had to operate as an illegal organisation. It set up a newspaper, mobilised workers and organised strikes. Some Russian socialists felt that the Russian peasant custom of dividing land periodically made them natural socialists. So peasants, not workers, would be the main force of the revolution, and Russia could become socialist more quickly than other countries. Socialists were active in the countryside through the late nineteenth century. They formed the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1900. This party struggled for peasants. rights and demanded that land belonging to nobles be transferred to peasants. Social Democrats disagreed with Socialist Revolutionaries about peasants. Lenin felt that peasants were not one united group. Some were poor and others rich, some worked as labourers while others were capitalists who employed workers. Given this .differentiation. within them, they could not all be part of a socialist movement.
The party was divided over the strategy of organisation. Vladimir Lenin (who led the Bolshevik group) thought that in a repressive society like Tsarist Russia the party should be disciplined and should control the number and quality of its members. Others (Mensheviks) thought that the party should be open to all (as in Germany).

Alexander Shlyapnikov, a socialist worker of the time, gives us a description of how the meetings were organised:  Propaganda was done in the plants and shops on an individual basis. There were also discussion circles … Legal meetings took place on matters concerning [official issues], but this activity was skilfully integrated into the general struggle for the liberation of the working class. Illegal meetings were … arranged on the spur of the moment but in an organised way during lunch, in evening break, in front of the exit, in the yard or, in establishments with several floors, on the stairs. The most alert workers would form a “plug” in the doorway, and the whole mass piled up in the exit. An agitator would get up right there on the spot. Management would contact the police on the telephone, but the speeches would have already been made and the necessary decision taken by the time they arrived ...’

Alexander Shlyapnikov, On  the  Eve  of 1917.  Reminiscences  from  the Revolutionary Underground.

Alexander Gavrilovich Shliapnikov (August 30, 1885 – September 2, 1937) was a Russian communist revolutionary, metalworker, and trade union leader. He is best remembered as a memoirist of the October Revolution of 1917 and as the leader of one of the primary opposition movements inside the Russian Communist Party during the 1920s.

The Russian Revolution: Economy and Society

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Economy and Society:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Russia’s people were agriculturists. About 85 % of the Russian empire’s population earned their living from agriculture. This proportion was higher than in most European countries. For instance, in France and Germany the proportion was between 40 % and 50%. In the empire, cultivators produced for the market as well as for their own needs and Russia were a major exporter of grain.  The government had experimented with laissez faire capitalist policies, but this strategy largely failed to gain traction within the Russian economy until the 1890s. Meanwhile, "agricultural productivity stagnated, while international prices for grain dropped, and Russia’s foreign debt and need for imports grew. War and military preparations continued to consume government revenues. At the same time, the peasant taxpayers' ability to pay was strained to the utmost, leading to widespread famine in 1891."

laissez faire is an economic system in which transactions between private parties are free from government interference such as regulations, privileges, tariffs, and subsidies. The phrase laissez-faire is part of a larger French phrase and literally translates to "let (it/them) go", but in this context usually means to "let go".

Labour problem:

In the 1890s, under the minister of finance Sergei Witte (Image: Left), a crash governmental programme was proposed to promote industrialization. His policies included heavy government expenditures for railroad building and operations, subsidies and supporting services for private industrialists, high protective tariffs for Russian industries (especially heavy industry), an increase in exports, currency stabilization, and encouragement of foreign investments. His plan was successful and during the 1890s "Russian industrial growth averaged 8 % per year. Railroad mileage grew from a very substantial base by 40 % between 1892 and 1902."

Industry was found in pockets. Prominent industrial areas were St Petersburg and Moscow. Craftsmen undertook much of the production, but large factories existed alongside craft workshops. Many factories were set up in the 1890s, when Russia’s railway network was extended, and foreign investment in industry increased. Coal production doubled and iron and steel output quadrupled. By the 1900s, in some areas factory workers and craftsmen were almost equal in number.

Industrial workers began to feel dissatisfaction with the Tsarist government despite the protective labour laws the government decreed. Some of those laws included the prohibition of children under 12 from working, with the exception of night work in glass factories. Employment of those who were between the ages of 12 and 15 was prohibited on Sundays and holidays. Workers had to be paid in cash at least once a month, and limits were placed on the size and bases of fines for workers who were tardy. Employers were also prohibited from charging workers for the cost of lighting of the shops and plants. Most industry was the private property of industrialists. Government supervised large factories to ensure minimum wages and limited hours of work. But factory inspectors could not prevent rules being broken.

Years	Average annual  strike
1862-69	6
1870-84	20
1885-94	33
1895-1905	176

In craft units and small workshops, the working day was sometimes 15 hours, compared with 10 or 12 hours in factories. Accommodation varied from rooms to dormitories. Workers were a divided social group. Some had strong links with the villages from which they came. Others had settled in cities permanently. Workers were divided by skill. A metalworker of St. Petersburg recalled, ‘Metalworkers considered themselves aristocrats among other workers. Their occupations demanded more training and skill . . . .’ Women made up 31% of the factory labour force by 1914, but they were paid less than men (between half and three-quarters of a man’s wage). Divisions among workers showed themselves in dress and manners too. Some workers formed associations to help members in times of unemployment or financial hardship but such associations were few. Despite divisions, workers did unite to strike work (stop work) when they disagreed with employers about dismissals or work conditions. These discontented, radicalized workers became key to the revolution by participating in illegal strikes and revolutionary protests. These strikes took place frequently in the textile industry during 1896-1897, and in the metal industry during 1902. 

Agrarian problem:

Every year thousands of nobles who found themselves in debt either mortgaged their estates to the noble land bank or sold their land to municipalities, merchants, or peasants. By the time of the revolution, the nobility had sold off one-third of its land holding and mortgaged another third. In the countryside, peasants cultivated most of the land. But the nobility, the crown and the Orthodox Church owned large properties. The government hoped to make peasants — recently emancipated from serfdom — a politically conservative, land-holding class by enacting laws to enable peasants to purchase land from nobility, paying small installments over many decades. The land, known as “allotment land”, would not be owned by individual peasants, but would be owned by the community of peasants; individual peasants would have rights to strips of land that were assigned to them under the open field system. Unfortunately a peasant was unable to sell or mortgage his piece of land so in practice he could not renounce his rights to his land and thus he would be required to pay his share of redemption dues to the village commune. The government had created this plan to ensure the proletarianisation of the peasants would never happen, but the peasants were not given enough land to provide for their needs. "Their earnings were often so small that they could neither buy the food they needed nor keep up the payment of taxes and redemption dues they owed the government for their land allotments. As time went on, the situation grew worse. Masses of hungry peasants roamed the countryside looking for work and would sometimes walk hundreds of miles to find it. Desperate peasants proved capable of violence."In the provinces of Kharkov and Poltava in 1902, thousands of them, ignoring restraints and authority, burst out in a rebellious fury that led to extensive destruction of property and looting of noble homes before troops could be brought to subdue and punish them." These violent outbreaks caught the attention of the government, so they created numerous committees to investigate the causes of these violent outbursts from the peasants. The results of their investigation found that there was no part of the countryside that was prosperous; some parts, especially the fertile areas known as "black-soil region", were in a state of decline.

Like workers, peasants too were divided. They were also deeply religious. But except in a few cases they had no respect for the nobility. Nobles got their power and position through their services to the Tsar, not through local popularity. This was unlike France where, during the French Revolution in Brittany, peasants respected nobles and fought for them. In Russia, peasants wanted the land of the nobles to be given to them. Frequently, they refused to pay rent and even murdered landlords. In 1902, this occurred on a large scale in south Russia. And in 1905, such incidents took place all over Russia. Russian peasants were different from other European peasants in another way. They pooled their land together periodically and their commune (mir) divided it according to the needs of individual families.

The open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages and lasted into the 20th century in parts of western Europe, Russia, Iran and Turkey. Under the open-field system, each manor or village had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acres each, which were divided into many narrow strips of land. The strips or selions were cultivated by individuals or peasant families, often called tenants or serfs. The holdings of a manor also included woodland and pasture areas for common usage and fields belonging to the lord of the manor and the church. The farmers customarily lived in individual houses in a nucleated village with a much larger manor house and church nearby. The open-field system necessitated co-operation among the inhabitants of the manor.

Chernozem (from Ukrainian: чорнозем, translated as "black soil, dirt or earth") is a black-coloured soil containing a high percentage of humus (7% to 15%), and high percentages of phosphoric acids, phosphorus an dammonia. Chernozem is very fertile and produces a high agricultural yield.

Nationality problem:

Russia was a multi-ethnic empire. Nineteenth-century Russians saw cultures and religions in a clear hierarchy. Non-Russian cultures were tolerated in the empire but were not necessarily respected. "European civilization was valued over Asian or African culture, and Christianity was on the whole considered more progressive and 'true' than other religions."

For generations, Russian Jews had been considered a special problem. "The official view had come to be that they were enemies of Christianity, exploiters of the peasantry, and the fountain head of the revolutionary movement." Like other minorities in Russia, the Jews lived in "miserable and circumscribed lives, forbidden to settle or acquire land outside the cities and towns, legally limited in attendance at secondary school and higher schools, virtually barred from legal professions, denied the right to vote for municipal councilors, and excluded from services in the Navy or the Guards."

Educated class as a problem:

The Minister of the Interior, Plehve, designated the schools as a pressing problem for the government.

Student were taking up problems that were unrelated to their "proper employment", and were taking part in open disorderly displays of defiance and radicalism. This was originally perceived by the government as lack of proper training in patriotism and religion. The government was disturbed by the widespread behavior but felt it could be fixed. In fact, when the official decision to overhaul the whole educational system was finally made, in 1904, and to that end Vladimir Glazov, head of General Staff Academy, was selected as Minister of Education, the students had grown bolder and more resistant than ever.

The Coming of Socialism to Europe

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Socialists were against private property, and saw it as the root of all social ills of the time.

Individuals owned the property that gave employment but the propertied were concerned only with personal gain and not with the welfare of those who made the property productive. So if society as a whole rather than individuals controlled property, more attention would be paid to collective social interests. Socialists wanted this change and campaigned for it.

How could a society without property operate? What would be the basis of socialist society?

Socialists had different visions of the future. Some believed in the idea of cooperatives. 

Robert Owen , a leading English manufacturer, sought to build a cooperative community called New Harmony in Indiana (USA). Other socialists felt that cooperatives could not be built on a wide scale only through individual initiative: they demanded that governments encourage cooperatives. 

In France, for instance, Louis Blanc  wanted the government to encourage cooperatives and replace capitalist enterprises. These cooperatives were to be associations of people who produced goods together and divided the profits according to the work done by members.

Karl Marx  and Friedrich Engels added other ideas to this body of arguments. Marx argued that industrial society was ‘capitalist’. Capitalists owned the capital invested in factories, and the profit of capitalists was produced by workers. The conditions of workers could not improve as long as this profit was accumulated by private capitalists. Workers had to overthrow capitalism and the rule of private property. Marx believed that to free themselves from capitalist exploitation, workers had to construct a radically socialist society where all property was socially controlled. This would be a communist society. He was convinced that workers would triumph in their conflict with capitalists. A communist society was the natural society of the future.

Support for Socialism:

By the 1870s, socialist ideas spread through Europe. To coordinate their efforts, socialists formed an international body . namely, the Second International. By the 1870s, socialist ideas spread through Europe. To coordinate their efforts, socialists formed an international body namely, the Second International.
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