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Russia's Revolution of 1905. Was Lenin right when he called the Revolution of 1905 a dress rehearsal for the Revolution of 1917?

Дата публикации: 04 сентября 2007
Публикатор: Научная библиотека Порталус
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS) - Imperial Russia →
Источник: (c) http://russia.by
Номер публикации: №1188913306


Russia's Revolution of 1905. Was Lenin right when he called the Revolution of 1905 a dress rehearsal for the Revolution of 1917?

Viewpoint: Yes. The Revolution of 1905 arose from many of the same issues and conflicts that came to the forefront in 1917.

Viewpoint: No. The Revolution of 1905 was the impetus for reform movements that had the potential to democratize Russia.

_______________________

Three years after his party's successful coup d'état in 1917, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin referred to the Revolution of 1905 as a "dress rehearsal" for the events of 1917. In 1905, Russian society was torn asunder by the Bloody Sunday (22 January) shootings of unarmed workers demonstrating for a redress of their grievances and by a costly and unsuccessful war with Japan. In the midst of rising urban and rural lawlessness, strikes, and civil unrest came calls for a constitutional state with guaranteed civil rights and representative institutions.
Although the tsarist government weathered the crisis of 1905, partly by granting civil liberties and some representative rights in October 1905, Lenin, like many other observers then and now, believed that the central problems remained unsolved and made the events of 1917 inevitable. In 1917, as in 1905, Russia was in the process of losing a war; dissidents were calling for greater democratic and civil rights; the urban and rural masses were causing unrest; and revolutionaries were plotting to destroy the state and society.
Yet, other scholars believe that the reforms of 1905 had the potential to bring about social and political changes other than those experienced in 1917. In 1905 the government did concede an impressive array of civil rights, and its creation of a legislative body, the State Duma, paved the way for greater democratization. Outside government, cultural life, professional organizations, local administration, the business world, and other institutions of civil society seem to have made much progress toward creating a Russian concept of participatory citizenship--a development that had more in common with Western European and American models of development than with socialist revolution.



Viewpoint: Yes. The Revolution of 1905 arose from many of the same issues and conflicts that came to the forefront in 1917.

Vladimir Lenin asserted that the events of 1905 should be interpreted as a "dress rehearsal" for what happened in 1917, denying the possibility that Russian politics could have evolved according to the paradigm of electoral representative governments established in Western democracies. Lenin believed that revolution would result in a proletarian democracy, that is, a government formed by and for the working class.

In a dress rehearsal, the characters are in place and know their lines, but they need one final opportunity to work out problems in the performance before the play opens. In the case of Russia, twelve years passed between dress rehearsal and opening night, but in their 1917 performance the players were able to overcome mistakes made during the dress rehearsal.

In both 1905 and 1917, the play was divided into three acts: unsuccessful war, the heightening of political consciousness across all social strata, and revolution. Although historians have pointed to fundamental differences in the reasoning behind the declarations of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 and World War I a decade later, the social, political, and economic results were similar. In both cases Russia entered a war that it was technologically unable to fight. A government that cannot win a war and suffers homefront instability as a consequence loses the confidence of its populace.

Although public responses to the outbreaks of both wars have important similarities, historians have tended to focus on the differences. That is, the Russians were considerably more positive about fighting Germany in 1914 than they were about going to war against Japan in 1904. In both instances, however, some Russians quickly took advantage of wartime circumstances to open a political struggle against the autocracy. While the tsar hoped to be able to inspire patriotic support for his regime, leaders from across the political spectrum who desired some form of constitutionalism used prosecution of the war for their own purposes. In 1904 they followed a model set up during the French Revolution of 1848, the so-called banquet campaign, in which they skirted laws against public political conferences by meeting at ostensibly professional or social gatherings to discuss political goals and strategies. The outcome was a liberal-democratic Union of Liberation, which had joined with other such groups under the umbrella of the Union of Unions by October 1905. Local-government groups, the zemstva (singular zemstvo), used the crisis atmosphere to expand their public and administrative roles. Better prepared in 1914 than in 1904-1905, these same groups organized locally and nationally, taking a major role in provisioning troops and other aspects of regulating supplies for a country at war. In 1914 they also had a more public forum, the State Duma, in which to debate politics. Some politicians who earlier had led in the banquet campaigns were in the so-called Progressive Bloc of the State Duma.

Workers and peasants also found political voices because of their critical roles in producing necessary supplies and provisioning the troops. Workers had been launching strikes since 1903, and following the massacre of peaceful demonstrators in January 1905, they intensified their efforts to win political and economic concessions. The declaration of war in August 1914 brought a temporary lull to the strike movement, which had been building since another attack on unarmed demonstrators, this time at the Lena Goldfields in 1912. Strikes began to occur more frequently in 1915; the number of strikers doubled to nearly one million in the next year, labor unrest reaching the boiling point on the 1917 anniversary of Bloody Sunday (22 January 1905). Peasants had never ceased their demands for more arable land, even after those who appropriated it for themselves had been put down by force in 1905. They renewed their disturbances en masse even before the outbreak of war; as a result, much of European Russia was under martial law in 1913. When given even highly restricted opportunities to vote, the peasants cast their ballots with socialist parties who supported their single political plank: land redistribution.

Another dissatisfied segment of the Russian population was the military. In the 1904-1905 conflict with Japan, as many as one-third of active army units rebelled to protest poor conditions, bad leadership, and the apparent senselessness of a remote war they did not understand against an enemy most had never heard of. Between 1914 and 1917 Russian soldiers lost millions of their comrades in what was widely seen as a doomed war against Germany; they, as well as their wives and widows, demonstrated their dissatisfaction by rioting.

From this volatile climate logically came revolution. Lenin overstated the extent to which the Revolution of 1905 and the popular demonstrations of February-March 1917 were "bourgeois" revolutions (following Marxist historical logic), but the initial ostensible victors in both incidents were those groups that most resembled Western-style politicians seeking electoral representation. Both revolutionary events ended with a weakened tsar. Nicholas II seemed to recover his balance after 1905, but the autocracy was irrevocably damaged, and his abdication in 1917 was the consequence of twelve years of political dissent. Against this background on each occasion, an alternative political institution took shape. In 1905 the bourgeoisie established an electoral, quasi-representative State Duma, and in 1917 members of that body, including many who had been politically active since 1905 and earlier, assumed positions in a Provisional Government. In both 1905 and 1917, the lower classes congregated in soviets, or representative councils. Although the soviets were dispersed in 1905, in 1917 they secured enough legitimacy that the Provisional Government was forced to recognize them; then Bolsheviks seized power in their name. The events of 1917 are clearly linked to those of 1905.

At this point, however, it is critical to look closely at the implications of Lenin's dictum that the liberals' political activities between 1905 and 1917 were not preparing Russia for a Western-style democracy and that instead the workers were preparing to seize power. If Soviet historians were myopic in their conviction that the Bolshevik Revolution was inevitable, then Western historians proved equally guilty of altering the facts to fit their own preconceived notions. The strongest argument levied by Western scholars is that all Russian classes joined together in 1905 with the common purpose of defeating the autocracy. In this reading of history, the liberals revealed their fatal flaw in their failure to unite with the lower classes in 1917. This interpretation grants heroic status to the Union of Unions in 1905 for its inclusiveness, while it ignores the willingness with which liberal elements turned their backs as the tsarist government began its armed assault on workers who were still striking in December 1905 and on rebellious peasants--after the tsar's celebrated October Manifesto promised a constitution. The exploited Russian majority--workers, peasants, and soldiers--had greater ambitions than just a State Duma that did not represent their most basic interests. Lenin correctly summarized the atrocities of December 1905 as "a decisive turn in Russian domestic politics toward the most extreme reaction."

Lenin created an epilogue to the 1917 performance. The proletarian democracy sought by the national soviets, who convened in Petrograd in October 1917 in order to hammer out political details, was perverted by the Bolsheviks' armed seizure of the soviets' power, a coup ironically carried out in their name. A dictatorship by the proletariat became a dictatorship of the proletariat. The peasants, again, had to pay the most severe price.

-- Louise McReynolds, University of Hawai'i, Manoa


Viewpoint: No. The Revolution of 1905 was the impetus for reform movements that had the potential to democratize Russia.

The events of 1917 in Russia loom so large and are so significant that it is difficult for scholars to evaluate other developments of the period except in the context of the ultimate demise of the tsarist regime. All too often, scholars of late Imperial Russia have concentrated solely on seeking the underlying reasons for the collapse of its monarchy. It seems, moreover, that many historians and social scientists have uncritically accepted Lenin's felicitous dictum that the Russian Revolution of 1905 was but the dress rehearsal for the complete upheaval of 1917. Accordingly, much attention has been paid to the dramatic increase in the size of the labor movement during the period 1905-1914, as well as to the general upsurge in strikes and other labor actions that gripped Russia after 1905. These same scholars conveniently ignore the implications of government legalization of the unions and that--as in prewar Great Britain and the United States--the majority of the Russian strikes were primarily economic in nature, not political. They also downplay the significance of the wave of reform and change that swept through both town and countryside during 1905-1914.

Perhaps the most impressive and promising development in Russian social and political life during 1905-1914 was the increasing activism of the zemstvo (local government, plural zemstva). The zemstvo, instituted in 1864, was originally envisioned as just a link in the administrative chain stretching from St. Petersburg to the countryside, which would allow the state bureaucracy to retain control but assign specific functions to be administered on the local level, but the zemstvy (elected deputies of the zemstvo) had soon come to understand that the massive problems besetting Russia could not be resolved without the active participation of society. To that end these activists had formed the General Zemstvo Organization (Obshchezemskaia organizatsiia) in order to coordinate relief efforts for the tsar's sick and wounded soldiers during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The exhausted regime had been forced to allow the organization to operate, and after the cessation of hostilities the union voted to continue its philanthropic efforts in European Russia despite the ban on such joint endeavors imposed by the Zemstvo Statute, the founding legislation of the local bodies. The activists believed that eventually the regime would be compelled to permit independent public initiative to meet the needs of the people in a rapidly changing Russia. Petr Stolypin, the last great statesman of Imperial Russia, who served as prime minister from 1906 until his assassination in 1911, largely agreed with these sentiments.

During the decade of its existence (1904-1914) the General Zemstvo Organization played a crucial role in famine relief for the hard-pressed Russian peasantry. Repeated crop failures produced not only famine, but also outbreaks of diphtheria, typhus, and cholera. Stolypin encouraged the union to play a crucial role not only in food provisioning and related philanthropic endeavors, but also in the facilitation of peasant resettlement in Siberia. Stolypin's attempt to break up the peasant communes, collective entities invested with the rights and responsibilities of peasant landownership, and to create a satisfied and prosperous peasantry with individual ownership of consolidated plots, has received a lot of attention. Of equal importance was his effort to ease the alleged "land shortage" by resettling peasants east of the Urals. The government's migration budget rose from 2.5 million rubles in 1905 to 13 million by 1908. The 1909 appropriation for this purpose exceeded 23 million, and the sums continued to rise until the outbreak of World War I; the draft budget for 1914 was 30,229,000, a sixfold increase over 1906. Zemstvo activists used some of these funds to establish medical-alimentary units along the Trans-Siberian railroad from Irkutsk to the Far East, as well as along the Amur River. They also sent teams of doctors into the newly established settlements to treat the peasants for various diseases. Huge sums were spent on road construction, hydrotechnical works, and communications infrastructure. Other funds were loaned directly to the settlers, who numbered precisely 3,417,502 in the period 1906-1913. Of this group, only 615,891 eventually returned to European Russia.

Even more remarkable was the dramatic increase in zemstvo activities at all levels after 1905. This growing activism flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which contends that educated society was demoralized and marginalized and unable to play a constructive role in Russian public life, especially after the so-called zemstvo reaction set in after the Revolution of 1905. The seizure of the zemstva by conservatives in the wake of this cataclysm has, of course, been amply discussed in the scholarly literature. Special emphasis has been placed on the broad array of programs that were immediately slashed or shut down in 1905-1907. The fact that conservatives dominated the zemstvo after 1905 has repeatedly been cited as evidence that local self-government groups could not possibly have fulfilled their mission as agents for change in the countryside. This assumption, in turn, has led many historians to conclude that Imperial Russia was doomed and that the 1917 Revolution was inevitable. The problem with this standard view, however, is that it stops in 1907, the year in which the main study of the zemstvo ends. Yet, as the historical record from 1908 to 1914 shows, the conservative nobles almost immediately realized that slashing the programs administered by the zemstva would undermine their own political influence and eliminate their ability to shape events in the countryside. Indeed, after 1907 they began to reassemble programs they had cut and implemented a wide-ranging program for educational reform that was even more impressive than the one implemented by their liberal forebears. Zemstvo expenditures on schools increased dramatically between 1907 and 1914, especially accelerating during the immediate prewar years. In 1913 total zemstvo budgets increased by nearly 40 million rubles over the previous year; of this increase nearly 42 percent (16.5 million) went to education. State grants to local zemstva also increased from the quite negligible sum of 2 million rubles in 1907 to more than 40 million rubles in 1913, a more than twentyfold increase that accounted for 16 percent of the total zemstvo budget in forty provinces. By 1912 most zemstva had also begun negotiations with the Ministry of Education to participate in a national plan to achieve universal schooling. In August 1911 the government permitted three hundred delegates from local zemstva, teachers, and educators to assemble in Moscow. Although most of the delegates were conservative, this congress passed a series of resolutions that were surprisingly progressive: expansion of adult-education programs, broadening the curriculum of rural schools, and rejecting curricula that emphasized vocational training for peasants rather than a general, secular education. In keeping with Stolypin's prescription for transforming Russia from a servile to a civil society, the zemstvo schools would serve as "bearers of culture" to inculcate in the peasantry the norms of civil society.

Conservative nobles jealously guarded their primacy in the countryside and defeated many of Stolypin's proposals to democratize the zemstva. The premier's plans to democratize the elections to the existing, county-level zemstvo and to establish the small zemstvo unit at the most basic level of the peasants' volost', or canton (which no amount of legerdemain could have prevented the peasantry from dominating), were blocked by rightist forces on the local level and nationally in the State Council. A local zemstvo would have empowered peasants and quite likely made good on the as-yet-unrealized promise of civic equality for them. Stolypin did, however, manage to restore the peasants' right to select their own representatives to the zemstva, and the granting of internal passports brought them into full citizenship. The peasants' exposure to local politics soon led them to play a more assertive role in zemstvo sessions. Despite the failure of zemstvo reform, these peasant deputies often made common cause with other underrepresented elements of society (such as urban property holders) to lobby for expansion of programs benefiting peasants. Moreover, these peasant deputies voted to increase zemstvo taxes to support education, agronomy, and medicine. In so doing, they were responding to thousands of petitions presented by peasant communes, further proof that the peasantry had learned the art of political pressure and had begun to make use of Russia's burgeoning public sphere to make their interests and concerns known. In other words, despite the failure to democratize local government, zemstvo programs touched ever widening circles of peasants, and within the village there were elements pressing for wider participation and inclusion in local government.

Though the tsarist government on the eve of World War I was still authoritarian, there had been many promising developments in Russian social and political spheres. Peasants worked alongside their former masters in local government and had their own representatives in the national legislature, the State Duma. Together they worked on projects of mutual concern and slowly learned the skills of self-organization necessary to put forward claims in the public sphere--essential preconditions for the development of a civil society. The growing complexity of zemstvo programs resulted in the increased reliance on an emerging middle class of trained professionals whose numbers grew steadily in the prewar years. The myriad conferences, congresses, and commissions that convened to discuss technical, social, economic, and other issues, were also instrumental in fostering public space for an emerging civil society in provincial Russia. The energy with which these public servants tackled the problems of a modernizing Russia gives further evidence that Russian society on the eve of World War I was not--as it is often depicted--demoralized, marginalized, and unable to play a constructive role in the regeneration of the Russian polity; nor was revolutionary upheaval inevitable.

-- Thomas Earl Porter, North Caroline A&T State University


LENIN'S DRESS REHEARSAL

In this address, published in May 1919, Lenin introduced the idea of the Revolution of 1905 as a "dress rehearsal" for the proletarian revolution:

How is it that one of the most backward countries of Europe was the first country to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to organise a Soviet republic? We shall hardly be wrong if we say that it is this contradiction between the backwardness of Russia and the "leap" she has made over bourgeois democracy to the highest form of democracy, to Soviet, or proletarian, democracy--it is this contradiction that has been one of the reasons (apart from the dead weight of opportunist habits and philistine prejudices that burdened the majority of the socialist leaders) why people in the West have had particular difficulty or have been slow in understanding the role of the Soviets.

The working people all over the world have instinctively grasped the significance of the Soviets as an instrument in the proletarian struggle and as a form of the proletarian state. But the "leaders", corrupted by opportunism, still continue to worship bourgeois democracy, which they call "democracy" in general.

Is it surprising that the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat has brought out primarily the "contradiction" between the backwardness of Russia and her "leap" over bourgeois democracy? It would have been surprising had history granted us the establishment of a new form of democracy without a number of contradictions.

If any Marxist, or any person, indeed, who has a general knowledge of modern science, were asked whether it is likely that the transition of the different capitalist countries to the dictatorship of the proletariat will take place in an identical or harmoniously proportionate way, his answer would undoubtedly be in the negative. There never has been and never could be even, harmonious, or proportionate development in the capitalist world. Each country has developed more strongly first one, then another aspect or feature or group of features of capitalism and of the working-class movement. The process of development has been uneven. . . .

World history is leading unswervingly towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, but is doing so by paths that are anything but smooth, simple and straight. . . .

. . . Leadership in the revolutionary proletarian International has passed for a time--for a short time, it goes without saying--to the Russians, just as at various periods of the nineteenth century it was in the hands of the British, then of the French, then of the Germans.

I have had occasion more than once to say that it was easier for the Russians than for the advanced countries to begin the great proletarian revolution, but that it will be more difficult for them to continue it and carry it to final victory, in the sense of the complete organisation of a socialist society.

It was easier for us to begin, firstly, because the unusual--for twentieth-century Europe--political backwardness of the tsarist monarchy gave unusual strength to the revolutionary onslaught of the masses. Secondly, Russia's backwardness merged in a peculiar way the proletarian revolution against the bourgeoisie with the peasant revolution against the landowners. That is what we started from in October 1917, and we would not have achieved victory so easily then if we had not. As long ago as 1856, Marx spoke, in reference to Prussia, of the possibility of a peculiar combination of proletarian revolution and peasant war. From the beginning of 1905 the Bolsheviks advocated the idea of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. Thirdly, the 1905 revolution contributed enormously to the political education of the worker and peasant masses, because it familiarised their vanguard with "the last word" of socialism in the West and also because of the revolutionary action of the masses. Without such a "dress rehearsal" as we had in 1905, the revolutions of 1917--both the bourgeois, February revolution, and the proletarian, October revolution--would have been impossible. Fourthly, Russia's geographical conditions permitted her to hold out longer than other countries could have done against the superior military strength of the capitalist, advanced countries. Fifthly, the specific attitude of the proletariat towards the peasantry facilitated the transition from the bourgeois revolution to the socialist revolution, made it easier for the urban proletarians to influence the semi-proletarian, poorer sections of the rural working people. Sixthly, long schooling in strike action and the experience of the European mass working-class movement facilitated the emergence--in a profound and rapidly intensifying revolutionary situation--of such a unique form of proletarian revolutionary organisation as the Soviets. . . .

Soviet, or proletarian, democracy was born in Russia. . . . The proletarian and peasant Soviet Republic has proved to be the first stable socialist republic in the world. As a new type of state it cannot die. . . .

Source: V. I. Lenin, "The Third International and Its Place in History," in his Collected Works, fourth edition, 45 volumes, edited by George Hanna (Moscow: Progressive Publishers, 1960-1970), pp. 307-311.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Anonymous, "Historical Transactions: Dress Rehearsal for 1917," in Russia in Transition, 1905-1914: Evolution or Revolution? edited by Robert H. McNeal (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), pp. 19-23.

Oskar Anweiler, "The Opening of New Possibilities," in Russia in Transition, 1905-1914: Evolution or Revolution? pp. 10-18.

Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Ascher, Russia in Disarray, volume 1 of The Revolution of 1905, 2 volumes (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1988, 1992).

Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

Mary Schaeffer Conroy, ed., Emerging Democracy in Late Imperial Russia: Case Studies on Local Self-Government (the Zemstvos), State Duma Elections, the Tsarist Government, and the State Council Before and During World War I (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1998).

Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Nicholas II: The Interrupted Transition (New York: Holmes & Meier, 2000).

Dominic C. B. Lieven, Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

Nicolai N. Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An Interpretation of Political Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990).

Thomas Porter and Scott Seregny, "The Zemstvo Reconsidered," in The Politics of Local Government in Russia, edited by Alfred Evans and Vladimir Gelman (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 19-44.

Опубликовано на Порталусе 04 сентября 2007 года

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