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History and Culture: The first Russian revolution. By Arnold Beichman.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, “Those
who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution
inevitable.” I thought of these momentous words as I recalled that
this is the centennial year of the first
Russian Revolution, which began on what is known as Bloody Sunday, January 22, 1905.
It all started with Father Gapon, a prison chaplain.
He led a group of St. Petersburg workers hoping to present to Tsar Nicholas
II a petition signed by 135,000 persons calling for political freedoms,
including an amnesty for political prisoners
and an 8-hour day at a time when 14 or 15 hours were an accepted employer practice. Facing
mounting costs of living, the petitioners called
for tax reforms including a graduated income tax.
Gapon was no ordinary priest. According to the British
historian Robert Service, Gapon fascinated Lenin and had long conversations
with him in 1905–6. Lenin recognized that Gapon had an intuitive feel
for the Russian workers. Unfortunately, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party
suspected Gapon of being a police spy and murdered him in Finland in 1906.
Bloody Sunday arose after the crushing defeats of the
tsarist army and navy during the Russo-Japanese war, climaxed by the fall
of Port Arthur. The Gapon petitioners demanded an end to the war
immediately. They carried portraits of the tsar and saints of the Russian
Orthodox Church as they gathered on Winter Palace Square. Without warning,
the palace guards fired on the demonstrators,
killing 100 and wounding several hundred more.
The 1905 tsarist massacre inspired a spirit of revolt
throughout Russia, but it was unorganized and had no agreement on ultimate
aims. At one point some 3 million workers were on strike. Even more
unprecedented was the organization of a nationwide peasant union. It was
then that the word “soviet” was first heard, which means
nothing more than “council.”
It was a great opportunity for a revolutionary genius
like Lenin, who had put it all in the revolutionary cookbook What Is to Be Done? published in 1902. He realized
that the 1905 Bloody Sunday would accomplish little. Tsardom re-emerged, a
little blood spattered but very much unbowed. A few Band-Aid reforms were
introduced but they didn’t matter. One can argue, counter-factually,
that had the tsar stayed out of World War I, the Romanov dynasty might have
survived and we wouldn’t be wondering if Anastasia had been the sole
Romanov survivor.
Lenin ignored Marx’s “law” that a
true proletarian revolution had to be preceded by a bourgeois revolution.
He had learned the lessons of 1905, the biggest of which was that, to make
a revolution, you needed a controlled party of dedicated revolutionaries.
The year 1905 has been described as the dress
rehearsal for the Bolshevik revolution, the low rumbling waves that
preceded the tsunami of 1917. One wonders whether looking back from 2105
the world will look as awful as it does today looking back on the last 100
years: two world wars, scores of little wars, the age of the H-bomb and, of
course, 9/11.
Special to the Hoover Digest. Available from the Hoover Press is CNN’s Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy, edited by Arnold Beichman. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org. Arnold Beichman, a political scientist, writer, and former journalist, has been a visiting scholar and research fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1982. |
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