III.

The Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905

Nicholas presided over a period of rapid industrialization that brought economic and social development not often matched by the political imagination to guide it. He was well served in the 1890s and early 1900s by Sergey Witte, minister of finance (1892-1903), who encouraged foreign investment in Russia and oversaw the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway (completed in 1904). Russia’s industries and cities grew in size and sophistication; liberal, populist, and socialist ideas found favour with workers and a rising middle class. Nicholas’s interest in Russian expansion in East Asia was however one of the causes of the disastrous Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), which in turn helped touch off the Russian Revolution of 1905.

On January 22, 1905, some 200,000 workers gathered outside the Winter Palace, residence of the tsar in St Petersburg. They intended to appeal directly to the tsar for better pay and conditions. The tsar’s uncle, Grand Duke Vladimir, commander of the Imperial Guard, gave the order to fire on the crowd, over a hundred of whom were killed and several hundred injured. The Bloody Sunday massacre undermined faith in the tsar and set off a wave of protest throughout Russia. Workers organized councils (“soviets”) and the middle classes agitated for parliamentary democracy. Peasants seized gentry lands and burned down manor houses. Nicholas issued his October Manifesto on October 30 (October 18, Old Style), 1905, giving reluctant assent to constitutional monarchy; a legislative assembly, the Duma, was first called in May 1906. Momentarily, educated Russians backed the regime; worker and peasant agitation was seen off with force. Nicholas attempted to regain the initiative, dissolving the first two Dumas and revising electoral law until half of parliament was elected by two per cent of Russia’s population. Under the influence of his prime minister Pyotr Stolypin (in office 1906-1911), reforms to encourage the growth of a prosperous property-owning peasantry by allowing them to claim ownership of their land and leave the communes were set in motion but their results were inconclusive. Worker disquiet increased in the two years prior to World War I with St Petersburg paralysed by a general strike in July 1914, on the eve of the outbreak of war.