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Beryl Williams marks the centenary of the revolutionary year 1905, and discusses the impact of the massacre outside the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, and the complex events throughout Russia that preceded and followed Bloody Sunday.
THE CENTENARY OF THE Russian Revolution of 1905 comes as historians are re-evaluating the late tsarist period, and as recently available local archives are throwing new light on the revolutionary year. The term 'revolution' has remained unchallenged, although by most definitions it does not qualify. The monarchy did not fall, and there was little real social or economic change. The political consequences of the October Manifesto issued by Tsar Nicholas II in the light of the uprising fell far short of liberal hopes. Nevertheless the standard work in English, by Professor Aschcr, accepts the term, and the year should be seen as a genuine revolution in its own right, not just as a 'dress rehearsal' for 1917. If 'revolution' is defined, as Hannah Arendt defined it, as a spontaneous, popular upheaval, during which new forms of self-government were developed from below, then it certainly qualifies.
The causes of the revolution, however, have been subjected to considerable review. The old assumptions of the inevitability of the collapse of tsarism, and that the rapid growth of industry led to peasant poverty, an agricultural crisis and a revolutionary-minded proletariat, are being challenged. It is now argued that, far from being in crisis, Russian agricultural output was increasing at the end of the nineteenth century, and that peasant rather than landlord agriculture was most productive. The peasantry adapted more successfully to conditions of industrialisation and post-emancipation than had been realized. Peasants were buying and renting land from the nobility, experimenting with new crops, growing wheat for the export market and going into market gardening to supply the expanding towns. Railways enabled easy transport of goods and people, enabling young men to work in the cities. They did not, however, become a full-time proletariat. They retained land in the villages, left their families in the countryside, and sent money home. Ninety-two per cent of Moscow workers still had regular contact with their villages in 1905. There were new opportunities for labour in the new and expanding towns near the coalfields of the Donbass,...