<>1904:1907; Russia experienced four years of extreme political disorder with the First Russian Revolution (the 1905 Revolution) at the center
*--Here are main sources of disorder =

*--These were the main streams that flowed into the flood of events called the 1905 Revolution [1905 REVOLUTION LOOP]

*--The main results of the 1905 Revolution =
  1. widespread rural disorder [LOOP on "peasants"] lent urgency to broad public political mobilization [LOOP on "union"]
  2. the first formal, elected legislative assembly in Russian history, THE STATE DUMA
  3. the last great gesture of the imperial reform tradition, the agrarian reforms of PETR STOLYPIN
*--Peacetime civic activism, as an expression of civil society and what might be called grassroots interest-politics, did not reach these levels again for eighty years
*--English scholar Bernard Pares was on the scene and observed some of the major political events of this era [bibliography]
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*--Boris Nikolaevich Mironov, The social history of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) presents the most comprehensive historical analysis of the rise of civil society and the rule of law in the centuries prior to revolutionary crises in the early 20th century
*--Andrew Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution
*--Thomas S. Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local Self-Government, 1861-1900
*--Jacob Walkin, The Rise of Democracy in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: Political and Social Institutions Under the Last Three Tsars
        On the 1905 Revolution itself =
*--Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905. Volume 1:Russia in Disarray. 2:Authority Restored
*------------------------, "German Socialists and the Russian Revolution of 1905", MIR:260-77
*--Sidney Harcave, The Russian Revolution of 1905
*--A. E. Healy, The Russian Autocracy in Crisis:1905-1907 (Hamden CN:1976)

<>1904:1905; German sociologist of world fame and influence, Max Weber (1864-1924), published articles, later a book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This famous book revealed the depths of Weber's "disenchantment" with the direction of his beloved "bourgeois" European culture. The rise of market economies in the 19th century promised liberal freedoms. When the Protestant ethic inspired the early spirit of capitalism and was inspired by it in turn, the market economy liberated human energies. Entrepreneurial enterprise rested on the "saintly" European shoulder like a light and welcome cloak. But now economic enterprise in this great "second industrial revolution" had become routinized and bureaucratic. It threatened creative energies with incarceration in a "disenchanted" industrial giganticism and financial managerialism. The light cloak had become "an iron cage" [TXT of the famous "iron cage" expression at the bottom of Ch. 5] [TXT of Ch. 5 as whole] [TXT of Ch. 2] [Excerpts = CCS:668-98 | CCS,2:67-97]. More Weber bibliography = [W][CWC:151 | CCS:359-61, 409]
*--In these years Weber's attentions were pulled west and east, toward USA and then toward Russia
*--First, he visited USA in order to give a lecture at the St. Louis "Louisiana Purchase Exposition" [world's fair]). As a result of this visit, he wrote a long article "Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1906) [TXT]. This noteworthy article has been neglected, perhaps because of the similarity of its title with the famous book above. Here Weber wrote, "In the past and up to the very present, it has been a characteristic precisely of the specifically American democracy that it did not constitute a formless sand heap of individuals, but rather a buzzing complex of strictly exclusive, yet voluntary associations"
*--Then Weber turned east, toward Russia (for which he studied Russian in order to follow the portentous 1905 Russian Revolution)
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*--Reinhard Bendix was one of the most influential Weber acolytes in the USA. He relied heavily on Weber for his essay "The Cultural and Political Setting of Economic Rationality in Western and Eastern Europe", in Reinhard Bendix, ed., State and Society: A Reader in Comparative Political Sociology (2nd ed., 1973, on shelf next to 1st ed., 1968)

<>1904:Geographical Journal 23:424-31. USA geo-politician H. J. Mackinder published "The Geographical Pivot of History". Russia, he wrote, was the geo-political heartland within which the future of the world was to be determined [MAP]
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*--Parker, Historical Geography:29, 329, 371-4, 377

<>1904:Russian writer of growing world fame Leo Tolstoy on church and state [VSB,3:733]

<>1904:USA Senator from Indiana Albert Beveridge published The Russian Advance after traveling the Trans-Siberian Railroad [RFP2,1:153-67]
*--Beveridge made a "pilgrimage" to Leo Tolstoy's Tula estate "Yasnaia poliana" [ID]. Kurt Grotz has kindly supplied photos relating to Beveridge's visit = [pix] [pix] [pix]
*--This railroad trip across Siberia and Russia was a sobering personal revelation about "racial" harmony among Russians and Chinese in Manchuria, and thus a direct challenge to his famous imperialist speeches in the previous decade
*--By the end of his life, Beveridge was writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln

<>1904:USA sociologist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of Business Enterprise [excerpts in CCC3,2:900-27 | CCS:660-7 | CCS,2:40-7]. He emphasized historical particularities of time and place rather than universal laws of economics. He felt that an industrial and engineering elite offered the best resolution--a "technocratic" resolution--of the social and economic dislocations caused by large-scale industrial modernization

<>1904:USA Chicago | Pavel N. Miliukov delivered lectures which were one year later published in book form as Russia and Its Crisis. He strove to explain Russian politics to Americans [cf. RRC2,2#35]
*--Miliukov sought an expanation of Russian particularity in its medieval history, so unlike that of "The West" [TXT]
*--He also put great weight on the shape Peter the Great gave to Russian history [ID]
*--Miliukov was a professor of history, but he was also a political activist who drew close to the Zemstvo liberal movement, only now in the process of organizing itself formally as a political party

<>1904ja02:ja05; Saint Petersburg | Union of Liberation [Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia] founding conference agreed on political program [DPH:296]
*--Liberal political parties were now functioning more or less openly within Russia
*--And a vigorous union movement added strength to a surprising and broad public mobilization that appeared before the Russio-Japanese war broke out and continued at a heavier pace thereafter

<>1904ja26:1905au23; Manchuria | Russo-Japanese war opened when Japan attacked Russian outposts. The war lasted only 20 months but brought an end to over 200 years of promising and largely peaceful relations. This war shaped the 20th century experience of both nations =
*--Japan won and was inspired by its ability to defeat a great European power but embittered by diplomatic failure at the end of the war
*1904fe10:Russia and Japan mutually declared war [TXT] [RFP2,1:168-70]
*--Japan/Korea treaty
*--General A. N. Kuropatkin wrote The Russian Army and the Japanese War
*1905:1909; British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print... Series A, Russia, 1859 -1914
*--This remote and unpopular war provided a disturbing background to Russian domestic political events as mounting crisis became the 1905 Revolution
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*--Denis Warner and P. Warner, Tide at Sunrise: A History of the Russo-Japanese War,1904-1905
*--J.N. Westwood, Russia Against Japan, 1904-1905:A New Look at the Russo-Japanese War

<>1904fe:Plehve approved charter of Assembly of Saint Petersburg workers. Recreated state-controlled labor unions or "police socialism". Soon Orthodox priest Father Gapon was in charge
*--The union movement expanded well beyond the factory floor and flourished well beyond state control
*--Wage-labor, like all other Russian social formations in these years, was shaking off state efforts to protect and expand old tsarist social/service hierarchies. Imperial social formations no longer fit on those hierarchies. Russian society was transformed, in part as a result of natural demographic and economic changes but also in part as a result of reforms introduced by the state itself over the previous four decades

<>1904sp:Zemstvo liberal Shipov met a third time with Plehve and Witte

<>1904sp:SoO cnf considered cdt [Ganelin:54]
<>1904ap:Plehve refused to approve several blx zmv elx (e.g., MVA:Shipov,Fed) where Zmv mobilized selves on VsR scale to aid wrx effort

<>1904my04:SRs Draft program [H05:268-73] The big agrarian socialist movement was working to define itself as an organized political party

<>1904jy15:Socialist Revolutionary Party "Battle Organization" assassinated Russian Interior Minister, Count Viacheslav Plehve, ending his 15-year career
*--Plehve was the last powerful "official reactionary" Interior Minister. His was the last gasp of a policy that dominated the reign of Alexander III and, so far, that of Nicholas II. Over the previous twenty years, statist reactionaries had been rolling back the Great Reforms, shifting the body-politic toward their imagined two-part pre-modern order = (1) autocratic absolutism, managed in the interests of certain insider elites and resting at the upper tip of (2) stable pyramidal social/service hierarchies
*--SRs issued a declaration to peasants explaining their position on political terror [TXT], giving specific emphasis to Plehve's role in the suppression of Peasant disorder in Kharkov and Poltava provinces [ID]
*--Boris Viktorovich Savinkov (1879-1925) was an SR leader and active participant in the assassinations of Plehve and, six months later, Grand Prince Sergei Aleksandrovich [ID]
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*--Amy Knight, “Female Terrorists in the Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party” [TXT]

<>1904au26:1905ja; Russian Interior Minister Sviatopolk-Mirskii abandoned reactionary policies of his assassinated predecessor and tried moderation for five crucial months
*--Once again (as in the first Russian epoch of political terror) the state appeared to respond to the threat of terror with concessions to a fledgling civil society. It was both tragic and ironic that the immaturity of Russian civil society and its inability to respond with strength to governmental concession followed straight from oppressive state policy over the previous decades, eased now only in a time of revolutionary crisis
*--Assassination of Plehve and elevation of Sviatopolk-Mirskii marked the end of a quarter-century era of reactionary state policy [LOOP back two decades]
*--And they marked the beginning of the 1905 Revolution [read on to 1904de12 to continue the 1905 LOOP]
*--Political concessions made by Nicholas II only whetted the appetite of oppositional forces. An old revolutionary truth appeared vindicated = Opposition intensifies when authorities make concessions to it

<>1904se08:+; Russia | BzmvS mtg regularly; planned no06:Zmv mtg [Ganelin:14]

<>1904se17:se25; Paris conference of revolutionary and oppositional political parties [H05:54-5 | Ganelin:13-15,54]

<>1904oc25:Dmitrii Shipov met with Sviatopolk-Mirskii to seek approval of national Zemstvo Congress [Ganelin:16-21]
*--A sign of crisis, the tsarist state wavered between repressive and concessionary actions

<>1904oc31:BzmvS mtg- S-M who wld not approve open, lgl mtg of Zmv [Ganelin:22]

<>1904no:Union of Liberation issued program [VSB,3:724]
*--Over the next months, the Union encouraged formation of various separate unions of vocational intelligentsia, engineers and technicians. These were not state-sponsored but voluntary "grass-roots" unions

<>1904no04:+; Sviatopolk-Mirskii report [GARF, cited in Ganelin:56] Nicholas I agreed with the report [Ganelin:32]

<>1904no06:no09; Saint Petersburg | First national congress of Zemstvo, led by Dmitrii Shipov, issued 11 theses [VSB,3:741-3 | H05:279-81 | MR&C2:385]
*--Banquet campaign began

<>1904de:Paris | Russian liberal & revolutionary political parties agreed to cooperate (SDs did not participate). Signed declaration = "None of the parties represented at the meeting, in uniting for concerted action, thinks for a moment of abandoning any point of its particular program, or of the tactical methods of the struggle which are adapted to the necessities, the forces, and the situation of the social elements, classes, or nationalities whose interests it represents. [Extreme expropriation of property and terrorism sharply divided this wide spectrum of oppositional parties.] But, at the same time, all declare that the principles expressed below are recognized by all of them: (1) The abolition of the autocracy; revocation of all the measures curtailing the constitutional rights of Finland. (2) The substitution for the autocracy of a democratic régime based on universal suffrage. (3) The right of every nationality to decide for itself; freedom of the national development, guaranteed by the law; suppression of all violence on the part of the Russian government, as practiced against the different nationalities." Points (1) & (2) dispatched the autocratic-bureaucratic state and traditional social/service hierarchies
*--Miliukov acknowledged that this declaration left out any reference to economic reform. The groups could not agree on that, but decided to put off the political struggle between liberals, who were moderate on the matter of  economic reform, and socialists, who pushed for economic egalitarianism. After clearing autocracy and dysfunctional social/service hierarchies out of the way, these political parties would be free to renew struggle among themselves, having defeated a common enemy, the tsarist state, and substituted democratic for old tsarist social relations [MR&C2:381-2]

<>1904de02:de06 & de08; Russian ministers debated Sviatopolk-Mirskii report
*--Witte wrote draft of de12:Ukaz (below) [MR&C2:387]

<>1904de05:Russia | Union of engineers & technicians, the first professional union [PR&R]
*--In this same month an Academic union formed (Vernadskii at Moscow University)
*--State manipulated labor unions began to show some independence from official control

<>1904de11:(NS?)Saint Petersburg labor demonstration [MR&C2:366-7]

<>1904de12:Russian Emperor Nicholas II decree [Ukaz] to Russian Imperial Senate [H05:282-5 | MR&C2:387-8 | Ganelin:39-41] The tsarist state acknowledged, "When ... the need for a given change seems advisable, WE consider it necessary to proceed with the execution of that change, even though it leads to substantive innovations in the law".
*--What seemed at first to be a specific concession to Zemstvo political demands was also a "crack in the edifice" of unlimited autocratic authority and decades of reactionary state policy. As Tocqueville put it, "The most dangerous moment in the life of any bad government is when it starts to improve itself"
*--Thus this de12:Ukaz might be taken as the first moment of formal state involvement in the Revolution of 1905
*--Zemstvo liberals rose to the forefront of broader national political mobilization. Thus the 1905 LOOP parallels the Zemstvo LOOP
*1905 LOOP

<>1904de13:de31; Azerbaijan, Baku oil fields | General strike among petroleum workers
*1905:Baku oil fields patrolled by Cossack troops [pix]
*--More on petroleum

<>1904de20:Manchuria | Russian forces in Port Arthur capitulated to the Japanese

<>1904de30:French socialist movement tried to create Union of French Socialists Parties [DPH:325-6]

<>1905:1916; Germany | Albert Einstein's relativity theory published

<>1905:English political theorist A. V. Dicey published his Harvard University lectures on liberalism and collectivism, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, which were nothing less than a history of democracy in England in the 19th century [CCS,1:791-802]

<>1905:USA | Western Federation of Miners [WFM], a radical labor union that broke with AFL seven years earlier, met secretly with Daniel De Leon [W], the head of the Socialist Labor Party [W], and Eugene Debs, ex-leader of the American Railway Union and now head of the Socialist Party (founded in 1900)
*--The Industrial Workers of the World [IWW or "Wobblies"] grew out of this meeting. William "Big Bill" Haywood was a leader who opposed ordinary labor unions because they sought compromise and non-revolutionary resolution of the "class struggle". He opposed compromise with political institutions unless they promoted revolution. Haywood reflected a US version of the familiar split within socialism [ID]. The IWW thrived mainly in the USA West and had fewer than 100,000 members. WW1 weakened the IWW, especially since its opposition to USA involvement after 1917 seemed to some unpatriotic
*--University of Oregon "Labor Project"
*--Eugene Debs ran for the Presidency three times on the Socialist Party ticket [see his 1908my23:campaign speech delivered in his hometown, Girard KS = "The Issue" [TXT] delivered during his third campaign]. His two-decade political career has been all but forgotten in American political culture
*--Political parties, protest movements and labor unions were coalescing. In this process, civil society sometimes expanded. At other times it narrowed or became more tightly focused.  Social-economic concepts of "class warfare" reflected the stubborn refusal of social elites to cooperate in the establishment of an appropriate place for wage-labor in the post-industrial body-politic. The more radical wing of the labor movement thus largely ignored the political-institutional concepts embodied in the notion of civil society [ID]. Social-economic formations raised barriers against one another. Those oriented toward the interests of industrial workers found it hard to include elite social formations. Elite social formations, for their part, intensified their efforts to limit the success of organized wage-labor. The center of attention shifted from how social-economic groups might adjudicate differences via effective political-institutional mediation to how one or the other social-economic faction might seize the state and wield it in its own particular interests. Elite formations were more often successful. Wage-labor had its efforts in this direction declared criminal

<>1905ja09:Saint Petersburg | "Bloody Sunday" opened when a large but peaceful assembly of factory workers and their families marched toward the Winter Palace, residence of Emperor Nicholas II and his family. The assembly carried a petition composed by union leaders Father Georgii Gapon & Ivan Vasimov [TXT] [H05:285-9 | DIR2:380-3 | CCC2,2:593-6 | DPH:297-300 | VSB,3:743-4]
*--Troops opened fire, thus showing that violence was not a monopoly of revolutionary terrorists
*--Father Gapon described Bloody Sunday [Eye:415-18]
*--The diverse union movement was consolidating its forces. Labor unions increased pressure on officials and added to that already exerted by growing peasant and Zemstvo political mobilization. Here at the beginning of this revolutionary year 1905, Russian factory workers made their dramatic entry
*--The wage-labor LOOP continues. If you would like for now to skip over the detailed account of wage-labor in the Russian 1905 Revolution, click here

<>1905ja11:Russian ministers ignored Witte request to discuss the tragic implications of Bloody Sunday [see above]
*--Moscow Governor General Dmitrii Trepov transferred to post of Petersburg Governor General and commandant of the Petersburg garrison with significant martial-law authority. (He was the son of an infamous previous SPB Governor General)
*1905 LOOP

<>1905ja17; Moscow Agricultural Society member Aleksei Ermolov reported to Nicholas II about the Gapon incident [H05:124-5 | *1925:KrA#8:49-69 | Page:68-9]

<>1905ja18:Russian Council of Ministers met [Ganelin:69]

<>1905ja22:oc22; A.G. Bulygin replaced Sviatopolk-Mirskii as Interior Minister. Bulygin lasted nine months, through the October crisis

<>1905ja22:Moscow Noble Assembly passed "loyal" conservative resolution and a liberal resolution [H05:105] Gentry politics vacillated

<>1905ja29:Saint Petersburg | Shidlovkii Commission assigned to investigate labor situation in the capital city. Members were not only bureaucrats but also representatives of workers themselves. Politically aroused workers predominated
*--Official fear of spontaneous popular initiative, especially that among wage-laborers, was so great that the commission was quickly dissolved [H05:122-3]

<>1905fe03 and 1905fe11:Council of Ministers met [Ganelin:85f] Topic = Should elected representatives of the public be brought into government?

<>1905fe04:Moscow | SRs "Battle Organization" assassinated the Emperor’s uncle, Grand Prince Sergei Aleksandrovich, with a bomb
*--Boris Savinkov participated in this shocking terrorist attack, but double agent Azev (with ties both to the SRs and the tsarist Interior Ministry police) played the central role [H05:127]
*--Political terror was a two-edged sword, it cut in all directions, deranging both those who wielded it and those against whom it was wielded. Similarly, it served the interests of both terrorist who hoped to "disorganize" the government and state reactionaries who were quick to use the fear of terror as an excuse for broad reactionary measures and the cessation of reform
*--Nonetheless, for about a year terror was diluted in the great flood of revolutionary actions coming in from all sides. But then terror once again flared up

<>1905fe18:Tsar Nicholas II issued ukaz authorizing ordinary subjects to petition him for relief of grievances
*--Interior Minister A.G. Bulygin's rescript followed, stating that the tsar would soon "assemble the most trustworthy  men, having the confidence of the people and elected by them, to undertake the preliminary examination and consideration of legislative measures" [cf. H05:129-30, and MR&C2:394-5]

<>1905fe24:Manchuria, Mukden | Japanese forces defeated Russian forces
*--For the tsarist state, international crisis mixed with domestic crisis. The 1905 Revolution LOOP extends through the next 30 or so SAC entries
*1905mr31:German Kaiser Wilhelm visited Tangiers, seeming to threaten French imperialist claims, and to threaten possible imperialist war. French politicians, perhaps influenced by Russian experience in Manchuria, reacted to this theatrical show of naval power. They divided on whether to become more militant against Germany or to build stronger economic ties with Germany so as to forestall war [BNE:199-200]
*--In that same season, the esteemed French socialist leader Jean Jaurès was refused permission to deliver an anti-war speech in Berlin which argued that the threat of war did not derive from conflict between the great majority of French and German wage-laborers. Instead, it derived inevitably from capitalist/European imperialist conflict, unrestrained on the global scene [BNE:200-1]

<>1905fe28:Office clerks & bookkeepers union came to life

<>1905mr:1905my; Paris | Union of Liberation program [H05:273-9]
*1905au:French translation issued
*--The Union of Liberation's three years of bold liberal opposition (largely abroad) were at their end, as the main leaders transferred all energy into the new Union of Unions which was centered in Russia itself and focused the energies of several unions of professional workers

<>1905mr:Russian Monarchical Party [Monarkhicheskaia Partiia] founded by state servitors [chinovniks], high-ranking aristocrats, and other "official reactionaries"
*--Compare this "official aristocratic" group and its political views with the rural gentry aristocrats

<>1905mr12:Russian teachers formed grammar-school union; soon physicians & lawyers formed unions

<>1905mr14:Russian Emperor issued Ukaz on freedom of religion

<>1905ap03:Russian pharmacists' union

<>1905ap05:Russian writers' union
*1905:1907; Maksim Gorky organized the publishing house "Znanie" [knowledge] dedicated to the promotion of works by progressive writers. Gorky also composed radical pamphlets in connection with the revolutionary events of this year, for which he was imprisoned, only to be released after wide public protest
*1906wi:Maksim Gorky left Russia, traveled to USA, visited France and settled in Italy for seven productive years

<>1905ap07:Tver Governor Urusov reported no "general dissatisfaction" or rebelliousness among peasants. Villagers were not much interested in "the anti-government struggle on questions of constitutions and political rights". They were interested only in land, taxes and the war. On that last subject, peasants were patriotic, but "in truth the present war is not popular among the peasants since it is carried on far from Russia, and is fought for the benefit of profiteers ... and not really for Russian interests". Peasants read newspapers closely and "are closely acquainted with all questions found in papers of various political views." Of course, they "interpret all news from the point of view that suits them". Urusov noted that, whatever their political tendency, newspapers tended to rile up peasants. Peasants nearly everywhere entertained the assumption that redemption payments and other forms of taxation would soon come to an end. Contradicting himself, Urusov reported that peasants closely followed national events in newspapers, and when they read of the reform promises in the tsarist ukaz, followed by even clearer promises in the Bulygin rescript, they moved ahead with their own initiatives, keyed to their perceptions of their own interests. Increasingly villagers decided to cease unbearable payments now. Then there is the matter of robbing wood from the privately owned forests, all justified on the basis of felt inadequacy of land distributed to peasants at the time of emancipation and more recent injustices worked on rural labor. Urusov described how "four or five years ago the government office of agriculture and State lands took away from peasant use, and enclosed, many publicly rented fields, long under lease of peasants who had raised the fields to a fine condition after  many years of labor. Then these areas were turned over to the protection of the forest guards. This ruined the peasants and placed them in unbearable straits since they needed the land badly. Besides that, the peasants ..., under the influence of recent events [i.e., spread of violent seizure of land by peasants], are openly saying that since they have insufficient land of their own they intend to use that of the landlords...." Villagers who work in urban factory environment return home and stir up trouble. Peasants do not much sympathize with factory workers. Agitators have little influence.  [Page:69-71]
*--S. D. Urusov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor
*--Petr Stolypin wrote report on the year 1904 in Saratov Province [VSB,3:801-2]
*--Statistics on landed property in Russia in this year [VSB,3:764-6]

<>1905ap17:Russian Emperor issued Ukaz  re. religious tolerance for Old-Ritualists [Raskolniki] [VSB,3:766]
*--The tsarist state moved to heal an old and great wound to the Russian "body-politic"

<>1905ap19:Geneva & Paris | Russian SDs debated at Congress #3. In the meantime, back home in Russia, events slipped more deeply into actual revolution
*--SDs split and issued Bolshevik Party and Menshevik Party programs [McC1:28-30 | Harding:313-4]
*1904:German (Polish-born) social-democrat Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) joined the debate about how Marxism ought to be applied to "backward" Russia. She was a thinker able always to anchor theory in solid practical experience and political-economic actualities. Her essay was published in the German Social-Democratic Party newspaper Neue Zeit [New Times] under the title "Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy", later published under a more polemical title, "Leninism or Marxism?" [And even later translated and published in reverse chronological order with her 1918 essay "Russian Revolution", edited by Bertram Wolfe, Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?]
*--Bolshevik resolutions on the peasant movement, on SRs, and on liberals [VSB,3:714-15]
*--Lenin expressed his views on the peasantry in these months [VSB,3:715]
*--In this year Lenin addressed the question of religion [BMC1:624-5] Some years later on the related topic of ethics and morality [BMC1:626]
*--Henceforward Russian Marxists, who had formed one Social Democratic Party for nine years, operated as two -- Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

<>1905ap22:26; Moscow Zemstvo Congress #2 deliberated on need for new election law (the so-called "Four-Tail" election policy: Voting should be equal, direct, universal, and secret) [H05:142-3]

<>1905ap27:Russian women's rights union were a reflection of mounting revolutionary crisis in Russia, but also of general European trends. Organizations grew in number, size and ambition (for example, the suffrage [election rights] movement intensified). Voting rights for women meant one thing in lands were men could vote; it meant yet more in lands where no one had the right to vote. Feminism was becoming a public movement for women's rights
*1906:English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst photographed as she was arrested [P20:1]
*--Later memoirs of Russian upper-class women's everyday life in this revolutionary epoch, Memories of Revolution
*--Henri Troyat, a Russian emigre author in France, wrote a fictionalized memoir/social history of Russian everyday life in the early 20th century, Daily Life in Russia under the Last Tsar
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*--Anna Hillyar and Jane McDermid, Revolutionary Women in Russia, 1870-1917 (2000), chapter 5 & conclusion
*--Nataliia Pushkareva, Women in Russian History: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Century
*--Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930
*--Linda Harriet Edmondson, Feminism in Russia, 1900-1917

<>1905my:Russia | Kokovtsov kmm re.mfg [Roosa"Russ.Ind"(1975)]

<>1905my:Russian railroad labor union

<>1905my08:my09; Moscow | Union of Unions [Soiuz soiuzov] founding meeting as a national organization, including 14 unions of academics, lawyers, agricultural accountants, medical doctors, veterinarians, railroad personnel, journalists and writers, zemstvo constitutionalists, women's and Jewish rights activists, and other engineers and technicians. Zemstvo constitutionalists withdrew after this initial meeting, but by the summer others joined
*--Program = convene Constituent Assembly with representatives elected according to universal, direct, equal and secret ballot to determine the political/institutional future of Russia
*--Pavel Miliukov presided over a 32-person Central Bureau which included AA Brandt, AI Ventskovskii, YaN Gordeenko, IN Denisevich, SM Kliachko, LI Lutugin, DF Sverchkov, GD Sidamonov-Eristov, ND Sokolov, and FR Ul'man
*1905my22:Moscow | Union of Unions, congress #2. Representatives of the radical intelligentsia joined workers in this union
*--The Union of Unions blossomed quickly over the previous three months. It played the role of central clearing house for many union organizations over the next half year. It continued in that role into the intense weeks of revolutionary mobilization after the huge Peasant Union joined forces with it. It lost some of its momentum as activists fanned out into now-legal political parties campaigning for seats in the new State Duma
*1926:MVA | Professional'noe dvizhenie: Materialy i dokumenty [ORBIS UW]

<>1905my14:my16; Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan | Japanese annihilated 32 Russian naval vessels that had come all the way from European waters

<>1905my24:my26; Zemstvo congress #3
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*--H05:159-60

<>1905je:Russian Black Sea fleet, Odessa port | Russian sailors revolted on naval Battleship Potemkin [Page:76-7]

<>1905je09:Tver guberniia village elder Nil Smirnov issued declaration based on decisions taken at the Ryleev village assembly = The person of the peasant is inviolable. The people must be given freedom of conscience, speech, press, assembly, unions and strikes. Peasant courts must function like all other courts. Peasants, and "yes, all persons", who suffer for their religious beliefs must at once be pardoned and released. Free grade schools must be introduced that teach various trades. Higher education must be as open to peasants as to other classes. "All government organs without exception must be under control of popular representatives, elected by the people themselves under their own system without any educational qualifications. Those elected should also require no property and educational standards but need only to be literate and of legal age." The Land Captain and the separate peasant status must be abolished. District bureaucracy must be restricted in its guardianship over peasants. Local village institutions should replace district administration. Land should be available to those who work it. Every peasant should receive an adequate amount of land from the village, and the government must provide material aid for its cultivation. Collective responsibility for taxes and all forms of indirect taxes should be abolished. Government should convoke an assembly of the people to decide if the Russo-Japanese war should continue.  Peasants suffer such hardships that death might be preferable to life. [Page:73]

<>1905jy:Russia, Peterhof | Secret state conference [H05:161(foolish description) & 165]

<>1905jy06:jy09; Moscow | Zemstvo congress#4 petitioned Nicholas II [H05:160]

<>1905au06:Saint Petersburg | Interior Minister S.G. Bulygin submitted his constitutional project which called for the creation of a State Duma with limited advisory powers [Raeff2:142-52 | VSB,3:702-3 | DPH:300]
*--Full Russian text in GDR:30-54]

<>1905au13:Moscow | All-Russian Peasant Union [Vserossiiskii Krest'ianskii Soiuz] founding Congress
*--Kursk guberniia peasants followed actions of Congress through the journal Russkoe slovo [Russian word] [VEO, Agrarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 1905-1906 gg., 1:56]
*--For past three years, rural dissatisfaction mounted. Now peasants mobilized in a way not unlike all other social groups caught up in the 1905 revolutionary era [PR&R:446-8]
\\
*--Robinson, ch6 (hungry villages), ch7 (peasant world), ch8 (decline of nobility & rise of "Third Estate"), ch9 (origins of 1905)
*--Maureen Perrie, Agrarian Policy:107-111
*--Stephen Dunn, Peasants of Central Russia
*--Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola, eds. Russian Peasant Women
*--Sir John Maynard, The Russian Peasant and Other Studies
*--Mary Matossian, "The Peasant Way of Life". In The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia
*--Christine D. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period

<>1905au17:Russia | Provisional regulation of university promised university autonomy

<>1905au23:se05; USA NH | Russia-Japan treaty negotiations to end Russo-Japanese War lasted 2 weeks and ended with the signing of the  Portsmouth Treaty [TXT] [W TXT] [McC1:11-12 | RFP2,1:170-2]
*--USA President Theodore Roosevelt lent his good offices in the negotiations between Russia and Japan. In ten remarkable years, a new overseas US imperialism had become a noteworthy factor in global politics, even if old Europe might not yet have been ready to take seriously the gravity of USA, or Japan, or Russia, for the matter


A postcard commemorating New Hampshire negotiations
Left to right = Russian Finance Minister Count Sergei Witte, Baron Rosen,
US President Theodore Roosevelt,
 Japanese Ambassador to the US Kogoro Takahira, and Japanese Foreign Minister Jutaro Komura
[SOURCE]

*--In this year, an early case in international law (i.e., law beyond the limits of nation-states), was heard when an English Russian Commission of Inquiry convened [RWP1,2:167-70]
*--For Russia, crises in international relations and domestic politics seemed to be abating, so the tsarist state entered the critical October days still hoping to suppress mass unrest with a combination of force and uncertain promises of reform
\\
*--Saul,2:153-8, 459-507
*--Alan Kimball, "The United States and the Soviet Union: Toward a Mutual Pacific Frontier" (1984)
*--John A. White, The Diplomacy of the Russo-Japanese War

<>1905se12:se15; Moscow | Zemstvo congress #5,194 members
*1905 LOOP

<>1905se19:Moscow railroad strike [H05:175-6]

<>1905fa:Buryat gatherings represented indigenous opposition to tsarist imperialist authority in their lands [GRH:162]

<>1905oc:Baltische konstitutionelle Partei formed, made up of conservative German gentry aristocrats
*--Lithuanian & Latvian nationalist movement under way
*1905oc:Kursk | People's Party (implying "National Party") [Narodnaia Partiia] founded, aristocratic and conservative. Gentry politics or state servitor politics?

<>1905oc07:Russian railroad labor strike began after member arrested [VSB,3:744]

<>1905oc08:Petersburg Governor General Trepov issued decree limiting rights of public assembly. This futile act flew in the face of mounting, near-universal public mobilization which was filling public places in all the larger cities of the Empire

<>1905oc09:Sergei Witte, fresh back from treaty negotiations that settled the Russo-Japanese War, submitted a bold memo to Nicholas II [VSB,3:703-4]

<>1905oc11:Russian wage-laborers submitted petition on working conditions to Witte & he replied [Nevison:18-19]

<>1905oc12:oc18; Moscow | Partiia narodnoi svobody [Party of Popular Freedom], a bold new liberal party, the first openly organized political party in Russian history, held its founding congress. They were not best known by their formal name. Instead, the name "Constitutional Democrats" came into wider usage. In fact, they became best known by the Russian initials for Constitutional Democrat, "KD". And these two Russian letters sounded like the unflattering French word for an adolescent in military training, "KA-DEH" [cadet]. Thus a back-formed nickname also came into wide usage = Kadety (Cadets)]
*--Program [McC1:33-5 | H05:292-300 | DIR2:405-10 | DIR3:438f | VSB,3:724]
*1905oc14:Pavel Miliukov addressed congress of this most important liberal political party [VSB,3:726]
*--KDs prepared for the anticipated State Duma
\\
*--Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia

<>1905oc13:Witte submitted yet another bold memo to Nicholas II. Witte's personal views did not get in the way of his practical political good sense [VSB,3:704-5]

<>1905oc13:Saint Petersburg Soviet [of Workers' Deputies] met for the first time, representing a new form of wage-labor political mobilization

<>1905oc14:Moscow general strike began. Over the previous ten days railroads had been shutting down. Georgii Khrustalev-Nosar, described the strike movement: "Within ten days strikes had seized the entire network of Russian railways, extending over 40,000 kilometers and employing 750,000 clerks and workers. Out of Moscow, as the center, the strike flame sent its rays spreading to the periphery. The railway strike predetermined the general strike. || The strike movement traveled on steel rails and shut down factories, plants, -- all of life in the industrial centers. [...] The strike revolution gave birth to the Soviet" [Page:80-1]

<>1905oc14:Russian Emperor issued Ukaz re. freedom of assembly

<>1905oc16:All-Russian general strike began; a remarkable, massive, open, national rebellion [H05:180-9]

<>1905oc17:Russian Emperor Nicholas II issued October Manifesto [TXT] [Russian TXT] [Other reprints = VSB,3:705 |Mehlinger:331-2 | DIR2:384-5 | GRH:627-8 | McC1:13-4 |  H05:195-6 | CCC2,2:596 | DPH:301-2]
*--This simple manifesto seemed to promise much. The projected State Duma seemed to be an elected parliamentary organization with apparent authority over the tsarist "cabinet" (ministers, "the government") and over all new legislation. This was the  first progressive reform of governmental/administrative institutions since the creation of the Zemstvos forty years earlier, and its immediate institutional implications exceeded anything since the time of Alexander I or perhaps since the time of Peter I
*--Two days after signing the Manifesto, Nicholas II wrote in his diary =

Through all these horrible days, I constantly met Witte. We very often met in the early morning to part only in the evening when night fell. There were only two ways open; to find an energetic soldier and crush the rebellion by sheer force. That would mean rivers of blood, and in the end we would be where had started. [Petersburg Governor General Trepov had issued orders to troops in the Petersburg garrison, "do not spare the bullets", but he now bowed to practical considerations = force would no longer work .] The other way out would be to give to the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have laws confirmed by a State Duma - that of course would be a constitution. Witte defends this very energetically. [Boldface added]
    Almost everybody I had an opportunity of consulting is of the same opinion. Witte put it quite clearly to me that he would accept the Presidency of the Council of Ministers only on the condition that his program was agreed to, and his actions not interfered with. We discussed it for two days and in the end, invoking God's help, I signed. This terrible decision which nevertheless I took quite consciously. I had no one to rely on except honest Trepov. There was no other way out but to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for.
*--Suppression or concession, that was the debate. After several decades of irresolution with respect to the legacy of Alexander II, the tsarist state was now forced at one moment to both quell vast disorder AND pick up the pace of reform. The Manifesto made extensive concessions to society, but Nicholas II and the insider elites around him may not have meant to fulfill all the promises of the October Manifesto. The promise of a State Duma calmed a nation in the grip of near universal and spontaneous rebellion. Only the most radical elements among mobilized wage-laborers and discontented villagers were ready to push toward further revolutionary accomplishment. The irony was that these contrary trends -- general calm and worker radicalism -- allowed certain voices within the tsarist state once again to resist reform and to entertain the dream of statist reaction through suppression
*--Much hung on the big and immediate question about how the grand promises of the October Manifesto might be actualized in newly drafted Fundamental Laws
\\
*--H05:193-5, 210

<>1905oc17:Saint Petersburg Soviet newspaper Izvestiia [News] began publication [VSB,3:745]

<>1905oc17:Sergei Witte reported to Emperor Nicholas II in connection with his assignment to coordinate the actions of the several ministries in preparation for the formation of a State Council. He said unrest "has seized various sosloviia" and has its roots much deeper than partial imperfections of government or in society, or as result of political extremists. Roots are found "in the disturbed equilibrium between the aspirations of conscious elements [in society] and the external forms of their life". Russian society had outgrown the old order. It would have a new order based on "civic liberty". Political institutions must be "raised to the level" of the "moderate majority of the people". Witte urged immediate granting of civil liberties and the equalization of "all Russian citizens before the law, without distinction of religion and nationality". He urged the creation of an elected legislature, and he insisted that the Imperial State Council should also be elected.. He advised Nicholas II to understand that a great empire like Russia was filled with a wide variety of factionalized interests. The monarch should rise above them. Do not interfere in any way in the elections, he advised. Stand by the 1904de12 decree. When the Duma meets, do not oppose it unless it presents a clear threat to the grandeur of Russia. Public activism should be suppressed only when it threatened society itself or the state [Mehlinger:333-5 | Doctorow, "Government" | H05:289-92 | Russian text GDR:91-4]
*--This began the final phase of Witte's career as statesman, serving as Russia's first "Prime Minister", but perhaps, without his knowing it, also serving as a stop-gap concession while certain tsarist insiders regrouped and revolutionary fervor abated
*--Witte urged the necessity for authentic concessions to society. It would be a half year later, on 1906ap23, after the revolutionary storm was weathered, that Witte and the rest of Russia learned in detail what tsarist authority intended to do. Meanwhile, Russia had a long and difficult winter ahead =

<>1905oc18:Moscow workers passed labor strike resolution [VSB,3:744]

<>1905oc19:oc20; Saint Petersburg | Nicholas II issued a second Manifesto in connection with the revolutionary crisis. Now he restructured the State Council into an appointed legislative chamber, a second chamber now attached to the earlier unicameral and elected Duma promised in the first manifesto. He also structured the Council of Ministers into a body independent of the Duma and under direct tsarist authority. There would be no authentic "cabinet", no formal interdependency between Duma and ministers  [McC1:17-18]
*--Sergei Witte moved ahead as if the promises of the October Manifesto were still fully realizable. He called a government conference on upcoming elections to the new State Duma. "State Duma" was still just a revolutionary promise and not yet fully defined. But Witte could not delay the novel and delicate task of courting for revolutionary government service certain of the "public men" associated with Zemstvo activism and other forms of elite urban activism
*1905 LOOP

<>1905oc19:1906wi; Emperor Nicholas II letters to his mother [PFM:89-92]

<>1905no:1907; Union of Russian Peoples [Soiuz russkikh liudei], a reactionary political party, formed and composed its program [VSB,3:728 | DIR2:410-16]
*--Later founded Black Hundreds [Chernye sotny] (anti-Semitic, reactionary political party)
*--What is the relationship of "reactionary social movements" like this and "official reactionary" policy?

<>1905no:Russian SRs program [McC1:32-3 | DIR2:399-405 | DIR3:431-8]

<>1905no03:Russian Imperial Decree cut peasant redemption payments in half for next year & abolished them altogether as of 1907 [DIR2:385-6 | DIR3:415-17 | DPH:302]  A forty-year-old deficiency in the greatest of the great reforms thus was corrected. Reforms continued under high-pressure revolutionary circumstances

<>1905no06:no10; Moscow | All-Russian Peasant Union Congress #2 [H05:219]. Max Weber numbered members at 500, but more nearly 200 [MWG:243-4]
*1907:1915; Journalist report on peasants in Saint Petersburg [Nevison:49f]

<>1905no06:no13; Moscow | Zemstvo congress #6 (last). Pavel Miliukov was admitted to organizational committee and claimed readiness to support Witte government [PR&R:533]. Congress sent deputation to see Witte = Sergei Muromtsev, Fedor Kokoshkin, and Ivan Petrunkevich. These deputies insisted that ministers in the new government be responsible to (under the authority of) the Duma rather than to the tsar [PR&R:534 | Manning,Crisis:187 says Witte refused to see deputation]
*--Ivan Petrunkevich, Memoirs of a Social Activist [ORBIS]

<>1905no10:no14; Moscow-Saint Petersburg | Octobrist Party [Soiuz 17 Oktiabria; Union of October 17] founded. Aleksandr Guchkov (1862-1936), Geiden & Dmitrii Shipov were at conference#1. This moderate political party issued a program [McC1:35-6 | VSB,3:726-8] The Octobrist Party attracted urban industrialists and financiers, most of whom were also big landowners
*1905no11:Saint Petersburg | All-Russian Trade and Industrial Union [Vserossiiskii Torgovo-Promyshlennyi Soiuz] founded; soon joined Progressive Economic Party [Progressivnaia ekonomicheskaia partiia]
*--Non-bureaucratic or "civilian" urban political elites were coming to life

<>1905no15:(oc15??) Saint Petersburg dmx fnd PPP [MWG:64 or259]

<>1905no16:Moscow | Committee of the All-Russian Peasant Union arrested six days after their second congress

<>1905no17:Vladimir Province, Kovrov District Land Captain reported to the Provincial Governor about rural disorders. "In the city of Kovrov a nest of troublemakers has been stirring, and they include people of various classes [sosloviia] and professions. They cover themselves by functioning as local zemstvo officials, working on agricultural committees and economic councils and serving on the committee for public temperance. This group has grown significantly and persistently carries on its evil work. They distribute pamphlets by Henry George, revolutionary leaflets and proclamations. They circulate appeals [off-prints?] of an edition of Donskaia rech' [voice of the Don, a newspaper] which contains the French 18th century Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and distribute large quantities of harmfully oriented newspapers to the peasants free of charge. They make tours of the villages and conduct secret discussions with [...] ruinous effects upon the population. Many workers among the peasants (I assume that they are paid by the agitators) promise all kinds of future gains and recruit their fellow villagers, who, as is known, are extremely ready to trust the tale-bearers and know-it-alls of their own villages. In daily mass meetings in the workshops even visiting orators lecture on all manner of subjects. It is rumored that some of the workmen are armed. In the evenings, youth walk about boldly singing revolutionary songs. The townsfolk, fearing unpleasantness, try to avoid leaving their homes at such times. In these meetings both the workers and the peasants of my region take part. Seeing that they get away with their illegal activity these people act insolently and teach this to the peasants. || All pronouncements of the Moscow Peasant Union appear in the villages in the form of proclamations which call for changing the old ways ... yes, even of banishing the chiefs, the clerks and land captains from the district peasant assembly [volostnoi skhod] [Page:72]

<>1905no17:no20; Moscow Union of Landowners [Soiuz zemlevladel'tsev] meeting called for statist reactionary measures and suppression of peasant disorder [MWG 1/10:250]  Gentry politics

<>1905no19:no20; Saint Petersburg | Sergei Witte conference with conservative Zemstvo congress members, most of them in the recently formed Octobrist Party [PR&R:534] = Guchkov & Mikhail Stakhovich; also Evgenii Trubetskoi, & Dmitrii Shipov [who had become embroiled in high politics over the previous three years and would again in a most unlikely role as leader of anti-Bolshevik forces in the time of the revolutionary civil war]. Over the previous month, Witte had been courting such "public men", representatives of progressive Zemstvo and urban economic life [GFF:703-10 | MWG:265-6] Witte also conferred  with Fedor Golovin, Georgii L'vov, & Fedor Kokoshkin. Witte offered to cooperate with these "public men" if they moderated their political stance
*--These "public men", however, still demanded a Constituent Assembly & universal suffrage [PR&R:532] In demanding a Constituent Assembly, they sought to wrest from the tsarist ministerial elite and to give to elected representatives the power to design the new Fundamental Laws. In other words, they sought to take from tsarist bureaucrats and give to the public the power to make an actuality out of the grand and vague promises in the October Manifesto
*--Still, Witte offered Ministry of Manufacturing and Industry to wealthy industrialist Guchkov who refused on grounds that Witte named reactionary career police administrator Petr Durnovo to the all-important post of Interior Minister [MWG:116 & 264]
*--Other Zemstvo liberals and figures from the urban public shared the scrupulous unwillingness of Guchkov to be compromised. Thus the Witte effort to form a mixed government of tsarist bureaucrats and "public men" collapsed
*--Witte all alone now with only the state. And most powerful state servitors were ready to see him fail [GO de05]
*--Forty-years of Zemstvo politics had come to this, though the  Zemstvo continued to play an important role in  national life
*1905 LOOP

<>1905no22:Committee of the Post & Telegraph union arrested

<>1905no22:Moscow then Saint Petersburg | Georgii Khrustalev-Nosar became chairman of workers' Soviet  [WRH3:496-7 | *1913:RRe#2:89-100]

<>1905no24:Russia | End of preliminary censorship
*--The imperial state brought an end to the 110-year-old constraint on Russian print culture. Unfinished business of the "great reform" era was taken up again under revolutionary pressure. A steady trickle of reform continued
*--GO 1905de02
\\
*--Daniel Balmuth, Censorship in Russia, 1865-1905
*--Charles Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804-1906

<>1905no26:Moscow | President of workers' Soviet, Khrustalev-Nosar arrested, and 26-year-old Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) replaced him
*1905no26:de05; Saint Petersburg | Nevison:77-80 (diary) covered these critical 11 days

<>1905de02:Saint Petersburg workers' Soviet issued Financial Manifesto calling on peasants to refuse to make redemption payments, demanding all wages be paid in gold or hard coin, full weight, and recommending all wage-laborers withdraw deposits from banks, "demanding all payments in gold" [VSB,3:746 | DPH:303-4 | Postgate:385 (part)]
*--State moved to suppress eight newspapers, this just over one week after the passage of a new and progressive censorship reform

<>1905de03:Saint Petersburg Soviet members arrested during meeting in Free Economic Society building
*--Trotsky mug-shot [pix]
*1906oc:Nosar and Trotsky testified at their trials [VSB,3:748]
*--The workers' Soviet faded from scene after two vigorous months of existence
*1907:Trotsky wrote Our Revolution, a description of those two vigorous months or organized revolutionary politics. This early work by Trotsky was based on his Marxist vision of history and his personal experience [TXT of ch.5]. The more general study of the 1905 Revolution [TXT] grew out of Our Revolution and contained the first versions of Trotsky's contribution to general Social Democratic ideology, the notion of "permanent revolution" [TXT of preface]
*--The memory and myth of the workers' Soviet lingered. Twelve years later, the Soviet revived and Trotsky returned from exile and emigration just as the old Regime collapsed in the 1917 Revolution

<>1905de04:Kostroma newspaper reported debates in peasant gatherings. Sameti village assembly [sel'skii skhod] passed two resolutions: (1) in view of land shortage, all land should be gathered in common property on conditions determined by representatives elected nationally, and (2) in the realm of politics it is essential that the people rule, without regard for soslovie or other qualifications at the central and the district levels, with freedom of conscience, association, assembly and expression. The passport system must be abolished and amnesty of all those earlier prosecuted for political activities and rural disorders. The Sameti assembly voted to join the All-Russian Peasant Union. An assembly in Tonkin district vowed not be pay taxes until the following measures were taken: (1) End the oppression by Land Captains, (2) institute peasant administration, carried out by peasants themselves, not just on paper, but in fact, (3) institute an assembly of all soslovie, (4) create equal rights for all peasants, (5) institute a constituent assembly on the basis of the four-member formula [? four-tailed electoral formula?], (6) refuse to participate in the Duma elections, (7) land must be the the free property of those who work it [GDR:161-2] Peasants had more in mind than burning gentry estates

<>1905de04:Petersburg | Octobrist Party held its second conference

<>1905de05:de07 & de09; Tsarskoe Selo "monarchical cnf" included Wtt gvt & ShpD, Gch Korf, PL Bobrinskii, VA [MWG:266 | protocol, Byloe 3(25) (1917 September):217-65]

<>1905de07:de19; Moscow strike & revolutionary disturbance [Nevison in Moscow?]
*--Resolution [VSB,3:746-8]

<>1905de11:Russian Election law for State Duma signaled governmental retreat from promises in the October Manifesto [ID] [Russian text GDR:94-102]
*--Official reaction regained some of its momentum after the setbacks of the previous 18 months
*1905 LOOP

<>1906:French highway engineer and political ideologist Georges Sorel (1847-1922) wrote Reflections on Violence [CCC2,2:954-63 | BMC1:566-71 | BMC4:633-41]
*--Sorel, among other things, extolled the positive virtues of political violence or terrorism

<>1906ja:Persia (Iran), Tehran and its suburbs the site of mounting popular disorder. Iranian people over the preceding decade demanded a curb on royal authority and the establishment of the rule of law. The shah ignored the challenge to his authority. Now the religious establishment, the merchants, and other classes mounted open protests. Merchants and clerical leaders fled from probable arrest by the shah. They sought sanctuary in mosques
*1906je:Tehran | Persian shah reneged on a promise to permit the establishment of a "house of justice", or consultative assembly. In response, 10,000 people, led by merchants, took sanctuary in the compound of the British legation in Tehran
*1906au:Persian shah was forced to issue a decree promising a constitution
*1906oc:Persian elected assembly convened and drew up a Constitution that provided for strict limitations on royal power, an elected parliament, or Majlis, with wide powers to represent the people, and a government with a cabinet subject to confirmation by the Majlis
*1906de30:Persian shah signed the revolutionary Constitution and died five days later. Within the year 1907, Supplementary Fundamental Laws provided, within limits, for freedom of press, speech, and association, and for security of life and property. The hopes for constitutional rule were not realized, however, as a result of (1) internal political weakness and (2) imperialist interference =
(1) 1907:1921; Persian shah Mohammad Ali and the Majlis engaged in constant struggle, then Bakhtiari chiefs and other grandees took over
(2) 1907au18:1919; For 12 years, leading up to and through the duration of WW1, English-Russian entente divided Persia/Iran into English and Russian spheres

<>1906:USA, NYC | Maxim Gorky, "City of the Yellow Devil" [Hasty:128-43], "Boredom" [TXT]
*--On cultural relations in these years, see Saul,2:387-96, 459-65, 557-67

<>1906ja:ap26; Saint Petersburg events described by Nevison:309-16

<>1906ja:Socialists-Revolutionaries [SRs], now a huge, unified and nation-wide party, held their First Congress and issued a program, which included reaffirmation of the need for "terroristic struggle, central and local, individual and mass". The program furthermore stated that "the new debauch of arbitrary rule finds the party once again at its battle station" [VSB,3:719-21]
*--By this time the SRs concluded that the autocratic state had betrayed the promises in the October Manifesto [ID]. This purely institutional issue, the betrayal of democratic political promises made in October, remained an issue over the next decade and fed popular discontent in the year 1917 [EG]
*--That month in Tambov Province, Battle Organization activist Mariia Spiridonova assassinated Luzhenovskii, an important activist in the "Black Hundreds" movement. In this new era of legal public mobilization across the full political spectrum, terror had become also a weapon in the struggle between different political parties and factions
*--However, within the ranks of the SRs, a "right-wing" broke away (i.e., revolutionary moderates -- if such a phrase is not wholly oxymoronic). These "moderates" lost patience with underground conspiracy and terrorism and committed to open political action. They formed a new party known variously as the Narodno-sotsialisticheskaia (Trudovaia) partiia [People's Socialist (Labour) Party] or Trudovaia narodno-sotsialisticheskaia partiia [Labouring People's Socialist Party]. In short, they were called Narodnye sotsialisti [People's Socialists (it is uncomfortable and misleading but possible to translate that as "National Socialists")]. They were nicknamed "NSs or "EnEsses"
*1906se:NSs expressed willingness to achieve their goals via political engagement in the State Duma. Leading members were NF Annenskii, VA Miakotin, AV Peshekhonov, VG Bogoraz-Tan, SYa Elpat'evskii, VI Semevskii, etc.
*--Soon NSs issued their own journal,  Narodno-sotsialisticheskii obozrenie [People's Socialist Review] which sought to make Russia a democratic republic, to transfer unused, privately owned land to the peasantry (with compensation to the landowners), and outright nationalization of (excessively) huge landed estates [latifundia estates]. Also monastic, royal and governmentally owned land should be nationalized and distributed to peasants
*--NSs extended their organization down to the local level as they campaigned for seats in the Duma. The first NSs party conference was held the following April

<>1906ja:Russian Marshals of nobility (i.e., chairmen of regional noble assemblies) gathered and passed a resolution in which they declared their willingness to help their sovereign restore peace and achieve the promises of the October Manifesto. However, they acknowledged serious difficulties and thus made recommendations [FFS:200-3] =

  • The state issued decrees [ap17 and oc17] promoting freedoms that have never been defined, thus loosing anarchy and disorder on the country. Political wavering creates an opening for revolutionary outbursts. Suspicions grow that the promises from the tsar will not be fulfilled. Disorder must be quelled
  • Convene the Duma as soon as possible. Quickly issue instructions on how this is to be done
  • Russia is a single, indivisible whole. No regional or national separatism should be allowed
  • Russians need to be protected when they are living among a majority of non-Russians
  • Freedom of conscience must not limit the preeminence of the Russian language and Orthodox Church
  • Economic self-regulation should be granted in outlying areas while protecting Russian interests
  • The State Duma should take the fundamental solution of the agrarian question to be its number one priority
  • The inviolability of private property must be the guiding principles, with certain defined exceptions
  • Colonization of distant frontiers must be facilitated by local discussion. State land should be offered to migrants
  • Financial policy must be revamped so as to promote agricultural productivity and marketing
  • The state should promote consolidation of peasant landholdings and termination of strip farming
  • Allow peasants to claim their share of community land, consolidate it as separate households, and sell them if they move [this an early call for conversion of peasant villagers into farmers]
  • The Peasant Bank should promote economic security of peasants. Government should assume some of the financial burden of loans. Interest rates should be lowered to the same level as those in the Noble Bank
  • "Arable state lands and forests ... and also crown lands [should] be made available to agriculturists with payment set according to accessed value. [...] Twenty-four marshals hold a separate opinion: twenty one marshals regard crown lands as private property, and three oppose consideration of this question at the congress"
  • Strong state authority must be exerted at the local level in order to suppress violence and plunder
  • Rules must be clearly stated and enforced to protect individual liberty from violence and work stoppage or desertion

More Gentry politics

<>1906ja05:11; KDs Party Congress#2 [Vtoroi]

<>1906ja22:Nizhnii Novgorod peasant petition outlined long history of discontent in their village Malyi Seskin, ending with a list of seven demands = (1) forests, lands and ponds owned by institutions, ministries [kabinetskie], private individuals, monasteries, churches and gentry [pomeshchich'i] should be turned over to to those who work them, under conditions of communal land management [obshchinnogo zemlepol'zovaniia] (2) direct and indirect taxes should be abolished and replaced by graduated progressive taxes (3) universal and obligatory [primary and secondary] education and accessibility to higher educational institutions to all who wish, at state expense (4) freedom of expression, press, assembly, union and strike (5) inviolability of the individual, home and correspondence (6) abolition of  capital punishment, military quartering and courts martial, and (7) swift convocation of the State Duma. Signed by 90 peasants in assembly, with their elder [starosta], and with notary signature of district police captain [ispravnik]  [GDR:163-4] Minsk area ditto [164-5]

<>1906ja30:Russian women's Progressive Party, program [FFS:303-8]

<>1906fe:gbx Zmv mtg, conflict pro- & anti-lbx [MWG]

<>1906fe:German sociologist Max Weber published "Zur Lage...", the first of two monograph-length studies of the Russian Revolution of 1905, for which purpose he learned the rudiments of Russian. First and second study published together in MWG [Weber]

<>1906fe05:Congress#1, Vserossiiskaia Torgovo-promyshlennaia partiia [cf.1905no11:] Liberal industrialist Pavel P. Riabushinskii used phrase "class consciousness" & urged resistance to "intelligentsia socialism" [Owen:274]
*--Urban "bourgeois" consciousness came to life under conditions of revolutionary crisis
\\
*--"Association of Industry and Trade, 1906-1917" in MERSH
*--"Riabushinskii", a Russian English-language website [W] | Russian-language website [W]

<>1906fe08:fe12; Octobrist Party held a conference

<>1906fe20:Tsarist manifesto and two ukazes about two chambers of the new legislative body. (1) The Imperial State Council [Sovet] would now be made up of delegates, one half elected and one half appointed by the tsar. Earlier, all were appointed by the tsar. (2) A "second house", the State Duma would be made up of elected delegates, but elections were not to be direct. Delegates were chosen in a four-tier process designed to mute the popular will [VSB,3:769-70 | MWG] [Russian text GDR:102-]
*--Ministries were not put under the authority of the two-chambered legislature. They remained responsible only to the tsar
*--The tsar no longer was formally described as having "unlimited autocratic power" [neogranichennaia samoderzhavnaia vlast']. The word "unlimited" was removed from his title
*1905 LOOP

<>1906fe21:Russian National Congress of Old-Ritualists [Raskolniki] sent address to Emperor Nicholas II [FFS:298-9]

<>1906fe22:fe23; Russian laws handed down with respect to relationship of southern imperial possessions to the new legislative institutions [GDR:123-33]

<>1906mr06:Russian State Duma election began

<>1906mr08:Russia | Ekaterinoslav guberniia Nobility submitted address to Emperor Nicholas II which showed how village disorders vexed gentry politics, yet also showed how anxious gentry were for the Emperor to honor the promises made in the October Manifesto [FFS:203-6]

<>1906mr08:Russian Senate received two ukazes about management of state budget [GDR:132-5]

<>1906mr08:mr11; Russian state took measures to maintain control over the electoral process [GDR:136-41]

<>1906ap07:ap12; Russian Council of Ministers deliberated with Nicholas II about the new Fundamental Laws [VSB,3:770-2]

<>1906ap10:ap25; Stockholm | Russian SDs Congress #4 (The Unity Congress [!!]) tried to bring Russian Marxists back together. However, the Menshevik/Bolshevik split widened. Mensheviks A.S. Martynov and P.B. Aksel'rod explained differences with Bolsheviks [VSB,3:716-17]
*--Agrarian program [VSB,3:801]
*--In this year, the German Social Democratic leader Karl Kautsky [pix] on meaning of the 1905 Russian Revolution, w/ preface by Vladimir Lenin [Hardy:352f] German and Russian Marxists sought common ground in the interpretation of this vital European event

<>1906ap14:Sergei Witte resignation became widely known. Witte memoirs gave bitter account of events leading to this [cf. VSB,3:748-50 and DIR2:418-25]
*--In mid April, Russian state secured loan and thus felt bolder in its desire to reverse large parts of the concessions granted in the October Manifesto. It no longer needed Witte

<>1906ap17:San Francisco earthquake described by USA author Jack London [Eye:418-21]

<>1906ap22:ap23; Congress of Noble Circles passed a resolution which symbolized conservative gentry politics. They called for restoration of law and order, especially the defense of the principles of autocracy and the enforcement of noble soslovie privileges and exemptions. They objected to the way in which "unworthy members and aliens with inappropriate bloodlines" had in recent times been elevated to prominent positions [FFS:206-10]

<>1906ap23:Russia's new Fundamental Laws issued [TXT] [original draft, Council of Ministers draft, & final version: Mehlinger:336-44 | cf. DIR2:387-93 | DIR3:417-25 | VSB,3:772-4 | DPH:395-6 | GDR:141-60]
*--New laws defined the powers of the Duma and the relation of the Duma legislature to the tsarist government (the ministries and their apparat) in ways that caused most to conclude that the Fundamental Laws betrayed the promises of the October Manifesto [ID]

<>1906ap27:1906jy08; First State Duma formally opened with KDs playing a central roll [VSB,3:774-6] but lasted only two months and two weeks
*--First Duma heard Emperor Nicholas II’s speech from throne & responded in an oppositional mood [RRC2,2#39 | PR&R:546-60 | Nevison:325-6]
*--Ten weeks of intense struggle between elected legislators and tsarist government followed
*--Over on the government side, the Emperor appointed confirmed monarchist Ivan Goremykin Prime Minister to replace Witte; Petr Stolypin became Interior Minister [WRH3:498-509]
*--Vasilii Maklakov (a scrupulously moderate member of the KD Party), The First State Duma: Contemporary Reminiscences
*--The First Duma was eventually dissolved by tsarist authority
*--The Second Duma was hardly more settled

<>1906ap27:+; First Duma Labor Group [Trudovaia Gruppa; best known as Trudoviki] formed in the midst of parliamentary proceedings, with 96 then 107 members, including Ivan Zhilkin, Aleksei Alad'in and Stepan Anikin, all educated professionals, journalists or teachers
*--Trudoviki were much influenced by the All-Russian Peasant Union and the SRs, but they were nonetheless a distinct product of the actual political situation that newly elected delegates, many of them from the village, found within the new parliament. They were an authentic product of labor political mobilization, particularly the mobilization of rural labor into an organized political party

<>1906my:dvr.unx (??soiuz zemledel GO 05no17)  fnd; cnx gnt pty

<>1906my05:State Duma replied to Emperor Nicholas II speech [RRC2,2:445-49 | Harper:40-1 | VSB,3:776-7]

<>1906my08:je01; State Duma, for four weeks, debated agricultural problems, including the old problem of landed estates, much influenced by the legislative agenda of the Trudoviki
*1906my08:Russian KDs position on agrarian question, "Project of the 42" [GDR:168-72]
*1906my17:Samara guberniia peasant woman wrote letter to State Duma [GDR:180-1]

<>1906my13:Government declaration & State Duma vote of no confidence in Goremykin government [RRC2,2#40 | VSB,3:777-8] Stenographic record of part of Duma session [GDR:160]

<>1906my23:Trudoviki agrarian program, "Project of the 104" [GDR:172-4]
*1906je02:Samara Province peasants "instructed" Duma [GDR:165-8]
*1906je10:Penza Province peasants petitioned State Duma [GDR:168]

<>1906je11:Russian nationwide nobles congress sent address to Nicholas II defending the "inviolability of property rights" of gentry landowners [VSB,3:800]
*--The previous seventeen years of gentry politics, here defined as promotion and defense of exclusive noble soslovie interests and landowning power, was a clear failure, just as it had been a half century earlier
\\
*--Robert Edelman, Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution: The Nationalist Party, 1907-1917
*--Roberta Thompson Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (1982)

<>1906je20:Emperor Nicholas II had "list" of prospective new coalition government on the basis of which Stolypin and Governor General Trepov negotiated with the KDs. Stolypin, representing a new generation of tsarist officialdom, now moved toward the center of official events. Trepov, representing an older generation (though only 51 years old), died three months later, ending his year and a half near the center.
\\
Tuck:127-8 says negotiations failed because the government acted too late, because conflict between bureaucrats and KDs too deep, and because Pavel Miliukov was too "doctrinaire"

<>1906jy04:State Duma Agrarian Commission reported [GDR:175-80]

<>1906jy06:Old-guard monarchist-absolutist statesman Goremykin out and Petr Stolypin in as Prime Minister. Two days later =
*1906jy08:jy09; First Duma dissolved [VSB,3:778 | CCC2,2:597-8 | DPH:306-7 | Russian text, Rospuska Gosudarstvennoi, in GDR:181-3]
*1906jy09:Stolypin made further unsuccessful effort to form coalition government [GFF:710-21]

<>1906jy10:Finland | Dissident delegates from the suppressed State Duma, with KDs and the Trudoviki at their center, fled to Finland and issued the Vyborg Manifesto [McC1:43-4 | VSB,3:779 | Meeting described in Harper,Russia:50-51 | Nevison:351-2]
*--The Vyborg Manifesto marked the end of the KDs' nine-month revolutionary period. There was no significant popular response to the radical proposals in the Manifesto
*--That day, Pavel Miliukov described Duma and "extreme parties" in a newspaper article
*--Years later the more moderate liberal, Vasilii Maklakov, remembered with regret this First Duma and its extremism [VSB,3:780-2]. Events sheared the KDs of their bellicose behavior. They now settled into life as a parliamentary party beginning with the Third Duma
*--Moisei Ostrogorski (1854-1919) revised his big theoretical study of political parties on the basis of his disillusionment as KD deputy to the First Duma
*1905 LOOP

<>1906jy10:London International Peace Conference | Maksim Kovalevskii delivered speech [Nevison:360-1] Nevison described voluble crowds at the Conference, caught up in the excitement of the Russian "march of democracy" [358]

<>1906jy17:In the style of the Vyborg Manifesto, revolutionary appeals continued from the dispersed groups within the First Duma. Trudoviki & SDs, joined by representatives of the SRs and Railroad Union, appealed to soldiers & sailors [Nevison:352-4] Their slogan was "land and liberty"
*1906jy18:Trudoviki & SDs, now joined by SRs, All-Russian Peasant Union and railroad unions, appealed to peasants [Nevison:354-6]

<>1906au:Germany | Max Weber published the second installment of his quick study of the First Russian Revolution
*--Both the first and the second monographs have been pulled together as The Russian Revolutions
*--Weber was interested to see if liberalism could be united with social democracy in Russia, thus to provide a model to be followed by other "disenchanted", dead-end and "bourgeois" political parties in his world. He was disappointed. He dubbed the political results of the 1905 Russian revolution "Pseudo-constitutionalism" [Scheinkonstitutionalismus]

<>1906au19:Stolypin saw to the creation of field court-martial squads to quell unrest in the countryside [VSB,3:783]
*--A week earlier Stolypin's dacha was the target of a deadly terrorist attack [ID] [VSB,3:782-3]
*1905:1909; Government statistics on political crime reported 2,390 executions for "terrorism", most of them following the Stolypin electoral-law coup [VSB,3:750]
*--In these days Stolypin issued several policy statements [VSB,3:783-5 | McC1:44-6]
*--Peasant unrest was brought under some control

<>1906oc03:oc07; Trudoviki held their first Conference in preparation for the Second Duma
*--That month the growing faction of terroristic and action-oriented members of the SR Party broke away to form the Union of SR Maximalists [3 paragraph ID]
*--That fall, the right-wing party Black Hundreds also prepared for the upcoming elections by issuing a position paper  [W]

Prime Minister Petr Stolypin

stolypin.jpg (32113 bytes)

<>1906no09:Tsarist ukaz outlined ambitious new departures in agrarian reform. The new policy was announced according to Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws which gave the new Prime Minister Stolypin and the ministries authority to legislate when the Duma was not in session. The policy was formulated independently from the contentious debate in the dissolved First Duma, even though the urgency for further peasant reform was made apparent in that Duma [TXT] [VSB,3:803-4 | McC1:142-4]
*--The first year under the October Manifesto and the subsequent Fundamental Laws seemed to be working more nearly in the interests of the established bureaucratic absolutism and less in the interests of those whose political activism forced the Emperor to issue the October Manifesto
*1906oc05:Russian Decree on Peasant Rights, issued under Stolypin's influence, laid the groundwork for this ambitious November ukaz. The October decree not only opened the new era in peasant reform but represented a long-delayed finalization of the 1861 serf emancipation [VSB,3:802-3] This final reform measure to come out of the 1905 Revolutionary period was the greatest
*--Article 87 required that the State Duma eventually ratify such measures as this, but it was four years before that happened. In the meantime, peasant political mobilization waned, and Stolypin entered into the phase of his greatest accomplishments
*1905 LOOP

<>1907:1912; Russian statesman, ex-Finance Minister (and ex-Prime Minister) Sergei Witte wrote his Memoirs, covering the big moments in his illustrious career [Excerpts = DIR3:451-60]

<>1907:1917; Polish-born member of SDs over previous ten years, Felix Dzerzhinskii (1877-1926) arrested and sent to Siberian prison and exile for nine years, described in publication of his Prison Diary and Letters

<>1907:French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) published Creative Evolution, an idealist critique of scientific knowledge [CCC2,2:1027-34 | BMC1:594-6 | BMC4:623-6]

<>1907:Philippine Islands | USA sponsored elections to a national legislature. This was the second such elected legislature in all of Asia, and the first in a client state closely supervised by a patron state (USA)

<>1907:Moscow "Religious-Philosophical Society in Honor of Vladimir Solov'ev" formed
*--Solov'ev died in 1900 at age 47, ending a brilliant 26-year career that contributed to the reorientation of Russian thought, from positivism to various shades of "spiritualism"
*1901:1903; Saint Petersburg "Religious-Philosophical" meetings were a prelude to the Moscow group [Florovsky,2:252-8]. Other events also characterized a new "spirit" in Russian high culture =
*1905:Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Peter & Alexis (v3 of trilogy "Christ & Anti-Christ")
*1906:friends published Nikolai Fedorov's "The Question of Brotherhood..." [Edie,3:16-54]
*1906:Leo Tolstoy, "Meaning of the Russian Revolution" [Raeff3:323-57], then in 1908 The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
*1906:Nikolai Losskii’s The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge became first translation into English of a technical work of Russia philosophy [Edie,3:321-42]
*--Evgenyi Trubetskoi was a leading figure in the Moscow group and author later of "The Bolshevist Utopia and the Religious Movement in Russia" [RRS]
*--Aleksandr Bogdanov, "Matter as a Thing-in-Itself" [Edie,3:393-404]
*--Also see Nikolai Grot [RRS:61-80], Vasilii Rozanov [91-104], Sergei Bulgakov [135-160], Viacheslav Ivanov [161-74], Georgii Chulkov [on mystical anarchism:175-86], Georgii Florovskii (George Florovsky) [225-46], Pavel Novgorodtsev [247-64]
*--Writers Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Belyi were involved in these developments
*--The Vekhi group was influenced by this society
\\
*--Florovsky,2:233-83

<>1907mr07:1907je03; Second State Duma opened more than a half year after the First Duma was dissolved, and it lasted just under three months before the state dissolved it as well
*1907mr06:Stolypin appeared in contentious session with Duma [VSB,3:785-7]
*1907ap16:ap20; NSs held their First Conference and sent 16 representatives to the Duma, but their moderate politics were drowned in the fervor of revolutionary opposition, and they soon faded from the scene, after only about one year of existence, not to reappear again until the days in which the Imperial old regime collapsed
*1907my03:Agrarian Commission received SRs agrarian program, signed by 104 deputies. Trudoviki and the All-Russian Peasant Union submitted their own program, but there was not enough time left to the Second Duma to consider either at length
*--The Trudoviki were near the end of their one-year existence
*--The Peasant Union was at the end of his 18-month revolutionary existence
*1907my10:Stolypin delivered speech to Duma on peasant question with the famous concluding line, "Those who oppose our state system [...] require great upheavals; we require a great Russia!" [VSB,3:804-5 | RRC2,2#41]
*1923je:Slavonic Review#2,4:36-55 | Bernard Pares, "The Second Duma" (an English eyewitness account) [More Pares]
*--Not until the Third Duma did parliamentary politics settle into a more permanent pattern of relationship with the tsarist state

<>1907my12:London | Russian SDs at Congress #5 heard Lenin's report on peasantry [VSB,3:808-9] Marxism was never strong in its comprehension of peasants, but now Lenin worked to bring his doctrine in line with Russian economic realities and revolutionary opportunities. Many felt he was just importing the agrarian program of the SRs
*--Peasant mobilization over the preceding two and one half years was effectively at its end, but the peasant question was far from settled

<>1907je03:Manifesto dissolving Second Duma [TXT] [VSB,3:787-8 | McC1:47-8]
*--Petr Stolypin coup d'etat imposed a new election law while Duma was no longer in session [Russian GDR:357-95]
*--As revolutionary disorder subsided (or should we say "was suppressed") and as the statist-oriented new election law took effect, the Third Duma met and was the first session of the State Duma to last its full five-year term
*1934:Three decades later, as Stalinism began to set down its roots in Soviet Russian life, the west European political refugee Petr Struve wrote memoirs of Russian liberal activists in the 1905 Revolution. He asserted that if at any time the liberals had succeeded in forming a cabinet, they would  have had to fight revolutionary maximalists to the death,  just as did Stolypin, either that or "capitulate pitiably before the triumphant mob" [*1934ja:SEER#12,35:366] One sniffs in this 1934 statement about "the triumphant mob" more nearly the scent of the anti-democratic European political atmosphere in the era of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini than of the political atmosphere in the time of the Second Duma
*--Stolypin's coup marked the end of the political crisis known as the "First Russian Revolution" =
*1905 LOOP begins again

<>1907je:Hague | Second International Peace Conference
*--First Conference
*--Major conventions signed at these two conferences aimed to strengthen the possibility of international law  [TXT]
*--USA supported these conventions (Spanish-American War [ID] and Panama adventure [ID] now behind it) while Russia opposed them (need to re-arm after Russo-Japanese War [ID])
*--Second International's Stuttgart Resolution on militarism and International Conflict supported the Hague resolutions [DPH:224-6]
*--Replaced after WW1 by World Court [ID]
\\
*--Saul,2:521-3

<>1907jy30:(13.7.40 Meiji): Saint Petersburg | Russian-Japanese treaty re. Manchuria, Korea & Mongolia [DIR2:432-4 | DIR3:473-78] In essence, the treaty divided Manchuria into "North Manchuria" under Russian authority and "South Manchuria" under Japanese authority. Korea was granted fully to Japan (with "most favored nation" status assigned to Russia). Outer Mongolia was granted to Russia
*--Ernest B. Price, The Russo-Japanese Treaties of 1907-1916 Concerning Manchuria and Mongolia
*--More treaties in Japanese-Russian international relations [DIR2:]

<>1907au18:1919; English-Russian entente [TXT] [DIR3:467-72]
*--Iran (Persia) was divided between Russia & England for 12 years, throughout WW1 and into the first post-war years. Working together, the two imperialist rivals ended the hope that the Iranian Constitutional Revolution might inaugurate a new era of independence. Two competing empires agreed to divide a third party, Persia, into spheres of influence. The Russians took the northern sphere, the British the southern and eastern. A central neutral sphere was preserved between the two where they were free to compete with one another for economic and political advantage
*--Iran had struggled to preserve its own Persian spheres of influence over the previous century, but now it appeared to be fully under European imperialist dominion =
*1908je:Persian shah deployed his Persian Cossack Brigade, under Russian command, to bomb the Majlis building, arrest deputies, and close down the assembly. However, Iranians continued to resist =
*1909jy:In Tabriz, Esfahan, Rasht and elsewhere, Iranian resistance to the shah coalesced in a wide-spread constitutional movement which marched from Rasht and Esfahan to Tehran, deposed the shah, and reestablished the constitution. The ex-shah went into Russian exile. Constitutional forces triumphed, but they faced serious difficulties. Upheavals in the time of Constitutional Revolution and civil war undermined stability and trade
*1910jy:Persian shah in Russian exile, and with Russian imperial support, landed troops in Persia in an attempt to overthrow parliamentary rule and regain his throne
*--Afghan independence was brought under "protection" of England. Also at this time Russia and England settled disagreements over Tibet, continuing that mountainous region's 200-year vulnerability to great powers
*--Eight years earlier, Lord Curzon, who was then English Viceroy of India, explained the interlocking relationship of Iran (Persia), Afghanistan, India and other English imperialist domains. He emphasized the threat posed by Russia to these territories "which Great Britain regards with good reason as falling within her sphere of influence" [BNE:185-7]
*--But now, eight years later, England sought to placate Russia in anticipation of the need for wide alliance against Germany, here on the eve of WW1. Energy politics (oil) also played a role in a era of transition to petroleum-powered military navies
*--In this same year, 1907, English Foreign Office official Sir Eyre Crowe [ID] reacted to growing German naval power and outlined one of the first European descriptions of how an "arms race" might be managed and how it might run out of control [P20:55 and PWT2:262-4 emphasize those pages from Crowe's long report that indicated Germany's yearning for expansion and power | BNE:201-8 presents a far more subtle excerpt that does more justice to Crowe's honest and intelligent assessment of the world situation]
*--This English/Russian entente completed the "Triple Entente" (France, Russia and England) which isolated Germany and set the European diplomatic stage for alliance among core "allies" in WW1 [DIR2:426-31 | ORW:147-8 | CCC2,2:620-1]
*--The Great Game was coming home, and it was increasingly obvious that Russia was the least competent of the big players, now having allowed herself to be put in a hostile relation to Germany, contrary to her own interests [EG], but strongly beneficial to England and France
*--British documents on the origins of the war, 1898-1914 v4. European imperialism and European war were fertilized together

<>1907oc15:Petersburg director of the Chief Prison Administration A.M. Maksimovskii assassinated by Ragozinnikova [VSB,3:809-10]

<>1907no01:1912je09; Third State Duma, elected according to the new Stolypin electoral law, lasted its full term, four and a half years
*--The First and Second Dumas were less legislatures than revolutionary tribunals. They were overpowered by statist forces, and, with the Third State Duma, the three-year-long 1905 Revolution was at an end. Now we ask, did it accomplish anything =
*1907no16:Stolypin defended his "get-tough" program before the Third Duma [VSB,3:788-9 | Full Russian text GDR:398-402]
*1908de08:Prime Minister Petr Stolypin's "wager on the strong" speech delivered to Third Duma and debated [VSB,3:805-7] Stolypin pushed for serious peasant reform
*--A notable accomplishment of the Third Duma was the first vigorous and effective primary education program
*1908mr11:Evgraf Petrovich Kovalevskii introduced education bill [VSB,3:817] But still, restrictions on Jews were maintained [VSB:818]
*1910:1911; Guchkov was elected president of the Third Duma
*--The Fourth Duma, elected in 1912,  was to be more nearly a part of the history of WW1 than it was of Russian democracy, so this Third Duma is the historical laboratory for testing Russian "readiness" for parliamentary democracy
*--About the importance of budgetary authorit