Why Was There a Revolution in 1905?

By 1905, a revolution was immanent, Tsar's power was to be challenged and the reasons for this are to be laid out here in this essay. Was the Tsar's non-reformist attitude solely to blame or was the nature of Tsardom destined to destroy itself? We need to look at the foundations of the revolution in order to fully understand this and make an informed response to these questions.

The foundations are laid out into five main parts, including short and long-term factors. The two main long-term factors being that the Tsar alienated many of the classes within Russia and his policy of non-reform led to repression. As these factors developed, other incidents became short-term factors. The failure in the Japanese War was a huge blow to Tsardom and undermined their ethos that Tsardom was the right regime for Russia and the political spring that came as the Tsar relaxed censorship brought an avalanche of criticism for Tsardom. Finally, the humiliation at Port Arthur triggered the protest at the Winter Palace, which developed into Bloody Sunday and was the birth of the revolution.

Investigating the first of the long-term factors causing the revolution, it seemed necessary to go back to examine the structure of Tsarist Russia pre-1905 to get a fuller picture. This period posed a problem for Nicholas II. The regime itself reinforced any class divisions from the bureaucracy to the peasants and alienated them even further. As, "the truth is Nicholas was never in touch with the common people. He never knew what it was like to worry where the next meal was coming from. He never had to. " He did not understand the way that Russia worked in practise. He could not, or would not, empathise with the peasants' hardships of the land and his ideas of Russia's troubles were laughable. Consequently, by 1905 he had estranged his subjects, including even some of the gentry' folk that had been so loyal to Tsardom in the past. They were a class in decline and it was partly due to the Tsar's incompetence. Owing to Russia's economic backwardness, the landowners found it almost impossible to farm for a profit. The gentry had no market for their produce, as their target market was near penniless and thus could not afford to purchase crops from the landowners. The Tsar did little to rectify the situation and in fact took land off the gentry following the emancipation of the Serfs and issued bonds, which were effectively I.O.U's for the value of the land, leaving them with mountainous debts to pay off and scepticism of the capability of Tsardom. This scepticism eventually turned to hatred and complete mistrust for some by1905 and they joined in the demonstrations and aided the revolution.

However, the gentry were the least of the threat to Tsardom. Nicholas's strong policy of industrialisation had ironically led to an established working class, and an ever-increasing educated middle-class, striving for democracy. As the number of factories and professional jobs increased, so did the amount of wealthy middle-class people, leading to even more people with access to education. The rising number of professionals led to many new theories and ideas being formulated. Granted, Nicholas had not yet relaxed censorship to the level where these ideas could be circulated legally within Russia, many fled to Switzerland and other such countries in order to gain access to libraries and the ability to publish their own works without oppression. Some of these students formed the Nihilist movement of the 1860's, which strove to demolish anything that could not be strictly explained by science and they thus "rejected the authority of the state, church and family. " They were inspired by Chernyshevsky's novel Ð''What is to be done?' that slipped through the Tsarist censor and were ordered t attack the established society, as Russia was Ð''rotten,' and thus they aided the revolution. The Will of the People, who had assassinated Nicholas's grandfather, maintained their influence in the form of fracture groups, still with the same general goal to demolish Tsardom.

Along with the new middle-class society came Liberalism, and the pressure for political freedom, from the people with educated arguments. The Liberals saw what was happening in the West and desired to have the same in Russia; they reasoned that an autocracy such as Tsardom did not work in Russia and that they deserved a democracy. They felt that they should have a voice in the government as Tsardom never led to Ð''justice.' Even the middle-class, who had no stake in land ownership for agricultural gain, saw that the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 was "not what the people dreamed of and needÐ'... " The radicals Mikhailov and Shelgunov declared this, along with claiming "we do not need a Tsar, or an emperor, or the Lord's anointed, or a robe or ermine covering up hereditary incompetence. " Vilification of the Tsar was snowballing, with every class adding to its momentum.

Subsequent to the increase in educated professionals, Marxism was born amongst the socialists. Karl Marx, a German philosopher, declared, "In a socialist society the free development of each would be the condition of the free development of all." The new educated class in Russia took up this ethos and man strived to obtain this socialist society. Within this society, the Tsar would have no place and thus the Social Democratic Party aimed to dethrone Nicholas, or at least remove his power, replacing him with a Duma. The Russian Marxists were forced to flee to Switzerland where they met Plekhanov and contemplated when the revolution would come. However, their work was not encouraging as it was revealed that Russia had not even reached the capitalist stage of development. Marx hypothesised that this bourgeois stage would be necessary before the socialist revolution and thus it would be decades before the time would be right, "Russia was overwhelmingly a peasant society. " Consequently, the SDP split at its first official conference in London, forming the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. The Mensheviks remained loyal to Marx's theory of social progression and kept faith that eventually their time would come. However, the rest of the party decided that they were not willing to die without living to see the revolution and followed the Bolsheviks, under Lenin, believing that an "educated elite could speed up the process. "

Lenin, who was once a member of the Will of the People, held onto the ethos that the Ð''general will' was that, that is in their best interests. Following his study of Marx, Lenin resolved that he now knew he true Ð''general will' of the people, as Marx's theory

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