Russian Revolution of 1905

Between January 1905 and mid-1907 the Russian Empire was shaken by a wave of strikes, peasant risings, mutinies and national revolts against the autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II. The upheaval forced the tsar to concede civil liberties, an elected parliament, the State Duma, and in 1906 the country's first constitution, but the regime survived and soon clawed back much of what it had given. Many historians see it as a prelude to the revolutions of 1917.

At the turn of the century Russia faced overlapping crises. Peasants, freed from serfdom in 1861, were burdened with redemption payments and lacked enough land for a fast-growing rural population. Rapid industrialisation under the finance minister Sergei Witte had created a new urban working class that worked long hours for the lowest wages in Europe and was forbidden to form unions or strike. Students were increasingly radical, and Poles, Finns, Jews and other minorities resented discrimination and Russification. Liberals organised to demand a constitution, while socialists formed the Socialist Revolutionary Party and the Marxist Social Democrats. Defeats in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 further discredited the government.

In December 1904 a strike at the Putilov works in St Petersburg spread across the city. On Sunday 22 January 1905 the priest Georgy Gapon led a large, peaceful procession of workers towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to the tsar. Troops opened fire, killing somewhere between about 200, the figure given by Witte, and 1,000 people. The massacre destroyed much of the remaining popular faith in the tsar and set off strikes throughout the empire. Over 400,000 workers struck in Russian Poland alone by the end of the month, and unrest spread to Finland, the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus.

Through the spring and summer, peasants seized land and tools and looted manor houses, and there was an insurrection in Łódź. In June the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied off Odessa, eventually handing the ship to the Romanian authorities. After the fleet's destruction at Tsushima in May, Witte negotiated peace with Japan. In October a railway strike grew into a general strike involving some two million workers, and in St Petersburg workers formed a soviet, or council, in which Leon Trotsky played a leading role.

Lacking enough reliable troops for wholesale repression, Nicholas reluctantly signed the October Manifesto drafted by Witte. It promised basic civil rights, legal political parties, a wider franchise and a Duma without whose consent no law could pass. Liberals were largely satisfied, and the strikes subsided, but socialists denounced the settlement. The concessions were accompanied by right-wing violence, including pogroms by the Black Hundreds against Jews. In December an armed rising in Moscow was crushed with artillery, leaving about a thousand dead.

On the eve of the first Duma, in 1906, the government issued the Fundamental Laws, which kept the tsar's control over ministers, the army and foreign policy and created an appointed upper chamber. The first Duma was dissolved after 73 days, and Pyotr Stolypin, the new prime minister, combined land reform with harsh repression and many executions. When the second Duma was dissolved in June 1907, a new electoral law favouring the propertied classes marked the end of the revolutionary period. Revolutionaries, meanwhile, waged a campaign of assassinations, and estimates of the dead during the revolution run to many thousands.

The revolution left Russia a limited constitutional monarchy with a weak parliament, briefly halted Russification in Finland and encouraged national movements in Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic. Vladimir Lenin later called it the "dress rehearsal" for the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Our 1900 and 1914 maps show the Russian Empire on either side of the revolution, including Congress Poland, Finland and the Baltic provinces where much of the unrest took place.