A New Awakening¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter "A New Awakening" charts the explosive growth of the Russian working class at the turn of the century and its rapid politicisation, which provided the material basis for a revolutionary upsurge. Between 1894 and 1902, the number of workers in factories employing over 1,000 workers increased by 141 per cent, concentrating nearly 1.2 million workers in just 458 enterprises. This shift in class composition is starkly reflected in arrest statistics: in 1884–90, only 15 per cent of those arrested for political offences were workers; by 1901–3, the figure had risen to 46 per cent. The strike data confirm the trend: in 1901, political strikes accounted for 22.1 per cent of all strikes; by 1903, they had surged to 53.2 per cent, overtaking purely economic strikes.
The chapter traces the arc of struggle from the Kharkov May Day demonstration of 1900 through the Obukhov Defence of 1901, where workers fought back with stones and iron against troops, to the Rostov-on-Don general strike of 1902 and the wave of political strikes that swept the South in 1903. The industrial crisis of 1900–1903, which saw 3,000 factories closed and 100,000 workers laid off, drove the movement beyond economism. As employers slashed wages, workers learned through their own experience that the state was their enemy, moving far beyond the "pettifogging 'theory of stages'" of the Economists. The working-class movement gave a mighty impulse to peasant revolts in Poltava, Kharkov, the Central Black Earth region, and Georgia, where landlords' houses burned and troops were deployed in force.
The revolutionary mood spread to students, 30,000 of whom took part in a general strike in winter 1901–2. The chapter contrasts the approach of Lenin and Iskra, which called on workers to aid the students, with that of the Economists, who looked askance at any movement beyond trade-union demands. Lenin understood that the working class, as the hegemonic force, had to take on auxiliary forces from all those inclined to struggle against autocracy. The intelligentsia was stirred from its despondency: the Socialist Revolutionary Party was formed in 1902, and terrorist acts against ministers reflected the developing crisis, though the chapter criticises individual terrorism as a blind alley that left the state intact.
The liberal bourgeoisie, feeling the ground tremble, began to organise hesitantly through the Zemstvos and the illegal journal Osvobozhdenie, edited by Peter Struve. Struve's preface to Witte's confidential memorandum The Autocracy and the Zemstvo marks his complete break with Marxism, as he adopts the role of unpaid adviser to the government, pleading with the bureaucracy to realise "before it is too late" the danger of resisting the "natural and historically necessary development of freedom". The chapter's polemic is directed against both the Economists, for their narrow trade-union consciousness, and the liberals, for their cowardly attempts to strike a deal with autocracy rather than lead a revolution. The tsarist regime, for its part, preferred the Cossack's whip to liberal allies whose ability to control the masses was conspicuously absent.