Revolution Begins¶
Core Argument¶
In the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, the Russian Revolution of 1905 began in earnest, and this chapter charts the explosive, spontaneous mass movement that immediately refuted liberal scepticism. The chapter opens with a sharp polemic against the ex-Marxist liberal Struve, who had declared two days before the massacre that no revolutionary people existed in Russia. Trotsky’s retort is deployed as the chapter’s keynote: the liberals believed in petitions, ministers, and dynamite, but not in the proletariat. The magnificent movement of the workers, the chapter argues, was the final answer.
The narrative then presents a cascade of evidence demonstrating the scale and speed of the revolutionary wave. Within a week of Bloody Sunday, 160,000 workers were on strike in St. Petersburg; across Russia, over 400,000 struck in January alone. The chapter traces the conflagration through Poland, where a general strike paralysed Warsaw and troops fired 60,000 rounds into a demonstration of 100,000 workers, leaving nearly a hundred dead. In Riga, 60,000 workers struck and a protest march was met with volleys that killed 70. The Baltic states, the Caucasus, and crucially the railway lines of Central Russia were all swept up. The chapter stresses that this movement cut across national lines—Polish, Armenian, Georgian, Lithuanian, and Jewish workers fought together against the autocracy. The Tsar’s first Manifesto, hinting at a constitution, was extracted by working-class action in a single week, achieving more than years of liberal petitioning.
The chapter then pivots to the state of the revolutionary party itself. The shock of 9 January pushed the entire movement leftwards and thrust previously marginalised Bolshevik and Menshevik worker-agitators to the fore. Yet the Party organisation was in disarray, reeling from the split. Lenin’s correspondence from February 1905 is quoted at length, revealing his fury at the “disunity” and “amateurism” among Bolsheviks inside Russia. He contrasts their formalism with the superior resources of the Mensheviks—more money, literature, and agents. The chapter argues that the Bolshevik committeemen, habituated to clandestine circle work, failed to react flexibly to the mass upsurge, finding excuses not to open the Party to new layers. This is the chapter’s central theoretical point: Lenin, who had argued for restricted membership in 1903 against Martov, now argued vehemently for opening the doors. He demanded the formation of hundreds of youth circles, the co-optation of every honest and energetic person, and the abandonment of “committee bureaucrat” habits. The chapter uses this to deliver a polemic against the Menshevik and bourgeois caricature of Lenin as a hidebound bureaucratic elitist, insisting that his method was always flexible and that his demand for a strong centre was never incompatible with mass recruitment. The strength of a revolutionary organisation, Lenin is quoted as saying, lies in the number of its connections.