The October Strike and the Soviet¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter traces the resurgence of the Russian revolutionary movement in the autumn of 1905, arguing that the apparent subsidence of the strike wave after the Bulygin Duma and the peace with Japan was deceptive. The new impulse came not from the most advanced sections of the proletariat but from its most backward layers—sawmill workers, brickyard labourers, bakers, domestic servants—as the proletarian army called up its reserves. The Moscow printers’ strike of 27 September triggered a general strike in that city, which then spread to St. Petersburg and, by 6 October, to the railways. Within days, three-quarters of a million railwaymen were on strike, and the movement became general across dozens of major centres, including Kharkov, Odessa, Kazan, and Tiflis. This compelled the Tsar to issue the October Manifesto on 17 October, after which the general strike subsided.
The chapter’s core theoretical claim is that the general strike is the highest expression of the working class becoming conscious of itself as a living social force. It binds the most advanced workers with the broadest layers, levelling distinctions and arousing the inert masses. In Russia, the strike struggle had no parallel anywhere in the world in its extent and acuteness, developing from economic into political strikes and then into insurrection. The working class drew behind it sections of the middle class and intelligentsia; juries refused to sit, lawyers declined to plead, and soldiers began attending mass meetings in solidarity. The general strike posed the question of power but could not resolve it in itself—that required a revolutionary party prepared to set the most advanced tasks.
A central polemic runs through the chapter against the notion that Russia’s backwardness made it an unlikely terrain for revolutionary Marxism. The author argues the opposite: Russia’s belated development meant its working class was politically virgin, unencumbered by reformist trade unions, labour aristocracies, or ossified bureaucratic parties. This allowed the Russian Marxists to move from tiny propaganda circles to a mass force in months, bypassing the slow, painful evolution of British, French, or German workers through trade unionism and reformism. Dialectically, the most backward class transformed itself into the most advanced in Europe.
The chapter also polemicises against Bolshevik activists who viewed insurrection in exclusively technical terms, as an organisational question of armed detachments, underestimating the political side—the need to win the masses through patient propaganda and agitation. Fighting detachments were necessary, but without the mass movement expressed through the Soviets, they were meaningless. The relationship between Party and mass movement is reduced to the difference between the finished scientific programme of Marxism and the necessarily incomplete, contradictory movement of the masses. Lenin’s method, the chapter insists, was to ‘patiently explain’, not to present ultimatums, recalling Marx’s dictum that one real step forward of the movement is worth a hundred correct programmes.
The Soviets themselves arose spontaneously in the October general strike as extended strike committees, nowhere foreseen in the writings of Marx or Engels. The Petersburg Soviet, with Trotsky as its leading figure, gathered 562 deputies from 147 factories, 34 artisan associations, and 16 trade unions. It compelled the eight-hour day, instituted workers’ control of production in some factories, formed a workers’ militia, and published its own organ. Soviets spread to more than 50 other towns and cities. However, the chapter notes the uneven development of consciousness: as late as November, provincial workers still petitioned the Tsar, and peasant disturbances, while spreading to 37 per cent of European Russia, lagged far behind the towns. The army, overwhelmingly peasant in composition, was in ferment but not sufficiently mobilised to alter the outcome. Lenin, from exile, greeted the Soviets as embryonic organs of workers’ power, urging them to proclaim themselves the provisional revolutionary government—a prophecy fulfilled in October 1917.