The Moscow Uprising¶
Core Argument¶
The Moscow Uprising of December 1905 is presented not as a planned insurrection directed from above but as a spontaneous combustion driven by the workers themselves, against which the Bolshevik leadership was largely helpless. By late October, peasant ferment had engulfed 37 per cent of European Russia, spreading to the armed forces and prompting the Bolsheviks to accelerate material preparations for insurrection—underground bomb factories, arms dumps, and fighting groups organised by Krassin, with funds raised by Gorky and through bank ‘expropriations’. Yet the storm centre, St. Petersburg, was exhausted. After the October Manifesto, liberal employers abandoned the workers; a November general strike, though numerically larger than October’s, was a last desperate effort by a gravely weakened class. Sensing the ebb, the bosses locked out the workers, the police repressed, and on 12 November the St. Petersburg Soviet called off the strike in a tactical retreat. The arrest of the Soviet’s chairman, Leon Trotsky, on 3 December sealed the capital’s fate.
The initiative then passed to Moscow, where fresh layers of workers—newly radicalised and impatient—pressed for action. Lenin, recognising the party’s weakness and the peasantry’s incomplete mobilisation, wished to postpone the showdown until spring, but, as Krupskaya records, he understood that ‘we shan’t be asked anyway’. The Moscow Soviet’s unanimous vote for a general strike on 7 December was, everyone knew, a vote for insurrection. The chapter polemicises sharply against Stalinist mythology, which later claimed the uprising was a planned Bolshevik operation. Drawing on the 1906 conference of fighting organisations, the text cites the Central Committee’s own representative, Sammer, dismissing the ‘button-pressing’ conception, and the Bolshevik leader Radov’s confession that the party was ‘completely unprepared’. The Mensheviks and SRs also participated, their reservations overridden by pressure from below.
The uprising itself was triggered by a government provocation—troops dispersing workers’ meetings. Barricades went up, and the fighting concentrated in the Presnya district, where textile workers fought with desperate heroism. The insurgents’ tactical advice—to act in small units, avoid fortified positions, and use alleyways for ambush—proved effective against demoralised troops, but the military balance was hopeless. Only 2,000 armed men faced the regular army; the arrival of the Semyonovsky regiment on 15 December decided the outcome. By 18 December, Presnya was bombarded into submission. The death toll reached 1,059, mostly civilians, followed by mass arrests and executions. The chapter concludes by counterposing Lenin’s verdict—that the workers should have taken to arms ‘more resolutely, energetically and aggressively’—to Plekhanov’s defeatist lament that ‘they should not have taken to arms’. The uprising’s tragedy lay not in the resort to arms but in the leadership’s hesitation and the objective disparity of forces.