The Peasants’ Revolt¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter argues that by mid-1906, the epicentre of revolutionary activity had shifted decisively from the towns to the countryside, posing a mortal threat to tsarism. The scale of the peasant revolt is established through statistics: 47 disturbances in April, rising to 160 in May, and 739 by June — a figure approaching the peak of autumn 1905. Half of European Russia was engulfed, with particular intensity in the Volga region (where the memory of Razin and Pugachev still animated the muzhik), the central Black Earth zone, Ukraine, Poland, and Tambov. Landlords fled as strike committees formed in villages, and guerrilla actions — the classical mode of peasant struggle — proliferated, notably the ‘forest brotherhood’ in Latvia and the ‘Red Hundreds’ in Georgia. This revolt directly threatened the feudal landowner class, the principal social support of the autocracy, and had an immediate echo in the army, where defeat and urban working-class example fuelled mutinies.
The chapter details the Bolshevik response. The RSDLP maintained military organisations in about 50 committees; the Moscow committee operated a secret military-technical bureau for producing arms and bombs. The Petersburg organisation was the strongest, sustaining a network of soldiers’ organisations and publishing some 20 illegal periodicals, including Kazarma and Soldatskaya Zhizn’. Agitation among recruits urged them not to fire on workers but to come over with their arms. A conference of military and fighting organisations was attempted in March 1906 but all delegates were arrested; a real conference took place in Tammerfors in November. Lenin, while hoping the peasant movement might reignite revolution, argued continually for caution against adventurism and premature action — a realism that would never have countenanced the later fashion for guerrilla war by a minority, which led to defeats in Latin America.
Despite this work, the Party’s influence among peasants remained weak. Social Democratic propaganda found only a feeble echo; peasants looked instead to the Narodnik parties — the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Trudoviks. The chapter polemicises sharply against the SRs, characterising their line as an eclectic mixture of utopian socialism (the idealisation of the peasant commune as a basis for bypassing capitalism) and ultra-leftism. It cites Kerensky’s memoirs to argue that the commune was in fact a bulwark of economic backwardness and police control, not a seedbed of socialism. The autocracy, aware of its social isolation, attempted Bonapartist manoeuvres: a rigged electoral law gave landlords one elector per 2,000 population, peasants one per 7,000, and workers one per 90,000. Peasant representation in the Duma was relatively high at 45 per cent, reflecting the regime’s desire to cultivate the conservative rural layers and preserve the illusion of the Tsar as ‘Little Father’. But the chapter concludes that by giving the peasantry a voice, however distorted, the autocracy unwittingly created a lever for revolutionary socialism. The Duma’s rights were severely restricted — parts of the budget, loans, currency, army and navy remained beyond its competence — and an upper chamber with equal rights was created. This gigantic swindle was the work of Count Witte, who further served the Tsar by negotiating a large French loan.