daily addressed by the Bolsheviks. During this strike,
the workers had set up a Council of the
Representatives. They were, in reality, one of the first
Soviets of Workers Deputies in Russia.
The peasants’ unrest broke out in the spring. The
peasants’ enmasse raided the estates, sugar-
refineries and distilleries of the landlords. They had
set fire to their Palaces and Manors. In many areas,
the peasants had seized the lands, resorted to the
whole sale cutting down of forests. They demanded
to turn the landed estates over to the people. They
seized the granaries and other products of landlords
and distributed them among the starving. The
landlords fled to the towns in panic. The tsarist govt.
had deployed the armed forces heavily in the villages
and sought to crush the peasant revolt. The firings,
arrests of the “ring leaders”, floggings and torturing
went on unabated. But the peasants did not cease
their struggle. The peasant movement had spread
widely in the central parts of Russia, Volga region and
in Georgia. The Bolsheviks were fully active in the
Country side.
But the 1905 Uprising faced a defeat. Utilising all
the weaknesses in the movement, the tsarist govt.
had succeeded in crushing down the upsurge.
The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks seriously differed
on the appraisal of this defeat. The Mensheviks were
overwhelmed by the tendency of defeatism. They
repented and declared that the workers should not
have taken to arms. A peaceful method of struggle
should have been adopted. But Lenin had
emphatically asserted: “On the contrary, we should
have been more resolute, energetic and aggressive
in our armed struggle and prepare the people for it”.
Lenin had drawn most valuable lessons from the
1905 Revolution. He said: i) The 1905 revolution had
“deeply ploughed the soil, uprooted the age - old
prejudices, awakened millions of workers, tens of
millions of peasants to political life and political struggle
and revealed to each other – and to the world – all
classes (all the principal parties) of Russian Society
in their true character and in the true alignment of
their interests, their forces, their modes of action, and
their immediate and ultimate aims”; ii) “Without the
dress rehearsal of 1905, the victory of October
Revolution was not possible”; iii) The peasantry was
still harbouring bourgeois illusions. Neither a stable
worker – peasant alliance was forged nor was the
hegemony of the Proletariat established over the
revolution. As a result, a concerted and decisive blow
could not be inflicted on the feudal classes and the
tsarist autocracy; iv) The 1905 revolution had taught
that “ ‘no sympathy’ for the workers on the part of the
educated people, no struggle of lone terrorists,
however heroic, could do anything to undermine the
November - 2017
tsarist autocracy and the omnipotence of the
capitalists. This could be achieved only by the struggle
of the workers themselves, only by the combined
struggle of the millions......”
W ith the suppression of 1905 upsurge, the
revolutionary tide began to recede and gradually
subside.
However, the tsarist govt. knew that it had
suppressed an upsurge but the revolution still haunts
it. So in addition to repression it resorted to another
‘soft’ weapon. It proclaimed a law in Dec 1905
convening a ‘legislative’ duma. This Duma, however,
had denied voting rights to over half of the population
(women and mill workers), provided for an unequal
and cumbersome electoral process to ensure that the
Duma remains dominated by the classes that are
subservient to the tsar and acts like a rubber stamp.
The Mensheviks, however, extolled it as a means
to solve the problems of revolution and liberate the
people from the tsardom. The Bolsheviks saw the
Duma as “an impotent appendage of tsardom, a
screen for the evils of tsardom, which later would be
discarded as soon as it proved inconvenient”.
The Bolsheviks had boycotted the elections for
the (Witte) Duma of 1906. But later they concluded
that it was “a mistake, although a small and easily
remediable,” as this Duma had come in the immediate
after – math of the defeat of 1905 revolution. Then,
the party was in dire need of utilising every forum and
legal opportunity to revive the revolutionary move-
ment. The Bolsheviks knew that large sections of
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