Glad you are back but if WW1 is going to happen I don’t think a rightist UK would be long for this world with a leftist US in the world.
The Glowing Dream: A history of Socialist America
- Thread starter Iggies
- Start date
Some working-class men. Property qualifications resulted in approximately 40% of men still being disenfranchised prior to 1918.
It's also worth noting that the major dispute over Womens' Suffrage wasn't over whether women should get the vote, the vast majority agreed on that, but whether that right should only be extended to women who met the property qualifications or if those qualifications should be abolished for all men and women. The Suffragettes were mostly focused on just removing the barriers for wealthy women, Liberals wanted to reduce the property qualifications as well as remove sex qualification whilst the Suffragists wanted to use the opportunity to abolish property qualifications. Ironically, those with the more moderate goals tended to make use of the more radical methods in their pursuit.
That helps explain why many, many suffragettes became Conservative MPs (OTL).
Oh yeah, the Suffragettes had a lot of terrible politics, real cursed First Wave Feminism. Except for Sylvia Pankhurst, she was cool.
Yah glad this is back!!
Really appreciate the previous update showing how that their not a immediate civil war fighting against the coup that often show but they take power and realistically have a lot of time to do what they want
Damm I was hoping that we have a leftist Britain and America well maybe there still hope
Really appreciate the previous update showing how that their not a immediate civil war fighting against the coup that often show but they take power and realistically have a lot of time to do what they want
Damm I was hoping that we have a leftist Britain and America well maybe there still hope
If the Suffragettes were wealthy women with the goal to only extend the franchise to themselves, I think it does actually make sense that they would use the most extreme methods: this is Edwardian England, rich women are probably just convinced they can get away with more radical actions (and they probably can) because of their place in the social structure. Lady Croyden can afford to do some things and just seem "excentric" whereas her milkmaid would be clubbed down by policemen for doing the same things.
1905 in Russia
Russia was, in the early twentieth century, generally considered the most backward state in Europe. She was the only European nation still languishing under the dictates of an absolute monarch, responsible to God alone. Over 70% of her vast population, stretching from the Bug River in the west to the icy Kamchatka on the Pacific, was composed of simple peasants, who lived much as their fathers had for centuries. The repressive state apparatus of the Romanov tsar was legendary, with its legions of police spies, rigid censorship, and the ever-looming specter of a Siberian exile hanging over the heads of dissidents.
But if Russia had fallen behind, she was also racing to catch up.
In 1894, the new tsar Nicholas II had been raised to the throne. Though the crown he inherited proved to be his misfortune, the emperor was also fortunate enough to inherit a singularly able finance minister by the name of Sergei Witte, who had been appointed to his position by the last tsar.
Witte was a whirlwind, who set about bringing Russia ‘up to speed’. He raised tariffs, which not only protected native industry and labor, but also sought to entice foreigners to – rather than dump finished goods on Russia - set up their enterprises inside the bounds of the empire itself. He also moved Russia onto the gold standard, raising the confidence of European investors in the rouble. The result was billions of roubles poured into the old ‘gendarme of Europe’ from without, jump-starting the empire’s transition into modernity. Industrial productivity, ranging from coal to steel to oil, increased many times over during his tenure, spanning the decade from 1890 to 1900. The length of railway trackage doubled. On the eve of the Ten-Year War, Russia ranked fifth among the industrial powers of the world.
The drawback to Witte’s schemes was that they made the Russian Empire’s burgeoning economy almost entirely dependent on foreign capital. By 1900, nearly half of the investments made in Russian industry were of foreign origin – in oil, steel, and other extractive enterprises, the percentage was far higher.
That meant economic fibrillations in the west were bound to be felt in Russia and felt hard.
Sitting at the peak of this unstable but upsurging swell of prosperity was Russia’s unhappy tsar, Nicholas II. It has often been said that Nicholas would have done better to have been born a middling bourgeois in the west. Unfortunately for himself, his family, and Russia, he was not.
Nicholas’ ill-starred reign was defined by the inability of his wife, the one-time German princess Alexandra (familiarly ‘Alix’) of Hesse and by Rhine, to conceive a son and heir.
In 1895, the royal couple joyously welcomed their first child into the world: Olga, a girl.
Two years later, Alix was again pregnant, and this time bore Tatiana. Another daughter.
In 1899, Maria was born, and in 1901, Anastasia, and by then, the Russian people had begun to wonder if the empire was not cursed.
The tsar and tsarina loved their daughters, who proved to be as charming, beautiful, and intelligent as princesses ought to be. But they worried dearly for the future of the dynasty if no son should be produced. After the birth of Anastasia, Nicholas was moved to revoke the century-old Pauline laws which prohibited the ascension to the throne of any woman so long as a male relation in the direct line of succession remained alive. He did so over the vociferous opposition of many a reactionary aristocrat and courtier but was more strongly determined to see a child of his own inherit the autocracy than he was devoted to primogeniture. So, in January of 1905, when it developed that Alix was pregnant yet again, Grand Duchess Olga was the heir presumptive. For now, anyways.
Nicholas and all Russia prayed fervently for a son at last.
But fortune was not yet finished with the Romanovs.
The American crisis had begun in 1901, deepened in 1902 and early 1903, and finally reached its nadir in 1904.
As the knock-on effects were felt in England and France, the vast amount of Franco-British capital ploughed into in Russia was similarly impacted. Investments began to shrivel up. Many of the empire’s more primitive inhabitants, who scratched their living from the earth, hardly noticed. But in the great cities of Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, and Kiev, industry suffered, as did its workers.
Unemployment spiked to 8% in 1904, higher among industrial laborers. Grumbling and talk of strike began.
As if this was not enough, earlier in the year Russia had entered into an ill-advised war with the Japanese on the other side of the continent. A war it was becoming increasingly clear as the year ground on that Russia was going to lose. Bureaucratic inefficiency, logistical difficulties, international disapproval, and lack of popular enthusiasm combined to result in an embarrassing series of defeats for Nicholas, culminating in the near-annihilation of the Russian Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan, in late April of 1905.
This, combined with continuing economic duress back home, proved the spark to ignite the flame of revolution.
On May Day of 1905, workers at Petersburg’s Putilov walked out on strike, in protest of recent pay cuts. By nightfall, this had blossomed into a wave of similar strikes throughout Petersburg, and clashes with police and mounted Cossacks left scores dead. Within the week, the tumult had spread to Russia’s other urban centers; Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, Tfilis.
By the time the peasantry joined in, and rural landlords found their mansions sacked and burned and their estates occupied and divided by former tenants, it was clear revolution had come to Russia.
The banners in the streets of Petersburg and Moscow reiterated not only the usual demands for higher wages and labor protections, but now mixed them with ominous calls for “political liberty” and some even damned the tsar for the “humiliations” in the east.
Especially consternating was that the disturbances were not confined to the “popular” classes. Middle class professionals, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, joined their social inferiors in the streets, calling for political and economic reform, and an end to the war.
Even some of the wealthiest men in Russia, like the industrialist Alexander Guchkov (who privately despised the tsar) and Alexei Putilov himself, joined in on calls that the tsar legalize trade unions, proclaim an amnesty for Siberian exiles, and worst of all, acquiesce to an elected parliament.
In cities and towns across the empire, workers and peasants and even many bourgeois elected local councils – the first of the famous ‘soviets’ – to represent their interests and pressure the established authorities. First and foremost was the great Petersburg Soviet, soon chaired by a returned émigré called Lev Trotsky, born of wealthy Ukrainian-Jewish farmers, but also a committed Marxist.
Nicholas was deeply shaken by all of this and remained locked away in his country retreat at Tsarskoe Selo a few miles out of Petersburg while the country blazed around him.
Alix, a convinced enemy of reform, and certainly of revolution, urged her husband to concede nothing to the mob and the dark powers she imagined directed it, and to disperse the revolutionaries by force and confirm the power of the autocracy.
Nicholas wavered.
Meanwhile, the western press, which was largely embarrassed by the tsardom’s “backwardness” if not outright hostile, applauded what they hoped was Russia’s move towards liberal, parliamentary respectability. Optimistic articles by the Times of London and Paris’ Le Temps downplayed involvement of red ‘incendiaries’ and focused on the part played by middle-class reformers like Pavel Milyukov and Guchkov. Nevertheless, the obvious distaste abroad for the autocracy only deepened convictions in reactionary Russian circles (and that included the empress at least) that there was an international conspiracy directed against Holy Russia.
Indeed, certain foreign forces were working against the autocracy. The American millionaire Jacob Schiff, a devout Jew and thus sworn foe of the famously anti-semitic tsardom, publicly applauded what he called “a great people risen against the terrible tyranny that has oppressed them for generations,” and financed Russian émigré organizations seeking Russian democratization.
The bureau of the Socialist International extended “heartfelt congratulations and full sympathy to our Russian brothers struggling for liberty.”
While soldiers clashed with insurgent workers and peasants across the empire, leaving dead scores that soon became hundreds, Nicholas continued his indecision.
Men like Sergei Witte and the emperor’s own cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai, urged him to bow to public and foreign pressure and establishment a parliament (a ‘Duma’) and submit to a constitution. The tsarina and the Minister of the Interior, a convinced reactionary named Peter Durnovo, begged the tsar to stand fast.
Meanwhile, Lenin returned from a Swiss exile to revolutionary Petersburg, where he gave a number of speeches before the Soviet (including at least one debate with Trotsky) and issued various declarations blasting his rivals for opportunism or reformism.
National minorities joined in the restiveness – in the Baltics, Latvian and Estonian farmworkers occupied the estates of their noble German landlords and refused to decamp. When the Cossacks and private militia of the lords marched in to restore order, they fought back. Even as far afield as Central Asia, imperial military outposts were attacked by Kazakh and Turkmen insurgents.
In Petersburg, by mid-June, the police presence had been largely uprooted, and the city was in the hands of the revolutionaries. Red flags flew from every spire and balcony, and the decrees of the Soviet had infinitely more weight than those of the tsar, still cowering in Tsarskoe Seloe.
But as the revolution grew stronger, so did its enemies.
Amid the chaos, a Russian doctor called Alexander Dubrovin founded an organization he called “The Union of the Russian People.” This would be a hardline reactionary league, dedicated to the defense of throne and altar against creeping modernity, liberalism, and socialism. Rabidly anti-Semitic, the URP insisted Russia was in the crosshairs of a godless international conspiracy spearheaded by Jewish revolutionaries, who sought to destroy the tsardom and ruin the empire. Founded in May of 1905, only a few weeks after the first strikes in Petersburg, the URP’s ranks swelled with anxious rightists, ranging from wealthy bourgeois to fervently religious but impoverished peasants.
Though the URP was without a doubt the largest and the most prominent, many similar organizations sprouted up across the Russian Empire like mushrooms in the succeeding months. Collectively, they garnered the nickname, “the Black Hundred,” or “the Black One-Hundred.”
Soon, Black-Hundredist militants clashed with revolutionary workers or socialist students in the streets of major cities and shored up the manpower of the army when it rode in to suppress peasant unrest.
By mid-August of that year, probably some 3,000 at least had already died in the disturbances over the empire.
Then, in early September, as Russia continued in a state of low-intensity warfare, the liberal activist and newspaperman V.D Nabokov got an idea. His plan was to assemble a few thousand (or at least a few hundred) demonstrators, unarmed and free of red flags, and march them out to Tsarskoe Seloe to see the tsar. This inoffensive but formidable crowd would affirm their loyalty to Russia and the throne, but at the same time insist upon the most widely agreed upon revolutionary watchwords: an elected parliament, labor rights, and an amnesty for political prisoners.
From the beginning, Nabokov’s scheme faltered. He had intended upon a handpicked crowd of well-dressed workers and wholesome peasants with icons of the tsar and had also intended that the march be disproportionately composed of older individuals and women. But the march had been widely publicized, not only in the liberal paper Rech, which Nabokov edited, but also in a number of radical publications such as the Social Democratic Izvestia and even the Black Hundredist Eagle. On 18 September (O.S), as the marchers – some 4,000 in all – assembled in Petersburg to begin the trek out to Nicholas’ estate, the crowd was swelled by masses of young men, many of them drunk and many of them deserting soldiers, waving red banners and singing revolutionary songs.
The demonstrators’ numbers grew yet larger as the march went on, and by the time they actually reached Tsarskoe Seloe there may have been as many as 10,000 marchers present, and a number of them armed.
When it first came within sight of the Catherine Palace, the demonstration was greeted by two squadrons of the tsar’s palace Horse Guard, and promptly ordered to disperse and go home by the commanding officers.
They refused.
As is so common with such tragedies, who precisely bore responsibility for the ensuing bloodshed has been argued for decades.
Some of the more truculent marchers traded insults with the troops. The singing of “God Save the Tsar” was drowned out by “the Marseillaise.”
Finally, someone – soldier or revolutionary – fired a shot, and the massacre began.
The Horse Guards fired into the crowd. Unfortunately for them, they were vastly outnumbered and though many fled straightaway, many of the marchers were only galvanized by the outrage.
Men with armed with pistols pushed forward and shot back.
A full-scale battle was soon playing out on the palace green.
The tsar and his pregnant wife heard the gunfire from their bedroom, where they had been resting.
From a second-story window, six-year-old Grand Duchess Maria watched the Horse Guard ride into the crowd, sabers drawn and carbines blazing.
When the smoke cleared and the last of the demonstrators were put to flight, nearly a hundred corpses littered the palace lawns, and sixteen of these were of the tsar’s guard.
It was in this atmosphere that Alix gave finally birth.
The torturous, stress-induced thirty-two-hour labor bore tragic fruit, even as the corpses were still being cleared away from the palace grounds: the tsar had a son at last, but the boy was stillborn.
The doctors insisted – rightly or wrongly – that the stress of 18 September was responsible for a premature labor and for the death of the boy.
The grief and horror of it all finally ended the tsar’s vacillations. There would be no concessions, and certainly no elected parliament.
A week later, on 30 September, two divisions and several attached units of the Russian Army converged on St. Petersburg. It never being considered that the revolutionaries who held the city might go peacefully, Petersburg was shelled prior to the issue of any demand for surrender.
Five days of brutal street-fighting ensued. Lenin only just slipped out of the city with his life, disguised as a bagman.
By the time the city was reduced, the red flags ripped down, the indiscriminate shelling and shooting over with, some 5,000 were dead in Petersburg and the surrounding provinces alone. Half of the Petersburg Soviet was shot out of hand on the orders of General A.A. Orlov, who was made military governor of Petersburg. The other half was packed off to Siberian exile.
Among those unilaterally sentenced to death was the soviet’s fiery chairman, Trotsky, who died at the age of twenty-six, shouting curses at the firing squad.
The same scenes were repeated in Russia’s other great urban centers – Moscow, Kiev, and Warsaw, where the participation of Polish nationalists in the disturbances merited an especially brutal crackdown.
Cossacks rode into the countryside and dispersed rural soviets with the same ferocity.
Black Hundredist militias joined in the repression and acted with the tacit approval and occasional full cooperation of the military and police. In the Pale of Settlement, the reaction coalesced into another round of pogroms, as Jews were identified with the revolutionaries.
Orthodox priests led mobs in attacks on Jewish homes and shops, to the traditional cry of “beat the Yids.”
Some 80 Jews were killed in an Odessa pogrom that spanned from 1 to 3 October, and in Kiev as many as 100 died.
Nicholas promptly fired Witte for encouraging rapprochement with the revolutionaries.
A wave of arrests swept the country.
Nabokov was taken into custody for his part in the organization of the disastrous march. Alix, beside herself with grief over the loss of her infant son, insisted he be hanged. Nicholas was inclined to agree. Even Durnovo was reluctant to do this, as Nabokov was a wealthy man from a respectable family with powerful friends.
But in the end the imperial family won out. Nabokov went before a military tribunal, was charged and convicted of treason in a trial lasting about thirty minutes, and summarily hanged a few hours later.
Thousands of less prominent figures met the same fates.
In October of 1905, Nicholas dismissed Durnovo and appointed a new Interior Minister, Peter Stolypin. Much like Witte, Stolypin considered himself an enlightened figure who wanted to modernize Russia. But he was also happy to organize this new wave of repressions for the tsar.
Stolypin saw to it that particularly restive regions, including most of the major cities, and large swathes of the Ukrainian countryside, along with Central Asia and the Baltic territories, were placed under military government. The military governors were empowered to act with absolute authority, and Stolypin encouraged them to show “splendid brutality” so that “the rebels” would learn the folly of resistance quickly and thus “no further blood be spilled.”
General A.N Meller-Zakomellsky, made military governor of the Ukrainian provinces, issued a directive to his officers to the effect that “rebels and incendiaries” were to be treated “utterly without pity.” All fifty representatives of the railwayman’s strike committee in Kiev, which had controlled the rail-lines connecting to the city since mid-May, were shot after a brief collective military trial. Hundreds more railwaymen who had participated in the strike were arrested, many sent into Siberia, to the point that the rail lines of central Ukraine suffered severely for lack of men to work them.
When a village in the Kherson province refused to disband its soviet, and refused to vacate the land seized from the local landlord, Meller-Zakomellsky ordered the whole town razed.
In the Baltics, General Orlov boasted of hanging “rebels” all along the road to Reval for miles and miles, “just like Spartacus.” Rebellious Latvian farmworkers were rounded up by the coordinated actions of tsarist troops and the militias of local landed noblemen. Thousands were killed and tens of thousands subjected to various punitive measures.
The repression stretched well into 1906, and by mid-1907, when the battles and the mass executions were tallied up, it was estimated that some 30,000 lost their lives in what became known among Russian dissidents as the Terror. Many more were injured, millions of roubles’ worth of property destroyed, and as many as 300,000 may have become political prisoners.
Even world-famous figures such as the writer Maxim Gorky were not safe – Gorky, who had written in favor of the Petersburg Soviet and was friendly with many prominent revolutionaries, was arrested in the fall of 1905. He was very nearly executed, but an international outcry managed to save his life, and he was allowed to go into exile.
The émigré papers and enemies of the Russian autocracy abroad found much grist for the anti-tsarist propaganda mill in all this horror. The bloody repression was almost universally condemned in the west, save for among certain sectors of the extreme right.
British Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain, a convinced Unionist who would fully support the British Army's crackdown on the 1907 strike, denounced the “stupid despotism” of the tsar.
President Henry Frick, who was currently overseeing the dismantling of the organized left in his own country, stated that the tsar’s actions were "not those of a Christian and civilized government.”
The Russian left itself was in full retreat, as the autocracy seemed firmer than ever over the ashes of 1905. But the revolutionaries were not beaten, and in the end the great setback would only serve to fire their determination.
Six-year-old Maria Romanova asked her mother why all the bloodshed and suffering, and the tsarina informed her daughter that the Jews and freemasons sought to rule Russia and stirred up the revolution to that end.
Meanwhile, six-year-old Vladimir V. Nabokov asked his own mother who had taken father away. She tearfully replied that the tsar had murdered him, and young Nabokov thus swore to hate the tsar forevermore.
But if Russia had fallen behind, she was also racing to catch up.
In 1894, the new tsar Nicholas II had been raised to the throne. Though the crown he inherited proved to be his misfortune, the emperor was also fortunate enough to inherit a singularly able finance minister by the name of Sergei Witte, who had been appointed to his position by the last tsar.
Witte was a whirlwind, who set about bringing Russia ‘up to speed’. He raised tariffs, which not only protected native industry and labor, but also sought to entice foreigners to – rather than dump finished goods on Russia - set up their enterprises inside the bounds of the empire itself. He also moved Russia onto the gold standard, raising the confidence of European investors in the rouble. The result was billions of roubles poured into the old ‘gendarme of Europe’ from without, jump-starting the empire’s transition into modernity. Industrial productivity, ranging from coal to steel to oil, increased many times over during his tenure, spanning the decade from 1890 to 1900. The length of railway trackage doubled. On the eve of the Ten-Year War, Russia ranked fifth among the industrial powers of the world.
The drawback to Witte’s schemes was that they made the Russian Empire’s burgeoning economy almost entirely dependent on foreign capital. By 1900, nearly half of the investments made in Russian industry were of foreign origin – in oil, steel, and other extractive enterprises, the percentage was far higher.
That meant economic fibrillations in the west were bound to be felt in Russia and felt hard.
Sitting at the peak of this unstable but upsurging swell of prosperity was Russia’s unhappy tsar, Nicholas II. It has often been said that Nicholas would have done better to have been born a middling bourgeois in the west. Unfortunately for himself, his family, and Russia, he was not.
Nicholas’ ill-starred reign was defined by the inability of his wife, the one-time German princess Alexandra (familiarly ‘Alix’) of Hesse and by Rhine, to conceive a son and heir.
In 1895, the royal couple joyously welcomed their first child into the world: Olga, a girl.
Two years later, Alix was again pregnant, and this time bore Tatiana. Another daughter.
In 1899, Maria was born, and in 1901, Anastasia, and by then, the Russian people had begun to wonder if the empire was not cursed.
The tsar and tsarina loved their daughters, who proved to be as charming, beautiful, and intelligent as princesses ought to be. But they worried dearly for the future of the dynasty if no son should be produced. After the birth of Anastasia, Nicholas was moved to revoke the century-old Pauline laws which prohibited the ascension to the throne of any woman so long as a male relation in the direct line of succession remained alive. He did so over the vociferous opposition of many a reactionary aristocrat and courtier but was more strongly determined to see a child of his own inherit the autocracy than he was devoted to primogeniture. So, in January of 1905, when it developed that Alix was pregnant yet again, Grand Duchess Olga was the heir presumptive. For now, anyways.
Nicholas and all Russia prayed fervently for a son at last.
But fortune was not yet finished with the Romanovs.
The American crisis had begun in 1901, deepened in 1902 and early 1903, and finally reached its nadir in 1904.
As the knock-on effects were felt in England and France, the vast amount of Franco-British capital ploughed into in Russia was similarly impacted. Investments began to shrivel up. Many of the empire’s more primitive inhabitants, who scratched their living from the earth, hardly noticed. But in the great cities of Petersburg, Moscow, Kharkov, and Kiev, industry suffered, as did its workers.
Unemployment spiked to 8% in 1904, higher among industrial laborers. Grumbling and talk of strike began.
As if this was not enough, earlier in the year Russia had entered into an ill-advised war with the Japanese on the other side of the continent. A war it was becoming increasingly clear as the year ground on that Russia was going to lose. Bureaucratic inefficiency, logistical difficulties, international disapproval, and lack of popular enthusiasm combined to result in an embarrassing series of defeats for Nicholas, culminating in the near-annihilation of the Russian Pacific Fleet in the Sea of Japan, in late April of 1905.
This, combined with continuing economic duress back home, proved the spark to ignite the flame of revolution.
On May Day of 1905, workers at Petersburg’s Putilov walked out on strike, in protest of recent pay cuts. By nightfall, this had blossomed into a wave of similar strikes throughout Petersburg, and clashes with police and mounted Cossacks left scores dead. Within the week, the tumult had spread to Russia’s other urban centers; Moscow, Kiev, Warsaw, Tfilis.
By the time the peasantry joined in, and rural landlords found their mansions sacked and burned and their estates occupied and divided by former tenants, it was clear revolution had come to Russia.
The banners in the streets of Petersburg and Moscow reiterated not only the usual demands for higher wages and labor protections, but now mixed them with ominous calls for “political liberty” and some even damned the tsar for the “humiliations” in the east.
Especially consternating was that the disturbances were not confined to the “popular” classes. Middle class professionals, doctors, lawyers, and businessmen, joined their social inferiors in the streets, calling for political and economic reform, and an end to the war.
Even some of the wealthiest men in Russia, like the industrialist Alexander Guchkov (who privately despised the tsar) and Alexei Putilov himself, joined in on calls that the tsar legalize trade unions, proclaim an amnesty for Siberian exiles, and worst of all, acquiesce to an elected parliament.
In cities and towns across the empire, workers and peasants and even many bourgeois elected local councils – the first of the famous ‘soviets’ – to represent their interests and pressure the established authorities. First and foremost was the great Petersburg Soviet, soon chaired by a returned émigré called Lev Trotsky, born of wealthy Ukrainian-Jewish farmers, but also a committed Marxist.
Nicholas was deeply shaken by all of this and remained locked away in his country retreat at Tsarskoe Selo a few miles out of Petersburg while the country blazed around him.
Alix, a convinced enemy of reform, and certainly of revolution, urged her husband to concede nothing to the mob and the dark powers she imagined directed it, and to disperse the revolutionaries by force and confirm the power of the autocracy.
Nicholas wavered.
Meanwhile, the western press, which was largely embarrassed by the tsardom’s “backwardness” if not outright hostile, applauded what they hoped was Russia’s move towards liberal, parliamentary respectability. Optimistic articles by the Times of London and Paris’ Le Temps downplayed involvement of red ‘incendiaries’ and focused on the part played by middle-class reformers like Pavel Milyukov and Guchkov. Nevertheless, the obvious distaste abroad for the autocracy only deepened convictions in reactionary Russian circles (and that included the empress at least) that there was an international conspiracy directed against Holy Russia.
Indeed, certain foreign forces were working against the autocracy. The American millionaire Jacob Schiff, a devout Jew and thus sworn foe of the famously anti-semitic tsardom, publicly applauded what he called “a great people risen against the terrible tyranny that has oppressed them for generations,” and financed Russian émigré organizations seeking Russian democratization.
The bureau of the Socialist International extended “heartfelt congratulations and full sympathy to our Russian brothers struggling for liberty.”
While soldiers clashed with insurgent workers and peasants across the empire, leaving dead scores that soon became hundreds, Nicholas continued his indecision.
Men like Sergei Witte and the emperor’s own cousin, Grand Duke Nikolai, urged him to bow to public and foreign pressure and establishment a parliament (a ‘Duma’) and submit to a constitution. The tsarina and the Minister of the Interior, a convinced reactionary named Peter Durnovo, begged the tsar to stand fast.
Meanwhile, Lenin returned from a Swiss exile to revolutionary Petersburg, where he gave a number of speeches before the Soviet (including at least one debate with Trotsky) and issued various declarations blasting his rivals for opportunism or reformism.
National minorities joined in the restiveness – in the Baltics, Latvian and Estonian farmworkers occupied the estates of their noble German landlords and refused to decamp. When the Cossacks and private militia of the lords marched in to restore order, they fought back. Even as far afield as Central Asia, imperial military outposts were attacked by Kazakh and Turkmen insurgents.
In Petersburg, by mid-June, the police presence had been largely uprooted, and the city was in the hands of the revolutionaries. Red flags flew from every spire and balcony, and the decrees of the Soviet had infinitely more weight than those of the tsar, still cowering in Tsarskoe Seloe.
But as the revolution grew stronger, so did its enemies.
Amid the chaos, a Russian doctor called Alexander Dubrovin founded an organization he called “The Union of the Russian People.” This would be a hardline reactionary league, dedicated to the defense of throne and altar against creeping modernity, liberalism, and socialism. Rabidly anti-Semitic, the URP insisted Russia was in the crosshairs of a godless international conspiracy spearheaded by Jewish revolutionaries, who sought to destroy the tsardom and ruin the empire. Founded in May of 1905, only a few weeks after the first strikes in Petersburg, the URP’s ranks swelled with anxious rightists, ranging from wealthy bourgeois to fervently religious but impoverished peasants.
Though the URP was without a doubt the largest and the most prominent, many similar organizations sprouted up across the Russian Empire like mushrooms in the succeeding months. Collectively, they garnered the nickname, “the Black Hundred,” or “the Black One-Hundred.”
Soon, Black-Hundredist militants clashed with revolutionary workers or socialist students in the streets of major cities and shored up the manpower of the army when it rode in to suppress peasant unrest.
By mid-August of that year, probably some 3,000 at least had already died in the disturbances over the empire.
Then, in early September, as Russia continued in a state of low-intensity warfare, the liberal activist and newspaperman V.D Nabokov got an idea. His plan was to assemble a few thousand (or at least a few hundred) demonstrators, unarmed and free of red flags, and march them out to Tsarskoe Seloe to see the tsar. This inoffensive but formidable crowd would affirm their loyalty to Russia and the throne, but at the same time insist upon the most widely agreed upon revolutionary watchwords: an elected parliament, labor rights, and an amnesty for political prisoners.
From the beginning, Nabokov’s scheme faltered. He had intended upon a handpicked crowd of well-dressed workers and wholesome peasants with icons of the tsar and had also intended that the march be disproportionately composed of older individuals and women. But the march had been widely publicized, not only in the liberal paper Rech, which Nabokov edited, but also in a number of radical publications such as the Social Democratic Izvestia and even the Black Hundredist Eagle. On 18 September (O.S), as the marchers – some 4,000 in all – assembled in Petersburg to begin the trek out to Nicholas’ estate, the crowd was swelled by masses of young men, many of them drunk and many of them deserting soldiers, waving red banners and singing revolutionary songs.
The demonstrators’ numbers grew yet larger as the march went on, and by the time they actually reached Tsarskoe Seloe there may have been as many as 10,000 marchers present, and a number of them armed.
When it first came within sight of the Catherine Palace, the demonstration was greeted by two squadrons of the tsar’s palace Horse Guard, and promptly ordered to disperse and go home by the commanding officers.
They refused.
As is so common with such tragedies, who precisely bore responsibility for the ensuing bloodshed has been argued for decades.
Some of the more truculent marchers traded insults with the troops. The singing of “God Save the Tsar” was drowned out by “the Marseillaise.”
Finally, someone – soldier or revolutionary – fired a shot, and the massacre began.
The Horse Guards fired into the crowd. Unfortunately for them, they were vastly outnumbered and though many fled straightaway, many of the marchers were only galvanized by the outrage.
Men with armed with pistols pushed forward and shot back.
A full-scale battle was soon playing out on the palace green.
The tsar and his pregnant wife heard the gunfire from their bedroom, where they had been resting.
From a second-story window, six-year-old Grand Duchess Maria watched the Horse Guard ride into the crowd, sabers drawn and carbines blazing.
When the smoke cleared and the last of the demonstrators were put to flight, nearly a hundred corpses littered the palace lawns, and sixteen of these were of the tsar’s guard.
It was in this atmosphere that Alix gave finally birth.
The torturous, stress-induced thirty-two-hour labor bore tragic fruit, even as the corpses were still being cleared away from the palace grounds: the tsar had a son at last, but the boy was stillborn.
The doctors insisted – rightly or wrongly – that the stress of 18 September was responsible for a premature labor and for the death of the boy.
The grief and horror of it all finally ended the tsar’s vacillations. There would be no concessions, and certainly no elected parliament.
A week later, on 30 September, two divisions and several attached units of the Russian Army converged on St. Petersburg. It never being considered that the revolutionaries who held the city might go peacefully, Petersburg was shelled prior to the issue of any demand for surrender.
Five days of brutal street-fighting ensued. Lenin only just slipped out of the city with his life, disguised as a bagman.
By the time the city was reduced, the red flags ripped down, the indiscriminate shelling and shooting over with, some 5,000 were dead in Petersburg and the surrounding provinces alone. Half of the Petersburg Soviet was shot out of hand on the orders of General A.A. Orlov, who was made military governor of Petersburg. The other half was packed off to Siberian exile.
Among those unilaterally sentenced to death was the soviet’s fiery chairman, Trotsky, who died at the age of twenty-six, shouting curses at the firing squad.
The same scenes were repeated in Russia’s other great urban centers – Moscow, Kiev, and Warsaw, where the participation of Polish nationalists in the disturbances merited an especially brutal crackdown.
Cossacks rode into the countryside and dispersed rural soviets with the same ferocity.
Black Hundredist militias joined in the repression and acted with the tacit approval and occasional full cooperation of the military and police. In the Pale of Settlement, the reaction coalesced into another round of pogroms, as Jews were identified with the revolutionaries.
Orthodox priests led mobs in attacks on Jewish homes and shops, to the traditional cry of “beat the Yids.”
Some 80 Jews were killed in an Odessa pogrom that spanned from 1 to 3 October, and in Kiev as many as 100 died.
Nicholas promptly fired Witte for encouraging rapprochement with the revolutionaries.
A wave of arrests swept the country.
Nabokov was taken into custody for his part in the organization of the disastrous march. Alix, beside herself with grief over the loss of her infant son, insisted he be hanged. Nicholas was inclined to agree. Even Durnovo was reluctant to do this, as Nabokov was a wealthy man from a respectable family with powerful friends.
But in the end the imperial family won out. Nabokov went before a military tribunal, was charged and convicted of treason in a trial lasting about thirty minutes, and summarily hanged a few hours later.
Thousands of less prominent figures met the same fates.
In October of 1905, Nicholas dismissed Durnovo and appointed a new Interior Minister, Peter Stolypin. Much like Witte, Stolypin considered himself an enlightened figure who wanted to modernize Russia. But he was also happy to organize this new wave of repressions for the tsar.
Stolypin saw to it that particularly restive regions, including most of the major cities, and large swathes of the Ukrainian countryside, along with Central Asia and the Baltic territories, were placed under military government. The military governors were empowered to act with absolute authority, and Stolypin encouraged them to show “splendid brutality” so that “the rebels” would learn the folly of resistance quickly and thus “no further blood be spilled.”
General A.N Meller-Zakomellsky, made military governor of the Ukrainian provinces, issued a directive to his officers to the effect that “rebels and incendiaries” were to be treated “utterly without pity.” All fifty representatives of the railwayman’s strike committee in Kiev, which had controlled the rail-lines connecting to the city since mid-May, were shot after a brief collective military trial. Hundreds more railwaymen who had participated in the strike were arrested, many sent into Siberia, to the point that the rail lines of central Ukraine suffered severely for lack of men to work them.
When a village in the Kherson province refused to disband its soviet, and refused to vacate the land seized from the local landlord, Meller-Zakomellsky ordered the whole town razed.
In the Baltics, General Orlov boasted of hanging “rebels” all along the road to Reval for miles and miles, “just like Spartacus.” Rebellious Latvian farmworkers were rounded up by the coordinated actions of tsarist troops and the militias of local landed noblemen. Thousands were killed and tens of thousands subjected to various punitive measures.
The repression stretched well into 1906, and by mid-1907, when the battles and the mass executions were tallied up, it was estimated that some 30,000 lost their lives in what became known among Russian dissidents as the Terror. Many more were injured, millions of roubles’ worth of property destroyed, and as many as 300,000 may have become political prisoners.
Even world-famous figures such as the writer Maxim Gorky were not safe – Gorky, who had written in favor of the Petersburg Soviet and was friendly with many prominent revolutionaries, was arrested in the fall of 1905. He was very nearly executed, but an international outcry managed to save his life, and he was allowed to go into exile.
The émigré papers and enemies of the Russian autocracy abroad found much grist for the anti-tsarist propaganda mill in all this horror. The bloody repression was almost universally condemned in the west, save for among certain sectors of the extreme right.
British Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain, a convinced Unionist who would fully support the British Army's crackdown on the 1907 strike, denounced the “stupid despotism” of the tsar.
President Henry Frick, who was currently overseeing the dismantling of the organized left in his own country, stated that the tsar’s actions were "not those of a Christian and civilized government.”
The Russian left itself was in full retreat, as the autocracy seemed firmer than ever over the ashes of 1905. But the revolutionaries were not beaten, and in the end the great setback would only serve to fire their determination.
Six-year-old Maria Romanova asked her mother why all the bloodshed and suffering, and the tsarina informed her daughter that the Jews and freemasons sought to rule Russia and stirred up the revolution to that end.
Meanwhile, six-year-old Vladimir V. Nabokov asked his own mother who had taken father away. She tearfully replied that the tsar had murdered him, and young Nabokov thus swore to hate the tsar forevermore.
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No need for the hurry. This is more interesting than the overly-America-centric stuff. There are plenty of excessively USA-focused "the rest of the world? I hear that's a place that exists, as a side-note" TLs out there. It makes the TL more enjoyable when you show a broader range of the world.
Oh God, we're getting a URP dominated Russia aren't we? If so, my money's on us seeing a proto-Holocaust going on in Russia because of them by the time TTL's Russian Revolution occurs.
I mean seriously if even Frick is appalled, then that can't be a good sign for what's to come.
I mean seriously if even Frick is appalled, then that can't be a good sign for what's to come.
Yeah, all this does is kick the can down the road a few years, and worse, it militarizes them. Now they know they have nothing to lose, and conditions are gonna get worse in the meantime, further alienating people from the Tsar.
Congrats Nicky, you have your throne still. It's just all bayonets now.
Vince
Monthly Donor
I was actually imagining a teenage Vladimir Nabokov assassinating the Tsar leading to Soviet Russia.
This is ominous in how this, to me, she will become an evil Tsarina in the future.
I'm going to assume that when the successful Russian Revolution happens, the resultant civil war will be much shorter (given that must be more opposition to the ancien regime) and thus Russia will be better off for it.