516Chapter 26
the turn-of-the-century (1898–1902), Russian farmers
produced an average yield of 8.8 bushels of grain per
acre, whereas British farmers supported an urban popu-
lation by producing 35.4 bushels per acre. As late as
1912 the entire Russian Empire contained a total of 166
tractors.
Sergei Witte addressed Russian backwardness in
several ways. Taxes on the sale of alcoholic spirits pro-
vided the largest source of revenue, so Witte built a
state monopoly on such sales. He put the Russian cur-
rency (the ruble) on the gold standard, to enhance
credit with foreign lenders. Russia already carried a
large national debt, which amounted to 5.5 billion
rubles in 1891—nearly six times the annual budget of
the empire. Such debt had become so integral to Euro-
pean economics that Russia was still repaying Dutch
loans of 1778 and 1815 and devoted nearly 27 percent
of its budget to loan repayments. Witte believed that
“[n]o country has ever developed without foreign capi-
tal” and sought new loans. He used this investment to
found a national bank, provide state aid in building fac-
tories, and construct the Russian railroad system. Witte
created a system of state-controlled (60 percent owner-
ship) railways. He doubled the total of working track in
Russia during the 1890s, including the construction of
the Trans-Siberian Railroad, a five-thousand-mile link
between Moscow and the Pacific port of Vladivostok.
The cost of this program, however, was a national debt
so severe that state supported progress in other areas
was impossible.
Industrialization increased political discontent. The
living and working conditions that characterized early
industrialization everywhere increased the revolution-
ary violence that Russia had experienced for a genera-
tion. Attempted assassinations became a regular feature
of Russian politics. During the 1890s two prime
ministers, an education minister, a provincial governor,
and an uncle of the czar were among those killed. With
no Parliament, underground radical parties flourished.
Plekhanov organized the Russian Social Democratic
Party in 1898, and agrarian radicals from the populist
tradition created a competing organization, the Social-
ist Revolutionary Party, in 1901. This underground—
largely led by people from educated, middle-class
backgrounds—became more complex in 1903 when
the Social Democrats held a party congress in London
and split in two. That congress marked the emergence
of Lenin in Russian politics. Lenin (the adopted name
of a lawyer born Vladimir Ulyanov) was radicalized by
the execution of his older brother for plotting against
the czar. Arrested in 1895 and sent to Siberia for
spreading propaganda in St. Petersburg, Lenin reached
Switzerland in 1900 and there published a revolution-
ary newspaper, Iskra(the Spark), to be smuggled into
Russia. He joined Plekhanov (also an intellectual living
in exile) in building the Social Democratic Party, but he
soon rejected Plekhanov’s idealistic socialism in favor of
a more revolutionary doctrine. Lenin called for a small
party of revolutionary leaders instead of a mass move-
ment. In a clever propaganda stroke, Lenin named his
small faction of the party the Bolsheviks (the majority),
branding the more numerous supporters of Plekhanov
the Mensheviks (the minority).
In addition to the underground activities of the So-
cial Democrats and the Social Revolutionaries, open
opposition existed to czarist autocracy among liberal-
democratic westernizers. This movement drew its
strength from the intelligentsia, the liberal professions,
educated urban circles, and zemstvoworkers who com-
bined to organize the Union of Liberation in 1903.
This group was a nascent liberal political party, critical
of autocracy and calling for a constitution, a parlia-
ment, and a bill of rights.
Russia experienced a major revolution in 1905.
Crushing defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05,
(see chapter 27), led to this revolt. In mid-1904, Plehve
was killed in a terrorist bombing. A few weeks later,
zemstvodelegates assembled for a congress in St. Peters-
burg and asked Nicholas II to call a Russian Parliament.
During the winter of 1904–05, as the Russian army suf-
fered reverses in the Orient, strikes and demonstrations
began. A turning point came in January when an Or-
thodox missionary to the working-class slums of St. Pe-
tersburg, George Gapon, led a protest march to deliver
a petition to Nicholas II. Gapon (known as Father
Gapon, although he had not completed his study for
the priesthood) had been organizing illegal trade
unions since 1903 and had recently led his followers
out on strike. Their petition to the czar called for Russ-
ian democracy and help for workers and peasants. Be-
fore marchers could reach the royal palace, however,
the army fired upon them. Seventy marchers were
killed and 240 wounded in this “Bloody Sunday” mas-
sacre. Gapon escaped to London but was assassinated
there. Strikes, demonstrations, and a naval mutiny
(aboard the battleship Potemkinin the Black Sea)
followed.
Nicholas II vacillated in response to the revolution
of 1905. Count Witte was not a great champion of lib-
eralism, but he was a pragmatist. He encouraged the
czar to concede, and he drafted the documents (the
August Manifesto and the October Manifesto) in which
Nicholas did so. The August Manifesto promised a lim-
ited Parliament (the Duma) to be elected by limited suf-