Tsarist Russia 721supplied the Russian forces. The Russian army was poorly commanded and
fought with outdated artillery and rifles. By the Treaty of Portsmouth (New
Hampshire), signed in September 1905 at a conference hastily arranged by
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, Japan took over Russia’s lease of the
Liaodong peninsula and Chinese concessions in Manchuria. Russia accepted
Japanese influence over Korea. A new world imperial power was born.
The Revolution of 1905Many of the tsar’s subjects had blamed government inaction for the murder
ous famine of 1891-1892, which had captured world attention. In 1902,
peasants attacked noble property in some districts, and a wave of industrial
strikes followed the next year. Liberals organized support for political reform
by sponsoring banquets similar to those employed by French republicans
just before the Revolution of 1848. Dissent mounted against forced Russifi
cation among subject nationalities, most notably the Poles and the Finns.
Marxist groups were particularly active in Poland—where the issue of Polish
nationalism versus internationalism was hotly debated—and in the Jewish
Pale—those provinces where Jews were allowed to settle and where they
faced endemic anti-Semitism and occasional bloody pogroms.
Shocking defeats in the distant Russo-Japanese War increased calls for lib
eral reform. A wide-ranging social and political alliance for change extended
across classes. For the first time, liberals and socialists (except for Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks), gentry, intellectuals, professionals, and workers, and both
Russians and non-Russians came together in common opposition to autoc
racy, embracing a loose ideology of reform. After the assassination of his min
ister of the interior in July 1904 by a Socialist Revolutionary, Nicholas II
appointed a more moderate successor in the hope of calming dissent. More
over, the tsar allowed a national congress of zemstvos and dumas to take place.
It called for the establishment of a national parliament.
In the meantime, the Russian labor movement remained small and faced
constant police harassment. Skilled factory workers supplied the majority
of labor militants. At the turn of the century, the police had authorized
government-controlled labor associations in the hope of undercutting rev
olutionaries by encouraging workers to concentrate on economic griev
ances and achieve some small victories through negotiation or conciliation,
as strikes remained illegal. But such halfway measures gave workers useful
organizational experience.
In January 1905, a strike by 100,000 factory workers brought Saint
Petersburg to a standstill. In Warsaw, a general strike brought violence and
reprisals by troops. On January 22, an Orthodox priest, Father Gapon, led a
march of workers to the tsar’s Winter Palace, carrying a petition asking for
4 justice” and political reform. Troops blocked their way. When the marchers
locked arms and refused an order to disperse, a commander barked out the
order to fire.