Tsarist Russia 723Even more important, Nicholas’s October Manifesto of 1905 created a
national representative assembly, the Duma, to be chosen by universal male
suffrage, and promised freedom of the press. Some state officials and most
nobles, however, viewed these particular reforms as unacceptable, associat
ing them with the parliamentary regimes of the West. But progressive
nobles and businessmen were encouraged by the sudden, unexpected turn
of events. Some staunch liberals, some of whom had participated in the
zemstvos, took the name of the Constitutional Democratic Party (known as
the Kadets). They demanded constitutional rule, insisting that even the
promised reforms left the essential structures of autocracy unchanged. In
the meantime, the Mensheviks had championed the establishment of Saint
Petersburg workers’ councils, known as soviets. These were neighborhood
councils made up of delegates from factories, shops, trade unions, and po
litical parties who helped organize strikes, which became legal in Decem
ber. The Mensheviks now were willing to collaborate with the liberals to
bring further reforms to workers and peasants.
But a violent uprising in Moscow in December 1905 brought on vigorous
counter-revolution. Witte ordered the arrest of many of the workers’ lead
ers. The soviets no longer were free to meet. Army units returning from
Manchuria crushed nationalist demonstrations in Poland and Georgia and
brutally restored order in the Russian and Ukrainian countryside. In the
Baltic provinces of Latvia and Estonia, punitive expeditions ordered by the
tsar killed over 1,000 people while crushing strikes and rural unrest. Fanat
ical Russian nationalists known as the Black Hundreds, perhaps instigated
by Orthodox priests, unleashed a wave of violence against Jews (and against
Russian, German, and Polish property owners, as well) which lasted more
than a year. The Black Hundreds were led by small traders and agricultural
laborers who feared that economic change would cost them what limited
security they had and by police who opposed political reform. In the Black
Sea town of Odessa, drunken mobs aided by the local police murdered 800
Jews, injured more than 5,000 others, and left twice that number homeless.
The tsar himself intervened to prevent Witte from prosecuting the police
there, praising the “mass of loyal people”; they had struck out against “trou
blemakers.” Jews could be conveniently blamed for agitating against auto
cratic rule.
Against this turbulent backdrop, the Duma had met for the first time in
April 1906. The U.S. ambassador described the gathering in the Winter
Palace of the members of the Duma, who were dressed “in every conceiv
able costume, the peasants in rough clothes and long boots, merchants and
tradespeople in frock coats, lawyers in dress suits, priests in long garb and
almost equally long hair, and even a Catholic bishop in violet robes.” The
majority of the Duma members were Kadets (Constitutional Democrats),
largely because the Marxist Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and the Socialist
Revolutionaries refused to participate in the election.