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• 1906:French ideologist Sorel, Reflections on Violence
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<>1904:1907; Russia experienced four years of extreme political disorder with the First Russian Revolution (the 1905 Revolution) at the center

• Main sources of disorder =
• tsarist state policies [LOOP from 1874], especially the five years between 1899 and 1904 [LOOP]
  
• still festering and unresolved consequences of serf emancipation [13-hop LOOP on "peasant"]
• ZEMSTVO political mobilization
  
• growth of large revolutionary parties
  
• broken-down war in Asia
  
• Main streams that flowed into the flood of events called the 1905 Revolution [1905 REVOLUTION LOOP]
• Main results of the 1905 Revolution =
  1. Widespread rural disorder [LOOP on "peasants"] lent urgency to broad public political mobilization [LOOP on "union"]
  2. First formal, elected legislative assembly in Russian history, THE STATE DUMA
  3. Last great gesture of the imperial reform tradition, the agrarian reforms of PETR STOLYPIN
• Activism as an expression of civil society and what might be called grassroots interest-politics did not achieve this broad scope or reach these levels again for eighty years [ID]
• English scholar Bernard Pares was on the scene and observed some of the major political events of this era [bibliography]
• The 1905 Revolution is frequently called 'The First Russian Revolution"
• "The Second Russian Revolution" followed 12 years later, in the winter of 1917 [ID]
• "The Soviet Revolution" (aka "The Bolshevik Revolution" or "The Communist Revolution" or "The October Revolution" or -- throughout the Soviet period of Russian history -- "Great October") followed eight months later [ID]
  \\
  *--Boris Nikolaevich Mironov, The social history of Imperial Russia, 1700-1917 (2000) presents the most comprehensive historical analysis of the rise of civil society and the rule of law in the centuries prior to revolutionary crises in the early 20th century
  *--Andrew Verner, The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution
  *--Thomas S. Pearson, Russian Officialdom in Crisis: Autocracy and Local Self-Government, 1861-1900
  *--Jacob Walkin, The Rise of Democracy in Pre-Revolutionary Russia: Political and Social Institutions Under the Last Three Tsars
          On the 1905 Revolution itself =
  *--Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905. Volume 1:Russia in Disarray. 2:Authority Restored
  *------------------------, "German Socialists and the Russian Revolution of 1905", MIR:260-77
  *--Sidney Harcave, The Russian Revolution of 1905
  *--A. E. Healy, The Russian Autocracy in Crisis:1905-1907 (Hamden CN:1976)
  

<>1904:1905; German sociologist of world fame and influence, Max Weber (1864-1924), published articles, later a book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

• This famous book revealed the depths of Weber's "disenchantment" with the direction of his beloved "bourgeois" European culture
• The rise of market economies in the 19th century promised liberal freedoms. When the Protestant ethic inspired the early spirit of capitalism and was inspired by it in turn, the market economy liberated human energies. Entrepreneurial enterprise rested on the "saintly" European shoulder like a light and welcome cloak
• But now economic enterprise in this great "second industrial revolution" had become routinized and bureaucratic. It threatened creative energies with incarceration in a "disenchanted" industrial giganticism and financial managerialism
• The light and welcome cloak had become "an iron cage" [TXT of the famous "iron cage" expression at the bottom of Ch. 5] [TXT of Ch. 5 as whole] [TXT of Ch. 2] [Excerpts = CCS:668-98 | CCS,2:67-97]
• More Weber bibliography = [W] [CWC:151 | CCS:359-61, 409]
• In these years Weber's attentions were pulled west and east, westward toward USA and then eastward toward Russia
• First, he visited USA in order to give a lecture at the St. Louis "Louisiana Purchase Exposition" [world's fair]). As a result of this visit, he wrote a long article "Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism" (1906) [TXT]. This noteworthy article has been neglected, perhaps because of the similarity of its title with the famous book above. Here Weber wrote, "In the past and up to the very present, it has been a characteristic precisely of the specifically American democracy that it did not constitute a formless sand heap of individuals, but rather a buzzing complex of strictly exclusive, yet voluntary associations"
• On this trip to USA, Weber visited and described the great mid-continent city Chicago. He was amazed by the vibrancy, energy and verve of the sprawling urban center, stretching westward from the banks of Lake Michigan, and he was appalled by it in equal measure. The biography of Weber written by his wife Marianne Weber quotes his descriptive letter back home in which he marveled at the vastness of the powerful city, more extensive than London. Weber's most vivid impression of Chicago was of a raw, crude power. Except for the better residential areas, Chicago resembled to him a wild, giant human being with skin removed and all organic processes revealed
• Compare Weber's 1904 reaction to Chicago with Hippolyte Taine's 1872 reaction to London [TXT]
• Weber's dark vision of corporate capitalism in "The West" was somewhat eased, but not cleared, by what he saw in USA here in the Progressive Era
• Back home in Germany, Weber turned his attentions eastward, toward Russia (for which he studied Russian in order to follow the portentous 1905 Russian Revolution)

<>1904:Geographical Journal 23:424-31. USA geo-politician H. J. Mackinder published "The Geographical Pivot of History" [TXT]
*--Russia, he wrote, was the geo-political heartland within which the future of the world was to be determined [ID]
\\
*--Parker, Historical Geography:29, 329, 371-4, 377

<>1904:Russian writer of growing world fame Leo Tolstoy on church and state [VSB,3:733]

<>1904:USA Senator from Indiana Albert Beveridge published The Russian Advance after traveling the Trans-Siberian Railroad [RFP2,1:153-67]

• Beveridge made a "pilgrimage" to Leo Tolstoy's Tula estate "Yasnaia poliana" [ID]. Kurt Grotz has kindly supplied photos relating to Beveridge's visit = [pix] [pix] [pix]
• This railroad trip across Siberia and Russia was a sobering personal revelation about "racial" harmony among Russians and Chinese in Manchuria, and thus a direct challenge to his famous imperialist speeches in the previous decade
• By the end of his life, having absorbed the lessons of the Progressive Era, Beveridge was writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln (much as Ida Tarbell turned her energies to the study of Lincoln's legacy)

<>1904:USA sociologist Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of Business Enterprise [excerpts in CCC3,2:900-27 | CCS:660-7 | CCS,2:40-7]. He emphasized historical particularities of time and place rather than universal laws of economics. He felt that an industrial and engineering elite offered the best resolution -- a "technocratic" resolution -- of social and economic dislocations caused by large-scale industrial modernization

<>1904:USA Chicago| Russian history professor and political activist Pavel N. Miliukov delivered lectures which were one year later published in book form as Russia and Its Crisis

• Miliukov strove to explain Russian politics to Americans [cf. RRC2,2#35]
• He found part of Russian particularity in its medieval history, so unlike that of "The West" [TXT]
• He also put great weight on the shape Peter the Great gave to Russian history [ID]
• Miliukov was close to the Zemstvo liberal movement, only now in the process of organizing itself formally as a political party back in Russia

<>1904ja02:ja05; Saint Petersburg | Union of Liberation [Soiuz Osvobozhdeniia] founding conference agreed on political program [DPH:296]

• Liberals in novel political parties were now functioning more or less openly within Russia
• And a vigorous union movement added strength to a surprising and broad public mobilization that appeared before the Russo-Japanese war broke out and continued at a heavier pace thereafter

<>1904ja26:1905au23; Manchuria | Russo-Japanese war opened when Japan attacked Russian outposts [MAP]

• 1904fe10:Russia and Japan mutually declared war [TXT] [RFP2,1:168-70]
• 1904au22:Japan/Korea treaty [ID]
• 1905:1909; British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print... Series A, Russia, 1859 -1914
• General A. N. Kuropatkin wrote The Russian Army and the Japanese War
• The war lasted only 20 months but brought an end to over 200 years of promising and largely peaceful relations between these two Pacific powers
• Thus the war helped shape the 20th century experience of both nations =
• For Japan. military victory inspired confidence in its ability to defeat a great European power, but diplomatic failure at the end of the war embittered Japan for decades
• For Russia, this remote and unpopular war contributed a sharp bump as the Empire tumbled toward the 1905 Revolution

<>1904fe:Plehve approved charter of Assembly of Saint Petersburg workers. Recreated state-controlled labor unions or "police socialism"

• Soon Orthodox priest Father Gapon was in charge
• The union movement expanded well beyond the factory floor and flourished well beyond state control
• Wage-labor, like all other Russian social formations in these years, was shaking off state efforts to protect and expand old tsarist social/service hierarchies
• In "actual fact" (de facto) -- even if not by "legal prescription" (de jure) -- increasingly large functioning groups of people in the Empire could no longer be packaged within traditional social/service hierarchies [ID]
• Russian society was transformed, in part as a result of natural demographic shifts and economic transformations, but also in part as a result of reforms introduced by the state itself over the previous four decades

<>1904sp:Zemstvo liberal Dmitrii Shipov met a third time with Plehve and Witte in the hope that the state might cut some slack for expanding Zemstvo movement

• That very spring, Plehve refused to approve several Zemstvo elections of popular liberal activists who were associated with vigorous Zemstvo mobilization on an Empire-wide scale to aid the failing official war effort
• A Union of Liberation conference deliberated on the possible need to organize a coup d'état against the jealous and exclusionary state [Ganelin:54]

<>1904my04:Socialist Revolutionary Party [SRs] Draft program [H05:268-73] The big agrarian socialist movement was working to define itself as an organized political party

<>1904jy15:SRs "Battle Organization" assassinated Russian Interior Minister, Count Viacheslav Plehve, ending his 15-year career

• Plehve was the last powerful "official reactionary" Interior Minister. His was the last gasp of a policy that dominated the reign of Alexander III and, so far, that of Nicholas II
• And yet Plehve was a reactionary who with reluctance and without consistency understood the need for certain measured and tightly controlled reforms [EG]
• Still, we can see that over the previous twenty years of quickened public mobilization, statist reactionaries were rolling back the Great Reforms, shifting the body-politic toward their imagined two-part pre-modern order =
   (1) autocratic absolutism, managed in the interests of certain ensconced insider elites who nested at the bureaucratic upper tip of
   (2) enforced pyramidal social/service hierarchies
• SRs and their "Battle Organization" issued a declaration to peasants explaining their position on political terror [TXT], giving specific emphasis to Plehve's role in the suppression of Peasant disorder in Kharkov and Poltava provinces [ID]
• Boris Viktorovich Savinkov (1879-1925), a leader among SRs,  was an active participant in the assassination of Plehve
• Six months later, he helped carry out the assassination of Grand Prince Sergei Aleksandrovich [ID]
• He  was an aristocrat with strong affinities to Imperial military culture. He was an admirer of Napoleon and served briefly in the French army during WW1
• Savinkov described his life of dark personal deracination and moral indirection in novels and in a memoir [bbl]

<>1904au26:1905ja; Russian Interior Minister Sviatopolk-Mirskii abandoned reactionary policies of his assassinated predecessor and tried moderation for five crucial months

• Assassination of Plehve and elevation of Sviatopolk-Mirskii marked the end of a quarter-century era of reactionary state policy [LOOP back two decades]
• And they marked the beginning of the 1905 Revolution [read on to 1904de12 to continue the 1905 LOOP]
• Political concessions made by Nicholas II only whetted the appetite of oppositional forces. An old revolutionary truth appeared vindicated = Opposition intensifies when authorities make concessions to it
• Once again (as in the first Russian epoch of political terror) the state appeared to bend before the threat of terror when it made political concessions to a fledgling civil society. It was both tragic and ironic that the immaturity of Russian civil society -- its inability to respond with strength to governmental concession -- followed straight from oppressive state policy over the previous decades, eased now only in a time of revolutionary crisis and terrorism

<>1904se08:+; Russia | BzmvS mtg regularly; planned no06:Zmv mtg [Ganelin:14]

<>1904se17:se25; Paris conference of revolutionary and oppositional political parties [H05:54-5 | Ganelin:13-15,54]

<>1904oc25:Dmitrii Shipov met with Sviatopolk-Mirskii to seek approval of national Zemstvo Congress [Ganelin:16-21]
*--A sign of crisis, the tsarist state wavered between repressive and concessionary actions

<>1904oc31:BzmvS mtg- S-M who wld not approve open, lgl mtg of Zmv [Ganelin:22]

<>1904no:Union of Liberation issued program [VSB,3:724]
*--Over the next months, the Union encouraged formation of various separate unions of vocational intelligentsia, engineers and technicians. These were not state-sponsored but voluntary "grass-roots" unions

<>1904no04:+; Sviatopolk-Mirskii report [GARF, cited in Ganelin:56] Nicholas I agreed with the report [Ganelin:32]

<>1904no06:no09; Saint Petersburg | First national congress of Zemstvo, led by Dmitrii Shipov, issued 11 theses [VSB,3:741-3 | H05:279-81 | MR&C2:385]
*--Banquet campaign began

<>1904de:Paris meeting of Russian liberal & revolutionary political parties agreed to cooperate (SDs did not participate)

• Delegates signed a declaration which stated, in part =

  None of the parties represented at the meeting, in uniting for concerted action, thinks for a moment of abandoning any point of its particular program, or of the tactical methods of the struggle which are adapted to the necessities, the forces, and the situation of the social elements, classes, or nationalities whose interests it represents. [Extreme expropriation of property and terrorism sharply divided this wide spectrum of oppositional parties.] But, at the same time, all declare that the principles expressed below are recognized by all of them:
  (1) The abolition of the autocracy; revocation of all the measures curtailing the constitutional rights of Finland.
  (2) The substitution for the autocracy of a democratic régime based on universal suffrage.
  (3) The right of every nationality to decide for itself; freedom of the national development, guaranteed by the law; suppression of all violence on the part of the Russian government, as practiced against the different nationalities.

• Points (1) & (2) addressed the central concern of Russian political opposition, expressed time again over the previous century = the autocratic-bureaucratic state and traditional social/service hierarchies
• Point (3) now moved toward political center stage after many decades thundering in the wings like a threatening storm
• Miliukov acknowledged that this declaration left out any reference to economic reform. The groups could not agree on that, but decided to put off the political struggle between liberals, who were moderate on the matter of  economic reform, and socialists, who pushed for economic egalitarianism. First, defeat the common enemy, the tsarist state, and, second, substitute democratic for old tsarist social relations, then, third, tackle the divisive economic issues. It seemed prudent at this time to concentrate on clearing autocracy and dysfunctional social/service hierarchies out of the way before these political parties renewed struggle among themselves on the economic questions [MR&C2:381-2]
• These negotiated maneuvers correspond very closely to one plausible visual representation of just what a civil society is [TXT]

<>1904de02:de06 & de08; Russian ministers debated Sviatopolk-Mirskii report
*--Witte wrote draft of de12:Ukaz (below) [MR&C2:387]

<>1904de05:Russia | Union of engineers & technicians, the first professional union [PR&R]

• In this same month an Academic union formed to link publicly active forces in universities. Chemist Vladimir Vernadskii at Moscow University was a major force in this movement. Over the next few weeks, under the urging of the Union of Liberation, SPB Elektrotechnicheskii Institut professor A. A. Brandt pulled together a programmatic statement of higher educational issues which was signed by 342 professors, and was issued in early 1905 as "The Declaration of the 342"
• State manipulated labor unions began to show some independence from official control
• Institutions of higher learning were at the forefront of aroused public activism, but professional organizations, universities and other scholarly institutions acted in close harmony with movements throughout the whole imperial social-political-economic organism

<>1904de11:(NS?)Saint Petersburg labor demonstration [MR&C2:366-7]

<>1904de12:Russian Emperor Nicholas II decree [Ukaz] to Russian Imperial Senate [H05:282-5 | MR&C2:387-8 | Ganelin:39-41]

• The tsarist state acknowledged, "When ... the need for a given change seems advisable, WE consider it necessary to proceed with the execution of that change, even though it leads to substantive innovations in the law".
• What seemed at first to be a specific concession to Zemstvo political demands was also a "crack in the edifice" of unlimited autocratic authority and decades of reactionary state policy. As Tocqueville put it, "The most dangerous moment in the life of any bad government is when it starts to improve itself"
• Thus this de12:Ukaz might be taken as the first moment of formal state involvement in the Revolution of 1905
• Zemstvo liberals rose to the forefront of broader national political mobilization. Thus the 1905 LOOP parallels the Zemstvo LOOP
• 1905 LOOP

<>1904de13:de31; Azerbaijan, Baku oil fields | General strike among petroleum workers

• 1905:Baku oil fields patrolled by Cossack troops [pix]
• More on petroleum

<>1904de20:Manchuria | Russian forces in Port Arthur capitulated to the Japanese

<>1904de30:French socialist movement tried to create Union of French Socialists Parties [DPH:325-6]

<>1905:1916; Germany | Albert Einstein's relativity theory published
*--The idea of "relativity" resonated far beyond the science of physics

<>1905:English political theorist A. V. Dicey published his Harvard University lectures on liberalism and collectivism, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, which were nothing less than a history of democracy in England in the 19th century [CCS,1:791-802]

<>1905:USA | Western Federation of Miners [WFM], a radical labor union that broke with AFL seven years earlier, met secretly with Daniel De Leon [W], the head of the Socialist Labor Party [W], and Eugene Debs, ex-leader of the American Railway Union and now head of the Socialist Party (founded in 1900)

• The Industrial Workers of the World [IWW or "Wobblies"] grew out of this meeting. William "Big Bill" Haywood was a leader who opposed ordinary labor unions because they sought compromise and non-revolutionary resolution of the "class struggle". He opposed compromise with political institutions unless they promoted revolution. Haywood reflected a US version of the familiar split within socialism [ID]. The IWW thrived mainly in the USA West and had fewer than 100,000 members. WW1 weakened the IWW, especially since its opposition to USA involvement after 1917 seemed to some unpatriotic
• University of Oregon "Labor Project"
• Eugene Debs ran for the Presidency three times on the Socialist Party ticket [see his 1908my23:campaign speech delivered in his hometown, Girard KS = "The Issue" [TXT] delivered during his third campaign]. His two-decade political career has been all but forgotten in American political culture
• Political parties, protest movements and labor unions were coalescing. In this process, civil society sometimes expanded. At other times it narrowed or became more tightly focused.
• Social-economic concepts of "class warfare" reflected the stubborn refusal of social elites to cooperate in the establishment of an appropriate place for wage-labor in the post-industrial body-politic
• The more radical wing of the labor movement thus largely ignored the political-institutional concepts embodied in the notion of civil society [ID]
• Social-economic formations raised barriers against one another. Those oriented toward the interests of industrial workers found it hard to include elite social formations. Elite social formations, for their part, intensified their efforts to limit the success of organized wage-labor
• The center of attention shifted from how social-economic groups might adjudicate differences via effective political-institutional mediation to how one or the other social-economic faction might seize the state and wield it in its own particular interests
• Elite formations were more often successful at turning governmental power against working folks. Wage-labor efforts in this direction were declared to be criminal conspiracy
• These most bitter competitive political/social factions matured in the Progressive Era

<>1905ja09:Saint Petersburg | "Bloody Sunday" opened when a large but peaceful assembly of factory workers and their families marched toward the Winter Palace, residence of Emperor Nicholas II and his family

• The assembly carried a petition composed by union leaders Father Georgii Gapon & Ivan Vasimov [TXT] [H05:285-9 | DIR2:380-3 | CCC2,2:593-6 | DPH:297-300 | VSB,3:743-4]
• Troops opened fire, thus showing that indiscriminate violence was not a monopoly of revolutionary terrorists. It served the purposes of official terrorism as well
• Father Gapon described Bloody Sunday [Eye:415-18]
• Working woman Vera Karelina described events [BRW:346-53]
• The diverse union movement was consolidating its forces. Labor unions increased pressure on officials and added to that already exerted by growing peasant and Zemstvo political mobilization. Here at the beginning of this revolutionary year 1905, Russian factory workers made their dramatic entry
• The wage-labor LOOP continues. If you would like for now to skip over the detailed account of wage-labor in the Russian 1905 Revolution, click here

<>1905ja11:Russian ministers ignored Sergei Witte request to discuss the tragic implications of Bloody Sunday [see above]

• Moscow Governor General Dmitrii Trepov assumed post of Petersburg Governor General and commandant of the Petersburg garrison with significant martial-law authority
• He was the son of an infamous previous SPB Governor General
• 1905 LOOP

<>1905ja17; Moscow Agricultural Society member Aleksei Ermolov reported to Nicholas II about the Gapon incident [H05:124-5 | *1925:KrA#8:49-69 | Page:68-9]

<>1905ja18:Russian Council of Ministers met [Ganelin:69]

<>1905ja22:oc22; A.G. Bulygin replaced Sviatopolk-Mirskii as Interior Minister. Bulygin lasted nine months, through the October crisis

<>1905ja22:Moscow Noble Assembly passed "loyal" conservative resolution and a liberal resolution [H05:105] Gentry politics vacillated

<>1905ja29:Saint Petersburg | Shidlovskii Commission was created to investigate labor situation in the capital city. The commission was named after its leading figure, Senator Shidlovskii; not to be confused with Sergei Shidlovskii, a founder of the Octobrist political party. Commission members were not only bureaucrats but also representatives of workers themselves. Politically aroused workers overwhelmed bureaucrats on the Commission, and it soon had to be dissolved
*--Official fear of spontaneous popular initiative, especially that among wage-laborers, was so great that the commission was quickly dissolved [H05:122-3]

<>1905fe03 and 1905fe11:Council of Ministers met [Ganelin:85f] Topic = Should elected representatives of the public be brought into government?

<>1905fe04:Moscow | SRs "Battle Organization" assassinated the Emperor’s uncle, Grand Prince Sergei Aleksandrovich, with a bomb

• Boris Savinkov participated in this shocking terrorist attack, but double agent Azev (with ties both to the SRs and the tsarist Interior Ministry police) played the central role [H05:127]
• Political terror was a two-edged sword, it cut in all directions, deranging both those who wielded it and those against whom it was wielded
• Similarly, terror served the interests of both radicals who hoped to "disorganize" the government and state reactionaries who were quick to use the fear of terror as an excuse for broad reactionary measures and the cessation of reform
• Nonetheless, for about a year terrorism was diluted in the great flood of revolutionary actions coming in from all sides

<>1905fe18:Tsar Nicholas II issued ukaz authorizing ordinary subjects to petition him for relief of grievances
*--Interior Minister A.G. Bulygin's rescript followed, stating that the tsar would soon "assemble the most trustworthy  men, having the confidence of the people and elected by them, to undertake the preliminary examination and consideration of legislative measures" [cf. H05:129-30, and MR&C2:394-5]

<>1905fe24:Manchuria, Mukden | Japanese forces defeated Russian forces

• For the tsarist state, international crisis mixed with domestic crisis. The 1905 Revolution LOOP extends through the next 30 or so SAC entries
• 1905mr31:German Kaiser Wilhelm visited Tangiers, seeming to threaten French imperialist claims, and to threaten possible imperialist war. French politicians, perhaps influenced by Russian experience in Manchuria, reacted to this theatrical show of naval power. They divided on whether to become more militant against Germany or to build stronger economic ties with Germany so as to forestall war [BNE:199-200]
• In that same season, the esteemed French socialist leader Jean Jaurès was refused permission to deliver an anti-war speech in Berlin which argued that the threat of war did not derive from conflict between the great majority of French and German wage-laborers. Instead, it derived inevitably from capitalist/European imperialist conflict, unrestrained on the global scene [BNE:200-1]

<>1905fe28:Office clerks & bookkeepers union came to life

<>1905mr:1905my; Paris | Union of Liberation program [H05:273-9]

• 1905au:French translation issued
• The Union of Liberation's three previous years of bold liberal opposition (largely abroad) were at their end
• The main leaders transferred all energy into the new Union of Unions which was centered in Russia itself and concentrated the power of several unions of professional workers
• Liberalism in Russia, as elsewhere in Europe in earlier times, made itself ready for revolution

<>1905mr:Russian Monarchical Party [Monarkhicheskaia Partiia] founded by state servitors [chinovniks], high-ranking aristocrats, and other "official reactionaries"
*--Compare this "official aristocratic" group and its political views with the rural gentry aristocrats

<>1905mr12:Russian teachers formed grammar-school union; soon physicians & lawyers formed unions

<>1905mr14:Russian Emperor issued Ukaz on freedom of religion

<>1905ap03:Russian pharmacists' union

<>1905ap05:Russian writers' union

• 1905:1907; Maksim Gorky organized the publishing house "Znanie" [knowledge] dedicated to the promotion of works by progressive writers
• He also composed radical pamphlets in connection with the revolutionary events of this year, for which he was imprisoned, only to be released after wide public protest
• 1906wi:He left Russia, traveled to USA, visited France, and settled in Italy for seven productive years
• 1906:USA, NYC | Maxim Gorky, "City of the Yellow Devil" [Hasty:128-43], "Boredom" [TXT]
• On USA/Russian cultural relations in these years, see Saul,2:387-96, 459-65, 557-67

<>1905ap07:Tver Governor Urusov reported no "general dissatisfaction" or rebelliousness among peasants. Villagers were not much interested in "the anti-government struggle on questions of constitutions and political rights". They were interested only in land, taxes and the war. On that last subject, peasants were patriotic, but "in truth the present war is not popular among the peasants since it is carried on far from Russia, and is fought for the benefit of profiteers ... and not really for Russian interests". Peasants read newspapers closely and "are closely acquainted with all questions found in papers of various political views." Of course, they "interpret all news from the point of view that suits them". Urusov noted that, whatever their political tendency, newspapers tended to rile up peasants. Peasants nearly everywhere entertained the assumption that redemption payments and other forms of taxation would soon come to an end. Contradicting himself, Urusov reported that peasants closely followed national events in newspapers, and when they read of the reform promises in the tsarist ukaz, followed by even clearer promises in the Bulygin rescript, they moved ahead with their own initiatives, keyed to their perceptions of their own interests. Increasingly villagers decided to cease unbearable payments now. Then there is the matter of robbing wood from the privately owned forests, all justified on the basis of felt inadequacy of land distributed to peasants at the time of emancipation and more recent injustices worked on rural labor. Urusov described how "four or five years ago the government office of agriculture and State lands took away from peasant use, and enclosed, many publicly rented fields, long under lease of peasants who had raised the fields to a fine condition after  many years of labor. Then these areas were turned over to the protection of the forest guards. This ruined the peasants and placed them in unbearable straits since they needed the land badly. Besides that, the peasants ..., under the influence of recent events [i.e., spread of violent seizure of land by peasants], are openly saying that since they have insufficient land of their own they intend to use that of the landlords...." Villagers who work in urban factory environment return home and stir up trouble. Peasants do not much sympathize with factory workers. Agitators have little influence.  [Page:69-71]

• S. D. Urusov, Memoirs of a Russian Governor
• Petr Stolypin wrote report on the year 1904 in Saratov Province [VSB,3:801-2]
• Statistics on landed property in Russia in this year [VSB,3:764-6]

<>1905ap17:Russian Emperor issued Ukaz  re. religious tolerance for Old-Ritualists [Raskolniki] [VSB,3:766]
*--The tsarist state moved to heal an old and great wound to the Russian "body-politic"

<>1905ap19:Geneva & Paris | Russian SDs debated at Congress #3

• SDs split and issued Bolshevik Party and Menshevik Party programs [McC1:28-30 | Harding:313-4]
• 1904:German (Polish-born) social-democrat Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919 [ID]) joined the debate about how Marxism ought to be applied to "backward" Russia. She was a thinker able always to anchor theory in solid practical experience and political-economic actualities. Her essay was published in the German Social-Democratic Party newspaper Neue Zeit [New Times] under the title "Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy" [TXT] This essay was later published under a more polemical title, "Leninism or Marxism?" [And even later translated and published in reverse chronological order with her 1918 essay "Russian Revolution", edited by Bertram Wolfe, Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?]
• Rosa Luxemburg became a central figure in the European social-democratic movement | Her writings on the internet = W-TXT
• Bolshevik resolutions on the peasant movement, on SRs, and on liberals [VSB,3:714-15]
• Lenin expressed his views on the peasantry in these months [VSB,3:715]
• In this year Lenin addressed the question of religion [BMC1:624-5] Some years later on the related topic of ethics and morality [BMC1:626]
• Henceforward Russian Marxists, who had formed one Social Democratic Party for nine years, operated as two -- Bolsheviks and Mensheviks
• In the meantime, back home in Russia, events slipped more deeply into actual revolution

<>1905ap22:26; Moscow Zemstvo Congress #2 deliberated on need for new election law (the so-called "Four-Tail" election policy: Voting should be equal, direct, universal, and secret) [H05:142-3]

<>1905ap27:Russian women's rights union were a reflection of mounting revolutionary crisis in Russia, but also of general European trends

• Organizations grew in number, size and ambition (for example, the suffrage [election rights] movement intensified)
• Voting rights for women meant one thing in lands were men could vote; it meant yet more in lands where no one had the right to vote
• Feminism was becoming a public movement for women's rights
• 1906:English suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst photographed as she was arrested [P20:1]
• Later memoirs of Russian upper-class women's everyday life in this revolutionary epoch, Memories of Revolution
• 1907:Tatiana Shchepkina-Kupemik, short story “First Ball” described woman revolutionist [BRW:324-35]
• Henri Troyat, a Russian émigré author in France, wrote a fictionalized memoir/social history of Russian everyday life in the early 20th century, Daily Life in Russia under the LastTsar

<>1905my:Russia | Kokovtsov kmm re.mfg [Roosa"Russ.Ind"(1975)]

<>1905my08:my09; Moscow | Union of Unions [Soiuz soiuzov] founding meeting as a national organization of all unions of working and professional people, including 14 unions of academics, lawyers, agricultural accountants, medical doctors, veterinarians, railroad personnel, journalists and writers, zemstvo constitutionalists, women's and Jewish rights activists, and other engineers and technicians

• Program = convene Constituent Assembly with representatives elected according to universal, direct, equal and secret ballot to determine the political/institutional future of Russia
• Pavel Miliukov presided over a 32-person Central Bureau which included AA Brandt, AI Ventskovskii, YaN Gordeenko, IN Denisevich, SM Kliachko, LI Lutugin, DF Sverchkov, GD Sidamonov-Eristov, ND Sokolov, and FR Ul'man
• 1905my22:Moscow | Union of Unions, congress #2. Representatives of the radical intelligentsia joined workers in this union
• The Union of Unions blossomed quickly over the previous three months. It played the role of central clearing house for many union organizations over the next half year. It continued in that role into the intense weeks of revolutionary mobilization after the huge Peasant Union joined forces with it. It lost some of its momentum in 1906 as activists fanned out into now-legal political parties campaigning for seats in the new State Duma
• 1926:MVA | Professional'noe dvizhenie: Materialy i dokumenty [ORBIS UW]
• Zemstvo constitutionalists withdrew after this initial meeting, but by the summer others joined

<>1905my14:my16; Tsushima Straits between Korea and Japan | Japanese annihilated 32 Russian naval vessels that had come all the way from European waters

<>1905my24:my26; Zemstvo congress #3
\\
*--H05:159-60

<>1905je14:je25; Russian Black Sea fleet, Odessa port | Russian sailors revolted on naval Battleship Potemkin (pronounced PaTIOMkin) [Page:76-7]

• 1905je20:SDs issued a leaflet titled "To the Whole Civilized World". The leaflet acknowledged the relationship of foreign war to domestic war (i.e., revolution) when it announced that "a grandiose picture of a great war of liberation has presented itself before your very eyes"
• The battleship rested in the Odessa port long enough to hold a funeral on shore for a sailor killed in the uprising on board. Authorities were alarmed at the great mass of city residents who took to the streets in sympathy. Troops were dispatched to regain control over the port. The Potemkin disembarked and sailed hither and yon seeking a safe port and also trying to enlist other ships of the line to join them in revolt
• 1905je25:Romanian authorities allowed the ship a safe harbor in the Black Sea port of Constance

<>1905je09:Tver guberniia village elder Nil Smirnov issued declaration based on decisions taken at the Ryleev village assembly = The person of the peasant is inviolable. The people must be given freedom of conscience, speech, press, assembly, unions and strikes. Peasant courts must function like all other courts. Peasants, and "yes, all persons", who suffer for their religious beliefs must at once be pardoned and released. Free grade schools must be introduced that teach various trades. Higher education must be as open to peasants as to other classes. "All government organs without exception must be under control of popular representatives, elected by the people themselves under their own system without any educational qualifications. Those elected should also require no property and educational standards but need only to be literate and of legal age." The Land Captain and the separate peasant status must be abolished. District bureaucracy must be restricted in its guardianship over peasants. Local village institutions should replace district administration. Land should be available to those who work it. Every peasant should receive an adequate amount of land from the village, and the government must provide material aid for its cultivation. Collective responsibility for taxes and all forms of indirect taxes should be abolished. Government should convoke an assembly of the people to decide if the Russo-Japanese war should continue. Peasants suffer such hardships that death might be preferable to life. [Page:73]

<>1905jy:Russia, Peterhof | Secret state conference [H05:161(foolish description) & 165]

<>1905jy06:jy09; Moscow | Zemstvo congress#4 petitioned Nicholas II [H05:160]

<>1905au06:Saint Petersburg | Interior Minister S.G. Bulygin submitted his constitutional project which called for the creation of a State Duma with limited advisory powers [Raeff2:142-52 | VSB,3:702-3 | DPH:300]
*--Full Russian text in GDR:30-54]

<>1905au13:Moscow | All-Russian Peasant Union [Vserossiiskii Krest'ianskii Soiuz] founding Congress
*--Kursk guberniia peasants followed actions of Congress through the journal Russkoe slovo [Russian word] [VEO, Agrarnoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 1905-1906 gg., 1:56]
*--For past three years, rural dissatisfaction mounted. Now peasants mobilized in a way not unlike all other social groups caught up in the 1905 revolutionary era [PR&R:446-8]
\\
*--Robinson, ch6 (hungry villages), ch7 (peasant world), ch8 (decline of nobility & rise of "Third Estate"), ch9 (origins of 1905)
*--Maureen Perrie, Agrarian Policy:107-111
*--Stephen Dunn, Peasants of Central Russia
*--Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola, eds. Russian Peasant Women
*--Sir John Maynard, The Russian Peasant and Other Studies
*--Mary Matossian, "The Peasant Way of Life". In The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia
*--Christine D. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Family and Community in the Post-Emancipation Period

<>1905au17:Russia | Provisional regulation of university promised university autonomy

<>1905au23:se05; USA NH | Russia-Japan treaty negotiations to end Russo-Japanese War lasted 2 weeks and ended with the signing of the  Portsmouth Treaty [TXT] [W TXT] [McC1:11-12 | RFP2,1:170-2]
*--USA President Theodore Roosevelt lent his good offices in the negotiations between Russia and Japan
*--Ten years earlier, few could have foreseen the rise of USA as a new overseas imperialist state, USA was now a noteworthy factor in global politics, even if old Europe might not yet have been ready to take USA seriously, or Japan, or Russia, for that matter. Old Europe was on the eve of destruction. Of the three nations represented on the postcard just below, only two, USA and Japan, were to survive WW1 intact

A postcard commemorating New Hampshire negotiations
Left to right = Russian Finance Minister Count Sergei Witte, Baron Rosen,
US President Theodore Roosevelt,
 Japanese Ambassador to the US Kogoro Takahira, and Japanese Foreign Minister Jutaro Komura


[SOURCE]

*--In this year, an early case in international law (i.e., law beyond the limits of nation-state sovereignty), was heard when an English/Russian Commission of Inquiry convened [RWP1,2:167-70]+
*--For Russia, crises in international relations and domestic politics seemed to be abating, so the tsarist state entered the critical October days still hoping to suppress mass unrest with a combination of force and uncertain promises of reform
\\
*--Saul,2:153-8, 459-507
*--Alan Kimball, "The United States and the Soviet Union: Toward a Mutual Pacific Frontier" (1984) [long-term background to 20th-21st cc.  Russian/Japanese international relations]
*--John A. White, The Diplomacy of the Russo-Japanese War

<>1905se12:se15; Moscow | Zemstvo congress #5,194 members
*1905 LOOP

<>1905se19:Moscow railroad strike [H05:175-6]

<>1905fa:Buryat gatherings represented indigenous opposition to tsarist imperialist authority in their lands [GRH:162]

<>1905oc:Baltische konstitutionelle Partei formed, made up of conservative German gentry aristocrats
*--Lithuanian & Latvian nationalist movement under way
*1905oc:Kursk | People's Party (implying "National Party") [Narodnaia Partiia] founded, aristocratic and conservative. Gentry politics or state servitor politics?

<>1905oc07:Russian railroad strike began after a union member was arrested [VSB,3:744]

<>1905oc08:Petersburg Governor General Trepov issued decree limiting rights of public assembly. This futile act flew in the face of mounting, near-universal public mobilization which was filling public places in all the larger cities of the Empire

<>1905oc09:Sergei Witte, fresh back from treaty negotiations that settled the Russo-Japanese War, submitted a bold memo to Nicholas II [VSB,3:703-4]

<>1905oc11:Russian wage-laborers submitted petition on working conditions to Witte & he replied [Nevison:18-19]

<>1905oc12:oc18; Moscow | Partiia narodnoi svobody [Party of Popular Freedom], a bold new liberal party, the first openly organized political party in Russian history, held its founding congress. They were not best known by their formal name. Instead, the name "Constitutional Democrats" came into wider usage. In fact, they became best known by the Russian initials for Constitutional Democrat, "KD". And these two Russian letters sounded like the unflattering French word for an adolescent in military training, "KA-DEH" [cadet]. Thus a back-formed nickname also came into wide usage = Kadety (Cadets) KDs]
*--Program [McC1:33-5 | H05:292-300 | DIR2:405-10 | DIR3:438f | VSB,3:724]
*1905oc14:Pavel Miliukov addressed the congress of this most liberal of the Russian political parties [VSB,3:726]
*--KDs prepared for the anticipated State Duma
\\
*--Terence Emmons, The Formation of Political Parties and the First National Elections in Russia

<>1905oc13:Witte submitted yet another bold memo to Nicholas II. Witte's personal views did not get in the way of his practical political good sense [VSB,3:704-5]

<>1905oc13:Saint Petersburg Soviet [of Workers' Deputies] met for the first time as the wage-labor strike movement spread along Russian rail lines
*--The Soviet representing a new and more explicitly political-institutional form of wage-labor mobilization
\\
*--Oscar Anweiler, Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils,1905-1921

<>1905oc14:Moscow general strike began after more than a week of mounting work stoppage, led by the railroad unions. Georgii Khrustalev-Nosar, described the strike movement =

Within ten days strikes had seized the entire network of Russian railways, extending over 40,000 kilometers and employing 750,000 clerks and workers. Out of Moscow, as the center, the strike flame sent its rays spreading to the periphery. The railway strike predetermined the general strike.

The strike movement traveled on steel rails and shut down factories, plants, -- all of life in the industrial centers. [...] The strike revolution gave birth to the Soviet [Page:80-1]

*--Railroads were vital to all participants in modern life

<>1905oc14:Russian Emperor issued Ukaz in order to gain some control over freedom of assembly, which was now an altogether "voluntary" association, totally out of the control of official "assignment"
<>1905oc15:Council of Ministers closed all Russian universities

<>1905oc16:All-Russian general strike began; a remarkable, massive, open, national rebellion [H05:180-9]
*-- Wage-labor political behavior was so far in essence not unlike the behavior of other "working people", rural, urban, clerical, professional (including  university professors and students) -- they all went out on strike

<>1905oc17:Russian Emperor Nicholas II issued October Manifesto [TXT] [Russian TXT] [Other reprints = VSB,3:705 |Mehlinger:331-2 | DIR2:384-5 | GRH:627-8 | McC1:13-4 | H05:195-6 | CCC2,2:596 | DPH:301-2]

• This simple manifesto seemed to promise much. The projected State Duma seemed to be an elected parliamentary organization with apparent authority over the tsarist "cabinet" (ministers, "the government") and over all new legislation
• This was the first progressive reform of governmental/administrative institutions since the creation of the Zemstvos forty years earlier ID, and its immediate institutional implications exceeded anything since the time of Alexander I [ID] or perhaps since the time of Peter I [ID]
• Two days after signing the Manifesto, Nicholas II wrote in his diary =

Through all these horrible days, I constantly met Witte. We very often met in the early morning to part only in the evening when night fell. There were only two ways open; to find an energetic soldier and crush the rebellion by sheer force. That would mean rivers of blood, and in the end we would be where had started. [Petersburg Governor General Trepov had earlier issued orders to troops in the Petersburg garrison, "do not spare the bullets", but he now bowed to practical considerations = force would no longer work.] The other way out would be to give to the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have laws confirmed by a State Duma - that of course would be a constitution. Witte defends this very energetically. [Boldface added]

Almost everybody I had an opportunity of consulting is of the same opinion. Witte put it quite clearly to me that he would accept the Presidency of the Council of Ministers only on the condition that his program was agreed to, and his actions not interfered with. We discussed it for two days and in the end, invoking God's help, I signed. This terrible decision which nevertheless I took quite consciously. I had no one to rely on except honest Trepov. There was no other way out but to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for.

• Suppression or concession, that was the debate. After several decades of reactionary state policy, or at least irresolution with respect to the reform legacy of Alexander II, tsarist officials were now forced at one moment to both quell vast disorder AND pick up the pace of reform.
• The Manifesto made extensive concessions to society, but Nicholas II and the insider elites around him may not have meant to fulfill all the promises of the October Manifesto. The promise of a State Duma calmed a nation in the grip of near universal and spontaneous rebellion. Only the most radical elements among mobilized wage-laborers and discontented villagers were ready to push toward further revolutionary accomplishment. The irony was that these contrary trends -- general calm and worker radicalism -- allowed certain voices within the tsarist state once again to resist reform and to entertain the dream of statist reaction through suppression
• Much hung on the big and immediate question about how the grand promises of the October Manifesto might be actualized in newly drafted Fundamental Laws
  

<>1905oc17:Saint Petersburg Soviet newspaper Izvestiia [News] began publication [VSB,3:745]

<>1905oc17:Sergei Witte reported to Emperor Nicholas II in connection with his assignment to coordinate the actions of the several ministries in preparation for the formation of a State Council

• Witte told his Emperor that unrest has seized various sosloviia and has its roots much deeper than partial imperfections of government or in society, or as result of political extremists. Roots are found "in the disturbed equilibrium between the aspirations of conscious elements [in society] and the external forms of their life"
• In other words, Russian society had outgrown the old order. It would have a new order based on "civic liberty". Political institutions must be "raised to the level" of the "moderate majority of the people". Witte urged immediate granting of civil liberties and the equalization of "all Russian citizens before the law, without distinction of religion and nationality"
• He urged the creation of an elected legislature, and he insisted that the Imperial State Council should also be elected
• He advised Nicholas II to understand that a great empire like Russia was filled with a wide variety of factionalized interests. The monarch should rise above them. Do not interfere in any way in the elections, he advised. Stand by the 1904de12 decree [ID]
• When the Duma meets, do not oppose it unless it presents a clear threat to the grandeur of Russia. Public activism should be suppressed only when it threatened society itself or the state [Mehlinger:333-5 | Doctorow, "Government" | H05:289-92 | Russian text GDR:91-4]
• This began the final phase of Witte's career as statesman, serving as Russia's first "Prime Minister", but perhaps, without his knowing it, also serving as a stop-gap concession while certain tsarist insiders regrouped and revolutionary fervor abated
• Witte urged the necessity for authentic concessions to society. It would be a half year later, after the revolutionary storm was weathered, that Witte and the rest of Russia learned in detail what tsarist authority intended to do [ID]
• Meanwhile, Witte and Russia as a whole had a long and difficult winter ahead =

<>1905oc18:Moscow workers passed labor strike resolution [VSB,3:744]

<>1905oc19:oc20; Saint Petersburg | Nicholas II issued a second Manifesto in connection with the revolutionary crisis

• Now the irresolute Emperor restructured the State Council into an appointed legislative chamber, a second chamber now attached to the earlier unicameral and fully elected Duma promised in the first manifesto
• He also structured the Council of Ministers into a body independent of the Duma and under direct tsarist authority. There would be no authentic "cabinet", no formal interdependency between Duma and ministers [McC1:17-18]
• Sergei Witte moved ahead as if the promises of the October Manifesto were still fully realizable. He called a government conference on upcoming elections to the new State Duma. "State Duma" was still just a revolutionary promise [ID] and not yet fully defined. But Witte could not delay the novel and delicate task of courting for revolutionary government service certain of the "public men" associated with Zemstvo activism and other forms of elite urban activism
• 1905 LOOP

<>1905oc19:1906wi; Emperor Nicholas II letters to his mother [PFM:89-92]

<>1905no:1907; Union of Russian Peoples [Soiuz russkikh liudei], a reactionary political party, formed and composed its program [VSB,3:728 | DIR2:410-16]
*--Later founded Black Hundreds [Chernye sotny] (anti-Semitic, reactionary political party)
*--What is the relationship of "reactionary social movements" like this and "official reactionary" policy?

<>1905no:Russian SRs program [McC1:32-3 | DIR2:399-405 | DIR3:431-8]

<>1905no03:Russian Imperial Decree cut peasant redemption payments in half for next year & abolished them altogether as of 1907 [DIR2:385-6 | DIR3:415-17 | DPH:302]
*--A forty-year-old deficiency in the greatest of the great reforms thus was corrected
*--Reforms continued under high-pressure revolutionary circumstances

<>1905no06:no10; Moscow | All-Russian Peasant Union Congress #2 [H05:219]
*--Max Weber numbered members at 500, but more nearly 200 [MWG:243-4]
*1907:1915; Journalist report on peasants in Saint Petersburg [Nevison:49f]

<>1905no06:no13; Moscow | Zemstvo congress #6 (last)
*--Pavel Miliukov was admitted to organizational committee and claimed readiness to support Witte government [PR&R:533]
*--Congress sent deputation to see Witte = Sergei Muromtsev, Fedor Kokoshkin, and Ivan Petrunkevich. These deputies insisted that ministers in the new government be responsible to (under the authority of) the Duma rather than to the tsar [PR&R:534 | Manning,Crisis:187 says Witte refused to see deputation]
*--Ivan Petrunkevich, Memoirs of a Social Activist [ORBIS]

<>1905no10:no14; Moscow-Saint Petersburg | Octobrist Party [Soiuz 17 Oktiabria; Union of October 17] founded

• Aleksandr Guchkov (1862-1936), Geiden & Dmitrii Shipov were at conference#1
• This moderate political party issued a program [McC1:35-6 | VSB,3:726-8]
• The Octobrist Party attracted urban industrialists and financiers, most of whom were also big landowners. Sergei Shidlovskii was a member
• 1905no11:Saint Petersburg | All-Russian Trade and Industrial Union [Vserossiiskii Torgovo-Promyshlennyi Soiuz] founded; soon joined Progressive Economic Party [Progressivnaia ekonomicheskaia partiia]
• Non-bureaucratic or "civilian" urban political elites were coming to life

<>1905no15:(oc15??) Saint Petersburg dmx fnd PPP [MWG:64 or259]

<>1905no16:Moscow | Committee of the All-Russian Peasant Union arrested six days after their second congress

<>1905no17:Vladimir Province, Kovrov District Land Captain reported to the Provincial Governor about rural disorders =

In the city of Kovrov a nest of troublemakers has been stirring, and they include people of various classes [sosloviia] and professions. They cover themselves by functioning as local zemstvo officials, working on agricultural committees and economic councils and serving on the committee for public temperance. This group has grown significantly and persistently carries on its evil work. They distribute pamphlets by Henry George, revolutionary leaflets and proclamations. They circulate appeals [off-prints?] of an edition of Donskaia rech' [voice of the Don, a newspaper] which contains the French 18th century Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and distribute large quantities of harmfully oriented newspapers to the peasants free of charge. They make tours of the villages and conduct secret discussions with [...] ruinous effects upon the population. Many workers among the peasants (I assume that they are paid by the agitators) promise all kinds of future gains and recruit their fellow villagers, who, as is known, are extremely ready to trust the tale-bearers and know-it-alls of their own villages. In daily mass meetings in the workshops even visiting orators lecture on all manner of subjects. It is rumored that some of the workmen are armed. In the evenings, youth walk about boldly singing revolutionary songs. The townsfolk, fearing unpleasantness, try to avoid leaving their homes at such times. In these meetings both the workers and the peasants of my region take part. Seeing that they get away with their illegal activity these people act insolently and teach this to the peasants. || All pronouncements of the Moscow Peasant Union appear in the villages in the form of proclamations which call for changing the old ways ... yes, even of banishing the chiefs, the clerks and land captains from the district peasant assembly [volostnoi skhod] [Page:72]

<>1905no17:no20; Moscow Union of Landowners [Soiuz zemlevladel'tsev] meeting called for statist reactionary measures and suppression of peasant disorder [MWG 1/10:250]  Gentry politics

<>1905no19:no20; Saint Petersburg | Sergei Witte conference with conservative Zemstvo congress members, most of them in the recently formed Octobrist Party [PR&R:534] =

• Who? Aleksandr Guchkov & Mikhail Stakhovich; also Evgenii Trubetskoi, & Dmitrii Shipov [who had become embroiled in high politics over the previous three years and would again in a most unlikely role as leader of anti-Bolshevik forces in the time of the revolutionary civil war]
• Over the previous month, Witte had been courting other "public men", representatives of progressive Zemstvo and urban economic life [GFF:703-10 | MWG:265-6]
• He also conferred  with Fedor Golovin, Georgii L'vov, & Fedor Kokoshkin
• He offered to cooperate with these "public men" if they moderated their political stance
• These "public men", however, still demanded a Constituent Assembly & universal suffrage [PR&R:532]
• In demanding a Constituent Assembly, they sought to wrest from the tsarist ministerial elite and to give to elected representatives the power to design the new Fundamental Laws
• In other words, they sought to take from tsarist bureaucrats and give to the public the power to make an actuality out of the grand and vague promises in the October Manifesto
• Still, Witte offered Ministry of Manufacturing and Industry to wealthy industrialist Aleksandr Guchkov who refused on grounds that Witte named reactionary career police administrator Petr Durnovo to the all-important post of Interior Minister [MWG:116 & 264]
• Other Zemstvo liberals and figures from the urban public shared the scrupulous unwillingness of Guchkov to be compromised
• Thus the Witte effort to form a mixed government of tsarist bureaucrats and "public men" collapsed
• Witte was all alone now with only the state. And most powerful state servitors were ready to see him fail [GO de05]
• Forty-years of Zemstvo politics had come to this, though the  Zemstvo continued to play an important role in  national life
• 1905 LOOP

<>1905no22:Committee of the Post & Telegraph union arrested

<>1905no22:Moscow then Saint Petersburg | Georgii Khrustalev-Nosar became chairman of workers' Soviet [WRH3:496-7 | *1913:RRe#2:89-100]

<>1905no24:Russia | End of preliminary censorship
*--The imperial state brought an end to the 110-year-old constraint on Russian print culture
*--Unfinished business of the "great reform" era was taken up again under revolutionary pressure
*--After end to preliminary censorship, a steady trickle of reform continued
\\
*--Daniel Balmuth, Censorship in Russia, 1865-1905
*--Charles Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804-1906

<>1905no26:Moscow | President of workers' Soviet, Khrustalev-Nosar arrested, and 26-year-old Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) replaced him
*1905no26:de05; Saint Petersburg | Foreign newspaper correspondent Nevison:77-80 (diary) covered these critical 11 days

<>1905de02:Saint Petersburg workers' Soviet issued Financial Manifesto calling on peasants to refuse to make redemption payments, demanding all wages be paid in gold or hard coin, full weight, and recommending all wage-laborers withdraw deposits from banks, "demanding all payments in gold" [VSB,3:746 | DPH:303-4 | Postgate:385 (part)]
*--State moved to suppress eight newspapers, and this just over one week after the passage of a new and progressive censorship reform [ID]

<>1905de03:Saint Petersburg Soviet members arrested during meeting in Free Economic Society building

• Trotsky mug-shot [pix]
• 1906oc:Nosar and Trotsky testified at their trials [VSB,3:748]
• The workers' Soviet faded from scene after two vigorous months of existence
• 1907:Trotsky wrote Our Revolution, a description of those two vigorous months or organized revolutionary politics. This early work by Trotsky was based on his Marxist vision of history and his personal experience [TXT of ch.5]
• Trotsky's  more general study of the 1905 Revolution [TXT] grew out of Our Revolution and contained the first versions of Trotsky's contribution to general Social Democratic ideology, the notion of "permanent revolution" [TXT of preface]
• The memory and myth of the workers' Soviet lingered. Twelve years later, the Soviet revived and Trotsky returned from exile and emigration just as the old Regime collapsed in the 1917 Revolution

<>1905de04:Kostroma newspaper reported debates in peasant gatherings
*--Sameti village assembly [sel'skii skhod] passed two resolutions:
(1) in view of land shortage, all land should be gathered in common property on conditions determined by representatives elected nationally, and
(2) in the realm of politics it is essential that the people rule, without regard for soslovie or other qualifications at the central and the district levels, with freedom of conscience, association, assembly and expression
*--The passport system must be abolished and amnesty of all those earlier prosecuted for political activities and rural disorders. The Sameti assembly voted to join the All-Russian Peasant Union
*--An assembly in Tonkin district vowed not be pay taxes until the following measures were taken:
(1) End the oppression by Land Captains,
(2) institute peasant administration, carried out by peasants themselves, not just on paper, but in fact,
(3) institute an assembly of all soslovie,
(4) create equal rights for all peasants,
(5) institute a constituent assembly on the basis of the four-member formula [? four-tailed electoral formula?],
(6) refuse to participate in the Duma elections,
(7) land must be the the free property of those who work it [GDR:161-2]
*--Peasants clearly had more in mind than burning gentry estates

<>1905de04:Petersburg | Octobrist Party held its second conference

<>1905de05:de07 & de09; Tsarskoe Selo "monarchical cnf" included Wtt gvt & ShpD, Gch Korf, PL Bobrinskii, VA [MWG:266 | protocol, Byloe 3(25) (1917 September):217-65]

<>1905de07:de19; Moscow strike & revolutionary disturbance [Nevison in Moscow?]
*--Resolution [VSB,3:746-8]

<>1905de11:Russian Election law for State Duma signaled governmental retreat from promises in the October Manifesto [ID] [Russian text GDR:94-102]
*--Official reaction regained some of its momentum after the setbacks of the previous 18 months
*1905 LOOP

<>1906:French highway engineer and political ideologist Georges Sorel (1847-1922) wrote Reflections on Violence [CCC2,2:954-63 | BMC1:566-71 | BMC4:633-41]

• Sorel, among other things, extolled the positive virtues of political violence or terrorism
• Terrorism was working its way into the European political fabric
• Political terrorism was a nearly identical twin -- the domestic political twin -- to European imperialist administration and emerging practices of international or global "total war" [ID]

<>1906ja:Persia (Iran), Tehran and its suburbs the site of mounting popular disorder

• Iranian people over the preceding decade demanded a curb on royal authority and the establishment of the rule of law. The shah ignored the challenge to his authority. Now the religious establishment, the merchants, and other classes mounted open protests. Merchants and clerical leaders fled from probable arrest by the shah. They sought sanctuary in mosques
• 1906je:Tehran | Persian shah reneged on a promise to permit the establishment of a "house of justice", or consultative assembly. In response, 10,000 people, led by merchants, took sanctuary in the compound of the British legation in Tehran
• 1906au:Persian shah was forced to issue a decree promising a constitution
• 1906oc:Persian elected assembly convened and drew up a Constitution that provided for strict limitations on royal power, an elected parliament, or Majlis, with wide powers to represent the people, and a government with a cabinet subject to confirmation by the Majlis
• 1906de30:Persian shah signed the revolutionary Constitution and died five days later
• Within the year 1907, Supplementary Fundamental Laws provided, within limits, for freedom of press, speech, and association, and for security of life and property
• The hopes for constitutional rule were not realized, however, as a result of (1) internal political weakness and (2) imperialist interference =
  (1) 1907:1921; Persian shah Mohammad Ali and the Majlis engaged in constant struggle, then Bakhtiari chiefs and other grandees took over
  (2) 1907au18:1919; For 12 years, leading up to and through the duration of WW1, English-Russian entente divided Persia/Iran into English and Russian spheres

<>1906ja:ap26; Saint Petersburg events described by Nevison:309-16

<>1906ja:Socialists-Revolutionaries [SRs], now a huge, unified and nation-wide party, held their First Congress and issued a program, which included reaffirmation of the need for "terroristic struggle, central and local, individual and mass". The program furthermore stated that "the new debauch of arbitrary rule finds the party once again at its battle station" [VSB,3:719-21]

• By this time the SRs concluded that the autocratic state had betrayed the promises in the October Manifesto [ID]. This purely institutional issue, the betrayal of democratic political promises made in October, remained an issue over the next decade and fed popular discontent in the year 1917 [EG]
• That month in Tambov Province, Battle Organization activist Mariia Spiridonova assassinated Luzhenovskii, an important activist in the "Black Hundreds" movement
• A half-year later, the Black Hundreds were responsible for the assassination of Mikhail Gertsenshtein, member the new State Duma (KDs) and labeled "Yid" by the Black Hundreds
• In this new era of legal public mobilization across the full political spectrum, terror had become also a weapon in the struggle between different political parties and factions
• However, within the ranks of the SRs, a "right-wing" broke away (IE=revolutionary moderates -- if such a phrase is not wholly oxymoronic). These "moderates" lost patience with underground conspiracy and terrorism and committed to open political action. They formed a new party known variously as the Narodno-sotsialisticheskaia (Trudovaia) partiia [People's Socialist (Labour) Party] or Trudovaia narodno-sotsialisticheskaia partiia [Labouring People's Socialist Party]. In short, they were called Narodnye sotsialisti [People's Socialists (it is uncomfortable and misleading but possible to translate that as "National Socialists")]. They were nicknamed "NSs" or "EnEsses"
• 1906se:NSs expressed willingness to achieve their goals via political engagement in the State Duma. Leading members were NF Annenskii, VA Miakotin, AV Peshekhonov, VG Bogoraz-Tan, SYa Elpat'evskii, VI Semevskii, etc.
• Soon NSs issued their own journal,  Narodno-sotsialisticheskii obozrenie [People's Socialist Review] which sought to make Russia a democratic republic, to transfer unused, privately owned land to the peasantry (with compensation to the landowners), and outright nationalization of (excessively) huge landed estates [latifundia estates]. Also monastic land holdings, royal properties and governmentally owned land should be nationalized and distributed to peasants
• NSs extended their organization down to the local level as they campaigned for seats in the Duma. The following April, NSs held their first party conference

<>1906ja:Russian Marshals of nobility (i.e., chairmen of regional noble assemblies) gathered and passed a resolution in which they declared their willingness to help their sovereign restore peace and achieve the promises of the October Manifesto. However, they acknowledged serious difficulties and thus made recommendations [FFS:200-3] =

• The state issued decrees [ap17 and oc17] promoting freedoms that have never been defined, thus loosing anarchy and disorder on the country. Political wavering creates an opening for revolutionary outbursts. Suspicions grow that the promises from the tsar will not be fulfilled. Disorder must be quelled
• Convene the Duma as soon as possible. Quickly issue instructions on how this is to be done
• Russia is a single, indivisible whole. No regional or national separatism should be allowed
• Russians need to be protected when they are living among a majority of non-Russians
• Freedom of conscience must not limit the preeminence of the Russian language and Orthodox Church
• Economic self-regulation should be granted in outlying areas while protecting Russian interests
• The State Duma should take the fundamental solution of the agrarian question to be its number one priority
• The inviolability of private property must be the guiding principles, with certain defined exceptions
• Colonization of distant frontiers must be facilitated by local discussion. State land should be offered to migrants
• Financial policy must be revamped so as to promote agricultural productivity and marketing
• The state should promote consolidation of peasant landholdings and termination of strip farming
• Allow peasants to claim their share of community land, consolidate it as separate households, and sell them if they move [this an early call for conversion of peasant villagers into farmers]
• The Peasant Bank should promote economic security of peasants. Government should assume some of the financial burden of loans. Interest rates should be lowered to the same level as those in the Noble Bank
• "Arable state lands and forests ... and also crown lands [should] be made available to agriculturists with payment set according to accessed value. [...] Twenty-four marshals hold a separate opinion: twenty one marshals regard crown lands as private property, and three oppose consideration of this question at the congress"
• Strong state authority must be exerted at the local level in order to suppress violence and plunder
• Rules must be clearly stated and enforced to protect individual liberty from violence and work stoppage or desertion

More Gentry politics

<>1906ja05:11; KDs Party Congress#2

<>1906ja22:Nizhnii Novgorod peasant petition outlined long history of discontent in their village Malyi Seskin, ending with a list of seven demands =
(1) forests, lands and ponds owned by institutions, ministries [kabinetskie], private individuals, monasteries, churches and gentry [pomeshchich'i] should be turned over to to those who work them, under conditions of communal land management [obshchinnogo zemlepol'zovaniia]
(2) direct and indirect taxes should be abolished and replaced by graduated progressive taxes
(3) universal and obligatory [primary and secondary] education and accessibility to higher educational institutions to all who wish, at state expense
(4) freedom of expression, press, assembly, union and strike
(5) inviolability of the individual, home and correspondence
(6) abolition of  capital punishment, military quartering and courts martial, and
(7) swift convocation of the State Duma. Signed by 90 peasants in assembly, with their elder [starosta], and with notary signature of district police captain [ispravnik]  [GDR:163-4]
*--Minsk area ditto [164-5]
\\
*--Oleg Bukhovets subjected about 200 peasant petitions of this era to aggregate analysis and offered a summary of their content

<>1906ja30:Russian women's Progressive Party, program [FFS:303-8]

<>1906fe:gbx Zmv mtg, conflict pro- & anti-lbx [MWG]

<>1906fe:German sociologist Max Weber published "Zur Lage...", the first of two monograph-length studies of the Russian Revolution of 1905, for which purpose he learned the rudiments of Russian. First and second study published together in MWG [Weber]

<>1906fe05:Congress#1, Vserossiiskaia Torgovo-promyshlennaia partiia [cf.1905no11:]
*--Liberal industrialist Pavel P. Riabushinskii used phrase "class consciousness" & urged resistance to "intelligentsia socialism" [OCP:274]
*--Urban "bourgeois" consciousness came to life under conditions of revolutionary crisis and struggled to make a clear distinction between liberalism and socialism
\\
*--"Association of Industry and Trade, 1906-1917" in MERSH
*--"Riabushinskii", a Russian English-language website [W] | Russian-language website [W]

<>1906fe08:fe12; Octobrist Party held a conference

<>1906fe20:Tsarist manifesto and two ukazes about two chambers of the new legislative body
(1) The Imperial State Council [Sovet] would now be made up of delegates, one half elected and one half appointed by the tsar. Earlier, all were appointed by the tsar
(2) A "second house", the State Duma would be made up of elected delegates, but elections were not to be direct. Delegates were chosen in a four-tier process designed to mute the popular will [VSB,3:769-70 | MWG] [Russian text GDR:102-]
*--Ministries were not put under the authority of the two-chambered legislature. They remained responsible only to the tsar
*--The tsar no longer was formally described as having "unlimited autocratic power" [neogranichennaia samoderzhavnaia vlast']. The word "unlimited" was removed from his title
*1905 LOOP

<>1906fe21:Russian National Congress of Old-Ritualists [Raskolniki] sent address to Emperor Nicholas II [FFS:298-9]

<>1906fe22:fe23; Russian laws handed down with respect to relationship of southern imperial possessions to the new legislative institutions [GDR:123-33]

<>1906mr06:Russian State Duma election began

<>1906mr08:Russia | Ekaterinoslav guberniia Nobility submitted address to Emperor Nicholas II which showed how village disorders vexed gentry politics, yet also showed how anxious gentry were for the Emperor to honor the promises made in the October Manifesto [FFS:203-6]

<>1906mr08:Russian Senate received two ukazes about management of state budget [GDR:132-5]

<>1906mr08:mr11; Russian state took measures to maintain control over the electoral process [GDR:136-41]

<>1906ap07:ap12; Russian Council of Ministers deliberated with Nicholas II about the new Fundamental Laws [VSB,3:770-2]

<>1906ap10:ap25; Stockholm | Russian SDs Congress #4 (The Unity Congress [!!]) tried to bring Russian Marxists back together
*--However, the Menshevik/Bolshevik split widened. Mensheviks A.S. Martynov and P.B. Aksel'rod explained differences with Bolsheviks [VSB,3:716-17]
*--Agrarian program [VSB,3:801]
*--In this year, the German Social Democratic leader Karl Kautsky [pix] explained meaning of the 1905 Russian Revolution, w/ preface by Vladimir Lenin [Hardy:352f]
*--German and Russian Marxists sought common ground in the interpretation of this vital European event

<>1906ap14:Sergei Witte resignation became widely known
*--Witte memoirs gave bitter account of events leading to this [cf. VSB,3:748-50 and DIR2:418-25]
*--In mid April, Russian state secured loan and thus felt bolder in its desire to reverse large parts of the concessions granted in the October Manifesto
*--The state felt it had now weathered the revolutionary storm and was ready to repair the damage. It no longer needed Witte

<>1906ap18:San Francisco earthquake described by USA author Jack London [Eye:418-21]
*--The first century in the history of a great Pacific-Rim urban center was punctuated by a great natural calamity [W#1] [W#2] [W#3] [W#4]

<>1906ap22:ap23; Congress of Noble Circles passed a resolution which symbolized conservative gentry politics
*--They called for restoration of law and order, especially the defense of the principles of autocracy and the enforcement of noble soslovie privileges and exemptions
*--They objected to the way in which "unworthy members and aliens with inappropriate bloodlines" had in recent times been elevated to prominent positions [FFS:206-10]

<>1906ap23:Russia's new Fundamental Laws issued [TXT] [original draft, Council of Ministers draft, & final version: Mehlinger:336-44 | cf. DIR2:387-93 | DIR3:417-25 | VSB,3:772-4 | DPH:395-6 | GDR:141-60]
*--New laws defined the powers of the Duma and the relation of the Duma legislature to the tsarist government (the ministries and their apparat) in ways that caused most to conclude that the Fundamental Laws betrayed the promises of the October Manifesto [ID]

<>1906ap27:1906jy08; First State Duma formally opened with KDs playing a central roll [VSB,3:774-6] but lasted only two months and two weeks

• First Duma heard Emperor Nicholas II’s speech from throne & responded in an oppositional mood [RRC2,2#39 | PR&R:546-60 | Nevison:325-6]
• Ten weeks of intense struggle between elected legislators and tsarist government followed
• Over on the government side, the Emperor appointed confirmed monarchist Ivan Goremykin [ID] Prime Minister to replace Witte; Petr Stolypin became Interior Minister [WRH3:498-509] Goremykin in 1894 had been Nicholas II's first Interior Minister, appointed in part because of his record of service in putting down the 1863-64 Polish uprising, and because of his dabbling in peasant affairs. Now at mid-stream in his reign, Nicholas again turned to the utterly loyal Goremykin.
• Vasilii Maklakov (a scrupulously moderate member of the KDs), The First State Duma: Contemporary Reminiscences
• The First Duma was eventually dissolved by tsarist authority
• The Second Duma was hardly more settled

<>1906ap27:+; First Duma Labor Group [Trudovaia Gruppa; best known as Trudoviki] formed in the midst of parliamentary proceedings, with 96 then 107 members, including Ivan Zhilkin, Aleksei Alad'in and Stepan Anikin, all educated professionals, journalists or teachers
*--Trudoviki were much influenced by the All-Russian Peasant Union and the SRs, but they were nonetheless a distinct product of the actual political situation that newly elected delegates, many of them from the village, found within the new parliament
*--Trudoviki were an authentic product of labor political mobilization, particularly the mobilization of rural labor into an organized political party

<>1906my:dvr.unx (??soiuz zemledel GO 05no17)  fnd; cnx gnt pty

<>1906my05:State Duma replied to Emperor Nicholas II speech [RRC2,2:445-49 | Harper:40-1 | VSB,3:776-7]

<>1906my08:je01; State Duma, for four weeks, debated agricultural problems, including the old problem of landed estates, much influenced by the legislative agenda of the Trudoviki
*1906my08:Russian KDs position on agrarian question, "Project of the 42" [GDR:168-72]
*1906my17:Samara guberniia peasant woman wrote letter to State Duma [GDR:180-1]

<>1906my13:Government declaration & State Duma vote of no confidence in Goremykin government [RRC2,2#40 | VSB,3:777-8] Stenographic record of part of Duma session [GDR:160]

<>1906my23:Trudoviki agrarian program, "Project of the 104" [GDR:172-4]
*1906je02:Samara Province peasants "instructed" Duma [GDR:165-8]
*1906je10:Penza Province peasants petitioned State Duma [GDR:168]

<>1906je11:Russian nationwide nobles congress sent address to Nicholas II defending the "inviolability of property rights" of gentry landowners [VSB,3:800]
*--The previous seventeen years of gentry politics, here defined as promotion and defense of exclusive noble soslovie interests and landowning power, was a clear failure, just as it had been a half century earlier
\\
*--Robert Edelman, Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution: The Nationalist Party, 1907-1917
*--Roberta Thompson Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (1982)

<>1906je20:Emperor Nicholas II had "list" of prospective new coalition government on the basis of which Stolypin and Governor General Trepov negotiated with the KDs
*--Stolypin, representing a new generation of tsarist officialdom, now moved toward the center of official events
*--Trepov, representing an older generation (though only 51 years old), died three months later, ending his year and a half near the center.
\\
Tuck:127-8 says negotiations failed because the government acted too late, because conflict between bureaucrats and KDs too deep, and because Pavel Miliukov was too "doctrinaire"

<>1906jy04:State Duma Agrarian Commission reported [GDR:175-80]

<>1906jy06:Old-guard monarchist-absolutist statesman Goremykin out and Petr Stolypin in as Prime Minister. Two days later =
*1906jy08:jy09; First Duma dissolved [VSB,3:778 | CCC2,2:597-8 | DPH:306-7 | Russian text, Rospuska Gosudarstvennoi, in GDR:181-3]
*1906jy09:Stolypin made further unsuccessful effort to form coalition government [GFF:710-21]

<>1906jy10:Finland | Dissident delegates from the suppressed State Duma, with KDs and the Trudoviki at the center, fled to Finland and issued the Vyborg Manifesto [McC1:43-4 | VSB,3:779 | Meeting described in Harper,Russia:50-51 | Nevison:351-2]

• The Vyborg Manifesto marked the end of the KDs' nine-month revolutionary period. There was no significant popular response to the radical proposals in the Manifesto
• That day, Pavel Miliukov described Duma and "extreme parties" in a newspaper article
• Years later the more moderate liberal, Vasilii Maklakov, remembered with regret this First Duma and its extremism [VSB,3:780-2]
• Events sheared KDs of their bellicose behavior. They now settled into life as a parliamentary party beginning with the Third Duma
• Moisei Ostrogorski (1854-1919) revised his big theoretical study of political parties on the basis of his disillusionment as deputy (KDs) to the First Duma
• 1905 LOOP

<>1906jy10:London International Peace Conference | Maksim Kovalevskii delivered speech [Nevison:360-1]
*--Nevison described voluble crowds at the Conference, caught up in the excitement of the Russian "march of democracy" [358]

<>1906jy17:In the style of the Vyborg Manifesto, revolutionary appeals continued from the dispersed groups within the First Duma

• Trudoviki & SDs, joined by representatives of the SRs and Railroad Union, appealed to soldiers & sailors [Nevison:352-4] Their slogan was "land and liberty"
• 1906jy18:Trudoviki & SDs, now joined by SRs, All-Russian Peasant Union and railroad unions, appealed to peasants [Nevison:354-6]
• 1906au06:Orel Province, Bolkhovskii Disetrict| Bunino village peasant women protested [BRW:343-6]

<>1906au:Germany | Max Weber published the second installment of his quick study of the First Russian Revolution

• Both the first and the second monographs have been pulled together as The Russian Revolutions
• Weber was interested to see if liberalism could be united with social democracy in Russia, thus to provide a model to be followed by other "disenchanted", dead-end and "bourgeois" political parties in his world
• He was disappointed. He dubbed the political results of the 1905 Russian revolution "Pseudo-constitutionalism" [Scheinkonstitutionalismus]

<>1906au19:Stolypin saw to the creation of field court-martial squads to quell unrest in the countryside [VSB,3:783]

• A week earlier Stolypin's dacha was the target of a deadly terrorist attack [ID] [VSB,3:782-3]
• 1905:1909; Government statistics on political crime reported 2,390 executions for "terrorism", most of them following the Stolypin electoral-law coup [VSB,3:750]
• In these days Stolypin issued several policy statements [VSB,3:783-5 | McC1:44-6]
• Peasant unrest was brought under some control

<>1906se:Russian universities reopened after nearly a year in official suspension

<>1906oc03:oc07; Trudoviki held their first Conference in preparation for the Second Duma
*--That month the growing faction of terroristic and action-oriented members of the SR Party broke away to form the Union of SR Maximalists [3 paragraph ID]
*--That fall, the right-wing party Black Hundreds also prepared for the upcoming elections by issuing a position paper  [W]

Prime Minister Petr Stolypin

<>1906no09:Tsarist ukaz outlined ambitious new departures in agrarian reform

• 1906oc05:Russian Decree on Peasant Rights, issued under Stolypin's influence, laid the groundwork for this ambitious November ukaz
• The October decree not only opened the new era in peasant reform but represented a long-delayed finalization of the 1861 serf emancipation [VSB,3:802-3]
• The first year under the October Manifesto and the subsequent Fundamental Laws seemed to be working more nearly in the interests of the established bureaucratic absolutism and less in the interests of those whose political activism forced the Emperor to issue the October Manifesto. But this final reform measure to come out of the 1905 Revolutionary period was the greatest
• The new policy was announced according to Article 87 of the Fundamental Laws which gave the new Prime Minister Stolypin and the ministries authority to legislate when the Duma was not in session
• The policy was formulated independently from the contentious debate in the dissolved First Duma, even though the urgency for further peasant reform was made apparent in that Duma [TXT] [VSB,3:803-4 | McC1:142-4]
• Article 87 required that the State Duma eventually ratify such measures as this, but it was four years before that happened
• In the meantime, peasant political mobilization waned, and Stolypin entered into the phase of his greatest accomplishments
• 1905 LOOP

<>1907:1917; Polish-born member of SDs over previous ten years, Felix Dzerzhinskii (1877-1926) arrested and sent to Siberian prison and exile for nine years, described in publication of his Prison Diary and Letters

<>1907:Philippine Islands | USA sponsored elections to a national legislature
*--This was the second such elected legislature in all of Asia, and the first in a client state closely supervised by a patron state (USA) which was inspired by its Progressive Era at at its height

<>1907:Moscow "Religious-Philosophical Society in Honor of Vladimir Solov'ev" formed

• Solov'ev died in 1900 at age 47, ending a brilliant 26-year career that contributed to the reorientation of Russian thought, from positivism to various shades of "spiritualism"
• 1901:1903; Saint Petersburg "Religious-Philosophical" meetings were a prelude to the Moscow group [Florovsky,2:252-8]. Other events also characterized a new "spirit" in Russian high culture =
• 1905:Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Peter & Alexis (v3 of trilogy "Christ & Anti-Christ")
• 1906:friends published Nikolai Fedorov's "The Question of Brotherhood..." [Edie,3:16-54]
• 1906:Leo Tolstoy, "Meaning of the Russian Revolution" [Raeff3:323-57], then in 1908 The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
• 1906:Nikolai Losskii’s The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge became first translation into English of a technical work of Russia philosophy [Edie,3:321-42]
• Evgenyi Trubetskoi was a leading figure in the Moscow group and author later of "The Bolshevist Utopia and the Religious Movement in Russia" [RRS]
• Aleksandr Bogdanov, "Matter as a Thing-in-Itself" [Edie,3:393-404]
• Also see Nikolai Grot [RRS:61-80], Vasilii Rozanov [91-104], Sergei Bulgakov [135-160], Viacheslav Ivanov [161-74], Georgii Chulkov [on mystical anarchism:175-86], Georgii Florovskii (George Florovsky) [225-46], Pavel Novgorodtsev [247-64]
• Writers Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Belyi were involved in these developments
• The Vekhi group was influenced by this society

<>1907:1913; I; Isle of Capri | Russian émigré author Maksim Gorky produced some of his greatest works = the novel Mother [TXT] [TXT] and his three-part autobiography which opened with part one, "My Childhood" [Detstvo] and concluded with, "My Universities" [Moi universitety, not completed until 1923]

<>1907:French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) published Creative Evolution, an idealist critique of scientific knowledge [CCC2,2:1027-34 | BMC1:594-6 | BMC4:623-6]
\\
*--"[Bergson] was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Bergson argued that the intuition is deeper than the intellect. His Creative Evolution (1907) and Matter and Memory (1896) attempted to integrate the findings of biological science with a theory of consciousness. Bergson's work was considered the main challenge to the mechanistic view of nature. He is sometimes claimed to have anticipated features of relativity theory and modern scientific theories of the mind." [Source]

<>1907mr07:1907je03; Second State Duma opened more than a half year after the First Duma was dissolved, and it lasted just under three months before the state dissolved it as well

• 1907mr06:Stolypin appeared in contentious session with Duma [VSB,3:785-7 | “Rech’ v Gosudarstvennoi Dume” (GRV:273-7)]
• 1907ap16:ap20; NSs held their First Conference and sent 16 representatives to the Duma, but their moderate politics were drowned in the fervor of revolutionary opposition, and they soon faded from the scene, after only about one year of existence, not to reappear again until the days in which the Imperial old regime collapsed
• 1907my03:Agrarian Commission received SRs agrarian program, signed by 104 deputies. Trudoviki and the All-Russian Peasant Union submitted their own program, but there was not enough time left to the Second Duma to consider either at length
• The Trudoviki were near the end of their one-year existence
• The Peasant Union was at the end of his 18-month revolutionary existence
• 1907my10:Stolypin delivered speech to Duma on peasant question with the famous concluding line, "Those who oppose our state system [...] require great upheavals; we require a great Russia!" [VSB,3:804-5 | RRC2,2#41]
• 1923je:Slavonic Review#2,4:36-55 | Bernard Pares, "The Second Duma" (an English eyewitness account) [More Pares]
• Not until the Third Duma did parliamentary politics settle into a more permanent pattern of relationship with the tsarist state

<>1907my12:London | Russian SDs at Congress #5 heard Lenin's report on peasantry [VSB,3:808-9]

• Marxism was never strong in its comprehension of peasants, but now Lenin worked to bring his doctrine in line with Russian economic realities and revolutionary opportunities
• Many felt he was just importing the agrarian program of the SRs
• Peasant mobilization over the preceding two and one half years was effectively at its end, but the peasant question was far from settled

<>1907je03:Manifesto dissolving Second Duma [TXT] [VSB,3:787-8 | McC1:47-8]

• Petr Stolypin coup d'état imposed a new election law while Duma was no longer in session [Russian GDR:357-95]
• As revolutionary disorder subsided (or should we say "was suppressed") and as the statist-oriented new election law took effect, the Third Duma met and was the first session of the State Duma to last its full five-year term
• 1934:Three decades later, as Stalinism began to set down its roots in Soviet Russian life, the west European political refugee Petr Struve wrote memoirs of Russian liberal activists in the 1905 Revolution. He asserted that if at any time the liberals had succeeded in forming a cabinet, they would  have had to fight revolutionary maximalists to the death,  just as did Stolypin, either that or "capitulate pitiably before the triumphant mob" [*1934ja:SEER#12,35:366] One sniffs in this 1934 statement about "the triumphant mob" more nearly the scent of the anti-democratic European political atmosphere in the era of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini than of the political atmosphere in the time of the Second Duma
• Stolypin's coup marked the end of the political crisis known as the "First Russian Revolution" =
• 1905 LOOP begins again

<>1907je:Hague | Second International Peace Conference
*--First Conference
*--Major conventions signed at these two conferences aimed to strengthen the possibility of international law  [TXT]
*--USA in the Progressive Era supported these conventions (Spanish-American War [ID] and Panama adventure [ID] now behind it) while Russia opposed them (need to re-arm after Russo-Japanese War [ID])
*--Second International's Stuttgart Resolution on militarism and International Conflict supported the Hague resolutions [DPH:224-6]
*--Replaced after WW1 by World Court [ID]
\\
*--Saul,2:521-3

<>1907jy30:(13.7.40 Meiji): Saint Petersburg | Russian-Japanese treaty re. Manchuria, Korea & Mongolia [DIR2:432-4 | DIR3:473-78] In essence, the treaty divided Manchuria into "North Manchuria" under Russian authority and "South Manchuria" under Japanese authority. Korea was granted fully to Japan (with "most favored nation" status assigned to Russia). Outer Mongolia was granted to Russia
*--Ernest B. Price, The Russo-Japanese Treaties of 1907-1916 Concerning Manchuria and Mongolia
*--More treaties in Japanese-Russian international relations [DIR2:]

<>1907au18:1919; English-Russian entente [TXT] [DIR3:467-72]

• Iran (Persia) was divided between Russia & England for 12 years, throughout WW1 and into the first post-war years. Two competing empires agreed to divide a third party, Persia, into spheres of influence. The Russians took the northern sphere, the British the southern and eastern. A central neutral sphere was preserved between the two where they were free to compete with one another for economic and political advantage
• Working together, the two European imperialist rivals ended the hope that the Iranian Constitutional Revolution might inaugurate a new era of independence
• Iran had struggled to preserve its own Persian spheres of influence over the previous century, but now it appeared to be fully under European imperialist dominion =
• 1908je:Persian shah deployed his Persian Cossack Brigade, under Russian command, to bomb the Majlis building, arrest deputies, and close down the assembly. However, Iranians continued to resist =
• 1909jy:In Tabriz, Esfahan, Rasht and elsewhere, Iranian resistance to the shah coalesced in a wide-spread constitutional movement which marched from Rasht and Esfahan to Tehran, deposed the shah, and reestablished the constitution. The ex-shah went into Russian exile. Constitutional forces triumphed, but they faced serious difficulties. Upheavals in the time of Constitutional Revolution and civil war undermined stability and trade
• 1910jy:Persian shah in Russian exile, and with Russian imperial support, landed troops in Persia in an attempt to overthrow parliamentary rule and regain his throne
• Afghan independence was brought under "protection" of England
• Also at this time Russia and England settled disagreements over Tibet. The mountainous region Tibet had for 200 years suffered vulnerability in its relationship to great powers
• Eight years earlier, Lord Curzon, who was then English Viceroy of India, explained the interlocking relationship of Iran (Persia), Afghanistan, India and other English imperialist domains. He emphasized the threat posed by Russia to these territories "which Great Britain regards with good reason as falling within her sphere of influence" [BNE:185-7]
• But now, eight years later, England sought to placate Russia in anticipation of the need for wide alliance against Germany, here on the eve of WW1
• Energy politics (oil) also played a role in a era of transition to petroleum-powered military navies
• In this same year, 1907, English Foreign Office official Sir Eyre Crowe [ID] reacted to growing German naval power and outlined one of the first European descriptions of how an "arms race" might be managed and how it might run out of control [P20:55 and PWT2:262-4 emphasize those pages from Crowe's long report that indicated Germany's yearning for expansion and power | BNE:201-8 presents a far more subtle excerpt that does more justice to Crowe's honest and intelligent assessment of the world situation]
• This English/Russian entente completed the "Triple Entente" (France, Russia and England) which isolated Germany and set the European diplomatic stage for alliance among core "allies" in WW1 [DIR2:426-31 | ORW:147-8 | CCC2,2:620-1]
• The Great Game was coming home, and it was increasingly obvious that Russia was the least competent of the big players, now having allowed herself to be put in a hostile relation to Germany, contrary to her own interests [EG],, but strongly beneficial to England and France
• British documents on the origins of the war, 1898-1914 v4
• European imperialism and European war were fertilized together

<>1907oc15:Petersburg director of the Chief Prison Administration A.M. Maksimovskii assassinated by Ragozinnikova [VSB,3:809-10]
*1908:NYT article [TXT] described assassination, execution of Ragozinnikova, and then the revenge killing of another tsarist official by Ragozinnikova's brother
*--Revolutionary terror abated, but would not cease. Insider police-administered terror also lived on =
*1907:1912; Russian statesman, ex-Finance Minister (and ex-Prime Minister) Sergei Witte wrote his Memoirs, covering the big moments in his illustrious career [Excerpts = DIR3:451-60]. Witte was "retired", but not out of the action =
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*2001de02:Revolutionary Russia#14,2:1-32| Iain Lauchlan, "Security Policing in Late Imperial Russia" [TXT]  | Also see his "The accidental terrorist: Okhrana connections to the extreme-right and the attempt to assassinate former Chairman of the Council of Ministers Sergei Witte in 1907"| (( A case study in the relationship between the tsarist secret police -- Okhrana or okhranka -- and acts of political terror perpetrated by the extreme-right in late Imperial Russia. This specific case concerns the tangled web of conspiracy, propaganda and controversy that surrounded the attempted assassination of Witte))

<>1907no01:1912je09; Third State Duma, elected according to the new Stolypin electoral law, lasted its full term, four and a half years

• The First and Second Dumas were less legislatures than revolutionary tribunals. They were overpowered by statist forces
• With the Third State Duma, the three-year-long 1905 Revolution was at an end
• Now we ask, did it accomplish anything =
• 1907no16:Stolypin defended his "get-tough" program before the Third Duma [VSB,3:788-9 | Full Russian text GDR:398-402]
• 1908de08:Prime Minister Petr Stolypin's "wager on the strong" speech delivered to Third Duma and debated [VSB,3:805-7] Stolypin pushed for serious peasant reform
• A notable accomplishment of the Third Duma was the first vigorous and effective primary education program
• 1908mr11:Evgraf Petrovich Kovalevskii introduced education bill [VSB,3:817] But still, restrictions on Jews were maintained [VSB:818]
• 1910:1911; Aleksandr Guchkov was elected president of the Third Duma
• About the importance of budgetary authority in the growth of parliamentary power [WRH3:509-10 | *1912:RRe#1:14-48]
• About political parties in the mature State Duma period [WRH3:511-21]
• The "revolutionary era" of political party formation seemed over as groups got down to work within the Duma structure
• The Third Duma was a political environment within which the KDs, Octobrists and other moderate political parties thrived
• However, large and more radical groups, the SRs and SDs, were marginalized and continued to organize themselves in anticipation of a future revolutionary situation. The obdurate revolutionary quality of SR and SD programs was not just a peculiarity of Russian experience. A darkening political mood influenced the evolution of political parties throughout Europe on the eve of WW1
• The Third State Duma was Stolypin's finest hour
• Aleksandr Izvolskii, Recollections of a Foreign Minister
• Vladimir Gurko, Features and Figures of the Past: Government and Opinion in the Reign of Nicholas II
• Vladimir Kokovtsov, Out of My Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov, Russian Minister of Finance, 1904-1914, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, 1911-1914
• The Fourth Duma, elected in 1912,  was to be more nearly a part of the history of WW1 than it was of Russian democracy, so this Third Duma is the historical laboratory for testing Russian "readiness" for parliamentary democracy

<>1908:Root-Takahira agreements

<>1908:USA Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] organized. The struggle against crime was also feature of the Progressive Era

<>1908jy23:Turkey (Ottoman Empire) | | "Young Turks", led by Mustafa Kemal (1880-1938) and others, launched nationalist/reformist movement aimed to modernize Turkey in order better to resist foreign manipulation. The movement was less Ottoman and imperialist than it was Turkish nationalist
*--Soon the German Empire, via Deutsche Bank and Krupp Manufacturing, was supplying the tottering Ottoman Empire with investment capital and heavy modern industrial-grade weaponry. The Berlin-Baghdad Express project [ID] was revived
*--More Ottoman Turkey
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*--Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power

<>1908:All-Russian Women's Congress| Anna Kalmanovich speech [BRW:321-4]

<>1908au:London | Russian SRs held First General Party Conference under leadership of Viktor Chernov [VSB,3:810-11]

<>1908se:Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina [W] Russia's attentions called back to Balkans nearly 30 years after chastisement in Berlin. The Great Game was about to make its final contribution to the catastrophe of World War One

<>1908no:Russian poet Aleksandr Blok seemed to welcome a revolutionary future, though with dread, as he anticipated the destruction of the intelligentsia: "The People & the Intelligentsia" [Raeff3:359-63] Blok took on other interpretive issues in "Catiline: A Page from the History of World Revolution" [RRS:291-320]
*--Blok never let go of his revolutionary fascination and dread
*--Andrei Belyi, another Symbolist poet, wrote on "Revolution and Culture" [RRS:271-90] Some of his essays have been translated
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*1979:1980; ENG.OX| Avril Pyman, The life of Aleksandr Blok| v1= The distant thunder, 1880-1908| v2= The release of harmony, 1908-1921 (rich in long citations from original sources)

<>1908de29:English financier Lord Furness delivered a speech extolling virtues of controlling markets by combination of large corporations, monopolies, economic cartels, or, here, "amalgamations" [CCC2,2:795f CCC3,2:870-6]
*--Three years earlier John P. Davis warned of overweening power of big business = Corporations: A Study of the Origin and Development of Great Business Combinations and of their Relation to the Authority of the State

<>1909:Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud delivered lectures in USA on origin and development of psychoanalysis [CCC2,2:1061-83]

<>1909:Russian intellectuals published Vekhi [Signposts; Landmarks] a collection of essays critical of the Russian intelligentsia [ID], especially its revolutionary radicalism

• New trends in Russian thought [ID] reflected in this anthology = Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Mikhail Gershenzon, Izgoev, Kistiakovskii, Struve,& Frank [VSB,3:812-14]
• Fellow intelligenty protested
• Struve, "The Intelligentsia and the National Face" [RRS:265-70]
• 1909ja30:Tolstoy wrote "A Letter to a Revolutionary" [VSB,3:816-17]
• 1909:Paris |Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Zinaida Gippius, and D. Filosofov published Tsar i revoliutsiia
• 1917:Mikhail Nesterov portrait of Pavel Florenskii and Nikolai Bulgakov, pix in Olga's Gallery

<>1909:Lenin published Materialism & Empirio-Criticism [Edie,3:410-36]
*--Prominent Russian philosopher Liubov Akselrod [pseudonym "Ortodoks"], a powerful woman’s voice among Russian Marxists, reviewed Lenin’s essay [Edie,3:457-63]. Still an émigré, Lenin had to content himself with philosophical ramblings in isolation from actual politics

<>1909fe12:USA NYC | The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] formed
*--[W] describes how the group was "formed by a group of black and white citizens committed to helping to right social injustices". FOUNDERS: Mary White Ovington, Dr. Henry Moscowitz, Oswald Garrison Villiard, William English Walling, Ida Wells-Barnett and W.E.B. DuBois led the "Call" to renew the struggle for civil and political liberty
*--The Progressive Era put attention to racial issues

<>1909:+; Cubism introduced in west European painting, with Pablo Picasso playing a leading role

<>1909fe20:Italian newspaper Le Figaro featured "Initial Manifesto of Futurism" on its front page. Birth of a movement that rejected 19th century esthetics [CWC:6-15]

• The author was the poet F. T. Marinetti, a man of great inherited wealth = "We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed! A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath -- a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit."
• Marinetti drove a 1908 four-door, four-cylinder Fiat Brevetti convertible, top speed, forty miles an hour [pix]
• Marinetti wrote, “We will glorify war -- the only true hygiene of the world -- militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful Ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman”
• On the question of WW1, and chauvinistic militarism in general, the Dada [ID] movement moved in a direction opposite to the Futurists
• These movements opened an epoch of extreme innovation in European fine arts

<>1909jy25:English Channel first crossed by air. French pilot Louis Blériot described feat [Eye:422-3]

<>1909oc12:Japanese Prince Ito killed by Korean terrorist, causing Japan to impose an imperialist dictatorship in Korea

• China and Japan in conflict this year over Manchuria. Old Russian interests still relevant to this question, as were the interests of the new player on the block, USA
• USA alarmed, proposed neutralization of the entire Manchurian railroad network, but Japan and Russia rejected this idea
• USA Secretary of State-to-be Knox received letter from Theodore Roosevelt warning about Japan [F/Russia/ and /mainland/ in TXT]

<>1910:English journalist and pundit Norman Angell, The Great Illusion [TXT], disputed the possibility that modern warfare could bring benefit to a nation [CCC3,2:1277-96]

• In this year, French intellectual Charles Péguy published Notre Jeunesse. Here he exposed what he thought was a two-pronged attack on his beloved French Republic, one from the left and the other from the right [CCC3,2:1045-66]. Born of peasant stock, he refused a commission as officer in WW1. He died fighting in the ranks with his fellow citizens at the Battle of the Marne
• Italian Nationalist Association founder declared, "Just as socialism teaches the proletariat the value of class struggle, so we must teach Italy the value of international struggle. But international struggle is war? Well, then, let there be war! And nationalism will arouse the will for a victorious war, ... the only way to national redemption" [P20:3]
• French socialist leader Jean Jaurès published anti-war statement L'Armée nouvelle [CCC2,2:1107-16 | CCC3,2:1067-76]
• In these pre-WW1 years, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde published The Young People of Today which attacked the liberalism and positivism [ID] of the older generation and praised the patriotic, religious, and heroic future of French youth. It promised that "nothing can be more useful for the renewal of the fatherland than a generation that is athletic, realistic, un-ideological, virtuous, and fit for economic struggles, since nothing can better insure the revitalization and the health of the race". [CWC:16-35]

<>1910:Russian political activist and theorist Moisei Ostrogorski published Democracy and the Party System in the United States: A Study in Extra-Constitutional Government, based on a vast earlier book, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties [TXT]

• In the late 19th century, Ostrogorski lived in the USA and made a serious study of its constitutional politics, much influenced by the critical atmosphere of the US Progressive Era
• By 1910 Ostrogorski had also experienced Russian party politics. He had been an active member of the KDs in the First Russian Duma [ID]. And he had been deeply disappointed by that experience
• So on-the-scene study of politics in England and USA, plus direct experience of Russian politics in the 1905 Revolution, made him skeptical about political parties. Like so many Europeans of the day, he was now unsure of the received tradition of 19th-century optimism and liberalism. He described a tendency toward oligarchic [minoritarian elitist] manipulation of the larger party membership. He called such parties "cadre parties"
• "Cadre" came to mean a designated and trained managerial elite
• Contradictions vexed liberalism from the outset [ID]. Now in the early 20th century it suffered also from a degree of internal corruption of central principles
  

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*1976:Political Studies#23,4 on Ostrogorskii's political ideas

<>1910:Petersburg liberal intelligentsia [ID] defended their cause against the attacks launched the year before by the Vekhi group

• Pavel Miliukov, Maksim Kovalevskii, Ivan Petrunkevich, Konstantin Arsen'ev, Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskii, and others contributed chapters to Intelligentsiia v Rossii: Sbornik statei [Excerpts = VSB,3:814-16]
• 1991:In the last year of the Soviet Union, Vekhi and Intelligentsia were republished together

<>1910:Russian Bolshevik branch of the SDs drew up pessimistic platform. They anticipated no Marxist revolution soon [VSB,3:811-12]

<>1910ja18:England, Liverpool | Suffragette [a woman fighting for the right to vote] Lady Constance Lytton, disguised as a laboring-class woman, described how police force fed her in the Walton Gaol [jail] [Eye:423-5]

• Women's issues were not limited to the vote = *1901:Maria Pokrovskaia offered a woman’s perspective on prostitution and alcoholism [BRW:359-62] and the question “Should Men Be Chaste?” [BRW:135-8]
• 1910ap21:Russian Prostitutes' Petition [BRW:138-40]
• 1910:Ekaterina Gardner’s speech on abolishing brothels [BRW:362-6]
• 1910:Russian woman Aleksandra Dementeva spoke on Prostitution as a Profession [BRW:199-205]

<>1910fe08:USA | Knox memo to the Russian state
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Zabriskie

<>1910je14:Russian Third Duma passed complicated Stolypin land law, four years after the initial tsarist ukaz [VSB,3:807-8]

• Stolypin Land Law sought to allow peasant families to claim farming land as their own that had been traditionally subject to periodic redistribution within the village assembly [mirskoi skhod] or peasant commune
• Later these scattered holdings could be consolidated into single farmsteads, though the technical and social complexity of consolidation was never fully resolved. These reforms also promoted peasant migration to the new lands of Siberia, Central Asia, and the piedmont of the northern Caucasus Mountains. Costs and other passport difficulties associated with migration to Siberia via the Trans-Siberian Railroad were eased for pioneer-minded peasants in European Russia [TXT] Witte's confidence in railroads, central to his system introduced two decades earlier, was being confirmed
• Serious agrarian reform preceded Stolypin [GO 1649:Moscow 1797mr24 1837:1841]. The Emancipation of the serfs in 1861 is the single most famous event. Now the state returned to the countryside to complete the job only started in the 19^th century
• Andrei Koefoed, My Share in the Stolypin Agrarian Reforms
• Old "Russian hand" among English pundits, Donald Mackenzie Wallace offered a few "whiggish" remarks on the State Duma and Stolypin in the 1912 edition of his famous book Russia [VSB,3:790]
• The Stolypin reforms may be seen as a belated effort to put the various modernizing reform measures of the previous century on a more solid basis. Having worked on the upper stories of this new tsarist structure for over 100 years, the imperial state now got serious about work on the foundations and first floors. Too little, too late?
• These reforms may also be seen as part of a conceptual development in macro-economic thought in Europe since the time of Adam Smith [ID]. Teodor Shanin has argued [Roots of Otherness,2:4-7] that Stolypin represents "the second amendment" to classical economic theory, in which the state takes charge of social relations and the economy in the interests of the state, in which the state follows a failed peasant revolution with a "revolution from above", a state revolution designed to transform peasant life and guarantee the strength and security of the state. Friedrich List [ID] represents what Shanin calls "the first amendment"
• Peasant life at the turn of the 20th century was difficult. Everyday life in the Russian village seemed doomed by glacial changes associated with economic "modernization" around the whole globe. Those who struggled to preserve village traditions, or to build a future based on recapturing them, could be "conservatives" [EG], could be "revolutionaries" [EG#1 | EG#2], or could be cultural idealists, reactionary atavists or just plain curmudgeons. Consider this idealized peasant market scene painted by Boris Kustodiev
• 1911:Piatnitskii Folk ensemble formed [ID]. "Folk art" and "pop-art" flourished together, but were not the same thing
• Everywhere in the world, the forces of industrial modernization and/or imperialist intervention into traditional village life were eradicating ancient rural ways. One of the last great theoretical efforts to defend the vitality and survivability of village life was the Russian theorist Aleksandr Chaianov [ID] (Remember Howells, Weber and Veblen)
• 1909ap19:Law on trans-Ural settlement encouraged villagers to pack off to the Siberian frontier = "Go east, young man" [VSB,3:818]
• In the waning years of the Russian Empire the Stolypin reforms aimed to transform the institutional foundations of Russian village everyday life. The largest socio-economic objective was to convert villagers into farmers and to find a way to accommodate those who were willing to become Siberian settlers to get this done [pix of peasant pioneers at rail station]. Promotion of rural prosperity via pioneer settlement to open lands put Russia in line with earlier trends of US history [ID] which seemed to encourage the hearty "yeoman farmer". The future of rural life did not seem to hold the same promise as the past. Still, a certain number of Russian farmers prospered
• 1910se:Stolypin returned from a tour of peasant settlement in Siberia and reported to Nicholas II. He had earlier expressed the concern that "the democracy of Siberia will crush us". His meaning of democracy was largely social, not political/institutional. He meant to say that a "peasant sea" might wash over complex hierarchical Russia, but he was not frightened because he felt industrialization would check that possibility. Now he reported that

  after a fearful convulsion, Russia undoubtedly is going through a powerful economic and moral upsurge, to which also the harvest of the last two years contributes strongly. Siberia is growing fabulously; in the waterless steppes which two years ago were regarded as unfit for settlement, during the last few months there have grown up not only villages but almost cities. And the mixed current of right and poor, strong and weak, registered and irregular migrants bursting through from Russia into Siberia is in general a wonderful and powerful olonizational element. I would add, an element that is firmly monarchist, with a right, pure, Russian outlook.

• He went on to express this cautious excitement =

  All this and much else -- these are urgent and immediate questions. Otherwise, in an unconscious and formless manner will be created an enormous, rudely democratic country, which soon will throttle European Russia." In other words, his reforms were working, perhaps too well. Thus measures had to be taken to make sure they did not tumble out of state control. The very psychology of the people had changed.
  
  Among the peasants already there have appeared apostles of land settlement and agricultural improvements. I saw members of the First Duma from the peasant-revolutionaries [ID] who are now passionate homesteaders [khutoriane] and devotees of order. And how right you are, Your Majesty, how rightly you fathomed what is going on in the soul of the people, when you write that the fundamental questions for the government are land settlement and migration. One must apply enormous forces to these two problems and not let them languish.

• 1912jy05:Another law on trans-Ural settlement built on apparent successes [VSB,3:889]
• Here are some illustrations of traditional rural ways in Russia =
• Housing [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix]
• Arts and crafts [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix]
• Everyday life illustrated by photos = [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix] [pix]
• Stolypin had little interest in protecting "traditional rural ways"
• 1912:Russian Peasant women appealed for divorce and described abuse of wives [BRW:102-107]
• And what of those in Russia and elsewhere who were squeezed off the land and into the ranks of the burgeoning new class, wage-laborers?

<>1910jy07:(4.7.43 Meiji) Petersburg | Russian-Japanese treaty (1912:and 1916:other treaties) [DIR2:434-9]

<>1910au08 (NS au22):Japan annexed Korea. Tension between Japan and China over Manchuria
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*--Peter S. H. Tang, Russian and Soviet Policy in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia, 1911-1931. Durham NC:1959

<>1910no07:Leo Tolstoy died, ending a career of national and international cultural and "spiritual" influence that spanned about a half century
*--Vladimir Chertkov's memoir on the last days of Tolstoy [TXT]

<>1911:English labor activist and public intellectual L.T. Hobhouse defended liberalism in its modern evolution toward welfare legislation, Liberalism [CCS,1:803-24]
*--Hobhouse continued the tradition of Thomas Hill Green’s brand of English liberalism with its attention to the good of the whole community as well as to individual liberty, and its emphasis on health, education and welfare, all three vital elements in the accommodation of wage-labor in the industrializing body politic [PWT2:176-9]

<>1911:German Social Democratic Party activist Robert Michels became pessimistic about prospects for democracy in modern industrial societies and wrote critically about political parties, A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy [CCS:507-31 | CCS,1:7 897-921]

<>1911:USA abrogated 1832:treaty of Navigation and Commerce with Russia, in part because of treatment of Russian Jews. Powerful banker and associate of the Harriman railroad companies, Jacob Schiff, played a role, as did the USA diplomat and Progressive Party activist, Oscar Straus. See Straus' The American spirit (1913), especially the section on Russia and America. The Progressive Era influenced US foreign policy
*--Jewish emigration to USA was fast making it a a rival to Russia in the size of its Jewish population. This demographic fact helps explain growing US sensitivity to the problems of anti-Semitism. Many Jewish emigrants to USA came from the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
*--This demographic influx can be compared with the Russian experience in the 1770s
*--Rose Cohen, Out of the shadow: A Russian Jewish girlhood on the Lower East Side [original publication in 1918]
*--Joseph Boyarsky, The life and suffering of the Jew in Russia; a historical review of Russia's advancement beginning with the year 987 A.D. to the close of the nineteenth century; a description of the special laws enacted against the Jews, and reasons thereof (Los Angeles, 1912)
*1992:Yelena Khanga published her family’s unusual émigré experience in USA, Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family,1865-1992
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*--Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York| Many Jews who migrated to USA came from the Russian imperial Pale of Settlement, Ukraine and Poland. Many of them thought of Russian culture as the model of modern, this-worldly spiritual greatness. What the Jewish intelligentsia meant by Russian culture largely meant the progressive traditions of the Russian radical intelligentsia [ID]. They set about creating a political movement in the “Yiddish” language, a German-based language often written in the Hebrew alphabet. Most middle and eastern European Jews in the 19th century spoke Yiddish. The movement formed up political parties and published a significant periodical literature
*--By the early 21st century, Yiddish progressivism had disappeared in USA and in Europe. And the Yiddish language survived mainly as a significant enrichment of slang expression in English and other European tongues
*--Saul,2:233-57, 292-6, 396-401, 474-7, 523-7, 567-9, 582-4
*--Steven Cassedy, To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America (1997)

<>1911my:1911de; Persian government hired US businessman W. Morgan Shuster [ID] treasurer general in an effort to reform national finances

• Shuster got into big trouble when he sought to collect taxes from powerful officials who were Russian protégés. He dispatched a tax department police force into the Russian zone. The Russians came to the support of their protégés
• 1911de20:Persian Majlis (parliament) unanimously refused a Russian ultimatum demanding Shuster's dismissal. Russian troops, already in the country, moved to occupy Tehran
• Native Bakhtiari chiefs and their troops surrounded the Majlis building, forced acceptance of the Russian ultimatum, and shut down the assembly, once again suspending the constitution. Bakhtiari efforts prevented Russian occupation of the capital but momentarily terminated the Majlis
• 1911:1921;  For a decade, through WW1 and its immediate aftermath, Bakhtiari chiefs and other powerful notables governed Persia
• 1914:1918; Throughout WW1, Russian, British, and Ottoman troops occupied Persia
• Shuster returned to the United States and wrote The Strangling of Persia, a scathing indictment of Russian and British meddling in Persian affairs. Shuster decried the influence of the Great Powers and concluded that "it was obvious that the people of Persia deserve much better than what they are getting, that they wanted us to succeed, but it was the British and the Russians who were determined not to let us succeed"
• Iranian political modernization was delayed decades

<>1911my09:Serbia, Beograd | A secret, nationalistic, para-military political organization, "Union or Death" [Black Hand (ID)], composed their "Constitution" [TXT]
*--They sought to wrest from Austrian AND Ottoman control all territories they considered part of the Yugoslav "national" historical heritage

<>1911jy:USA | Great international energy corporation Standard Oil broken into smaller companies

• VIDEOTAPE = [tape 1] Episode 1: Traces the rise of the oil business, controlled by John D. Rockefeller, and how reporter Ida Tarbell wrote a famous expose of Rockefeller. Looks at Rockefeller's legacy, the rise of modern business, and Tarbell's example of modern investigative journalism. The break-up of Standard Oil was one of the most dramatic accomplishments of the Progressive Era. Episode 2: Shows how Shell Oil and Royal Dutch merged, then challenged Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Explores how oil transformed daily life all over the world, made Russia a great power, and helped the Allies win World War 1
• In just a third of a century, oil or petroleum corporations had become the most strategic trans-national industry
• 1912:1970; Next half century's growth of major trans-national petroleum corporations illustrated on three tables =
   Table #1 Table #2 Table #3
• 1921:+; Seattle native Anna Louise Strong visited Russia and reported on the petroleum industry there

<>1911se01:Kiev opera house, in the presence of Nicholas II, Dimitrii Bogrov, both a revolutionary terrorist and and agent of the secret police, assassinated Prime Minister Petr Stolypin, a premature end to a brilliant seven years at the official center of Russian events

• Over the previous decade of political terror SRs in their Battle Organization had carried out 263 acts of terrorism. They assassinated 2 state ministers, 33 provincial governors, 16 city mayors, 7 generals, 15 colonels, and 26 police spies. Seventy seven terrorists were apprehended and executed
• 1911:Polish-born English-language novelist Joseph Conrad published Under Western Eyes [TXT], a penetrating fictional account of Russian émigré revolutionist in underground Geneva. The novel reflected European fascination with "bomb-throwing anarchists" and political terrorism, but also reflected something of Conrad's own Polish family history
• As the 20th century unfolded, did terrorism become a variety of interest-politics [ID]? Whose interests were served?

<>1912:German general (retired) Friedrich von Bernhardi published popular, pro-war book, Deutschland und der nächste Krieg [Germany and the next war] [CWC:55-69]

<>1912:Russian avant painter Wassily Kandinsky published Concerning The Spiritual In Art, And Painting In Particular

• View a large collection of Kandinsky paintings in Olga's Gallery
• Innovation in the fine arts seemed to presage a new revolutionary epoch for mankind, despite the fact that a large portion of the population felt little more than, at best, puzzlement and, at worse, revulsion, when exposed to work like Kandinsky's

<>1912:USA election year marked apex of "progressive" movement

• In opposition to these trends, National Association of American Manufacturers (NAM) resisted welfare reform & social insurance; growing labor-union movement undecided [Rimlinger:62-86]
• West Virginia Brown Mine. A photo by Lewis W. Hine of a young driver in the Brown mine. By this time the young man was a one year veteran, working from 7:00am to 5:30pm daily
• The Progressive Era failed to alter this situation. Legislation regulating child wage-labor was held to be unconstitutional until the Roosevelt New Deal Era
  
  

<>1912fe12:China declared a republic by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925)
*--This the consequence of the Chinese Emperor's abdication and the collapse of the nearly 300-year-old Manchu Dynasty at the end of a tragic half-century of subordination to "Western" imperialist powers

<>1912fe26:Saint Petersburg | Mikhail Rodzianko, president of State Duma (a member of the Octobrist Party) and loyal subject of the tsar, was brave enough to report to Emperor Nicholas II about the antics of Grigorii Rasputin and their great harm to Russia
*--Rodzianko wrote his memoirs of these pitiful events and this pitiful time, Reign of Rasputin [Excerpt = DIR2:440-9 | DIR3:479-90]
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*--"Rodzianko" website with English-language quotes from documents [W]

Contemporary cartoon showed
Nicholas II and his wife
in Rasputin's control

<>1912ap04:Russia experienced widespread labor demonstrations in protest against the massacre of something between 200 and 500 Siberian workers in the gold fields of the Lena River region

• 1912ap09:ap11; State Duma discussed Lena incident [VSB,3:820-1]
• 1912:1914; Despite strict censorship intended to prevent any inflammatory material reaching the screen, many early Russian films achieved a remarkably candid portrayal of social conditions for the laboring poor [EG]
• 1912je23:Health and accident insurance act passed to protect industrial workers. An elected "Social Insurance Council" was created (including labor deputies) [VSB,3:820-1 | Rimlinger outlined 1914:social insurance bill which the Council proposed to Fourth Duma = TXT]
• Despite growing unrest, Russian Marxism found itself, after a third of a century, with only a slim hope of success in Russia. The industrial laboring class was just too small a portion of the population there
  

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*1964de & 1965mr:SlR  | Leopold Haimson, "Social Stability..."

<>1912ap27:Russian decree ordered officers and soldiers of the Russian army in time of war to spare civilians and their properties, to spare the wounded and imprisoned enemy, to  honor the unarmed enemy soldier who sought mercy, and to refrain from plundering the dead [VSB,3:819]
*--This on the eve of an early demonstration of the vicious possibilities of modern total war

<>1912je09:Full five-year term of Third State Duma ended

<>1912je15:Russian judicial reform reinstituted the elected justice of the peace [mirovoi sud] [VSB,3:819-20]
*--The position of the Land Captain in the countryside was weakened, but this widely despised institution continued to function more or less as it had for 23 years

<>1912oc17:1913jy30; Balkan crisis in international relations resulted in two Balkan Wars

• Metaphorically speaking, European Imperialism took this first of two big, booted steps out of Asia and Africa and back into the heart of Europe
• The first step was into the south Slavic territories [this the meaning of "Yugoslavia"] between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire where two vicious Balkan wars were fought in which 142 thousand died. The Ottoman Turkish Empire lost European territory in war [MAP]
• International imperialist conflict struck home, while domestic wage-labor problems intensified in pace with the incredible growth of industrial productive power
• The second step reached further into central and western Europe two years later when the first mechanized total global war broke out (WW1)
• Great powers come into conflict within Europe, and their worlds came shaking down in a short six year period
• It could be said that three-quarters of a century in "the Great Game" now yielded catastrophe
• International imperialist competition [DPH:220-9, 268-71]
• 1894:1914; Correspondence between Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm| 1914:Their telegrams [TXT]
• British documents on the origins of the war, 1898-1914 vv9-10
• S. D. Sazonov, Fateful Years, 1909-1916 [memoirs of Russian Foreign Minister] LND:1928 [Excerpts VSB,3:798-9 | DIR2:467-73]
  

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*--W. Bruce Lincoln, In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War. NYC:1983
*--Donald M. Wallace, Russia (LND:1912) [914.7 W155]
*----------. Russia: On the Eve of War and Revolution (Princeton:1984) [DK262.W29]

<>1912no15:1917oc06; Saint Petersburg | Fourth State Duma lasted nearly five years

• Its first 21 months of peace-time existence were plagued by growing international crisis as well as by deteriorating domestic economic and social conditions
• Its accomplishments did not promise to equal those of the Third State Duma
• See for example the statistics on state finances, 1900-1913, and Kokovtsov's report on economic development, 1904-1914 [VSB,3:822-6]
• Even with the serious crises of war and revolution, it can be said that the Russian economy, since the introduction of the Witte system, had been very beneficial to the grandee elites who were tapped into state power
• Economic conditions among the majority of the population, the wage-labor poor, were altogether another matter
• 1911:1914; Merchant P. A. Buryshkin described Moscow industrialists [VSB,3:826-7 | Russian memoirs]
• Then came World War One with two and a half years of military disaster
• The State Duma collapsed with the Romanov dynasty after 1917mr02

<>1913:German political economist Werner Sombart published Zur Geistesgeschichte des modernen Wirtschaftsmenschen [A contribution to the spiritual history of modern businessmen, translated into English in 1915 as The Quintessence of Capitalism], combining social science methods with the subtle new discipline psychology [CCS,2:98-125]
*--Sombart began as a "sceintific Marxist" but evolved in the direction of Nazi-style nationalism [ID], all this without letting go his desire to be "scientific"

<>1913:Spanish scholar and essayist Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (1921: Eng. translation, The Tragic Sense of Life) [CCC2,2:1096-1104]

• In many ways an "anti-modernist", Unamuno was modern in his use of paradox and irony, and his strong sense of individual independence
• He was also a firm defender of liberalism against the many statist doctrines that gripped Spain in the 1930s
• He died defending this cause

<>1913:USA Federal Reserve Act [ID]

<>1913mr01:Pravda | Russian émigré revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, "Historical Fate of the Doctrine of Karl Marx" (among other things, on Russia and Asia) [StH:3-5 | shorter excerpt: KMM:246-7]
*--Petersburg police filed ID photo of young Georgia revolutionary, Soso Dzhugashvili, who would later gain world fame as Joseph Stalin

<>1913mr03:USA, WDC | "Votes for Women", a detail from cover of the Official program - Woman suffrage procession [ source ]

• In this year in USA (Hartford CN) English Suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst delivered lecture on why feminists must be militant [P20:11 | PWT2:187-90]
• And the English physician Almroth E. Wright published book in which he argued The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage [P20:15]
• 1914wi:English Fabian activist Mabel Atkinson delivered lectures which demanded the combination of women's social and political rights with the general progressive, scientific platform of the socialist movement [CWC:35-54]
• Library of Congress website on USA suffrage movement
• WW1 was about to interrupt the quarter-century-long US Progressive Movement, but "progressivism" was becoming a global phenomenon
• 1914:M.I. Pokzovskaya, Working Conditions for Women in the Factories [P20:95]
• Celebration of "International Women's Day" marked the beginning of the end of the Russian old regime
• 1914:1915; Russian woman writer Marina Tsvetaeva wrote poem for Sofia Pamok on friendship [BRW:143-50]
  
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*--Joni Lovenduski and Jill Hills, eds., The Politics of the Second Electorate: Women and Public Participation, Britain, USA, Canada, Austria, France, Spain, West Germany, Italy, Sweden, Finland, Eastern Europe, USSR, Japan | ch.3:33-51 (USA) ch.13:278-98 (USSR)
*--Donald B. Meyer, Sex and Power: The Rise of Women in America, Russia, Sweden, and Italy
*--Julia Bush, Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-suffragism in Britain
*--Rose Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society 1880-1914

<>1913my29 (NS):Paris | Russian composer Igor Stravinsky "Rite of Spring" ballet caused riots when premiered [Youtube ballet]
*--Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russe staged the performance [W]
*--Diaghilev, "Complex Questions: Our Imaginary Decadence" [RRS:81-90]

1913:Paris. Vaslav Nijinsky
danced in "Afternoon of a Faun"

*--YouTube footage illustrating Stravinsky's biography
*--With the outbreak of WW1, Stravinsky went into permanent exile from his homeland. He was to become perhaps the most important composer of the 20th century. He did not return, even for a visit, until a tumultuous half century had passed
*--In he two decades before the outbreak of WW1, Russian fine arts established themselves at the forefront in a fantastic epoch of European high cultural and pop-art creativity, this on the eve of the great European catastrophe, WW1

1914sp:Berlin Frühlings-Schau [Spring Exhibition] poster

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*--Wagar on early 20th-century Russian arts [3 paragraph TXT]

<>1914ja:Russian Prime Minister was again Ivan Goremykin. Eight months before the outbreak of WW1, power was shifting toward anti-Witte/anti-Stolypin factions
*--The Finance Ministry fell into the hands of insider profiteers, ready to rig imperial procurement in ways that allowed large sums of state revenue to flow into their pockets

<>1914fe:Russian statesman Petr Durnovo memo on futility of war with Germany [TXT | Excerpts = VSB,3:793-8 | GRH:3-23 | DIR2:450-66 | RRC2,2#42]
*--The old police official and ex-Interior Minister was at the end of his career, but he saw that the Russian Empire might be too

<>1914ap:USA CO, Ludlow mining region | US troops opened fire on striking miners and their families temporarily housed in an encampment set up by the Rockefeller Co. The episode came to be known as "The Ludlow Massacre"
*--This US military attack on US wage-labor was commemorated in a song written by Oklahoma-born folk singer Woody Guthrie [TXT | SOUND SNIPPET]

<>1914je28 (NS):Yugoslavia, Sarajevo | Heir to the Austrian imperial throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated by Serbian nationalists. Borijove Jevtic, a conspirator in the plot, described events [Web | Eye:441-4]

• 1914jy21 (NS):Belgrade | Austrian ambassador Baron von Giesl delivered Austrian Response to the assassination [P20:59]
• Austrian imperialists saw this as an evil act of terror with Europe-wide political/military implications
• The Serbian resistance movement saw in it something of a local triumph
• World War One, the Europe-wide catastrophe that had been looming for years, now was triggered
• Local South-Slavic national independence, the century-long dream, was permanently injured as the agony of Yugoslavia stretched into the 20th century and beyond

<>1914jy29 (NS):Paris | Last meeting of the International Bureau of the Second International. European socialists tried unsuccessfully to control rising patriotic fervor in their own midst as WW1 loomed [CWC:69-82]

• 1914jy30 (NS):French socialist leader of immense popular appeal, Jean Jaurès [pix] [pix] [pix], was assassinated by a fanatical French patriot. An idealist, Jaurès sought to reconcile Marxist materialism with his own philosophy. He did not promote revolution. Instead he worked for progressive and peaceful international and inter-class relations. He defended Dreyfus [ID] and worked for the separation of church and state. He believed that political democracy and economic socialism were compatible and were a practical possibility in his time. He struggled against the forces of war growing stronger by the day within the European capitalist political-economies, as well as within the ranks of social-democracy. He advocated diplomatic rather than militaristic resolution of the crisis in Europe. The crisis, in his view, was caused by European policy itself. The long and futile career of Jean Jaurès ended when he was killed on the very eve of the great catastrophe, WW1
• Socialist and wage-labor movements in Europe and North America faced a great crisis. Chauvinistic patriotism [aggressive identification of national grandeur with the military assertiveness of one's own nation-state] spread among the working people. Chauvinistic patriotism dissolved factional struggle of wage-labor with employers into a general stew of national bellicosity. Chauvinistic patriotism displacing whatever internationalism the movements had been able to impart over the previous decades. French and German workers ceased to be brothers and became to one another ridiculous "frogs" and beastly "huns". The people flocked to the flag to sacrifice themselves in this vast and holy struggle
• European social-democracy and the Second International were dealt a blow from which they were only very slowly able to recover. Militarism trumped socialism, but it also devoured the remains of post-Napoleonic European "conservatism" and liberalism, at least for the time being. In general, the command imperative -- the virtues of disciplined management and control -- was first adumbrated in the France of Louis Napoleon [ID] and brought to even higher levels of efficiency under Bismarck in Germany [ID]. It was now amplified in the second industrial revolution [ID] and honed to perfection in the imperialized world [ID]. With the outbreak of WW1, it took center stage, and the cost to Europe was staggering =

<>1914au01:1918mr; World War One represented the second big step of European imperialist militarism, out of the non-European world and back into the heart of Europe itself. The first step occurred only two years earlier

• African anti-imperialist leader from Nyassaland, John Chilembwe (1871?-1915) saw the ironic relationship of Europe's WW1 to its colonial imperialism [BNE:293-4]
• In Europe, WW1 lasted four years and three months and had two fronts, eastern and western [W#1] [W#2]
• Russian declaration of war [ORW:173-4]
• 1910-1914 British documents on foreign affairs.... Series A, Russia, 1859 -1914 (1983)
• British documents on the origins of the war, 1898-1914 v11
• Collected diplomatic documents relating to the outbreak of the European War (1915)
• Germany and the Revolution in Russia, 1915-1918: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry
• Maurice Paléologue, An Ambassador's Memoirs [TXT] (Last French ambassador to the Russian Court)
• General Sir Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914-1917 (1921)
• Stanislas Kohn, The Cost of the War to Russia: The Vital Statistics of European Russia During the World War (1932)
• Stanley Washburn, On the Russian Front in World War I: Memoirs of an American War correspondent. New York:1982
  
• War on the eastern front lasted three years and seven months, until 1918mr
• War on the western front lasted eight more months, until 1918no
• Consider the vast consequences of this fact = the two fronts fell quiet at different times and for very different reasons [EG]
• Eight million, five-hundred and fifty-five thousand died in 1563 days of modern industrial total warfare
• Follow hypertext LOOP on "battlefield" to highlight some key military moments in WW1
• In the largest sense, the war pitted two coalitions of sovereign nation states against one another =
• "The Triple Entente" (England, France and Russia). They were known later as "Allies" when Italy and USA joined this coalition)
• "Central Powers" (Germany, Austria and Ottoman Turkey)
• Every major European capital welcomed the prospect of war with mass "patriotic" demonsterations =
  • St.Petersburg, in the days before actual outbreak. was gripped in war frenzy, as described by Sergei N. Kurnakov [Eye:448-50]
  • Paris| Roland Doregelès, "That Fabulous Day" [P20:60]
  • Vienna| Stefan Zweig, "The Rushing Feeling of Fraternity" [P20:62 | PWT2:266-7]
  • Berlin| Philipp Scheidemann, "The Hour We Yearned For" [P20:63 | PWT2:267-8]
  • London| Bertrand Russell, "Average Men and Women Were Delighted at the Prospect of War" [P20:64]
• SOON euphoria waned =
• Remarque's All Quiet... described trench warfare [P20:67 |PWT2:268-71]
• Siegfried Sassoon, Base Details [P20:69]
• Wilfred Owen, Disabled [P20:70]
• Great World War, 1914-1945 documents everyday life experience of populations in the two great world wars of the 20th century
• International catastrophe of WW1 was the setting within which the Russian old regime fell and out of which Soviet revolutionary events were born =
• In the 77 years from WW1 to 1991, those who sought "liberal" or "social-democratic" transformation of Russian social/service hierarchies fought an uphill battle
• Total war and total statism brought an end to the 200-year history of Russian Imperial social/service hierarchies
• Over the next 77 years, those who would build much more powerful, hyper-modernizing social/service hierarchies flourished [follow LOOP Stalinism]
• War-time origins of Russian revolutions [LOOP]
• GO 1917mr02 for the first decisive revolutionary turning point in WW1
• GO 1917oc25 for the second
• Alexandra, Empress of Russia. The Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914-1916 (1923)
• Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, The Secret Letters of the Last Tsar.... (1938)
• ----------. The Letters of the Tsar to the Tsaritsa, 1914-1917 (1929) [ORBIS]
• A selection of these royal letters  [VSB,3:847-56]
• At first, many welcomed the war with enthusiasm = Mikhail Rodzianko, St. Petersburg [VSB,3:831 | DIR3:511]
• Many participants in events later described their impressions and offered their interpretations =
• S. A. Korff, Autocracy and Revolution in Russia (1923)
• G. T. Marye, Nearing the End in Imperial Russia (1929)
• A. A. Mossolov, At the Court of the Last Tsar, ... 1900-1916 (1935)
• P. P. Gronsky and N. I. Astrov, The War and the Russian Government (1929)
• Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy: A Study of the Evidence (1939; a secondary work, based on personal experience in Russia and filled w/ long quotes from primary documents) [More Pares]
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*--Robert Palmer and Joel Colton, in their 1950s general textbook A History of the Modern World, offered this description and evaluation of the culture out of which this war [WW1] emerged and the damage done to that culture by war's end =

All the belligerent governments during the war attempted to control ideas as they did economic production. Freedom of thought, respected everywhere in Europe for half a century, was discarded. Propaganda and censorship became more effective than any government, however despotic, had ever been able to devise. No one was allowed to sow doubt by raising any basic questions. [...] People were trapped in a nightmare whose causes they could not comprehend. Each side wildly charged the other with having started the war from pure malevolence. The long attrition, the fruitless fighting, the unchanging battle lines, the appalling casualties were a severe ordeal to morale. Civilians, deprived of their usual liberties, working harder, eating dull food, seeing no victory, had to be kept emotionally at a high pitch. Placards, posters, diplomatic white papers, schoolbooks, public lectures, solemn editorials, and slanted news reports conveyed the message. The new universal literacy, the mass press, the new moving pictures, proved to be ideal media for the direction of popular thinking. Intellectuals and professors advanced complicated reasons, usually historical, for loathing and crushing the enemy. In Allied countries the Kaiser was portrayed as a demon, with glaring eyes and abnormally bristling mustaches, bent on the mad project of conquest of the world. In Germany people were taught to dread the day when Cossacks and Senegalese should rape German women and to hate England as the inveterate enemy which inhumanly starved little children with its blockade. Each side convinced itself that all right was on its side and all wrong, wickedness, and barbarity on the other. An inflamed opinion helped to sustain men and women in such a fearsome struggle. But when it came time to make peace [ID] the rooted convictions, fixed ideas, profound aversions, hates, and fears became an obstacle to political judgment.

*--CRH:311-335| Melissa Stockdale, "The Russian Experience of the First World War"
*--Aaron J. Cohen, Imagining the Unimaginable: World War, Modern Art, and the Politics of Public Culture in Russia, 1914-1917 (2008:Nebraska)
*--Boris L. Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (a historical novel)
*--Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, August 1914 (a historical novel)
*--Mikhail Sholokhov, Quiet Flows the Don  (Made into a movie)
*--W. Rutherford, The Russian Army in World War I (1975)

<>1914au04 (NS):Berlin | Hugo Haase, the influential leader of the largest political party in Germany, the Social Democrats, delivered a speech to the German Reichstag [parliament]. He tried to explain why his party seemed to reverse itself and vote for war credits in support of the German Imperial Army as WW1 broke out [CWC:83-7]

• Haase did not personally support the war. He agreed with the European socialist and labor position = The war was in the interests of European imperialist and militarist forces; the war could mean the death knell to social democracy and the negation of the previous half-century of wage-labor activism
• He did, however, accept the nationalistic, German-patriotic argument that the war might have positive progressive consequences, because it was directed against evil Russian despotism
• The "ism" of nationalism had become stronger than the "ism" of socialism
• Thus ended the Second International, which had built on the legacy of the First International
• A half decade later, after WW1 in 1919, a very different sort of international took up the cause = The Third International or Comintern, under the control first of Lenin then Stalin and the USSR
• Over the next 25 years, moderate socialism and tightly constrained labor movements managed however to eke out a certain existence for themselves. Emerging European statism encroached on their independence
• The 19th-century liberal tradition (which was never comfortable with wage-labor activism) seemed to have lost its bounce

<>1914au08(NS):Russian State Duma met in special session
*--Three memoir accounts of this extraordinary session = French Ambassador Georges Maurice Paléologue, Mikhail Rodzianko, and Pavel Miliukov [VSB,3:831-3]

<>1914au09:All-Russian Union of Cities founded at a congress of city mayors in the first days of WW1, suggesting (falsely) that urban political culture might strengthen under conditions of modern total war

• A few days later, an All-Russian Union of Zemstvos formed with much the same goal = to mobilize social forces to the cause of world war, to supplement woefully inadequate efforts of government officials [VSB,3:840-1]. War was just too important to be left to generals, or even to government officials. Total war required total social commitment as well as official governmental commitment
• 1914jy:England | No doubt about it, modern total war was big business. Osbert Sitwell described confronting Basil Zaharoff [English pseudonym of Basileios Zacharias], one of the great millionaire European armaments dealers ("merchants of death") [Eye:444-5] The English made Zaharoff a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath after WW1
• 1914:1915; England, London | Russian born historian Pavel Vinogradov [Paul Vinogradoff here] published works [ID] designed to show the English that they were allied with a people of significant democratic potential. Russians languished under tsarist authority, but longed for democracy in a way the "Western" allies could applaud. Vinogradov had been a professor at Moscow University until his resignation in protest over government repression. He emigrated to England where he became professor at Oxford University. A half-century of Russian university activism had by this time put higher education near the center of the fledgling Russian civil society, and Vinogradov wanted everyone to know that Russian civil society found roots in deep native traditions
• War-time conditions in Russia, as well as in other belligerent nations, did not promote local independence but rather evolution of state-centered social, economic and military mobilizations, early versions of the modern "military-industrial complex" [ID]. On both the eastern front and the western front 19th-century liberal traditions came under fire (so to speak)
• Semen Zagorskii, State Control of Industry During the War
• The first months of WW1 were a time of great patriotic outpouring, but many Russians perceived that the war was an international catastrophe that might provide an opportunity for modern national transformation [LOOP on war-time origins of Russian revolutions]

<>1914au:Belgium suffered swift destruction of its fortresses by German Imperial artillery, notably at Liege [TXT] and very soon after at Brussels [TXT], then Louvain [TXT]. Modern industrial-grade warfare shocked old-fashioned noble sensibilities about battle

• 1914au21: Brussels (the capital of the technically neutral country Belgium) was run over by German forces on their way to the strategic Channel ports and Paris. Richard Harding Davis described events [Eye:445-8]
• After the fall of Belgium, German intellectuals defended German war actions [TXT]
• 1914au23:1914au30; Victory in Belgium was followed two days later by victory on the Eastern Front against Russian Imperial armies. Russia suffered a massive collapse at the "Second Battle of Tannenberg" [W] (*1410:First battle of Tannenberg ID)

<>1914se03:Paris ordered evacuated (prematurely) [W]. Taxis delivered fresh recruits to the critical battlefield that would decide the fate of the great French capital city. But that battle did not take place. The battle of the Marne was a vastly destructive and bloody victory for the French (with timely help from the British)

• For Germany the war in the west was not the desired swift victory, such as was recommended in the Schlieffen Plan. In the west, the war was already starting to bog down in trench warfare. Huge battles loomed in the east. Germany would now have to fight on two fronts, west and east, splitting its troops and materiel in half
• 1914se12:European western front | Brigadier General E.L. Spears described how a French General convinced a soldier, soon to die before a firing squad for deserting his post, that his death was in its way patriotic [Eye:450-1]

<>1914se09:German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg outlined German war aims in which the treatment of European neighbor territories resembled German treatment of its imperialist domains in Central Africa [BNE:208-11]

<>1914se22:German submarine attacks extended the modern battlefield under the sea [W]

<>1914fa:German WW1 effort enhanced by creation of Kriegsrohstoffabteilung [KRA or Wartime Raw Materials Division], a hybrid civilian/military institution

• KRA was designed for effective military mobilization of economic and military resources for the great war. It drew private enterprise into tight association with government
• Brilliant industrialist Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) headed this early example of modern "military-industrial complex"
• Soon Rathenau was out and the German high command took full control over the institution
• 1915:Rathenau reported on KRA to a political group called "German Society 1914" [CWC:117-32]

<>1914no05:Petrograd | Five Bolshevik deputies in Fourth State Duma arrested

<>1914no10:Belgium, first battle around the town Ypres resulted in startling casualties on all sides
*--For German veterans in the post-WW1 years, this event was mythologized and made into a sacred moment of German militaristic valor [EG]

<>1915:1916; Petrograd | Police surveillance on Rasputin revealed ribald details in the everyday life of the Empress' favorite holy man [VRX:21-56]
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*--Elem Klimov historical film about Rasputin, Agoniia

<>1915:German (Czech-born) writer Franz Kafka published "The Metamorphosis" [TXT]

<>1915:London | An elite, insider group of English public men formed "The Round Table" and began publication of think-tank style analysis of official English policy in time of war
*--They took the shocking impressions of the terrible war as a basis for projecting a post-war era in which many of the members of this "private" club were to play an important role [CWC:102-117]

<>1915:1917; Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud delivered series of lectures at the University of Vienna which came to be known as his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis [CCS:73-113 and CCS,1:213-53, also includes some later general descriptions by Freud. Other Freud texts in BMC1:611-17]
*--Freud also began to address everyday life questions about broader public issues, e.g., "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915) [CWC:155-75 | CCS:179-200 | BPE:617-36]

<>1915ja18:Japan confronted China with 21 demands [RWP1,3:224-8]
*1915mr15:US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan responded
*1915my11:Bryan outright rejected Japanese intentions in China and reaffirmed "Open Door" policy

<>1915ja19:ja30; German air attacks on ports in East Anglia extended the modern battlefield into the skies. Submarine attacks at sea continued

<>1915mr18:English-French attack on Ottoman Turkish Empire (an ally of Germany and other Central Powers) at Dardanelles failed

• Great battle at Gallipoli lasted ten months. Allies landed 500,000 troops, of whom 300,000 fell as casualties in this ill-conceived and lost cause [W]
• Ottoman Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal became a national hero as his forces slaughtered British troops (most of whom were colonials, not Englishmen)
• 1915je:Ottoman Empire | Gallipoli assault described by Leonard Thompson [Eye:451-3]
• The attack was a gross failure, resulting in almost 214,000 casualties among the soldiers from the British Commonwealth
• Note how England devoted attention to battlefields outside Europe, in territories essential to British imperial power
• EG = Six months before the Gallipoli disaster (1914fa) British forces landed at the southern tip of Iraq at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (where they flow together and into the Persian Gulf). This vital territory was administered from the city Basra. After WW1 the British saw to the creation there of a "nation" that has become known as "Kuwait"
• 1915oc24:England cultivated rebellious spirit among Arabic subjects of the Ottoman Empire, but not among the Turkish subjects. England presenting itself as a liberator of the peoples of modern-day Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other areas, playing on the ethnic tensions between Turks and Arabs [BNE:295-6]
• 1915no:British colonial and military officials accepted the failure of their invasion to take all of Iraq from the Ottoman Empire. For the time being, they laid claim to Basra
• 1916wi:English diplomat Mark Sykes met with French counter-part François George-Picot, who brought the French ambassador to Russia, Maurice Paléologue, into the discussion. These three devised the “Sykes-Picot Agreement” which proposed to slice up all but a small portion of the core territory of the Ottoman Empire =
• “The sick man of Europe” was terminal, and these "western" allies were ready now -- after a half century of "life-support" -- to assist in what they thought of as some sort of diplomatic "death with dignity". These allies were confident that they would be the main heirs of Ottoman demise. Among these ambitious imperialist schemers, however, Sykes especially feared home-grown, nationalistic, progressive- and independent-minded Mustafa Kemal and the “Young Turks” [ID] who rose up among the ruins of the old Ottoman Empire. He perceived how these Young Turks threatened “western interests” simply by pursuing their and Turkey's own. They intended to be the main heirs of Ottoman demise
• The English and the French pressed their imperialistic claims to the Ottoman inheritance, as did Russia, who had to be tossed some sort of bone in this largely "Western" inspired process. The Agreement would have left very little to "Turkey". If this dismemberment of the old Ottoman Empire had worked, it would have served well the interests of England and France, with little sops in the direction of imperialist allies Russia and Italy
• 1916my16:England and France hammered out a bilateral agreement (their arrogance now excluded other WW1 allies). They agreed on how they would divide between them the Ottoman Turkish Empire's Arabic territories [BNE:296-8 | MAP#1 | MAP#2 | [MAP#3]. Notice the far south-west corner of the map where a specific scheme was proposed to create an internationally administered territory for the relocation of European Jews after WW1

<>1915ap22::Germans the first to use poison gas in the early hours of the unending Battle of Ypres
*--Engineering sciences and industrial technology contributed to modern battlefield effects [W]

<>1915my27:Russian Congress of War Industries Committee formed to promote entrepreneurial cooperation with the imperial state in the mobilization of the Russian economy for modern total war

• Aleksandr Guchkov was president through its stormy two years of existence
• The Association of Industry & Trade issued a resolution on the question of needed coordination of economic efforts in war time [McC1:79-81]
• G/Shotwell
• General M. A. Beliaev informed the French ambassador, "You know all about the dearth of munitions. [...] Just think! In several infantry regiments which have taken part in the recent battles at least one third of the men had no rifles. These poor devils had to wait patiently, under a shower of shrapnel, until their comrades fell before their eyes and they could pick up their arms" [VSB,3:835]
• General Sir Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914-1917 (1921) reported much the same (v1:282 ff.) [Excerpts VSB,3:836-40]
• GO 1915jy
  

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*--MERSH ("War Industries Committee" & "Labor Groups of the War Industries Committee")
*--Lewis H. Siegelbaum, The Politics of Industrial Mobilization in Russia, 1914-1917

<>1915je01:Germany launched first Zeppelin attack on London. A major world capital briefly became a battlefield
*1915su:Eyewitness accounts of scenes from the battlefield on the western and eastern fronts [Eye:453-6]
*1915de19:Allied retreat described [Eye:456-7]

<>1915jy:Russian wartime mobilization aided by formation of Zemgor [an acronym formed by combining Zemstvo + gorod (city), signifying an organization that combined rural and urban groups, a nation-wide expression of civil society]

• 1915jy11:13; All-Russian Union of Cities a further aid to wartime mobilization [GRH:131]
• These were the last significant gasps of two Great Reforms before the old regime collapsed
• The half-century of Zemstvo existence ended as it began, with serious resistance from high-ranking insider-grandees of the autocratic regime, even when Zemstvo efforts represented a rare instance of effective national mobilization
• Here we also see municipal institutions struggling to build on stingy foundations laid by earlier reforms with their failed promise of independent urban public life or at least self-administration
• A. N. Antsiferov, et al. Russian Agriculture during the War
• Ernest Poole, The Village: Russian Impressions
• ----------. "The dark people": Russia's crisis
  

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*--McC1:77-9

<>1915au:Russia | Special war council created to address needs for military mobilization [GRH:123]

<>1915au12:Russian State Duma Chairman Rodzianko appealed to the tsar to reconsider his decision to relieve and personally replace Grand Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich as commander in chief of Imperial Russian forces

• Rodzianko begged Nicholas II "not to subject your sacred person to the dangers in which you may be placed" at the front. He made so bold as to urge that the war had created such a crisis that it might drag Nicholas down if he were to associate himself with it
• Then Rodzianko even more boldly proposed, "Reassure troubled and already alarmed minds by forming a government from among those who enjoy your confidence and are known to the country by their public activities" [VSB,3:844-5]
• The war forced Octobrist Party member Rodzianko into close political alliance with the arch liberal Miliukov, a leading member of the KDs

<>1915au17:Russian universities dealt with admission of women [BRW:192-3]

<>1915au25:Russian State Duma faction, Progressive Bloc, issued a strong anti-governmental program, signed by V. A. Bobrinskii, V. N. L'vov, I. I. Dmitriukov, Sergei Shidlovskii, I. N. Efreimov. Pavel Miliukov, D. D. Grimm, and Baron V. Meller-Zakomel'skii [GRH:134-6 | McC1:71-3 | DIR2:475-6 | DIR3:515-17 | VSB,3:845-7]

• Grand Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich, uncle to tsar Nicholas II, was the supreme commander of Russian troops
• While the Grand Prince inherited Peter the Great's physical stature, he did not inherit Peter's leadership ability
• Emperor Nicholas II went to the front in order to take his uncle's place, thus installing a tsar-commander without stature or ability
• Nicholas' decision to take personal command over a failing war effort was a serious blow to the prestige of the tsar. This fateful move did not improve the quality of military command at General Headquarters. In addition, war failures could now be laid directly at the feet of the Emperor
• Amazing debate in Russian Council of Ministers showed disorder at the highest levels of Russian statecraft [A. N. Yakhontov, Prologue to Revolution]
• The eastern front was sapping Russian political vitality while it brought new life to war profiteers and opportunists

<>1915se:Russian War Industries Committee and Association of Industry & Trade aided wartime effort [VSB,3:841-2 | GRH:124]

<>1915se:Russsia | Zemgor resolution [GRH:149] More resolutions [DIR3:517-19] showed vigorous public effort to aid in military mobilization

<>1915se26::1916my03; Aleksei Khvostov, a member of the Black Hundreds and leader of rightist factions in the Fourth Duma, was appointed Interior Minister
*--Khvostov diverted huge sums from the state treasury to the support of cronies and their radical rightist publications
*--War-time origins of Russian revolutions LOOP

<>1915se29::USA loaned $500M to England and France. The financing of modern war took its dimensions from the giganticism of the second industrial revolution [W]

<>1915oc:German socialist journal Der Kampf [The struggle] published Social Democrat Rudolf Hilferding's "Co-Partnership of Classes?", an attack on the moderate party members who supported the war and an explanation of his rational socialist order in which big corporations and businesses would have a role [CWC:87-102]

<>1915no:Russian sailor rebellion [VRX:57-70]
*--The international battlefield on the eastern front threatened to become a domestic battlefield
*--The western front also experienced military/civilian disorder as the monstrous actualities of modern industrialized war became clearer to all
*--War-time origins of Russian revolutions [LOOP]

<>1916:Russsian author Andrei Belyi published his novel Petersburg, a powerful piece of political fiction which explored in most creative ways the meaning of the 1905 Revolutionary period

<>1916:Swiss Protestant theologian, a leader of a "neo-orthodox" movement in his church, Karl Barth delivered an address "The Righteousness of God" [BMC1:667-70 | BMC4:664-7]

<>1916ja31:The Great Zeppelin Raid showed the potential of that military technology [W]

<>1916fe05:Switzerland, Zurich | Hugo Ball, German avant-garde theater director, opened the Cabaret Voltaire

• Ball was a critic of WW1 and dissenter from the bourgeois culture that nurtured industrial militarism His cabaret was located in a Zurich neighborhood known to various counter-culture innovators, e.g., James Joyce and Vladimir Ilich Lenin. But it was also a neighborhood of international war profiteers and covert spies
• The cabaret soon became the matrix of a shocking anti-establishment artistic movement. Its leading exponents -- the Alsatian Hans Arp and Romanian Tristan Tzara -- named the movement “Dada”. No one was sure what “Dada” meant, but many associated it with the Slavic expression “Yes-yes” = Da, da
• An early Dada manifesto emphasized the unconscious, chaotic and irrational elements of creativity in the fine arts [CWC:368]. Here are some excerpts, with SAC editor intervention to enhance clarity of this loose composition =

  Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family = Dada
  A protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action = Dada
  Knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manner = Dada. Abolition
  Of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create = Dada
  Of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of value by our valets = Dada
  Every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight = Dada. Abolition
  Of memory = Dada. Abolition
  Of archeology = Dada. Abolition
  Of prophets = Dada. Abolition
  Of the future = Dada
  Absolute and unquestioning faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity = Dada
  Elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere =
  Trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record =
  To respect all individuals in their folly of the moment =
  Whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic =
  To divest one’s church of every useless cumbersome accessory =
  To spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them --
  With the extreme satisfaction that it doesn’t matter in the least --
  With the same intensity in the thicket of one’s soul --
  Pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels
  Freedom = Dada Dada Dada
  A roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies = LIFE

• Influenced by Italian “Futurists” [ID], the Dada movement refused to go the direction of Futurists into the glorification of irrational chauvinistic militarism. On the contrary, Dada sought to bring and end to war and the pull down the civilization that depended on it. They were pacifists, draft dodgers and political émigrés from many points of the European compass. They were international and internationalists
• Culture could thus also be seen occasionally as a battlefield
• The movement attracted the French painter Marcel Duchamp [ID]
• Hugo Ball wrote a diary/memoir, Flight Out of Time (1996)
• The Dada Reader: A Critical anthology
• Herschel B. Chipp, ed., Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics (1973)
• Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets
• Dada exerted influence on European artistic movements for almost two decades

<>1916fe21:Battle of Verdun [W] had raged for days and now became a colossal battlefield. The battle consumed 78 divisions and caused 350,000 casualties (wounded, dead or otherwise lost from the ranks)

<>1916fe:German journal Die Frau [The woman] published Max Weber, "The Laws of the Gospel and the Laws of the Fatherland" which sought to explain why Germany had to worship the god of war, in the name of a great nation's destiny, and why at different times one might worship the god of the Sermon on the Mount [CWC:151-5]

<>1916fe::Russian Prime Minister Goremykin relieved of duties, his long career now at an end
*--Goremykin's replacement was a notably unqualified Boris Stürmer
*--Here, as nearly everywhere, the Russian name "Shtiurmer" is written in the German orthography to emphasize one of the reasons for wide-spread discontent associated with his appointment. Another reason for discontent was that Rasputin played a role in this affair. This was perhaps the moment of Rasputin's most elevated influence

<>1916ap:At sea, Adolf K.G.E. von Spiegel described successful U-Boat attack on a steamer [Eye:457-9]

<>1916ap24:ap29 (NS); Ireland, Dublin General Post Office, headquarters for a weeklong rebellion against English imperialist rule

• About 1500 revolutionaries seized key British government buildings and faced a counter-attack by British soldiers, many of them Irish
• A rebel manifesto read, ''In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom''
• About 450 civilians, soldiers, police and rebels died in the uprising
• Great Britain was in the midst of WW1, therefore Irish independence seemed traitorous to many, even to many Irish. Fellow Dubliners, especially wives of the more than 140,000 Irishmen fighting and dying in British uniform on the western front, cursed rebel survivors who were led away in handcuffs
• However, British authorities executed 16 rebel commanders and subordinates, transforming them into martyrs
• W.B. Yeats expressed it this way in his poem "Easter 1916" = ''A terrible beauty is born''
• The Irish electorate was radicalized in guerrilla warfare for independence. The Insurrection inspired Ireland's successful war of independence from Britain
• The  international battlefield was unquestionably provoking outbursts on various domestic battlefields

<>1916jy:Russian Bolshevik leader Lenin, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" [TXT] [CCC3,2:1079-88]

• It shocked many, including Marxists, to read Lenin's analysis of how the overthrow of capitalism might come as much from the non-European social-economic formations under imperialist control as from a mature western European workers movement within a mature capitalist environment
• Lenin insisted that the imperialized non-European world was capitalism's "soft underbelly". Well into the 20th century, this text was the central Marxist critique of European imperialism and ushered in a new age of national liberation movements well beyond the industrializing European world
• 1916mr:Lenin had issued an earlier influential pamphlet, "Socialist Revolution & the Right of Nations to Self Determination", which harmonized deeply with -- and possibly had a direct influence on -- post-WW1 efforts to put the world back together [EG]
• Russian Marxism had experienced several ups and downs since the 1880s, but it now found a way to incorporate the massive issues of war and imperialism into its industrial-revolutionary ideology
• Unknown to even its most visionary leaders, Lenin's Russian Marxism was about to insert itself onto center stage of world history. After twenty years of isolated revolutionary cogitation and factional in-fighting, Lenin was about to show his remarkable skills of revolutionary leadership = In April, 1917, Lenin returned from European exile and opened his campaign to fill the political vacuum caused by the abdication of Nicholas II

<>1916jy01:English and French troops began the tragic Somme offensive [W]

• Reverend John M.S. Walker described the 21st Casualty Clearing Station during the first 3 days of battle [Eye:463-4]. The battle resulted in 419,654 casualties
• 1916se15:Same battlefield saw first use of tanks, English Mark I, built heavily around the chassis of a USA Holt tractor. Bert Chaney described [Eye:466-7]
• Memoirs of this infamous battle [W]
• WW1 was bogging down in trench warfare punctuated by occasional and largely indecisive massive attacks back and forth, straining the capacity of all belligerents. Unrest in the ranks, and among civilians as well, added to the threat that the home front might become a battlefield in many locales

<>1916jy:USA journal Atlantic Monthly 118:86-97 ran Randolph Bourne's critique of the idea of "assimilation" and defense of a more pluralistic or multi-cultural approach to citizenship, "Trans-National America" [TXT]

<>11916oc01:London | Michael MacDonagh described bringing down a German Zeppelin L31 [Eye:467-9]
*--The battlefield was becoming very mechanized, very industrialized

<>1916oc:Okhrana police report on conditions of Russian everyday life [Florinsky,End:133-7,143,165-7,191,214-15 | DRR:8-12]

<>1916no01:Russian liberal oppositional leader Pavel Miliukov spoke before the State Dume [McC1:88-90 | VSB,3:870] He said,

When the Duma declares again and again that the home front [IE=everyday life] must be organized for a successful war and the government continues to insist that to organize the country means to organize a revolution, and consciously chooses chaos and disorganization -- is this stupidity or treason

Voices from the left of the hall answered Miliukov's rhetorical question, "It's treason!" Miliukov continued,

In the name of our responsibility to those people who elected us, we shall fight until we get a responsible government which is in agreement with the three general principles of our program. Cabinet members must agree unanimously as to the most urgent tasks, they must agree and be prepared to implement the program of the Duma majority, and they must rely on this majority not just in the implementation of this program, but in all their actions.

Miliukov clearly joined the fate of the domestic political home front to the fate of the international eastern front of WW1

• Modern total war made the question of military mobilization much more than a simple military question
• In 1905, Nicholas II and his elite Imperial advisers made fateful decisions to betray promises embedded in their October Manifesto
• They failed to link the new Russian Council of Ministers with the new elected and representative Duma [ID]
• They left it under standard tsarist/bureaucratic absolute control
• By protecting the arbitrary power of the old imperial elite, they guaranteed a rocky and damaging beginning for parliamentary government in Russia [ID]
• Now, ten years later, the betrayal came home to roost. The betrayal would soon prove fatal to all parties involved in the wartime struggle
• It had massive consequences for Russian and world civilization
• Within a year, the autocracy and the Duma were swept away [ID], as were liberals, conservatives and social democrats
• All political parties but one were defeated in less than one year after Miliukov's "treason" speech [ID]

<>1916no19::Russian State Duma heard impassioned and sensational attack on Rasputin, delivered by Vladimir Purishkevich, founding member of the Union of Russian Peoples, a zealous monarchist and extreme right-wing delegate to the Duma

• The Duma delegates, right-wing, left-wing, moderate, never mind, they all shouted Bravo [VSB,3:872-3]
• It was after this speech that Prince Feliks Yusupov approached Purishkevich with the idea to assassinate Rasputin

<>1916no25:Petrograd everyday life conditions described by police [1992no29:MNe#48:4]

<>1916de:London | First issue of Russian Co-operator: a Journal of Co-operative Unity appeared with brief history of Russian cooperative movement since 1865 [VSB,3:842-4]

<>1916de:Russian rural conditions described in a letter by Grand Prince Nikolai Mikhailovich to Emperor Nicholas II [DIR3:519-21]
*1916de:Congress of the Nobility issued resolution [DIR3:521-2]

<>1916de16:Petrograd basement of Prince Feliks Yusupov's palace. High-ranking conspirators, led by the dashing Prince, murdered Rasputin, bringing an end to his four years of high court mischief
*--War-time origins of Russian revolutions [LOOP]
\\
Klimov's film AGONIIA portrays the murder in graphic and tense detail

<>1916de19:English government took over shipping and mining in order to maximize efficiency of military mobilization. Under certain conditions, laissez faire or market economics were found inadequate, even in the original home of "capitalist economics". In this other sense, then, the home front was becoming a battlefield

<>1917:Central Asia | Tadzhik people and Khanate of Bokhara lost independence; became vassal to Russia

<>1917:German industrialist and public figure Walter Rathenau, taking lessons from three years of WW1-era military mobilization, designed a model for a thoroughly planned "New Economy" in his book Von kommenden Dingen [In days to come] [CCC2,2:818f | CCC3,2:928-36]
*--The legacy of WW1 military mobilization became a dominant feature of global historical development over the coming century

<>1917ja07:Nicholas II issued a Special Order of the Day [DIR3:522]

<>1917fe:French troops in the trenches on the western front grew restive and soon were in open rebellion against the dreadful war

• The French military mutinies were put down by Marshal Henri Pétain, later famous in WW2 as Nazi puppet ruler of southern France
• As in Russia on the eastern front, so also in France on the western front, modern total war developed a domestic battlefield all its own
• Pétain's memoirs accounted these WW1 days of soldier rebellion [CWC:132-51]

END OF THE ROMANOV DYNASTY

• 1917fe23:mr02; Eight days of intense disorder, sometimes called "the February Revolution", eight days in February that opened eight months of "the Second Russian Revolution" [1905 = "First"] [Some background statistics = McC2:2-7]
• These days were dramatic, but they had long-term causes and consequences. They cannot be understood independently from the WW1 context = GO to the beginning of  war-time origins of Russian revolutions [LOOP]

<>1917fe23:Russia | International Women's Day in Petrograd expanded into massive "street level" demonstrations of war-time working women

• The SD "Inter-district" faction [Mezhraiontsy] issued a proclamation on this occasion [TXT]
• Wartime experience, working and fighting (both in international and internal wars), strengthened women's movements. Women's issues now gripped all Europe and North America
• 1917:English middle-class woman Naomi Loughnan, Genteel Women in the Factories [P20:71 | PWT2:272-4]
• 1916:German woman Magda Trott described Opposition to Female Employment [P20:73]
• 1916my04:New York Times reported from Russian newspapers about Russian Women in Combat [P20:73]
• 1917:Russian radical Ariadna Tyrkova, The Emancipation of Women [DRW:51-7]
• Social and economic protest during the Russian commemoration of International Women's Day represented the domestication of the international battlefield
• International war was becoming internal war; war was becoming revolution

<>1917fe25:Pskov | From his railroad bivouac near the front, Emperor Nicholas II prorogued Fourth Duma

• This political/institutional event, which stretched over five days, until the abdication of Nicholas II, compounded the social and economic disorder =
• 1917fe25:fe26; Petrograd | Commander of the Petrograd Military Disctrict, General Sergei Khabalov, reported on conditions of everyday life [VSB,3:878]
• 1917fe26:Okhranka (political police) reported on conditions of everyday life [TXT] Especially critical was the breakdown of food supply [McC2:7-9]
• 1917fe26:Duma President Rodzianko telegrammed Emperor Nicholas II in Pskov =

  The situation is serious. The capital is in a state of anarchy [he means "chaos"]. The government is paralyzed; the transport service has broken down; the food and fuel supplies are completely disorganized. Discontent is general and on the increase. There is wild shooting in the streets; troops are firing at each other. It is urgent that someone enjoying the confidence of the country be entrusted with the formation of a new government. There must be no delay. Hesitation is fatal.

• "Confidence of the country" was a novel consideration for an establishmentarian politician like Rodzianko. Along with the new demands of total military-industrial mobilization of national life, and consequently the militarization of politics in general, "everyday life" considerations had grown in importance over the previous two centuries

<>1917fe27 (2:30pm):Petrograd | Fourth State Duma ignored Nicholas II’s effort to prorogue it [GRH:277-8]

• Instead, the Duma Executive Committee formed a Provisional Committee [McC2:9-11]. Participant's eyewitness account [TXT]
• USA Ambassador David Francis reported to State Department [DRR:12-14]
• Rodzianko, now the chair of the Provisional Committee, again telegrammed Emperor Nicholas II in Pskov [Chamberlin,1:429 |  McC2:11-12 | StH:16(with letter of Empress to Nicholas II as well)] =

The situation is growing worse. Measures should be taken immediately as tomorrow will be too late. The last hour has struck, when the fate of the country and dynasty is being decided.

The government is powerless to stop the disorders. The troops of the garrison cannot be relied upon. The reserve battalions of the Guard regiments are in the grips of rebellion, their officers are being killed. Having joined the mobs and the revolt of the people, they are marching on the offices of the Ministry of the Interior and the Imperial Duma.

Your Majesty, do not delay. Should the agitation reach the Army, Germany will triumph and the destruction of Russian along with the dynasty is inevitable.

• The Fourth Duma was a large representative and legislative body whose strength had grown over the eleven years since the troubled convocation of the First Duma [ID]. Now, in a time of catastrophic wartime crisis, the Duma seemed to shrink from the center of events. It distilled but a portion of its possible great national authority into the small flask of Rodzianko's "Provisional Committee" with its fresh-minted "Commissioners" [Komissary]. The Duma officially lived on for eight months more, but at this point it ceased to function as "State Duma". Thus the Russian "experiment" in European-style parliamentary politics began with the 1905 Revolution (the "first" Russian Revolution) and came to an abrupt end in the first moments of the second Russian Revolution
• Parliamentary government of this sort was not to be revived until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, seventy-six years later
• As international and domestic ("internal") war raged all around, no one and no organized group planned or knew or guessed what lay ahead
• Duma and tsar were sliding out of the picture. All national institutions, except the Imperial Armed Forces, would be new to the scene in a matter of just three more days =

<>1917fe27 (7pm):Just down the hall from the Duma's Provisional Committee in the Taurida Palace, Petrograd Soviet [Council] of Workers and Soldiers Deputies (summoned earlier) met for the first time and formed its own Executive Committee [GRH:291-2]

• 1917fe27:fe28; Russian State Council telegraphed Emperor Nicholas II [GRH:279-80]
• 1917fe27:mr04; Reactions to February Revolution in its first days [McC1:92-100]
• 1917fe28(02:00):Russian Duma Provisional Committee issued a proclamation [VSB,3:881]
• 1917fe28:Russian General Alekseev telegrammed gloomy report [McC2:12-13]
• Even before Nicholas passed from the scene, a basis was laid for an amazing eight-month contest of strength, a situation that came to be called Dvoevlastie [Dual Power] which pitted the "Provisional Committee" (and subsequent "Provisional Governments") against the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Soldiers Deputies (and subsequent much-expanded "Soviets of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies")
• For better or for worse, a remarkable thing can be said = Only one public person spoke out clearly and persistently with his answer to the question, "what's to be done?"

<>1917mr02:Pskov, at the front | Emperor Nicholas II abdicated in favor of his brother Michael | [TXT] [Russian TXT] [PFM:467-8 | StH:17 | GDR:510-11 | DIR3:524]

• Nicholas did not want the weight of the crown to fall on his hemophiliac son
• Two and a half years of international battlefield extended the reach of war into the domestic life of belligerent peoples, further than ever before
• Now international and internal war combined to bring down the first of the great powers. The Russian Empire was a casualty on the eastern front, but the war did not come to an end. The eastern front raged on for three more seasons
• Was the domestic revolutionary battlefield created by the international battlefield of WW1?
• Would that internal war (revolution) have happened with or without WW1?
• Within a matter of just a few days, the more than 300-year Romanov dynasty was at its end. The Emperor was finished, and the Empire itself was teetering on the brink of disintegration and destruction. Imperial Russia collapsed in the midst of World War One. And even the loyal high command seemed ready to move on to something new =

In all the commanding staff there was not found one man to take action in behalf of his tsar. They all hastened to transfer to the ship of the revolution, firmly expecting to find comfortable cabins there. Generals and admirals one and all removed the tsarist braid and put on the red ribbon" [Trotsky,1]

• Bernard Pares (1867-1949), an English scholar who visited Russia and who was closely familiar with Russian political developments since the 1905 Revolution [ID] was author of several scholarly first-hand accounts of war and revolution there. He concluded the following about the 1917 collapse of the old regime =

  The story which emerges from this material is as tragic as anything I have ever known. Following the events throughout while they were evolving and later filling in one gap after another in my knowledge of them, I have become quite convinced that the cause of the ruin came not at all from below, but from above [PFM:24]

HERE'S A PEAK AHEAD =

• International war-time catastrophe and a simmering domestic revolutionary situation caused the "February Revolution", but the fall of the old regime did not cure its causes, nor did the subsequent eight-month era of ineffective "Provisional Governments"
• Eight months after the February Revolution, armed units of the Petrograd Soviet, led by members of the Bolshevik Party, seized power in an event know as The Soviet Revolution (also known as "The Bolshevik Revolution" or "Great October" in Soviet historiography)
• In early 1918, after three months of troubled negotiations, Soviet leaders were forced to sign a peace treaty with Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk [ID]
• The treaty temporarily stripped from Soviet control much of the western regions of the old Russian Empire
• By 1921, after more than two years of revolutionary Civil War, those territories were partially brought under Soviet rule
• Twenty-five years later, at the end of WW2 [ID], yet more of the old Imperial territory was brought under Soviet rule
• Then 45 years after that, in 1991-1992,  the Soviet Union, the successor to the old empire, dissolved [ID] in one of the most spectacular geo-political transformations of modern world history

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