Red Mutiny (47 page)

Okhrana informants reported to Sevastopol that Matyushenko was orchestrating a plot to assassinate Vice Admiral Chukhnin and, more worryingly, had been overheard in September, saying, "There will be a mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet again, and it will be colossal." Periodically, those watching Matyushenko lost his trail. He was suspected, accurately so, of slipping in and out of Sevastopol and Odessa at will. Despite his surreptitious movements his intentions were clear. That autumn, the sailor sent an open letter to the Russian naval officers, warning them, "Change will come soon to Russia. If you think it is far off, you're mistaken. I repeat, it is coming very soon."

Four days after the
Potemkin
surrendered in Constanza, Nicholas invited Sergei Witte—who had likened the mutiny to a grand fable—to Peterhof and offered him the post of chief plenipotentiary to the peace negotiations with Japan. Muravyev, the ambassador to Rome, had withdrawn, and the tsar needed the war concluded. Although feeling, as Witte told another government minister, that he had been called only when "a sewer needed to be cleaned," he was a patriot and the person most qualified for the job. Mandated to secure peace, Witte traveled to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where President Theodore Roosevelt served as intermediary. (For his self-proclaimed role of "knocking their heads together," Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize.) Despite Japan's superior negotiating position, Witte secured a deal by mid-August that required no indemnity for Russia and the loss of much less territory than expected. To reward Witte for his success, Nicholas made him a count.

Simultaneous with these efforts, Nicholas took steps to quell another critical source of Russia's unrest: the call for government re-form. Since February, Interior Minister Bulygin had been convening with grand dukes, ministers, and privy councilors over what kind of representation and rights to offer the people. In early July, a secret conference chaired by the tsar discussed a final proposal. The participants remained divided on how much, if any, reform was needed. Then Count A. P. Ignatyev spoke. A well-known reactionary, he had recently returned from a trip to Odessa and the Black Sea region in the mutiny's wake. To everyone's surprise, he stated that without serious reform the autocracy was finished. On August 6, a month of vacillation later, Nicholas agreed to what would be known as the Bulygin Constitution, promising the creation of an elected State Duma.

As much as Nicholas now believed he had done everything he needed to quiet the rebellions that had started in January and recently erupted in the Black Sea, the worst was yet to come. The war's execution had already marshaled resistance to the tsar and had shown his rule to be corrupt and inept. After all, he had overseen the first loss of a European power against an Asian country in modern history. The new reforms provided for only a consultative body, dismissible at Nicholas's discretion, and its stringent voter restrictions guaranteed that most workers would be excluded. Liberals and revolutionaries alike derided the tsar's halfhearted proposal. Further, he had done nothing to help peasants or workers.

In September, Nicholas and his family took a long Baltic Sea cruise aboard his yacht, the
Polar Star.
During the day, they enjoyed picnics on sandy island beaches and sailed the blue waters. At night, they lit fireworks or settled around the piano to listen to the tsarina play Beethoven. Nicholas was as happy as he had been since his childhood. On September 19, he reluctantly returned to Peterhof, dreading the burdens of state. They came all too quickly.

That same day a strike, a minor affair at a Moscow printing shop, ushered in a national uprising. Twenty-four hours later, printers throughout the city walked out. Over the next few days, workers struck at factory after factory. When the police tried to force the city's bakers to return to work, worried that Moscow would go hungry without bread, a scuffle ensued. Cossack soldiers had to be called in to suppress the unrest. This incident brought Moscow University students into the fray. Workers marched in the streets, more confrontations occurred, and on October 2, a council ("soviet") of workers was assembled to lead the strikes.

Just as the unrest began to lose steam, Prince Trubetskoy died. In St. Petersburg and Moscow, thousands of mourners came out to demonstrate for the liberal hero who in early June had appealed to the tsar for reform, saying, "Do not linger, sire.... Great is your responsibility before God and Russia." The crowds waved red flags and sang the "Marseillaise." In front of the Winter Palace, marchers dropped to their knees and quietly honored those who had fallen on Bloody Sunday.

More strikes followed. Printers, steelworkers, woodworkers, ship-builders,
droshky
drivers, postal workers, and even the Mariinsky ballet dancers—they all participated. Then the railwaymen struck, tipping the scales. Train lines shut down, first the Moscow-Kazan route, then scores of others. Russia stood still. Food prices doubled, then tripled; banks and offices closed; ministers were stuck in their homes; schools were canceled; and telegraph lines and the power supply went dead. In the capital, a lone searchlight above the Admiralty shone at night.

Workers organized more soviets. Revolutionaries—Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, and Socialist Revolutionaries alike—agitated and encouraged more strikes. Apart from the very busy twenty-six-year-old Leon Trotsky, however, Lenin and the revolution's other leaders were in their Geneva remove, far from the swelling, spontaneous insurrection that fanned out across the empire. For the most part, the liberals supported the strikes, announcing as much in the newspapers, but they also feared that the workers would align themselves too closely with the socialists and call for "continuous revolution."

The movement's scale and strength shocked Nicholas, who, as one court steward wrote, had been "living in an utter fool's paradise, thinking that he is as strong and all-powerful as ever." With the
Polar Star
on call outside Peterhof in case the tsar needed to escape the country, he prepared to unleash General Trepov, whose mantra was "spare no cartridges and use no blanks," on the crowds. But even this strong measure offered no guarantee of calming the people. On October 9, with Russia standing on the brink of chaos, Witte cornered the tsar in his Peterhof study and told him he had only two choices to prevent revolution from "sweeping away a thousand years of history": install a military dictatorship and decorate the streets with blood or create a constitutional government as the liberals had proposed. Witte outlined these points in a manifesto prepared in advance of their conversation.

Over the next eight days, as the protests intensified, Nicholas consulted everyone from his wife to his uncles and his ministers. As always, there was division, but most, including Trepov, sided with Witte that much more reform was needed—now. Nicholas finally consented. But on October 17, minutes before signing the manifesto to mandate civic freedom, rule of law, and the creation of a truly representative State Duma, he hesitated. Then he called for his uncle Grand Duke Nikolai, a strong-willed veteran soldier with a physical presence and roaring voice akin to Alexander III, to invest him with dictatorial powers. Before meeting with his nephew, Nikolai told Baron V. B. Fredericks, the minister of court, "You see this revolver"—he withdrew a revolver from his jacket—"I'm going now to the tsar and I will beg him to sign the manifesto. Either he signs or in his presence, I shall send a bullet through my head."

Nicholas signed. Two days later, he lamented to his mother, "My dearest Mama, you can't imagine what I went through before that moment.... From all over Russia they cried for it, they begged for it, and around me many—very many—held the same views.... There was no other way out than to cross oneself and give what everyone was asking for. My only consolation is that such is the will of God, and this grave decision will lead my dear Russia out of the intolerable chaos she has been in for nearly a year." While the tsar whined to his mother that he had violated his sacred oath to uphold the autocracy, the Russian people rejoiced. The October Manifesto, as the document came to be called, was read in churches and city squares. Strangers embraced one another in the street and threw champagne-soaked parties, celebrating. "The greatest moment in Russian history," one diarist recorded. Rallies in support drew tens of thousands in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Odessa, Tiflis, Baku, Minsk, and other cities throughout the empire.

Then true mayhem erupted. Witte took over as president of the Council of Ministers, and the tsar's government attempted to work out the details of these new freedoms. Liberals debated how far to push the reforms and whether or not to support Witte, splitting their ranks. Given an inch, the revolutionaries now battled for more power. Lenin, Martov, and other socialist leaders planned on returning to Russia to foment further rebellion. The soviets organized more strikes, increasingly allowing revolutionaries to dominate their leadership and push toward an armed insurrection. Sensing the government's weakness, soldiers and sailors staged their own protests, and peasants ransacked their landlords' estates.

Fearing the autocracy's downfall, right-wing monarchists fought back with the tacit (and sometimes overt) support of the tsar and his ministers. In the streets, the Black Hundreds, a motley collection of monarchists, marched against liberals, socialists, and the Jews, whom they perceived as the wellspring of Russia's advance toward democracy. In gangs reinforced by common criminals and spurred on by the police, they attacked workers, students, and, most zealously, Jews. In the two weeks after the October Manifesto was announced, a reported three thousand Jews were killed in 690 separate pogroms. The greatest tragedy occurred in Odessa. After the
Potemkin
mutiny, General Kakhanov had been replaced by an even worse type, Baron A. V. Kaulbars, who assisted the Black Hundreds in an orgy of barbarity. Rallying under the cry "Beat the kikes," they torched Jewish homes, pillaged their stores, tossed Jews from rooftops, shot them at point-blank range, mowed them down with machine guns, disemboweled them, and raped them. Over three days, they murdered 800 Jews, wounded 5,000, and left over 100,000 homeless.

Hand in hand with this violence, the Russian people experienced six weeks of what became known as the "Days of Liberty." Unions multiplied. The soviets expanded their reach, especially in St. Petersburg, and they formed militias. Newspapers of every political viewpoint "increased like mushrooms," and nearly absolute freedom of assembly held sway.

These days vanished in early December after the Bolsheviks, prompted by Lenin and mildly encouraged by the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, decided to launch an insurrection in Moscow. Though they lacked the population's general support and held misguided hopes that the military's rank and file would come to their side, they were intoxicated by their own fiery words. Lenin said at the time, "Victory, that for us is not the point at all.... We should not harbor any illusions.... The point is not about victory but about giving the regime a shake and attracting the masses to the movement."

After announcing a general strike and arming some workers, the revolutionaries, led in part by Vasilyev-Yuzhin (the same Bolshevik whom Lenin had sent to connect with the
Potemkin
), seized railway stations and erected barricades in several parts of the city. Over the next few days, a street war developed against the police and soldiers, shutting down Moscow. The governor-general of Moscow then petitioned the tsar for more troops. Sensing that Moscow could fall if the revolutionaries moved on the Kremlin, Nicholas authorized a ruthless repression, bolstered by advice from Witte and Trepov. Soldiers descended on the city with orders to "exterminate the gangs of insurgents." With artillery barrages and a hail of machine-gun bullets, the uprising was put down. Over one thousand Muscovites died.

Emboldened by the military's success, Nicholas then endorsed a widespread terror campaign against his opposition. Socialists were hunted down and killed. Workers and students were whipped with rods and thrown in jail. Peasant villages were torched to the ground. The new interior minister, P. N. Durnovo, instructed his provincial governors that "it is impossible to judge hundreds of thousands of people. I propose to shoot the rioters and in cases of resistance to burn their homes." Over the next five months, the campaign crushed the revolutionary parties, dispirited the liberals, filled the jails, ruined the economy, and left thousands more dead.

Nonetheless, the reforms Nicholas mandated in October could not be dismissed. For the first time, the Russian people had enjoyed the gift, as one observer wrote, "to think and talk freely." This they would not forget. For the first time, the tsar of Russia had agreed to relinquish absolute control over the country, setting in motion the creation of a popularly elected representative body. The people's voice
would
be heard, and Russia would never be the same again.

On April 27, 1906, the State Duma's elected deputies attended a reception at the Winter Palace before they opened their first session. In the vast Coronation Hall, the old and new leaders of Russia stood across from one another, divided by the gold and crimson throne, which was draped with an ermine imperial cloak. To the right stood finely dressed, wizened ministers and state councilors, medal-strewn and gold-braided admirals and generals, and bejeweled ladies in waiting—aristocracy, all of them. To the left stood the recently elected deputies, some in handsome evening clothes befitting their noble rank or wealth, but others in peasant frocks, worker blouses, and priest's cassocks. The two groups stared at one another like enemies across a battlefield.

At
1 P.M.
, the minister of ceremonies struck the floor with his staff and the doors opened. In came Nicholas, dressed in his Preobrazhensky Guards Regiment uniform. His mother and wife accompanied him at his left and right. A church choir chanted as they strode to the throne, lips pursed, crossing themselves as if on their way to a funeral. With his voice trembling at first, Nicholas read a prepared text from the throne, which promised an exalted future for Russia. He concluded with the hope that the deputies would "prove themselves worthy of the confidence bestowed by tsar and people." Then he bowed and solemnly left the hall, not having cast even a glance at the deputies throughout the ceremony. His court applauded enthusiastically. The deputies did not.