A people's tragedy

Hardly surprising, then, that such a large and prominent part in the revolutionary movement should have been played by the Jews.fn8 Even Witte, speaking in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, was forced to admit that if the Jews ‘comprise about 50 per cent of the membership in the revolutionary parties’ then this was ‘the fault of our government. The Jews are too oppressed.’ The Jewish Bund was Russia’s first mass-based Marxist party. Established in 1897, it had 35,000 members by 1905. It declared the Jews to be a ‘nation’ and demanded full national autonomy for them, with Yiddish as the official language, within a Russian federation. Such demands were rejected by the Russian Marxists (including Iulii Martov and Leon Trotsky, who were themselves Jews), who put class interests above nationalist ones and who, in any case, were deeply hostile to the Jewish nationalism of the Bundists (Georgii Plekhanov accused them of being Zionists who were afraid of sea-sickness). The result was that the two Marxist movements went their separate ways. There was also a large Zionist movement, which the tsarist regime had allowed to grow after the early 1880s because it advocated Jewish emigration in reponse to the pogroms; although it too was banned in 1903 on the grounds that inside Russia it served as a vehicle for Jewish nationalism.65

It was not just the Jews who were turning to nationalism in response to the growing discrimination against them at the turn of the century. Throughout the Empire the effect of the Russification campaign was to drive the non-Russians into the new anti-tsarist parties. Virtually the whole of the Finnish population rallied to the Young Finns, the Social Democrats and the Party of Active Resistance, against the imposition of Russian rule and military conscription, in contravention of Finland’s rights of self-rule, after 1899. In the Baltic provinces the native population turned to the Social Democrats to defend their national rights against the tsarist state. In Poland they turned to the Polish Socialist Party, which argued that the Polish problem could only be solved by the combination of a social and a national revolution. In the Ukraine it was the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, established in 1902, which made the early running in the national and social revolution, playing a key role in the peasant uprisings of 1902, although it was quickly overshadowed by the Ukrainian National Party and the Ukrainian Social Democrats. In Georgia the Social Democrats led the national revolution, which was both anti-Russian and socialist, in 1904–6. Even the Armenians, who had always been the most loyal to their Russian masters, rallied to the Dashnaks after 1903 in opposition to the Russification of their local schools. In short, the whole of the Tsarist Empire was ripe for collapse on the eve of the 1905 Revolution. Its peoples wanted to escape.

3 Icons and Cockroaches

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i A World Apart

Early one morning in March 1888 Mikhail Romas left Kazan and sailed thirty miles down the Volga River as far as the village of Krasnovidovo. There he hoped to change the life of the peasants by setting up a co-operative store. Romas was a Populist, a member of the clandestine People’s Right group, who had recently returned from twelve years in prison and exile for trying to organize the peasants. Siberia had not made him change his views. At Krasnovidovo he aimed to rescue the villagers from the clutches of the local merchants by selling them cheap manufactured goods and organizing them into a gardeners’ co-operative selling fruit and vegetables direct to Kazan.