The Russian Revolution

On February 18, Nicholas signed three documents. The first was a manifesto urging the population to help restore order. The second was an invitation to the Tsar’s subjects to submit “suggestions” “on matters concerning the improvement of the state and the nation’s well-being.” The last was a “rescript” to Bulygin informing him that the Tsar had decided to “involve the worthiest men, endowed with the nation’s confidence and elected by the people, in the preliminary working out and evaluation of legislative bills.”⁷⁰

While experts were drafting the proposal for an advisory (zakonosovesh-chatel’naia) assembly or Duma, across the country hundreds of meetings took place to draw up petitions. The response to its invitation exceeded anything the government had anticipated:

The newspaper carried accounts of the meetings and thus publicized the grievances and demands that were being voiced by a growing number of people. Instead of curbing unrest, the monarch’s ukase proved to be [the] catalyst that mobilized masses of people who had not previously dared to express opinions on political issues. Dominated by liberals and liberal demands, the petition campaign really amounted to a revival, in more intense form, of the liberal offensive of the fall and winter of 1904–5.⁷¹

The liberals seized the opportunity offered by the February 18 edict to press their program, resuming the banquet campaign in the guise of a “petition campaign.” It was now possible, not only at private gatherings but also at public assemblies, to demand a constitution and a legislative parliament. The zemtsy held their Second Congress in Moscow in April 1905: the majority of the delegates would be satisfied with nothing less than a Constituent Assembly. Various professional associations met and passed resolutions in the spirit of the Union of Liberation. The bureaucrats, fearful of the effect of the manifesto on the village, tried to keep it out of peasants’ hands, but the liberals foiled them, using provincial and district

zemstva to distribute it in hundreds of thousands of copies. As a consequence, in the spring of 1905, 60,000 peasant petitions flooded St. Petersburg.⁷²

(Except for a handful, they remain unpublished and unstudied.) The petition campaign inadvertently contributed to the politicization of the village, even though the peasants’ cahiers seem to have dealt mainly with land and related economic matters.*