The Revolution of 1905

Russia’s first revolution began on “Bloody Sunday,” 22 January 1905, when police in St Petersburg fired on a large, peaceful demonstration of workers carrying icons and portraits of the tsar and led by a controversial priest from Ukraine, Georgii Gapon.

Throughout the following spring and summer, a mounting crescendo of strikes enveloped the country. At its high point in October, close to 2 million workers – 120,000 in Ukraine – staged a mammoth general strike. Meanwhile, in the countryside, widespread disturbances spread rapidly, usually taking the form of pillaging and burning the hated landlords’ estates. Even in the armed forces there was unrest and a number of rebellions occurred, the most famous of which was the mutiny on the cruiser Potemkin in Odessa harbor. Refusing orders to fire on the strikers on the shore, the crew of the Potemkin – which consisted mainly of Ukrainians and was led by Opanas Matiushenko, a native of Kharkiv province – rebelled and took control of the ship. One of the few officers to join the mutineers was O. Kovalenko, a leading member of RUP.

In the face of mounting pressure, Tsar Nicholas II grudgingly agreed to concessions. These culminated in the famous October Manifesto (17 October) that granted his subjects full civil rights and promised the establishment of a parliament or duma. It appeared that the empire was about to become a constitutional monarchy.

For the Ukrainian movement, the revolution brought two crucial improvements: it finally broke the government’s resolve to enforce the hated 1876 restrictions on the Ukrainian language and allowed Ukrainians to associate freely. The results were immediate and impressive: in November 1905 there had been only one Ukrainian newspaper and by early 1906 there were already seventeen. The number of publishing ventures jumped from two to seventeen, thirteen of which were based in Kiev. In almost every town there appeared hromady or Ukrainian clubs, as they were now called. In the countryside, Prosvita, a cultural institution modeled after a society of the same name in Galicia, proliferated. Although the first Prosvita in Eastern Ukraine was founded in Katerynoslav at the end of 1905, by the middle of 1907 there were thirty-five in the major cities of Ukraine, each with numerous branches in the surrounding villages and also among the emigrants in the Far East. However, even at the height of the revolution, the government restricted the growth and coordination of the work of these societies for the following reason, as stated in one of its circulars; “Bearing in mind that the measures through which Prosvitas wished to influence the people are considered very dangerous in the present unrest… and also having in mind that Little Russia is a part of one great Russian state, and that the awakening of national political consciousness of the Little Russian people, at this time, cannot be permitted… the administration of the guberniia decided to refuse the registration of the Ukrainian society Prosvita.”⁸

Cooperatives, usually headed by Ukrainian activists, burgeoned: in Kiev province their numbers grew from 3 in 1904 to 193 in 1907, in Podilia from 18 in 1905 to 200 in 1908, and in Kharkiv province from 2 in 1905 to 50 in 1907. It became abundantly clear that once restrictions were lifted, the Ukrainian movement had much greater potential for growth than commonly had been expected.

Although the Ukrainian parties, like all the parties in the empire, were caught unaware by the revolution, they worked feverishly to take advantage of the upheaval. Most dynamic was Spilka, the Ukrainian component of the Russian Social Democratic party, which favored the Mensheviks. It was especially effective in mobilizing the peasants for strikes and demonstrations and drew many of them into its membership. The Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers’ party (USDWP), the successor of RUP, was not as successful in expanding its base of support. Claims by its supporters that its membership reached 3000 during the revolution are probably exaggerated. A noteworthy aspect of its activity, however, was the organization, as a gesture of goodwill to the Jewish Bund, of several units of party members in Poltava and Lubny to maintain order and protect Jewish communities from pogroms. The Ukrainian liberals (URDP) made few efforts to reach beyond the intelligentsia. However, when elections to the Duma were held in the spring of 1906, their influence increased.

The turning point in the revolution occurred in early 1906 when tsarist concessions led to a split among the revolutionaries. Satisfied with guarantees of constitutional government, the liberals agreed to participate in the elections to the Duma. But the radicals, insisting that a social revolution had not yet taken place, decided on a boycott. As a result, the strongest Ukrainian parties – Spilka and the Ukrainian Social Democrats – did not put candidates forward and only a handful of Ukrainian liberals were elected. However, a considerable number of Ukrainians were elected on the tickets of Russian parties. Of the 497 members of the first Duma, the delegates from Ukraine consisted of 63 Ukrainians, 22 Russians, 5 Poles, 4 Jews, and 1 German. When the Duma convened, the Ukrainians quickly organized a parliamentary club consisting of over forty members to formulate their demands.

First and foremost, the Ukrainians in the Duma insisted on greater autonomy for their country.

So displeasing did Nicholas II find his first exposure to parliamentary government that he exercised his prerogative and dismissed the first Duma after only seventy-two days. Only after imposing voting restrictions, which skewed the electorate in favor of the more conservative, propertied classes, did the tsar obtain, in the third and fourth dumas, the conservative majority that he could tolerate. As was to be expected, the Ukrainian parties, being all leftists, were excluded from the latter dumas and Ukrainian issues were thus almost totally ignored. The postrevolution reaction

By 1907, the government, backed by a conservative majority in the Duma, was ready to go on the counteroffensive against “revolutionary excesses.” A state of emergency was declared and all demonstrations strictly forbidden. Military courts were established throughout the empire and hundreds of revolutionaries and rebellious peasants were sentenced to death. Political parties were driven underground and their best-known leaders, including many of the old RUP activists, fled abroad. One by one, the Ukrainian clubs disbanded. Only the Prosvitas – their activity reduced to staging theatricals – and several scholarly societies were allowed to continue. But Ukrainian periodicals, which had appeared in such profusion in 1905, practically disappeared, and all talk of Ukrainizing education now met with open derision on the part of the authorities.

The anti-Ukrainian policies of the government found strong support among certain sectors of Russian society. Petr Struve, a famous liberal spokesman, wrote a series of articles in 1908 that advocated general support for a “Greater Russia” and sharply criticized the Ukrainian movement for its “lack of patriotism.”¹⁰ As Russian nationalism mounted to chauvinistic levels in the years before the First World War, Ukrainian activists were increasingly perceived by many Russians as advocates of “treacherous separatism” or, to use a favorite term of the Ukrainophobes, “Mazepism.” Repeated rumors and innuendo implied that leading Ukrainians were secretly in the pay of the Germans and Austrians.

In Ukraine, certain Russian newspapers, such as Novoe Vremia and Kievlianin, made it a point to alert their readers to the “dangers” of Ukrainianism. In 1908 the Club of Russian Nationalists was founded in Kiev for the express purpose of “waging social and cultural war against the Ukrainian movement and defending the foundations of the Russian state in Ukraine.”¹¹

But the Ukrainians were not without their supporters. In 1911, at the All-Russian Congress of zemstva workers in Moscow, the representatives of the Kharkiv and Poltava zemstva came out strongly in support of the introduction of Ukrainian in the elementary schools. In general, backing for cultural Ukrainianism was widespread among the zemstva in Ukraine. In the academic world, such well-known Russian scholars as the philologists Aleksei Shakhmatov and Fedor Korsh defended the Ukrainian movement against its maligners, as did the Polish linguist Jan Bedouin de Courtney. An especially strong supporter of Ukrainian demands for autonomy was the fiery, Odessa-born Zionist Vladimir Zhabotinsky. However, these well-wishers were rare exceptions to the general hostility of Russian society and of the tsarist government to the Ukrainian movement in the years before the First World War.