sides-good jobs, cash payments equal to nearly $1,000, and immunity from future prosecution.
On September 27, Yeltsin explicitly rejected the zero option. Three days later the Orthodox patriarch suggested that the church should mediate. The two sides agreed and began talks the next day. However, on October 3, events moved rapidly to their denouement. The exact sequence of events remains murky. A march organized by purported supporters of parliament was mysteriously allowed through a cordon around the White House. Then, apparently, hidden Kremlin snipers fired on it. Then Rutskoi, instead of calling on the crowd to defend the White House, urged it to storm the city hall, the Kremlin, and the Ostankino television center. Thereafter, acts of violence on both sides, and an unexplained episode of the Kremlin not at first defending Ostankino, ensured that events got out of control and many people were killed. Throughout, the Yeltsin team appeared to use cunning methods to create a situation in which it would appear that parliament’s side, not its own, had used violence first.
That night, the Kremlin team, not wanting to order the army in writing to open fire, had great difficulty persuading key military leaders to go take action. However, the next day a light tank bombardment of the White House softened up the by now depleted body of parliamentarians, who soon surrendered. Twenty-seven leaders were arrested, only to be amnestied four months later. According to the Kremlin, a total of 143 people were killed during the confrontation. However, an impartial investigation by the human rights group Memorial gave an estimate of several hundred.
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Over the next three months Yeltsin exercised virtually dictatorial powers. He shut down the Constitutional Court; abolished the entire structure of regional, city, and district legislatures; and banned certain nationalist and communist parties and publications. With minimal public debate, he pushed through a new constitution that was officially approved by referendum on December 12, although widespread charges of falsified results were not answered and the relevant evidence was destroyed. He also broke the promise he gave in September to hold a new presidential election in June 1994, and postponed the event by two years.
Although in September 1993 most of the parliament’s leaders were no less unpopular than Yeltsin and his government, and although Russia would probably have been ruled no better-more likely worse-if they had won, Yeltsin’s resort in October to violence instead of compromise seriously undermined Russia’s infant democracy and the legitimacy of his government. See also: CHUBAIS, ANATOLY BORISOVICH; GAIDAR, YEGOR TIMUROVICH; MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; RUTSKOI, ALEXANDER VLADIMIROVICH; YELTSIN, BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press. Shevtsova, Lilia. (1999). Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Realities. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The general strike of October was the culminating event of the 1905 Revolution and the most inclusive and consequential of several general strikes that took place in 1905, resulting in the announcement of the Manifesto of October 17. It was initiated first and foremost by workers in larger industrial enterprises, many of whom nursed unsatisfied demands from strikes earlier in the year. Although the ripeness of workers to strike in many diverse working situations across the empire was paramount, the call of the All-Russian Union of Railroad Workers for a national rail strike on October 4 provided a timely impetus. The railroaders’ strike gave them control of Russia’s means of communication, allowing them to spread word of the strike throughout the empire, while their immobilization of rail traffic forcibly idled many trades and industries.
Although workers and the urban public generally found themselves at different stages of organizational and political development in October, a unique synergy arose that stirred them all to greater effort. The spread of the strikes from the generally more unified and mobilized factory workers to artisans, small businesses, and white-collar workers of the city centers lent the October strike its general character and explained its success. In St. Petersburg, the strike’s most important site in terms of its political outcome, the participation of tram drivers, shop clerks, pharmacists, printers, and even insurance, zemstvo, and bank employees, meant that the center of the capital closed down, bringing the strike directly into the lives of most citizens by encompassing the broadest array of occupations and the broadest social spectrum of all the strikes in 1905.
Many of the worker strikes supplemented their factory demands with demands for political rights and liberties, so that the labor strikes blended seamlessly with the broader, ongoing political protests of the democratic opposition. University students in particular, but also secondary schoolers and educated professionals, promoted the strike with gusto and imagination, especially in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other university towns. Students opened their lecture halls to public meetings, where workers met the wider urban public for the first time and where much support for the strike was generated. The volume of this protest gave pause to the police and the government, providing an even greater margin of de facto freedom of speech and assembly. Many craft and service workers took the opportunity to organize their first trade unions. Several political parties, including the Kadet or Constitutional Democratic Party, were organized in this interval. Slower moving populations, such as peasants, soldiers, and policemen, drew inspiration from the widespread protests and began to demand their rights.
The revolutionary organizations prospered from the upsurge of labor militancy in October, recruiting new members and becoming better known among rank-and-file workers. Revolutionary or1086
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ganizers, especially Mensheviks, were indispensable in the creation and leadership of the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, informal bodies of elected factory delegates organized in about fifty locales during 1905, especially in October, to lead and assist strikers over entire urban and industrial areas. The Soviet of St. Petersburg, the most celebrated of these organs of direct democracy, went beyond strike leadership to pursue a revolutionary agenda in the capital. Its arrest on December 3 cut short its political promise, but its brief career and its flamboyant second president, Leon Trotsky, inspired similar organs in later revolutions around the world.
In response to the January strikes, the tsarist government had granted an elected assembly to discuss, but not implement, legislation (the “Bulygin Duma”). To maintain the integrity of autocratic rule, several of Emperor Nicholas’s ministers began to advocate a unified government, headed by a prime minister. Sensing the country’s mood in early October and led by the respected Count Sergei Yu. Witte, they advised Nicholas to grant political and civil rights, legislative authority, and an expanded electorate. Nicholas hesitated between liberalization and forceful repression of the strikers; after deliberating several days, he reluctantly agreed to the former. The Manifesto of October 17 was the most significant political act of the 1905 Revolution. It provoked powerful, euphoric expectations of a total transformation of Russian life. These expectations remained over the long run, themselves transforming Russian politics and culture, though in the short run the promise of a constitutional state divided the opposition and enabled the government to restore the authority of the autocracy by early 1906 through a bloody repression not possible in October. See also: BLOODY SUNDAY; DUMA; NICHOLAS II; REVOLUTION OF 1905; WORKERS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ascher, Abraham. (1988). The Revolution of 1905, Vol. 1: Russia in Disarray. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Engelstein, Laura. (1982). Moscow, 1905: Working Class Organization and Political Conflict. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Harcave, Sidney. (1964). First Blood: The Russian Revolution of 1905. New York: Macmillan. Reichman, Henry. (1987). Railwaymen and Revolution: Russia, 1905. Berkeley: University of California Press. Surh, Gerald D. (1989). 1905 in St. Petersburg: Labor, Society, and Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Trotsky, Leon. (1971). 1905, tr. Anya Bostock. New York: Random House. Verner, Andrew M. (1990). The Crisis of Russian Autocracy: Nicholas II and the 1905 Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
