Looking back in 1920, Lenin wrote that without the "dress rehearsal" of 1905, victory in 1917 would have been impossible. The revolution of 1905 did not overthrow the tsar, but it showed every weakness of the old order and gave Russians their first taste of mass politics.

A war that went wrong

In February 1904 Japan attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in Manchuria. Russian leaders had expected an easy victory over an Asian power; instead came defeat after defeat. Port Arthur fell in January 1905, and the Russian army lost the huge land battle of Mukden in early 1905. Worst of all, at the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905 the Japanese navy destroyed most of the Baltic Fleet, which had sailed halfway around the world to reach the Pacific. The war exposed incompetence at the top and deepened anger at home. It ended with the Treaty of Portsmouth in September 1905, brokered by the American president Theodore Roosevelt.

Bloody Sunday

On Sunday 9 January 1905, tens of thousands of St Petersburg workers and their families marched toward the Winter Palace. They were led by a priest, Father Georgy Gapon, who ran a workers' association that the police themselves had once encouraged. The marchers carried icons and portraits of the tsar and a petition asking for an eight-hour day, a fair wage, an elected assembly and civil rights. Nicholas was not in the city. Troops fired on the peaceful marchers, killing at least a hundred and probably several hundred. The day became known as Bloody Sunday. For many workers it destroyed the old image of the tsar as a father who would protect his people if only he knew their suffering.

A year of upheaval

Strikes spread across the empire. Peasants burned manor houses and seized land. In Poland, the Baltic provinces and the Caucasus, social protest mixed with national demands. In June the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied in the Black Sea. In October a general strike shut down railways, factories, offices and even the ballet.

During that strike, workers in the capital created the St Petersburg Soviet, a council of deputies elected in the factories. "Soviet" simply means council. It coordinated the strike, published its own newspaper and for several weeks acted almost like a rival government. A Marxist in his mid-twenties, Leon Trotsky, became its most prominent leader. Soviets also appeared in Moscow and other cities.

The October Manifesto

Facing collapse, Nicholas listened to Witte. On 17 October 1905 he signed the October Manifesto. It promised civil liberties and an elected Duma whose consent would be needed for new laws. Liberals split: the Octobrists accepted the Manifesto as enough, while the Kadets pushed for more. The government then turned to repression. Police arrested the St Petersburg Soviet in December, and troops crushed an armed uprising in Moscow with artillery. Punitive expeditions swept rebellious villages and provinces.

In April 1906, days before the first Duma met, the government issued the Fundamental Laws. These kept for the tsar the power to appoint ministers, dissolve the Duma and rule by decree when it was not sitting. The first two Dumas were dissolved within months. In June 1907 the government changed the election law on its own authority, giving landowners far more weight, and produced a tamer Third Duma.

Stolypin: reform and repression

The strongman of these years was Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister from 1906 to 1911. He believed that a class of prosperous, independent farmers would make the countryside loyal. His land reform let peasants leave the commune and own consolidated farms of their own. By 1916 perhaps a fifth to a quarter of commune households had taken title to their land, though most peasants stayed in the commune. Stolypin said Russia needed about twenty years of peace for this transformation to work.

He was just as determined to crush revolution. Special field courts-martial tried suspects quickly and hanged many of them. The nooses became known as "Stolypin's neckties". In September 1911 Stolypin was shot at the Kiev opera house, in front of the tsar, by a man who was both a revolutionary and a police informer. He died days later.

Worked example: what the Manifesto promised and what survived

Compare a liberal's hopes in October 1905 with the system that existed by 1907. The Manifesto promised freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association. Many of these did take hold in part: legal newspapers multiplied, political parties and trade unions could operate in the open, and Russia had a national elected body for the first time.

But the Fundamental Laws still described the tsar's power as autocratic. Ministers answered to him, not to the Duma. Emergency decrees could bypass parliament. The 1907 election law meant one landowner's vote counted for far more than a worker's. A liberal could conclude that Russia had become a limited constitutional monarchy, or that it had gained only a constitutional costume over an unchanged autocracy. Historians still debate which reading fits better. Either way, the experiment left a large part of educated society disappointed and a large part of the working class convinced that only force would move the regime.