Tsar Nikolai Issues What Became Known as the October Manifesto: October 17, 1905

This text comes from our book, Light to the Nations, Part II.

With Liberals challenging the tsar’s autocratic government, with Marxists agitating both the city working class and the rural peasantry, and with the bulk of Russia’s military thousands of miles away, it is no wonder that revolution shook Russia in 1905. News of military disasters, such as the destruction of the Russian fleet in May 1905, only made the revolutionists bolder. Liberals, especially, thought they now could force the tsar to accept a constitutional government; but when in June a delegation of Liberal nobles demanded that Nikolai establish a constitution and a representative assembly, he refused. In August, however, he gave in so far as to allow for the formation of a duma (representative assembly); but, said Nikolai, this body would have no power to pass laws. The duma would only draw up drafts for laws; then the tsar would either approve or reject them.

Nikolai II

The failure of the Liberals to force Tsar Nikolai to accept a constitutional government strengthened the revolutionary socialist parties in Russia. All over the Russian Empire, workers and students went on strike, and peasants staged uprisings in the rural districts. All of these people united from October 10 to 14, 1905, in a massive general strike that halted factory production, telegraph and postal services, and traffic on the Russian railroads. On October 14, 1905, Mensheviks organized a Soviet of Workers Delegates, while Liberals formed a new party, the Constitutional Democrats. Both groups called for the formation of a constituent assembly whose members would be elected by universal manhood suffrage.

Faced with such widespread unrest, Tsar Nikolai thought of abdicating. Upon the signing of the peace treaty with Japan on September 5, 1905, however, Nikolai knew that his army would soon return to Russia. He needed only to bide his time and, meanwhile, pacify the revolutionaries.

So, on October 17, 1905, the tsar issued what has become known as the October Manifesto. In the manifesto, the tsar promised to tolerate non-Orthodox religions, relax laws against Jews, allow Polish schools to use the Polish language instead of Russian, cancel back payments peasants owed the government for loans to buy land, and follow the law in trying political prisoners in court. Most important, the tsar promised to establish a duma whose members would be elected by all the Russian people and whose approval would be needed before any bill could become a law.

Lev Trotsky

But the tsar’s October Manifesto did not bring peace to Russia. Throughout November, peasant uprisings continued to trouble the countryside; and in St. Petersburg, the workers’ soviet, under the leadership of Lev Davidovich Trotsky, was calling for a continuing revolution. Lenin, who had returned to Russia in November, encouraged Trotsky’s defiance of the government and called on his own Bolsheviks to recruit more workers into the revolutionary struggle.

But the socialist revolution was doomed to failure. On December 3, 1905, police in St. Petersburg arrested Trotsky and the soviet delegates. An armed uprising of socialists in Moscow on December 7 led to four days of street fighting, but it too was crushed by troops that had come from St. Petersburg. In the following weeks, military expeditions destroyed whatever was left of the revolutionary uprisings in Russia.