The Russian Revolution by Sheila Fitzpatrick

problems. In the words attributed to an earlytwentieth-century Minister of Interior, `a small victorious war' was the best remedy for Russia's domestic unrest. Historically, however, this was a rather dubious proposition. Over the past halfcentury, Russia's wars had tended neither to be successful nor to strengthen society's confidence in the government. The military humiliation of the Crimean War had precipitated the radical domestic reforms of the i86os. The diplomatic defeat that Russia suffered after its military involvement in the Balkans in the late 1870s produced an internal political crisis that ended only with Alexander II's assassination. In the early 19oos, Russian expansion in the Far East was pushing it towards a conflict with another expansionist power in the region, Japan. Though some of Nicholas II's ministers urged caution, the prevailing sentiment in court and high bureaucratic circles was that there were easy pickings to be made in the Far East, and that Japan-an inferior, nonEuropean power, after all-would not be a formidable adversary. Initiated by Japan, but provoked almost equally by Russian policy in the Far East, the Russo-Japanese War broke out in January 1904.
    For Russia, the war turned out to be a series of disasters and humiliations on land and at sea. The early patriotic enthusiasm of respectable society quickly soured, and-as had also happened during the 1891 famine-attempts by public organizations like the zemstvos to help the government in an emergency only led to conflicts with the bureaucracy and frustration. This fuelled the liberal movement, since autocracy always seemed least tolerable when it was most clearly perceived as incompetent and inefficient; and the zemstvo nobility and professionals rallied behind the illegal Liberation movement, directed from Europe by Petr Struve and other liberal activists. In the last months of 1904, with the war still in progress, the liberals in Russia organized a banquet campaign (modelled on that used against the French King, Louis Philippe, in 1847), through which the social elite demonstrated support for the idea of constitutional reform. At the same time, the government was under other kinds of pressure, including terrorist attacks on officials, student demonstrations, and workers' strikes. In January 1905, Petersburg workers held a peaceful demonstrationorganized not by militants and revolutionaries, but by a renegade priest with police connections, Father Gapon-to bring their economic grievances to the attention of the Tsar. On Bloody Sunday (9 January), troops fired on the demonstrators outside the Winter Palace, and the 1905 Revolution had begun.18
    The spirit of national solidarity against the autocracy was very strong during the first nine months of 1905. The liberals' claim to leadership of the revolutionary movement was not seriously challenged; and their bargaining position with the regime was based not only on support from the zemstvos and the new unions of middleclass professionals but also on the heterogeneous pressures coming from student demonstrations, workers' strikes, peasant disorders, mutinies in the armed forces, and unrest in the non-Russian regions of the Empire. The autocracy, for its part, was consistently on the defensive, seized by panic and confusion, and apparently unable to restore order. Its prospects for survival improved markedly when Witte managed to negotiate peace with Japan (the Treaty of Portsmouth) on remarkably advantageous terms in late August 1905. But the regime still had a million of its troops in Manchuria, and they could not be brought home on the Trans-Siberian Railway until the striking railwaymen were brought back under control.
    The culmination of the liberal revolution was Nicholas II's October Manifesto (1905), in which he conceded the principle of a constitution and promised to create a national elected parliament, the Duma. The Manifesto divided the liberals: the Octobrists accepted it, while the