What was 1905 russian revolution

Search this Guide Search. Russian Revolution of Topics in Chronicling America In , Russian strikes, mutinies, and rebellions led to revolutions in their political system.

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Introduction "Scene during recent rioting in the ancient capital of Russia, where revolutionists and loyal troops are now engaged in a battle which has cost thousands of lives. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Timeline January 23, Bloody Sunday, a culmination of discontentment with war, hunger and rights, occurs; thousands dead or wounded.

February 21, University of St. Petersburg students join strike. Rumours were spread that there were so many deaths, that soldiers disposed of the bodies in the night to disguise the real number killed. The government figure was less than deaths. News of what happened quickly spread throughout Russia. Russia seemed to be on the point of imploding. In January the demonstrators in St Petersburg had merely wanted the tsar to help improve their living standards. By the summer, the demands had become far more political.

Protestors called for freedom of speech to be guaranteed; they demanded an elected parliament Duma and they demanded the right to form political parties. The Finns and Poles demanded their right to national independence. In October , a general strike took place in Moscow and quickly spread to other cities. All manner of people took to the streets demanding change — students, factory workers, revolutionaries, doctors and teachers.

However, the army remained largely loyal to the Tsar, unlike in the wartime conditions of , and the regime did not topple. Starting in the mid th century, the Russian authorities promoted rapid economic modernisation while trying to maintain the traditional social order and political absolutism.

State-led industrialisation, however, created new social groups, such as urban workers ; enlarged the intelligentsia; and facilitated contact between villages and urban centres. These changes also increased the burden of taxation on workers and peasantry, although historians disagree over the degree of disenchantment in the countryside and conditions varied between regions.

The perceived hardship nevertheless exacerbated long-standing peasant discontent with the terms of their emancipation, which required redemption payments for land they considered in their possession already.

Grievances of the lower orders and aspirations for political participation of sections of the nobility and intelligentsia had few outlets. The tsarist regime did not acknowledge urban workers as a group; they remained peasants under the law and were expected to remain subservient to authority, whether that was factory owner or Tsar. The powers of landlords and provincial governors over peasants were wide-ranging and arbitrary. Freedom of speech and association were virtually non-existent.

City councils and rural zemstvos , elected local government institutions granted in the s, were repeatedly restricted. Dates given for the beginning, the high point, and the end of the revolt vary according to the interpretation or social group of interest to the historian. Left-wing social historians concentrate on workers as the driving force. They deem Bloody Sunday on 9 January , when police and soldiers fired on unarmed workers marching to present the Tsar with their demands, to be the onset of revolution; they consider the armed uprising in Moscow in December as the high point.

Unrest in the countryside became more widespread and militant in the autumn of and was not fully suppressed until At that point, a disastrous war with Japan and the replacement of the assassinated hard-line Minister of Internal Affairs Viacheslav Konstantinovich von Pleve — by the more conciliatory Piotr Dmitrievich Sviatopolk-Mirskii — prompted Russian liberals to launch a campaign for political reform.

It ended with the dissolution of the Second Duma and rewriting the electoral laws in favour of ethnic Russian landowners in June The liberal movement was a loose collection of gentry, zemstvo officials and members of the professional intelligenstia: teachers, doctors, lawyers, agronomists, engineers, and statisticians often employed by the zemstvos and referred to as the "Third Element".

Their overarching aim was to secure civil and political freedoms and a popularly-elected national representative body. This umbrella group, however, accommodated agendas from moderate constitutional aspirations to solidarity with revolutionaries and the masses. The campaign brought together Union of Liberation supporters, zemstvo activists, and even members of the radical intelligenstia at ostensibly private gatherings and their resolutions caused a sensation when reported in newspapers.

The Union of Unions supported radical measures to topple the autocratic regime, including the general strike. The disparate liberal movement split in October when moderates, frightened by the spectre of violence, sought to realise their aims through participation in the proposed Duma, while the majority of the radical intelligentsia moved further left. They also carried a petition pleading for an eight-hour workday, the right to establish trade unions, a democratically-elected constituent assembly, and civil liberties.

Labour unrest is hard to measure, but hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike in most months of , demanding better pay, medical care, and political reform.