October Manifesto

the royal manifesto (right), made public on October 17, 1905, had an explosive impact. The country was teetering on the brink of disaster. During the first half of October in Russia, approximately two million people had been on strike. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, not only had major factories closed, but also universities, schools, theaters, and newspapers. Ministers had to use military ships to travel to Peterhof to report to the tsar, since trains were not running.

Nobody knew what to expect. Revolutionaries felt power was within their grasp, while conservatives were hoping that the government would act forcefully. The tsar himself was in a state of utter indecision. If he listened to the hardliners and instituted a dictatorship, there would surely be blood spilled, and a lot of it. But if he made concessions and granted political liberty? For Nicholas II, in whom a sense of the sanctity of autocracy had been nurtured from early childhood, this was almost unthinkable. “It is not my place to squander the legacy that has been handed down to me by my forebears,” he said. But he had to decide one way or the other.

If the memoirs of the outstanding statesman Sergei Witte are to be believed, a dictatorship was only narrowly averted. Witte, who drafted the Manifesto, was told by Baron Frederichs, a member of the tsar’s inner circle, that:

The Manifesto will be signed in the version you presented and your report will be sanctioned… As soon as I returned to my quarters the Grand Duke* arrived. I apprised him of what was happening and informed him that he must establish and take charge of a dictatorship. At this point the Grand Duke took a revolver out of his pocket and said, “You see this revolver? I will now go to His Majesty and beg Him to sign the Manifesto and Count Witte’s program. Either He will sign or I will discharge a bullet into my forehead in His presence from this revolver.” With these words he quickly withdrew. After a while, the Grand Duke returned and conveyed to me the order to rewrite the Manifesto and report in final form and then, when you arrived, to bring these documents for His Majesty’s signature.

It is hard to say whether or not such a scenario actually played out, but it is an intriguing possibility. For Witte, it was important to deflect the charge that he forced the tsar into signing the Manifesto. Nikolai Nikolayevich, a popular general, would not have been in any position to argue with his royal nephew and would have been compelled to accept the post of military dictator. But he also would not have been capable of carrying out this assignment and was therefore prepared to take his own life. It is clear just how inflamed passions had become throughout Russia, from the palace to the peasant hut.

The Manifesto took everyone by surprise. The provincial governors were at a total loss and had no idea what they were supposed to do next. The Manifesto was not a law, it merely ordered the government to introduce political freedoms, to conduct an amnesty, and to convene the State Duma, but by the following day there were demonstrators marching under red flags in all the cities. In some places there were attempts to disburse them, and in some there were counter-demonstrations by the right, with occasional clashes between the two sides. The first consequence of the newly proclaimed freedoms was the spilling of blood.

Nevertheless, many people were ecstatic. There was hugging and kissing in the streets and thanksgiving in the churches. But others were mortified, whether they kept their sense of horror to themselves or proclaimed it loudly. Witte recalled that, after reading the Manifesto, Count Sheremetyev “ordered the Emperor’s portraits in his palace to be turned around so that the painting faced the wall and the hardware faced out, while another portrait was taken up to the attic.”

A hundred years later, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn raised an angry voice against the Manifesto in The Red Wheel. “With a single glancing blow, the Manifesto turned the entire historical course of a thousand-year-old ship, as if it was torn from the autocrat’s hands by a whirlwind of rashness? And almost before he had a chance to read it through a second time?” Later, in the same novel, he wrote, “The Manifesto of October 17 was not just impulsive and poorly conceived – it was unclear and ambiguous. Later absorbed into the fabric of the constitution of April 23, 1906 (which was called the ‘Fundamental Laws’ so as not to vex the Emperor’s ear), it sort of limited autocracy and sort of tried to preserve it. But down the road the Manifesto opened the door to revolution.”

The left was also unhappy.

The tsar took fright and published a manifest.

Freedom for the dead, for the living – arrest!
became a popular refrain. But why freedom for the dead? Freedom was given to the living: to the political prisoners who were released, to politicians who could now legally establish parties, and to citizens who could now send representatives to the State Duma. The Manifesto offered a great opportunity, but it had to be put to good use. Despite all the revolutionary furor, Russia was in the ascendant. Its economy was growing, its living standard was rising, its culture was flourishing. Today historians have compiled a good deal of statistical evidence for this.

If political liberalization had been added to economic prosperity, how wonderful life would have been! During the tense days before the Manifesto was published, Witte’s thoughts kept turning to his grandson, and he was right to wonder about its impact on his descendants.

Today those descendants live in France and the United States. Can we blame this on the fact that on October 17, 1905, the tsar signed a manifesto limiting autocracy, or did the Manifesto represent a positive development and Russia simply did not take full advantage of the opportunities it presented, with its politicians getting bogged down in petty strife and discord and failing to notice the emergence of the Bolsheviks?

You could argue both sides, but you have to agree with Count Witte, who said about another of the tsar’s decrees, “This decree is of the same sort as the Manifesto of October 17, 1905. In other words, it is a set of acts that can be ignored for a while, that can be cursed, but that no one can destroy.”