Bloody Sunday's year forced an October Manifesto Duma
The Russian Revolution of 1905—the First Russian Revolution—began on 22 January 1905 and pushed the empire toward a constitutional monarchy with a legislature. Peasant anger at landlords and semi-feudal burdens mixed with urban crisis after Western money markets contracted in 1899–1900.
Pressure had built for years. Because Russian industry depended on European capital, the tightening of Western credit in 1899–1900 triggered a slump that lasted longer than Europe's own downturn. In the countryside, the emancipation of 1861 had freed serfs without giving them enough land. Plots were held by the village commune, could be neither sold nor mortgaged, and carried redemption payments that many families could not meet; by 1903 peasant arrears on taxes and dues reached 118 million rubles. Nobles, meanwhile, had sold a third of their land and mortgaged another third. Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve admitted in 1903 that, after land, the gravest problems were the Jews, the schools and the workers.
Losses in the war with Japan and urban joblessness added fuel. On 22 January 1905 guards outside the Winter Palace shot at a peaceful march of workers led by the priest Georgy Gapon, destroying what loyalty remained to Nicholas II. Strikes and protests spread and were put down harshly; in June the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied, and in October a railway stoppage grew into general strikes in the two capitals, where workers formed the first St Petersburg Soviet.
The tsar's October Manifesto promised an elected assembly, an end to censorship and broader voting. Sergei Witte drafted the country's first constitution, enacted on 6 May 1906, but it settled little: reformers split into conservative Octobrists and liberal Kadets, while the left argued over toppling the monarchy. The Duma could not pass its own laws, and Nicholas dissolved it in July 1906, installing Pyotr Stolypin to restore autocracy; a second Duma was dismissed in June 1907 and the franchise was rigged toward property owners.
Many historians see 1905 as the prelude to 1917. Potential leaders were largely jailed or abroad at the time, and Lenin later called it the dress rehearsal without which October would have been impossible.
Source: Russian Revolution of 1905
