The Revolution of 1905 and the Crisis of Political Values Jack Dickens Introduction On 18 October 1905, Nicholas Il's government published an 'October Manifesto', a document drafted by his premier Sergei Witte, in an attempt to appease a society which had been brought to a state of paralysis by a coincidence of strikes, political opposition to the tsarist regime, and the obstinate response of the regime. . Yet by March 1906 the tsar and his ministers were already reacting against and dismantling many of the tentative promises that they had made at the zenith of the political crisis in October. · The ensuing period was one which caused a crisis and struggle of values, ideas, and temporality, as individuals from across the political spectrum attempted to grapple with the legacies of 1905. In a great variety of historical works, 1905 has been presented as a crucial turning point, a moment in which all was either lost, or all was gained. However, historians of the Russian fin de siècle such as Hans Rogger and Orlando Figes have emphasised the opportunities as well as the failings of 1905 and its immediate aftermath; a moment of euphoria and anxiety, chance, contingency, and potential.1 Instead of viewing the revolution of 1905 only as a closed period of time and political contestation, understood purely through the events of the fateful year and its immediate aftermath, I am going to place and examine how contemporaries responded to its events more broadly within a continually unfolding crisis of Russian politics throughout the fin de siècle. I will not examine the events of 1905-1907 in isolation but suggest how we might seek to trace continuities across the period more generally, and emphasise how the events of these years dramatically intensified pre-existing and deep-seated ideological divisions, as well as invoking novel responses. In doing so the aim is to look at 1905-1907 not as a closed and stillborn revolution per se, as a moment of unprecedented political contest and experimentation within the period of 1890- 1921.2 (i) Context: political values before 1905.3 Note the sheer variety of political values which could be constructed to reform Russian politics and society. ‘Legal Populism' · Developed out of the remnants of the populism/narodnichestvo of the 1870s · The failures of 'going to the people' . The breakdown of Land and Liberty (zemlia i volia) into The People's Will (narodnya volia) and The Black/Universal Partition (Chornyi peredel) The Socialist Revolutionaries . A turn towards seeing the locus of the narod as being in the factories as well as in the countryside. . SR Party founded in late 1901 . Victor Chernov - the leader and outstanding thinker of the SRs · Anti-Marxist 1 See: Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution, 1881-1917 (London: Longman, 1983), p. 213-214; Figes, A People's Tragedy (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 192. 2 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Visions and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 3. 3