The Lena Massacre. Artist: A. V. Moravov
Sources: webpage and Lunapic
1. THE FOURTH DUMA ELECTION CAMPAIGN AND THE TASKS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL-DEMOCRATS.
The political strikes and the first demonstrations over the Lena shootings show that the revolutionary movement among the working masses of Russia is growing.1 This thickening of the revolutionary atmosphere casts a vivid light on the tasks of the Party and its role in the election campaign.
The crisis worsens in new circumstances. The reactionary Duma 2 bestows on the landlords power, on the bourgeoisie an arena for making deals and on the proletariat a small platform. We need this platform and the election campaign for our revolutionary work among the masses. We need the illegal Party to direct all this work in the Taurida Palace and on Kazanskaya Square,3 at mass meetings of workers during strikes, at district meetings of Social-Democratic workers and at open trade-union meetings.
Only the hopelessly blind can yet fail to see the utter absurdity and perniciousness for the working class of otzovism and liquidationism,4 those products of decay and disintegration caked during the triumphant term of the counter-revolution. The experience of the Narodniks has shown us plainly what a scandalous naught obtains upon adding the liquidationism of the "Trudoviks" or of the "legal" writers in Russkoye Bogatstvo 5 or Sovremennik 6 plus the otzovism of the Socialist-Revolutionary "party" (so called).
Let us now sum up the facts brought to light during the pre-election mobilization of political forces. Three camps stand out clearly: (1) The Rights from Purishkevich the Black-Hundred 7 landlord to Guchkov the conservative merchant are heart and soul for the government. (2) The liberal bourgeois (the "Progressists" and the Cadets and various groups of non-Russians) are against the government and against the revolution. (3) The democratic camp where the revolutionary Social-Democrats—anti-liquidationist united and organized—have firmly and plainly unfurled alone their own banner, the banner of revolution.
The counter-revolutionary nature of the liberals is a main feature of the present historical moment. Whoever does not see the counter-revolutionary nature of the "cultured" bourgeoisie has forgotten everything, learned nothing and takes the name of democrat (to say nothing of socialist) in vain. As it happens, the Trudoviks and "our" liquidators see poorly and understand poorly! The Trudoviks and our liquidators are vacillating between the liberals and the democrats, between legal opposition and revolution.
[...]
The hegemony of the liberals in the Russian emancipation movement has always meant and will always mean defeat for the movement. The liberals manoeuvre between the monarchy of the Purishkeviches and the revolution of the workers and peasants, betraying the latter at every crunch. The task of the revolution is to take advantage of the liberals' fight against the government but to neutralize their vacillations and treachery.
The policy of the liberals is to scare Purishkevich and Romanov a little with the prospect of revolution in order to share power with them and jointly suppress it. Their bourgeois provenance dictates their policy, so the Cadets' cheap talk about "democracy" but their actual fusion with the most moderate "Progressists" of the type of Yefremov,8 Lvov, Ryabushinsky and Co.
The tactics of the proletarian Party should be to use the contest between liberals and Purishkeviches over the division of power in order to nurture, intensify and shore up the revolutionary onslaught of the masses without in any way allowing "faith" in the liberals to take hold among them. Then their onslaught will overthrow the monarchy and entirely wipe out the Purishkeviches and Romanovs.
At election time the Party's tactics in any second ballots, in the press or at meetings, should be to unite the democrats against the Rights and against the Cadets by exploiting the liberals' hostility to the Rights. Hence the need for a revolutionary platform that trespasses the bounds of "legality" even now. Hence the slogan of a republic to undermine the liberal slogans of reform in the lair of a "Rasputin-Treshchenkov" constitution.9
Our task is to train an army of champions of the revolution everywhere, at all times, in all types of work, in every field of activity, at every turn of events that may be forced upon us by a victory of the reaction, the treachery of the liberals, the persistence of the crisis, etc.
[...]
The present democratic upswing is an indisputable fact. It is growing with more difficulty, slower pace and more toil than we would wish for, but it is growing. This is what we must "support" and foster during our election campaign and every activity. Our task is to harden the revolutionary democrats with ruthless criticism of Narodnik liquidationism and Narodnik otzovism in order to forge a republican peasant party, but first and foremost, to rid "our own house" of liquidationism and otzovism, to deepen our revolutionary Social-Democratic work among the proletariat and to strengthen the illegal Social-Democratic Labour Party.
The outcome of the growing revolutionary crisis does not hang on us. It hangs on a thousand different factors, the revolution in Asia,10 socialism in Europe. But it behooves us to conduct consistent, steady proselytism among the masses in the spirit of Marxism. This kind of work alone is never performed in vain.
According to one version the strike was sparked by the extremely difficult working and living conditions.
Another version points to in-house shenanigans of Lena Goldfields Co Ltd, a London concern run by competing international banks which together owned about 70% of Lenzoloto shares.
The Lena goldfield miners styled their life "free penal servitude" because they had to work often in icy water knee-deep and because their workday lasted 10-12 hours. In addition a portion of their salary was meted out in the form of coupons redeemable exclusively at company stores where merchandise was often of poor quality. The apparent trigger for the strike was being sold horse meat for beef. Another version says "rotten meat" instead of horse meat.
In the first days of the strike the miners elected a Central Strike Committee and a Central Bureau. Elders were elected to keep the peace in the workingman barracks.
On March 3 (16), 1912, the strikers presented a petition to the administration demanding an 8-hour workday, higher wages, overtime, no fines, no layoffs during the winter season, better lodgings, health services and the dismissal of some administration officials. The Lenzoloto administration agreed to review the petition on condition that work resumed on March 6 (19). Otherwise the company would dismiss and dump the strikers. Irkutsk Governor F. A. Bantysh attempted to mediate in the dispute but to no avail.
On the night of April 4 (17) eleven members of the Central Bureau were arrested by order of gendarme captain N. V. Treshchenkov. That same day several thousand miners went to the Nadezhdinsky Mine with a written petition for the deputy provincial prosecutor requesting the release of their arrested comrades. On the approaches to the mine over a hundred soldiers confronted the miners and on Treshchenkov's order opened fire. There is no official data on the number of victims. Various sources put the figure of dead as low as eigthy-three and as high as two hundred and seventy. Similarly the number of wounded ranges from a hundred to two hundred and fifty.
Rumours about the Lena massacre spread quickly across Russia. State Duma deputies made a formal request to the Government. The causes and circumstances of the massacre were investigated by an official commission headed by former Minister of Justice S. S. Manukhin and by a separate opposition-coalition commission headed by A. F. Kerensky. Both pronounced the miners' working conditions inhumane and the germanderie's volley unprovoked. Chief responsibility for the massacre was laid on Lenzoloto management, the local authorities and Captain Treshchenkov in particular. He was fired and demoted to the rank of private in the infantry regiment of St. Petersburg province. The official report was published on June 7 (20), 1913.
Kerensky later recalled: "As a result of an open investigation, the company's monopoly was rescinded and the administration revamped. Slums where miners and their families dwelled were demolished and rebuilt as decent houses, wages were raised and working conditions improved significantly."
The bloody drama at the Lena goldfields ignited a widespread public outcry. The miners' strike lasted until August 1912, subsequently over 80% abandoned the goldfields. Mass rallies and protests began across the country, over 300,000 people taking part. The liberal and socialist parties blamed the Russian government for the tragedy. The Bolsheviks led by V. I. Lenin assessed the wave of public protests as evidence of a "new revolutionary upsurge" in Russia.
A monument to the victims of the Lena massacre (photograph on the right) was erected in 1967 on the outskirts of the village of Aprelsk, Bodaibo district, Irkutsk region.
Russian sources: The Presidential Library and Yandex Maps.
2 The State Duma was a representative assembly without real authority. Elections to the Duma were neither direct, fair nor universal. The toiling classes and the non-Russian nationalities had limited voting rights. A considerable fraction of workers and peasants had none. Under the electoral law of December 11 (24), 1905, one landlord vote was worth three urban bourgeoisie votes, fifteen peasant votes and forty-five workingman votes. The First and Second Dumas were dissolved by the tsarist government. On June 3, 1907, the government issued a new electoral law which further curtailed the voting rights of workers, peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie, guaranteeing the supremacy of the landlord-capitalist bloc in the Third and Fourth Dumas.
3 Taurida Palace (Tavrichesky Palace) was the venue for Duma sessions from 1906 to 1917. Kazanskaya Square faced the Kazan Cathedral of St. Petersburg and was the scene of frequent revolutionary demonstrations.
4 The liquidators were hefted by the wave of bourgeois desertion. They renounced revolution and the illegal Party, sought to find legal room for themselves in the regime of June 3 (16), 1907, to advance constitutional reforms and to create an "open" workers' party. Theirs was not a Social-Democratic but a liberal labour stance.
The otzovists (from the word otzovat, to recall) favoured recalling the Social-Democratic deputies elected to the Third Duma, for they did not realize the need to use the Duma rostrum and all "legal avenues" for revolutionary Social-Democratic work. They reverted to the no-longer-relevant slogans of 1905. Time showed that their proposal sowed anarchy in the ranks. Most Bolsheviks favoured a boycott in the summer of 1907, but by the spring of 1908 they turned around and very sharply rebutted otzovist propaganda in St. Petersburg and Moscow. After being so roundly defeated in Russia, the otzovists and their fellow travellers eked out a miserable existence abroad as the impotent Vperyod group (Lunacharsky, Alexinsky and others).
5 Russkoye Bogatstvo (Russian Wealth) was a monthly published in St. Petersburg from 1876 to mid-1918. In the early 1890s it was a liberal Narodnik organ and in 1906 it essentially became the mouthpiece of the semi-Cadet Popular Socialist Party.
6 Sovremennik (The Contemporary) was a literary and political monthly published in St. Petersburg from 1911 to 1915. Abound this publication milled Menshevik liquidators, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Popular Socialists and Left liberals. It had no links with the masses of the workers. Lenin described its trend in 1914 as a hybrid of Narodism and Marxism.
7 The Black Hundreds were monarchist bands organized by the tsarist police to combat the revolutionary movement. They murdered revolutionaries, attacked progressive intellectuals and carried out anti-Jewish pogroms.
8 Efremov, I. N. (1866-1945) was a member of the First, Third and Fourth State Dumas, chairman of the progressive faction (left of the Octobrists, right of the Cadets) and a founder of the Progressive Party in 1912. In 1913 he attended the International Peace Congress of Stockholm and proposed the creation of an institute to resolve international conflicts peacefully. In 1914 he joined the French masonic Rose lodge. During the First World War he joined the Duma detachment of the Red Cross on the Austrian front. After the February Revolution he became Minister of State Welfare in the Provisional Government. He helped to found the short-lived Russian Radical Democratic Party and was its chairman. The October Revolution found him in Switzerland as a special envoy of the Provisional Government. He stayed abroad and remained a member of Masonry: Astrea Lodge, Hermes Lodge, Thebes Lodge, Good Samaritan Masonic group, Brotherhood Lodge (part of the Grand Orient of France) and the Grand Scots Chapter. He died in Paris. Russian source: Wikipedia
9 Rasputin, G. Y. (1872-1916) was an adventurer who enjoyed great influence at the Court of Nicholas II. Most strikingly he personified the obscurantism, fanaticism and moral decay prevalent in the upper class of tsarist Russia.
Treshchenkov, N. V. (1875-1915) was a Captain of the Gendarmerie who led the shooting of the Lena gold-miners in April 1912.
10 On February 12, 1912, the Manchu Ching dynasty issued the edict of abdication of Pu-yi the child emperor. This opened the legal door to the proclamation of the Republic of China. Source: Wikipedia.
2. THE REVOLUTIONARY UPSWING.
The great May Day strike of the proletariat of all Russia and the accompanying street demonstrations, revolutionary leaflets and speeches before throngs of workers have clearly shown that Russia has entered a period of revolutionary upswing.
[...]
The three years 1908-10 were a period of Black-Hundred counter-revolution at its worst, of liberal-bourgeois renegacy and of proletarian despondency and disintegration. The number of strikers dropped steadily from sixty thousand in 1909 to fifty thousand in 1910.
A noticeable change set in at the end of 1910. The demonstrations mainly of students on the occasion of the deaths of Muromtsev the liberal and Leo Tolstoy signified that a fresh breeze had begun to blow, that the mood of the democratic masses had reached a turning point. The year 1911 saw the workers go over gradually to the offensive as the number of strikers rose to a hundred thousand.
[...]
Let us recall the experience of 1905. Events show that the tradition of the revolutionary mass strike lives on among the workers. The strike wave of 1905, a mixture of political and economic strikes, involved 810,000 strikers during the first quarter and 1,277,000 during the fourth, these were figures without precedent in the world.
According to tentative estimates the strikes over the Lena events implicated about three hundred thousand workers and the May Day strikes about four hundred thousand. Withal the strike movement grows steadily. Every day the newspapers, even liberal ones, bring news of how the wildfire of strikes is spreading.
[...]
The Russian revolution was the first to develop this proletarian tool of agitation on a large scale, of rousing, uniting and drawing the masses into the fray. Now the proletariat is once more wielding it with an even firmer hand. No power on earth can match what the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat accomplishes with it.
[...]
Hundreds of thousands of revolutionary agitators are appearing all at once on the scene.1 Their influence is magnified by their inseparable bond with the rank and file, with the masses. They tarry among them, fight for the most urgent needs of every worker's family and blend this immediate exertion with political protest and the struggle against the monarchy.
Indeed the counter-revolution has stirred in millions and tens of millions bitter hatred toward the monarchy and instilled in them a crude understanding of what role the monarchy plays, so that now, the slogan of the foremost workers of the capital—Long Live the Democratic Republic!—rushes through thousands of channels in the wake of every strike and reaches out to the backward commons, to the most remote provinces, to the "people" to the "depths of Russia"!
3. CONCERNING THE EVENT OF NOVEMBER 15.
On November 15 the Fourth Duma opened. And on November 15 there was a demonstration of workers in St. Petersburg.1 In view of previous political strikes, and because of them, this demonstration had the importance of a major historical event. The strikes led up to demonstrations. The movement of the masses rose to a higher plane, from political strikes to street demonstrations. This is a great step forward which should be stressed, noted and evaluated for its true worth by all politically enlightened leaders of the proletariat.
The significance of this step forward is all the greater because it coincided with the opening of the Fourth, landlord, Black-Hundred, June Third Duma. A perfectly timed demonstration! Wonderful proletarian instinct, the ability to counter and contrast the opening of the Black-Hundred "parliament" with red banners in the streets of the capital!
Wonderful proletarian instinct...
4. EDGING TOWARDS WAR.
St. Petersburg: Russia will add four dreadnoughts, four cruisers, twelve submarines and thirty-six torpedo boats to its Navy in 1915.
St. Petersburg: In 1917 Russia plans to have fifteen dreadnoughts, two battleships of 17,700 tonnes displacement and numerous warships of lesser tonnage and firepower.
In 1920 the size of the German, Russian and French navies is projected to be the following:
Germany: sixty-one dreadnoughts, forty protected cruisers, seventy-two submarines and a hundred and forty-four torpedo boats.
Russia: thirty dreadnoughts, ten protected cruisers, thirty-six submarines and a hundred and eight torpedo boats.
France: twenty-eight dreadnoughts, twenty heavy cruisers, ninety-four submarines and fifty-two torpedo boats.
Odessa: A Ukrainian peasant reportedly 141 years old died recently.
St. Petersburg: The Minister of War has published the following numbers of suicides in the Russian Army,
1910: seventy-two officers and a hundred and ninety-six soldiers.
1911: ninety officers and two hundred and fifty-seven soldiers.
The Russian wheat harvest is expected to be 50% bigger than last year's.
Paris: It is rumoured that the crew of a Russian Black Sea cruiser mutinied and murdered all its officers. Coastal batteries opened fire and sank the rebel ship, no one survived.
Berlin: A Berliner newspaper states that a Balkan war is imminent since Russia seems bent on supporting Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro in their common cause against Turkey.
St. Petersburg: Students who eschew politics will have a salaried post in the Russian bureaucracy guaranteed.
Vilnius: The Engineers Regiment mutinied. Another regiment was sent against them and a fierce combat ensued which left a hundred dead and two hundred wounded.
St. Petersburg: Germany is aligned with Turkey and will not tolerate a Turkish defeat. Germany and Austria would declare war on Russia if Russia mobilizes in support of the Balkan peoples.
St. Petersburg: The Czarina's son has been diagnosed with a serious kidney ailment. Upon being informed the Czarina attempted suicide by throwing herself out of a second-floor window at the Palace.
Bulgaria and the Turks: The question of the day, very portentous and fraught with dangers, is the following: Will the big powers brook that Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia and Greece expand their territory without doing so themselves? Russia, France and England seem to condone the enlargement of the Balkan states without compensation. But that is not the case with Austro-Hungary whose designs on Novi Pazar and Albania are known from of old. A month has not yet elapsed since the Austrian Parliament declared that its national interest would be imperiled tremendously if Serbia were to expand its territory by one inch [...] and this perhaps would trigger an European war.
St. Petersburg: An attempt to derail the Czar's Imperial train has failed.
London: The talks between the Emperor of Austria and the Czar of Russia have been very reassuring. Both pledged to preserve the peace.
Moscow: A blaze in a workingmen's lodging house killed fourteen tenants. The building was reduced to ashes.
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