As I went about trying to figure out how I was going to approach the discussion of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905 I came across the picture above, which I later discovered was part of a collection of Japanese woodblock prints that depicted portions of this war. I was further intrigued by the […]
Week 2 Posts
Father Gapon vs. ‘Our Father’
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Bloody Sunday began as a call from the people, to their leader to make the changes they saw necessary. It ended in the death of hundreds. In 1904, an Orthodox priest named Georgii Gapon mobilized thousands of workers into his ‘Assembly of Factory Workers’. Originally, the purpose of the organization was to provide a safe […]
Октября Манифестъ
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The October Manifesto was created out of the hope for changed, signed out of fear, and not fully used until the “Fundamental Laws” was written almost 6 months later. The year of 1905 proved to hold the biggest trouble for … Continue reading →
The Duma of the Russian Empire
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The Russian Duma was intended to act as a steady transition towards a more democratic Russia, controlled and guided by the Tsar. However, this first meeting of the Duma (seen above) was far from a controlled change. The Duma spiraled out of the Tar’s control and became a public and legitimate source of revolutionary change […]
Weak Fixes for Growing Problems
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Last week, I alluded to Nicholas II’s unwillingness to give up absolute power in a time of growing unrest in his country. Of the failed ploys by Russian monarchists to appease revolutionary forces, none were on such a large scale … Continue reading →
Sticking it to Stolypin: Conflicting Views
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Pyotr Stolypin was a major political player during the last decade of the Russian Empire. He rose to power on the back of the Russian Revolution of 1905, and tended to side with the Octoberists, a slightly more conservative group that agreed to back down if the government followed the October Manifesto it had made(…)
Welcome to the “Party”: Marxism and Leninism in Late-Imperial Russia
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Following the publication of, “The Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, the Marxist ideology took root nearly every European state to some extent. One of the consequences of this dispersion and diffusion of Marxism into European political thought was that the theory differed from region to region and from state to(…)
Our Father, Who Art in Heaven
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While Czar Nicholas was beloved by the people and reverently called ‘our father’, a new rival patriarch entered the Russian economic-political scene in 1904. Father Gapon, an Orthodox priest, retracted from his religious duties in order to organize the “Assembly of Russia … Continue reading →
You’ve got to fight…for your right… to commie. Protests in 20th Century Russia
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“In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forced its way into the censored literature before the government realized what had happened and the unwieldy army(…)
The Russo-Japanese War: Declining Russian Imperialism
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