Leon Trotsky: 1905

Leon Trotsky: 1905: CHAPTER 5 -- The Spring
was necessary to plunge into the struggle. But the "fathers" showed no inclination whatever to accept
such consistent political thinking. On the contrary, they immediately took fright lest excessive haste and
impulsiveness break the delicate cobweb of confidence. The "fathers" did not support the "sons"; they
handed them over, hand and foot, to the liberal Prince's cossacks and mounted gendarmes.
Neither, however, did the students receive any support from the workers. This made it manifestly clear
how limited, in reality, was the "banqueting campaign" of November and December 1904. Only the
thinnest, uppermost layer of the proletariat's aristocracy joined it, and "real workers," whose appearance
gave rise to mixed feelings of hostile fear and curiosity, could be counted at the banquets of this period in
single or at most double figures. The deep inner process taking place in the conscious ness of the actual
masses was not, of course, in any way linked with the hastily conceived actions of the revolutionary
students.
And so the students were, in the final analysis, left almost entirely to their own resources.
Nevertheless these demonstrations, after the long political truce caused by the war -- demonstrations
which, given the critical internal situation created by military defeat, bore a sharply political character
and which the telegraph quickly reported to the world at large -- made a much stronger impression on the
government, purely as a symptom, than all the wise admonitions of the liberal press. The government
pulled itself together and made haste to show its mettle.
VI
The constitutional campaign which began with a meeting of several dozen zerntsy in Korsakov's elegant
apartment and ended with the incarceration of several dozen students in the police stations of Petersburg
and Moscow met with a twofold response from the government: a reformist "ukase" and a police
"announcement." The case of December 12, 1904, which remains the finest fruit of the "confidence
policy" of the so-called "spring," made the safeguarding of the basic laws of the Empire an essential
condition for any further reformist activity. Generally speaking, the ukase formulated what had already
been contained in Prince Svyatopolk's newspaper interviews, which were so filled with good intentions
and cautious reservations.
This gives a sufficiently clear idea of its value. The government announcement issued two days later
possessed an incomparably higher degree of political clarity. It described the November conference of
the zerntsy as the prime source of a subsequent movement "alien to the Russian people," and re minded
the dumas and the zemstvos that in discussing the resolutions of the November conference they were
acting against the law. The government pointed out further that its lawful duty consisted in defending
state order and the public peace; for that reason, all gatherings of an anti-government character would be
stopped by all legal means at the authorities' disposal. If the Prince enjoyed little success in his efforts
directed towards the peaceful reconstruction of the country, he was quite strikingly successful in
fulfilling the more general task which was, in fact, the reason why history had placed him for a time at
the head of the government: the task of destroying the political illusions and prejudices of the average
citizen.
The era of Svyatopolk-Mirsky, which opened to the fanfare of the trumpets of conciliation and ended
with cossacks' whips whistling through the air, had the effect of raising to unparalleled heights the hatred
of absolutism among all elements of the population possessing even a modicum of political
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