Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [280]
In 1905 the great Marxist event, Revolution, suddenly took place—in the wrong way in the wrong country. Russia had not reached the highly industralized stage which Marx had predicated as necessary for collapse. The rising was not the work of a self-conscious disciplined proletariat but simply of exasperated human beings. No one was surprised that it failed, but the most extraordinary aspect of its passage was that it left Socialism virtually untouched.
All over the world people were horrified by the Cossacks’ shooting down of workers on their march to the Winter Palace with their petition to the Czar. When news of the “fiendish massacre” was heard at a Trade Union Congress in Liverpool, the immediate reaction was to raise a fund of £1,000 for the families of the murdered men. When the Russian workers’ protest became a general strike in October, forcing the regime in its fright to grant a Constitution, the event created a profound impression as a triumph of the working class. Workers in Europe held mass meetings, cheered and waved red flags. “Long live the Russian Revolution! Long live Socialism!” shouted Italian peasants fifteen hundred miles from St. Petersburg. But no spark from the Russian fire ignited a general conflagration. The long-awaited spontaneous uprising had occurred, but no Western working class was prepared to overthrow capitalism. Only the Austrian Socialists alertly used the example to bring to a climax their campaign for universal suffrage.
Seizing the opportunity to work on the fright inspired in the rulers by Russian events, Viktor Adler in Vienna proclaimed a general strike for November 28. He worked on the preparations for a month in advance. One party member in a factory where the workers were not Socialists could not bring them to join; no one would talk about the Revolution or the proposed strike or “touch a political subject with a ten-foot pole.” The demonstration, however, was a success. In Vienna, the Mariahilferstrasse was black with thousands of marchers packed so tightly that it took an hour to cover the half mile to the Ringstrasse, where the parade was joined by even greater crowds from other districts of the city. The tramp of the masses, the clenched fists, the red flags, raised again the terrible vision of Mme Hennebau in Germinal. The Austrian regime, frightened by the demonstrations, yielded the promise of manhood suffrage, which went into effect in 1907, virtually the only positive result of the Russian rising.
German Social-Democrats, too, arranged demonstrations for reform of the electoral system in Prussia, which was organized according to the tax roll. The great number of small taxpayers at the base who paid the same total amount as the fewer middle third and as the very few rich at the top were not permitted to elect more than one-third of the local representatives. The Socialists always elected their full third of the municipal councils, but even when they had the votes, could never win control. Nor, confirming Jaurès’ taunt, could they win it on the barricades. Against the steel of the Prussian government, their demonstrations won no improvements.
One effect of the Russian revolution was to lose the Socialists votes. In the German election of 1907 middle-class voters represented by the Progressive party, which previously, when it came to a choice, had supported the Social-Democrats in preference to the reactionary parties, voted for the Conservative candidate. They were influenced too by heavy propaganda of the Navy and Pan-German Leagues, who wanted the election to register an overwhelming mandate for nationalism and imperialism. In the “Hottentot Election,” as it was called from the current war in Germany’s African colonies, the Socialists for the first time since 1890 lost seats.
Leon Trotsky, despairing at the repression under which the Russian