I did not even know about the first Russian revolution.

[No Elephants]

Please excuse me while I try to catch up.

Revolution of 1905
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from First Russian Revolution)


Revolution of 1905



Manifestants before the Bloody Sunday.

Date 22 January 1905 – 16 June 1907
(2 years, 4 months, 3 weeks and 4 days)
Location Russia



The Revolution of 1905 was a wave of mass political and social unrest that spread through vast areas of the Russian Empire. Some of it was directed against the government, while some was undirected. It included worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies. It led to the establishment of limited constitutional monarchy, the State Duma of the Russian Empire, the multi-party system, and the Russian Constitution of 1906.

snip

At the turn of the century, discontent with the Tsar’s dictatorship was manifested not only through the growth of political parties dedicated to the overthrow of the monarchy but also through industrial strikes for better wages and working conditions, protests and riots among peasants, university demonstrations, and the assassination of government officials, often done by Socialist Revolutionaries."<2>

The government finally recognized these problems, albeit in a shortsighted and narrow-minded way. The minister of interior Pleheve stated in 1903 that, after the agrarian problem, the most serious ones plaguing the country were those of the Jews, the schools, and the workers—in that order.<3> The Russian economy was tied to European finances so when the western money markets contracted in 1899-1900, Russian industry plunged into a crisis deeper and more prolonged than that which concurrently struck western European industry. This setback aggravated discontent throughout society in the five years preceding the revolution of 1905.<4>

Every year thousands of nobles who found themselves in debt either mortgaged their estates to the noble land bank or sold their land to municipalities, merchants, or peasants. The nobility had sold off one-third of its land holding and mortgaged the third that remained. The peasants had become emancipated from serfdom.<5> The government had hoped to make them a politically conservative land holding class. The government issued laws providing the peasant would purchase certain land owned by nobility and would pay for it through redemption dues over decades.<5>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Russian_Revolution

According to the wiki, the Tsar's government actually set up communes, in the hope of turning people into conservative land owners.

I never knew that.

While the Tsar's army technically defeated the revolutionaries, a Constitution was adopted in 1906.

There seems to be no end to stuff I never knew.