The Tsar and his ministers believed that a victorious war would solve the problem of his failing popularity at home. In an act of naivety Nicholas provoked Japan to the point that the rivalry became so intense a war between the two nations was unavoidable. On February 8, 1905, the Japanese attacked Port Arthur, and the Russo-Japanese war had begun. A quick, easy victory was expected for the Russians, but the Japanese smashed the Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur, and a poorly-equipped and badly led Russian army was heavily defeated in the important town of Mukden in March of 1905. Far from strengthening the position of the Tsar government, the war, ironically, had weakened it. The railway system was commandeered to keep the army supplied in the Far East, so in the cities the lack of transport led to food shortages and price rises. Factories had no access to raw materials, so they had to lay off workers or shut down completely. At first the people were willing to support the war effort, but when news of defeat arrived they became angry. They demanded higher wages, the formation of trade unions and the abolishment of certain laws. Sergei Witte brilliantly negotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth after the war, in August 1905. Russia did not have to pay any reparations to Japan and very little land was lost to Japan. At home people would have been happier, thinking the defeat had not been so humiliating, since the peace treaty had not made a mockery of their country. This would have improved the Tsar image slightly. Also, post treaty, the railway network had been freed up so food and supplies were now reaching towns and cities in larger quantities. The Tsar was beginning to become more respectable once again, although the loss of the war had actually caused immeasurable damage to the Tsars, once grand, image.
On October 22, 1905, thousands of industrial workers, men, women and children marched to protest peacefully to the Tsar. The march was led by a priest and a union leader called Father Gapon. They marched on towards the Tsar's palace in St. Petersburg, carrying a petition that requested from him the improvement of living conditions, and more freedom of expression. When the crowds were asked to leave, they refused and the guards fired upon the peaceful protesters, resulting in the death of hundreds, and the wounding and trampling of many thousands of people. This tragedy was called ‘Bloody Sunday’. This, in turn, sparked an endless number of proletarian strikes, peasant uprisings, as well as further opposition to the Tsar and the tsarist systems he had meant to protect.
The peasants respected the Tsar greatly, as the Tsar was the leader of their church and a figure for them to look up to. After Bloody Sunday the grand image of him was shattered. Though the Tsar was not present at the Winter Palace, the people believed he was and that he had given the order to fire upon them as nobody was able to tell them any different as a result of terrible communication between town to town. The passing of news was almost like a game of Chinese whispers from one place to another, the message inevitably being changed somewhere along the line, becoming more exaggerated and dramatic as it is passed further on. Political activity increased dramatically: the Bolsheviks were too small to cause any serious trouble and the Mensheviks believed that this bourgeois revolution had to occur so did not try to interfere by attempting a socialist revolution.
Moreover, there was still opposition from the peasants and workers, so the Tsar used his returning troops to put down their demonstrations. There was an alliance between the bourgeois and the working-class revolutionaries. Witte realised that this alliance needed to be broken and proposed the October Manifesto which proposed greater individual freedom. A Duma was also created which would share power with the Tsar. At first the Tsar was unwilling to sign it, but he had no choice and eventually did so. For some, like the Octobrists, the October Manifest was enough to satisfy their needs and views and they were willing to work with it. Others, like the Social Revolutionaries (SR’s), saw what little was being offered to peasants and workers and worried that the Tsar would not keep his promise because of the distrust he had earned from previous occasions, such as the war. So the SR’s decided to continue the revolution with other parties following their lead. Unfortunately, for the extreme right and left wing parties, they had become considerably weaker because they had been divided, so it was much easier for the Tsar to suppress their disturbances.
Peter Stolypin replaced Sergei Witte in April 1906, and he used police and law courts against agitators. The agitators were hung, or sent into exile in Siberia, like Lenin. Trotsky who had played a leading part in the St. Petersburg Soviet was arrested. Striking workers had to stop and start to work again or face starvation and Stolypin used hired thugs in the countryside, known as Black Hundreds, to kill suspected peasant troublemakers. On April 27, the first Duma opened. It would silence middle-class opposition, or so he thought. The voting system was unbalanced where 1 gentry was equal to 45 worker votes and the Tsar had a state council whose members he chose. This state council could veto any legislation, so the only power the Duma had was rejecting or accepting legislation. When the Duma rejected the Tsar legislation, he dissolved the Duma. The Tsar did this twice in one year when parties that held contrasting views to the Tsar gained more votes than parties that complimented the Tsars visions. He had also made reforms to the October Manifesto meaning that the Dumas were filled with his own aristocratic supporters which completely defied the point of having a Duma at all as Russia’s population, again, was not represented how they would have wished.
Overall, how the Tsar survived politically was mainly due to his irrepressible power that he had over Russia and partially luck. Nicholas was lucky due to the fact that the parties that wanted to revolt had been unorganised and missed their opportunity windows to launch successful revolts, as well as the fact that the parties did not combine early on to combat Tsarist Russia. A crucial factor of the Tsars survival was the fact that Nicholas had his thumb on anyone with power and could use them accordingly. He had the full support of his armed forced at the time and this also quashed any resistance to the Tsar and was a deterrence to any thinking of revolt. He relied heavy on many of his right hand men to think up great schemes and solutions to his problems. These people included the likes of Sergei Witte and Peter Stolypin, whom directed the Tsar in the right direction. If it wasn’t for these factors then surely Nicholas II would have been overthrown as he was entirely incapable of running the country alone.
