On November 9th Trepoff sent in his resignation, and Durnovo, since infamous for his brutality, took office. The same day a violent but ill-considered mutiny broke out among the sailors and gunners at Kronstadt.
From that moment the Government began to recover courage, and we may mark the gradual revival of reaction. Perhaps it was immediately due to the refusal of the Liberal Zemstvoists to take part in a ministry under Witte, unless the promises of the manifesto were guaranteed, and a Constituent Assembly convened. In any case the change was quite apparent in a manifesto of November 12th, declaring the present situation unsuitable for the introduction of reforms, which would only be possible when the country was pacified.
Next day a ukase proclaimed martial law in Poland, and excluded that country from the manifesto, on the pretence that the Poles were plotting against the integrity of the Russian Empire by establishing a separate nation of their own.
The Central Strike Committee answered this ukase on the morrow (November 14th) by declaring another general strike in sympathy with Poland, and Witte, on his side, retaliated by posting an appeal to the work-people, conceived in his most unctuous and fatherly style. It ran—
“Brothers! Workmen! Go back to your work and cease from disorder. Have pity on your wives and children, and turn a deaf ear to mischievous counsels. The Tsar commands us to devote special attention to the labour question, and to that end has appointed a Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which will establish just relations between masters and men. Only give us time, and I will do all that is possible for you. Pay attention to the advice of a man who loves you and wishes you well.”
This appeal was immediately followed (November 17th) by a manifesto to the peasants, reducing their payments for the use of land by one-half after January, 1906, and abolishing it altogether after January, 1907. These payments were still being made under the land settlement that followed the emancipation of the serfs in the early sixties, and their nominal value to the Government was seven million pounds a year. But the apparent generosity of the remission is diminished by the consideration that the peasants had already paid the economic value of the land many times over, and pressure could still be brought upon them to make up the heavy arrears due to successive famines.
Three days later (November 20th), the Central Strike Committee declared the strike at an end. This second general strike was felt to have been a failure. People and funds were still exhausted by the first. Comparatively few of the great factories came out; the object of the strike was too remote from the workman’s daily life to persuade him to endure the starvation of his family for it. So the strike failed. It produced nothing; it did not frighten or paralyse the Government.
Nevertheless, the Strike Committee remained the most powerful body of men in the Empire, and their order commanding the cessation of the strike called hopefully upon the working classes to continue the revolutionary propaganda in the army, and to organize themselves into military forces “for the final encounter between all Russia and the bloody monarchy now dragging out its last few days.”
Such was the situation when, on November 21st I landed at the revolutionary little port of Reval, and went on to St. Petersburg by the first train which had run since the strike ended.