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The Satirical Journals of the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907: a Brief Introduction

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The Satirical Journals of the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907: a Brief Introduction EXPERIMENT эксперимент Experiment 19 (2013) 17-23 brill.com/expt The Satirical Journals of the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907: A Brief Introduction Marcus Levitt and Oleg Minin The satirical journals that proliferated during the 1905 Revolution offer a rich and paradoxical portrait of one of the most complex and exciting episodes in Russia’s political, social, and cultural history. On the one hand, the journals describe the impotence of the ancien regime headed by impe- rial Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, and the exuberance of popular libera- tion. On the other, they comment on the government response and the political developments of the revolutionary period often as a nightmare of demons, vampires, monsters, skeletons, executions, anti-Semitic pogroms, rapes and assassinations. Lenin described 1905 as a “dress rehearsal” for the 1917 Revolution, but that does not do justice to its complexity or to the messiness of the events, which followed no predictable script. Its start is usually taken to be “Bloody Sunday,” January 9 (old style), 1905, when a peaceful demonstration of some 50,000-100,000 workers in St. Petersburg taking a petition to Tsar Nicholas II were fired upon by troops, killing about 200 and wounding approx. 800.1) Unrest among workers and demands for democratic reforms had long been building in Russian soci- ety, and Bloody Sunday led to strikes, anti-governmental demonstrations and violence across the Empire. The government’s failure to respond effectively to social unrest, together with the embarrassing and costly military defeats in the Russo-Japanese War (Jan. 27 [Feb. 9] 1904-Aug. 23 [Sept. 5] 1905), kept revolutionary fires building, with outbreaks of urban and rural violence, including a series of mutinies in the navy. The mount- ing storm of discontent reached a crescendo in October when railroad 1) Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. 25. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/2211730X-12341240 18 M. Levitt, O. Minin / Experiment 19 (2013) 17-23 workers helped spread a “Great October General Strike” to cities across the Empire. This, in turn, led to Tsar Nicholas issuing on October 17, 1905, the Imperial Manifesto entitled “On the Improvement of Order in the State” (the so-called October Manifesto), which declared, for the first time in Russia’s history, five basic civil liberties—a kind of Russian Bill of Rights. These were: the right of personal inviolability; of religious con- science; of speech; of assembly; and of association. The manifesto also proclaimed the establishment of a Russian parliament (Duma), thus end- ing the tsar’s absolute autocratic rule, at least on paper. This—and the Revolution as a whole—raised hopes for reform throughout the Empire, especially among its many oppressed nationalities. It opened a new era of political life, which included the formation of Russia’s first legal political parties, unions, soviets and occupational lobbying groups. These organiza- tions challenged the patrimonial autocracy’s exclusive monopoly on polit- ical authority and claimed the right to formulate and express public opinion. It was at this crucial juncture late in 1905, when long-delayed desire for change finally seemed to be crowned with success, that the boom in satir- ical journals began. The declaration of press freedom by the October Man- ifesto and the subsequent relaxation of censorship regulations by the new press laws of November 24, 1905 (the so-called Temporary Press Rules), heralded the long-awaited, legal liberation of the Russian press.2) This period—roughly from October 1905 through the summer of 1906—was 2) In actuality, the Russian periodical press claimed its freedom immediately following the October Manifesto, when many newspapers and journals (not without support from the St. Petersburg and Moscow Soviets) were printed in accordance with what became known as iavochnyi poriadok or publishing without prior approval by the censoring authorities. See M. Ganfman, “Iavochnyi period svobody stolichnoi pechati,” Svoboda pechati pri obnov- lennom stroe (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia t-va ‘Obshchestvennaia Pol’za,’ 1912), pp. 43-61; S. I. Makhonina, Istoriia russkoi zhurnalistiki nachala XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 2002), pp. 24-25. Ironically, the Temporary Press Rules of November 24, 1905, were regarded by the repre- sentatives of the St. Petersburg press community, which by that time were united under the aegis of the Union for the Protection of the Freedom of the Press (Soiuz v zashchitu pechati), as restrictive and limiting. See B. V. Anan’ich, and R. S. Ganelin, Sergei Iul’evich Vitte i ego vremia (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), pp. 252-253; E. A. Valle-De-Barr, Svoboda russkoi pechati: Posle 17 oktiabria 1905 g. (Samara: Zemskaia Tipografiia, 1906), pp. 20-32..
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