The 1905 Revolution in Ufa: Mass Politics, Elections, and Nationality

Abstract

Shortly after Tsar Nicholas II issued his Manifesto of 17 October 1905, granting his subjects freedom of speech, assembly, and conscience and promising them personal inviolablity and a new state Duma, Ufa Governor Boleslav Tsekhanovetskii gave permission for a public demonstration.' The large crowd that turned out on 19 October made a striking impression. Eight to ten thousand of the city's seventy-five thousand residentswhat Tsekhanovetskii called nearly the entire city-were present in Ufa's Ushakovskii Park out of curiosity at this extraordinary, exceptional spectacle of a new character. The crowd's diversity was as impressive as its size. Containing members of the intelligentsia, simple people, students, women, workers, petty bureaucrats, officers, and soldiers, the crowd demonstrated the meaning of the October Manifesto to a wide variety of city residents. For the first time, the governor wrote, freedom of speech and assembly were to life.2 The 1905 Revolution brought mass, participatory politics to Ufa, and to much of the rest of the empire. Concerted action by educated elites and the working population pressured the tsar into the concessions contained in the Manifesto, the provisions of which in turn gave legitimacy to an even broader political mobilization that included most of urban society. The Manifesto and the near collapse of authority in October 1905 changed the tsarist administration's exercise of political power and, simultaneously, the population's