In my opinion the failure of the revolution in 1905 was caused by many different contributing factors, however the key reason for the failure, was the success of state authority and the Tsar retaining control. If the Tsarist state had collapsed, as in 1917, the revolution would have inevitably been successful. A revolution means to forcibly overthrow a government. In February 1905, 400,000 workers went on strike due to the response of the bloody Sunday; the strikes were organized by the unhappy workers and were not organized by the revolutionaries.
The most significant reason for the fail of the 1905 revolution was the armed forces hadn’t yet become sufficiently disillusioned by the Tsarist regime in the same way that many peasants and working class had. In October 1905 the government began to reassert its authority. It supported the formation of a new political group called the union of Russian people, which lead to the pro-government terrorist group. The Black Hundreds, a counter revolutionary pro-government terrorist group which also helped the military to hunt down and execute thousands of known reformers. The black hundreds were extremely dominant as they had the Tsars back. The army stayed loyal to the Tsar, crushing revolutionary disturbances and arresting thousands of revolutionaries who opposed the tsar and were exiled from Siberia
One of the reasons why the 1905 Russia revolution had failed was because the revolutionaries had no leadership. This meant that they were unorganized and therefore attacks and industrial action were randomly taking place according to other strikes. Therefore the threat from each individual strike was much less of a threat to the Tsarist regime than they would have been had the industrial action been coordinated so that they happened at the same time. This allowed the Tsar and the army to be able to eliminate the individual threats much easier than had there been widespread attacks. Therefore the Russian revolution of 1905 failed because the revolutionaries were too easy to defend against as their attack were not powerful enough meaning the army only had to stop one group at a time meaning the revolutionaries suffered heavier casualties than they would have done.
Secondly, the lack of leadership meant that the different revolutionaries had different aims meaning that they were not always on the same side and would often have fights as the social revolutionaries wanted land to be owned by the peasants and to share power with the Tsar where the social democrats wanted to remove the Tsar completely. The social democrats that were divided between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, wanted to completely change society and remove the Tsar. This meant the revolutionaries were a threat to themselves as well as the government. Therefore the 1905 revolution failed because of the different aims of the people meaning that they did not unite to one cause. Also the revolutionaries were split by the October manifesto which introduced a new more democratic government a duma which was first elected in 1906 it contained large numbers of deputies who wanted social reform. This pleased the social revolutionaries as they wanted to share power with the Tsar. However the social democrats wanted to remove the Tsar completely and therefore opposed the October manifesto.
Overall, the Russia revolution had failed due to the tsarist system. The tsar gained support from the liberals after the manifesto which helped him restore his power. They had absolute power to destroy any opposing group as he had extremely strong support from the military such as the black hundreds. Also the lack of leadership played a considerable role for the fail of the 1905 revolution. As a large percentage of the protestors were unorganized. Bust most importantly the power and authority the tsar had he was able to destroy his opposition.
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