The policy of Russification of the non-Russian peoples of the empire, which had been a characteristic of the reign of Alexander III, continued. Nicholas II held anti-Semitic views and favoured the continued discrimination, in economic and cultural life, against the Jews. Russification of the German schools in the Baltic provinces continued, and the old university of Tartu (now in Estonia), which had been closed in 1893, was reopened as the Russian University of Yuryev. In the central provinces of European Russia, Orthodox missionaries continued their efforts to compete with Muslim Tatar missionaries for the conversion of the small, still partly shamanistic, Finno-Ugric population of this area.

In Armenia, an imperial decree of June 25, 1903, transferred to Russian administration the national fund of the Armenian Apostolic Church, which was formed by the individual subscriptions of Armenian Christians and had been used for the social and educational needs of the Armenian community. By this action the government turned against itself the most loyal of all the non-Russian peoples, whose hatred of Turkey had long bound it devotedly to the cause of the empire. The confiscation of the fund was followed by large-scale passive resistance by the Armenians, who boycotted the Russian law courts, schools, and administrative authorities.

Similar resistance was provoked in Finland by the military conscription law of 1898 and by the imperial manifesto of February 1899, which stated that imperial decrees should have precedence in Finland over Finnish laws, and thus threatened to reduce the Finnish diet to the status of a provincial assembly. The Finnish people as a whole met these actions with passive resistance, but terrorism was also used, and in June 1904 the Russian governor-general, Nikolay Bobrikov, was assassinated by a Finn, Eugene Shauman.

Resurgence of revolutionary activity

Among the Russian people political opposition revived in the late 1890s. Its most visible expressions were student demonstrations, which were especially violent in 1899 and 1900, and in some of which factory workers joined. Cossacks charged the demonstrators, many were arrested, and some were conscripted into the army (where they only spread their political ideas) or merely expelled from the university. Students inclined not only to revolutionary doctrines—whether Narodnik (“Populist “) socialism or Marxism—but also to terrorism. The assassins of the minister of education, Nikolay Bogolepov, in February 1901, and of the minister of interior, Dmitry Sipyagin, in April 1902, were both students.

In March 1898 representatives of several illegal Marxist groups met in Minsk to found the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (R.S.D.R.P.). Its leaders, however, were almost immediately arrested by the police, and the Social Democratic movement took political shape among Russian exiles in western Europe. In 1903, at its second congress, held partly in Brussels and partly in London, a rift appeared between the followers of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin) and the rest. Lenin maintained that the party should be confined to full-time “professional revolutionaries,” while Yuly Osipovich Tsederbaum (Martov) and others preferred as their aim a mass working-class party, without stringent conditions for membership, similar to the German or other western European socialist parties. Lenin took for his faction the name Bolshevik (derived from bolshinstvo, “majority"), because it had won a majority in the election of the party’s key bodies. His opponents became known as Mensheviks (menshinstvo, “minority”). In fact, in the following decade the factions within the movement were extremely fluid, and no single group for any length of time had clear majority support among the party membership.

The various illegal Populist groups in Russia also made efforts to unite, and at a conference held in Switzerland they formed the Socialist Revolutionary Party. This party’s leadership, like that of the Social Democrats, came principally from the intelligentsia. Its aim was to appeal above all to the peasants, whereas the Social Democrats laid the main emphasis on the industrial working class. In practice it was hard to establish contact with peasants, because of their scattered distribution and the comparative ease with which the police could observe the entry of strangers into villages. Consequently the Socialist Revolutionaries no less than the Social Democrats found their mass support in the cities. Neither party had a monopoly of proletarian support.

Other political movements

Russian liberalism also became organized in this period. Two trends may be roughly distinguished—a cautious, limited constitutionalism favoured mainly by enlightened conservatives among the landed gentry and officers of the zemstvos, and a radical liberalism which insisted on full parliamentary and responsible government and drew its support mainly from the urban professional classes. The second trend, forming a secret Union of Liberation, expressed its views in the weekly paper Osvobozhdeniy (“Liberation”), published in Germany and edited by the former Marxist Pyotr Berngardovich Struve.

Political parties also appeared among the non-Russian nationalities. Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian nationalist movements took form, led by middle-class professional people and supported by peasants. In Poland there were two main parties, the National Democratic Party, which stood for moderate democracy, and the Polish Socialist Party. Both wished self-government for Poland, and independence if possible. The extremist “Social Democracy of Poland and Lithuania” bitterly opposed all Polish nationalism and aimed at a single socialist republic for the whole territory of the Russian Empire. In Ukraine, the first political party to advance the view that there was a separate Ukrainian nation, and to claim autonomy for it, was the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, founded in 1901. It split soon into socialist, radical, and conservative nationalist sections. Both the Polish and the Ukrainian movements received help from their allies in Austrian Galicia. Among Russian Jews, the main trends in these years were on the one hand various forms of socialism, on the other the new international movement of Zionism. In Armenia the Dashnaktsutyun (“Confederacy”) Party resembled, in ideas and methods, the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries. In Georgia by far the strongest group was social democracy, of the Menshevik branch. Finally, among the Muslims of Russia a democratic movement was growing, in favour of secularism, modernization, emancipation of women, and political liberty. Its main centre was Kazan, its social leadership came from Tatar merchants and school teachers.

Foreign policy and the Russo-Japanese War

Russian foreign policy in the 1890s was concerned above all with the Far East. The inability of Nicholas II to decide between contradictory policies urged by different advisers was a major factor in the drift toward war with Japan. Russia refused to make a bargain with Japan, leaving it Korea in return for Russian dominance in northern Manchuria, or even in all Manchuria. By insisting on having all Manchuria and all Korea, it forced Japan first to ally itself with Britain and then to go to war with Russia.

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The war brought a series of defeats to Russia, culminating in the destruction of the Baltic Fleet in the Strait of Tsushima in May 1905. It was fortunate for Russia that Japan too was exhausted by its efforts, so that peace could be obtained on fairly favourable terms. U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt brokered the Treaty of Portsmouth, by which Russia abandoned all claims to Korea and surrendered Port Arthur and the South Manchurian Railway. However, it was able to retain its position in northern Manchuria and its control of the Chinese Eastern Railway, so essential for communication between Siberia and Vladivostok. Russia also kept the northern half of Sakhalin and did not have to pay an indemnity.