Why Did Tsardom Survive 1905?

Why did tsardom survive 1905?

(1) Although the political parties shared the same ultimate goal of overthrowing the existing order--Tsardom, they were divided from one another. The Liberals, the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks and the Social Revolutionaries had different political programmes. In 1905 each political party made its own struggles against Tsardom. Thus the Tsarist government could suppress these political parties one by one. Besides the division between the political parties, there was much dissension within each of the political parties: the right-wing Liberals disagreed with the radical Liberals, the Mensheviks disagreed with the Bolsheviks, and the moderate Social Revolutionaries disagreed with the radical Social Revolutionaries. The internal division within each party gravely weakened the strength of its struggle against Tsardom.

(2) The chief driving force of the 1905 Revolution was the masses. But the masses were not properly led by the political parties to seize power. Both the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries had wrong conceptions of the role they should take in the 1905 Revolution. They believed that the bourgeois revolution should precede the socialist revolution and that they should wait for the liberals to establish a bourgeois government in 1905. Thus they did not make use of the potential revolutionary strength of the masses to capture power from the Tsarist government as soon as the 1905 Revolution broke out. But the Liberals were too weak in number that they could not become an independent political force to replace the Tsarist government.

(3) The political programmes of the political parties failed to secure wholehearted support from the masses because their programmes did not represent the wishes of the masses. The Liberals did not include social and economic reforms in their programme. The programme of the Social Democrats advocated the establishment of a Socialist State through a class struggle but few of the workers understood revolutionary theories and they just wanted a better economic