42 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 43 and the conflict remained unsettled, the needs unsatisfied. To be sure, great changes were made, important reforms introduced.
The dissolution of the peasant communities, the division of community lands and the sale of a great number of nobility estates through the government (so called Peasants Bank. were by no means unimportant, for this agrarian reform program strengthened economically the agricultural bourgeoisie and intensified the process of proletarization of the peasantry. The workmen insurance reform, with its entire machinery, agitation, etc. was also a feature of no small importance. And the Duma itself, impotent and reactionary as it was, played a very important role in the revolutionary movement as a centre of organization of the various classes and groups and as a platform which had enjoyed freedom of speech to a very great extent.
But all these and other reforms did not solve the problem of political reconstruction, they did not solve the labor problem and did not satisfy the peasants cry for land. The objective conditions have not changed materially, the causes of revolution have not been eliminated. And triumphant as the counter revolution was, it could not take out the revolutionary soul of the most revolutionary class of Russia the proletariat. Economical and political strikes were frequent, political demonstrations not unusual. And when in 1912 a Ludlow massacre was perpetrated in Lena, Siberia, where the workers of the gold mines struck, entire Russia was shaken by a wave of protests, strikes and demonstrations of the masses of labor. The reactionary forces of the czar could not suppress this outbreak, although cruel measures were taken. The revolutionary movement of the working class grew. So much so that a few days before war was declared a general strike of the Petrograd workers was in progress, one demonstration followed the other, and the existence of the autocratic regime was then seriously threatened.
Even the bourgeoisie realized it and, naturally, turned somewhat to the left. They realized that the holy trinity alliance had failed in its purpose. As the reforms did not better the conditions of the people, they could not create the so much needed home market. On the contrary, obstacles were placed in the way of industrial development, strikes were common, frequently bringing disorganization into the entire industrial life. No wonder that the opposition of the bourgeoisie grew, that at the last few conventions of business organizations held before the war po litical reforms were demanded, the government openly criticized.
But the outbreak of the war put an end to this frivolity of the bourgeoisie, whose patriotic fervor compared favorably with that of the capitalistic classes of any other warring nations. In the first place the war opened possibilities for foreign inarkets which had become more and more important as the hopes for a home market vanished. Subsequent events proved, however, the faultiness of all these calculations, for the war once more showed the utter inability of the Russian autocracy to carry out the imperialistic designs of the bourgeoisie.
On the battlefield defeat after defeat followed, at home an undesirable condition of chaos set in. The production of war munitions was diminishing every day, both because of the inefficiency, graft and thefts of the faithful bureaucracy and because of the wholesale arrests amongst the skilled workers suspected of a revolutionary mode of thought. The same causes brought the same results in the operation of the peace industries and in the production of foodstuffs. There had been an actual shortage of food and other necessities of life, and the prices had been growing daily until they reached almost the same level as in the United States.
The inefficiency of the government of the czar and especially its inability to carry on the war successfully had, quite naturally; revived the opposition of the bourgeoisie. At the Industrial and Commercial Congresses, at the conventions of the Union of Zemstvoes and Cities, at political party conferences, protests against the government were frequently voiced and demands for a share in the government made. To the leaders of the bourgeoisie it was quite clear long before the revolution that with such managers as the government of the czar could furnish, they could get neither a foreign nor a home market. And the progressive bloc in the Duma, created by this revival of bourgeois opposition, grew less and less generous in their support of the czar.