Why did 1905 fail when 1917 succeeded?

The short answer

• Autocracy without a shock-absorber. Nicholas faced demands over wages, land, ethnicity and censorship without a legal opposition or parliament through which they could be addressed. In surviving European monarchies, parliaments shared power and responsibility for hard times. Russia's throne had no comparable intermediary, so complaints about government became complaints directed at the ruler himself.
• Industrialization outran the state. Witte's factories brought hundreds of thousands of workers together in a few cities. Railways then connected those centers, allowing a strike to spread across Russia in days. The police system had been designed for scattered villages; industrialization gave workers new means of collective action without giving them a political institution in which to press their demands.
• The unanswered land question. Four in five Russians were peasants. Freedom from serfdom in 1861 had left many in debt and still wanting the gentry's land. Governments hesitated to give up those estates, but refusing the demand left it alive. It would shape 1917, the civil war and the fortunes of armies that offered land to the villages or threatened it.
• A war lost to Japan. The government undertook the 1904–05 war with Japan partly for prestige: “a short victorious war” might quiet unrest. The result was a lost fleet at Tsushima and a humiliating peace. Defeat by an Asian power the regime had despised exposed its weakness just as the cities erupted.

What it changed

A pseudo-constitution. The Duma, which first met in 1906, gave Russians an institution in which they could expect representation. But the Tsar could dissolve it, and Stolypin rigged the franchise until it became compliant. Its existence raised hopes that its restricted powers could not satisfy, leaving a generation to see reform within the system as a dead end.

The soviet is invented. In 1905 the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies grew from a strike committee into a rival authority. Trotsky gained experience as its chairman. The council supplied a model for later soviets, and twelve years afterward the word would name the revolution itself.

Stolypin’s wager on the peasant. Stolypin wanted members of the peasant commune to become prosperous independent farmers with a stake in order—“a wager on the strong.” He thought the policy needed twenty years of peace; it received nine. An assassin killed him in 1911, and the land question still confronted the government as 1917 approached.

The revolutionaries learn their trade. Lenin, Trotsky, the Mensheviks and the SRs carried lessons from the failed revolution into 1917. They had seen soviets emerge, tested the army's role, confronted the peasant question and learned how far liberal allies could be trusted. Failure gave its survivors experience they could use in another crisis.