Financial Manifesto of 1905

an appeal by revolutionary political parties and mass organizations to the population of Russia to hasten the collapse of tsarism. The manifesto was published Dec. 2, 1905, in the Bolshevik newspaper Novaia zhizn’ and in Menshevik, Socialist Revolutionary, and bourgeois liberal newspapers. The groups that issued the appeal were the RSDLP, the St. Petersburg soviet of workers’ deputies, the All-Russian Peasant Union, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Polish Socialist Party.

The Financial Manifesto explained how the tsarist government had led Russia to financial and military ruin. It urged the people to refuse to pay taxes and duties, to withdraw their deposits from the State Bank and from savings banks, and to demand that wages and payments in all financial transactions be made in gold. It called upon all countries to refuse to grant tsarism the new loans the regime needed in order to suppress the revolution, and it warned that the people would not permit the repayment of such loans.

Although the tsarist government confiscated newspapers and closed down the publications that printed the Financial Manifesto, the appeal had its effect. In December 1905 deposits in savings banks were exceeded by withdrawals, which totaled 90 million rubles.