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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
The last time we talked about how the shocking disappointments of the Russo-Japanese War led to a sudden awakening of liberal and reformist opposition to the tsar in the summer of 1904 that culminated with the Zemstvo Congress, which demanded an end to tsarist absolutism. Today, we are going to talk about another major tide that was rising alongside that liberal opposition: the worker’s movement, and how that movement, itself building up steam amidst bad news from the far east and the liberal demands for political reform, would wind up blowing the lid off the whole thing in January 1905.
Now you may have noticed that as we talked about the people allegedly speaking on behalf of the working classes, the Social Democrats, be they Bolshevik or Mensheviks, or the SRs, or the Legal Marxist or revisionist economists, the workers themselves never really entered into it. That’s because for all their talk none of these parties, by their own frank admission, had done a great job actually connecting with actual workers. Though the method of agitation was now accepted, the track record after nearly a decade was not great. The best of the lot by far was the Bundists, who really had forged an alliance between workers and intelligentsia socialists, but they were of course operational only among Jewish workers, and they had just gotten the boot from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. The radical socialists were not the leaders, nor hardly even the friends of the workers. One Menshevik reported as late as December 1904 in the middle of a great labor upheaval that we’re going to be talking about today, he called a meeting of workers directly affiliated with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and only ten people showed up. SRs agents, similarly, reported to their central committee that attempts to organize inside the working classes had produced meager results.
But there was a working class movement developing. It existed. It was growing. So where did it come from, and who was leading it?
Well, we know that since the introduction of the Witte system, the working classes of Russia had nearly doubled in size. But that still only made them at most 5% of the total population. But though small in the grand scheme of things, inside the various major cities of the empire, their growth was immense and noticeable. St Petersburg alone added 250,000 workers to its population over the 1890s, and they now accounted for nearly 30% of the total population. The existing infrastructure of the city was not equipped to handle this influx, and suddenly the lodging houses, tenements, and meager dwellings of the industrialized periphery were overflowing with poor families. Conditions here were deplorable by any objective measure. And if you’ll recall, one of the hallmarks of early Russian industrialization was that the workforce was often transient. People moved back and forth between their home villages and jobs in the cities. And this flux meant that the places people lived and where they ate and bathed and got medical attention were only ever temporary expedience. It was a bit like you were going off to some particularly crappy summer camp. It was only meant to be temporarily endured, not lived in full time. And so conditions just never got better. People were not just renting rooms, they were renting corners of rooms. You could rent not just a bed, but part of a bed. Sanitation was, of course, practically nonexistent, and the food was disgusting.
The work itself, meanwhile, was long and grueling. There were no safety standards in the factories, there were hardly any rights for anybody at all. And pay was literally inadequate. The Ministry of Finance itself surveyed conditions and concluded that a family of four needed about fifty rubles a month to purchase basic necessities — that is food and shelter and heat — and then they found that 75% of the workers were making less than thirty rubles a month. The economic and moral math was just not adding up.
After the turn of the century, people were still moving back and forth between villages and factories, just trying to stay alive. But the industrial way of life was becoming increasingly permanent, and there was already a group of more skilled workers who now lived full-time in the cities, and who were making maybe sixty rubles a month. And this group sometimes earns the label the labor aristocracy. They could survive living year-round in the city, they were better educated and could boast more irreplaceable skills. But as the days and months and years went by and conditions remained horribly exploitive, this group became more radicalized. And when and where we find our socialist radicals managing to meet and educate and propagandize a potential working-class recruit, chances are they came from this cohort of the quote unquote labor aristocracy, and they were well on their way to becoming the working class leaders of the industrial proletariat. Actually of the workers, not just for the workers.
In contrast to this radicalizing cohort, the lower skilled, less educated, and still mentally peasant workers tended to remain culturally conservative. They were Orthodox Christian and believed strongly in the divine benevolence of the tsar. And indeed, one of the things reported by both Social Democrats and SRs back to their respective central committees was that they struggled to recruit among these workers, because they were out there pitching overthrowing the tsar, and everyone was like, what? We, we love the tsar. And he loves us too. To them, the tsar was not a villain, but a hero. Not the devil, but their savior. It understandably made recruiting for a political revolution to overthrow their hero and savior very difficult.
But even these culturally and politically conservative workers did not like the conditions under which they lived. And though tangible party building had been slow going, the ideas and demands espoused in radical pamphlets and broadsheets over the past decade had had an impact. And there were also now working class leaders who continued to share these ideas and demands directly with their coworkers. They were talking about shorter work days, a minimum wage, medical attention, safety standards — the kinds of demands that Lenin and Martov often denounced as mere economism, but which to the workers was the difference between, like, their kids living and dying. And this was another thing that hindered any connection between the socialist intelligentsia and the workers. The intelligentsia socialists were always trying to pivot from economic demands for the workers to grand political schemes, but the workers didn’t want their grievances to be made abstract and used as political leverage. They wanted their demands met. This was not abstract to them. It was a matter of immediate life and death. And this reality is actually part of what led many revisionist socialists to turn to quote unquote economism in the first place, they were responding to the workers themselves.
As the 1890s advanced, demands for workplace reform gained traction, as did the number of work stoppages and strikes. Now, we talked about the first big one of this new industrial era, with the rowing textile workers strike that unfolded over two months in the spring of 1896. After that, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior, both tracked with alarm the growth of the number of workers strikes. They counted 118 in 1896, then 145 in 1897, then 215 in 1898, and then it dipped a little to 189 in 1899. Plenty of these records that make up the strikes that are known to us are police records, because they indicated when and where the police had to come in to break them up. Now, there was a slack period around 1900 and 1901, as the Witte system started to slow down and it made the workers more reticent, but things picked up again in 1903 — over 500 work stoppages and strikes were recorded in that year alone.
The authorities were vexed, and divided over what to do. Do we just keep cracking down? Do we just ride it out? Do we actually mandate the reforms these people are demanding? The regime’s various ministers remained divided, but by 1898, one guy was proposing a novel solution, which was later dubbed police socialism. The originator of this idea was the head of the Moscow Okhrana, Sergei Zubatov. Zubatov had himself started as a teenage revolutionary, but quickly grew disillusioned and switched sides, first becoming a police informant, and then, once his cover got blown, joining the Okhrana full-time as an officer. Zubatov was a skilled and talented agent, and by 1896, he was head of the Moscow section.
And thanks to his own background, Zubatov was well aware that workers had legitimate grievances. Their lives were miserable, and if their miserable lives were simply ignored by the authorities, the workers would inevitably be organized into a formidable army by the agents of revolution. Zubatov’s big idea was to beat the revolutionaries to the punch, to organize worker groups that will be funded by, and under the auspices of, the Okhrana. That way they could control the workers movement rather than just fight against it. And if these police unions actually delivered material benefits, then not only were you sapping the revolutionary potential of the working classes, you were making them downright loyalists to the regime. These unions would be steeped in tsarist propaganda: your lives are being improved thanks to our little father. He is your friend, not the sinister revolutionaries.
Zubatov received cautious permission to pursue this plan after the turn of the century. Now, of course Zubatov’s organizations didn’t come right out and say, oh, we’re a union run by the police; instead he hired workers and agents, sometimes right out of the ranks of Social Democrats and SRs who had bills to pay, and who rationalized that delivering real material change might be possible inside an organization that was not being shut down by the police, but supported by it. The pilot program in Moscow was successful enough that when Plehve took over as minister of the interior in the spring of 1902, he promoted Zubatov to chief of Okhrana, and let him keep expanding his police unions. Zubatov moved to St. Petersburg, but struggled to make inroads with the workforce of the capital. He did not have the same kind of long-standing trusted connections he had in Moscow..
But then in the fall of 1902, he was alerted to a particular priest who was doing amazing business among the impoverished workers, who was gaining a large following thanks to his charismatic oratory, genuine humanity, and evident sincerity. And this priest was Father Georgy Gapon. If Zubatov could get Gapon onboard, then it seemed like he might be able to bring the whole St Petersburg working class under the umbrella of police socialism.
Georgy Gapon was born in 1870, and unlike practically every other person we’ve talked about so far in this series, he did not get into radical student politics. He was a bright kid, who got a scholarship to study at a seminary, and was noted by his superiors as a potential star in the making. But young Gapon had his own ideas about religion and spiritual service, and was frankly grossed out by what he saw as the corrupt and stagnant hierarchy of the existing Orthodox Church.
One of his teachers then slipped him some Tolstoy, who’s anarcho-Christian broadsides further blasted Gapon’s faith, not in god, but in the church. Gapon wanted to minister to the poor and the impoverished and the suffering like a true Christian, and he saw in the official hierarchy only corruption, hypocrisy and decay. So he gave up on the idea of being a priest and quit the church. He then spent a few years bouncing around trying different things to make money, and while tutoring a well-to-do family, he fell in love with one of their daughters, Vera, and the couple decided to get married. But her parents were not keen on the match until Gapon agreed to apologize to the church for his previous behavior and go back to trying to be a priest. He was talented and intelligent enough that he was welcomed back into the fold, as long as he behaved himself.
So, Gapon settled in. But this new life was quickly upended. After having two children, Vera suddenly got sick and died in 1898, which precipitated another crisis of faith for Gapon, and a move to St. Petersburg. But ultimately, he decided to stick with the church. He studied more and became a priest, and found his true calling working and ministering to the growing working classes of the capital. And as I said, his mixture of genuine sincerity, his charismatic oratory and his simple, constant presence amongst them earned upon a large following among the workers. His evident concern for their material as well as their spiritual wellbeing made him a potentially potent leader of the worker’s movement. Gapon himself was already entertaining such thoughts. And that is how Gapon came across Zubatov’s radar.
In the fall of 1902, Zubatov reached out to this priest, who was so trusted by the workers, and proposed a deal. Now Gapon was understandably standoffish to Zubatov’s overtures. Gapon had his own ideas on his own plans, and he wasn’t looking to become just a paid police stooge. But by the spring of 1903, Gapon concluded that it was better to organize and grow without the police cracking down on him. So he entered into a mutually satisfactory agreement with Zubatov and the Okhrana, that Gapon would keep his organization apolitical and focused on religion and self-improvement, most especially Gapon’s group would promote loyalty to the tsar. This was no problem for Gapon; he seems to have genuinely believed in the Orthodox Christian belief that the tsar had been put on earth by god to protect his people. So it was no compromise for Gapon to promote the tsar to the workers as their generous benefactor.
Now while he was getting started, Gapon did take money from Zubatov, and it is a persistent historical rumor that he subsequently received a personal hundred ruble a month stipend from the Okhrana. But so far as I can tell, that particular rumor doesn’t have firm historical evidence backing it up. So while it is indisputably true that Gapon worked in cooperation with the authorities, and took their money from time to time, the deal he struck with Zubatov left Gapon’s group outside the more explicit police union scheme. Which is all to say that, given Gapon’s larger ambitions and his desire to work free of political interference, here in 1903, it’s not really clear who is using who.
It was probably best for Gapon that he managed to keep his group outside of Zubatov’s police union network in the summer of 1903, one of Zubatov’s groups down at Odessa went rogue and participated in a strike, which was all the ammunition that skeptics inside the regime needed. In August 1903, Zubatov was dismissed from his post has head of Okhrana, and his groups were subsequently dismantled. The police socialism experiment was over. But this was good news for Gapon, who continued his own independent relationship with the officials who replaced Zubatov, and Gapon’s religious approach was now seen as a much safer way to control the working classes. Gapon was savvy enough to lean heavily on what officials wanted to hear, and he played up the great themes of orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality, that he would do things through the lens of the Christian faith, that his love for the tsar was real and heartfelt, and this was all about improving the moral and spiritual condition of the community. As for the nationality part, Gapon promised that membership and his groups would be open only to good Russians of Orthodox faith, and here he exploited antisemitic tropes about foreign agitators — that is, Jews — leading good Russians away from God and the tsar.
In the spring of 1904, Gapon finally received permission to form a new organization that he wanted to officially charter called the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg. The Assembly, as it was called for short, started opening branches all over the working class periphery of the capital, hosting social events, dances, concerts, and lectures on self-improvement and spiritual uplift.
But while he was saying one thing to various officials, he was saying another thing to his top lieutenants. By the time the charter of the Assembly was approved in the spring of 1904, Gapon had purged from his inner circle most of those who had been paid agents of Zubatov. Now working with a newer group of leaders directly loyal to him, Gapon presented them with a document in March 1904 that he said was the real plan. This document was quite a bit more ambitious than what Gapon had been telling the authorities. It listed some pretty major economic demands: labor laws to protect workers, freedom to form unions, an eight hour workday and the minimum wage. But it also included a raft of political demands: freedom of speech and the press and assembly and religion, equality before the law, worker participation in lawmaking, a direct progressive income tax, universal education, canceling those redemption payments the peasants still labored under, and transferring land to the people. This was a blueprint for the wholesale reform of the Russian state and economy. But Gapon told his lieutenants, nobody is yet ready for this real plan, and he swore them to secrecy.
Historians continue to debate whether Gapon floated this document to his lieutenants as secret bait, to keep them loyal while he pursued a much more conservative agenda aimed at working class docility, or whether he was lying to his state handlers, and this really was the real plan. For my part, Gapon seems to have had great ambitions and a sense of personal destiny. And when he marched on Bloody Sunday in January 1905, the petition he bore was almost word for word the text of the program he had shown his lieutenants.
Gapon could not have founded the Assembly at a more fortuitous moment, because the spring of 1904 was right when bad news from the far east started swirling, and political opposition started rising. Then in the summer of 1904, Plehve was assassinated and replaced by the more liberal Mirsky. In this new liberal atmosphere, Gapon started pushing beyond the limits of his agreement with the authorities, the biggest of which was to confine his activities to St. Petersburg. Instead, he undertook a mission to form branches in other cities, and by the fall, he had opened nine branches and counted 5,000 members, numbers that only increased into the winter.
The police authorities, now operating under a more tolerant administration, actually seemed fine with letting Gapon run around. Their main problem was now seditious and potentially revolutionary liberals who were denouncing the tsar; Gapon, meanwhile, was running around telling everybody the tsar is great, he loves you and you should love him back. If anything, Gapon’s assembly was counted as an asset, not a liability. And indeed if Nicholas and his ministers had not been so blunderously blunderful, Gapon might have proven to be a powerful ally, rather than the regime’s undoing.
So this is roughly where we left off last week. It’s December 1904, with the Zemstvo Congress and the banquet campaigns and all the public demonstrations, and then the tsar’s underwhelming concessions, which were coupled with threats for everyone to sit back down and shut up. The tsar was able to hope that that would be the end of it for, oh, just about two weeks, before devastating news hit St. Petersburg.
Just as the tsar was issuing his supremely watered down concessions, the Japanese army completed their envelopment of the hills around Port Arthur. They then proceeded to mount their own artillery and shell what was left of the Russian fleet in the Harbor. Completely helpless, these ships were sunk one by one. With the Russian fleet now sitting at the bottom of the harbor, the Russian garrison commander of Port Arthur unilaterally concluded that further resistance was pointless, and he surrendered the base. Port Arthur had fallen. It was lost. When the news reached St. Petersburg, public opinion, still furious about the tsar’s weak response to the Zemstvo Congress, roared with righteous indignation. It was amidst all this hostile public energy and just general angry disbelief at the fall of Port Arthur, that a small incident at the Putilov Ironworks became the spark that brought the revolution of 1905 out of the liberal salons and to the streets.
The Putilov Ironworks was the single largest factory in Russia, employing about 12,000 workers. It also happened to have the single largest contingent of Assembly members, there were about 500 assembly members who worked there. Now though, the police tolerated the Assembly, the boss of the Putilov Ironworks had a very different attitude: he hated them. He complained to his own friends inside the Ministry of Finance that the Ministry of the Interior was out here undermining his ability to perform necessary work for the war. On December the fourth, one of these assembly workers had his pay docked, and when he complained, he was fired on the spot. This was a firing which was accompanied by a public diatribe by one of the managers against the Assembly. Over the next few weeks, three more Assembly members were fired on flimsy pretexts. Now initially, even Gapon assumed that this was not that big of a deal and some kind of arrangement could be made. But the workers inside the factory were furious, and the rumor was now that anyone connected to the Assembly was going to be fired. With his own followers begging for him to intervene, Gapon decided he could either lead, or be left behind. And so he led.
On December the 27th, there was a large meeting where Gapon openly threatened to strike if the workers were not reinstated. A week of fruitless negotiations between Gapon, management, and the government produced nothing. And with the deadline for action passed, on January the third, the workers of the Putilov Ironworks went on strike. Then, sympathetic Assembly members in other factories stirred their own coworkers. Two days later, 10,000 more workers had walked off the jobs, and this wave kept spreading over the next week, soon impacting 382 different factories with somewhere between a 100 and 150,000 workers walking off the job. St. Petersburg was now effectively under a general strike.
To return briefly to our friends in the revolutionary underground, the Social Democrats, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks alike, were taken completely by surprise. Lenin and Krupskaya did not hear about the strike from their own agents; instead, they read about it in foreign newspapers. One Bolshevik confessed to Lenin he had not even heard of Gapon until a few weeks earlier. So Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs alike all ordered their agents to get in there, infiltrate the strike and take it over, I mean, this is a really big deal, we need to lead it. In the first few days, they confidently believed that this could be done. But taking over the strike meant sidelining Gapon, denouncing him as a police stooge or as an agent of the tsar, but whenever they stood up in a worker’s meeting and so much as hinted about Gapon’s credibility, they were mercilessly booed and shouted down. By January the seventh, they were writing back to say, we’ve been able to keep our place in the ranks by openly conforming to Gapon’s leadership, but there is no way we’re taking this thing over. When Iskra attempted to take credit for turning Gapon in a political direction, the SR’s paper Revolutionary Russia complimented Iskra on their successful turn to creative writing.
But things were now taking a political turn. This was moving from an economic strike to a political confrontation. For his part, Gapon was happy to take the advice of these revolutionary agents, be the Bolshevik, Menshevik, SR or people out of the Union of Liberation. But Gapon was clear that while they could participate, they could not lead.
The idea Gapon now settled on was to draft a petition to the tsar and carry it to him in a great peaceful procession, to alert him to the conditions under which the workers lived, and beg him to intercede on behalf of his people. A draft of this petition then circulated around over the next few days, which, as I said, a mounted to an almost verbatim list of the items that had been included on the secret real plan that he had shown his lieutenants back in March of 1904. The only real change is that it appears that someone in the Union of Liberation got him to add an explicit demand for a national representative assembly.
But because this real plan had always been secret, and because it’s not entirely clear Gapon thought it was ever going to become public, this looked like a sudden change in direction. It was certainly far more overtly political than anything Gapon had previously endorsed in public. When the draft petition was complete, Gapon sent it to Mirsky in the Ministry of the Interior, and said, here is a copy of a petition. We are going to march in a peaceful procession to the Winter Palace this Sunday, January the ninth. Please be prepared to meet us.
The regime’s response was as usual inadequate, contradictory, and detached from reality. They would neither meet Gapon’s demands, nor did they want to explicitly reject them, and make the situation worse. Some suggested arresting Gapon, but that seemed sure to rile up the workers even more, so they drifted into loosely hoping this would all just kind of blow over. The tsar was not even at the Winter Palace at the moment, he was out at the imperial residence in the suburb of Tsarskoye Selo, about a ninety minute train ride away. Rather than bring the tsar back, his ministers decided to use his absence to their advantage. The authorities posted notices starting on January the seventh forbidding any demonstrations, and saying the tsar is not at the Winter Palace and he is not going to be at the Winter Palace on Sunday. Along with this, they arranged for some additional troops to be brought into reinforce the garrisons. Their objective would be to prevent any workers who defied the ban on demonstrations from entering the old central city, and especially from entering the grounds of the Winter Palace.
The government hoped that the tsar’s absence, coupled with the presence of all of these troops, would deflate the workers, and Sunday would pass without any problems. Now a few isolated voices suggested maybe the tsar should meet his people, maybe he should take their petition, if nothing else, then to diffuse the general strike we’re dealing with? But those lonely voices were ignored. On Saturday night, Mirsky took the train out to Tsarskoye Selo and briefed Nicholas, who wrote in his diary that some socialist priest was causing trouble, but it was all well in hand, no big deal.
Back among the workers, a few lonely voices were likewise trying to stop Gapon from going ahead with the march. The tsar isn’t there. The army is massing. Do you think we should rethink this? But Gapon insisted that the army would not dare shoot on an unarmed procession of peaceful supplicants. And besides, he was now staked to this thing, all or nothing. He had spent the last few days in full blown revivalist preacher mode, building up excitement, energy, and most of all expectations. The tsar will see us. He must see us. The Bible commands it. He was whipping people up to promise to die for the cause if need be. “Are you ready to die,” he would shout, and they would all shout back, “Yes! We are with you.” So for Gapon, there was already no going back.
Before dawn, on Sunday, January the ninth, 1905, workers started gathering at six pre-arranged locations around the periphery of the city, with orders to congregate on the Winter Palace at two in the afternoon. The day was bitterly cold, but spirits were high. When they converged, they said prayers, sang hymns, carried icons and portraits of the tsar. Gapon had explicitly banned the red flags of socialism to avoid accusations that they were dangerous revolutionaries. They all dressed in their Sunday best. They brought their wives and children. Many workers emptied their pockets to show that they were not armed.
As they departed, it appears to have been generally known that the tsar was not actually home, at least a lot of people seem to understand this. But they also understood that he was only a 90 minute train ride away, and that once they planted themselves that the Winter Palace, he would have to come back.
But they also marched out with a kind of grim determination in the ranks that they were marching toward soldiers, and things might get very ugly, very fast. At the head of the largest procession, Gapon had convinced himself that there was no way the tsar could refuse them. There was no way the army was going to fire on them. There was no way this wasn’t going to work.
But he did have one kind of, sort of backup plan. Assuming that he would at least be invited into the Winter Palace to parlay with… someone, Gapon carried in his pocket a red and a white handkerchief. If he waved the white handkerchief when he emerged, that meant the petition had been received and all was well. But if he waved the red handkerchief, that meant they had been rejected and that meant it was time for a general insurrection. He had made the socialists and the revolutionaries promise to play it cool during the procession. But if they saw that red handkerchief, all bets were off, and they could do whatever they wanted.
None of them ever got that far.
And there was not, as you might have in your imagination, thanks to later fanciful depictions of Bloody Sunday, a single dramatic confrontation at the Winter Palace. The 9,000 infantry and about 3,000 cavalry who were now inside St. Petersburg had been posted at various bridges, gates, and main roads to prevent the six different precessions from advancing into the central city. Nor, I should say, was the violence that’s about to happen the result of one big premeditated plan to violently crush the people. As with so much of late tsarist Russia, Bloody Sunday was the result of confusion, lack of direction, poor leadership, and vague orders. The police working for the Ministry of the Interior, for example, seemed to passively acquiesce to the march. Policemen were present as the marchers embarked, and they did nothing. Some even doffed their caps is the procession went by, which led many workers to conclude that they had official permission to be doing what they were doing.
But the regular army, working under the Ministry of War, was told under no circumstances are you to allow these people to enter the city center. Now when these orders were issued, I think the assumption was that the mere presence of all of the soldiers would be enough to turn the crowd back. But if you order a bunch of soldiers to not let people get by them, soldiers have ways of following that order.
The largest procession, as I said, was led by Gapon. They reached the Narva Gate in the southwest of the city somewhere around 10 or 11:00 AM. Gapon was out in front, surrounded by supporters and bodyguards, and as they approached the gate, a line of soldiers barred the way. Orders to disperse went unheeded. Gapon was convinced he could win this staring contest. Even a cavalry charge only moved the workers back a little bit, but did not break them up. Those in the back of the procession likely had little clear idea what was happening in the front anyway. The soldiers were then ordered to fire two volleys of warning shots over the heads of the crowd. But again, unless you’re right up in front, you don’t know where that crackling is coming from, nor do you know why that crackling is happening. So the marchers did not disperse and they did not turn around.
Then a bugle sounded, and the soldiers leveled their rifles and fired directly into the people.
Forty were immediately killed or wounded, including those closest to Gapon. And now the procession did break up and panic. Gapon himself was spirited away over a fence, and then he moved through a series of apartments, ultimately winding up in the apartment of Maxim Gorky, who I have not introduced yet, but who I’ll get around to one of these days.
The stunning realization that those are was capable of murdering his own people devastated Gapon, and his now wounded and angry mantra was, “There is no god any longer. There is no tsar.”
Similar violent clashes followed in other parts of the city as the various processions approached reinforced gates and bridges, all with the same result. Orders to disperse were ignored. That was followed by firing directly into the massive unarmed demonstrators. The largest clash was at Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main grand boulevard. Here, families not even involved in the demonstration, who were simply out for a Sunday walk, were overtaken by a worker’s procession that filled the street. These numbers were then swelled further by workers who had been driven away by violent clashes elsewhere, but who were still trying to finish the march to the Winter Palace. And according to at least one account I’ve read, there were about 50,000 people bunched up in Nevsky Prospect by mid-afternoon. At the north end of the street, protecting the approach to the Winter Palace, there stood a phalanx of troops. When they could not get the people in front of them to turn around nor disperse, they lowered their guns and started firing. Ultimately, four total volleys, plus some artillery, scattered the shocked crowd backwards, leaving dead bodies strewn everywhere. The demonstrators never did reach the Winter Palace. None of them did. They never saw the tsar, they never presented their petition. Instead, they left their dead in the street and fled for home, full of shock, disbelief, resentment, anger, and hate. For the crime of trying to tell the tsar how wretched their lives were, he had murdered them.
The final casualty numbers of Bloody Sunday are hard to pin down. The official report says 96 killed with 333 wounded; stories from the political opposition put the numbers as high as 4,000 killed, which is clearly an exaggeration; in contemporary histories as I have read, I’ve seen quoted 130 dead, 299 wounded, as well as 200 dead and 800 wounded. But the numbers themselves hardly matter. The psychological impact of what was immediately dubbed Bloody Sunday was going to be the same no matter what the final body count.
The reason that final body count doesn’t matter is because no matter what, it always includes one very specific, very important death: that was the death of the myth of the good tsar.
The belief that, yeah, the tsar was good, benevolent, and generous, and that the main problem is that he was surrounded by evil ministers, corrupt bureaucrats, and self-interested officials had deeper roots in Russian history. This belief was strong enough that it had inoculated both rank and file workers and rural peasants against more radical revolutionary agitators. But this wasn’t just about the lower classes. Within the liberal intelligentsia that we talked about last week, a distinction was usually drawn between the tsar, who they were loyal to, and the bureaucracy that surrounded him, which they blamed for creating an unnatural barrier between the tsar and his people.
This week, we saw how Gapon’s assembly had always pointed to the tsar as their ally, not their enemy. So it’s hard to imagine a worst mishandling of this situation by the regime. The workers who had marched out on Bloody Sunday believed the tsar was a good man who would protect and save them. And he could have secured their love and shorn up popular support for his faltering regime with even the barest of gestures. Outside the morality of the thing, a basic political calculation suggests maybe cementing the loyalty of the workers to act as a counterbalance against the seditious liberal and socialist opposition might not be the worst idea in the world. But no. Not only had the tsar refused to hear his people’s anguished cries for help, but his army had murdered them in the streets. The survivors were left shocked and horrified. They felt betrayed. And their faith in the tsar was shattered. And to the revolutionaries they had once rebuffed, they now listen to with open ears and angry hearts.
In our final assessment, we know that Bloody Sunday was not the result of Nicholas’s personal cruelty. He had not ordered the army to mow people down in the streets. He was just catastrophically out of touch. After being briefed on events in St. Petersburg, Nicholas wrote in his diary that night simply that it was all “painful and sad.” Like it was a depressing story on the news about something that was happening on the other side of the world. Nicholas just did not grasp the severity of the situation, the grief stricken rage it had produced, nor his own culpability in remaining so sleepily aloof. Now, were his advisors and ministers also to blame for not alerting him to alternative answers to the St. Petersburg general strike, for downplaying how serious it was, for creating a situation where the army wound up murdering a bunch of peaceful, unarmed, and loyal subjects of the tsar? Of course. But if you’re claiming to be an absolute autocrat whose unquestioned, all-encompassing authority comes directly from god, and nothing can stand between you and your people, that you are their protector, and they love you as much as you love them? Well, then buddy, this policy of sad eyed obliviousness is not going to cut it.
Back in St. Petersburg, Father Gapon escaped detection by shaving his beard, and then getting dressed in another set of clothes that had been provided by theatre friends of Maxim Gorky. Now sought by the police who had tolerated him for so many years, Gapon probably should have skipped town directly. Instead, he snuck into a packed meeting of the Free Economic Society, where leaders of the liberal intelligentsia were meeting to discuss the day’s dramatic events. In the midst of this meeting, this man who no one had ever seen before stood up and started railing against the tsar, saying the time for half-measures were over. In the midst of this fiery speech, the room suddenly realized that it was Father Gapon.
The meeting descended into chaos, and Gapon had to hustle out the door. He then departed St. Petersburg, eventually making his way to the relative safety of Finland. But before he left, he penned an open letter that said amongst other things, “Tear up portraits of the bloodsucking tsar […] be thou damned with all thine august reptilian progeny!”
Bloody Sunday took a fire that was burning in St. Petersburg and spread it across the whole empire. The liberal opposition was more emboldened than ever. They used the combination of the fall of Port Arthur and Bloody Sunday to expect and demand political reform. Tsarist absolutism was a moral, political, economic, and military disaster. Meanwhile, the working class joined their brothers and sisters in the capital, and the general strike spread across Russia, ultimately including some 500,000 workers.
On Saturday, January the eighth, the tsar’s ministers had gone to bed hoping this would all blow over. By the time they went to bed on Sunday, July the ninth, it had all blown up in their faces.