Bloody Sunday on 22 January 1905 was the massacre of peaceful and unarmed protestors by soldiers outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. The crowd of workers and their families were led by Father Georgy Gapon (1870-1906), who had wanted to present Tsar Nicholas II (reign 1894-1917) with a petition for reforms. Over 1,000 people were killed, and many more were wounded in the incident.
Part of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Bloody Sunday led directly to a general strike and other forms of protest against the Tsarist regime. The protests involved peasants, industrial workers, the urban middle class, and elements of the military. Ultimately, there was no regime change, and the tsar held on to power by promising reforms and a new representative parliament, the Duma. The reforms proved to be disappointing in reality, and, following Russia's disastrous performance in the First World War (1914-18), two further revolutions in 1917 finally toppled the tsar and established a Communist government.
Background: An Unpopular Tsar
Tsar Nicholas II had reigned over the Russian Empire since 1894, but his absolute rule faced a major challenge with the January revolution of 1905, when workers, peasants, and elements of the military all called for political, social, and economic changes and a more representative system of government. A working class of factory workers had sprung up since industrialisation, while many peasants had gained the right to work their own land. The student class had also grown significantly. None of these groups was directly represented in Russia's legal classification of society into four tiers: the nobility, gentry, townsmen, and peasantry. Trouble against the tsar's authoritarian rule had been simmering away for quite some time, with various public disturbances breaking out against state authority. As the historian C. Read notes, "the army dealt with 19 disturbances in 1893; 33 in 1900; 271 in 1901 and 522 in 1902" (74). Politically-motivated assassinations were not uncommon and claimed victims in the police force, local government, and at ministerial level.
The simmering discontent was raised to boiling point by several new factors from 1901 onwards. The formation of worker unions led by police officials – an idea of police socialism, which came from Sergei Zubatov, the Moscow police administrator – backfired as these associations hid radicals in plain sight. The global economic slump of 1901 to 1905, which greatly increased unemployment, and Russia's losses in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) further dented the tsar's prestige and added to the woes of those who called for political and economic change. Actions of protest became increasingly violent. Vyacheslav Plehve, the conservative minister of the interior, was assassinated by a member of the Union of Social Revolutionaries in July 1904. Just as demonstrators planned to march on the Winter Palace, the tsar's official residence in St. Petersburg, news came of the fall of Port Arthur (in Manchuria) to the Japanese, one of Russia's key fortresses and a major naval base. The tsar was shown to be not only incompetent at running the economy but also at conducting wars.
Father Gapon & the Assembly of Workers
On Sunday, 22 January (Old Style Calendar: 9 January) 1905, a demonstration was organised at the Winter Palace in which a petition would be presented to a representative of the tsar, calling for some new form of representative government. The protesters were led by a radical Orthodox priest, Father Georgy Gapon (1870-1906), who had formed (with state permission) a union of factory workers in St. Petersburg called the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers. Gapon assured the authorities that it was better for workers to unite openly in unions rather than, he said, "leave them to organise (as they surely will) and manifest their independence secretly and guilefully, harming themselves and perhaps the entire nation" (quoted in Hosking, 406).
In a draft proposal for the government, Gapon called for more liberty for workers who were "deprived of freedom of speech, conscience, press and assembly…workers must strive to acquire civil rights and participation in the administration of the state" (ibid). Gapon's Assembly wanted a restriction on excessive working hours for factory workers (over 12 hours per day was then the norm), improvements in wages, state insurance, and more freedom to form unions. It also wanted peasants to receive the land they themselves worked and receive cheap credit. Worker and peasant interests were to be represented in a new constituent assembly. Other requests included a fairer tax system, freedom of association, speech, press, and religion, and free (but compulsory) education for young children, and an amnesty for political prisoners. Gapon decided to put all of these demands in writing and present them, along with 150,000 signatures added in support, to the tsar after a peaceful march.
Death at the Winter Palace
Gapon took the precaution of informing the authorities that he intended to lead his march to the Winter Palace. The government tried to stop the march, but it was too late for such a response. The tsar prudently spent the night away from the palace. The peaceful crowd workers, women, and children were dressed in their Sunday best and armed with nothing more sinister than religious icons and pictures of the tsar. They approached the palace, ignoring shouts to disperse when they passed through various checkpoints. As they marched on, they were fired upon by infantry troops stationed outside the palace. The soldiers had perhaps previously been given orders to fire on the gathering by nervous local security officials, or they had simply panicked. The situation worsened when Cossack cavalry charged down the crowd. Later, when innocent bystanders lingered to see the carnage outside the palace, they, too, were fired upon. Over 1,000 people were killed, with 2,000 more wounded (Montefiore, 521). The massacre immediately became known as 'Bloody Sunday'.
Following the incident, a general strike followed in St. Petersburg. The tsar's ideal image as a just and rightful ruler was shattered, at least in the cities. As one worker at the march recorded:
On this day I was born a second time, but now not as an all-forgiving and all-forgetting child, but as an embittered man, prepared to struggle and to triumph.
(Hosking, 409).
Things soon escalated. On 17 February, the tsar's uncle, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia (1857-1905), governor-general of Moscow, was assassinated when a bomb was thrown into his carriage. Peasant revolts followed, as did strikes and protests by students and intellectuals, not only in Russia but across the empire. In June, sailors of the battleship Potemkin staged a mutiny at Odessa. More general and local strikes followed in October (including a hugely disruptive railway strike), and the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies was formed. This Soviet (meaning 'council'), led by Georgy Stepanovich Khurstalev-Nosar (1877-1919) as chairman and with Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) as deputy, called for an 8-hour limit to the working day. The problem for the revolutionaries, though, was that they had no unified and central organisation and no undisputed leadership.
The tsar, living in a reality all of his own, still believed that force should continue to be used against any and everyone who protested against his divine right to rule as he wished. Fortunately, such figures as the statesman Sergei Witte (1849-1915) persuaded the tsar of the folly of this approach, and Nicholas was ultimately obliged to offer concessions to the protestors and provide a more constitutional form of governance. The tsar's first, rather tame proposals, listed in the August Manifesto, were rejected by most liberals. The tsar then announced on 17 October an amnesty and deeper reform measures in what became known as the October Manifesto. This move at least divided the opposition to the tsar, since the manifesto largely satisfied the more moderate liberals and those in society who were neither peasants nor workers. The latter two groups and certain radicals were prepared to fight on, but Nicholas was aided by the return of the army after the Russo-Japanese War. The army, which remained loyal to the tsar, was used as a tool to brutally repress opposition. As Read notes: "Autocracy was under assault from all quarters and it only escaped by the skin of its teeth" (75).
The Tsar's Reforms
Nicholas guaranteed certain civil rights for his subjects; there was a greater freedom of the press, and trade unions, strikes, and student political meetings were all now allowed. These changes had long-term effects on the politicalisation of ordinary people in the coming years. The police and other authorities did keep a close watch on political activities of any kind, and journalists received fines or were imprisoned for anything deemed too radical. Nicholas also created a new parliament, which consisted of the Council of State (upper house) and the Duma (lower house). Half of the upper house members were nominated, and the rest came from the upper classes. Members of the Duma were elected by the general population, although most of the voting was indirect.
In reality, Nicholas' parliament, which first met in April 1906, did not offer very much by way of an independent political body, since ministers were directly responsible to the tsar, and their powers concerning finance were limited. Pyotr Stolypin (1862-1911), prime minister from 1906 to 1911, instigated several important economic and agrarian reforms. Many of the Stolypin reforms were reasonably successful, but the tsar was determined to water down or avoid altogether as many points of the October Manifesto as possible. Nicholas further worsened his relations with ordinary people with his support of ultra-reactionary nationalist organisations such as the Union of Russian People, which "fomented disorder with their pogroms in the western borderlands…The Unions were forerunners of mid-century fascism" (Service, 9).
The radical left, which counted amongst its numbers the Marxist Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), seemed to have missed its chance of overthrowing the Tsarist regime. Lenin, then in self-imposed exile in Switzerland, rued the lack of unity of the left; the title of his 1904 work One Step Forward: Two Steps Back seemed a good summary of the failure to capitalise on the 1905 revolution. Lenin later wrote that the events of 1905 were not those of a true revolution, but rather a "dress rehearsal for revolution" (Wood, 34).
Time was on the Communists' side, though, since the lack of deeper reforms, coupled with Russia's disastrous entry into the First World War (1914-18), led to the violent Russian Revolution of 1917 (actually two revolutions, one in February and the second in October), when the Tsar was deposed and Soviet Russia was established with Lenin as its leader. These momentous events can be traced back to one Sunday in 1905, when ordinary Russians "tried to break out of the semi-rural ghetto and into the modern urban world of citizenship and interest representation" (Hosking, 408).
