The tsar’s decision to replace Plehve with a moderate, Peter Sviatopolk-Mirskii (already known for his willingness to appease radical students), as the new Minister of Interior was less a reflection of the tsar’s enlightenment and flexibility than of his vacillation and despair. And it was interpreted as such by contemporaries. After a brief optimistic ‘spring’ based on a false hope that the new minister would be allowed to bring about some fundamental change, the process of political polarization resumed. The contentiousness of autocracy’s enemies now grew apace, as even moderates waited impatiently for the moment that would advance their cause.
Enter Father Gapon: A Road to Bloody Sunday
That moment was soon provided by St Petersburg’s industrial workers. In 1904, in what seemed like a reprise of the Zubatov experiment (defunct since the summer of 1903) without Zubatov, the charismatic Orthodox priest Georgii Gapon had succeeded in mobilizing thousands of members into his ‘Assembly of Russian Factory Workers’. Originally approved and even financed by the police (with the goal of weaning workers away from the radicals and bolstering their commitment to autocracy by providing safe outlets such as tea-rooms and public lectures), Gapon’s organization soon took on a life of its own. On the one hand, some of his most trusted aides turned out to be former Marxists who, though no longer very revolutionary, still provided workers with intense exposure to the Western model of a legal labour movement and notions of civil rights and constitutional order. On the other hand, the grass-roots movement—and in this respect
Both worker militancy and the mood of the former Marxists could not fail to be influenced by society’s leftward swing, especially in the hothouse atmosphere of the capital. When in December 1904 some workers at the giant Putilov factory, members of Gapon’s Assembly, were dismissed, with little justification, in what appeared to be an effort to reduce the Assembly’s influence, the organization could not maintain its credibility unless it rose to the defence of the injured parties. In a sense, everything that had happened to the Assembly over the past year—its organization into neighbourhood branches, the swelling of its ranks, its members’ exposure to liberal and worker-centred political discourse—had conspired to prepare it for this moment of truth. To this concoction must be added the charismatic and sympathetic personality of Gapon himself, who came to embody all the workers’ conflicting and confusing aspirations, lending them palpable personification at a moment when the workers might otherwise have lacked unity and direction.
The outcome was a city-wide general strike in January 1905 and a dramatic decision, taken almost simultaneously at the grass-roots and upper levels of Gapon’s organization, to organize a mass march on the Winter Palace with a petition for Tsar Nicholas, ‘our father’. Undoubtedly drafted in large part by the workers’ ex-Marxist intellectual advisers, but also with ample feedback from many workers, the petition combined class-centred demands for higher wages and shorter hours (the eight-hour day, an ‘economic’ demand with special political resonance) with a liberal political programme that included a constitution and free elections based on direct, universal manhood suffrage.
The decision of the emperor was no less dramatic. It was to disregard the petitioners by failing to appear at the palace to receive the petition. Even more fateful was the decision to authorize military units to fire on advancing petitioners. Since the procession—which included women and children—not only was unarmed but carried Orthodox crosses and icons (Sergei Eisenstein’s filmed depiction of marchers carrying red flags and likenesses of Marx should be ignored) and sang patriotic songs, the order to shoot to kill proved particularly repulsive. Indeed, it turned public opinion against the tsar almost as soon as word got out that well over a hundred were dead and many more were wounded on this ‘Bloody Sunday’ (9 January 1905).
The 1905 Revolution
