Under Gapon's charismatic leadership, thousands of Petersburg workers were organised into neighbourhood associations centred around local clubhouses, tearooms and libraries that for the first time provided them with venues of social, cultural and eventually political interaction. Gapon himself was influenced and assisted by a small but dedicated group of workers and intelligenty who, having passed through the school of Social Democracy and found it wanting, remained nonetheless dedicated to the workers' cause as they now understood it. As the months went by, it began to dawn on the St Petersburg officials who had begun by supporting Gapon financially that instead of the calming, loyal, religious influence they had hoped for, they had created a sort of Frankenstein monster, sobering (literally) and religious to be sure, but a movement that was rapidly escaping their control. More and more Gapon's 'Assembly of Factory Workers' (Sobranie russkikhfabrichno-zavodskikh rabochikh) was being transmogrified into a giant labour union, with pretensions to represent the interests of Petersburg workers against their employers. Hence when three of its members were fired from the giant (c. 12,000 workers) Putilov engineering works in late December, precipitating an illegal strike at a plant on which the government heavily relied for its shipbuilding and armaments production, Gapon (after some hesitation) assumed the role of what today might be called 'worker-priest', encouraging the spread of the strike to many other factories and organising a citywide protest demonstration. On 9 January 1905, thanks to nervous, trigger-happy troops and a government that simply did not get the picture, unarmed workers and their families who attempted to march, militantly but without violence, on the Winter Palace were repeatedly fired upon, with over a hundred demonstrators killed and many more injured. The day has gone down in history as Russia's notorious 'Bloody Sunday', the opening salvo of the revolution of 1905.[69]
Though it was led by a presumably apolitical priest, it would be a mistake to think ofthe workers' demonstration of 9 January as lacking in political content. The petition to the tsar that was carried by many of the demonstrators was replete not only with the class-centred particularistic demands of industrial labour (including, however, 'economic' demands with strong political connotations such as the eight-hour day and the right to form trade unions), it also contained, though couched in religious rhetoric, something closely resembling the political programme of Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), the recently formed organisation that best embodied Russian liberal opinion (regrouped in the form of the Kadet Party some ten months later). These included the demand for a Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of a four-tailed suffrage as well as such basic rights as freedom of speech, assembly and religion. At the same time, the petition included demands - the elimination of redemption payments, for example - that spoke to the interests of the peasantry, the socio- legal group (soslovie) to which most workers still belonged and with which many still had genuine economic, familial and personal links. And, though the petitioners had received no direct input from either Bolsheviks or Mensheviks, their language included a hostile reference to the 'capitalist-exploiters of the working class'.[70] Although this and other rhetorical flourishes (including those of a liberal character) may well have reflected the influence of the Assembly of Factory Workers' cohort of disillusioned Marxists, the fact that so many workers appeared to be comfortable with such a seemingly incongruous mix of liberal, radical and traditional discourses - the languages of urban class warfare, 'bourgeois' civic values and 'humble' peasant pleading, accompanied by the visible parading and display of religious icons and portraits of the tsar - speaks volumes of the mixed, labile, internally contradictory state of mind of Russia's most 'advanced' workers as they unwittingly embarked on their and the twentieth century's very first revolution. Little wonder that Lenin craved a party that could provide Russian socialists with the closed continuity of 'consciousness' in the face of such volatile shifts of mood in the class they claimed to represent. [71]
If the revolutionary year began, then, with no clear victor in the struggle between the radical Left and the forces of order for the allegiance of Russia's ideologically still impressionable and unformed labour force, by the end of that year radicals would emerge as the clear winners in this competition, though with no single faction dominating.[72] One way to think of the year 1905 is as an acceleration at hothouse temperatures of the earlier competition for worker allegiance, but this time with a decided advantage on the side of the revolutionaries thanks to the shattering of faith in the tsar precipitated by Bloody Sunday. One observes the government desperately dishing out new proposals to win back the workers but invariably falling behind the curve of disillusionment. Perhaps the most serious government initiative in i905 (prior to October) was the Shidlovskii Commission, an attempt launched at the end of January to bring the aspirations of volatile St Petersburg workers under control by harnessing them for the first time to an elected body of (male) worker representatives, chosen (in contrast to the feeble and unpopular law on starostas of 1903) by workers, without any input from employers (although together with government officials, employers would be represented on the commission itself). With worker representatives chosen via a complex two- stage system of voting based on the size of the factory, the commission was supposed to get at the roots of the workers' discontents and come up with new solutions to their most pressing problems.[73] This was a tacit admission by the government that the traditional notion of a worker population so rooted in its peasant traditions as to seek comfort in the goodwill of the tsar, a notion that may still have seemed to be plausible at the dawn of Bloody Sunday, was no longer adequate to the challenge faced by the regime.
Although workers at some St Petersburg factories were sometimes advised by liberal and left-leaning lawyers and other educated well-wishers, revolutionary activists representing the various socialist parties played almost no role in the first-stage elections to the commission that took place in the middle of February. If for a brief moment, it appeared as if the government might have out-manoeuvred the radical Left and recaptured some of its lost ground, however, events were moving too fast and basic distrust was too great for the government to hold on to its advantage. What it had succeeded in doing was to promote 'the first basically free elections ever held in Russia by workers',[74]but it then quickly managed to lose control of the process while providing workers with multiple venues where they could nurture their growing political sensitivities and feel the strength and empowerment that comes with open debate, voting and unconstrained political sociability. In one of those unusual sequencings that does seem to distinguish historical processes in modern Russia, workers now found themselves the only social group in the country to have been granted a (relatively) democratic, if ephemeral, franchise under a notoriously autocratic system. Not content to follow the marching orders of the regime that had empowered them, Petersburg workers (from whom workers in other parts of Russia were quickly gaining inspiration) rejected the limitations that the government wished to place upon the new commission, guaranteed its failure by boycotting its meetings and often aired their grievances in language that called the entire political order into question, thereby replicating but also dwarfing the paradoxes of the zubatovshchina.
69
The most thorough scholarly account ofthe
70
For an English translation of the text of the petition, see Sablinsky,
71
The degree to which civil and political rights, the ruleoflaw, and relatedliberal aspirations were part of the workers' value system in this period is carefully analysed in S. A. Smith, 'Workers and Civil Rights in Tsarist Russia, i899-i9i7', in Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson (eds.),
72
Importantinsightsinto the role ofworkersinthe 1905 Revolution maybe foundin: Gerald D. Surh,
73
Described in detail in Schwarz,