Meanwhile, the great conference of the Zemstvos took place in November, and was followed by the petition of Russian barristers for a grant of law and liberty. I could not but feel that the day when freedom would be wrested from the hands of our old oppressors would be near, and at the same time I was terribly afraid that, for lack of support on the side of the masses, the effort might fail. I had a meeting with several intellectual Liberals, and asked their opinion as to what the workmen could do to help the liberation movement. They advised me that we also should draft a petition and present it to the Government. But I did not think that such a petition would be of much value unless it were accompanied by a large industrial strike.*
6. Governor Fullon visits Father Gapon and his Assembly of Russian Workers.
Gapon’s testimony leaves no doubt that the worker petition that led to Bloody Sunday was conceived by his advisers from the Liberation Movement as part of the campaign of banquets and professional gatherings. At the end of November, Gapon agreed to introduce into his Assembly the resolutions of the Zemstvo Congress and to distribute to its members publications of the Union of Liberation.53
The opportunity for a major strike presented itself on December 20, 1904, with the dismissal of four workers belonging to his Assembly by Putilov, the largest industrial enterprise in the capital. Because the Putilov management had recently founded a rival union, the workers viewed the dismissals as an assault on their Assembly and went on strike. Other factories struck in sympathy. On January 7, an estimated 82,000 workers were out; the following day, their number grew to 120,000. By then, St. Petersburg was without electricity and newspapers; all public places were closed.54
Imitating the banquet campaign, Gapon on January 6 scheduled for Sunday, January 9, a worker procession to the Winter Palace to present the Tsar with a petition. As was the case with all the documents drafted by or with the assistance of the Union of Liberation, the petition generalized and politicized specific and unpolitical grievances, claiming that there could be no improvement in the condition of the workers unless the political system was radically changed. Written in a stilted language meant to imitate worker speech, it called for a Constituent Assembly and made other demands taken from the program of the Union of Liberation.55 Gapon sent copies of the petition to high officials. Preparations for the demonstration went ahead despite the opposition of the socialists.
Since Gapon’s Assembly enjoyed official sanction, the workers had no reason to think that the planned demonstration would be anything but orderly and peaceful. But the government feared that a procession of tens of thousands of workers could get out of control and lead to a breakdown of public order. In the eyes of the authorities Gapon was not so much a police agent as a “fanatical socialist” who exploited police protection for his own revolutionary purposes. It was further feared that the socialists would take advantage of the unrest to press their own agenda.56 On January 7, Fullon appealed to the workers to stay away, threatening to use force, if necessary. The next day, orders went out for the arrest of Gapon, but he managed to hide.
That evening, January 8, Mirskii convened an emergency meeting of ministers and such high officials as happened to be on hand: a haphazard gathering to deal with what threatened to become a major crisis. It was decided to allow the demonstration to proceed but to set physical boundaries beyond which it was not to go. The Winter Palace was to be off limits. If persuasion failed to deter the workers, the troops deployed at these boundary lines were to shoot. There was a general sense, however, that force would not be required. The Tsar dismissed the strike of 120,000 workers and the planned demonstration as a trivial incident: on the eve of the massacre, he noted in his diary: “At the head of the workers’ union is some kind of a priest-socialist, Gapon.” Assured that the situation was under control, he departed for Tsarskoe Selo, his country residence.
Fullon, who had responsibility for the city’s security, although a professional Gendarme, was a gentle, cultivated person who, according to Witte, disliked police methods and would have been better employed running a girls’ boarding school.57 Implementing decisions taken the previous night, he placed armed troops at several key points in the city.
By the time Gapon’s workers began to gather Sunday morning at the six designated assembly points it was evident that a confrontation had become unavoidable. The demonstrators were in the grip of a religious exaltation and prepared for martyrdom: the night before, some had written farewell letters. The marching columns looked like religious processions, the participants carrying ikons and singing hymns. As the groups advanced toward the city’s center, bystanders took off their hats and crossed themselves; some joined. Church bells tolled. The police did not interfere.
7. Bloody Sunday.
Eventually, the demonstrators ran into army pickets. In some places the troops fired warning shots into the air, but the masses, pushed from behind, pressed on. The soldiers, untrained in controlling crowds, reacted in the only way they knew, by firing point-blank at the advancing crowd. The worst altercation occurred at the Narva Gate, in the southwestern part of the city, where Gapon led the demonstrators. The troops fired and the crowd fell to the ground: there were 40 dead. Gapon rose to his feet and cried: “There is no God anymore, there is no Tsar.” Massacres occurred also in other parts of the city. Although journalists spoke of 4,600 killed and wounded, the best estimate is 200 killed and 800 injured.* Immediately, disorders spread throughout St. Petersburg. In the evening, there was much looting, especially of shops carrying liquor and firearms.58
Bloody Sunday caused a wave of revulsion to sweep across the country: among the masses, it damaged irreparably the image of the “good Tsar.”
Mirskii received his walking papers on January 18 without so much as a word of thanks: he was the first Minister of the Interior since the post had been created a century earlier to be let go without some honorific title or even a medal.59 His replacement, a colorless bureaucrat named Alexander Bulygin, also resisted as long as he decently could the honor of being named minister. Real power now passed into the hands of D. F. Trepov, who took over from Fullon the post of governor-general in the capital. A dashing officer, he had the complete confidence of Nicholas, who appreciated his candor and lack of personal ambition: in the months that followed, Trepov would exert a rather beneficial influence on Nicholas, persuading him to make concessions that he would rather have avoided.*
In the wake of Bloody Sunday protest meetings took place throughout Russia: zemstva, municipal councils, and private organizations condemned in the sharpest terms the government’s brutality. The workers responded with strikes. In January 1905 over 400,000 workers laid down their tools: it was the greatest strike action in Russian history until that time.60 University students left their classrooms; in some localities the unrest spread to secondary schools. On March 18, 1905, the authorities ordered all institutions of higher learning closed for the rest of the academic year. The released students swelled radical ranks. Disturbances were especially violent in the borderlands. On January 13, in the course of a general strike in Riga, Russian troops killed 70 persons. The following day, during a strike in Warsaw, 93 people lost their lives; 31 more were killed there during May Day celebrations (April 18).61 The worst massacres occurred in mid-June in Odessa, where striking workers were joined by the crew of the mutinous battleship Potemkin. Here 2,000 are said to have died and 3,000 to have been gravely injured.62 In many localities, criminals took advantage of the breakdown of order to ply their trade. In Warsaw, for example, Jewish gangsters disguised as “anarcho-Communists” broke into affluent residences, “expropriating” money and whatever else struck their fancy.63