Bloody Sunday in 1905: The Massacre at the Tsar's Winter Palace
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.
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⇒ Bloody Sunday in 1905: The Massacre at the Tsar's Winter Palace
