by Philipp Blom
Even during the summer of 1904, Gapon openly showed his filial trust in the Tsar. A worker at the Putilov steel plant later recalled a speech in which the priest told workers: ‘Though the Tsar is far away and God is high in the heavens and although there is much which the authorities do not know, we will bring the situation of the working people to the attention not only of the factory owners but of the powers that be.’ The Father of the People would be dismayed to learn of his children’s hardships and would punish those whose greed and cruelty had created the workers’ misery, the priest assured his audience.
Father Gapon was an intelligent man who clearly detested the conservatism of the official Church and had chosen active social engagement. He knew the daily struggle for existence of the workers who came to him and was familiar with their miserable living conditions, the constant danger of accident and penury, the hunger, the alcohol, and the illness dogging their lives. He agreed with the socialists in believing that the situation had become untenable. Unlike the revolutionaries, however, Gapon was sure in the knowledge that if only the Tsar in his goodness were not misled by his duplicitous advisers, everything could be changed. Capitalism was a blight on Russia’s soul because it interjected a pernicious layer of officials and rich entrepreneurs that sundered the age-old bond between the Tsar and his people. The solution was therefore a simple one: the Little Father would have to be told, personally, away from the influence of the wicked men around him.
‘There is no God!’ Father Gapon surrounded by supporters.
Father Gapon’s workers’ ministry developed far more momentum than expected by the authorities who had allowed his organization and influence to grow. He began to hold meetings with intellectuals, political activists and businessmen, and together with an inner circle he started work on a petition to be presented to the Tsar in person as soon as an opportunity should arise, possibly on the occasion of another great military defeat - a moment at which the Tsar could not but listen to his people. The opportunity came sooner than even Gapon had expected when four railroad car workers were summarily dismissed from the Putilov plant. All four were members of Gapon’s organization and so, perhaps also to prove his credentials in the world of real work, he took it upon himself to intercede for their jobs. The management was intransigent, pointing out that the workers in question had been lazy and unreliable, and in the tense general situation some 12,500 workers at the plant went on strike in support of their colleagues on 5 January. Gapon backed their action and suddenly found himself at the head of a huge wave of strikes that swept through the city like wildfire. On 4 January the workers of the Franco-Russian Machine Plant joined in, one day later 16,000 at the Neva Machine and Shipbuilding works, 2,000 at the Neva textile factory, and hundreds more in smaller plants. Within three days, some 140,000 workers in 380 factories were refusing to work.
At Father Gapon’s headquarters, the mood became one of hectic optimism. Meetings succeeded one another across the city until deep into the night as the organization realized that the strike gave them an unprecedented power base. If the Tsar was to be made to see the desperate condition in which his humblest subjects found themselves, this was the moment to speak. A peaceful march to the Winter Palace was decided: a workers’ pilgrimage to the centre of power, imploring His Majesty to listen. Aware of the dangers this project entailed, Father Gapon personally wrote to Interior Minister Mirskii, requesting permission for the march to go ahead and enclosing a copy of the petition to be presented to the Emperor in front of the palace gates. All members of the organization were asked to appear on the morning of 8 January in their best clothes, with icons and other religious symbols - and sober.
The petition, which has already been quoted, was couched in the most respectfully subservient terms but ended with an almost menacing flourish of praise for the Emperor: ‘Thou wilt thus make Russia both happy and famous, and Thy name will be engraved in our hearts and those of our posterity for ever. And if Thou dost not ... respond to our pleas we will die here in this square before Thy palace. We have nowhere to go and no purpose in going.’ It may have been the undertone of threat and determination contained in this otherwise innocuous document that determined the government not to authorize the march and to post flyers throughout the city, warning that any large gatherings would be dealt with ‘by the appropriate measures’.
The Tsar himself had shown not the slightest inclination to play the workers’ game and had stayed at Tsarskoe Selo, outside the capital, where on 8 January units of infantry and cavalry were posted around strategic routes. The workers, meanwhile, continued with their preparations. There were rumours that they would not be allowed to march, but there were always rumours of one kind or another. The plain-clothes policemen who in any case were present at all their assemblies listening to their speeches gave no indication that there might be a problem. If they were to meet a cordon of soldiers with bayonets, they would simply go up to the soldiers and say ‘Brother, do you really want to shoot me?’ an old man said, to general approval.
An eerie quiet lay over St Petersburg on the morning of 9 January. The weather was mild and the steps muffled by the freshly fallen snow; normal traffic and activity had almost come to a standstill in the striking city as first hundreds and then thousands of workers assembled at various points around the city to begin their march. They were not sure what fate would await them, but foreseeing the worst, they had put able-bodied men at the front. A worker addressed the crowd waiting at Vasilevskii Island: ‘You know why we are going. We are going to the Tsar for the Truth. Our life is beyond endurance ... Now we must save Russia from the bureaucrats under whose weight we suffer. They squeeze the sweat and blood out of us. You know our workers’ life. We live ten families to the room. Do I speak truth?’ Voices from the crowd assented, puffing their warm breath into the winter air. ‘And so we go to the Tsar. If he is our Tsar, if he loves his people he must listen to us ... We go to him with open hearts. I am going ahead in the first rank and if we fall the second rank will come after us. But it cannot be that he would open fire on us.’ Then the crowd said the Lord’s Prayer. Sobs were heard among the mumbling voices. The march began.
Among the demonstrators slowly making their way towards Troitskii Bridge (overlooked at this very moment by a sleepy Sergei Witte from his salon window) was Maksim Gorky, who later described the killing of one worker in the crowd by Cossack cavalry:
The dragoon circled round him and, shrieking like a woman, waved his sabre in the air ... Swooping down from his dancing horse ... he slashed him across the face, cutting him open from the eyes to the chin. I remember the strangely enlarged eyes of the worker and ... the murderer’s face, flushed from the cold and excitement, his teeth clenched in a grin and the hairs of his moustache standing up on his elevated lip. Brandishing his tarnished shaft of steel he let out another shriek and, with a wheeze, spat at the dead man through his teeth.
As they were fired upon and attacked by Cossacks with sabres drawn, the protesters’ bitter disillusionment struck more terribly than the soldiers’ bullets. ‘There is no Tsar, there is no God!’ Father Gapon was heard crying, as his comrades fell around him and holy icons fell into the snow from their lifeless hands. As the crowd scattered into the surrounding streets, the priest managed to escape to Gorky’s flat, where he was admitted by the millionaire revolutionary industrialist Savva Morozov, who amused himself by playing bodyguard to his writer friend. (‘He scurries before the Revolution like a devil before the dawn,’ in Chekhov’s words.) ‘Give me something to drink! Wine. Everyone’s dead!’ cried Gapon, who was blue in the face and stared around in wild bewilderment. Gorky tried unsuccessfully to calm down the priest, who was shaved and disguised in civilian clothes to avoid arrest. It was a priority to prove to the workers that their hero was not among the victims (there were already rumours that he had been one of the first to die) and so Gorky summoned the director of the Art Theatre, Asaf Tikhomirov, to come over to the flat and make up the traumatized priest
to give him a semblance of vigorous life. Vodka had to do the rest.
In the evening of Bloody Sunday, Father Gapon appeared in front of a crowd of workers and intelligentii at the Free Economic Society. When he appeared next to Gorky on the stage, a small, clean-shaven man looking ‘like a shop assistant in an elegant store’ and wearing strange clothes, an excited whisper ran through the crowd. Gapon’s message was as unfamiliar as his garb: ‘Peaceful means have failed. Now we must go over to other means!’ he shouted, and pronounced a ‘pastor’s curse’ on the ‘traitor Tsar who ordered the shedding of innocent blood’. Later that night, Gapon, now a revolutionary, fled to Finland, and from there to Zurich, where he met Lenin.
Even the monarch himself was more than usually moved by the day’s events. In his diary, which usually carried faithful weather reports and numbers of animals shot during the hunt, he noted: ‘A terrible day. Troops had to fire in many places of the city, there were many killed and wounded. God, how painful and awful. Mama came straight from the city to mass. We lunched together. Walked with Misha. Mama is staying with us for the night.’
Into Chaos
Reactions to Bloody Sunday were swift. A general strike was called and life in St Petersburg ground to a complete standstill as railway workers joined en masse. Armed ‘workers’ protection’ groups began to roam the streets and fought skirmishes with the police. The situation was deteriorating fast, with strikes and unrest now also flaring up in other cities, particularly in Moscow. The Tsar’s response to this impending catastrophe was to appoint General Dimitrii Trepov, a tough cavalryman and, in Witte’s words, ‘a sergeant major by training and a pogromshchik by conviction’, as new governor of St Petersburg, commanded to restore order with an iron hand. Trepov presided over the collapse of civil order, busily clapping in jail the very democratic activists who might have been able to alleviate the situation on the streets, while the monarch proceeded to do nothing at all.
At this point, even the most conservative of his admirers expressed their despairing disillusionment with their ruler. Ilya Repin, painter of portraits to high society, wrote to a friend on 22 January: ‘How good that for all his base, greedy, predatory thieving nature he [the Tsar] is at the same time so stupid that perhaps he will soon fall into a trap to the general happiness of enlightened people’; Leo Tolstoy commented that the Tsar ‘listens to his uncles, his mother… He is a pitiful, insignificant, even unkind person.’ Another observer, Count Bobrinskii, wrote in his diary: ‘The Tsar sleeps. He sleeps on a volcano,’ and then: ‘The Tsar is still without will - he sleeps. The Tsar and the Tsarina sit behind locked doors at Tsarskoye Selo. The Grand Dukes are absolutely terrified.’
‘Like an average guards colonel of good
family’: Tsar Nicholas II.
The result of this paralysed fear was the replacement on 20 January of the well-meaning Count Mirskii as minister of the interior with Alexander G. Bulygin, who could be relied upon to follow orders rather than give them. Even the new minister, however, insisted that concessions would have to be made. ‘One would think you are afraid a revolution will break out,’ the Tsar remarked critically, only to be told: ‘Your Majesty, the revolution has already begun.’ Finally, on 18 February the Tsar issued a manifesto promising a consultative Duma elected according to a new formula which, as liberal journalists calculated, would allow less than 1 per cent of the potential electors of St Petersburg to cast their vote. In other regions, the percentage of eligible voters would be even smaller. It was, in Witte’s words, ‘a body modelled on Western European parliaments in all respects but the essential one, the power to enact laws’.
The Bulygin Duma was in no way enough to satisfy the demands of the revolutionaries on the streets. But were they truly revolutionaries? Did the uprisings of 1905-6 amount to a revolution? Perhaps not in the strict sense of the word. There was no coordinated effort and no transfer of power. Still, after a year of strikes and sporadic outbreaks of civil war in some cities, the ‘little revolution’ brought a complete breakdown of Russia’s fragile civil society and an almost total suspension of the rule of law. Strikes went on throughout the year, with numbers reaching from some 36,000 striking workers in the relatively quiet month of September, to the height of the revolt in December, when some 418,000 men and women in 13,000 factories put down their tools. Universities across the country were the scenes of angry mass protests by students and were closed for the remainder of the year. In the larger cities, marauding mobs became a common sight. In Nizhni Novgorod they attacked at will anyone who looked well dressed, injuring more than seventy people in a single day; in Moscow children of ten years were accused of ‘sedition’ and beaten by angry mobs under the eyes of the police, in Mogilev the policemen themselves went on the rampage, while the governor of Kishinev in Bessarabia feared that the city was turning into ‘an arena of civil war’. The frequent intimidation by groups of workers met with counter-terror: the Black Hundreds, a rightist organization with a long history of counter-revolutionary violence, launched attacks on those they deemed responsible for the breakdown of order. Believing the Jews to be behind all disloyalty and leftish agitation, they began a campaign of pogroms and individual attacks on Jews throughout the empire.
The situation in the countryside, some of it beyond the reach of the law at the best of times, deteriorated into general anarchy as peasants organized rent strikes, began illegal logging in the landlords’ woods and attacked the manor houses themselves. Everything that smacked of the decadent, Westernizing luxuries of the ruling classes was smashed, hacked to pieces, or simply plundered and divided up among the villagers: porcelain, clothes, entire libraries. In one instance peasants even broke up a grand piano and shared out the ivory keys. By early 1906, some 3,000 manors had been looted or burned down.
The government had already lost control over large areas of its territory. A state of siege had been declared in Warsaw after the bloody suppression of a demonstration involving some 100,000 during which soldiers fired into the crowd and killed 93; Finland was in the grips of a general strike; and western Georgia was effectively ruled by the Marxist national liberation movement. Only 80 miles from Moscow itself, Sergei Semenov, a peasant admirer of Tolstoy, established the Markovo Republic, refusing to acknowledge the authority of the Russian state and governing a region comprising several villages, through a system of democratic councils. The republic addressed demands to the St Petersburg government, including a national legislative assembly, civil rights for the peasantry, free and universal education, freedom of movement, and an amnesty for political prisoners. Only when these demands were met would the citizens of the Markovo Republic pay taxes to the Tsar, or obey his authority in any way. Semenov was president of this courageous impromptu state, whose brief story ended for its leaders in Moscow prison cells in 1906.
Overwhelmed by the breakdown of order throughout the empire, the authorities knew that they could not rely on the armed forces to restore order. Often peasants themselves, who had been pressed into the army for many years and were forced by their pitiable pay to mend their own boots and grow their own vegetables and livestock (‘an army of cobblers and farmers’, Orlando Figes calls them), the soldiers began to disobey orders when asked to put down revolts in the countryside.
The most technically demanding branch of the armed forces was the navy, which also had on its list the largest proportion of literate men and of socialists. Discontent was high among sailors, and was raised still higher by Admiral Alexeev’s pitifully incompetent waste of ships and men at Port Arthur and Tsushima against a numerically inferior but vastly better trained Japanese navy. It took nothing more than a piece of rotten meat to cause a full-scale rebellion on one of the navy ships still lying in the Black Sea, the battleship Potemkin. When the ship’s doctor decided on 14 June that a side of beef crawling with maggots could and should be eaten by the crew, the men protested and the captain ordered the muster of armed marines against the sailors. Fearing a summary mass execution of th
eir leaders the sailors rushed the officers, killing seven of them, while one of their own number, Grigori Valenchuk, also fell. Now in the hands of the insurrectionaries, the Potemkin raised a red flag and set course for the harbour of Odessa, where striking workers and government forces had been fighting running battles for the past fortnight.
The Potemkin episode sent a clear signal to the government. Even the Tsar could no longer deny that the situation had escalated beyond the usual rebellion that could be put down with a few hundred floggings and a handful of imprisonments, and even the most reactionary of his closest advisers urged him to create a State Duma and give in to the main demands of the liberal opposition. Otherwise, they argued, the powerful but scattered strikes would sooner or later become coordinated and would create an unstoppable movement for revolution. The choice was between loosening his grip on power or risking not only his crown, but also his life, they argued in front of the Emperor, who at first remained unimpressed: ‘I’m not afraid for my life,’ he commented. ‘I believe that God has a plan for all of us.’
The Tsar was at a complete loss as to how to react to the mounting pressure upon his reign. In his despair he turned to a man he distrusted and disliked: Sergei Witte, who had just achieved a remarkable result at the negotiating table in New York, where he had managed to secure advantageous peace with Japan. On 9 October 1906 Witte was summoned to the Tsar and asked his opinion of the situation. He informed the Emperor that the proposed Bulygin Duma had failed to satisfy the demands of the revolutionaries, and the country was now on the brink of revolution. There were only two possible courses of action left: to grant constitutional reform and hold elections for a Duma, a state of parliament with universal suffrage, or to appoint ‘a reliable person with virtually dictatorial power to employ ruthless force against disorder of whatever variety’. The second option, Witte warned, would be very bloody, and its success uncertain because the troops might side with the insurrectionaries. Time was of the essence, he insisted: the hitherto spontaneous strikes in the major cities were now being coordinated by the leaders of the socialist movement who had come out of their exile to organize and command a proper revolution, and the situation might become impossible at any moment. The Emperor vacillated, reflected, listened to his uncles, and changed his mind.
