The Revolution of 1905

Abstract

On 22 January, 1905, a priest, Father George Gapon, led a great mass of peaceful petitioners to the square in front of the tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg to implore the tsar to relieve their miserable conditions. Their grievances were diverse, but the petition they carried reflected the increasingly assertive demands of industrial workers who had recently paralysed the capital with mass strikes:

Sire! We workers, our children and wives, the helpless old people who are our parents, we have come to you, Sire, to seek justice and protection. We are in great poverty, we are oppressed and weighed down with labours beyond our strength; we are insulted, we are not recognised as human beings, we are treated like slaves … Despotism and arbitrary rule are strangling us, and we are suffocating. Sire, our strength is at an end! The limit of our patience has been reached; the terrible moment has come for us when it is better to die than to continue suffering intolerable torment.¹