- What was Bloody Sunday?
“Bloody Sunday” is the name given to a fateful event that took place on January 9, 1905, in the city of St. Petersburg, in the then Russian Empire. On the winter morning of that Sunday, a mass of thousands of people marched peacefully towards the Winter Palace, located in the aforementioned city, where the Tsar Nicholas II and your family. This march was led by the priest of the Orthodox Church, George Gapon, and had the objective of delivering a petition to the tsar, in which the demand for better living conditions for the factory workers in the city was stated.
Father Gapon took this initiative after the dismissal of four workers at St. Petersburg's largest factory, the Putilov, in December 1904. This dismissal was due to the complaint that these workers made about the ill-treatment they suffered at the hands of the factory foreman. The dismissal of the workers provoked the revolt of workers from other factories in the city, who, in turn, had the support of the unions. The following month, the large mass of workers dissatisfied with working conditions was organized by Father Gapon and marched in procession to the Winter Palace, but the tsar was no longer in the Palace.
Palace guards were allowed to open fire on the unarmed crowd. It is estimated that around 1000 people were affected and that almost half died on the spot.
- Trigger of the 1905 Revolution
The massacre of January 9, 1905 unleashed a wave of riots that took the streets of St. Petersburg and other Russian cities. As historian Robert Service says in his book Comrades: A History of World Communism, followed “months of riots, strikes were organized and workers' councils (or “soviets”) were created. The most famous of these was the Petersburg Soviet, led by the brilliant young Marxist orator Leon Trotsky.”
Not only Trotsky, but other characters that would make up the Bolshevik revolutionary front in 1917, like Vladimir Lenin, ended up joining the 1905 revolts and rehearsing a Russian workers' revolution that year. However, the tsar, in articulation with moderate socialist leaders, ended up making some concessions to the workers in order to appease the situation, thus delaying the end of his regime.
