Home / General / This Day in Labor History: January 22, 1905

This Day in Labor History: January 22, 1905

/
/
/
683 Views

On January 22, 1905, the first Russian Revolution began when the military fired on striking workers in St. Petersburg. The revolution, such as it even was, failed, as most revolutions do, but it laid the groundwork for the conditions in 1917 being right for a successful revolution.

Working and political conditions in early 20th century Russia were terrible. The peasants had been emancipated, but for many, life was hardly any better. They had allotted land, but they weren’t allowed to mortgage or sell it and they made too little money to make a living from it. Growing Russian nationalism coming from the palace alienated the nation’s enormous minority populations. Jewish Russians had moved rapidly toward secularism and the Bund, with new socialist ideas becoming increasingly common in pretty sizable swaths of that population. Industrialization in Russia was still pretty nascent, but those workers were angry too, as the Tsar had banned strikes and unions. The military was angry too, with rank and file soldiers dealing with terrible conditions, including hunger and a lack of proper clothing in a nation where you really need that. 1905 would be a very bad year for the Russian military. The political crackdowns after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 had led to political reaction that continued through the 1905 revolutions. Anti-Semitism was the game of the day for the Russian government. When a group of workers in January 1905 came to the Winter Palace to present a peace petition, Tsar Nicholas II had the military fire upon them.

Core to the issues in 1905 was government policy toward industrial workers. The government had done a good job of engaging in rapid industrialization since 1890. Both manufacturing growth and railroad mileage increased impressively, though it was still small compared to western Europe. The problem though was that it was all built on taxing the poor, particularly peasants forced to work in towns. Pressure built on the Russian government from all sides. Workers had struck pretty consistently since 1902, when railroad workers went on strike in the Caucasus. These developed further and led to a general strike in November 1902 based in Rostov-on-Don. The Tsar’s forces crushed the strike with lots of killings, but it was also a key moment in the political development of the Russian working classes and they began to make political demands that by 1905 went well with the leftist organizations and liberals more or less allied.

Workers in St. Petersburg went on strike at the end of 1904, contributing to the larger move toward revolution a few weeks later. That started with six workers fired for political activity. Sympathy strikes spread and upwards of 150,000 workers struck by mid-January. On January 22, 1905, soldiers of the Imperial Guard attacked the demonstrators, led by Father Georgy Gapon. He was a Ukrainian born Orthodox priest who had become an advocate for the Russian working class. That day, the workers decided to present a petition to the Palace. It was a very reasonable action. It was not intended to be violent or challenging particularly. It simply listed demands that included the eight hour day, a pay raise, and better working conditions.

The Tsar and his advisors went ballistic upon hearing what was happening and prepared for maximum violence. About 10,000 troops prepared to battle the peaceful workers, including Cossacks. On January 22, the troops attacked groups of workers around the city. Unlike how artistic representations presented it, including the painting at the top of this post, there wasn’t a single battle in front of the Winter Palace. Rather, the troops made sure the workers never got that far. We don’t know how many people died that day. The government said 96. The workers said 4,000. Best guess is a couple of hundred.

This repression only created greater upheaval in the nation. Strikes spread from Warsaw to Moscow and Riga to Baku. Confidence in the government among the poor declined and never recovered. In February, Nicholas II agreed to a Duma, but with very limited powers. This only ratcheted up the pressure. In St. Petersburg, the Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Delegates formed, with Leon Trotsky at the center. That started in early 1905, but went nowhere until October. That month, a strike broke out in the city, soon becoming a general strike. The Soviet began to run the strike and became an elected body of workers throughout the city, with a wide variety of leftist. It was also the first time that the city’s workers had ever elected, well, anything. Trotsky at this point was a Menshevik and was the leading representative of that side of the movement there. The Bolsheviks were opposed to this, as Lenin determined to be in charge of everything and was not in charge of this. The October Manifesto promised universal suffrage, civil rights, and the establishment of a constitution once the Tsar was overthrown or sidelined. The Tsar did not want to sign this, but at the moment, he did not have the military forces rallied to crush it. So he signed it after a short delay and waited for the right moment to strike back.

With the signing of the Manifesto, the strike in St. Petersburg ended and the Tsar and his allies could focus on crushing dissent elsewhere for the time being. Right-wingers started attacking various enemies, mostly leftists and Jews, which in their mind were mostly the same thing.

The other big event of the year was the uprising of the sailors in Odessa in June. This became a bigger deal in the aftermath than it was at the time. The Russian battleship Potemkin had a mutiny that was soon crushed by the Tsar’s forces. This actually had little to do with the key issues at play in 1905, but served as a larger symbol of the dissatisfaction with the Russian state. It became the public vision of the 1905 revolution later due to Sergei Eisenstein’s masterful The Battleship Potemkin, perhaps the greatest of all the astoundingly innovative Soviet silent films. Perhaps the most well-known artistic portrayal of Bloody Sunday is Dmitri Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony, a musical representation of 1905 in Russia. One movement is specifically about Bloody Sunday and in fact, the composer’s father and uncle were there as participants. Maxim Gorky also wrote The Life of a Useless Man, his 1908 novel, about the incident and its aftermath.

The Tsarist state spent the next few years in full-on repression, including the death and likely murder of Father Gapon in 1906. Political arrests and executions rose over the next five years. Many things would have to happen between then and the 1917 revolution, including World War I. But the Russian state started laying the groundwork on this date in 1905.

This is the 546th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :