What Was Bloody Sunday 1905?
At about 11 in the morning of 22 January 1905 (9 January by the old-style calendar), a column of several thousand workers, women, and children from the Narva Gate district of St Petersburg, marching behind crosses and icons and a portrait of the Tsar, reached the Obvodny Canal and the Cossack picket. The picket commander had orders to clear the canal. The Cossacks refused. The column moved on, past the Narva Gate, to the Petersburg side of the Troitsky Bridge, where it met the regular army. The 93rd Irkutsk Infantry, under Captain Georgi Stahl, was ordered to fire. It fired. The street cleared in ten minutes, leaving at least 40 dead and several hundred wounded. The massacre of 22 January 1905 is the date that gives the Russian Revolution of 1905 its name (see Ascher, The Revolution of 1905, 2004; Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1990).
The background
The massacre was the result of a strike movement that had been developing in St Petersburg since the autumn of 1904. The Putilov works, the largest industrial enterprise in the capital with about 13,000 workers, had been the site of a major strike in December 1904, organised by the priest Georgy Gapon. Gapon had formed a workers’ association, the Assembleya, under police auspices in 1903, and the association had become a mass organisation by the autumn of 1904. On 7 January 1905, four workers of the Putilov works were dismissed for membership in the association; the workers called for a strike; the strike spread to the other great works of the capital; and on 9-22 January, the strike became a political march.
Gapon drafted the petition, which asked for a wide range of reforms: civil liberties, the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, an end to the war with Japan, a Constituent Assembly, and “the right freely and honestly to elect representatives.” The march to the Winter Palace was supposed to be the moment when the Tsar received the petition in person. The march was peaceful; the participants had been told to bring their families and to dress in their best clothes to emphasise the non-threatening character of the demonstration. The Tsar was not, in fact, at the Winter Palace on 22 January; he was at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, and the petition was never delivered (Pipes, 1990).
The massacre
The first shots were fired on the Petersburg side of the Narva Bridge, where the 93rd Irkutsk Infantry fired on the column at 11 am. The casualties were heavy: estimates range from 200 to 1,000 dead and 800 to 2,000 wounded. The number of marchers was 50,000-150,000, depending on the source; the number of the columns was about ten. The columns were met by army units at various points along the route, and the columns were fired on at the Narva Bridge, the Troitsky Bridge, the Liteinyi Bridge, and the Neva quay. The St Petersburg garrison, however, was mostly Cossack, and the Cossack units refused to fire on the marchers; it was the regular infantry that did the firing (Ascher, 2004).
The aftermath
The massacre of 22 January was the political event of the early 1905. The traditional image of the Tsar as the Batiushka Tsar, the Little Father of the Russian people, was destroyed. The slogan “Down with the autocracy” became a rallying cry of the opposition, and the number of strikes and political demonstrations grew rapidly in the weeks that followed. By the end of January, more than 440,000 workers were on strike in St Petersburg; by the end of February, the figure for the whole of Russia was about 1 million. The peasant revolts, the mutinies in the army, and the Potemkin mutiny of June 1905 were the first political results.
The October Manifesto of 17 October 1905 was the regime’s response to the general strike of October 1905; the manifesto was in part a recognition that the regime could not suppress the workers and the soldiers who had, in the autumn of 1905, become the largest single political force in the country. The Petrograd Soviet of 1905 was a direct political descendant of the workers’ associations that had organised the 22 January march (Ascher, 2004; Pipes, 1990).
The legacy of Bloody Sunday
Bloody Sunday was the event that introduced the Russian working class as a political actor. The 1905 revolution was, in a real sense, a working-class revolution: the workers of the major cities — St Petersburg, Moscow, Baku, Warsaw, Riga, Kiev, Kharkov — were the backbone of the strike movement and the soviet movement. The 1917 February Revolution, which began with a strike of women textile workers in the Vyborg district of Petrograd, was the direct descendant of the 22 January march; the 1917 October Revolution was, in its turn, the political application of the lessons of 1905.
The memory of Bloody Sunday has been kept alive by the Russian working class for over a century. The 22 January march has been commemorated in Russia on 9 January (old style) since 1905, and the 9 January was made a public holiday in 1917. The 22 January anniversary, under the new-style calendar, has been commemorated in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods (Ascher, 2004).