Bloody
Sunday Massacre in Russia
Well on its way to losing a war
against Japan in the Far East, czarist Russia is wracked with internal
discontent that finally explodes into violence in St. Petersburg in what will
become known as the Bloody Sunday Massacre.
Under the weak-willed Romanov
Czar Nicholas II, who ascended to the throne in 1894, Russia had become more
corrupt and oppressive than ever before. Plagued by the fear that his line
would not continue—his only son, Alexis, suffered from hemophilia—Nicholas fell
under the influence of such unsavory characters as Grigory Rasputin, the
so-called mad monk. Russia’s imperialist interests in Manchuria at the turn of
the century brought on the Russo-Japanese War, which began in February 1904.
Meanwhile, revolutionary leaders, most notably the exiled Vladimir Lenin, were
gathering forces of socialist rebellion aimed at toppling the czar.
To drum up support for the
unpopular war against Japan, the Russian government allowed a conference of the
zemstvos, or the regional governments instituted by Nicholas’s grandfather
Alexander II, in St. Petersburg in November 1904. The demands for reform made
at this congress went unmet and more radical socialist and workers’ groups
decided to take a different tack.
On January 22, 1905, a group of
workers led by the radical priest Georgy Apollonovich Gapon marched to the
czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to make their demands. Imperial forces
opened fire on the demonstrators, killing and wounding hundreds. Strikes and
riots broke out throughout the country in outraged response to the massacre, to
which Nicholas responded by promising the formation of a series of
representative assemblies, or Dumas, to work toward reform.
Internal tension in Russia
continued to build over the next decade, however, as the regime proved
unwilling to truly change its repressive ways and radical socialist groups,
including Lenin’s Bolsheviks, became stronger, drawing ever closer to their
revolutionary goals. The situation would finally come to a head more than 10
years later as Russia’s resources were stretched to the breaking point by the
demands of World War I.