722 Ch. 1 8 • The Dominant Powers in the Age of Liberalism
More than 300 marchers, including women and children, fell dead, and
perhaps 1,000 or more were wounded. “Bloody Sunday” helped shatter the
myth that the tsar was the Holy Father manipulated by selfish nobles and
wicked advisers. Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the latter partic
ularly influential in the countryside, encouraged more strikes. A violent
faction of the Socialist Revolutionaries carried out a particularly bloody
series of terrorist attacks and assassinations. Nicholas dismissed his liberal
minister of the interior. The tsars uncle fell to an assassin’s bullets. Strikes
spread to Poland, where they were bolstered by the nationalist movement,
and to Ukraine, Latvia, and Estonia. In some parts of Russia and in the
Baltic provinces, peasants attacked the homes of wealthy landowners. In
the southeastern borderlands, Muslim leaders announced the formation of
an All-Russian Muslim League. Workers began to organize trade unions in
huge numbers and newspapers appeared in open defiance of censorship. In
June, sailors on the battleship Potemkin mutinied on the Black Sea, killing
the captain and several officers.
With the bulk of the army fighting the Japanese in Manchuria, Nicholas
appeared to choose the path of reform, appointing Sergei Witte (1849
1915) as prime minister. Witte was eager to make Russia a modern indus
trial power, and he believed that he could do so if the tsar granted minimal
reforms. He persuaded Nicholas to rescind redemption payments to the
state for land acquired when the serfs were emancipated in 1861, to allow
Poles and Lithuanians to use their own languages, to allow religious toler
ation in Poland, to return political trials to regular courts, and to abolish
some restrictions on Jews.