autocrat, yet, when driven by hunger and depriva-
tion, resorting to violence and destruction. Those
peasants recently forced by destitution into the
crowded tenements or factory barracks of St
Petersburg and other industrial centres to work,
even lived separated from their families. At the
heart of the problem of a Russia seeking to mod-
ernise and move into the twentieth century lay this
vast peasantry. It was mainly on their heads too
that the burden of industrialisation had to be
placed, because they provided a cheap labour force
and generated the necessary surplus of wealth
which made investment in new and expanding
industries possible. Exports of agricultural pro-
duce had to provide the greater part of capital to
pay for all that the state spent on the huge army,
on administration and on industry. In the early
twentieth century the heavily burdened peasantry
was ripe for large-scale violent protests. In town
and country sporadic violence was to turn into the
explosion of 1905.
The year 1905 marks a turning point in the
history of Russia. The peasantry looted and burnt
the countryside and appropriated the landlords’
land. The immediate reason was the loss of
authority suffered by the tsarist autocracy during
the Russo-Japanese War. Violence also flared in
St Petersburg and the towns. The defeat of the
Russian armies in China and the despatch of
the Russian fleet to the bottom of the ocean
by the Japanese at the battle of Tsushima in May
1905 weakened the hold of the autocratic tsar
and his ministers.
The capital, St Petersburg, became the scene
of violence and brutal repression. It was the enig-
matic leadership of a charismatic priest, Father
Georgei Gapon, who had initially worked for the
tsarist regime, that led to bloodshed. As trade
unions were forbidden in Russia the tsarist
authorities developed an ingenious scheme to
provide a safety valve for industrial grievances and
a link with the government workers. Associations,
carefully guided in their loyalty to the tsar and led
by reliable supporters of autocracy were pro-
moted. One of these associations, formed with
the blessings of the Ministry of the Interior, was
Gapon’s in St Petersburg. Gapon proved an
unreliable supporter. He organised a mass strike
and in January 1905 the whole of industrial St
Petersburg was shut down by strikes. On what
became known as Bloody Sunday, 22 January, he
led to the Winter Palace a huge demonstration of
workers, their wives and children, perhaps as
many as 200,000 in all, dressed in their Sunday
best, to seek redress of their grievances from the
tsar. At the Narva Gate the head of the proces-
sion was met by Cossacks, who charged with
drawn sabres at the masses before them, maiming
and killing indiscriminately; soldiers fired into the
crowd. Killing continued all morning. Several
hundred, possibly as many as 1,000, innocent
people perished. The spell of a beneficent tsar was
broken. The tsar would never entirely recover his
authority or the faith and veneration of the masses
who had seen him as their ‘little father’.
Throughout the borderlands – Poland, the
Baltic, Finland and the Caucasus – there followed
widespread unrest and insurrection. To the
earlier victims of assassination now, in February
1905, was added another illustrious victim, the
Grand Duke Sergei, the tsar’s uncle. Terrorism,
strikes, student agitation and a rioting peasantry,
together with the defeated and demoralised army
and navy, added up to a picture of Russian autoc-
racy in complete disarray. The prospect of disaf-
fected armed forces on which autocracy relied was
a spectre reinforced in June 1905 by the cele-
brated mutiny of the battleship Potemkin in
Odessa harbour. Russian autocracy had reached a
critical point: the tsar could go on shooting and
follow a policy of harsh repression or seek to
master the situation by some timely concession
and reform. He chose the latter, though at heart
he remained a convinced, unbending autocrat.
Yet, from the low point of his reign in 1905
to the outbreak of the war nine years later the tsar
managed better than many would have foretold
at the outset. For a short while he placed the able
Sergei Witte in charge of the immediate crisis.
Witte had a true, if cynical appreciation of the
problem of governing the empire. ‘The world
should be surprised that we have any government
in Russia, not that we have an imperfect govern-
ment’, he remarked in July 1905. Witte was con-
vinced that chaos would follow if the tsar’s rule
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MULTINATIONAL RUSSIAN AND HABSBURG EMPIRES 43
