Bloody Sunday (Russia 1905)In 1914 Russia was considered backward by the standard of Western industrial society. Russia still recalled a recent feudal past.
Twelve years earlier in 1905 the workers of St. Petersburg (the Germanic name was change to its Russian equivalent, Petrograd, in 1914 with the outbreak of hostilities with the Central Powers) protested hardships due to cyclical downturns in the economy.
Urban workers appealed to the Tsar as “little father” for relief for their hardships. On Sunday in January 1905 the tsar’s troops fired on a peaceful mass demonstration in front of Winter Palace. A thousand were killed, including many women and children, who were appealing to the tsar for relief.
The event, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday, set-off a revolution that spread to Moscow and the countryside.In October 1905 the regime responded to the disruptions with a series of reforms that legalized political parties and established the Duma, or national parliament Peasants, oppressed with their own burdens of taxation and endemic poverty, launched mass attacks on big landowners throughout 1905 and 1906.
The government met workers’ and peasants’ demands with return a repression in 1907. In the half-decade before the Great War, the Russian state stood as an autocracy of Parliamentary concession blended with severe police control.
Bloody Sunday (Russia 1905)
