2. Sergei Witte: Finance Minister Responsible for industrialisation reform in Russia

3.  Rapid industrialisation brought with it virtually no legislative or regulatory controls on the treatment of labour  By the first years of the 20th century, Russia’s three million industrial workers were one of the lowest paid workforces in Europe

5.  The average working day was 10.5 hours, six days a week  15-hour days were not unknown.  There were no annual holidays, sick leave or superannuation.

6.  Workplace hygiene and safety were poor; illness, accidents and injuries were common-place and with no leave or compensation available, sick or injured workers were summarily dismissed  Factory owners often imposed arbitrary fines for lateness, failing to meet production quotas or more trivial ‘offences’ like toilet breaks and talking or singing while working

8.  Living conditions were overcrowded because there was not enough infrastructure to support the peasants moving to the cities looking for industrial work  1904 survey: An average of 16 people per apartment

9. The dissatisfaction of factory workers grew steadily but became particularly acute in the final months of 1904 because:  Russia entered the difficult and disastrous war with Japan  The national economy slipped into a severe recession where trade declined, where companies to dismiss thousands of workers and increase pressure on those they retained.

10.  There were significant increases in homelessness and poverty; the tsarist government’s only response was to ask zemstvo leaders to organise charitable relief.  Food prices in the cities increased by as much as 50 per cent, however wages failed to increase correspondingly.

11.  In early 1905, 5 men were sacked from the Putilov Steel Works, one of the largest factories in St Petersburg  This resulted in massive strikes of sympathy throughout the city, growing to 105 000 workers by Friday, 7 January 1905

12.  On a freezing Saturday morning on the 9 th January 1905, the largest strike in Russia’s history occurred  111 000 men, women and children started to march in different sections of St Petersburg aiming to march to the Tsar’s Winter Palace on the Neva River  The Putilov strikes and Sunday march were organised by Father Georgy Gapon, a Ukranian-born priest and head of the radical Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers

14.  The aim of these strikes was to present the Tsar with a petition signed by 135 000 workers outlining their grievances and requesting significant reforms, including  The marchers carried religious symbols and carried portraits of the Tsar and Tsarina

15.  Nicholas II was in his palace 25 miles south of the capital  As several thousand workers approached the Winter Palace, officers called out the palace’s security garrison (comprised of soldiers and cossacks) to guard its entry points  As the workers approached, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd  It is not known whether the soldiers fired spontaneously or in response to aggression  The number of victims is also unclear, estimated between 96 and over 200

21.  Nicholas was condemned in much of the Western world as a tyrant  The Tsar was given the name of ‘Bloody Nicholas’ within Russia  Father Gapon: “there is no God…there is no Tsar!”  The next day, 150 000 workers showed their disgust by not working  The Tsar lost his benevolent image and lost the support of a large proportion of the workers  Over the coming days these strikes expanded throughout St Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, Warsaw and the Baltic states

23.  February 17 th : Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the Tsar’s uncle and brother-in- law and former governor of Moscow, was assassinated in the Kremlin  The murder was carried out by the SR party’s terrorist arm

24.  Last class: we saw that this was the turning point in the Russo-Japanese War  Japan sealed the humiliating military defeat of Russia  Exposed weaknesses in infrastructure  Contributed to economic recession and rising of food prices  Exacerbated existing discontent from ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre

25.  Another worrying sign for tsarism was a spate of mutinies that erupted in military units through the middle and end of 1905, spurred by a drop in morale after the Battle of Tsushima  The most famous of these occurred aboard the battleship Potemkin on the Black Sea, triggered by officers with a liking for corporal punishment and the serving of maggot-ridden meat to mistreated sailors.  In June 1905 the sailors, inspired by civilian uprisings in the cities, rebelled and killed or expelled the ship’s officers.  Now in command of the Potemkin, they sailed it first to Odessa (which was under a general strike) and then to Romania, where most of them disembarked.  Another mutiny broke at in November at the naval depot in Sevastopol, where several thousand sailors formed their own worker’s representative council and demanded the abolition of tsarism, a constituent assembly and improvements to their conditions.

26.  In September, on return from fighting the Japanese in the east, army troops mutinied and occupied a section of the Trans-Siberian Railway  These mutinies: Nicholas was losing support of some of the armed forces, unable to restore order given the random nature and location of armed opposition

28.  Miliukov (Menshevik leader) establishes a worker’s union in May, the All-Russian Union of Peasants in June  The St Petersburg Soviet (representative worker’s committee) is established by Leon Trotsky in October, containing 500 delegates elected by 200,000 workers in almost 100 different factories –to represent industrial workers  The Mensheviks were the dominant political group in this new body  The Bolsheviks and SRs were also well-represented  Factory workers and peasants were now formally represented so their grievances could be heard

29.  Within a month of Bloody Sunday an estimated 800,000 industrial workers were striking across Russia, around half of these in St Petersburg alone  By October, the widespread nature of these halted the economy  The Tsar was forced to act –issued the October Manifesto on 17 th October 1905 promising a parliament to represent the Russian people, called a Duma

31. A TRAIN OVERTURNED BY STRIKING WORKERS AT THE MAIN RAILWAY DEPOT IN TIFLIS IN 1905

32. 1. Russian industrial workers endured low wages, poor working conditions and appalling treatment from employers. 2. Conditions worsened in 1904 due to the war and economic recession, leading to the formation of workers’ sections. 3. In January 1905 workers at the Putilov plant, led by Georgy Gapon, drafted a petition intended for the tsar. 4. When they attempted to deliver this, scores of workers were gunned down in the street by tsarist soldiers. 5. ‘Bloody Sunday’, as it became known, eroded respect for tsarism and contributed to a wave of general strikes, political demands and violence that became the 1905 Revolution.

33. 5. The 1905 Revolution that followed was not a coordinated revolution but a series of anti-tsarist strikes, protests and actions. 6. Triggered by the Bloody Sunday shootings in the capital, it began as general strikes imposed by industrial workers. 7. There was also political violence, such as the assassination of the tsar’s uncle Grand Duke Sergei. 8. Other features of the revolution were military mutinies and the formation of workers’ soviets. 9. The tsar responded by promising a representative Duma but this was not done either promptly or sincerely.