Part Two

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"Sire! We workers, our children and wives, the helpless old sople who are our parents, we have come to you, sire, to seek stice and protection. We are in great poverty, we are oppressed id weighed down with labours beyond our strength ... espotism and arbitrary rule are strangling us, and we are ffocating. Sire! Our strength is at an end! The limit of our itience has been reached; the terrible moment has come for us ben it is better to die than to continue suffering intolerable by Ian Swindale tment . Pres by a priest, sunre ot their Sunday best, the city to present a petition to • Tsar. The date was January 9th 1DS and on that day the roads to = Winter Palace led not to 'justice " protection' but to death. The Tsar's officers had planned a body massacre of the unarmed akers and their families in order "teach the workers a lesson' . But ¡ the snow covered streets around • Winter Palace turned red witn = blood of the workers, a very ferent lesson was being learnt in e working class districts from the ie intended by the Csar MASSACRE The massacre of Bloody inday' took place at the height of general strike in Petersburg in lich over 100,000 workers were rolved and which had brought the y to a standstill. The attack on • demonstration led immediately Ithe erection of barricades in the irking class areas and the aption of street fighting in dious parts of the city.

The rapid growth of capitalism Russia at the end of the 19th atury had not only led to increase in the size of the asian working class but had also ced the workers into struggle minst the employers.

Starting very largely as purely onomic struggles, these strikes be and more took on a political Louring. As economic crisis followed economic crisis and hardship grew in the face of Russia's military defeats in the war against the Japanese, the working class more and more linked with their economic demands a call for a freely elected constituent assembly, a republic and a provisional POLITICAL STRIKE Moreover, it was becoming clear to the workers of Petersburg that the way to fight for these demands was through the mass political strike. It was precisely a strike of this nature that led to the events of January 9th.

The capitalist class, themselves wanting to break out of some of the restrictions on expansion and profitability imposed by Tsarism, also wanted a Constituent Assembly.The disorders that took place in the early months of 1905 finally convinced them that the only way they would be able to continue "peacefully' exploiting the working class was if Russia took on the mantle of bourgeois democracy.

The capitalists themselves, however, were unable to carry out the revolution that would be necessary to put an end to the Tsarist autocracy.

Firstly, most of Russian capital was owned by foreign capitalists and the native capitalist class was therefore too weak as a class to lead a revolutionary movement. Russian capitalists were afraid of the strength of the working class be social democratic ... a coherent government with social democratic majority"

The period of relative calm through the summer of 1905 gave way in October to a fresh wave of

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Mersburg crossed the bridges *ling from the working class areas