The Putilov Strike¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter examines the Putilov strike of January 1905 as a pivotal moment in which a seemingly reformist, police-sponsored movement, led by the priest Gapon, was overtaken by a revolutionary dynamic that neither the Tsarist authorities nor the Social Democrats could control. The core argument is that the idea of a petition to the Tsar, initially conceived by Gapon as a safe channel for worker discontent, was transformed by the mass ferment into a vehicle for radical demands, revealing the deep political consciousness that years of Social Democratic agitation had cultivated among the workers, even as the Party itself remained organisationally isolated and impotent.
The chapter documents the strike’s rapid escalation: from 26,000 workers out on 5 January to 111,000 by 8 January. Mass meetings assumed a quasi-evangelical character, with Gapon delivering increasingly radical speeches under pressure from the crowd. Crucially, the movement acquired a political character when a mass meeting voted for a Constituent Assembly, political liberty, an end to the war, and the freeing of political prisoners. The chapter argues that these demands, and the inclusion of key Social Democratic slogans in Gapon’s petition—from the eight-hour day to the Constituent Assembly—demonstrated the imprint of Marxist propaganda on working-class consciousness. Yet the Party itself was absent. The chapter draws on Martov’s history and the minutes of the Bolshevik Third Congress to confirm that the January events unfolded “not only outside the immediate leadership of the Social Democracy, but even without a significant participation by it as an organised whole.” The Petersburg committee was in a “deplorable state,” its links disorganised, its agitators beaten, leaflets destroyed.
The chapter’s polemical thrust is directed against any romanticisation of the Social Democrats’ role. It stresses that the workers saw the Party as “alien elements coming from without,” and that Gapon’s authority was unassailable. In the Narva district, a lone Social Democrat was howled down. The chapter cites Livshits’s frustration: the Party knew the peaceful procession would end in bloodshed, but “such a force did not exist” to prevent it. The argument is that the revolution’s opening act was a spontaneous mass movement, not a Party-led insurrection, and that the Social Democrats’ weakness was exposed even as their ideas found an echo. The chapter concludes with the stark observation that in 24 hours the whole situation was transformed—a prelude to the Bloody Sunday massacre that would shatter the workers’ faith in the Tsar.