CLIL UNIT ---- THE REVOLUTION OF 1905

'Bloody sunday', tsar nicholas ll's troops shooting

demonstrators outside of the winter palace in 

st, petersburg, russia, january 22, 1905, 

still taken from the 1925 soviet film 'the ninth of january'.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 began in St. Petersburg when troops fired on a defenseless crowd of workers, who, led by a priest, Father Gapon, were marching to the Winter Palace to petition Czar Nicholas II.

Over 100 workers were killed and some 300 wounded. This incident, known as Bloody Sunday, was followed in succeeding months by a series of strikes, riots, assassinations, peasant outbreaks and naval mutinies. In June, 1905, sailors on the Potemkin battleship, protested against the serving of rotten meat. . The Potemkin Mutiny spread to other units in the army and navy. Now industrial workers all over Russia went on strike and in October, 1905, the action of railwaymen paralyzed the whole Russian railway network.

These disorders joined with the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) when, in January 1904 the Japanese besieged Port Arthur, a Russian naval base and attacked the Russian Pacific Fleet destroying it in 45 minutes. Russian forces were left without supplies as the Trans-Siberian Railway was unfinished and there was no effective way of moving troops from the west.

The embarrassment of defeat to an Asiatic power added to the view that Tsarist government was incompetent. 

Nicholas II of Russia

So the government promised the establishment of a consultative duma, or assembly. Nonetheless, unsatisfied popular demands provoked a general strike, and in a manifesto issued in October the czar granted civil liberties and a representative DUMA to be elected democratically.

At their first meeting, members of the Duma put forward a series of demands including the release of political prisoners, trade union rights and land reform. Nicholas II rejected all these proposals and dissolved the Duma.

In April, 1906, Nicholas II chose the more conservative  Peter Stolypin who attempted to provide a balance between the introduction of land reforms and the suppression of the radicals. The next Duma convened in February, 1907. This time it lasted three months before the Tsar closed it down.