A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-violent Conflict

PART ONE

MOVEMENT TO POWER

Even so tyrants … the more is given them, the more they are obeyed, so much the more do they fortify themselves, become stronger and more able to annihilate and destroy. If nothing be given them, if they be not obeyed, without fighting, without striking a blow, they remain naked, disarmed and are nothing—like as the root of a tree, receiving no moisture or nourishment, becomes dry and dead.

—Etienne de la Boétie, 1577

CHAPTER ONE

Russia, 1905: The People Strike

The Silent Tanks

IN THE DARKNESS OF A SUNDAY NIGHT, in the second summer after the Cold War was over and when Russia was at peace, Major Sergei Evdokimov was awakened by the clanging of an emergency alarm. By three in the morning he was with his armored unit, based outside Moscow, waiting for instructions. They were not long in coming. As the eastern sky began to pale, Evdokimov’s battalion commander ordered them to motor down the Minsk highway into Moscow and take up positions blocking two bridges across the Moscow River, which meanders through the center of the city. There were no explanations, but the major and his men followed orders without question—even when they pointed force at the civilian heart of Russia. So at eight o’clock sharp that Monday morning on August 19, 1991, Evdokimov signaled his column of tanks to move out.¹

In the same dawn, Valerii Zavorotnyi, a computer scientist from Leningrad, was awakened by his ringing phone. Gorbachev has been arrested, said the voice on the other end. Emergency rule has been introduced. Zavorotnyi turned on his television and found classical music playing on all three channels, a familiar sign from years past that a major state event had occurred. Later an announcer came on and read an Appeal to the Soviet People, issued by a group of high officials calling themselves the State Committee for the State of Emergency. Compatriots, Citizens of the Soviet Union, it began, a mortal danger looms large over our great Motherland. The Committee promised to end the crisis facing the country, and its Resolution No. 1 banned strikes and demonstrations, asserted control over the mass media, and suspended the activities of parties and organizations that interfered with normalization.²

All across the vast country, people awoke to the same news, delivered by telephone, by jittery neighbors, by radio and television. But no one was terribly surprised. For months there had been rumors that hard-line communists were preparing a coup to reverse the political and economic reforms introduced by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, it appeared, the nightmare had come true. The breathing room given to Soviet citizens over the last five years was about to be revoked, at gunpoint.

No sooner had the coup leaders begun issuing commands, however, than people disobeyed them. The first to do so was Gorbachev himself, who, after refusing to give his approval to the State of Emergency, was held prisoner at his summer home. Boris Yeltsin, the elected president of the Russian Federation, was not so easily contained. Eluding the KGB officer sent to arrest him, Yeltsin raced to the White House, the headquarters of his government. At noon he climbed on top of a tank outside and read his own appeal, addressed to the Russian People, declaring all acts of the junta illegal and calling for a nationwide general strike. Then he went on the radio: At this difficult hour of decision, he reminded the country’s soldiers, remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against the people … The honor of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people.³

By what he did as well as what he said, Yeltsin urged defiance of the coup. By early afternoon Muscovites were holding small demonstrations outside the Kremlin walls and posting photocopies of Yeltsin’s appeal in the Metro. Soon men and women converged on the White House and built barricades out of construction materials, phone booths, and anything else they could lay their hands on. Cab drivers even donated their cars to fortify the ramparts.

When a line of tanks rumbled down Kalinin Prospekt on its way to the White House, people formed a human chain across the road. Be with the People! they yelled. Don’t shoot at your own people! An old man shouted, I’ve worked my whole life, you see, all my life I’ve paid for this army, and now you’ve turned against me, you’re shooting at me. The argument carried the moment; the commander cut off his engine, and the other tanks in the convoy followed suit. People climbed all over them, offering candy, bread, and milk to the soldiers inside.

When Major Evdokimov and his company pulled up near the Kalininskii Bridge, right by the White House, they learned about the coup from people putting up barricades. A few demonstrators swore at them, calling them fascists, and others, including an acquaintance of the major, tried to convince him to defect to Yeltsin’s side. The thirty-six-year-old career military officer was not sure what to do. It was no easy thing to contemplate disobeying orders; but he had made up his mind on the way downtown that he would not attack unarmed civilians. I’m going to stay here, I’ve received an order, he declared. But we will not shoot or crush anyone. I give my word.⁴

For several hours Evdokimov and his men stayed put. Around seven in the evening, a deputy from the Russian parliament appeared and asked the major to come talk to Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, who was organizing the defense of the White House. Rutskoi told him about Gorbachev’s arrest and Yeltsin’s call to disobey the junta, and he asked him to help protect the White House. Give me an order, Evdokimov replied. We’ll help. With that Evdokimov went back out to his company and led the tanks, now flying the Russian tricolor, rather than the Soviet hammer and sickle, through the cheering crowd to the White House.

Many journalists also refused to knuckle under. On Monday evening the junta held its first (and last) press conference. Tatiana Malkina, a young reporter, raised her hand and, with one question, destroyed the veil of legality that the junta was struggling to create. Could you please say whether or not you understand that last night you carried out a coup d’état? That night the whole country heard about the barricades in Moscow and Yeltsin’s appeal on the tank from a five-minute report on an official news program, Vremia. Banned newspapers got the news out by faxing reports to activists, who distributed them on the streets.

The coup plotters expected that a show of force would unnerve any opposition. Indeed, most people, even the majority in Moscow and Leningrad, were passive; they went on with their daily lives, enjoyed their vacations, and paid scant attention to the news. Yeltsin’s call for a national strike met with little response. But enough people came to the White House, as similar strongholds of resistance materialized in other cities, so that the junta was denied the acquiescence it needed. By posting leaflets, going to rallies, building barricades, and scrawling graffiti on tanks, these ordinary citizens showed that they would not be intimidated.

On Tuesday around 100,000 people were emboldened to go to a rally at the White House; by then more military units had joined the shield around the building. High military commanders, such as Pavel Grachev and Aleksandr Lebed, declared their support for Yeltsin, and even top KGB officers made it clear they would not take part in a bloodbath. In the end, the junta never ordered the attack prepared for Tuesday night. By early Wednesday the coup had collapsed.

The men and women who took to the streets in August 1991 had written a new chapter in the long Russian struggle to make government reflect the people’s will. Although many of them may not have known it, they were not the first Russians to throw up civilian barricades in central Moscow and dispute arbitrary rule. Eighty years earlier, just a flew blocks from where the White House now stands, at the end of a year-long popular upheaval that shook the government of Tsar Nicholas II, Muscovites by the thousands had confronted armed soldiers in December 1905. But when they brandished guns, the troops mowed them down, killing scores—and stalling Russia’s first democratic revolution. Until that moment, Russia had been the scene of the century’s first sustained use of nonviolent action to achieve basic rights. But it started as it ended: on a day of violence.

BLOODY SUNDAY

The Priest and the Workers

On a cold, clear Sunday morning in January 1905, in the industrial outskirts of St. Petersburg, a young long-haired priest stood before several thousand factory workers. Father Georgii Gapon read a prayer, said a blessing over everyone, and then asked if anyone was armed. When the answer was no, he was pleased: Good. We will go unarmed to our Tsar. A little after eleven, the crowd set off for the center of town, singing prayers as it went. In the front row, marchers carried a cross, icons, portraits of the country’s rulers, and a banner reading Soldiers! Do not shoot the people! Their destination was the royal family’s Winter Palace, where they would be joined by similar processions from other points in the city, over 100,000 in all. Then, on the spacious, classically proportioned square outside the palace, in the heart of the capital of the Russian empire, they would present a petition to Nicholas II.⁵

The petition they carried, entitled A Most Humble and Loyal Address, had been drafted by Gapon. We, the workers and inhabitants of St. Petersburg, it began, … come to Thee, O Sire, to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; we are oppressed, overburdened … Do not turn Thy help away from Thy people … Allow them to determine their own future; deliver them from the intolerable oppression of the officialdom. Raze the wall that separates Thee from Thy people and rule the country with them …⁶

Gapon’s followers were approaching their ruler not in revolt but in supplication. The petition listed more than a dozen requests, such as a minimum wage and an eight-hour day, yet it looked beyond workers’ grievances and also embraced a political agenda that would touch every person in the empire. It called for freedom of speech, press, worship, and association; the release of all political prisoners; and equality before the law for all people. Most important, it called for a constituent assembly, elected by universal and equal suffrage. This is our principal request, upon which everything else depends, the petition insisted.

In effect, the marchers were asking the Tsar to dissolve an entire era of Russian history. Article 1 of the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, still in effect in 1905, defined it succinctly: To the Emperor of all the Russias belongs the supreme autocratic and unlimited power. A good Tsar would consult with his subjects and take their interests to heart, but he would not share his power with the people, or let it be constrained by civil liberties that would stand regardless of his will. His subjects felt the hand of the state everywhere: Censors decided what appeared in newspapers and journals, governors could order anyone detained without trial, and associations or clubs of the most innocent kind could be forbidden. Autocracy, in short, meant that there were no rights.

The Tsar’s love for this system was more than a desire for personal power; he believed he had a divine mandate, reflected in hallowed traditions. Russia had industrial workers and capitalist entrepreneurs, modern political thinkers and artistic movements, but Nicholas surrounded himself with the trappings of an earlier time. He insisted that official documents use archaic spelling, and he held costume balls where everyone wore replicas of two-hundred-year-old outfits. He preferred to spend time in Moscow, with its traditional wooden architecture and winding streets, rather than among the massive stone palaces in the newer, more European St. Petersburg. In his imagination if not in reality, Nicholas stood before his subjects like a father before his children, bound by mutual affection and obligation before God.⁷

But some Russians wanted to sweep away that fantasy, and much of educated society had hungered for political change for the better part of a century. Beginning with a rebellion by military officers in 1825, small groups had from time to time hatched conspiracies to liberate the country from absolutism. The People’s Will had managed to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in 1881 (Nicholas, then thirteen, had seen his grandfather die), and a new terrorist group, the Battle Organization of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party, had become active after the turn of the century.

Other radicals rejected terrorism and tried instead to organize peasants or workers for popular uprisings. Marxist ideas tempted many young people, and socialists had agitated among workers in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and elsewhere since the 1890s. Still others were bent on persuading the government to reform itself. In the first years of the new century, a liberal movement emerged among many landowners, professionals, and intellectuals, who used public meetings and publications, both legal and illegal, to call for a constitution and some form of representative government.

Thus the demands in Father Gapon’s petition—free unions, civil liberties, democracy—had all appeared before, in the appeals of revolutionary and liberal groups. What made the Gapon petition unprecedented was that tens of thousands of people took to the streets to show they supported it. For the first time demands for an end to autocracy came from an incipient mass movement rather than from educated circles. But the movement was also, ironically, aided by the state’s own policies.

One of the policymakers was Sergei Zubatov, head of the political police in Moscow. Zubatov, who had once consorted with radicals and then been a police spy, feared that the state would lose ground to revolutionaries in the battle for workers’ allegiance. He attacked the complacent view, popular among top officials, that since Russia’s workers came mostly from peasant families, they would reflect the conservatism commonly found in the countryside. Strikes in St. Petersburg, and the involvement of Marxist activists in organizing them, collapsed this myth and provoked Zubatov to come up with a novel plan. He argued to his bosses that workers had real complaints, that their loyalty would last only as long as they believed that the state was not the enemy—and he won approval from the Ministry of Interior for state-sponsored mutual aid societies among workers in several cities, under the supervision of police agents. The state, not the revolutionaries, would lead workers to a brighter future.

Zubatov’s strategy proved to be explosive. His associations became embroiled in disputes between workers and employers and actually organized strikes in a number of places. Outraged employers complained bitterly to V. K. Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, who transferred Zubatov to St. Petersburg late in 1902. But Zubatov was not to be deterred, and he established a new organization in the capital, the St. Petersburg Mutual Aid Society of Workers in the Machine Industry.⁸

One of the young men attracted to that society was a twenty-eight-year old worker by the name of N. M. Varnashev. From the age of twelve he had been working in factories in a city that had been flooded during the past decade by thousands of rural migrants who had put down their plows and taken up the tools of industry. Most of these workers were barely literate and still quite rustic, and they were crammed into tenements and grim barracks. But there were no unions to look out for their interests, and strikes were illegal and therefore risky. Still, some felt the yearning for something better.⁹

Often while daydreaming at his lathe, Varnashev would ask himself, And what should become of you, if you lose this job and you can’t immediately find a new one? And if you get hurt, or you grow sick and exhausted in your old age? Unlike many of his fellow workers, Varnashev took the time to think about his situation; he was an avid reader and saw himself as an urban, even cosmopolitan man. As a skilled metal worker, he was among the best paid in the city, and he had managed to find rooms near the city’s statelier neighborhoods. He had even spent some of his earnings on a newfangled device called a bicycle.¹⁰

One autumn day in 1902, Varnashev (who was still learning to ride) pedaled over to visit his friend and co-worker Stepanov, who lived across the Neva River. After a few scrapes on his hands and knees and one collision with an apple-seller, Varnashev arrived at his friend’s apartment. There he was introduced to a man named Kladovikov, who told him about a plan brewing among workers to organize a mutual aid fund, similar to one in Moscow. Kladovikov invited him to its second meeting, to be held the next week—and with that small step Varnashev started down a path that would bring him, together with thousands of other St. Petersburg workers, into open conflict with the government of Tsar Nicholas II.¹¹

One of the leaders whom Zubatov had recruited for the St. Petersburg society was Georgii Gapon, who had arrived in the capital a few years earlier from his native province, after the death of his wife. Gapon, who came from a peasant family, showed a great concern for the poor people he met in the city, and while studying at the Theological Academy, had worked at an orphanage. His growing popularity among the city’s less fortunate eventually came to Zubatov’s attention.¹²

Gapon was a charismatic and complicated character. His personal charm helped him win the trust of almost everyone he met, from Tsarist officials to their seditious opponents. His sermons could reduce listeners to tears, and his eyes burned with some inner light. Generous to the workers he met at the Zubatov society, he treated them without the condescension shown by many revolutionary intellectuals. But Gapon’s passion was not harnessed to a disciplined sense of purpose. He had an impulsive and mercurial personality, which led him repeatedly to betray the trust that he persuaded others to place in him.¹³

Gapon had become a regular at meetings of the Zubatov society, listening carefully, encouraging workers to speak their minds, and occasionally offering a comment. By the spring of 1903 he had made friends with a few of the key members, including Varnashev, who urged him to take a more active role. But Gapon had declined, and many St. Petersburg workers were too leery of the authorities to join an organization operating under police control. By late 1903 the society was moribund. Gapon, Varnashev, and a few others, however, were busy setting up a new organization, which they called the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers in the City of St. Petersburg.

Like the Zubatov societies, the Assembly enjoyed the approval of officials, who saw it as something that might divert workers’ attention from labor conflict and agitation by revolutionaries. In one crucial respect, however, it was different: Gapon convinced officials that the presence of police agents had deterred workers from joining the society in St. Petersburg, and they agreed to keep the police out of day-to-day operations of the Assembly. Gapon alone would oversee its affairs and guarantee that workers’ energies were channeled in wholesome directions.¹⁴

The priest’s initial intentions were probably not political. Earlier he had mingled with dockworkers on the city’s wharves. They got to trust me, he said later, and some of them confessed to having become infected with political ideas. I did not at that time think that political change was necessary. Patriotism motivated the Assembly, he explained in a memorandum to the police: Essentially the basic idea is to build a nest among the factory and mill workers, he told them. From thence healthy and self-sacrificing fledglings could fly forth to defend their tsar and country and aid their fellow workers.¹⁵

The Assembly’s leaders, known as the Responsible Circle, were mostly skilled, married, and relatively well-off metal workers. They set up a clubhouse in an industrial district, and members brought in furniture and books, found a cheap piano, and hung a portrait of the Tsar. Some nights there would be meetings, on others there were lectures, concerts, or dancing, or people just sat around reading or playing chess. The Assembly also organized a mutual aid fund and represented members in disputes with employers. Unlike the Zubatov societies, however, the Assembly steered clear of strikes. It seemed on the surface to be about anything except politics, justifying the confidence that officials placed in Gapon’s judgment and reliability.¹⁶

These same officials, however, would have been appalled had they known what was going on behind this façade of self-help. While Gapon’s early views oscillated between personal allegiance to the Tsar and disapproval of autocracy, the catalyst for entangling the Assembly in politics was someone else: Aleksei Karelin, a self-educated lithographer and former member of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic (SD) Workers’ Party, who had been arrested and exiled for a time in the 1890s. Karelin and his associates had become disenchanted with the SD’s tactics and welcomed the chance the Assembly offered to reach workers under legal cover and without fear of police harassment. They brought with them years of organizational experience and, in Varnashev’s words, unshakeable authority among the city’s factory workers, an influence that Gapon did not yet enjoy.¹⁷

After some initial distrust, Gapon eventually won the confidence of Karelin and the other radicals, just as he had the regime’s officials. After meetings of the Responsible Circle, around ten at night, Gapon would invite a smaller number of workers, including the Karelin group, to his apartment, where they smoked, drank tea, and talked. In these midnight sessions, Gapon showed that he was inching toward the politically subversive views of the new members, who took key posts in the Assembly.¹⁸

In March 1904, Gapon invited Karelin, Varnashev, and two other members of the Assembly’s inner circle to his apartment, swore them to secrecy, and pulled out a sheet of paper. On it was written, in red ink, a program for political and social change in the Russian empire. Political demands included civil liberties, equality of everyone before the law, and the immediate pardon of all those who suffered for their convictions. Social demands included legalization of trade unions, an eight-hour work-day, a minimum wage, worker participation in drafting social insurance laws, and land redistribution for peasants. This was the sort of program that the Karelin clique had been urging on Gapon, and it was accepted as the Assembly’s Secret Program.¹⁹

Senseless Dreams

The Secret Program built a bridge between the workers and a broader opposition stirring in St. Petersburg. For over a decade, people of property and learning had been offering polite criticism of the government, advocating reform in journals and other sedate forums. But in 1904 the liberal movement had started reaching out to other potential opponents of the regime. This became evident at two congresses, of educators and doctors. With their doors opened to students and workers, these meetings were quickly turned into political forums. Speakers called for civil liberties and the right to unionize. The police closed the education congress and arrested its organizers, and the doctors’ congress ended in chaos when participants, angry that it was being closed early, threw chairs at a military band that tried to drown out their protests.²⁰

As this happened, delegates were arriving in the capital for the first congress of the Union of Liberation, an unlikely alliance between wealthy noblemen and radical intellectuals. The aristocrats had spent years trying to turn provincial (zemstvo) assemblies into a springboard for constitutional reform. Not only had Nicholas ignored all their appeals, he had labeled them senseless dreams. But futility can inspire a change in methods, and a number of former revolutionaries, who had dropped the Marxist belief in class struggle, also were ready to join this new movement. Our task is not to divide but to unite, said the mission statement of the Liberationists’ journal.²¹

In 1904 two events had helped galvanize latent discontent and awaken a readiness for change among educated, upper-class Russians. At the end of January, the Japanese attacked Russia’s Pacific fleet at Port Arthur, culminating years of rivalry between the two countries in the Far East. Almost immediately, the war brought a string of humiliating defeats for Russia, exposing the technical backwardness of the military and the ineptitude of its commanders. Public opinion, already frustrated by the regime’s rigidity and repressiveness, now chewed on military disaster as another rag of complaint.

Amid this brewing disaffection, terrorists had assassinated Plehve, the widely hated minister of the interior, in July. His replacement, Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii, recognized the chasm of hostility that yawned between the government and the country’s elite, and felt strongly that the government must make peace with moderates. Word of Mirskii’s conciliatory attitude had raised hope that reform might be possible, while his relaxation of control over public life gave liberals fresh opportunities to speak out and organize. In this newly enlarged political theater, the Liberationists took center stage.²²

After staking out a wider tent for opposition with the simple demand for representative, constitutional government, they now enlisted prominent leaders in the zemstvo assemblies to get behind this position. The First Zemstvo Congress, held in Moscow in early November, passed a resolution favoring a national assembly with real powers, which went against the very essence of the autocracy.²³

To diversify the movement and also provide innocuous cover for dissent, the Liberationists organized a series of banquets in cities across the empire, beginning in late November, to mark the fortieth anniversary of judicial reform. There were more than 600 diners—writers, lawyers, ‘zemstvo men,’ in general, the intelligentsia, the prominent writer Maxim Gorkii said in a letter to his wife about one banquet. Outspoken speeches were made, and people chanted in unison, ‘Down with the autocracy!’ ‘Long live the constituent assembly!’ and ‘Give us a constitution’ … It was all very heated and very democratic. Everywhere the banquets deepened the passion for change and gave many their first exposure to uninhibited speech.²⁴

Having reached out to moderate liberals on its right and to its own natural constituency of urban professionals, the Liberationists now extended a hand to the socialists. To do this, the Union committed itself to a fully democratic rather than merely constitutional reform program. By the end of the year, the Liberationists could justifiably claim to speak for a wide cross-section of Russian society, including many of the country’s most respected citizens.²⁵

Nicholas seemed oblivious to the mounting disquiet. The Tsar spent his days immersed in court ceremonies and petty administrative matters, and since he was wont to appoint officials on the basis of personal manners and connections to the imperial court, the government tended to pitch back and forth from one policy to another, as ministers gained and lost the Tsar’s favor. But his interior minister was well-focused on the causes of dissension, and he worked out a plan to deal with it. As I see it, Mirskii told the Tsar, the aspirations of the huge majority of well-intentioned people are … to establish Russian legality, broad tolerance of beliefs, and participation in legislative work in order to prevent the issuing of laws that are totally unsuitable or issued at some minister’s whim. At the end of November he sent the Tsar a reform package, proposing an expanded franchise for zemstvo elections, the lifting of pre-publication censorship, and, above all, creation of an elected consultative assembly. None of these, Mirskii believed, would unravel the basic fabric of Tsarist rule, but the reforms would be sufficient to split the opposition and quiet the outcry for political change.²⁶

But the decree Nicholas finally issued on December 12 fell far short of Mirskii’s suggestions. Instead of guaranteeing reform, it offered vague promises to consider certain changes and left out any mention of an assembly; never, under any circumstances, will I agree to a representative form of government, the Tsar insisted. The next day a second decree threatened repression if there were any further public disturbances or anti-government demonstrations. Mirskii submitted his resignation and told the Tsar, it is inconceivable to run the country without the support of societal forces.²⁷

Shutting the door on moderates and their hopes for orderly progress toward a reformed system, the December edicts also exposed the limits of the Liberationists’ strategy. As long as the Tsar believed that he could disregard what his most respected citizens thought, and as long as he was adamantly opposed to any weakening of autocratic powers, then protest alone, no matter how articulate or loud, would not produce meaningful reform. It was not enough to object to the autocracy; the opposition had to push the regime to change. What the Tsar, his ministers, and their liberal opponents alike did not recognize as the year faded was that a new form of power was quickening under their very feet, one that, like a surprising winter thaw, would dissolve the ice on which they stood in the new year.

To Be Heard … by All of Russia

Compared to the conspicuous dissent of lawyers, professors, landowners, and intellectuals, the efforts of Father Gapon and his friends to build their Assembly had created hardly a ripple. Yet beneath the waterline of events, the Assembly had grown apace: By the fall, it had over 7,000 members and eleven district branches, all the while keeping on its apolitical public face—even as the turbulent waves in political thought that had washed over educated society broke over the Assembly. Newspapers reported on the country’s shameful military defeats and on the political demands made by the Union of Liberation, the Zemstvo Congress, and, eventually, the banquet campaign. All this, wrote Varnashev, gave the Assembly’s branches fully legal and gratifying material for agitation and propaganda. Liberationists came to the Assembly to read lectures, and several of them met privately with Gapon. Both the Karelin group and the liberals urged the same thing: Workers must join the campaign against the autocracy.²⁸

Father Georgii Gapon, members of the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers, and the mayor of St. Petersburg, 1905.

Credit: ©David King Collection

On November 28, the evening after a bloody assault by soldiers on student demonstrators, about thirty-five people, including leaders of the Assembly’s district branches, crammed into Gapon’s stuffy, dimly lit apartment. The priest introduced his Secret Program and asked those who differed with it to leave the meeting and keep silent. Many who stayed wanted to take immediate, dramatic action rather than only issue a statement or send a delegation to the government. But all agreed on one idea, Varnashev remembered. If the workers were to add their voice, then it should be done in such a way as to be heard not only by the government, but by all of Russia. So they decided that Gapon should work out the content for a petition and devise some way to present it in public.²⁹

The meeting in Gapon’s apartment led to more debate rather than rapid action. But soon something unexpected happened to force the Assembly’s hand. In early December four Assembly members who worked at the giant Putilov metal factory, the largest industrial plant in Russia, were fired or threatened with firing. Gapon took this as a challenge: If he could not get the workers reinstated, the organization’s authority would be damaged, and it might be hit with other arbitrary measures. In the final days of December, Assembly leaders paid visits to the city’s chief factory inspector, the director of the Putilov factory, and the city’s governor. All but the governor greeted them rudely, and their demands were rejected. The only thing left was the sanction of last resort: a strike.³⁰

On Sunday, January 2, 6,000 Putilov workers met at the Assembly’s Narva branch and voted to strike the next day to protest the firings. By Tuesday they had closed down the plant and idled over 12,000 workers. Their demands: rehiring the fired workers, a board of workers’ representatives to oversee pay rates, an eight-hour day, the end of overtime work, and free medical care. Putilov strikers began to make the rounds of other factories, and by the end of the week, over 110,000 workers at more than 400 factories in St. Petersburg had joined the