Sunday, 22 January 1905, the 9th by Russia's old calendar. A priest named Gapon leads tens of thousands of workers toward the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg with a petition to the Tsar: an eight-hour day, a fair wage, an elected assembly. Troops fire into the crowd. The government admits about a hundred dead; rumour says thousands.
Why then
Russia is losing a war to Japan, and Port Arthur fell three weeks ago. Peasants want land, workers want rights, and the autocracy has no parliament to absorb any of it. The shooting turns a strike into a revolution.
What they wanted
The marchers believe the Tsar will hear them. Nicholas II means to stay an autocrat. By autumn a soviet, a council of workers' deputies, sits in St. Petersburg with a young Trotsky among its leaders.
What changed
Mutiny on the battleship Potemkin, a general strike, and in October a manifesto promising an elected Duma, a parliament. Within days pogroms break out in hundreds of towns. Then the reaction: field courts-martial, punitive trains along the railways, and a Duma dissolved when it disagrees. Lenin will call 1905 the dress rehearsal.
Still argued
Abraham Ascher argues the regime survived by splitting its enemies more than by reforming. The Duma was weak, but it existed; the soviet was crushed, but remembered.