The Russian Revolution

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian Empire was the largest contiguous state on earth and one of the most fragile. It stretched from Warsaw to Vladivostok, encompassed over a hundred ethnic groups, and was governed by a single man who believed God had personally appointed him to rule. The empire had no parliament, no independent judiciary, no legal political parties. It had a secret police, a state church, and roughly 130 million subjects, most of them peasants who could not read.

On January 22, 1905, a priest named Father Gapon led thousands of workers to the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. They carried icons and portraits of the tsar. They wanted to present a petition: better wages, shorter hours, an elected assembly. Palace guards opened fire. Somewhere between 200 and 1,000 people died. The massacre, remembered as Bloody Sunday, shattered the myth that the tsar was the people's protector.

What followed was a year of upheaval. Workers went on strike across the empire. Peasants burned manor houses. Sailors mutinied on the battleship Potemkin. Ethnic minorities in Poland, Finland, and the Caucasus demanded autonomy. For a few months, it looked like the autocracy might fall.