Free The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia by Candace Fleming

October 3, there was a walkout by Moscow’s printers for better pay and working conditions. By mid-October, the printers in St. Petersburg and other cities went on strike, too. Then the railway workers joined the strike, bringing the country’s entire train system to a grinding halt. Millions of other workers followed suit. Factory workers, schoolteachers, postal workers, telegraph operators—all walked off their jobs, as did doctors, lawyers, bankers, even the ballerinas of St. Petersburg’s Imperial Mariinsky Theatre. Cities ground to a standstill. There were no newspapers or tramcars, and there was no electricity at night. Factories closed. Trains sat unmoving on the tracks. And fuel and food began to grow scarce. Day and night, mobs marched through the streets, waving red flags (a traditional revolutionary symbol) and threatening to destroy any business that did not shut its doors. No longer were people striking just for better wages and living conditions. The events of Bloody Sunday had shown them that they needed a voice in how their country was run. Only then could they hope to better themselves in society. And so they also demanded a legislature—a Duma—whose members they would elect.
    This last demand was largely due to an organization called the St. Petersburg Soviet (
soviet
means “council” in Russian). Begun in early 1905 by a handful of workers from several of the city’s factories, the soviet’s purpose was to organize and coordinate all the strike actions happening across the city. Members urged workers to act with discipline and with common goals in mind (like the Duma the people wanted to establish). Because it took the form of a workers’ government, it appealed to the city’s voiceless classes. By October, the organization had over five hundred members frommore than a hundred St. Petersburg factories and workshops. Perhaps more important, it inspired laborers in fifty other Russian cities to set up soviets, too.
    But these soviets would be short-lived. Perceiving them as a political threat, Nicholas declared the workers’ councils illegal. He had their leaders arrested, and their meetings suppressed. As quickly as the soviets had sprung up, they disappeared.
    Despite the chaos in the city, Nicholas continued on as if nothing had happened. “The tragic aspect of the situation,” one courtier wrote in his diary on October 14, “is that the tsar is living in an utter fool’s paradise, thinking that He is as strong and all-powerful as before.”

C HOICES
    Ten days later, Prime Minister Count Sergei Witte took matters into his own hands. Having demanded an audience with the tsar, he bluntly told Nicholas that the country was on the verge of a revolution so potentially devastating that it would “sweep away a thousand years of history.” The tsar had two choices: “Crush the rebellion by sheer force … and that would mean rivers of blood,” Nicholas later explained to his mother, or “give to the people their civil rights, freedom of speech and press, also to have … a Duma.”
    Nicholas recoiled at the idea of these democratic reforms. “The heart of the tsar is in the hand of God,” he told his ministers. Any change would weaken the sacred, moral power bestowed upon him by the Almighty. “I am not holding on to the autocracy for my own pleasure,” Nicholas went on. “I act in this spirit only because I am certain that this is necessary for Russia.”
    Besides, it wasn’t wretched living conditions that had caused the country’s problems, claimed Nicholas. It was the fact that peoplehad turned against the autocracy and their holy tsar. “We have sinned … and God is punishing us,” he said. Therefore, strikes and protests were not a sign that the country needed democratic reform. Rather, they were God’s way of telling the country it needed an even
stricter
autocracy.
    His ministers tried convincing him otherwise. Better to make a few concessions than turn St.