Father Georgiy Apollonovich Gapon (17
February [O.S. 5 February] 1870 — 10 April [O.S.28
March] 1906) was a Russian Orthodox priest and a
popular working class leader before the Russian Revolution of
1905.
Georgiy Apollonovich Gapon was born February 17,
1870 (o.s.) in the village of Beliki, Poltava Oblast, Ukraine,
then part of theRussian Empire. He was the oldest son of
a Cossack father and mother who hailed from the local peasantry.
Gapon's father, Apollon Fedorovich Gapon, had some formal
education and served as an elected village elder and clerk in Beliki. His
mother was illiterate but religiously devout and actively raised her son
in the norms and traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church.
At the age of 23 Gapon took a job in Poltava as
a zemstvo statistician, supplementing his income with money earned
working as a private tutor. It was in this capacity that he met the
daughter of a local merchant in a house in which he was giving private
lessons. The family objected to a proposed marriage due to Gapon's limited
employment horizons, however, and as a means of overcoming this obstacle he
again sought to become a priest. He made an appeal to Bishop
Ilarion of Poltava, apologizing for past behavior and promising to fulfill
expectations of the church in the future. The bishop was moved by the
appeal and interceded with the family, winning the couple permission to marry.
Gapon was placed on the fast track to priesthood,
occupying a place as a church psalm reader for a year, followed by a pro
forma promotion to deacon for just one day before being made priest of the
Poltava cemetery church. Gapon's
services were innovative and informal and his church rapidly grew in size,
negatively affecting other more formalistic local churches, whose priests lodge
complaints against him. Nevertheless,
Gapon continued to enjoy the support of the bishop in his position and was
largely satisfied with his station in life.
Gapon and his wife had two children in rapid
succession, but his wife fell ill following the 1898 birth of the second child,
a boy. She died not long afterward and Gapon decided to leave Poltava to
make a new life in the capital city of Saint Petersburg. Bishop
Ilarion made a strong recommendation to Konstantin Pobedonostsev,
procurator of the Holy Synod, that Gapon be allowed to take the entrance
examination to the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy despite his
lack of the standard Seminary certificate.
Gapon's status as a student at the St. Petersburg
Theological Academy, one of the elite theological training institutions of
the Orthodox Church, placed him in good graces with the Bishop Nikolai
of Taurida, who permitted Gapon to live in a monastery
near Sebastopol without having to take monastic vows.
Father
Gapon, under the financial support of Colonel Motojiro
Akashi of the Imperial Japanese Army organized
the Assembly of Russian
Factory and Mill
Workers of St. Petersburg, which was also patronized by the Department
of the Police and the St. Petersburg Okhrana (secret
police). The Assembly's objectives were to defend workers' rights and to
elevate their moral and religious status. He was the person to lead the
industrial workers to the city of Russia during the year 1905 before bloody
Sunday with courage. Only persons of Russian Orthodox denomination were
eligible to join its ranks. Soon the organization had twelve branches and 8,000
members, and Gapon tried to expand activities to Kiev and Moscow.
Gapon was not simply an obedient instrument of the police; cooperating with
them, he tried to realize his own plans.
From the end of 1904, Gapon started to cooperate
with radicals who championed the abolition of the Tsar's autocracy.
On January 22 [O.S. January 9] 1905,
the day after a general strike burst out in St. Petersburg, Gapon
organized a workers' procession to present a petition to the Tsar, which ended
tragically (Bloody Sunday 1905). Gapon's life was saved by Pinchas
Rutenberg, who took him away from the gunfire. He then became the guest
of Maxim Gorky.
Following
Bloody Sunday, Gapon anathematized the Tsar and called upon the workers to take
action against the regime, but soon after escaped abroad, where he had close
ties with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
Gapon soon revealed to Rutenberg his contacts with
the police and tried to recruit him, too, reasoning that double loyalty is
helpful to the workers' cause. However, Rutenberg reported this provocation to
his party leaders, Yevno Azef (who was himself a secret police spy)
and Boris Savinkov. On March 26, 1906 Gapon arrived to meet
Rutenberg in a rented cottage outside St. Petersburg, and after a month he
was found there hanged. Rutenberg asserted later that Gapon was condemned by
the comrades' court. In reality, three S.R. party combatants overheard their
conversation from the next room. After Gapon had repeated his collaboration
proposal, Rutenberg called the comrades into the room and left. When he
returned, Gapon was dead.
Bloody Wednesday refers
to the events of 15 August 1906 in the (Congress) Kingdom of Poland, where
the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party (OB PPS)
carried out a series of attacks on Russians, primarily police officers and
informants. This took place in the context of the Revolution in the
Kingdom of Poland (1905–1907), and represented one of the biggest actions in
the history of OB PPS.
"Warszawianka" is a Polish song
written some time between 1879 and 1883. The title, a deliberate reference
to the earlier song by the same title, could be translated as either
"the song of Warsaw" or "the lady of Warsaw". To
distinguish between the two, it is often called "Warszawianka 1905
roku" ("Warszawianka of 1905"), after the song became the hymn
of demonstrating workers during theRevolution in the Kingdom of Poland
(1905–1907), when 30 workers were shot during
the May Day demonstrations in Warsaw in 1905.
The Russo-Japanese War (8
February 1904 – 5 September 1905) was fought between the Russian
Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions
in Manchuria and Korea. The major theatres of operations were
the Liaodong Peninsula and Mukden in
Southern Manchuria, and the seas around Korea, Japan, and the Yellow Sea.
Russia sought a warm-water port on
the Pacific Ocean for their navy and for maritime trade. Vladivostok was
operational only during the summer, whereas Port Arthur, a naval base in
Liaodong Province leased to Russia by China, was operational all year. Since
the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, negotiations between
Russia and Japan had proved impractical. Russia had demonstrated an
expansionist policy in the Siberian far-east from the reign of Ivan the
Terrible in the 16th century. Through threat of Russian expansion,
Japan offered to recognize Russian dominance in Manchuria in exchange for
recognition of Korea as within the Japanese sphere of influence. Russia refused
and demanded Korea north of the 39th parallel to be a neutral buffer zone
between Russia and Japan. The Japanese government perceived a Russian threat to
its strategic interests and chose to go to war. After negotiations broke down
in 1904, the Japanese Navy opened hostilities by attacking the Russian Eastern
Fleet at Port Arthur in a surprise attack.
Russia suffered numerous defeats to Japan,
but Tsar Nicholas II was convinced that Russia would win and chose to
remain engaged in the war; at first, to await the outcomes of certain naval
battles, and later to preserve the dignity of Russia by averting a
"humiliating peace". The war concluded with the Treaty of
Portsmouth, mediated by US President Theodore Roosevelt. The complete
victory of the Japanese military surprised world observers. The consequences
transformed the balance of power in East Asia, resulting in a reassessment of
Japan's recent entry onto the world stage. Scholars continue to debate the
historical significance of the war.
Russification is a form of cultural
assimilation process during which non-Russian communities,
voluntarily or not, give up their culture and language in favor of the Russian
one.
In a historical sense, the term refers to both official
and unofficial policies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union with
respect to their national constituents and to national minorities in Russia,
aimed at Russian domination.
The major areas of Russification are politics and
culture. In politics, an element of Russification is assigning Russian nationals
to leading administrative positions in national institutions. In culture,
Russification primarily amounts to domination of the Russian language in
official business and strong influence of the Russian language on national
idioms. The shifts in demographics in favour of the ethnic Russian
population are sometimes considered as a form of Russification as well.
Analytically, it is helpful to distinguish Russification,
as a process of changing one's ethnic self-label or identity from a non-Russian ethnonym to
Russian, from Russianization, the spread of the Russian language,
culture, and people into non-Russian cultures and regions, distinct also from Sovietization or
the imposition of institutional forms established by the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union throughout the territory ruled by that party. In
this sense, although Russification is usually conflated across
Russification, Russianization, and Russian-led Sovietization, each can be
considered a distinct process. Russianization and Sovietization, for example,
did not automatically lead to Russification – change in language or
self-identity of non-Russian peoples to being Russian. Thus, despite long
exposure to the Russian language and culture, as well as to Sovietization, at
the end of the Soviet era non-Russians were on the verge of becoming
a majority of the population in the Soviet Union.
The St. Petersburg workmen's
petition to the Tsar, January 22, 1905
