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
Sire,—
We working men of
St. Petersburg, our wives and children, and our parents, helpless, aged men and
women, have come to you, О Tsar, in quest of justice and protection. We have
been beggared, oppressed, over-burdened with excessive toil, treated with
contumely. We are not recognized as normal human beings, but are dealt with as
slaves who have to bear their bitter lot in silence. Patiently we endured this;
but now we are being thrust deeper into the slough of right-lessness and
ignorance, are being suffocated by despotism and arbitrary whims, and now, О
Tsar, we have no strength left. The awful moment has come when death is better
than the prolongation of our unendurable tortures. Therefore, we have left
work, and informed our employers that we shall not resume it until they have
fulfilled our demands. What we have asked is little, consisting solely of that
without which our life is not life, but hell and eternal torture.
Our first petition
was that our employers should investigate our needs together with ourselves,
and even that has been refused. The very right of discussing our wants has been
withheld from us on the ground that the law does not recognize any such right,
and our demand for an eight-hours day has been dismissed as illegal. To fix the
prices of our labour in concert with ourselves, to adjudge upon
misunderstandings between us and the lower administration of the factories, to
raise the wages of unskilled work men and women up to a rouble a day, to
abolish overtime, to take better care of the sick, to instruct without
insulting us, to arrange the workshops so that we might work there without
encountering death through draughts, rain, and snow: all these requests have
been condemned by our employers as unlawful, and our very petition treated as a
crime, while the wish to better our condition is regarded as a piece of
insolence towards the employers.
О Emperor, there
are more than three hundred thousand of us here, yet we are all of us human
beings only in appearance and outwardly, while in reality we are deemed devoid
of a single human right, even that of speaking, thinking, and meeting to talk
over our needs, and of taking measures to better our condition. Any one of us
who should dare lift his voice in defence of the working class is thrown into
prison or banished. The possession of a kindly heart, of a sensitive soul, is
punished in us as a crime. Fellow-feeling for a forlorn, maltreated human being
who is bereft of his rights is consequently a heinous crime. О Tsar, is this in
accordance with God's commandments, in virtue of which you are now reigning? Is
life under such laws worth living? Would it not be better for all of us working
people in Russia to die, leaving capitalists and officials to live and enjoy
existence?
Such is the future
which confronts us, Sire, and therefore we are gathered together before your
palace walls. Here we await the last available means of rescue. Refuse not to
help your people out of the gulf of rightlessness, misery, and ignorance. Give
them a chance of accomplishing their destiny. Deliver them from the intolerable
oppression of the bureaucracy. Demolish the wall between yourself and the
people, and let them govern the country in conjunction with yourself. You have
been sent to lead the people to happiness; but happiness is snatched from us by
the officials, who leave us only sorrow and humiliation. Consider our demands
attentively and without anger. They have been uttered not for evil, but for
good; for our good, Sire, and yours. It is not insolence that speaks in us, but
the consciousness of the general necessity of escaping from the present
intolerable state of things. Russia is too vast, her wants too manifold, to
admit of bureaucrats alone governing her. It is absolutely necessary that the
people should assist, because only they know their own hardships.
Refuse not to
succour your people; give orders without delay to representatives of all
classes in the land to meet together. Let capitalists and workmen be present;
let officials, priests, physicians, and teachers all come and choose their own
delegates. Let all be free to elect whom they will, and for this purpose let
the elections to the Constituent Assembly be organized on the principle of
universal suffrage. This is our principal request, on which everything else
depends. It is the best and only plaster for our open wounds, without which
they will ever remain open and hurry us on to death. There is no one panacea
for all our ills; many are needed, and we now proceed to enumerate them, speaking
plainly and candidly to you, Sire, as to a father. The following measures are
indispensable.
In the first
section are those which are directed against the ignorance and disfranchisement
of the Russian people. They include —
(1) Freedom and
inviolability of the person, liberty of speech, of the press, of association,
of conscience in matters of religion, and separation of Church and State.
(2) General and
obligatory education by the State.
(3) The
responsibility of Ministers to the nation, and guarantees for the legality of
administrative methods.
(4) Equality of all
persons, without exception, before the law.
(5) The immediate
recall of all who have suffered for their convictions.
In the second
section are measures against the poverty of the nation.
(1) The repeal of
indirect taxation, and the substitution of a direct progressive income-tax.
(2) Repeal of the
land redemption tax. Cheap credit, and a gradual transfer of the land to the
people.
The third section
comprises measures against the crushing of labour by capital.
(1) Protection of
labour by the law.
(2) Freedom of
working men's associations for co-operative and professional purposes.
(3) An eight-hours
working day and the limitation of overtime.
(4) The freedom of
the struggle between labour and capital.
(5) The
participation of representatives of the working classes in the elaboration of a
bill dealing with the State insurance of workmen.
(6) A normal
working wage.
Those, Sire,
constitute our principal needs, which we come to lay before you. Give orders
and swear that they shall be fulfilled, and you will render Russia happy and
glorious, and will impress your name on our hearts and on the hearts of our
children, and our children's children for all time. But if you withhold the
word, if you are not responsive to our petition, we will die here on this
square before your palace, for we have nowhere else to go to and no reason to
repair elsewhere. For us there are but two roads, one leading to liberty and
happiness, the other to the tomb. Point, Sire, to either of them; we will take
it, even though it lead to death. Should our lives serve as a holocaust of
agonizing Russia, we will not grudge these sacrifices; we gladly offer them up.
Signed by
George Gapon and about 135,000 workmen.
Manifesto
of October 17th, 1905:
We, Nicholas II, By the Grace of God Emperor and Autocrat of all
Russia, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, etc., proclaim to all Our loyal
subjects:
Rioting and disturbances in the capitals [i.e. St. Petersburg and the
old capital, Moscow] and in many localities of Our Empire fill Our heart with
great and heavy grief. The well-being of the Russian Sovereign is inseparable
from the well-being of the nation, and the nation's sorrow is his sorrow. The
disturbances that have taken place may cause grave tension in the nation and
may threaten the integrity and unity of Our state.
By the great vow of service as tsar We are obliged to use every
resource of wisdom and of Our authority to bring a speedy end to unrest that is
dangerous to Our state. We have ordered the responsible authorities to take
measures to terminate direct manifestations of disorder, lawlessness, and
violence and to protect peaceful people who quietly seek to fulfill their
duties. To carry out successfully the general measures that we have conceived
to restore peace to the life of the state, We believe that it is essential to
coordinate activities at the highest level of government.
We require the government dutifully to execute our unshakeable will:
(1.) To grant to the population the essential foundations of civil
freedom, based on the principles of genuine inviolability of the person,
freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association.
(2.) Without postponing the scheduled elections to the State Duma, to
admit to participation in the duma (insofar as possible in the short time that
remains before it is scheduled to convene) of all those classes of the
population that now are completely deprived of voting rights; and to leave the
further development of a general statute on elections to the future legislative
order.
3.) To establish as an unbreakable rule that no law shall take effect
without confirmation by the State Duma and that the elected representatives of
the people shall be guaranteed the opportunity to participate in the
supervision of the legality of the actions of Our appointed officials.
We summon all loyal sons of Russia to remember their duties toward
their country, to assist in terminating the unprecedented unrest now
prevailing, and together with Us to make every effort to restore peace and
tranquility to Our native land.
Given at Peterhof the 17th of October in the 1905th year of Our Lord
and of Our reign the eleventh.
No comments:
Post a Comment