On this day a peaceful procession of workers was fired upon by Tsar Nicholas II’s guards outside the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg in what would later be known as ‘Bloody Sunday‘. It was the start of the First Russian Revolution and was followed by a series of demonstrations and strikes which were all brutally repressed by the tsar’s troops. In June, sailors on the battleship Potemkin undertook a famous mutiny, and in October, a strike by railway workers turned into a general strike in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. However, after some temporary concessions, the tsar’s autocratic rule was restored by June 1907. Lenin later described the Revolution of 1905 as the “dress rehearsal” without which the “victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would have been impossible.”
