Surveying the events of Bloody Sunday, one is struck above all by this very combination of naïve patriarchal faith in the tsar and fierce street struggle with armed conflict against tsarist power. The first day of the Russian revolution brought face to face, with stunning force, old and new Russia; it showed the agony of the ancient peasant faith in the tsar-batushka and the birth of a revolutionary people in the person of the urban proletariat. It is no accident that European bourgeois newspapers say that Russia on the 10th of January is no longer what Russia was on the 8th of January. It is no accident that the German Social-Democratic newspaper we mentioned above{83} recalls how 70 years ago the workers' movement began in England, how in 1834 English workers protested with street demonstrations against the prohibition of workers' unions, how in 1838 near Manchester they worked out at enormous assemblies the "People's Charter" and Pastor Stephens proclaimed that "every free man who breathes free God's air and walks on free God's earth has the right to his own hearth." And this same pastor called upon the assembled workers to take up arms.

Here in Russia, the movement too was headed by a priest who in one day passed from the call to go with a peaceful petition to the tsar himself to the call to begin a revolution. "Comrades, Russian workers!" wrote Father Georgy Gapon after the Bloody Day in a letter read at a gathering of liberals. "We no longer have a tsar. A river of blood has flowed today between him and the Russian people. It is time for Russian workers without him to begin the struggle for popular freedom. I bless you today. Tomorrow I shall be among you. Today I am occupied with important work for our cause."

It is not Father Georgy Gapon who speaks. It is the thousands and tens of thousands, the millions and tens of millions of Russian workers and peasants who until now could naively and blindly believe in the tsar-batushka, seek relief for their unbearably heavy situation from "the very" tsar-batushka, blame only the officials deceiving the tsar for all abuses, violence, arbitrariness, and plunder. Long generations of downtrodden, brutalized peasant life, abandoned in remote backwoods, strengthened this faith. Every month of new life—urban, industrial, literate Russia—undermined and destroyed this faith. The last decade of the workers' movement brought forward thousands of advanced proletarians, Social-Democrats, who had fully consciously broken with this faith. It had educated tens of thousands of workers whose class instinct, hardened in strike struggles and political agitation, had undermined all the foundations of such faith. But behind these thousands and tens of thousands stood hundreds of thousands and millions of the laboring and exploited, the humiliated and insulted, proletarians and semi-proletarians, for whom such faith could still remain. They could not go into insurrection, they were capable only of petitioning and imploring. Their feelings and moods, their level of knowledge and political experience were expressed by Father Georgy Gapon, and herein lies the historical significance of the role played in the beginning of the Russian revolution by a man who yesterday was known to no one, today become the hero of the day in Petersburg, and throughout European press beyond Petersburg.

It is now understandable why the Petersburgian Social-Democrats, whose letters we cited above, at first could not but regard Gapon with distrust. A man wearing a cassock, who believed in God and acted under the high patronage of Zubatov and the security police, could not but arouse suspicion. Whether sincerely or insincerely he was tearing off his cassock and cursing his belonging to the vile clergy, that estate of priests who rob and corrupt the people—no one could say with certainty, except perhaps those who knew Gapon personally, that is, except a negligible handful of people. Only the unfolding historical events, only facts, facts and facts could decide this. And the facts decided this question in Gapon's favor.

"Will Social-Democracy be able to seize hold of this spontaneous movement?" asked themselves in trepidation our Petersburgian comrades, seeing the irresistible rapid growth of the general strike, capturing extraordinarily broad strata of the proletariat, seeing the irresistible influence of Gapon on such "gray" masses who could be swayed even by a provocateur. And the Social-Democrats not only did not support naïve illusions about the possibility of peaceful petitioning, they disputed with Gapon, they directly and decisively upheld all their views and all their tactics. And history, which the working masses created without Social-Democracy, confirmed the correctness of these views and this tactics. The logic of the proletariat's class position proved stronger than Gapon's errors, naivities, and illusions. Grand Duke Vladimir, acting in the name of the tsar and with all the tsar's power, undertook by his deed as executioner to show the working masses precisely that which Social-Democrats have always shown and will continue to show them by printed and spoken word.

The masses of workers and peasants, still retaining a remnant of faith in the tsar, could not go into insurrection—we said. After the ninth of January we are justified in saying: now they can go and will go into insurrection. "Tsar-batushka" by his bloody reprisal against unarmed workers himself drove them onto the barricades and gave them the first lessons of struggle on the barricades. The lessons of "father-tsar" will not be wasted.

Social-Democracy's task remains to take care for the widest possible dissemination of news of the Petersburgian Bloody Days, for greater cohesion and organization of its own forces, for more energetic propaganda of the slogan long since advanced by it: an all-national armed insurrection[44].