This year, the Ukrainian mass-media have devoted a lot of air time and print to a string of events that occurred a century earlier in the Russian empire: the massacre of protesting workers near the Czar's Winter Palace in St. Petersburg; the Potemkin mutiny in Odessa and other clashes between the proletariat and the Czarist regime, which in sum served as a dress rehearsal for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
On 9 January 1905 (Gregorian calendar), a peaceful procession of St. Petersburg workers was fired on by the police and Cossack units as they were delivering a petition to Nicholas II. They were led by an Orthodox priest named Georgy Gapon. The list of demands included eight-hour working days, better working conditions, higher salaries, universal suffrage and an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Whoever gave the order, over 100 men, woman and children, some carrying icons and the Czar's portrait, were killed. Around 300 others were wounded. This tragic day, which has since been known as Bloody Sunday, led to factory strikes, university walkouts and unrest that engulfed the whole country.
People's indignation had been accumulating for years, but the workers, peasants, students and soldiers who attempted spontaneous protests were either executed, imprisoned, banished to Siberia or frightened into submission.
The police apparently attacked the peaceful demonstration in the hope of intimidating other potential protestors and would-be rebels. Some say Gapon was an agent provocateur. But the result was the opposite. Russia erupted in social and political upheaval. Ukraine was also particularly hard hit. Here the Ukrainian language was banned and ethnic discrimination thrived. Ukrainians at the time were officially known as Little Russians, or derisively called khokhols. The country's significant Jewish population had to obey draconian and humiliating rules.
Millions of peasants took part in rebellions throughout the vast empire. They destroyed their landlords' mansions and palaces, cut down their forests and slaughtered their cattle and pigs. By the way, during all the revolutions that Ukraine went through, the worst casualties were noted among cows and pigs. This was especially true after the 1917 revolution, during the years of forced collectivization. Live stock figures dropped again between 1996 and 2005, after the implementation of land reform. In the past five years, the number of cows and pigs in the country has been halved, while our forests have been decimated at a catastrophic speed. The harm is the greater, as Ukraine has fewer forests than any other European country. Thus, the loss of livestock and woods appear to be the price our nation pays for social conflicts. Even today, villagers in any part of Ukraine can show you glades where landowners' forests once grew.
My own family knows many stories about the injustice and arbitrariness of landowners and Czarist officials. Most of the peasants from our village did not have their own fields to cultivate, so they had to labor for the local lord to earn a little money. My father's elder brother offered his services as a cattle grazer for the promise of getting a calf in autumn. His family hoped they would be able to raise this calf to one day feed themselves. However, revolution broke out, and the peasants led off all the landowners' cattle. My uncle managed to hold on to the calf he'd been promised.
But a few weeks later, the landlord came back to the village accompanied by Czarist troops. The village priest and constable organized public punishments in the local square. The villagers were forced to give back what they had stolen and then mercilessly whipped with the rifle ramrods provided by the soldiers. The landlord also demanded that the calf be returned. When my uncle's mother protested, she was given 25 lashes. They stripped her publicly and delivered the blows in front of her family and neighbors. She remembered the humiliation and shame that she had been subject to right up to her deathbed. It was the public dishonor rather than the blows themselves that still made her weep. It's no surprise then that three of her four sons, who had witnessed the punishment, joined the Bolsheviks against the Czar.
It was uprisings in the army and navy that presented the biggest threat to the Czarist regime. In Kyiv, one such armed revolt was headed by Borys Zhadanivsky. Memorials are erected in several Ukrainian cities to commemorate the courageous participants in these uprisings. The greatest mutiny broke out on the Battleship Potemkin. In June 1905, a group of sailors complained about the serving of rotten meat. The captain ordered that the ringleaders be shot. The firing squad refused to carry out the order and joined with the rest of the crew in throwing the officers overboard.
But sailors from other ships didn't follow suit. Eventually, the Potemkin sailed to Romania, where the mutineers surrendered to the local authorities. Nevertheless, the mutiny found a place in history. Sergey Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is still considered to be one of the great cinematic achievements of all times.
Next, in December that year, came the rebellion by urban workers in Moscow's Presnya district. To extinguish the revolutionary flame, the regime had to make concessions. The Czar signed a decree granting more civil liberties; however, the revolutionaries were defeated because their uprising was local, largely spontaneous and not centrally coordinated by any single political force. Thirty thousand rebels were arrested by police. Five thousand of them were executed. The civil liberties that the Czar had guaranteed did little to stop police persecution and torture. But the people's yearning for change was not to be subdued.
The event allowed Russia's democratic forces to draw several conclusions about the doomed Russian autocracy and its inevitable downfall. They realized that the defeat of revolution was temporary and that a second wave of uprisings was imminent. They only had to organize rebels better to ensure victory. Historians of that time claim that the Czar knew a second phase of revolution was coming but could not change the system in time. So in 1917, Nicholas II abdicated without any resistance, turning over his powers to a provisional democratic government, which would in turn relinquish power to Lenin's radical adherents.
Today, we can calmly look back on the 20th century and analyze its upheavals. The first conclusion that we can make is that revolutions are recurrent. We should not regard them as final and decisive deliverance from dogmatism, stagnation, injustice and tyranny. After each revolution, social 'dirt' begins to accumulate again, leading to new rebellions.
In many parts of the world, people have managed to avoid revolutions, introducing improvements into state and social institutions gradually. To do this, a society has to be stable and democratic, with an efficient and publicly responsible government. In authoritarian or totalitarian countries, where dictators rule, there are no such conditions, so social, political, religious and other explosive upheavals are inevitable.
Luckily, in Ukraine and Georgia recent change has been peaceful and non-violent. The people swept away their hated regimes through organized demonstrations rather than arms. Such scenarios could be repeated in other post-Soviet republics where democracy - the decisive pre-condition for self-improvement and permanent social rejuvenation - is oppressed. If Czar Nicholas II had at least started to democratically reform his empire, he may have avoided revolution. However, his and other monarchists' desire to hold on to power eventually led to their tragic loss of it.
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