Bloody Sunday, as the day is known in Russian annals, is generally regarded as the beginning of the First Revolution.  Immediately people began to talk of armed resistance.  On the evening of the day of the tragedy there was a meeting of more than seven hundred Intellectuals at which the means for carrying on revolution was the topic discussed.  This was the first of many similar gatherings which took place all over Russia.  Soon the Intellectuals began to organize unions, ostensibly for the protection of their professional interests, but in reality for political purposes.  There were unions of doctors, writers, lawyers, engineers, professors, editors, and so on.  Quietly, and almost without design, there was being effected another and more important union, namely, the union of all classes against autocracy and despotism.

The Czar gave from his private purse fifty thousand rubles for the relief of the families of the victims of Bloody Sunday.  On the 19th of January he received a deputation of carefully selected “loyal” working-men and delivered to them a characteristic homily, which infuriated the masses by its stupid perversion of the facts connected with the wanton massacre of Bloody Sunday.  Then, at the end of the month, he proclaimed the appointment of a commission to “investigate the causes of labor unrest in St. Petersburg and its suburbs and to find means of avoiding them in the future.”  This commission was to consist of representatives of capital and labor.  The working-men thereupon made the following demands: 

(1) That labor be given an equal number of members in the commission with capital;

(2) That the working-men be permitted to freely elect their own representatives;

(3) That the sessions of the commission be open to the public;

(4) That there be complete freedom of speech for the representatives of labor in the commission;

(5) That all the working-people arrested on January 9th be released.

These demands of the working-men’s organizations were rejected by the government, whereupon the workers agreed to boycott the commission and refuse to have anything to do with it.  At last it became evident to the government that, in the circumstances, the commission could not accomplish any good, and it was therefore abandoned.  The Czar and his advisers were desperate and vacillating.  One day they would adopt a conciliatory attitude toward the workers, and the next day follow it up with fresh measures of repression and punishment.

Little heeding the stupid charge by the Holy Synod that the revolutionary leaders were in the pay of the Japanese, the workers went on organizing and striking.  All over Russia there were strikes, the movement had spread far beyond the bounds of St. Petersburg.  General strikes took place in many of the large cities, such as Riga, Vilna, Libau, Warsaw, Lodz, Batum, Minsk, Tiflis, and many others.  Conflicts between strikers and soldiers and police were common.  Russia was aflame with revolution.  The movement spread to the peasants in a most surprising manner.  Numerous extensive and serious revolts of peasants occurred in different parts of Russia, the peasants looting the mansions of the landowners, and indulging in savage outbreaks of rioting.