Context and Identity of the Work
How the Petersburg Workers Went to the Tsar (Как петербургские рабочие к царю ходили) is a short prose piece by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik writer, critic, and later the first People’s Commissar for Enlightenment (Education) in Soviet Russia. The work is a reflective narrative built around the events of Bloody Sunday, 9 January 1905 (22 January in the New Style calendar), when a large column of St. Petersburg workers, led by the priest Georgy Gapon and carrying petitions and religious icons, marched on the Winter Palace to present their grievances to Nicholas II. The troops fired on the crowd, killing and wounding a great many people, and the massacre became the immediate trigger for the revolution of 1905.
Lunacharsky wrote the text as a retrospective account of that day and of the circumstances that led workers to believe in the tsar as a benevolent father who could be petitioned. The piece is less a documentary chronicle than a literary and political reckoning: it reconstructs the psychology of the marchers, the hold of traditional monarchist faith on them, and the moment at which that faith collapsed. In this respect it belongs to the broader Russian Marxist and revolutionary literature of the 1905 period, in which writers tried to turn the massacre into a lesson about class consciousness.
The Narrative Premise and Its Setting
The story is set in the industrial working-class districts of St. Petersburg in the winter of 1904–1905. The capital’s factories had been hit by economic hardship, layoffs, and a wider sense of injustice, and the labour movement had been drawn into the orbit of the Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers, an organisation sponsored by the police and directed by Father Gapon. Lunacharsky’s text takes this context seriously. It shows that the workers who walked toward the palace were not, for the most part, revolutionaries in the sense of the socialist parties; many of them carried the image of the tsar as a just ruler who had been deceived by his officials and who would surely hear the people if he could only be reached directly.
The narrative is organised around this gap between what the workers believed and what the autocracy actually was. The author treats the march as a kind of collective pilgrimage. Workers dressed in their Sunday clothes, bearing icons, portraits of the tsar, and religious banners, move through the snowy streets toward the palace in orderly ranks. The procession has an almost liturgical character, and Lunacharsky dwells on the way that religious ritual and monarchist devotion merged in the marchers’ minds.
The Characters
The text does not rely on a single fixed protagonist in the manner of a conventional novel. Instead it moves among a set of collective and representative figures. The most prominent of these is the mass of ordinary workers, whose voices, hopes, and gestures the author renders with sympathy. Among them stand individual types: the older worker steeped in religious faith, the younger and more politically aware worker who begins to question the premise of the petition, and the families who join the procession with their wives and children. Lunacharsky uses these figures to show a spectrum of consciousness within the crowd, from unreflective loyalty to a dawning recognition of the class character of the state.
Father Gapon appears as the organiser and spiritual leader of the march. Lunacharsky presents him as a figure who embodied the ambiguity of the moment: a priest who had drawn workers into a legal labour organisation, who spoke the language of faith and the tsar’s paternal authority, and who was simultaneously manipulated by and drawn toward more radical currents. The author treats Gapon’s role with a mixture of pity and critique, seeing in him the tragedy of a man who believed he could channel popular devotion into a reform of the system.
Opposing these figures are the representatives of the state: the troops, the officers, and in the background the imperial government and the tsar himself, who never appears in person in the crowd’s imagination except as an absent, idealised father. The contrast between the faith of the marchers and the cold machinery of the state’s response is central to the text.
How the Action Unfolds
The narrative begins with the atmosphere of the city in the days before the march. Lunacharsky describes the grievances of the workers, the economic pressures, the strikes and dismissals, and the growing expectation that the petition to the tsar might finally open a path to relief. The mood is one of hope mixed with tension. The workers prepare, gather, and discuss the plan, and the author conveys the sense that many of them genuinely believed that the sovereign, if he were approached correctly, would respond to their suffering.
The middle of the account follows the march itself. The columns converge from different districts and move toward the centre of the city. Lunacharsky renders the procession as a visual and emotional spectacle: the icons held aloft, the singing of hymns and the national anthem, the orderly bearing of the crowd. The sense of expectation builds as the marchers approach the centre, where the military stands in their path. The author emphasises the contrast between the peaceful, almost devotional character of the crowd and the readiness of the troops.
The turning point is the shooting. Lunacharsky describes the moment when the soldiers open fire, the panic and confusion that follow, the falling of bodies on the snow, and the stunned disbelief of those who had come to petition their father. The text makes clear that the massacre was not simply an act of violence against revolutionaries but a violation of the very faith on which the marchers had based their action. The collapse of that faith is the emotional and ideological climax of the work.
Key Turning Points and Their Meaning
The central turning point is the recognition, forced upon the survivors and witnesses, that the tsar could not or would not be the protector they had imagined. Lunacharsky treats this as a moment of enlightenment in the Marxist sense. The workers’ naive monarchism, sustained by religion and by habit, is shattered by direct experience of state violence, and the author argues that this shattering opened the way for a more conscious and class-based understanding of their situation.
A second important theme concerns the response of the working class in the days and weeks after the shooting. The text shows the spread of strikes across the city and beyond, the rise of anger and solidarity, and the beginnings of a politicised labour movement that would soon reach the scale of the 1905 revolution. Lunacharsky presents these developments as the direct and logical consequence of the massacre, and he sees the event as a pivot from the paternalist illusions of the old labour movement toward a movement organised around its own interests.
Resolution and Conclusions
The work does not end with a conventional resolution of character arcs, since it is a historical and political reflection rather than a fictional plot. Its conclusion is interpretive: Lunacharsky argues that the events of that January day were a decisive education for the Russian proletariat. The faith in the tsar that had been cultivated by church, state, and tradition was exposed as a false consciousness, and the workers emerged from the massacre with a sharper sense of their enemies and of their collective power.
The author’s broader thesis, which runs through the whole piece, is that revolutionary consciousness is not born from theory alone but from experience, and that the massacre was an involuntary but powerful lesson in the nature of the autocracy. The closing passages return to the image of the marchers and the snow, framing the day as the moment when a naive pilgrimage became the first act of a politically conscious movement.
Place in Lunacharsky’s Work and Significance
Lunacharsky was among the most prolific Bolshevik writers of his generation, active as a critic, playwright, essayist, and political theorist, and later as the head of Soviet cultural and educational policy. His writings on 1905 belong to a body of revolutionary commentary in which the events of that year were reinterpreted as the first great proving ground of the Russian working class. How the Petersburg Workers Went to the Tsar is valued in Soviet and Russian literary history as an example of the way writers of this period combined reportage, moral pathos, and political analysis to shape the memory of the revolution.
Its significance lies in its effort to explain how the workers’ old loyalties were broken and how that breaking became a precondition for the revolutionary movement. For readers interested in the history of 1905, the text offers both an emotional entry into the events of Bloody Sunday and an interpretive framework that shaped how that day was remembered in the decades that followed.
