Tag Archives: Bloody Sunday

SOME DAY there would be no tsars, but there was little sign of that during the last years of the nineteenth century. Alexander III still held Russia in a firm grip. When he died in 1894, his son Nicholas II came to the throne. Nicholas was twenty-six years old. He was a handsome young man and a few months after his father’s death he was married to a German princess. They were in love and it looked as though Nicholas would be a popular ruler. His reign began badly. In 1896, a great crowd gathered on a field in Moscow …

IT WAS a Sunday in January of 1905 and snow lay on the ground and rooftops of St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia. Although winters were cold in this northern city and it seemed like a day to sit indoors before a warm fire, many people were hurrying through the streets. About 200,000 men, women and children gathered in huge crowds, their breath making puffs of vapour in the frosty air. Soon they formed processions and began marching across the hard-packed snow. As they tramped along in ragged lines, they sang the national anthem, “God Save the Tsar.” Many of …