The Political Police and the 1905 Revolution, I: The Descent into Chaos, January–November

Abstract

Colonel Gerasimov, the newly appointed chief of the St Petersburg OO, wrote that Bloody Sunday ‘opened a new epoch in the history of Russia’.¹ For Tsardom's political police this statement held special meaning. Bloody Sunday and the events that followed upon it forever altered the tsarist political police's relationship with Russian society. During the revolution the political police witnessed the alliance of almost the entire population against the monarchy² – against them personally³ – and as the revolution progressed the forces of order came to recognise that they were not capable of subduing the swelling unrest. The sudden awareness of their powerlessness before this greatest threat to the autocracy's existence in the three hundred year history of the dynasty demoralised them.⁴