Georgy Apollonovich Gapon was a
Russian OrthodoxThe Russian Orthodox Church ; or The Moscow Patriarchate , also known...
priestA priest or priestess is a person having the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particular, rites of sacrifice to, and propitiation of, a deity or deities. Their office or position is the priesthood, a term which may also apply to such persons collectively.Priests and priestesses...
and a popular
working classWorking class is a term used in academic sociology and in ordinary conversation to describe, depending on context and speaker, those employed in lower tier jobs as measured by skill, education, and compensation....
leader before the
Russian Revolution of 1905The 1905 Russian Revolution was a wave of mass political unrest through vast areas of the Russian Empire. Some of it was directed against the government, while some was undirected. It included terrorism, worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies...
.
Early life
Gapon was the son of Ukrainian peasants. He was educated in a theological seminary and married in 1896, but was widowed in 1898. He then moved to
St. PetersburgSaint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city's other names were Petrograd and Leningrad...
and graduated from its theological academy in 1902. Gapon became a religious teacher at the St. Olga children orphanage in 1900 and became involved in working with factory workers and families impoverished by unemployment.
Bloody Sunday incident
Father Gapon organized the
Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of St. Petersburg, which was patronized by the Department of the Police and the St. Petersburg Okhrana (
secret policeSecret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy to maintain national security against internal threats to the state....
). The Assembly's objectives were to defend workers' rights and to elevate their moral and religious status. Only persons of Russian Orthodox denomination were eligible to join its ranks. Soon the organization had twelve branches and 8,000 members, and Gapon tried to expand activities to
KievKiev or Kyiv , is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300...
and
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
. Gapon was not simply an obedient instrument of the police; cooperating with them, he tried to realize his own plans.
From the end of 1904, Gapon started to cooperate with radicals, who had championed the abolition of the Tsar's
autocracyA autocracy is a form of government in which the political power is held by a self-appointed ruler. The term autocrat is derived from the word autokratōr...
.
On , the day after the general strike burst out in St. Petersburg, Gapon organized a workers' procession to present a petition to the Tsar, which ended tragically (Bloody Sunday 1905). Gapon's life was saved by Pinchas Rutenberg, who took Gapon away from gun fire.
Following the Bloody Sunday, Gapon anathematized the Tsar and called upon the workers to take action against the regime, but soon after escaped abroad, where he had close ties with the
Socialist-Revolutionary Partythumb|right|200px|Socialist-Revolutionary election poster, 1917. The caption in red reads "партия соц-рев" , short for Party of the Socialist Revolutionaries....
. Gapon and Rutenberg fled abroad, being welcomed in Europe both by prominent Russian emigrants Georgy Plekhanov,
Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Lenin , born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov , was the Bolshevik Leader of the 1917 October Revolution, and the first Head of State of the Soviet Union; in the course of his political career, he used the pseudonyms Lenin, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Lenin, and N. Lenin...
, Pyotr Kropotkin, and French socialist leaders
Jean JaurèsJean Léon Jaurès was a French Socialist leader. Initially an Opportunist Republican, he evolved into one of the first social democrats, becoming the leader, in 1902, of the French Socialist Party, which opposed Jules Guesde's revolutionary Socialist Party of France...
and
Georges ClemenceauGeorges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman, physician, and journalist. He served as the prime minister of France from 1906-1909 and 1917-1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of the major voices behind the Treaty of Versailles...
. He found sanctuary in
GenevaGeneva, is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie...
and in London at 33 Dunstan House,
StepneyStepney is an inner-city district in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is located east north-east of Charing Cross and forms part of the East End of London. The area is a mix of post-war high density housing, Victorian mansion blocks and terraced housing that were not demolished during slum...
, with anarchists
Peter KropotkinPeter Alexeyevich Kropotkin was a geographer, a zoologist, and one of Russia's foremost anarchists. One of the first advocates of anarchist communism, Kropotkin advocated a communist society free from central government. Because of his title of prince, he was known by some as "the Anarchist...
and
Rudolf RockerJohann Rudolf Rocker was an anarcho-syndicalist writer and activist. A self-professed anarchist without adjectives, Rocker believed that anarchist schools of thought represented "only different methods of economy" and that the first objective for anarchists was "to secure the personal and social...
. After the
October ManifestoThe October Manifesto was issued on October 17 1905 by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia under the influence of Count Sergei Witte as a response to the Russian Revolution of 1905....
, before the end of 1905, Gapon returned to Russia and resumed contact with the Okhrana.
Suspected as an agent provocateur
Gapon soon revealed to Rutenberg his contacts with the police and tried to recruit him, too, reasoning that double loyalty is helpful to the workers' cause. However, Rutenberg reported this provocation to his party leaders,
Yevno AzefYevno Azef , was a Russian socialist revolutionary who was also a double agent working both as an organizer of assassinations for the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and a police spy for the Okhrana, the Imperial secret police...
(who was himself a secret police spy) and
Boris SavinkovBoris Viktorovich Savinkov was a Russian writer and revolutionary terrorist...
. On March 26, 1906 Gapon arrived to meet Rutenberg in the rented cottage out of St. Petersburg, and after a month he was found there hanged. Rutenberg asserted later that Gapon was condemned by the comrades' court. In reality, three S.R. party combatants overheard their conversation from the next room. After Gapon had repeated his collaboration proposal, Rutenberg called the comrades into the room and left. When he returned, Gapon was dead.
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