The priest who led the march, and ended a double agent
After Bloody Sunday, Gapon wrote: "We no longer have a tsar. Today a river of blood divides him from the Russian people. It is time for the Russian workers to begin the struggle for the people's freedom without him."
On January 9, 1905, he led 150,000 workers in a petition march to the Winter Palace, where troops opened fire. He survived to write "We no longer have a Tsar," but when his double game with the police came to light, SR combatants hanged him the next year.
Career Timeline
- 1902–04Organizes the police-sponsored Assembly of Factory Workers
- 1905.1.9Leads the Winter Palace petition march, Bloody Sunday
- 1905–06Exile; contacts with the revolutionary parties
- 1906His police ties exposed; hanged by SR combatants
Related historical events
The Double Game with the Police
In autumn 1902, Gapon made contact with Sergei Zubatov, head of the Special Section of the Police Department. Zubatov was building police-controlled legal workers' unions to counter revolutionary propaganda, and he recruited Gapon, already popular among workers, into the project. Under Zubatov's patronage, Gapon organized the 'Assembly of Russian Factory Workers of St. Petersburg'. But from the start, he planned to deceive the police. 'From the very first minute I led them all by the nose,' he later admitted. 'My whole plan was built on that.' He drafted a new charter sharply limiting police interference, approved by Deputy Interior Minister Pyotr Durnovo in February 1904. Gapon cultivated a personal friendship with City Governor Ivan Fullon and used it to bar the police entirely from his organization; inside, he formed a 'secret committee' that read illegal literature and discussed armed uprising. Until January 9, 1905, the authorities had no idea what was unfolding inside Gapon's Assembly. Bloody Sunday came as a complete shock. After fleeing abroad, suspicions arose that Gapon resumed contact with the police in the summer of 1905, though documentary evidence remains inconclusive. Upon returning to Russia, he allied with Count Sergei Witte and supported the reform path promised by the October 17 Manifesto. In February 1906, the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionary Party concluded that Gapon was an agent of the authorities who had betrayed the revolution. Pinhas Rutenberg (the same man who had rescued him on Bloody Sunday) lured him to an empty dacha in Ozerki, where a comrades' trial ended with Gapon hanged. He was 36.