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assistance and diverting them from political questions; but they had quite an unpleasant experience. As long as these were small closed organisations they were quite harmless but as soon as the broad labour masses began to join, they became centres of the economic struggle. The historian of this police device, Professor Oseroff, declares that as soon as the weavers, for instance, on the initiative of the Okrana, organised a mutual aid society they sent delegates to the factories with a demand for an increase of wages. The union created in Odessa was the initiator of large strikes in which tens of thousands of workers participated. The attempt of the Okrana to protect the economic organisations roused protests on the part of the manufacturers who regarded this as an attempt ot the feudal government to save itself by stirring up the workers against the bourgeoisie. Complaints flowed from Moscow to Petrograd, the Minister of Finance took the side of the employers and Zubatoff was transferred to Vologda.
But as the labour movement was growing unrestrainedly a fresh attempt was made by the Police in 1904 to create support among the workers. A meeting of the Russian factory workers under the protection of the Minister of the Interior, Plehve, and the Metropolitan Antonius, formed a society for the purpose, as the rules state, of "arousing and strengthening national consciousness of the workers." At the head of this society stood Father Gapon who organised 11 branches. These branches in spite of their police origin became the centre of the labour movement in Petrograd. A series of strikes and demonstrations took place which ended in the bloody shambles of the 9th January (old style). This tampering of the police with the workers resulted in the defeat of the autocracy.
The Revolution of 1905.
Bloody Sunday served as a starting point for a tremendous revolutionary impetus. In the course or several months more than 500,000 workers struck. Strikes broke out one after another. Economic strikes took the shape of political strikes. The pressure was so great that tsarism had to look through its fingers at the "illegal" activity of the workers. Simultaneously with the bloody January days and the strike wave roused by these events the work of organising the trade unions was proceeding. The first union to be formed was that of the printers. Immediately after a union of clerks and book-keepers was formed. At the same time a semi-legal union of shop assistants and a union of druggist assistants began to organise. At a secret meeting held in May, 1905, unions of watch makers, tailors, tanners and boot and shoe makers were formed.
A number of unions were formed in Moscow in the spring of 1905. The illegal printers' union which existed in Moscow since 1903 for improving the conditions of labour and which accepted the programme of the Social-Democratic Party, carried on since 1905 an economic struggle. But in September, 1905, a printers' strike broke out in Moscow and advantage was taken of the occasion to create a council of printers' delegates for Moscow which, in fact, became a trade union. In the spring of 1905 the Bolsheviks organised a party union of bakers, the founders of which practically became the leaders of
