Two hundred
thousand workers, about half the industrial labor force, are on strike in
Petrograd. Among others, students joined them. The slogans cried for bread, but
also against tsarist autocracy and the war.
On the first day
of strikes, only police were sent to control the crowds. But on the second day,
the authorities took the second step in a long-planned escalation: they sent
Cossacks to drive the workers back with horses and whips. But the plan of the
tsar’s Council of Ministers failed. The Cossacks, instead of driving away the
workers, in some cases simply filed through them, or let them pass under their
horses. Nor did they fire on the workers, but some of them broke up police
formations that were. Trotsky says, “…one of them gave the workers a good
wink.”
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