When the French Revolution overthrew the monarchy and executed King Louis XVI, the Russian aristocrats shrugged: the Russian peasants seemed too complacent to try anything similar at home. Indeed, more than a century later it was not the crushing inequality that finally brought mass demonstrations to Russian streets, but working conditions resembling slavery. Russian workers toiling away 11 hours a day (10 hours on Saturdays) at factories petitioned the czar for an improvement in their pay and decrease in hours. They took to the streets to make their voices heard, and they were met there by heavily armed police.

On this day, January 22, 1905, a large but peacefully-marching crowd was met by police and Cossack horsemen near the grounds of St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, the official residence of the czar. The security forces opened fire on the crowd, triggering a mass panic in which several hundred died.

The incident marked the beginning of the Russian Revolution of 1905. More protests soon followed the St. Petersburg one, and in summer of that year the czar agreed to form an elected body, called the Duma, roughly resembling a European parliament. Still, legal maneuvering by the czar gave control of the Duma to Russian aristocrats, where it stayed until the communist takeover in 1917.