In Petersburg, a revolution has broken out, which the tsarist regime is trying to drown in rivers of workers’ blood and kill with the silence of the press. In the capital city, the butchers of tsarism carried out a pitiless slaughter of the unarmed people. And, all the while, the press in our country and in the tsarist empire, muzzled by the censors, was forced to remain silent about these most important and dramatic historical events that will be recorded for centuries in the history of Russia and in fact in the history of the world. All the while, the press had to be satisfied with the bald-faced lies of the official communiqués. But the revolution cannot be killed by silence. And the streams of workers’ blood that were shed in Petersburg will ultimately come pouring down on the house of the Romanovs. Not for nothing do the revolutionary people in Russia, with a premonition of a major historical drama soon to come, now refer to Nicholas the Second as—Nicholas the Last! The tsarist government did not hesitate to slaughter even women and children, who were innocently playing on the public plazas of the capital. With its own hand this government is digging a grave even for a constitutional monarchy of the Romanovs and preparing the way for a republic in Russia!
The revolution broke out totally spontaneously and unexpectedly. It was preceded by a general strike of the Petersburg workers, so that Petersburg was without lights at night, it had no daily papers coming out, and its factories and workshops stood empty. The revolution was started by a section of the workers who were loyal to the tsar and who wanted to combine loyalty to him with freedom! They wanted to march to the tsar’s palace led by the priest Gapon, who had composed a petition that combined an appeal from loyal subjects with a plea for a little bit of freedom. But, before long, the government found itself in a very great hurry to free its loyal subjects from their naive illusions. Today, those very same workers are shouting, “Down with the tsar!” And that same Father Gapon is leading crowds in struggle against the tsar.
Because the censorship is not allowing any further news reports, thus blocking information to the general public, we are reprinting the most important dispatches from the foreign press. But even those reports are incomplete, since the government is not allowing any private correspondence, while the official Russian telegraph agency† is totally at the service of the government. As for the activities of the revolutionary-minded masses of Social Democratic workers, and of any party committee, those can only be guessed at slightly from reports of red banners waving at barricades or of leaflets and underground writings being circulated in the capital city.*