Working conditions are intolerable; our situation is becoming more excruciating as the time goes by. Father Gapon has been like a ray of Gratifying light that has shone through our darkened hope and made it come to life once again. Four members of the Assembly of Russian workers were dismissed at the putilov iron works 2 days ago and father Gapon true to his word has assisted us by calling for industrial action.
110, 000 workers in St Petersburg, including myself, have now gone out on strike. We now sit impatiently anxious to see what our next step of action shall be and how it may affect our life in the days yet to come. Will we fail and go back to our insufferable conditions as they were before, Will we come out on top and get given the tolerable treatment we deserve, or worse yet will we suffer such a humiliating defeat that our conditions worsen from what they once were. Sitting here I can not help but allow such thoughts to surface in my mind, after all this is a significant action by which my life can suffer a vast transformation, whether it will be for better or worse, is still yet to come.
January 18th
Another day has begun and yet another decision has been made Father Gapon has decided to make a personal appeal to the Tsar. He has wrote a petition asking to give us healthier working conditions, we have requested a reduction in working days from 10hours to 8hours, a increase in wages and an improvement in working conditions amongst others. The response to our petition amongst the workers is overwhelming as an infinite amount of people have signed the petition. We shall go to the winter palace on the 22nd of January to present our petition, in hopes to get a positive response to the requests we have made. I live in hope till the day comes for us to present our petition to the tsar and receive a response expectantly a constructive one at that.
22nd January 1905
As we marched through the Winter palace we were road blocked by the army, we attempted to get them out of our way in a calm and rational manner however despite our attempts they refused to move and let us in. Unable to think of any alternative we only saw one action we could take that could possibly give us an opportunity to move the army out of our path. Crouching down to the ground the protestors and I gathered stones of the ground and regrettably threw them at the army, although it was regrettable we had no alternative, the army put us in a tough situation from which we could not get out of without putting up a fight.
The army inevitably fought back using water cannon and rubber bullets to disperse of the crowd we had formed, however as they begun to fight back we refused to back down, we wanted our rights to be given to us, we wanted to be treated withrespectand be addressed to by others with some common decency, is that so much to ask? What we did was not a crime we could have gone much further with the matter however we did not, we merely stood up for our own rights.
We all began to scream and panic scattering away from one another as a trigger was pulled and a gun shot was heard going off. Within seconds thirteen of our allies are lying dead on the ground they had just minutes ago picked stones up from, others were wounded and the remainder in shock.
The army when questioned claimed they only returned fire, however how could this be true when we approached the winter palace unarmed? It is undeniably clear that we could not have fired any shots, we did not fire any shots, and the only shots that were fired were those of the armed force.
