George Gapon (Georgi Apollonievich Gapon) (1870–1906) was a priest whom preached in the worker’s suburbs of St. Petersburg, where he was supported by and amiable among the people. He organised the Assembly of Russian Factory and Plant Workers of St. Petersburg, which was subsidised by the Department of the Police and the St. Petersburg secret police, Okhranka. He organized a procession of St. Peterburg workers to present a petition to the Tsar on January 9 (Bloody Sunday 1905). He was saved by his followers that day. Following Bloody Sunday he anathematized the emperor and called upon the workers to take action against the regime, but soon after escaped abroad where he had close ties with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. After the October Manifesto he returned to Russia and resumed contact with the Okhranka. Suspected as an agent provocateur, Gapon was executed by Pinhas Rutenberg in accordance with a sentence passed on him by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
At this moment Gapon tried hard to confine the negotiations to the points in dispute, whereas the agitators put forward demands of a wider kind, such as the eight-hour working day, and they gradually obtained his concurrence on condition that no political demands should be introduced into the programme.
Gapon was no longer merely the president of the Workmen's Union: inebriated with the excitement he had done so much to create, he now imagined himself the representative of the oppressed Russian people, and the heroic leader of a great political revolution.
At one of the first volleys FatherGapon fell, but he turned out to be quite unhurt, and was spirited away to his place of refuge, whence he escaped across the frontier.
Gapon came from a peasant family in the Ukraine, and as a young man he had been much moved by Tolstoy's conception of nonviolence and of a mild and loving anarchy as the solution for the problems of the world.
Gapon, however, could not be found, and nothing then remained to be done but to bring as many police and soldiers as possible into the city, and to wait and see what the next day would bring forth.
Gapon carried in his hand their petition for an eight-hour day, a minimum wage of one ruble a day (about fifty cents), no overtime and a constituent assembly; and this he hoped to hand personally to the Czar while the crowd waited in the snow outside the palace.
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