Krasnaia Red Presnia Uprising
The Pivotal Battle of the 1905 Russian Revolution in Moscow
What started off as a strike ended up with artillery and the Tsarist Imperial Guard putting down a full fledged revolt that forever after left the Presnia district Red.
The year 1905 was pivotal in Tsarist Russia. At the beginning of the year, Russian workers and peasants, sick of living conditions only made worse by losses in the Russo-Japanese War, marched on the Tsar's Winter Palace in St Petersburg. These unarmed marchers were shot by members of the Tsar's Imperial Guards in January 1905 on what was later called the Bloody Sunday Massacre. This sparked off a year of riots, mutinies, assassinations and revolution all over the country. Only weeks after Bloody Sunday revolutionaries blew up the Tsar's uncle, the Grand Duke Serge in Moscow. Throughout the summer Cossacks and the Tsar’s foot soldiers were called in when more than 4000 workers' strikes and peasant riots turned violent. In June the battleship Potemkin mutinied at the Black Sea port of Odessa; with the crew killing their officers and raising a red flag before abandoning their vessel in a Romanian port ten days later. This cumulated in October with the entire working apparatus of Russia, from the railroad workers to government clerks, walked off their jobs and brought the country to a standstill. Tsar Nicolas II hastily assembled a constitution and announced reforms. This, coupled with the end of the Russo-Japanese war took the wind out of the sails of many of the rioters and the revolution of 1905 was largely over. That is, except for Red Presnia (also spelled Presnya and Presna)
Presnia was the working class factory district of Moscow, Russia’s heartland city. It was packed with huge mills and foundries where 150,000 workers toiled in conditions that would be seen today as barbaric. The Presnia (from then on dubbed the Krasnaia Presnia, or Red Presnia) district went on a peaceful strike on December 7th, 1905. Vice Admiral Doubassoff (Dubasov), the man who replaced the recently-assassinated Grand Duke Serge as governor of Moscow, ordered the ringleaders of the strikers to be arrested the next day. The arrest was a fiasco and most of the leaders escaped, where they promptly called for open insurrection. Workers were armed by revolutionaries of all flavors (dubbed ‘The Joint Council of Volunteer Fighting Squads’) who had been stockpiling some 800 firearms acquired both locally and through Russian cells abroad. The workers, many of whom had served years in the army due to conscription, formed partisan Druzhina detachments that fought a guerilla campaign with the Tsar's gendarmes and the Moscow garrison. A section of the 2nd Grand Duke Michael's Rostov Grenadier Regiment refused to march and was arrested. This was the first mutiny of a Tsarist regiment since 1826. Fifty officers of the garrison, returning from the Japanese war, were siezed and disarmed by the crowd at the train station. By December 10th Admiral Doubassoff had resorted to closing off the district and bombarding it with field artillery while he awaited reliable reinforcements.
When six days of bombardment had not brought Red Presnia to its knees, Admiral Doubassoff sent in the 1st Battalion of the Semenovsky Foot Guards Regiment that had just arrived from St Petersburg. The Semenovsky's were the second-oldest regiment in the Tsar's army, founded personally by Peter the Great just outside of Moscow at the start of his reign. They were crack regular soldiers drawn from the whole of the 1.4-million man Russian Army and led by handpicked officers. The Semenovskys, under the command of Colonel FE Min, stormed the district on the morning of December 17th. Colonel Min ordered his troops to "Act without mercy" and to "make no arrests". The Bolshevik militia leader, Litvin, ordered his men to lay down their arms and disperse when it was apparent that a few hundred armed workers were no match for almost 1,000 guardsmen. . For the loss of a hundred military casualties the Semenovsky Regiment and the Moscow garrison razed the district and put down the rebellion. When the fires had been extinguished and the bodies counted the butcher's bill was terrible. The civilian dead numbered 1059, including over a hundred women and no less than 86 small children.
The Semenovsky's returned to St Petersburg and were decimated in World War One only to mutiny in 1917 and support the people against their Tsar. Their commander, Colonel Min, was promoted to General and made an aide to the Tsar. After two foiled attempts, Min was shot dead or his actions by a young revolutionary girl on August 26, 1906 on the train platform at Peterhof. The young girl who killed Min surrendered to the man's wife and turned over a bomb that she would have used had her shots missed. Vice Admiral Doubassoff was also the subject of revolutionary vendetta, surviving no less than a half dozen bombings and shootings before being killed by a bomb in October 1906.
According to post revolution soviet archivists an estimated 65.600 civilians were killed or executed across the country by the Russian military and Tsarist police during the 1905-1907 time period.
Sources
Bookchin, Murray The Third Revolution, 2000
Lincoln, W Bruce In Wars Dark Shadow 1991
Girl Kills Gen Min, Wife Seizes Slayer. New York Times August 27, 1906.
Moscow Regiment Muntines, Officers Siezed. New York Times December 12, 1905.
Lenin, VI Lessons of the Moscow Uprising 1907 in Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1965, Moscow, Volume 11, pages 171-178.
