ABSTRACT
Kyiv (Kiev) was a prime candidate for serious popular unrest when revolution gripped the Russian Empire during 1905. As the Empire’s third city, after St Petersburg and Moscow, it was a major centre of regional governance, industry, commerce, communications, higher education and culture. Its population, numbering nearly 600,000, included large contingents of skilled and unskilled workers, while the existence of its university and recently opened polytechnical institute ensured the presence of several thousand students, whom the regime traditionally viewed as a volatile radical element. The city had a long tradition of radical activism and, by 1905, its political scene included a wide variety of illegal, anti-tsarist organizations, notably the liberal Union of Liberation, the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (PSR), Russian Social Democrats (of both Bolshevik and Menshevik persuasions), the Ukrainian Social Democratic Union (the ‘Spilka’) and the Jewish Bund. Also, large amounts of proscribed subversive literature were able to reach the city, as a consequence of the proximity of the Empire’s western border. In short, there seemed good reason for the head of the Kyiv gendarmerie to report in 1902 that the city had become the centre of revolutionary and socialist activity of all factions in the south of the Empire.1
