Gapon, Georgi Apollonovich

(1870–1906)

   Father Gapon ran a large working-class parish in St. Petersburg in the first years of the 20th century and was respected for his defense of workers’ rights. He was recruited as an agent by Nikolai Zubatov, Okhrana’s chief in the capital city. Gapon became deeply embroiled in Zubatov’s “police socialism” strategy, a clandestine effort to win working-class support for the tsarist regime. Gapon organized a massive and peaceful march on the Winter Palace in January 1905, which was brutally put down by troops, resulting in the loss of a hundred lives. The “Bloody Sunday” repression ended any hope of police socialism and revolutionized the St. Petersburg working class.

   Following Bloody Sunday, Gapon fled abroad, trading police socialism for revolution. He met with Vladimir Lenin, as well as other Bolsheviks and the Socialist Revolutionary Battle Organization leaders, to obtain weapons and financial support for revolution. In early 1906 Gapon entered Russian Finland, where he was murdered, apparently by members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party who had discovered his relationship with the Okhrana. Gapon was a tragic pawn caught between the Okhrana and the revolutionary parties. He died a priest without a church and a revolutionary without a party.