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Assembly of Russian Workers of St. Petersburg
to advance workers' conditions within a frame-
work the police could approve. Social Demo-
cratic infiltration of the group soon brought
tensions with regard to goals and tactics, push-
ing the assembly toward more confrontational
tactics, such as strikes, than Gapon would have
preferred. In December 1904, the assembly
became involved in a mass strike after some of
its members were dismissed. Gapon then drew
up a manifesto to the czar, expressed in a mix-
ture of religious and secular language, appealing
for more social justice. It proved immensely pop-
ular and soon collected over 150,000 signatures.
On Sunday, January 9, 1905, Gapon headed a
long procession of workers whose goal was to
present the petition to Czar
NICHOLAS II
in the
Winter Palace. The police overreacted, fired on
the crowd, and killed more than a hundred peo-
ple including women and children. Known as
BLOODY SUNDAY
, the incident destroyed what was
left of the myth that the czar was the loving
father of the people and sparked what became
the 1905 Revolution. Although the incident
shocked and radicalized Gapon, his police con-
tacts eventually caught up with him, as the
Socialist Revolutionaries assassinated him in
1906 as an “agent provocateur.”
gress, he founded his first school, or
medrese,
in
the Crimea in 1882. Known as Jadidism (New
Method), Gasprali's educational philosophy
sought to renew Islamic schooling through a syn-
thesis of Islamic culture and Western-style tech-
nical education. His school was a success and
soon Gasprali was traveling through the Muslim
regions of the Russian Empire as far as
BUKHARA
,
promoting jadidist education. As a publicist,
Gasprali was driven by the belief that linguistic
unity was the prerequisite for political unity. In
1883 he founded the newspaper
Terdzhuman
(
Tercuman,
or Interpreter), one of whose goals
was the promotion of a pan-Turkic language
based on modern Ottoman Turkish that would be
understood by all Turkic peoples from Istanbul to
Turkestan. For the next three decades, the news-
paper was in the forefront of Muslim intellectual
life in the empire. Gasprali also published period-
icals for women and children and a satirical jour-
nal entitled
Kha, kha, kha
(
Ha, Ha, Ha
). He was
also active in the political awakening of Russian
Muslims, participating in three Muslim con-
gresses where he defended his message of pan-
Turkism. A moderate with regard to Russian
culture and the empire, he advocated cultural
and political cooperation based on the healthy
development of a Muslim national culture that
would lead to mutual cultural understanding
between Russian Muslims and non-Muslims. At
a time of growing nationalist assertiveness, this
message did not resonate well with the younger
generation of Russian Muslims. By the time of
his death, a network of jadidist schools had
developed, extending from the Crimea and the
Volga at one end to the eastern borders of Central
Asia on the other. Gasprali's educational legacy is
uncontested and essential in understanding the
intellectual and political development of the
Muslims of the Russian Empire.
Gasprali (Gasprinsky), Ismail Bey
(1851-1914)
reformer
An advocate of moderate secular and liberal
reform among the Muslims of the Russian
Empire, Ismail Bey Gasprali was a Crimean Tatar
who became known as the “father of pan-Turk-
ism.” Gasprali, sometimes referred to as Gasprin-
sky, was born in Gaspra, a village in the Crimea,
to an impoverished Tatar noble family. He
entered the Moscow Cadet Corps and later lived
in Paris and Istanbul, before returning to his
native Crimea. From his life in these places, he
absorbed a distinctive blend of Slavophile ideas,
liberalism and reformist, which he sought to
blend into an ideology of pan-Turkism. A cham-
pion of education as the best vehicle for pro-
Ge, Nikolai Nikolaevich
(1831-1894)
artist
Of French origin, Ge joined the Academy of Arts
in 1850. From 1857 to 1869, he studied in Italy,
settling in Florence, where he concentrated
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