It is the turn of the century and the days of Imperial Russia are numbered. Nicholas II was crowned in May 1896. Nearly 1400 men, women and children were crushed to death in the crowds at his coronation, which was quickly seen as a bad omen. Within a year, disturbances had broken out in Russian universities and the Socialist Revolutionaries were disrupting government by murdering senior government ministers close to the Tsar. Double agents used their privileged position to mount further assassinations.
By the end of 1904, Russia was close to turmoil and a strike at the Putilov Engineering works in St Petersburg spread quickly to other factories. Within a month a hundred thousand workers had downed tools.

Dmitry Shostakovich's eleventh symphony - The Year 1905 - portrays the bloody culmination of the strikes on Sunday the 9th of January, when soldiers opened fire on protesters bringing a petition to the Tsar, leaving more than a hundred dead in the snow.

And trouble at home was soon to coincide with disaster abroad. Aggressive expansionism in the far-east had brought Russia into conflict with Japan, and the catastrophe of Tsushima in which Russia lost eight battleships and four cruisers, with 4000 men dead and 7000 taken prisoner. That and the uprising in Odessa, immortalised in Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, dealt Tsarism an immortal blow from which it would never recover. Suddenly the mighty tsarist system didn't look so mighty after all.

The resulting concessions introduced by the Tsar were seen as an admission of the regime's fragility. As Martin Sixsmith hints, 'It wouldn't take much for the whole edifice to come crashing to the ground.'

Historical Consultant: Professor Geoffrey Hosking

Producers: Adam Fowler & Anna Scott-Brown
A Ladbroke Production for BBC Radio 4. Show less