Before October
1905
The 1905 revolution
A dress rehearsal: a soviet, a manifesto, an uprising, and a defeated party that learned to wait.
After troops fired on a petitioning crowd in St. Petersburg on Bloody Sunday (9 January 1905, old style), strikes and mutinies spread. Workers in the capital formed a soviet — a council — in which a young Leon Trotsky became a leading voice. The tsar issued the October Manifesto promising a Duma. In December the Moscow uprising was crushed.
The empire survived, but it never recovered the belief that it could not be challenged. Bolsheviks took two lessons they would reuse in 1917: armed uprising can be organized, and a soviet can be captured and turned into a government.
Where to check it · Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905; Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy.