Petersburg's First Mass Labor Organization

Expansion and the Emergence of the Opposition Almost from the earliest days of his contacts with industrial workers in the capital, Gapon was acquainted with one particular group of them that distinguished itself from the rest by its developed political experience and knowledge. The head of the group was the lithographer Aleksei Karelin, a self-educated worker-intellectual and native of St. Petersburg, a former participant in the Brusnev Circle of the early 1890s, who in 1903 still considered himself a revolutionary Social Democrat. Gapon took Karelin into the small circle of workers with whom he discussed forming the organization that later became the Assembly.1 Karelin's prestige among workers as a self-educated political activist who had suffered arrest and exile, his large number of acquaintances and contacts in the work force of the capital, and his willingness to take part in Gapon's self-help schemes more than compensated for the risk of associating with him. If nothing else, Karelin's friendship would pave the way to recruiting Assembly members in the Vasil'ev Island district of the city, where he and his group were most active and influential. More important than that was the moral respectability which these revolutionary workers lent to an organization which was always tainted to some degree with the suspicion of police associations, the reassurance their presence would give to ordinary, nonrevolutionary workers who wanted nothing to do with police unions.2 The labor historian V. V. Sviatlovskii, himself a participant in the early circle movement in St. Petersburg and a friend of Karelin, described the group's members as 'eagles,' . . that is, people dissatisfied with the party

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