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On a freezing Sunday in January 1905, a peaceful crowd of workers marched towards the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to deliver a petition. They were met not by their “Little Father,” the Tsar, but by rifle fire. The massacre of that “Bloody Sunday” lit a fuse, and the Russian Empire exploded in a year of strikes, mutinies, and peasant uprisings. This was the 1905 Revolution. The revolution ultimately failed. The Tsar survived. But it was a failure that shook the foundations of the autocracy and, as Lenin later called it, a “great dress rehearsal” for the final, successful…