This Bloody Sunday fueled revolutionary sentiment, and a general strike paralyzed Russia in October. Strikes and protests culminated in the January 1905 march on the Winter Palace to demand reforms, where over a hundred people were massacred. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was formed in 1898, which split into the Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) factions at a congress in 1903. The famine-plagued 1890s were a time of increasing political discontent. As a young man, Stalin himself served time in such camps, exiled to Siberia in 1903. Pushkin and Lermontov suffered terms of exile, and Dostoevsky served time in a penal camp, which became the subject of his book Notes from the House of the Dead. Dissidents were often sent into exile, prisons or penal camps, though the conditions of these pale when compared to the gulag. Long before Lenin created a secret police and Stalin expanded its powers, there is a history of tsars such as Nicholas I using secret police to suppress political enemies. Russia has a long history of highly centralized and often harsh rule, challenged intermittently by peasant uprisings.
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