The labor unrest that spilled out onto the streets of St. Petersburg in January 1905 and shook the autocracy was hardly a new phenomenon in Russia. Historiography— both Western and Soviet—has shown persuasively that labor discontent was widespread in Russia’s industrial centers for at least the preceding two decades. An explosive combination of miserable working and living conditions and repressive regimentation was further aggravated by only partially redeemed hopes of government-sponsored reforms in the 1880s and 1890s. Moreover, reform legislation was vitiated from the start by the government’s desire to keep the workers under strict control. This aim not only took precedence over the wish to see their grievances redressed, but amounted to a philosophy running through the whole corpus of Russian labor law and virtually institutionalized in the Department of Factory Inspection, created by a decree of July 1, 1882. Designed originally to seek out infractions of the labor laws, it soon became a policing agency for the factory owners.