Black Hundreds

[7] Revolutionary newspapers identified the Black Hundreds as a threat, describing them as "hooligan gangs" paid by the government to threaten political opponents.

The Menshevik leader Julius Martov feared that the government would bribe lower class individuals to act against the social revolutionaries of the time.

The term became more closely associated with pogrom-like violence after thousands of people were killed in attacks on demonstrations, public assemblies, and in the anti-Semitic pogroms that followed the October Manifesto.

[6][9][10][11] Members of the Black Hundred organizations came from different social strata—such as landowners, clergymen, the high and petty bourgeoisie, merchants, artisans, workers, and the so-called "declassed elements".

The Postoyanny Sovyet Ob'yedinnyonnykh dvoryanskikh obshchshestv Rossii (United Gentry Council) guided the activities of the black-hundredists; the Tsarist regime provided moral and financial support to the movement.

Such propaganda provoked anti-Semitic sentiments and monarchic "exaltation" and incited pogroms and terrorist acts, performed by the Black Hundreds' paramilitary groups, sometimes known as "Yellow Shirts".

Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP wrote in 1905: The fight against the Black Hundreds is an excellent type of military action, which will train the soldiers of the revolutionary army, give them their baptism of fire, and at the same time be of tremendous benefit to the revolution.

[18]On behalf of the Saint Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP, an armed attack was carried out on the Tver tea house, where the workers of the Nevsky Shipbuilding Plant, who were members of the Union of the Russian People, gathered.

In October 1906, they elected the so-called glavnaya uprava (a kind of board of directors) of the new all-Russian Black Hundred organization "Ob’yedinyonniy russkiy narod" (Объединённый русский народ, or Russian People United).

They blamed the movement for not only failing to stress monarchism as its key ideological foundation but also supposedly being run under the influence of classical liberals and Freemasons.