[1] It was formed in the wake of Bloody Sunday, as the professional associations organized themselves at national level, to rally their members behind the liberal cause.
[2] Their participation gave the intelligentsia a direct link with the masses, whom they had been distanced from.
[2] After the founding of the Bulygin Duma in 1905, the radicals in the Union of Unions, alongside the Social Democrats, became more determined than ever to use "mass civil disobedience" as a weapon to pressurize the government to make further reforms and concessions, even though liberals chose not to boycott the elections to the Duma.
[3] During the general strike in September 1905, after the most educated and wealthy of the working class – the printers – had gone on strike, the railway workers, and the Union of Railway Employees and Workers, followed suit.
[5] The Union of Unions served partly as the origin of the Petersburg Soviet, as they first came up with the idea of a workers council established to orchestrate general strikes.