Many people with only a passing famililarity with Russian history will have heard about the revolution of 1905 — and about the massacre of unarmed workers by the Tsar’s troops in January of that year. That event came to be known as “Bloody Sunday”. And the man who stood at the head of that giant, peaceful demonstration was a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Gapon.

This very readable autobiography was written just months later, published in 1905 in London. I always thought that instant publication of celebrity biographies was a relatively new innovation — but they clearly existed 120 years ago as well. And Gapon was quite the celebrity following his dramatic escape from the clutches of the tsarist police force, the Okhrana.

But here’s the irony: Gapon was himself an agent — a paid agent — of that same police force, and was allowed to form mass organisations of workers in St. Petersburg under his control, making them less of a threat than workers’ organisations under the control of, for example, Social Democrats.

Gapon of course does not acknowledge in this book that he was an Okhrana agent — but he is quite open about his meetings with the police, including the infamous Zubatov who came up with the strategy of police-controlled trade unions to keep the workers on a tight lead.

Within a few months of the book’s publication, Gapon was lured to a shack outside of the imperial capital in Russia by a friend who he had attempted to recruit for the Okhrana. In the room next door, a group of workingmen who had followed Gapon and believed in him, were waiting and listening. As Gapon was bragging about how much money one could earn as an Okhrana spy, the workers burst into the room and killed the priest.