Manifestation du 17 octobre 1905

On 17 October 1905, with the country convulsed by strikes and revolt, Tsar Nicholas II signed a manifesto promising civil liberties and an elected assembly. For a few days it felt like victory. Repin painted that exact mood: a crowd of students, workers and professors surging across a city square, red flags up, singing, carrying a freed political prisoner high on their shoulders. He called it the ecstasy of common delight. But he could not leave the picture alone. He kept reworking it for years, finishing and dating it only in 1911, by which time the promises of that October had largely been clawed back and the jubilant crowd looked more like a memory. Russian audiences first saw the painting in 1912.