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A man in a dark frock coat and a white bow tie rides on the crowd’s shoulders with one arm thrown up. Someone below him waves a wide black hat. Red banners fill the space behind.

The year in Russia had opened in blood. On the ninth of January, 1905, a priest named Georgy Gapon led thousands of workers toward the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to hand the tsar a petition. The men came in their good clothes, many carrying icons and portraits of Nicholas himself. The guards fired on them in the snow. Hundreds died, and the day was named Bloody Sunday, and the faith that the tsar was a father who did not know his people were suffering died with them. Strikes spread through the winter and spring, then a mutiny in the Black Sea fleet, then, in October, a general strike that stopped the trains, the presses, the lights, and finally the whole country. With the empire at a standstill, Nicholas II signed a single sheet of paper on the seventeenth of October, 1905. The October Manifesto promised what Russia had never had: freedom of speech and assembly, an elected parliament called the Duma, the beginnings of a constitution. He signed it because his ministers told him the only other choice was a military dictatorship, and he signed it hating every word. When word reached the streets the strike turned to carnival in an afternoon. Students, professors, and workers poured out under red flags, singing the revolutionary songs that had been illegal the day before, hoisting men just released from the prisons up onto their shoulders. That afternoon is what Ilya Repin painted, though he did not begin until 1907 and kept reworking the canvas until 1911. Repin was the most famous painter in Russia, the man who had painted the barge haulers on the Volga and Ivan the Terrible cradling the son he had just killed. He built this crowd out of single faces rather than a mass. A man in a dark frock coat rides on shoulders with one arm thrown up. Beside him a bare arm holds a bunch of red flowers, and the mouths all around are open on a song. The joy in the picture was already a lie by the time the paint dried. The freedoms the manifesto promised were clawed back within months, and the Duma was dissolved when it displeased the crown. The same autumn that produced the singing crowds produced pogroms in dozens of towns, mobs beating and killing Jews while the police looked away. Repin knew all of it and painted the singing anyway, the one hour when the street believed it had won. He painted the date into the picture as well, on a white banner over the crowd: 1905, 17 October. Within 12 years the tsar was gone, and the men who finished him carried the same red flags down the same streets.