Reincarnated as an Imperial Prince

What the Ruthenian People Needs

"His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor!" He started.

"We, workers and inhabitants of the city of St. Petersburg, members of various estates of the realm, our wives, children, and helpless old parents, have come to you, Sovereign, to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished and oppressed, we are burdened with work, and insulted. We are treated not like humans but like slaves who must suffer a bitter fate and keep silent. And we have suffered, but we only get pushed deeper and deeper into a gulf of misery, ignorance, and lack of rights.

Despotism and arbitrariness are suffocating us, we are gasping for breath. Sovereign, we have no strength left. We have reached the limit of our patience. We have come to that terrible moment when it is better to die than to continue unbearable suffering. And so we left our work and declared to our employers that we will not return to work until they meet our demands.

We do not ask much; we only want that without which life is hard labor and eternal suffering. Our first request was that our employers discuss our needs together with us. But they refused to do this; they denied us the right to speak about our needs, on the grounds that the law does not provide us with such a right. Also unlawful were our other requests: to reduce the working day to eight hours; for them to set wages together with us and by agreement with us; to examine our disputes with lower-level factory administrators; to increase the wages of unskilled workers and women to one ruble per day; to abolish overtime work; to provide medical care attentively and without insult; to build shops so that it is possible to work there and not face death from the awful drafts, rain, and snow.

Our employers and the factory administrators considered all this to be illegal: every one of our requests was a crime, and our desire to improve our condition was slanderous insolence.

Sovereign, there are thousands of us here; outwardly we are human beings, but in reality, neither we nor the Ruthenian people as a whole are provided with any human rights, even the right to speak, to think, to assemble, to discuss our needs, or to take measure to improve our conditions. They have enslaved us and they did so under the protection of your officials, with their aid and with their cooperation. They imprison and send into exile any one of us who dares to speak on behalf of the interests of the working class and of the people. They punish us for a good heart and a responsive spirit as if for a crime. To pity a down-trodden and tormented person with no rights is to commit a grave crime.

The entire working people and the peasants are subjected to the arbitrariness of a bureaucratic administration composed of embezzlers of public funds and thieves who not only have not been concerned at all for the interests of the Ruthenian people but who harm those interests. The bureaucratic administration has reduced the country to complete destitution, drawn it into a shameful war, and brought Ruthenia ever further towards ruin. We, the workers and the people have no voice in the expenditure of the enormous sums that are collected from us. We do not even know where the money collected from the impoverished people goes. The people are deprived of any possibility of expressing their wishes and demands, or of participating in the establishment of taxes and in their expenditure. Workers are deprived of the possibility of organizing into unions to defend their interests.

Sovereign! Does all this accord with the law of God, by Whose grace your reign? And is it possible to live under such laws? Would it not be better if we, the toiling people of all Ruthenia, died? Let the capitalists – exploiters of the working class – and the bureaucrats – embezzlers of public funds and the pillagers of the Ruthenian people – live and enjoy themselves.

Sovereign, this is what we face and this is the reason that we have gathered before the walls of your palace. Here we seek our last salvation. Do not refuse to come to the aid of your people; lead it out of the grave of poverty, ignorance, and lack of rights; grant it the opportunity to determine its own destiny, and deliver it from them the unbearable yoke of the bureaucrats. Tear down the wall that separates you from your people and let it rule the country together with you. You have been placed on the throne for the happiness of the people; the bureaucrats, however, snatch this happiness out of our hands, and it never reaches us; we get only grief and humiliation.