The Lena Goldfield incident, 1912

The Lena Goldfields incident was a notorious incident that occurred on 17 April 1912 in the Lena Goldfields in Siberia. Demands from the miners there for better pay and conditions were resisted by the employers, who appealed to the police to arrest the strike leaders as criminals. The issue thus became the much larger one of trade union rights in Russia. When the police moved into Lena, the strikers closed ranks and the situation rapidly worsened, resulting in troops firing on and killing or injuring a large numbers of miners. The Okhrana (Imperial Russian army) appeared to have acted as agents provocateurs in order to identify the organizers of the strike.