Lena Goldfields Massacre--Bob A. Feldman
Channel: protestfolk
Date: 2021-03-16

An historical labor song and folk song about the April 4, 1912 massacre of striking workers by Czarist Russia police in the Lena goldfields of Siberia.
(lyrics)
(verses)
The Lena goldfields in Siberia
Were owned by Brit capitalists
Who, with Russian partners, paid low wages
Yet from the goldfields made huge profits.

Seven million rubles in profits
Was what the Brit masters took annually
Yet the food supplied to their miners
Was rotten and unfit to eat.

So six thousand exploited workers
In the early months of 1912
Went on strike in the Lena goldfields
To negotiate a better deal.

(chorus)
On April 4, 1912 in Lena
The Czar's police fired their guns
And 500 unarmed Lena workers
Were killed or were wounded and bled.

(verses)
To protest the bloody massacre
From the shooting near the Lena goldmines
300,000 Russian workers
Joined in a political strike.

And on May Day of 1912
400,000 workers struck and marched
For a Russian Revolution
Before World War I did start. (chorus)

By the year of 1917
After War turned the world upside down
The fruit for Revolution had ripened
And Russian workers brought the System down. (chorus)