A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

'The factory owner is an absolute sovereign and legislator whom no laws constrain,' declared Professor Yanzhul, a leading proponent of factory regulation during the 1880s. Indeed, by hiring workers on private contracts, employers could bypass most of the government's labour legislation. All sorts of clauses were inserted into workers' contracts, depriving them of legal rights. Long after such fines had been outlawed, many workers continued to have their pay docked for low productivity, breakages and petty infringements of the factory rules (sometimes amounting to no more than going to the toilet during working hours). Some employers had their workers degradingly searched for stolen goods whenever they left the factory gates, while others had them flogged for misdemeanours. Others forbade their workers to wear hats, or to turn up for work in their best clothes, as a way of teaching them their proper place. This sort of 'serf regime' was bitterly resented by the workers as an affront to their personal dignity. 'We are not even recognized as people,' one complained, 'but we are considered as things which can be thrown out at any moment.' Another lamented that 'outside Russia even horses get to rest. But our workers' existence is worse than a horse's.'⁴⁶ As they developed their own sense of self-worth, these workers demanded more respectful treatment by their employers. They wanted them to call them by the polite 'you' (vyi) instead of the familiar one (tyi), which they associated with the old serf regime. They wanted to be treated as 'citizens'. It was often this issue of respectful treatment, rather than the bread-and-butter question of wages, which fuelled workers' strikes and demonstrations.

Historians have searched exhaustively for the roots of this labour militancy. The size of the factories, the levels of skill and literacy, the movement of wages and prices, the number of years spent living in the city, and the influence of the revolutionary intelligentsia — all these factors have been examined in microscopic detail in countless monographs, each hoping to discover the crucial mix that explained the take-off of the 'workers' revolution'. The main argument among historians concerns the effects of urbanization. Some have argued that it was the most urbanized workers, those with the highest levels of skill and literacy, who became the foot soldiers of the revolution.⁴⁷ But others have argued that the recent immigrants — those who had been 'snatched from the plough and hurled straight into the factory furnace', as Trotsky once put it — tended to be the most violent, often adapting the spontaneous forms of rebellion associated with the countryside (buntarstvo) to the new and hostile industrial environment in which they found themselves.⁴⁸

Now there is no doubt that the peasant immigrants added a volatile and often belligerent element to the urban working class. Labour unrest during the early decades of industrialization tended to take the form of spontaneous outbreaks of violence, such as riots, pogroms, looting and machine-breaking, the sort of actions one might expect from an uprooted but disorganized peasant mass struggling to adapt to the new world of the city and the discipline of the factory. Some of these 'pre-industrial' forms of violence became permanent features of the landscape of labour unrest. A good example is the common workers' practice during strikes and demonstrations of 'carting out' their factory boss or foreman in a wheelbarrow and dumping him in a cesspool or a canal. Nevertheless, it is going too far to suggest that such 'primitive' forms of industrial protest, or the raw recruits behind them, were the crucial factor in the rise of labour militancy.⁴⁹ During the 1890s strikes became the principal form of industrial protest and they required the sort of disciplined organization that only the most urbanized workers, with their higher levels of skills and literacy, could provide. In this context, the peasant immigrants were unlikely to play a leading role. Indeed, they were often reluctant to join strikes at all. With a piece of land in the village, to which they could return when times got hard, they had less inclination to take the risks which a strike entailed, compared with those workers who had broken their ties with the village and depended exclusively on their factory wage. The latter stood at the forefront of the labour movement.