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

Here Russia stood in stark contrast to Europe, where the most skilled and literate workers tended to be the least revolutionary and were being integrated into the wider democratic movement. There were few signs of such a moderate 'labour aristocracy' emerging in Russia. The print workers, with their high rates of pay and their close ties with the intelligentsia, were the most likely candidates for such a role. Yet even they stood firmly behind the Marxist and Social Revolutionary parties. Had they been able to develop their own legal trade unions, then these workers might have made enough gains from the status quo not to demand its overthrow. They might then have gone down the path of moderate reform taken by the European labour movements. But the Russian political situation naturally pushed them towards extremes. Unable to develop their own independent organizations, they were forced to rely upon the leadership of the revolutionary underground. To a large extent, then, the workers' revolutionary movement was created by the tsarist regime.

Militancy is nothing if not a set of attitudes and emotions. And as Kanatchikov's story illustrates, the roots of the workers' militancy were essentially psychological. His personality changed as he adapted himself to the lifestyle of the city and acquired new skills. Mastering the precision techniques of the pattern-makers, the elite machine-construction workers who drafted and moulded the metal parts, gave him confidence in his own powers. It also paid him more

money, which gave him a greater sense of his own worth. Learning to read and talking to the other workers exposed him to the secular modes of thought and new 'scientific' theories, such as Darwinism and Marxism, which weakened his belief in religion. In other ways, too, the young Kanatchikov was struggling to break free from the influence of the village. He was repelled by the 'hooliganism' of his co-inhabitants in the artel', by their heavy drinking, their fighting and their rough peasant manners. He moved into a room on his own, swore a solemn oath never to drink anything stronger than tea, and set out on a rigorous course of self-improvement to wipe out all traces of his humble peasant roots. He sought to make a new image for himself, to emulate 'those young urban metalworkers', as he put it, 'who earned an independent living and didn't ruin themselves with vodka'. He saved up to get his hair cut in the Polish style and to buy a stylish jacket with mother-of-pearl buttons, and a cap with a velvet band, such as the labour aristocrats wore. He bought a suit, with a watch for the waistcoat pocket, a straw hat and a pair of fancy shoes, for Sundays. For fifteen kopecks, he even bought a Self-Teacher of Dance and Good Manners, which warned him not to wipe his nose with his napkin and told him how to eat such delicacies as artichoke and asparagus, although, as he later admitted, he 'did not even know if these things belonged to the animal, vegetable, or mineral world'.⁵⁰

Self-improvement was a natural enough aspiration among skilled workers, like Kanatchikov, who were anxious to rise above their peasant origins and attain the status in society which their growing sense of dignity made them feel they deserved. Many harboured dreams of marrying into the petty-bourgeoisie and of setting themselves up in a small shop or business. They read the boulevard dailies, such as the Petersburg Sheet (Peterburgskii listok), which espoused the Victorian ideals of self-help, guided its readers in questions of good taste and decorum, and entertained them with sensational stories about the glamorous and the rich.

It was only to be expected that this search for respectability should be accompanied by a certain priggishness on the part of the labour elite, a fussy concern to set themselves apart from the 'dark' mass of the peasant-workers by conducting themselves in a sober and 'cultured' way.* But among those peasant-workers, like Kanatchikov, who would later join the Bolsheviks, this prudishness was often reflected in an extreme form. Their sobriety became a militant puritanism, as if by their prim and ascetic manners, by their tea-drinking and self-discipline, they could banish their peasant past completely. 'We were of the

* Here lay the roots of that peculiar Russian concept of kul'turnost', the state of having good manners, rather than being well educated, as in the Western concept of the term 'cultured', from which it is derived. This etymological twist could only have happened in a country like Russia, which was struggling to rid itself of its peasant past and attain the external trappings, if not the deeper moral sensibilities, of Western civilization.