Encyclopedia of Russian History

Be that as it may, once the war began to go badly for Russia, there were growing signs of a revival of the labor movement, especially in 1916. By late February 1917, St. Petersburg workers (women textile workers as well as the traditionally militant, mainly male, metal and munitions workers) were joining with other elements of the urban population, including the military garrison, in increasingly confrontational demonstrations. Workers now played a prominent role in the overthrow of the tsarist regime and, in cooperation with the radical intelligentsia and their party activists, resurrected an updated version of the soviets of 1905, this time with the crucial participation of soldiers. Over the next few months, worker militancy in the form of strikes, street demonstrations, factory occupations, and participation in the organizations of the revolutionary parties added enormously to the difficulties of the new Provisional Government, which was simply unable to satisfy worker demands under wartime conditions. Hence when the Bolsheviks succeeded in overthrowing the Provisional Government in October 1917 and dispersing the recently elected Constituent Assembly the following January, they would do so with a great deal of working-class support, though this support was not for Bolshevik single-party rule but for a soviet government consisting of a coalition of left parties and supportive of worker democracy within the factory. The ensuing Civil War of 1917-1921

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

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WORKERS’ CONTROL

was a period of bloodshed, hunger, and, eventually, draconian measures such as the militarization of labor and the introduction of strict one-man management, inflicted by a relentless Bolshevik regime on recalcitrant workers. Though indispensable to the Reds in their struggle against the Whites in these years of civil war, workers emerged from the war demoralized and, in many cases, thanks to the damage suffered by Russian industry, declassed. Workers now ceased to be a significant independent force in the country’s political life. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; LABOR; OCTOBER GENERAL STRIKE OF 1905; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; REVOLUTION OF 1905; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; UNION OF STRUGGLE FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF LABOR

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bonnell, Victoria E. (1983). Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haimson, Leopold H. (1964-1965). “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917.” Slavic Review 23 (4): 619-642; 24(1):1-22. Johnson, Robert E. (1979). Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wildman, Allan K. (1967). The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891-1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zelnik, Reginald E. (1971). Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855-1870. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zelnik, Reginald E., ed. and tr. (1986). A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zelnik, Reginald E., ed. (1999). Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections. Research Series, no. 101. Berkeley: International and Area Studies, University of California.

REGINALD E. ZELNIK

WORKERS’ CONTROL

The slogan “workers’ control,” popular among radical Russian workers during the 1917 Revolution and the early years of Bolshevik rule, designated a program that was supposed to lead directly to so1674 cialism. The program called for the proletariat to seize and operate the capitalists’ factories and to plan and manage production and distribution throughout Russian industry. The concept had its roots in nineteenth-century European socialism and especially in the syndicalist movement, which espoused economic units organized and run by workers.

Immediately after the February 1917 Revolution, demands for workers’ control began to spread among activist workers in large enterprises. The slogan attracted growing support in the summer and fall of 1917 as economic conditions worsened, real wages fell, and some factories closed, while workers were locked out of other plants. Several Bolshevik leaders espoused workers’ control as early as April 1917, and Lenin, recognizing the slogan’s broad appeal, adopted it as part of the Bolshevik platform in June, encouraging its use in Bolshevik propaganda.