1861, when serfdom was abolished and almost all labor was placed on a contractual footing.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
With the abolition of serfdom, Russia began a new spurt of industrial development. In the 1890s Russian industry expanded rapidly, growing at an average rate of 8 percent per annum. The number of industrial workers, if viewed as a percentage of the overall population, was still small by the end of that decade; according to the 1897 census, the Empire’s population was over 125 million, while the number of workers was roughly two million. However, their social and political importance became increasingly evident, in part because of their concentration in politically sensitive areas such as St. Petersburg (the capital), Moscow, the port city of Baku, and the industrial regions of Russian-occupied Poland.
The most dramatic manifestation of the workers’ importance was their participation in strikes and demonstrations. If strike is loosely understood as any work stoppage in defiance of management, then strikes certainly took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they began to be taken seriously by Russian officials, publicists, and political activists only in the 1870s and especially the 1890s. By the early twentieth century a fierce and sometimes agonizing competition had begun between radicals of various persuasions (Social- Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, etc.), liberals, religious organizations, and the government for working-class political support. In the 1905 Revolution, radicals emerged as the clear winners in this competition, though with no single faction dominating. At least in major urban industrial centers, workers played the leading role in the revolutionary struggles of that year. Their moment of greatest triumph came with the October general strike and the creation of citywide workers’ councils (soviets), one of which virtually became the governing body of the city of St. Petersburg. However, the bloody suppression of the armed uprising of Moscow workers in December 1905 marked the end of the workers’ triumphant period. Although labor unrest continued in 1906, workers ceased to pose a serious threat to the Russian government until the labor movement revived in the period between 1912 and 1914.
Nevertheless, the 1905 Revolution did bear some fruit for Russia’s workers, including the government’s recognition for the first time of their right to form unions and engage in strikes (albeit within very tight restrictions) and the right to elect their own delegates to the new Russian Parliament, the Duma (albeit under a very restricted franchise). Russian industry soon began to recover from the setbacks it had undergone in the first few years of the century, and by 1910 was again experiencing a robust expansion. As the position of workers in the labor market became more favorable, workers grew less and less tolerant of management misconduct and government repression. A government massacre of Russian goldminers in the spring of 1912 resuscitated the dormant labor movement and ushered in a two-year period of militant strike activity and demonstrations in many parts of Russia, most dramatically in St. Petersburg and, in 1914, Baku. Politically, this worker militancy worked to the tactical advantage of the Bolsheviks and, to a lesser extent, the Socialist Revolutionaries, while working to the disadvantage of the more moderate Mensheviks, who feared that workers’ passions had been aroused to a degree that could prove counterproductive. Some historians have argued that Russian industrial centers were on the cusp of a new revolution when the onset of World War I, in the summer of 1914, put a temporary damper on worker unrest. However, it must also be acknowledged that the labor movement was dying down before war was declared.
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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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
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
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.
In August, September, and October 1917, workers seized some factories, and more were taken over after the Bolsheviks came to power. But faced with shortages of basic supplies, chaotic markets, labor absenteeism, and inadequate technical and managerial know-how, proletarian owners had little success in getting factories back into production. Lenin soon soured on the practice of workers’ control, and beginning in early 1918 he started centralizing economic decision-making. He also called for unitary or one-man management (edi-nonachalie) in industries and individual enterprises as well as use of bourgeois specialists-former engineers, technicians, and managers-to help operate the factories and reenergize the economy. Although workers’ control was largely
