The industrialization of Russia created, of course, a considerable working class. While Russians began to work in factories in the Urals and elsewhere far back in history, as mentioned in previous chapters, a sizeable industrial proletariat grew in Russia only toward the end of the nineteenth century. Russian industrial workers numbered over 2 million in 1900 and perhaps 3 million out of a population of about 170 million in 1914. Not impressive in quantity in proportion to total population, the proletariat was more densely massed in Russia than in other countries. Because of the heavy concentration of Russian industry, over half the industrial enterprises in Russia employed more than 500 workers each, with many employing more than 1,000 each. The workers thus formed large and closely knit groups in industrial centers, which included St. Petersburg and Moscow.
True, the term 'worker' may be too definitive and precise as applied to the Russian situation. Populists, Marxists, and scholars of other persuasions, as well as Western specialists such as Zelnik and Johnson, have debated the extent to which Russian workers remained - or ceased to be - peasants. These workers usually came from the village. Often they belonged to the village commune, left their families behind in the village, and spent a part of every year there, gathering harvest and performing other peasant tasks. For them the village remained their home, while the factory became a novel way to earn obrok, so to speak. When a close relationship with the village ceased, many factory hands still maintained their membership in it and sought to retire to it to end their days in peace. And even after all important ties with the countryside were broken and workers were left entirely and permanently on their own in towns and cities, they could not shed overnight their peasant mentality and outlook. The Russian proletariat tended to be not only the pride but also the despair of the Marxists both before and after 1917. In fact, in the years following the October Revolution much of it vanished into the countryside. Nevertheless, the Marxists were right in their argument with the populists to the extent that they emphasized the continuing growth of capitalism and the proletariat in Russia. With all due qualifications, from the 1880's on, an industrial working class constituted a significant component of Russian population, an essential part of Russian economy, and a factor in Russian politics.
As noted in an earlier chapter, the government initiated modern labor
legislation in the 1880's, when Minister of Finance Bunge tried to eliminate or curb certain glaring abuses of the factory system and established factory inspectors to supervise the carrying out of new laws. More legislation followed later, with a law in 1897 applicable to industrial establishments employing more than 20 workers that limited day work of adults to eleven and a half hours and night work to ten hours. The ten-hour day was also to prevail on Saturdays and on the eve of major holidays, while no work was allowed on Sundays or the holidays in question. Adolescents and children were to work no more than ten and nine hours a day respectively. A pioneer labor insurance law, holding the employers responsible for accidents in connection with factory work, came out in 1903, but an improved and effective labor insurance act, covering both accidents and illness, appeared only in 1912. Unions were finally allowed in 1906, and even then exclusively on the local, not the national, level.
However, in spite of labor legislation, and also in spite of the fact that wages probably increased in the years preceding the First World War - a point, incidentally, strongly denied by Soviet scholars - Russian workers remained in general in miserable condition. Poorly paid, desperately overcrowded, and with very little education or other advantages, the proletariat of imperial Russia represented in effect an excellent example of a destitute and exploited labor force, characteristic of the early stages of capitalist development and described so powerfully by Marx in
Not surprisingly, the workers began to organize to better their lot. Indeed, they exercised at times sufficient pressure to further labor legislation, notably in the case of the law of 1897, and they could not be deterred by the fact that unions remained illegal until after the Revolution of 1905 and were still hampered and suspected by the government thereafter. The first significant strikes occurred in St. Petersburg in 1878 and 1879 and at a Morozov textile factory near Moscow in 1885. The short-lived but important Northern Workers' Union, led by a worker and populist, Stephen Khalturin, helped to organize the early labor movement in the capital. Major strikes took place in the '90's, not only in St. Petersburg, but also in Riga, in industrial areas of Russian Poland, and in new plants in the Ukraine. In addition, railwaymen struck in several places. The strike movement again gathered momentum in the first years of the twentieth century, culminating, as we know, in the Revolution of 1905, the creation and the activities of the St. Petersburg Soviet, its arrest by the government, and the unsuccessful armed uprising of workers in Moscow at the very end of the year. A lull of several years followed these events. However, the Russian labor movement revived shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. Strikes became frequent after the massacre of workers in the Lena gold fields in April 1912, when police fired into a crowd of protesting workers killing and wounding more than a hundred of them. In 1912, 725,000 workers
went out on strike, 887,000 in 1913, and over a million and a quarter from January to July in 1914. Their demands, it should be noted, were often political, as well as economic, in character. The Social Democrats, both the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, developed large-scale activities in the Russian labor movement.
Peasants constituted the vast majority of the Russian people, at least three-quarters of the total population according to the census of 1897. In a sense, they were the chief and the most direct beneficiaries of the 'great reforms,' particularly since the serfs received their freedom and the state peasants escaped some of their bondage to the state. Yet, after the reforms, their condition remained the largest and the gravest problem in Russia. As mentioned, the emancipation provisions proved to be insufficient to develop a healthy peasant economy - whether any provisions would have sufficed is another matter - and some of these provisions were shown to be entirely unrealistic: at the time of the partition former serfs received considerably less than their half of the land, and they simply could not meet the redemption payments. Moreover - a point which we have not discussed in any detail - the emancipation took a long time and followed an uneven course throughout Russia, with periods of transition and other delays to the peasants' full acquisition of their new status. And even that status, when finally attained, did not make the peasants equal to other social groups. Thus they possessed a separate administration and courts and, besides, were tied to the peasant commune in most of European Russia.
The communes, which received the land at the time of the emancipation, were made responsible for taxes and recruits and were in general intended to serve as bulwarks of order and organized life in the countryside. No doubt they helped many peasants keep their bearings in post-reform Russia, and they usually provided at least minimal security for their members. Even industrial workers, as mentioned above, often planned to retire in their villages. But the price of communal services was high. Communes tended to perpetuate backward, indeed archaic, agricultural production: they continued their traditional, ignorant ways, including the partitioning of land into small strips so that each household would receive land of every quality; and they lacked capital, education, and initiative for modernization. Individual householders, even when more progressively inclined, to a large extent had to follow the practices of their neighbors and, besides, acquired little incentive to improve their strips in those communes which periodically redivided the land. At the same time communes greatly hampered peasant mobility and promoted ever-increasing overpopulation in the countryside. Members of a commune frequently found it difficult to
obtain permission to leave, because their departure would force the commune to perform its set obligations to the state with fewer men. Also, where communes periodically redivided the land among the households, the head of the household could prevent the departure of one of its members on the ground that that would result in a smaller allotment of land to the household at the next reapportionment. As Gerschenkron commented: 'Nothing was more revealing of the irrational way in which the village commune functioned than the fact that the individual household had to retain the abundant factor (labor) as a precondition for obtaining the scarce factor (land).'
Population in Russia grew rapidly after the emancipation: from over 73 million in 1861 to over 125 million according to the census of 1897 and almost 170 million in 1917. Land prices more than doubled between 1860 and 1905, and almost doubled again between 1905 and 1917. In spite of the fact that peasants purchased much of the land sold over a period of time by the gentry, individual peasant allotments kept shrinking. Russian economic historians have calculated that 28 per cent of the peasant population of the country could not support itself from its land allotments immediately after the emancipation, and that by 1900 that figure had risen to 52 per cent. That the allotments still compared reasonably well with the allotments of peasants in other countries proved to be cold comfort, for with the backward conditions of agriculture in Russia they plainly did not suffice. The average peasant ownership of horses also declined sharply, with approximately one-third of peasant households owning no horses by
