Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917
422
Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917
422Hardcover
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Overview
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691633961 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1011 |
| Pages: | 422 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.40(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917
By Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05578-7
CHAPTER 1
THE ECOLOGY OF LABOR PROTEST AT THE END OF THE OLD REGIME
The 1917 revolution began in a cascade of strikes. Early on the morning of February 23, International Women's Day, women from several textile mills in the crowded industrial Vyborg district of Petrograd left their looms and took to the streets. One of the largest of these plants, the Nevka thread works, was situated between two of the city's major metalworking plants, New Lessner and Erikson, where some 8,700 skilled and activist workers turned out machine tools and sophisticated electrical controls. As 3,000 Nevka strikers passed their gates chanting slogans and calling for support, New Lessner and Erikson metalists spilled out to join them, and so, within the hour, did hundreds more from the Sampsonievskaia Cotton Works, Russian Renault (Reno), the Parviainen and Baranovskii machine plants, the Nobel works, and other nearby plants. By 10 A.M., Bolshoi Sampsonievskii Prospekt, the central thoroughfare in the Vyborg district, was overflowing with strikers. Some 50,000 workers had joined the protests by noon. By late afternoon, as strikers reached the center of the city by way of Liteinyi Prospekt, their numbers had doubled.
Strikes spread quickly. On Friday, February 24, hundreds of metalists refused to report for the morning shift at the Langenzippen works, across the river from the Winter Palace. Their comrades at the Vulcan plant stayed away as well. By midmorning, electro-mechanical workers at the huge Siemens-Schuckert plant on Vasil'evskii Island had come out, joined by students from the nearby Petrograd University, and soon by hundreds from the Baltic shipyards. In the Narva district, some 24,000 or more Putilov workers prepared to join the swelling wave. Four days before, the Putilovists had been locked out of their plant in a dispute over the firing of militant workers, and many were eager to organize their own demonstrations. Clashes with police took place at nearby Treugol'nik, the city's major rubber plant, which employed some 15,000 persons. For the first time, ominously for the regime, workers subject to military discipline at state plants like the Obukhov steel works stopped work as well.
Strikes continued to spread rapidly, turning into massive demonstrations. By Saturday, February 25, workers paralyzed the city. State Duma leaders conferred anxiously and communicated with army headquarters; workers and revolutionary activists began to organize their own revolutionary council, the Petrograd Soviet. Garrison soldiers at first fired on workers in several places but soon refused to do so. The city quieted briefly on Sunday, February 26, but then erupted again on Monday morning, with thousands of workers flooding every major artery, joined now in many places by sympathetic soldiers. The tsarist regime was losing all semblance of authority. In one wing of the Tauride palace, State Duma leaders formed a "Temporary Committee" and prepared to appoint their own ministers to a Provisional regime. Down the corridors in the same building, workers' representatives and socialist party leaders convened the Petrograd Soviet's first tumultuous session. By February 28, the tsar's ministers had resigned. In consultation with Soviet leaders, the Duma Committee drew up a new cabinet list, headed by the well-known liberal zemstvo figure, Prince G. E. Lvov.
Nicholas himself soon realized the hopelessness of his situation. On March 2, under great pressure, he abdicated in favor of his brother, who in turn refused to take the throne. Thousands of workers heard of these events, awed by the enormity of their accomplishment. Russia appeared to have moved from autocracy to democracy in a little more than a week, and overwhelmingly — at least in the first instance — because some 400,000 people in more than 900 enterprises, virtually the entire working population of the capital, had participated in some form of strike.
The February Conjuncture and Longer-Term Processes of Change
The eight days between February 23 and March 2 constituted one of those rare periods in history when long-term processes of change come together under particular circumstances, and in a brief, intensive moment, fundamentally alter the basic structures of an entire social and political order. The eight months that followed reflected a similar, if broader, conjuncture, as attempts to fashion new social and political relations were themselves conditioned by elements of the moment as well as less apparent longer-term patterns. The distinction often drawn by historians between immediate and longer-term patterns of change is particularly important for understanding revolutionary Russia in general and strikes in particular. If the conjunctural elements we will examine in the following chapters were greatly affected by successive surges of strikes and strikers in 1917, these protests themselves took place in the context of a much longer historical experience. Processes of long duration, as they have been called, thus need attention at the start, particularly in terms of the ways they may have conditioned the historical memories of those who would play such an important role in events that followed the February upheaval. In statistical language, we need briefly to treat strikes in 1917 as one year in a longer time series, and before probing their particularities and their historical meaning, enquire in this and the following chapter how strikes between February and October related to broader historical patterns.
In fact, Vyborg metalists and others looking out across the river at the Winter Palace in February 1917 regarded the monarchy's collapse as the culmination of many years' struggle, not just eight days' effort. From 1905 until the very eve of the revolution, Russia had been awash in strikes. Despite narrow limits for legal strike activity and a pervasive police presence in industrial plants, nearly 10 million factory workers went on strike between 1895, when statistics began to be compiled, and 1916, averaging one-quarter of the factory labor force each year. In the periods of peak strike activity before the war, 1905–1906 and 1912–1914, the average annual proportion of strikers approached three-quarters of the factory labor force. By contrast, only about one-third of the entire industrial work force, including workers in mines and metallurgical plants, went on strike in France in the entire period between 1890 and 1914, a time of militant revolutionary syndicalism. Although there were years when the number of industrial strikers in Great Britain and Germany exceeded 50 percent of the workforce before the war, no other European country matched Russia's overall level of strike activism.
Strikes were particularly intense on the eve of the war. In the first seven months of 1914 alone, more strikes occurred in Russia than in the entire period between 1908 and 1911, and more plants were shut down for political purposes than in 1912 and 1913 combined. If strikes had continued throughout 1914 at the same intensity and frequency, the year would have seen more workers take to the streets than during Russia's first great revolutionary upheaval in 1905, nine years before. As Leopold Haimson's study of the period shows in exhaustive and convincing detail, 1912 and 1913 were years of an enormous resurgence in Russian labor protests, symptomatic to many people of a new revolutionary storm.
The outbreak of war in July 1914 brought a brief period of quiescence to the labor front in Russia as it did throughout Europe. The lull, however, was short lived, much more so than in Western Europe. In France and Germany, it was not until 1917 that the number of industrial workers on strike surpassed 1912 levels; and in Britain, this did not occur until the war had ended. The number of economic strikes in Russia increased in 1915 to levels approximating those in 1912. There was a resurgence as well of political strikes and strikers. As we will see, by 1916 the intensity of industrial strikes again approached the levels of the prewar period, and on the eve of revolution, in January and February 1917, more workers participated in strikes for political rather than enterprise-related goals than in 1913. For Vyborg workers as well as others, February was a final episode in the last of three great strike waves stretching from the first revolution in 1905 to the monarchy's collapse. And some in New Lessner, the Parviainen works, Siemens-Schuckert, and other enterprises in Petrograd had undoubtedly experienced all three.
Industrial Expansion and the Workforce Before 1917
We will look more closely at these strike figures below and in chapter 2, as we relate them to the data we have gathered for 1917. For now it is important to appreciate only how central the strike phenomenon itself was to Russia's workplace environment before February, and to recognize that the great feeling of protest reflected in strikes was related both to the stresses of an antiquated and repressive political structure and to the strains of very rapid industrial growth, particularly in the period between 1908 and 1913. This growth propelled Russia forward in the capitalist world, but not without bringing major changes to the workplace.
The aggregate statistics of industrial expansion in this period are well known: the output of cast iron increased some 64 percent between 1908 and 1913; coal, almost 40 percent; iron and steel, more than 50 percent; and the consumption of cotton, 22 percent, to cite just four examples. The value of imported goods rose from 912 million rubles in 1908 to 1,374 million in 1913, and that of exports from 998 to 1,520 million rubles. From a level of around 1.5 percent between 1900 and 1906, Russia's annual rate of industrial growth soared to 6.25 percent between 1907 and 1913, and was even higher in the years immediately preceding the war. Problems of capitalization, the quality and prices of imported goods, and relatively low levels of productivity led many Russian industrialists to insist that levels of profitability were not commensurate with these increases, and many looked to the state for help. In this respect as in others, the outbreak of war proved enormously beneficial — a "godsend," in the view of one recent historian. By 1916, more than 30 percent of all industrial output went directly toward the war effort, and in the all-important metals and machine-construction sector, the figure was closer to two-thirds.
Much of Russia's rapid industrial expansion was underwritten by foreign capital and administered by foreign managerial personnel. Workers in St. Petersburg and elsewhere, particularly in South Russian metallurgical plants, often found themselves bossed by foreign managers and engineers, whom they readily blamed for unsatisfactory wages or working conditions. Unrest at plants like Siemens-Schuckert, Russian Renault, Singer, or Moscow's Dinamo machine factory almost always involved some degree of xenophobia. Yet there was simply no escaping for Russia either this foreign presence or foreign economic dependency if industry was to continue to expand more rapidly than the supportive capacity of domestic resources. By 1913, in fact, imports of as basic a commodity as coal, which Russia itself possessed in enormous quantity, were increasing at twice the rate of domestic production, and despite higher costs, accounted for some 25 percent of all Russian requirements.
To some extent the state itself attempted to mediate the labor conflicts arising in these years of rapid growth, even as direct state economic activity diminished between 1906 and the start of the war. Factory inspectors who served the Ministry of Trade and Industry enforced government labor legislation. They also assiduously recorded strikes and sometimes tried to resolve industrial conflicts. More commonly, the state lent its police powers to the industrialists, who often called on the militia and even the army to help suppress unrest.
All this was part of the life experience of older workers on the eve of revolution. At the same time, repressive factory conditions often shocked the tens of thousands of new workers brought into the workplace before and during the war. From January 1, 1901, to January 1, 1914, the number of workers under the purview of the Factory Inspectorate increased from 1,692,300 to almost 2,000,000. Within this group, the number of textile workers under Inspectorate jurisdiction increased almost 30 percent; workers in paper manufacturing and printing, some 37 percent; those in the manufacture of wood and wood products, almost 66 percent; chemical workers, 51 percent; and the all-important metals sector, which included metal fabricating, machine building, and the highly skilled workers of the electro-technical factories like Erikson and Siemens-Schuckert, almost 53 percent. By 1917 these figures had changed only slightly.
These workers were, however, only part of the total industrial workforce. Employees in state enterprises, on the railroads, and in metallurgical plants remained outside the Factory Inspectorate's jurisdiction, and do not figure either in prerevolutionary strike statistics or the common aggregates of industrial workers. According to best estimates, there were more than a million workers in these categories by 1917, and hence more than 3,300,000 workers in the industrial workforce as a whole by 1917, in almost 15,000 enterprises throughout the empire. Some 311,000 were employed in 74 state-owned plants, almost all related to defense production. The major groupings can be found in table 1.1.
There were, of course, millions of additional workers in 1917 beyond those in the industrial workforce, in services, agricultural labor, retail trade establishments, and the like. Although no precise figures are available, the Soviet historian L. S. Gaponenko has made some very good estimates using archival material and other contemporary sources. By his account, there were nearly 15 million workers employed in some type of hired labor by October 1917 outside the formal industrial categories. His findings are summarized in table 1.2.
What do these figures tell us? It should be apparent, first, that Russia's industrial labor force was expanding much too rapidly to be staffed entirely by the offspring of factory workers, and that peasants, consequently, streamed into the factories in substantial numbers between 1900 and 1917. Moreover, subsistence agriculture and minimal educational opportunities in the countryside meant that these new workers possessed few industrial skills and little familiarity with modern industrial work habits. Skilled, self-disciplined workers were thus relatively scarce in industrializing Russia. At the same time, the rapid influx of new workers made it impossible for urban welfare systems to keep pace with social need. Urban living conditions were abysmal by any standard of the time, and recognized as such;16 only the relatively more desperate agrarian conditions kept active the flow of peasant recruits into industry. In turn, these conditions meant that generations of Russian workers themselves never severed their relations with their rural villages of origin, producing what some observers regarded as a particular type of hybrid peasant-proletarian.
In such circumstances, skill was obviously a scarce and valued attribute, particularly in machine building and the crucial electro-technical sector of metalworking. Because of their scarcity and centrality to industrial production, skilled workers trained in Russian industry enjoyed relatively high standards of living and significant autonomy on the job. At the same time, as new capital poured into Russian plants after 1905, the privileged position of metalworkers was also placed in jeopardy. To some degree, capital bought technology; particularly in the metals trades, technology rendered some skills obsolete, although the extent and effect of "deskilling" and the degree to which skilled workers felt threatened in Russia is unclear.
The distribution of industrial workers by branch can be seen in table 1.3. What is most impressive about these figures is not so much their relative magnitudes, but the changes between 1914 and 1917, to which we will return, and the fact that they show such a heavy concentration of workers in three quite different kinds of industry: metal processing and manufacturing, textiles, and food. Not only were the techniques and processes of production quite different in each of these branches, but so, too, were the degrees of social differentiation among the workers involved, and the physical contexts of work.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 by Diane P. Koenker, William G. Rosenberg. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
- LIST OF FIGURES, pg. xi
- LIST OF TABLES, pg. xiii
- PREFACE, pg. xv
- LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xix
- Introduction. Understanding Strikes in 1917, pg. 3
- 1. The Ecology of Labor Protest at the End of the Old Regime, pg. 23
- 2. Strikes in 1917: An Overview, pg. 61
- 3. The February Revolution and the Mobilization of Labor, pg. 96
- 4. Management-Labor Relations in the Weeks of Conciliation, pg. 129
- 5. Spring Strikes and the First Coalition, pg. 151
- 6. Collective Action and Social Order, pg. 179
- 7. Perceptions of Strikes and the Nature of Strike Reporting: Social Identities and Moral Valuations, pg. 213
- 8. Labor Activism in Midsummer, pg. 239
- 9. Social Polarization and the Changing Character of Strikes in the Fall, pg. 265
- 10. Strikes and the Revolutionary Process, pg. 299
- APPENDIX 1. Methodology and Sources, pg. 331
- APPENDIX 2. Supplementary Statistical Information, pg. 347
- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 351
- INDEX, pg. 377