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

by Orlando Figes

  The desire for social betterment was very often synonymous with the desire to leave the village and find a job outside agriculture. Becoming a clerk or a shop assistant was seen by the younger peasants as a move up in the world. For young peasant women, in particular, who found themselves at the bottom of the patriarchal pile, working as a domestic servant in the city (which is what most of them did) offered them a better and more independent life. Many social commentators noted such aspirations. A study of rural schoolchildren in the 1900s, for example, found that nearly half of them wanted to pursue an 'educated profession' in the city, whereas less than 2 per cent wanted to follow in the footsteps of their peasant parents. 'I want to be a shop assistant', remarked one village schoolboy, 'because I do not like to walk in the mud. I want to be like those people who are cleanly dressed and work as shop assistants.'40 Parents and educators became alarmed that many peasant boys, in particular, once they learned how to read and write, refused to do agricultural work and tried to distinguish themselves from the rest of the village by swaggering around in raffish city clothes.

  If social ambition was often the primary motive of those peasants who

  went to the towns, more commonly, as in Kanatchikov s case, it was an unexpected consequence of a move enforced by poverty. But either way the experience of the city transformed the way most peasants thought — of the world, of themselves, and of the village life they had left behind. On the whole, it had the effect of making them think in secular, more rational and more humanistic terms, which brought them closer to the socialist intelligentsia, and to reject and even despise village culture, with its superstitions and its dark and backward ways. That was the Russia of 'icons and cockroaches', to cite Trotsky's phrase, whereas the city, and (for many of them) the urban culture of the revolutionary movement, stood for progress, enlightenment and human liberation. The rank and file of the Bolshevik Party were recruited from peasants, like Kanatchikov. The mistrust and indeed contempt which they were to show for the peasantry, once in power, can be explained by this social fact. For they associated the dismal peasant world with their own unhappy past, and it was a vital impulse of their own emerging personal and class identity, as well as of their commitment to the revolution, that this world should be abolished.

  Kanatchikov's father had arranged an apprenticeship for him at the Gustav List factory through a neighbour from Gusevo who had gone to work there several years before. Most immigrants relied on such contacts to get themselves settled in the city. The peasants of one village or region would form an association (either an artel' or a zemliachestvo) to secure factory jobs and living quarters for their countrymen. Whole factories and areas of the city were 'colonized' by the peasants of one locality or another, especially if they all shared some valuable regional craft, and it was not unusual for employers to use such organizations to recruit workers. The industrial suburb of Sormovo near Nizhnyi Novgorod, for example, where one of the country's largest engineering works was located, recruited all its workers from a handful of surrounding villages, where metal-working was an established handicraft. Through such associations the peasant immigrants were able to maintain ties with their native villages. Most of them supplemented their factory incomes by holding on to their land allotment in the commune and returning to their village in the summer to help their families with the harvest. The factories suffered much disruption at harvest time.* Other peasants regularly sent home money to their families. In this way they were able to keep one foot in the village, whilst their economic position in

  * According to a survey of 1881, over 90 per cent of the workforce in textiles and 71 per cent of all industrial workers returned to their villages during the summer. The proportion declined towards the turn of the century as the urban workforce became more settled. Factories adapted to the situation by stopping work during the agricultural season, or by moving to the countryside. The government encouraged the latter, fearing the build-up of an urban working class. Only 40 per cent of the Empire's industrial workers lived in the cities at the turn of the century.

  the city was still insecure. Indeed in some industrial regions, such as the Urals and the mining areas of the south, it was common for the workers to live in their villages, where their families kept a vegetable plot, and commute to the factories and mines.

  Many of these immigrants continued to see themselves as essentially peasants, and looked on industrial work as a means of 'raiding' the cash economy to support their family farms. They maintained their peasant appearance — wearing their traditional home-made cotton-print blouses rather than manufactured ones, having their hair cut 'under a bowl' rather than in the new urban styles, and refusing to shave off their beards. 'They lived in crowded, dirty conditions and behaved stingily, denying themselves everything in order to accumulate more money for the village,' Kanatchikov recalled. 'On holidays they attended mass and visited their countrymen, and their conversations were mostly about grain, land, the harvest and livestock.' When they had saved up enough money they would go back to their village and buy up a small piece of land. Others, however, like Kanatchikov, preferred to see their future as urban workers. They regarded their land in the village as a temporary fall-back whilst they set themselves up in the city.41

  It was through an artel' of fifteen immigrant workers that Kanatchikov found a 'corner' of a room in a 'large, smelly house inhabited by all kinds of poor folk'. The fifteen men who shared the room bought food and paid for a cook collectively. Every day at noon they hurried home from the factory to eat cabbage soup — just as the peasants did, 'from a common bowl with wooden spoons'. Kanatchikov slept in a small cot with another apprentice. His windowless 'corner' was dirty and full of 'bed bugs and fleas and the stench of "humanity" '. But in fact he was lucky to be in a private room at all. Many workers had to make do with a narrow plank-bed in the factory barracks, where hundreds of men, women and children slept together in rows, with nothing but their own dirty clothes for bedding. In these barracks, which Gorky compared with the 'dwellings of a prehistoric people', there were neither washing nor cooking facilities, so the workers had to visit the bath-house and eat in canteens. There were whole families living in such conditions. They tried as best they could to get a little privacy by hanging a curtain around their plank-beds. Others, even less fortunate, were forced to live in the flophouse or eat and sleep by the sides of their machines. Such was the demand for accommodation that workers thought nothing of spending half their income on rent. Landlords divided rooms, hallways, cellars and kitchens to maximize their profits. Speculative developers rushed to build high tenements, which in turn were quickly sub-divided. Sixteen people lived in the average apartment in St Petersburg, six in every room, according to a survey of 1904. In the workers' districts the figures were higher. The city council could have relieved the housing crisis by building suburbs and

  developing cheap transportation, but pressure from the landlords in the centre blocked all such plans.42

  Like most of Russia's industrial cities, St Petersburg had developed without any proper planning. Factories had been built in the central residential districts and allowed to discharge their industrial waste into rivers and canals. The domestic water supply was a breeding ground for typhus and cholera, as the Tsar's own daughter, the Grand Duchess Tatyana Nikolaevna, discovered to her cost when she contracted it during the tercentenary celebrations in the capital. The death rate in this City of Tsars was the highest of any European capital, including Constantinople, with a cholera epidemic on average once in every three years. In the workers' districts fewer than one in three apartments had a toilet or running water. Excrement piled high in the back yards until wooden carts came to collect it at night. Water was fetched in buckets from street pumps and wells and had to be boiled before it was safe to drink. Throughout the city — on house-fronts, inside tramcars, and in hundreds of public places — there were placards in bold red letters warning people not to drink the water, though thirsty workers, and especially those
who had recently arrived from the countryside, paid very little attention to them. Nothing of any real consequence was done to improve the city's water and sewage systems, which remained a national scandal even after 30,000 residents had been struck down by cholera in 1908—9. There was a good deal of talk about building a pipeline to Lake Lagoda, but the project remained on the drawing board until I9I7.43

  From his first day at the factory the young Kanatchikov was acutely conscious of his awkward and rustic appearance: 'The skilled workers looked down on me with scorn, pinched me by the ear, pulled me by the hair, called me a "green country bumpkin" and other insulting names.' These labour aristocrats became a model for Kanatchikov as he sought to assimilate himself into this new working-class culture. He envied their fashionable dress, with their trouser cuffs left out over their shiny leather boots, their white 'fantasia' shirts tucked into their trousers, and their collars fastened with lace. They smelt of soap and eau de Cologne, cut their hair 'in the Polish style' (i.e. with a parting down one side rather than in the middle as the peasants wore their hair), and on Sundays dressed in suits and bowler hats. The pride which they took in their physical appearance seemed to convey 'their consciousness of their own worth'; and it was precisely this sense of dignity that Kanatchikov set out to achieve.44

  But for the moment, he found himself at the bottom of the factory hierarchy, an unskilled worker, labouring for six days every week, from 6 a.m. to 7p.m., for a measly wage of 1.5 roubles a week. Russia's late-flowering industrial revolution depended on cheap labourers from the countryside like Kanatchikov. This was its principal advantage over the older industrial powers, in which organized labour had won better pay and working conditions. As

  Count Witte put it in 1900, the Russian worker, 'raised in the frugal habits of rural life', was 'much more easily satisfied' than his counterpart in Europe or North America, so that 'low wages appeared as a fortunate gift to Russian enterprise'. Indeed, as the factories became more mechanized, employers were able to exploit the even cheaper labour of women and children. By 1914 women represented 33 per cent of the industrial workforce in Russia, compared to 20 per cent in 1885, and in certain sectors, such as textiles and food processing, women workers were in the majority. The factory took a heavy toll on their health, additionally burdened, as so many of them were, with bawling babies and alcoholic husbands. 'One cannot help but note the premature decrepitude of the factory women,' a senior doctor wrote in 1913. 'A woman worker of fifty sees and hears poorly, her head trembles, her shoulders are sharply hunched over. She looks about seventy. It is obvious that only dire need keeps her at the factory, forcing her to work beyond her strength. While in the West, elderly workers have pensions, our women workers can expect nothing better than to live out their last days as lavatory attendants.'45

  The tsarist government was reluctant to better the lot of the workers through factory legislation. This was one of its biggest mistakes, for the buildup of a large and discontented working class in the cities was to be one of the principal causes of its downfall. Part of the problem was that influential reactionaries, like Pobedonostsev, the Procurator-General of the Holy Synod and close adviser to the last two tsars, refused to recognize the labour question' at all, since in their view Russia was still (and should remain) an agrarian society. In other words the workers should be treated as no more than peasants. Others feared that passing such reforms would only raise the workers' expectations. But the main concern was that so much of Russian industry remained in the hands of foreign owners,* and, if their labour costs were to rise, they might take their capital elsewhere. The gains made by British workers in the 1840s, and by German workers in the 1880s, remained out of reach of Russian workers at the turn of the century. The two most important factory laws — one in 1885 prohibiting the night-time employment of women and children, and the other in 1897 restricting the working day to eleven and a half hours — had to be wrenched from the government, after major strikes. But even these reforms left major loopholes. The small artisanal trades and sweatshops, which probably employed the majority of the country's workers, were excluded from all such protective legislation. The inspectorates, charged with ensuring that the factories complied with the regulations, lacked effective powers, and employers ignored them with impunity. Working areas were filled with noxious fumes and left

  * The percentage of foreign shareholding in joint-stock companies rose from 25 per cent in 1890 to about 40 per cent on the eve of the First World War.

  unventilated. Shopfloors were crammed with dangerous machinery, so that accidents occurred frequently. Yet most workers were denied a legal right to insurance and, if they lost an eye or a limb, could expect no more than a few roubles' compensation.

  'The factory owner is an absolute sovereign and legislator whom no laws constrain,' declared Professor Yanzhul, a leading proponent of factory regulation during the 1880s. Indeed, by hiring workers on private contracts, employers could bypass most of the government's labour legislation. All sorts of clauses were inserted into workers' contracts, depriving them of legal rights. Long after such fines had been outlawed, many workers continued to have their pay docked for low productivity, breakages and petty infringements of the factory rules (sometimes amounting to no more than going to the toilet during working hours). Some employers had their workers degradingly searched for stolen goods whenever they left the factory gates, while others had them flogged for misdemeanours. Others forbade their workers to wear hats, or to turn up for work in their best clothes, as a way of teaching them their proper place. This sort of 'serf regime' was bitterly resented by the workers as an affront to their personal dignity. 'We are not even recognized as people,' one complained, 'but we are considered as things which can be thrown out at any moment.' Another lamented that 'outside Russia even horses get to rest. But our workers' existence is worse than a horse's.'46 As they developed their own sense of self-worth, these workers demanded more respectful treatment by their employers. They wanted them to call them by the polite 'you' (vyi) instead of the familiar one (tyi), which they associated with the old serf regime. They wanted to be treated as 'citizens'. It was often this issue of respectful treatment, rather than the bread-and-butter question of wages, which fuelled workers' strikes and demonstrations.

  Historians have searched exhaustively for the roots of this labour militancy. The size of the factories, the levels of skill and literacy, the movement of wages and prices, the number of years spent living in the city, and the influence of the revolutionary intelligentsia — all these factors have been examined in microscopic detail in countless monographs, each hoping to discover the crucial mix that explained the take-off of the 'workers' revolution'. The main argument among historians concerns the effects of urbanization. Some have argued that it was the most urbanized workers, those with the highest levels of skill and literacy, who became the foot soldiers of the revolution.47 But others have argued that the recent immigrants — those who had been 'snatched from the plough and hurled straight into the factory furnace', as Trotsky once put it — tended to be the most violent, often adapting the spontaneous forms of rebellion associated with the countryside (buntarstvo) to the new and hostile industrial environment in which they found themselves.48

  Now there is no doubt that the peasant immigrants added a volatile and often belligerent element to the urban working class. Labour unrest during the early decades of industrialization tended to take the form of spontaneous outbreaks of violence, such as riots, pogroms, looting and machine-breaking, the sort of actions one might expect from an uprooted but disorganized peasant mass struggling to adapt to the new world of the city and the discipline of the factory. Some of these 'pre-industrial' forms of violence became permanent features of the landscape of labour unrest. A good example is the common workers' practice during strikes and demonstrations of 'carting out' their factory boss or foreman in a wheelbarrow and dumping him in a cesspool or a canal. Nevertheless, it is going too far to suggest that such 'primitive'
forms of industrial protest, or the raw recruits behind them, were the crucial factor in the rise of labour militancy.49 During the 1890s strikes became the principal form of industrial protest and they required the sort of disciplined organization that only the most urbanized workers, with their higher levels of skills and literacy, could provide. In this context, the peasant immigrants were unlikely to play a leading role. Indeed, they were often reluctant to join strikes at all. With a piece of land in the village, to which they could return when times got hard, they had less inclination to take the risks which a strike entailed, compared with those workers who had broken their ties with the village and depended exclusively on their factory wage. The latter stood at the forefront of the labour movement.

  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.