Lieven D. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 2: Imperial Russia, 1689-1917
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Reform, war and revolution
is no evidence that they thought of themselves as engaging in a new kind of
activity, one that charged the participants with the energy that came from
partaking in an international workers’ movement or even in a pan-European
trend. What is significant, however, is that the government authorities, in a
sense ahead of the workers’ own curve, did use such language, as did the
contemporary Petersburg press. To be sure, when the authorities spoke of a
stachka, their emphasis was on the conspiratorial connotation of the term, and
at the trial of the leading participants the prosecutors did their best (though
with only limited success) to criminalise the workers’ action by treating it
as a kind of conspiracy against the state. But if official thinking about such
phenomena was still quite murky, the views of segments of the press were less
so and, as in the case of the paper Novoe vremia, which pointedly (and anxiously)
described the Nevsky events as a dangerous new phenomenon: ‘And a strike
has befallen us, and God has not spared us!’ Perhaps even more revealing
of the shift that was taking place in the press’s views of labour unrest was
the reaction to much less dramatic work stoppages among some Petersburg
clothing workers shortly before the Nevsky events. News of these actions had
caused the newspaper Birzhevye vedomosti to make the questionable claim
that this was ‘the first example of workers strikes [stachki rabochikh]’ in Russian
history, and to cautiously advance the hope that ‘for the moment, they will not
give rise to the same kind of difficulties here as in West European countries’.
8
From this time forth, it would be hard to find a work stoppage of any
significant proportions that was not discussed both publicly and in the corri-
dors of government agencies in the context of Russia’s possible susceptibility
to the European disease of labour unrest and the prophylactic devices that
might best be designed to stave off an epidemic. Almost immediately, the
government began to move in two divergent directions: on the one hand,
harsh police measures, most notably arrest, imprisonment and administrative
exile without trial, usually imposed by the office of governor, were brought to
bear on the leaders of any future strike action, which was to be treated as a
criminal conspiracy against the state, and not merely as an economic conflict,
between workers and their employers, within civil society. On the other hand,
expanding on the work of a mainly abortive commission of the early 1860s,
the government created a series of high-level official commissions in the 1870s
that, with some participation of and consultation with a narrow segment of
the public (mainly manufacturers, but also academic and technical experts),
8 Zelnik, Labor and Society,pp.340–1; Novoe vremia quote as cited in Gaston V. Rimlinger,
‘The Management of Labor Protest in Tsarist Russia’, International Review of Social History
5,part2 (1960): 231.
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were intended to devise the kind of factory legislation that might avert the
disaffection of workers and discourage them from evolving into a dangerous,
‘West European’-type of working class.
The second strike that aroused the fears of both government officials and
opinion makers was the prolonged and (unlike the Nevsky strike) ultimately
violent clash between textile workers and their employers at Estland Province’s
Kreenholm Cotton-Spinning and Weaving Factory, the largest textile mill at
the time in all of Europe.
9
The dramatic nature of this event – with such
striking features as a spectacular setting (a factory less than a hundred miles
from St Petersburg, located on a riverine island, its machines powered by a
giant waterfall), multiethnic participants on both sides (Russians, Estonians,
Germans and a smattering of Finns), death and violence (a collapsed bridge
with dozens of women workers drowned, workers hurling stones at soldiers
and soldiers almost firing on workers) – magnified the danger (or promise) of
worker protest unleashed by the events of 1870, and had the additional effect
of propelling a number of disgruntled Kreenholm workers into the ranks of
the radical movements that were beginning to arise in St Petersburg at around
this time.
From 1872 until the fall of the tsarist regime some forty-five years later,
the interaction between workers and members of the radical intelligentsia
(studenty, as they began to be called by workers whether or not they were
actually studying at the time) would be a central element in the evolution of
the revolutionary movement in Russia.
10
Out of this often troubled yet often
productive relationship would evolve several phases of worker–student polit-
ical play in two parallel universes dominated by two different kinds of youth:
one, the student radicals, formally educated at Russia’s leading institutions
of higher learning; the other, the politicised workers, self-educated, or for-
mally educated at adult-education centres (‘Sunday schools’, factory schools,
schools of the Imperial Russian Technical Society), or informally educated (or
propagandised) in illegal study circles (kruzhki) by the studenty themselves.
The political persuasions on the intelligentsia side of this equation would
of course vary considerably over time: Populist in the 1870s and much of the
9 R. E. Zelnik, Law and Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995). In Russian the Estonian ‘Kreenholm’ was rendered
as ‘Krengol’m.’
10 These interactions are addressed in detail by the authors of the articles in R. E. Zelnik
(ed.), Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections
(Berkeley: International and Area Studies, 1999); the same articles and others may be
found in Russian in Rabochie i intelligentsiia Rossii v epokhu reform i revoliutsii, 1861–fevral’
1917 (St Petersburg: Izd. Russko-Baltiiskii informatsionnyi tsentr BLITs, 1997).
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1880s, vaguely Marxist in the late 1880s and 1890s (in the 1890s and even earlier
Russia’s Populists had more than a touch of Marxism and Marxists more than
a touch of Populism), and finally evolving into the somewhat more stable
groupings of Social Democrats or SDs (as of 1903, both Bolsheviks and Men-
sheviks) and Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs) at the start of the new century.
11
Yet the broad structure of the relationship and the conflicts that inhered therein
would be surprisingly consistent: radical intelligenty would define themselves
as the bearers of the truth that guided and of the intellectual and organisa-
tional machinery that drove the revolution, while viewing workers (workers
and peasants in the case of Populists and SRs) either as the raw material they
would have to forge into a powerful fighting force or as the essential yet still
dormant bearers of a revolutionary message, a message that, if most workers
were not yet conscious of it, would one day be revealed to them by a com-
bination of experience at the workplace and study with already ‘conscious’
intelligenty and propagandised workers (sometimes defined as rabochie-
intelligenty).
Workers, for their part, or at least the ones most politically aware and most
attracted to revolutionary ideas, were repeatedly torn between a positive and a
negative perception of the studenty, at times appreciating their concentrated,
even passionate attention and gaining a higher sense of their own worth as a
consequence, but at other times resenting their tutelage and striving to assert
their class and even personal independence from their socially more privileged
intelligentsia mentors.
∗∗∗∗∗
By the early twentieth century a fierce and sometimes agonising compe-
tition for worker allegiance had begun between radicals of various per-
suasions (Bolshevik SDs, Menshevik SDs, SRs, and their rough equiv-
alents among many of the non-Russian minorities), liberals, social and
religious organisations, and the government, for working-class political sup-
port. Indeed, the entire history of the Russian labour movement lends itself
to an analysis framed as a competition between the agents of the Left and
the agents of the state for the allegiance of the empire’s rapidly growing
numbers of industrial workers, whose numbers increased by about a mil-
lion in the course of the 1890s. Certainly by the beginning of the new cen-
tury, industrial workers – the proletariat as they were now often called by
those who courted them and those who feared them – were viewed by
11 For the influence of Marxism on Russian Populism, see especially Andrzej Walicki, The
Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1969).
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almost all political actors as pivotal players in the on-going struggle for
power.
12
On the government side, as already suggested, there were of course internal
divisions, as there were on the Left, as to what strategies were best suited to
win this competition with the revolutionaries. If police-driven suppression
vied with enlightened, European-model labour legislation as the two main
contending models of government action, the latter approach generally held
the upper hand from about 1882 to 1900. To be sure, good old-fashioned
suppression, sometimes very draconian, was always ready on hand when all
else failed, and no labour action, especially violent unrest, would be permitted
to attain its goals directly, lest the striking, demonstrating, or rioting workers
be encouraged to repeat their successful strategies again and again. Yet in the
wake of Russia’s most serious strikes of the 1880s and 1890s – the Morozov
strike of textile workers in Vladimir Province in 1885 and the great citywide
textile strikes in St Petersburg in 1896–7 – new laws were introduced that,
building in part on the work of the commissions of the 1870s, were aimed at
preventing the abuse and exploitation of industrial workers at the hands of
ruthless, inflexible employers.
13
When this legislation had clearly failed to stem the tide of labour unrest
and the on-going, potentially dangerous contacts (often troubled and tense,
to be sure) between politicised workers and radical intelligenty, some govern-
ment officials, most notably Sergei Zubatov of the Ministry of Internal Affairs’
Department of Police, began to explore a new and very risky approach.
14
Instead of relying directly on the cruder forms of oppression, but at the same
12 How and why the efforts of liberals to win the allegiance of industrial workers had
difficulty taking hold is best analysed in William G. Rosenberg, ‘Representing Workers
and the Liberal Narrative of Modernity’, in Zelnik, Workers and Intelligentsia,pp.228–59.
13 The legislation of 1886 was anticipated by laws in 1882 and 1884 that, among other new
restrictions, placed limits on the hours worked by women and minors and provided for a
permanent corps of factory inspectors (doctors, political economists and others), admin-
istered by the Finance Ministry, to see to it that the factory laws were properly enforced.
Just how fully they were enforced is an open question, but there is no doubt that there
were zealous factory inspectors who took their charge seriously and came into genuine
conflict with recalcitrant industrialists. See M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky [Baranovskii], The
Russian Factory in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur and Claora S. Levin (Homewood,
IL: Mysl, 1970), part 2, chapter 2;V.Ia.Laverychev,Tsarizm i rabochii vopros v Rossii
(1861–1917 gg.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), chapter 2; Boris Gorshkov, ‘Factory Children:
An Overview of Child Industrial Labor and Laws in Imperial Russia, 1840–1914’, in M.
Melancon and A. K. Pate (eds.), New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia,
1840–1918 (Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2002), pp. 9–33, esp. pp. 29–32.
14 See Jonathan Daly’s chapter on police in this volume. The classical English-language
study of Zubatov’s programme is Jeremiah Schneiderman, Sergei Zubatov and Revolution-
ary Marxism: The Struggle for the Working Class in Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1970).
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time by-passing the Factory Inspectorate and refusing to allow the workers
access to their own, independent labour associations, Zubatov introduced
a series of government-sponsored and closely supervised organisations for
workers. Often (erroneously) referred to as ‘police unions’, these organisa-
tions were particularly active in Moscow and in the towns of the Jewish Pale
of Settlement, most notably Odessa and Minsk. It was Zubatov’s aim to divert
workers away from socialist agitators, including the so-called ‘Bund’ (the influ-
ential branch of Social Democracy that had been operating successfully among
Jewish workers in the Pale since 1897) by providing them with tamer social and
intellectual activities such as public lectures, tea rooms and reading rooms, and
by expressing enough sympathy for their cause as to give them the impression
that it was the government and not the socialists that stood for the attainment
of their true interests.
15
Although Zubatov’s efforts began on a successful note, with time his agents,
manyof them over-zealous, began to lose control of the situation, inadvertently
giving the organised workers more rein than they originally intended and, in
their efforts to prove that they were pro-labour, encouraging them to defy
their employers. When sympathetic Zubatov-sponsored speakers such as the
Moscow University political economy professor I. Kh. Ozerov lectured to the
workersabout the situation of labourin West Europeancountries wherelabour
unions were permitted, this was a signal for some of his listeners to claim the
same right to organise that existed by then in England, France and Germany.
Factory owners, in turn, complained to the Finance Ministry that Zubatov’s
activities were poisoning the minds of their employees, complaints that set the
stage for conflicts between the two most concerned ministries. In this context
it is difficult, however, to assign either ministry with the designation ‘pro’ or
‘anti’ labour, since Witte himself, while hostile to Zubatov, began to seriously
consider that Russia would be better off with a free labour movement, that is,
with workers allowed to organise their own trade unions and even, though
only under strictly limited circumstances,to engage in strikes.Though it would
take the revolution of 1905 to bring about this concession – a rather feeble 1903
law allowing workers in some factories to elect their own ‘elders’ (starosty)
was the only significant labour legislation between 1897 and 1906 – the conflict
between the two ministries helped open the door to renewed labour unrest,
which was particularly virulent in St Petersburg in the spring of 1901 (the
15 On the Bund (formally, the General Jewish Labour Union in Russia and Poland), see
Henry J. Tobias, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1972).
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‘Obukhov defence’) and in Rostov-on-Don and other parts of southern Russia
in 1902–3.
The ill-fated Zubatov experiment did have an unforeseen consequence of
monumental proportions, the so-called gaponovshchina, a series of events that
affected the course of Russian history in a manner that took both govern-
ment officials and revolutionaries completely by surprise. In 1904, as a spin-off
to the already discredited project of police-sponsored labour activity in St
Petersburg, a charismatic young priest named Father Gapon was encouraged
to open tearooms for the workers of that city, social clubs where the inhab-
itants of the city’s various industrial neigbourhoods could safely engage in
innocent, non-political sociability, far from the subversive influence of SDs,
SRs or other radical intelligenty. An offspring of the zubatovshchina (Colonel
Zubatov’s attempt to control the labour movement by sponsoring police trade
unions), this project came at a time when the relations between St Petersburg
workers and the SD intelligentsia were in a state of temporary lull. Successful
co-operation between Petersburg workers and the Marxist intelligentsia had
been visible in the mid-1890s when the Marxist group called the Union of
Struggle for the Emancipation of Labour launched the policy of ‘agitation’
in support of workers’ day-to-day grievances, culminating in the basically
spontaneous though intelligentsia-assisted strikes of 1896–7. Soon thereafter,
however, disagreements between workers and their frequently overweening
intelligentsia mentors would lead to repeated conflicts between them, caus-
ing many workers (with the support of some ‘worker-phile’ intelligenty) to
be attracted to the kind of worker-centred ouvri
´
erisme that was then gather-
ing around the journal Rabochaia mysl’ (Workers’ Thought). These workers,
who took seriously the Marxist slogan that the liberation of the working class
was the task of the workers themselves, would accept the co-operation of the
Marxist intelligentsia on their own terms only, a condition that not only future
Bolsheviks like Vladimir Lenin but also future Mensheviks like Iulii Martov,
Pavel Aksel’rod and Georgii Plekhanov, the ‘father’ of Russian Marxism, were
unwilling to accept.
16
16 By far the best treatment of these and related developments are Allan K. Wildman, The
Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891–1903 (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1967), and Dietrich Geyer, Lenin in der russischen Sozialdemokratie:
Die Arbeiterbewegung im Zarenreich als Organizatsionsproblem der revolution
¨
aren Intelligentz,
1890–1903 (Cologne: B
¨
ohlau Verlag, 1962). The most useful biographies of the four Marx-
ists mentioned here are by Robert Service (Lenin), Israel Getzler (Martov), Abraham
Ascher (Aksel’rod) and Samuel Baron (Plekhanov). All four are also discussed incisively
in Leopold Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955).
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Such conflicts with workers were complicated by other aspects of the SD
intelligentsia’s troubled situation between 1898 and 1904. Many of their leading
cadres were either under arrest in Siberia or other venues or had fled abroad
to Paris, Geneva, Zurich or London, with few opportunities for direct per-
sonal contact with Russia’s workers. The supposed founding congress of the
Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDRP) in Minsk in 1898, poorly
attended, and including only one genuine worker, had proved abortive, while
the Second Congress (Brussels and London 1903), while well attended, had
culminated in the Party’s split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions and
the temporary withdrawal of the Jewish Bund from the Party’s ranks. Per-
haps more to the point, and in a sense underlying all these problems was the
SD intelligentsia’s difficulty in addressing the issue of how best to relate to
the ‘spontaneous’ labour movement, with its tendency to deviate from the
norms of intelligentsia-contrived ‘consciousness’ at times by spinning off in
the allegedly apolitical direction of ‘Economism’, at other times pulled in the
direction of senseless violence and the destructive, self-defeating riot (bunt).
Although by no means supported by all SD intelligenty, and himself highly
critical of those intelligenty who did not share his views, it was Lenin who in
his well-known polemical pamphlet Chto delat’? (What Is to Be Done?) came
closest to openly revealing the deeper problematics of worker–intelligentsia
relations and unleashing the painful and divisive issue of spontaneity versus
consciousness.
17
As a result of these circumstances, with the issues of worker autonomy from
the intelligentsia now merging with militant workers’ emphasis on strikes and
other mass actions, the time between the Petersburg textile strikes and the
appearance of What Is to Be Done? was one of maximum tension between
worker-phile (ouvri
´
eriste) workers and those Marxist intelligenty who were
most concerned to retain and expand their leadership role in the movement.
17 For a discussion of Lenin’s pamphlet in the broader context of Marxism’s unresolved
tensions around the leadership role of workers and worker–intelligenty relations in Russia
see my ‘Worry about Workers: Concerns of the Russian Intelligentsia from the 1870sto
What is to Be Done?’, in Marsha Siefert (ed.), Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays
in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003). For more
on the intellectual and psychological background to the SD intelligentsia’s attitudes see
Haimson, Russian Marxists. For a rich though regionally restricted discussion of the role
of violence in Russia’s labour unrest, see Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms:
The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia 1870–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992); see also Daniel R. Brower, ‘Labor Violence in Russia in the Late Nineteenth
Century’, SR 41, 3 (1982): 417-31; Vospominaniia Ivana Vasil’evicha Babushkina, 1893–1900
(Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1955), p. 74. Babushkin’s memoir was written in London in 1902
and first published in 1925.
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Thisis not to saythat all co-operation betweenworkersand Marxist intelligenty
was discontinued, for in the entire period from the mid-1890sto1905, that
thread, while often damaged, was never broken.
18
But it is to say that by late
1904, when Father Gapon’s leadership of St Petersburg workers had begun to
take fire, he found a vacuum of authority among the workers and a hunger for
someone to fill the shoes that might otherwise have been filled by revolutionary
Social Democrats.
Under Gapon’s charismatic leadership, thousands of Petersburg workers
were organised into neighbourhood associations centred around local club-
houses, tearooms and libraries that for the first time provided them with
venues of social, cultural and eventually political interaction. Gapon himself
was influenced and assisted by a small but dedicated group of workers and
intelligenty who, having passed through the school of Social Democracy and
found it wanting, remained nonetheless dedicated to the workers’ cause as
they now understood it. As the months went by, it began to dawn on the
St Petersburg officials who had begun by supporting Gapon financially that
instead of the calming, loyal, religious influence they had hoped for, they had
created a sort of Frankenstein monster, sobering (literally) and religious to be
sure, but a movement that was rapidly escaping their control. More and more
Gapon’s ‘Assembly of Factory Workers’ (Sobranie russkikh fabrichno-zavodskikh
rabochikh) was being transmogrified into a giant labour union, with preten-
sions to represent the interests of Petersburg workers against their employers.
Hence when three of its members were fired from the giant (c. 12,000 workers)
Putilov engineering works in late December, precipitating an illegal strike at
a plant on which the government heavily relied for its shipbuilding and arma-
ments production, Gapon (after some hesitation) assumed the role of what
today might be called ‘worker-priest’, encouraging the spread of the strike
to many other factories and organising a citywide protest demonstration. On
9 January 1905, thanks to nervous, trigger-happy troops and a government
that simply did not get the picture, unarmed workers and their families who
attempted to march, militantly but without violence, on the Winter Palace
were repeatedly fired upon, with over a hundred demonstrators killed and
18 Apposite examples of the numerous militant workers who, despite some painful encoun-
ters with intelligenty, continued to identify with the RSDRP and retain their faith in the
Marxist intelligentsia are Semen Kanatchikov and Ivan Babushkin; see A Radical Worker
in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Sem
¨
en Ivanovich Kanatchikov, ed. and trans. R. E.
Zelnik (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Vospominaniia Ivana Vasil’evicha
Babushkina, 1893–1900 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1955).
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many more injured. The day has gone down in history as Russia’s notorious
‘Bloody Sunday’, the opening salvo of the revolution of 1905.
19
Though it was led by a presumably apolitical priest, it would be a mistake to
think of the workers’ demonstration of 9 January as lacking in political content.
The petition to the tsar that was carried by many of the demonstrators was
replete not only with the class-centred particularistic demands of industrial
labour (including, however, ‘economic’ demands with strong political conno-
tations such as the eight-hour day and the right to form trade unions), it also
contained, though couched in religious rhetoric, something closely resembling
the political programme of Osvobozhdenie (Liberation), the recently formed
organisation that best embodied Russian liberal opinion (regrouped in the
form of the Kadet Party some ten months later). These included the demand
for a Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of a four-tailed suffrage as
well as such basic rights as freedom of speech, assembly and religion. At the
same time, the petition included demands – the elimination of redemption
payments, for example – that spoke to the interests of the peasantry, the socio-
legal group (soslovie) to which most workers still belonged and with which
many still had genuine economic, familial and personal links. And, though the
petitioners had received no direct input from either Bolsheviks or Mensheviks,
their language included a hostile reference to the ‘capitalist-exploiters of the
working class’.
20
Although this and other rhetorical flourishes (including those
of a liberal character) may well have reflected the influence of the Assembly
of Factory Workers’ cohort of disillusioned Marxists, the fact that so many
workers appeared to be comfortable with such a seemingly incongruous mix
of liberal, radical and traditional discourses – the languages of urban class
warfare, ‘bourgeois’ civic values and ‘humble’ peasant pleading, accompanied
by the visible parading and display of religious icons and portraits of the tsar –
speaks volumes of the mixed, labile, internally contradictory state of mind
of Russia’s most ‘advanced’ workers as they unwittingly embarked on their
and the twentieth century’s very first revolution. Little wonder that Lenin
craved a party that could provide Russian socialists with the closed continuity
19 The most thorough scholarly account of the gaponovshchina is Walter Sablinsky, The Road
to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St Petersburg Massacre of 1905 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1976); see also Gerald D. Surh’s insightful essay, ‘Petersburg’s First Mass
Labor Organization: The Assembly of Russian Workers and Father Gapon’, parts 1 and
2, RR 40, 3/4 ( July–October, 1981): 412–41; Sergei I. Potolov, ‘Petersburg Workers and
Intelligentsia on the Eve of the Revolution of 1905–7: The Assembly of Russian Factory
and Mill Workers in the City of St Petersburg’, in Zelnik, Workers and Intelligentsia,
pp. 102–15. See also Gapon’s own selective but valuable account, Georgii A. Gapon, The
Story of My Life (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905).
20 For an English translation of the text of the petition, see Sablinsky, Road,pp.344–9.
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of ‘consciousness’ in the face of such volatile shifts of mood in the class they
claimed to represent.
21
∗∗∗∗∗
If the revolutionary year began, then, with no clear victor in the struggle
between the radical Left and the forces of order for the allegiance of Russia’s
ideologically still impressionable and unformed labour force, by the end of
that year radicals would emerge as the clear winners in this competition,
though with no single faction dominating.
22
One way to think of the year
1905 is as an acceleration at hothouse temperatures of the earlier competition
for worker allegiance, but this time with a decided advantage on the side of
the revolutionaries thanks to the shattering of faith in the tsar precipitated by
Bloody Sunday. One observes the government desperately dishing out new
proposals to win back the workers but invariably falling behind the curve of
disillusionment. Perhaps the most serious government initiative in 1905 (prior
to October) was the Shidlovskii Commission, an attempt launched at the end
of January to bring the aspirations of volatile St Petersburg workers under
control by harnessing them for the first time to an elected body of (male)
worker representatives, chosen (in contrast to the feeble and unpopular law
on starostasof1903) by workers, without any input from employers (although
together with government officials, employers would be represented on the
commission itself ). With worker representatives chosen via a complex two-
stage system of voting based on the size of the factory, the commission was
supposed to get at the roots of the workers’ discontents and come up with
new solutions to their most pressing problems.
23
This was a tacit admission by
the government that the traditional notion of a worker population so rooted
21 Thedegreeto which civil and political rights,the rule of law, and relatedliberal aspirations
were part of the workers’ value system in this period is carefully analysed in S. A.
Smith, ‘Workers and Civil Rights in Tsarist Russia, 1899–1917’, in Olga Crisp and Linda
Edmondson (eds.), Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp.
145–69.
22 Important insights into the role of workers in the 1905 Revolutionmaybe foundin: Gerald
D. Surh, 1905 in St Petersburg: Labor, Society, and Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1989); Laura Engelstein, Moscow, 1905: Working-Class Organization and Political
Conflict (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982); Robert Weinberg, The Revolution of
1905 in Odessa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Solomon M. Schwarz,
The Russian Revolution of 1905: The Workers’ Movement and the Formation of Bolshevism
and Menshevism, trans. Gertrude Vakar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967);
Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St Petersburg
and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), part 2;Abraham
Ascher, The Revolution of 1905:RussiainDisarray(Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1988). See also the books by Reichman and Steinberg cited in note 5, above.
23 Described in detail in Schwarz, Russian Revolution, chapter 2, and more concisely in
Bonnell, Roots,pp.110–17.
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