Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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esther kingston-mann

1930s – on their private plots and communal traditions. By the mid-1990s, over

60 per cent of Russian households were producing a signiﬁcant proportion

of their own food needs on private rural and urban garden plots. Some 14

million were sited in the countryside, and depended on former collectives for

the material prerequisites for farming – that is, seeds, machinery and fuel.

Under these circumstances, the rage and despair of a rural populace in

decline soon overshadowed the 1980s critiques of the Soviet era. As in other

societies that experienced ‘structural adjustment’, rural women (and children)

were the most hard hit; womenwere particularly threatened by ‘land for shares’

programmes that failed to acknowledge their special claims and – given their

childcare responsibilities – their disproportionate need for the social welfare

supports of the Soviet era. It is also worth noting that although women had

for years borne major responsibility for the productive private plots of the

Soviet era, they were not targeted as potential entrepreneurs either by local

ofﬁcials, by aid agencies or by the rural population itself.

In the words of a

seventy-two-year-old woman farm worker from Voronezh province in 1995:

‘what do I think about restructuring? We’ve been restructured about once

every ﬁve years for as long as I can remember. And every time things get

worse instead of better. I don’t see why it should be any different this time.

Restructuring usually means that things get worse.’

In important respects, farm women may have represented in its most

extreme form the challenge that the rural populace posed to would-be reform-

ers and tormentors throughout the twentieth century. Opposed to the single-

minded privatisation measures of the Stolypin era and to the incomparably

more brutal and single-minded collectivism of the 1930s, they were averse in the

1990s to the ‘either/or’ choices presented to them by the Russian government.

Although they were no longer the illiterates of the pre-Soviet era, many farm

women (and men) nevertheless continued to believe that labour legitimised

claims to property. Like their forebears, they were suspicious of individuals

who bought land but did not use it, or misused it, or purchased land only to

sell it at a higher proﬁt, denouncing them as ‘speculators’ (spekulanty) rather

than ‘true owners’.

For their part, the Union of Private Landed Proprietors, understandably

enraged by the destruction of harvests and burning of tractors carried out by

collective farmers during the early 1990s, denounced the archaic ‘traditions of

81 Ibid., p. 207. 82 Perotta, ‘Divergent’, p. 164. 83 Ibid., pp. 148–9.

84 Myriam Hivon, ‘The Bullied Farmer: Social Pressure as a Survival Strategy’, in Bridger

and Pine, Surviving,pp.42–3.

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egalitarianism’ and the survival of the Soviet era’s ‘culture of envy’.

Frus-

trated enthusiasts like Boris Nemtsov complained that ‘the primary hindrance

to privatisation of land in Nizhnii Novgorod province is the lack of people

who want to become owners’.

In the newly independent Baltic state of

Estonia, reformers denounced the machinations of Soviet-era ‘Red barons’

who reclaimed former privileges at the expense of former employees.

general, advocates of privatisation attributed the problems of agriculture to

the irreconcilable contradiction between collectivism and private economic

initiative.

For their part, collective and state farm workers argued that when private

enterprise became the only legitimate and legally protected form of farm

ownership, the state subsidised private farmers, granted them preferential

credit arrangements and praised them for their achievements. In contrast,

the state deprived collective farmers of their former advantages and then

viliﬁed them for laziness and incompetence.

Former collective and state

farm managers were particularly prone to argue that small-scale family farms

were incapable of meeting the food needs of the Russian Republic. In general,

critics of privatisation attributed the inefﬁciency of collective enterprises to

external causes and in particular to government policies that privileged some

groups at the expense of others.

There is plenty of evidence to support arguments on both sides of this issue.

Among both defenders and enemies of privatisation, peasants differed with

each other and with the government over the acceptable costs of change, the

services and beneﬁts to which citizens should legitimately be able to lay claim,

and the role of the state as either a promoter of social cohesion or a catalyst

for an individualistic, almost Darwinian struggle for survival.

Post-Soviet rural life: prospects and dilemmas

In the Russian Republic, agricultural production was 36 per cent lower in 1997

than in 1990. Reasserting the economic priorities of the Stalin and pre-1917

years, Yeltsin-era investment in agriculture declined from 16 per cent of the

total in 1992 to 2.5 per cent in 1997.By2000, over 90 per cent of Russian grain

still came from former collective and state farms; private farms had made

85 Ibid., pp. 34–43. 86 Quoted in Ioffe and Nefedova, Continuity, p. 158.

87 Abraham, ‘Regeneration’, pp. 356–7.

88 Myriam Hivon, ‘Local Resistance to Privatization in Rural Russia’, Cambridge Anthropol-

ogy 18, 2 (1995): 18.

89 Perotta, ‘Divergent’, p. 161.

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only a very modest impact and did not perform appreciably better than the

former public sector.

Despite the brevity of the privatisation experiment and

the rapid rates at which rural land has been bought and sold since 1991, there

are few signs that privatisation has – as yet – positively affected agricultural

productivity rates.

Both the enduring and changing dilemmas of the post-Soviet era are evident

in the case of Estonia – an outstanding success story of the 1990s. Newly priva-

tised Estonian family farms have produced high agricultural yields (together

with the stark economic divisions between the prosperous and the poor that

recall the inter-war years of Estonian independence). Particularly troubling,

however, are the late 1990s reports that both supporters and opponents of

private farms believed that up to a third of the private farms in Estonia would

fail due to shortages of machinery and materials, the absence of social ser-

vices like health care and a scarcity of capital.

In the Russian Republic,

among the approximately 30 million who still lived on the land and owned

shares in former collective and state farms, the limited access to credit, poor

infrastructure and high cost of social protections were bankrupting even the

moreefﬁcientformer Soviet farm enterprises. It was estimated in 1998 that only

20 per cent of the former collective farms/joint-stock companies in the Rus-

sian Republic were capable of surviving within a competitive and capital-scarce

environment.

In 2003, many public opinion polls indicated that most former collective

farmers – who still controlled three-quarters of Russia’s arable land – were

opposed to the private ownership of land. At the same time, new land laws

have further undermined traditional links between labour claims and land

use by permitting foreign investors to purchase landed property for capitalist

agribusinesses. Such moves aroused opposition not only from labourers who

still owned shares in former collective farms, but also from new privatefarmers

who had leased collective farm ﬁelds and worked hard to improve them.

Reﬂecting on the events of the past decade, the Agrarian Party’s Iurii Savinok

declared: ‘Look what happened in the 90s – all Russia’s industries and resources

were grabbed by a few rich oligarchs . . . Does anyone doubt that the same

will happen when land goes on the block?...Ordinary Russians will be

dispossessed again.’

From the perspective of the rural populace at the dawn of the twenty-

ﬁrst century, survival and success seem more dependent on the ability of

90 Caskie, ‘Back’, pp. 200–1. 91 Ioffe and Nefedova, Continuity,p.296.

92 Abraham, ‘Regeneration’, p. 367. 93 Caskie, ‘Back’, p. 206.

94 Quoted in F. Weir, ‘This Land is My Land’, In These Times, 11 Nov. 2002.

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individuals and households to mobilise a broad range of political and economic

resources than on a talent for generating and reinvesting private proﬁts. In the

words of new private farmer A. I. Poprov in 2003, ‘Ownership is an empty

symbol. What’s important is who possesses the land and how he uses it.’

It has been suggested that a sustainable and productive Russian agriculture

might well be compatible with an economic system that permits diverse farm

sizes and ownership structures that range from large-scale to independent

peasant farms to semi-subsistence household plots.

Such a proposal would

be quite consistent with the history of mixed economies that peasants created

whenever there were choices available to them. But the adoption of such a

strategy would require reformers to abandon their dichotomised ‘either/or’

approach to development for one that is far more sensitive to the social impact

of economic change upon the rural populace. As we have seen, economic

pluralism has rarely appealed either to Russian or Soviet governments. As a

policy, it remains – at least so far – starkly at odds with those currently being

deployed or contemplated in the Russian Republic.

95 Weir, ‘This Land’, In These Times. 96 Caskie, ‘Back’, p. 208.

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lewis h. siegelbaum

‘What is the contemporary factory worker in Russia’, asked Mikhail Tugan-

Baranovskii towards the end of the nineteenth-century, ‘a peasant living on the

land who makes up the deﬁciencies of his agricultural income by occasional

factory work, or a proletarian bound closely to the factory who lives by sell-

ing his labour power?’

Tugan-Baranovskii, among Russia’s foremost political

economists, seemed unsure how to answer the question. Citing earlier stud-

ies showing a decline in seasonal employment among workers in Moscow

province, he nevertheless had to acknowledge that ‘the tie of the factory

worker to the soil, although waning, is still very strong’, that it was ‘economi-

cally necessary and therefore is tenaciously maintained’. Yet, echoing an article

of faith among Russian Marxists, he conﬁdently predicted that ‘a complete

severance of this tie...isinevitable, and the sooner it takes place the better’.

What was thus on one level an empirical question that lent itself to statistical

enquiry into patterns of labour mobility, employment and workers’ ties to the

land, on another implied more complex issues. Central to the Marxist paradigm

of historical evolution, the formation of an industrial proletariat in Russia was a

question that came to the fore during the 1890s because of the unprecedentedly

rapid growth of factory industry, associated social dislocations and the political

implications of these developments. Retrospectively, it served as the opening

chapter in the revolutionary narrative that the Bolsheviks would tell about

themselves and the society they were determined to transform.

Fast-forwarding nearly a hundred years, we ﬁnd the authors of a book

about post-Soviet Russia’s transition to capitalism asking: ‘What about the

1 M. I. Tugan-Baranovskii, Russkaia fabrika v proshlom i nastoiashchem, 2nd edn (St

Petersburg: O. N. Popova, 1900), p. 441.

2 Ibid., pp. 449, 451.

3 Arthur Mendel, Dilemmas of Progress in Tsarist Russia: Legal Marxism and Legal Populism

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961); Igal Halﬁn, From Darkness to Light:

Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pitts-

burgh Press, 2000).

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workers?’

This question does not so much recapitulate Tugan-Baranovskii’s

as imply the reversal of the situation that precipitated it. By the mid-1990s, de-

industrialisation was well under way, and industrial workers, who comprised

some 50 million people, were in imminent danger of becoming redundant.

The once heroic rabochie, the universal class of Marxist dreams, had become

rabotiagi, working stiffs, embodiments of the failure of the Soviet experiment.

For much of the twentieth century, labour historians conventionally

employed the concept of the working class as an objective description of

a distinct social group with measurable characteristics and factory workers

as the core element within that class. Thanks to feminist scholarship, the

linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities and the arrival of the

post-industrial era, this convention gave way to an understanding that such

terms as ‘class’, ‘industrial’ and even ‘factory’ are linguistically constructed

and culturally speciﬁc, that statistics bearing on these categories are neither

self-evidently reﬂective of the real world nor value-neutral but rather derive

from the nexus of knowledge and power, and that the same can be said of

determinations of core and marginal elements.

These reconceptualisations provide a fresh opportunity to revisit some of

the terrain already ‘covered’. Thinking through whether class is to be under-

stood as a sociological aggregate, a linguistic construction, an ‘imagined com-

munity’, or the sum total of certain cultural practices is not to bid farewell to

the working class, but to enrich our sense of what a good deal of the struggles

of (at least) the twentieth century were about.

This is particularly so in the case of Russia where throughout much of the

century ‘the working class’ had extraordinary political salience and workers

experienced radical, often wrenching, changes in the nature and validation of

the workthey performed. In this chapter workers’ experiencesarerelatedtothe

social and cultural spaces they occupied. Four chronologically overlapping

themes span the twentieth century. The ﬁrst two comprise key elements of

the Bolshevik narrative of the path to communism; the others represent com-

ponents of a counter-narrative that emerged out of the party’s abandonment

of the model of the heroic working class and, ultimately, the dissolution of the

Soviet Union. Two dimensions – the discursive and the experiential – were

4 Simon Clarke et al., What About the Workers?: Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in

Russia (London: Verso, 1993).

5 William H. Sewell, Jr., ‘Towards a Post-materialist Rhetoric for Labor History’, in Lenard

Berlanstein (ed.), Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana

and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 15–38. See also Geoff Eley and Keith

Nield, ‘Farewell to the Working Class?’, International Labor and Working-Class History

(Hereafter ILWCH) 57 (2000): 1–30.

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always in dynamic tension and often became blurred as workers both collec-

tively and individually appropriated others’ ideas about who they were, what

they needed and how they should act to fulﬁl their needs. The ‘contemporary

factory worker’ of Tugan-Baranovskii’s enquiry was thus both an object of

others’ imaginings and a subject with agency.

Peasants into workers

The factory worker, observed the governor of Khar’kov province in his ofﬁ-

cial report for 1899 (a year after the publication of Tugan-Baranovskii’s book)

‘is losing many of the worthy and distinctive traits that are characteristic of

the villager, especially the latter’s positive, undemanding, traditional world-

view, so rooted in religious teachings and in the biddings of his ancestors’.

This loss of ‘spiritual equilibrium’, he added, was providing ‘a very conve-

nient opening for those who wish to awaken his dissatisfaction with his own

situation and with the social system, which is precisely what the enemies of

the existing order have recently been attempting, unfortunately with some

success’.

Theimageof the undemanding, tradition-bound peasant, a mainstayamong

tsarist ofﬁcials and conservatives more generally, had its analogue among the

liberal and socialist intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. It was of the ‘grey

muzhik’ – ‘dark’, superstitious, in need of being rescued from benightedness,

but almost inaccessible.

These images persisted even while peasants in the

post-emancipation decades regularly tramped off to labour markets to be hired

foroff-farm work,engaged in extensive commerce with townsfolk, came under

and made use of the new court system, attended schools, entered the army,

consumed cheaply produced popular literature and otherwise expanded their

contacts with the wider world.

By the turn of the century there already existed

a substantial ethnographic literature, much of which noted the increasing

6 Quoted in Iurii I. Kir’ianov, ‘The Mentality of the Workers of Russia at the Turn of the

Twentieth Century’, in Reginald E. Zelnik (ed.), Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial

Russia:Realities, Representations, Reﬂections (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999),

p. 96.

7 Cathy A. Frierson, Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural People in Late Nineteenth-Century

Russia (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

8 Jeffrey Burds, ‘The Social Control of Peasant Labor in Russia: The Response of Village

Communities to Labor Migration in the Central Industrial Region, 1861–1905’, in Esther

Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter (eds.), Peasant Economy, Culture, and Politics of Euro-

pean Russia, 1800–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 52–100;Jeffrey

Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1985).

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penetration of urban-originated ideas, practices and goods into the village and

the dying out of old, village-based customs.

Peasant labour migration assumed huge proportions in the late nineteenth

century. During the 1890s, an average of 6.2 million passports were issued every

year by peasant communes to departing peasants (otkhodniki) in the forty-

three provinces of European Russia. The heaviest out-migration was in the

eight Central Industrial provinces of Iaroslavl’, Moscow, Vladimir, Kostroma,

Kaluga, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tula and Riazan’, followed by the north and north-

west, the Southern Agricultural Region and the Central Black Soil Region.

Agricultural workers made up the largest contingent of otkhodniki, but sub-

stantial numbers sought and found work in the cities and industrial sites of the

country. Some 100,000 to 150,000 immigrants arrived in Moscow every year

between1880 and 1900; in St Petersburg the city’sworkingpopulationincreased

by two-thirds in the 1890s, mostly on account of peasant in-migration.

Peas-

ants also travelled to and found work in the burgeoning metallurgical and

coal-mining industries of the south.

The contemporary (and later Soviet) ﬁxation on the factory and the rapid

growth of its labour force obscured the fact that substantially larger num-

bers of peasant migrants found employment in smaller-scale artisanal work-

shops, commercial establishments, domestic service, prostitution, transporta-

tion, public utilities and unskilled construction jobs.

Workers all, they were

more evenly divided between men and women than was the case among

factory workers who were overwhelmingly male.

But they did take up

9 See e.g. Ministerstvo zemledeliia i gosudarstvennogo imushchestva. Otdel sel’skoi

ekonomiki i sel’sko-khoziaistvennoi statistiki, Otchety i issledovaniia po kustarnoi promysh-

lennosti v Rossii, 11 vols. (St Petersburg: Kirshbaum, 1892–1915).

10 Burds, ‘Social Control of Labor’, pp. 56–7.

11 Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite: Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 104; Gerald D. Surh, 1905 in St.

Petersburg: Labor, Society, and Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989),

p. 18.

12 Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial

Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 45–7.

13 Victoria E. Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg

and Moscow, 1900–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983);

Bonnell (ed.), The Russian Worker: Life and Labor under the Tsarist Regime (Berkeley and

Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 186–208; Barbara Alpern Engel,

Between Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia, 1861–1914 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 126–238.

14 Olga Crisp, ‘Labour and Industrialization in Russia’, in Peter Mathias and M. M. Postan

(eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press, 1978), vol. vii, pt. 2,p.368; Rose L. Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace

and Society, 1880–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984),

pp. 80, 83.

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lewis h. siegelbaum

residence in the same districts of cities, partook of many of the same pas-

times and, generally speaking, inhabited the same cultural world as recently

arrived factory workers.

The image of the authentic proletarian – a factory worker employed year-

round and totally dependent on his wage – nevertheless continued to exercise

its hold over the Marxist intelligentsia, representing for them the maturity of

Russian capitalism and the possibility of recruiting workers into the ﬂedgling

social democratic movement. On the basis of such criteria as literacy, sobri-

ety and a secular world-view, workers could be judged as to whether they

were merely part of the masses, incomplete proletarians as it were, or had

attained the status of (politically) ‘conscious workers’.

This distinction cor-

responded to the trajectory of some factory workers who, shedding their

peasant appearance and ‘outlook’, came to understand their place in society

in the terms described by the literature they encountered in the revolution-

ary underground circles. As proud of their skills as they were resentful of

the petty tyranny of foremen and the dissolute ways of their fellow work-

ers, they entered the ranks of the Russian Social Democratic Party, agitated

among other workers, organised strikes and embraced the cause of proletarian

revolution.

They were, however, a tiny minority among workers. More commonly,

and especially in the Central Industrial Region, workers effected a ‘symbio-

sis’ between the village and the factory. Facilitated by the location of most

factories on the outskirts of cities or in relatively autonomous industrial set-

tlements, their retention of kinship ties and landholding gave them a ‘tactical

mobility’ that city-dwellers and ‘pure’ proletarians lacked.

Several labour his-

torians, focusing on the 1905 Revolution and its aftermath, have challenged

the Bolshevik master narrative of working-class formation and the develop-

ment of a corresponding class consciousness by emphasising the overlapping

of parochial (e.g. craft, trade union) allegiances among artisanal workers

with broader class identities, the volatility of mining and metallurgical work-

ers as evidenced by their participation in both social democratic-organised

strikes and anti-Semitic pogroms, and ‘vanguard’ workers’ expression of a

15 Allan Wildman, The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891–1903

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Tim McDaniel, Autocracy, Capitalism, and

Revolution in Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988),

pp. 162–212.

16 See Reginald E. Zelnik (ed.), A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen

Ivanovich Kanatchikov (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986).

17 Robert E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nine-

teenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979), pp. 155–62.

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Workers and industrialisation

sense of self in the eclectic language of universal human rights and religious

eschatology.

‘At least until the early twentieth century’, writes Barbara Alpern Engel, ‘the

working-class couple who shared a roof was a relative rarity in Russia’s major

cities.’ Although a gradual trend towards an urban-based family life accelerated

after the 1905 Revolution and the Stolypin reforms of 1906–7, cohabitation

of the working-class family never became the norm in tsarist Russia. This

undoubtedly was because the cost of maintaining a family on the wage paid to

most male workers was prohibitive, at least in a city like St Petersburg where

it amounted to roughly three times the average annual wage for the country

during 1905–9.

Hence factory owners’ provision of (notoriously crowded

and insalubrious) barracks or dormitory accommodation, and the absorption

by the village of the costs of reproduction, elderly care and other welfare

functions. This too suggests the ‘tactical mobility’ of workers.

The persistence of workers’ ties to the village would save many of them

when, during the desperate years of civil war, they ﬂed from the starving

cities. Statistics on the industrial workforce from 1917 onwards generally tell a

story of diminution. From a high-point of 3.5 million, the number of workers

in ‘census’ industry (i.e. industrial enterprises employing more than sixteen

workers) dropped to slightly over 2 million in 1918, and remained at between

1.3 and 1.5 for the remainder of the civil war.

Losses were greatest in the most populous industrial centres, that is, Petro-

grad, Moscow, the Donbass and the Urals. The number of industrial workers

in Petrograd dropped from 406,000 in January 1917 to 123,000 by mid-1920.

Workers also declined as a proportion of the city’s population – from 45.9

per cent of able-bodied adults in 1917,to34 per cent by the autumn of 1920.

Between 1918 and 1920 Moscow experienced a net loss of about 690,000 people,

of whom 100,000 were classiﬁed as workers. Over the same period, the num-

ber of factory and mine workers in the Urals dropped from 340,000 to 155,000.

Large enterprises where the Bolsheviks had concentrated their agitational and

recruitment efforts suffered disproportionately, partly owing to the shutting

18 Bonnell, Roots of Rebellion, pp. 439–55; Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms; Mark Stein-

berg, ‘Vanguard Workers and the Morality of Class’, in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald

G. Suny (eds.), Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-

versity Press, 1994), pp. 66–84.

19 Engel, Between the Fields and the City,pp.126–29, 201 (quotation on p. 201); Crisp, ‘Labour

and Industrialization in Russia’, pp. 404–13.

20 D. A. Baevskii, Rabochii klass v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti (1917–1921 gg.) (Moscow: Nauka,

1974), p. 238; Iu. A. Poliakov, Sovetskaia strana posle okonchaniia grazhdanskoi voiny: terri-

toriia i naselenie (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), pp. 214–19.

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