Revolutions are centrally about the breakdown of state power, the elimination of old political elites and institutions, and the ultimate reconstitution of a new state power and a new elite. The history of revolutions is thus, intrinsically, a political history, and the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is no exception. It begins in February with the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy, continues with the ‘dual power’ of the Provisional Government and Petrograd Soviet, culminates in the Bolshevik seizure of power and eventuates in a one-party dictatorship. Yet revolutions entail more than the collapse of state power: they engender a whole-scale restructuring of social relations. Only recently, have historians begun to pay attention to the profound changes which took place in the society, culture and economy of Russia during the revolutionary years. The manifold transformations of social relations were dependent on the collapse of state power, but they in turn shaped the processes whereby centralised, bureaucratic state power was reconstituted. Power was thus directly at issue in all the multiple changes which rent the fabric of tsarist society, and it is for this reason that any ‘social history’ of the Russian Revolution cannot but also be a political one.

The present study is concerned with the relationships between class power as it was manifest in the world of work and the broader processes of the Russian Revolution. It seeks to explore the impact of the revolution on factory life in Petrograd during 1917 and the early part of 1918.