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Labor Violence in Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Daniel R. Brower
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Extract

Protest action accompanied by violence was widespread among Russian factory workers during the late nineteenth century. The phenomenon was noted by tsarist officials and radicals alike, but historians since then have paid little attention to the problem. This neglect has contributed to a distorted picture of the working-class movement and of the relations between Russian workers and factory and state authorities. In recent years it has become a truism to affirm that collective violence constitutes evidence of profound social stress. It is also true that the form and character of the violence in certain historical circumstances provide unique insight into the attitudes and expectations of groups, such as factory workers, otherwise unable to express their views. The violent actions of Russian workers are particularly important to an understanding of the origins of the revolutionary movement among the workers in the early twentieth century. What form did these actions take? Who were the participants, and what goals did they seek to attain? How did the incidence and nature of the actions change over the last decades of the century? Although the evidence is not abundant, answers to these questions suggest that collective violence played an important part in the working-class movement in the late nineteenth century.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , Fall 1982 , pp. 417 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1982

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References

1. Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke, vol. 3, pt. 2 (Moscow, 1963), pp. 207-13. Although the selection of documents is at times tendentious, emphasizing the role of radicals and deemphasizing the significance of violence in labor unrest, this multivolume collection of documents remains the major published source on the worker movement (see Johnson, Robert, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century [New Brunswick, N.J., 1979], pp. 121–23.Google Scholar

2. “Politicheskii obzor Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii za 1892,” Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Oktiabr'skoi Revoliutsii (TsGAOR), fond 102, delo 152 (1893), chast’ 11, list 13. I was able to consult these valuable yearly reports from provincial gendarme officers only for the period 1881 to 1893. Soviet archivists affirmed that the reports began only in 1881 and that the post-1893 reports have disappeared. Although there are grounds to doubt these claims, I was in no position to debate the point.

3. “Politicheskii obzor za 1884,” TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 59 (1885), ch. 27, 1. 20; “Politicheskii obzor za 1887,” ibid., d. 89 (1888), ch. 12, 11. 7-8.

4. “Vsepoddanneishii otchet Saratovskogo gubernatora za 1897,” Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv SSSR (TsGIA), f. 1282, opis’ 3 (1898), d. 300, 11. 21-22.

5. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian, table 7.1, p. 126; Johnson uses the memoirs of the factory inspector Gvozdov to back up his assertion of the infrequency of violence (ibid., p. 192, n. 4), yet another first-hand observer of the northern Russian workers, the Vladimir provincial gendarme chief Nikolai Voronov, paints a very different picture (N. I. Voronov, Zapiski o sobytiiakh Vladimirskoi gubernii [Vladimir, 1907]). Voronov's account is based largely on reports he prepared during his period of service (1886-1900).

6. “Vsepoddanneishii otchet za 1898,” TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 3255 (1899), 1. 10.

7. Voronov, Zapiski, p. 7; Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke, vol. 3, pt. 1 (Moscow, 1952), pp. 25-26.

8. See Thomas, Malcolm, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Newton- Abbot, 1970), pp. 75–78Google Scholar. Rioting workers in nineteenth-century France left their factory machinery unharmed ( Perrot, Michelle, Les ouvriers en greve, vol. 2 [Paris, 1974], pp. 578–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

9. “Vsepoddanneishii otchet za 1898,” TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 3255 (1899), 11. 10-11.

10. Rabochee dvizhenie, vol. 3, pt. 2, pp. 310-16.

11. Voronov, Zapiski, pp. 34-36; the trial of workers arrested for participation in the disorders was reported in Moskovskil listok, May 19, 1899.

12. Zelnik, Reginald, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (Stanford, Calif., 1971), pp. 164–68, 367.Google Scholar

13. Rabochee dvizhenie, vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 503.

14. A sweeping attack on Russian industrial capitalism by a gendarme officer is found in “Politicheskii obzor Bogorodskogo uezda za 1886,” TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 9 (1887); it is cited extensively in Rabochee dvizhenie, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 717-35.

15. Rabochee dvizhenie, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 487-88.

16. Hobsbawm, Eric, Primitive Rebels (New York, 1965), pp. 108, 110-11Google Scholar; Hobsbawm's argument is criticized in Tilly, Charles, The Rebellious Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 289–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 3255, 1. 10.

18. “Vsepoddanneishii otchet za 1898,” TsGIA, f. 1283, op. 3 (1899), d. 5397, 1. 790.

19. The very successful novel was written by N. I. Pastukhov, editor of Moskovskii listok and a writer with an instinctive sense of the tastes of the new mass reading public; the hero of the novel, Churkin, was a romanticized version of a real-life contemporary bandit transformed by Pastukhov into a Robin Hood of northern Russia.

20. The Russian word bunt, derived from the German bund, had acquired a meaning in eighteenth-century official documents of organized revolt. A century later it had entered popular usage as either “riot” or “revolt” and had lost all negative connotations. In all the sources cited in this article it is used in a context making it virtually synonymous with “pogrom” and hence is best translated as “riot.“

21. Petr Moiseenko, Vospominaniia starogo revoliutsionera (Moscow, 1966), pp. 70, 80.

22. I. V. Babushkin, Vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1925), p. 86.

23. “Stachki i ikh znachenie dlia rabochikh,” Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke, vol. 4, pt. 1 (Moscow, 1961), pp. 75-79.

24. Ibid., p. 583.

25 V. Lebedev, “K istorii kulachnykh boev,” Russkaia starina, 54 (August 1913): 336-38.

26. D. Bagaiei and D. Miller, htoriia goroda Khar'kova, vol. 2 (Khar'kov, 1912), pp. 955-56.

27. Rabinovich, Mikhail, Ocherki etnografii russkogo feodal'nogo goroda: gorozhane, ikh obshchestvennyi i domashnii byt (Moscow, 1978), p. 161 Google Scholar; Anokhina, Liudmila and Shmeleva, M., Byt gorodskogo naseleniia srednei polosy RSFSR v proshlom i nastoiashchem (Moscow, 1977), pp. 276–77.Google Scholar

28. I. A. Slonov, Iz zhizni torgovoi Moskvy (Moscow, 1914), pp. 23-24.

29. Dispatch by an anonymous local correspondent, Moskovskii listok, January 16, 1882.

30. E. I. Nemchinov, “Vospominaniia starogo rabochego,” Na zare rabochego dvizheniia v Moskve (Moscow, 1933), p. 158.

31. D. A. Pokrovskii, “Kulachnye boi,” Ushedshaia Moskva (Moscow, 1964), p. 158.

32. Moskovskii listok, January 10, 1899.

33. A. Smirnov, “Brianskie zavody,” Letopis’ revoliutsii, no. 4 (1923), p. 88.

34. “Politicheskii obzor za 1892,” TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152 (1893), ch. 11, 11. 11-12.

35. Ibid., d. 88 (1884), ch. 4, 11. 23-24.

36. Ibid., d. 9 (1887), ch. 21, 11. 58-59.

37. Ibid., 1. 43.

38. Semen Kanatchikov, Iz istorii moego bytiia (Moscow, 1930), p. 153.

39. Voronov, Zapiski, p. 25.

40. P. Smidovich, Rabochie massy v 90-kh godakh (Moscow, 1930), p. 13; these memoirs were written in 1901.

41. “Politicheskii obzor Dmitrovskogo uezda za 1884,” TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 88 (1885), ch. 35, 11. 52-53.

42. A. Timofeev, Chem zhivet zavodskii rabochii? (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp. 96-98.

43. Cited in V. Kut'ev, “Dokumental'nye materialy moskovskikh gosudarstvennykh arkhivov po istorii rabochego klassa goroda Moskvy” (Kandidat diss., Moscow State University, 1955), pp. 116-18.

44. K. Mironov, Iz vospominanii rabochego (Moscow, 1906), pp. 4-5.

45. Timofeev, Chem zhivet, p. 98.

46. Kut'ev, “Dokumental'nye materialy,” p. 118.

47. Smidovich, Rabochie massy, p. 14.