What Was the Russian Working Class?
The Russian working class, the industrial proletariat of the late imperial period, numbered about 1.5 million factory workers in 1865, about 3 million by 1913, and about 14 million wage earners of all kinds in the same year. The working class was concentrated in a small number of industrial centres, in the St Petersburg and Moscow gubernias, in the Baltic and Polish provinces, in the Donbas, in Baku, and along the railway lines. The working class was, in essence, a creation of the Russian industrialisation of the 1890s, and it was the social basis of the 1905 Revolution and the February Revolution of 1917. The working class was, in addition, the principal social constituency of the Bolshevik Party, and it was the working class that the post-1917 Soviet state was, in its official ideology, designed to represent (see von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization of Russia, 1969).
The pre-industrial background
The Russian working class was recruited largely from the peasantry. The 1861 emancipation of the serfs had released a substantial labour force, and the Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s — the judicial reform, the zemstvo reform, the city reform, the educational reform — had created a more favourable climate for industrial development. The Russian industrial development, however, was modest until the 1890s. The Russian Empire in 1860 was an overwhelmingly agricultural country, with about 90% of the population engaged in agriculture, and the urban industrial sector was small.
The Russian industrial development of the 1890s — the “great spurt” — was the central fact of the late nineteenth-century Russian economy. The great spurt was driven by a combination of factors: the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the introduction of the gold standard in 1897, the high level of foreign investment, the high level of state investment, and the development of the southern Russian industrial complex. The Russian industrial production grew at about 6-8% per year in the 1890s, the highest rate of any major European country in the period. The Russian iron and steel production tripled; the Russian coal production tripled; the Russian oil production grew tenfold (Gatrell, The Great War and the Russian Economy, 2005).
The working class and the labour movement
The working class grew rapidly in the 1890s and 1900s. The St Petersburg working class, in particular, was the centre of the Russian labour movement. The principal Russian industrial centres of the period were St Petersburg, Moscow, the Donbas (Yuzovka, Makeyevka, Horlivka), Baku, the Central Industrial Region (Tula, Nizhny Novgorod, Tver, Yaroslavl), the Polish industrial region (Lodz, Warsaw), and the Baltic industrial region (Riga, Reval). The Russian working class was, accordingly, geographically diverse: a relatively small proportion of the working class was engaged in the large-scale heavy industry, and a larger proportion was engaged in the small-scale light industry, particularly the textile industry.
The Russian labour movement developed rapidly in the late imperial period. The first major strike wave occurred in the 1870s and 1880s, with major strikes in St Petersburg, the Morozov strike of 1885 at the Morozov textile mill in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, and the 1896 St Petersburg textile strike. The 1900s were marked by a series of major strike waves, the most important of which was the 1903 general strike in the south. The labour movement became increasingly radical, and the 1905 Revolution was the central event: the formation of the first soviets, the worker councils, was the central political innovation of the revolution, and the soviets became the basis of the post-1905 Russian political life (von Laue, 1969).
The working class in the revolutions of 1917
The working class played a central role in the revolutions of 1917. The February Revolution began on 23 February 1917 (8 March new style), when women textile workers in Petrograd walked off the job over bread shortages; the strike spread, the garrison soldiers mutinied, and the imperial government collapsed. The working class provided the mass base for the Petrograd Soviet, and the Soviet’s Order No. 1 of 28 February 1917 was the central political document of the February Revolution. The working class was, in this sense, the principal social force of the February Revolution.
The October Revolution was, similarly, a working-class revolution. The Bolsheviks drew substantial support from the workers of the major industrial centres, and the Soviet’s seizure of power on 25 October 1917 was carried out by the Red Guards and the Kronstadt sailors. The Bolsheviks’ slogans of “Peace, Land, and Bread” appealed to the war-weary soldiers, the land-hungry peasants, and the bread-hungry urban population. The Soviet government that followed the October Revolution declared itself a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the working class was, in the Soviet ideology, the privileged class of the new state. In practice, the working class was, in the 1920s, increasingly subordinate to the new state apparatus, and the Soviet working class of the late 1920s and 1930s was, in many respects, a different social formation from the late imperial working class (Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 1996).
The legacy
The Russian working class was, in the late imperial period, one of the most politically active working classes in the world. The Russian labour movement, the Russian revolutionary movement, and the Russian social democracy were all, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class phenomena, and the principal political innovations of the period — the soviet, the workers’ council — were Russian working-class innovations. The Russian working class was, in this sense, the social basis of the 1917 revolutions and the post-1917 Soviet state. The legacy of the Russian working class is, accordingly, a central question of the early twentieth-century Russian and European history (Gatrell, 2005).