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Collective Action and Collective Violence in the Russian Labor Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Diane Koenker
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Extract

Historians of the Russian labor movement have been slowly chipping away at the stereotypes about Russian workers created by generations of intellectuals quick to generalize from eye-catching impressions. The result has been the stereotyped, bipolar working class. On the one hand is the “peasant yokel” who too frequently resorts to the violent and mindless behavior indigenous to his original rural swamp. On the other hand, we find the skilled urban worker, sometimes a “half-literate intellectual,” sometimes a labor aristocrat who disdains to cooperate with his socialist mentors. Daniel Brower's look at labor violence attempts to help reshape the familiar stereotype by exploring the cultural roots of the Russian worker's predilection for violence and by showing that such behavior is less mindless and more political than its critics have accepted. By not adequately specifying the contours and especially the frequency of violence, however, he leaves us ultimately with the old image of a Pugachevshchina in the factories. Brower in effect takes the pieces of the stereotype he has chipped away and glues them back in approximately the same pattern.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , Fall 1982 , pp. 443 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1982

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References

1. The language is from Prince Sviatopolk-Mirskii in 1902, quoted in Chamberlin, William H., The Russian Revolution, vol. 1 (New York, 1965), p. 263 Google Scholar. See also Plekhanov, G. V., Russkie rabochie v revoliutsionnom dvizhenii in Sochineniia, vol. 3 (Moscow-Leningrad, 1928)Google Scholar. For pertinent criticism of these views, see, for example, McKinsey, Pamela Sears, “From City Workers to Peasantry: The Beginnings of the Russian Movement ‘To the People,'” Slavic Review, 38, no. 4 (December 1979): 629–49Google Scholar and Wildman, Allan K., The Making of a Workers’ Revolution (Chicago, 1967)Google Scholar.

2. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass., 1978), pp. 90-91.

3. Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), pp. 248-49.

4. See Brower's note 5.

5. Robert Eugene Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979).

6. See William M. Reddy, “Skeins, Scales, Discounts, Steam, and other Objects of Crowd Justice in Early French Textile Mills,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21, no. 2 (April 1979): 204-13.

7. According to E. J. Hobsbawm, in England, “wrecking was simply a technique of trade unionism in the period before, and during the early phases of, the Industrial Revolution” (Hobsbawm, Labouring Men [Garden City, N.Y., 1967], p. 11).

8. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (February 1971): 76-136.

9. Tilly, Tilly, and Tilly, Rebellious Century, pp. 249-50.

10. Perdiguier, Agricol, Mémoires d'un Compagnon (Moulins, 1914)Google Scholar; Sewell, William H. Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 40–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. There is a suggestion of this in Heather Hogan, “Conciliation Boards in Revolutionary Petrograd,” Russian History (forthcoming).

12. George Rudé stresses the importance of such interaction in Ideology and Popular Protest (New York, 1980). On consciousness in 1917, see Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, 1981), pp. 362-64.

13. This view is discussed in Koenker, Moscow Workers, pp. 44-45. Early reporting of the 1980 strikes in the Gdansk shipyards made the same familiar claim. Gdansk employed many new migrants, which led to social breakdown and unrest. Similarly, labeling Lech Walesa an “unemployed electrician” makes him seem a much more socially marginal character than correctly calling him a “blacklisted electrician.“

14. M. Tugan-Baranovskii offers evidence that youths were not “torn” from their native soil; they eagerly traveled to jobs in the big cities (Tugan-Baranovskii, Russkaia fabrika v proshlom i nastoiashchem [Moscow, 1922], p. 388). See also Tilly, Tilly, and Tilly, Rebellious Century, pp. 251-52.

15. See Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian, pp. 75-79 and Koenker, Moscow Workers, p. 49.

16. The intensity of the grievances, as well as nonviolent ways of articulating them, are admirably documented in Hogan, “Conciliation Boards.“

17. David Snyder and William R. Kelly, “Industrial Violence in Italy, 1878-1903,” American Journal of Sociology, 82, no. 1 (1976): 131-62, report violent strikes were much less likely to succeed than nonviolent ones.

18. Ronald Aminzade, “The Transformation of Social Solidarities in Nineteenth-Century Toulouse,” in John M. Merriman, ed., Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe (New York, 1979), pp. 85-105.

19. Belousov, I., Ushedshaia Moskva (Moscow, 1927?), p. 91 Google Scholar; Gaisinovich, A., “Pervyi etap rabochego dvizheniia na zavode ‘Serp i Molot,'” Istoriia proletariata SSSR, vol. 6 (1931), p. 159.Google Scholar