This book explores the impact of the 1917 Revolution on factory life
in the Russian capital. It traces the attempts of workers to take
control of their working lives from the February Revolution through
to June 1918, when the Bolsheviks nationalised industry. Although
not primarily concerned with the political developments of the
Revolution, the book demonstrates that the sphere of industrial
production was a crucial arena of political as well as economic
conflict.
Having discussed the structure and composition of the factory
workforce in Petrograd prior to 1917 and the wages and conditions
of workers under the old regime, Dr Smith shows how workers saw
the overthrow of the autocracy as a signal to democratise factory life
and to improve their lot. After examining the creation and activities
of the factory committees, he analyses the relationship of different
groups of workers to the new labour movement, and assesses the
extent to which it functioned democratically.
The central theme of the book is the factory committees’
implementation of workers’ control of production. Dr Smith rejects
the standard Western interpretation of this movement as
‘syndicalist’, showing that its ideological perspectives were close to,
but not identical with, those of the official Bolshevik party.
Essentially, workers’ control was a practical attempt to maintain
production and to preserve jobs in a situation of deepening economic
chaos. On coming to power in October, the Bolsheviks envisaged an
expansion of workers’ control, and the committees pressed for
nationalisation and workers’ management. The collapse of industry
and the reluctance of employers to continue their operations,
however, convinced the Bolshevik leadership that workers’ control
was inadequate as a means of restoring order in the economy, and
they subordinated the committees to the trade unions in 1918.
Dr Smith assesses the extent to which the Bolsheviks’ capacity to
carry out a genuinely revolutionary programme was limited by their
own ideology or by the economic and social conditions in which the
revolution was born. Throughout, he places the struggle in the
factories in the context of an international and comparative
perspective. The book will thus appeal not only to historians of
Russia and the Russian Revolution, but also to students of labour
history and of revolutionary theory.
S. A. SMITH is Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex. He
studied at the Universities of Oxford, Birmingham, Moscow and
Beijing.
RED PETROGRAD
REVOLUTION IN THE FACTORIES
1917-1918
SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES
Editorial Board
JULIAN COOPER, KAREN DAWISHA, LESLIE HOLMES, MICHAEL KASER,
ALISTAIR MCAULEY, MARTIN MCCAULEY, FRED SINGLETON
The National Association for Soviet and East European Studies exists for the
purpose of promoting study and research on the social sciences as they relate
to the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. The Monograph
Series is intended to promote the publication of works presenting substantial
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of the USSR and Eastern Europe.
Books in the series
A. Boltho Foreign Trade Criteria in Socialist Economies
Sheila Fitzpatrick The Commissariat of Enlightenment
Donald Male Russian Peasant Organisation before Collectivisation
P. Wiles, ed. The Prediction of Communist Economic Performance
Vladimir V. Kusin The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring
Galia Golan The Czechoslovak Reform Movement
Naum Jasny Soviet Economists of the Twenties
Asha L. Datar India’s Relations with the USSR
and Eastern Europe, 1933-1969
T. M. Podolski Socialist Banking and Monetary Control
Rudolf Bicanic Economic Polity in Socialist Yugoslavia
S. Galai Liberation in Russia
Richard B. Day Leon Trotsky and the Politics of Economic Isolation
G. Hosking The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government
and Duma 1907-14
A. Teichova An Economic Background to Munich
J. Ciechanowski The Warsaw Rising of 1944
Edward A. Hewett Foreign Trade Prices in the Council
for Mutual Economic Assistance
Daniel F. Calhoun The United Front: the TUC and the Russians 1923-28
Galia Golan Yom Kippur and After: the Soviet Union
and the Middle East Crisis
Maureen Perrie The Agrarian Polity of the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary
Party from its origins through the revolutions of 1909—1907
Gabriel Gorodetsky The Precarious Truce: Anglo-Soviet Relations 1924-27
Paul Vysny Neo-Slavism and the Czechs 1898-1914
James Riordan Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport
and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR
Gregory Walker Soviet Book Publishing Policy
Felicity Ann O’Dell Socialisation through Children’s Literature:
The Soviet Example
Stella Alexander Church and State in Yugoslavia since 1943
Sheila Fitzpatrick Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union 1921—1934
T. H. Rigby Lenin’s Government: Sovnarkom 1917-1922
M. Cave Computers and Economic Planning: The Soviet Experience
Jozef M. van Brabant Socialist Economic Integration; Aspects of contemporary
economic problems in Eastern Europe
R. F. Leslie, ed. The History of Poland since 1863
M. R. Myant Socialism and Democracy in
Czechoslovakia, 1943-1948
Blair A. Ruble Soviet Trade Unions: Their Development in the 1970s
Angela Stent From Embargo to Ostpolitik:
The Political Economy of West
German-Soviet Relations 1933-1980
D. A. Dyker The Process of Investment in the Soviet Union
RED PETROGRAD
REVOLUTION IN THE FACTORIES
1917-1918
S. A. SMITH
Senior Lecturer in History, University of Essex
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 1983
First published 1983
First paperback edition 1985
Library of Congress catalogue card number: 82-12885
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Smith, S. A.
Red Petrograd: revolution in the factories,
1917-18.—(Soviet and East European studies)
1. Leningrad—Politics and government
2.Russia—Politics and government—1894-1917
3.Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917-1936
I.TideII. Series
947-45DK265.8.L/
isbn o 521 24759 4 hard covers
isbn o 521 31618 9 paperback
Transferred to digital printing 2003
CE
To my mother and father
Contents
Acknowledgementsx
Introductioni
1 A profile of the Petrograd working class on the
eveofigi75
Petrograd: the city and its industry5
The size and distribution of the factory workforce
in 19179
The social composition of the Petrograd working class14
Peasant workers and ‘cadre’ workers14
Sexual and age divisions23
Skill divisions27
Conclusion35
2 The tsarist factory
The administration of the tsarist factory3 7
Conditions of work41
The standard of living during the war44
The strike movement during the war48
3 The February Revolution: A new dispensation in
the factories54
Democratising the factory order54
The eight-hour day65
Wage struggles68
Management strategy after the February Revolution74
4 The structure and functions of the factory
committees80
The structure of the factory committees80
F actory committees and the organisation of food supply 86
Factory committees and labour discipline88
Factory committees and the campaign against
drunkenness92
Factory committees and cultural policy94
Factory militias and Red Guards98
5 Trade unions and the betterment of wages103
Craft unionism and industrial unionism103
The political composition of the trade unions109
Strikes and inflation116
The campaign for collective wage contracts119
The metalworkers’ contract121
The wage contracts: key features129
Relations between workers and Sluzhashchie134
6 The theory and practice of workers’ control of
production139
The theory of workers’ control139
Anarchism, syndicalism and the Petrograd labour
movement142
Workers’ control as a response to economic chaos145
The politics of workers’ control: February to October
J9J7*49
Menshevik, SR and anarchist perspectives on control
of the economy151
The Bolsheviks and workers’ control153
The factory committee conference debates on
workers’control156
The politics of workers’ control at factory level160
7 Deepening economic chaos and the intensification
of workers’ control168
Economic crisis and industrial relations168
Workers resist attempts to evacuate industry171
The factory committees against redundancies174
Workers’ control becomes more radical176
The relationship of the factory committees to the trade
unions185
8 The social structure of the labour movement190
The social composition of labour protest and labour
organisation190
Women workers192
Peasant and unskilled workers196
Y oung workers197
Democracy and bureaucracy in the trade unions and
factory committees200
Democracy in the trade unions200
Democracy in the factory committees203
9 The October Revolution and the organisation of
industry209
The decree on workers’ control209
The role of the trade unions216
The subordination of the factory committees to the
trade unions219
Towards a socialist economy223
Lenin, the Bolsheviks and Workers’ control after
October225
10 The economic crisis and the fate of workers’
control: October 1917 tojune 1918230
From workers’ control to workers’ self-management230
Economic catastrophe and the dissolution of the
working class242
The labour organisations and the crisis of labour
discipline246
Conclusion253
Notes266
Bibliography308
Index328
Acknowledgments
This book began life as a Ph.D. thesis undertaken at the Centre for
Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham.
I wish to thank everyone there for providing a stimulating atmos-
phere in which to work, especially Professor Moshe Lewin, now of the
University of Pennsylvania, who provided much of the inspiration for
this work when it was in its early stages. I would like to express my
warm thanks to Maureen Perrie, also of CREES, who supervised the
final stages of this work. I am most grateful to the British Council for
granting me an exchange studentship to Moscow University in the
academic year 1976-7, and to Professor V. Z. Drobizhev of the
Faculty of History, who gave me advice and hospitality. I would like
to record my indebtedness to the librarians of INION and the Lenin
Library in Moscow, the newspaper room of the BAN Library in
Leningrad and, above all, to Jenny Brine, librarian of the Baykov
Library, CREES.
I would like to thank the University of Essex for granting me study
leave during the Autumn term of 1979, and all my colleagues in the
History Department for providing a congenial atmosphere in which
to teach. Mary McAuley, Geoffrey Crossick, Geoffrey Hosking and
Rose Glickman all made helpful comments on parts of this book in an
earlier form. Professor Yoshimasa Tsuji of Waseda University read
the whole manuscript, and made many useful criticisms. I am
grateful to all of them, though none bears any responsibility for any
errors that remain. Finally, I would like to say thank-you to all my
friends in Birmingham, Moscow, Leningrad, Colchester and else-
where, who offered me the personal support without which I could
not have written this book. Special thanks to Bob Lumley, Kevin
Halliwell, Karl Goswell, Elia Michael, Peter Baxter and, above all,
Philip Jakes.
Introduction
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.1 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, culmin-
ates 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. Its central theme is the struggle of workers to abolish the
autocratic order of the tsarist factory, their efforts to establish
workers’ control of production, and their groping attempts to
reorganise life in the factory. This study is not primarily concerned
with tracing the emergence of a revolutionary political consciousness
among Petrograd workers, and thus the events, political parties and
personalities which dominate other accounts of the revolution recede
into the background of the present study.2 Nevertheless, in deliber-
ately foregrounding the activities of workers around work and
production, it is hoped to shed new light on the wider political
developments of 1917, in particular, by demonstrating that the sphere
of production was itself an important arena of political as well as
economic conflict.
Although the separation of the economy and polity is a particular
feature of modern capitalist society, the unequal distribution of power
within production is crucial to the maintenance of class power in
society at large. If one defines power as the capacity of a group to
control the physical and social environment and to thus make its
interests prevail over those of other groups, then it is clear that
management and workers do not enjoy equal power within the
production process.3 The two sides of industry do not have equal
access to and control over resources and sanctions, be they material or
ideological. In 1917 the unequal distribution of power within
production was a central concern of Petrograd workers, and their
struggle for greater power in industry had major implications for the
balance of class forces in society at large and for the eventual
consolidation of a new state power.
This perspective has implications for the way in which we analyse
working-class activity in 1917, for it means that we must jettison any
simple dichotomy between the ‘economic’ and ‘political’ struggles of
workers, i.e. between struggles which take place within the sphere of
production and those which take place on the terrain of the state. In
Marxist discourse this dichotomy appears in the guise of the Leninist
distinction between ‘trade-union’ and ‘Social-Democratic’ struggles.
Although he was not absolutely consistent in this view, Lenin tended
to argue that the spontaneous struggles of workers for the improve-
ment of wages and working conditions could only generate a
‘trade-union’ consciousness, the chief characteristics of which are
sectionalism and economism, and that only through the intervention
of a revolutionary party could workers develop a revolutionary
awareness of capitalist society.4 The experience of 1917 suggests that
this rigid dichotomy is in need of modification. In that year, in a
context of economic crisis and acute class conflict, the attempts of
workers to defend their living standards and to preserve jobs led
them, to a large extent ‘spontaneously’, to see in the revolutionary
options offered by the Bolsheviks the ‘natural’ solution to their
immediate problems. Moreover, the Leninist thesis overlooks issues
of power and control within production. In most work-situations
there is resistance by workers to the authority of the employer, so that,
in the words of Carter Goodrich, the ‘frontier of control’ is constantly
shifting.5 An orthodox Leninist might argue that such conflicts over
job-control are but a variant of economistic struggles, since they
encroach on, but do not transcend, managerial authority. Yet even at
their most defensive, such conflicts testify to the desire of workers to
impose their definitions upon the work-situation. The experience of
1917 again suggests that when the power of the state is relatively
ineffective, defensive struggles by workers to control production can
quickly become offensive struggles to take power from management,
and that these struggles have profound implications for the balance of
power within society as a whole. The present study suggests that it
was the struggles of workers in the world of work, and the activities of
work-based organisations, such as the factory committees and trade
unions, which were of central importance in promoting revolutionary
consciousness in 1917. This is not to suggest that consciousness
developed solely on the basis of the experience of work. In 1917
revolutionary feeling grew in response to the wide range of problems
that faced the Russian people - problems of war, governmental
ineptitude and the crisis in the countryside. Nor is it to suggest that
revolutionary consciousness grew in a purely ‘spontaneous’ fashion.
Bolshevik agitation played a crucial part in articulating this con-
sciousness. Nevertheless the Bolsheviks did not themselves create
revolutionary feeling; it developed primarily out of attempts by
workers to grapple with problems of survival.
This study concentrates almost exclusively on factory workers in
Petrograd. It ignores important groups such as railway workers,
transport workers, workers in public utilities, postal and telegraphic
workers, shop workers, construction workers, domestic servants,
small artisans and others. This is not because these workers were
defined a priori as somehow less ‘proletarian’ than factory workers. It
was decided to concentrate on factory workers, partly to keep down
the length of the book, and partly because factory workers did
constitute the major element within the industrial labour force and
within the labour movement in Petrograd in 1917. Perhaps something
should be said to justify the inclusion of printers in the category
‘factory workers’. It is true that of the sixty-four print works (tipografii)
in Petrograd for which we have information, twenty-seven employed
less than fifty workers; but even if one excludes the huge State Papers
print works, which employed 5,784 workers, the average print works
still employed 136 workers, so it was more of a ‘factory’ than a small
workshop.6 It should not be supposed that factory workers, in any
sense, constituted a homogeneous social group. They were divided
among themselves by industry and trade, degree of proletarian-
isation, skill, sex, age etc. These divisions are important in under-
standing the dynamics of the labour movement in 1917, and are
explored in Chapters 1 and 8.