The servants and house porters demand advice as to which party they should vote for in the ward elections. Every wall in the town is placarded with notices of meetings, lectures, congresses, electoral appeals, and announcements, not only in Russian, but in Polish, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and Hebrew … Two men argue at a street corner and are at once surrounded by an excited crowd. Even at concerts now the music is diluted with political speeches by well-known orators. The Nevsky Prospekt has become a kind of Quartier Latin. Book hawkers line the pavement and cry sensational pamphlets about Rasputin and Nicholas, and who is Lenin, and how much land will the peasants get.
Compared with this, remarked John Reed, ‘Carlyle’s “flood of French speech” was a mere trickle … For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune.’ It was as if the whole of Russia, having been kept silent for hundreds of years, had to express everything on its mind in as short a time as possible. ‘Day and night, across the whole country’, Paustovsky wrote, ‘a continuous disorderly meeting went on from February until the autumn of 1917.’23
This growing political awareness and self-confidence among the workers was reflected in the mushroom growth of labour organizations during 1917. The trade unions and the Soviets resumed from where they had left off in 1905–6. But these were quickly overtaken by the factory committees, an innovation of 1917 which, having been elected on the factory floor, tended to develop faster and be more responsive to the immediate demands of the workers than either the unions or the Soviets, which, being organized at the industrial and city levels respectively, tended to be more bureaucratized. The main aim of the factory committees was to ensure the continuation of production at the plant. Factory closures were a daily occurrence, thousands of workers were being laid off, and many workers suspected their employers of deliberately running down production so as to ‘starve out revolution’ (or, as the capitalist Riabushinsky put it, in a phrase that seemed to confirm these fears, it would take ‘the bony hand of hunger’ to make the workers ‘come to their senses’). The committees set themselves up to fight against ‘sabotage’ by checking up on the work of the management; by taking charge of the supply of raw materials; and by regulating hiring and firing. They took charge of maintaining labour discipline; fought against absenteeism and drunkenness; and organized militias to defend the factory at night. ‘Workers’ control’ was their aim, although by this was meant not so much the workers’ direct management of production as their direct supervision of it, including participation on collective boards of management. As Steve Smith has convincingly shown, this did not make them the anarcho-syndicalist organizations depicted by many historians. It was never the aim of the factory committees to turn their plants into worker-communes and there was nothing in their practice to suggest that they rejected either state power or a centrally planned economy. On the contrary, as organs primarily of workers’ defence designed to keep their factories running in the face of an economic crisis, they often ended up by demanding the nationalization of their plant. It was this, along with the Mensheviks’ domination of the trade unions, that made them the favoured channel of Bolshevik activity in 1917.24
