Kanatchikov’s father had arranged an apprenticeship for him at the Gustav List factory through a neighbour from Gusevo who had gone to work there several years before. Most immigrants relied on such contacts to get themselves settled in the city. The peasants of one village or region would form an association (either an artel’ or a zemliachestvo) to secure factory jobs and living quarters for their countrymen. Whole factories and areas of the city were ‘colonized’ by the peasants of one locality or another, especially if they all shared some valuable regional craft, and it was not unusual for employers to use such organizations to recruit workers. The industrial suburb of Sormovo near Nizhnyi Novgorod, for example, where one of the country’s largest engineering works was located, recruited all its workers from a handful of surrounding villages, where metalworking was an established handicraft. Through such associations the peasant immigrants were able to maintain ties with their native villages. Most of them supplemented their factory incomes by holding on to their land allotment in the commune and returning to their village in the summer to help their families with the harvest. The factories suffered much disruption at harvest time.fn12 Other peasants regularly sent home money to their families. In this way they were able to keep one foot in the village, whilst their economic position in the city was still insecure. Indeed in some industrial regions, such as the Urals and the mining areas of the south, it was common for the workers to live in their villages, where their families kept a vegetable plot, and commute to the factories and mines.
Many of these immigrants continued to see themselves as essentially peasants, and looked on industrial work as a means of ‘raiding’ the cash economy to support their family farms. They maintained their peasant appearance — wearing their traditional home-made cotton-print blouses rather than manufactured ones, having their hair cut ‘under a bowl’ rather than in the new urban styles, and refusing to shave off their beards. ‘They lived in crowded, dirty conditions and behaved stingily, denying themselves everything in order to accumulate more money for the village,’ Kanatchikov recalled. ‘On holidays they attended mass and visited their countrymen, and their conversations were mostly about grain, land, the harvest and livestock.’ When they had saved up enough money they would go back to their village and buy up a small piece of land. Others, however, like Kanatchikov, preferred to see their future as urban workers. They regarded their land in the village as a temporary fall-back whilst they set themselves up in the city.41
It was through an artel’ of fifteen immigrant workers that Kanatchikov found a ‘corner’ of a room in a ‘large, smelly house inhabited by all kinds of poor folk’. The fifteen men who shared the room bought food and paid for a cook collectively. Every day at noon they hurried home from the factory to eat cabbage soup — just as the peasants did, ‘from a common bowl with wooden spoons’. Kanatchikov slept in a small cot with another apprentice. His windowless ‘corner’ was dirty and full of ‘bed bugs and fleas and the stench of “humanity” ’. But in fact he was lucky to be in a private room at all. Many workers had to make do with a narrow plank-bed in the factory barracks, where hundreds of men, women and children slept together in rows, with nothing but their own dirty clothes for bedding. In these barracks, which Gorky compared with the ‘dwellings of a prehistoric people’, there were neither washing nor cooking facilities, so the workers had to visit the bath-house and eat in canteens. There were whole families living in such conditions. They tried as best they could to get a little privacy by hanging a curtain around their plank-beds. Others, even less fortunate, were forced to live in the flophouse or eat and sleep by the sides of their machines. Such was the demand for accommodation that workers thought nothing of spending half their income on rent. Landlords divided rooms, hallways, cellars and kitchens to maximize their profits. Speculative developers rushed to build high tenements, which in turn were quickly subdivided. Sixteen people lived in the average apartment in St Petersburg, six in every room, according to a survey of 1904. In the workers’ districts the figures were higher. The city council could have relieved the housing crisis by building suburbs and developing cheap transportation, but pressure from the landlords in the centre blocked all such plans.42
