The tsarist government was reluctant to better the lot of the workers through factory legislation. This was one of its biggest mistakes, for the build-up of a large and discontented working class in the cities was to be one of the principal causes of its downfall. Part of the problem was that influential reactionaries, like Pobedonostsev, the Procurator-General of the Holy Synod and close adviser to the last two tsars, refused to recognize the ‘labour question’ at all, since in their view Russia was still (and should remain) an agrarian society. In other words the workers should be treated as no more than peasants. Others feared that passing such reforms would only raise the workers’ expectations. But the main concern was that so much of Russian industry remained in the hands of foreign owners,fn13 and, if their labour costs were to rise, they might take their capital elsewhere. The gains made by British workers in the 1840s, and by German workers in the 1880s, remained out of reach of Russian workers at the turn of the century. The two most important factory laws — one in 1885 prohibiting the night-time employment of women and children, and the other in 1897 restricting the working day to eleven and a half hours — had to be wrenched from the government, after major strikes. But even these reforms left major loopholes. The small artisanal trades and sweatshops, which probably employed the majority of the country’s workers, were excluded from all such protective legislation. The inspectorates, charged with ensuring that the factories complied with the regulations, lacked effective powers, and employers ignored them with impunity. Working areas were filled with noxious fumes and left unventilated. Shopfloors were crammed with dangerous machinery, so that accidents occurred frequently. Yet most workers were denied a legal right to insurance and, if they lost an eye or a limb, could expect no more than a few roubles’ compensation.
‘The factory owner is an absolute sovereign and legislator whom no laws constrain,’ declared Professor Yanzhul, a leading proponent of factory regulation during the 1880s. Indeed, by hiring workers on private contracts, employers could bypass most of the government’s labour legislation. All sorts of clauses were inserted into workers’ contracts, depriving them of legal rights. Long after such fines had been outlawed, many workers continued to have their pay docked for low productivity, breakages and petty infringements of the factory rules (sometimes amounting to no more than going to the toilet during working hours). Some employers had their workers degradingly searched for stolen goods whenever they left the factory gates, while others had them flogged for misdemeanours. Others forbade their workers to wear hats, or to turn up for work in their best clothes, as a way of teaching them their proper place. This sort of ‘serf regime’ was bitterly resented by the workers as an affront to their personal dignity. ‘We are not even recognized as people,’ one complained, ‘but we are considered as things which can be thrown out at any moment.’ Another lamented that ‘outside Russia even horses get to rest. But our workers’ existence is worse than a horse’s.’46 As they developed their own sense of self-worth, these workers demanded more respectful treatment by their employers. They wanted them to call them by the polite ‘you’ (vyi) instead of the familiar one (tyi), which they associated with the old serf regime. They wanted to be treated as ‘citizens’. It was often this issue of respectful treatment, rather than the bread-and-butter question of wages, which fuelled workers’ strikes and demonstrations.
Historians have searched exhaustively for the roots of this labour militancy. The size of the factories, the levels of skill and literacy, the movement of wages and prices, the number of years spent living in the city, and the influence of the revolutionary intelligentsia — all these factors have been examined in microscopic detail in countless monographs, each hoping to discover the crucial mix that explained the take-off of the ‘workers’ revolution’. The main argument among historians concerns the effects of urbanization. Some have argued that it was the most urbanized workers, those with the highest levels of skill and literacy, who became the foot soldiers of the revolution.47 But others have argued that the recent immigrants — those who had been ‘snatched from the plough and hurled straight into the factory furnace’, as Trotsky once put it — tended to be the most violent, often adapting the spontaneous forms of rebellion associated with the countryside (buntarstvo) to the new and hostile industrial environment in which they found themselves.48
