The Russian Revolution полностью

2. Workers banded in cooperatives (arteli) who hired themselves out and distributed among members the cooperative’s earnings. Housed in barracks furnished by the employer, they usually left their families behind. Because they did not lead a normal family life, workers in this group regarded their status as transient and usually returned to the village to help out with the harvest. Russia’s largest industry, textile manufacture, relied heavily on such labor.

These two groups constituted the majority of Russians classified by the 1897 census as industrial workers. They consisted mostly of peasants. The next two categories had severed ties with the village.

3. Workers who lived with their families. Because wages were low, their wives usually also sought full-time employment. They often resided in communal quarters provided by the employers, the living spaces of which were separated by curtains, with kitchens used communally. The employers also often provided them with factory shops and schools. This arrangement would be adopted by the Soviet Government during its industrialization drive in the 1930s.

4. Skilled workers who no longer depended on their employers for anything but wages. They found their own lodgings, bought provisions on the open market, and if laid off, no longer had a village to which to return. It is only in this category that the dependence of the worker on the employer, reminiscent of serf conditions, came to an end. Workers in this category were to be found mainly in the technically advanced industries, such as machine-building, centered in St. Petersburg.

As this classification indicates, industrial employment, in and of itself, did not lead to urbanization. The majority of industrially employed Russians continued to reside in the countryside, where most of the factories were located, and retained close connections with their villages. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that they also retained a rural outlook: Schulze-Gävernitz concluded that the principal differences between Russian and Western European industrial workers derived from the fact that the former had not yet broken ties to the land.²⁸ The only significant departure from this pattern could be found among skilled workers (Group Four) who as early as the 1880s began to display “proletarian” attitudes. They developed an interest in mutual aid associations and trade unions, about which they had learned from foreign sources, as well as in education. The illegal Central Labor Circle, formed by a group of skilled St. Petersburg workers in 1889, was Russia’s first rudimentary trade union. The strikes of textile workers in St. Petersburg in 1896–97 to protest working conditions were the earliest overt manifestations of this new spirit.²⁹

Despite the rural origins and outlook of the majority of industrial workers, the government eyed them with suspicion, fearing that their concentration and proximity to cities made them susceptible to corrupting influences. And, indeed, there was cause for concern. In the early 1900s, industrial workers in St. Petersburg and Moscow were 80 to 90 percent literate, which made them an inviting target for the propaganda and agitation of radicals, to which the rural population was quite immune.

The most difficult aspect of rural Russia to understand is peasant mentality, a subject on which the scholarly literature is quite unhelpful. There exist many works on the economic conditions of the pre-revolutionary peasantry, on its folklore and customs, but virtually no scholarly studies that explain what the muzhik believed and how he reasoned.³⁰ It is as if Russian intellectuals regarded the peasant mind as an immature specimen of the progressive mind (their own) and hence undeserving of serious attention. To understand the peasant mentality, one must have recourse to other than scholarly sources, mainly belles lettres.³¹ These can be supplemented with information gathered by students of peasant customary law, which provides an oblique insight into the peasant mind as revealed by the way he coped with problems of daily life, especially property disputes.³² Familiarity with this material leaves little doubt that the culture of the Russian peasant, as that of the peasantry of other countries, was not a lower, less developed stage of civilization but a civilization in its own right.