Ultimately the most important social result of the increasing industrialization of Russia was the appearance of the factory working class. At the time of the emancipation there were a bit less than a million miners and factory workers, but by 1913 their number had grown to a bit over 3 million, with perhaps another half a million railroad and other transport workers. These 4 million formed the core of the working class, alongside many more seasonal workers in construction and agriculture and some 1.5 million domestic servants. In a country of some 180 million people these were a small minority, but they were strategically placed. They worked in industries that used increasingly modern equipment, and the elite of the working class, the skilled metal workers, performed tasks of considerable technical complexity, cutting precision parts following blueprints supplied by the engineers. For such skilled workers, some education was necessary, and for all the workers, a mental break with the village routine and adjustment to city life was essential.
City life was in itself a whole new world for young migrants from the countryside. Most of them male and living without families for years, they slept in barracks put up by the factory owners. The barracks were notorious, but the managers put them up precisely because they actually kept workers at the factory, since the fast pace of urbanization meant a permanent shortage of housing. Married workers and some single men who found places outside the barracks ended up renting “corners,” parts of basements partitioned off by clotheslines. Sanitation was minimal, and the crowding in the poorer areas of St. Petersburg made it the tuberculosis capital of Europe. A city nevertheless afforded more than a village. Cheap theaters and musical halls provided entertainment, and in the summer were often outside. For those who wanted to better themselves, there were small popular libraries and reading rooms, and popular literature boomed – the first tabloid newspapers and cheap adventure stories appeared on the streets. Workers were increasingly literate. In 1897, 60 percent of male workers were literate, and 35 percent of women workers were literate, but in St. Petersburg the figures were 74 percent and 40 percent, respectively.1 At the same time, the absence of mass education for workers beyond the most elementary meant that many had little formal education but sharp intelligence and a thirst for knowledge.
While the work took them out of the village routine, it soon established another routine of its own. Ten and twelve hour days were normal, with only Sunday and a few hours on Saturday off. Pay was low, but the low skill level of most workers meant that Russian labor was expensive to the employer in spite of the low wages. Conditions were probably not radically worse than in the West, but labor unions and strikes were forbidden, so even the most elementary improvements were hard to come by. The 1885 strike at the Morozov textile works near Moscow brought new factory legislation, requiring managers to at least pay the workers on time. On the whole there was little government supervision of the workplace, and ironically the major result of the government’s efforts was the Factory Inspectorate. It had little power to enforce proper conditions, but its voluminous reports and statistics left a treasure for historians.
Those historians would not have been much interested in the Factory Inspectorate’s records had the Russian working class not become the recruiting ground and principal base of the revolutionary movement. The populists of the 1870s had already attempted to recruit workers, but their great hope was the peasantry, not the workers. The emergence of Marxism in the 1880s under the leadership of Georgii Plekhanov changed the focus. For Russia Marxism was an exotic import, a German ideology with entirely West European roots. In exile in the West, Plekhanov observed the growing strength of Marxist socialism in Germany and was deeply impressed. Armed with a new worldview, Plekhanov rejected the entire heritage of Chernyshevsky and populist ideology. The populists had believed that industrial capitalism in Russia was an artificial growth, the result of the economic policy of the autocracy. Once the autocracy was overthrown, they thought capitalism would disappear and the peasants would build socialism out of peasant communities and artisanal collectives. As a Marxist, Plekhanov believed that the growth of capitalism in Russia was inevitable. It might not grow swiftly, but it was growing and creating a working class – the proletariat, who, in Karl Marx’s words was, “the class called to liberate humanity” and the class that would bring socialism. For the time being, however, Plekhanov and his tiny band of exiles remained in Switzerland translating Marx into Russian and smuggling pamphlets across the Russian border.
It was the industrial boom of the 1890s that gave the Marxists their chance, and from then on their influence and strength grew from year to year. Small Marxist groups appeared in the larger cities, led by young men and women from the intelligentsia like Vladimir Lenin and Iulii Martov, distributing leaflets and organizing reading groups to spread the new ideas. By 1898 they were able to form a party, the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Alongside the Marxists the populist strain in the Russian revolutionary movement revived, producing a series of small groups committed to a peasant revolution but in practice recruiting among workers. They combined the older belief in the socialist potential of the village community with the Marxist notion that the workers would organize socialism in the industrial cities. Much of their activity went into terrorism (which the Marxists rejected), but ultimately the populists were able to form a party in 1901–02, the Party of the Socialists-Revolutionaries to rival the Marxist Social Democrats.
Thus the industrialization of Russia had brought forth new social classes, the businessmen who owned and ran the factories and the workers who toiled within them. It created new forms of urban life and new opportunities for women. Ultimately it also created the social forces that would blow Russian society apart.
1 In Russia as a whole, in the same year, only 29 percent of men and 13 percent of women were literate. In France, Germany, and northern Europe by the 1890s literacy was nearly universal for both men and women. The Russian figures were matched only in southern Italy, and even Spain was slightly ahead. By 1914 Russian literacy rates reached about 40 percent of the whole population, with great differences between women and men.
13 The Golden Age of Russian Culture
The development of Russian society in the reform era profoundly affected Russian culture, both by changing the institutional environment of culture and by calling forth new intellectual and artistic impulses. For almost all spheres of thought and creation, the period was the first great age of Russian culture, and the first one to bring that culture an audience beyond its boundaries. By the 1880s Russia had become part of the world, not just as a major political power but as a major contributor to the arts and even to science.
SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF REFORM
Science had not flourished in the years of Nicholas I. While the universities did provide high-level instruction, the professors were often foreigners and facilities were small and inadequate. Lobachevskii’s new geometry was the work of an isolated provincial professor whose calculations needed only his own genius and a pencil and paper. After the Crimean War, the government realized that the scientific level of the country needed to be raised, and the Ministry of Education provided for the expansion of science departments in the universities as part of a general upgrading of higher education. Equally or more important were the initiatives of the Ministry of Finance, especially its reorganization of the Technological Institute in St. Petersburg. A modern engineering school was crucial to the industrialization program, but the reformed curriculum had one unexpected result of worldwide significance. The young Dmitrii Mendeleev set out to provide a new, up-to-date chemistry course, and in the process found the existing textbooks unsatisfactory. He started to create his own, and in the process of looking for a way to explain the relationships among the various elements in nature, realized that they fit a certain pattern. The idea of a regularity was not absolutely new, but Mendeleev went further: he saw that there were gaps in the pattern and in 1869 he predicted that new elements would be found to exist that filled in these gaps. Soon scientists abroad found his prediction to be correct, and Mendeleev became Russia’s foremost scientist. His fame endured on the walls of science classrooms ever after in the form of charts of the periodic table of the elements that came from Mendeleev’s discovery.