The most visible sign of worker discontent was strikes and, beginning in 1905, the growth of trade unions. The upheavals of 1905, in which economic and political demands were constantly interconnected, were unprecedented in vehemence and scale, though foreshadowed by widespread strikes in 1896-7, 1901 and 1903. During 1905, strikes broke out in almost every industry and every part of the country, and workers began forming illegal trade unions, which, along with strikes, were legalised in the wake of the October manifesto (strikes in December 1905, unions in March 1906). The government clearly hoped (and radicals feared) that legalising strikes and unions and allowing workers to vote for representatives to the new State Duma would give workers effective channels for redressing their grievances, thus leading the labour movement onto a more peaceful path. Initially, this appeared to be precisely what happened. Thousands of workers joined the legal unions and concentrated on attaining better economic conditions. The leaders of these unions, and many members, became increasingly cautious, so as not to give the government an excuse to close the unions down. And, among the socialist parties, workers tended to choose as their leaders Mensheviks, who emphasised, for the short term, legal struggle for realisable and mainly liberal-democratic gains. This moderation of the labour movement might have continued had not the tsarist government acted in ways that aggravated workers' political attitudes. Although trade unions were legal, they were under the close surveillance and control of the police, who regularly closed meetings, arrested leaders and shut down union papers. Meanwhile, employers endeavoured, often with success, to take back economic gains workers had made in 1905, and to form their own strong organisations. When the strike movement revived in 1910-14, workers' frustrations were sharply visible, not only in the stubborn persistence of strikers and the revival of political demands but also in the growing popularity of the more radical Bolsheviks. In the autumn of 1912, Bolsheviks won a majority of workers' votes to the Duma in almost all industrial electoral districts. Many unions elected Bolshevik majorities to their governing boards.[31]
It bears remembering that social and political discontent is a social and cultural construction as much as a natural response to material conditions, tangible relationships or political restrictions. Workers had to see their conditions not as the inevitable lot of the poor but as correctable wrongs. They needed a language of justice and right and a belief that alternatives existed. Workers constructed such a vocabulary partly out of traditional sources of moral judgement: religious ethics and communitarian values, for example.
But fresher sources abounded. Magazines, newspapers, pamphlets and books widely disseminated ideas about universal rights, the natural equality of all human beings and the mutability of every political order. Whatever the sources, notions of justice, entitlement and progress were becoming unset- tlingly widespread among Russia's urban poor. These arguments were evident, for example, in demands presented during strikes. Beside appeals for economic or political change (higher wages, shorter hours, civil rights), many demands focused on what have been termed 'moral issues' (or 'dignity issues'). The most obvious of these was the demand for 'polite address'. But even ordinary economic demands for higher wages, shorter hours and cleaner lavatories, were interpreted as necessary so that workers might 'live like human beings'. In the trade union press, we often hear workers speaking of their identity as 'human beings' not 'machines' (or 'slaves' or 'cattle') and their consequent human 'rights'. Popular discontent, of course, was not simply about justice, democracy and rights. It also contained a great deal of anger and resentment. Once aroused to open protest, workers could express a desire to punish and humiliate, even to dehumanise, those who stood above them and whom they blamed for their sufferings. In this spirit, workers put foremen or employers in wheelbarrows, dumped trash on their heads and rolled them out of the shop and into the streets, or, less ceremoniously, beat them, occasionally to death. Plebeian lives encouraged the poor to dream of revenge and reversal as well as of justice.[32]
Evidence of worker 'consciousness' and protest hardly exhausts the story of working-class mentalities in the pre-war years. As any 'conscious' worker would readily admit (and often complained) too many workers were lost in a dire state of'unenlightened melancholy, impenetrable scepticism, and stagnant inertia'.[33] In practice, according to frequent accounts by dismayed working- class activists, this meant (and the talk here was mainly about men) too much alcohol, workers lying to their wives about wages squandered on drink (along with contempt for, and violence against, women), vulgar swearing, sexual licentiousness and crass tastes in boulevard fiction, the music hall and trashy popular cinema. Working-class women were viewed as victims in all this and as lost in 'backwardness' and 'passivity'. In a way, the cultural behaviour of ordinary workers could be seen as a type of defiance against elite moral norms and, by extension, a form of protest against class domination. But, activists constantly worried, such rebellion did not point to any alternative. On the contrary, it seemed a mark of disillusionment and 'impenetrable scepticism', of escapism and ephemeral pleasure at best.
In the countryside
The vast majority of Russians were peasants - at 85 per cent, Russia had the highest proportion of rural dwellers in Europe on the eve of the First World War.[34] A great deal of everyday peasant life had changed little since the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and even from earlier times. Work, community, family and religion remained the hallmarks of everyday life in the village. Subsistence family farming and handicraft manufacture were still central to the texture of everyday life, little changed by technological innovation. Village life was largely controlled by the commune (obshchina or mir), acting most often through its assembly of male heads of household. The commune held collective title to local peasant lands and made the major decisions about land use (what work should be done in each field, when to do it and by which methods) and periodically, according to tradition, redistributed the holdings, which were divided into scattered strips, among peasant families on the basis of a calculus of hands to work and mouths to feed. The commune also carried out a range of fiscal, administrative and community functions: tax collection, military recruitment, granting or refusing permission to individuals to work away from the village, investigating and punishing petty crimes and misdemeanours, maintaining roads and bridges and the local church or chapel, dealing with outsiders and caring for needy members of the community. The village community was not simply a structural fact of life, but also a cultural value, as can be seen vividly in the collective enforcement ofcommunity values and order - through rituals of charivari (vozhdenie), which publicly humiliated offenders against community interests and norms, and occasional collective violence, some of it startlingly brutal, against deviants and criminals. Community solidarity was a moral value as well as a way to survive in a harsh world. The family household remained the foundational unit of everyday peasant social and economic life. Within the family, the male head of household exercised enormous power: controlling, sometimes brutally, behaviour in his household, representing the family at assemblies of the village commune, and holding village administrative, police and judicial posts. In this patriarchal world, women were relegated to domestic and some farming work and to ceremonial life.
33
A. Zorin [Aleksei Gastev], 'Sredi tramvaishchikov(nabrosok)',
34