On 14th March the Bolsheviks used their majority in the Petrograd City Soviet to pass a resolution that resolved to “clear the Putilov of the White Guardists and bagmen”. Any workers who refused to work would be fired. All workers’ meetings were banned. Any worker found with a copy of the Putilov Resolution would be arrested. Any workers who stayed on strike would be evicted from their homes and have their ration cards removed. After this, those strikes still running (at the Putilov, the Truegolnik rubber factory and the Rozhdestvenskii trampark) were put down by force. When the Putilov workers barricaded themselves in, the factory was stormed and occupied, with several workers shot on the spot. Over three hundred were arrested. Executions followed after a summary trial.25 Estimates of the total number of strikers shot varies from dozens to hundreds. Gordon Leggett records that mass executions took place outside the city where blindfolded workers were put against a wall and mowed down by machine guns.26
Despite this, disturbances spread beyond Petrograd and Moscow, with more revolts occurring in Tula, Briansk, Tver, Sormorvo, Orel, Smolensk and Astrakhan. A strike at the armaments plant in Tula broke out in February after the arrest of workers who had complained that local commissars, and Cheka and Red Army men received better rations. Although it was repressed more strikes broke out again in March and these escalated to a general strike in the city. This was put down by the army who imposed military discipline in Tula’s factories. Strike leaders were identified and sacked.
In June, workers from textile mills, tram lines, printing shops and rail car plants in the city of Tver took strike action to protest the forced conscription of 10% of Tver’s workers into the Red Army. They also protested the lack of fair elections to the local Soviet. Unlike in Tula, the government decided to listen to the strikers, and the special commissar dispatched from Moscow to “liquidate” the strike, V.I. Nevsky, reported back that the strikers’ demands were justified. He also found that Tver’s local Communist Party commissars had been hoarding rations, accruing special privileges and behaving like petty tyrants. Nevsky negotiated with the elected representatives of the Tver strikers, conceded many of their demands were legitimate and recommended to Moscow that the local one-party dictatorship be ended. Because of this the rebellion in the town subsided.27
Tver proved that not every manifestation of worker unrest needed to be dealt with in the bloody manner of Tula or the Putilov Works. Sometimes, as in Briansk, Orel and Smolensk, emissaries from Moscow honestly reported back that strikes were not “counter-revolutionary” but arose from real grievances. At the Eighth Party Congress in March 1919 the senior Bolshevik Nikolai Ossinski, previously head of the State Bank and now one of the leaders of the “Democratic Centralists” who criticised the lack of democracy within the rcp and the Soviets, told delegates honestly, “Rebellions that are going on are not White Guardist, they take place because our commissars behave disgracefully”.28 Ossinski and other Democratic Centralists openly warned of the danger of a “bureaucratic dictatorship”.
Tragically, this approach faltered in the provincial fishing town of Astrakhan. In spring 1919 it sat between Kolchak’s forces on the Volga and Deniken’s sweeping in from the northern Caucasus. If these had joined up they would have formed one united White Army front. This may explain the exceptional brutality with which a strike at Astrakhan’s metal plants and a rebellion by unwilling conscripted soldiers were put down. Communists and loyal Red Army units surrounded strike rallies and opened fire. Workers then joined with rebellious soldiers and fought back. Between 10th and 12th March there was heavy fighting throughout the town, which finally died down as the Communists reasserted control. The Cheka then carried out mass executions.29
Writing in 1990 in the Slavic Review, Vladimir Brovkin, whose work on the 1918 and 1919 mass strikes against the Bolsheviks is invaluable to an accurate understanding of the period, considered that “the strikes of 1919 have remained a blank in Soviet history”.30 To a great extent they still are, yet they are the vital background to the 1921 Kronstadt uprising and proof that it did not arise from “anarchist elements” or a “monarchist conspiracy”, but was the culmination of a consistent and continuous working-class struggle for civil rights. The struggle took political form, but in great part it arose from protest against an intolerable industrial regime. Central to that regime was the imposition of the model of “scientific management” created by the American engineer Frederick Taylor onto Russian industrial workers.
Lenin’s passion for “Taylorism” said much about his conception of socialism. Taylor’s use of time-and-motion studies to make the tasks of the factory more automated and mechanistic had been utilised ruthlessly by American employers to restrict freedom within the workplace and reduce workers to heavily monitored drones. In theory Taylor’s ideas, explained in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), were designed to increase efficiency by providing proper training for workers and ensuring they did not waste their time in boring, unproductive labour. In reality they were used by employers to squeeze every last atom of labour possible from their employees. In his major work, Taylor wrote,
It is only through enforced standardisation of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.31
This was meat and drink to the Bolsheviks. They were classic productivists, in thrall to a vision of increasing industrial production as the only route to economic development and social liberation. They did not question the value of unrestrained industrial growth, or demonstrate the distaste for its moral and aesthetic squalor found in the socialism of Morris, Carpenter and Kropotkin. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all saw the salvation and achievement of socialism in the development of the economy’s productive forces. Therefore any system of management, such as Taylorism, that produced measurable growth in the forces of production was by definition a good thing. Decentralised, grassroots control of production, as found in Factory Committees, self-managed firms or independent cooperatives, which all offered a different perspective on growth and on economic and social development, were deemed irrelevant at best and petty-bourgeois at worst.
The Bolsheviks were of their time. Socialist rhetoric aside, their conception of work reflected the Protestant Work Ethic and unquestioning acceptance of the need for daily, routine, compulsory work performed in order to secure the means of subsistence. Sadly, these attitudes define the work experience of 2017 as much as that of 1917. The zero-hours contract, to take the worst example, is designed for the employers’ convenience, with no regard for “work-life balance”. It is a concept rejected by the growing “Refusal of Work” movement, itself linked to a positive conception of “degrowth” as the necessary route out of social and ecological collapse.