From this time forth, it would be hard to find a work stoppage of any significant proportions that was not discussed both publicly and in the corridors of government agencies in the context of Russia's possible susceptibility to the European disease of labour unrest and the prophylactic devices that might best be designed to stave off an epidemic. Almost immediately, the government began to move in two divergent directions: on the one hand, harsh police measures, most notably arrest, imprisonment and administrative exile without trial, usually imposed by the office of governor, were brought to bear on the leaders of any future strike action, which was to be treated as a criminal conspiracy against the state, and not merely as an economic conflict, between workers and their employers, within civil society. On the other hand, expanding on the work of a mainly abortive commission of the early 1860s, the government created a series of high-level official commissions in the 1870s that, with some participation of and consultation with a narrow segment of the public (mainly manufacturers, but also academic and technical experts), were intended to devise the kind of factory legislation that might avert the disaffection of workers and discourage them from evolving into a dangerous, 'West European'-type of working class.
The second strike that aroused the fears of both government officials and opinion makers was the prolonged and (unlike the Nevsky strike) ultimately violent clash between textile workers and their employers at Estland Province's Kreenholm Cotton-Spinning and Weaving Factory, the largest textile mill at the time in all of Europe.[59] The dramatic nature of this event - with such striking features as a spectacular setting (a factory less than a hundred miles from St Petersburg, located on a riverine island, its machines powered by a giant waterfall), multiethnic participants on both sides (Russians, Estonians, Germans and a smattering of Finns), death and violence (a collapsed bridge with dozens of women workers drowned, workers hurling stones at soldiers and soldiers almost firing on workers) - magnified the danger (or promise) of worker protest unleashed by the events of 1870, and had the additional effect of propelling a number of disgruntled Kreenholm workers into the ranks of the radical movements that were beginning to arise in St Petersburg at around this time.
From i872 until the fall of the tsarist regime some forty-five years later, the interaction between workers and members of the radical intelligentsia (studenty, as they began to be called by workers whether or not they were actually studying at the time) would be a central element in the evolution of the revolutionary movement in Russia.[60] Out of this often troubled yet often productive relationship would evolve several phases of worker-student political play in two parallel universes dominated by two different kinds of youth: one, the student radicals, formally educated at Russia's leading institutions of higher learning; the other, the politicised workers, self-educated, or formally educated at adult-education centres ('Sunday schools', factory schools, schools of the Imperial Russian Technical Society), or informally educated (or propagandised) in illegal study circles (kruzhki) by the studenty themselves.
The political persuasions on the intelligentsia side of this equation would of course vary considerably over time: Populist in the 1870s and much of the 1880s, vaguely Marxist in the late 1880s and 1890s (in the 1890s and even earlier Russia's Populists had more than a touch of Marxism and Marxists more than a touch of Populism), and finally evolving into the somewhat more stable groupings of Social Democrats or SDs (as of 1903, both Bolsheviks and Men- sheviks) and Socialist-Revolutionaries (SRs) at the start of the new century.[61]Yet the broad structure of the relationship and the conflicts that inhered therein would be surprisingly consistent: radical intelligenty would define themselves as the bearers of the truth that guided and of the intellectual and organisational machinery that drove the revolution, while viewing workers (workers and peasants in the case of Populists and SRs) either as the raw material they would have to forge into a powerful fighting force or as the essential yet still dormant bearers of a revolutionary message, a message that, if most workers were not yet conscious of it, would one day be revealed to them by a combination of experience at the workplace and study with already 'conscious' intelligenty and propagandised workers (sometimes defined as rabochie- intelligenty).
Workers, for their part, or at least the ones most politically aware and most attracted to revolutionary ideas, were repeatedly torn between a positive and a negative perception of the studenty, at times appreciating their concentrated, even passionate attention and gaining a higher sense of their own worth as a consequence, but at other times resenting their tutelage and striving to assert their class and even personal independence from their socially more privileged intelligentsia mentors.
By the early twentieth century a fierce and sometimes agonising competition for worker allegiance had begun between radicals of various persuasions (Bolshevik SDs, Menshevik SDs, SRs, and their rough equivalents among many of the non-Russian minorities), liberals, social and religious organisations, and the government, for working-class political support. Indeed, the entire history of the Russian labour movement lends itself to an analysis framed as a competition between the agents of the Left and the agents of the state for the allegiance of the empire's rapidly growing numbers of industrial workers, whose numbers increased by about a million in the course of the 1890s. Certainly by the beginning of the new century, industrial workers - the proletariat as they were now often called by those who courted them and those who feared them - were viewed by
almost all political actors as pivotal players in the on-going struggle for
power. [62]
On the government side, as already suggested, there were ofcourse internal divisions, as there were on the Left, as to what strategies were best suited to win this competition with the revolutionaries. If police-driven suppression vied with enlightened, European-model labour legislation as the two main contending models of government action, the latter approach generally held the upper hand from about 1882 to 1900. To be sure, good old-fashioned suppression, sometimes very draconian, was always ready on hand when all else failed, and no labour action, especially violent unrest, would be permitted to attain its goals directly, lest the striking, demonstrating, or rioting workers be encouraged to repeat their successful strategies again and again. Yet in the wake of Russia's most serious strikes of the 1880s and 1890s - the Morozov strike of textile workers in Vladimir Province in 1885 and the great citywide textile strikes in St Petersburg in 1896-7 - new laws were introduced that, building in part on the work of the commissions of the 1870s, were aimed at preventing the abuse and exploitation of industrial workers at the hands of ruthless, inflexible employers.[63]
59
R. E. Zelnik,
60
These interactions are addressed in detail by the authors of the articles in R. E. Zelnik (ed.),
61
For the influence of Marxism on Russian Populism, see especially AndrzejWalicki,
62
How and why the efforts of
63
The legislation of 1886 was anticipated by laws in 1882 and 1884 that, among other new restrictions, placed limits on the hours worked by women and minors and provided for a permanent corps of factory inspectors (doctors, political economists and others), administered by the Finance Ministry, to see to it that the factory laws were properly enforced. Just how fully they were enforced is an open question, but there is no doubt that there were zealous factory inspectors who took their charge seriously and came into genuine conflict with recalcitrant industrialists. See M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky [Baranovskii],