When this legislation had clearly failed to stem the tide of labour unrest and the on-going, potentially dangerous contacts (often troubled and tense, to be sure) between politicised workers and radical intelligenty, some government officials, most notably Sergei Zubatov of the Ministry of Internal Affairs' Department of Police, began to explore a new and very risky approach.[64]Instead of relying directly on the cruder forms of oppression, but at the same time by-passing the Factory Inspectorate and refusing to allow the workers access to their own, independent labour associations, Zubatov introduced a series of government-sponsored and closely supervised organisations for workers. Often (erroneously) referred to as 'police unions', these organisations were particularly active in Moscow and in the towns of the Jewish Pale of Settlement, most notably Odessa and Minsk. It was Zubatov's aim to divert workers away from socialist agitators, including the so-called 'Bund' (the influential branch of Social Democracy that had been operating successfully among Jewish workers in the Pale since 1897) by providing them with tamer social and intellectual activities such as public lectures, tea rooms and reading rooms, and by expressing enough sympathy for their cause as to give them the impression that it was the government and not the socialists that stood for the attainment of their true interests.[65]
Although Zubatov's efforts began on a successful note, with time his agents, many ofthem over-zealous, began to lose control ofthe situation, inadvertently giving the organised workers more rein than they originally intended and, in their efforts to prove that they were pro-labour, encouraging them to defy their employers. When sympathetic Zubatov-sponsored speakers such as the Moscow University political economy professor I. Kh. Ozerov lectured to the workers about the situation oflabour in West European countries where labour unions were permitted, this was a signal for some of his listeners to claim the same right to organise that existed by then in England, France and Germany. Factory owners, in turn, complained to the Finance Ministry that Zubatov's activities were poisoning the minds of their employees, complaints that set the stage for conflicts between the two most concerned ministries. In this context it is difficult, however, to assign either ministry with the designation 'pro' or 'anti' labour, since Witte himself, while hostile to Zubatov, began to seriously consider that Russia would be better off with a free labour movement, that is, with workers allowed to organise their own trade unions and even, though only under strictly limited circumstances, to engage in strikes. Though it would take the revolution of 1905 to bring about this concession - a rather feeble 1903 law allowing workers in some factories to elect their own 'elders' (starosty) was the only significant labour legislation between 1897 and 1906 - the conflict between the two ministries helped open the door to renewed labour unrest, which was particularly virulent in St Petersburg in the spring of i90i (the 'Obukhov defence') and in Rostov-on-Don and other parts of southern Russia in 1902-3.
The ill-fated Zubatov experiment did have an unforeseen consequence of monumental proportions, the so-called gaponovshchina, a series of events that affected the course of Russian history in a manner that took both government officials and revolutionaries completely by surprise. In 1904, as a spin-off to the already discredited project of police-sponsored labour activity in St Petersburg, a charismatic young priest named Father Gapon was encouraged to open tearooms for the workers of that city, social clubs where the inhabitants of the city's various industrial neigbourhoods could safely engage in innocent, non-political sociability, far from the subversive influence of SDs, SRs or other radical intelligenty. An offspring of the zubatovshchina (Colonel Zubatov's attempt to control the labour movement by sponsoring police trade unions), this project came at a time when the relations between St Petersburg workers and the SD intelligentsia were in a state of temporary lull. Successful co-operation between Petersburg workers and the Marxist intelligentsia had been visible in the mid-i890s when the Marxist group called the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of Labour launched the policy of 'agitation' in support of workers' day-to-day grievances, culminating in the basically spontaneous though intelligentsia-assisted strikes of 1896-7. Soon thereafter, however, disagreements between workers and their frequently overweening intelligentsia mentors would lead to repeated conflicts between them, causing many workers (with the support of some 'worker-phile' intelligenty) to be attracted to the kind of worker-centred ouvrierisme that was then gathering around the journal Rabochaia mysl' (Workers' Thought). These workers, who took seriously the Marxist slogan that the liberation of the working class was the task of the workers themselves, would accept the co-operation of the Marxist intelligentsia on their own terms only, a condition that not only future Bolsheviks like Vladimir Lenin but also future Mensheviks like Iulii Martov, Pavel Aksel'rod and Georgii Plekhanov, the 'father' of Russian Marxism, were unwilling to accept.[66]
Such conflicts with workers were complicated by other aspects of the SD intelligentsia's troubled situation between i898 and i904. Many oftheir leading cadres were either under arrest in Siberia or other venues or had fled abroad to Paris, Geneva, Zurich or London, with few opportunities for direct personal contact with Russia's workers. The supposed founding congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDRP) in Minsk in 1898, poorly attended, and including only one genuine worker, had proved abortive, while the Second Congress (Brussels and London 1903), while well attended, had culminated in the Party's split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions and the temporary withdrawal of the Jewish Bund from the Party's ranks. Perhaps more to the point, and in a sense underlying all these problems was the SD intelligentsia's difficulty in addressing the issue of how best to relate to the 'spontaneous' labour movement, with its tendency to deviate from the norms of intelligentsia-contrived 'consciousness' at times by spinning off in the allegedly apolitical direction of'Economism', at other times pulled in the direction of senseless violence and the destructive, self-defeating riot (bunt). Although by no means supported by all SD intelligenty, and himself highly critical of those intelligenty who did not share his views, it was Lenin who in his well-known polemical pamphlet Chto delat? (What Is to Be Done?) came closest to openly revealing the deeper problematics of worker-intelligentsia relations and unleashing the painful and divisive issue of spontaneity versus consciousness.[67]
As a result of these circumstances, with the issues of worker autonomy from the intelligentsia now merging with militant workers' emphasis on strikes and other mass actions, the time between the Petersburg textile strikes and the appearance of What Is to Be Done? was one of maximum tension between worker-phile (ouvrieriste) workers and those Marxist intelligenty who were most concerned to retain and expand their leadership role in the movement.
This is not to say that all co-operationbetween workers and Marxist intelligenty was discontinued, for in the entire period from the mid-i890s to 1905, that thread, while often damaged, was never broken.[68] But it is to say that by late 1904, when Father Gapon's leadership of St Petersburg workers had begun to take fire, he found a vacuum ofauthority among the workers and a hunger for someone to fill the shoes that might otherwise have been filled by revolutionary Social Democrats.
64
See Jonathan Daly's chapter on police in this volume. The classical English-language study of Zubatov's programme is Jeremiah Schneiderman,
65
On the Bund (formally, the General Jewish Labour Union in Russia and Poland), see Henry J. Tobias,
66
By far the best treatment of these and related developments are Allan K. Wildman,
67
For a discussion of Lenin's pamphlet in the broader context of Marxism's unresolved tensions around the leadership role ofworkers and worker-intelligenty relations in Russia see my 'Worry about Workers: Concerns of the Russian Intelligentsia from the 1870s to
68
Apposite examples ofthe numerous militant workers who, despite some painful encounters with intelligenty, continued to identify with the RSDRP and retain their faith in the Marxist intelligentsia are Semen Kanatchikov and Ivan Babushkin; see