Instead of becoming a step in the direction of co-optation, the Shidlovskii elections actually contributed to what became the most important revolutionary innovation to emerge from the labour movement in 1905 - the soviet (sovet). Although the precise origins of the idea of a citywide representative workers' council are still a matter of some dispute, most historians of 1905 agree that the experience of electing factory delegates in February helped pave the way for Petersburg workers to elect their own representatives to the Petersburg soviet in October. The other important source of the concept was, of course, the citywide strike committee, which was the nuclear body from which the soviet developed, with few participants understanding at first that they were participating in the creation of a historically new institution. While some Soviet historians have tried to trace the antecedents of the Petersburg soviet a few months further back in time, to the Assembly of Delegates (Sobranie Upolnomochennykh) that oversaw the Bolshevik-supported (but not led) multi-factory general strike in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in May and June, Solomon Schwarz has demonstrated that the two institutions were qualitatively different and that the Petersburg soviet was a first of its kind, that is, the first in which the members saw themselves as being not only a local strike committee, but an unauthorised instrument of local self-government, one that dared to substitute itself for the officially constituted authorities.[75]
In fact, the Petersburg soviet was the direct result of the October general strike that was launched on 8 October by Moscow printers and spread by railway workers on the Moscow-St Petersburg line, a strike that, thanks to the railway, soon fanned out into almost all the industrial centres of the Russian Empire. The soviet's origins were 'spontaneous' in the sense that unaffiliated Petersburg workers and not the revolutionary parties launched the initiative, first as a citywide strike committee (not without precedent) and then as a claimant to local, and to some degree, since St Petersburg was the capital city, even national, political authority (a phenomenon completely without precedent in Russia, though somewhat analogous to the Paris Commune of 1871). To be sure, all the major revolutionary groups were fairly quick to recognise the importance of the new organisation, though Bolsheviks - still more committed to the tactic of armed uprising and ambivalent about strikes at a time of revolution - more reluctantly so than others. They all - Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs - sought and achieved representation on the soviet's executive committee, with the nominal Menshevik but ultra-radical revolutionary Leon Trotsky, as is well known, playing a very prominent role as the soviet's vice- president.[76]
At least in St Petersburg, the brief period of the October general strike and the soviet's subsequent dominance of the city should be seen as the workers' moment of greatest triumph in 1905. The Petersburg soviet virtually became the governing body of that city for several weeks. However, the bloody suppression of the armed uprising of Moscow workers in December 1905 marked the end of the workers' triumphant period, as those workers who went to the barricades with SD, especially Bolshevik, support were crushed by artillery fire and the onslaught of loyal regiments hurried by train from St Petersburg to Moscow. If the tsar's belated but promising Manifesto of 16 October was extorted from him by the power ofthe labour movement, which was supported in diverse ways by radicals and liberals alike, the defeat of the Moscow workers and the near simultaneous arrest of the Petersburg soviet in December placed the government in a much better position to minimise the actual concessions, including workers' rights, projected in the manifesto.
Although labour unrest continued well into 1906,[77] workers would cease to pose a serious threat to the Russian government until the labour movement revived in the wake of the Lena Goldfield massacre of April 1912. Nevertheless, the 1905 Revolution did bear some palpable if limited gains for workers. This included the government's recognition for the first time of their right, albeit within very tight restrictions, to form 'professional' unions and, though only in the private sector, to engage in non-political economic strikes, as well as their right to elect their own delegates to the new Russian parliament, the Duma, though under a very restricted franchise (rendered even narrower after Petr Stolypin's electoral coup of3 June 1907).[78]
As the country recovered from the throes of revolution, Russian industry, with the aid of a newly energised commercial banking system, began to recover from the setbacks it had undergone in the first few years of the century. By 1910 industry was again experiencing a robust expansion, although at a growth rate of 6 per cent per annum it fell significantly short of the 8 per cent growth rate of the 1890s. As the position of workers in the labour market became more favorable, they grew less and less tolerant of management misconduct and government repression.
Nevertheless, it took the massacre of some one hundred goldminers in the spring of 1912 to resuscitate the still cautious labour movement. If in 190711 the labour movement had largely restricted itself to legal, above-ground activities, causing some Bolsheviks to level the exaggerated charge that the trade unions' Menshevik-oriented leaders were acting as 'liquidators' of the underground Party, Lena ushered in a two-year period of militant strike activity and demonstrations, with workers often striking at a significantly higher rate than they had in the revolutionary year i905. This unrest took place in many parts of Russia and among virtually every category of worker, including the unskilled and semi-skilled textile women of the CIR. But once again the movement evolved most dramatically in St Petersburg, though in the summer of 1914 it took on a particularly aggressive form in Baku. Politically, this worker militancy worked to the tactical advantage of the Bolsheviks and, to a lesser extent, the SRs, while working to the disadvantage of the more cautious and to some extent disillusioned Mensheviks, who increasingly feared that workers' irrational passions, which they saw as reflecting their close peasant origins, were moving them in a direction for which Russia's 'objective' conditions was not historically ripe. Those passions, it was felt, had been aroused irresponsibly by the Bolsheviks, and, to a degree that might prove counterproductive or even worse, were threatening to turn back the clock on Russia's progress toward democracy. Some historians, most famously Leopold Haimson, have suggested that Russian industrial centres were on the cusp of a new revolution, or at least of violent, irrepressible conflagration, when the onset of the First World War in the summer of 1914 put a temporary damper on worker unrest. However, it must also be acknowledged, as does Haimson, that labour unrest in the capital was dying down, at least for the moment, shortly before war was
declared.[79]
Be that as it may, once the war had begun to go badly for Russia, there were growing signs of the labour movement's revival, especially in 1916. By the middle of February 1917, hungry St Petersburg (now 'Petrograd') workers, their wages lagging far behind a spiralling wartime inflation, were again engaged in significant strike activity. This unrest included women textile workers and, replacing drafted workers, recently recruited woman munitions workers, as well as the traditionally militant, male, metal- and machine-workers. By the last days of the month they were joining with other elements of the urban population, including sections of the military garrison, in increasingly confrontational demonstrations that led directly to the fall of the Romanov dynasty and the tsarist regime.
76
Trotsky's own account of these events, though quite tendentious, still repays reading: Leon Trotsky,
77
See Abraham Ascher,
78
See G. R. Swain, 'Freedom of Association and the Trade Unions, 1906-14', in Crisp and Edmonson,
79
L. H. Haimson, 'The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917', SR 23, 4 (Dec. 1964): 619-42, and 24, 1 (March 1965): 1-22; for a somewhat different perspective, see Robert B. McKean,