The ideological aims of Count D. A. Tolstoy underlying the revision of the Great Reforms were, for example, far from fully realised in the zemstvo legislation but had a much fuller impact in the spheres of education and censorship, where they created a gulf between the regime and the progressive intelligentsia. The dangerous consequences of this phenomenon were manifest in i900-6. The co-operation of the liberal bureaucracy and liberal social forces in the eras of Nikolai Miliutin and Loris-Melikov was abandoned, as was their systematic approach to reform. In the i880s Bunge continued the work of the Great Reforms, and Tolstoi and Pobedonostsev revised it. Thus, if it makes sense to speak of 'the epoch of Great Reforms', there is less reason to speak of 'the epoch of counter-reforms', which would imply co-ordination of the various aspects of internal policy under Alexander III. The course set on preserving the autocracy inviolate, which was proclaimed in the Manifesto of 29 April i88i and reinforced by the decree of i4 August i88i on states of emergency, signified the state's loss of initiative in the realisation of large-scale reforms. That initiative would pass to social forces. When Stolypin tried to regain the initiative for the monarchy he did not have the twenty years he asked for. Those twenty years had been lost between 1881 and 1905.
I would like to stress one more problem. Russian and Western historiography has accumulated a rich store of factual material, many valuable conclusions and observations. But these achievements remain disparate and isolated. A comparison of the results of the study of 'institutional' and 'social' history, a comparison of the work on different reforms and a more attentive attitude to the knowledge already established in the historiography, together with a broadening of the range of sources could all yield new approaches and new answers to the question posed in the title of this chapter.
Russian workers and revolution
REGINALD E. ZELNIK
'Workers', people who live off their daily labour and the sweat of their brows, have of course been present since the very dawn of Russian history Depending on the exact time and place, they have included slave labourers (largely extinct by the beginning of the eighteenth century), a wide variety of highly restricted serfs (numerically dominant from the sixteenth century to 1861 if we include peasants whose lord was the state), and free or 'freely-hired' (vol'nonaemnye) labourers, but 'free' only in the sense that their obligation to their employer, at least theoretically, was purely contractual, while they remained the bondsmen of their noble lords. Viewed more narrowly, however, defined not simply as people who worked for a living, but only as those employed in manufacturing and paid a wage, workers started to become important to the Russian economy and society mainly in the eighteenth century, beginning with the reign of Peter the Great (1689-1725), who placed a high priority on the country's industrial development. But even under Peter and for many years to come, most workers employed in manufacturing and mining, even if paid in cash or in kind, were unfree labourers, forced to toil long hours either in privately owned enterprises or in factories owned by the government. Among those who experienced the worst conditions in this period of labour-intensive industrialisation were the 'possessional' (posessionnye) and 'ascribed' (pripisannye) workers - state peasants who, since Peter's time, had been bound to the factory or its owner, and who were compelled to pass this unfortunate status on down to their children.[51]Even those who were 'free' at least in the sense that they were free to negotiate their terms of employment with employers who had no extra-economic, that is, purely coercive controls over them, were almost all otkhodniki, the serfs of a landowner who controlled their freedom of movement, was given part of their wages as all or part of a quit-rent (obrok), and sometimes even negotiated the otkhodniki's terms of employment directly with the owner of the enterprise where they worked, leaving the workers with little or no power to negotiate with their employers. Although the practice of serf owners contracting out their serfs to non-noble manufacturers was outlawed in the early 1820s, the continued coexistence of institutions of (contractually) free and forced labour, often combined in the same individuals, at a time when forced labour (except for convicts) had virtually vanished from the European scene, was a noteworthy and notorious characteristic of Russian society until as late as 1861, when serfdom was abolished and almost all labour except in some military factories was placed on a contractual footing.
The number of freely hired factory workers in Russia expanded considerably in the 1830s and the decades that followed, though mainly in the growing textile sector (especially the spinning and weaving of cotton cloth). One important stimulus was the decision of the British government to lift its ban on the export of cotton-spinning machinery in 1842. Since the manufacture of machinery was perhaps the least developed branch of Russian industry at that time, most Russian factories were still devoid of mechanisation before this shift, and, if we accept the favoured terminology of Soviet Marxist historians, should perhaps be thought of as manufactories rather than factories, since they depended on hand labour and outwork, were deficient in steam engines, and were often only minimally centralised.[52] Before the 1840s, those few factories (fabriki) that did employ steam-driven machinery, and were therefore likely to bring their workers together under a single roof, had depended to a large extent on the precarious practice of obtaining smuggled British machinery or importing lesser quality machines from Belgium or France. Hence the legalisation of machinery-export by Britain did mark an important stage in the evolution of an industrial landscape in Russia where large numbers of workers, still maintaining the subordinate legal status of serfs, to be sure, were gathered together in large numbers at a central location, most notably in St Petersburg and in the Central Industrial Region (CIR), especially the provinces of Moscow and Vladimir. The large majority of these were for many years to come the workers of Russia's growing number of cotton-spinning mills, with the mechanisation of weaving following only after some delay and probably not nearing completion until the 1880s. Little wonder, then, that despite ideological imperatives to push Russia's industrial revolution back in time in order to combat the concept of Russia's 'backwardness', serious Soviet economic and social historians have acknowledged the absence of a true proletariat in pre-reform Russia, substituting such compromise concepts as 'pre-proletariat' (predproletariat) and in some cases even arguing that pre- reform Russia was yet to experience a full-fledged industrial revolution, since the presence of a proletariat and a truly free labour market was a necessary sign of that historical phase.[53]
51
See my'The Peasant and the Factory', in Wayne S.Vucinich (ed.),
52
This notion, rooted in the writings of Karl Marx and sometimes exaggerated in Soviet historiography, is best exemplified in the title 'Ot manufaktury k fabrike', a widely cited article by the Soviet historian M. F. Zlotnikov published in
53
The Soviet historian most closely identified with the concept of a