With the abolition of serfdom, the way was open in Russia to new spurts of industrial growth, a modest one in the 1870s and early 1880s, and a major one in the 1890s, during the incumbency of the pro-industrial finance minister Sergei Witte (1892-1903). One can question the extent to which the emancipation as such, meaning its contribution to labour mobility, was a primary stimulus of industrial growth, as contrasted to the state-supported railway construction that followed in its wake and was vigorously pursued in the 1890s, especially the Trans-Siberian line. Surely, despite their emancipation from personal bondage, the peasants' continued attachment to the rural commune (mir, obshchina) limited the degree to which conditions after 1861 would remove past restraints on the complete mobility of labour. The omnipresence of the commune prolonged the ties between the urban worker and his or her village, delaying the transformation of the majority of peasant-workers into a permanent, well-trained, urbanised labour force, fully assimilated into modern industrial life, all its bridges to village life having been burned.[54] Sheer numbers of available workers, however, were never an issue. By the 1890s, despite the persistence of communal restraints, and with Russia's industry - including mining, metallurgy and, in the Petersburg region especially, the manufacture of machinery, rails, rolling stock, ships and military hardware - expanding at a record pace of 8 per cent per annum, the rapid growth of the land-hungry rural population easily provided factories with a numerically adequate labour pool (while at the same time reducing the proportion of workers who were urbanised, literate and self-identified as permanent denizens of the industrial world).
Of course, viewed as a percentage of the overall population, the number of industrial workers was still small at the end of turn of the century. According to the 1897 national census (Russia's first), the empire's population was over 128 million, while the number of industrial workers (an elusive category, to be sure) was only somewhat over 2 million at the turn of the century. However, the social and political importance of these workers became increasingly evident, in part because of their concentration in politically sensitive areas such as St Petersburg (the official capital), Moscow (the old capital and to many contemporaries still Russia's principal city), the ethnically mixed port cities of Baku and Riga, and the industrial regions of Russian-occupied Poland. And to this list should be added the miners of the Urals and the Don basin as well as two groups, the railway workers and the printers, who would become very influential politically - the former because of their rapidly expanding numbers and strategic locations as the empire's railway network expanded from its Moscow hub, the latter because of their special role as an educated middling group located between the industrial working class and the intelligentsia.[55]
The most dramatic manifestation ofthe workers' social and political importance was their participation in strikes and demonstrations. If a strike is loosely understood as any collective work stoppage carried out in defiance of one's employer, then strikes, like other worker actions (most notably flight before the expiration of a contract), certainly took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dissatisfied workers put down their tools and in some cases fled both the factories and mines of their private employers and those owned by the state. Yet before the 1870s, to the extent that government officials were disturbed by such developments at all - first in the mid-i84os and then again in the early 1860s - they were influenced more by the demonstration effect of developments in Western Europe and the possible destabilising influence of the 1861 Emancipation than by actual labour unrest in Russia. To a great degree, such unrest as there was both before and in the wake of the Emancipation, much of it confined to railway construction workers and Ural miners, was viewed by the authorities, and not without reason, as an extension of peasant unrest rather than a discrete phenomenon in its own right. Nor was it viewed very differently in the 1860s by Russia's revolutionary youth, whose perception of the workers was limited to the still quite accurate notion that they were peasants who happened to be temporarily employed away from their villages and who, like the young revolutionary populist Petr Kropotkin, sometimes looked askance at the strike as an illusory weapon, one that was bound to end in failure, yet if promoted by intelligenty, would implant in workers the false hope that their lot could be improved under the existing
system. [56]
Labour unrest among industrial workers began to be taken more seriously by Russian officials, publicists, and political activists of all stripes only in the 1870s, which is when the story of workers in Russia begins to become not only a social but a political narrative. Although it would be foolish to place an exact date on the transition, two events, both involving textile workers - one in 1870, one in 1872 - are particularly relevant.
In 1870 there was a major strike action at what was then St Petersburg's largest textile mill, the Nevsky cotton-spinning factory. Although most of the Petersburg region's larger factories were located at the outskirts of the city, in its industrial suburbs (with some important medium-sized factories located in the city's north-eastern Vyborg District), the Nevsky was exceptional in its location near downtown St Petersburg, at a site that gave it special visibility. In addition, the work stoppage was prolonged and sustained, was followed by a contested, adversarially structured trial of its leaders (made possible by the 1864 judicial reforms), and was widely covered in the press (made possible by the 1865 censorship reforms). In other words, though there had been countless work stoppages in Russian factories before, because it tookplace in the middle of the Great Reforms this was the first such event in Russia proper to enter the public arena and be incorporated into the new civic discourse that flowered during the reign of Alexander II. Strikes would henceforth be a political
issue.[57]
We must, of course, be careful about our use of language. At the time, the workers themselves did not use the term 'strike' - usually stachka or zabastovka in the Russian of those years, but occasionally shtreik - and there is no evidence that they thought of themselves as engaging in a new kind of activity, one that charged the participants with the energy that came from partaking in an international workers' movement or even in a pan-European trend. What is significant, however, is that the government authorities, in a sense ahead of the workers' own curve, did use such language, as did the contemporary Petersburg press. To be sure, when the authorities spoke of a stachka, their emphasis was on the conspiratorial connotation of the term, and at the trial of the leading participants the prosecutors did their best (though with only limited success) to criminalise the workers' action by treating it as a kind of conspiracy against the state. But if official thinking about such phenomena was still quite murky, the views of segments ofthe press were less so and, as in the case ofthe paper Novoevremia, which pointedly (and anxiously) described the Nevsky events as a dangerous new phenomenon: And a strike has befallen us, and God has not spared us!' Perhaps even more revealing of the shift that was taking place in the press's views of labour unrest was the reaction to much less dramatic work stoppages among some Petersburg clothing workers shortly before the Nevsky events. News of these actions had caused the newspaper Birzhevye vedomosti to make the questionable claim that this was 'the first example of workers strikes [stachki rabochikh]' in Russian history, and to cautiously advance the hope that 'for the moment, they will not give rise to the same kind of difficulties here as in West European countries'.[58]
54
The best analysis of industrial workers' continued connection with their villages in the post-reform period is Robert E. Johnson,
55
On railway workers, see Henry Reichman,
56
Peter Kropotkin,
57
For a detailed analysis of the Nevsky strike and subsequent trial, see Zelnik,
58
Zelnik,