Among the non-Russian masses demands for radical social and economic policies generally eclipsed purely nationalist demands. In general, peasants preferred parties that spoke to them in their own tongue and defended local interests, but they would only support nationalists when they backed their own struggles against the landed gentry. In Ukraine, the nationalist movement was politically divided, weakened by pronounced regional divisions, and limited by the fact that nearly a quarter of the population, concentrated in the towns, was Russian, Jewish, or Polish. Nevertheless the socio-economic grievances of the peasantry had an ethnic dimension since most landowners were Russians or Poles. The middle-class politicians of the Rada were forced to take an increasingly radical stance on the land question in order to maintain peasant support. As this suggests, nationalism was strongest where it was underpinned by powerful class sentiment. In Latvia, for example, a large working class and lower middle class faced a
commercial and industrial bourgeoisie that was Jewish, Russian, or Polish. In 1917 nationalist politicians of a liberal or moderate socialist hue rapidly lost ground to Latvian Social Democracy which had a base among workers and landless peasants, the latter hating the 'grey barons', or Latvian farmers, almost as much as the German nobility. Generally, workers in the non-Russian areas were more likely to respond to class politics than to nationalism. In the Donbas and the cities of eastern Ukraine, for example, there was a strong working class, but it comprised Russians and Russianized Ukrainians who supported the pan-Russian struggle for soviet power rather than a strictly nationalist agenda.
As 1917 wore on, nationalist politicians steadily stepped up their demands for autonomy, partly in the face of obduracy by the Provisional Government, partly as politics in general radicalized. In Estonia the £ government redrew administrative boundaries along ethnic lines after g February but the elected assembly, known as Maapaev, was dissatisfied e with the extent of autonomy on offer. Challenged from the left by jg Russian-dominated Soviets, it steadily moved towards demanding 1 complete autonomy. The reluctance of the government to concede meaningful autonomy was motivated partly by fear that nationalist movements were a Trojan horse for Germany, and by deep attachment to a unified Russian state, especially strong among the Kadets. This was particularly evident in relation to Ukraine. With approximately 22% of the empire's population, Ukraine was by far the largest minority area, and its resources of grain, coal, and iron, together with its strategic position, made it of paramount importance to the government. The latter resisted the Rada's demands for limited devolution of power, with the result that it moved steadily in the direction of separatism. When in September Keren sky finally endorsed the principle of self-determination 'but only on such principles as the Constituent Assembly shall determine', it was too little, too late, and in November the Rada declared Ukraine a republic.
28
Social polarization
At the root of the crisis that overtook the Provisional Government after July lay a serious deterioration of the economy. In the first half of 1917 production of fuel and raw materials fell by at least a third, with the result that many enterprises closed temporarily or permanently. By October, nearly half a million workers had been laid off. The crisis was aggravated by mounting chaos in the transport system, which led to a shortage of bread in the cities. Between July and October prices rose fourfold and the real value of wages plummeted. Between February and October 2.5 million workers went on strike mainly for higher wages, but though strikes increased in scale during the autumn, especially in the Central Industrial Region close to Moscow, they became ever harder to win outright.
We demand that the Ministry of Labour speedily order the factory owners and industrialists to stop their game of 'cat and mouse' and immediately undertake the increased extraction of coal and ore and also the production of agricultural tools and equipment, so as to reduce the number of unemployed and halt the closure of factories. If Messrs Capitalists will not pay attention to our demand, then we, the workers of the iron-rolling shop, demand complete control of all branches of industry by the toiling people. Of you capitalists, weeping your crocodile tears, we demand that you stop crying about devastation that you yourselves have created. Your cards are on the table. Your game is up.
Resolution of the general meeting of the iron-rolling shop of the Putilov
The factory committees responded to the crisis by implementing workers' control of production. Being the labour organizations closest
to the rank-and-file, the committees were the first to register the shift in working-class sentiment away from the moderate socialists towards the Bolsheviks. The first conference of Petrograd factory committees at the end of May overwhelmingly passed a Bolshevik resolution on control of the economy. As the economy began to collapse, the factory committees mobilized to prevent what they saw as widespread 'sabotage' by the employers. Workers' control signified the close monitoring of the activities of management; it was not intended to displace management but to ensure that management did not lay off workers in order to maintain profits. Employers, however, resented any infringement of their 'right to manage' and class conflict flared up on a dramatic scale. In the Donbas and Urals employers abandoned the ailing mines and metallurgical plants, leaving the committees struggling to maintain production. The idea of workers' control had not emanated from any political party, but the willingness of Bolsheviks, anarchists, and Left SRs to support it was a majorfactor in their growing popularity. By contrast, the insistence of moderate socialists that workers' control merely exacerbated chaos in the economy turned workers against them.
In the countryside conflict also began to increase during the summer. The first signs of trouble came when peasants resisted government attempts to get them to hand over grain. The war had seen a fall in the volume of grain marketed - it fell from one-quarter of the harvest before 1914 to one-sixth by 1917 -since peasants had no incentive to sell grain when there were no goods to buy and when the currency was losing its value. Concerned to feed the army and the towns, the government introduced a state monopoly on the sale of grain, but its attempts to induce peasants to sell grain at fixed prices provoked antagonism, peasants preferring to conceal grain or turn it into moonshine. More ominously, peasants grew restive at the slow progress towards solving the land question. The government had set up an unwieldy structure of land committees to prepare the details of the reform, thereby heightening peasant expectations, but was loath to
begin land redistribution while millions of soldiers were still in the field. In addition, it was torn between the Kadets, who insisted that landlords must be fully recompensed for land taken from them, and Chernov, the Ministerof Agriculture, who wished to see the orderly transfer of gentry estates to the land committees. From early summer, peasants began to take the law into their own hands. They acted cautiously at first, unilaterally reducing or refusing to pay rents, grazing cattle illegally, stealing wood from the landlord's forests, and, increasingly, taking over uncultivated tracts of gentry land on the pretext that this would boost the nation's grain supply. In the non-black-earth zone, where dairy and livestock farming were paramount, peasants concentrated on getting their hands on meadowland and pasture. Because of the inability of local authorities to react, illegal acts soared, levelling off somewhat during the harvest, but climbing sharply again from September. By autumn peasants were seizing the land, equipment, and livestock on gentry estates and redistributing them outright, especially in Ukraine. As one peasant explained: 'The muzhiki (peasant men) are destroying the squires' nests so that the little bird will never return.'