Did the tsarist regime in its hectic career after 1861 arrive at a coherent strategy on its working class? Soviet historiography claimed that it did, but it consisted of the repression of workers' movements, complemented by the bribery of welfare, the deceit of unions sponsored by the state, and the ideological and cultural corruption of Sunday schools, temperance societies, and rational recreation. Three generations of Soviet historians attempted to "expose" tsarist policy and purpose, continuing the tradition established by the radical intelligentsia, party organizers, union leaders, strikers, and so many rank-and-file workers before 1917. The autocracy repressed a class that was growing in consciousness as it became first a class in itself through the development of capitalism promoted by autocracy, and then a class for itself under the guidance of the Marxist intelligentsia and eventually the Bolsheviks. Capitalism was inevitable, the emergence of the working class was necessary to that process, and the contradictions of capitalism had to work themselves out through class conflict, the struggle for emancipation, and its dénouement in the Revolution of 1917 and beyond. The repression of the class was not a policy choice since the state could engage in no other form of action; it was doomed to failure from the outset but fated to run its predestined course.

The defects of such an account are numerous and easy to caricature, but its central inadequacy lies in its denying agency to, of all things, the Russian [End Page 307] state. The state has become a mere automaton at the hands of Capitalist Fate; and only the Marxist intelligentsia, more specifically the Bolsheviks and Lenin, have been blessed with agency. The autocracy had no options, according to this version of what happened; its script had been written before the working class had appeared; and its performance cannot be meaningfully assessed against its ambitions or compared to that of other capitalist states. As such, there was no strategy at all; it would be hopeless to look for one; and the historian may do no more than chronicle the ceaseless conflicts that punctuated the career of the late imperial regime. With some distinguished exceptions like L. M. Ivanov, who saw the mixed bag of possibilities in the Russian proletariat, or T. K. Gus´kova who examined the peculiar features of the Urals workers, Soviet historiography has ended up being just such an exhausting and deadening chronicle sustained by an immense output of archival publications.¹

Non-Soviet accounts, however, have not proposed even a general pattern, evidently because none was discernible, and have preferred to examine the problem through discrete blocks of analysis. The first of these blocks was what constituted the "labor question" and how it was handled. Reginald Zelnik's first book has yet to be superseded in any language for its investigation of the "labor question" as it was discussed by officials, "experts," and businessmen in the middle of the 19th century.² But the officials and businessmen saw the problem of a new industry and new working class as one of urban degeneration, poverty, and political disaffection; and their solutions were health controls, urban development, regulation, and repression. Such definitions of the "labor question" came hot from the anvils of Germany, France, and England and focused on the challenge of a new and growing class of a class-based society. But such a definition of the "labor question" in Russia did not include the workers who for more than a century had toiled in the mining and metallurgical sector in the Urals and elsewhere, in the rural serf factories of the nobility, and in cottage industries (kustari) all over the country. Workers already comprised multiple categories of serfs, peasant craftsmen, and urban artisans when the new class in advanced factory industry multiplied so vigorously from the 1820s on. The "labor question" was almost a code or shorthand used by officials and the intelligentsia to discuss this modern working class abstracted from workers as a whole; it conveniently delimited but significantly narrowed the sphere of power relations, class structure, and [End Page 308] social ordering; and the bureaucracy and the radical intelligentsia competed for control of this space opened up by the "labor question."

Since legislation is assumed to define the field at its most abstract, comprehensive, and normative, it has been privileged over rules, regulations, and administrative action, which are supposedly designed for limited application. Joachim von Puttkamer's work has embraced the largest chunk of labor legislation from 1881 to 1905; and since so much of the law was oriented to the welfare or protection of workers, his fidelity to the content of this legislation makes it appear that the primary thrust of tsarist labor policies was welfare and protective regulation, however keenly he is aware of its limitations.³ The exhaustive account of the Soviet historian I. I. Shelymagin is limited to "exposing" the inadequacies of tsarist legislation without capturing the nature of the power struggles between workers and "exploiters"; and the post-Soviet work by E. V. Khokhlov has made sweeping claims on the normatizing agenda of the Shtakel´berg and other commissions from the 1850s to the 1880s.⁴ But the unavoidable issues of relations of power, of unions and strikes, and the "lesser" ones of culture were in fact directed through rules and administrative orders rather than mediated by laws. In the event, legislation coincides in effect with the domain of what used to be called the "labor question" in mid-century; and legislation and regulation concerning pre-modern workers or workers outside factory industry have not been touched on, with the exception of the artisanate in an independent monograph.⁵

As for the other principal categories of workers—those in mining and metallurgy, in the railways, in the plants run by the war and naval ministries, and in cottage industry and the more elusive groups like construction workers, menials, and casual labor—there is little or nothing about what was legislated for them. All these groups were administered through a vast number of rules and regulations neither dignified by the term legislation nor systematized like the rules and laws regarding factory workers. This is especially noteworthy in the case of workers in mining and metallurgy, chiefly in the Urals, on whom real legislation did exist (the Ustav gornyi of 1806, for example). Here the laws, rules, and administrative and factory practices lie in a tangled heap and seem to have discouraged independent study of the legal position of these workers. [End Page 309]

The scanty work on labor law, even from before 1917, suggests that such law as existed did not embrace many fields of labor relations either thematically (power, culture) or sectorally, and that a book or books on the subject would be impossible in fact.⁶ If confined to labor legislation, such a study would be imprisoned within the "labor question," whereas an attempt to be comprehensive would take it far beyond labor legislation to invade the territory of labor relations and practice.

The relations of power between workers, on the one hand, and the state and managers, on the other, have inspired remarkably few studies, important though they obviously are. These studies are of four major types.

1. Works that address the contest between the state and political groups, in which workers play the secondary role of supplying firepower for revolutionary organizations. Absorbed, and sometimes obsessed, with the heroic joust between the intelligentsia and the state and their respective strategies of mobilizing the masses, these accounts only marginally deal with the state's labor strategies.
2. Studies of the working class (rather than of political parties), their conditions of living and working, and of their movements. This large body of literature focuses on workers themselves to the virtual exclusion of the action of the state, except to record how workers struggled to escape its tentacles. The state seems to engage in nothing but repression; and in this respect these works supplement Soviet scholarship, although without its predictable teleology.⁷ [End Page 310]
3. The remarkably few works that attend to action "from above" by the state and management. Zelnik's two monographs range over just this field for St. Petersburg from mid-century to the Nevskii strike of 1870 and for the Kreenholm strike of 1872.⁸ These are perhaps the best accounts we have of how "repression" was established as policy in the early 1870s, and of how officials faced the dilemma of distinguishing between the permissible "economic" and the seditious "political" strike. These elusive distinctions between the economic and the political, which obsessed the Narodniks of the 1870s and the Marxists from the 1880s on, had already become a daily bureaucratic headache to the gendarmerie beginning in the 1870s. But Zelnik's example has not been followed as much as it might have been.
4. Works on Police Socialism. This topic has attracted considerable attention owing to the coherence of the theme, the focused nature of the action, and the theorizing that accompanied it, which were in spectacular contrast with all the other forms of bumbling repression, half-measures of welfare, fragmentary legislation, or piecemeal cultural indoctrination.

Thus we have chiefly only Zelnik and the group of Zubatovshchina (police socialism) studies on the state's direct engagement with workers, or "histories from above."⁹ All other studies are "histories from below," of the condition of workers and their movements against the state and employers, almost to the point of ignoring the state, bizarre as that may appear in a situation like the Russian one.

No single set of principles seems to underlie the action of the state from the 1860s to 1917 as seen from these works of non-Soviet historiography. In contrast, Soviet historiography has so obviously sought to fit every trivial detail into the Procrustean bed of tsarist repression and capitalist contradiction that it has yielded an ideological chronicle more than the "scientific" history it claimed to engage in. Workers seem not to have been taken seriously by the [End Page 311] bureaucracy or were written off as a cause lost to socialism, especially after 1905. Officials elaborated grandiose plans, and executed large segments of them, on agrarian structures; industrialization and economic development; rural administration and zemstvo, parliament, and representative government; the judiciary; the press; education; military reform; nationalities; colonial rule; global power structures, and much else. Yet they seem to have been inadequate and tentative about workers. No one person or group of officials entered this wilderness with a missionary purpose in the manner with which Dmitrii Miliutin shouldered the burden of military reform, Sergei Witte of economic development, and Petr Stolypin of agrarian reform. No great careers were made by carving an empire out of this otherwise promising territory. Only the state's sponsorship of workers' unions is associated with one person, Sergei Vasil´evich Zubatov, who did indeed make it his missionary purpose, but he was an official of the Okhrana at a secondary level, not one of the major political figures of his time. A faceless bureaucracy performed its bureaucratic routines that seemed to be of little moment even for officials' memoirs.¹⁰

Practice without Theory

The reason for such apparent neglect may lie in the obvious. Neither the autocracy nor its conservative supporters among the nobility or the intelligentsia could possibly discern a decisive role for workers in the future construction of Russia as they could so naturally with respect to the peasantry. It required a socialist imagination to assign such significance to that picayune phenomenon; and it is not surprising that the only person who attempted to formulate a strategy was Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov, the "renegade" or "apostate" revolutionary Narodnik who had campaigned with such energy among workers in his Narodnik days in the 1870s and claimed in 1906 that "I know peasants little and have not been able to get close to them," but that "workers are the closest to me in spirit," and that "workers are my own people."¹¹ He argued that workers entering the factory and urban life required a substitute for the commune which they had just abandoned; he implied that the state also needed that ersatz commune for the more effective subordination of workers. He therefore proposed incorporating workers through representative organizations responsible to the state in the "spirit of the estate," and constructed a putative theory of workers as an estate.¹² But his was a solitary theoretical voice among conservatives. [End Page 312]

Neither the regime nor its supporters could formulate a strategy, but the uncoordinated actions could be made to yield a pattern over the half-century and more after 1861. Stated baldly, it amounted to attempting to constitute workers as an estate (soslovie) in mutant form. It derived from the traditions of Russian statecraft in general and of action with respect to workers in particular; it was crafted as one of the many-sided responses to liberal egalitarianism and socialist class struggles; and it ran parallel to but was not directly inspired by European conservative strategies of integrating workers to the social hierarchy through welfare, leisure mobilization, and political organization and representation.

However, estates in Russia seemed both too archaic and too imprecise to attract much attention either inside or outside the Soviet Union. Faced with the contradictory trends of the mounting attacks on estates and the reassertions on their behalf, Abbott Gleason has come dangerously close to claiming that the senescence of the estates contributed to their virility.¹³ After the Cold War, Boris Mironov's authoritative history of the imperial period has devoted considerable space to estates, if only to reassert the modernization thesis of their atrophy and mutation into classes as Russia headed toward a "normal society," that is, two steps behind Europe in its modernization.¹⁴ Studies of capitalists and of the bourgeoisie stress the vigor of the merchant estate (kupechestvo), its accumulation of privileges, and its adroit exploitation of the patronage system, amounting to an effective fusion of class and estate advantages.¹⁵ The unpromising terrain of the urban petty bourgeoisie, organized in part as the meshchanstvo estate, has revealed unexpected riches.¹⁶ More recently, Natal´ia Ivanova and V. P. Zheltova's large tome on estates and classes have suggested that workers were more homogeneous than the bourgeoisie owing to their common peasant background and specifically estate membership, which together contributed enormously to their impressive [End Page 313] class solidarity and "class consciousness" of the revolutionary years;¹⁷ and Thomas Owen's independent argument that the bourgeoisie was too fragmented along estate, ethnic, and regional lines to develop class consciousness lends indirect support to their thesis.¹⁸ Sheila Fitzpatrick's important article on the relevance of estates in comprehending the social hierarchies and identities of early Soviet times demonstrates not only the validity of investigating this overly contemned conceptual structure but also that estates were sufficiently vibrant in late imperial Russia for them to contribute to the ordering of early Soviet society.¹⁹ These works collectively suggest that late imperial social strategies belonged to the European patterns of "modernization" or the resistance to it, presented in most focused form by Arno Mayer in his Persistence of the Old Regime in Europe.²⁰ Such cohabitation has been described as "sedimentary"—that is, one layer was set over another without dissolving or displacing it, so that estate and class flourished in competitive unison rather than emerging sequentially.²¹ Conservatives were wedded to continuities just as their opponents pursued discontinuities; and it should come as no surprise to us if these theoretically irreconcilable opposites should have cohabited in a real world that can never wholly embody any one theory.

Gregory Freeze's contribution, however, remains the most important, albeit with a major limitation. He has argued that estates were novel, not archaic, as they were formed, in effect, only in the early 19th century and evolved concurrently with classes at least until the Great Reforms of the 1860s.²² He has not, however, pursued the full implications of his own thesis for the post-reform period of industrialization from 1861 to 1917. Faced with the considerable evidence of estate-type strata and their social and political vitality, Freeze has retreated into claiming that they were "survivals," and hence by implication archaisms, without accounting for their dynamism suddenly petrifying after 1861. Furthermore, he has tended to read the noisy action by noble lobbies for the revival of estates as policies of the autocracy and then presented the contradiction of the formation of classes and the conservation of estates as fatal to the regime. [End Page 314]

I would argue that neither were estates or estate-type formations "survivals" somehow escaping the capitalist juggernaut, nor was their competition with classes a fatal contradiction. Instead, it was the strategy of the state to contain the danger of class formation through estates. But these were no longer the estates so beloved of traditionalists and lobbyists: they were new formations, a species of mutant estates if you will, without corporate structure but legally validated and socially sanctioned, flexible enough to absorb such social upstarts as the working class while securing the venerable presence of nobility and peasantry. Much of our energy and attention is diverted to examining whether the estate itself was surviving or reviving after 1861. Indeed, the estate was becoming in many senses obsolete, as so many historians have correctly recorded, but estates were not necessarily being overtaken by classes, as too many historians have wrongly concluded. There were alternatives to class, and these were derivations or emanations from estates without any longer being proper estates as defined in law and bequeathed by history. The innovative energy of the late imperial state was exhibited in constituting workers as just such an estate-type social stratum, breaching class theory and ignoring estate laws and thereby privileging hierarchies of unequally endowed social groups over hierarchies of class within citizenship as one of the constitutive principles of the late empire.

The meaning of soslovie is notoriously confused, which is almost to be expected from the deliberately untheorized pragmatism of the conservative. The legal term for social orders or status groups was sostoianie, but in normal usage most people preferred soslovie, here rendered as estate. It meant at least the following: (1) bodies constituted by the state, with hereditary membership and elected representatives responsible to the state, as were peasants, nobles, meshchane, and Cossacks; (2) occupations and professions such as the bureaucracy, the military, and the clergy; (3) more informally, other professions and categories such as the free professions and students, including artists, musicians, or writers; (4) legal statuses which did not necessarily have corporate structures, such as Jews, inorodtsy, and many nationalities; (5) even institutions like the Senate; and (6) any general social category of class, status, occupation, religion, nationality, or tribe.²³ This welter of definitions and usages points to the common attribute of a social order determined by the state with groups slotted into their places in a hierarchy. As a hierarchy of constituted groups ordered by the state, it was set off against the egalitarianism of citizenship and of its self-constituting hierarchies of status and of class. Constituting and ordering belonged to the traditions of autocracy, but only Tikhomirov saw its theoretical promise even for the working class. [End Page 315]

Unity through Censuses

Workers were first assembled into a single entity through statistics. Until the Great Reforms, population statistics were led by the tax censuses or revisions, which contained numerous counts of workers; but these were all as estates, as historically and legally established, not as a single identity specifically of workers. After the last (Tenth) Revision in 1858, the population censuses began, that is, a count of the whole population rather than just the taxpaying part of it as in the revisions. They began as urban censuses, and in them workers were listed specifically as such.

With the census of St. Petersburg in 1869, class and estate hierarchies appeared side by side, as if to assert that both classifications of Russian society were valid. Thus workers were listed both as one of the occupations of the raznochintsy and as a class in industry after owners and managers.²⁴ The censuses of 1881, 1890, and 1900 also inserted workers both within the occupational listings of industry and trade and in a class hierarchy of four levels—owner, manager, worker, and self-employed without workers.²⁵ The Moscow censuses of 1882 and 1884 adhered to the now-established format, although with only the triple distinction of owner, clerical staff, and worker, without the individual self-employed as in St. Petersburg.²⁶ The other major towns, especially Odessa and Baku, followed the lead of the capitals.²⁷ Iu. E. Ianson noted a 76 percent "peasant–petty bourgeois" (krest´iansko-meshchanskii) presence in St. Petersburg in 1890, imparting statistical precision to a common observation that urbanization and proletarianization [End Page 316] assumed the form of peasantization.²⁸ Workers in whatever guise were, however, identified as a single entity.

The only proper population count of the Russian empire in its entirety on a single day was held on 28 January 1897. It classified the whole population into estates and into 65 occupations²⁹ and then published a separate volume devoted to workers alone, at the behest of Minister of the Interior Viacheslav Plehve.³⁰ This census thus takes in the full range, scattering workers into estate and occupational fragments and then assembling them into a single category of the population.³¹ It was an honor accorded only to workers, and it seemed to suggest "that the formation of the working class was at this time the most 'visible' and calculable process (compared with other classes)."³² Conceptual unification is undeniable, but whether it amounted to recognition of class status is open to question, since conservative social structuring headed in an alternative direction.

Unification through Legislation?

The other overarching process of homogenization (but also of fragmentation) was legislation. Some branches of labor legislation tended to uniformity, especially those on the employment of women and children, on the factory inspectorate, and on the labor contract. The law of 1 June 1882 prohibited child labor under the age of 12, restricted it between the ages of 12 and 15, and established a factory inspectorate to enforce the law. On 3 June 1885, night work for women and children under 17 was prohibited in certain industries and gradually extended thereafter. The law of 3 June 1886 regulated the contract itself, providing for workbooks for workers with all the terms of the contract written in them; two weeks severance pay; wage payments every month without deductions for whatever reason; payment only in cash, not in kind of any sort; and no changes to the terms of the [End Page 317] contract during the period of the contract.³³ On 2 June 1897, the working day was restricted to 11.5 hours for all private and state sectors in manufacturing, mining, and railways, and it provided for 66 compulsory holidays a year. This was as comprehensive as the law on hiring. On 2 June 1903, workers suffering injury at work were to be compensated; this was the first step toward accident insurance, and it was enacted in the usual stages, sectorally, from then until 1906. In 1912, a general law on accident and medical insurance finally emerged, with provision for an insurance council to enforce it; and it embraced all sectors, including about 3 million workers in its ambit, which was extraordinary.³⁴

But the development of labor law was at best only a general long-term tendency, and so much legislation was partial that it is not easy to discern the standardization that the law is expected to provide. The artisanate was excluded as ever from its ambit, and the Urals workforce was always subject to further exceptional laws. The process itself was fragmented, with sectors, categories, and regions receiving separate legislative treatment even when the same law was extended to each. The logic of estates organization demanded unique conditions and therefore fragmentation, whereas a unified labor market required uniformities, with the menace of a single working class looming ominously. In the event, both tendencies operated simultaneously in a manner that was obviously messy and "irrational" to the observer informed by the lucid theories of the socialists and the practice of Europe. In the long term, it tended to homogenization under the law, but the pace was glacial, and it would have taken at least until the 1930s, at that rate, to arrive at something akin to a unified labor law for all workers. Meanwhile, generations lived and died in a state that so many are pleased to call "transitional," but that in fact is as permanent as any historical age, just as the Soviet Union germinated, blossomed, and faded, all in the transition to communism.

Concepts of the Worker as a Hybrid

While statistically a single entity called workers was rapidly forming during the latter half of the 19th century, and legislatively it was taking shape far more uncertainly, no one in the bureaucratic and conservative camp explicitly made a theoretical statement on his concept of the worker. There were, however, innumerable pronouncements on and about workers from which we may derive what was understood as a worker.

In this view, workers constituted the class defined in political economy and supposedly found in the factory districts of Europe, the mobile wage-worker, dependent almost wholly if not entirely on his wages for his livelihood and legally free to negotiate the terms of his employment. This species, [End Page 318] it was always said until the very end of the empire, did not exist in pure form in Russia; at best, it was always an approximation; and that approximation was a fusion of industrial wage labor and the peasant or rural craftsman. This was presented as both a statement of fact and as an ideal to be achieved or maintained as appropriate. This distinct category, called the worker but not a true worker, was then analyzed in his numerous avatars, chiefly the factory serf or ex-serf of the Urals and elsewhere, the rural craftsman, the peasant working in the rural factory, the peasant as urban migrant or seasonal labor, the factory or urban worker who had left his family in the village, the artisan or urban craftsman, and the historically constituted estates of workers, such as the Tula armorers. If a category of the population could be so clearly identified by occupation and wage work and yet was not a class, it could be only its alternative, a soslovie. This conclusion gave rise to the untheorized theory of workers as an estate rather than a class; although not stated as such anywhere, this view was meaningful to its users.

The Russian worker as a hybrid peasant-worker was the topic of much celebrated polemic before the Revolution and has been investigated in considerable detail during the past half-century, more outside the Soviet Union than within it. The peasant composition of the workforce has been repeatedly shown in many different ways: how workers retained their land connections even if they did not cultivate their plots, maintained their families in the village, and returned to the country to marry, for vacations, and to retire; how in town or the factory district they depended on the support system known as the zemliachestvo or persons from their villages; or how labor recruitment most often took place through the labor cooperative (artel´) of their fellows from the same rural districts.³⁵ These studies eroded the Marxist and later Soviet thesis that a pure proletariat—free of the land, permanent to the factory, and increasingly hereditary or born of proletarian fathers—had been forming or had formed sufficiently to constitute a critical mass for the workers' revolution. But more than the validity or otherwise of the hybrid peasant-worker thesis, it is important to examine the meaning of its having been advanced so consistently by both the bureaucracy and intelligentsia from mid-century until the eve of World War I.

By the 1840s, the orthodoxy had been established that the worker was and should remain a peasant in the factory on the grounds that agricultural [End Page 319] earnings would act as insurance against unemployment and material deprivation, that the rural community would protect him from anomie and moral degeneration, and the village would fix his subordinate position in the social and political hierarchy sufficiently to forestall revolutionary urges. This view was presented in different ways, in part or as a whole, by ministers like E. F. Kankrin and P. D. Kiselev, the leading Slavophile Ivan Kireevskii, and the influential Prussian conservative scholar Baron Haxthausen. Lesser figures such as the political economist Ivan Gorlov, Councillor of State Ludwik de Tengoborski, and even Frédéric LePlay followed suit.³⁶

Leading the conservative press after the Emancipation and aggressively campaigning for a dynamic conservatism, Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov lectured his readers that "it would be absurd to regard [workers] as proletarians,"³⁷ a word he reserved for the technical precision of landlessness. A major congress of industrialists in 1870, with full participation by officials, roundly declared that there was no working class in Russia "as in the West" because "we do not have a proletariat, which is a matter of envy among all foreign states." "We do not have two classes, only two categories of workers, of which one works in factories, and the other at home in the villages, chiefly wherever agriculture is inadequate for subsistence."³⁸ High officials like A. A. Lieven, the governor of Moscow, were not being original by stoutly claiming in 1871 that "we do not have a proletariat," and that factory work, like cottage industry, was just another source of earning for the rural population.³⁹ [End Page 320]

Another type of official, the factory inspector, backed up this polemical argument with his universally accepted authority as a "neutral" expert anointed by "science." Ia. T. Mikhailovskii, the chief factory inspector, distilled the wisdom of a generation by presenting the Russian worker to an international exhibition at Chicago in 1893 as blessed and protected by his landholding. The worker "loves his land and leaves it unwillingly for the factory"; he "maintains permanent contact with his village"; and, with the security of his land, he could "demand more for his labor than he could have, had he been completely homeless and landless."⁴⁰ I. I. Ianzhul, the first factory inspector, complained of non-factories being passed off as factories, and hence of peasants as workers.⁴¹ In his memoirs, published as late as 1907, this outstanding official could still assert the peasant substance of the worker: "The Russian working class, or as it incorrectly describes itself, 'proletariat' (because the major part of it is still tied to the land and therefore has no right to call itself the dispossessed)."⁴² P. A. Peskov, the factory inspector of the Vladimir circle, found it difficult to apply the new law on child labor because most often he could not distinguish the factory from cottage industry in the textile sector.⁴³ In 1885, V. I. Miropol´skii of the Voronezh factory circle, which embraced eight large provinces of the Black Earth and Volga regions, described his inspection rounds as forays deep into the country, "sometimes into woods and marshlands, far from habitation";⁴⁴ even the inspector of the industrially more developed St. Petersburg factory circle managed to complain bitterly about having to travel to remote factories on horseback;⁴⁵ and their superior, V. P. Litvinov-Falinskii, the director of the Department of Industry [End Page 321] in the Finance Ministry, claimed at the turn of the century that the labor question did not yet exist in Russia because workers were peasants.⁴⁶

Officials, from ministers down to factory inspectors, and conservative members of the intelligentsia such as Katkov did not proceed beyond general and ideological statements, but their political opponents, the Narodnik intelligentsia, backed up these theses with formidable empirical research, known collectively as the zemstvo statistics. They presented the worker as being part peasant because he retained some sort of village connection, be it through part-time agricultural employment, ownership of land, family ties in the village, membership in the commune, taxes paid as a peasant, vacationing in the village, remittances and eventual retirement to the village, and, finally even the replication of the peasant community in an urban or factory setting. They focused especially on the nature of the connection with the land (ownership and cultivation) and on heredity, or how many had worker fathers.

The studies of the industrial provinces of the center (around Moscow), St. Petersburg, and the Urals all revealed them to be part peasant. The overwhelming majority of the peasant population in industrialized Vladimir province engaged in supplementary off-farm wage work; in many uezds, between 30 and 40 percent of the peasants had abandoned agriculture altogether while continuing to belong to the village. Contrary to the strict theory of proletarianization, landowning households in the most industrialized uezd (Shuia) sent more workers to factories than did landless households,⁴⁷ while in Iur´ev uezd landholding and off-farm employment went hand in hand rather than move in opposite directions.⁴⁸ Aleksei Vasil´evich Smirnov, who surveyed the uezdy of Aleksandrov and Pokrov, suggested that the factory was the final stage in the evolution of a local peasant tradition of non-agricultural occupation, from seasonal off-farm work through cottage industry to manufactory and to factory.⁴⁹ N. I. Vorob´ev presented [End Page 322] similar accounts of the major factory region of Sereda in Kostroma province as typical of the whole province, and he did not flinch from submitting the same theses to the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom) in 1919.⁵⁰ Workers were peasants, whether they worked the land or not; and to the bureaucracy and the Narodniks, the Marxist energy invested in demonstrating the abandonment of cultivation as an index of the formation of a working class was misspent.

Paradoxically again, heredity was more likely an index of the peasant composition of the workforce than of its working-class evolution. N. S. Karinskii noted in 1901 that in Melenki uezd, Vladimir province, 27 percent of the male industrial population was hereditary, but only 5 percent of those in textile factories (fabrichnye) and 17 percent of metalworking plants (zavodskie) were. That is, the actual factory population (fabrichnye and zavodskie) was less hereditary than were other types of off-farm workers.⁵¹ Vorob´ev, as usual, rummaged up the intriguing detail that in Shuia uezd in the late 1890s, 48.2 percent of the men and 36.6 percent of the women in factories were hereditary workers, but the closer the factory was to the village, the greater the influence of heredity. This suggested that the more a peasant could remain within the fold of the peasant community, the more he could afford to become a hereditary worker!⁵² Famed factories like the vast Sormovo plant of Nizhnii Novgorod with 8,000 workers, or the highly successful Ramenskoe cotton weaving and spinning factory, had permanent workforces of peasants.⁵³ Even B. Avilov, a Bolshevik of the crucial year 1903, cautioned that too much should not be made of heredity since seasonal labor had long been hereditary.⁵⁴ Indeed, the famed researches of [End Page 323] E. M. Dement´ev⁵⁵ and A. V. Pogozhev⁵⁶ on the workers of Moscow province almost defined the hereditary proletarian workers' estate. As elsewhere, the workers of the local cloth factories had been hereditary for three generations or more as landlord serfs, had never practiced agriculture, and, unlike the working class, did not have to forge new bonds as they had remained solidary as a factory proletarian estate.⁵⁷

Similarly, the exceptional features of Urals workers, marking them off from the rest of the Russian proletariat, have been noted with unfailing regularity. As elsewhere, the Emancipation virtually imposed land allotments and their redemption payments on these workers, leading to their eternal preoccupation with the parochial problem of land rights. The Emancipation settlement ineluctably entered into wage and other calculations since the factory or the workers' former serfowner was now their capitalist employer, they were settled on the lands of the factory, and they had to work out all the details of the Emancipation with these same persons or bodies. In conditions of employment insecurity, the former serfs were desperate to retain these jobs as their privilege against usurping migrants or the terror of the market; and the best way of doing so was to exploit rather than dissolve the intricate web of relationships of dependence and patronage, including collective hiring practices and joint responsibility, all dating from the days of serfdom.⁵⁸ The land question was both the substance and the metaphor of these networks; land remained a major item for negotiation in strikes and agitations, and generally a proletarian matter until the October Revolution.⁵⁹ [End Page 324]

The Urals industry had been recognized as technologically retarded by mid-century, and many plants were due for closure; this led to extensive under-employment among these workers, and both the state and workers treated land as a source of security. The law of 2 December 1862 required management to provide fully for its workers before closure by ensuring provisions for one year or allotting land from the factory's own estates. The costs of closure being so great, many of these plants preferred the lesser evil of remaining in operation. The labor force was not laid off and was always shown as being on the rolls, but it could not in fact be fully employed. It often worked part-time, with a large number of free days (gulevye dni); as many as 59 plants resorted to such free days in the 1890s, with only 22 not doing so.⁶⁰ This led to severe pressures on wages, high competition for allotment land for subsistence, and an extensive range of supplementary earnings in agriculture, trade, and other petty enterprise—such as the manner in which the under-employed armorers of Tula were permitted to combine their jobs with private enterprise and to receive raw material at concessional rates.⁶¹ The Urals worker's attachment to his plot of land and his dependence on his factory were idealized as models of interdependence, absence of proletarian alienation, and the wholeness of being, where "the principle of bondage has been replaced by the great principle of mutual advantage," all so conspicuously lacking in metropolitan St. Petersburg.⁶² A "hereditary proletariat," so hopelessly sought out by Marxist theorists from the unpromising ranks of urban peasants elsewhere, flourished from pre-industrial times in the Urals. Before 1905, only 14.2 percent of those in Urals metallurgy were peasants, as opposed to 52 percent in the metal industry of St. Petersburg and 40.9 percent in Moscow, but land and land rights were integral to Urals workers' wage structure and proletarian existence rather than being the residue of a pre-proletarian past.⁶³

The largest evidence of the hereditary worker as peasant is drawn from the older industrial centers, especially the Urals and the central region made up of Moscow, Vladimir, Iaroslavl´, and Kostroma provinces. Yet St. Petersburg was little better. Two important surveys on the eve of World War I show workers overwhelmingly to be of the first generation—that is, their parents were peasants. A respected, dispassionate, liberally inclined, but [End Page 325] non Narodnik socialist, the "Economist" Sergei Prokopovich, concluded in 1909 in a study conducted for the Imperial Russian Technical Society that "as a rule, the Russian proletarian is reared, not in a worker's family, not in town, not in the factory or the plant, but in the peasant family, in the village, in agriculture," essentially because his wages could not support a family in town. He drove the point home by arguing that "the average size of a worker's family in the 50 provinces of European Russia, 1.98 persons, shows that the ranks of the proletariat are replenished, not by proletarian children, but by migrants from outside, from the peasantry."⁶⁴ In 1913, Nikolai Gimmer surveyed the evidence and concluded that the worker was a "transitional class … in an unstable equilibrium, interested directly and in equal measure both in fortifying the farm and in extracting the best conditions for proletarian work" (ital. in orig.).⁶⁵ Heredity and landlessness among workers, deplored by Narodniks because of the deprivation that landlessness entailed, were presented by Marxists as compelling evidence of the formation of a working class and exploited by conservatives as suggesting an alternative, to which their obfuscating pragmatism did not accord a name but which is most recognizable as a workers' estate.

The image we form of workers in imperial Russia, before 1905 especially, is drawn from the literature on the peasantry and rural society more than any other. As hundreds of volumes poured forth from the zemstvo and provincial presses in province after province from the 1860s on, the information on workers accumulated and their coordinates on the map of Russian society were ever more precisely determined. There is no other single source that assembled and presented the facts in such rich detail and analyzed them with such thoroughness. All the Marxists, led by Plekhanov and Lenin, depended substantially on this category of documentation, and Soviet scholarship has been equally beholden to the same sources, supplementing them with factory archives but by no means substituting for them. Factory and other inspectors and similar sources were niggardly with information and analyses; they were so bureaucratically confined to the establishments under the inspectorates that it has been a source of limitless frustration to subsequent scholarship; and historians are still busy in post-Soviet times calculating the number of workers in imperial Russia.⁶⁶ The source itself crafted the image, and the conservatives carried the day, ably if unwittingly assisted by their Narodnik opponents and critics, even into Soviet times. [End Page 326]

Thus the bureaucracy, with the assistance of the Narodnik intelligentsia, successfully projected workers as neither true workers nor true peasants but a mélange of the two, which refuted the claim that they were a class even if they were a distinct entity. Workers as an estate were neither theoretically stated nor legally validated, but it became a premise of action upon workers by officials, managers, priests, and sympathetic members of the intelligentsia, both conservative and liberal. The action took the form of organization, leadership, ideology, and representation permitted or supplied to workers, which collectively amounted to the mobilization of workers as an estate.

Workers' organization and leadership went together, and the earliest form of it was as proper estates, especially among the artisanate and workers in state plants.

The Artisanate

The artisanate, numbering some 802,000 in 1910, belonged to the urban poor; and while artisans included petty employers and tradesmen along with workers, these distinctions are difficult to apply too strictly.⁶⁷ They were organized as estates until the Revolution with all the artisans of any one town administered by the Artisans' Board (Remeslennaia uprava) under its chairman, called the remeslennyi golova, who became an official and subordinate of the municipal administration or town duma.⁶⁸ The duties of these boards were typically Muscovite in inspiration, an imperious "summons to the population to elected service and joint responsibility as estates and as local groups in order to improve the extraction of taxes and to reinforce the feeble resources of the administration."⁶⁹ Such compulsory elections yielded "social-judicial-administrative recruits,"⁷⁰ as Kliuchevskii acidly described them, with vested interest as officials responsible more to the state than to the constituencies that elected them. Not surprisingly, two congresses of artisans (in 1900 and 1911) demanded not merely the preservation of the estate but also excluding merchants (kuptsy), extending their operations into rural areas, and keeping out the factory inspectorate, to be followed up by a new statute on the artisanate (remeslennyi klass).⁷¹ [End Page 327]

These estates were up for abolition from the 1850s on, but the abolition never happened because the theoretical lucidity of the abolitionists could not compete with the convoluted logic of the raison d'état of conservative reform. The Shtakel´berg (Stackelberg) Commission of 1859–62 imagined a working class free of guild and servile restrictions, deplored the archaism and irrationality of these estates, and demanded their abolition to promote entrepreneurship.⁷² But the bureaucrat made his career by distributing patronage and mastering illogic, not by erasing it.⁷³ Reform had to supplement or augment the resources of the state in some fashion, in the manner that the abolition of serfdom and the contraction of the powers of the nobility over the peasantry combined with the downward extension of the bureaucracy through the zemstvo. This reform proposed neither. Artisans were organized as an estate that ordered the social hierarchy and permitted bureaucratic penetration of the urban poor, and the St. Petersburg Artisans' Board justifiably expected to crush further argument in conservative circles by claiming and demanding that the guild "be in municipal government one of those administrative entities that the mir with its village assembly is for our rural local government"⁷⁴ (ital. in orig.).

Abolition was eventually pursued at the turn of the century for fear of sedition, not as a rational reform for a uniform working class. Guilds were, after all, associations of workers and the urban poor: harassed by mounting waves of revolutionary energy, Sipiagin in the Interior Ministry and Witte in Finance exploited Senate rulings on technicalities to suppress 106 of them in 1902–3. But the experience of 1905 showed that guilds contained rather than inflamed class war; and the Senate, the new Ministry of Trade and Industry, and even the Interior Ministry all generously re-interpreted the rules in 1908–10 to restore them.⁷⁵

The law, its interpretation and enforcement, and artisans' lobbies all worked to preserve the estate of artisanal workers rather than merge them with a future working class. Left-wing and liberal reformers complained that the guild structure maintained the "fiction of the paternalism" of masters toward journeymen and apprentices by freeing masters from labor legislation and the factory inspectorate.⁷⁶ But to conservative reformers, this was the purpose and attraction of the estate, to fragment the class by resorting to [End Page 328] (among other things) special legislation to produce a renewed version of the estate as the two congresses had demanded.

Workers in the State Sector

Another workers' estate, in both formal and informal senses, consisted of the workers under the jurisdiction of the war and naval ministries. The most famous of these were the armorers of Tula, a regular estate until its abolition in 1864, but there were also workers scattered in other factories like those of Sestroretsk, Izhevsk, and Izhorsk and in Zlatoust, Kazan, Okhta, and the Baltic Shipyard. Generally the ministries attempted to insulate them from the rest of the working class by creating special working, living, and welfare conditions, which imparted estate-like features to such workers; but the Tula armorers retained something very like their estate structure even after its formal abolition.

An armament center of metal-forging, the recipient of state favors from the early 17th century on, Tula enjoyed Peter's exceptional patronage, with guaranteed supplies of metal and freedom from recruitment and the poll tax. The smiths were constituted as a special estate of their own, their privileges reconfirmed and extended by Catherine II in 1782, with the right to rise into the merchantry (kupechestvo).⁷⁷ Although the estate was abolished in 1864, its corporate existence flourished for the purpose of administering its capital assets. These consisted of financial grants from Catherine II in 1782 and Alexander II in 1867, besides the home for invalids and the orphanage. Smiths enjoyed the privilege of conducting private business along with the job in the state factory,⁷⁸ to the dismay of Bonch-Bruevich, who complained bitterly to Lenin in 1905 that they "aspire to their petty-bourgeois comfort."⁷⁹ Eventually the estate was revived as a modern corporate association as late as 1915, with the explicit and archaic-enough name "Tula Townsmen's Association of Ex-Armorers" (Tovarishchestvo meshchan goroda Tuly byvshikh oruzheinikov).⁸⁰

The War Ministry employed about 100,000 workers at the beginning of the 20th century and periodically considered whether these workers were a class apart from those in the private sector. Until the reforms of [End Page 329] the 1860s, these workers belonged to the military estate as "lower ranks" (nizhnye chiny) and people "in military service" (voennosluzhashchie). The Popov Commission of 1902–5, which inquired into workers' conditions in the War Department, declared them a class apart from those in the private sector where the "power of capital" lay "as a heavy burden on human labor," whereas "the exchequer … does not pursue entrepreneurial [promyshlennye] objectives," and the manager of state enterprises "is not interested in the direct extraction of profit from the worker."⁸¹ An official military historian claimed in 1913 that the Artillery Department could boast of the most advanced regulations on the working day, wages, welfare, hiring rules, and much else, from as early as the 1870s. These were necessary, it was argued, as these workers "serve the interests of state security,"⁸² and these claims to estate-like exclusivity became something of an ideology.⁸³ Heather Hogan has pointed to the caste-like features of the metalworkers of St. Petersburg, mainly in state enterprises, who enjoyed superior working conditions and high levels of literacy, and whose enclosed world resembled a peasant mir; all this was known as the "Nevskii model."⁸⁴ While Hogan has stressed the skills and traditions that contributed to this mentalité, the state's deliberate attempts at enclosing the workers' social milieu should not be overlooked.

Welfare Organizations

Outside the historical estates, the bureaucracy did provide for a surprisingly wide range of organizations in order to extract a suitably subordinate working-class leadership, as it had from within the estates. Workers were organized from as early as the 1860s, chiefly for welfare and culture, and even for the muted airing of grievances, but never as unions and obviously not for the purpose of strike, class struggle, and revolution. Welfare bodies were joint organizations of workers, managers, and others; such "class collaboration" was the norm in state enterprises, but it also flourished in the more professionally managed private factories. The law of 8 March 1861 abolishing serfdom in the Mines Department required it to set up miners' associations (gornozavodskie tovarishchestva) run jointly by workers and management. They accumulated funds by deducting 2–3 percent from the wages [End Page 330] of workers with equivalent contributions from employers. These associations disbursed welfare to workers, but they also attended to the morals of their members, mediated in disputes, and ran consumer stores. The ironmasters of South Russia established their own, less ambitious "societies for assistance" (obshchestva posobiia) in 1884, followed by others in Odessa in 1886, Krivoi Rog in 1890, Tomsk in 1894, Baku in 1895 for the oil industry, and many similar groups. In the 1880s and 1890s, the establishments of the ministries of finance, army, navy, and communications all followed suit.⁸⁵ A wide network of workers' organizations had appeared, all with joint membership, for welfare, ideological influence, and limited redress of grievances. Their hierarchical subordination earned them the contempt of revolutionary and Soviet literature, which disdained to investigate their role and impact.⁸⁶ But they well indicate the model of organization that the conservative establishment had in mind for workers: it was of a piece with the artisanal and village bureaucracies, of various forms of incorporation of the poor, who would elect their leaders to serve the state.

Even with the searing experience of the revolution of 1905–7 behind it, the autocracy persisted with these welfare bodies run jointly by officials and workers. Thus the new insurance law of 1912 required sickness funds (bol´nichnye kassy) to be set up with joint contributions from workers and managers and even run jointly by them, in the manner of the miners' associations of 1861. General assemblies of workers elected the worker members of the board, and both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks found these a useful front for their organizational and publishing activities. By 1916, there were 89 factory funds in Moscow city, 5 in the district or uezd, 6 for entire industries, and another 7 funds that were not for any particular group of workers. As one historian has noted, "The Sick Funds were easily the largest mass working-class organizations prior to 1917."⁸⁷ The law also created insurance councils to oversee the law, and workers had to elect members to these bodies. By June 1914, there were 344 such councils representing 378,000 workers in Moscow province, and another 176 councils for 164,000 workers in St. Petersburg province. Again, "the councils rapidly became the largest associations of workers in the country's history."⁸⁸ The government could have run [End Page 331] the insurance system wholly through officials instead of creating such mass organizations of workers for the purpose, and workers had even demanded it in preference to joint contributions, but the state adhered to tradition by choosing the joint bodies in spite of their subversive possibilities. In its typically unco-ordinated and experimental fashion, the state attempted to shape workers in both the private and public sectors through estate forms of representation rather than permit them to emerge as a class through unions.

The Starosta Law of 1903

Workers' representation and organization was further extended by the law of 10 June 1903 on the election of a factory workers' representative (starosta) throughout the private sector in manufacturing and mining. In concept it replicated the village bureaucracy, it chose the same name of starosta, and it extended the bureaucratic chain of command downward by having the manager select the starosta from a panel of names proposed by workers. But managements were permitted discretion in applying the law, and they were obstructive. The ironmasters of the South claimed in 1903 that mutual aid societies and labor co-operatives served that purpose well enough.⁸⁹ The capitalists of St. Petersburg and Poland at the Popov Commission of the War Ministry protested in 1904 that such measures would segregate workers from the peasantry, which was already well served by the village bureaucracy;⁹⁰ and in the province of Nizhnii-Novgorod certain major employers concealed the law from workers although it had to be printed in their work books (raschetnye knigi).⁹¹ By 1905, only some 40 private enterprises had applied the law, although some managements were ready, even keen, to integrate workers through such strategems.⁹² At the Semiannikov plant in late March 1905, workers were urged to use this law to elect representatives to meet the commission under N. P. Langovoi, director of the Department of Industry in the Finance Ministry, which was investigating the factory and carrying with it the proposals of the Kokovtsov Commssion on labor legislation in general.⁹³ The manager even presented these workers' deputies with the balance sheet [End Page 332] and calculations to argue that the eight-hour day was impossible. But workers saw through the trick, as they later recalled, of making junior bureaucrats out of them by flooding them with paperwork beyond their comprehension; and while they went through with elections, managing even to get two Bolsheviks through, they confined themselves to general resolutions.⁹⁴ Even so, they disposed of an unusually large budget of 10,000 rubles a month for workers' welfare, they managed to collect strike funds for the Putilov workers, and they generally enjoyed considerable authority among workers.⁹⁵

This law was extended almost immediately, under the name of vybornyi (elected), to the War Ministry, to act in tandem with the freshly recommended internal factory inspector.⁹⁶ Since in theory there could be no class conflict in a department of state, the factory inspector here would not mediate in disputes as the Finance Ministry's inspector was meant to do; instead, he would be just another link in the uninterrupted chain from manager down to the last worker. For that reason, he was even described, rather hopefully, as a "petitioner" or khodatai on behalf of workers, acting alongside the workers' representative, the vybornyi. Similarly, in the crisis of 1905, Minister for Communications Prince M. I. Khilkov, promptly ordered the application of this law as early as 8 February throughout the shops and depots but not along the lines of the state railways, and workers responded eagerly, even though such vybornye could not immediately blossom into union leaders.⁹⁷ But they saw the value of such elections, and in the surge of 1912–14, workers in both capitals demanded that the law be revived; although the two employers' Societies of Factory Owners refused to do so, certain factories like the Nevskii, Siemens-Halske, Vulkan, and Novyi Aivaz ignored their own association and went ahead with elections of such factory elders.⁹⁸

These multiple organizational initiatives served to extract a leadership and to ensure its subordination to the bureaucracy and managers: appropriate ideologies were then also instilled into them, but they took the form of cultural action.

Cultural Action

The cultural activities of the state, a species of conservative counter-kruzhkovshchina, consisted of schools, lecture courses, temperance societies, [End Page 333] and rational recreation. While workers were perhaps the single largest consumers of these products offered by government, management, and the intelligentsia, they were not intended solely for workers. Consequently, the literature on the subject also includes workers with the plebeian masses.⁹⁹ More than 300 privately run Sunday schools mushroomed in the heady years 1859–62 before they were suppressed for fear of sedition; in 1874, they were permitted alongside parish schools and were subject to the severe ideological discipline of the Holy Synod; from 1882 on, the Imperial Russian Technical Society was allowed to run Sunday and evening courses for workers specifically;¹⁰⁰ and from 1887 on such schools for the general public multiplied, so that by 1905 there were as many as 112,300 students in them.¹⁰¹ Factory owners were as enthusiastic about their ideological possibilities as were the radical intelligentsia about the kruzhki, and as early as 1870 the first major congress of industrialists welcomed Iulii Osipovich Shreier's missionary zeal of "following the example of Western states, to make fundamental economic truths accessible to workers" and "make them fully empowered citizens of the future."¹⁰² As an admirer of Schulze-Delitzsch's program of workers' mutualism and self-sufficiency in Prussia, Shreier waxed eloquent on his conservative ideologue's dream: "The growth of awareness of his [the worker's] self-sufficiency would serve as the foundation for the welfare of the entire workers' estate and thus ensure the flowering of civilization in the whole country."¹⁰³ The owners of the Emil Tsindel´ cotton-printing factory in Moscow in the 1870s and 1880s went so far as to distribute a cash award of 3 rubles to workers who completed the school course, while workers cynically claimed that he had collected 100 rubles per worker as a subsidy from government.¹⁰⁴ In 1882, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Vargunin of the paper factory that bore his name rustled up contributions from a number of entrepreneurs of the Schlüsselberg factory district in St. Petersburg to run his school. It brought together "the best elements of the working population, which thereafter, naturally enough, influence[d] those around them."¹⁰⁵

Lecture courses were much favored for being amenable to strict control. They were begun in 1872 in St. Petersburg under the direction of the Ministry of Education through a Permanent Commission; in 1876, the [End Page 334] ministry instituted them for the provincial towns; and in 1902, a special series was organized in Moscow to consolidate the Zubatovite experiments there. They were enormously successful, to judge from individual testimonies and the statistics of attendance.¹⁰⁶ The audience consisted of workers and the urban poor even when they were not held in factory districts, and they virtually stampeded their way into places like the Polytechnical Museum auditorium in Moscow, which seated only 500!¹⁰⁷ In 1892–94, the Permanent Commission in St. Petersburg alone organized 1,032 events notching up an attendance of 182,200; for the difficult years of 1906–12, there were 3,711 lectures with a total attendance of 429,500.¹⁰⁸ Many other organizations pitched in; and by the end of 1904, there were as many as 27 of them in the capital alone. While the government encouraged public initiative, or civil society as it has been called since perestroika, they laid down the ground rules thus: "by means of public lectures to provide the people with moral, rational activity; stimulate among them love for the Orthodox Church, the tsar, and the fatherland; develop their understanding of the Christian duties of man; and disseminate available and useful knowledge."¹⁰⁹

The temperance societies (obshchestva trezvosti) catered to the moral (and physical) health of the worker without letting go one whit of the ideological. From the end of the 1880s, the clergy had led with these in the proletarian heartlands of Shuia, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Iaroslavl´, the Urals, and elsewhere. In the late 1890s, they were followed by the Finance Ministry's national temperance guardianships (popechitel´stva o narodnoi trezvosti), which numbered 795 by 1912. Besides the obligatory lectures on the evils of alcohol and the provision of rehabilitation services, these bodies purveyed large doses of official dogma, ran libraries and cafés, sponsored parks and walks for rational recreation, and published a vast number of tracts. They helped replace the dissolving solidary bonds of the rural community, since "the proletarian instinct could not sustain isolation and it demanded community," as the Bolshevik worker Aleksandr Sidorovich Shapovalov recalled of his religious and temperance phase.¹¹⁰ "The priest and the quack" were the only refuge from alcohol, the danger of which workers saw clearly enough; they would swear by the miracle-working icon of the Virgin to refrain from drink for anything between three months and a year, violate their oath within [End Page 335] two weeks, yet return with unfailing regularity to repeat their vows.¹¹¹ They worked closely with the purely religious "Society for the Dissemination of Religio-Moral Enlightenment in the Spirit of the Orthodox Church" (Obshchestvo rasprostraneniia religiozno-nravstvennogo prosveshcheniia v dukhe pravoslavnoi tserkvy) set up in 1881 in St. Petersburg. Capitalists and managers enthusiastically supported these, arranged for icon corners in factories, and observed religious days and holidays. Each factory shop would have a branch of the Temperance Society, which would meet at the icon to elect its leader, the "lamp elder" (lampadnyi starosta); by 1900, these had spread widely, and both the Gaponite movement and the police found their recruits here, according to Bolshevik workers' memoirs.¹¹² The local unit of the Temperance Society of the Greater Iaroslavl´ manufactory added a Women's Mission (Zhenskaia missiia) in 1895 to break the "tavern culture." The two together assembled "the best men and women" as "the best antidote to the degenerate inclinations of the factory masses."¹¹³ They were capable not only of conquering alcohol and sedition but also of "destroying superstition and triumphing over false doctrines"—in short, the Old Belief, which was widespread in the Iaroslavl´ region.¹¹⁴ The autocracy and the Orthodox Church, let it not be forgotten, fought on two fronts: atheism and liberalism on the one side; and schism, heresy, and the heathen on the other.

But rational recreation demanded the active engagement of workers. From the 1880s, managers and factory owners, especially, were keen on encouraging as many of these cultural activities among workers as possible. In 1885 in St. Petersburg, the Vargunin factory owner set up his Nevskii Society for Popular Recreation (Nevskoe obshchestvo po ustroistvu narodnykh razvlechenii); it was followed by the Ligovskii Gardens, the Vasileostrovskii Theater for Workers, and in 1901 the Nobel People's House, a public cultural and recreation center. Enthusiasts for "enlightenment" and art for the people were appalled at the "third-class art" and cheap entertainment purveyed, especially by the temperance guardianships,¹¹⁵ but the Nevskii Society could not satisfy the demand until workers began staging their own plays in 1905.¹¹⁶ The highly successful director of the Sestroretsk arms factory promoted the usual savings and loans funds, an orchestra, a dance troupe, and [End Page 336] a choir to promote a taste for Russian, "not factory" songs.¹¹⁷ The Nizhnii Novgorod Industrial Congress was informed in 1896 that the auditorium of the Greater Iaroslavl´ manufactory was always packed to its capacity of 1,500 with workers and their families during concerts, plays, and children's presentations;¹¹⁸ the Briansk factory workers regularly played to audiences of more than 700;¹¹⁹ and even such an unpromising center as the village of Kokhmo in Vladimir province, with its Iasiuninskii factory, could mobilize its workers to stage as many as four plays in a single winter and get the tavern behind them.¹²⁰ From the mid-1890s, some of the most famous factories in Moscow city and province—the Trekhgornaia, Tsindel´, Til´, Guzhon, Ramenskaia, Balakhinskaia, and others—had theaters, choirs, orchestras, libraries, and schools. The other major industrial centers of Vladimir, Iaroslavl´, the Donbass, Baku, and the Urals followed suit; and entire professions like the printing trade were especially committed, as a self-consciously cultural avant-garde of the proletariat, to such creativity and moral improvement, as Mark Steinberg has so often and usefully reminded us.¹²¹ As with welfare organizations promoted by the state and management, so, too, these cultural activities opened new spaces for both the state and the workers to enter and exploit. The intelligentsia appeared on both sides, according to its ideological preferences, and the ultimate outcome was in effect a competition between the dirigisme of the state and the autonomous activity (samodeiatel´nost´) of the workers.¹²²

Police Socialism

The next step was the daring new strategy of mobilizing the entire class as a corporation in the image of the noble, meshchanskoe, artisanal, and peasant estates, and it ran parallel to the process of political party formation from the late 1890s. Known by the derogatory expression "police socialism," it [End Page 337] consisted of the police sponsoring organizations of workers throughout a city for both the redress of grievances and ideological subservience. It was carried out in the centers of proletarian radicalism—Moscow, Minsk, Odessa, and St. Petersburg—through the Zubatovite and Gaponite organizations. It promoted organization, leadership, "economic" movements, ideological contest, and rational recreation, all as a single large program, over entire proletarian centers and in a co-ordinated fashion. It was a faithful replication of the estate structure, now on the unlikely soil of labor or industrial relations.

Sergei Zubatov, the head of the Okhrana in Moscow, organized the Council (Sovet) of Workers in Mechanical Production with its charter approved by Dmitrii Trepov, the chief of police in Moscow, "in the confidence that the workers will justify my faith and reliance on them."¹²³ Between 1902 and 1904, the council set up a series of mutual-aid bodies for each of the textile-weaving, button-making, confectionery, tobacco, packaging, perfumery, textile-printing, engraving, printing, and binding trades; and like the artisanal guilds their elected officials and general assemblies of members functioned under charters approved by government. The council under Slepov and Afanas´ev supervised these bodies in the manner of the Artisans' Board for the guilds: it effectively represented the workers of Moscow and was known as the Council of Workers of the City of Moscow from March 1902.¹²⁴ The council negotiated in industrial disputes on behalf of workers, but under Zubatov's supervision; and it became an authoritative spokesman of the working class of the city. Trepov defended the council against the protests of factory owners like Guzhon¹²⁵ or ministers like Sipiagin and Witte on the ground that the council resolved disputes through negotiation, as, for example, with the weavers, who were "the most inclined to riotous behavior because of their immaturity, and dangerous because of their numbers and special cohesiveness."¹²⁶ However, both Zubatov and worker leaders sought to create a single coordinating body, representative of the class, "the kernel or foundation of all workers' organizations of the city of Moscow,"¹²⁷ or "the [End Page 338] head of the working masses."¹²⁸ Zubatov had by now set up a corporate structure for the workers of Moscow—divided into their respective trades, united under an umbrella organization called the council, and run by elected officials who were responsible to government and monitored in every detail.¹²⁹ Only heredity was lacking from the list of estate attributes.

Zubatov's next target were the Jewish workers in Minsk and Odessa, for which he fixed on the foursome—Mania Vil´bushevich, Iosif Gol´dberg, Iulii Zamoilovich Volin, and Aleksandr Chemerisskii—all in Minsk, and Meer Kogan, Shmuel, and Shaevich in Odessa. He formed them into the Independent Jewish Labor Party to break the Jewish Bund's authority and permitted them to engage in economic strikes and to negotiate. They claimed that "[t]he Party has no political objectives and will turn to political questions only to the extent necessitated by the daily interests of the workers,"¹³⁰ by which they meant that they would fight off the politics of the Bund. Volin proposed a "purely workers' newspaper," the Iuzhnoe obozrenie, with a circulation of up to 30,000 copies.¹³¹ Zubatov welcomed this as "the cornerstone in the struggle with the mass revolutionary movement," and wanted one in Yiddish also, or, as they called it, zhargon, since the Bund had as many as eight periodicals among a Jewish proletariat that was almost wholly literate. He also hoped to stimulate Zionism at the expense of socialism.¹³²

But his chief and double-edged weapon was the successful economic strike to undermine the Bund. The autocracy could coerce employers, provide meeting halls, finance organizers, and arrest leaders of the Bund. He suggested that the police should "look the other way during strikes, since it is clear that they are neither criminal nor political."¹³³ Lopukhin, the director of the Department of Police, instructed his subordinates in both Minsk and Odessa in 1902 to favor the movement: "Vil´bushevich is personally known to me and Count Shuvalov. Cooperate with her fully if need be."¹³⁴ He gave [End Page 339] the most explicit support over the objections of General Novitskii of the Kiev gendarmerie: "Vil´bushevich and Volin are representatives of the labor movement in the said direction, which completely corresponds to the views of the government."¹³⁵ Furthermore, the appropriate committee of the party could bargain on the conditions generally applicable to the trade and sign agreements between itself and the employer. It was the kind of power that confederations of unions or an industrial union seek to exercise; certainly it was unprecedented for tsarist Russia.¹³⁶ It was called a party but did not possess the ideological or programmatic range of a political party that expected to wield the power of the state. It was an ideological organization to fight off the Social Democrats strictly within the working class and in union politics, and as such was a more radical version of the council in Moscow or the assembly in St. Petersburg.

The third Zubatovite undertaking was the Gaponite Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers of the City of St. Petersburg, registered by the police on 15 February 1904, and it reproduced the essential features of the Council of Moscow. Its charter provided for rational recreation and an anodyne politics—or as Gapon put it, "now is not the time for a superficial approach to the corruptive [and] constantly growing revolutionary propaganda, especially among workers."¹³⁷ It was meant to be a leisure and cultural organization with just a dash of mutualism to render it more useful.¹³⁸ In midsummer 1904, Lieutenant-Colonel Kremenetskii of the St. Petersburg Okhrana happily reported that the assembly was in every respect a success.¹³⁹ Major General Fullon, the governor of the city, opened a series of sections; and by the late autumn of 1904, the working class of the city had been united in a non-revolutionary body called the Assembly. Like the Moscow Council, the Gaponite Assembly was designed to concern itself with "the life, needs, and legal status of workers and other matters pertaining to the assembly."¹⁴⁰ It did not distinguish among trades or even treat the factory as the base unit as soviets generally did: it was a single, citywide organization (with local branches) [End Page 340] of the class and excluded non-workers. The "Responsible Circle," as the executive committee was described, was accountable to the police for the good conduct of the assembly and was drawn exclusively from the working class.¹⁴¹

Three major structures had flourished between 1901 and 1905 to organize and represent the working class of entire cities, including the undisputed proletarian and revolutionary pace-setter in the empire. Whether it was the Council in Moscow, the Party in Minsk and Odessa, or the Assembly in St. Petersburg, these organizations' resemblance to one another and to estate representation is unmistakable; by organizing the working class of an entire city, they also prefigured the revolutionary soviets.¹⁴²

Electoral Franchise

The final step in the mobilization of workers as an estate was the Duma franchise in 1905 and 1907. Three electoral systems were put in place before the Revolution of 1917: for the zemstvo in 1864 and 1890, for town dumas in 1870 and 1892, and for the State Duma in 1905 and 1907. They rigorously followed the principles of representing social interests through separate curiae rather than individual citizens through the purely territorial constituency, and they deployed the unequal rather than the equal vote. In utterly pragmatic fashion, what appears as a theoretically unsound and irrational hierarchy of groups was constructed at various times between 1864 and 1907. A large number of interest groups had been identified and given a fixed representation. These groups were sometimes estates of the purest water, as in the case of the nobility by the 1890 zemstvo franchise, or the Cossacks by the Duma election law of 1905. They could be estates in practice, as with the peasantry; they could be a consciously disguised version of an estate, as with the landowners' curiae in the 1864 zemstvo and State Duma laws; and they could be part estate and part class, as in the internal differentiation of the landowners' and peasant curiae. They could be something akin to tax categories or another variety of social group, like the frequently proposed rural leaseholders, or the occupants of rented accommodation in towns, which was finally enacted in 1907, or just capitalists, for whom a fourth curia or at least a special position in the first curia was suggested. They could be classes as in the everyday usage of rich, middle, and lower middle, as in the three curiae of the town duma laws of 1870 and 1892, and even pure classes, as stipulated in theory, as with the provision for the working class in the State Duma law of 1905.¹⁴³ [End Page 341]

Four principles emerge clearly from the theoretical chaos: first, of a hierarchy of privilege that could, in principle, stretch endlessly; second, of groups defined politically by the state; third, of classes, even the working class, intercalated into the hierarchy as social interest groups; and finally, of class relations that were embedded within, rather than determining, the structure. Such a hierarchy of electoral rights conserved important attributes of the estates hierarchy while abandoning it in formal terms. As Petr Valuev lucidly explained at the time of the zemstvo reform, "it conserves in part the historical features of estate grouping, for one of the principal, historically constituted estates shall dominate in each of these groups."¹⁴⁴

The manner in which workers were finally enfranchised is both curious and revealing. The Council of Ministers agreed in 1905 that the estate principle had become unrealistic. A system based on an equal vote, however, would be unworkable unless the property and other qualifications were set absurdly high, and universal suffrage entailed submerging vitally important social categories. As the ministers could not find a uniform criterion to apply, they listed the precise categories of the population that were to be privileged and then specified the dose of privilege. This resulted in the unequal vote and a social-interest constituency that virtually replicated the estates, without the nomenclature but with the same essence of nobility, townsmen, and rural inhabitants as in 1785.¹⁴⁵

At the Peterhof Conference in July 1905 on the forthcoming State Duma, A. S. Stishinskii and the stalwarts of the United Nobility—A. P. Strukov, Count A. A. Bobrinskii, A. A. Naryshkin, and Count A. P. Ignat´ev—fought a rearguard action for the restoration of the estates, regurgitating all the arguments deployed for the zemstvo counterreform of 1890. With instincts nurtured by Muscovite tradition, Stishinskii demanded that Duma representation be imposed as an obligation, like the tiaglo of yore. This captured the spirit of the estate system, of corporate bodies instituted by the state and [End Page 342] ordered to elect their representatives to serve the state.¹⁴⁶ In a national parliament like the Duma, this meant no more than loyalty to the Crown, which turned out to be possible in spite of the Revolution. Count Dmitrii Sol´skii assured them that the present curial structure delivered in effect an estate pattern of distribution without technically being composed of estates, which had been Valuev's argument for the zemstvo franchise. By Sol´skii's calculations, out of 5,368 electors, 2,295 would be landowners, in effect nobility; and 1,828 would be peasants, which added up to 4,133 or 70 percent; the danger of seditious majorities would be further contained by indirect voting.¹⁴⁷ As always, in relation to their numbers in the country, the landowners secured the highest representation, the urban bourgeoisie the next, and the peasantry the least, although in the composition of the Duma, the peasantry would enjoy a relative majority.

After the October Manifesto, the franchise had to be extended, but the curial structure was retained and a workers' curia was added. The conference at Tsarskoe Selo in December 1905 debated whether universal suffrage would return a radical or a conservative majority. Nobody was certain, the argument cut both ways, and Witte, now chairman of the Council of Ministers, straddled both sides of the fence with the comment: "My reason inclines me toward the second draft [universal suffrage], but my intuition makes me dread it."¹⁴⁸ They finally opted for curiae that represented a wide spectrum of the population without universal suffrage or the equal vote, and Witte endorsed his own handiwork with the condescension of the technocrat: "The Duma might well be weak in intellect, but not in its conservatism."¹⁴⁹

But workers presented them with a special dilemma. From the summer of 1905, when Witte had demanded that workers be enfranchised, the notion of workers as an estate was hovering in the background;¹⁵⁰ the solution was now found, à la Valuev, by constituting them as the equivalent of one in political and electoral terms, as a curia. Nobody could delude himself that workers could be conservative, as they could in the case of peasants. [End Page 343] Dmitrii Shipov, Aleksandr Guchkov, V. I. Timiriazev, and especially Witte, raised two important objections, both of them a foretaste of the controversies around the Soviet franchise of 1918.

First, they were dismayed by the segregation of workers as a separate constituency even as they approved of the extended franchise. Shipov, Guchkov, and Verkhovskii wanted to submerge the workers among the masses through universal suffrage and the equal vote. Guchkov—unnerved by the experience of the general strike, the St. Petersburg soviet, and an ominous strike movement in Moscow—feared that the group of workers' deputies in the Duma "would become an organized strike union," and Prince A. D. Obolenskii of the Council of State seconded him.¹⁵¹ Guchkov protested that "workers would be segregated into a special class," Timiriazev fretted over workers being granted special status, and Witte—as usual with the greatest clarity—exposed the distinction between representing citizens and social categories: "The workers' movement by itself is not so dangerous; what is dangerous is that the government recognizes, as it were, the political force of the working class as a state within the state."¹⁵² The only consolation lay in keeping their numbers securely low by excluding 7 million agricultural workers, 3.5 million servants, 2 million unskilled workers, 1 million construction workers, 1 million workers in trade, and several lesser categories.¹⁵³ It seemed the best of a bad bargain.

Second, not only were workers being guaranteed representation through the curia, but their most militant groups were being granted that privilege. Plants with at least 50 male workers were given the vote, and those with between 50 and 1,999 male workers were entitled to one delegate. Above the figure of 2,000 workers, one more delegate could be elected for every 1,000 workers. Ironically, this cut both ways. Enterprises with less than 50 workers were excluded altogether, which meant not merely the artisanate and the urban poor in general but all small factories. Among those enfranchised, however, the size of the plant did not improve the rate of representation. Thus even a plant with 3,000 workers would earn only two delegates. Complaints poured in from both ends of the political spectrum. Social Democrats were aggrieved that the more "advanced" workers of the larger plants lost out to the more "backward" ones of smaller units. They estimated that in European Russia, 145,234 workers in plants of 50–1,000 workers could choose 2,072 delegates, but 475,111 workers in plants with more than 1,000 workers each had only 424 delegates.¹⁵⁴ In Moscow, only 3 out of 331 eligible factories could send 2 delegates each, and none could return more than 2 delegates [End Page 344] each.¹⁵⁵ Sidel´nikov estimates that as many as 2 million male workers who were eligible were disfranchised under one pretext or another.¹⁵⁶ But conservatives like Guchkov and Timiriazev argued the same in reverse. Both of them testily inquired why the most radical and dangerous of the species were being singled out for favor instead of being made to stew in their own electoral juice, in the placid majorities of their own class, the signalmen, watchmen, cabbies, artisans, boatmen, workers' artels, and the urban poor in general.¹⁵⁷ Witte more soberly asked about railway workers, factories outside towns, and others who would not enter the category of factory workers as contemplated.¹⁵⁸ Like Plekhanov in the 1870s and 1880s and the soviets in 1917–18, tsarist ministers awarded the coveted prize of recognition to the most organized and the most "advanced," those in the big factories.¹⁵⁹

Two drafts were then considered: the first was to elect workers' Duma deputies separately; the second provided for workers' delegates in the electoral college, where all the curiae would sit jointly to elect Duma deputies. Under the first draft, workers would be guaranteed a fixed number of Duma deputies; under the second, only workers' electors would be guaranteed, but not workers' Duma deputies. Eventually the second draft was adopted. Furthermore, as with estate corporate organization, the law permitted only workers to stand for election, which excluded intelligentsia representatives of workers.¹⁶⁰ The estate in theory could represent only itself, not the general interest as in parliamentary systems; as such, intelligentsia representation belonged to parliament, not to the estate.¹⁶¹ The "organized strike union" could function at the provincial level up to the electoral college, something that might not have been possible in the absence of the curial system, and it was not necessarily a disadvantage that only workers could represent workers. As Guchkov had feared, radicals at once discerned the potential for a soviet of workers' deputies.¹⁶²

The guberniia electoral assemblies were composed as follows: 42.3 percent from the peasant curia, 32.7 percent from the landowners', 22.5 percent [End Page 345] from the urban, and 2.5 percent from the workers'. Thus the relative weights for the curiae were almost as calculated for the Bulygin Duma, but with the addition of workers. Besides the groups excluded, as noted above, about 75–80 percent of the peasantry were disfranchised by granting the vote only to heads of households, and the extraordinary inequality was maintained: Lositskii's figures for January 1906 show one elector per 2,000 landowners, 4,000 townsmen, 30,000 peasants, and 90,000 workers.¹⁶³ The State Duma was thus the zemstvo writ large in terms of electoral structure, but with workers suffixed.

The working class was enfranchised as a community, not as individuals. The name of the factory, not those of workers, appeared on the electoral lists, and the factory emerged as the equivalent of the rural society or the village community. Elections here went through three stages. Factories selected their delegates to urban and guberniia assemblies; these chose the electors; the electors then sat with those of other curiae to elect the duma deputies. Workers secured about 2.7 percent of the electors, and Stolypin's coup of 3 June 1907 did not alter this figure even while it shifted the balance among landlord, townsman, and peasant.¹⁶⁴ Unlike property owners and taxpayers, workers were recognized not as individual citizens but only as members of their class, as employees of their factories. The class was constitutionally recast as a community, and individuals were granted the right of political participation as members of that community. Only by bestowing estate attributes on the class were workers permitted the right to political action.

The logic of soslovnost´ or estate had penetrated the workers' franchise in three distinct ways. First, the electoral system was constructed as a hierarchy of curiae where one estate dominated in each, as originally planned by Valuev for the zemstvo franchise in 1864 and in a more limited way for the urban duma franchise in 1870. In whatever fashion workers entered such a system, they would be subordinated to soslovnost´. Second, they were enfranchised, not by extending the franchise of the urban and rural inhabitants—to which status groups (sostoianiia) they belonged—but by carving out an altogether independent curia consisting of only workers. Workers had never been either a status group or an estate, except in the limited contexts noted earlier, yet they were inserted into a hierarchy of curiae defined principally by status groups and estates as if they constituted a distinct estate on their own. They were not being merged with the masses as citizens and as individuals; their identity as a group was to be raised to the height of political privilege through the franchise; and their class assertion would now acquire a conservative legitimation that seemed grotesque to conservatives and bizarre to radicals. Their segregation as an estate contributed to the intensification of their class [End Page 346] attributes, and both together diminished the quality of citizenship.¹⁶⁵ Class and citizen are generally assumed to be a blissful union founded on the ruin of estates; but in Russia, estate and class were wedded to the stillbirth of the citizen. The principle of soslovnost´ was as resilient as it was becoming perverse, and the conservative strategy of stabilization through a hierarchy of newfangled estates was transmogrified into a parody of itself. Witte expressed this as the advent of a "state within the state," but the decision went in favor of a separate workers' curia, whatever the danger it portended, on the assumption that the autocracy could manipulate unequal interest groups and classes better than it could citizens.

Third, only one part of the working class was appended to the three existing modified estates as a separate curia. It was an exercise of the autocracy's prerogative of granting exclusive rights through which estates used to be created. The franchise was not extended to all those in the same condition as these workers by income, profession, residence, education, status, or any such qualification—in short, neither by class nor occupational criteria. A segment of the class was isolated, those in factories of a specific size, and innumerable other categories ignored. It was a purely political choice, a tribute to their revolutionary significance in 1905. Ironically for such a regime, the working class was rewarded for its revolutionary energy, and within the class its explosive warhead was granted the medal of honor; that same dynamic reasserted itself 12 years later when workers' voting rights in the soviets were distributed unequally according to institutional, organizational, and revolutionary capacity. As Leont´ev had so presciently pronounced en passant, "the estates, or the inequality of people and classes, is itself more important for the state than the monarchy."¹⁶⁶

A conservative strategy for workers did exist among bureaucrats, managers, clergy, and intelligentsia, but it has to be teased out of their opaque utterances and pragmatic partial responses to problems as they arose. It should come as no surprise that the model of the estates attracted them, since power had been successfully distributed and ordered, in their eyes, through such structures. Large numbers of workers had always existed only in estate institutions, most notably those in the Urals mining and metallurgical sector. The peasantry was firmly ensconced in communes and rural societies of various types under the joint supervision of nobility and bureaucracy, and it was further integrated through the zemstvo, subordinated to the nobility through the zemstvo franchise, and subject to bureaucratic monitoring. The urban poor were also structured, albeit more loosely, through their artisanal [End Page 347] and meshchanskie bodies, and similarly subservient through the municipal franchise. These complex arrangements could ideally be retained, renewed, and replicated among workers and complemented by both ideological and political mobilization, and they could compete against the efforts of the radical intelligentsia. Officials and managers formulated the peasant-worker thesis, with considerable assistance from the Narodniks, not out of romantic attachment to the past or a willful refusal to see realities but as a realistic ideological strategy to challenge the thesis of the pure proletariat or working class. They organized workers through a wide variety of bodies, for welfare, culture, industrial dispute, and ideological competition, all of which served in addition to select a conservative workers' leadership answerable to the state; and they set workers in an electoral hierarchy that reproduced the estates in modified form and thus constituted a workers' estate-type stratum for electoral purposes. The repression for which the tsarist state is so notorious belonged with this range of action and should not be made to stand alone in its pure negativity. They cumulatively amounted to attempting to banish a labor movement and incorporating workers as an estate or subordinate organizations under elected leaders serving as agents of the state. Their efforts were not entirely wasted, for the postrevolutionary state reproduced the estate through the soviet form of integration and subordination to the state and its successful suppression of anything akin to a labor movement. As in so many other fields, the Soviet state built on tsarist initiatives.