David MANDEL (1947 - )

Professeur titulaire, département de sciences politique, UQÀM

“The Ivanovo-Kineshma Workers
in War and Revolution.”

In Strikes, Social Conflict and the First World War. edited by L. Haimson. And G. Sapelli, "Annali" Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 1990/1991, Milano 1992, pp. 497-523.

The working class of Russia's Central Industrial Region (C.I.R.) has been largely neglected by historians, who have tended to focus on the city of St. Petersburg, as the center of the labor and revolutionary movements. Here, among the capital's skilled workers they have found an active, literate, politicized, class-conscious proletariat that is not far from Marx's own vision of the most revolutionary class. In contrast, the prevalent image of the provincial workers is that of a "backward", "grey", benighted mass, still strongly attached to its peasant roots. [1]

This image is not altogether false. It is, however, simplistic, because the working class of the C.I.R. was far from homogeneous. Besides "backward masses", it also provided the labor movement with some of its most class-conscious and revolutionary contingents. One of these was the textile workers of the Ivanovo-Kineshma region. Nowhere in Russia, not even in the machine-construction factories of the "red" Vyborg District of St. Petersburg, did the Bolsheviks enjoy such unshakable hegemony. One of the aims of this study is to shed light on the sources and character of this "Bolshevism". A more general aim is to learn what the revolutionary movement looked like in this provincial backwater, in the "glush'".

The Ivanovo-Kineshma industrial region, located about 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow, embraced the three south-eastern districts (uezdy) of Kostroma province. In June 1918, these districts seceded from their respective provinces to create the province of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, thus consecrating administratively the underlying economic, social and increasingly political unity of the area. [2]

Industrial employment between 1914 and 1918 varied here around the 150,000 mark. [3] Of these, about 140,000 worked in the various branches of the cotton industry. [4] In 1917, Russia had 727,000 textile workers in a total industrial work force of 3.6 million. [5] Characteristic of this region were the "factory villages" (fabrichnye  [498] sela), really small towns that had grown out of villages around the textile mills. In 1913, 62,000 of these workers were employed in the cities of Ivanovo-Voznesensk (33,500), Kineshma (11,960), Shuia (12,800), and Kovrov (3.800). [6] The latter three were district administrative centers, in which non-working class elements - white collar, professional, petty-bourgeois - predominated. However, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, with a population of 85,000 in January 1917, [7] was really the largest factory-village of the region, one that had grown into a major city. The main factory villages, such as Kokhma, Sereda, Teikovo, Tezino, Rodniki, Vichuga, were also predominantly urban in character, their permanent population devoted entirely to non-agricultural pursuits.

Well before the advent of industry to the area, its soil and climatic conditions had forced the peasants to seek supplementary income in crafts, transport, commerce and forms of wage labor. The principal craft was weaving, first of linen and then cotton. The burning of Moscow during the Napoleonic invasion gave textile production here an important boost by temporarily eliminating a major competitor. Peasant entrepreneurs established putting-out enterprises, so-called "distribution offices", which gave out materials and paid by the piece. The most successful of these eventually established manufactures, which after the Emancipation, gave way to mills employing steam power. The cheap, stable labor force, already largely prepared for mill work, good water supplies and eventually rail connections also attracted capital from Moscow.

The history of Sereda, already a prosperous trading village in the eighteenth century, was typical. In the late 1820s, Gorbunov and Skvortsov, local peasants, established distribution offices nearby. Their descendants built the first factories in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and by the turn of the century, these employed 11,429 workers. At the time of the revolution, the mills employed 12,000 workers, and the town had a population of 16,650, as well as thirty-two shops, several inns, and a tavern. For three quarters of the population, Sereda was the sole and permanent place of residence. [8]

Utro Rossii, a liberal Moscow paper, called Ivanono-Voznesensk a "nest of Bolshevism". [9] Here, "social democrat" was virtually synonymous with "Bolshevik", and "Bolshevik", with "conscious" or "organized" worker. So strong was this hegemony that the Bolsheviks were viewed less as a partisan, political organization, than as a sort of club of "conscious" workers. In May 1917, the workers of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Weaving Mill gave the following strike mandate to their union delegates :

We declare to the pot-bellied gentlemen that we will fight together with the soviet of workers' and soldiers' deputies, as well as with the factory committees, trade unions and other organizations, which are as it were [kak by] divisions of the broadest organization of the workers, the Social-Democratic Party, on whose banner is etched the word "socialism". [10]

The workers of the region showed their affinity for the Bolsheviks both before the war, in elections to the State Duma, as well as in 1917, in elections to the Soviets,  [499] trade union conferences, organs of local self-government and the Constituent Assembly. [11]

The Bolshevism of these workers, also characteristic of Petrograd's metalworkers, is at first puzzling, given the strong social and cultural differences between the two groups. While both liberal and socialist observers praised the Petrograd metalworkers as "that incomparable type... with which one might be tempted to educate old Europe with the light of a socialist revolution, [12] and compared them favorably with the intelligentsia, [13] local Bolshevik leaders readily admitted that "the general cultural level of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk proletariat was very low." [14] According to one local activist.

The textile workers, in their mass, were so downtrodden, backward, and undeveloped that in explaining things to them one had to use the simplest, most uncomplicated language, and they would much more willingly listen to a homegrown orator than to an intellectual from outside with his literary language. [15]

These are descriptions of the workers in 1905, but twelve years later the cultural gap remained large. The 1918 industrial census found that 46.1% of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk province workers were literate - 37.1% of the women and 75.5% of the men. Among Petrograd metalworkers, the literacy rate was 88% - 70% for women and 92% for men. [16] (The national rates were 60.4% for women - 37.5% for men -82.6%). [17]

The overall differences in literacy rates were related to the predominance of men in metalworking and of women in textiles. In the 35 years preceding the 1917 revolutions, and especially after 1905, women increasingly replaced men in the mass unskilled jobs of the textile industry. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk during the war, women for the first time came to outnumber men : by 1916, they constituted 62.4% of the industrial labor force, whereas in 1913 they made up 45.90% of the workers. [18] For the region as a whole, according to the 1918 census, 60.4% of the industrial workers were women. [19]

During the war, the employment of adolescents also significantly increased, so that by February 1917, adult males constituted only just over one quarter of the work force, concentrated in the skilled trades. [20] In Petrograd metalworking at the start of 1917, adult males still constituted almost three quarters of the work force. [21]

About 90% of the textile workers were unskilled. By comparison, most workers in metalworking, and especially machine construction, were relatively skilled. This, as well as the difference in the sexual composition of the respective work forces, were among the chief reasons why wages in Petrograd were the highest in Russia, [500] while those in the Ivanovo-Kineshma region were among the lowest. A speaker at the regional textile union conference in 1917 accounted for the low wages by the unskilled nature of the work, which required no special training or strength, therefore allowing the employment of women and juveniles, who "have lower cultural needs and agree to any conditions". [22] As one factory inspector put it, owners liked women's "great conscientiousness, concentration, abstinence (they do not smoke or drink) and also their submissiveness and less demanding nature when it comes to wages". [23] In 1908 in Kostroma province, women textile workers doing the same work as men earned on the average 20% less. [24] It is not surprising, therefore, that the union's demand in 1917 to equalize wages for men and women met with great resistance on the part of the owners.

Women, and unskilled workers generally, were weakly represented in leadership roles. At the June 1917 delegates' conference of the regional textile union, of 72 delegates providing information, only 26 were weavers, spinners, or cotton printers, the chief occupations. All the other delegates were skilled workers - foremen, mechanics, engravers, warpers - all male trades. Among the nine members of the central strike committee in October 1917, there was not a single woman. [25] This was only in part directly due to male prejudice. Other factors were the low level of literacy among women, low wages, and the burden of family responsibilities that fell mainly on women.

The loss of young adult men during the war, commonly seen as the most active element (about half of those remaining were over 40), was bemoaned by local leaders. [26] The shortage of leadership elements was acutely felt here, as everywhere in the provinces. In October 1917, the local Bolshevik paper complained that.

In all organizations... there is an acute shortage of cultural forces. Organizational and agitational work leave absolutely no time for broad systematic political education among the workers... Our comrades have literally to tear themselves in pieces. True, there have been cases where strong people, tribunes, have emerged from among the workers, but the weakness of their basic preparation can be felt in their speeches. [27]

By way of contrast, the organization of the Vyborg district of Petrograd, with its concentration of machine-construction factories, not only managed very well on their own forces drawn up from local workers, but sent organizers and agitators to other districts of the capital, as well as to the front and the countryside. [28]

The low wages of workers of the Ivanovo-Kineshma region were also linked by observers to the ties retained by many of the workers to the land. [29] According to the 1918 census, 35.7% of the region's workers owned land before the revolution. This was somewhat higher than the national average - 31.5%, but lower than in Moscow -39.8%. [30] (In Petersburg province, it was only 16.5% - though this figure should be interpreted with caution, as by the time of the census two thirds of the capital's workers were no longer in the factories.) These ties to the land in part reflected the fact that the vast majority of workers were recruited from the immediate or adjacent districts, and many were thus able to continue living in their villages or at least to return there on holidays. [31]

[501]

In the capitals and in most other industrial areas, the social and cultural traits described above were generally characteristic of the least class conscious strata of workers. This was relected, for example, in an affinity for the Social Revolutionaries, an avowedly peasant party with a populist, rather than class, appeal. Thus, a left Menshevik journalist writing in August 1917 compared the metalworkers of Petrograd's Putilov factory with the workers of Moscow Trekhgornaia textile mill : "In the first case, there is a clear understanding of class interest ; in the second, the fundamental issue is land". [32] However, in the Ivanovo-Kineshma region, the Socialist-Revolutionaries had virtually no following among the workers, though they were popular among the peasants and soldiers. At the May 1917 Conference of Soviets and Factory Committees, of 56 delegates, 42 were SDs, while only two were SRs. [33] Yet the July peasant congress in the Shuia district called for support of the SRs in the Constituent Assembly elections, and the Kostroma province Soviet of Peasant Deputies, elected in May, had an entirely SR executive. [34]

A report on the electoral campaign to the Constituent Assembly in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in November 1917 contrasted the strikingly colorful SR placards, "entirely according to the taste of the village" - peasants with sheaves of rye, a village, a cup of blood, an eagle - with the Bolsheviks' placards : the decrees of the Soviet Congress and the biographies of the candidates. When the reporter asked a soldier (a peasant from a nearby district) whom he supported, he answered that he liked the Bolsheviks but he had voted SR : "We can't do otherwise, because, you see, the Bolsheviks gave us peace, but the SRs gave us land [zemlitsd]. So you see, we voted for them, for land and liberty". [35] The difference in mentality between workers and peasants was especially striking in the pre-war elections to the State Duma, in which the workers and their electors displayed remarkable solidarity and organizational unity in order to elect Social Democrats, while the peasants chose kulak electors who behaved in a totally individualistic manner. [36]

The relatively brief history of the region's labor movement is replete with examples of great militancy, discipline and solidarity in face of a harshly repressive regime. Among the most notable collective actions were the 57-day general strike in 1905 in Ivanovo-Voznesensk that produced Russia's first soviet, the "soviet republic" in Sereda in 1906, "the tobacco-pouch strike" in Teikovo in defense of a worker accused of stealing cloth, the decision of the Ivanovo workers to shorten the work week rather than accept layoffs, the 58-day strike in Teikovo at the height of the post-1905 reaction in face of mass arrests and military occupation, the strike of 17,000 workers in Tezino in the summer of 1914 that lasted several weeks into the war, and the three general strikes in Ivanovo during the war itself. [37]

Certain social characteristics particular to the workers of the region help to explain this class consciousness. One of these was their high degree of concentration -825 workers on average on each mill, the highest concentration in Russia, according to the 1918 census. [38] And if one omits the isolated rural mills, the figure rises to 1,080. The concentration was actually highest in the factory villages - 2,467 per mill (in the cities, it was only 737). [39] Thus, on the eve of the revolution, the three mills of [502] Sereda, the largest of the "factory villages", employed 12,000 workers. [40] The four adjacent villages in the Vichuga area had eight mills employing 35,000 workers. [41] By comparison, the average concentration in Petrograd was 388 workers and in Moscow 176. [42]

The impact of this high concentration on the workers' consciousness was inten-sifiecfby the extreme social polarization of these industrial centers. Here, the workers and their families, who made up almost the entire population, found themselves face to face with the mills' owners and administration, separated at best by the thinnest stratum of intermediate elements - government employees, shopkeepers, intellectuals. Zelikson-Bobrovskaia, a Bolshevik professional, described the social situation in Ivanovo-Voznesensk (which was less extreme than in the factory villages) in 1908 in the following terms :

In all my wanderings over the face of the earth, nowhere have I seen so naked and blatant a contrast between misery and luxury as that which immediately strikes the eye in Ivanovo. In any "well-managed" town, as one knows, the squalid dwellings of the workers are carefully removed from sight to the outskirts, the suburbs. But Ivanovo-Voznesensk itself, as a whole, was such an outskirts, thickly populated with an enormous population of textile workers and tattered, rickety, little children-future textile workers.

Amidst the small, almost windowless cottages, which each had the amazing capacity of housing several families, there suddenly appears a luxurious mill owner's palace of fanciful design. The link between the workers' hovels and the owners' palaces are the huge buildings, the looming smoke-stacks of the mills, built and equipped according to the last word of science.

On the streets of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, dug up by pigs and littered with nauseating garbage, one could encounter the family of a mill owner riding by in a very chic carriage pulled by snow-white horses and driven by a fat, shiny driver. Inside are his well-fed wife and children, with their nanny, maid and other domestic servants. I used to wonder how these people had the nerve to stroll past the windows of the workers in the employ and how the workers found the self-control to calmly watch the carriage rolling past their windows.

Here, in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, without camouflage, without any intermediate strata, the two sides stood facing each other : labor and capital. It was more than clear how, with hardly any organization, we, the Bolsheviks, did not have to endure any competition from either the Mensheviks or the SRs. [43]

In this region, the class enemy was not a disembodied, anonymous board of directors. The mill owners had homes in the area and took an active part in managing their enterprises. The workers knew them at first hand, gave them nicknames, told jokes and composed ballads about their personal lives and idiosyncracies. The workers were also well aware of the humble family origins of these "clever kulaks, traders in bast sandals and tar [who] turned into our lords, the mills owners who exploit our labor". [44]

What little there was of an intelligentsia was generally hostile to the labor movement. Varentsova, a local Bolshevik leader and a teacher by profession, recalled :

Ivanovo-Voznesensk was a typical factory town in which two classes dominated the scene : capitalists and workers. The so-called "third element", zemstvo employees, statisticians, doctors, and other representatives of the liberal professions, from which the revolutionary [503] intelligentsia and sympathizers were largely drawn, was absent here. True, Ivanovo-Voznesensk had an intelligentsia in the form of a large technical personnel serving the mills-managers, chemists, mechanics, etc. But this was already a purely bourgeois intelligentsia, which served capital and the capitalists conscientiously and during twenty years did not yield a single SD from its midst who had any relationship to local work. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk organization rested entirely upon the workers. [45]

As for party professionals from the outside, they were easily picked out by the police amidst the homogeneous and relatively small populations. As a result, despite their generally low cultural level, the workers furnished their own leaders. Frunze was struck by this when he arrived in Ivanovo in May 1905 to find a Social-Democratic organization of 500 members :

Almost all were from among the local workers. I was, incidentally, extremely surprised and struck by the prominent place assumed by the workers themselves in the life of the party. I had been acquainted with the life and composition mainly of the Petersburg and Moscow organizations and had not seen anything like it there. True, there also were very active and talented party militants who emerged from the mass of workers. But they were somehow overshadowed and took a second seat alongside the numerous party workers that the intelligentsia put forward in these centers. But in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, on the contrary, even the slightest influence and participation of the latter in the life of the local organization was completely unnoticeable. Both the local leadership collective and the district organizations at that time consisted exclusively of workers, except for a single intellectual (who left party work after 1905). The only gesture made by the local intelligentsia was the formation of a small group of sympathizers, the most prominent being A.S. Bubnov.

The situation was extremely characteristic, for it left-and now still leaves-its imprint on the entire structure of social life. I do not think that in the whole territory of Russia there is another place like Ivanovo-Voznesensk in this respect. Here you can observe a pure example of the creation of life by the proletariat itself, without any participation of other groups of the population...

[This is why] the inner party split that traumatized many organizations in Russia was never felt here. There were no parallel organizations in this area. The local party organizations were mass proletarian organizations in the full sense of the word, closely tied to the very mass of the working class. This also explains their exclusive influence... Without any exaggeration, one can say that it [the party] was the focus of all the interests of the workers, a living part of the worker organism. [46]

Another feature of the local scene was the close collaboration between the economic and political authorities, in practice probably little different from what occurred in the capitals, but more blatant here. It was not uncommon, for example, for the police chief or factory inspector to arrive at the scene of a strike in the carriage of the mill owner-though this did not cease to enrage the workers. The city duma in Ivanovo was dominated by the mill owners, large merchants and real estate owners. [47] V.S. Smirnov recalled the "enlightened coalition" that the mill director, who liked to be known as the "man with the heart of stone," put together in Teikovo to deal with the "rebellious animals" : the police, factory inspector, Cossak commander, spies and shop owners. [48]

In such a social context, where there was no society outside of the mill owners and their servants, the Menshevik discourse in 1917 about a coalition of the "vital [504] forces of society" that would be the basis of a liberal democracy, could not arouse any enthusiasm.

The Ivanovo-Kineshma workers themselves were a socially and economically homogeneous group : 93% were employed in the textile industry, the vast majority in unskilled jobs. In addition, virtually all the workers were recruited from the local or adjacent areas, where the peasantry had a long history of experience with wage labor. [49] By contrast, peasants who came to the factories and mills of the capitals were generally from distant provinces and "straight from the plough" - they came because there were few local sources of wage employment. These newcomers' stay in the anonymous city was somewhat alleviated if they could link up with a regional association. [50] In the Ivanovo-Kineshma region, the transition from village to mill was not so uprooting an experience and the new workers more easily and rapidly found their place in the new working class society.

At the time of the 1918 census, 62.3% of the workers had been at the mills at least since the start of the war, and 35% since mid-1908. [51] The average age of arrival for men was 14.8 and for women 16.3. Only 12% of the workers had begun work at the mills after the age of 20. [52] Thus, despite the peasant origins of most of the workers and the turnover due to wartime conscription, a significant majority in 1917 had behind them a lengthy record of industrial employment, which was also their formative adult experience. The census data show that from at least 1908 onward (including the wartime period) about 35% of the newcomers were "hereditary proletarians", i.e., the children of factory workers. [53]

During the war, the proportion of workers with ties to the land increased : 38% of those recruited during the war owned land (30.5% were involved in working it), while 33% of those recruited before the war owned land (and 23.5% worked it). [54] But for most of these, mill work was still the basic source of income. As one observer noted, "The workers of Ivanovo-Voznesensk province cling to their villages even though the peasant economy is destroyed or in an accelerated process of destruction, because they have houses and families there and cannot find lodgings near the mills". [55]

These traits-concentration, social isolation, homogeneity, relatively high degree of proletarianization-help account for the "Bolshevism" of the Ivanovo-Kineshma workers. But if they tended to support the same party and general political positions as Petrograd's metalworkers, the differences in socio-economic situations and culture of the two groups made for rather different types of class consciousness. Indeed, if in the case of Petrograd one does not hesitate to use the term "class consciousness", in the case of Ivanovo-Kineshma "class instinct" would perhaps be more appropriate.

This difference manifested itself particularly in the way the workers related to political issues, which for the Ivanovo-Kineshma workers remained very abstract and distant. Much more than the Petrograd metalworkers, the region's workers tended to relate to politics indirectly, through the mediation of their immediate, local and especially economic needs. Of course, this was not just a question of culture - the center of national politics was indeed very far removed, and directly political collective actions could rarely be perceived as capable of producing tangible results.

[505]

By comparison with Petrograd, there were relatively few collective actions here that began as overtly political. When they did become politicized, it was often in response to police intervention. The workers' leaders, the "conscious workers", were constantly laying plans to transform economic protest into a political movement. But careful observers were able to see the revolutionary potential of a movement that put forth no political demands. It was not an accident that the October Revolution here took the form of a general economic strike.

The Ivanovo-Kineshma workers were also more dependent on the leadership for political orientation. Although 1905 saw the formation of Russia's first soviet, only a few months later, Ivanovo-Voznesensk experienced a pogrom directed against the Jews and the workers' leaders. If the workers' participation in it was small, they nevertheless did little to stop it. An important factor here was the absence of those who had led the strike - most had left the city when the pogrom began. [56] During 1917, but especially after the October Revolution, protests, sometimes violent, broke out periodically over the absence of food. These were often directed against the workers' leaders in the Soviets. But generally, the latter had only to return to the mills to explain matters to the workers to obtain expressions of renewed support. [57]

Before the February Revolution, the Ivanovo-Kineshma region labor movement had a relatively short but nevertheless eventful and intense history. While the earliest strikes date back to the founding of the mills in the last third of the nineteenth century, the first more or less concerted action, involving five Ivanovo mills, occurred in 1885 over the reduction of wages. [58] In the second half of the 1890s, the strike movement took on a broader character with the first general strike in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in the winter of 1897/8, which succeeded in opposing a reduction of holidays. A strike in 1895 at the "Kompaniia" mill was the first occasion in which social democrats played an active, if limited, role in the mass movement. [59]

But it was really only in the 1905 revolution that the working class here finally became "conscious of itself". The general strike of May-June marked the point of fusion of the social democrats with the mass movement. What began as a purely economic strike-at first the workers vehemently protested against attempts to introduce political elements-became the first consciously political, anti-Tsarist collection action of the region. [60]

The last echoes of the revolution died by the summer of 1907, with the onset of economic depression and on its back a period of deep political reaction. The one exception to this lull in labor unrest, remarkable in all of Russia, was the basically defensive 51-day strike in Teikovo, whose workers had managed to preserve the only trade union, albeit much reduced, in the region. This extremely stubborn and solidary movement ended in defeat. [61]

The labor upsurge of 1912-1914 was reflected unevenly in the region. For textiles, unlike metalworking, this was not a boom period. The workers of Vladimir province remained relatively quiet, though there were signs of an awakening before the war : the first months of 1914 saw seventeen strikes here, more than in the previous two years combined. However, attempts on the eve of the war to expand the movement in response to events in Petrograd and in Kostroma province failed. [62]

In contrast, Kostroma province, together with Petersburg and Baku, was a center [506] of renewed labor militancy. (One of the differences between the two neighbouring provinces was the respective roles of their Bolshevik Duma representatives : Shagov, on the Kostroma side, played a direct, active role in the movement, while Samoilov, on the Vladimir side, was sick or abroad for most of this period.) On the eve of the war, 14 mills employing 30,000 workers were on strike. The movement spread spontaneously, but the workers displayed a high degree of discipline and tenacity despite fierce repression. The 6,000 workers of the village of Tezino presented management with no less than 150 demands involving wages, conditions, polite address by administrators, (a common demand since 1905), and then struck without awaiting a reply, attempting in the process to draw along the domestic servants of the owners and management. At the very first meeting of the strike, they warned the authorities that they would use force if necessary to free anyone who might be arrested. [63]

The governor of Kostroma province offered the following assessment of the movement :

The present strike is extremely serious, not only because of its dimensions, but by the very essence of the factors at work : being on the surface economic, the movement is, in fact, in my opinion, entirely of a revolutionary character... When a strike in the course of a few days embraces an entire district, when identical demands were presented, when these demands are obviously unrealizable, then it is completely clear that the labor movement is being guided by someone's unseen hand, a hand that so far cannot be seized. This hand, having taken possession of the labor movement... will apparently lead the workers to social revolution. The movement can be stopped in view of the measures taken, but the workers have made a review of the army, a probe of its discipline, and its leaders have established the readiness of the proletariat to answer their call. [64]

This report brings out some important characteristics of the movement here. One is the tendency for strikes, even with minimal or no initial leadership, to become general, at least within the district or town. This reflected the homogeneity of the working class and its conditions. It was also the basis of the workers' capacity for disciplined joint action with only minimal formal coordination.

Another trait, already mentioned, is the almost exclusively economic character of the movement's stated goals, while, at the same time, the workers' political radicalism can scarcely be doubted. Unlike Petrograd during this period, the region saw no overtly political strikes or demonstrations to mark May Day, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday or the Lena massacre. Yet, the governor was convinced that the movement was heading for revolution. And indeed, even the start of the war did not stop it - in some cases the workers remained on strike until mid-September, despite the intensified repression. [65]

The outbreak of war itself evoked little by way of patriotic sentiment among the workers, and even where this was the case, the high inflation, food shortages, repression and bad news from the front were enough to make it vanish without a trace by the end of the war's first year. [66]

In the first months of the war, the workers found themselves in a situation of semi-employment, as the regular trade routes were disrupted (half of the cotton and all of the dyes came from abroad, the latter from Germany). However, military orders eventually caused a major boom in the textile industry that finally brought it out [507] of stagnation. The favorable economic conjuncture, coupled with the decline in real wages due to inflation, led the workers on the Kostroma side to present wage demands in the spring of 1915 that were at least partially met by the owners, still no doubt under the impression of the movement of the eve of the war. [67] In March, on the Vladimir side, the owners also granted a 10% raise after the Easter break. But this did not satisfy the workers. A series of strikes occurred in April and in the first half of May that largely failed. The police also reported dissatisfaction with food shortages : the workers felt that the merchants were hoarding goods in order to push up prices. The police chief in Ivanovo-Voznesensk reported that a general strike was practically inevitable. [68]

It began on May 25, when the workers of the Kuvaevskaia Mill struck with the intention of mobilizing the rest of the city's population and going to the city duma to demand that it lower the maximum prices on food items. The next day the strike became general, and several thousand workers converged on the square before the duma. For two days the local authorities appealed to them to elect negotiators. But the workers feared a ruse to arrest their leaders. However, they did produce a list of specific demands, including a set of prices below pre-war levels, a wage raise, "polite address" and the release of two workers previously arrested for inciting to strike. On May 29, while city authorities negotiated frantically with the merchants, and the workers discussed whether they should shut down the shops and try to bring out the domestic servants, the governor arrived. After giving his personal guarantee, the workers elected 100 delegates, who returned that evening to report that prices had been lowered, in particular that of flour by 20-40%.

The next day, almost all the workers returned to the mills, where they presented wage demands, though a few mills remained out of several more days. But despite the governor's urging, the owners agreed only to an increase in the lodging allocation (about 4-7% of the wage) and promised to open a shop selling basic consumer goods at cost. [69] In his report the governor agreed with the workers that their wages were "insignificant" and that the merchants had been artificially jacking up prices. [70] The leaders of the strike, according to the Vladimir province chief of police, were local workers, "conscious comrades", who did not, however, belong to any organization. Another report put the number of Ivanovo-Voznesensk SDs at 300. [71] The strike, he continued, was "purely economic". [72] On the face of it, this was true. The only political demand, to free the two prisoners, was apparently dropped later. But the economic demands of the general strike, itself an illegal act in the midst of war, when other industrial centers, including Petrograd, were still relatively calm, were presented initially not to the mill owners but to the city government, which, in its turn, according to the police, "consists almost entirely of merchants and mill owners... and is concerned solely with the amassing of wealth and thus contributes to inflation and causes panic among the population, concerned over the hoarding of goods". [73] The standard distinction between economic and political is indeed problematic in such a context !

As the governor had foreseen, the workers' gains in Ivanovo led to the presentation of similar demands elsewhere in the region. On June 2 and 3, Kokhma struck, demanding the same prices as in Ivanovo as well as a rise of one ruble in the lodging [508] allocation. Shuia struck June 2-4, and Teikovo June 11. The Vladimir side of the region registered 68 strikes (42,135 strikers) in May and 30 (31,324 strikers) in June, all at least partially successful. [74]

The Kostroma side also saw brief, scattered strikes, but the main echo of Ivanovo was the June strike of linen workers in the provincial capital (outside the area of this study), which began with economic demands but ended up in pitched battles with the forces of order across barricades. The workers had been incensed by the presence of troops and mounted police and by arrests among their comrades. The Kostroma printers then joined in protest against the massacre. [75]

In Ivanovo, the workers felt cheated by the meager results of their strike, as prices continued to climb and wheat flour and buckwheat disappeared from the shops. By July, according to the police, they were talking of a repeat of the May strike ; only this time it would be "stronger". [76] At a meeting on the night of July 10-11, representatives of the city's SDs met with their comrades from some of the mill centers of the region. All reported the absence of support for the war among the workers, who were increasingly rallying to the party. The Ivanovo delegates proposed a resolution to mobilize the workers to struggle for their political rights through an economic strike : the economic action would not yield results, and this would provide a basis for shifting it into a political plane. In the meanwhile, agitation should be started for a political strike. After a lengthy debate, the proposal was accepted as a "tactical guide," but the issue was to be submitted to the local organizations. [77] In most cases, however, this proved difficult, as local organizations as such did not exist. In Sereda and Kokhma, at least, the SDs felt that the action would be untimely. [78]

Nevertheless, a meeting of Ivanovo-Voznesensk activists on July 26 decided to organize a strike in the near future, putting forward at first economic demands and then, calling for an end to the war. [79] On the night of August 8-9, a meeting of about 300 workers in the woods outside of Ivanovo listened to speeches about the necessity of ending the war, overthrowing the government and carrying out the social-democratic program. The next night, leaflets were posted in Ivanovo, Shuia and Kokhma calling for the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war, explaining that it was better to die on the barricades for freedom and a permanent peace than to die in a war for one's class enemies.

That same night, the Ivanovo police conducted a mass search and arrested 20 workers, including some who had been elected delegates in the negotiations with the governor during the May strike. Some of these were released in the morning for lack of evidence. But it was too late. The strike erupted that day, and the released workers assumed its leadership. By evening, a huge crowd had assembled on the town square to demand the release of all the prisoners. The police chief's proposals to elect delegates were ignored. From the crowd came shouts against the war and the autocracy as well as calls for the workers to free the prisoners themselves. After failing to convince the crowd to go home, E.C. Zinoviev, an old Bolshevik worker who had just been released, led it toward the jail. On the way, troops opened fire, killing 30, including Zinoviev, and seriously wounding 53. Towards the end of the next day, the workers began to return to the mills. [80]

[509]

The Kostroma and Ivanovo-Voznesensk strikes in the summer of 1915 were the first significant political protests of the war - both, at least in the immediate sense, responses to police repression. The Ivanovo massacre sparked off Petrograd's first important political strikes of the war. But while in the capital the strike movement became increasingly political in character (in the second year of the war, one half of the workdays lost were due to political strikes, while in the last six months before February, three quarters of the workdays lost were in political actions, [81] in the Ivanovo-Kineshma region there were no other overtly political collective protests before the revolution.

The next fifteen months were punctuated by scattered economic strikes throughout the region, the high point being the general strike in May 1916 in Shuia's 4 mills (8,000 workers) that lasted for over a month. [82] The police attributed these strikes to the workers' deteriorating economic situation - inflation and food shortages - as well as to the workers' calculation that the economic conjuncture was favorable to them, as the owners were making huge profits and could scarcely keep up with demand. The police also observed that although they could find no obvious leaders among the workers, the strikers were displaying greater solidarity and organization and often took management by surprise. Finally, the women were now showing greater tenacity than the men, who often faced loss of their military deferment. [83]

Most reports concluded that the movement was entirely economic and posed no threat to the regime. But a few observers felt that the apparent political calm was deceptive. A report from May 1916 noted :

The strikes, as modest and harmless as they were in April, nevertheless had a harmful significance, in the sense of the development of solidarity that could serve as a basis for dangerous organizational abilities, especially dangerous because the idea of "settling scores" at the end of the war is quite... strong and widespread in the worker milieu. [84]

Another report from the same month found the workers' mood to be "calm and expectant, but one cannot speak of any patriotic upsurge. This forced calm is entirely the result of their understanding that it is impossible to mount a strong anti-government movement before the war ends". [85]

December 1916 began with the usual scattered strikes. Then, in the middle of the month, the workers of several Ivanovo mills presented demands for wage raises and a bonus of one month's wage. On December 23, the workers of the Kuvaevskaia mill struck and won a bonus, though somewhat less than demanded. But the same day, Vitov, a liberal mill owner with the reputation for being a maverick, gave his workers a bonus equal to four months' wages. Threatened by a massive strike, the other owners decided to raise the monthly food allocation. This was not enough for the workers, who began their third general strike of the war on December 29, demanding the same bonus as the Vitov workers had received. The police naturally blamed Vitov for the strike and placed him under surveillance. Vitov explained that he had decided to give his workers a Christmas present in view of the high cost of living, his large profits, and to commemorate his mother's death.

On December 31, the owners threatened to fire any worker who was not back at work within three days. But the workers' response was to add new demands, including a 75% wage raise, free baths at the mills, pay for strike days, shops selling below [510] market prices, polite address, worker supervision of medical personnel, an increase in the lodging allocation and a fifteen-ruble food allocation for all workers, without regard to sex or age. However, by mid-January, most workers had returned on the basis of the owners' original offer. [86]

At the same time, a strike broke out in the two mills at Kokhma, the fifth that year. Workers with deferments were handed over to the military authorities, but the rest held out, demanding and winning their return. This strike ended two weeks before the revolution. [87] Elsewhere, scattered economic strikes continued as before. A police report from mid-January on the Kostroma side stated :

As before, we observe rather frequent partial strikes in the province, but the causes are almost exclusively economic in character. Political questions such as the postponement of the convocation of the State Duma and State Council or the anniversary of January 9, do not play a role in these strikes. The mood of the workers in all these strikes is very peaceful and there are no manifestations of an anti-state character in these parts. [88]

Indeed, even though most Ivanovo workers were on strike on January 9th, no demonstrations or other actions were reported to commemorate the day. In Petro-grad, between 200,000 and 300,000 workers struck in the biggest political strike of the war. [89]

The events of February and March 1917 would soon show that the outward political calm concealed profound alienation from the regime : the region's workers were more than ready to welcome the news of the revolution that would soon arrive by telegraph from Petrograd. This, of course, was true of virtually the whole country, and not only of the workers. The State Duma's "Department for Relations with the Provinces" reported in 1917 that the "widespread conviction that the Russian muzhik is attached to the Tsar, cannot live without the Tsar, was clearly refuted by the unanimous joy, the sigh of relief, with which they learned that they will henceforth be living without the one without whom they could not live". [90] Again, some officials did sense this. A police report from mid-January on the Kineshma district noted the absence of anti-government disorders. But it went on to state that the war, the defeats, the deteriorating economic situation, and the government's inability to organize the rear have created in "different strata of the population undoubted dissatisfaction with the existing order of things that expresses itself differently in different strata, and one observes all this time a sort of expectant mood that somehow, through someone's will, something will change, that the situation cannot stay as it is". The educated were looking to the State Duma, "but among the simple folk, one hears some kind of undefined threats or fear, and it is not clear to whom they are addressed, that they [the soldiers] will soon come home and will show them". [91]

This passage suggests a sense among the popular classes that the revolutionary opening would have to come from the outside. This was probably true on the whole. However, there were signs on the eve of the revolution that the mood might be changing. Thus the assistant chief of police of Vladimir province reported a few days before the revolution :

Under the impact of the food crisis, the mood of the broad masses of Ivanovo-Voznesensk is extremely agitated... So extreme a mood was not observed even in 1905, [511] and if the food crisis is not resolved satisfactorily, one must inevitably look forward to a workers' strike, to their demonstrating to demand bread and an end to the war, since... according to rumor, the workers are making efforts to obtain revolvers which the soldiers have brought back from the front. [92]

The reaction of the Novoloki workers to the news of revolution in Petrograd was typical for the region. Novoloki, a village about 14 kilometers from Kineshma, was the site of a large textile complex with 3,000 workers. In early January, the workers of the weaving mill had gone out on strike and were still out when on February 25, G. Korolev, a social democrat activist, was summoned to a party meeting in Kineshma. Here he received rather vague information about strikes and fraternization with soldiers in Petrograd. He was instructed to try to turn the economic strike in Navoloki into a political one and to make it general in the village. This proposal was met enthusiastically by Novoloki's activists, and they put it before the workers of the mechanical shop, who also needed little persuading, despite threats from management and the presence of police at the mill. Before long the entire complex had struck.

At this point Korolev was called back to Kineshma by a coded phone call : "The flour has arrived. Come !" At the edge of town, he saw posted the governor's appeal for calm. He asked some soldiers what they would do if the workers came to over-throwthe authorities. They replied that they would help. They were already passing around hectographed leaflets about the events in Petrograd, while the police stood by passively.

The Kineshma SDs proposed that since Novoloki was already on strike, it should take the initiative in raising the other workers of the area. Korolev expressed his doubts about the workers walking the 14 kilometers in the dead of winter, all the more so as the loyalties of the Kineshma garrison were still not entirely clear. But the next morning, the entire worker population of the village set off behind red banners, picking up en route the workers of several other mills and a significant number of peasants. A moment of hesitation occurred outside of Kineshma when the workers spotted a detachment of soldiers, but they soon made out the red flags attached to the bayonettes. Before long, workers were streaming into the town from all the surrounding mills. Their first acts were to free the political prisoners and arrest the police and higher officials. That evening, a meeting of 15,000 workers and other citizens elected (by another account, confirmed) a Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Public Organizations, which included, among others, representatives of the War-Industry Committee, i.e. the mill owners. Its mandate was to coordinate its activity with the Provisional Government, insofar as the latter carried out the people's demands, especially the convocation of a Constituent Assembly. A soviet of workers' deputies elected soon after delegated ten members to the Revolutionary Committee. For several weeks, the names of the two organizations appeared together on a local bulletin. [93]

Back at Novoloki, the workers disarmed the police and elected a militia and factory committee. On the suggestion of the Kineshma soviet, "in the interests of the fatherland", they unanimously decided to return to work. "But insisting on our demands, we inform the owners that, if they sympathize with the revolutionary movement, they will meet our demands." [94]

[512]

The workers' unhesitating and active welcome of the revolution thus involved at the outset a willingness to participate in coalition organs with "census" elements, as well as support for the war, as a non-annexationist war of defense of the revolutionary fatherland, and conditional support for the Provisional Government. In the region, as in the capital, the revolution seemed to have brought the society temporarily together, as the mill owners participated in demonstrations and attended workers' meetings, sporting red ribbons on their lapels, pledging thousands of rubles to build cultural facilities for the people. [95] In any case, the idea of taking power by themselves directly was at the time far from the workers' thoughts. They defined their Soviets as "non-partisan organizations, defending the political and economic interests of the workers". [96] Everywhere the workers sent representatives to the revolutionary committees to sit beside census elements. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, it was the Bolshevik-led soviet itself that initiated the creation of the revolutionary committee, to which it then delegated ten members. [97]

But while the workers did participate in such coalition organs, they were unyielding on the prerogatives and the class character of their own political organizations, the Soviets. In Vichuga, the soviet (representing some 35,000 workers) sent delegates to the Tezino volost' revolutionary committee as well as to the Kineshma district committee. But the workers here did not allow white-collar employees into the soviet, "because it is impossible to find the line that separates them from the administration ; it is difficult to separate those receiving a small salary from the mill aristocracy". [98]

From the start, the Soviets insisted on sole jurisdiction in matters pertaining directly to the workers. The Kovrov soviet at its first session informed the local revolutionary committee not to take any decisions regarding the workers without first obtaining the Soviet's agreement. [99] In Shuia, the soviet informed the Society of Factory and Mill Owners that its note complaining of "disorganization in the worker milieu", sent to the revolutionary committee, should have been addressed to the soviet, since only "the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies are at present empowered to examine such questions and to take specific decisions". [100] In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, the soviet informed the revolutionary committee that it could make no decisions on economic issues between workers and employers. [101]

Apparently there was some opposition to participation in the revolutionary committees but it was too small to make a difference. An editorial in Izvestiia of the Kostroma soviet of March 11 explained the all-national character of the revolution that had united all classes and therefore claimed so few victims.

The Russian workers for now have to go together with those with whom they won freedom. In a number of places, including Kostroma, protests are heard against participation in those organizations that have taken power with representatives of the zemstva and city [government]... If we push them away, they will go against us. Maybe that is not so frightening, but all the same it would cause severe complications in the struggle for our ideals. We need to use our time not for struggle but for organization. There will be enough struggle in the future.

That the workers - including Bolshevik workers - of such an historically polarized region accepted this argument is not surprising, after three years of war [513] and intense repression. According to a local Bolshevik activist, the workers in February were "extremely disorganized, physically exhausted and politically backward". [102] Participation in local coalitions occurred all over Russia. The capital was an exception, in part because at issue there was the formation of a national government. Yet even in Petrograd, although the Menshevik and SR leaders of the soviet refused offers to enter the government, Kerensky (himself a member of the soviet executive) easily won approval for the soviet for his personal decision to join the government. Nor is there any evidence of rank-and-file protest against this. [103]

In any case, participation in local revolutionary committees was apparently not seen as "conciliationism". As late as June 1917, i.e., long after the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet had begun demanding the transfer of power to the Soviets, the Ivanovo Bolsheviks decided to leave their members in the Executive Committee of Public Organizations, even while calling at the same time for concrete measures to transfer power to the soviet. [104] The Executive Committee itself soon brought matters to a head by declaring itself the sole authority in the city, to which all other organizations had to submit. But a sort of dual power continued to exist in the city until the Bolsheviks won the election to the city Duma at the end of August. [105]

Whatever the exact nature of the workers' "conciliationism" and "defensism" at the start of the revolution, these positions proved to be superficial and short-lived. Already on April 24, the Teikovo soviet demanded that power be transferred to the Soviets. [106] The Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet followed suit on May 12, following its reorganization on a more representative basis. [107] The immediate motive of this shift was the Provisional Government's refusal to renounce its imperialist war aims, something that was revealed in Miliukov's note that unleashed the April Crisis in Petrograd. The Teikovo Soviet's resolution came immediately after the note became known. It began : "The Provisional Government is a government that is thoroughly imperialist, tied hand and foot to Anglo-French and Russian capital". The Ivanovo soviet passed its resolution after a discussion of the war, noting that the government "in its bourgeois essence", could not keep its promises.

But the war was not an abstract issue here. It was experienced directly in the absence of the men and in the growing economic dislocation, especially the inflation and the shortages of food, fuel and raw materials. The founding conference of the regional textile union on June 10-12 demanded by an overwhelming majority that power be transferred to the Soviets as the only way out of the "catastrophe of unprecedented proportions" that was approaching. It called for workers' control of production, the organization of exchange between industry and agriculture, and other measures. [108] Already on April 30, a conference on food called for control over its distribution by the local Soviets. [109]

At the same time, the honeymoon between the workers and the mill owners, to the extent that it had existed, turned sour. When the Easter break ended on April 24, a number of mills did not re-open, the owners contending that they lacked fuel or raw materials. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet demanded that mills not resuming production pay full wages and it established a commission for control of industry. This was enough to get the mills open. [110] In Shuia at the start of May, the owners' association [514] sent a note to the executive of the local revolutionary committee complaining that the factory committees were taking over management functions, thereby threatening the mills with closure. The soviet responded that while the owners saw the work of the factory committees as an infringement on their prerogatives, the committees were only defending the interests of the workers. If the owners made good their threat to close, the workers would petition the state to requisition the mills. [111]

The threat of closure henceforth remained an immediate and constant one. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet noted that the owners were doing nothing to secure the fuel that was available and that the desire of the mill owners to close down production in this difficult moment is nothing less than the desire to take the revolutionary working class by hunger in order to take back the freedom that it has won. [112]

The other important issue was wages. This too was seen by the workers as a test of the owners' adherence to the revolution, as the Novoloki workers had declared upon returning to work after the revolution in March. Wage increases were granted at the time in most mills, but they did not satisfy the workers, since prices continued to mount. A regional conference of Soviets on April 4-6 issued a package of demands, including the eight-hour day, a wage raise, and a one-time bonus equal to 20% of the entire wage between Easter 1916 and Easter 1917. A meeting with the owners on May 10-12 ended in a deadlock over the modalities of introducing the eight-hour day and over the size of the bonus - the owners' offer was 35-40% below what was asked. When the owners declared that they would carry out their offer unilaterally, the workers' delegates walked out. They decided to stick to their demands but to put off a strike until a regional trade union could be organized and supplies of fuel and raw materials made ready. Once this was accomplished, the workers would join battle "along the entire front of the Ivanovo-Kineshma region". This position was wholeheartedly supported at meetings in the mills. [113] It was symbolic that the Ivanovo soviet first demanded the transfer of power to the Soviets on the day that the talks broke off.

All this was occurring against the background of an increasingly bitter campaign in the bourgeois press blaming the workers for the country's troubles. Utro Rossii began an investigative series on the "Russian Manchester" because, it wrote, "we hear cries from all sides that industry, and especially the textile industry, is threatened, not so much by general causes, as by the inordinate demands of the workers and the owners' inability to meet them". [114] On April 29, the workers of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk Factory of Mechanical Products decided to boycott the bourgeois press for its "baiting of the soldiers and workers". [115]

In the light of this remarkably swift and unanimous transition from guarded support for the Provisional Government to the demand for soviet power, the "con-ciliationist" mood of February appears as an aside, an aberration in the region's nearly unbroken record of "Bolshevism", which, if it meant anything, stood of an irreconcilable hostility to the propertied classes. Indeed, despite the very real nature of the issues cited in the various resolutions demanding soviet power, it is hard to escape the impression that the really decisive element in the shift was that of leadership : the reconstruction of the Bolshevik organization that had been smashed during the war, the return from prison, exile and the front of experienced local leaders, and the party's political reorientation along the lines of Lenin's "April Theses".

[515]

Following the call of the First Congress of Soviets, demonstrations were held on June 18th throughout the region in support of the Soviets. However, here as in Petro-grad, the workers went further than the moderate socialist leadership of the Congress wished. Instead of merely expressing their support for the Soviets, the workers demanded that they take power. [116]

News of the July Days (an attempt by the capital's workers and a part of the garrison on July 3-5 to pressure the moderate socialist majority of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets to take power) reached the region in the form of a telegram from the Bolsheviks' Moscow Regional Bureau telling of "a decisive action in Petro-grad of the factories and regiments" and calling for demonstrations and strikes under the slogan of "all power to the Soviets". In Ivanovo, the soviet called for a demonstration on July 6 - the soldiers were to come in battle dress - despite a prohibition on demonstrations by the Executive Committee of Public Organizations and its chairman's threat to open fire on the demonstrators. On the night of July 4-5, the soviet dispatched delegates, accompanied by armed militia, to occupy the post, telegraph, telephone, railway station and other key buildings. According to the commissar of Vladimir province, practically all the workers took part in the demonstration. [117] Similar demonstrations were held in Rodniki, Sereda, Teikovo, Shuia and other points. [118]

Meanwhile, in Petrograd, the workers' movement suffered a major defeat when the moderate socialist leaders allowed the use of armed force against them. This ushered in a period of political reaction culminating in the abortive coup d'etat by General Kornilov at the end of August. A major slander campaign was mounted by the bourgeois press and abetted by the moderate socialists. (It was at this point that the Minister of Internal Affairs leaked information purporting to implicate Lenin in taking German gold.) The reaction won a certain short-lived popular support. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk, as in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks were accused of attempting to seize power (an accusation that may have had some basis at least in Ivanovo). Shaken by this turn of events, the executive of the Ivanovo soviet agreed on July 17 to participate in an inquiry into the local July events launched by the Executive Committee of Public Organizations. However, the soviet plenum would hear nothing of this. It affirmed that the soviet had acted correctly and that it was responsible in its actions only to the Central Executive Committee of Soviets in Petrograd. It also decided to elect a new executive. [119]

In the Ivanovo-Kineshma area, the reaction against the Bolsheviks was limited mainly to the district centers, Iur'evets and Kineshma, with their large petty bourgeois and state employee populations. [120] Generally, however, the polarization between the working class and "census" society continued to deepen and grow more bitter around the issue of wages and factory closings.

The Council of United Industry of the Central Industrial Region, emboldened by the turn of political events in the capital, issued a circular on July 22 advising its members that under no circumstances should they submit to orders issued by the Soviets. Moreover, they should avoid all direct contact with the Soviets and cease payment of wages to workers absent from their jobs because of duties in working class and other public organizations. As for the factory committees, their rights had been defined by the law of April 23, 1917 that limited their jurisdiction to "internal order". They had no right of control nor any say in hiring and firing. [121] On July 23, the Teikovo soviet wrote to its counterpart in Ivanovo :

[516]

The representative of the Karetnikova firm does not recognize the local soviet of w.d. nor the mill committee and he will not pay for [time spent at] meetings, and whatever we decide is not carried out. Instead, it is pointed out that "the revolutionary wave has fallen, and now I will decide to introduce whatever arrangements I like". [122]

For workers the issue was not simply the distribution of power in the factories. It was whether the owners would have a free hand in carrying out their plan to close the mills. Utro Rossii reported that at the beginning of August, 35,000 textile workers in the region were unemployed because of the lack of fuel and raw materials. [123] The Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet accused the mill owners of doing nothing to secure fuel once navigation had reopened on the Volga, while they continued to cite the shortage of fuel as the reason for closing their mills. Meanwhile the soviet had learned that the owners' oil reservoirs in Kineshma had been rented out and that fuel was being shipped up river for sale to Moscow industrialists. The Soviet's intervention resulted in an immediate quadrupling of fuel deliveries to the city's mills. [124] "It has reached a point, concluded the Soviet's executive, where the production of our entire region is being stopped, while at the same time wagons and tankers stand on the sidings, waiting for months to be repaired or for spare parts, when this could be done in the course of a few days. From this we can see that the industrialists want to disorganize production and, having stopped the mills, to smash the entire organization of democracy." [125]

Matters were also heating up on the wage front, the basic issue being the establishment of a minimum subsistence wage tied to the cost of living. The August 13-17 delegates' conference of the regional textile union heard a report on the wage struggle. Wage demands had been made at the very start of the revolution, and the frightened owners had made concessions, though rather slowly and in a non-uniform manner, which tended to encourage further demands. To give the struggle a more uniform character, the Soviets called a conference in April, and following this presented demands to the owners in May. Though no agreement was reached, the owners did make further concessions - a 100% raise - but not everywhere. Prices continued to rise, and the workers made new demands, while the owners complained that these were ruining industry. In addition, the workers were dissatisfied with a situation in which different wages were paid for the same job, often in the same mill. The threat of a mass strike was in the air, something that the owners were apparently looking forward to. The union had to direct the workers into an organized channel. But, the rapporteur warned, the struggle would be harder in April, as the owners

had by now completely recovered from their initial fright before the revolution. They once again feel sure of victory and, having proudly raised their head, throw out one challenge after the other to the working class - they refuse to pay for idle time, they ignore the factory committee. And the are also ahead of the working class in the construction of their own organizations. [126]

The conference gave the executive a strike mandate to seek a minimum living wage. The union's position was upheld by the rank and file, who, with few exceptions, refrained from individual strikes until the regionwide demands were prepared.

[517]

In addition, the food crisis had once again become critical. In Shuia on August 8, a crowd of peasants attacked the Food Authority, beating up some of its members. That same day, the Vladimir province food authority sent the following telegram to the Ministry of Food Supply : "Vladimir province is on the edge of the abyss. There is no food. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk workers have gone three days without bread. A hundred and eighty thousand people are on the eve of a food riot". [127]

A few days later, the Ivanovo Bolshevik committee adopted the following resolution :

The dissatisfaction of the workers is growing and insistently calls for decisive measures to meet their demands to one degree or another. The [Bolshevik] organization has to take upon itself the leadership of the economic strike that is undoubtedly ripening and unquestionably approaching. The party must turn the economic strike, if it occurs, into a political one. [128]

This resolution rings a bit strange in a region where the workers for the past three months had been demanding the transfer of power to the Soviets. On August 12, a general assembly of workers of the Vichuga area discussed the State Conference that was opening in Moscow. This conference had been "organized" (the mode of representation was highly skewed to favor supporters of the government coalition) by Kerensky with a view to obtaining a common declaration of support for the government from both "democracy" and "census society". The Vichuga meeting resolved that :

In Russia, five months of the politics of conciliation have resulted in total failure. Attempts to unite on a common political platform workers and capitalists, peasants and landowners, republicans and monarchists, have only resulted in a situation where not one of the provisional governments has taken decisive measures to end the war or the economic dislocation, or to transfer the land to the peasants, or to fight the counterrevolution... Military conspiracies, a slanderous offensive, not only against the Bolsheviks, but against all Zimmerwaldists, sabotage of economic undertakings, struggle against land reform, a campaign against the soldiers' organizations and against the soviets-these are the means of struggle and the slogans of the counterrevolution that has openly proclaimed as its goal a restoration by means of a coup d'état. Before the popular masses arises the terrible danger of the loss of all their revolutionary gains... The only way out of this situation [is] a complete break with the counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie and the transfer of all power into the hands of revolutionary proletarian, soldiers' and peasants' Soviets. [129]

The Bolshevik paper Nasha Zvezda in its editorial on August 24, warned the workers : "The tenth wave of the Russian revolution is ahead. It will be more difficult than all the preceding ones. For the working class will have to play the leading role in it, an even more decisive role, since it will have to struggle against all the propertied classes and will have fewer comrades in that struggle."

The news at the end of August of Kornilov's attempted coup hardly came as a surprise, and the reaction in the mill centers was, as before, unanimous : arm the workers, arrest the Tsarist generals and the leaders of the "counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie", close and confiscate the "counterrevolutionary bourgeois press", expel the agents of international imperialism, and transfer all power to "truly revolutionary Soviets". [130] Frunze, who in the fall of 1917 was chairman of the executive of [518] the Shuia soviet as well as of the city and district organs of self-administration, characterized the situation after the Kornilov affair in the following terms :

The mood everywhere, and especially among the workers and soldiers, was strongly revolutionary. The Soviets felt their strength and acted in the consciousness of the absolute inevitability of the transfer of power to the toilers in the whole republic. But as time passed and it did not happen, the movement here and in the entire Vladimir province began to overflow its banks. [131]

As Frunze noted, real power in the industrial centers was already in fact in the hands of the Soviets, which everywhere had Bolshevik majorities and which controlled the armed forces - the garrisons and the red guards. [132] Thus, on October 17, the representative of the administration of the Iasiunskii mills in Kokhma complained to the general assembly of the Soviet of Factory and Mill owners of the "arbitrary actions of the local soviet" it was requisitioning food and fodder, forbidding the shipment of manufactured goods, and had removed one of the managers. The assembly noted unanimously that these were only "particular manifestations of the regime of seizures, violence and arbitrariness that is supported by the power-lessness of the central and local legal authorities". [133]

At the same time, in a number of places, the Bolsheviks were actually the legal authority, having won elections at the end of August and the beginning of September to the organs of the local self-government. This was the case in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Rodniki volost', the town and district of Shuia, Yurevets district, and Kineshma district. [134]

In contrast to Petrograd, there was no mood of attentisme here, no linking of the transfer of power to the Congress of Soviets. Meetings typically demanded the transfer of power "at once". [135] One local activist recalled that "many women workers accused the Communists of indecision toward the Provisional Government". [136]

The chief reason the movement began to "overflow its banks", as Frunze put it, was the economic situation, in particular the food crisis, which took another major turn for the worse at the end of August. Ivanovo-Voznesensk reported cases of workers falling on the road from exhaustion and of illness among post and telegraph employees due to hunger. [137] On September 20-21, the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet heard reports on the desperate situation in the mills, with workers complaining about the work of the soviet and the Food Authority and threatening to stop work because of hunger. The soviet resolved that.

The spontaneous movement of the masses that is beginning is provoked by hunger, the insignificant wages and the general disorganization of economic life - the shortage of cotton in the mills and the increasing number of mill closures... The resolution of these problems depends on the general situation in the country, on the war that still continues, on the government that stands at the head of the country. The assembly finds it necessary to direct the rising movement onto an organized path of political demonstration under the slogans "all power to the Soviets", "peace, bread, work".

At a meeting with representatives of the city's public organizations, it was decided to hold a demonstration on September 23 as well as meetings in the mills to [519] explain the situation to the workers. [138] Similar demonstrations were held in other centers but they did little to alleviate the workers' truly desperate situation. On October 3, the Ivanovo soviet telegraphed the government that the situation was "horrendous" and that unless a food train was dispatched directly, the soviet would not be responsible for any disorders that might occur. As an extreme measure, it conducted searches for hidden stores of food. [139]

On October 4, a meeting of representatives of the mills was held on the food situation. The town's big grain merchants were also invited. The mood became very angry toward the soviet when the workers learned that there was no hope of obtaining grain in the immediate future. The merchants, for their part, said that they could organize food distribution but that they were hindered by the various committees. However, representatives of the Soviets managed to calm the workers, explaining again the role of the war and of the Provisional Government. The meeting decided that each mill should choose two representatives who could be attached to the Food Authority and keep the workers informed. It ended with a pledge on the part of the workers' delegation "to fight ignorant agitation and to defend staunchly the workers' organizations". [140] This scenario, sometimes in more extreme form, would repeat itself many times over during the next three years, as food shortages and hunger became chronic.

The struggle to keep the mills open was also growing more desperate. Atthe start of September, four Ivanovo mills and eight outside the city closed, putting 30,000 workers out of work. [141] The Bureau of the Factory Conference [Zavodskoe soveshchanie], a governmental body, took note of the increasingly frequent cases of "deliberate refusal on the part of the owners of industrial enterprises to continue production at their factories and mills, even after the Factory Conference had established the possibility of doing so". It proposed a law making this a serious criminal offense, but this proposal met with no sympathy in higher government circles. [142]

The other economic issue was wages, which by now had fallen far behind prices. The 100% raise granted in May had been reduced to nothing. In Shuia and nearby, the demand for a wage increase and for equal wages for similar work finally gave rise to a general strike on September 25. The owners had made an offer but they tied it to their output norms. The workers rejected this in view of the poor quality of the materials they were given and because of the hunger. However, a settlement was reached within three days [143] and generally, strikes were rare in this period. Given this situation, the workers behaved with considerable restraint as the regional textile union prepared to present its demands to the owners. By all accounts, the mood of the rank and file toward this forthcoming struggle was "very militant and cheerful", an assessment that would be borne out in the strike itself. [144]

The October Revolution in the Ivanovo-Kineshma region took the form of a general strike for a living minimum wage. The official transfer of power, as Frunze recalled, went almost unnoticed and "was accepted as something totally evident and inevitable". [145] According to V. Kuznetsov, the first chairman of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet, "in a city such as Ivanovo-Voznesensk, we had nothing to overthrow... [520] We contacted Shuia, Kineshma, Teikovo and other workers' settlements. Everywhere - quiet, calm, restraint. It was surprising - two such quiet months : February and October. [146] The only exceptions were the district centers, Kineshma and Yurevets. Elsewhere, the only active opposition, and it was weak, came from post, telegraph and other state employees.

On October 20, the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet set up a headquarters of the Red Guard and declared the soviet to be in a state of open war with the Provisional Government. The soviet would henceforth act independently of the Provisional Government to regulate economic and political life on its own in accordance with the interests of the toiling masses. [147] The next day, the general strike began, and it immediately confirmed where the real power lay : everywhere workers set up armed pickets and seized full control of the mills, telegraphs and telephones and the property of the owners. No one could gain access to the mills and no goods could leave without permission of the strike committees. Nor were the owners, the higher administration and their families allowed to leave the area, though most had fled to Moscow before the strike began. One besieged mill owner was refused permission to slaughter his cow for food. [148]

The news of the insurrection in Petrograd was welcomed enthusiastically in the region. [149] A force of soldiers and workers sent from there played an important role in the victory of the Moscow uprising. [150] On November 1, the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet resolved :

Russia is at present living through a period of acute class struggle, civil war. Not the working class, nor the soldiers, nor the peasants began this bloodshed. The blood being shed on the streets of Petrograd and Moscow falls on the head of the overthrown Provisional Government and the parties and groups that support it.

All socialist parties at this moment of the newly arisen Kornilovshchina must rally and create a united socialist front. Parties that reject this and seek coalitions in committees of public salvation with Kornilovist elements cast themselves out of revolutionary democracy and openly take their place in the ranks of the counterrevolution.

The Ivanovo-Voznesensk Soviet promises full support by all means possible to the new Provisional Government - the government of the revolutionary soldiers, peasants and workers that has emerged from the midst of the Soviets and is responsible to them. [151]

Ten days later, the soviet demanded an end to negotiations for a coalition with the moderate socialists, whom it considered traitors to the revolution, and called solely on the Left SRs to enter the government. [152]

The transfer of power in the center had little immediate effect on the course of the strike or on its outcome. On November 5, once the fighting in Moscow had come to an end, the central strike committee proposed to end the strike if the owners would recognize in principle the six-ruble minimum wage. The owners replied that a minimum could be established only through negotiations in a conciliation chamber. A meeting of the union executive with representatives of the region's Soviets [521] agreed that, now that they had power, it was no longer in the workers' interests to continue the strike. Rather, it was the owners who wanted to keep the mills closed. However, the meeting also agreed that the strike could not be ended without showing the workers some concrete gains. It was decided, therefore, to begin negotiations with the owners while continuing the strike and to propose as a minimum basis for its termination a guarantee against dismissal of strikers, recognition of the principle of a minimum living wage (without specifying its size), a collective agreement retroactive to August 1, and payment for time on strike.

In the meanwhile, the new People's Commissar of Labor advised the union to end the strike, as he was drafting a law on the minimum wage, limitation of profits, etc., and he promised to intervene actively in the dispute. The union, however, decided to pursue the strike until there was an agreement. From all across the region, the reports were the same : the mood was cheerful, no worse than at the start. [153]

On November 11, representatives of the workers and owners met in Moscow. The union found the owners' reply unacceptable, in particular their insistence that a minimum wage be tied to productivity norms and that the new rates be made retroactive only to October 1. The union broke off the talks, but they were resumed on November 14, thanks to the intercession of the Moscow Soviet. A compromise was reached that recognized the principle of a minimum living wage. No one would be fired for the strike, but there would be no pay for time lost, and the raise would be made retroactive to September 15. The union also agreed to productivity norms.

The strike ended on November 17. Factory committees were instructed to continue to control shipments and mill finances and to carefully verify claims - numerous, but in most cases unfounded - that the mills could not reopen for technical reasons. [154] But the talks that continued after the return to work did not result in an agreement on the size of the minimum wage and they too broke off. The owners then decided to introduce their proposed minimum unilaterally - 5.25 rubles for men and 4.50 for women. The union had to decide on a response. Information from Moscow made it clear that a new strike would have little effect on the owners, who were probably hoping for it. On November 30, the union executive met with representatives of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk soviet and decided to arrest the most prominent of the mill owners and to bring them to Ivanovo. [155] A few days later, the union instructed the factory committees to introduce the six-ruble minimum wage for both men and women "without preliminary permission" and to establish monitoring committees made up two thirds of workers and one third of management. If the latter stopped production in protest, the workers were to start it up again on their own and notify the soviet. [156]

On December 3, a detachment of armed workers from Teikovo delivered four mill owners from Moscow to the Ivanovo jail. One was released after signing a collective agreement. The others were freed three weeks later on the insistent request of the Moscow Soviet Commissar of Labor.

After their release, the union once again proposed negotiations on the basis of an agreement on a six-ruble minimum. But no answer came, and the factory committees continued to introduce it "without preliminary permission". To this effect, the executive of the regional soviet instructed the factory committees and local Soviets to take measures to forestall possible sabotage, including the establishment of full [522] control over the shipment of manufactured goods and the prohibition of absence without permission on the part of the owners, higher administration and their families. Owners and administrators were to sign pledges to carry out their normal functions conscientiously. When necessary, the factory committees were to request the aid of red guards and revolutionary soldiers in enforcing these measures. [157]

The evolution of this struggle made clear the limits of the use of political power to support the workers' economic demands within the framework of a capitalist economy, particularly when the owners were in any case not enthusiastic about operating their mills. As late as March 1918, the fifth delegates' conference of the textile union was told : "We have found that despite the acquisition of political power by the proletariat and poor peasantry, the cause of the defense of labor by means of a collective agreement has scarcely been made easier, even for our own far from weak union". [158]

The workers thus came face to face with the issue of nationalization, which had not been among their original goals, even though they had physically seized the mills at the start of the strike. Already on January 27, 1918, the Shuia soviet resolved to "defend the principle of nationalization of the textile industry, as a measure whose promulgation will become inevitable in the general course of the development of our revolution". [159] By the time the decree on nationalization of the textile industry was issued in August 1918, a series of large mills had already passed into the hands of the state as a result of their abandonment by their owners, or in response to management opposition to workers' control, or to what the workers perceived as sabotage or negligence. [160] The decree itself was thus very much a response to pressures from below, though full nationalization in the region was not completed until the spring of 1919, at the height of the civil war and of the economic collapse.

The October uprising and the formal transfer of power to the Soviets were not experienced in the region as marking a watershed in the revolution. The first collective agreement signed, on January 6, 1918 in Sereda, did not mention October 25 among the holidays, although it did include the "Day of the Revolution", February 27. [161] In part, this was because the workers already held political power. But in part it was also because they did not make a clear distinction in their minds between political and economic issues.

The October Revolution in the region had taken the form of a strike for a living wage. The Bolshevik leaders, the "conscious workers", considered it necessary to guide the economic movement into political channels. But the rank and file workers, and particularly the women, did not share this view - to them, the right to a minimally decent wage (an egalitarian demand that corresponded in particular to the interests of the mass of unskilled workers) was itself a basic democratic right. Thus, on returning to work in March, the Navoloki workers declared that if the owners "sympathize with the revolutionary movement, they will grant our [economic] demands". And the union leaders, though they themselves felt it best to end the strike after the October Revolution, knew that the workers would not end the strike without having won their economic demands.

The distinction between economic and political issues that dominates modern consciousness under capitalism was not a spontaneous development. It had to be imposed upon the popular classes by force, and this was not done easily. [162] In this [523] region, where industry had grown up in the villages, where there was virtually no left-leaning intelligentsia to offer a different vision of society, and where there was really no "census society" but the mill owners and their "lackeys", this type of distinction did not take hold. The persistence of "food" and lodging allocations as part of the wage, and the assumption, albeit often reluctant by the mill owners of responsibility for the food supply of their workers (at least during the war), indicates that the owners themselves may have shared a sense of paternalistic responsibility for their workers.

Of course, such an undifferentiated conception of responsibilities and rights left little room for a purely political, bourgeois-democratic revolution. Unlike Petro-grad, this region had never experienced a democratic movement embracing all classes. The 1905 revolution from its inception had been a polarized struggle of workers against mill owners over economic issues. It became politicized when the state intervened on the side of the owners. The local intelligentsia had never sympathized with the workers. [163] It is not surprising, then, that the "conciliationist" period of 1917 was extremely brief and the transition from February to October remarkably natural for local workers. It did not involve the painful and hesitant shift in consciousness observable among Petrograd's metalworkers.

As it turned out, the workers of this region did not succeed in securing the minimum living wage they sought. With foreign intervention, civil war and economic collapse, their material situation deteriorated beyond anything they had experienced in the course of the First World War. During 1918, protests against the horrendous food situation were frequent, but the Bolshevik's hegemony was never really challenged. A party report from Ivanovo-Voznesensk province in the fall of 1918 explained :

Although the number of Communists is relatively small compared to the total mass of workers (300,000) [!], one can say with confidence that the mood in the province is strongly Bolshevik... The mood among the workers is firm and relatively calm, though one does not observe any rush to join the Red Army : here one feels acutely the fatigue, as well as the tense, anxious conditions of life. Even in this unceasing anxiety over the fate of the revolution, they remain calm. With such workers it is easy to work and live. We could develop broad party work in the province, if one has in mind only the workers. But here we come up against the common misfortune - the shortage of active, experienced people. [164]

Here, in a few words, was the tragedy of Russia's working class (outside of Petro-grad, which ceased to exist soon after October as a living working-class center), strongly revolutionary material, but a shortage of "active people" upon which to build after the revolution.