This book explores the impact of the 1917 Revolution on factory life

In view of the fact that the owner of the factory has not appeared since 24
May, and that the factory has been working under the supervision of the
factory committee, we are seeking your permission to run production, to
receive and fulfil orders both state and private, and to continue production
when those state orders begun under Brenner have been finished and
despatched to the institutions from which they were received. Without your
permission, the committee will be deprived of the possibility of continuing
production at the factory and this will make it difficult for the workers to
receive their wages.⁵⁵

On 16 June the Peterhof district soviet agreed to check the accounts

of the Brenner works and to make an inventory of stock. It later
agreed to oversee an experiment in Self-management, by putting the
deputy to the soviet in charge of operations at the factory.⁵⁶ The




factory was desperately short of capital, so the committee turned to
other factory committees for help. The Triangle works lent the factory

0. 
   rubles and the Putilov works sent some raw material, but this
   did not really help. At one stage the committee began negotiations
   with Brenner about his possible return, but his terms proved
   unacceptable. By August productivity was sliding fast, workers were
   not receiving their wages and drunkenness was on the increase. On 24
   August the commissar of the local militia reported to the Peterhof
   soviet that he had received an order from the government to eject the
   workers from the factory.⁵⁷ The committee then turned to the
   government to demand sequestration. After pressure from the CCFC,
   the government agreed in September to place the factory in charge of
   the Factory Convention.⁵⁸
   

At the V.A. Lebedev airplane factory the thousand workers in late
May demanded a large increase, which management refused to
countenance. The SRs at the factory called for the wage claim to be
referred to the conciliation chamber, but they suggested that if
management persisted in its recalcitrance, the workers should
demand the removal of the director. Another group of workers,
however, demanded the immediate expulsion of the director ‘for
disseminating false rumours aimed at disorganising the workers and
employees of the factory’. They won the toss and the workers forced
the removal of the director from the board of the company. On 2 June
another general meeting was summoned at which a call was made for
workers to take over the running of the factory themselves. Some
pointed out that this was impractical, since they did not have any
capital to continue operations. A worker by the name of Tamsin
proposed the following resolution: ‘We empower the factory commit-
tee to take over the running of the factory by itself, to inform the board
of this step and to invite a government commissar to the factory and
to inform the metalworkers’ union.’ The SR chairman of the
factory committee resigned at this point, and the next day the SR
factory cell called a meeting which the Bolsheviks refused to attend.
This meeting agreed that ‘the question of transferring the factory into
the workers’ hands cannot be decided by an open vote, but only by a
secret ballot of all comrade-workers, so that each worker considers
himself responsible for the decision’. A member of the City Soviet
was called to the factory and he eventually dissuaded the workers
from taking over the factory, leaving it in charge of the board of
directors.⁵⁹

In a few instances workers tried to force the government to

‘sequestrate’ their factories, by nominating a new board of manage-
ment to run the enterprise, or by appointing a government official to
oversee the running of the enterprise. In general, the government was
not keen to do this and it resisted demands from workers at the
Slyusarenko airplane, the Langenzippen works and elsewhere for it to
take responsibility for management of their factories.⁶⁰ In a couple of
cases, however, the government did agree to sequestration. At the
Rykatkin engineering works, where twenty-four workers were em-
ployed, the government provided loans during the war of nearly a
million rubles for defence orders, but the value of completed orders
was less than 100,000 rubles. Suspecting peculation, the War
Industries Committee mounted an investigation. After a conflict with
the workforce in May, the owner, V.I. Rykatkin, resolved to close his
factory and began secretly to remove tools and equipment. After he
was caught one night, the Menshevik-dominated factory committee
refused him entry to the factory and petitioned the government to
sequester the enterprise. At first, the Ministry of Labour refused, but
at the end of July it acceded to the request.⁶¹

At the Respirator factory, where 7,000 workers were employed in

making gas-masks, the administration quit the factory at the end of
August. The factory committee couched its demand for sequestration
in unambiguously defencist terms:

We have made clear our position regarding the sabotage of our factory by the
administration, which has gone away at this most pressing and critical
moment. We consider this to be an act of desertion of the home front. In order
not to disrupt or harm production of gas-masks for the front, and in order that
the factory can work normally - in spite of the eight-day absence of the
administration - we unanimously resolve: As circumstances will not permit of
any delay, to demand the immediate appointment of a commissar to take care
of the legal side of things and that he be someone neutral. The works
committee and shop stewards’ committee take responsibility for production
and maintaining output ...

In no circumstances must our factory be subject to the War Industries
Committee, but to the state. We demand that the administration, which is
guilty of desertion, be handed over to a democratic court .. ,⁶²

The government seems to have resisted the demand for sequestration,

for the factory soon closed down.⁶³

The examples of the Brenner, Lebedev, Rykatkin and Respirator

works show clearly that efforts by workers to remove the administra-
tion were not inspired by syndicalist utopianism: they were designed
to save jobs. The committees behaved in an organised fashion and
liaised with the soviets and the government. They sought to force the




government into taking responsibility for the factory, and the sheer
practical difficulties of running a factory seem to have discouraged
them from attempting to run the factories by themselves. Factory
seizures, or ‘socialisations’ were almost non-existent in Petrograd,
although they were beginning to take place in the Ukraine by the
autumn of 1917.

As workers’ control became more aggressive and expansionist,

opposition to it from factory owners hardened. Everywhere em-
ployers began to resist ‘interference’ by factory committees and to
reassert their ‘right to manage’. Attempts by the Society of Factory
and Works Owners to confine the activities of the committees to the
area demarcated by the law of 23 April failed dismally. Employers
therefore tried to constrain the committees in other ways. They
attempted to stop them meeting during working hours. They
threatened to stop paying wages to committee members. They
deprived committees of premises in which to meet and threatened
individual members with dismissal or conscription into the army.⁶⁴
More significantly, the SFWO put pressure on the Ministry of
Labour to use its legal powers to curb the ambitions of the
committees. Anxious to meet objections from employers and to be
seen to be doing something, the Ministry of Labour took steps to limit
workers’ control. On 23 August it issued a circular affirming that the
right of hiring and firing workers belonged exclusively to the
employers. On 28 August it issued a second circular which forbade
factory committees from meeting during working hours. The circu-
lars provoked uproar in the labour movement, not least because they
appeared at precisely the time when General Kornilov was organising
to drown the revolutionary movement in blood. Meetings of workers
at Putilov, the Admiralty works, the Cable works, Nobel and Lebedev
works heaped obloquy on the Ministry of Labour for capitulating to
the counter-revolutionary demands of the employers.⁶⁵ At Langen-
zippen, the workers passed a resolution which said:

We reject with indignation the malicious slanders of the Ministry of Labour
that the work of the factory committee lowers labour-productivity. The
factory committee declares that ...

1. 
   Skobelev’s circular has a purely political character and is counter-
   revolutionary. It prevents the labour movement from following an organised
   course and supports the organised march of the counter-revolution, which
   aims to sabotage industry and reduce the country to famine.
   
2. 
   We are forced to conclude that in the present context [of Kornilov] the
   Ministry for the ‘protection of labour’ has been converted into the Ministry
   

for the protection of capitalist interests and acts hand in hand with
Ryabushinskii to reduce the country to famine, so that the ‘bony hand’ may
strangle the revolution.⁶⁶

At the Obukhov works a general meeting declared: ‘We consider the

existence of the factory committees to be a matter of life and death for
the working class. We believe that the implementation of Skobelev’s
circular would mean the destruction of all the gains of the working
class. We will fight with all our might and by all means, including the
general strike, for the existence of our factory committees.’⁶⁷ The
Third Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees (5-10 Sep-
tember) was hastily summoned to discuss the circulars. It roundly
condemned them, jeering at Kolokol'nikov’s pathetic attempts to
explain away the circulars on behalf of an embarrassed Ministry of
Labour.⁶⁸

Some employers saw the circulars as a green light to go ahead and

bring the factory committees to heel. At the Skorokhod shoe factory
and the Aivaz engineering works management announced that they
were going to stop paying members of the factory committee and stop
their interference in hiring-policy.⁶⁹ On 1 September the administra-
tion at Vulcan announced that it intended to halve the wages bill of
the factory committee. The committee resisted and was fully
supported by the workers, who, going further in their resistance than
the committee wished, clamoured for the removal of the director.
After several weeks’ bitter conflict, the wages of committee members
were restored to their former level.⁷⁰ At the Nevskii footwear factory
management persisted for a week in trying to stop meetings during
working hours and in refusing to pay workers to guard the factory, but
it then gave in.⁷¹ In general, labour organisations in Petrograd were
strong enough to thwart efforts by employers to constrain them, and
in most factories employers do not seem to have thought it worth even
trying.

After the failure of attempts to curb workers’ control by legal

means, employers were thrown onto the defensive. By September
workers’ control had been transmogrified from an essentially defen-
sive tactic of maintaining production into an offensive means of
forcing employers to keep open their factories come what may. The
dominant feeling amongst employers was aptly summed up in the
Torgovo-Promyshlennaya Gazeta: ‘The sole dream of the industrialist has
become to give up business and to close his enterprise, if only
for a short time. If cases of closure are not so numerous, it is only




because the threat of mob law, sequestration and unrest hangs over
him.’⁷²

Although the main impulse behind the workers’ control movement

was a practical concern to save jobs, the movement also reflected the
continuing concern of workers to realise the democratic gains of the
February Revolution. The expanding scope of workers’ control was
seen as further limiting the arbitrary authority of management and
fortifying the power of workers in production. Indeed the concern
with maintaining output and the concern with democracy were
mutually reinforcing: the effort to combat potential sabotage by the
employer necessitated a curtailment of his authority. This is made
clear by the preamble to the resolution on workers’ control, passed by
the First All-Russian National Conference of Factory Committees,
which stated: ‘Having overthrown autocracy in the political sphere,
the working class will aspire to achieve the triumph of the democratic
system in the sphere of production. The idea of workers’ control,
which arose naturally in the circumstances of economic ruin created
by the criminal policy of the ruling classes, is the expression of this
aspiration.’⁷³

The concern with workplace-democracy continued to be more vital

in the state sector than in the private sector up to October. At the
beginning of July the first national congress of factory and port
committees subject to the Naval Ministry discussed the possibility of
workers’ self-management. Kafieman, a delegate from the Izhora
works, and probably an SR, introduced a resolution which called for
naval enterprises to be run solely by the factory committees.⁷⁴ It was
envisaged that the latter would elect a director and administrative
staff, and that the Naval Ministry would send representatives to the
factories for purposes of‘control’. An opposing resolution introduced
by a Menshevik, Nabokov, from the Okhta shell shop, said that
factory committees should not run the naval enterprises, for this was
the job of the official administration, but that they should have rights
of information and inspection. Nabokov’s resolution was passed by 48
votes to ten, with seven abstentions.⁷⁵ It is ironic that the
Mensheviks Nabokov and Solomon Schwarz should have proposed
workers’ control instead of workers’ self-management at the confer-
ence, for their party officially rejected even workers’ control, but
clearly it was seen as a lesser evil to full-blown self-management.
The same conference, however, initially overrode attempts by the




Mensheviks to stop workers electing the administration, as they
already did at the Baltic and Izhora works. A resolution was passed
proposing that a list of candidates for the posts of director and chief
technician be drawn up by the Naval Ministry, factory committees
and technicians’ union, from which the workers would then make a
choice. The chosen director would then draw up a list of candidates
for administrative jobs at departmental and shop level, from which
the workers again would choose. They would, however, still retain the
right to raise objections (otvod) to particular administrators or
technicians. Engineers, who generally sat on the naval factory
committees in Petrograd, strongly condemned this resolution,
arguing that modern production required planning and expertise,
and that an elected administration would mean that popularity with
the workers would count for more than scientific training. In view of
this condemnation, the conference, two weeks later, overturned the
resolution by 37 votes to 29, though it upheld the right of workers to
object to administrative and technical personnel.⁷⁶ The conference
also reaffirmed that the factory committees should only exercise
‘informational’ or ‘preliminary’ control, not ‘responsible’ control.

In the autumn of 1917, as workers intervened more deeply into the

sphere of management, the distinction between the two types of
control seemed to grow more specious, for it was difficult for workers
to ‘control’ production on a broad scale, without taking some
responsibility for it. This problem greatly exercised the committee at
the Putilov works. As early as June the committee had gone to the
Ministry of Labour to demand a new administration, and discussions
had taken place within the committee as to the number of workers’
representatives that should sit on the new company board. Most of
the committee held that workers should demand a two-thirds
majority of the eighteen places on the board but the Bolshevik
chairman, Vasil'ev, believed that this would vest workers with
responsibility for production willy-nilly.⁷⁷ On 25 September mem-
bers of the works committee met with the vice-chairman of the
Defence Commission, Pal'chinskii, to discuss the state of production
at Putilov. He proposed that a joint commission of workers and
management be established to supervise the running of the factory
and to take charge of cutting the workforce and raising productivity.
The majority of Bolsheviks and Menshevik-Internationalists on the
works committee rejected this proposal, since they were unwilling to
take responsibility for sackings and redundancies; instead they called




for strict ‘control’ of the administration.⁷⁸ As Vasil'ev pointed out,
however, it was becoming difficult to prevent ‘control’ from entailing
‘responsibility’: ‘Assuming the functions of control, we will be drawn
unwillingly, but quite naturally, into the sphere of operations and of
factory productivity, into a sphere which is very ticklish from the
point of view of preserving the principles of revolutionary democracy
and observing the principles of class struggle.’⁷⁹

A conference of metalworkers on 15 October pondered further the

contradictions of workers’ control. The syndicalist, A.K. Gastev,
opened the discussion, arguing forcefully that the factory committees
were fooling themselves if they thought that ‘control’ could avoid
entailing responsibility. Speakers debated the relative merits of
‘informational’ versus ‘responsible’ control and a clear majority
spoke up for the latter. Although the conference took place only a
week before the October uprising, the expectation of the delegates
was that capitalism would continue for an indefinite time, but that the
state would regulate production on an increasing scale.⁸⁰ The next
day, however, a conference of works committees under the Artillery
Administration reaffirmed the orthodox position: ‘responsibility
for production lies exclusively with the administration ... but the
works committees have the right of control, which means that the
works committee, in the shape of its control commission, has the
right to attend all board meetings and to demand exhaustive
information’.⁸¹

Three days later, the First National Conference of Factory

Committees continued the debate. The Bolshevik Larin proposed
that the factory committees send one member to sit on each organ of
administration, though only with an advisory voice. Chubar' rejected
this, arguing that the committee representatives would be cast in the
role of‘adjutants to the generals’, that they would become embroiled
in paper work, that they would be used by management as ‘pushers’,
and that they would become targets of rank-and-file hostility. He
proposed that the factory committees control commission should
oversee the work of the administrative organs, but refuse to sit on
them.⁸² The resolution of the conference insisted that manage-
ment keep the committees fully informed of its decisions and of the
state of production, and allow it full access to correspondence and
accounts.⁸³

The debates about workers’ control in the autumn of 1917 arose

from the fact that the movement for workers’ control had a




relentlessly forward-moving dynamic. The demand for workers’
control was, in Trotsky’s parlance, a ‘transitional’ demand, which
stemmed from the immediate practical needs of workers, but which
pushed them ever forward into battle with the capitalism itself.
Workers’ control implied a kind of‘dual power’ in the factory which,
like ‘dual power’ at state level, was intrinsically unstable and
necessitated resolution at the expense of one class or another.

By October the movement for workers’ control had become a mass

movement. The Soviet historian, M.L. Itkin, estimates that 289,000
workers, or 74% of the city’s industrial workforce, worked in
enterprises under some form of workers’ control.⁸⁴ Yet this should be
kept in perspective, for Itkin calculates that workers’ control operated
in only 96 enterprises. Since there were 1,011 enterprises of all sizes in
the city and its suburbs⁸⁵, this means that 90% of enterprises,
predominantly small or medium-sized factories, were not touched by
workers’ control, Moreover only a minority of factory committees
practised workers’ control. It has been calculated that there were 244
factory committees in Petrograd province by October⁸⁶, so if Itkin is
correct, only 39% operated workers’ control. Workers’ control thus
affected only large factories and left the majority of smaller enter-
prises untouched.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE FACTORY COMMITTEES TO THE

TRADE UNIONS

The coexistence of factory committees and trade unions raised

problems about their respective spheres of competence. The factory
committees in the private sector had initially pursued activities of a
conventional trade-union type. After the re-establishment of trade
unions, the factory committees withdrew from the sphere of collective
bargaining and began to concentrate on workers’ control of produc-
tion. It was not clear, however, whether the committees should
operate independently of the trade unions, or whether they should
merge into them. At the First Conference of Factory Committees a
majority of delegates spoke in favour of the committees being separate
from the trade unions, on the grounds that their job - that of
controlling production - was different from that of the trade unions,
as conventionally understood. The minority of trade-union spokes-
men at the conference, principally the Mefhraionets, D. Ryazanov, and
the Menshevik, V.D. Rubtsov, argued that there was not room for




two labour organisations, and that the factory committees should
become the primary cells of the trade unions.⁸⁷ The trade-union
leaders seem to have been particularly worried by the proposal to set
up a Central Council of Factory Committees. Initially, the propo-
nents of a CCFC had envisaged that it would be attached to the
Petrograd Council of Trade Unions,⁸⁸ but in the course of the
conference, they seem to have decided in favour of an autonomous
body. Replying, on behalf of the majority, to trade-union objections,
the Bolshevik delegate from the New Parviainen works said: ‘At
present to turn the factory committees into departments of the trade
unions in the factories, as Comrade Ryazanov proposes, seems
impossible, in view of the fact that the factory committees have the
special task of bringing order to the economic life of the factories and
of implementing control — tasks with which the unions are not and
cannot be concerned.’⁸⁹ An anodyne resolution was carried which
bypassed the issues at stake and called merely for close liaison
between the new CCFC and the PCTU.⁹⁰

A week later, on 11 June, the central board of the Petrograd

metalworkers’ union issued a statement on the relationship of the
factory committees to the trade unions. It called unequivocally for the
strict subordination of the factory committees to the unions: