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

The union is the highest and only organisation responsible for the conduct of
workers in a particular branch of production. It alone has the right to put
demands on the organisations of capitalists and on the state on behalf of the
whole profession. It alone has the right to conduct either general or partial
disputes. It alone may put demands on the state concerning social security. It
alone can express the will of the whole profession on questions concerning the
forms of regulation and control of production ... Local factory committees
occupy a position of subordination to the trade union, within the general
framework of organisation of the branch of production ... but the overall
structure of the union must be made more complex by involving the factory
committees, so that the union combines within itself the organisation of its
members by branch of production and... by enterprise. However, the central
organisation of the whole trade union must be constituted so that the
preponderance of union representatives over individual factory representa-
tives is guaranteed. The strength offactory committee representation must be
broadest where the union is acting as regulator and controller of production,
and narrowest where the union is pursuing purely militant aims.⁹¹

This was a scarcely-veiled attack on the newly-created CCFC,

opposing the factory committees’ setting-up a centralised structure
alongside that of the unions. It is interesting to note that the
metal-union proposals concerning the relationship of the two




organisations, prefigured with uncanny accuracy the relationship
which was to be established after October.

The unwillingess of the metal-union leadership to accept a division

of labour between the factory committees and trade unions sprang
from their ‘productivist’ ideology. A significant group on the central
board believed that the trade unions should no longer concern
themselves merely with the defence of workers’ interests, but should
prepare to take up the tasks of regulating the economy as a whole.
They were sceptical of the efforts of the factory committees to organise
production at a local level. On 21 July the Provisional Central
Committee of the union passed a resolution, influenced by the
thinking of the Austro-Marxist, Rudolf Hilferding, which argued that
a new phase of state capitalism was coming into being which would
entail far-reaching trustification of production and distribution by the
state. It demanded the active participation of unions in the Economic
Council which was to be set up by the government.⁹² The aspiration
of the metal union that trade unions should be involved in state
regulation of the economy became a reality after October but, at this
stage, was not widely shared within the trade-union movement.

On 20 June the Third All-Russian Conference of Trade Unions

opened in Petrograd - the first national conference of trade unions
since the February Revolution. The 211 delegates comprised 73
Bolsheviks, 36 Mensheviks, 6 Menshevik-Internationalists, 11 Bund-
ists, 31 non-fractional Social Democrats, 25 SRs, 7 members of no
political party (others unknown).⁹³ The moderate socialists comman-
ded a majority. The Menshevik, V.P. Grinevich, introduced the
discussion on the tasks of the trade unions. He argued that the basic
task of the unions was to conduct the economic struggle of the working
class, whose chief weapon within the framework of capitalism was the
strike. He insisted that unions should not involve themselves in the
regulation of production, as this was the job of the government.⁹⁴ The
Internationalists excoriated the Mensheviks for their support of state
control of the economy rather than workers’ control. The Bolshevik
spokesman, N. Glebov-Avilov, in effect, argued that the job of
workers’ control was too important to be left to the factory commit-
tees, that it should be taken over by the trade unions and that the
factory committees should be subordinated to the trade unions: ‘The
factory committees must be the primary cells of the unions. Their
activities in the localities must be made dependent on the economic-
control commissions of the unions.’⁹⁵ This adumbrates the position




adopted by the Bolsheviks after October, but is at variance with the
line taken by the First Conference of Factory Committees. The
position adopted by the Mensheviks, which was accepted by
Conference by 76 votes to 63 votes, was also inconsistent. The
Mensheviks disliked workers’ control, but so opposed were they to the
trade unions becoming involved in the work of controlling produc-
tion, that they insisted that the factory committees take sole
responsibility for this. At the same time, they called on the unions to
turn the factory committees into their supports (opomye punkty) in the
localities and to execute their policies through them.⁹⁶

A full discussion of the relationship of the factory committees to the

trade unions took place at the Second Conference of Petrograd
Factory Committees (7—12 August). Lozovskii, later a key advocate
of the organisational subordination of the factory committees to the
unions, put forward a position which was designed to bridge the
divide between the two organisations. He argued that they both had
different spheres of interest: trade unions had to defend the wages and
conditions of labour and oversee the implementation of labour-
protection legislation; factory committees had the task of regulating
production. He argued that the committees should be subordinate to
the unions, insofar as they should be obliged to implement union
decisions at factory level, and should not strike without union
permission.⁹⁷ This position was fiercely denounced by the anarcho-
syndicalist, Volin, who lauded the factory committees as the only
revolutionary organisations capable of pursuing the struggle of
labour against capital, and dismissed the trade unions as being
eternally condemned to mediate between capital and labour.⁹⁸ He, in
turn, was attacked by Voskov, the Bolshevik delegate from the
Sestroretsk arms works, who argued that the factory committees:

cannot unite workers in the same way as the unions do. The whole
fragmented mass of workers in a particular factory is included in the factory
organisation and if the factory closes, this organisation dissolves. The factory
committee hangs by a thread, it can be replaced on the slightest pretext. The
union unites the truly conscious, organised workers; it remains constant; the
closure of individual factories does not undermine it.⁹⁹

Lozovskii’s resolution, proposing a division of labour between the

unions and the factory committees, won the day. Volin’s resolution
gained a mere eight votes.¹⁰⁰

On 20 October the All Russian Conference of Factory Committees

discussed once more the relationship of the factory committees to




the trade unions. The Bolshevik, Ryazanov, and the Menshevik,
Lin'kov, on behalf of the trade unions, accused the factory commit-
tees of separatism and called for their organisational subordination.
They were particularly unhappy about the existence of the CCFC
alongside the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, and
called for the disbandment of the former. They were bitterly opposed
by the anarcho-syndicalist Piotrovskii, from Odessa, and by the Left
SR Levin, from the CCFC, both of whom contrasted the vitality of the
committees to the lassitude of the unions.¹⁰¹ The Bolshevik V.
Schmidt, from the metalworkers’ union, conceded that the factory
committees had a particular role to play in the sphere of control of
production but wished to see them working under the auspices of the
unions.¹⁰² The Bolshevik Skrypnik, from the CCFC, emphasised that
there could at this stage be no question of making the committees the
executive organs of the unions, but went some way towards placating
the trade unionists by agreeing that the CCFC should collaborate
with the city organisations of trade unions in the realm of control of
production.¹⁰³

There is some evidence that by October opinion within the labour

movement was beginning to shift towards acceptance of the idea of a
merger of the trade unions and factory committees. A commission of
the All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees went some way
towards recognising trade-union primacy. Whilst stressing the
independence of the two organisations and the right of the factory
committees to organise into a national structure, the commission
called for the CCFC to include trade-union representatives and for it
to be given the status of a department of workers’ control of the
All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions. In addition, it called
for councils of factory committees to be established in each branch of
industry, which would become the sections for workers’ control of the
respective industrial unions.¹⁰⁴ Nevertheless the issue remained
unresolved on the eve of October. It was to take several months for the
Bolsheviks to resolve, since the party was divided by the institutional
loyalties of its members.


8

The social structure of the labour
movement

THE SOCIAL COMPOSITION OF LABOUR PROTEST AND LABOUR
ORGANISATION

In Chapter i it was argued that two broad groups can be discerned

within the Petrograd working class in 1917: the proletarianised,
skilled, mainly male workers, and the new, younger peasant and
women workers. It was the former group of‘cadre’ workers who built
the factory committees and trade unions after the February Revolu-
tion. Quantitative data to bear out this contention are lacking,
although a survey of fitters at the Putilov works in 1918, conducted by
Strumilin, showed that skilled workers dominated all labour orga-
nisations and had been the first to join the metal union in 1917.¹ This
is borne out by a complaint in the industrialists’ newspaper in the
spring of 1917 that ‘ it is usually the most skilled workers, they being
the most conscious, who participate in the different committees — the
factory committees, soviets etc.’.² The same sentiment was voiced by
A. Gastev at the first national congress of metalworkers: ‘in the unions
we operate by basing ourselves on the skilled element of the
workforce, for example, the turners and fitters ... this is the most
active section of the working class. The unskilled workers are, of
course, less active.’³ Skilled, experienced workers had a greater
capacity than new workers to initiate a social movement and to carry
out consciously-willed social change.⁴ They had more ‘resources’ for
organisation: they were better-paid and had more money and time at
their disposal; they were at home in the factory and understood how
production worked; they had experience of organising strikes and
trade unions, of informal shop-floor organisation and of job-control;
they were more literate and thus better-placed to participate in




political discourse. The shift in the balance of class forces which
resulted from the February Revolution created opportunities for
‘cadre’ workers to mobilise these ‘resources’ in order to create an
organised labour movement.⁵

The ‘cadre’ workers who built the labour movement, of whatever

political persuasion, tended to see the new, inexperienced workers as
the ‘dark’ or ‘backward’ masses, who had brought ‘disorder’ and
‘anarchy’ into the labour movement. As early as 1916 the Workers’
Group of the War Industries Committee noted that:

During the war the composition of the working class has changed; many
alien, undisciplined elements have come into the workforce. In addition, the
intensification of work, the broad application of female and child labour,
uninterrupted overtime and holiday work ... have increased the number of
grounds for conflict of all kinds and these often arise spontaneously. Instead
of organised defence of their interests, workers engage in elemental outbursts
and anarchic methods.⁶

A Latvian Bolshevik on the CCFC, A. Kaktyn', made a similar point

in 1917, blaming ‘anarchic disorders’ on the ‘not yet fully proletaria-
nised mass of workers consisting of refugees, people from the
countryside and others temporarily swept into industry by the war’.⁷
Employers too ascribed disorders to what they called the ‘alien
element’ (prishlyi element). At the Franco-Russian works management
complained that those who had come to the factory during the war
had had a bad effect on the discipline of the workforce as a whole.⁸
One must treat the accounts of ‘disorders’ by workers new to industry
with a certain caution, for the sources reflect the perceptions and
values of the ‘organisation builders’, not those of the new workers
themselves. We shall see that while the former were by no means
unsympathetic to their less experienced comrades, they often under-
estimated the capacity of new workers for self-activity and political
understanding, because the forms of their activity did not fit the
leaders’ own model of appropriate action.

The ‘backward masses’ (otstalye massy) were counterposed to the

more ‘conscious’ (soznatel'nye) workers. The new workers were
perceived as ‘backward’, either because they were apathetic and
indifferent to the labour movement and to politics, or because they
indulged in uncontrolled militancy (stikhiinost'). These characteris-
tics, which at first sight appear mutually exclusive, typified the
traditional pattern of behaviour of the Russian peasants: long periods
of quiescence punctuated by bouts of rebelliousness (buntarstvo). The




major task facing ‘cadre’ workers was to convince the new workers of
the need for organisation: to break them from their apathy or
persuade them of the advantages of planned, sustained pursuit of
their goals over sudden bursts of militancy, born of anger and
emotion, rather than of calculation. This was not so easy in the spring
of 1917, for direct action proved fairly effective in removing hated
administrators (‘carting out’) or in extracting concessions from the
employers. As the economic crisis worsened, however, the limitations
of sectional, spontaneous actions became more and more apparent.
The promotion of the interests of labour as a whole against capital
required durable organisation and clearly-formulated goals and
strategies. Volatile militancy tended to get in the way of this, and was
thus disliked by labour leaders. They sought to channel the militancy
of the new workers into organisation or, alternatively, to rouse
interest in organisation if workers were bogged down in apathy.

Women workers

In its first issue, the Menshevik party newspaper did not fail to note

that whilst women had courageously faced the bullets of the police
during the revolution, not one woman had as yet been elected to the
Petrograd Soviet.⁹ Observations that working women were not
participating in the nascent labour movement were commonplace. A
report on the Svetlana factory at the end of March noted that ‘it is
almost exclusively women who work there. They but dimly perceive
the importance of the current situation and the significance of labour
organisation and proletarian discipline. For this reason, and because
of low pay, a certain disorder in production is noticeable.’¹⁰ On 22
April fifty women from state factories, including twenty-two from the
Pipe works, met to discuss how to organise women. They agreed that
‘women workers everywhere are yearning to take part in existing
labour organisations, but up to now have joined them only in small
numbers, on nothing like the same scale as men’.¹¹ As late as June, a
woman from the Pipe works described the situation in shop number
four, where 2,000 women were employed on automatic machines
which cut out and processed fuses:

Sometimes you see how the women will read something, and from their
conversation it emerges that a desire to step forward has been kindled in their
hearts. But to our great regret, there is at present very little organisation
among the women of the Pipe works. There are no women comrades among




us to fan the spark of consciousness or point out to us the path to truth. We
really need a comrade who can speak on the tribune in front of a sea of faces
and tell us where to go, whom to listen to and what to read.¹²

If women workers did act to defend their interests, it was often by

means of elemental bouts of direct action. This is apparent from the
example of two notoriously ‘backward’ textile-mills on Vyborg Side,
where at the end of June two spectacular examples of‘carting out’
took place. After the textile union began contract negotiations with
the textile section of the SFWO, the latter called a halt to further
wage-increases in the industry, pending the settlement of the
contract.¹³ When the director of the Vyborg spinning-mill tried to
explain to a general meeting of workers that he was unable to consider
their demand for a wage-increase, the women seized him, shoved him
in a wheelbarrow and carted him to the canal where, poised perilously
on the edge of the bank, he shakily signed a piece of paper agreeing to
an increase.¹⁴ When L.G. Miller, the redoubtable chairman of the
textile section of the SFWO, heard of this he demanded that the
textile union send an official to the mill to sort out the women, but the
women refused to listen to the official. The director, therefore, agreed
to pay the increase and was fined 30,000 r. by the SFWO for so
doing.¹⁵ Only days later, women at the neighbouring Sampsionevs-
kaya mill, where Miller himself was director, demanded a similar
increase. When Miller rejected their demand at a general meeting,
women workers — who comprised 91% of the workforce — seized him
and called for a wheelbarrow (‘ Vmeshok i na tachkuP [‘Tie him in a sack
and shove him on a barrow!’]). Male apprentices tried to dissuade
them, but Miller climbed quietly into the barrow, asking only that the
women should not put a sack over his head. Instead they tied it to his
feet and, with raucous shouts, wheeled him around Vyborg Side,
urging him to agree to a wage-rise. Miller might have been thrown off
the Grenadier bridge had not a group of off-duty soldiers intervened.
Thoroughly shaken by his ordeal, Miller had to be carried back to the
factory, but he remained obdurate, and the women did not receive a
wage-rise.¹⁶

One should not assume from this that women remained outside the

orbit of the labour movement. Thanks to the efforts of small numbers
of socialist women, working women rapidly began to join the trade
unions and to engage in more organised forms of struggle. There are
no data on the number of women in the trade unions, but it does not
appear that the industries with the highest proportions of women




workers were necessarily those with low densities of trade-union
membership. In the food and textile industries women comprised
66% and 69% of the workforce, respectively, but trade-union
membership stood at about 80% and 70%.¹⁷ Trade-union mem-
bership was lowest in the chemical industry - at about 48% - which
does seem to have been linked to the fact that the skilled men joined
the metal and woodturners’ unions, leaving the peasant women
machine-operators, who comprised 47% of the workforce, to fend for
themselves.¹⁸ In the metal industry, however, men encouraged
women workers to join the union, and it is probable that a majority of
working women joined trade unions in the course of 1917, although
the evidence does not suggest that they participated actively in union
life. Women were poorly represented in leadership positions in the
unions, even in industries where they comprised a majority of the
workforce. Eleven out of twenty members of the first board of the
textile union were women, but only two remained after its reorganisa-
tion — alongside thirteen men.¹⁹ The Petrograd boards of the metal,
leather and needleworkers’ unions were equally unrepresentative -
each having a solitary woman member.²⁰

In the factory committees a similar situation existed. Women

comprised a third of the factory workforce, but only 4% of the
delegates to the First Conference of Factory Committees.²¹ At the
Triangle rubber works 68% of the workforce was female, but only two
of the twenty-five members of the factory ‘soviet’ were women.²² At
the Nevskaya footwear factory 45% of the workforce was female, but
none of the starosty was a woman.²³ At the Pechatkin paper-mill 45%
of the workforce was female, but only two out of thirteen starosty were
women. At the Sampsionevskaya cotton-mill, where 85% of the
workforce were women, representation was rather better, for four out
of seven members of the committee were women.²⁵ This suggests that
in industries where women were in the majority, they may have
tended to be less dependent on men - and more self-reliant.

Those socialist women who devoted so much effort to organising

working women accused the labour leaders of not paying enough
attention to the special needs of women. In June A. Kollontai
reproached the delegates to the Third Trade-Union Conference for
not taking up questions of maternity provision and equal pay.²⁶ In
September she wrote an article for the journal of the Petrograd
Council ofTrade Unions, which urged union leaders to treat women




‘not as appendages to men, but as independent, responsible members
of the working class, having the same rights and also the same
responsibilities to the collective’.²⁷ In October she spoke to the First
All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees warning of the
political danger of their remaining indifferent to the plight of women
workers.²⁸ At none of the conferences of the labour movement in 1917,
however, was there a full discussion of the problems of working
women and of their relationship to the organised labour movement.

At factory level women workers often met with active discrimina-

tion from men in their attempts to organise. At the Pipe works a
woman complained. ‘It happens, not infrequently even now, that the
backward workers, who lack consciousness, cannot imagine that a
woman can be as capable as a man of organising the broad masses,
and so they make fun of the elected representatives of the women
workers, pointing their fingers as though at a savage, and saying with
a sneer: “there go our elected representatives”.’²⁹ M. Tsvetkova
wrote to the leatherworkers’ journal, complaining about the
behaviour of her male colleagues: