Encyclopedia of Russian History

With the abolition of serfdom, Russia began a new spurt of industrial development. In the 1890s Russian industry expanded rapidly, growing at an average rate of 8 percent per annum. The number of industrial workers, if viewed as a percentage of the overall population, was still small by the end of that decade; according to the 1897 census, the Empire’s population was over 125 million, while the number of workers was roughly two million. However, their social and political importance became increasingly evident, in part because of their concentration in politically sensitive areas such as St. Petersburg (the capital), Moscow, the port city of Baku, and the industrial regions of Russian-occupied Poland.

The most dramatic manifestation of the workers’ importance was their participation in strikes and demonstrations. If strike is loosely understood as any work stoppage in defiance of management, then strikes certainly took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they began to be taken seriously by Russian officials, publicists, and political activists only in the 1870s and especially the 1890s. By the early twentieth century a fierce and sometimes agonizing competition had begun between radicals of various persuasions (Social-Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, etc.), liberals, religious organizations, and the government for working-class political support. In the 1905 Revolution, radicals emerged as the clear winners in this competition, though with no single faction dominating. At least in major urban industrial centers, workers played the leading role in the revolutionary struggles of that year. Their moment of greatest triumph came with the October general strike and the creation of citywide workers’ councils (soviets), one of which virtually became the governing body of the city of St. Petersburg. However, the bloody suppression of the armed uprising of Moscow workers in December 1905 marked the end of the workers’ triumphant period. Although labor unrest continued in 1906, workers ceased to pose a serious threat to the Russian government until the labor movement revived in the period between 1912 and 1914.

Nevertheless, the 1905 Revolution did bear some fruit for Russia’s workers, including the government’s recognition for the first time of their right to form unions and engage in strikes (albeit within very tight restrictions) and the right to elect their own delegates to the new Russian Parliament, the Duma (albeit under a very restricted franchise). Russian industry soon began to recover from the setbacks it had undergone in the first few years of the century, and by 1910 was again experiencing a robust expansion. As the position of workers in the labor market became more favorable, workers grew less and less tolerant of management misconduct and government repression. A government massacre of Russian goldminers in the spring of 1912 resuscitated the dormant labor movement and ushered in a two-year period of militant strike activity and demonstrations in many parts of Russia, most dramatically in St. Petersburg and, in 1914, Baku. Politically, this worker militancy worked to the tactical advantage of the Bolsheviks and, to a lesser extent, the Socialist Revolutionaries, while working to the disadvantage of the more moderate Mensheviks, who feared that workers’ passions had been aroused to a degree that could prove counterproductive. Some historians have argued that Russian industrial centers were on the cusp of a new revolution when the onset of World War I, in the summer of 1914, put a temporary damper on worker unrest. However, it must also be acknowledged that the labor movement was dying down before war was declared.