The Russian Revolution Read Online Free PDF

peasantry, formed a large part of the Russian working class; and few were more than second-generation workers and urban dwellers. Although Soviet historians claim that more than 50 per cent of industrial workers on the eve of the First World War were at least second-generation, this calculation clearly includes workers and peasant otkhodniki whose fathers had been otkhodniki.
    Despite these characteristics of underdevelopment, Russian industry was in some respects quite advanced by the time of the First World War. The modern industrial sector was small, but unusually highly concentrated, both geographically (notably in the regions centred on Petersburg and Moscow and the Ukrainian Donbass) and in terms of the size of the industrial plants. As Gerschenkron has pointed out, comparative backwardness had its own advantages: industrializing late, with the aid of large-scale foreign investment and energetic state involvement, Russia was able to skip over some of the early stages, borrow relatively advanced technology and move quickly towards large-scale modern production.' Enterprises like the famous Putilov metalworking and machine-building plant in Petersburg and the largely foreign-owned metallurgical plants of the Donbass employed many thousands of workers.
    According to Marxist theory, a highly concentrated industrial proletariat under conditions of advanced capitalist production is likely to be revolutionary, whereas a pre-modern working class that retains strong ties to the peasantry is not. Thus the Russian working class had contradictory characteristics for a Marxist diagnosing its revolutionary potential. Yet the empirical evidence of the period from the 189os to 1914 suggests that in fact Russia's working class, despite its close links with the peasantry, was exceptionally militant and revolutionary. Large-scale strikes were frequent, the workers showed considerable solidarity against management and state authority, and their demands were usually political as well as economic. In the 1905 Revolution, the workers of St Petersburg and Moscow organized their own revolutionary institutions, the soviets, and continued the struggle after the Tsar's constitutional concessions in October and the collapse of the middle-class liberals' drive against the autocracy. In the summer of 1914, the workers' strike movement in Petersburg and elsewhere assumed such threatening dimensions that some observers thought that the government could not take the risk of declaring a general mobilization for war.
    The strength of working-class revolutionary sentiment in Russia may be explained in a number of different ways. In the first place, limited economic protest against employers-what Lenin called trade unionism-was very difficult under Russian conditions. The government had a large stake in Russia's native industry and in the protection of foreign investment, and state authorities were quick to provide troops when strikes against private enterprise showed signs of getting out of hand. That meant that even economic strikes (protests over wages and conditions) were likely to turn political; and the widespread resentment of Russian workers against foreign managers and technical personnel had a similar effect. Although it was Lenin, a Russian Marxist, who said that by its own efforts the working class could develop only a `trade-union consciousness' rather than a revolutionary one, Russia's own experience (in contrast to that of Western Europe) did not bear him out.
    In the second place, the peasant component of Russia's working class probably made it more revolutionary rather than less. Russian peasants were not innately conservative small proprietors like, for example, their French counterparts. The Russian peasantry's tradition of violent, anarchic rebellion against landowners and officials, exemplified in the great Pugachev revolt of the 1770s, was manifest once again in the peasant uprisings of 1905 and 19o6: the Emancipation of 1861 had not