13 February, 2024
Author: Sean Matgamna
Third in a series around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924
Franco Venturi (in his book Roots of Revolution) quotes a police report on the state of things in the St Petersburg working class after the impact of the populists (Narodniks.
“The gross, vulgar methods employed by factory employers are becoming intolerable to the workers. They have obviously realised that a factory is not conceivable without their labour... Without workers [the employers] can do nothing.
“A realisation of this has now given rise to that spirit of solidarity among the workers which has so often been noted these days.
“Two or three years ago the employers’ affairs were no better than they are at present. Then, too, it often happened that the workers did not receive their wages on time. Yet then everything went smoothly. The cunning employer flattered his workers and said good-naturedly that he could not pay them at the right time, and they withdrew in silence, and next day turned up quite normally for work.
“But now as soon as even the most popular employer holds back wages for only three or four days, the crowd begins to murmur and curse, and strikes often break out. Even in the workshops where money for wages can never be lacking — as this is a State industry — the spirit of opposition to be found among the workmen has appeared on a scale utterly unknown before. There have been cases of work stopping because the men were not satisfied with an insufficient wage or because of oppression exercised by the management of the workshops.
“All this, taken as a whole, clearly betrays the influence of the propagandists, who have been able to sow among the workers hatred for their employers and the belief that the forces of labour are being exploited”.
The first
It was not in St Petersburg but in Odessa, in the south, on the Black Sea, that the first distinct working-class organisation in the Russian empire emerged. 30,000 of Odessa’s 200,000 population were proletarians. The story began with the work of a populist, E Zaslavsky, which lasted nine months (in 1875) before he was arrested.
He was a noble, but not rich. In 1872-3 he had anticipated the mass movement of 1874 from the towns to the peasants, and gone out to “the people” on his own. He came back disabused and convinced that the “people” to work with were the urban proletariat. He moved in the opposite direction to the majority of the populists at that time.
Zaslavsky was a believer in Lavrov’s policy of long-term work through propaganda, and not the Bakuninist one of trying to foment immediate revolt. He circulated Lavrov’s émigré paper, Vpered (Forward). In 1873 he became a teacher in an existing small group of populists who worked around the Bellino-Vendrich factory, which had about 500 workers.
He tried to teach political economy and working-class history, but abandoned that for simply reading aloud Chernyshevsky’s didactic novel What Is To Be Done? (Vladimir Ulyanov, Lenin, would later appropriate the title for his 1902 pamphlet).
The group printed and distributed illegal leaflets, and helped workers form a library and start a communal bath.
350 workers in the factory set up a credit union. The activity of organising the workers in this mutual-aid bank eventually led to the creation of a workers’ organisation of 200 members. They had a structured leadership, an entrance fee, a subscription, and regular meetings. This was the nucleus of the Union of Workers of Southern Russia (as it was called, “Southern Russia” then being taken to include Ukraine). It spread to other factories across Odessa.
What was the “Union of Workers of Southern Russia”? A trade union? A political party? A mutual aid society? It was all of them!
Venturi: “It emphasised its distinctive working-class nature. This led to moves to exclude non-workers, and soon there was internal war between Bakuninists and others that led to a split. But the organisation survived.”
What did it do? It made propaganda, held classes, fought the working-class struggle on wages and conditions. It supported strikes, for example at the Bellino-Vendrich factory and at the Gullier-Blanchard factory. It published a manifesto on those struggles that was distributed in the towns along the Black Sea coast. Virtually everything the union did was, of course, still illegal. In late 1875 it was virtually destroyed by police action. Some of its organisers got ten years hard labour. Zaslavsky got ten years. He went half-mad in jail, and died there of TB in 1878.
From then on the Bakuninists predominated in attempts to revive the Union.
Pavel Axelrod, one of the future consistent Marxists, was still a Zemlya i Volya Bakuninist, but already working-class oriented and heavily influenced by the workers’ movement in the West. He desired, as he put it, to “let the voice of the working classes be heard”. He had been working in Kiev since 1872, and there, in 1879, he started the “Workers’ Union of South Russia”, deliberately reviving the name of the Odessa organisation of 1875.
That union soon disintegrated when Axelrod, who after the June 1879 split in Zemlya i Volya was now with Plekhanov in Black Redistribution, went to St Petersburg. In terms of the history of the Russian working-class movement, it was however very important. Its programme was an eclectic hybrid of Bakuninist and Western social-democratic approaches.
Axelrod was in transition to West European style social democratic politics in which the proletariat, not, as in populist socialism, the peasantry, was central. The union’s goal was to be an anarchist stateless society, but it advocated immediate democratic freedom in Russia. It advocated palliatives and reforms, such as the reduction of hours of work. It had a variant of the minimum-maximum programme, split between short-term reform objectives and longer-term aims, such as was typical of the Western Social Democrats at that time, with an anarchist rather than a Marxian socialist “maximum” programme and eventual goal.
The Workers’ Union was restarted in Kiev in 1880 by two young populists of a different political bent, Nikolai Shchedrin and Elizaveta Kovalskaya, who believed in vigorous economic terrorism — the use in the towns of the sort of violence against exploiters and officials which Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) had advocated and used in the countryside.
Shchedrin took work in a railway centre, and soon a dozen railworkers formed the nucleus of the revived organisation. And it spread. The Ukrainians in the organisation objected to recruiting Jewish workers — “they killed Christ”. The organisers had to fight such attitudes, and they did.
The following year an anti-Jewish pogrom was started — Jewish quarters were attacked, people maimed and killed, and women raped, with the police and soldiers looking on or participating. Shchedrin was already in jail, but the workers he had educated, whose antisemitism he had confronted, put out a leaflet urging the people to fight their exploiters and not the “poor Jews”.
Narodnaya Volya would back the paper that started the widespread pogroms from 1881 — it was a genuine popular movement of the people, wasn’t it? — but that was in the future.
The Workers’ Union had 600 members and held mass meetings in the open air, outside the town. The methods of the Union were a mix of elite terror against the exploiters, the Bakuninist Zemlya i Volya policy of calls for immediate revolt, and working-class mass action. The workers were still feeling their way, enshrouded still in the integument of populism and populist methods. Many of them still retained the mentality of peasants, looking for help to their “little father”, the Tsar.
The organisation was strong in the Kiev Arsenal, but they fought there not by mass working-class action but by publishing a manifesto threatening the director of the Arsenal with death if he did not give the workers what they wanted. He did as he was told! The working day was reduced by two hours.
The Union saw it as a central task to create for the workers their own “fighting organisation” — that is, an organisation to wage terrorist guerrilla war as a weapon of the working-class struggle against exploitation.
Theirs was a working-class terrorism. Venturi quotes Axelrod’s memoirs to the effect that Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will, the majority of Zemlya i Volya after the 1879 split, the minority in which became Plekhanov’s group), with its concentration on killing the Tsar and on winning the support of the upper layers of society, objected to this economic terrorism against the capitalists because it would alienate the bourgeoisie when they sought its support and money. This, Narodnaya Volya, was the organisation that would become defined by its notionally short-term and tactical aim shared with the liberals, of seeking for a constitution.
Jail
By late 1880 the leaders of the Southern Workers’ Union were in jail. Shchedrin paid for his brief activity with a sentence of death, commuted by the Tsar to hard labour for life. He continued to fight in jail, and was again sentenced to death for striking an army officer. Again the sentence was commuted. He went mad and spent the rest of his life in an insane asylum, dying there in 1919. Elizaveta Kovalskaya eventually escaped from jail.
The work of building the Russian labour movement did not come cheap in human cost. Up to the revolution, the typical career of those who built the movement would be to spend a few months or a year at liberty working underground and then to spend years in jail or Siberian exile. The road to the October Revolution would be paved with the bones and skulls of many thousands of such people.
As Trotsky recounted it, even in a later period: “The movement was as yet utterly devoid of careerism, lived on its faith in the future and on its spirit of self-sacrifice. There were as yet no routine, no set formulae, no theatrical gestures, no ready-made oratorical tricks... Whoever joined an organisation knew that prison followed by exile awaited him within the next few months.
“The measure of ambition was to last as long as possible on the job prior to arrest; to hold oneself steadfast when facing the gendarmes; to ease, as far as possible, the plight of one’s comrades; to read, while in prison, as many books as possible; to escape as soon as possible from exile abroad; to acquire wisdom there; and then return to revolutionary activity in Russia”.
Timeline
1861: Abolition of serfdom. Alexander Herzen, from exile, calls on intellectuals to “go to the people”. First major populist (Narodnik) group, Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom), 1861-4.
1872-3: The “Chaikovists” build the first populist workers’ groups in Petersburg.
1874-5: First and second waves of young radicals “going to the people”.
1875: Union of Workers of Southern Russia formed.
1876: Second Zemlya i Volya group: “Bakuninist”, aims to spark immediate mass rebellion for socialism.
1878-80: North Russian Workers’ Union formed.
1879: Zemlya i Volya splits. Majority, called Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), goes for “terrorism” (assassination of top officials) with first aim of winning a constitution. Minority, Chornyi Peredel (Black Redistribution), upholds old approach.
1879-81: A second Workers’ Union of South Russia formed; again crushed.
March 1881: Narodnaya Volya people kill the Tsar. They are hanged. Intense repression crushes Narodnaya Volya.
April 1881: First of a wave of pogroms.
1883: Plekhanov, Axelrod, and other former leaders of Chornyi Peredel, now in exile in Switzerland, form Group for the Emancipation of Labour, with a new perspective.
Third in a series around the anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) in 1924
Franco Venturi (in his book Roots of Revolution) quotes a police report on the state of things in the St Petersburg working class after the impact of the populists (Narodniks.
“The gross, vulgar methods employed by factory employers are becoming intolerable to the workers. They have obviously realised that a factory is not conceivable without their labour... Without workers [the employers] can do nothing.
“A realisation of this has now given rise to that spirit of solidarity among the workers which has so often been noted these days.
“Two or three years ago the employers’ affairs were no better than they are at present. Then, too, it often happened that the workers did not receive their wages on time. Yet then everything went smoothly. The cunning employer flattered his workers and said good-naturedly that he could not pay them at the right time, and they withdrew in silence, and next day turned up quite normally for work.
“But now as soon as even the most popular employer holds back wages for only three or four days, the crowd begins to murmur and curse, and strikes often break out. Even in the workshops where money for wages can never be lacking — as this is a State industry — the spirit of opposition to be found among the workmen has appeared on a scale utterly unknown before. There have been cases of work stopping because the men were not satisfied with an insufficient wage or because of oppression exercised by the management of the workshops.
“All this, taken as a whole, clearly betrays the influence of the propagandists, who have been able to sow among the workers hatred for their employers and the belief that the forces of labour are being exploited”.
The first
It was not in St Petersburg but in Odessa, in the south, on the Black Sea, that the first distinct working-class organisation in the Russian empire emerged. 30,000 of Odessa’s 200,000 population were proletarians. The story began with the work of a populist, E Zaslavsky, which lasted nine months (in 1875) before he was arrested.
He was a noble, but not rich. In 1872-3 he had anticipated the mass movement of 1874 from the towns to the peasants, and gone out to “the people” on his own. He came back disabused and convinced that the “people” to work with were the urban proletariat. He moved in the opposite direction to the majority of the populists at that time.
Zaslavsky was a believer in Lavrov’s policy of long-term work through propaganda, and not the Bakuninist one of trying to foment immediate revolt. He circulated Lavrov’s émigré paper, Vpered (Forward). In 1873 he became a teacher in an existing small group of populists who worked around the Bellino-Vendrich factory, which had about 500 workers.
He tried to teach political economy and working-class history, but abandoned that for simply reading aloud Chernyshevsky’s didactic novel What Is To Be Done? (Vladimir Ulyanov, Lenin, would later appropriate the title for his 1902 pamphlet).
The group printed and distributed illegal leaflets, and helped workers form a library and start a communal bath.
350 workers in the factory set up a credit union. The activity of organising the workers in this mutual-aid bank eventually led to the creation of a workers’ organisation of 200 members. They had a structured leadership, an entrance fee, a subscription, and regular meetings. This was the nucleus of the Union of Workers of Southern Russia (as it was called, “Southern Russia” then being taken to include Ukraine). It spread to other factories across Odessa.
What was the “Union of Workers of Southern Russia”? A trade union? A political party? A mutual aid society? It was all of them!
Venturi: “It emphasised its distinctive working-class nature. This led to moves to exclude non-workers, and soon there was internal war between Bakuninists and others that led to a split. But the organisation survived.”
What did it do? It made propaganda, held classes, fought the working-class struggle on wages and conditions. It supported strikes, for example at the Bellino-Vendrich factory and at the Gullier-Blanchard factory. It published a manifesto on those struggles that was distributed in the towns along the Black Sea coast. Virtually everything the union did was, of course, still illegal. In late 1875 it was virtually destroyed by police action. Some of its organisers got ten years hard labour. Zaslavsky got ten years. He went half-mad in jail, and died there of TB in 1878.
From then on the Bakuninists predominated in attempts to revive the Union.
Pavel Axelrod, one of the future consistent Marxists, was still a Zemlya i Volya Bakuninist, but already working-class oriented and heavily influenced by the workers’ movement in the West. He desired, as he put it, to “let the voice of the working classes be heard”. He had been working in Kiev since 1872, and there, in 1879, he started the “Workers’ Union of South Russia”, deliberately reviving the name of the Odessa organisation of 1875.
That union soon disintegrated when Axelrod, who after the June 1879 split in Zemlya i Volya was now with Plekhanov in Black Redistribution, went to St Petersburg. In terms of the history of the Russian working-class movement, it was however very important. Its programme was an eclectic hybrid of Bakuninist and Western social-democratic approaches.
Axelrod was in transition to West European style social democratic politics in which the proletariat, not, as in populist socialism, the peasantry, was central. The union’s goal was to be an anarchist stateless society, but it advocated immediate democratic freedom in Russia. It advocated palliatives and reforms, such as the reduction of hours of work. It had a variant of the minimum-maximum programme, split between short-term reform objectives and longer-term aims, such as was typical of the Western Social Democrats at that time, with an anarchist rather than a Marxian socialist “maximum” programme and eventual goal.
The Workers’ Union was restarted in Kiev in 1880 by two young populists of a different political bent, Nikolai Shchedrin and Elizaveta Kovalskaya, who believed in vigorous economic terrorism — the use in the towns of the sort of violence against exploiters and officials which Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom) had advocated and used in the countryside.
Shchedrin took work in a railway centre, and soon a dozen railworkers formed the nucleus of the revived organisation. And it spread. The Ukrainians in the organisation objected to recruiting Jewish workers — “they killed Christ”. The organisers had to fight such attitudes, and they did.
The following year an anti-Jewish pogrom was started — Jewish quarters were attacked, people maimed and killed, and women raped, with the police and soldiers looking on or participating. Shchedrin was already in jail, but the workers he had educated, whose antisemitism he had confronted, put out a leaflet urging the people to fight their exploiters and not the “poor Jews”.
Narodnaya Volya would back the paper that started the widespread pogroms from 1881 — it was a genuine popular movement of the people, wasn’t it? — but that was in the future.
The Workers’ Union had 600 members and held mass meetings in the open air, outside the town. The methods of the Union were a mix of elite terror against the exploiters, the Bakuninist Zemlya i Volya policy of calls for immediate revolt, and working-class mass action. The workers were still feeling their way, enshrouded still in the integument of populism and populist methods. Many of them still retained the mentality of peasants, looking for help to their “little father”, the Tsar.
The organisation was strong in the Kiev Arsenal, but they fought there not by mass working-class action but by publishing a manifesto threatening the director of the Arsenal with death if he did not give the workers what they wanted. He did as he was told! The working day was reduced by two hours.
The Union saw it as a central task to create for the workers their own “fighting organisation” — that is, an organisation to wage terrorist guerrilla war as a weapon of the working-class struggle against exploitation.
Theirs was a working-class terrorism. Venturi quotes Axelrod’s memoirs to the effect that Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will, the majority of Zemlya i Volya after the 1879 split, the minority in which became Plekhanov’s group), with its concentration on killing the Tsar and on winning the support of the upper layers of society, objected to this economic terrorism against the capitalists because it would alienate the bourgeoisie when they sought its support and money. This, Narodnaya Volya, was the organisation that would become defined by its notionally short-term and tactical aim shared with the liberals, of seeking for a constitution.
Jail
By late 1880 the leaders of the Southern Workers’ Union were in jail. Shchedrin paid for his brief activity with a sentence of death, commuted by the Tsar to hard labour for life. He continued to fight in jail, and was again sentenced to death for striking an army officer. Again the sentence was commuted. He went mad and spent the rest of his life in an insane asylum, dying there in 1919. Elizaveta Kovalskaya eventually escaped from jail.
The work of building the Russian labour movement did not come cheap in human cost. Up to the revolution, the typical career of those who built the movement would be to spend a few months or a year at liberty working underground and then to spend years in jail or Siberian exile. The road to the October Revolution would be paved with the bones and skulls of many thousands of such people.
As Trotsky recounted it, even in a later period: “The movement was as yet utterly devoid of careerism, lived on its faith in the future and on its spirit of self-sacrifice. There were as yet no routine, no set formulae, no theatrical gestures, no ready-made oratorical tricks... Whoever joined an organisation knew that prison followed by exile awaited him within the next few months.
“The measure of ambition was to last as long as possible on the job prior to arrest; to hold oneself steadfast when facing the gendarmes; to ease, as far as possible, the plight of one’s comrades; to read, while in prison, as many books as possible; to escape as soon as possible from exile abroad; to acquire wisdom there; and then return to revolutionary activity in Russia”.
Timeline
1861: Abolition of serfdom. Alexander Herzen, from exile, calls on intellectuals to “go to the people”. First major populist (Narodnik) group, Zemlya i Volya (Land and Freedom), 1861-4.
1872-3: The “Chaikovists” build the first populist workers’ groups in Petersburg.
1874-5: First and second waves of young radicals “going to the people”.
1875: Union of Workers of Southern Russia formed.
1876: Second Zemlya i Volya group: “Bakuninist”, aims to spark immediate mass rebellion for socialism.
1878-80: North Russian Workers’ Union formed.
1879: Zemlya i Volya splits. Majority, called Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), goes for “terrorism” (assassination of top officials) with first aim of winning a constitution. Minority, Chornyi Peredel (Black Redistribution), upholds old approach.
1879-81: A second Workers’ Union of South Russia formed; again crushed.
March 1881: Narodnaya Volya people kill the Tsar. They are hanged. Intense repression crushes Narodnaya Volya.
April 1881: First of a wave of pogroms.
1883: Plekhanov, Axelrod, and other former leaders of Chornyi Peredel, now in exile in Switzerland, form Group for the Emancipation of Labour, with a new perspective.
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