What was thus on one level an empirical question that lent itself to statistical enquiry into patterns of labour mobility, employment and workers' ties to the land, on another implied more complex issues. Central to the Marxist paradigm of historical evolution, the formation of an industrial proletariat in Russia was a question that came to the fore during the 1890s because of the unprecedentedly rapid growth of factory industry, associated social dislocations and the political implications of these developments. Retrospectively, it served as the opening chapter in the revolutionary narrative that the Bolsheviks would tell about themselves and the society they were determined to transform.[86]
Fast-forwarding nearly a hundred years, we find the authors of a book about post-Soviet Russia's transition to capitalism asking: 'What about the workers?'[87] This question does not so much recapitulate Tugan-Baranovskii's as imply the reversal of the situation that precipitated it. By the mid-1990s, de- industrialisation was well under way, and industrial workers, who comprised some 50 million people, were in imminent danger of becoming redundant. The once heroic rabochie, the universal class of Marxist dreams, had become rabotiagi, working stiffs, embodiments of the failure of the Soviet experiment.
For much of the twentieth century, labour historians conventionally employed the concept of the working class as an objective description of a distinct social group with measurable characteristics and factory workers as the core element within that class. Thanks to feminist scholarship, the linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities and the arrival of the post-industrial era, this convention gave way to an understanding that such terms as 'class', 'industrial' and even 'factory' are linguistically constructed and culturally specific, that statistics bearing on these categories are neither self-evidently reflective of the real world nor value-neutral but rather derive from the nexus of knowledge and power, and that the same can be said of determinations of core and marginal elements.
These reconceptualisations provide a fresh opportunity to revisit some of the terrain already 'covered'. Thinking through whether class is to be understood as a sociological aggregate, a linguistic construction, an 'imagined community', or the sum total of certain cultural practices is not to bid farewell to the working class, but to enrich our sense of what a good deal of the struggles of (at least) the twentieth century were about.[88]
This is particularly so in the case of Russia where throughout much of the century 'the working class' had extraordinary political salience and workers experienced radical, often wrenching, changes in the nature and validation of the workthey performed. In this chapter workers' experiences are relatedto the social and cultural spaces they occupied. Four chronologically overlapping themes span the twentieth century. The first two comprise key elements of the Bolshevik narrative of the path to communism; the others represent components of a counter-narrative that emerged out of the party's abandonment of the model of the heroic working class and, ultimately, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Two dimensions - the discursive and the experiential - were always in dynamic tension and often became blurred as workers both collectively and individually appropriated others' ideas about who they were, what they needed and how they should act to fulfil their needs. The 'contemporary factory worker' of Tugan-Baranovskii's enquiry was thus both an object of others' imaginings and a subject with agency.
Peasants into workers
The factory worker, observed the governor of Khar'kov province in his official report for 1899 (a year after the publication of Tugan-Baranovskii's book) 'is losing many of the worthy and distinctive traits that are characteristic of the villager, especially the latter's positive, undemanding, traditional world- view, so rooted in religious teachings and in the biddings of his ancestors'. This loss of 'spiritual equilibrium', he added, was providing 'a very convenient opening for those who wish to awaken his dissatisfaction with his own situation and with the social system, which is precisely what the enemies of the existing order have recently been attempting, unfortunately with some success'.[89]
The image ofthe undemanding, tradition-boundpeasant, amainstay among tsarist officials and conservatives more generally, had its analogue among the liberal and socialist intelligentsia of the nineteenth century. It was of the 'grey muzhik' - 'dark', superstitious, in need of being rescued from benightedness, but almost inaccessible.[90] These images persisted even while peasants in the post-emancipation decades regularly tramped off to labour markets to be hired for off-farm work, engaged in extensive commerce with townsfolk, came under and made use of the new court system, attended schools, entered the army, consumed cheaply produced popular literature and otherwise expanded their contacts with the wider world.[91] By the turn of the century there already existed a substantial ethnographic literature, much of which noted the increasing penetration of urban-originated ideas, practices and goods into the village and the dying out of old, village-based customs.[92]
Peasant labour migration assumed huge proportions in the late nineteenth century. Duringthe 1890s, an average of 6.2 million passports were issued every year by peasant communes to departing peasants (otkhodniki) in the forty- three provinces of European Russia. The heaviest out-migration was in the eight Central Industrial provinces of Iaroslavl', Moscow, Vladimir, Kostroma, Kaluga, Nizhnii Novgorod, Tula and Riazan', followed by the north and northwest, the Southern Agricultural Region and the Central Black Soil Region.[93]Agricultural workers made up the largest contingent of otkhodniki, but substantial numbers sought and found work in the cities and industrial sites of the country. Some 100,000 to 150,000 immigrants arrived in Moscow every year between 1880 and 1900; in St Petersburgthe city's workingpopulationincreased by two-thirds in the 1890s, mostly on account of peasant in-migration.[94] Peasants also travelled to and found work in the burgeoning metallurgical and coal-mining industries of the south.[95]
The contemporary (and later Soviet) fixation on the factory and the rapid growth of its labour force obscured the fact that substantially larger numbers of peasant migrants found employment in smaller-scale artisanal workshops, commercial establishments, domestic service, prostitution, transportation, public utilities and unskilled construction jobs.[96] Workers all, they were more evenly divided between men and women than was the case among factory workers who were overwhelmingly male.[97] But they did take up residence in the same districts of cities, partook of many of the same pastimes and, generally speaking, inhabited the same cultural world as recently arrived factory workers.
The image of the authentic proletarian - a factory worker employed year- round and totally dependent on his wage - nevertheless continued to exercise its hold over the Marxist intelligentsia, representing for them the maturity of Russian capitalism and the possibility of recruiting workers into the fledgling social democratic movement. On the basis of such criteria as literacy, sobriety and a secular world-view, workers could be judged as to whether they were merely part of the masses, incomplete proletarians as it were, or had attained the status of (politically) 'conscious workers'.[98] This distinction corresponded to the trajectory of some factory workers who, shedding their peasant appearance and 'outlook', came to understand their place in society in the terms described by the literature they encountered in the revolutionary underground circles. As proud of their skills as they were resentful of the petty tyranny of foremen and the dissolute ways of their fellow workers, they entered the ranks of the Russian Social Democratic Party, agitated among other workers, organised strikes and embraced the cause of proletarian revolution.[99]
86
Arthur Mendel,
87
Simon Clarke et al.,
88
William H. Sewell, Jr., 'Towards a Post-materialist Rhetoric for Labor History', in Lenard Berlanstein (ed.),
89
Quoted in Iurii I. Kir'ianov, 'The Mentality of the Workers of Russia at the Turn of the Twentieth Century', in Reginald E. Zelnik (ed.),
90
Cathy A. Frierson,
91
Jeffrey Burds, 'The Social Control of Peasant Labor in Russia: The Response of Village Communities to Labor Migration in the Central Industrial Region, 1861-1905', in Esther Kingston-Mann and Timothy Mixter (eds.),
92
See e.g. Ministerstvo zemledeliia i gosudarstvennogo imushchestva. Otdel sel'skoi ekonomiki i sel'sko-khoziaistvennoi statistiki,
94
Joseph Bradley,
95
Charters Wynn,
96
Victoria E. Bonnell,
97
Olga Crisp, 'Labour and Industrialization in Russia', in Peter Mathias and M. M. Postan (eds.),
98
Allan Wildman,
99
See Reginald E. Zelnik(ed.),