They were, however, a tiny minority among workers. More commonly, and especially in the Central Industrial Region, workers effected a 'symbiosis' between the village and the factory. Facilitated by the location of most factories on the outskirts of cities or in relatively autonomous industrial settlements, their retention of kinship ties and landholding gave them a 'tactical mobility' that city-dwellers and 'pure' proletarians lacked.[100] Several labour historians, focusing on the 1905 Revolution and its aftermath, have challenged the Bolshevik master narrative of working-class formation and the development of a corresponding class consciousness by emphasising the overlapping of parochial (e.g. craft, trade union) allegiances among artisanal workers with broader class identities, the volatility of mining and metallurgical workers as evidenced by their participation in both social democratic-organised strikes and anti-Semitic pogroms, and 'vanguard' workers' expression of a sense of self in the eclectic language of universal human rights and religious eschatology.[101]
At least until the early twentieth century', writes Barbara Alpern Engel, 'the working-class couple who shared a roof was a relative rarity in Russia's major cities.' Although a gradual trend towards an urban-based family life accelerated after the 1905 Revolution and the Stolypin reforms of 1906-7, cohabitation of the working-class family never became the norm in tsarist Russia. This undoubtedly was because the cost of maintaining a family on the wage paid to most male workers was prohibitive, at least in a city like St Petersburg where it amounted to roughly three times the average annual wage for the country during 1905-9.[102] Hence factory owners' provision of (notoriously crowded and insalubrious) barracks or dormitory accommodation, and the absorption by the village of the costs of reproduction, elderly care and other welfare functions. This too suggests the 'tactical mobility' of workers.
The persistence of workers' ties to the village would save many of them when, during the desperate years of civil war, they fled from the starving cities. Statistics on the industrial workforce from 1917 onwards generally tell a story of diminution. From a high-point of 3.5 million, the number of workers in 'census' industry (i.e. industrial enterprises employing more than sixteen workers) dropped to slightly over 2 million in 1918, and remained at between 1.3 and 1.5 for the remainder of the civil war.[103]
Losses were greatest in the most populous industrial centres, that is, Petro- grad, Moscow, the Donbass and the Urals. The number of industrial workers in Petrograd dropped from 406,000 in January 1917 to 123,000 by mid-1920. Workers also declined as a proportion of the city's population - from 45.9 per cent of able-bodied adults in 1917, to 34 per cent by the autumn of 1920. Between 1918 and 1920 Moscow experienced a net loss of about 690,000 people, of whom 100,000 were classified as workers. Over the same period, the number of factory and mine workers in the Urals dropped from 340,000 to 155,000. Large enterprises where the Bolsheviks had concentrated their agitational and recruitment efforts suffered disproportionately, partly owing to the shutting
lewis h. siegelbaum
down of entire shops and partly due to heavy mobilisation for the Red Army and food procurement detachments.[104]
De-proletarianisation was not only demographic. Lenin could lament the 'petty-proprietor outlook' of the 'newcomers' who sought to escape the military draft or increase their rations, but this was an all too convenient excuse for the demoralisation of those workers who had not fled or been enlisted and the party's loss of support among them.[105] In any case, the party - and at least some workers - weathered this crisis, albeit just barely. The haemorrhaging of the proletarian body was staunched within a few years of the introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Old blood flowed back, but as new blood poured in towards the end of the 1920s, a 'crisis of proletarian identity' could be discerned among skilled workers.[106]
Stalin's 'great turn' towards industrialisation, accompanied by the collectivisation of agriculture, provoked massive out-migration from the villages. Between 1928 and 1932, approximately 12 million people departed, some to swell the ranks of forced labourers in labour camps and special settlements, and others to escape starvation or, at best, unremunerated labour in the kolkhoz. Those who left voluntarily were mainly young males. Some were consigned by their collective farms for a given period to industrial enterprises or construction sites, usually located in remote regions, under conditions specified in 'organised labour recruitment' (orgnabor) contracts. Others headed on their own or in groups to the cities which swelled in population but not, for the most part, in accommodation, services and infrastructure. Still others were absorbed by state farms (sovkhozy) whose employed population increased from 663,000 in August 1929 to nearly 2.7 million three years later.[107]
These migration flows were by no means one-way. Nor did migrants necessarily settle in their first place ofresidence. The demand for labour was such that migrants frequently shopped around, 'flitting' like 'rolling stones' from one construction site or factory to another, clogging railroad stations and other collection points, and otherwise disrupting the state's attempts to gain control over the labour market. Those attempts culminated in the introduction of compulsory internal passports for every citizen, sixteen years and older, living in towns and at construction sites or employed in transport and on state farms. The law, issued on 27 December 1932, initially targeted 'yesterday's peasants' who were 'undigested by the proletarian cauldron'. Eventually, it was used as a filtering device to remove the itinerant population and all 'people who are not involved in socially useful labour' from designated 'regime cities' (rezhimnye goroda).[108]
These measures worked, but only temporarily. During 1933, the number of new migrants who settled in cities declined to three-quarters of a million compared to 2.7 million in the previous year. Industry actually shed jobs, and what new employment opportunities existed were taken up by the other 'reserve army of labour', namely, the wives and daughters of workers already based in the towns.[109] By 1935, however, rural to urban migration was almost back to pre-passportisation levels.
The huge numbers of peasants absorbed by industry in the 1930s utterly transformed the factories where they worked and the cities in which they resided. They too were transformed, although usually not as rapidly as, or in ways that, party agitators would have liked and Soviet historians later contended.[110] The shock worker heroes and especially the outstanding Stakhanovites were represented in the Soviet media as embodying success stories from which the new Soviet workers could take instruction not only about workbut about other dimensions of life.[111] But even after they had entered the 'proletarian cauldron', peasant migrants chose selectively from what was on offer by theparty and state. Like more experienced workers, they learned when it was necessary to express approval of or affirmation for decisions made elsewhere (to 'speak Bolshevik' in Stephen Kotkin's inimitable phrase), but also how to circumvent the limits of state provisioning.[112] They may even have
100
Robert E. Johnson,
101
Bonnell,
102
Engel,
103
D. A. Baevskii,
104
Baevskii,
105
V I. Lenin,
106
Hiroaki Kuromiya, 'The Crisis of Proletarian Identity in the Soviet Factory, 1928-1929',
107
Sheila Fitzpatrick,
108
109
Wendy Goldman,
110
cf. David Hoffmann,
111
Lewis H. Siegelbaum,
112
Stephen Kotkin,