So, it's been a while since I updated this. Thanks to Nyvis for reading the drafts and for Sumeragi for help sourcing materials. Hope you enjoy and don't hesitate to comment or ask questions!
Saving Soviet Democracy: A Russian Revolution Timeline
by GiantMonkeyMan
Interlude: Soviets, Unions, Factory Committees, and the Petrograd Metalworkers
For most of the history of the Russian working class their organisations had been illegal and brutally suppressed but nonetheless the working class was routinely willing to dismiss these laws as unjust and collectively struggle to improve their living conditions, their wages, and the conditions in their workplaces. Their organisations were spontaneous and embryonic, usually limited to one factory plant or one industry, and these organisations would try to negotiate with the management some improvement to the current state of affairs and either be successful or face repression and sometimes both as the management would initially give in to some key demands but later fire or have arrested all the organisations' leadership. Workers looked to the trade unions of the more developed working class in the European West but all such projects were illegalised before they could coalesce and so mostly the forms of organisation thrust upon Russian workers were vibrant, temporary, and sudden invasions into a normality of autocracy.
The working class was still a small minority of around 3 million in Russia prior to 1905 but it was during the strike wave and revolution of that year that the organisational form of the "soviet" became popularised and solidified. Prior to 1905, workers' organisations would take upon a multitude of different names but would mostly reflect the same sorts of projects facing the same sorts of struggles. "Sovet starost" (council of factory elders), "deputatskoe sobranie" (assembly of deputies), "komissija rabocich" (workers commission), "stacecnyj komitet" (strike committee), and a host of other names would be utilised and their flexibility, the lack of any specific terminology or structure, showed both their origins as springing from spontaneous traditions of struggle and their decentralisation.
The only official representation workers could expect were in the form of police-controlled unions but for obvious reasons these were unlikely to be fully supported by workers. In some cases the police-controlled unions' attempts at mitigating radicalism found themselves outpaced by the energetic desperation of the workers they claimed to represent. One such instance was in the midst of the war with Japan in 1905 which was rapidly becoming unpopular with the working class, particularly in the face of rising prices and worsening living conditions. Father Gapon, a priest who became the head of one such police union, unwittingly ended up leading a march of workers that intended to show their disgruntlement. His intention had been to direct the anger of the workers towards peacefully presenting a letter to the Tsar. The Tsarist state couldn't countenance such perceived arrogance and the demonstration was fired upon in a massacre that became known as Bloody Sunday. It was as if a fire burned in the major cities but in 1905 the strike waves and revolution emerged not because of the agitation of specific political parties or the organisational prowess of trade unions but on the contrary instead a spark met the tinder and it was from this developing struggle that trade unions emerged and the political party that most supported workers, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, flourished.
Workers in factories organised meetings during which representatives were elected for sometimes temporary and sometimes permanent committees to engage with management for increases in wages, improvements in working conditions, and decreases in working hours. One such organisation developed in the Ivanovo Voznesensk district of Moscow in mid-May as 40,000 textile workers on strike elected 110 representatives to what would become the first recognised "soviet". The textile workers initially formed the soviet as a much familiar attempt to organise a strike to simply improve pay and conditions in the factory but the demands of the strike grew beyond that limited scope and the workers linked their struggle with the struggles of other workplaces, the struggles in the communities and neighbourhoods in Moscow, and the general struggle against the war. The military intervened in bloody clashes and although the soviet disbanded and the strike ended by July, it had caused a lasting impression on the Russian working class. By October the strike wave across Russia reached a new crescendo and this time the form of the "soviet" spread to Petrograd where a city-wide soviet was organised with one representative being elected for every 500 workers and radicals like Leon Trotsky emerged as powerful voices.
The revolution of 1905 was crushed, the workers' organisations made illegal once more, the revolutionaries arrested or exiled, and a wave of reactionary opposition arose once more to inflict pogroms on Jewish and minority communities and declare the unwavering defence of autocracy. The soviets had been disbanded but the memory of these community and workplace organs of power that had spread out along the iron arteries of the Russian rail network, developed and controlled by the disenfranchised and the oppressed, remained in the minds of working people and the small underground revolutionary network. Trotsky would suggest in his history of 1905 that "The Soviet’s strength was determined by the role of the proletariat in a capitalist society. The Soviet’s task was not to transform itself into a parody of parliament, not to organise equal representation of the interests of different social groups, but to give unity to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat." and Lenin would say also in 1907 that "the soviets of workers deputies and their union are essential to the victory of the insurrection".
Following the First Russian Revolution of 1905, trade unions, much like radical political parties, existed in a state of semi-illegality. Being employed in vital heavy industry and working within large condensed factories with tight-knit communities, metalworkers were often at the forefront of industrial struggles and were tightly linked to the various formations of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party. Most trade unions lacked national bodies and organised within cities or districts and the St Petersburg Metalworkers' Union was among the most significant trade unions in Russia's pre-revolutionary history and yet even despite this it would only unite around 13% of the metalworkers in the city prior to 1917. Some workers actually argued for district or individual factory autonomy and some workers preferred to maintain the old system of factory elders however eventually a centralised city-wide union was eventually formed in the summer of 1906 in the aftermath of the revolutionary struggles in the year before. The St Petersburg Society of Mill and Factory Owners, representing a conglomerate of Russian capitalists, refused to recognise the Union and worked with the state to destroy the organisation whenever they could.
Prior to 1914, the Metal Workers' Union and its leadership faced constant harassment and oppression, being formally closed five times and having its journal censured for multiple perceived infractions and closed completely seven times. The Tsarist autocracy battled with the ideas of democracy and representation constantly. When the Second Duma, a grudging concession after the revolution, was closed in July of 1907 it was only twenty days later that the metalworkers in Petrograd also found their Union closed. Whilst the Union was formally centralised across the city, in concessions to the pressures of those that wanted decentralised autonomy, the Union had many institutional structures, such as district treasuries and strike co-ordination, that shielded it from easy suppression of its leadership as various districts would still have well-realised organisation. Between 1907 and 1912, the Union's leadership was largely composed of Mensheviks or their supporters, similarly to many emergent trade unions of the period including the railway workers' union, largely because they were seen to be committed to broad open and democratic workers organisations in the tradition of Western trade unionism.
Despite all its set backs and the hurdles that they had to overcome, the Metalworkers' Union became a focal point of militant proletarian class consciousness. It strove to improve the social, economic, and political conditions of workers throughout Petrograd. It was central to the growing strike wave that developed prior to the first world war, with the first six months of the year seeing one and a half million Russian workers on strike, and again after the initial wave of patriotism and repression at the start of the war had passed the Union was once more central to the building strike wave all the way up to the February Revolution. Bolshevik Alexander Shliapnikov returned to Petrograd in April of 1914 and, partly to reacquaint himself with the workers movement and partly to avoid the suspicions of the police, decided to turn down the offer of the Petrograd Party for a leadership role to instead get a job in a metalworking factory. He managed to get work at first the New Lessner Works and then later at the prestigious Ericsson factory, where only the most skilled found work.
Shliapnikov was a metalworker and Bolshevik organiser who due to his commitment and dedication became a member of the Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks at the age of 22 but this rise in prominence had garnered police attention and forced him to flee in exile to France. He became a "worker-intelligentsia", working in French factories and writing articles for both trade union and Bolshevik Party publications, sometimes under the pseudonym "Metallist". He was a quick mind and became fluent in French and heavily involved in the French trade union movement. He developed a strong romantic relationship with fellow Russian socialist emigre Alexandra Kollontai and although their relationship eventually ended she would remain fond of him and they would develop similar ideas of strong working class autonomy and grassroots organising. Lenin also recognised his worth and as Shliapnikov travelled in Europe and worked in different cities the two exchanged letters and coordinated. Eventually he decided to return to Russia using a false passport and immediately reintroduced himself to the workers movement at the ground level saying, "I am in admiration of our proletariat. Since I last left Petersburg, it is as if it has been reborn. Real leaders have emerged from the deep cadres of the working class; despite exiles and arrests, the cause has moved forward".
He had hoped to stay in Russia indefinitely but the war violently interrupted those plans as the autocracy began an even harsher crackdown of individuals involved in illegal political activities. With the blessing of the Bolshevik Duma faction and the Petrograd Bolsheviks, he fled to Sweden and became an intermediary between the Bolsheviks within Russia and Lenin and the other exiled leadership but once those networks had been set up with the help of Swedish social democrats, Shliapnikov found himself struggling for funds and eventually went to seek work in factories in England where he joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, a militant trade union that accepted only the most skilled workers. However, towards the end of 1915 it became clear that, after the repression of the Bolsheviks within Russia, that the party needed co-ordination and Lenin implored Shliapnikov to return to Russia and reorganise the smuggling routes for correspondence and newspapers as well ensure that the party remained healthy. Shliapnikov had a conspiratorial bent and favoured finding dedicated worker-organisers instead of less reliable members of the intelligentsia so under his influence rose prominent worker-bolsheviks like Kliment Voroshilov and Yuri Lutovinov and Shliapnikov would also recruit Bolshevik student activist Vyacheslav Molotov for help in editing Pravda.
Lenin chaffed at the distance between himself and the struggles in Russia during the war and Shliapnikov often felt frustration at being the middleman in his arguments with other party members and as a result during one such dispute over some articles in Kommunist, a journal ran by Bukharin, Shliapnikov wrote back to Lenin "I relayed your decision, but of course not in such a harsh form as your postcard. And I further refuse to be your intermediary in this affair". Lenin respected him enough to write back an immediate apology but Shliapnikov was a forgiving person, understood Lenin's frustrations, and at the time was largely focused on the building struggle within the War Industries Committees. The War Industries Committees were established by the Kadets and the Octobrists in an effort to placate workers through the election of workers' representatives to help in the organising of vital plants and to circumvent the ponderously slow Tsarist bureaucracy. The Bolsheviks boycotted the Committees as they were organs used with the aim of furthering the imperialist war effort but nonetheless all the factions of the RSDLP and the nascent anarcho-syndicalist movement participated in the elections on the factory floor as they were vital moments to agitate and argue freely and openly.
It was in the midst of the organisation of the Labour Group of the War Industries Committees, led by the Menshevik Kuz’ma Gvozdev, that the idea of reviving the factory committees was discussed openly only months before the February Revolution. Out of the 1905 revolution, "factory committee" became the accepted term for the embryonic workers' organisations within a single workplace whilst "soviet" had come to mean a very specific working class organ that stepped beyond the individual factory or shop floor into the broader community and into broader political argument. Close to 60% of all workers in Petrograd were involved in the metalworking industry and the most concentrated elements were largely centred in the Vyborg District and they were young, literate, and militant. The largest strike during the war to date occurred on January 9th with 200,000 workers in Petrograd with metalworkers at the forefront. It was but a prelude of the February Revolution in which women workers demanded bread on February 23rd, taking their demands to the streets and into the factories, and then two days later the workers of the Vyborg district lead a General Strike in which again over 200,000 workers participated and with complete political chaos came the abdication of Tsar Nicholas.
The factory shop floors became large meeting areas for thousands of workers to share their disgruntlement with the war and the state of the economy. Factory committees sprung up organically in these conditions to make sometimes mundane and sometimes entirely radical demands on the shop floor. Some factory committees argued for the complete transfer of production into workers' control, the end of the war, and the end of Tsarism while other committees had more simple demands like increases in wages or the continuation of production, and thus their jobs, despite turbulent economic conditions. The most common demand was for the eight hour working day. It was the demand that initially divided the Liberal controlled Provisional Government, who wanted to maximise war production, and the more Social Democratic Petrograd Soviet but on March 10th the Provisional Government acquiesced and recognised the eight-hour day within the capital on the same day that the Petrograd Owners Association agreed with the Soviet to allow the formation of factory committees. The factory committees had mostly pragmatic motives, organised by the workers themselves to improve the general working conditions that they inhabited day to day and there were as likely to co-operate with management to ensure the smooth running of the workplace as they were to organise wildcat strikes.
Shliapnikov was the most senior Bolshevik on the ground in Petrograd during the February Revolution and became a central figure in the Petrograd Soviet. Due to his experience as a metalworker and a revolutionary both in Russia and abroad, he was well respected by the grassroots working class of the city but with the return of Kamenev and Stalin from internal exile he found himself pushed to the sidelines as the two preferred to moderate the revolutionary demands in order to better co-operate with the Mensheviks in the Soviet. Instead, he dedicated himself to trying to reconstitute the city-wide Metalworkers' Union and after a near miss collision with an automobile he claimed his focus sharpened from the brush with mortality. Despite his, and many others', efforts the metalworkers were among the last to actually form (or reform, as it were) an official trade union after February, regardless of the fact that the metalworkers were at the forefront of militancy, in part due to the conflict of interests between individual workplace factory committees and industry-wide trade unionism. However, on 23rd of April during a city-wide assembly of metalworkers an agreement was made with various nascent metalworker union branches to formally approve of the Metalworkers' Union's statutes as a coherent and encompassing body. On the 7th of May Shliapnikov himself, a Menshevik Volkov, who would eventually join Martov's Socialist-Internationalists, and an independent socialist Gastev, who would eventually swing towards the Bolsheviks after the July Days, were all elected to a central board of the Petrograd Union.
Soon after the formation of the Petrograd Metalworkers' Union, an industrial union encompassing all workers in the industry, there formed a union of welders, a craft union trying to organise a specific job within the metalworking industry. Shliapnikov warned the members of the welders' craft union that they threatened to undermine the unity of workers' struggles but the union persisted nonetheless. Craft unionism was largely insignificant in the grander scheme of things and across Russia industrial unionism remained the preferred organisational method. Prior to the February revolution, trade unions had largely been illegalised and suppressed by the Tsarist autocracy but by the end of the year Petrograd would be the most unionised city in the world and 90% of those union members were part of industrial unions, uniting all the workers in one industry, regardless of pay grade or skill level. In June, workers and trade union activists would organise a Trade Union Conference and overwhelmingly offer its support for industrial unionism.
In many ways, the conflicts between the Union trying to organise the broad challenges of workers throughout the whole industry, the factory committees struggling and organising amidst the specific challenges of individual factories, and the Soviet trying to balance a broad political struggle with constant pressures from its constituent parts, exemplifies the same layered and nuanced internal struggles being repeated across Russia often between groupings and organs of power that should technically be struggling towards the same goals. The Bolsheviks had many dedicated and militant worker-organisers within the factory committees, competing on the far left with the much smaller and less organised anarcho-syndicalists, but mostly the party considered the trade unions to be the central organ of workers' struggles. Shliapnikov, influenced by his experiences in Western trade unions and due to his position in the Petrograd Metalworkers' Union, tended to think the trade union as a coordinating body was key but he also recognised the importance of the committees and tried to get them to associate with the unions and work within the unions where possible.
Between the 30th of May and the 5th of June, the First Conference of the Factory Committees of Petrograd and Its Environs was convened representing nearly 80 percent of all the workers in Petrograd through 367 factory committees. The Mensheviks opposed the move towards a co-ordination of factory committees as they had found a lot of traction within the burgeoning trade union movement whilst the anarchists opposed what they saw as centralisation but ultimately the Central Council of Factory Committees for the City of Petrograd was formed with a strong Bolshevik influence. Shliapnikov, much like many Bolsheviks, gathered many hats in this period being on the chair of the Metalworkers Union, being involved in the Council of Factory Committees, as well as being involved in the formation of workers' militias and the Red Guard as a representative of the Petrograd Soviet. All these formations were inherently interwoven within the general struggle ongoing throughout the city and Russia.
Within the factory committees, as within the unions and the Soviet itself, the question of workers' control consistently arose and throughout 1917 there were constant moments where workers asserted "workers' control" in conflict with the management. However, what this actually constituted to the rank and file differed greatly depending on the factory, the skill of the workers, whether the trade union or the factory committee was more influential, and a host of other factors. For some workers, "workers' control" just meant having respect on the shop floor instead of being abused or the management using diminutive terms of address. For others the right to decide hours and the bargain for wages was considered "workers' control". Some saw workers' control as the oversight and organisation of the factory by the Soviet and others that the rank and file workers would co-ordinate production and distribution through the factory committees. What is clear throughout this period is that the Bolshevik's grassroots organisers were far to the left of their leadership in calling for the factory committees to instate direct control and Shliapnikov and other leading Bolsheviks at times had to wade through turbulent waters during this debate.
The end of June and the beginning of July saw the tumultuous build up to the July Days but specifically for the Petrograd Metalworkers Union there began the establishment of the All-Russian Metalworkers Union. The trade union leadership and rank and file radicals argued in the period over the domain and authority of the trade unions and the factory committees. Shliapnikov was amongst the trade union moderates, wanting to fold the factory committees into the trade unions, but he had been working since April very closely with the Bolshevik activists in the factory committees and later with the Central Council of Factory Committees and so had much influence on the rank and file. He tried to articulate a system in which factory committees would provide the organ within which the industry-wide unions could organise and guide the struggle. Similar conflicts and overlapping layers of control and responsibility were taking place across Russia due to the very decentralised and spontaneous nature of the revolutionary upheaval established after the February Revolution. It was during this period that Shliapnikov began organising with Metalworkers in Moscow and coordinating with the left wing Bolsheviks in Russia's Second Capital such as Timofei Sapronov.
The Metalworkers' Union Leadership called on the demonstrators in July to remain peaceful, to avoid armed confrontation, but they still supported the striking workers and although the Union had particular influence amongst the Vyborg workers many of the rank and file activists were amongst the most militant workers. Many Menshevik trade unionists during this period were joining Trotsky and Martov's Socialist-Internationalists and by the end of July the entirety of the All-Russian Metalworkers' Union central committee was composed of either Bolsheviks, Socialist-Internationalists, or left-wing independent socialists. The factory committees, due to their decentralised nature, either joined the demonstrations whole-heartedly or urged caution amongst their members. Ultimately, the shift in political rhetoric in all arenas of discussion and organisation in this period became more radical and more militant. July and August saw some of the greatest levels of participation within the factory committees mainly because all across Russia reaction was rearing its ugly head in the form of Black Hundreds and the threat of right-wing military autocracy led by Kornilov so most of the workers saw the need to organise within the workplace to prevent any reversion to the old days prior to the gains won after the February revolution.
With the arrest of Lenin and many other leading Bolsheviks, Shliapnikov, by necessity, was launched back into a senior leadership role. Along with Yakov Sverdlov, who was the primary organisational figure of the Bolsheviks during this period, Shliapnikov recognised the threat of the possibility of a sweeping series of arrests, or even potential assassinations, that could lead to the Bolsheviks becoming rudderless and the revolution destroyed. Shliapnikov set about ensuring that within districts, within factories, Bolshevik activists had the tools needed to operate autonomously and co-ordinate the defence of the working class and, whilst he distrusted much of the intelligentsia of other parties, he ensured that the Bolshevik worker-organisers co-operated with rank and file Socialist-Internationalists and Left-SRs. Rank and file Bolsheviks were demoralised by Lenin's arrest but the threat of suppression by Kornilov mobilised them rapidly. Through the Metalworkers' Union and the factory committees, Shliapnikov coordinated the formation of the Red Guards that would defend the city of Petrograd from the advance of Kornilov's forces during the failed coup attempt. The Provisional Government's credibility was destroyed. All across Russia, workers were radicalising and peasants were revolting. When finally the Soviet Alliance emerged from their jail cells after finally being granted bail they found, already prepared, a working class hungry for power.
-----
These committees carried various labels: assembly of delegates or deputies (delegatskoe, deputatskoe sobranie), workers commission (komissija rabocich), commission of electors (komissija vybornych), council of factory eiders (sovet starost), council of authorized representatives (sovet upolnomocennych), strike committee (stacecnyj komitet), and the like- or simply deputies (deputaty).
- The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers Councils by Oskar Anweiler
As one of Russia's largest trade unions and as a focal point of Social Democratic organizing activity, the St. Petersburg Metal Workers' Union was among the most significant of the prerevolutionary trade unions. Its history is richly suggestive not only of the patterns and problems of the Russian labor movement as a whole in the critical 1907-1914 period, but of the distinctive features of the Russian labor experience as compared to that of its Western counterpart. Even a cursory glance at this history would note the extraordinary repression the union suffered at the hands of the autocracy—in the prerevolutionary period the union was closed five times, its journal seven times, and its governing board racked by countless arrests. The union faced by all accounts the strongest employers' association in the country and sustained a remarkably high rate of failure in its strikes. Although one of the largest and most militant of the prewar unions, i t never united more than 13 percent of the capital's metal workers and waged a continuous and on balance unsuccessful struggle against factory-based labor organizations. Further, the councils of the metal workers' union were often rent by the intense, bitter, and divisive fractional struggles of Social Democracy. The union developed as well in the context of significant structural change in the metal-working industry, at first in a period of sharp economic dislocation and high unemployment, later in a period of economic growth and expansion. Metal workers suffered the unique strains and anxieties of a rationalizing industry, and their union struggled to interpret and respond to these pressures.
- Labour and Management in Conflict: The St Petersburg Metal-Working Industry, 1900-1914 by Heather Jane Hogan
He yearned to return to St. Petersburg, where worker unrest was growing. In April 1914 he entered Russia with the passport of a French citizen (Jacob Noé). When he returned to Russia, he had been away for so long that he already ‘felt like a tourist’ in his native land, indicating how strongly Western Europe had shaped his identity. In Petersburg he met with Bolshevik Party leaders Lev Kamenev, Alexei Badaev and Grigory Petrovsky, but claimed later that he felt uncomfortable in the presence of Roman Malinovsky, who in 1918 was convicted of having been a police informer and shot. By keeping Malinovsky unaware of his whereabouts, Shlyapnikov unwittingly avoided the wave of arrests that decimated the ranks of Bolshevik leaders and activists in summer 1914. [...] Not long after Shlyapnikov arrived, Petersburg Bolshevik leaders offered him a post in the central Party organisation, due to his past membership in the Petersburg Committee and his leadership experience abroad. Instead, he chose to work in factories because he wanted to reacquaint himself with working-class life, make new contacts among workers and avoid police attention.
- Alexander Shliapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik by Barbara Allen
In need of funds, Shlyapnikov sought factory work in England. To Lenin’s continued protests, he finally answered that not only was he unable to support himself and Bolshevik operations, but that he needed to help his mother in Murom. Having arrived in London in early April 1915, he established contact with Maxim Litvinov, the most prominent Bolshevik in England and later Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Within four days of his arrival, Shlyapnikov found work as a turner at the Fiat automobile plant in Wembley, near London. Although he corresponded with cc members infrequently in the summer of 1915, he lectured at Russian clubs on the revolutionary movement in Russia and in Scandinavia. He spoke English well enough to discuss his opposition to the war and his political views with British workers. Moreover, he joined and participated in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, a militant British union, and was proud of his membership. It was not easy for foreigners to join the ASE. Shlyapnikov’s acceptance marked recognition of his advanced metalworking skills. Generally, English workers positively impressed him; he perceived them as less militarist or chauvinist than workers in ‘semi-free’ European countries.
- Alexander Shliapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik by Barbara Allen
The workers’ economic struggle was once again partially legalized before the war, and trade unions and locally elected factory committees, often under Bolshevik leadership, waged a number of quite militant struggles in the 1912-1914 period.7 Russia’s entry into the war dealt a severe though temporary blow to this process. Many Russian workers, like their European counterparts, put aside their class demands and rallied under the flag of patriotism. Labour organizations were again decimated, partly by renewed tsarist repression and partly by the call-up of many workers to the front, especially the more militant. Many large plants were even militarized, the workers legally treated as mobilized soldiers. By 1915, however, strike activity had resumed again, but the strike committees did not become permanent organs. In the summer of 1915, legal worker representation at the plant level was again revived under the system of War Industries Committees, which was initiated by the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) and the Octobrists, two liberal bourgeois parties, in an effort to free Russian industry from the constraints of tsarist bureaucracy. Workers representatives, elected in two stages beginning at the plant level, were to sit in a special section on the War Industries Committees, but their proportion of votes was minimal. Although the Bolsheviks boycotted the committees on the grounds that they furthered the aims of an imperialist war, all sections of the Social Democratic Party participated in the plant elections, which provided the first opportunity since the beginning of the war for public meetings and open political debate.
- Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience by Carmen Sirianni
For example, the location of most printing shops not in the predominantly industrial and working-class peripheries but in the centre, populated by the more affluent and educated elements, undoubtedly reinforced the ties felt by the printers towards 'society' as well as their perceptions of the power of the propertied classes compared to the workers. By contrast, working in the militant atmosphere of the Vyborg District with its large cadre of skilled metalworkers, its homogeneous proletarian population and revolutionary reputation, the wartime newcomers were more quickly assimilated into the prevailing spirit of working-class radicalism here than elsewhere.
- The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime by David Mandel
The Vyborg District continued to lead. Large factories provided the major meeting places that held thousands of workers, with orators of different ideological persuasions all advocating radical actions. An Okhrana spy, Limonin’ (Bolshevik Shurkanov) noted that factories were turned into ‘grandiose’ clubs. Experienced orators electrified the workers and attempted to coordinate actions for strikes and demonstrations. At New Parvianen more than 5,000 workers assembled at the mining workshop, where the Bolshevik, Menshevik-Internationalist, and SR orators appealed to fight against the war and tsarism.
- The February Revolution, 1917 by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
The demand for the eight-hour day was the most insistent of all in the early weeks of the revolution. It had been part of the Social Democratic programme since 1898, and had been central throughout the stormy months of 1905. In 1917 it was one of the first issues that threatened to tear apart the hastily constructed coalition of bourgeois liberals in the Provisional Government and the reformist socialist leadership of the Petrograd Soviet. And, indeed, it threatened to alienate the workers from their Soviet leaders, who did not press the issue vigorously until the workers in many plants in Petrograd and Moscow simply stopped working after eight hours. An agreement with the Provisional Government on 10 March did recognize the eight-hour day in the capital, and as the news spread, workers elsewhere pressed the demand with similar insistence. But the owners soon reneged, arguing that the shortened day threatened to disrupt war production. The Soviet leaders accepted this rationale, and many workers seemed to do so as well, with the added compensation of double pay for overtime in many places. But the issue remained alive, especially as the justifications for continuing the war began to lose cogency in face of the repeated defeats of the Russian armies over the next few months.
- Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience by Carmen Sirianni
The Mensheviks, who opposed the formation of a factory-committee centre independent of the Central Council of Trade Unions, voted against the proposal, as did the Anarcho- Syndicalists, who feared the overcentralization of the movement. But the conference approved the proposal and elected nineteen Bolsheviks, two Mensheviks, two SRs, one Interdistricter (Trotsky’s group), and one Anarcho-Syndicalist to the twenty-five member council. Later in the month, the Organization Bureau of the state artillery enterprises was merged with the Central Council. The functions of the Council were to include directing the acquisition of fuel, raw materials, machinery, and markets; the distribution of financial and technical information; and the establishment of a committee to aid the peasants (mostly by providing farm implements). Members of the Central Council, which was in more or less permanent session, also participated in various government boards and state agencies concerned with labour, defence, and supply, although usually only to demand two-thirds representation for itself.
- Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience by Carmen Sirianni
Perhaps more importantly, the workers viewed these conflicts against the background of both the government's plan to 'unload' Petrograd and the long history of recourse to lockouts by Petrograd industrialists as a favourite means of struggle against the workers' political as well as economic demands. The defensive or reactive nature of workers' control explains why the demand did not really come into its own until May when the situation had become sufficiently serious. Even so, control in the sense of access to documents and comprehensive monitoring of management was still very rare in this period. A Soviet study of 'instances of control' for May and June in 84 Petrograd factories (employing 230 000 workers) found that only 24.5 per cent of all cases involved any sort of control over production, with another 8.7 per cent over finances and sales. For the rest, 24.6 per cent had to do with 'control over conditions of work', 24.1 per cent with hiring and dismissals, and 7.5 per cent with guarding the plants-all areas previously subsumed under the March demand for 'control over internal order'.
- The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime by David Mandel
Foreign Minister Milyukov, in assuring the Allies in a 20 April telegram that Russia would wage war according to the tsarist government’s treaties with them, radicalised many leftists. By the Bolsheviks’ Seventh Party Conference (24–9 April 1917), a large majority of delegates agreed with Lenin’s positions on the Provisional Government and the war. Nevertheless, the conference did not agree wholly with his claim that Russia was undergoing a transition to socialist revolution, but leaned somewhat towards Kamenev’s position that Russia was still in the process of a bourgeois-liberal revolution. Shlyapnikov played a minimal role in this sea change in the Party, because in April he suffered concussion in an automobile accident and was hospitalised for several weeks.14 His incapacitation pushed him further from the centre of party activity.
- Alexander Shliapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik by Barbara Allen
In addition to the Socialist-Internationalists having an influence on the trade union movement, turning many of the leaders of the trade unions away from the more moderate socialists and more specifically the Mensheviks, in this timeline Alexander Shliapnikov avoids being his by an automobile on the streets of Petrograd and as a result is more central to the organising of the Factory Committee Council, the All-Russian Metalworkers' Union, and the general rank and file organising of the Bolshevik Party. What I'm hoping to set up here is that Shliapnikov had a lot of potential through his influence with the grassroots workers within Petrograd and in this timeline he might be closer to reaching that potential in part because he avoids a stay in the hospital and remains directly involved in party organising. The Bolsheviks, as a result, become slightly more oriented towards the rank and file radicalism that was so endemic during this period.
Craft unionism was therefore by no means a spent force in 1917, but its strength was not great, if one compares Russia to other countries. By October 1917, Petrograd had one of the highest levels of unionisation in the world, and at least 90% of trade unionists in the city were members of industrial unions. Measured against this achievement, craft unionism must be counted a failure. This failure was partly due to the fact that the guild tradition had never been powerful in Russia, whereas in Western Europe craft unions were heirs to a vital guild 'tradition'.35 More importantly, however, craft unionism and trade unionism were not suited to an industrial environment where the majority of wage-earners worked in modern factories. Even the skilled craftsmen in these factories were not of the same type as those who had formed the 'new model' unions in Britain after the demise of Chartism. They therefore tended to see their interests as being best defended in alliance with less skilled factory workers, rather than in isolation from them. We shall see that sectional pressures of all kinds existed within the Russian labour movement in 1917 and were a force to be reckoned with, but they did not seriously endanger the project of industrial unionism.
- Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918 by SA Smith
Shlyapnikov numbered among the moderate union leaders, including Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, who favoured the subordination of factory committees to industrial unions at the factory level. Bolshevik radicals, on the other hand, advocated an independent role for the committees. At the First Conference of the Petrograd Factory Committees, held on 30 May–5 June 1917, radical Bolsheviks won approval of a central council for the factory committees, thus unifying the factory-committee movement. The alarmed moderates saw this as a threat to trade unions, but the radicals held a stronger position. The radicals conceded that the Central Council of Factory Committees should coordinate its actions with the All-Russian Central Trade Union Council (VTsSPS), but there was no indication of any subordinate relationship. In addition, Shlyapnikov and some other moderate Bolsheviks won election to the Central Council of Factory Committees. When reporting the results to the Petrograd Metalworkers’ Union, Shlyapnikov attempted to soften the blow by emphasising similarities and minimising differences between moderates and radicals, but his colleagues refused to surrender.
- Alexander Shliapnikov, 1885-1937: Life of an Old Bolshevik by Barbara Allen
The nadir of popular participation seems to have been reached in July and August, due to a convergence of factors whose relative significance is not completely clear. In Petrograd, fear and a sense of isolation among the militant workers after the July repression and the unleashing of the right-wing Black Hundreds surely played a part. As class and party polarization increased, the more militant workers may have shifted the focus of activity to the Bolshevik party. After General Kornilov’s attempted march on the city in late August, a renewed burst of activity and participation occurred, as workers saw the gains of February threatened, and also perceived the chance of extending the revolution with the support of the moderate socialist forces. In Moscow as well, there was renewed interest and participation after the Kornilov threat. July and August were also months of vacation for many, of temporary plant closures and travel to the countryside for the five major religious holidays of the late summer period.
- Workers Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience by Carmen Sirianni
