Cities and workers

Ilya Repin painted barge haulers on the Volga in 1870–73: a line of men on a towpath, a river that still needed human backs. Later realist oil, Russian Museum, not a factory clock. Use it for the labour an industrialising empire still displayed as a picture, then return to the mills of the 1890s. A strap on a shoulder is not an 11.5-hour statute. The last article closed on gold and oil and a village treated as a treasury. This page is the urban working class that industrial growth began to produce. It seemed fated to repeat the history of workers in the early stages of industrial capitalism in Western countries. The workers were unskilled, badly paid, overworked, and miserably housed.

Uprooted from the village communities in which they had at least had a recognised place, the peasants’ children who flocked into the new industrial agglomerations suffered both physical and moral privation. This was especially true of central Russia, where the surplus of labour kept wages down to the minimum. It was in St Petersburg, where employers found it less easy to recruit workers, that the transformation of the amorphous mass of urban poor into a modern working class made the most progress. St Petersburg employers were also less hostile to government legislation on behalf of the workers. Geography here is a labour market. The capital paid better because it could not fill the yards from an endless nearby village. Moscow’s provinces could.

In 1882 Finance Minister Nikolay Khristyanovich Bunge introduced an inspectorate of labour conditions and limited hours of work for children. In 1897 Witte introduced a maximum working day of 11.5 hours for all workers, male or female, and of 10 hours for those engaged in night work. Trade unions were not permitted, though several attempts were made to organise them illegally. The Ministry of the Interior, being more interested in public order than in businessmen’s profits, occasionally showed some concern for the workers. In 1901 the head of the Moscow branch of the security police, Colonel Sergey Vasilyevich Zubatov, encouraged the formation of a workers’ society intended to rally the workers behind the autocracy, but it was largely infiltrated by Social Democrats. Strikes were strictly forbidden but occurred anyway, especially in 1885, 1896, 1902, and 1903.

A later photograph of Nicholas II among workers at the Putilov works. Use it as the mill the capital could not ignore, then return to 1897. A visit is not a union. It is an emperor in a yard that would later strike.

The growth of an industrial working class provided a mass basis for socialist movements. By the end of the century some interest in politics was beginning to penetrate even to the peasantry, especially in parts of the middle Volga valley. A more radical attitude, combining elements of liberalism and socialism, was to be found in the professional classes of the cities, including many persons employed by the zemstvos as teachers, doctors, engineers, or statisticians. Moderate liberalism, aiming at a consultative national assembly, was strong among elected zemstvo members, largely of the landowning class. The city thus held several oppositions at once: a working mass without legal unions, a professional layer paid by the zemstvo, and a landowning liberalism that still dreamed of being heard. None of those yet had a Duma. The Duma is two titles away.

In 1897, at the time of the first modern census in Russia, there were 104,000 persons who had attended or were attending a university — less than 0.1 percent of the population — and 73 percent of these were children of nobles or officials. The number who had studied or were studying in any sort of secondary school was 1,072,977, or less than 1 percent of the population, and 40 percent of these were children of nobles and officials. In 1904, primary schools managed by the Ministry of Education had rather more than 3,000,000 pupils, and those managed by the Orthodox church not quite 2,000,000. The combined figure represented only 27 percent of the children of school age in the empire at that time. Persistent neglect of education could no longer be explained by sheer backwardness and lack of funds. The Russian Empire of 1900 could have afforded a modern school system, albeit rudimentary, if its rulers had considered it a top priority.

The word intelligentsia came into use in the last half of the nineteenth century. It described both a social group and a state of mind: persons with a good modern education and a passionate preoccupation with general political and social ideas. Its nucleus was in the liberal professions of law, medicine, teaching, and engineering. The intelligentsia was by its very nature opposed to the existing political and social system. It did not consist of active revolutionaries, although it preferred the revolutionaries to the government, but it was from the intelligentsia that the professional revolutionaries were largely recruited. The lack of civil liberties and the prohibition of political parties made it necessary for socialists to use conspiratorial methods. Those sentences are the city’s other population: not only haulers and mill hands, but readers who judged art by whether it furthered social progress. Do not write Belinsky’s whole career here. Name the utilitarianism as the weather of the educated street.

Keep Krivoy Rog’s ore out of this page except as the reason the mill exists. Keep the gold standard out of it. Keep 13 March 1881 out of it. Cities and workers here are an unskilled mass, St Petersburg versus the central provinces, Bunge 1882, Witte 1897, no unions, Zubatov 1901, strikes in four dated years, a census of schooling, and an intelligentsia that preferred conspirators to clerks. Readers who want the tsesarevich’s Asian tour will find it under Nicholas II. Readers who want a massacre before the Winter Palace will find it under the last title. This article’s last job is to hand them a city that had hours, no legal union, and a police experiment that Social Democrats infiltrated.

The law forbade the strike and limited the day. The mill stopped anyway, in years the police could list.

Repin’s haulers are a 1870s river. Putilov is a capital works the emperor could walk through. Yaroshenko’s student, used two articles ago, was the educated coat on the same streets. This page’s third picture should stay with the mill and the river, not steal the kursistka again. The surplus of village labour that kept central wages down is the same surplus the economic pages named as peasant overpopulation. Seasonal migration, Siberia, and the factory were not enough to absorb it. Those who did reach the agglomeration lost the recognised place of the commune and gained a bunk. Physical and moral privation is Britannica’s pairing. Do not decorate it with an invented lodging-house scene.

Do not invent a wage in kopeks. Do not invent Zubatov’s membership list beyond infiltration by Social Democrats. Do not invent a strike’s city beyond the years given. Do not write Bloody Sunday into 1903. The four strike years are already a drumbeat. The 11.5-hour day is already a number. The census fractions are already a shame. Together they explain why the next emperor would meet not only zemstvo liberals with dreams but a working class that had learned to stop work without permission. That meeting is 1905. This title stops at the class, the hours, the forbidden union, and the police society.

The previous title’s businessmen accepted autocracy because it paid them. This title’s workers had no legal way to bargain with those businessmen. The Interior Ministry cared about order more than profit, which is why an inspectorate and a Zubatov society could exist beside a ban on unions. Order is not mercy. It is a different office. Bunge limited children’s hours. Witte limited the adult day. Neither legalised the strike. The strike happened anyway. That is the urban fact this chapter needed before it could say that Russia stood on the edge of a century in which a palace square would fill with petitioners. The petitioners are not yet here. The mill is.

Nikolay Kasatkin painted a cupola-furnace worker in 1899: a man and heat. Later genre of a mill’s inside, not a 1897 clock. Use it for the labour Witte’s furnaces needed, then put it aside. Coal on a face is not a zemstvo statistic. It is why St Petersburg could become a working class faster than a village surplus would allow Moscow’s hinterland to.

Stop this page before a petition to the Winter Palace. The next title is Nicholas II, the man who would receive that century as a personal property. Cities and workers here are haulers, mills, 11.5 hours, four strike years, Zubatov, a thin school system, an intelligentsia. Repin’s towpath is the old labour still visible. Putilov is the new yard. Kasatkin’s fireman is the heat inside. Witte had wanted enterprise. Enterprise had wanted backs. The backs had begun, illegally, to stop. The emperor who would have to answer them had not yet been named on this page. He is the next face.

Alexander II had freed persons who still paid for land. Alexander III had clipped the zemstvo that tried to school their children. Witte had built mills those children walked to. This title is the walk’s arrival: a class without a union, with a day, with strikes, with a police that tried to love them for the autocracy and lost them to Social Democrats. That is enough urban history for a chapter that still has an emperor to introduce and a year called 1905 to reach. The edge of the twentieth century is not yet. The bunk and the clock are.