Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an International Perspective Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Part I Introductions
- Part II Models and realities
- Part III Workers in metal-processing enterprises in comparative perspective
- Part IV The effects of short-term variation
- 18 Introduction
- 19 Economic cycles and labor conflicts in Germany during the first quarter of the twentieth century
- 20 The crisis of state and society in Britain, 1917–1922
- 21 Strikes and the war
- 22 Labor unrest in Imperial Russia on the eve of the First World War: the roles of conjunctural phenomena, events, and individual and collective actors
- 23 Strikes in Russia, 1917: the impact of revolution
- Part V Conclusion
23 - Strikes in Russia, 1917: the impact of revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Part I Introductions
- Part II Models and realities
- Part III Workers in metal-processing enterprises in comparative perspective
- Part IV The effects of short-term variation
- 18 Introduction
- 19 Economic cycles and labor conflicts in Germany during the first quarter of the twentieth century
- 20 The crisis of state and society in Britain, 1917–1922
- 21 Strikes and the war
- 22 Labor unrest in Imperial Russia on the eve of the First World War: the roles of conjunctural phenomena, events, and individual and collective actors
- 23 Strikes in Russia, 1917: the impact of revolution
- Part V Conclusion
Summary
Analyzing the impact of 1917 on strikes in Russia is something like retrieving spilled mercury. Revolutionary change created such fluid circumstances that strikes and protests often changed their nature in the very course of occurring; and just as one is about to get an analytical grasp on events, their form shifts and they skitter from reach, changing size and shape even as they continue to remain the same elemental material.
Changes in Russia's political environment altered the meaning of strikes from the first. Largely illegal and hence explicitly political before the overthrow of the tsar, strikes in 1917 simultaneously became a “routine” element of democratic labor–management conflict and an implicit challenge to the ability of both soviet and government leaders to develop stable social relations and workable democratic institutions. As in other areas of life in 1917, the exercise of democratic rights weakened democratic structures, a paradox of political transformation common to most revolutionary situations. Thus, strikes in the spring, which had as their goal the consolidation of revolutionary gains through improving material welfare and eliminating arbitrary and authoritarian social relations in the workplace, became in the fall a central aspect of social polarization and the breakdown of democratic order, and an important social basis for the Bolsheviks' coming to power.
The same can be said about Russia's economic circumstances and the rapidly changing conditions of work that led in a brief time to fundamental changes in patterns of industrial management and management–worker relations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Strikes, Wars, and Revolutions in an International PerspectiveStrike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, pp. 512 - 522Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989