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Peasant Migration and the Russian Working Class: Moscow at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert Eugene Johnson
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Extract

Almost a hundred years have elapsed since Russian Marxists and Populists began their polemics over the social effects of industrialization, and seven decades have gone by since Bolsheviks and Mensheviks first clashed over the “ripeness” or maturity of the Russian working class. Nevertheless, debate continues to this day over the outlook of the prerevolutionary Russian working class.

No one disputes the fact that in the decades before 1917 a majority— albeit a shrinking proportion—of factory workers came from the peasant estate (soslovie). Before the Stolypin legislation of 1906, a peasant who moved to the city or factory found it almost impossible to end his legal obligation to the village commune where he was born, and roughly 90 percent of the industrial workers in the city of Moscow were legally peasants. The question remains, however, whether the ties imposed by the passport system and obligatory land allotments were an empty formality: Were the “peasants“ in Russian factories peasants in name only? How did the move to the cities and factories affect their ideas, values, or behavior ?

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , December 1976 , pp. 652 - 664
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1976

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References

1. According to the 1902 municipal census, 107, 781 factory workers resided within the city limits of Moscow (Perepis’ Moskvy 1902 goda, part 1, no. 2, table 2, pp. 10-11), as well as 104, 899 in other nonfactory branches of manufacturing and 37, 679 in transport. Of these workers, 92.7 percent of the first group, 90.3 percent of the second, and 94.6 percent of the third had been born elsewhere. The census does not indicate their soslovie, but other studies from the same years show that migrant workers were almost exclusively peasants (see, for example, P. M. Shestakov, Rabochie na manufakture “EtniV Tsindel'” v Moskve [Moscow, 1900], p. 20; at the Tsindel’ cotton mill, one of Moscow's largest, 94. 2 percent of the work force came from the peasant soslovie). The city's total population had grown from 753, 000 in 1882 to 1.17 million in 1902; in both years, roughly threefourths of the total population had been born elsewhere.

2. A recent and subtle version of this argument is offered by Kirianov, Iu. I., “Ob oblike rabochego klassa Rossii,” in Rossiiskii proletariat: Oblik, bor'ba, gegemoniia, ed. Ivanov, L. M. (Moscow, 1970), pp. 100–140 Google Scholar. This author gives considerable attention to the peculiarities of Russian development, and to the distinctions between various strata of the working class. He leaves no doubt, however, as to which workers were the bearers of revolutionary class consciousness—the “primitive” outlook of the peasant or semipeasant masses could not have produced a revolution (pp. 126-27).

3. See, in particular, Laue, Theodore Von, “Russian Peasants in the Factory, 1892-1904,” Journal of Economic History, 23, no. 1 (March 1961): 61–80 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In Von Laue's words, “the peasant-worker's exertions were shorn of their spiritual wholeness. The connection between his inward motivation and his outward motions had been severed, the harmony broken. In this ‘dehumanization of labor’ lay the deepest source of his resentment against industrialization” (p. 80).

4. This point is emphasized by Leopold Haimson in his article “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917, ” Slavic Review, 23, no. 4 (December 1964): 619-42. In his view, newly-recruited workers “combined with their resentments about the painful and disorienting conditions of their new industrial experience a still fresh sense of grievance about the circumstances under which they had been compelled to leave the village.” In the factories, such workers came into contact with a new generation of militant, city-born youths, and with Bolshevik agitation and propaganda; the result in St. Petersburg was a “spirit of buntarstvo” and a “polarization between workers and educated, privileged society.”

5. In a provocative review of several recent Soviet publications, Reginald Zelnik suggests that “a relatively high proportion of hereditary proletarians … tended to be a function of industrial stagnation” —that is, that each new cycle of economic growth required the recruitment of new cadres of inexperienced workers from the countryside, thereby tending to submerge the “proletarian” workers in a semiproletarian mass. Zelnik goes on to describe the working class as having a “uniquely volatile and dynamic mixed consciousness, ” in which agrarian grievances were compounded with those of the city and factory ( “Russian Workers and the Revolutionary Movement, ” Journal of Social History, 6, no. 2 [Winter 1972-73]: 217-19).

6. A. G., Rashin, “Dinamika chislennosti i protsessy formirovaniia gorodskogo naseleniia Rossii v XlX-nachale XX w.,” Istoricheskie zapiski, no. 34, 1950, p. 71.Google Scholar

7. Dement'ev, E. M., Fabrika, chto ona daet naseleniiu i chto ona u nego beret (Moscow, 1893), pp. 1–57 Google Scholar. Dement'ev's research was part of the Moscow zemstvo's comprehensive survey of factory conditions throughout Moscow province, and his findings were first published in Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Moskovskoi gubernii, Otdel Sanitarnyi, vol. 4, no. 2 (Moscow, 1893).

8. Dement'ev, Fabrika, p. 6 ff.

9. Sbornik statisticheskikh svedenii po Moskovskoi gubernii, Otdel Sanitarnyi, vol. 4, no. 1 (Moscow, 1890), p. 287.

10. Dement'ev, Fabrika, p. 46.

11. According to figures compiled by the Ministry of Finance, the number of factory workers in Moscow city and province increased from 164, 560 to 259, 424 between 1879 and 1901. The greatest part of this increase occurred during the industrial boom of the “Witte years” from 1895 to 1900. See Ministerstvo finansov, Departament torgovli i manufaktur, Ukasatel’ fabrik % zavodov evropciskoi Rossii, comp. P. A. Orlov (St. Petersburg, 1881); and Spisok fabrik i savodov evropciskoi Rossii [for 1901] (St. Petersburg, 1903).

12. Dement'ev, Fabrika, p. 49.

13. Ibid., p. 35.

14. K. A. Pazhitnov, Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1924), pp. 179-80, referring specifically to Moscow province.

15. Statisticheskii eshegodnik Moskovskoi gubernii sa 1885 g. (Moscow, 1886), pp. 78-79, 128.

16. Pavlov, F. P., Za desiaf let praktiki (Moscow, 1901), p. 70.Google Scholar

17. On the other hand, V. I. Romashova, using the archive of the Kol'chugin brass and copper works in Moscow (GIAMO, f. 335), has concluded that the families of most disabled workers resided not in the country but at the factory; she does not give concrete figures. ( “Obrazovanie postoiannykh kadrov rabochikh v poreformennoi promyshlennosti Moskvy, ” in Rabochii klass i rabochee dvizhenie, 1861-1917 [Moscow, 1966], pp. 161-62.)

18. Shestakov, Robochie na manufakturc, p. 22. Further evidence of workers’ ties to the village can be found in Shestakov's investigation of landholding. Fully 90 percent of the workers he interviewed possessed an allotment of land; of the remaining 10 percent, three-fourths came from families which had received no land at the time of emancipation. Although one-third of the workers could not supply detailed information about their land holdings, all but one knew exactly how many horses and cows their household possessed. It should be noted that these workers were not, in the main, newly-arrived from the villages, but had spent an average of 10.3 years in factory employment (ibid., pp. 19, 25, 26).

19. Perepis’ Moskvy 1882 goda, nos. 1-3 (Moscow: Gorodskoi statisticheskii komitet, 1884-86); Perepis1 Moskvy 1902 goda, part 1, nos. 1-3 (Moscow: Statisticheskii otdel Moskovskoi gorodskoi upravy, 1904-6). The national census of 1897 ﹛Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis’ nascleniia Rossiiskoi imperii, 1897 g., vol. 24, notebooks 1-2 [Moscow, 1901-4]) and the municipal one of 1871 (Statisticheskie svedeniia o zhiteliakh goroda Moskvy, po perepisi 12 dek. 1871 g. [Moscow, 1874]) were both examined during the preparation of this article, but were found to lack the particular categories of information which were most relevant to the present discussion.

20. Mikhailovskii, V, “Glavneishie predvaritel'nye dannye perepisi goroda Moskvy, Chast’ 1,” Izvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy, 26, no. 9 (1902): 9–10, 24.Google Scholar

21. In fact, because of worsening economic conditions, in-migration in both years may have been less, and out-migration greater, than at other times. The statistician who directed the 1902 census concluded that population increase had been greatest from 1897 to 1900, and had fallen off somewhat in 1882 and 1902 (ibid., p. 10).

22. Massal'skii, V., “Predvaritel'nye dannye perepisi 1902 goda, IV: Naselenie po semeinomu sostoianiiu,” Isvestiia Moskovskoi gorodskoi dumy, 28, no. 15 (1904): 25.Google Scholar

23. Smertnost’ naseleniia goroda Moskvy, 1872-1889 g., comp. Statisticheskii otdel Moskovskoi gorodskoi upravy (Moscow, 1891), pp. 20-22. The mortality rate for the total population in the years 1882-85 (including foundling infants) was 28.2 per 1, 000 per annum. Age-specific rates were as follows: age 10-15, 5.6 per 1, 000; 15-20, 7 per 1, 000; 20-30, 11 per 1, 000; 30-40, 15 per 1, 000; 40-50, 22 per 1, 000; 50-60, 34 per 1, 000. Sixty-eight percent of all migrants in the 1882 census were in the age group 10-40, as compared to 47 percent of the Moscow-born population (Percpis’ Moskvy 1882 goda, no. 2, sec. 1, p. 50).

24. This was probably attributable to the poor economic conditions of 1901-2.

25. Svavitskii, A. and Sher, V., Ocherk polozheniia rabochikh pechatnogo dela v Moskve (po dannym ankety, proizvedennoi Obshchestvom rabochikh graficheskikh iskusstv v 1907 g.) (St. Petersburg, 1909).Google Scholar

26. Ibid., pp. 8-9.