1 A good illustration of the error to which those with Marxist preconceptions are subject may be found in the well-known work on the history of the Russian factory by Tugan-Baranovskij. In the earlier editions of his work, Tugan-Baranovskij, on the basis of a study made by E. Dement'ev in 1884–1885 in three districts in the province of Moscow concluded that “what was in process of becoming about fifteen years ago is now an accomplished fact: Russia possesses a numerous factory proletariat, which belongs only nominally to the peasantry, which can be considered as possessing land in name only, but which in reality is as little assured of its subsistence, as strongly divorced from the soil, as the Western European proletariat.” (The writer has at hand only the German version of the first edition, Geschichte der Russischen Fabrik [Berlin, 1900], p. 525.Google Scholar) At the time of the appearance of the third edition of Russkaja fabrika in 1907, Tugan-Baranovskij seems to have become aware that he had been misled by Dement'ev and that his views were contrary to those prevailing among specialists on the subject. While leaving his discussion of the tie to the land, based primarily on Dement'ev, exactly as it was before, he now eliminated the concluding sentence quoted above, and added several pages of new discussion, introducing the point, not even so much as hinted before, that the majority of the workers were living in the cities without their families and were sending part of their wages to their families left behind in the commune. (See the reprint of the third edition, published in Moscow in 1922, pp. 337–44.) The available data seem to indicate that most of the workers had ceased to leave the factories for field work, though the number who did so was probably much larger than is implied by the figures presented by Tugan-Baranovskij. See the evidence on this subject marshaled by Schwarz, Solomon, Labor in the Soviet Union (New York, 1952), pp. 1–5 Google Scholar. Some interesting data on wages may be found in Prokopovič, S. N., “Kresfjanstvo i poreformennaja fabrika,” in Dživelegov, A. K. and others, Velikaja reforma (Moscow, 1911), VI, 268–77.Google Scholar

2 In 1903, there was quoted with approval in the State Council the following saying of Bismarck, : “Any monarchical, paternalistic government must look after the interests of the working class,” Otčët po deloprotzvodstvu Qosudarstvennago Soveta za sessiju 1902-1903 gg. (St. Petersburg, 1904), II, 146 Google Scholar. It wasi in general brought to the attention of the State Council that in Western Europe conservative groups took the lead in introducing social legislation.

3 The view that patriarchal relations governed the relations between capital and labor was frequently reiterated by many government officials in many government institutions up to 1905. The following quotation is taken from a secret circular of the Ministry of Finance, December 5, 1895: “In our industry patriarchal relations predominate between master and worker. This patriarchy expresses itself in many cases in the concern of the factory owner for the needs of the workers and employees in his factory, in his solicitude for the preservation of harmony and agreement, in the simplicity and justice of their mutual relations. When at the foundation of such relations lies the law of morality and Christian feeling, then there is no need to resort to written law.

“In Russia, fortunately, there does not exist a working class in that sense and significance as in the West; consequently, there does not exist also a labor problem, and neither the one nor the other will have or can have with us the basis of their creation, if, along with the carrying out of the factory owner's concern for the welfare of the workers, you [i.e., officials of the factory inspection] on your side apply all your efforts to strengthen the sense of legality and the moral obligation of the workers,” Ozerov, I. K., Politika po rabočemu voprosu v Rossii za poslednie gody (St. Petersburg, 1906), pp. 24–25 Google Scholar. This “secret” circular was printed in the Orlovskij vestnik in 1896. Because the Tsarist administration was filled with officials sympathetic to the liberal opposition, there was hardly a secret document which was not at one time printed in the press, at home or abroad. However, Ozerov had access to the archives of the Ministry of Finance, and his book is filled with direct quotations from unpublished documents.

4 Gordon, Manya, Workers Before and After Lenin (New York, 1941), p. 17.Google Scholar

5 See the writer's State and Society in Tsarist and Communist Russia, a forthcoming publication of a university press.

8 The police basis of factory legislation is discussed at great length, and with appropriate quotations from official documents by Luntz, M. G., Sbornik state], iz istorii fabričnago zakonodatel'stva, fabričnoj inspekcii i rabočago dviŽenija v Rossii (Moscow, 1909), pp. 38–61 Google Scholar. See also the chapter on factory legislation by Tugan-Baranovskij, , Russkaja fabrika v proslom i nastojaščem (3rd ed., Moscow, 1922), pp. 296–329 Google Scholar.

7 M. G. Luntz, in Sbornik state], at first discusses factory legislation in Russia as if it was a pure expression of the class interests of the bourgeoisie, pp. 5–37. Since, however, the police basis of factory legislation stands out too sharply to be ignored, Luntz suddenly reversed his field, kept emphasizing that the interests of the bureaucracy and the interests of the bourgeoisie were by no means identical, with the former necessarily supreme, and wrote what the writer considers the most acute analysis available of the political and police influences on factory legislation, pp. 38–61. This is only one of many examples available from the writings of pre-revolutionary Marxists illustrating the difficulties encountered in fitting well-known facts to Marxist precepts.

8 Pokrovskij, M., “BurŽuazija v Rossii,” in Bol'shaja sovetskaja ènciklopedija (1927), VIII, 182–94Google Scholar. Another Marxist, P. A. Berlin, correctly writes: “The government always vacillated between, on the one hand, the decision to close its eyes to the labor problem in Russia as nonexistent, invented merely by malefactors, and, on the other hand, the desire to prove to the workers its class impartiality, its readiness to protect them from brutal exploitation…. It is impossible therefore to say that those hesitant zigzags with which our factory legislation moved forward reflected a unity of the social will of government and bourgeoisie. In this field, between the bourgeoisie and the government, as we have already noted, a struggle proceeded, and conflicts arose,” Russkaja burŽuazija v staroe i novoe vremja (Moscow, 1922), p. 190 Google Scholar. It should be noted that the industrialists were not always united on the labor problem. Varying conditions in the St. Petersburg and Moscow industrial regions led the St. Petersburg industrialists to propose social legislation, principally the prohibition of night work and the regulation of the length of the working day, as a means of obtaining a competitive advantage over the Moscow industrialists. There is an explanation of this situation in Gordon, op. cit., pp. 16–17. However, the writer finds it incomprehensible how Miss Gordon could permit the impression to be given that “the driving power behind the labor legislation was entirely economic….” The political interests of the Government stand out beyond any question in the entire history of labor legislation in Russia. For a more complete explanation of the difference in the views of the Moscow and St. Petersburg industrialists, see Tugan-Baranovskij, op. cit., pp. 309–10 and Bykov, A. N., Fabričnoe zakonodatel'stvo i razvitie ego v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1909), pp. 153–55Google Scholar. Bykov explains in detail how the underlying economic and technical conditions which originally gave rise to the difference in views were being equalized so that the disputes between the two groups of industrialists were disappearing.

9 There is a description of the factory legislation in Gordon, op. cit., pp. 15–29, 58–63 and in Miller, Margaret, The Economic Development of Russia, 1905–1914 (London, 1926), pp. 230–34Google Scholar, but both accounts are inadequate. The provisions of the laws are described in detail in Luntz, Sbornik statej, Litvinov-Falinskij, V. P., Fabričnoe zakonodatel'stvo i fabričnaja inspekcija v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1900)Google Scholar, and A. N. Bykov, Fabričnoe zakonodatel'stvo i razvitie ego v Rossii, but they are interpreted quite differently. Luntz was a violent Marxist and his comments are frequently untrustworthy. Litvinov-Falinskij was a government apologist, and his comments are likewise inadequate. Bykov's work is by far the best written and the most reliable in the field. Tugan-Baranovskij's account, op. cit., pp. 296–329 is brief but good. On the insurance law of June 23, 1912, see Bykov's article in Vestnik Evropy, December, 1912, pp. 173–99, and M. Bernatskij, “Russkie zakony o strakhovanii rabočikh,” Sovremennyj mir (January, 1913), pp. 76–94.

10 There are systematic comments on the practical application of the various laws in Bykov, op. cit. Complete data are not available, but Bykov's evaluations of the evidence at hand are probably quite sound. Confirmation of many of Bykov's evaluations may be found in Mikulin, A. A., Fabričnaja inspekcija v Rossii (Kiev, 1906)Google Scholar.

11 On the content of the law of 1886, see “Ustav o promyslennosti,” Svod zakonov, Vol. XI, Articles 47–60, 86–106 and 127–56Google Scholar. There are commentaries on the law by Bykov, op. cit., pp. 170–93 and by Litvinov-Falinskij, op. cit., pp. 127–70. Only a few provisions of the law have been cited in the text. On the control placed on direct abuses by the industrialists and the change in the character of the complaints made by the workers, see Bykov, op. cit., pp. 170, 197. Detailed statistical evidence of the drastic changes after 1886 is available only for the fines imposed on workers by factory managers and the prices of food in factory stores; it is discussed by Bykov, pp. 187–88, 193. See also Mikulin, op. cit., pp. 75–79, 83–87, 210 and the comments in Russkij zakon i rabočij, pp. 3–4, an official document explained in note 22 below. That the collective dissatisfaction of the workers took new forms in the middle of the 1890's can be confirmed from the history of the labor movement. See, for example, Kolcov, D., “Rabočie v 1890–1904 gg.,” in Martov, , Maslov, and Potresov, , eds., Obščestvennoe dviženie v Rossii v načale XX veka (St. Petersburg, 1910), I, 183–229 Google Scholar. Kolcov, a Social Democrat, does not seem to understand what happened. Since he was unable to describe briefly the grievances of the workers in strikes before 1896, he complains that they consisted only of “trivial nagging” (p. 199). Impressed by the new evidence of solidarity shown by the St. Petersburg workers in the strikes of 1896–1897 he stresses the changes in the “psychology” thereafter revealed in the proletariat (p. 190). Kolcov, incidentally, comments favorably on the law of 1886 and its application by the factory inspection (p. 186); the same is not true of some of his Social Democratic colleagues even among those who contributed to the same volume. It should not of course be inferred that the defense of some of the workers’ interests by legislation insures their well-being.

12 The most frequently cited protests are those made in 1887 by a group of Moscow industrialists and the fair merchants of Nizni-Novgorod. See Janžul, I. I., Iz vospominanii i perepiski fabričnago inspektora (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 2–4 Google Scholar. The protests were, however, continuous. As Luntz has put it, the petitions of the merchants and industrialists requesting that the factory inspection be curbed remain “a permanent memorial of the class cynicism of Russian capital,” op. cit., p. 109.

13 The statistics are cited by D. P. Nikolskij, “Russkij rabočij po otčëtam fabričnoj inspekcii,” Vestnik Evropy, September, 1905, pp. 299–301 and by A. A. Mikulin, Fabričnaja inspekcija v Rossii, pp. 206–8. No attempt will be made in this article to explain the prisutstvija po fabričnym i gornozavodskim delam or other technical details concerning the administration of the factory inspection. For a compact summary (including the many changes made from 1882 to 1909) see Bykov, Fabričnoe zakonodatel'stvo, pp. 247–63.

14 Both Nikolskij, loc. cit. and Mikulin, loc. cit. bring out this point. The remaining points are discussed by Mikulin, op. cit., pp. 208–9.

15 While it is true that the nonpayment of wages, is normally a civil matter, the treatment of it as such by the Tsarist Government, in view of its primary interest in the maintenance of public order, was incomprehensible. The nonpayment of wages was a common complaint of the workers and in approaching the factory inspectors for satisfaction, they were hardly in a position to understand why the latter could not take action in their behalf on such an important matter, and could take action on other matters which interested them far less. The initiation of a civil suit by the worker-peasants was in almost all cases utterly out of the question, and their chief means of holding dishonest employers in line was the strike.

16 Mikulin, op. cit., pp. 194–96.

17 Quoted by Ermanskij, A., “Krupnaja bur~uazija,” inMartov, et al., Obščestvennoe dvženie v Rossii v načale XX-go veka (St. Petersburg, 1910), Vol. II, Part 2, p. 81 Google Scholar.

18 I. I. Janžul actively participated in the work of the Plehve commission and has described it in detail, Iz vospominanii i perepiski fabričnago inspektora, pp. 9–11,65–72.

19 It is not without interest that nine days after the issuance of a law protecting the interests of the factory workers, another law was approved protecting the interests of the landowners against the violations of the law and dishonest actions of agricultural workers. See Litvinov-Falinskij, Fabričnoe zakonodatel'stvo i fabričnaja inspekcija v Rossii, p. 100. On the motivation of the Government in coming to the aid of the factory workers, see the introduction to the official summary of the debate in the State Council on the law of June 3, 1886, Otčǫt po Gosudarswennomu Sovetu za 1886 god (St. Petersburg, 1888), pp. 426–29.Google Scholar

20 At first there was some tendency on the part of the inspectors to refuse to certify wage scales, because they regarded the wages as too low or feared that they might for one or another reason lead to disorders in the factories. In 1898, Witte called the attention of the Committee of Ministers to the harm such interference with the setting of wage rates could cause to industry, and the Committee, in a decree confirmed May 8, 1898, affirmed that the inspectors had no right to refuse to sign the schedule of wage rates. However, the Minister of the Interior pointed out that it remained the obligation of the inspectors to anticipate disorders and strikes which might arise out of wage rates not properly fixed. Consequently, if the inspectors thought that the rates were too low in comparison with those paid in similar neighboring factories, or if their method of calculation left room for arbitrariness on the part of the factory owners, they were to notify the governor of the province. In any case, the inspectors had to sign the schedule, and both the inspectors and the governor could act only with “moral means.” See verbatim extract of the journals of the Committee of Ministers quoted in Litvinov-Falinskij, op. cit., pp. 152–56.

21 See the secret circular of August 12, 1897, sent by the Minister of the Interior to the governors, printed in Ozerov, Politika po rabočemu voprosu, pp. 29–33.

22 The writer is here following the analysis of the laws punishing strikes made in an official memorandum of the Division of Industry of the Ministry of Finance, published by the editors of Osvoboždenie under the title Russkij zakon i rabočij, with an introduction by Peter Struve (Stuttgart, 1902), pp. 8–17. The memorandum was also published in Nos. 4-6 of Osvoboždenie. The laws which punished strikes if no acts of violence Were committed were contained in Articles 1358 and 1358 of the code of punishments (Svod zakonov, Vol. XV). Article 1358 provided for the detention of from seven days to three months of factory workers who agreed among themselves to cease work before the work contract expired for the purpose of compelling the factory owners to raise wages. Article 1358 provided for jail sentences of from two to eight months for workers who both concerted to go on strike and actually ceased work for the purpose of compelling the factory owner to raise wages or change other conditions of the work contract, before the contract expired. If, however, the workers obeyed the first demand of the police authorities to return to work, then they were freed from punishment. As the authors of the memorandum point out, there was no clarity as to what the law was punishing. Article 1358 implied that it was an understanding among the workers to cease work (stačka in the narrow sense of the term) which was being punished. Article 1358 implied that it was the actual cessation of work which was punishable since strikers who returned to work on the first demand of the police were freed from punishment, even though they had come to an understanding to cease work. Both articles of course treated as a crime an act which was regarded as purely civil in nature in most countries, namely the abandonment of the terms of a contract before the expiration of the contract. Neither article permitted punishment for strikes planned or effected after the work contracts had expired, or strikes called in protest against proposed terms of a new contract.

23 On the policy of the administration toward strikes, see the chapter in Ozerov, op. cit., pp. 23–38, which quotes secret circulars on the problem of strikes issued by the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Finance. The policy of exiling workers on strike, even though they committed no act punishable under the laws, was proposed to the governors by the Minister of the Interior in the secret circular cited in note 21 above. This point was protested by the Minister of Finance (Witte), who in violation of Article 60 or the Ustav o promyšlennosti, had not been consulted by the Minister of the Interior before the circular was issued. The circular remained in force, however, until the spring of 1905.

24 This point is discussed at length in the memorandum of the Ministry of Finance, Russkij zakon i rabočij, pp. 5–8. The unequal responsibility of both sides for an identical violation of the law was insisted upon by the Minister of the Interior (then Count D. A. Tolstoy) in the interest of maintaining public order and peace. The memorandum points out that public order was being identified with the normal course of work, and then exclusively of industrial workers, with ho similar concern shown for the normal course of work of other kinds of employees. The workers were being criminally punished furthermore only for the probability that public order would be infringed, whether the infringement actually took place or not.

25 The State Council's motivation in declining to permit appeals on fines imposed by factory managers is explained in Otčǫt po Qosudarstvennomu Sovetu za 1886 god, pp. 443–44. It is there stated: “If … it was indicated in the law that incorrectly imposed fines are subject to return to the workers, then this could not only provoke, from their side, a huge number of suits and complaints in the hope of the possible return of the fines, but would also to a certain degree weaken in their eyes the very importance intentionally given to the manager of the factory for the sake of the maintenance of discipline among the workers.” For various reasons, the abuse of the power of fining the workers was not expected, and apparently did not actually take place.

26 According to Bykov, similar functions were performed by the inspection in Austria and in some of the states in the German Empire, Fabričnoe zakonodatel'stvo, pp. 115–27.

27 Luntz, Sbornik state], p. 79.

28 Bykov, op. cit., p. 181.

29 Quoted by Mikulin, Fabričnaja inspekcija v Rossii, p. 217. Earlier, while conceding that the inspection lacked adequate enforcement authority and that most of the important grievances of the workers could be redressed only through a civil suit, he nevertheless stressed that the mediatory role of the inspection was significant because of the great moral authority enjoyed by the inspectors over the factory managers. Furthermore, they did have some means of putting pressure on the factory managers; they could, claims Mikulin, always threaten to prosecute the managers for some violation of the formalities of the law and rather than pay a fine for such a violation, they made the concessions to the workers demanded by the inspectors (pp. 194–99, 201–6). The result was that despite all the imperfections of the law, the inspectors succeeded in satisfying in whole or in part, three-quarters of the complaints of the workers. This rosy view of the conciliatory functions of the inspection is abandoned quite suddenly in the concluding chapter, where Mikulin admits that the inspection had achieved its best results in the early years, that the moral authority of the inspectors was inadequate, and that the workers had recently lost confidence in them. No clear statement is given as to when the inspectors’ moral authority ceased to be adequate. Its decline was presumably gradual, but the probabilities are that by 1896, when the individual grievances of individual workers had given way to mass demands, and wellorganized strikes became the rule, the effectiveness of the inspection as a mediator between capital and labor had passed its peak. The writer has been informed by Mr. Gustav Hilger, who was manager of a heavy engineering plant in Moscow from 1910 to 1914, that the moral authority of the factory inspectors was again very great during that period, but a detailed examination is beyond the scope of this article.

30 Minister of Finance N. Kh. Bunge (1881–1887) was one of the prime movers in the establishment of factory legislation and the factory inspection, and was in general known for his sympathetic attitude toward the workers. His successor, I. A. Vyšnegradskij (1887–1892) is said to have worked closely with the industrialists and to have been indifferent to the fate of the workers. Witte, in his attitude toward the workers, was in between Bunge and Vyšnegradskij, but probably closer to Vyšnegradskij, while Kokovcov was likewise in between, but probably closer to Bunge.

31 Ozerov, Politika po rabocemu voprosu, p. 179. For a summary of the views of Sipjagin and other police officials, see ibid., pp. 131-52. Sipjagin's views on the solution of the labor problem consisted of a characteristic combination of elaborate police measures, increased government tutelage, the active and progressive development of the factory legislation started in the eighties, and most amazing of all, the conversion of a significant part of the proletariat into prosperous and conservative small landed proprietors.

32 Ibid., p. 181.

33 See ibid., pp. 164–94. Also Kokovcov, V. N., Iz moego prošlago (Paris, 1933), I, 40–43 Google Scholar, and Mikulin, Fabricnaja inspekcija, pp. 137–68.

34 Further details on police socialism may be found in Bertram Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, pp. 270–75, 283–86, and M. Gordon, Workers before and after Lenin, pp. 30–37. An inside view of the organization and operation of the labor unions is given by Ozerov, op. cit., pp. 195–254. For a clearer view of the considerations which led Grand Duke Sergej Aleksandrovič and D. F. Trepov to accept Zubatov's ideas in Moscow, see the diary of A. A. Polovcev, in Krasnyj arkhiv, III, 132.

35 Ozerov, op. cit., pp. 24, 38.

36 On these points, see Ozerov, op. cit., p. 24 and “Russkij zakon i rabočij,“ in Osvobošdenie, No. 5 (August 19, 1902), p. 70. (The writer does not have available at this time the separately issued brochure cited earlier.)

37 Quoted by Ozerov, op. cit., pp. 184–85. It is curious to note that when Plehve approached Kokovcov in 1904 in order to gain his support for the transfer of the .factory inspection to the Ministry of the Interior, he complained that the inspection was prone to support exclusively the interests of the workers against the interests or the capitalists. See Kokovcov, , Iz moego prošlago, I, 40–43.Google Scholar

38 The alternate use of force and concessions is cited by the Social Democratic Kolcov, in describing the strike movement in St. Petersburg from 1895–1898 and is correctly ascribed by him to the traditional hostility of the nobility to the commercial classes as manifested by representatives of the Ministry of the Interior. “Rabočie v 1890–1904 gg.,” in Martov et ah, Obščestvennoe dviženie, I, 193–94. The inmemorandum on the labor problem prepared by the Ministry of Finance and published in Osvoboždenie in 1902 (No. 5, p. 70) mentions force and concessions as alternative approaches customarily used by the Ministry of the Interior. It was pointed out by Struve in the introduction to the separately published brochure (see note 22 above) that the memorandum was probably composed by representatives of the factory inspection in 1898. Ozerov mentions that the factory owners reproached the workers for making use of the support of the administrative authorities, and adds that “this support, if it took place, was in a very weak degree,” op. cit., p. 75. This is one of numerous errors made by Ozerov, who was given access to the archives of the Ministry of Finance, and whose book, while valuable, must be used with caution. Ozerov, an economics professor, was not a Marxist, but he wrote his book in 1904 or 1905, at a time when the antagonism between state and society had reached a peak and when any author who failed to condemn the bureaucracy risked both the loss of his readers and the loss of his reputation. This probably explains the tendentiousness of his book, which to this reader seems somewhat artificial, and explains also his unwillingness to emphasize either that the inspection was of much use or that the bureaucracy could possibly accomplish anything for the workers.

39 Quoted by Ozerov, op. cit., p. 191 and by Luntz, Sbornik state], p. 66.

40 The course of the conflict between Kokovcov and the industrialists in the first part of 1005 has been summarized by Ermanskij, A., “Rrupnaja buržuazija v 1905–1907 g.,” in Martov, et al, Obščestvennoe dviienie, Vol. II, Part 2, pp. 41–50 Google Scholar and by Luntz, Sbornik state], pp. 68–74.

41 On the work of the commission from 1905–1908, see K. Pažnitnov, “ ‘Novyj kurs’ politiki po rabočemu voprosu (Proekty rabočego zakonodatePstva s 1905 po 1908 g.),” Vestnik Evropy (March, 1909), pp. 218–50.

42 Otčët po deloproizvodstvu Gosudarstvennago Soveta za sessiju 1905–1906 gg., p. 714.

48 Ibid., p. 597; quoted also by V. Svjatlovskij, Professional'noe dvženie v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1907), pp. 352–53.

44 Otčët po deloproizvodswu Gosudarstvennago Soveta za sessiju 1905–1906 gg., p. 601; quoted also by Svjatlovskij, op. cit., pp. 357–58.

45 For the text of the two laws, see Polnoe sobranie zakonov, 3rd Series, Vol. XXV, No. 26,987, and Vol. XXVI, No. 27479. That part of the law of December 2, 1905, which legalized strikes simply abrogated articles 1358 and 1358 of the code of punishments. Article 514 of the same code was abrogated by action of the State Duma and State Council in 1912.

46 See note 5 above.

47 Otčët po deloproizvodstvu Gosudarstvennago Soveta za sessiju 1905–1906 gg., pp. 601–2; quoted also by Svjatlovskij, op. cit., p. 358.

48 I. I. Janžul, Iz vospominanii i perepiski fabričnago inspektora, pp. v–vi. On page 204, Janžul mentions that there were instances when he succeeded in winning “just concessions” for the workers, only to find that the agreements he made with the factory owners in their behalf were upset by their extreme demands. This was, of course, approximately twenty years before the time he published his book.

49 It need hardly be pointed out that in the period just before the Revolution, the most destructive influence on the labor movement was exercised by the Bolsheviks, who actively sought to crush the slightest signs of “self-activity“ among the workers, to take control of the labor movement and to use it to destroy their enemies.