1. Russia's Stolen Revolution (1905-1924) Russian Labor Before the Revolution 6-1917: Revolution and Counter-revolution 9-The Workers Oppose Lenin 13-Purging the Labor Movement 16
1. Russia's Stolen Revolution (1905-1924) "He who wishes to proceed to Socialism by any path other than political democracy must inevitably arrive at absurd and reactionary conclusions, both in...
...They had not achieved their main political goals, but they had organized new unions throughout the country, numbering 250,000 workers, and won their full economic demands in a fourth of the strikes, settling another 50 per cent of the disputes through mutual concessions...
...The Bolsheviks accepted the mantle of the Soviets which Kornilov had draped on their shoulders...
...On Thursday, October 26, workers in St...
...In the summer and fall of 1919, when the decisive battles of the Civil War were fought, the peasant masses whom the SRs had championed remained neutral...
...In the fall and winter of 1920-21, the Workers' Opposition carried on a spirited campaign within the Communist party...
...Scores of unarmed workers were killed by Lenin's soldiers, and next day machine guns and artillery barred the entrance to the Assembly hall...
...Where were the Petrograd workers when the Assembly met...
...Though Emil Vandervelde and Theodor Liebknecht were among the distinguished Socialist lawyers admitted to the courtroom, the outcome of the trial was predetermined...
...Jean Jaures's French Socialist newspaper, L'Humanite, reported from St...
...Under Bolshevik leadership, a workers' militia was formed in Petrograd that was to become the Red Guard that carried Lenin to power in November...
...next day they were joined by the workers of the Admiralty shops and the Galernaya docks...
...A. L. Lozovsky, Bolshevik secretary of the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions, likewise denounced Lenin's rule by force and urged coalition with the Socialists...
...In June 1922 came the most dramatic anti-Socialist move of the Soviet Government...
...Here is raised the banner of rebellion against the three-year-old tyranny and oppression of Communist autocracy, which has put in the shade the 300-year-old despotism of monarchism...
...freedom of speech, press and assembly for all who labor...
...The Government sent Red Army cadets to disperse the workers' demonstrations and proclaimed martial law...
...The whole syndicalist absurdity," Lenin had said at the 10th Congress, "must be thrown into the waste-basket.'' Trotsky justified the imposition of authoritarian controls by writing that "the whole history of mankind is the history of its education for work, for higher productivity of labor...
...They opposed Trotsky's plans for centralized rule of industry and for the "merging" of unions with the Government...
...The Social Democrats, on the other hand, gained sympathy in labor ranks in the heart of Communist-ruled territory...
...For the next eight months, the country enjoyed unprecedented liberty under a Provisional Government of Constitutional Democrats and moderate Socialists.* * "As a reeult of the February Revolution,'' laid Soviet Finl Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan in 1956, "the working people of Russia won such demoorntic freedoms as hod never existed even in the United Stntes...
...In Saratov, mill workers and municipal employes went on strike...
...The intervention of foreign troops, meanwhile, alarmed patriotic Russians...
...At the same time, the Factory-Shop Committee Conference insisted that "trade unions must have the right, upon their own initiative, to bring legal action against all employers who violate labor contracts and labor legislation, and also in behalf of any individual workers in any branch of labor...
...By the 11th Party Congress (1922), the trade unions' role in the factories was defined: complete subservience to the Party Central Committee and to the industrial managers it saw fit to appoint...
...The rank-and-file Bolshevik workers (and the larger numbers who followed the Petrograd Soviet under both Socialist and Bolshevik leadership) had little idea they were helping Lenin establish a one-party dictatorship...
...One of them in May 1896 embraced 30,000 workers in 20 textile plants and lasted three weeks...
...The 11th Congress proclaimed that "every additional interference by the trade unions in the administration of enterprises must be absolutely recognized as injurious and forbidden...
...Both the Government and the Soviets agreed, however, that the final word would belong to the Constituent Assembly, scheduled for election on November 25...
...Three years of carnage on the Eastern Front brought poverty and hunger to Russia...
...When Social Democratic candidates for local Soviets were too popular, the Cheka arrested them and scratched their names from the ballot...
...On the eve of Lenin's coup, his intimates Gregory Zinoviev and Leo Kamenev resigned in protest from the Party Central Committee...
...He soon became infected by the mood of the workers...
...The sailors of nearby Kronstadt naval base, who had helped Lenin to power in 1917, protested the repressions in Petrograd...
...The battle was joined in 1905...
...Nevertheless, scores of prominent Social Democrats ended their days in Siberian prisons...
...The Caucasus produced half the world's oil, but not one chemical factory could be found in the empire—basic medicines had to be imported...
...Afterward, Trotsky told the Petrograd Soviet coldly: "The will of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets has been anticipated by the rising...
...instead, the prisoners were to be held as hostages so long as the SRs "refrain from action against the Soviet Republic...
...guarantees for unions and cooperatives...
...The railworkers demanded restoration of full civil rights to political prisoners...
...Impressed by labor's growth, the Mensheviks urged Social Democracy to concentrate on the trade-union movement and disband conspiratorial revolutionary cells...
...It was a decisive turning point in Soviet history...
...Petersburg...
...At the end of 1904, Gapon called a strike at the Putilov iron works, demanding an eight-hour day, the right of collective bargaining, and a permanent labor-management committee on factory conditions...
...Determinedly and in an organized manner demand: "Liberation of all arrested Socialists and nonpartisan workingmen...
...Outside the cities, their vote was slight...
...Supported by peasants and intellectuals as well as many workers, the Socialist Revolutionaries advocated producers' and consumers' cooperatives, socialization of the land, and democratic controls over industry...
...They don't want to live by the decrees of the Bolsheviks...
...The "Bloody Sunday" massacre of January 22, 1905 dealt a deadly blow to popular faith in the monarch...
...For nearly a century the best of the Russians have dreamed of this day...
...This, Lenin calculated correctly, would ultimately stem the tide of workers' and peasants' discontent...
...Lenin timed the coup for November 7, the day before the Second Congress of Soviets opened, because he felt it would be "disaster or formalism to wait for the uncertain voting...
...twice she escaped and twice she was rearrested during the Civil War...
...Now, by the decree of March 21, 1921, anyone "recognized as dangerous to the Soviet structure" could be sentenced to forced labor by administrative police action...
...desperate strikes had erupted in silk and textile mills in the 1830s...
...Lenin, Two Tactics, 1905...
...Two years later, when Lenin died, Stalin vowed to "guard and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat...
...the rival candidate was Lenin...
...At the same time, the Cheka hunted down Socialists—some 2,000 Social Democrats, including the entire Central Committee, were arrested in the first three months of 1921...
...all official persons, without exception, will be paid at a rate not exceeding the average wage of a competent worker...
...The Petrograd workers were the first to speak out...
...Most of their leaders were Menshevik Social Democrats...
...Petersburg: "Not only have the workers quit work, not only have the members of the liberal professions declared a strike, but even the functionaries, the police officers have abandoned their posts...
...When the Assembly refused to surrender its powers to Lenin's Government, it was dispersed by force...
...Pravda lies when it says that the demonstration of January 18 was organized by the bourgeoisie...
...When the Constituent Assembly met on January 18, 1918, it chose Socialist Revolutionary leader Victor Chernov its President...
...Military defeats by Germany, and an abortive coup in September 1917 by General Lavr Kornilov, whom the Government had named commander-in-chief, shifted the balance in the Petrograd Soviet to Lenin...
...full equality before the law...
...This time he pledged freedom of speech, press and assembly and the right of labor to organize...
...Previously, a decree of April 15, 1919 had authorized the use of forced labor for state economic projects, but forced labor could be imposed only on persons guilty of open armed rebellion...
...In the hungry cities, there was growing anti-Bolshevik feeling and revived Socialist sentiment among the workers...
...Maxim Gorky, Albert Einstein, Anatole France and others protested that the trial was conducted in a lynch-mob atmosphere...
...Though the Russian worker's purchasing power was still only half that of a German, a fourth that of an American, the gap had been narrowing...
...Only at this point did most (though not all) of the Socialist Revolutionary leaders take up arms...
...Nevertheless, not one of the accused recanted his views...
...A mutiny on the battleship Potemkin in June spread to sailors of the Black Sea and Baltic Fleets...
...The workers were met with the bullets of the Tsar's troops...
...Father Gapon, an energetic young priest, headed the national Union of Russian Workers, which united these societies...
...In June 1919, the main body of Socialist Revolutionaries decided to abandon armed struggle, although they condemned the "absurd and harmful illusion" that the Communist regime would evolve democratically...
...In the course of the year 1905, no less than 2.8 million Russian workers had gone out on strikes, tens of thousands of them for two months or more...
...Lenin, in the minority, did not put forth a Bolshevik candidate, but unsuccessfully backed SR dissident Maria Spiridonova...
...The factories, they believed, should be run by the union organizations on the spot, rather than by managers appointed in Moscow...
...We see that this leads directly to the elimination from political life of many proletarian organizations, to the establishment of an irresponsible regime, and to the destruction of the Revolution...
...When the war began in 1914, there were 4.5 million Russian workers engaged in manufacturing, mining, construction and transport—four times as many as in 1861...
...Alexandra Kollontay, with Labor Commissar Shliapnikov a leader of the so-called Workers' Opposition, complained: "The workers ask—who are we...
...Spiridonova," Lenin had said in 1918, "is a woman whose uprightness neither I nor anyone else can impugn...
...Despite Lenin's hold on state power, and impressive initial decrees on peace, workers' control of industry, and land to the peasants, the Bolsheviks received only 9 million of the 36 million voles tabulated...
...In the midst of the Kronstadt uprising, the Communist party held its 10th Congress (March 8-16, 1921...
...These workers had demanded a 10-hour day...
...all official persons will be not only elective, but also subject to recall at any time upon the demand of a majority of the electors...
...In an August manifesto, the Tsar reluctantly promised a popularly-elected representative assembly, called the Imperial Duma, with advisory powers...
...The coalition demands by labor, echoed by prominent Bolsheviks, corresponded to Russia's actual political sentiments...
...Yet strangely, the final spark came from the regime itself—when it repudiated by violence a reform movement it had itself encouraged...
...Ryazanov, head of the Marx-Engels Institute, was barred from all further work with labor...
...After two weeks of bloodshed, it was finally suppressed by troops and artillery from St...
...But the pressure of world opinion was such that the death sentence was suspended...
...Actively opposed to Kolchak, the Mensheviks demanded freely elected Soviets, free trade unions, and freedom of speech and press for all workers' parties...
...Petersburg workers joined the Putilov strikers...
...Tomsky returned to union work within the year, but was defeated by Stulin in the intra-Parly struggles of the Into 1920s, and committed suicide in 1936...
...A new weapon against the Socialists was forged a week after the 10th Congress closed...
...Starting on the Moscow-Kazan and Moscow-Yaroslavl lines, the strike spread to Smolensk, Nizhni Novgorod, Kazan, Kharkov, Kiev and other cities...
...On March 5, Trotsky demanded Krondstadt's unconditional surrender, and two days later Red Army guns opened fire on the fortress...
...From them, the workers heard that social justice and political freedom were inseparable: The first step to social renovation was the end of autocracy...
...The Workers' Opposition leaders had little sympathy for non-Communists, but sought greater trade-union initiative and broader rights for labor...
...he also promised that all legislation would be submitted for Duma approval...
...On October 20, the All-Russian Railway Workers' Union called a general strike...
...Friday the 27th saw vast mass meetings throughout the capital...
...A railroad spanned Siberia, but peasants in the vast domain were debt-ridden and short of good land...
...The elections to the Constituent Assembly, held three weeks after Lenin's coup, showed that the Socialists had an unmistakable majority...
...The Socialist Revolutionaries, on the other hand, won 20 million votes and a clear majority of seats...
...The workers also created a new Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies, and local Soviets throughout Russia...
...The Revolution released labor's energies as never before...
...But the workers' and sailors' revolts finally convinced Lenin that far-reaching changes were necessary if the Communists were to retain power...
...These are your own brothers...
...By the summer of 1918, the Communists were engaged in a bloody civil war with Socialists as well as several armies of "Whites...
...Traditional concepts of unionism, as well as promises of workers' control of industry, went by the board...
...The regime would live to fight another day...
...the Provisional Government which had been organized by the Duma and Soviet leaders cleared its major legislation with the Petrograd Soviet...
...On March 12, units of the Petrograd garrison began to join the populace in demanding that the Duma assume power...
...Their leader Maria Spiridonova was jailed in November 1918...
...Members of the Soviet began to talk of seizing state power by an armed uprising...
...Can't you see the red banners...
...In another appeasement effort, the Government offered the railwaymen a nine-hour day...
...the right to strike and organize unions without reprisals...
...Are we really the prop of the class dictatorship, or are we just an obedient flock that serves as a support for those who, having severed all ties with the masses, carry out their own policy and build up industry without any regard to our opinions and creative abilities under the reliable cover of the party label...
...They had always had a formidable majority in the Typographical Union, and were almost as strong among the Metal, Chemical and Textile Workers...
...In many areas occupied by various White forces, estates were returned to the landlords, and a White Terror followed the Red Terror of Lenin's Cheka (established December 19, 1917...
...Post and telegraph workers struck again, soldiers and sailors also rebelled, but the high tide of revolution was past...
...abolition of martial law...
...Young army officers had tried to establish constitutional government in 1825...
...The arrest of 2,000 leading Mensheviks in the spring of 1921 was followed by continued harassment of lesser figures throughout the 1920s...
...Meanwhile, the 10th Congress dealt with opposition groups...
...Stressing their own radical agrarian program, the Bolsheviks now made overtures to the Socialist Revolutionaries, promising them legality in return for support against the Whites...
...At the same time, any Communists, unconnected with the Workers' Opposition, who seemed sympathetic to greater union independence were shifted out of the Soviet labor field...
...Military Communism" had proved a disastrous failure...
...Then, in May, professional societies banded together in a Union of Unions, demanding civil liberties and responsible government...
...Though the police harried labor considerably, trade unionism survived the political reaction which followed dissolution of the Second Duma...
...his resignation was not accepted...
...Workers, finding no legal institutions to express their protests, turned to clandestine socialist groups who preached the radical reconstruction of society...
...Lozovsky, arrested in the anti-Semitic campaign Forties, was reported to have been executed on August 12, 1952...
...But there resulted an even greater enslavement of human personality...
...Without unions, without a party, on 12-hour shifts, the workers still found strength to protest...
...On November 7, 1917, the Provisional Government, unable to cope with the overwhelming desire for peace, was overthrown by a party which promised the country immediate peace, the peasants land, and the workers more freedom and control over industry...
...Such opposition is a deviation from Marxism to bourgeois trade-unionism...
...Recession, unpopular war with Japan, and mounting pressure for political freedom in the preceding years had helped prepare the explosion...
...One faction (the so-called Volsky group) accepted the offer, and for ten days in March 1919 a Socialist Revolutionary newspaper appeared again in Petrograd...
...Quietly a campaign was prepared against remaining Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats...
...1. Russia's Stolen Revolution (1905-1924) "He who wishes to proceed to Socialism by any path other than political democracy must inevitably arrive at absurd and reactionary conclusions, both in the political and economic sense...
...he denied that there was "any real difference between voluntary and compulsory labor...
...In July, leaders of the two democratic socialist parties entered the Provisional Government...
...In Minsk, the strike was general...
...The sailors never moved on Petrograd, limiting themselves to defensive action, and on March 17 Bolshevik armies led by Trotsky and Mikhail Tukhachevsky finally broke through and captured Kronstadt...
...Three major parties led the fight against absolutism: ?The Russian Social Democratic Labor party, Marxist in orientation, founded in 1898...
...Indeed, before Lenin's return from exile, Stalin and other prominent Bolsheviks had urged cooperation with the Mensheviks and the Provisional Government...
...The Bolsheviks promised more freedom, not less—sooner, not later—than the Provisional Government dared grant in wartime...
...industrial production fell to 15 per cent of 1913...
...the Communists closed it when it called for free elections...
...Petersburg metal workers raised theirs more than 40 per cent between 1904 and 1907...
...Izvestia, organ of the Kronstadt Soviet, replied: "With the October Revolution, the working class had hoped to achieve its emancipation...
...The power of the police and gendarme monarchy fell into the hands of usurpers—the Communists—who, instead of giving the people liberty, have instilled in them only the constant fear of the Cheka, which by its horrors surpasses even the gendarme regime of Tsarism...
...on the 15th, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated...
...Outside of that, there remains only one way: the constitution of a purely Bolshevik government by means of political terror...
...Petersburg factories elected a Soviet (Council) of Workers' Deputies to direct the struggle...
...He ordered the Army's most trusted Communist regiments to Petrograd and crushed the workers, according to an eye-witness, "with an iron hand...
...Two weeks later, when Lenin rejected the Railway Workers' demand for a coalition government with the Socialist parties, five members of the Bolshevik Central Committee (including Zinoviev, Kamenev and Alexei Rykov) resigned, and 11 of the 15 members of Lenin's Council of People's Commissars (including Labor Commissar Alexander Shliapnikov) joined in this public declaration: "We are in favor of a Socialist government composed of all the parties...
...A key Bolshevik demand, often reiterated, was workers' control of industry...
...Following the purge of Socialists and "non-Party" elements, the Party destroyed the Workers' Opposition...
...Shlianpuikoy and Rvaznaoy wore also purged in the Thirties...
...In the Eighties, too, according to a Soviet historian, "the labor movement in Russia attained unprecedented proportions, and strikes involving a greater and greater number of the people compelled the Government to make concessions which were embodied in labor laws...
...Lenin disagreed and called the Mensheviks "liquidators" of the Party organization...
...PURGING THE LABOR MOVEMENT In offering only economic palliatives to the workers and reaffirming strict centralist dictatorship, not only over the country but within the ruling party, Lenin paved the way for the bureaucratic caste dictatorship which emerged in the 1920s...
...In a deeper sense, the steady growth of both industry and education since the 1860s had created a new political atmosphere...
...The First Imperial Duma, officially boycotted by the Socialists, nevertheless contained few friends of absolutism...
...Tomsky was dismissed as chairman of the Central Council of Trade Unions and sent to Turkestan...
...At first, the 12 leading defendants were sentenced to death, and the rest to jail terms...
...if we live, we will continue our fight against you in the same way as before...
...At the same time, the Congress cynically declared: "Neither the Communist party nor the Soviet Government nor the trade unions can under any circumstance forget that the resort to strikes in a country with a proletarian government can be described only as a bureaucratic assault on the proletarian government and as a survival of the capitalist past and institutions on the one hand, and as showing the lack of political development and the cultural backwardness of the toilers on the other...
...Revolution is organizing itself throughout the Empire...
...The Socialist Revolutionary party joined the Socialist International in 1903...
...The working class and the employing class have nothing in common...
...Criticized by Martov in December 1919 for his failure to observe the Constitution promulgated in 1918, Lenin replied: "When we hear such declarations, coming from people allegedly in sympathy with us, we say: 'Yes, terror by the Cheka is absolutely necessary.' " THE WORKERS OPPOSE LENIN The workers, who had supported Lenin when he promised speedy elections to the Constituent Assembly, workers' control of industry, and a democratic peace, turned steadily against his rule through the years of Civil War and "Military Communism" (1918-1921...
...Two months later, however, this government was overthrown by Admiral Alexander Kolchak...
...now it was first on the list of the Petrograd workers in February 1921...
...free public education...
...Lenin also said: "The Party fights for a more democratic workers' and peasants' republic, in which the police and the standing army will be completely abolished and replaced by the universally armed people, by a universal militia...
...Officials of the Interior Ministry, hoping to insulate workers' economic demands from the movement for political revolution, had sanctioned workers' aid societies all over Russia...
...She is one of many outstanding Socialist prisoners for whom the Soviet Government has never accounted...
...When union congresses seemed Menshevik-inclined, the Communists purged them...
...Underlying all three was the general feeling that, with the Whites defeated and foreign intervention over, the time had come to end political terror and draconian economic measures and to begin living up to the great promises of 1917...
...In the elections to the Second Duma, the Socialist Revolutionaries and Social Democrats did participate, winning 120 of the 524 seats...
...The Constitutional Democratic party, which in 1905 unified a number of liberal groups...
...When the Metalworkers rejected by a 120-to-40 vote the officers' slate dictated by the Party Central Committee, the Party ignored the union's own nominees and installed all its own appointees...
...In 1883, George Plekhanov, Paul Axelrod, Vera Zasulich and Lev Deutsch formed the Emancipation of Labor group, which produced Russian Social Democracy...
...Andrei Andreyev, who had been in opposition in 1920, returned to union work for several years, but in the 1930s was assigned to agriculture...
...The workers' petition respectfully implored Nicholas II to transform Russia from an autocracy to representative government by commanding that "elections to the Constituent Assembly take place under conditions of universal, secret and equal suffrage...
...Of the 37 delegates who had backed Shliapnikov at the 10th Party Congress, only four reappeared with a vote at the 11th Congress a year later...
...Resolution adopted by Bolshevik coal miners of Kharkov, October 30, 1917...
...22 leaders of the Socialist Revolutionary party—most of whom had spent two or more years in Communist jails—went on trial...
...Lenin and Trotsky, it soon became clear, looked to the trade unions as instruments to enforce labor discipline, not as organizations for the defense of workers' interests...
...On November 1, 1917, when the first All-Russian Conference of Factory-Shop Committees declared for the Bolsheviks, it resolved that "the impending transformation of industry from a war to a peace economy . . . [can be accomplished] only by means of the democratic self-government of the workers themselves...
...Despite new restrictions on the suffrage, smaller Socialist delegations in both the Third and Fourth Dumas (1907-17) pressed the workers' demands...
...He proclaimed a New Economic Policy (NEP) which restored the free market in agriculture, legalized trade, encouraged artisans and small private enterprise, and invited foreign investment...
...At this Congress, Lenin spurned the Kronstadt and Petrograd demands for free Soviets and liberty for Socialists, as well as the Workers' Opposition platform of increased rights for labor...
...these had organized strikes and mass demonstrations against factory owners, but did not attack the Government...
...In addition, some 40 seats went to the "Left" SR group, which agreed in December to collaborate with Lenin...
...Although the origins of Lenin's bureaucratic centralist dictatorship can be found in his pre-1917 writings, the Bolshevik appeals which swayed soldiers and workers in Petrograd and Moscow in 1917—both before and after the Kornilov affair—were of the opposite character...
...The Party Congress agreed with Lenin's logic...
...Here is Maxim Gorky's account, written four days later: "On January 18, 1918, the unarmed Petrograd democracy, workers and employes, came out to celebrate in honor of the Constituent Assembly...
...How did Lenin meet it...
...Among them were men like Eugene Timofeyev and Abram Gotz, who before the Revolution had spent years at Tsarist hard labor...
...1917: REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION World War I ended the period of gradual economic and social gains for labor...
...Like the Socialist parties, the Constitutional Democrats urged an eight-hour day, full freedom for unions, and comprehensive social security...
...Thus, by February 1921, Lenin faced a three-fold crisis: There was broad peasant unrest because of the grain-seizure policies of the Government...
...Shliapnikov attempted to quit the Central Committee over this action...
...In Moscow, where labor discontent ran high and the Bolsheviks were strong, the strike became an insurrection...
...This last is the road taken by the Council of People's Commissars...
...When Lenin signed the Brest-Litovsk pact with Germany in March 1918, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries also turned against the regime...
...they want to control their own destinies...
...Yan Rudzutak, also prominent in the trade-union hierarchy during, the 1920s, backed Stalin in the fight against Tomsky, but was executed in 1938...
...In addition to the Soviets and trade unions, "factory shop committees" were organized in the major plants...
...few trusted him...
...As Russia entered the 20th century, it was no closer to representative government than it had been in 1825...
...A year later, the Government granted an 111/2-hour day with 10 hours on Saturday, prohibited work on Sunday and 17 annual holidays, and restricted overtime to 120 hours a year...
...The authorities were informed of the peaceable nature of the procession several days in advance...
...when he rejoined after the Civil War, he was assigned to foreign labor affairs...
...but even in Petrograd they got only 424,000 of 950,000 votes...
...When the Duma attempted to enact a full charter of democratic rights, the Tsar dissolved it...
...No less than 20 per cent of workers owned some land of their own, and real wages had increased 15 per cent since 1900—a rate of improvement which compared favorably with any nation on the continent...
...A mass procession of workers would present their petition at the Winter Palace on Sunday, January 22, 1905...
...Both wings regarded labor as the decisive political force...
...The peasants, whom Lenin had told to seize the land without waiting for the Constituent Assembly, found Communist requisitioning squads in their midst to seize grain...
...The russian labor movement arose side by side with the revolutionary movement against absolutism...
...At the Fourth Congress of Trade Unions in May 1921, the Communist caucus, meeting under the chairmanship of Mikhail Tomsky, approved (by a l,500-to-30 vote) D. B. Ryazanov's resolution that "selection of [union] leaders should be made by the organized masses themselves...
...Within Communist ranks, the Workers' Opposition was claiming broad prerogatives for organized labor as against the Party apparatus...
...and no less than half the industrial workers left the factories for the villages...
...By October 26, the strike had spread to Warsaw, Vilna, Tambov, Irkutsk, Ashkabad...
...Of the various democratic parties, only the Menshevik organization consistently rejected armed force in favor of such political opposition (in the Soviets and trade unions) as was still possible...
...But they also asked freedom of speech, press and conscience...
...Here, in Kronstadt, has been laid the cornerstone of the Third Revolution which is to break the last chains of the worker and open the new, broad road to Socialist creativeness...
...Elsewhere, the Russian winter closed on an exhausted working class...
...The declared aim of the Kornilov coup, staged after the Germans captured Riga (September 3), was "to hang the German supporters and spies, with Lenin at their head, and to disperse the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies so that it will never reassemble...
...Though the Bolshevik slogan was "All Power to the Soviets," they promised to bow to the will of a freely-elected Constituent Assembly...
...Lenin, Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin appeared personally at the Congress to crack down...
...exiled to Central Asia in 1925, she was last heard of in Ufa in 1930...
...If we must die," Gotz told the tribunal, "we will die without fear...
...Three Social Democratic delegates did participate with SRs, liberals and others in the Ufa Conference (September 8, 1918) setting up an All-Russian Provisional Government...
...We cannot and we will not follow it...
...This," said the workers, "is our most important request...
...First of all, the workers and peasants need freedom...
...In 1886, employers were compelled to pay wages at stated intervals and to give the worker a pay-envelope with a full accounting...
...Local unions fared no better than the central organization...
...In 1912 came the largest-scale unrest since 1905, set off by the violent repression of a strike in the Lena gold fields of Siberia...
...collective bargaining, the eight-hour day and a minimum wage...
...The repressions against Socialists, trade unionists and Party dissidents which followed the 10th Congress enabled the chiefs of the national Party apparatus to create the machinery for retaining power in the hands of a small group—retaining it not only against the will of liberty-minded workers, but even against the will of leading currents within the Party...
...The struggle," Shliapnikov later wrote, "took place not along ideological lines but by means . . of edging out from appointments, of systematic transfers from one district to another, and even of expulsion from the Party...
...at the same time, he ordered the end of organized opposition groups within the Party...
...There is not a single banner hostile to the working class, or to you.' "Now, just as then, the soldiers reply: 'We have orders to shoot.' " The Socialist majority of the Assembly had refused to defend it by armed force...
...And now that this goal has been reached and the democracy has come out to rejoice, the 'People's Commissars' have given orders to shoot...
...and immediate convocation of a Constituent Assembly elected by secret ballot and universal suffrage...
...As production fell, the original promise of workers' control of industry and the later one of democratic nationalization gave way to restriction of workers' rights and Party domination of the trade unions...
...A week after the Kornilov fiasco, the Bolshevik group led by Leon Trotsky gained its first majority in the Petrograd Soviet...
...families of Kronstadt men living in Petrograd were seized as hostages...
...When the police arrested the Soviet's executive committee on December 14, it called another general strike...
...Rather than yield the Party's monopoly of political power, Lenin decided to make economic concessions...
...The way was cleared for the transformation of the unions into powerless auxiliaries of the Communist government and managers...
...Street meetings in Petrograd were banned ("in case of resistance, execution on the spot") ; workers, soldiers and sailors suspected of sympathizing with the rebels were arrested...
...Only a widely-publicized hunger strike by 10 of their Moscow leaders forced Lenin to banish them abroad instead of sending them to Siberian exile...
...freedom of speech, press and conscience...
...Here they were aided by the urban remnants of the SR organization...
...Comrades, preserve revolutionary order...
...Of the 777 delegates to the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets (June 16, 1917), 285 were SRs, 280 Mensheviks and 105 Bolsheviks...
...Railway day laborers had raised their wages by a third within the year...
...Sympathy strikes almost immediately involved more than 215,000 workers...
...For a while, the nation was stunned, although sporadic strikes continued...
...On February 24, 1921, they called strikes in the Government munition works, the Trubochny and Baltiiski mills and the Laferm factory...
...The 9th Communist Party Congress proclaimed in 1920: "There can be no question of trade-union opposition to the institutions of the Soviet state...
...In factories owned by Russians, as in the newer ones erected by French, German, Swedish and British firms, limits were set on exploitation...
...These they regarded as uniquely their own organizations...
...Lenin admitted in 1921: "Never was the poverty of the working class so vast and acute as in the period of its [sic] dictatorship...
...The enfeeblement of the workers and peasants is near the point of complete incapacitation...
...Just as on January 22, 1905, so on January 18, 1918, there are people who . ask those who fired: 'Idiots, what are you doing...
...abolition of indirect taxes in favor of a progressive income tax...
...the immediate release of political prisoners...
...The years following the 10th Congress also saw the Government take full control of the trade unions...
...As late as March 26, 1921, the Moscow Union of Chemical Workers elected Martov their honorary chairman...
...Thereupon Prime Minister Stolypin falsely accused leading Social Democratic deputies of conspiring to organize an armed uprising, dissolved the Duma, and arrested the Social Democratic leaders...
...Laws of 1882 and 1885 set up regular factory inspection and restricted child labor...
...Between 1895 and 1900, there were more than 100 strikes each year...
...But Socialist persuasion could not halt Communist force...
...It endorsed Trotsky's program for central management of the factories, as skillfully reworded by Lenin, and it also approved a resolution "On Party Unity," drafted by Lenin, which forbade Party members to organize, agitate or prepare platforms—even within Party circles—against decisions of the Central Committee...
...In 1903, the Social Democrats split into two wings: a Bolshevik group headed by Lenin, and Mensheviks led by Martov...
...Pravda knows that those in line were workers of factories and that these workers were shot...
...When industry rejected these terms, 140,000 other St...
...To the Workers' Opposition, Lenin had replied with devastating effect: "If the trade unions, nine-tenths of whom are not Party members, appoint the administrators of industry, then what need is there of the Party...
...The Constituent Assembly," said George Plekhanov, father of Russian Marxism, "represented the laboring masses of Russia...
...In March 1917, Petrograd women who went out on the streets to demand bread were quickly joined by workers and students...
...On the Volga, at Archangel, in the Urals and Siberia, Socialist deputies of the Constituent Assembly tried to rally the masses against Lenin's dictatorship...
...Resistance brought quick reprisals...
...Between 1917 and 1922, the average wage—paid mostly in provisions?slumped to a third of the prewar level...
...With the Civil War over, the workers saw little justification for such stringencies, and the Communist chiefs among them soon felt estranged...
...The Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had originally collaborated with Lenin, were also persecuted...
...Unrest continued...
...in the face of Kronstadt, Lenin scrapped it...
...Not one drop of the people's blood must be spilled," said Victor Chernov...
...Lozovsky, the outstanding Communist unionist in 1917, was expelled from the party in 1918...
...The Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, populist in approach, organized in 1901...
...Now a strikers' proclamation, posted in Petrograd on February 27, declared: "A complete change is necessary in the policies of the Government...
...Labor achieved steady wage gains through 1916, as well as such important reforms as the health and accident insurance law of 1912...
...A meeting of the First and Second Squadrons of the Baltic Fleet on March 1, attended by 16,000 sailors, soldiers and workers, pledged solidarity with the Petrograd workers and demanded free elections to the Soviets...
...Labor unrest continued until the outbreak of World War I. In 1912, 1913 and 1914 there were more than 6,000 strikes, involving a million workers each year...
...By mid-1917, more than 1.5 million workers were organized—six times as many as in 1907 _in 967 separate unions, as well as in powerful national federations...
...Petersburg workers in January 1905...
...Martov urged a democratic party...
...On Monday, October 30, the Tsar appointed a libera] Premier and issued another manifesto...
...The Soviet Government has never revealed the fate of these imprisoned Socialists, although unofficial reports state that those who survived many more years as hostages were shot shortly before World War II...
...The demand for release of imprisoned trade unionists and democratic socialists had been high on the banners of the St...
...Immediately after the 11th Congress, on April 4, 1922, Joseph Stalin was named General Secretary of the Communist party...
...Many of the bold promises and sweeping decrees of the early days of Communist rule had produced chaos in agriculture and industry...
...but only in the 1880s did the two movements, joining forces, gather decisive momentum...
...On March 2, an order signed hy Lenin and Trotsky called the sailors "tools of former Tsarist generals," and branded the movement for free Soviets as "the work of Entente interventionists and French spies...
...Gapon decided to appeal directly to the Tsar...
...Therefore, the realization of workers' control is an indispensable preliminary to the demobilization of industry...
...Lenin favored a highly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries...
...The Soviet continued to resist, demanding the eight-hour day, an amnesty for all political prisoners and elections to a Constituent Assembly...
...Lenin, who had returned to Russia in November, called for an armed uprising...
...On the 26th, the Petrograd Soviet voted to lock out the Trubochny strikers and deprive them of their rations...
...unrestricted freedom of movement...
...it was dominated by the Constitutional Democrats and informally grouped "Peasant Laborites," and the masses, ignoring the party leaders, chose 18 Social Democratic deputies...
...In the spring and summer of 1917, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) predominated in the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets...
...We consider that only the creation of such a government can possibly guarantee the results of the heroic struggle of the working class and the revolutionary army...
...Like the Socialists, they found responsive echoes among the disillusioned workers...
Vol. 39 • December 1956 • No. 62
