| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Michael Melancon & Alice K. Pate eds., New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1840–1918 (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica 2002)

THIS TIMELY COLLECTION of essays makes an important contribution to our understanding of Russian workers in late Imperial and revolutionary Russia, and signposts the direction for Russian labor history in this post-Soviet era. The contributors, drawn together by the "Allan K. Wildman Group for the study of Russian workers and society," include eminent figures from the field, as well as up and coming scholars. Though the essays, organised in a loosely chronological format, encompass a broad scope of different approaches, overall they chime a harmonious accord.

Boris Gorshkov's study on children working in factories is an important contribution to our understanding of Russia's working class, not least because it plugs an important gap in the historiography. Setting his study firmly in the context of developing civil society, Gorshkov discusses attitudes towards child labour, and state responses to popular concerns, which gradually set restrictions on child labour through the 1880s and 1890s. I was disappointed that the author did not explore the question of notions of childhood, and at what age youths were considered adults, particularly as one of the later essays (Steinberg 131) refers to this specifically.

Page Herrlinger's illuminating piece on factory workers and religion, specifically Russian Orthodoxy, places religious worship in the factory context, and in doing so offers a fascinating perspective on the challenges of factory life, and on religion in the continuity of social change. Herrlinger openly challenges the oft-expressed dichotomy between workers and peasants, and uses religion to expose the ways in which workers and their families breached this dichotomy. The practical problems of maintaining a religious lifestyle are clearly spelled out, thus offering an alternative explanation for the well-documented "loss of faith" of the urban lower class. Herrlinger also addresses the ways in which the church itself adapted and compromised to reach its flock. She makes a number of useful and underexplored connections, which it is to be hoped will be pursued in future work: the positive connections between Christianity and socialism, for example, the connection of interest in religion with a broader trend of interest in education, and most interesting of all, the ways in which Orthodoxy was sometimes channelled into secular, radical, or political directions.

The next chapter, by Sergei Firsov, also deals with workers and the Orthodox Church. I found this chapter the least satisfying of the collection, and one that was in some respects discordant with the collection overall. A number of Firsov's conclusions seemed to contradict those of Herrlinger in the previous chapter; he suggests an absolute conflict between church and socialism, and argues that the church "struggled against urban influences," (68) in contrast to Herrlinger's more nuanced position. Firsov does not link into some key western historiography, notably the work of Joan Neuberger on hooliganism in late Imperial Russia. Mikhailov's chapter on self-organization in the workplace begins, rather ambitiously, by suggesting a direct link between the collective mentality in the peasant commune, and forms of self-organisation that developed in the factories. While his first examples, which refer to organisations such as zemliachestva and artels, which sprang directly from peasant ways of life, are fine, the link between peasant collective mentality and the elected elders' system and trade unions is less easy to support.

Alice Pate tackles the numerous failed attempts to unify the Social Democrat party, and argues, significantly, that the party's activists and party workers broadly supported a united party, and were less conscious of the significance of ideological differences, while the party's divisions into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions were retained only by the machinations of the party's émigrés, Lenin foremost among them. Pate suggests that the domination of the discourse by factionalist Social Democrat language was what determined the eventual continuation of factionalism, despite the non-partisan realities for grassroots activists. Pate makes her case convincingly, if somewhat laboriously, and comes to the important conclusion that younger workers were not in fact moving towards Bolshevism as was claimed by the seminal social historians, but that they were moving more generally towards Social Democracy, in a more broadly conceived form.

Mark Steinberg's contribution takes a very different approach. Using as his sources worker literature of the late Imperial period, Steinberg discusses the importance of conceptions of individualism, suffering, and self in the development of working-class identity. Rejecting notions of fatalistic Russian "masochism of suffering," Steinberg nonetheless notes that the "moral poetics of suffering preoccupied Russian workers." (127) This is a sensitive and thought-provoking piece, which points up a number of ambiguities and problems. Worker literature often railed against the drunkenness, apathy, and loutishness of the "working masses," and in doing so the worker-writer identified himself as a "stranger"; both a worker and yet outside the worker milieu. This 'outsider' mantle is highlighted by the language used by worker-writers, which echoed Russia's high literary traditions, rather than popular speech and folklore. Steinberg's concluding point brings us back to political realities, pointing out that in a profoundly unequal society, recognition of self-worth was very dangerous. The importance of this 'recognition of self' is reflected in the numerous worker appeals for respect of their human dignity.

I found it slightly puzzling that the editors chose to place William Rosenberg's important essay towards the end of this collection. Rosenberg's paper essentially sets out a theoretical position which most of the essays here seem in some respects to emulate. This much is acknowledged by the editors in the afterword. Rosenberg challenges the processes through which we operate as historians, and suggests that we reconsider and challenge the direction of historical study. Essentially a defence of social history against the encroachments of post-modernism, and post everything else, Rosenberg addresses the problem of the discrediting of class as a category, and points out that the collapse of the Soviet Union does not in itself necessitate a redrawing of the past. Rather, new evidence and new theoretical paradigms, such as have been produced by cultural and gender history, can do that.

Michael Melancon's piece on the Petrograd factory committees between March and June 1917 debunks the myth of Bolshevik dominance of the factory committee movement. Through a typically detailed study of the archival evidence, the conclusion drawn is that the committees were consistently radical, but that they were not Bolshevik. He furthers a position he has presented before very convincingly that party political affiliations were of very limited importance to the operation of shop-floor politics. He points out that the factory committees' pursuit of "full-blooded workers' control," (183) often assumed to be an indicator of Bolshevik affiliations, was in fact nothing more than a pragmatic response to the loss of factory administrators in the first days after revolution. Melancon convincingly suggests that pragmatism, rather than political dogmatism, provides a far more convincing explanation for the ebb and flow of party political support in 1917 and 1918.

The final chapter, by Michael C. Hickey, presents a detailed account of a month- long strike that occurred in Smolensk during 1917. Hickey's extensive work on revolutionary Smolensk enables him to present a detailed and nuanced picture here. He emphasizes the importance of placing the Smolensk strike, which broadly followed national contours of labour unrest, in a specific regional context. He makes a number of important conclusions, notably the importance of the strike's failure as reflecting a broader rejection of the moderate socialists, and the rising heat of class rhetoric.

This collection will be of great value to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as to specialists of Russian late Imperial and revolutionary history.


Sarah Badcock University of Nottingham

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