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survive for long, having been repressed by 1892, but they had attracted a number of women workers who would continue to concentrate their efforts : on organising their sisters, notably Vera Karelina in the 1905 Revolution, as well as female intellectuals who would later organise women workers for the Bolsheviks in 1917, such as Nadezhda Krupskaia. Although historical attention has been on Petersburg Brusnev had recognised that Moscow, where he moved in the winter of 1891 to take a job as an engineer with a railway company, was an important centre for political propaganda. The nature of the Moscow economy, which had a large textile base, meant that the Brusnev circles looked to weavers as well as metal workers. Despite the crushing of the Brusnev group there were extensive networks of circles in Moscow in the mid 1890s. As pointed out above there were female circles, but most circles were largely run by skilled male workers, rather than intellectuals. Then the focus of activities shifted from the education of a few workers (which, however necessary, was believed to isolate the recipients from their work mates) to agitation on the factory floor. What the politically conscious workers were determined to do was to overcome the divisions in their class which so damaged the labour movement. 68 In 1892, Sergei Mitskevich joined a group of Marxist intelligentsia in Moscow. He had already developed the view that the intelligentsia should adopt the leading role in the social democratic movement. Yet it was not until the following year that he made any contact with workers' circles, and then only through a chance meeting with a female intellectual who had propagandised railway workers. She introduced him to two members of an established workers' circle which consented to listen to his Marxist propaganda. Most of the workers' circles Mitskevich and his intellectual comrades addressed consisted of skilled metal workers, and the intelligentsia did not attempt to reach a wider audience among even male workers. Rather it was workers who did that, without reference to the intelligentsia. These Moscow workers believed that it was necessary to broaden the base of the social democratic movement to the less skilled and less developed workers, which entailed a huge effort to break down the labour hierarchy. In their view such divisions were harmful to the working class, which they were convinced had to be unified. That meant that attention had to be paid to women workers. The Moscow textile industry was very labour intensive, since it could draw on a huge pool of cheap labour from the poor agricultural areas in the region. While the intelligentsia concentrated their efforts on skilled workers, Moscow's textile industry was overwhelmingly unskilled, relying on large numbers of women as well as children. The textile industry was long established in Moscow and contrasted sharply with the metal industry which depended on a core of highly skilled literate men. Given the division of labour between the sexes, the hierarchy of skill (which was monopolised by men), the fact that men and women not only worked in different jobs but lived separately, with men often grouping together and hiring a woman to cook and clean I for them, it was very difficult for those male worker activists to reach working ; women. There was in any case a huge cultural gap between the skilled and the unskilled, and much suspicion held by the latter towards the former not only because I politically conscious workers often refused to drink alcohol, but also because they were considered 'godless'. Even as the skilled worker tried to agitate among the unskilled, he often despaired of their passivity and conservatism (of male as well as female workers). Despite these huge obstacles, workers' circles developed, and, independently of the intelligentsia, the members established a central circle to co-ordinate the movement which became the Moscow Workers Union. In the following year the 69 Union turned to mass agitation. The suspicion of even skilled workers towards the intelligentsia was largely class-based: that the intelligentsia were essentially bourgeois, that they did not treat workers as equals, and that ultimately they would betray the workers. The circles were overwhelmingly made up of male workers, partly because of the way the activists made contact with others, by using their skills to secure jobs in the 'male' metal and construction industries, setting up workers' circles and then moving on to repeat the process. Even in the female textile industry, it was the skilled male workers, such as pattern makers, who were drawn into the circles. Given the intense police surveillance, it was difficult to penetrate beyond the workshop. Still, they tried hard to agitate among the mass of workers by means of leaflets written in a style which would appeal to poorly educated workers, and starting from their everyday grievances. In all, the emphasis was on the need for unity and solidarity among workers, while the content of many of the leaflets could have been addressed to female as much as male workers, since concern over working and living conditions was common to both: 'Comrades, let us forget the quarrels and disagreements amongst ourselves, let us unite and establish funds and together hand in hand demand a reduction of the working day from our enemies.' The form of the address, however, was often explicitly masculine: 'Comrades, we get drunk and see how the capitalists rob us, how our blood is drunk.'12 One agitational leaflet addressed directly the issue of male hostility towards female workers: We must never separate male from female workers. In many factories in Russia women workers already constitute the majority of the workforce, and they are even more cruelly exploited by the factory owners. Their interests are no different from the interests of male workers. Male and female workers must grasp each other by the hand and together struggle for their liberation.13 The Union supported the establishment of a number of workers' circles, such as one run by Mania Boie, the sister of a leading member of the Union, the metal worker Konstantin Boie. Given the very low level of literacy among women workers, such Literatura Moskovskogo Rabochego Soiuza, 71 ibid.,68 70 circles were usually conducted by female students. Rather than attempt to infiltrate the factories as had been tried unsuccessfully in the 1870s, these women contacted workers through Sunday Schools, as Muralova did. From a starting point of as few as three textile workers, by the middle of 1895 as many as 50 women has been drawn to the circles, which affiliated to the Union. In 1895, in StPetersburg as a result of the confluence between several independent social democratic circles the Union of Struggle was established. The Union took its propaganda work from within the confines of study circles to the factories and mass agitation. There were four women among its 17 founding members: Krupskaia, Radchenko, Nevzorova and Iakubova. Krupskaia, Nevzorova and Iakubova were assigned to different Petersburg districts while Radchenko (who later joined the Mensheviks) and her husband were made responsible for the administrative affairs in the organisation, looking after the finances and technical work of the Union. More women joined the Union and took part in its activities. But their work is best described as that of'foot soldiers' rather than 'party lieutenants'. The majority was either teachers or students, with a smaller number of women workers, who became responsible for the 'technical' issues in the organisation. Some were engaged in printing and distributing leaflets, others collected funds and donations. The male intellectuals were more involved in theoretical debates while male workers from the organisation were more responsible for the co-ordination of the practical work. In fact, as a result of many arrests among the ranks of active male and women workers, there were few of them left in St Petersburg by the end of 1895. But the new 'division of labour' was setting a pattern for the way the two genders would fare in the RSDRP, the party which would become the spiritual successor to the Union of Struggle. Efforts to unite smaller social democratic circles were made elsewhere in the country. In 1895 Olga Varentsova founded a Workers' Union in Ivanovo-Voznesensk. It lasted until 1897 when its leading members, including Varentsova herself, were arrested and exiled for three years. On her return she was barred from living in Ivanovo and had to settle in Voronezh. With a group of other social democrats she came up with an idea to set up a larger organisation which could co-ordinate revolutionary work in all textile centres outside Moscow, such as Ivanovo- Voznesensk, Kostroma, IaroslavF and smaller industrial towns such as Shuia and Kineshma. The idea was to ease the pressure on smaller groups which often lacked 71 funds for wider and more rigorous propaganda work, and to provide these smaller groups with clandestine literature, set up a chain of safe houses both to and store it as well as to provide shelter and false passports for comrades who needed them. The area was by now predominantly industrial but until the start of the twentieth century political activities had been highly localised and often ceased as a result of successful police operations which netted the agitators. To overcome this isolation, a decision was taken to invite representatives from all social democratic organisations in the area to Kineshma to inaugurate the new organisation which was to be known as the Northern Workers' Union. The first official congress of representatives from the four main districts took place in the summer of 1901, with Ivanovo being represented by the woman worker E.Volodina. At that meeting Varentsova was elected one of the Union leaders. In Kharkov one of the leading social democrats was Evdokiia Sysoeva-Levina. In 1893 she joined a Marxist organisation which had developed from a number of study circles. Sofia Pomeranets-Perazich became a committed female revolutionary while studying dentistry abroad. In 1893 she returned to Kiev where she devoted her time and efforts to agitation in worker's circles, paying particular attention to women workers. After the revolution she recollected the difficult conditions in which she had to carry out propaganda among women: I remember one circle in Podol. Somebody introduced me to a woman worker from a seamstresses' workshop. Through her I was able to start a circle consisting of eight people. These were young Jewish women seamstresses forced to work under terrible conditions. They slept on the floor and ate in the room where they also had to work; the only time we had for our studies was when the workshop owners, a childless couple, went to see their friends. I4 She also remembered another group of young women workers. When Pomeranets- Perazich came for the second lesson she saw several army cadets and officers drinking beer and vodka there. This scene brought her to the conclusion that to continue work with these frivolous young seamstresses would be a waste of time. A S. Tsederbaum, Zhenshchina v nisskom revoliutsionnom dvizhenii, 177-178 72 woman worker from the Kiev social democratic organisation, Raisa Strazh, was more persistent. She used to help her fellow workers, with considerable success, to demand improvement in their pay and living conditions. She would take up a position in one of the less attractive workshops. After a while she would organise a strike among the workers and once the demands of the workers were met she would leave for another place. The growth in intensity and changes in the methods of agitation and propaganda now employed by the social democrats in their approach to revolutionary activity among workers came to fruition in the mid 1890s, during the wave of strikes which affected the main industrial centres in the country. Nor was it simply isolated strikes in individual factories. Instead, there were general strikes in the textile industry, a major employer of female labour. Indeed, the more skilled and better organised metal workers, whom revolutionaries tended to see as the natural leaders of the labour movement, were much less militant in the mid 1890s than the more backward textile workers. During the 1896 general strike in Petersburg 30,000 textile workers took part. In 1898 the Maxwell factory workers went on strike not only with economic demands but also political ones, such as: freedom to strike and to hold meetings. These demands were included in spite of opposition from the Union of Straggle which believed that the workers were not ready for such action. According to eyewitness accounts, not only did women-employees participate, but also the wives of male workers were actively involved in the protest, encouraging their men, supplying them with firewood, boiling water for use as a weapon, and throwing stones and bricks at the police. Among those arrested for taking part in the strike were many women. The strike movement, however, weakened as the economy entered a cycle of depression and unemployment increased at the end of the century. In addition, the authorities had succeeded in crushing the labour movement and severely disrupting the links which had been forged between it and the professional revolutionaries. Given the strength of the state, revolutionaries were forced to reconsider their organisational strategies. On the one hand, they continued to view skilled male workers as the key to the development of the socialist revolution. On the other hand, the strikes of the mid 1890s had shown that it was the less politically conscious unskilled workers who were at the forefront of the protest movement. Social democrats in particular were suspicious of spontaneous protest, partly because it was 73 so difficult to control, and partly because experience so far showed that it was not sufficient to undermine the tsarist regime, whose repression of such action was brutal. Nevertheless, while the nascent workers' organisations had been crushed, workers did not simply submit to the superior force of the authorities. For example, in the summer of 1903 a wave of strikes had spread across the south of Russia. In Ekaterinoslav one of the most frequent speakers at gatherings of striking workers was Ekaterina Groman, a Bolshevik agitator, who had only recently arrived in town after running away from her place of exile in Siberia. Groman did Download 88.01 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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