Synopsis
Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode-a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant-to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Reginald E. Zelnik is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (1971) and the editor and translator of A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semon Ivanovich Kanatchikov (1986).
From the Back Cover
"With scrupulous attention to his sources, elegant presentation of narrative detail, and a flair for psychological analysis, Zelnik has managed to tell the story of a small episode in a manner that illuminates the grand issues of imperial Russian history. It is a remarkable achievement."--Laura Engelstein, Princeton University
"Zelnik has allowed the wonderfully textured account of the strike to illuminate some of the most gnarled problems in Russian labor history. . . . A breakthrough work, one that challenges more conventional labor historians to rethink the very nature of the field."--Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan
"A tour de force, a magnificent example of Zelnik's capacities for historical reconstruction."--Daniel Orlovsky, Southern Methodist University
From the Inside Flap
With scrupulous attention to his sources, elegant presentation of narrative detail, and a flair for psychological analysis, Zelnik has managed to tell the story of a small episode in a manner that illuminates the grand issues of imperial Russian history. It is a remarkable achievement.--Laura Engelstein, Princeton University
Zelnik has allowed the wonderfully textured account of the strike to illuminate some of the most gnarled problems in Russian labor history. . . . A breakthrough work, one that challenges more conventional labor historians to rethink the very nature of the field.--Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan
A tour de force, a magnificent example of Zelnik's capacities for historical reconstruction.--Daniel Orlovsky, Southern Methodist University
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Law and Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872
By Reginald E. ZelnikUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1995 Reginald E. ZelnikAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0520084810
One
Before the Strike
There is no doubt that the entire population of the city of Narva will follow the development and progress of such an enormous enterprise with keen attention.
Das Inland, 13 May 18571
In the late spring of 1870 a strike took place at the Nevskii cotton-spinning factory in St. Petersburg that startled Russian officialdom and stirred the souls of the liberal public.2 Though the world of industrial relations would never again be the same in the Russian capital, several years would pass before a strike of comparable magnitude again disturbed the peace of that city. Yet to the surprise of everyone concerned, it was only two years later, in 1872, that Russia experienced a second major textile strike, one of such proportions and cataclysmic character that it dwarfed its predecessor in the impact it produced on the public and the government alike. What was especially shocking about the Kreenholm strike, apart from its sheer force—a seven on the Richter scale of labor unrest to the Nevskii's four—was its location. An island settlement on the Narova (or Narva) River near the border that divided Petersburg province from Estland, the small indus-
From Russian translation in KM , 188. Das Inland was a weekly German-language paper published in Dorpat (Tartu), Livland province.
On the Nevskii strike, see R. E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870 (Stanford, 1971), chap. 9.
trial settlement of Kreenholm was close enough to the Russian capital—some eighty-five miles to the east3 —for events at the factory to reverberate there quickly. At the same time, it was far enough away to leave the strike, at least in its initial phase, beyond the effective control of Petersburg officials, who read with alarm the detailed reports they received from their local agents.
Although no unrest could strike more terror into the hearts of Russian officials than that occurring in the immediate vicinity of the capital, certain factors made the news from Kreenholm very frightening. Not the least of these was the evidence it offered that even an isolated border area, far removed from the influence of university students or other "outside agitators," was susceptible to menacing outbursts of labor unrest and stubborn resistance to authority, displays of militant struggle of a kind that Russia's rulers had usually equated with criminal acts of rebellion.4 Between 9 August and mid-September 1872, the most turbulent episode of labor unrest that had ever taken place in a Russian factory ran its course in Kreenholm. In the physical intensity of the workers' defiance, which included brief but daring physical resistance to armed troops, it would not be surpassed until the better-known "Obukhov defense" of 1901. In the number of workers involved—over five thousand at the peak of the strike—it would not be matched until the Morozov strike of 1885 (ca. eight thousand). In duration—though here we encounter some problems of measurement and definition—it would not find its equal until the citywide textile strike that rocked St. Petersburg in 1896.5 And in its official reception, it was simply unprecedented: no previous incident of labor unrest—not even the Nevskii strike, widely viewed by contemporaries as the first "European" strike in Russian history—had sent as many tremors reverberating through government circles.
Like all the incidents mentioned above except the Obukhov defense, indeed like all of Russia's most telling episodes of labor unrest before
To be precise, the direct distance from Narva to St. Petersburg was 84 statute miles. The distance to St. Petersburg by rail (starting in 1870) was 98.3 statute miles (via Gatchina).
On the criminality of strikes in the eyes of Russian officials in the mid–nineteenth century, see Zelnik, Labor and Society , 40, 149–50; and, for their perception of this issue in the context of the Nevskii strike, chap. 9. The criminality of strikes in Russia will be discussed in chapter 4, below.
For documentation on the strikes of 1885 and 1896–97, see Morozovskaia stachka. Sbornik dokumentov i vospominanii (Moscow, 1935); RD 4:1, 192–337, 542–619. For documents on the Obukhov defense, see Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v 1901–1904 gg. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1975), 23–34.
the turn of the century, the Kreenholm upheaval was launched by the ostensibly "backward," "gray," "dark," "ignorant," semirural workers of the textile industry, the much maligned fabrichnye .6 The unrest involved an entire community of workers, women and children as well as adult males, Russians as well as Estonians, barely skilled piecers as well as highly qualified weavers and spinners, illiterate and semiliterate Muscovite peasants as well as a handful of more educated town dwellers with ties to the nearby town of Narva or even to Estland's provincial capital, Reval. While, with some exceptions, the metalworking and machine-building factories of St. Petersburg and other regions continued to slumber, it was textile factories such as Nevskii, Kreenholm, and Morozov that first placed the challenge of labor militancy before the government and before society. "La France gréviste, c'est d'abord la France textile";7 the same could be said at the time of Russia.
If as an embattled textile factory Kreenholm, far from proving unique, prefigured the series of strikes that would exemplify the Russian labor scene for nearly three more decades, there are also aspects of the Kreenholm story that set it apart from the rest, characteristics that will occupy us in the following pages. Since many of these features were the direct or indirect consequence of the factory's unusual setting and location, it is Kreenholm's geography, in particular its political and economic geography, that provides our point of departure.
The Setting
In 1857 a small group of Moscow entrepreneurs joined forces with a German financier to found the Kreenholm cotton-spinning and weaving factory. The factory was to be built on a Narova River island situated between a pair of broad and powerful waterfalls, some twenty-six to thirty-three feet in height, that overlooked the historic Hanseatic city of Narva, site of Tsar Peter I's famous defeat at the hands of Swe-
The word fabrichnye (masc. sing., fabrichnyi ) refers to workers from a fabrika , one of the basic words in Russian for "factory" or "plant" (the other basic word being zavod , though manufaktura was still encountered at this time). In common parlance fabrichnye was often used to designate textile workers specifically. The common practice in English of translating fabrika as "factory" and zavod as "plant" has no logic behind it beyond the desire to come up with two distinct words.
Michelle Perrot, Les ouvriers en grève. France, 1871–1890 , 2 vols. (Paris, 1974), 1:352.
den's King Charles XII in 1700.8 Narva, which was captured from Sweden during Peter's Ingrian campaign of 1704 and formally ceded to Russia by treaty in 1721, was now a modest commercial-industrial town of some five thousand inhabitants. It was located (except for the suburb of Ivangorod) on the left (west) bank of the river, eight miles inland from the Finnish Gulf port that bore the same name and somewhat south of the point on the river where Estland and Petersburg provinces met.9
Narva has been described by Erik Amburger, a leading historian of the region, as a "foreign body" in the province of Estland.10 Although located on the Estland side of the river, the town contained few ethnic Estonians. It was still heavily German in both its core population and its governing elite, with Russians, Estonians, and Finns inhabiting its three suburbs and a rural Estonian population living mainly in its hinterland. Architecturally, the city still showed signs of its recent Swedish past. Administratively, it belonged not to Estland but to the Iamburg district (uezd ) of Petersburg province, in which it had been loosely incorporated after its acquisition by Russia. But if Narva was a foreign body in Estland, it was a foreign body in Petersburg as well. Its Hanseatic German character was reinforced by the fact that Peter and his successors had continued to recognize its ancient corporate privileges, embodied in a municipal charter that distinguished it from other "Russian" towns.11 In this sense, especially before the introduction in Narva in 1873 of the Russian municipal reform of 1870,12 it was as different from the other Russian towns as was any town within the administrative frontiers of Estland, Livland, or Kurland.
For practical purposes, Narva was also remote from the city of St. Petersburg, which did double duty as provincial and imperial capital. Until the construction in 1870 of a railroad line between Narva and St.
My information on the geographical setting is from documents in KS ; regional maps; and Erik Amburger, Ingermanland: Eine junge Provinz Russlands im Wirkungsbereich der Residenz und Weltstadt St. Petersburg–Leningrad , 2 vols. (Cologne and Vienna, 1980); Heinrich Johann Hansen, Geschichte der Stadt Narva (Dorpat, 1858); Ian M. Matley, "The Dispersal of the Ingrian Finns," Slavic Review 38, no. 1 (March 1979): 1–16; "Narva," in Karl Baedeker, Russia with Teheran, Port Arthur, and Peking: Handbook for Travelers (Leipzig, 1914), 81–83; and Raun, Estonia .
The figure five thousand is from Hansen, Geschichte , 393, who was writing in 1857. It encompasses Narva's three suburbs, including Ivangorod, the ancient Russian fortress settlement on the right bank, but does not include the military garrison.
Amburger, Ingermanland , 66.
Hansen, Geschichte , 394.
German merchants in Narva were able to postpone but not to prevent the introduction of the 1870 reform in their town. See Kann, Narva , 98.
Petersburg, overland travel across the eighty-five-mile stretch that separated the two cities was both difficult and time-consuming, as was the trip between Narva and Reval,13 the equally remote capital of Estland. Although the steamboat ride between Narva and St. Petersburg, a voyage of six to seven hours, was probably more practical than the overland trip by horse-drawn carriage, the boat was not available on a daily basis.14 Thus, with the important exception of an electromagnetic telegraph line erected in 1855,15 the pre-1870 Narva region had only tenuous ties to the two administrative centers, one to the east, one to the west, with which it would have to interact in times of crisis.
Unlike Narva, though little more than a mile to its south, the island-town (mestechko ) of Kreenholm, designated site for the new factory, belonged to Estland administratively. Yet in other respects Kreenholm too occupied an odd position between the two adjacent provinces. Estland, for the most part, was still rural, an area of small-scale agriculture and dairy farming, with only a tiny number of factories, most of them clustered around Narva and along the northernmost banks of the river. Viewed from an economic standpoint, that small industrial cluster, together with a few factories on the Petersburg side of the river, might be usefully thought of as a remote but important outpost of industrial St. Petersburg, a frontier of the factory center that radiated outward from the capital, rather than an integrated part of the Estland economy.16
But Kreenholm's remoteness from St. Petersburg must be emphasized as much as its ties. Whatever its economic links to that city, Kreenholm, as my choice of the word outpost should suggest, was not just another point on a graduated continuum of factory locations stretching westward from St. Petersburg. Almost all the major factories of Petersburg province were concentrated near the capital, some in the city itself, others in its adjacent suburbs and villages. Except for a small border area of Iamburg, the westernmost district of Petersburg province (just to the east of Kreenholm), the entire area between the capital and Estland was sparsely populated and rural, almost devoid of industry. At
The distance between Narva and Reval is 107 statute miles; by rail, 123.9 miles.
On the eve of the First World War the boat was available only twice a week. See Baedeker, Russia , 81.
Hansen, Geschichte , 371; Kann, Narva , 94. The line was completed at about the same time as the Western Union Company was founded in the United States (1856). As will be seen, the telegraph line connecting Narva with Reval and St. Petersburg would play an important role in the events of 1872.
See Erik Amburger, "Das neuzeitliche Narva als Wirtschaftsfaktor zwischen Russland und Estland," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 15, no. 2 (June 1967): 197–208.
least until 1870, when distances between Kreenholm and St. Petersburg to the east and Reval to the west were effectively reduced by the completion of the Petersburg-Narva-Reval railroad line, Kreenholm, like Narva, remained isolated.
Kreenholm's isolation from St. Petersburg was reinforced by the fact that Estland, like the other Baltic provinces Livland and Kurland, though long since incorporated into the empire, still retained certain customary rights and privileges with respect to its judicial and police-administrative institutions—including exemption from the judicial reform of 1864. Estland's privileged status, when compared with the situation of a typical Russian province, gave it a considerable measure of autonomy from the imperial administration. Like other provinces, to be sure, it was "administered" by a provincial governor (residing in Reval), appointed by and responsible to the Imperial Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). But this partial centralization was balanced by the government's continued concessions to the region's corporate traditions, particularly to the time-honored prerogatives of its German-speaking nobility (Ritterschaft ), still virtually unchallenged as the local ruling elite, and to a lesser extent of the German-speaking merchant class, still the dominant group in the governing bodies of towns. Peter and his successors had allowed each Baltic province to retain a modified version of its ancient "constitution" (Landesverfassung ), which in turn was partially anchored in the region's customary law.17 It should therefore come as no surprise that, although most of these niceties of public administration and corporate privilege may have had little meaning to the people of Kreenholm and the neighboring villages in times of peace and tranquillity, they would become a source of confusion when the dormant police-judicial apparatus was awakened by the sounds of industrial conflict.
Let us now observe the setting of Kreenholm through a narrower lens, examining the riverine site of the factory against its more immediate surroundings and using the opportunity to meet some of the entrepreneurs responsible for the area's economic development. As may be seen in map 2, the Narova River has its source in Lake Chudskoe (Peipus). From there it flows northward until it empties into the Gulf of Finland
Despite a number of important modifications over 150 years, the Baltic provinces were also allowed relatively independent status for their Lutheran churches. For further details on these matters, see Erik Amburger, Geschichte der Behördenorganisation Russlands von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917 (Leiden, 1966), 174–79, 386–87; for general background, see Wilhelm von Wrangell and Georg von Krusenstjern, Die Estländische Ritterschaft. Ihre Ritterschaftshauptmänner and Landräte (Limburg an der Lahn, 1967), esp. 39–61.
(which, thanks to a large sandbank on the river's estuary, is not accessible from Narva by boat). About ten miles before completing its northward descent, some two miles south of Narva, the river becomes a series of rapids, after which it is suddenly divided, by the large island of Kreenholm, into two waterfalls, a wide one to the right (east), a somewhat narrower one to the left. Then the waters reunite beneath the island and continue their gentler course past Narva to the gulf.18
Although Peter the Great is said to have designated the island as an ideal location for a large water-powered factory, the only industry to appear there for many years to come was a sawmill belonging to a line of Narva merchants, a wealthy German family that possessed the island as its private property and used it as a vacation retreat.19 In the 1820s a German merchant tried unsuccessfully to develop a small woolens factory on the island, but, plagued by fire and other mishaps, the enterprise went under in 1831.20 It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that Peter's idea was taken up in earnest by one of Europe's leading entrepreneurs, Lev Gerasimovich Knop (1821–94), better known as Ludwig Knoop, sometimes called "the Moscow cotton king."21
If the term international capitalist fit any nineteenth-century figure in Russia, surely it was Knoop, aptly described most recently as a "German-English-Russian" manufacturer. Born into a family of Bremen tradesmen, Ludwig was the nephew of Fredrich Knoop, who (like the father of Friedrich Engels) was a successful German textile manufacturer in Manchester but with important contacts in the burgeoning Moscow textile industry of the 1840s. In 1839 Fredrich sent his young nephew to Russia to act as his agent. This was a time when Russian textile plants were badly in need of foreign machinery, and English machine manufacturers, since 1842 no longer restricted by the old British ban on the export of spinning machines, were eager to open up the Russian market. An able and aggressive entrepreneur, the younger Knoop quickly established himself in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and, somewhat later, Reval, where his German language and contacts and English contacts and credits served him well. Before many years had passed his company offices had spread across two continents, reaching from Mos-
Baedeker, Russia , 83.
KM , 9–10; Ch. M. Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost' v proshlom i nastoiashchem , vol. 1 (Moscow, 1915), 207.
Kann, Narva , 103.
Walter Dehio, Erhard Dehio: Lebensbild eines baltischen Hanseaten, 1855–1940 (Stuttgart, 1970), 73.
cow to Bremen, with a branch in London and affiliates as far away as New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston.22
According to one of Knoop's later business associates, it was Ernst Kolbe, the German mayor of Narva, who first alerted Knoop to the potential value of the nearby island on the Narova rapids as a site for industrial investment. Toward the end of 1856 Knoop and his corporate partners purchased the island from its owners, the Sutthoffs, a family of Narva merchants, for fifty thousand silver rubles, with the intention of constructing a cotton-spinning factory.23
Knoop was not the first entrepreneur of this period to grasp the importance of the Narova as a cheap source of power. By this time three other factories had already sprung up in the area. Two were on the river's right bank, in the Iamburg district of Petersburg province, and one was on the left bank, in Estland's Waiwara (German: Allentacken) district, on a large property (Gut ) called Joala, owned by the family of Georg von Cramer, wealthy merchants with landholdings on both sides of the river. The first of the three factories, a woolens mill on the right bank, close to the waterfall, was founded around 1820 by Paul Momma, a Narva merchant. In 1836 Momma sold the mill, which by now had several hundred workers, to the Narova Manufacturing Company, a stock company organized by Cramer's father, Benedict, owner of the land where the factory stood. Cramer and the Narva merchants who joined him in this venture (including Momma himself) were well connected in St. Petersburg, as witness the presence among the owners of the company's million-ruble block of shares of such notables as Minister of Foreign Affairs Karl von Nesselrode and General Count Alexander von Benkendorff, a German nobleman from Estland who served simultaneously
Ibid., 35, 73; Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost' , 204–5; Walther Kirchner, Die deutsche Industrie und die Industrialisierung Russlands, 1815–1914 (St. Katharinen, W. Ger., 1986), 147 (for the term German-English-Russian ), 182, 278–79; Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich. Zwei Jahrhunderte deutsch-russische Kulturgemeinschaft (Stuttgart, 1986), 264. The editors of KS err in describing Knoop simply as an English entrepreneur (213) and may overstate the role of British capital in the Kreenholm company (vi–vii). For an admiring, informative overview of Knoop's Russian career, including his international connections and his brilliant entrepreneurial mode of operation, see Gerhart von Schulze-Gävernitz, Volkswirtschaftliche Studien aus Russland (Leipzig, 1899), 90–106; the author refers to Knoop as "more than a Rockefeller," "the Arkwright of Russia," "a genius of capitalism" (90). For a more balanced though similarly appreciative view, see Stuart Thompstone, "Ludwig Knoop, 'The Arkwright of Russia,'" Textile History 15, no. 1 (1984): 45–73. According to Thompstone (47–48), Knoop went to Russia in 1839 as assistant to the representative of the De Jersey Company, a Manchester trading house.
Hansen, Geschichte , 385; Dehio, Erhard Dehio , 36.
as head of the Imperial Chancellery's Third Section, chief of gendarmes, and confidant to Nicholas I.24
In 1845 the factory, which proved unprofitable, was again sold, this time to a prominent Russian entrepreneur of German extraction, the wealthy industrialist and court banker Baron Alexander Stieglitz, an educated man with excellent connections in both St. Petersburg and the Baltic provinces and a graduate of the German university in Dorpat (Tartu), Livland. Owner of St. Petersburg's largest cotton mill, the Nevskii factory (founded in 1833 and scene of the 1870 strike mentioned earlier), Stieglitz later served as director of Russia's State Bank (1860–66). The ambitious entrepreneur, whose Petersburg cotton factory was, for its time, highly mechanized and technically advanced, was unhappy with the condition of his newly acquired woolens mill. He soon resolved to dismantle it and replace it with a larger, more up-to-date structure, one whose imposing presence by the waterfall—a contemporary described it as "almost a city in itself"—would dominate the landscape of the right bank for years to come. In 1857, when the Kreenholm factory was still under construction, the work force of the reconstructed and now quite prosperous Stieglitz mill had grown in number to a thousand.25
Between Stieglitz's acquisition of the woolens mill and Knoop's purchase of Kreenholm, two smaller, less imposing factories were erected in the area, one by the Cramer family, the other by Stieglitz himself. The former, also a woolens mill, was situated on Joala, the huge Cramer property on the Estland side, near the western waterfall. Construction of Stieglitz's second factory was begun in 1851 on the right bank, close to his woolens mill; this one (with a branch in St. Petersburg) specialized in the manufacture of sailcloth and sails. In 1857, shortly after Knoop and his partners purchased their island, Cramer sold them the nearby buildings of his woolens factory, together with the stretch of Joala land on which they stood.26 Thus the Kreenholm factory, located on an island
KM , 10; Hansen, Geschichte , 331, 335; Kann, Narva , 103–4. On the involvement of Benkendorff in numerous lucrative commercial ventures, see Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia Under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 98–99.
KM , 10, Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost' , 208; Kann, Narva , 104. On Stieglitz and the "house of Stieglitz," see also William L. Blackwell, The Beginninings of Russian Industrialization, 1800–1860 (Princeton, 1968), 69, 255–60; Kirchner, Die deutsche Industrie , 360; Dehio, Erhard Dehio , 74. The reference (1858) to "a city in itself" (fast eine Stadt für sich ) is in Hansen, Geschichte 339. Not surprisingly, given his interests in both Petersburg and Estland, Stieglitz was a moving force behind the development of the Petersburg-Narva-Reval railroad, completed in 1870.
Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost' , 208; Hansen, Geschichte , 351, 393; Kann, Narva , 105–6.
across the river from the two Stieglitz factories but with property extending to the river's left bank, occupied a central place in the oddly shaped configuration of factories that bridged the lower Narova beginning in the late 1850s.
Before operations at the Kreenholm factory could begin in earnest a site had to be found for housing the thousands of workers slated to be brought there. Since the island, some thirty acres in area, was to be covered with factory buildings almost from end to end, much of the housing would have to be located on the left-bank shore land—the property purchased from Cramer and adjacent land still owned by him. In the 1850s the small area south of the Narva city wall (the wall of the ancient fortress, not removed until the fortress itself was demobilized in 1864) was still in use as pasturage. The area nearest the island, part of the old Cramer property, comprised the tiny village of Joala and a large farmstead of some eight thousand acres bearing the same name. The village itself was too small to house many workers, but the plentiful vacant lands still owned by Cramer in the immediate vicinity, between the river to the east and the newly constructed (1857) Narva "chaussée" to the west, provided a serviceable site for workers' barracks and auxiliary buildings. The Kreenholm company rented the additional land from Cramer and began to construct these buildings, all of them wooden (stone buildings would be added after 1864), at the same time as it was erecting the first structure on the island itself. Some Joala acreage was also preserved as farmland, for use by the company for the cultivation of grain and other produce for sale to workers.27
Kreenholm island was connected to the housing area on the left bank by a 267-foot wooden bridge, designed to serve as a footpath to and from work and as a delivery route for those supplies and materials not brought to the island directly by boat. About thirty feet wide, suspended some thirty-five feet above the water, the bridge was buttressed by two piers at the island end and two on the shore. Serving both functionally and symbolically as the factory gate, the bridge, not unlike the gates of ordinary factories, would one day become an important site for dramatic confrontations between management and labor.28
KM , 19–20, 23. In 1880 the company purchaed the rented land from Cramer. There were no stone buildings before the vacating of the fortress in 1864 because stone structures located at 1.5 versts or less from a Russian fortress were forbidden by law. (On the demobilization of the fortress, officially decreed in May 1863, see also Kann, Narva , 96.)
The bridge is described in KM , 24. For the bridge's role in the coming conflicts, see chapter 3 below.
The Kreenholm company acquired no property on the more distant right bank of the river. To be sure, its operations were by no means independent of that area. The proximity of the Russian-speaking villages of the Iamburg district (especially agriculturally impoverished villages such as Iazvishchi) and of the Gdov district, just to the south, provided Kreenholm with a readily available source of semiskilled labor.29 But since, for practical reasons, no bridge was built between the island and the eastern shore, many Iamburg and most Gdov peasants hired by the factory were housed on the opposite bank, crossing the river by boat when they returned to their villages for weekends and holidays. In other words, though they lived quite close to their homes, many workers from the Russian (that is, the Petersburg) side, unlike those from the Estland side, led their everyday lives apart from their families.
Ethnic Composition
The location chosen for the Kreenholm factory contributed substantially to the ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity of its work force. From the bottom to the top, from the lowliest factory hand to the highest level of management, and to a degree never approached in the textile mills of Russia's Central Industrial Region (CIR) or even in the somewhat more ethnically mixed factories of urban and suburban St. Petersburg, ethnic and cultural diversity would dominate the Kreenholm scene.
The workers, to begin at the bottom of the factory's social hierarchy, were recruited from two basic ethnolinguistic groups, Estonians and Russians, with the former generally outnumbering the latter by a high ratio—over 2.3 to 1 (3,244 Estonians, 1,400 Russians) in 1872.30 With
On Iazvishchi, see I. I. Vlasov, Tkach Fedor Afanas'ev (1859–1905). Materialy dlia biografii (Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 1925), 7.
The 1872 figures are from the report of the government commission that investigated the strike (RD , 368–69). Despite seasonal and annual fluctuations, the proportions seem to have been fairly constant. Nine years after the commission report, a well-organized one-day regional census showed a ratio of Estonians to Russians of almost exactly 2:1; see Ergebnisse der baltischen Volkszählung vom 29. December 1881 , Theil 2: Ergebnisse der ehstländischen Volkszählung , Band 3: Die Zählung auf dem flachen Lande , Lieferung 1 (Reval, 1884), 29. In September 1872 the Estland governor mistakenly reported the proportions as 50-50; see "Zapiska o bezporiadkakh byvshikh v Avguste na Krengol'mskoi manufakture" (hereafter cited as "Zapiska o bezporiadkakh"), TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, l. 27; and KS , 52n.
some possible exceptions (caused by a wave of Estonian peasant conversions from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy in the 1840s), this division overlapped greatly with the workers' division into two religious communities, Lutheran and Russian Orthodox.31 These parallel distinctions, ethnic and religious, were of paramount importance to the workers, determining to a great extent their social bonds outside the factory and shaping the nature and location of their leisure activities. The distinctions were clearly manifested in residential patterns, whether viewed in terms of the location of a locally recruited worker's home village (Russian/Orthodox on the right bank, Estonian/Lutheran on the left) or the site of the workers' temporary barracks, which were segregated mainly by ethnicity. There are also strong if inconclusive indications that the Estonians were much more likely than the Russians to be employed in family units. Whereas among adult Estonian workers in 1872 there were seven females for every ten males (985 women, 1,351 men), among the Russians there were only four (333 women, 807 men). Moreover, children made up a higher proportion of the Estonian work force (28 percent) than of the Russian (18.5 percent).32 The importance of these ethnic and religious divisions was consistently recognized and even reinforced by the factory management, which deliberately provided not only for separate housing but even for separate dining facilities. Predictably, separate religious instruction was provided for the children and adolescents of each group.
Adding further to the ethnic and cultural diversity of the work force was the presence of a certain number of Finnish, German, and Swedish workers, most of them Lutheran. Unfortunately, their proportion among the rank-and-file workers (in contrast to foremen and other supervisors) is impossible to calculate with any precision.33 Official documents generated by the 1872 strike tended to designate all non-Russian workers as Estonians, though many of these bore German or Swedish surnames. Since there is never any reference in the documents to workers
The conversions, a form of protest against Lutheran German landlords, took place in northern Livland; see Raun, Estonia , 45, 48–49, 53–54.
Based on figures in RD , 369. The 1872 figures are hard to compare with those from the 1881 census, which fail to distinguish between adults and children in enumerating the work force by sex. Including all ages, the Kreenholm work force had as many as nine Estonian females for every ten Estonian males in 1881, but only five Russian females for every ten Russian males (Ergebnisse , 29).
The 1881 census identifies only seventy-three workers as linguistically neither Estonian nor Russian; thirty-nine of these were Germans (Ergebnisse , 29). There are no comparable data for 1872.
actually speaking Swedish or German, it is fair to assume that almost all these workers were culturally Estonian, individuals whose family names happened to reflect the peculiarities of the region's historical legacy.34 Given the close similarity of Finnish and Estonian, however, identifying Finns among the Kreenholm workers, whether by name or by speech, is not possible. But as we shall see, the factory's use of children sponsored by the Petersburg Foundling Home makes it clear that a small but significant number of Kreenholm's workers were native speakers of Finnish (though to add to the confusion, some, like Vasilii Gerasimov, had patently Russian names and were officially registered as Russians).
If we now move up to the next level of the Kreenholm social ladder, the lower supervisory positions—crew leaders, foremen and assistant foremen, low-level technicians—we find a somewhat different ethnic mix. Since the available data are never clear as to whether crew leaders were counted as "workers" (they probably were), we can only guess that, because these positions were often filled by direct promotion from the ranks, they more or less mirrored the ethnic mix of Estonians and Russians found in the work force. Among the foremen, overseers, and technical personnel, however, one encounters a plurality of Germans (both local and foreign), some Russians, some Englishmen (commonly found in such positions in European countries at an early stage of industrialization, and easily importable by Knoop), and no Estonians, clearly Kreenholm's ethnic underclass.35
Moving still higher up the ladder to the "responsible" managers who stood between the lower supervisory personnel and "the owners," as the corporate board of directors was often called, we note the virtual disappearance of all groups but Germans, the nationality that dominated the day-to-day administration of the factory from the outset of its operations. In due course, we will get to know certain of the German managers more intimately, especially Ernst Kolbe, whom we already know as the mayor of Narva who called the advantages of the Kreen-
Estonian and Latvian peasants formally freed from serfdom in 1816 (in Estland) and 1819 (in Livland) lacked official family names before that time. Once emancipated (without land or full freedom of movement) they often took on the German names of their former masters. There is a concise explanation of the 1816–19 emancipation, including its narrow limits and phased implementation, in Raun, Estonia , 47–48.
Our only specific data are from the 1881 census: of fifty-five office workers, technicians, and foremen/overseers (Beamte, Techniker, Meister —the term Aufseher is not used), all of them male, twenty-two were (linguistically) German, fourteen Russian, none Estonian (Ergebnisse , 29). The twenty-two may include some of the German managers discussed below. On Knoop's use of Englishmen in his Russian factories in the 1860s, see Schulze-Gävernitz, Volkswirtschaftliche Studien , 95.
holm site to Knoop's attention. It was perhaps in return for this favor that Kolbe was appointed by Knoop and his partners to the post of chief factory manager, a position he held until his authority was eroded by the events of 1872. Until that time he exercised—or aspired to exercise—almost unlimited control over the day-to-day life of the factory, a power enhanced by his dual role as its general manager and a founding member of the corporate board, the only member who was always on the scene.
With the partial exception of Knoop (who held the title of director from 1857 until his death in 1894), the other major owners, all members of the board, functioned more as absentee landlords than as active business executives. Like Knoop, they were men with wide-ranging financial interests who spent much more of their time in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or abroad than they did in Estland. Like their lowest hirelings, the board members were ethnically varied, though the pattern was very different. As already noted, Knoop was a cosmopolitan German who had been raised in Russia, educated at the German university in Livland, and maintained both business and family ties with the English-speaking world. Among the other members were ethnic Russians whose names will be familiar to students of Russian entrepreneurship. Perhaps the best known was Koz'ma T. Soldatenkov, "Moscow merchant, cotton-textile manufacturer, Old-Believer leader, philanthropist and patron of art and literature." Grandson of a serf, son of a wholesale merchant, Soldatenkov was a barely educated man, pious and devoted to his "heretical" faith, and vastly successful as a trader of cotton yarn. Despite his heterodox religion he received much valued recognition from official Russia in the form of honorific titles and appointments. It was Knoop who, impressed by his talents, invited Soldatenkov to serve as a Kreenholm director, which he did for the rest of his life.36
Almost as renowned in the world of business were the four Khludov brothers, especially Aleksei and Gerasim, sons of Ivan Khludov, an Old-Believer peasant turned Moscow entrepreneur. Like Soldatenkov, in whose Moscow business circles they traveled, the Khludovs were successful cotton magnates, proud patrons of the arts, and frequent participants in the work of official commissions, organs of local government, and civic organizations. Unlike Soldatenkov, they eventually forsook the faith of their fathers for the edinoverie , a "comfortable halfway house"
On Soldatenkov, see Thomas C. Owen, "Soldatenkov, Koz'ma Terent'evich," in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History , vol. 36 (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1984), 135–38 (quotation from 135).
to the established Orthodox church.37 It was one of the Khludov brothers who first put the others in touch with Knoop, a contact that led to their participation in his venture. Like Knoop, the Khludovs later became heavily involved in business dealings in Germany, England, and the United States, thereby reinforcing the international character of Kreenholm's corporate board.38
Other founders of the company included several German businessmen (some of them registered in the Moscow or Petersburg merchants' guild) and an English entrepreneur named Richard Barlow.39 Though Barlow, only a "candidate" director, was not very involved in the factory's operations (he owned his own textile plant in St. Petersburg), his presence added tone to the international color of the new undertaking, while underscoring one of the principal justifications for locating a factory near the Gulf of Finland and the mouth of the Narova: easy access (after the Crimean War) at relatively low transport costs to imported British machinery and American cotton, shipped to the Narva port via England.40 Emblematic of the factory's absentee ownership was the location of the company's headquarters, site of Knoop's personal office, in Moscow, the primary residence of most members and candidate members of the board. (Until he moved to St. Petersburg in 1870, however, Kolbe resided in Kreenholm, and he continued to maintain a second home there.) At any given moment only three men bore the title of full director. From 1863 to 1873, more or less the boundary years of our study, they were Knoop, Soldatenkov, and Gerasim Khludov.41
The Beginnings
The Kreenholm factory was established at a time of great excitement and activity in the Russian textile industry, especially cottons. After a brief interruption during the Crimean War, the growth of cotton cloth production that had begun in the 1830s and 1840s resumed as part of a short but powerful upsurge in entrepreneurial fever that gripped the
Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, 1982) 141; see also 167–68.
Ibid., 162–63.
For a full list, see Hansen, Geschichte , 387.
Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost' , 207.
KM , 15; see also TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 562, l. 117.
country in 1856-57, much of it concentrated in textiles.42 The founding of the Kreenholm factory was perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of this mood, with grandiose language about its future as the largest factory of its kind in Europe "if not on the face of the earth" figuring prominently in the rhetoric surrounding its construction.43 This spirit of economic optimism, coupled with a cultivated sense of local (i.e., Narva) civic pride, was vividly conveyed in a Narva citizen's description (in a German-language newspaper) of the ceremony launching the construction of the first factory building:
On the island of Kreenholm, located between two waterfalls of the Narova River, the ceremonial laying [of the cornerstone] of a cotton-spinning and weaving factory took place on 30 April 1857. Many guests journeyed to this celebration, some from Moscow and St. Petersburg. A large crowd filled the square . . . and the beautiful spring weather favored the celebration, so significant for our city.
Anticipating an image that the Kreenholm company would try to project in the years ahead, the celebration was invested with an ecumenical religious flavor, with Orthodox and Lutheran clergy from Narva sharing equally in the ceremonials. Just a hint of Orthodox preeminence might have been discerned in the order of ceremonial events, with the Russian priest, probably from the Cathedral of Transfiguration (Preobrazhenskii sobor), preceding the German Lutheran pastor of the Church of St. John (St. Johannis-Kirche) in the performance of their respective offices.44
After the St. John's choir had sung a German chorale from the 127th Psalm, "Except the Lord Build the House, They Labor in Vain that Build It," the pastor spoke to the same theme, asking the Lord to bless the ceremonies and calling for the protection of the area by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Then, while the choir chanted the chorale "Love the Lord God," the cornerstone was laid with three symbolic blows of a hammer. The symbolic importance of the occasion was also marked by the laying of the second stone by an official representative of the imperial gov-
For an overview, see G. S. Isaev, Rol'tekstil'noi promyshlennosti v genesize i razvitii kapitalizma v Rossii, 1760–1860 (Leningrad, 1970), 153–66. See also Blackwell, Beginnings , 44, 46–47; Zelnik, Labor and Society , 45, 75.
Das Inland , 15 May 1857, in KM , 187.
Counting the cathedral, there were three churches of "the Greek faith" (i.e., Russian Orthodox) in Narva and its suburbs at the time. There was also a "Swedish-Finnish" Lutheran church, St. Michael's. The Estonian population had no church, only a simple prayer house. See Hansen, Geschichte , 343, 345, 365, 395; KM , 99; Baedeker, Russia , 83. A pillar of Narva's German community, Georg Cramer had recently served (and may still have been serving) as a warden of St. John's; Hansen, Geschichte , 347, 361.
ernment, commander of the Narva garrison Major General Baron Wilhelm von Krüdener, and by the presence of members of Kreenholm's board of directors, among them Gerasim Khludov, Kolbe, and Soldatenkov, who placed a gilded nameplate displaying the names of the founders.
The ceremonies were followed by a festive luncheon, with toasts proposed by Kolbe to the health of the emperor, Alexander II, and to that of Prince Aleksandr Suvorov, governor general of the Baltic provinces. The toasts were met by fervent cries of "Hoch!"—German apparently serving as the celebration's lingua franca. After lunch the participants were taken on a stroll to the spit of the island, an excellent vantage point from which to admire the natural beauty of the area before returning home.45
The factory founders lost no time in developing and equipping the building whose cornerstone had been so ceremoniously laid. The basic factory complex was to consist of four large and sturdy buildings, constructed of stone and iron: a left and a right spinning building, or "corpus" (korpus ), which together constituted "the spinning factory," and a left and a right weaving corpus, which combined to form "the weaving factory." But in the beginning there was only the spinning factory, or rather its left corpus—later known as the Old Half or Old Wing (Staraia polovina )—the first to be completed. Its walls and roof went up in the fall of 1857, just months after the ceremony, with floors, arches, and window casements finished by the following summer. By October 1858 it was in full operation, equipped with over eight thousand spindles powered by two water-driven wheels housed in the adjoining wheel room.
Work on the left corpus of the adjacent weaving factory was finished by the end of the summer of 1859. This building contained its own wheel room, which contained the water-driven wheel that powered the factory's first 516 looms. The right corpus of the spinning factory, known as the New Half or New Wing (Novaia polovina ), was finished in the fall of 1861 (year of the emancipation of Russia's serfs), and the corresponding half of the weaving factory was completed the following year. By the time the four structures were fully operational the spacious workshops of the rapidly expanding spinning factory boasted over sixty-four thousand spindles, while the number of looms in the comparably capacious shops of the weaving factory approached one thousand.46
Das Inland , 15 May 1857, in KM , 187.
To put these numbers in some perspective, according to official government figures for 1861 the entire cotton cloth industry of Petersburg province had 3,864 mechanical looms and just under 712,000 spindles (Isaev, Rol' , 190). Thus at this early stage Kreenholm alone already had the equivalent of 26 percent of the looms and 9 percent of the spindles in all the cotton factories of Petersburg province.
Construction of water mains, bridges, and (in Joala) workers' housing proceeded in tandem with construction of the factory buildings, with most of the work completed by 1862 (though in response to the growth of the work force, housing continued to be built throughout the 1860s and beyond). By the end of 1862 seven two-story barracks (kazarmy ) had been erected on the left bank around a single large courtyard. Each wooden building measured roughly 210 by 35 feet and contained from 60 to 78 tiny, poorly ventilated one- or two-room units, for a total of 504 "apartments," with one or more communal kitchens on each floor. Toilet facilities were located in separate outhouses. Other buildings erected in the area by 1862 included an apartment house for office workers (seven units), a house for foremen and other supervisory personnel (sixteen units), a small school building, a modest, understaffed, but sturdy little infirmary (with 150 beds by the end of the decade), and a pharmacy. All these structures were built with logs.47
The two large factories (four buildings), both made of high-quality limestone from a local quarry, closely resembled each other. The spinning buildings had four stories. Each "half" (or "wing") of the building—observers sometimes identified a "half" as a separate factory (fabrika )—faced the other, and together they formed a huge quadrangle, with a large interior courtyard. Though similarly designed, the weaving factory was only three stories high and occupied a much smaller area, 206,855 square feet on the ground as compared to the spinning factory's 360,650. The adjacent wings of each building were joined together by two sets of "galleries," or enclosed walkways, which normally provided easy passage between them.48
The Witness
In the summer of 1864, two years after completion of the factory's construction, a twelve-year-old Finnish-speaking boy with a
KM , 29–30, 53, 84–86; Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost' , 208–10; Zapiska No. 1 (memo appended to investigating commission's report, 15 Nov. 1872), RD , 375–76, 382–83.
KM , 30, 33.
Russian name, Vasilii Gerasimov, arrived in Narva in a horse-drawn cart with a large group of boys and girls of the same age.49 From Narva this confused and sullen collection of ethnically mixed orphans and abandoned children, all of them wards of the Petersburg Foundling Home, was taken to the Kreenholm factory, far removed from the villages where many had been raised by Finnish foster parents.50 At the factory they were assigned to the spinning section and billeted in Barrack No. 7, one of the recently constructed dormitories, with girls on the top floor, boys on the bottom. About thirty boys, including Vasilii, were assigned to Apartment No. 3.
For Vasilii this day marked the beginning of an eventful eight-year sojourn in Kreenholm during what were both his and the factory's formative years. He as well as the factory would come of age in 1872, when both the youth of twenty and the young enterprise of fifteen experienced a shock powerful enough to change their lives. For historians, the youngster's arrival at Kreenholm is important for another reason. From 1864 through the explosive events of 1872, a young man was on the spot who would later record in brief but vivid detail the story of his experiences—from the dull patterns of Kreenholm's humdrum daily routine to the colorful moments of unrest that beset the factory during his final year there.
No memoir, of course, can be read as if it were a natural history, an unmediated recording of the events it purports to describe, and in chapter 6 we will have occasion to discuss the problems of interpretation posed by this particular document. For the moment, however, in our exploration of the factory's early years and the background to the events that troubled year fifteen, Gerasimov serves us well as an observant, if committed, informant, a conveyor of mood as well as information. His memoir is almost our only source of evidence generated by neither state nor company officials, and the only audible voice of a Kreenholm worker (unlike the written summaries of workers' post-strike testimony) not
Like Vasilii, many of the Finnish-speaking children were considered ethnic Russians. Their language came from having been the wards of Finnish foster parents.
On the Imperial Foundling Home (vospitatel'nyi dom ), see David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, 1988); idem, "Abandonment and Fosterage of Unwanted Children: The Women of the Foundling System," in The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research , ed. David L. Ransel (Urbana, Ill., 1978); Materialy dlia istorii S.-Peterburgskogo Vospitatel'nogo doma , comp. F. A. Tarapygin (St. Petersburg, 1878). On the initial contract of 1862, wherein the Foundling Home agreed to supply Kreenholm with young (age twelve or older) workers and the company agreed to maintain certain conditions of employment, see Materialy , 49–50.
filtered through an official. In short, he is our single most important witness to the strike, though we must resist the temptation to accept all his testimony at face value. Since he cannot be cross-examined, the evidence he presents must be carefully compared with other parts of the documentary record.
As a witness, Gerasimov is especially useful for the light he sheds on the factory administration, as seen from the standpoint of a worker. With the exception of KM , the official company history whose often celebratory picture of management must be taken with a grain of salt, the only other major source of information about the pre-1872 regime at Kreenholm is the official inquiry of October–November 1872, when a special commission appointed by the MVD sought the causes of the upheaval in the previous practices of factory managers, practices painfully experienced by young Gerasimov for eight long years.51 Both Gerasimov's account and the government inquiry reveal the degree to which the island factory and the company's shoreside residential settlement were ruled by the directors like a state within a state, beyond the effective control of a supposedly centralized, autocratic imperial government.
The Factory Administration
Several circumstances combined to endow the Kreenholm factory with the character of a quasi-autonomous political unit—most notably its physical isolation, the special rights and privileges of the local German elite (of which Ernst Kolbe, the factory manager, was a leading member), and the high prestige of some of the company's absentee owners. To this list might be added the ethos of serfdom, an institution that continued to exist in Russia (though not in Estonia) until the fifth year of the factory's life. Part company town and part preindustrial fiefdom or barony, Kreenholm managed to escape the usually watchful eyes of Russia's central police apparatus until its managers lost effective control over law and order. As an isolated factory island, Kreenholm was governed in its early years more like a moat-encircled medieval castle than the modern industrial complex it other-
There is no evidence in the documentary record that Gerasimov himself was interrogated in the course of the commission's investigation.
wise resembled. If the Herr im Haus paternalism of the factories of Central Europe was also prevalent in the textile mills of Russia, nowhere was it starker than in Kreenholm.
Herr im Haus is, of course, the notorious phrase first used by Alfred Krupp in his antistrike proclamation of 187252 —the very year that most concerns us. It is cited here not so much to underscore the German element in Kreenholm's administration (in the mid–nineteenth century, "paternalistic and heavy-handed regulation of workers' lives" was as characteristic of Russia's CIR as it was of Germany)53 as to dramatize the extent to which Kreenholm, despite its "modern" articles of incorporation, stock-company financial structure, international commercial links, and advanced machinery, existed and operated as a sort of barony, in well near feudal isolation from central, regional, and even local public control. Until the explosive events of 1872 ended Kreenholm's insulation from the outside world, the de facto absence of external judicial or administrative constraints—let alone the scrutiny of public opinion—was extreme even by Russian standards.
There were, to be sure, circumstances within the factory that placed some limits on management's readiness to act arbitrarily. Just as a feudal lord (or a pre-1861 Russian serf-owner) might feel constrained to tolerate the customary ways of his serfs as long as they fulfilled their labor
Versions of Krupp's statement may be found in Heinrich Herkner, Die Arbeiterfrage. Eine Einführung , 7th ed., vol. 1: Arbeiterfrage und Sozialreform (Berlin and Leipzig, 1921), 417; and (a much shorter excerpt) Werner Conze, "Arbeiter," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland , ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1972), 239 ("dass ich in meinem Hause wie auf meinem Boden Herr sein und bleiben will"). Note also the words of Louis Piette, a Saarland paper manufacturer (1840): "Eine Fabrik gleicht einem Staate, dessen Oberhaupt der Fabrikherr ist" (quoted in Conze, "Arbeiter," 239). For a thorough treatment of the Krupp firm's activities on the Russian market, including the reasons for Alfred's rejection of several proposals to locate a plant in Russia, see Kirchner, Die deutsche Industrie , 204–33.
The quoted phrase is from Robert E. Johnson's apt characterization of the policies of Moscow industrialists (referring to the 1880s–1890s) in his Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), 81. For an example of strict policies of patriarchal control by an entrepreneur in another branch of Russian industry, see Theodore H. Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution , vol. 1: Life and Work in Russia's Donbass, 1869–1924 (Princeton, 1989), esp. 41–42. A comparable if less authoritarian paternalism could be found even in the textile mills of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, such as the New York cotton works called Harmony Mills; see Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855–84 (Urbana, 1978), 57, 58. As to France, Perrot writes (re the period 1870–90) of the "obstination d'un manufacturier arrogant, et, dans le textile, ce type surabonde" (Ouvriers en grève 1:356).
obligations and paid their rents,54 Kolbe and his associates hesitated before daring to tamper with certain practices that had begun to take root at the factory during its earlier years. Frail elements of an unwritten social contract between the Kreenholm management and certain groups of workers did emerge, understandings, as will be seen, that placed limits on the ability of the lord to rule his house with complete disregard for the feelings of his subjects. But with very few exceptions these constraints failed to prevent the administration in general, and Kolbe in particular, from exercising a degree of power that, when finally forced on the attention of government officials in 1872, would move them to expressions of shock and disapproval.
Estland's acting provincial prosecutor, for example, an imperial official appointed by the Justice Ministry, expressed dismay that Kolbe had been running the factory without a trace of outside supervision or oversight (kontrol' ). "Local authorities," he complained in a report to his superiors, "have been able to exert almost no influence on Kreenholm." And that was not all:
Beyond the reach of all supervision, taking advantage of his own power and also of the helpless condition of the workers, and counting on his personal connections, for many years Mr. Kolbe has run the factory completely despotically [samovlastno ]; he has been both judge in his own disputes with workers and implementer of his own decisions. Kolbe's unrestricted exercise of arbitrary power [proizvol ] has weighed heavily on the working population.55
The factory's unfortunate isolation from "local authorities" was also emphasized in 1872 by the Estland provincial governor, who pointed out that a combination of physical distance and other inhibiting factors had made it impractical for disputes between Kreenholm workers and their employers to be adjudicated within the structure of Estland's distinctive judicial system or mediated by local police.56 Officially, as part of Estland's Allentacken (Waiwara) district, Kreenholm (along with Joala) came within the jurisdiction of the Allentacken Hakenrichter , a district official or magistrate elected from among the local (German) nobility for a three-year term, whose duties combined police and quasi-judicial functions. But the Hakenrichter's office was located in Järva
See, for example, Michael Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Etude de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques (Paris, 1963).
Report of Vladislas A. Zhelekhovskii to Ministry of Justice, 4 Oct. 1872, RD , 345–46.
"Zapiska o bezporiadkakh," TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, ll. 27–29.
(Russian: Ieva), some thirty-five miles from Kreenholm, and the Hakenrichter himself was completely bereft of support staff. Moreover, his authority was limited by local law to minor disputes (with the disputed value not exceeding 15 rubles).57 Similarly, the local parish court (prikhodnyi sud ), though not as far away from Kreenholm (eighteen miles), had at best only a very limited jurisdiction as mediator of disputes between workers and their employers (it was designed primarily for agrarian disputes), while the next higher judicial instance, the Wesenberg district court, was eighty miles away and, except in times of emergency (usually peasant unrest), convened for only a few weeks each year.58 To the governor's regret, all of this contributed to the factory administration's ability to exercise privately what were normally public police and judicial functions.
In a similar vein, the MVD's investigating commission accused the Kreenholm administration of putting itself, from the earliest years of its existence, in "a position of complete independence, in which it could govern the workers as it saw fit." Kolbe, the commission complained, had held "the reins of administration in his own hands alone," while the factory's isolation from outside influence meant that "the germ of evil" had lingered there for its entire fifteen-year existence.59 Comparable criticisms were voiced by Finance Minister Mikhail Reutern, then Russia's highest official responsible for the oversight of private industry, and by Deputy Chief of Gendarmes Nikolai Levashev, the empire's second highest police officer. And they were echoed quite emphatically in a report on Kreenholm jointly submitted to the tsar by the MVD, the Finance Ministry, and the Third Section, which regretted that, though "a private institution," the factory had been permitted to exercise "juridico-police powers."60 What all these officials seemed to be saying, though the expression was not used, was that official neglect had permitted Kreenholm to become "a state within a state," with Kolbe—later
Svod mestnykh Uzakonenii Gubernii Ostzeiskikh , Part 1, art. 973, para. 39, reproduced in ibid., 33. See also RD , 333n.
The relevant law was part of the 1856 Estland agrarian reform: Polozhenie o krest'ianakh Estliandskoi gubernii , arts. 745, 753–54, 760, 790, all reproduced in TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, ll. 33–34. For art. 753 see also RD , 333n.
The commission's Zapiska No. 2, RD , 386–87.
Letter from Reutern to Minister of Internal Affairs Timashev, 15 Dec. 1872 (commenting on the report of the commission), RD , 397–402. An editors' note on 402, supported by a reference to archives of the Third Section, says that Levashev fully shared Reutern's views on these matters. For the report to the tsar (26 Jan. 1873) signed by Timashev, Reutern, and Levashev, see RD , 402–4 (quotation from 403).
described in Gerasimov's memoir as "a despot in every sense of the word" (19)—its de facto lord and master.61
These assessments, made by high officials in the wake of the charged events of 1872, are confirmed in vivid detail by Gerasimov. The factory management's direct and arbitrary exercise of police and judicial power—for example, corporal punishment and solitary confinement as disciplinary means, the rendering of summary judgments for petty offenses—constitutes a leitmotif of his narrative. On the very day of his arrival in Kreenholm, Gerasimov recalls, draconian methods were employed to launch him on the path of Russification (re -Russification might be more apposite in his case) as Russian language and Orthodox religious exercise were forced on him and other Finnish-speaking children. Slaps on the face and threats of beating were used to teach them to pray "correctly." In the days ahead a teacher, using "the fist and the birch rod" as his pedagogic tools, would "torture" them every night from nine to eleven in the factory school—this after sixteen hours of "hellish" work. Even for relatively minor violations, factory police would beat them with sticks and straps and place them in a punishment cell on rations of bread and water (17–18).62
If supreme power over the workers was held by Kolbe (who was not too aloof to exercise it personally on occasion), the day-to-day task of maintaining order fell to the factory police. While the use of a private factory police force was not unknown in the mid-nineteenth century, either in Russia or abroad, what was unusual at Kreenholm was the decision to create a police force that would have the appearance not simply of a body of private security guards but of a juridically constituted public institution, an official-looking entity occupying a private space in an empire where private right was at a premium. As early as 26 November 1857, the year the company was founded, the directors promulgated a formal "police statute" (politseiskii ustav ).63 Though in substance little
Here and throughout the volume, in-text page references to Gerasimov's memoir are to the 1923 version, Zhizn' russkogo rabochego .
The factory school, divided into Estonian and Russian sections, had existed since the founding of the factory. We are told in the factory's official history (with reference to these early years) that there is "no information on the activity of the school or on the degree of success of the instruction there" (KM , 100).
The content of the statute is summarized in Raport, RD , 354; and Zapiska No. 2, RD , 386ff. No copy has ever been located in the Estland archives, nor has a copy of a revised and apparently stricter version drafted in 1870 and almost certainly implemented, even though never confirmed (KS , 81n). For evidence that the 1870 draft was in operation, despite the absence of any legal basis, in late September 1872, see the relevant correspondence in TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, ll. 194–95, 240–41, 253–56.
more than an internal company document (it was never submitted to appropriate authorities for the required "censorship"), the statute was intended to generate an aura of official certification. To this end, written approval of the document was sought and obtained from the then governor of Estland, Johan von Grünwald.
If not exactly a treaty between sovereign powers, the company's early compact with the governor had the effect of blurring the distinction between private and public law. In approving the statute, for example, the governor was giving his tacit seal of approval to the exclusion of Kreenholm workers from the jurisdiction of the parish court. Of less practical but at least equal symbolic import, he was also granting the factory the right to correspond with government offices without postage, a privilege normally reserved to state institutions.64 Given the difficulties Estland officials would later face in endeavoring to extend their reach from Reval to Kreenholm, the governor may have welcomed the statute for no other reason than administrative convenience. From the point of view of the company directors, however, much more was at stake: a precedent had been set that could someday be invoked to justify its claim to what amounted to a small but locally effective form of sovereign power.
For the moment, this little entente between Reval and Kreenholm went unnoticed by the higher authorities in St. Petersburg, or so it appears in light of their shock when they later confronted the statute's existence. But the net effect was that, on the very eve of the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of fundamental judicial reforms in Russia, a group of prominent entrepreneurs found themselves with the kind of personal and judicial authority over their workers that Alexander II now saw fit to remove from the hands of the Russian gentry, and this in a part of the empire bereft of serfdom for over forty years.
Because a version of the 1857 statute was still in force in 1872, it is helpful to familiarize ourselves with some of its provisions. The statute provided for the creation of two distinct but complementary categories of police, designed to maximize the efficiency of management's disciplinary control over what was planned to be a large and heterogeneous work force. On the one hand there was the "factory police" (fabrichnaia politsiia ), a permanent paid professional body, headed by a man appointed by and responsible to the factory manager. This group was to function as the real locus of police power in Kreenholm's day-to-day
Zapiska No. 2, RD , 386.
operations. On the other hand there was a tiny unit called the "worker police" (rabochaia politsiia ), in principle a rotating, irregular body elected by workers from among their own number. It consisted of four men: an "elder" (starshina ), his assistant, and two overseers (nadzirateli ).
Notwithstanding the formalities of election, the worker police were in a predictably weak and tenuous position. Not only did the statute subordinate them to the factory police, but their election also had to be confirmed by management, which retained the right to reject any nominee who gave it pause. Moreover, their jurisdiction was strictly confined to minor cases—almost exclusively petty disputes among workers, never conflicts between workers and their supervisors—and their decisions were always subject to appeal to and reversal by the factory police.
To be sure, within their confined area and subject to that appeal the worker police were granted the power to inflict some rather severe punishments, both financial and physical: fines as high as ten days' wages, up to fifty blows with the birch rod (the district magistrate was limited by law to thirty), and, with the prior approval of the factory police, up to two days' confinement in a punishment cell. Yet given their low position in the hierarchy of authority and the temporary nature of their office, it is doubtful that worker police would act very harshly on their own, a conjecture supported by the fact that none of the serious punishment situations mentioned in the sources was ever handled by worker police alone. Not that their caution would raise the esteem in which they were held by their fellow workers or increase the chance that those workers would view them as their genuine representatives. Although the directors were no doubt influenced by their awareness of Russian and perhaps Estonian peasant traditions—the traditional office of village elder (starosta ) was an obvious model for the starshina—we do not know just why these offices were made elective. What we do know is that any notion of legitimate representation is belied by the contempt displayed toward the worker police by their "constituents" once the authority of the factory police, their superiors, began to wane.
In contrast to the worker police, the factory police possessed genuine power, if not authority. The range of punishments available even to the otherwise powerless worker police should alert us to the kind of measures available to their superiors. Indeed, the factory police's use of fines, confinement, and beating was not subject to any specific limitation by the statute. Although they did not draft the factory regulations—that was left to higher authorities, mainly Kolbe—the factory police adju-
dicated the more serious infractions and executed the punishments that followed. If Kolbe, in effect, was Kreenholm's legislator and executive authority, the chief of factory police combined the roles of executive assistant and judge, while always acting within his master's guidelines.
Even this arrangement was too loose for Kolbe, who included in the regulations a sweeping provision that not only invested his office with virtually unlimited residual power, but also united his function of ruler with that of high priest: "In all cases not cited in these regulations the director of the factory will decide the case in accordance with justice and his own conscience [po pravde i sovesti svoei ]."65 Thus, though we may safely assume that outside authorities would be summoned in the event of a murder or some other grave felony, for most purposes the police-judicial structure at Kreenholm was a self-contained system under the overarching authority of Kolbe, with a nominal role reserved for an official, the Hakenrichter, who resided many miles away.
The Weavers
The men and women recruited to work at the Kreenholm factory in its early years were in a favorable market situation. In part because of the end of the British ban on the export of spinning machinery, the number and size of Russian cotton mills had grown rapidly in the 1840s and early 1850s, especially in the Petersburg area. Interrupted by the Crimean War, this expansion resumed in 1856, a year of record sales for some Petersburg mills, and, despite a brief period of recession, continued during an uneven boom period that lasted for two more years. Several large cotton mills were founded in this brief period.66 When the Kreenholm factory opened in 1857, still in the midst of the industry's expansion, the owners found themselves without a large
This is the wording found in the regulations posted in the workers' living quarters in the 1860s. Another version, printed in their paybooks, was phrased less arrogantly, with the director deciding such cases "according to justice [spravedlivost' ] and the mutual satisfaction of the factory and the workers." Both versions are in KS , 171.
See A. F. Iakovlev, Ekonomicheskie krizisy v Rossii (Moscow, 1955), 61–80; Zelnik, Labor and Society , 45, 75, 78. For empirewide data on cotton mills for 1850–60 (including value of output and number of workers), see K. A. Pazhitnov, Ocherki istorii tekstil'noi promyshlennosti dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii. Khlopchatobumazhnaia, l'no-pen'kovaia i shelkovaia promyshlennost' (Moscow, 1958), 17. Pazhitnov (17–19) counts sixty cotton mills in 1859. Moscow province had the most factories, but Petersburg had more spindles.
enough pool of qualified workers among the local population. The factory had a thousand positions to fill by the end of its first year, and double that number soon thereafter. Many of these openings were for qualified spinners and—especially—weavers. Such workers had to be attracted to the unlikely location of Kreenholm from Moscow, Vladimir, and other parts of the CIR, where much of the cotton industry was concentrated.67 Their migration, which significantly changed the population structure of the area, was encouraged by the prospect of relatively decent wages and working conditions. That Kreenholm was forced to compete for their labor with Petersburg mills such as the Nevskii factory made these workers' prospects even brighter.68
Because spinners were easier to come by and easier to train,69 it was skilled weavers who became the chief beneficiaries of the favorable conjuncture of the late 1850s. This advantage was reflected not only in their wages and other material benefits, but also in the solicitude with which they were treated by their supervisors in the early years, and the caution with which the potentially oppressive weight of the 1857 statute was applied to them.70 For example, weavers were exempted in these days from the stringent fines that were levied for breaking or damaging machinery. Like weavers elsewhere, they were also accorded a great degree of autonomy in carrying out their work and much discretionary control over the work process in their shops.71 Notwithstanding the nominal authority of their immediate supervisors, weavers were generally free to set their own pace, and the only penalty for slow work was self-inflicted: lower earnings at the prevailing piece rate. Although bonuses were used to stimulate productivity, it was up to the individual weaver to decide whether to take advantage of this opportunity.
Amburger, Ingermanland , 364; idem, "Das neuzeitliche Narva," 207. Some highly skilled workers, who probably served as foremen and instructors, were also brought in from abroad; see RD , 354.
At the time, Stieglitz's Nevskii factory was by far the largest textile mill in the Petersburg area. In 1859 it had 1,300 workers, 160,000 spindles, and steam-driven machinery with a total of 460 hp (Pazhitnov, Ocherki , 18, 21); in 1861–62 it had 2,000 workers and 550 hp (Isaev, Rol' , 190–91). But it would soon fall behind Kreenholm in every respect.
On the ease and routinized nature of operating a spinning machine compared to operating a mechanical loom, see Perrot, Ouvriers en grève 1:362n (citing Charles Benoist).
My description of the weavers' work situation and their early relations with the Kreenholm management is based on Gerasimov, Zhizn' (1923), 27–28.
"In spite of mechanization, the weaver maintains a greater margin of freedom and initiative than the spinner" (Perrot, Ouvriers en grève 1:362; see also the quotation from Benoist on 362n).
In many respects the relative independence of a Kreenholm weaver was comparable to that of a handloom weaver in cottage industry. There was, however, one important difference, dictated by the mechanization of the work: the weavers were required, like all other Kreenholm workers, to be at their workplace at a specified hour, 5:30 A.M., when the water wheels that powered their mechanical looms were set in motion, and to stay at the factory until 8:30 P.M., when power was cut off. Like an independent craftsman, they could work slowly or rapidly, carefully or laxly, without the burden of direct supervision; but like semiskilled factory hands, they lacked control over the time and place of their labor, which were determined by management. Virtually autonomous within the shop and within the time frame of the workday, weavers were still required to be present at the factory for the full workday, six days a week, and were thus unable to alter the overall organization of their day, the proportion of their time spent at or away from the job. Under these circumstances, and especially with a bonus available, it made good economic sense for a weaver to try to maximize his or her (some were women) daily output, since on-the-job autonomy could not be translated into the nonfactory use of time, whether in income-producing activity or leisure.
As long as management was satisfied that this combination of incentives and constraints was producing the desired quantity of good work, there was little reason to challenge the weavers' real if only partial autonomy. Hence, though there were some indications (to be noted shortly) in the early 1860s that the weavers' privileged position was beginning to come under attack, most signs pointed to a generally positive situation for them well into that decade.
The weavers' relatively favorable position in the labor market also translated directly into relatively high social prestige within the local hierarchy of workers. Upon arriving at the factory in 1864, young Gerasimov was quickly alerted to the prevailing social distinctions when he was told that weavers who lived at the factory inhabited special quarters described as "white," while spinners were relegated to less comfortable dormitory rooms described as "black." He viewed the few members of his cohort who were assigned to the "white" rooms—that is, the children sleected to become weavers—as particularly fortunate. (Gerasimov himself was assigned to black Room No. 107.) According to the common wisdom, these rooms were called "white" not because they were better, though better they were, but because the weavers, so we are told, kept them so clean (17).
Their fastidious living habits, matched by a corresponding neatness of dress, strongly suggest that the special status granted the weavers was reflected in their own self-image. It also found expression in the esteem in which they were held by other workers, a point that struck some government officials nearly a decade later. On what must have been one of the first occasions on which the term was used in reference to a Russian factory, the commission that investigated the events of 1872 described Kreenholm's nine hundred weavers as a "labor aristocracy" (rabochaia aristokratiia ) and concluded that they exerted "a very great influence on the remaining mass of workers."72
Gerasimov tells us that the favorable position of the weavers started to decline as early as 1860, four years before his arrival, when management began to impose "one form of pressure after another" on them (28). His explanation is vague, however, and, though there is evidence of some difficulty in the cotton industry that year, 1860 appears to be too early. In fact, it was the cotton famine coincident with the American Civil War that caused a genuine if short-lived crisis in the cotton industry, and that crisis assumed serious proportions only in 1862, with recovery beginning in 1866.73 If Kreenholm's management wished to respond to this challenge by means other than mass dismissals—a solution that would have forced the isolated factory to reprise the difficulties of its earlier recruitment efforts when recovery returned—the most obvious alternative was to lower its wage bill by gradually reducing piece rates, abolishing bonuses, and inflicting harsher fines. To introduce these and other tough measures around 1863, when the economic conjuncture
RD , 374. This is the earliest use of the term labor aristocracy I have seen in Russian (though I have not explored the question systematically). It may have been borrowed from the Russian translation of Marx's Das Kapital , which appeared in early 1872 (see chapter 4, note 160). Its use in Russian discussion of factory labor soon became rather common. See, for example, the report of an 1879 zemstvo-sponsored investigation of sanitary conditions in Petersburg factories, which refers to skilled, well paid, highly trained masterovye who "are separated from the mass of the working people by their way of life and constitute, as it were, its aristocracy" (Golos , no. 316 [15 Nov. 1879]: 2). The figure 900 is from Zapiska No. 1, RD , 370 ("over nine hundred men and women"), where we also learn that the full weaving section, including the skilled weavers' unskilled assistants, consisted of 1,470 persons.
Iakovlev, Ekonomicheskie krizisy , 63–64, 76–77 (on 1860); 88–92 (on 1862–66). To some extent the recovery was aided by the tariff of 1868, which, while unprotective of Russian manufacturers, kept a duty on imported cotton cloths that represented a very high percentage of their cost; see V. Ia. Laverychev, Krupnaia burzhuaziia v poreformennoi Rossii (1861–1900 gg.) (Moscow, 1974), 121. Thompstone refers to the disruption in Russia's cotton textile sector caused by the Civil War as "a hiccup in the industry's expansion" ("Ludwig Knoop," 50).
was too unfavorable to the workers to allow them to fight back effectively, was a fairly safe course of action.
At first, however, none of these emergency measures added up to a direct assault on the prerogatives of the skilled weavers, the workers whom the administration could least afford to lose or even alienate. If we now turn from the vague, incautious chronology in Gerasimov's memoir to the more specific, carefully weighed information in the report of the 1872 commission, we see that Kolbe's assault on the weavers' independence—or at least the harshest manifestation of that assault, the stepped-up imposition of fines for damage to machinery and for insufficient output (anomalous at a time of raw cotton shortage)—dated not to the first years of the decade but, "to the best of our knowledge" (naskol'ko izvestno ), to "only four years ago," roughly 1868.74
More broadly, the commission accused management of having pressed heavily on the workers around that time because the labor market had grown more favorable to the employer; in other words, management's original incentive to treat certain workers with solicitude and to protect their earnings "artificially" was no longer in play. In the rather bookish words of the commission (which included a professor): "When, in accordance with the laws of economics, the supply [of labor] began to exceed the demand, the directors of the company gradually began to curtail the privileges and advantages that were offered the workers when first they came to the factory." To be sure, the commission's foray into the realm of political economy was brief and its argument incomplete. Apart from its failure to address the particular situation of the weavers, it neglected to mention the cotton crisis of the Civil War years or to grapple with the fact that if by 1868 the demand for labor was indeed on the rise, the market should have favored the workers. Nevertheless, the clear implication of the report was that the privileged position of certain Kreenholm workers had deteriorated, victim of the factory's success in attracting a "steady influx" of qualified people, presumably more than enough to meet its growing need for weavers.75
The factory had held on to its core workers at a time of contraction, and apparently no longer had serious difficulty attracting new ones at a time of expansion. Instead of rescinding his tougher policies of the past half decade, Kolbe now was confident enough to hold the line. And whether or not the workers affected were all weavers, it was the qualified
Zapiska No. 2, RD , 391–92.
Raport, RD , 354 (for the quote on "laws of economics"), 356; Zapiska No. 2, RD , 385.
weavers, the most privileged of Kreenholm workers from the outset, who would take greatest offense at his hard-line attitude. As the most independent of the workers, they were also the most prone to resist an assault on past privileges, especially when the period of crisis in the industry had passed and the restoration of their former status seemed to be within their grasp.
Under the circumstances, Kolbe was faced with two choices: prize and cajole the weavers, in recognition of the contribution they could make to Kreenholm's new market opportunities; or keep them down in their place, in hopes that the tougher policies of the early 1860s could be maintained and expanded even in the new market situation. He chose the latter.
With the illusory advantage of hindsight, while viewing the past from very different perspectives, both Gerasimov and the investigating commission described the cataclysm of 1872 as virtually unavoidable. According to Gerasimov, the administration's devious ploys had long been transparent to the workers, "who were just waiting for a suitable occasion to declare their protest" (28). The commission went even further: given management's policies, "these disorders were bound to manifest themselves." They were an "inevitable consequence" of fifteen years of bad administration. In view of the workers' lack of rights (bezpravnost' ) and the abusive system of fines, "one might have expected [such] disorders to arise sooner or later."76
We may readily agree with some of the assumptions behind these assessments. Surely the continuous existence of an extremely one-sided structure of authority at the factory, untempered by any mediating influences other than the weavers' precarious and increasingly threatened customary rights, must serve as the point of departure for anyone wishing to understand the severity of the conflict that would soon unfold. Yet the fact remains that the underlying tensions, however long they had been simmering, did not boil over until the summer of 1872. As Gerasimov himself acknowledged, however many reasons there were for Kreenholm workers to hate their employers, "they continued to endure it all, . . . to see which way the wind would blow. So it went," he wrote, "until 1872, when the patience of the workers finally ran out" (27).
The idea of patience running out, like tensions boiling over, may provide us with a useful metaphor, but it contributes little of explanatory
Raport, RD , 356–57, 362, 364.
value. While the enduring presence of oppressive practices does add to our understanding of the preconditions of the conflict, it yields only circular explanations of the actual outbreak of trouble and little insight into the new meanings the conflict took on as it ran its course. Surely the outbreak of sustained unrest in 1872 cannot be anticipated merely by reading barometers (or tea leaves) of oppression; even if reliable serial data on wages, fines, and punishments were preserved, the intensity of oppression would have to be viewed as an immeasurable quantum and evaluated against the preexisting pride and self-awareness of the particular group of workers. Similarly, even if we assumed that scholars could agree on such a gauge, degrees of hostility and resentment on the part of workers are registered on no scale that would help us to plot them over time; nor would we be justified in assuming that the outbreak of unrest would necessarily occur when the gauge was at its highest. That the focal point of the Kreenholm unrest, the locus of its strength for the duration of its existence, was situated among weavers, the least downtrodden (though not the best paid) workers at the factory, belies the existence of an algorithm for computing repression's contribution to protest; so too does the existence of moments when oppression was intense and resentment great, but resistance was absent. The general setting we are now familiar with and the modus operandi of the managers as they went about the daily task of exercising their authority—these must be the essential elements of any analysis of the speed and intensity with which a weaver-led movement would find resonance and response among broader strata of workers. Likewise, the special prerogatives of weavers as Kreenholm's "labor aristocracy," and, most important, management's repeated challenge to those privileges, will help us to account for the weavers' leadership role once the struggle was in train. But it is the peculiar circumstances of the summer of 1872 to which we turn now for an understanding of why "the patience of the workers finally ran out" just when and where it did.
Continues...
Excerpted from Law and Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872by Reginald E. Zelnik Copyright © 1995 by Reginald E. Zelnik. Excerpted by permission.
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