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forfeit several weeks' or months' wages, although those who quit their jobs during winter months faced lighter penalties.^^

Another common practice was to pay wages only a few times a year, and to pay them in arrears, so that, for example, July's might not be received until mid-August. By the time the relevant pay-day arrived, workers were several weeks into the new pay period, and if they left they would not receive all that was due to them. Another example is found in the "rules of internal order" which existed at the Batashev foundry (Tula) and which contained the provision that a minimum of two weeks' salary must be withheld at all times from workers' wages. One factory investigated by Factory Inspector 1. lanzhul in 1883 withheld ten per cent of all wages between October and Easter, and paid the sum only to workers who "re-enlisted" for the summer term.'^^ In the long interval between pay-days, workers were allowed to buy goods on credit from factory owned stores, and were thereby even more tightly bound to their jobs by indebtedness. In at least one case, in the early 1880s, the worker indebtedness was so great that money wages were never seen at all by the workers."^ Such abuses were reduced but not wholly eliminated by the Factory Law of June 3, 1886. Fines imposed by employers, factory stores, and the mechanics of hiring, firing, and wage payments were major areas affected by this legislation.^^

I. lanzhul, Iz vospominanii i perepiski fabrichnogo inspektora pervogo prizyva: p.86.

^ GATO fond 46 opis 2 delo 1472.

^^ I. lanzhul, Iz vospominanii i perepiski fabrichnogo inspektora pervogo prizyva: p.87.

^^ I. lanzhul, Iz vospominanii i perepiski fabrichnogo inspektora pervogo prizyva: p.88.

For a detailed descriprion see M.I. Tugan-Baranovskii, The Russian Factory in the

1 3 0 In other instances employers refused, albeit illegally, to return

the passports of workers who wished to depart, seeking thereby to restrict their movement. Other employers established a system of mutual guarantees (krugovaia poruka), under which each worker had to be vouched for by another, who would pay a penalty if he left. Factories were also known to operate on a single shift in the summer months and revert to an around the clock, two-shift system in the autumn. Still another way of compensating for a shortage of workers in summer was to require each worker to tend several machines.

All of these measures had the direct or indirect effect of binding the workers to their jobs. Most were directed specifically at summer departures, that is, at departures for agricultural work rather than movement from one factory to another. The fact that many employers considered such measures necessary suggests that workers had not fully accepted the idea of year-round employment, and that many engaged in it u n w i l l i n g l y . ^ ^

Workers' economic ties to the countryside

Although year-round employment away from the native village was a major change in peasants' life patterns, the practice of otkhodnichestvo or temporary, rather than permanent, departure in search of wages persisted.'^^ studies of individual factories suggest the

great majority of workers in the Tula region retained land allotments which were either tended by relatives or leased to other peasants. ^ One exception noted by Smidovich was the metalworking industry, whose higher wages seem to have been incentive enough to keep workers from departing. V. Smidovich, Materialy dlia opisaniia g. July. p.29.

For indications that the pattern of otkhodnichestvo continued in some parts of Russia as late as the 1950s, see Stephen and Ethel Dunn, The Peasants of Central

1 3 1 The most complete set of data on Tula workers' ties to the land

was compiled at the Tula cartridge factory in 1899, where seventy-five per cent of all male workers were individually questioned about their holdings. Of 1335 peasants, just over ninety per cent possessed a land allotment, and of the remaining ten per cent, more than three- quarters were from families who received no land at the time of Emancipation.48

The question arises as to the significance of the stakes held in land allotments by the workers. Moreover, were they burdens carried unwillingly because of the legal restrictions described above? The results of the cartridge factory's study suggest several answers to these questions.

In the first place, only sixty-four per cent of respondents were able to supply detailed information about the size of their landholdings. Absent from the countryside for several years, they had not kept track of changes in the household allotment. However, they were much better informed about family livestock, with only one of the workers queried unable to give an exact answer on this point.49 Livestock, as Lenin and subsequent Marxist investigators appreciated, was an important indicator of a family's well-being, for without it even a better than average land allotment could not be worked.

The workers' responses reveal a substantial proportion of those with land had no livestock whatsoever (22.7 per cent).50 Fully 37.2 per

^^ A.A. Korolev, "Finansovo-ekonomicheskaia deiatelnost Tulskogo patronnogo

zavoda v kontse XlX-nachale XX vv. [1899-1907 gg.]," in Iz Istorii Tulskogo Kraia. Tula: 1972, p.26. It should be noted that the cartridge workers were not, in the main, short-term workers newly arrived from the countryside; they had spent an average of 10.3 years in factory employment.

^^ A.A. Korolev, 'Tinansovo-ekonomicheskaia deiatelnost Tulskogo patronnogo zavoda..." p.26.

^^ A.A. Korolev, 'Tinansovo-ekonomicheskaia deiatelnost Tulskogo patronnogo zavoda..." p.28.

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cent of all respondents reported their families were without a horse with the figures ranging from 62.7 per cent (Kashirskii uezd, Tula province) to 19.7 per cent (Odoevskii uezd, Tula province). On the other hand, 37.1 per cent of respondents counted two or more horses in their households. As for cows, 24.8 per cent of all respondents had none, but 23.2 per cent had two or more.^i

These percentages suggest that although a large proportion of workers was recruited from the most impoverished stratum of the peasantry, that is, from a group whose ties to agriculture were the most tenuous, another large contingent came from the more prosperous "middle peasantry" and kept, through their families, an active interest in agriculture.

The results of local government (zemstva) surveys are enlightening as they enquired in detail into a broadly representative sample of households, and asked questions about each of those household's access to land, livestock and non-family labour, if any.52 They itemised the components of peasant income and expenditure, in cash and in kind. Finally, they grouped the households according to a chosen indicator, usually allotment land or the number of horses owned. In this way, the investigators were able to depict the stratification of the peasantry in any given village at any given moment.

A.A. Korolev, "Finansovo-ekonomicheskaia deiatelnost Tulskogo patronnogo zavoda..." p.30.

These investigations about the internal organisation of peasant households were gathered and published by the zemstva, local authorities that the tsarist regime established in most rural areas in 1864. Initially, their efforts at data collection had a fiscal purpose, but they gradually assumed another character, as the zemstva statisticians sought to uncover the nature of peasant society in post-reform Russia. By 1892 more than 120 districts had been covered, comprising around three million households in all. Dozens of surveys of individual districts v^rere published before 1917.

133 These zemstva investigations, in the form of budget studies,

depicted a society that was far removed from the image of an egalitarian and homogeneous peasantry. One of the most well-known surveys, conducted in Voronezh province in 1887-1896 by F.A. Shcherbina, indicated that the gross income of the poorest households (those that sowed no allotment land and those sowing less than five desiatiny) amounted to no more than two-thirds of the per capita income of the wealthiest category. The net income of the "landless" households, again in per capita terms, came to just over one-tenth of the net income of the wealthiest, although the differential was less extreme in the case of those households that sowed up to five desiatiny. Furthermore, the wealthiest households (those with more than twenty-five desiatiny) were able to set aside a much higher proportion of their income for expenditure on the farm, rather than on the personal needs of family members. ^^

Data on the cartridge workers' landholdings are, as noted above, less complete. Of 780 workers who were able to supply information about their holdings, 79.3 per cent held less than one desiatina for each member of their family,^'^ and only 3.4 per cent more than two desiatiny. The overall average was 0.57 desiatiny per person.55 when these figures were compared with average allotments in the workers' native gubernii, they turned out to be between thirty- two to fifty-nine per cent below the regional averages.^^

53 F.A. Shcherbina, Krestianskie byudzhety Voronezh: 1900, pp.124, 198-199, 237. Families, as we will see later on, were large. The 1318 workers in the cartridge factory study had a total of 9725 persons in their households, of whom 5605 were able to work. A.A. Korolev, "Finansovo-ekonomicheskaia deiatelnost Tulskogo patronnogo zavoda..." p.37.

A.A. Korolev, 'Tinansovo-ekonomicheskaia deiatelnost Tulskogo patronnogo zavoda..." pp.26-27.

A.A. Korolev, "Finansovo-ekonomicheskaia deiatelnost Tulskogo patronnogo zavoda..." p.35.

1 3 4

These figures support the suggestion that social differentiation in the countryside was forcing the poorest peasants off the land and into the factories. Data on the disposition of land suggests, however, that the great majority of workers retained an active interest in agriculture. Only 0.5 per cent left their lands idle, and 14.3 per cent rented them out to other peasants. The remaining eigl\ty-five per cent left their allotment in the care of relatives, and 7.3 per cent of these hired labourers to assist them.57 In Tver guberniia almost ten per cent of peasant farmers were landless, Kostroma had 9.05 per cent, Pskov had 3.26 per cent, Riazan had 3.56 per cent and Nizhni Novgorod had 11.57 per cent. Historians have noted that in regions with industry there were usually large numbers of deserted holdings (otsutstvuiushchikh dvorov). In seven uezdy of Tver guberniia, for example, during the 1880s, 5.9 per cent of farm holdings were deserted; by 1911 this number had jumped to 16.3 per cent in one uezd and 19.8 per cent and 21.3 per cent in two other uezdy.^^

In sum, although the cartridge workers rarely took an active role in the working of their lands and were often uninformed about changes in their allotments, their ties to agriculture seem more than just a legal formality. Data from another source, though less complete, supports this conclusion. Results of a survey carried out by the Moscow Factory Inspectorate in 1893, covering seven Tula factories which employed a total of 2015 male workers, found that 23.5 per cent of these workers retained allotments and departed in the summer to work them. A further 51.2 per cent had turned their allotments over

A.A. Korolev, 'Tinansovo-ekonomicheskaia deiatelnost Tulskogo patronnogo zavoda..." p.38.

L.M. Ivanov, "Preemstvennost fabrichno-zavodskogo truda i formirovanie proletariata v Rossii," in L.M. Ivanov ed., Rabochii klass i rabochee dvizhenie v

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