As the revolutionaries struggled to integrate their ideas of individuality and experience with their actual experiences of individuals and ‘the narod,’ the tsarist authorities, led by the Third Section and its gendarme corps, mounted ever widening and ever more detailed investigations into the Empire’s most unruly and politically unreliable elements. The documented history of the ‘developed workers’ begins in the early 1870s with these investigations. Alekseev, Semën Volkov and the other circle workers’ first confrontations with the state were part of an investigation of ‘sedition’ stretching from St. Petersburg’s workers’ artels and factories to the capital’s University, Medical-Surgical Academy and Agricultural Institute (Volkov, Appx B:
282). Between November 1873 and March 1874 the chaikovtsy and the progandists that orbited around the circle were mostly seized by the police, questioned, then arrested.73 The workers’
cicles in Vasilevskii Island, Vyborg and Nevskii gate were destroyed along with the students’
71 Sinegub admits that he cannot remember their names: see Ibid, p. 41.
72 Ibid, p. 41.
73 Being ‘seized’ (zaderzhan(-a)) or ‘brought in’ for questioning to a local police station or the offices of Third Section was not always accompanied by arrest (arest). Arrest would often take place only after the suspect had been held informally and interrogated several times by the authorities. It was often the case that worker-suspects – depending on their responses to interrogation – would be released shortly after questioning, without being subject to further questioning, arrest or individual surveillance by the police (see below).
and the radicals’. Volkov had occasion to describe three of his interrogations (doprosy)74 by the state after he was first seized in March, 1874 (Volkov, Appx B: 281-2, 283-5).75 It was during these interrogations that Volkov and the circle workers’ particular lives were first marked as in some way historically significant. It is, therefore, in the mass of documents generated by the complex network of government institutions involved in these investigations (including the Third Section, its gendarmes and secret agents, local police forces under the direction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and civil and military courts under the direction of the Ministry of Justice)76 that the radicalised elements of the Russian working class acquired, for the first time, their own (albeit rather strangulated) ‘voice’ in the historical record. As the ‘positive notion’ of the workers’ representative function and the workers’ voice were being formulated by those who ‘went to the people’ (and the people they went to), the negative notion of the worker-intelligent – a figure at once self-determining and manipulated, responsible and irresponsible, of his class and different from it – developed from official attitudes to the ‘working people’ and the documentation of its radicalisation.
Responding to a perceived weakness in policing after Karakazov’s attempt to assassinate Aleksandr II in 1866, over the next decade the tsarist government instituted measures to strengthen the Empire’s security forces. In that year a special bureau concerned with thwarting terrorist plots was formed in St. Petersburg, and a couple of years later the corps of gendarmes were granted powers to investigate state crimes and punish those accused of them with further police observation, short prison sentences and administrative exile, all independently of the judiciary systems set in place by the reforms of 1864.77 Much of the police activity of the 1860s
74 The word opros (‘questioning,’ as opposed to ‘interrogation’) is sometimes used in the literature – for instance, in Sinegub’s memoirs (see below) - but rarely in the official documentation of the gendarmes, Third Section or regular police.
75 Volkov’s apartment was searched by Maior Kononov of the Gendarme Corp, ‘under the observation of prokurory,’ on the night of the 17/18 March, 1874 (see ‘Dokladnaia zapiska III otdeleniia Aleksandru II ob obyskakh i doporsakh v sviazi s revoliutsionnoi propaganda sredi rabochikh Peterburga,’ [18] March, 1874, RD 2.i, p. 449). Volkov was questioned first on the 19th of March, and was subsequently arrested and held by the III Department until transferred to the ‘House of Preliminary Detention’ (Dom Predvaritel’noi Zakliuchenii) (see
‘Doneseniie nachal’nika Peterburgskogo gubernskogo zhandarmskogo upravleniia N. S. Birina nachalniku III otdeleniia P. A. Shubalovu ob arestakh uchastnikov revoliutsionnoi propagandy,’ March 21, 1874, RD 2.i, p.
462; Volkov, Appx. B: 8.
76 On the Third Department: J. W. Daly, The Watchful State: Security and Opposition in Russia, 1906-1917 (DeKalb, 2004), p. xi-xiii (for a rough overview); I. Lauchlan, ‘The Okhrana: Security Policing in Late Imperial Russia,’ Late Imperial Russia: Problems and Prospects: Essays in Honour of R. B. McKean, I. D. Thatcher (ed.), (Manchester, 2005), p. 44-6; on the Ministry of Internal Affairs: D. Orlovskii, ‘High Officials in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 1855-1881,’ Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, W. M. Pintner and D. K. Rowney (eds.), (London, 1980), p. 250-252.
77 Daly, Watchful State, p. 3.
92 prefigured the repressive activities of the rest of the nineteenth century. Despite the post-Emancipation extension of reforms and the nominal liberalisation of certain institutions (particularly the university), paranoia about the harmful effects of alien philosophies from France and Germany, carried by malcontents like diseases into Russia to infect the Russian young, grew as perceived and actual threats to the existing order appeared in various forms:
minor disorders among the peasants and students broke out with increasing regularity; secret circles were discovered; assassination attempts foiled. Some of the groups (like N. Ishutin’s) had real terrorist intentions but hardly any supporters; others (like the earlier Zemlia i Volia group, in which both Chernyshevskii and Lavrov were participants) were multiplied many times in their strength and discipline by the imaginations of their investigators and prosecutors.
Paranoia grew correspondingly, manifesting itself, on the one hand, in knee–jerk policies towards students’ associations and the literature they obtained from Western Europe, and towards students’ interactions with the ‘lower classes’ on the other.78 From June 1869, provincial branches of the Third Department were charged with observing the students’
interactions with the narod as they took their summer vacations at home.79 In 1869, the Petersburg gendarme planted agents among the students of the Technical Institute, the Agricultural College and the Medical-Surgical Academy as disorders and unauthorised gatherings reached a new peak, manifesting in the main the student’s own anger with changes of regulations regarding the institutions of higher education, the deteriorating material position of students from poorer backgrounds, and their inability to confront either problem in the context of strict, state control of extra–governmental ‘association.’80 Similar steps were taken as Moscow University played host to ‘anti-governmental thinking’ and ‘sharp words against the Tsar’ in December, 1870.81
78 See Mezentsev’s circular to the provincial branches of the III Department, 23 May, 1870, GARF, f. 109, 3-ti eksp., 1870, ed. kh. 50, l. 2 (which uses the phrase ‘lower classes’).
79 Ibid, ll. 2-2 ob. The original circular ordering the ‘thorough observation…of the higher education students’
interaction with the lower classes’ dates from the 3 June, 1869 (l. 2). The file also contains responses from local nachal’niki to Mezentsev in St. Petersburg on the results of these observations (ll. 5-16).
80 Morozov, ‘Ocherk…,’ RN I, p. 203-5; see also GARF, f. 109, 3-ti eksp., 1870, ed. kh. 52, (ll. 1-32) on the setting up a mutual-aid kassy in Novorossiiskii University and the government’s heavy-handed response (l. 31-31 ob) to a venture the arrested and exiled have claimed was ‘non-political’ in intent (l. 12-12 ob).
81 See the ‘Letter from the nachal’nik of the gendarme, Moskovskaia guberniia, to Mezentsev,’ 14December, 1870, GARF, f. 109, 3-ti eksp., ed. kh. 96 (ch. 1), l. 40, on the planting of special agents among Moscow University students.
6. Tsar Aleksandr II
As revolutionary organisations of workers and students were being uncovered by police investigations in the 1871-76 period (the dolgushintsy in 1871, the chaikovtsy and lavristy in the winter 1873-4, the VRSO in 1875-6), the Third Department and other officials more readily drew connections between the revolutionaries’ efforts at agitation and disorders among the peasantry (especially blaming the spread of rumours of land repartition among the rural populace)82 and the urban workers (blaming anti-governmental propaganda). But the notion of the ‘outside influence’ - especially that of the individual agitator or ringleader – had high-stock in the law courts and with the secret police even aside from the connections explicitly uncovered by them between radicalised students and the working population. The long-running concerns of the government about workers’ poor living conditions, health problems and arbitrary treatment by contractors and factory administrators remained hidden from view in memoranda and letters circulated between nachal’niki of the gendarmes and police, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Aleksandr II. In this private sphere of reports and memos, some officials analysed the relationship between the workers’ socio-economic position and the
82 See, for example: ‘Tsirkular III otdelenia gubernskim zhandarmskim upravleniem ob usilenii nadzor za studentami tekhnologicheskogo instituta, prokhodiaushchimi praktiki na fabrikakh i zavodakh,’ 25 May, 1874, SRT, p. 150-1; see also ‘Zapiski moskovskogo gubernatora A. A. Livena ministru vnutrennikh del o polozhenii rabochikh v Moskovskoi gubernii,’ 24 Novermber, 1874, RD 2.ii, p. 280-82; 306.
94 propensity to ‘walk out,’ complain about company policy, strike or ‘riot.’83 But the willingness of the authorities to seriously consider the grievances of workers against their employers in each particular case, and even to take discreet action against obvious abuses of power by the latter, was always accompanied in the public sphere by the public use of the law against those individuals from among the workers whom it considered immediately ‘answerable’
(otvetstvennyi) for disorders.84
The immediate root of this peculiar mixture of private concern and public condemnation lay in the reactions of Adjutant General Trepov to the textile workers’ strike at Petersburg’s Nevskii Novobumagapriadil’naia fabrika (New Cotton-Spinning Factory, hereafter: Nevskii factory) in May, 1870.85 On the 22nd of May some 63 workers struck at the factory having demanded remuneration for pay owed to them before the Easter holiday, which the factory administration insisted had already been paid to them, according to agreed procedures, though their mal’chiki assistants. Having chosen three representatives and had their requests written up by the local innkeeper, the workers approached the English foreman, a certain John Beck, who promptly refused their demand.86 The resultant work stoppage led to the temporary halt in production in one department of the factory, employing 800 workers.87 In the period between Trepov’s report of these facts to the Tsar (27th of May) and his later recommendations to him on the 30th of May, the police investigation into the causes of the strike was already over and the ‘ringleaders’
rounded up. These four were duly tried without a jury in the local okrug court, along with 52 other lesser offenders, in early June. The latter were given mild sentences of three days arrest;
the ringleaders, having already served the short prison sentences of seven days during
83 See for instance, ‘Article on the worker question, by the St. Petersburg Department for the [consideration of the]
workers question,’ 3 July, 1871, GARF f. 109, 3-ti eksp., 1870, ed. kh. 64, ch. 1.i, l. 92 – 92 ob; see also ‘Iz politicheskogo obzora kapitana korpusa zhandarmov Zav’ialov nachal’niku Vladimir. gubern. Zhandarmskogo uprav. P. E. Belovodskomu o polozhenii rabochikh i revoliutsionnoi propaganda v Shuiskom i Kovrovskom uezdakh,’ 24 December, 1875, Doc. 16, RD 2.ii, p. 36 -43.
84 See, for example, N. A. Treskin, ‘Volneniia rabochikh na moskovskoi tekstil’noi fabrike I. P. Bultikova v 1851,’
Istoricheskie Zapiski, no 7, 1940, p. 271, 273, after 1870: see RD 2.i, p. 252-3, 255, 257-9, 277.
85 A detailed account of the strike, government and press reactions to it, and the hastily organized trial of the ringleaders is given in R. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855-1870, (Stanford, 1971), p. 340 – 369. Some of the archival documents used here can be found in RD 2.i, Documents 81-86, p. 238-243.
86 Zelnik, Labor and Society, p. 341.
87 ‘Report of nachal’nik of St. Petersburg police Rurenov to Trepov,’ 27May, 1870, GARF, f. 109, 3-ti eksp., 1870, ed. kh. 64, ch. 1.i, l. 1; ‘Report of General Adjutant Trepov to Tsar Aleksandr II,’ 27May, 1870, ibid, ll. 2-2 ob.
questioning and now left without work, were sent away from the capital back to their home regions at the behest of Trepov.88
The views of Trepov contained in the May 27th report formed the institutional basis for much of police and gendarme policy towards workers’ disorders over the next three or four years.
Having observed no general disturbance among Petersburg’s working population, Trepov concluded that the Nevskii strike was caused by ‘a lack of consciousness among workers of their rights and duties,’ which could be corrected by swift punishment of those responsible. He also hoped this would have ‘beneficial effect’ of discouraging such actions among the workers as a whole.89 Hence a division was made by Trepov (reinforced by the difference between the okrug court’s sentencing of the four ringleaders, on the one hand, and the other 52 strikers on the other), between those held individually responsible (having brought something alien into the worker population), those who had been dragged along with these ill-intentioned ringleaders, and the labouring population as a whole. That the first category were not simply scapegoats or
‘examples’ made, but genuinely considered answerable for disorders by the authorities, is shown by the manner in which Trepov’s suggestion for close police surveillance of the workers was followed in regional police departments. In Moscow the police were given a ‘free pass’ to enter any factory they liked and observe the workforce at will;90 the nachal’nik of the Moscow gendarmes noted that police would need to be ‘on the spot’ anyway (e.g. permanently at the factories and in the workers’ quarters) if they were to identify quickly the potential and actual
‘troublemakers’ who might ‘cause strikes.’91 Specific instructions sent in July to the guberniia police departments went so far as to detail the typical characteristics of probable troublemakers:
‘those who express dissatisfaction with the management,’ ‘especially those who complain about wages,’ ‘[those] who leave the factory with improper haste.’92
88 ‘Trepov...to Tsar,’ 27 May, 1870, GARF f. 109, 3-ti eksp., ed. kh. 64, ch. 1.i, ll. 2 ob -3; ‘Report of Colonel Kukov to Trepov,’ 13 June 1870, ibid., ll. 5-5 ob.
89 ‘Report of Trepov to Tsar,’ 27 May, 1870, l. 2 ob.
90 ‘Report from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the nachal’nik of the Moskovskaia gub. gendarme,’ 21 July, 1870, GARF f. 109, 3-ti eksp., 1870, ed. kh. 64, ch. 1.i, l. 25.
91 ‘Letter of the nachal’nik of the Moskovskaia gub. gendarme to the Ministry of Internal Affairs,’ 23 July, 1870, ibid., l. 26 -26 ob. The nachal’nik is complaining that the ‘police –chinovniki’ are too familiar and friendly with the fabrikanty, which leaves the police open to manipulation. Hence ‘on the spot’ police presence would allow them to observe the fabrikanty as well as the workers, and stay familiar with both so as to better ‘judge their moods.’
92 ‘Instructions to local police on the observation of the worker population,’ 23July, 1870, GARF f. 109, 3-ti eksp., 1870, ed. kh. 64, ch. 1.i, l. 28 ob.
96
7. Nevskii New Cotton-Spinning factory, St. Petersburg (1870s)93
Fear of the possible influence of students over the urban workers was already noticeable in the early 1870s.94 Yet the absence of evidence of outside agitation did not entail the wholesale abandonment of ‘bad apple’ explanations for the complexities of socio-economic explanation, but the simple transferral of ‘outsider’ status to those workers identified by the police as the ringleaders or instigators of unrest. If this status could not be conferred in terms of ‘estate difference,’ it was conferred in the act of disobedience itself, in bringing ‘forms of the expression of dissatisfaction alien to [Russian] soil’95 to Russian factories, workshops and construction sites. Concern with relations between workers and their employers – especially the fabrikanty in the cities and towns – continued to appear in private,96 but even these magnanimous (and still hidden) calls for the regulation of both sides of the worker/employer relationship took place within the context of increased police surveillance of the fabrichnye and the zavodskie populations, and their analyses were shot through with the logic of a public policy
93 B. M. Kochakov et al, Ocherki istorii Leningrada, v. 2 (Leningrad, 1957), p. 111.
94 See ‘Instructions to local police….,’ 23July, 1870, GARF f. 109, 3-ti eksp., 1870, ed. kh. 64, ch. 1.i,, l. 28-29 ob, instructing police to pay special attention to workers’ relations with ‘students, seminarists, gymnasium students and other people who draw attention to themselves,’ and especially to students from St. Petersburg’s Technical Institute involved in ‘practical work’ at factories in their home regions and elsewhere during their summer vacations.
95 ‘Article on the worker question,’ 3 July, 1870, op. cit, l. 92 – 92 ob.
96 Ibid, l. 92 ob (on worker/employer relations). This same article talks of suspicions of agitation among the workers somehow connected to similar activity in the factories of Prussia’s southeastern industrial region (95 -95 ob).
meant not only to scare the mass of workers away from strikes, but also to identify the ‘ill-intentioned outsiders’ (aliens) who might try to ‘instigate strikes among the unconscious Russian workers’ and therefore avert disorder by eliminating its immediate causes.97
Though the state’s domination of the labouring masses was a constant theme of social -revolutionary propaganda, for the early, ‘developed’ workers in St. Petersburg direct and personal confrontation with the state remained an abstract possibility not much accounted for in the conduct of their own highly illegal activities. Aleksei Peterson, one of Semën Volkov’s closest friends at the Vasil’ostrovsk district workers’ circle, observed in his memoirs that he had
‘hardly been touched by the police’ until the arrests of late 1873 and early 1874.98 The state’s hesitancy vis-à-vis the criminal actions of the ‘common people’ gave the worker-intelligenty a breathing space hardly ever afforded to individuals within and around the periphery of the student body after 1866. Since the state’s investigations began with a view of the student-intelligenty as the true source of sedition within Russia, reports apparently documenting the active role of workers in ‘collectivist’ or ‘internationalist’ propaganda were acted upon only timidly. The state ideology of the ‘ringleader,’ still in the mid-1870s applied to factory disorders and cases of seditious ‘instigation,’99 did not easily comprehend illegal activities involving the active roles both of intelligenty and of peasant-workers. To identify a peasant as a ringleader in such a case implied that he was responsible for thoughts and actions supposed quite alien to the
‘common people’ (especially atheist, anti-Tsarist, or regicidal sentiments, or the distribution of propaganda containing such sentiments), and hitherto attributable only to the harmful influence of members of the educated classes or other ‘outsiders’. Publicly, the state was never to recognise the full answerability (otvetstvennost’) of the workers alongside their intelligenty
97 ‘Report of the Ministry of Internal Affairs to the nachal’niki of regional police departments,’ 6 June, 1870, Ibid, l. 16.
98 A. N. Peterson, ‘Iz pros’by grazhdanina Sovetskoi Respubliki Aleksei Nikolaevich Peterson v Sotsial’noe Obespechenie o pensii,’ KiS, 1924, no. 3, p. 226.
99 There was some overlap between ‘instigation’ considered characteristic of the ‘common people’ (e.g. spreading rumours about, or commenting upon, the possible re-division [peredel’ or razdel’] of the land) and the revolutionary propaganda being spread through ‘word-of-mouth’ or ‘popular books’ by intelligenty and worker- circles (what can be called ‘seditious instigation,’ though this term will not be found in the documents). Some correspondence between the ideas of the ‘instigators’ with the propagandists (especially notions that linked property rights to labour) could of course be expected given the aim of the social revolutionaries to ‘express’ the
‘unconscious or conscious ideals already held by the narod’ (see, for instance, Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, p.
214-7; ‘Rech’ S. I. Bardinoi na zasedanii suda Osobogo Prisuvtstviia Pravitel’stvuiushchego senata (protsess
“50-ti”),’ RN 1, p. 356). Usually the distinction between ‘rumour spreading’ (simple ‘instigation’) and revolutionary propaganda was made on the basis of the use of the ‘popular books’ known to have been printed by the dolgushinsty (e.g. Bervi-Flerovskii’s ‘Kak dolzhen zhit’…’), the chaikovtsy (‘Chtoi-to, bratstsy…,’
‘Skazka o chetvërtakh brat’iakh…’) and other groups, or the involvement of students already known or suspected of bearing radical (revolutionary, regicidal) sentiments (see below).
98 comrades for involvement in seditious, criminal activities. Privately, a certain ‘commitment’ to the cause was attributed to those workers who refused to accept the peasant status and
98 comrades for involvement in seditious, criminal activities. Privately, a certain ‘commitment’ to the cause was attributed to those workers who refused to accept the peasant status and