The rise in the tide of revolution which had been foretold by Stalin at the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, and for which the Bolsheviks had persistently and stubbornly worked, became a fact after the suppression of the Kornilov conspiracy. The Kornilov affair served as clear and palpable proof to the people that the bourgeoisie and the landlords would go to any length and commit any crime to restore and retain their full power over the toiling people, and that the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks were prepared to commit any act of treachery to preserve their coalition with the bourgeoisie.
The civil war started by the capitalists in the Kornilov revolt caused strong repercussions among the masses. The working class was the first to be stirred into movement.
The action of the bourgeoisie was countered by a powerful strike movement, which gained in intensity daily, embracing increasing numbers of workers and spreading to the most out-of-the-way places, places which had not been affected even by the high tide of the strike movement in the Revolution of 1905.
The metal workers took the lead. Their heroic struggle showed how much energy the proletariat was capable of developing when led by so staunch a party ideologically as the Bolshevik Party, the party of Leninist, revolutionary Marxism. Until July 23 the Petrograd metal workers had still refrained from striking. After that they decided to start a general fight for the revision of wage agreements. The metal workers were confronted by a solid front of the employers, organised and led by the Chief Committee of United Industry.
The manufacturers were supported by the Provisional Government, which intervened every time the conflict assumed an acute form, But the concerted and organised onslaught of the metal workers broke the united front of the industrialists and in August compelled them to sign a new wage agreement.
The example of the Petrograd metal workers, and of the metal workers of Moscow, who took action almost at the same time, evoked a response all over the country. The metal-workers organised in the Urals, the Ukraine, the Donbas and Siberia. Experience had taught them that the revolutionary struggle was the only way to escape the crisis and the famine which the bourgeoisie was deliberately fostering.
The metal-workers were followed by the textile workers. At the linen mills of A. A. Lokalov in Gavrilo-Yamskaya in the Yaroslavl Province, over 3,000 weavers demanded an increase in wages and the sale of goods by the factory truck shop at fixed prices. The Menshevik Minister of Labour, Gvozdyev, intervened. This defender of the bourgeoisie proposed that the dispute should be submitted to a court of arbitration consisting of three representatives from the trade union, three from the factory administration and one person appointed by the Ministry of Labour. The court opened on September 27. The arbitrators dragged out the proceedings, and it was not until the middle of October that they at last gave their decision, a decision in favour of the workers. But even then the manufacturers would not concede.
In the country town of Likino in the Orekhovo-Zuyevo district, 4,000 workers, driven by starvation, for two months put up a solid resistance to the sabotage of the employer, who in August had closed down the factory on the pretext that there was no fuel. On September 2 the management proposed that the workers should take their discharge tickets. The workers refused. They sent delegates to Gvozdyev. They visited the Moscow Commissar of Labour. The reply was always the same: there is starvation everywhere, we cannot help. And it was not an isolated manufacturer with whom the workers had to deal in this case. Smirnov, the mill owner, was also Chairman of the Moscow War Industry Committee and an important official of the Provisional Government. Smirnov refused to make any concessions to the workers, even though the Moscow Soviet intervened in the conflict. The Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which was anxious to prevent the dispute from assuming an acute character, called upon Smirnov to concede, but the manufacturer obstinately continued to sabotage.
The workers of many other mills of Orekhovo-Zuyevo went on strike at the same time as the Likino workers. Separate strikes and conflicts developed into a big strike of textile workers in the whole Ivanovo-Kineshma district, where, in response to the call of the central strike committee, as many as 40,000 weavers downed tools on October 20.
The leather workers of Moscow began a strike on August 16 which lasted two and a half months. They forced a breach in the united front of the employers and compelled them to negotiate separately.
The movement assumed wide proportions among the printers. The Petrograd printers won their strike on September 15 and the Moscow printers on the eve of the October Revolution. The printers of Petrograd and Moscow were followed by those of Ekaterinburg, Ekaterinoslav, Minsk, Baku, Astrakhan and Vologda.
The struggle assumed a stormy character among the miners of the Donbas. The strike movement spread from pit to pit, grew daily in dimensions and finally embraced the entire proletariat of the Donbas.
The strike movement spread to the railwaymen. The Executive Committee of the Railwaymen’s Union (abbreviated, Vikzhel), consisting largely of Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, made every effort to prevent the railwaymen from taking action. The leaders of the Vikzhel were mostly railway officials hence their bourgeois sympathies. The Vikzhel leaders promised to secure wage increases without a conflict by appealing to the bourgeois government. The Kornilov revolt convinced the railwaymen that delay only reduced the chances of an improvement in their conditions and made it easier for the bourgeoisie to consolidate its forces. The movement among the railwaymen, stimulated by the Kornilov affair, grew rapidly, as though the workers were anxious to make up for lost time.
The scared members of the Vikzhel on the Syzran-Vyazma Railway complained:
“It is extremely difficult, and in places impossible, to restrain the railwaymen from action. Partial actions break out spontaneously.”(1)
How strong was the pressure of the railwaymen can be judged from the fact that the Vikzhel, whose name was synonymous with servile fidelity to the capitalists, agreed to call a general strike on the railways on September 23. True, these “revolutionaries of the hour and of necessity”—revolutionary, that is to say, because of the pressure of the masses and not from innate class convictions—managed to stifle the strike within two days; but they could not switch the movement on to lines of compromise. The railwaymen’s organisations, especially the lower ones, protested against the treachery of the leaders and remained out on strike. And on the eve of the October Revolution there began an unanimous movement among the railway workers which, in October, smashed the sabotage of the Vikzhel when the latter tried to save the Provisional Government.
In a word, the strike movement swept through the whole country. Millions of proletarians rose up against the bourgeoisie.
What did this exceptionally widespread strike movement show?
It showed, firstly, that the various sections of the proletarians were being drawn into the struggle unevenly. The metal workers, who formed the core of the working class, were in the forefront. The struggle in their case was begun by the “Bolshevik” factories, the big plants of Petrograd and Moscow, where the leading forces of the Party were centred. The proletarian vanguard of Moscow and Petrograd drew the main body of the workers into the movement, stirred up the provinces and brought the laggers into line.
It showed, secondly, that since the Kornilov revolt the movement of the proletariat had become much more organised. After a period of respite and accumulation of strength, a vast number of trade unions were created.
By July there were 976 trade unions in Russia, with a membership of one and a half million, among them:(2)
| Metal-workers’ unions | over 400,000 members |
| Textile workers’ unions | 178,560 ” |
| Printers’ unions | 55,291 ” |
| Needle workers’ unions | 51,545 ” |
| Woodworkers’ unions | 28,601 ” |
| Commercial and industrial employees’ unions | 45,981 ” |
By October the membership of the trade unions had grown to over two million workers, of which Petrograd and Moscow accounted for one million. To the trade unions should be added the factory committees in the factories themselves. The trade unions and factory committees served as transmission belts for the Bolshevik Party by which it maintained contact with the worker masses. And in “workers’ control” it had a succinct and effective slogan which pointed to the immediate aim of the struggle of the proletariat.
The high state of organisation of the workers was accompanied by a high level of class consciousness and class solidarity. When the hungry workers of Likino came to demonstrate in Orekhovo-Zuyevo on September 19, the factories in the latter city stopped work and at a meeting the workers decided that each of them should feed one of the guests from Likino at his own home. An eye-witness of this demonstration of class solidarity writes:
“The visitors from Likino were assigned in the space of a few minutes. For some time afterwards many kept seeking for workers from Likino, but they had already all left for the homes and dormitories of the workers.”(3)
At a meeting held that same day the workers decided to contribute one day’s earnings for the support of the hungry comrades and to organise collections.
After a strike lasting three months, the printers of Ekaterinburg sent a letter to their Moscow comrades in which they said:
“The strike has ended in a victory for the workers. . . . Once more, comrades of Moscow, we thank you for your support, which helped us to emerge victorious.”(4)
The printers of Kharkov also sent their thanks to the printers of Moscow for financial assistance rendered:
“In greeting you, comrades of Moscow, the strike committee expresses its confidence that, with a united proletariat, we shall defeat capital.”(5)
And everywhere in the provinces the labour movement at that period furnished striking evidence of the ability of the Bolshevik Party to combine partial demands with the general aims of the movement.
True to Lenin’s precept—always with the masses and at the head of the masses, never running ahead, but never lagging behind—the Bolshevik Party defended the everyday demands of the workers for higher wages, improved working conditions and food supply, control over the hiring and dismissal of workers, and the protection of female labour. The Bolsheviks acted boldly and energetically, not only as organisers of political campaigns but also as leaders of the disputes and strikes of individual groups of workers. They went among all grades of workers, took a hand in every form of the struggle and linked it up with the general aims of the movement. The Party regarded the partial demands of the workers as a sort of ladder by which the various groups of workers could mount from small, local problems to the general problems of revolutionary policy.
The majority of the strike began with economic demands: higher wages, revision of wage agreements, etc. But the workers very soon realised that success could be achieved only by passing from economic demands to political demands. The fight waged by the workers after the Kornilov-Kerensky attempt to crush the proletariat was one more proof of the law established by Lenin as a result of a study of the strikes of 1905, namely, that unless economic strikes were closely bound up with political strikes there could be no extensive mass movement.
“At the beginning of the movement,” Lenin wrote, “and when new strata are being drawn into it, the purely economic strike predominates, but, on the other hand, the political strike arouses and stirs up the backward, lends a general character to and extends the movement, and raises it to a higher level.”(6)
But the chief feature of the labour movement in Russia in the days prior to the October Revolution was the change in the forms of the struggle.
Lenin demanded that these forms should not be artificially invented, but that use should be made of those that arise of themselves in the course of events. Lenin taught that every form of the struggle should be regarded historically, and that at any particular moment the method should be selected that best corresponded to the aims of the Party. Flexibility has always been one of the indications of the strength of the Bolshevik Party. Demonstrations and strikes—economic and political—had been the chief forms of struggle of the proletariat even before the Kornilov revolt, but now new elements appeared in the movement. An extensive strike movement swept over the Donbas in October. The Government dispatched Cossacks, whose appearance only served to intensify the revolutionary indignation. The miners demanded the withdrawal of the punitive expeditions, threatening to start a general strike on October 10. Three days later, Ataman Kaledin wired the Minister of War:
“At the mines the entire power has been seized by various self-appointed organisations which recognise no other authority but their own.”(7)
The miners removed managers, arrested recalcitrants and took the administration of production into their own hands.
In their fight against the employers, the workers began to resort more and more to arresting and removing managers. On September 18 the metal workers of Kharkov arrested the managing directors of the General Electric Company and placed them under the custody of the Red Guard. A conference of industrialists of South Russia held in Kharkov addressed the following complaint to the Minister of Labour:
“In view of the fact that criminal elements are going entirely unpunished, the conduct of the workers at the factory of the General Electric Company has been imitated at the factory of Gerlach and Pulst, where the management was also kept under arrest for twenty hours. To-day, September 20, the directors of the Kharkov Locomotive Works have been arrested in the same way.”(8)
It was not, of course, a question of imitation; it was rather that the old form of struggle was no longer adequate and could not be adapted to the new aims: the movement was directly faced with the problem of government power and the administration of industry.
This new form of struggle was to be observed also in the case of the leather workers of Moscow. The strike of the Moscow leather workers lasted over two months. The employers would not give way. The workers demanded the adoption of more vigorous measures. A meeting of leather worker delegates proposed that the managers should be removed and those factories whose owners evaded satisfying the demands of the workers should be immediately seized. The delegate meeting adopted a resolution demanding the transfer of government power to the Soviets and insisted on the immediate confiscation of factories where agreement had not been reached between the workers and the employers.
By way of emphasising that this resolution was not an empty threat, the meeting added the following significant clause:
“After the 18th the factory committees will immediately proceed to adopt practical measures in preparation for sequestration, such as taking an inventory of goods, machinery and so forth.”(9)
In a number of factories the workers began to institute workers’ control by decree of the factory committees or the Soviets. It was in this way that workers’ control was introduced in the Tryokhgorka factory in Moscow.
When capitalists shut down their enterprises, the workers would refuse to submit and would continue to work. In September the management of the Helferich-Sade works, Kharkov, ordered the plant to be closed down. In response the factory committee called upon the men to continue work on their own accord and entrusted the management of the plant to a special committee. This was the case in many other plants all over the country.
The workers’ movement was clearly assuming the character and form of an open revolutionary struggle.
The most obvious sign of the new revolutionary crisis was the rapid process of Bolshevisation of the Soviets, factory committees and other organisations. The workers were entrusting the leadership to those who by their persistent, day-to-day efforts were proving their ability to further the revolution. The control of the Petrograd Soviet passed into the hands of the Bolsheviks on August 31, and the Moscow Soviet adopted a Bolshevik resolution for the first time on September 5. In the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets of Workers’ Deputies the Bolsheviks proved to be in the majority.
Every hour brought new victories to the Bolshevik Party. On September 1 alone, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets received demands from 126 Soviets in the provinces insisting that it take over power.
On September 3, a delegate meeting of the Textile Workers’ Union was held in Moscow, attended by 300 delegates representing 175,000 workers. The meeting adopted a resolution moved by the Bolsheviks demanding the transfer of power to the Soviets.
On September 5 a Congress of Soviets of Central Siberia opened in Krasnoyarsk at which Bolshevik resolutions were adopted by delegates representing 110,000 workers and 90,000 peasants.
On September 10 began the Third Regional Congress of Soviets of Finland at which the influence of the Bolsheviks was supreme.
New elections to the Saratov Soviet on September 30 resulted in a Bolshevik majority: the Bolsheviks secured 300 seats, the Socialist-Revolutionaries 90 and the Mensheviks 53.
Demands for the transfer of power to the Soviets poured in from all over the country—from the Far North, from distant Siberia, from the shores of the Black Sea, from the Ukraine, and from Central Asia and Transcaucasia. The newspapers of the period literally bristle with items, reports and resolutions indicative of the steady increase of Bolshevik influence among the masses.
A vivid example of the prevailing sentiment is furnished by a resolution passed by the 4,000 workers of the car and locomotive shops of the Alexandrov works in Petrograd:
“1. The government in power, far from doing anything to satisfy the urgent needs of the working class and the peasantry, far from adopting indispensable measures to end the war and improve the food situation, is wholly concerned in defending the interests of the capitalists and landlords, is leaving the settlement of the question of war and peace to the imperialist annexationists, and is ‘tackling’ the food shortage by raising the price of bread.
“2. Such a government can count on only one thing from us—the most determined resistance. We consider the immediate removal of the government an urgent aim, for it is ruining the cause of the revolution and has ranged itself under the banner of counter-revolution.
“3. The revolution will perish if the government is not taken over by the workers, the soldiers and peasants through the Soviets. We therefore demand that the forthcoming Congress of Soviets should proclaim the power of the Soviets.
“4. Realising that the revolution is passing through a terrible period, we declare that in the fight for power and for the victory of the revolution, the Soviets may count on our unreserved and determined support.”(10)
Under the pressure of the workers, the lower organs dissolved and appointed new elections, which resulted in majorities for the Bolsheviks. The factory committee of the Tryokhgornaya Textile Mills in Moscow resolved to resign, and the new presidium of the factory committee immediately declared that it “considered a strike struggle for the power of the Soviets essential.”(11)
The proletarian masses learnt by bitter experience that what the Bolshevik Party taught was true, namely, that the revolution could be saved only by a determined and self-sacrificing struggle for the overthrow of the manufacturers’ and landlords’ government headed by Kerensky.
[1] Central Archives of the October Revolution, Records—6, Chancellery of the Provisional Government, Register 1, File No. 281, folios 55-56.
[2] Central Archives, The Labour Movement in 1917, Moscow, 1926, p. 85.
[3] “A Hunger March,” Rabochy Put, No. 25, October 1, 1917.
[4] Central Archives, The Labour Movement in 1917, Moscow, 1926, p. 194.
[5] Ibid., p. 194.
[6] Lenin, “Strike Statistics in Russia,” Collected Works (Russ. ed.), Vol. XV, p. 44.
[7] “The Donetz Basin, General Kaledin’s Measures,” Russkoye Slovo, No. 235, October 14, 1917.
[8] Central Archives, The Labour Movement in 1917, Moscow, 1926, p. 222.
[9] “The Leather Workers’ Strike,” Izvestia of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, No. 191, October 19, 1917.
[10] “At the Alexandrov Works,” Rabochy Put, No. 43, October 22, 1917.
[11] “Minutes of the Factory Committee of the Tryokhgornaya Textile Mills,” History of the Proletariat in the U.S.S.R. , 1932, No. 9, p. 160.
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