Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution: Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University

by Diane P. Koenker

Overview

Whereas most Soviet and American scholars of the Russian Revolution have emphasized the great leaders and the great events of 1917, Diane Koenker reverses this trend in a study of the Russian working class.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691638867
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Studies of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University , #667
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	7.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.50(d)

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Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution

Studies of the Russian Institute, Columbia University

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By Diane P. Koenker

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1981 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05323-3

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CHAPTER 1

Moscow 1917

The Image of the City

An aerial photo of Moscow taken toward the start of the twentieth century shows a sea of low red-brick and yellow-stucco buildings, dotted by the onion-shaped domes of hundreds of churches. The ancient fortress of the Kremlin dominates the city center, the citadel's red-brick walls surrounding the tall Ivan bell tower and cathedrals. Southwesterly along the river arise the massive golden dome of the Cathedral of the Resurrection, and beyond, the red bell tower of Novo-Devich'e monastery. The low profile of the city is broken by red factory smokestacks that stand side by side with the gold and green and blue church cupolas; a few new five- and six-story buildings tower over the squares of the central city. In general, by the turn of the century Moscow was spreading outward, not upward, sprawling across the northern bend of the Moscow River and reaching, by 1917, far along the river's tributaries, over drained marshlands, into the fields that once belonged to the wealthy monasteries and the nobility. The city of Moscow in 1917 was defined, approximately, as the area within the limits of the Okruzhnaia, or circular railroad, which ringed the city, shuttling freight from one rail depot to another. Such an economic definition was quite fitting for the city that once had symbolized Russia's spiritual life but which was now the secular capital of native Russian industry and trade.

The city had grown in concentric circles (see map); the original town was the Kremlin on the north bank of the Moscow River. Later, outside the Kremlin's gates and along the great Red Square, a settlement of tradesmen and artisans developed. Ultimately, this quarter was surrounded by its own wall and became known as the Kitai-gorod, after the Tatar word for fortress. The walls were important to the city's survival, for these were the days of perpetual Tatar raids into the territory of the Grand Princes of Muscovy. On the eastern and southern frontiers of the city was a line of fortress-monasteries to provide further protection from the Tatar threat.

At the end of the sixteenth century, the growing city was bounded by a new wall, whitewashed; the new area became known, appropriately, as the White City. Later, the Tatar danger long past, the wall was replaced by a ring of boulevards lined with trees and parks. Beyond this ring, during the reign of the first Romanov tsar, an earthen wall was constructed which completely circled the city on both banks of the river. In time, the growing population expanded beyond this barrier, and the rampart became a new boulevard garden ring, the Sadovoe kol'tso. By the nineteenth century, the Sadovoe had become the unofficial boundary of the censused (tsenzovaia) or privileged Moscow.

In subsequent decades, the city continued to grow, absorbing nearby villages. Factories were built in the shadows of the old fortress-monasteries. By 1900, Moscow extended as far as, and in places farther than, the Kamer-Kollezhskii val, another earthern rampart built earlier as a customs barrier. And by 1917, the city encompassed not only the area inside the old boundary but also the suburbs of Blagusha and Simonovka to the east, Cherkizovo and Bogorodsk to the northeast, Alekseevskoe, Mar'ina roshcha, and Butyrki to the north.

Most, but not all, of the workers of Moscow lived within official city limits, but the problem of defining a "Moscow worker" remains somewhat complicated. Official citizenship was to some extent voluntary. An inhabitant of a marginal suburb could choose whether or not to consider himself a city resident; city election officials in 1917 stipulated that those in the outskirts who wished to vote in municipal elections could attach themselves to an adjacent urban precinct. Participation in the Moscow city workers' soviet in 1917 was likewise voluntary; the municipal metal-rolling plant, located about seven miles from the city, sent its deputies to the Moscow Soviet, but the workers of Tushino, only a mile farther away, formed their own soviet. For the purposes of this study, it is both reflective of the period and convenient to take as a formal definition the one adopted by the city Soviet in 1917: Moscow workers were those who sent deputies to the Moscow Soviet.

Boundary vagaries aside, there was an important distinction between the city of Moscow, which is the subject of this study, and other territorial entities that also went by the name "Moscow." The city was located in the center of Moscow province (guberniia), which included, in addition to the capital, several large manufacturing towns and numerous small settlements, both agricultural and industrial. This province was divided into thirteen districts, or uezdy. Moscow district (uezd) surrounded the city of the same name; as the city expanded, the size of the uezd gradually diminished. Besides these general administrative divisions, the name Moscow was also occasionally given to the entire Central Industrial Region, an area of manufacturing activity defined by the Factory Inspectorate to include the provinces of Moscow, Iaroslav, Kaluga, Kostroma, Nizhnyi-Novgorod, Riazan, Tula, Tver, and Vladimir. The Bolshevik party included these provinces and three more in an organizational district called Moskovskaia Oblast, the Moscow Region, which became the power base for the radical faction led by Nikolai Bukharin in 1917. In cultural life, Moscow had come to stand for a set of relationships implying ethnic Russianness and native economic endeavor, with Slavophile overtones. Thus, the name Moscow, when it appears in the sources and literature, can designate any one of these several administrative, political, or cultural units. In the present study, then, Moscow signifies only the city proper.

For administrative purposes, the city was divided into sixteen police districts (chasti), which corresponded roughly to the earlier historical divisions of the city (see map). Thus the old Kitai-gorod was now simply Gorodskaia; the ancient settlement of cotton weavers retained its name, Khamovniki, although it had lately become the home of fashionable sub- urban estates such as that of Leo Tolstoy. Each of these districts was further subdivided into two, three, or four police precincts (uchastki), to make fifty-one in all in 1917. The average population of a precinct was about forty thousand inhabitants; the size of inner-city precincts (within the Sadovoe on the north side of the river) was much smaller than that of the fast-growing outlying ones. The precincts were the basis for the municipal statistical data collections that provide much of the information about patterns of urban life in Moscow. They were also the electoral units in the June 1917 election and will be used to examine voting patterns of workers in Chapter Five.

In 1917, eleven larger units-raions — emerged to function side by side with the administrative precincts. These raions, which had been used by socialist party organizations before 1917, were sanctioned by the Moscow Soviet to serve as local centers of working-class activity; they corresponded, generally, to existing industrial and working-class neighborhoods. The limits of these raions were by no means so strictly defined as those of the police precincts. Workers who were situated in an inactive district might send deputies to a local soviet in a neighboring raion; and the political parties' raion organizations did not always embrace the same workers that were constituents of that raion's soviet. There were eight of these raions in March 1917; during the course of the year some of them consolidated and others, which emerged first as sub-raions, separated completely. Thus, there were eleven active raion centers by October: ten corresponded to geographical divisions and the eleventh united all of the workers employed on the railroads anywhere in Moscow. As the tempo of events quickened in 1917, these raions competed with central organs as focuses of working-class activity, and it is therefore important to keep in mind the distinctive characteristics of these various neighborhoods.

The city's center was its economic hub and was also the center of traditional Moscow. Here were located the Moscow Exchange (the central institution of the native Russian textile industry) and the wholesale and retail centers represented by the Upper and Lower Trading Rows. Also in this Gorodskoi precinct were numerous religious institutions. Four monasteries as well as many cathedrals and chapels were located inside the old Kitai-gorod walls.

In among the banks, wholesale houses, and churches lived the numerous small tradesmen and artisans who constituted the bulk of the population of the center. The composition of this district in 1917 had probably changed little from that reported in the 1897 all-Russian census, the only year for which occupational data by precinct is available. One-third of the precinct's residents were artisans employed chiefly in the clothing trades, and one-fourth each were in trade and in service. There were only a few factories here, accounting for fewer than eight hundred workers. The area was a male stronghold; few children were born, and with the exception of apprentices, few lived in the old city center.

Close beyond the walls of the Kitai-gorod, in what used to be called the White City, modern Moscow was emerging. Here in the Tverskaia and Miasnitskaia districts were the city's cultural centers: the university, conservatory, library, and theaters. Well-to-do Muscovites shopped along fashionable lanes and partied in the stylish new Metropol' and Natsional hotels. In general, this first ring of the city housed the comfortable houses and Hats of Moscow's ruling classes, of government officials, merchants, and intellectuals; but there were also residential pockets with quite distinct personalities. For example, university and conservatory professors were clustered on the Nikitskaia street, near their institutions. At the other extreme, the third Miasnitskii precinct, located at the far eastern edge of this ring, was probably the most down-and-out quarter of Moscow. The Khitrovo market in this precinct was the center of the city's demimonde, "the most horrible ulcer of the whole city." It was surrounded by cheap lodging houses, taverns, alehouses, and brothels. The death rate in this one precinct was twice the city average; the illegitimacy rate was also twice that of the rest of the city. Thousands of job seekers passed through the market every year, many falling prey to its "life of drunkenness, debauchery, and crime." Despite an ambitious municipal program to build scattered dormitories for this transient population (especially after a cholera epidemic swept through the district in 1910), the quarter remained a problem even in 1917; the Moscow Soviet sanctioned a raid into the Khitrovo market in July, which raid yielded three hundred military deserters and a number of forged Soviet mandates.

In the belt between the boulevards and the Sadovoe were located Moscow's finest residential neighborhoods. Along tree-lined streets in Prechistenskaia and the Arbat lived many of the city's distinguished citizens: nobility, officials, industrialists. These were the only two districts in the city in which women far outnumbered the men in the population, a fact explained by the large numbers of domestic servants employed in the great mansions in the quarter. What industry there was in this area of gardens, parks, and ponds, apart from the printshops and binderies that catered to the area's affluent population, was clustered in the far eastern section on the banks of the Iauza River.

The population of these central precincts grew relatively slowly in the years before and during the war. While the population of the city as a whole grew by 24 percent between 1912 and 1917, the center — between the Sadovoe and the river — grew by only 18 percent. There were so few workers here that in 1917 the entire area comprised only one soviet raion, known as Gorodskoi. The leading industry in this raion was printing. Over half (55 percent) of all printers in the city were employed here in shops averaging sixty workers each. Although residential data is less accessible than industrial location, it is probable that many printers lived in or very near this privileged central core as well.

The major industrial districts of Moscow were located south and east of the city center. Although fashionable homes had of late been built in the quarter immediately across the river from the Kremlin, they stood side by side with massive red-brick factories, all within sight of the Kremlin. Here in Zamoskvorech'e — the name means "across the Moscow River" — were some of the city's largest defense plants, including the stalwart revolutionary bastions of Bromlei, Mikhelson, and the Gustav List plants. Zamoskvorech'e, the first suburban area to be settled, was more densely populated than other outlying sections, especially in its two inner districts of Piatnitskaia and Iakimanskaia. In the precincts of both these districts closest to the river (see map), the density of population was twice that of Zamoskvorech' e as a whole. Once known as the Tatar quarter of Moscow, this area was now the neighborhood of the Tretiakov art gallery and the industrialists' mansions as well as factories and workers' barracks. Beyond the southern rim of the Sadovoe, industrial enterprises encroached on the fields once belonging to the nearby monasteries. A string of factories lined the Shabalovka, which led past the Donskoi monastery, and an entire industrial suburb grew up around the Danilovskii monastery farther to the east. By 1917, the city limits were pushed even past Danilovka, along the road to the town of Serpukhov. Workers in the old villages of Nizhnye kotly and Khavskaia sloboda, while legally still in Moscow uezd, participated with the Danilovka workers in their own subraion soviet.

To the east of the center were the districts of Basmannaia, Lefortovo, and Rogozhskaia. Lefortovo was once the site of the German suburb of Moscow, and the religious center of the Old Believers was (and is) in Rogozhskaia, but in 1917 the eastern quarter was almost purely working class. Many factories had sprung up along the Iauza River, which curved away to the northeast. Preobrazhenskoe, where young Peter I was said to have built the first Russian fleet, was now an area of factories, taverns, and low wooden buildings that housed workers, their families, and an occasional cow or pig. This was an area dominated by small textile factories. Farther to the east was the new industrial suburb of Blagusha; here newly evacuated factories from Poland and the Baltic provinces were built alongside local plants. The eastern quarter was a sprawling region expanding east to Blagusha, southeast to the village of Khokhlovo in the Novo-Andronevskaia area, and south to the Simonovskaia suburb, just across the river from Danilovka. Here, along the river, the government had financed several gigantic war plants. In this southern half of the Rogozhskaia raion, in sharp contrast to Lefortovo, metal and machine-building plants shaped the character of the neighborhood.

Most of the rail traffic to Moscow terminated in this eastern quarter, and it was the site of the large Kursk and Kazan railway workshops, employing hundreds of repair workers. Beyond the city limits, in Perovo, was another large railway yard whose workers frequently participated in the life of the city Closer to the Sadovoe, near Taganskaia square, were clustered small enterprises in which artisans engaged in a variety of industrial activity. The residents of these quarters were almost exclusively workers; there were so many that the region was divided into four, sometimes five, soviet raions. Its class composition can further be attested to by the advice of the Baedeker guidebook for 1914: "A visit to the E. quarter of the city offers little interest."

Before 1917, much of the city's recent growth had been spurred by the annexation of several artisans' settlements north of the city which became the communities of Butyrki, Mar'ina roshcha, Alekseevskoe, Sokol'niki, and Petrovskii park. These areas were poorly built up, with few services. In 1917, Butyrki contained numerous alehouses but not one secondary school. The adjacent Mar'ina roshcha, the Maria Wood, remained the center of gold and silver work in Moscow. Formerly, it had been a favorite recreation spot for Muscovites, but by 1917 it had been built over with the gridlike pattern of streets which was common to many of the city's newer industrial districts. The northern districts closer to the Sadovoe — four Meshchanskii precincts and three in Sushchevskii — were also settled by working people; both districts, like the eastern quarter, had large numbers of railway workers and because of the evacuation of the western provinces, an increasing number of non-Russian workers — Letts, Poles, and Lithuanians — as well. About 12 percent of the population in the northernmost precincts — Butyrki, Sushchevskii, Marina roshcha, Bogorodskoe, Alekseevskoe — were non-Russian refugees. Three raion soviets were active here: Butyrki, Sushchevsko-Mar'inskii, and the Sokol'niki raion encompassing the workers around Sokol'niki park and in the fourth Meshchanskii precinct.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Tables, pg. ix
• List of Illustrations, pg. xi
• List of Figures. List of Appendices, pg. xii
• Acknowledgments, pg. xiii
• Note on Dates and Transliteration. Abbreviations, pg. xv
• Introduction, pg. 1
• One. Moscow 1917, pg. 12
• Two. Life in the City, pg. 43
• Three. Moscow in the 1917 Revolution, pg. 94
• Four. Organizing the Revolution: The Evolution of Working-Class Institutions, pg. 143
• Five. Political Parties and the Working Class: The Evolution of Party Consciousness, pg. 187
• Six. Dimensions of Political Attitudes: Workers' Resolutions, pg. 228
• Seven. Dimensions of Political Attitudes: Workers' Contributions to Political Causes, pg. 269
• Eight. Workers and the Strike Movement in 1917, pg. 293
• Nine. Moscow's October, pg. 329
• Conclusion, pg. 356
• Appendix, pg. 368
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 387
• Index, pg. 411