New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1840-1918

Michael Melancon and Alice K. Pate, eds. New Labor History: Worker Identity and Experience in Russia, 1840-1918. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2002. v, 248 pp. $25.95, paper.Beginning with the title, the editors and contributors this volume self-consciously distinguish their project from the old labour history, so closely linked with the triumphalist historiography of the Soviet Union and its ruling Communist Party. In the introduction and conclusion, editors Michael Melancon and Alice K. Pate set forth a new agenda for the study of Russian workers, one which reflects the concerns of members of the Allan K. Wildman Group for the Study of Russian Workers and Society. The key term is workers' experience, coupled with an emphasis on workers' agency, as they seek a less ideological and party-oriented history. One might express their goal as the rescue, in a Thompsonian sense, of such under-appreciated figures as the religious worker, the effective liquidator, and the workers whose factory and strike unity stemmed from a usually disparaged peasant outlook. This volume bears comparison with the other recent collection on Russian workers: Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections, edited by Reginald Zelnik (Berkeley, 1999). Taken together, these two collections expose the fallacy of discounting labour history as having nothing new say in the post-Soviet era.This volume brings together works by junior scholars as well as those by noted specialists. The nine articles treat issues ranging from factory experience and collective life, the spiritual life of workers, and discourses, workers' role in the 1917 Revolution. A necessarily brief survey can only suggest the richness of the new research presented by the authors. A labour history discourse in which worker is coded male excludes not only women workers, but also the large component of the workforce made up of children. Boris Gorshkov's informative article addresses the neglected topic of child factory labour (1840-1914). he provides statistical information, as well as a nuanced analysis of the debates over labour legislation that, he concludes, served the positive function of focusing government and social attention on the need for redress of intolerable conditions. Two authors approach the topic of workers and religion from different vantage points. Page Herrlinger starts with a truism of Russian labour history-that exposure the factory milieu and radical political consciousness led workers atheism. She convincingly demonstrates, based on a fresh reading of workers' memoirs coupled with Church records, that Orthodoxy was not always rejected, but rather, for many workers, was adapted and reshaped in response the obstacles observance presented by the urban and factory environment. Sergei L. Firsov pays closer attention concerns of the Church hierarchy regarding the threat posed by irreligion both workers and peasant youth. he also notes that some workers, while dissatisfied with Orthodoxy, devised creative ways to reconcile the concept of social justice with belief in God (p. 73).Another received idea, that of a peasant/proletarian dichotomy, is challenged by Nikolai V. Mikhailov, who argues that various forms of workers' collective associations had their roots in the peasant commune. Workers ignored the 1903 Law on Starosty, for example, in favour of their own factory committees, which provided the foundation for the soviets of 1905. Mikhailov's focus on workers' collective psychology contrasts with the individualist note heard in the creative output of the worker-poets of the early twentieth century analyzed by Mark Steinberg. …

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