I917-I918 SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES Editorial Board
Julian Cooper, Karen Dawisha, Leslie Holmes, Michael Kaser, Alistair Mcauley, Martin Mccauley, Fred Singleton
unpublished
This book explores the impact of the 1917 Revolution on factory life in the Russian capital. It traces the attempts of workers to take control of their working lives from the February Revolution through to June 1918, when the Bolsheviks nationalised industry. Although not primarily concerned with the political developments of the Revolution, the book demonstrates that the sphere of industrial production was a crucial arena of political as well as economic conflict. Having discussed the
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... and composition of the factory workforce in Petrograd prior to 1917 and the wages and conditions of workers under the old regime, Dr Smith shows how workers saw the overthrow of the autocracy as a signal to democratise factory life and to improve their lot. After examining the creation and activities of the factory committees, he analyses the relationship of different groups of workers to the new labour movement, and assesses the extent to which it functioned democratically. The central theme of the book is the factory committees' implementation of workers' control of production. Dr Smith rejects the standard Western interpretation of this movement as 'syndicalist', showing that its ideological perspectives were close to, but not identical with, those of the official Bolshevik party. Essentially, workers' control was a practical attempt to maintain production and to preserve jobs in a situation of deepening economic chaos. On coining to power in October, the Bolsheviks envisaged an expansion of workers' control, and the committees pressed for nationalisation and workers' management. The collapse of industry and the reluctance of employers to continue their operations, however, convinced the Bolshevik leadership that workers' control was inadequate as a means of restoring order in the economy, and they subordinated the committees to the trade unions in 1918. Dr Smith assesses the extent to which the Bolsheviks' capacity to carry out a genuinely revolutionary programme was limited by their own ideology or by the economic and social conditions in which the revolution was born. Throughout, he places the struggle in the factories in the context of an international and comparative perspective. The book will thus appeal not only to historians of Russia and the Russian Revolution, but also to students of labour history and of revolutionary theory. S.A. SMITH is Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex. He studied at the Universities of Oxford, Birmingham, Moscow and Beijing. RED PETROGRAD REVOLUTION IN THE FACTORIES
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