Under the seven-year plan (1959–65), as well as the eighth (1966–70) and ninth (1971–75) five-year plans, the role of the working class continued to grow. Between 1865 and 1890 the working class increased from 706,000 to 1,433,000, with the number of workers in factory industry increasing from 509,000 to 840,000, in mining and metallurgy from 165,000 to 340,000, and in the railroad industry from 32,000 to 253,000. With the First World War raging on the battlefields of Europe, the Russian revolution has reached its decisive moment. ), So crucial was the place of workers self-rule in the unfolding of the revolution that, on the eve of taking power, Lenin was moved to theorize it in State and Revolution, written in August and Sep­tember 1917. The national detachments of the working class increased substantially. Capitalist industry developed under the auspices of, and was politically dependent upon, the old regime: in particular, the military industry was directly driven by the state. Under whatever terminology, this was a process of exploiting the peasantry, and without aid from more developed countries that had successful socialist revolutions, would ultimately require the use of authoritarian measures against the peasant — the construction of an ever more coercive regime. Leon Trotsky: The History of the Russian Revolution (three volumes);1905; The Revolution Betrayed (1937). More than 1 million young workers labored in the Komsomol “frontline” brigades, which became a school of production experience. Boxer is described as a hardworking, but naive and ignorant cart horse in George Orwell 's 1945 novel Animal Farm. In its efforts to increase the ranks of the working class during the 1950’s, the party focused on young people with a secondary education. However since the bourgeoisie would oppose working-class power at every turn, the only way to insure workers’ democratic rule would be to abolish bourgeois property. At the same time, Bol­sheviks succeeded in winning the support of the rank and file of the army — organized in soldiers’ soviets — depriving the Kerensky provisional government of the means of coercion to sustain its rule and constituting the vehicle for the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class. The working class plays a leading role in the affairs of state. Workers participated in trade union, Komsomol, and other social organizations. Samuel Farber: Before Stalinism. number of sovkhozes, there were a considerable number of kolkhozniks among the agricultural workers, who made up 15 percent of the total working class in 1970. It was part of a global process that couldn’t be limited to Russia. The Russian proletariat took shape as an all-Russian, international force counterposed to the great-power, chauvinistic division of the Russian state into the privileged Great Russians and the oppressed “foreigners.”. The working class was built up chiefly by means of the system of labor reserves. Regardless of class or status, Russian society was deeply patriarchal. The revolutionary momentum was lost, as well as the frontline workers who made the revolution. In the early 20th century there were 12–14 million wage laborers, including 2.5 million industrial workers. Owing to changes in the position of classes and social groups, the working class is growing closer to the kolkhoz peasantry and the intelligentsia in social status, the conditions and character of labor, standard of living, education, and culture. Between February and October of 1917, the Bolshevik Party ballooned from 25,000 to 350,000 members. The St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class played an enormous role in linking the working-class movement with scientific socialism. During the postwar period important changes took place in the territorial distribution of the working class. Women and young people took the place of experienced workers. More than three million soldiers were killed. The characteristics of Russia’s economic development, especially the combination of developed capitalist relations with widespread embryonic forms of capitalism, impeded the growth of class consciousness among the proletariat but resulted in the development of closer ties in Russia than in any other country between the working class and its vanguard and the millions of peasants. The proletariat became more and more impoverished. A new, socialist attitude toward labor emerged among the working class. Almost no occupational safety measures were taken in production. The period was marked by the formation of groups of advanced workers, such as the shock groups, who combined a creative approach and socialist purposefulness in their labor. They organized collectively at the level of industry, agriculture and garrisons, forming committees and councils to fight their bosses and the Tsarist regime. Industrial projects and incentives … For the world’s ruling classes, it meant isolating, discrediting and destroying the revolution, lest it spread to their doors. The proportion of workers among party members increased from 32 percent in 1956 to 40.7 percent by the beginning of 1973. Under the terms of Brest-Litovsk, revolutionary Russia lost Poland and the Baltic regions, as well as huge tracts of the Ukraine (27% of her sown area, 26% of her population, a third of her average crops, three-quarters of her iron and steel and 26% of her railway network). The working class barely existed, the country was exhausted, in crisis, and the leadership faced chaos, circumstances that did not augur well for the democratic self-governance of the working class. By the time Russia entered the epoch of imperialism, the proletariat had grown considerably, and its make-up had changed qualitatively. Soviet women did not fail to master any special skill. These are the things that take the most getting used to. Through the revolutionary creativity of the working class, soviets of workers’ deputies were established, not only as agencies of the uprising but also as a rudimentary form of the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. The center of the world revolutionary movement shifted to Russia. By the mid-1930’s, every tenth worker belonged to the party. In 1913 there were more than 3 million workers in the factories and mills, mining, and the metallurgical industry alone. The defeat of the revolution of 1905 initially threw the country into a period of deep reaction driven by counter-revolution. The working-class movement, which was led by the Bolsheviks, grew stronger (270,000 workers participated in strikes at the beginning of 1917); the army fell apart; and peasant disturbances increased. The proportion of occupations requiring unskilled, semiskilled, and heavy manual labor is declining. Construction of a major petroleum base, equal in importance to Baku, was begun between the Volga and the Urals. Indeed, in the early years of the revolution the Bolsheviks hoped to forge alliances with revolutionary syndicalists and anarchists to serve as partners in overthrowing bourgeois rule. As industrial installations in formerly occupied territory were reconstructed, large-scale workers’ groups were reestablished, particularly in the enterprises of the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the western and southern regions of the RSFSR. The workers’ level of occupational training improved, chiefly as a result of mechanization, automation, and the improvement of production technology. However on 6 July the Left SRs began an insurrectional revolt in Moscow, proclaiming their intention to govern alone and to “reopen the war against German imperialism.” They were defeated and from then the Bolsheviks ruled alone. Fyodor Dostoevsky is born in 1821. In May 1930 every fifth kolkhoz was headed by a Twenty-five Thousander (dvadtsati-piatitysiachnik). The working-class movement took the leading position in the liberation movement in Russia. Soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies—bodies associated with the revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry —were established throughout the country. As a result of measures adopted by the party, the general cultural and technological level of the working class rose considerably. The overwhelming evidence from a century of in-depth historical scholarship shows otherwise. The formation of a revolutionary Marxist party was accelerated by the mass character of the Russian working-class movement, the spread of the ideas of scientific socialism among the workers, and improvements in the workers’ level of consciousness and organization. The historical experience of the working class of the USSR in preparing and carrying out the socialist revolution, in building socialism, and in the construction of communist society, has great significance for the working class of all countries in its struggle to realize the great plans of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In the 1860’s most labor disturbances involved the mine workers in the Urals. As Evgeny Preobrazhensky had demonstrated in the debates of the 1920s, industrialization could proceed with what he called “socialist primitive accumulation.” This would entail unequal exchange between the urban producers and peasants, with overpriced industrial goods going to the peasants and underpriced food and raw materials coming back to the urban working class, and the surplus accruing to the industrial sector, to be used for investment and expansion. The Russian banking system is highly politicized, regulated and subject to the intervening whims of the Bank of Russia. At one pole, replacing the Tsarist regime, a new provisional government began to meet, bringing together all the forces favoring order and property — liberal nobles, professionals, bourgeoisie. By the end of the fifth five-year plan (1951–55), socialist industry was producing almost three-fourths of the social product of the USSR. Nineteenth-century working class Russians were factory workers, sailors and certified artisans. Direct exchange between town and country was imposed by the requisitioning of grain and direct state distribution of industrial goods under concentrated economic authority and power. If socialist revolution was to be secured in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, formally established in 1922) or begun to be realized over the longer run, it had to undertake the socio-economic prerequisites of socialism — at minimum, the industrialization of the economy so as to produce a working-class majority. Evgeny Preobrazhensky: The New Economics. The Bolshevik Party, a revolutionary Marxist party, was established in 1903 at the Second Congress of the RSDLP. Trotsky’s position, “neither peace nor war,” meant stalling for time. The large and immensely powerful Black Russian Terrier (BRT) is known for its courage, confidence, and intelligence. Lenin noted that in the fall of 1905 “it [the Bolshevik Party] became the party of the millions of the proletariat” (ibid., vol. The debate over peace terms had to begin from recognition of the immediate threat from occupying German forces. Minimum requirements for technical knowledge were stipulated, and schools of advanced experience and industrial technical courses were established. The abolition of the market was not based on material abundance and a highly developed productive base and advanced forms of democracy and citizen participation but on social disintegration, destroyed production, absolute scarcity and centralized, coercive authority. Their popularity grew from the confidence they earned, as their words and actions were debated democratically in the soviets and discussed on the streets. Meanwhile, workers fighting for socialism in the West were co-opted, isolated or repressed. 4, p. 172). The Bolshevik party had led the revolution in practice, legitimizing its leadership by winning formal majorities for its program in the soviets. Between 1928 and 1937 the working class created enormous productive forces and transformed the USSR into a mighty industrial power, ranking second in the world after the USA and holding first place in a number of branches of industry. In the mid-1870’s skilled Russian workers made up an army of hired laborers in the Ukraine, the Baltic region, and Transcaucasia. In all of these qualities the working class rises to a new level under the conditions of developed socialism. There were craftsmen and industry. Lenin wrote: “A gigantic petit bourgeois wave has swept over everything and overwhelmed the class-conscious proletariat, not only by force of numbers but also ideologically” (ibid, vol. Money was eliminated. In 1940 workers between the ages of 18 and 49 made up 85 percent of the entire working class. Industry supplied the countryside with agricultural machinery. The leading role of the working class in society and politics attained a higher level. The level of general education, occupational skill, and culture of the working class has improved immeasurably. It was not, nor could it be, a policy that corresponded to the economic tasks of the proletariat. There was now a fundamental conundrum. Victor Serge described the intoxicating power of that moment as one where “life is beginning anew, where conscious will, intelligence, and an inexorable love of mankind are in action.”. 18, 26, 27), were widely introduced. This too was corroding, as a more or less inevitable result of the curtailment of democracy in the society as a whole. In ferrous metallurgy, light industry, and the building materials industry, the number of workers increased at a slower rate, and in the coal industry there was an absolute decline in the representation of the working class. The working class has always been the most revolutionary, most organized, most unified, and most disciplined class, possessing political maturity and a collectivist psychology. Between 1955 and 1959 more than 6 million graduates of secondary general education schools entered the national economy. Had they handed over power, say, to a Constituent Assembly to determine the future course of the Russian Revolution, the revolution would have had a brief half-life. Nor did Russia possess the legal mass reformist parties with their parliamentary delegations, trade union leaderships and radical newspapers, not to mention sports clubs, popular theaters and the like, that played such a central role in the West’s working-class politics. Moscow and St Petersburg had Industrialization. The war, the internal measures against counter-revolution and famine, the privations of war communism and then the suppression of an early 1921 sailors’ revolt at Kronstadt(3) relegated the commune state to the status of myth. Everyone had to use the black market, even party members. Imperialism developed rapidly. Russian Revolution by Unknown Ironically, to counteract and preclude the “soviet threat,” Western capitalist regimes conceded to social democratic reforms fought for by organized labor — often socialists in the labor movement. When the bridge to Germany was lost as was the westward extension of the revolution, the Bolsheviks were caught in a bind. In 1972, 700,000 specialists with engineering and technology degrees were employed directly in industry as workers. Class Structure in 19th Century Russia Overview of Russia in the 19th Century European Class Structure before and during the 19th Century Ruled by Tsar Alexander I from 1801-1825 Russo-Turkish war, Russo-Swedish war, & Napoleon invades Russia. The Bolshevik party democratically won majorities for their program in the soviets in the months leading to October, and on that basis assumed the leadership of the workers and urban society. But in undermining the democratic and socialist foundations of their own rule, they ended up greatly reducing the attractiveness of their revolution to the world’s radical working classes — improving the conditions for the counter-revolution that would be perpetually pursued by the international ruling classes. Mass trade unions and independent workers’ cooperatives were founded. After the founding of the Liberation of Labor group (1883) and the establishment in several Russian cities of Marxist groups and circles, such as the Blagoev group, the Brusnev group, and the Fellowship of St. Petersburg Workmen, Russian Social Democracy made its first overtures toward the working-class movement, which “in each of its broader manifestations—has been drawing closer to the Russian Social Democrats in an effort to merge with them” (ibid, p. 245). But with its victory, it fell victim to the revolution’s structural lack of a political majority. One last horrendous consequence was that the terms of the peace sealed the sacrifice of the Finnish proletariat. Lenin, Evgeny Preobrazhensky. As we know, what actually happened under Stalin destroyed not only the majority of the Bolshevik leadership but millions more. 38, p. 306). The working class assisted the toiling peasantry in the socialist reconstruction of agriculture. The bourgeoisie was not numerous, and in political terms had virtually ceased to function once the February Revolution and subsequent abdication of the Tsar had taken place. In 1937 workers accounted for 40 percent of the deputies elected to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. The provisional government had been assembled by a group of leaders from Russia’s bourgeois capitalist class. Second-generation workers constituted 30–40 percent of the total. The non-Communist Russian Provisional Government under Prince Georgy Lvov replaced the Tsar. The party rallied the poor peasantry around the working class and, with the aid of detachments of vanguard workers and committees of the poor, crushed the resistance of the kulaks in the countryside, winning the middle peasantry over to the side of the proletariat and ensuring the consolidation of Soviet power on the basis of the alliance of the working class and the poorest peasantry. Revolution in Germany in the early 1930s or Spain in the middle 1930s could have been possible, saving the Russian revolution and sparing the world from the nightmare to come. 19, p. 422). At the same time, the capitalist class oversaw an industrial sector that had a distinctly modern form — no longer the small businesses of artisans and shopkeepers who, in earlier times, had ultimately seen it in their interest to defend private property. A. Marxism could apply to Russia even though its industrialization took place more recently. In 1917, two revolutions completely changed the fabric of Russia. The practice of having one workman operate several machines at a time became widespread, and new forms of competition emerged, including frontline brigades; patriotic movements of those who overfulfilled the production plans by factors of two, three, five, and ten; and movements for progressive organization and technology in production. Worker activists made the Bolshevik party their organization, even as these militants  collaborated on the ground with worker members of other parties. The Bolsheviks Come to Power (1976). During the postwar period the working class of the USSR, led by the Communist Party, equalled its exploits during the Great Patriotic War. In the theory of Karl Marx, the term proletariat designated the class of wage workers who were engaged in industrial production and whose chief source of income was derived from the sale of their labour power. The working class could make the revolution because it could win a political majority. New detachments were drawn into the Russian working-class movement, including the proletariat of the southern Ukraine, Transcaucasia, the Baltic region, and the Volga Region. 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