Law and Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872

By Reginald E. Zelnik

Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode—a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant—to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.
Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode—a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant—to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520914605

Reginald E. Zelnik

Reginald E. Zelnik is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (1971) and the editor and translator of A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semon Ivanovich Kanatchikov (1986).

Book preview

Law and Disorder on the Narova River

Law and Disorder on the Narova River

The Kreenholm Strike of 1872

Reginald E. Zelnik

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press

London, England

© 1995 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zelnik, Reginald E.

Law and disorder on the Narova River: the Kreenholm strike of 1872 / Reginald E. Zelnik.

p. cm.

A Centennial book.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-520-08481-0 (alk. paper)

1. Kreenholmi Puuvillasaaduste Manufaktuur Strike, 1872.

2. Strikes and lockouts—Cotton manufacture—Estonia—Narva.

3. Narva (Estonia)—History—19th century. 4. Gerasimov, Vasilii, d. 1892. 5. Textile workers—Estonia—Narva—Biography. I. Title. HD5397.8.T42 1872.N379 1995 331.89'2877'0094741—dc20 93-44876

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

987654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Pamela and Michael

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

ONE Before the Strike

TWO The Strike

THREE September Battles

FOUR Order and Law

FIVE Outcome, Epilogue, Conclusion

SIX Kreenholm Revisited: The Life and Memory of Vasilii Gerasimov

SEVEN Foster Child of the Foundling Home, by Vasilii Gerasimov

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the individuals who did so much to help me prepare this book and to the institutions that provided me with support. My attention was first attracted to the Kreenholm strike when, in connection with my research on St. Petersburg workers who belonged to radical study circles in the 1870s, I encountered repeated references not only to that strike but also to a number of politicized Petersburg workers who had taken part in it. (Among them was Vasilii Gerasimov, whose memoir is printed as chapter 7 of this study.) In 1982 I had the privilege of serving as co-organizer of an NEH- supported Berkeley conference on Russian labor history, where my own contribution was a somewhat truncated paper on the early stages of the Kreenholm strike, prepared at a time when I had not the slightest notion that I would one day expand my preliminary exploration of the strike into a book-length study. Because this would not have happened without the stimulus provided by panelists at the conference, I wish to express my thanks to all of them, but especially to Abraham Ascher, Victoria Bonnell (co-organizer of the conference), Daniel Brower, Leopold Haimson, Robert Johnson, David Montgomery, William Rosenberg, and Ronald Suny. These and other participants all had valuable advice, much of which I wisely took. (I am also grateful to Professors Ascher and Suny, as well as to my Berkeley colleague Nicholas Riasanovsky, for their more recent criticisms of the book manuscript.) Lynn Hunt and Thomas Laqueur both gave the original paper critical readings and encouraged me to carry out my research and my musings about Kreenholm at greater length, advice that I followed, though only after a series of delays.

I returned to the project with particular intensity in 1989, when, thanks to the perfect atmosphere provided by the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), I was able to work on the manuscript steadily for several months and to complete a draft. I am very grateful to Laura Engelstein, who later provided me with a superb critical reading of that draft and who, in addition to giving me her wise counsel, encouraged me to devote as much attention as I did to the question of zakonnost’ (rule of law).

In this and in other related projects, thanks to the generosity of UC Berkeley’s Center for Slavic and East European Studies, Institute of International Studies, and Committee on Research, I have been blessed over the years by some splendid assistants, including Barbara Allgaier, Kim Friedlander, Sarah Hepler, Jeff Rossman, Tony Swift, and Ted Weeks. I am also very grateful to the very professional staff of the University of California Press, including Sheila Levine (my sponsoring editor), Monica McCormick, Betsey Scheinet, and Anne Canright (whose copyediting was particularly thoughtful).

As already noted, much of the writing of the first draft of the book took place while I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study, where I also had the support of a University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities. I am grateful for financial support provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. My early research was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Study, and my translation of Gerasimov’s memoir (chapter 7) concludes a series of translations initially supported by the NEH Translation Program. Some archival research incorporated into chapter 6 was supported by an early grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board. An abbreviated version of that chapter has been published as Before Class: The Fostering of a Worker Revolutionary, the Construction of His Memoir, in Russian History/ Histoire Russe 20, nos. 1-4 (1993): 61-80.

My greatest thanks and my love go to my wife and friend of nearly four decades, Elaine Zelnik, who has constantly heartened, aided, and abetted me, saving me from many a pitfail. She is my inspiration.

Abbreviations

In citing sources from Soviet archives (i.e., archives that were located in the USSR at the time of my research, but are now located in Estonia and Russia), I have retained the former names of the depositories. In these citations I follow the standard Russian system of abbreviation: f. for fond (collection); op. for opis’ (inventory); eksp. for ekspeditsiia (department); d. for deio (file; pl. dd.)\ cd. khr. for edinitsa, khraneniia (storage unit, usually interchangeable with delo), ch. for chust’ (part); and I. for list (sheet or page; pl. II.). I have omitted the designation ob. (oborotverso) when the back of a sheet is cited, on the assumption that anyone wishing to consult these materials will understand that my citations may include the verso.

Other abbreviations (* = Full reference is in the Bibliography):

Dept. Med. Departament Meditsiny (Medical Department of the MVD) KM * Krengol’mskaia manufaktura,. 1857-1907. Istoricheskoe opisanie

KS * Krengol’mskaia stachka 1872 Sbornik dokumentov i materialov

LGIA Leningradskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv

MVD Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del (Ministry of Internal Affairs)

RD *Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke. Sbornik dokumentov (NB: In my notes, RD without a volume number always refers to volume 2, part 1)

TsGAOR Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Oktiabrskoi Revoliutsii

TsGIAESSR Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv

Estonskoi SSR v Tartu

TsGIASSSR Tsentral’nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv SSSR v Leningrade.

1. The Estland/Livland region in the mid-nineteenth century. Adapted from Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians (Stanford, 1987), 58.

2. Narva, Kreenholm, and the immediate area. The factory-island is seen in the middle of the Narova River.

Introduction

A society or polity may be suffused with tensions and latent conflicts that, normally concealed, break into the open and reveal themselves at special times, under unusual circumstances. When those times are momentous and those circumstances extraordinary, we often refer to them as revolutions, and they then enter permanently into the great master narratives of historians. When they are of lesser size and moment, as in the story about to be told, they are of course less likely to enter the canon of permanent historical reference points. Yet in making their own break into the open, they may be no less revealing, whether to contemporaries or to historians, of the social and political tensions that were buried beneath the surface before the eruption that laid them bare.

Such was the case with the Kreenholm strike of August-September 1872, an event that attracted me both because of the theatrical quality of the narratives to which it lends itself and because of the larger political, social, and cultural crosscurrents with which it briefly but forcefully intersected. I approach the strike not as a case study, in which broad hypotheses are scientifically tested, but as a case history, in which a story is put together with attention to the larger but nonetheless specific historical context in which it occurs—its social geography, as it were— and to the various issues that it raises. As a case history, the Kreenholm strike touches on several such issues: the spontaneous character of Russia’s early labor unrest before the exposure of workers to radical ideologies and prior to the development by the state of a fixed schema of classification for such events; the impact of the vicissitudes of economic growth on Russia’s social stability; the range and limits of the powers of the autocratic state vis-à-vis private interests, particularly those of big industry; the relations among the empire’s various nationalities, mainly Estonians, Russians, and Germans, each holding differing positions in Russia’s structure of power in this corner of the empire; and, perhaps most important, the obstacles along Russia’s tortuous, tortured, and never completed path toward genuine legality (zakonnost’). But the Kreenholm strike encounters these larger issues with all the drama and narrative force that can be found only in specific incidents of conflict, events evoking the lived experience of real human beings and involving particular if not peculiar institutions.

In a longitudinal, comparative study of Russia’s strike waves, or in a more restricted analysis of the factors governing the propensity to strike during a particular time of unrest (both areas in which important studies have appeared in recent years), one normally proceeds by abstracting from each strike the serial data needed—size of plant, number and characteristics of strikers, nature of demands, days lost—to array them alongside comparable data from other strikes in order to produce significant generalizations.¹ In a case history, as I approach it here, some of the same data will be used, but they will be woven into a narrative tale, with the analysis of their significance (including their significance to the principal players) integrated whenever possible into the narrative itself. In such a narrative it is virtually inevitable—and, I would add, desirable—that elements of character and contingency should interface with broader structural conditions and constraints. Indeed, it is precisely these elements that make possible the dramatic tension that is essential to most historical writing if it is to capture and reflect the excitement, uncertainty, and improvised quality of the experience of the actors. At the same time, a straightforward narrative telling, if such a thing even exists, would have a mindless quality in the absence of questions of historical significance, questions that showcase the light that a given moment of contingency sheds on broader problems of society and politics.

« » « »

The year 1872 was the last year in which a major episode of labor unrest took place in the Russian Empire that was completely untouched,

1. Recent examples are articles by Leopold Haimson, Eric Brian, Ronald Petrusha, Diane Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, V. I. Bovykin, L. I. Borodkin, and lu. I. Kir’ianov in Strikes, Wars, and Revolution in an International Perspective: Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Leopold H. Haimson and Charles Tilly (Cambridge, 1989).

even indirectly, by the influence of the left intelligentsia. Although interaction between factory workers and intellectuals, mainly universitylevel students, was starting to take shape that year, it was still largely confined to the imperial capital and had yet to reach out to the empire’s borderlands, even relatively close ones such as the Petersburg-Estland provincial frontier.1 Nor had worker-intelligentsia interaction begun to affect the course of labor unrest, as it would do over the next few years and continue to do down to the end of the old regime, sometimes mediated by the characteristically though by no means exclusively Russian figure of the worker intellectual, or worker intelligent.

Ever since Lenin’s notorious assertion of the limits on what workers were able to think and do if left to their own devices, a position that few came forth to challenge at the time (1902), it has been a commonplace of scholars and political activists alike that the development of a radical new vision of a just society must depend on the leavening provided by intellectuals from the outside. At a certain level of abstraction Lenin was no doubt right, as Barrington Moore has sadly and reluctantly conceded in reporting the results of his own investigation into the historical genesis of a sense of injustice.2 One may of course wish to question the value of the outside versus inside metaphor: the construction of any new social norm being by its very nature an interactive process, it is hard to conceive of the emergence of a new sense of anything as completely self-generated, autonomous, or internal. Nevertheless, it is difficult to dispute the almost tautological assertion that universalistic ideologies develop first among those with both the leisure and the training to think, talk, and write discursively. With this in mind, Moore convincingly concludes that those working-class protest movements that do emerge without input from intellectuals are likely to remain parochial in vision, drawing upon (while transforming) their own traditional notions of justice to construct an ethical system too narrow in scope to transcend the original community, with its daily face-to-face contacts and solidarities. The system they construct is too bound to the terms of a preexisting social contract, as Moore would put it, to project any broad new horizons.

Whatever the problems of Moore’s analysis when applied to workers of the industrial neighborhoods of cosmopolitan centers like St. Peters burg or Berlin, the investigation of a relatively isolated factory settlement such as Kreenholm will perforce move this discussion in a somewhat different direction. Unlike the mines of the Ruhr Valley, to which Moore directs our attention as a quintessential example of the influence of traditional norms on both the outbreak and the limits of a spontaneous labor movement, Kreenholm was a new factory, barely fifteen years old at the time of its eruption into open conflict. Its young work force, only recently recruited and from diverse regions and ethnic and social groups, lacked any ancient, time-honored tradition of mutual respect and obligations between masters and men (still less between masters and women). To be sure, certain norms and expectations of managerial conduct had begun to develop among the more highly skilled weavers, enough so that anger at the violation of some earlier understandings became a relevant factor in the unfolding conflict. But these norms and expectations can hardly be said to have acquired the force of long tradition, let alone of social contract, by 1872. And although the strikers demanded that some past practices be restored, they also called for the introduction of standards of managerial conduct that had never before been met at the factory or anywhere else within the workers’ range of experience. In some respects these standards contained the notion of a new kind of labor-management relationship, even a new factory constitution, and even, if only in an undeveloped way, an element of what later came to be known as workers’ control. It is not my intention to make sweeping claims in this regard, for the aspirations of the strikers and the compass of their group identification did remain limited, and, as will be seen in chapter 5, some of their most original themes were not reprised during Kreenholm’s next major round of unrest (1882). Nevertheless, one of my purposes will be to trace the process whereby Kreenholm workers, none of whom had prior exposure to a labor movement, came to rebel so stubbornly against managerial authority and, though briefly, against state power, and came to formulate demands, however haltingly, that struck out inventively in new directions, among them a limited but determined groping for a notion of legality.

The place of law in the political culture of the post-Emancipation period and the ultimate failure of normalized legal standards and procedures to sink deep roots into the soil of the autocratic regime have been thoughtfully examined by British and American scholars.3 Russia’s failure to develop a flourishing culture of law—one in which justice is dispensed by an independent judiciary, administrative fiat is restricted by the separation of powers, and men with the physical power to impose their will restrain themselves even if it means losing something they value highly—is frequently noted by scholars, who invoke that failure to explain the pressures for a revolutionary solution to the problems of a regime that was unwilling to abide even by its own laws. If, notwithstanding the judicial reform of 1864 and the integrity of its authors and their predecessors, it is Russian monarchs and their more prominent officials, including scions of the upper nobility, who have shouldered the blame for this fragility of legal culture,⁴ working-class (not to mention peasant and intelligentsia) impatience with legalistic, formal solutions to problems of social justice has also come in for a share of the blame.⁵

The Kreenholm story, however, introduces us to two sets of historical actors whose conduct did not frilly conform to the now conventional wisdom. On the one hand, as already suggested, we will see factory workers with no prior exposure to political discourse of any kind groping their way toward a rudimentary concept of legal norms and civil rights that arose from but stretched beyond their immediate material needs as a collectivity; on the other hand, we will meet a high government official of impeccable aristocratic, indeed princely, descent, the governor of Estland province, as well as a number of lesser officials, who, while never abandoning their primary commitment to their primary duty, maintaining order, in various ways contributed positively to the painfùl awakening of the Kreenholm workers’ legal consciousness, supporting their aspirations as much as was possible within the framework of the system that they served. The outcome of these strained and not fully articulated efforts to change the factory constitution in Estland was not a very happy one, nor, in all probability, could it have been, under prevailing political conditions. But the story of these ventures and of their failure is, as I hope to show, instructive, among other reasons for the light it sheds on the parameters of possibility at an important moment of Russian history when the precise rules of engagement in social conflict of this kind had not been codified or ritualized.

Ethnicity (or nationality) will figure in our story not as a leitmotif, but as a minor theme that surfaces here and there in what I believe are significant ways. Although the major players in the Kreenholm drama include Estonians and ethnic Germans as well as Russians, I approach the story primarily as an episode in imperial Russian history. It was the imperial regime that provided the broad political framework in which the conflict unfolded, and it was Petersburg officials—at one point the emperor himself—who made the major decisions that decided its outcome. Almost all the relevant documents—the governor’s files, the report of an investigating commission, the memoirs of a worker participant—are in Russian, and most of them reflect what might be called a Petersburg perspective on the Kreenholm events.6 Still, the Kreenholm management and staff, from the factory director down to the lowliest foreman, as well as all local police and judicial institutions, were heavily dominated by ethnic Germans, and at the highest levels by members of Estland’s German elite (Balts, to follow the no longer current usage). And the majority of workers, including the most militant strike leaders, were not Russians but Estonians. Because these ethnic distinctions were related in important ways to the distribution of status and power at both the factory and regional levels, they cannot be abstracted from our social and political narrative. Awareness of their presence will allow us to visualize in microcosm the multinational reality of mid-nineteenthcentury Russia, shortly before the emergence of aggressive Russification began to accelerate the pace of interethnic conflict under Alexander III. The story of Kreenholm should help us to gauge how strongly some ethnogeographic units were integrated into the absolutist state, just as it will help us to see the limits to which that state could (or would) exert its will against a powerful segment of the business world.

By now the reader will have noted my impenitent references to this study as a story and as the recounting of an historical event. Without joining directly into current debates about narrative history, its truth value, and the validity of its referential claims,7 I would like to suggest that the genesis, progression, and suppression of a strike, especially one that occurs at a young factory that has never before experienced such a phenomenon, lends itself nicely to a narrative mode of representation. This is especially true when many of the sources— reports, investigations, and memoirs—are themselves designed as narratives, testifying from the outset to the sense of the historical actors, both during and after the conflict, that an important event had taken place whose story line could be construed as having a beginning, a middle, and an (unhappy, for most of the parties concerned) end, punctuated by several peak moments of highly expressive social behavior. The perspective of historians, of course, is not that of the actors, much as we must strive to reconstruct their points of view. As historians we must, in a sense, start afresh, reworking the partly conflicting stories told by participants, witnesses, and investigators—some of whom viewed these events as dangerous disorders (besporiadki), others as a just and necessary struggle—into a new narrative, one that evaluates and reevaluates their varying points of view by seeking out sources and perspectives of which the actors were deprived. Not the least of our advantages is our knowledge of the post-1872 future, our ability to foresee what to the historical actors was still unknown, allowing us to fit the narrower story into a network of issues the significance of which becomes clear only when viewed within a larger chronological frame.

How do these issues affect the selection process as we re-create and then retell the story of Kreenholm 1872? One is generally expected to begin such stories with historical background, and this study is no exception. I do so in chapter 1, though rather narrowly, focusing almost entirely on the local background of the area where the factory was located and of the factory itself, including its owners, managers, and laboring population. Here in the introduction, however, rather than repeating in tedious detail what is already well known to historians, I will confine myself to a brief reminder of the abortive efforts under Catherine the Great and Alexander I to transform the country into a Rechtsstaat, a monarchial system in which monarch and bureaucracy are subject to the predictable restrictions of legality—even if the law is of their own making—and the citizens’ (or perhaps more accurately, the subjects’) rights are correspondingly protected, even if they lack any share in political sovereignty.8 The first major step in the direction of a genuine Rechtsstaat (a breakthrough by no means matched by the more modest achievements of codification in the 1830s) came only with the judicial reform of 1864, which included trial by jury with adversarial (as opposed to inquisitorial) proceedings. Equally noteworthy, however, is the ambivalence of Tsar Alexander II and many of his officials about the implementation of that very important reform. Especially interesting for our purposes was the decision not to apply the reform in Estland and Russia’s other Baltic provinces. Ironically, this exclusion was a demonstration of respect for those provinces’ traditional institutions, which were heavily dominated by the region’s German-speaking upper nobility (Ritterschaft) but which disregarded the vast majority of the nonprivileged, native—in this case Estonian—population.

In chapters 2, 3, and 4, the narrative heart of the book, I turn to a detailed account of the Kreenholm unrest, introducing some of the strike leaders individually, presenting a somewhat sociologically oriented description of the strikers, and highlighting changes in the language they used as the conflict progressed. As the story unfolds, I take special note of the way in which the governor introduced legal categories into the discussion (asking workers to keep their protests within legal bounds; questioning the legality of management’s actions; arguing to his superiors and others, by way of mitigation, that certain workers had not engaged in criminal conduct under existing law), thereby inadvertently insinuating notions of law into the workers’ social imagination.⁹

In chapter 5,1 focus on the situation at Kreenholm in the aftermath of the strike, providing a kind of epilogue to the story by tracing the fate of some arrested strikers, the governor, and others. A sidelong glance at St. Petersburg, where a few of the Kreenholm strikers ended up, will begin to tie our Kreenholm story to that of the nascent Petersburg labor movement. Also included in chapter 5 is a look forward at Kreenholm in the post-strike decade, 1872-82, and particularly at the less well- known ‘disorders of 1882, which I briefly examine in an attempt to fit the earlier strike into the factory’s longer-range trajectory.

If strictly conceived as the story of Kreenholm, this book really ends with chapter 5, for chapter 6, an analysis of the life and memoir of the Kreenholm worker Vasilii Gerasimov, is written in a different key and opens up a new though related set of questions. As indicated in my Note on Sources (below), one of my most important sources for the narrative sections is Gerasimov, a rank-and-file participant in the strike who later recorded his recollections of it and of his earlier life at the factory and in a Finnish village near St. Petersburg. The first known autobiographical writing by a factory worker in Russian, the memoir, though short, is full of valuable social description. (My translation of it is included here as chapter 7.) But over and beyond its value as a source, it is an interesting psychological and even literary document, one that enables us to gain some insight into the mentality of a young worker engaged in the complex process of self-identification. Just as the Kreenholm strike took place before its participants were exposed to any well-honed notion of what a strike should be, and hence of what modes of behavior were appropriate to the occasion, so too was Gerasimov’s memoir written well before the genre of worker’s autobiography existed in Russia, indeed, even before the debate over what should constitute a worker’s view of the world was fully joined.¹⁰ And the unusual circumstance (though less unusual than one might imagine) that Gerasimov, despite his solid Russian name, was of dubious ethnicity (his native language was Finnish) provides us with a unique opportunity to raise the important question of identity in the context of his autobiographical narrative.

A Note on Sources

The major printed documentation for this study consists of two volumes of archival material published in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The more important of the two, Krengol’msknid stachka 1872 g. (hereafter ICS), published by the Central State Historical Archive Administration of what was then the Estonian SSR, deals entirely with the strike and its aftermath.¹¹ This valuable collection consists of 135 documents, most of them taken from the archive of the governor of Estland province (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29), whose office was located in the provincial capital, Reval (now Tallinn or Tallin). They include essential items such as the governor’s correspondence, by mail and by telegram, with the factory administration, the vice governor, regional police and judicial officials, locally based officers of the Imperial Gendarmes, and, of course, high officials in St. Petersburg. KS also includes the strikers’ various demand lists, the texts of agreements reached between strike leaders and the administration, summaries of the interrogations of striking workers, the findings of the Estland tribunal that tried numerous strike participants and leaders, and, extremely important, the detailed report of a special government commission appointed to investigate the causes of the strike. I am able to attest to the probity with which these documents—which at critical moments amount to a running chronological record of the strike—were selected and compiled by the editors, for, thanks to the kindness of the directors of TsGIA ESSR, I have on microfilm a full set of the pertinent files of the governor’s office, which I have used to enrich this study, especially the part that covers the weeks following the suppression of the strike.12

The second volume of archival material is part of the more familiar Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke, published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences (hereafter RD).13 In contrast to Z€S, this multivolume collection features documents held in the central archives of the empire, and the long section on the Kreenholm strike consists entirely of materials from the Third Section’s thorough file on the case (TsGAOR, f. 109, 3 eksp., 1872 g., d. 150, in two parts).14

Though written only a decade after the strike (in late 1881 or early 1882), Gerasimov’s memoir was not published until 1906 (long after his death in 1892), when it appeared in the left-wing journal Byloe under the title Pitomets vospitatel’nogo doma, a reference to the St. Petersburg Foundling Home, of which he was a ward. After the October Revolution the memoir was republished several times, both in whole and in part, with new titles that ignored the author’s connection with the Foundling Home. Although Gerasimov’s Russianness was problematic, these titles emphasized his identity as a Russian worker and, in one case, though his revolutionary career lasted but a few months and is barely touched on in the memoir, as a worker revolutionary.15 Because, beginning at age twelve, Gerasimov spent a total of eight years as apprentice and worker at the Kreenholm factory, the memoir is a superb source of information about conditions there as well as about the strike in which he took part—though never as a leader and certainly not as a revolutionary. 16

In addition to archival materials and Gerasimov’s memoir, I have made extensive use of the Kreenholm company’s own official history, published in 1907 on the occasion of the factory’s fiftieth anniversary, especially for information on such matters as the physical layout of the plant, labor-force and production data, the structure and personnel of the plant’s administrative hierarchy, and the names and good deeds (never mis deeds) of various administrators.17 My information on Estland in general and on the Kreenholm/Narva region in particular has been gleaned from a variety of sources in Russian, English, and German, all listed in the bibliography, but I would like to make special mention here of the excellent—for my purposes indispensable—history of the area and its people by Toivo Raun.18 Reportage in contemporary newspapers, most notably Golos (St. Petersburg) and Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow), has been useful as a supplementary source on certain details of the strike.

A variety of other sources have been used in chapter 6 to compensate for the lack of detail in Gerasimov’s memoir on his life in St. Petersburg after he left Kreenholm, including his brief career as a revolutionary. Particularly useftil were materials in the archive of the Special Senate

Tribunal (the OPPS), which handled Gerasimov’s case after his arrest in 1875, and some published documents of the Third Section.¹⁹ As to his longyears in prison and exile (1875 to his death in 1892), and especially the years after he penned his memoir, the documentary record remains almost nil.

Though rarely mentioned by Western historians, even historians of labor, the Kreenholm strike was ritually referred to, though briefly (usually in a single paragraph or at most one or two pages), in almost every Soviet survey of the history of the Russian labor movement. Such summary statements always followed a similar pattern, stressing the heroic quality of the workers’ struggle and the solidarity between Russian and Estonian workers, and usually mentioning the Russians, though they were the minority group, first. A typical statement might read: "The Kreenholm strike had great significance. Proletarians not only made demands, but actively resisted the authorities. Russian and Estonian workers acted in common [sovmestnof demonstrating proletarian solidarity."²⁰ The only extensive treatment of the strike in Russian is a short book by Pavel Kann, written as a celebration of the strike’s hundredth anniversary.²¹ Although, as the title Heroic Exploit (Podvig) suggests, Kann’s book is written in the spirit of the above quotation, it also contains valuable information.

PART ONE

The Kreenholm Strike

1 On the first phase of student-worker interaction, see R. E. Zelnik, Populists and Workers: The First Encounter Between Populist Students and Industrial Workers in St. Petersburg, 1871-74, Soviet Studies 24 (1972): 251-69.

2 Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y., 1978), esp. 474; see also R E. Zelnik, Passivity and Protest in Germany and Russia: Barrington Moore’s Conception of Working-Class Responses to Injustice, Journal of Social History 15, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 485-512.

3 An excellent example is the recent collection edited by Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1989).

4 Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976).

5 For a balanced discussion of this topic, see S. A. Smith, Workers and Civil Rights in Tsarist Russia, 1899-1917, in Crisp and Edmondson (eds.), Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, 145-69.

6 Though the governor’s files include some correspondence in German with the Kreenholm management and local officials, there is also a Russian version of almost all these documents. See Note on Sources, below.

7 A recent article that is close to my own perspective on these matters is Andrew P. Norman, Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms, History anil Theory 30, no. 2 (1991): 119-35.

8 For a concise discussion, see Marc Raeff, The Well-ordered Police Stute: Social and Institutional Change Through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven, 1983), pt. 3; and idem, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime (New York, 1984), chaps. 4-5.

9 Clifford Geertz, in Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), discusses the concept of law as a species of social imagination (232).

10 It is true that such matters began to be discussed in St. Petersburg in the late 1870s, but by that time Gerasimov was already in prison or exile. Of course, this does not preclude the possibility that he was exposed to such discussion by his fellow prisoners.

11 Krengol’mskaia stachka 1872g. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Tallin, 1952) (hereafter cited as KS.) Although some of the original documents were in German, all items in this volume are in Russian. Those that are translations from German are the original translations made by officials at the time. The only items translated from Estonian, a language that was not then used for official transactions, are selections from newspapers.

12 TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, dd. 560, 561, and 562. Whenever possible my notes will cite the published collection, available in a few American research libraries; my archival citations are to documents not included in KS or included only in excerpted form. If there is any bias in the KS editors’ selections, it lies in a tendency to omit materials that highlight the degree of conflict between factory administration and officialdom, especially the governor.

13 Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke. Sbornik dokumentov, vol. 2, pts. 1 (1861—74) and 2 (1875-84), ed. A. M. Pankratova (Moscow, 1950). Part 1, the more pertinent volume, is cited below simply as RD. Other volumes of RD are cited with their volume and part numbers, e.g., RD 2:2.

14 Documents 111-36, RD, 317-406. Some documents, e.g., the report of the investigating commission, are printed in both collections, in which case I cite from RD, which is much more widely available than KS in American libraries.

15 The most important editions, published as separate booklets with introductions and annotations by prominent scholars, carried the titles Zhizn³ russkogo rabochegopolveka tomu nazad. Zapiski rabochego-sotsialista Vasiliia Gerasimova, annotated and with an introduction by R. M. Kantor (Moscow, 1923); and Zhizn³ russkogo rabo chego. Vospom- inaniia, annotated and with an introduction by B. S. Itenberg (Moscow, 1959). All my citations are from the 1923 edition. For shorter excerpts, see Zhizn’ russkogo rabochego polveka tomu nazad. Iz zapisok rabochego Vasiliia Gerasimova, in Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v opisaniisamikh rabochikh. (Ot 70-kh do 90-khgodov) (Moscow, 1933); and Zhizn’ russkogo rabochego polveka tomu nazad, in V nachale puti. Vospominaniia peterburg- skikh rabochikh 1872-1897gg., comp. E. A. Korol’chuk (Leningrad, 1975).

16 We have no comparable account of life at a Russian factory covering a span of time as long as the period covered in Gerasimov’s memoir for any period before the end of the nineteenth century.

17 Krengol’mskaia manufaktura. 1857-1907. Istoricheskoe opisanie, sostavlennoe po sluchaiu 50-ti-letiia ee sushchestvovaniia, ispolnivshegosia 30 aprelia 1907goda (St. Petersburg, 1907) (hereafter cited as KM). The book is most detailed about the years beyond the scope of this study.

18 Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians (Stanford, 1987).

19 TsGAOR, f. 112 (Osoboe Prisutstvie Pravitel’stvuiushchego Senata [OPPS]), op. 1, ed. khr. 107; Third Section documents in RD 2:2,48-60. Another useful source is the documentary appendix to E. Korol’chuk, Iz istorii propagandy sredi rabochikh Peter- burga v scredine 70-kh godov, Katorga i ssylka, no. 1/38 (1928): 20-26. For further details, see chapter 6, note 28, below.

20 Kratkaia istoriia rabochego dvizheniia v Rossii (1861-1917gody) (Moscow, 1962), 76.

21 P. la. Kann, Podvig rabochikh KrengoPmskoi manufaktury. K stoletiiu stachki. Istoricheskii ocherk (Tallin, 1972). Kann is also the author of a useful book on Narva, a town that played a significant role in the story of the strike: Narva. Stranitsy istoriigoroda (Tallin, 1979).

ONE

Before the Strike

There is no doubt that the entire population of the city of Narva will follow the development and progress of such an enormous enterprise with keen attention.

Das Inland, 13 May 18571

In the late spring of 1870 a strike took place at the Nevskii cotton-spinning factory in St. Petersburg that startled Russian officialdom and stirred the souls of the liberal public.2 Though the world of industrial relations would never again be the same in the Russian capital, several years would pass before a strike of comparable magnitude again disturbed the peace of that city. Yet to the surprise of everyone concerned, it was only two years later, in 1872, that Russia experienced a second major textile strike, one of such proportions and cataclysmic character that it dwarfed its predecessor in the impact it produced on the public and the government alike. What was especially shocking about the Kreenholm strike, apart from its sheer force—a seven on the Richter scale of labor unrest to the Nevskii’s four—was its location. An island settlement on the Narova (or Narva) River near the border that divided Petersburg province from Estland, the small industrial settlement of Kreenholm was close enough to the Russian capital— some eighty-five miles to the east³ —for events at the factory to reverberate there quickly. At the same time, it was far enough away to leave the strike, at least in its initial phase, beyond the effective control of Petersburg officials, who read with alarm the detailed reports they received from their local agents.

Although no unrest could strike more terror into the hearts of Russian officials than that occurring in the immediate vicinity of the capital, certain factors made the news from Kreenholm very frightening. Not the least of these was the evidence it offered that even an isolated border area, far removed from the influence of university students or other outside agitators, was susceptible to menacing outbursts of labor unrest and stubborn resistance to authority,