Charity and the Problem of Unemployment: Industrial Homes in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract

Educated Russians discovered unemployment in their country only towards the end of the nineteenth century. The word bezrabotitsa first appears in a dictionary only in 1891, where its definition hovers between holiday and unemployment.1 Some Russians continued to believe that the country's primarily peasant character protected it from ills such as unemployment suffered by the capitalist and urbanized West. As economic and social change accelerated, however, others recognized that the availability, nature, and demands of work in Russia were changing fundamentally.2 Not all of the millions of peasants who left their villages in search of seasonal or year-round employment could find suitable work in agriculture, urban services, or factories. The resulting unemployment and underemployment were exacerbated by the cycles of boom and depression to which an industrializing Russia was increasingly vulnerable. Disastrous crop failures in the 1890s seemed to reflect a steady erosion of the peasant economy in large parts of the country. These problems were often magnified by the low level of skill among workers. Only twenty-one percent of the entire population was literate in 1897.3 Abundant supplies of unskilled day laborers kept wages at subsistence level. As they became aware of these trends, educated Russians