Collective Action and Collective Violence in the Russian Labor Movement

Abstract

Historians of the Russian labor movement have been slowly chipping away at the stereotypes about Russian workers created by generations of intellectuals quick to generalize from eye-catching impressions. The result has been the stereotyped, bipolar working class. On the one hand is the “peasant yokel” who too frequently resorts to the violent and mindless behavior indigenous to his original rural swamp. On the other hand, we find the skilled urban worker, sometimes a “half-literate intellectual,” sometimes a labor aristocrat who disdains to cooperate with his socialist mentors. Daniel Brower's look at labor violence attempts to help reshape the familiar stereotype by exploring the cultural roots of the Russian worker's predilection for violence and by showing that such behavior is less mindless and more political than its critics have accepted. By not adequately specifying the contours and especially the frequency of violence, however, he leaves us ultimately with the old image of a Pugachevshchina in the factories. Brower in effect takes the pieces of the stereotype he has chipped away and glues them back in approximately the same pattern.