Labor Violence — A Reply

Abstract

Our discussion of violence among Russian labor in the late nineteenth century has raised more questions than it has answered and created considerable heat as well as light in this murky corner of Russian social history. There is a consensus that the subject deserves serious attention, but beyond that point, agreement ends. The questions raised by the discussants center on the typology and dynamics of labor violence, but include as well issues relating to the formation, popular culture, behavior, and urban acculturation of the Russian labor force. There is much we do not know about workers of the late tsarist years. Ronald Suny provides an impressive list of the authors of recent works on Russian labor history, but is quite justified in his complaint of the absence of an interpretive survey. We lack a real social history of Russian jabor (though the gap may soon be filled as a result of a recent conference on the subject). Consequently, we must each compose our own work, constructing a conceptual framework and selecting material to fit our own tentative argument. Not surprisingly, my imaginary survey includes a chapter on the origins and evolution of labor violence in the years prior to 1905. The scholars who have joined this discussion have, if one may judge by their comments, taken different paths. Suny relegates the subject to an earlier period, presumably the midnineteenth century. Diane Koenker chooses to view it as one part of collective action, profoundly modified by urbanization. Robert Johnson appears to be of two minds, on the one hand calling the subject important, while on the other emphasizing the rationality and discipline of the late-century worker movement, leaving the impression that (as in his book on Moscow labor) he minimizes violent protest and views strikes as the dominant mode throughout the period. How is the reader to judge the relative merits of the arguments? The task is made no easier by the controversy surrounding the subject. Discussion of worker violence touches sensitive nerves among those who believe the very mention of the topic is a reflection on the ethical standards of Russian labor or on the quality of social relations among Russia's lower classes. The issue comes to us weighed down with the ideological baggage of a century of debate among radicals, for whom labels like backwardness, rebelliousness, and Pugachevism revealed one's attitude toward revolution and progress in Russia. I admit to some disappointment at having terms like Bakuninism applied to my views and at being labeled a modernizer (does this make me a Westernizer in contemporary garb?). Some controversy enlivens debate and stimulates interest in a topic, but the use of polemical terms merely throws up clouds of confusion where clear vision is needed. All the discussants refer to the work of Western social historians, such as Hobsbawm and Sewell, whose conceptualizations of labor history provide analytical models for the study of Russian labor. Johnson is correct in warning of the dangers of using these models to force the Russian worker into an alien mold. The misuse of comparative historical methods creates as many stereotypes as does ideological bias. Clearly great care is needed in employing the concept of primitive rebels, which I used as a method of analyzing one pattern