Tsarist Labor Policy and the Railroads, 1885-1914

Abstract

The principal features of tsarist labor policy are well known. Although some provisions of tsarist labor legislation were enlightened by standards of their day, on whole government response to working-class militancy was confused, divided, and ineffective. The ministries of Finance and Internal Affairs were central loci of power on labor question and have thus justly attracted main attentions of scholars. But also important, if in a different way, was Ministry of Communications, charged with overseeing empire's rapidly expanding state and private railroad system. Railroad building was the essential condition of industrial development in Russia. By 1905 country's rail lines were serviced by over 750,000 workers and employees, more than two-thirds of whom worked for state. The ministry was thus not only central to regime's industrialization strategy, but was itself largest employer of hired labor in Russia.1 An examination of labor policy in Ministry of Communications can serve to bring policy of entire regime into sharper focus, highlighting its bureaucratic immobility and systemic failure. The Ministry of Communications never formulated a consistent labor policy. Before 1905 it responded to problems on an essentially ad hoc and ineffective basis, while after that fateful year it relied increasingly on repression to maintain labor peace. It might be thought that in its capacity as an employer tsarist state could find opportunities to practice benevolent paternalism it preached. But administration of state railroads could claim neither rationality of capitalist management nor patriarchy of an idealized past. From top to bottom railroading, with its myriad of petty satrapies and sway of arbitrary rule, resembled decaying hierarchy of Russian countryside.