Subject: Re: AUT: RE: Russia in 1920-21
From: chris wright <cwright-AT-megapathdsl.net>
Date: 28 Aug 2003 22:12:39 -0500


Hi Harald, Matthew,

Pirani is quite careful to not the drop in working population from 1920
to 1921, the period he is interested in.  The drop was dramatic, to
nearly half in Moscow, and Pirani is also careful, as Matthew noted, to
point out that a lot of the unrest was not for independent workers'
management of everything, but for more equitable distribution.

One thing that seems possible from Pirani's piece is that the workers to
some degree took the Bolsheviks at their word and unrest grew up around
the failure to implement ideas like a workers' wage for everyone and the
growing inequality.

Of course, Harald has raised before that the factory committees were
spread over a relatively small portion of total workplaces and that that
itself poses an interesting set of problems.

What I found interesting in the piece is exactly the refusal of the idea
that the working class was largely non-existant in this period.  Rather,
the struggles turned increasingly against the failure of the Bolsheviks
to live up to their promises by a hurt but not 'totally decimated and
inactive' population as Leninists have long claimed.  The amount of
self-activity was pronounced, but of a limited character politically.

Anyway, it is a good piece and while it is not exactly covering unknown
ground, it does cover a particular 7-9 month time frame between the end
of the Civil War and the NEP which is usually only mentioned for debates
in the Party.

Cheers,
Chris

On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 18:47, Harald Beyer-Arnesen wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Caygill, Matthew [CES]" <M.Caygill-AT-lmu.ac.uk>
> To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.Virginia.EDU>
> Sent: 28. august 2003 13.54
> Subject: AUT: RE: Russia in 1920-21
> 
> 
> > Chrias is right to draw attention to Simon Pirani's powerful article in
> the
> > latest Historical Materialism. Taking out a subscription to HM does also
> > allow access to the web version.
> >
> > Pirani certainly shows the extent of working class organisation and
> > discussion in Moscow as the civil war came to an end and his explicit
> > challenge to John Rees' version of the Leninist-Trotskyist orthodoxy of
> the
> > working class as an atomised mass that could no longer play anything like
> > the role it played in 1917 is very strong.
> 
> Well they hardly managed to play the same "role": The Bolshevik
> oppressive and exploitative regime prevailed. I have not read Simon
> Pirani's piece, and it may be excellent, richer in detail
> than earlier accounts and very much worthwhile. But the crux of
> the matter have been known for about 80 years for anybody
> who really wanted to know.
> 
> 
> >But at the same time the working
> > class had been badly hit by the civil war - if decimation is the loss of
> one
> > in ten then it was much worse in Moscow, and Petrograd was hit even  more.
> 
> It is tempting to suggest that you here somehwat confuse the
> decimation of Bolshevik workers with waged workers in general.
> Though the reliability of such figures can always be thrown in
> doubt, and we in all circumstances are talking about a situation
> where factories were relatively often temporaily closed down...
> still, according to Diane P. Koenker's article "Urbanization and
> Deurbanization in the Russian Civil War "(in "Party, State and
> Society in the Russian Civil War" Ed. Diane P. Koenker, William
> G. Rosenberg and Ronald G. Suny) from 1918 to (late) 1920
> the number of female workers in Moscow declined from 90 000
> to 80 000, while the number of male workers fell from
> 215 000 to 124 000. (Her source is official "soviet" statistics
> published in 1927.)  While according to William Chase in
> "Workers Soviet and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow
> 1918-1929":   "The Moscow proletariat in 1917 numbered
> between 410 000 and 420 000 members, 45 percent of whom
> worked in factories. By late 1920, that class ranks were halved
> and only 81 000 were industrial worrkers." Further most studies
> in the last decades suggest that the majority of the workers who
> had left were precisly the so much despised workers
> of peasants origin. ( Of course, the same could be said of the
> majority of workers who made the 1917 revolution.) Interesting
> enough also, the Moscow provincial authorities in the summer
> of 1920 estimated that its urban areas lacked 250 000 construction
> workers and 20 000 day labourers.
> 
> Petrograd was of course harder struck, and is said to alone
> have counted for about one half of the urban population
> decline during the civil war period. According to Lewis H. Sigelbaum's
> Soviet, State and Society: Between Revolutions 1918-1929":
> "The number of industrial workers in Petrograd plummeted from
> 406 000 in January 1917 to 123 000 by mid-1920." That
> still leaves only 30 000 less than the official figure of industrial
> workers in the whole of St- Petersburg province in 1905, and
> what is more, enough to have posed a threat to for the Bolshevik
> regime, the potential of its revolutionary overthrow, in particular
> as not too many workers like to be shot, harrassed or work under
> martial law, and the regime was already confronting the largest
> peasant (soldiers- and workers-)uprising that the Russian Empire
> had so far seen. Perhaps the regime was saved by the
> 5 million who died in the famine.
> 
> 
> > There are still objective factors about the strength and composition of
> the
> > working class to be taken into account. I think the real strength of
> > Pirani's piece is in pointing to the interplay of objective and subjective
> > factors - especially the growing Bolshevik view that they as the
> 'vanguard'
> > would take all the political decisions and generally frame the agenda as
> to
> > what workers could legitimately discuss or attempt to organise around.
> 
> As to "the growing Bolshevik view that they as the 'vanguard'
> would take all the political decisions and generally frame the
> agenda as to what workers could legitimately discuss or attempt to organise
> around,"  I do not know why so many confuse 1921 and onwards
> with late 1917, early 1918.
>         As for objetive factors, they were to a large extent of the
> Bolsheviks own making. You reap what you sow, as they say.
> 
> Sorry, for the somewhat ironical tone, Matthew. But I am a bit
> tired of people who begin in 1921, or latter, to find the answer
> to what went wrong, even if every historical evidence suggest
> otherwise. This said, it is an interesting period, as it held a
> certain social revolutionary potential. Though I suspect that
> the question of survival - in its most literal sense -- was the most
> urgent question in most workers and peasants minds. The
> spread of cannibalism points to that.
> 
> Harald
> 
> > More specifically the impression I got was that it wasn't so much working
> > class sentiment for direct control over rationing, but the issue of
> > inequalities in the ration that was the key focus in the build-up to the
> > strikes in 1920.
> >
> > Pirani is clearly doing excellent work on the archives about Moscow -
> there
> > is a chance that HM will publish his book. In the meantime his paper to
> the
> > BASEES Annual Conference 2003 is available on the web - 'The Moscow
> workers'
> > movement in 1921 and the role of non-partyism' at:
> > http://www.basees.org.uk/papers/pirani.pdf
> >
> > Cheers
> > Matthew
> 
> 
> 
> 
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