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Chapter 3. The History of Worker Unrest in the Lena Region, 1842–1912
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Chapter 3 The History of Worker Unrest in the Lena Region, 1842–1912 I n his report about the April tragedy, Senator Manukhin wrote that the “Lena gold-mining workers ’ strike was not a new phenomenon and not accidental.” The prehistory of the events supports both aspects of his contention. In its account of the strikes in the Lena mines, the Blagoveshchensk Church chronicle commented that workers’ desire to improve their material conditions was not the whole story of the strikes: The cause of the strikes has to be sought at a deeper level, in those abnormal relations created between those who hire workers and the workers , especially in such remote places as the taiga. Workers arrive here from home, from distant Russia, often chased from the homeland by hunger and other hardships. Arriving here hungry and cold, they agree to all conditions. . . . They have no idea what recompense they will receive for their labor. And then, after a few months, it dawns on them that, without additional income, their wages don’t even cover basic support . At this point certain misunderstandings arise [claimed the church chronicle with blessed understatement]. They purchase supplies at the company store, where some clerk, in the interests of the company, gives no choice of meat, hands out bread that is often half-baked, and so forth. From experience the workers know that it is useless to complain because here they simply tell you to quit if you don’t like things. . . . And so begins the strike. . . . The strikes here usually have an economic character.1 The Blagoveshchensk priests, longtime witnesses of workermanagement conflicts, captured the specifics of the workers’ situation in the remote taiga. Acute economic hardship, the unimaginable remoteness of the mines, and the resulting utter worker helplessness, or put another way, workers’ utter dependence on the very people who caused their travails, constituted the underlying characteristics of strikes in the Lena gold-mining region. Until the s, miners’ protests were completely unorganized and sometimes stormy. In his study, Semevskii remarked that most worker resistance was “passive” in that it consisted of workers simply fleeing the mines. In essence, workers voted with their feet, as physically hazardous and fraught with criminal consequences as this mode of protest was. Beginning in the s and s Siberian mine workers, at the time mostly in Western Siberia, created quite a record of mutinies and strikes. Since most of that era’s West Siberian enterprises were state owned and the laborers were possessional (tied to the enterprise ) or were serving terms at exile, the government invariably responded forcibly, as the law required. For example, the government employed military force against the uprisings throughout the Eniseisk mining region to the west of the Lena system. After summary trials in military courts, the authorities, according to one commentator, “cruelly punished” those involved. Thereafter “a lengthy quiet prevailed ” in the Siberian mines. This relative calm, punctuated by occasional protests, prevailed in West Siberian gold mines well into the s. The disorders that occurred normally found their cause in personal conflicts between the miners and individual mining administrators or government officials. They usually took the form of short-lived rampages, some drunkenness, raids on liquor supplies, and occasional attacks on offending officials. On the whole, the scattered nature of the West Siberian mines precluded concerted action.2 The same cannot be said of gold mining in Eastern Siberia where mines were often concentrated in a particular district and where conditions were remarkably challenging. As a result, collective protests in the region increased steadily, if not at first alarmingly. Even so, during the s and early s “disorders” in Eastern Siberia and, in particular , in the Olekminsk region were not unlike those of Western Siberia. They were mostly spontaneous and brief, if sometimes violent. For example , during several workers at one Olekma mine refused to be transferred to another mine owned by the same company. The local police officer blamed the episode on the poor conditions in the first mine, which had not lived up to the owners’ expectations in terms of profitability. That same year, when a Cossack detachment arrested a worker at the Sibiriakov, Bazarov, and Nemchinov Company mines, his companions forcibly freed him. In another incident, miners at the Trapeznikov mines refused to report to work in protest of poor History of Worker Unrest [3.238.62.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:15 GMT) conditions. During , at another Olekma mine, a group of...