Russia’s Factory Children: State, Society, and Law, 1800–1917 (review)

It should not come as a surprise that Russia, like every other European country, exploited child labor as it began to industrialize. Underage workers made up approximately fifteen percent of Russia’s factory labor force in the mid-nineteenth century. While labor historians have studied child labor in Western Europe, up until now this topic has been largely overlooked by scholars of Russia. Boris Gorshkov packs a lot of fascinating material into this brief volume, an overview of child labor in Russia from nascent industrialization to the 1917 Revolution.

Russia’s Factory Children is divided into two parts. The first part examines the development of labor during childhood. Gorshkov backgrounds the topic with a survey of rural child labor patterns and finds that adults saw these tasks as educating youths for adult occupations, rather than as simply economic exploitation. This is not to say that parents, and especially serf owners, did not exploit child labor. In mines and early industrial workshops, owners abused children as they found them more adaptable to new machines. The combination of the emancipation of the serfs, the growth of the capitalist market, and industrialization led to a proliferation in child labor. Gorshkov notes that while poverty drove many parents to send their children to the factories, many also saw apprenticeship in the factories as a means for a better life for their offspring and as a way of sustaining the battered nuclear family. Once in the factories, Russia’s children suffered the same illnesses and injuries as other children in Europe’s early factories.

The second section surveys the development of legislation as public distaste of child labor grew in the second half of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1860’s, the educated public pressured the state to study and regulate child labor. In 1882, the state relented by prohibiting most industrial labor for those under the age of twelve, limiting the hours of older children, and improving working conditions for youths. It later mandated education. Gorshkov shows how other European countries’ examples and public pressure pushed the state to begin to regulate child labor. Such an open and flexible government is a far cry from what scholars had once seen as an imposing state that closed itself off from any outside influence. Indeed, Gorshkov is at his strongest when he compares Russia to other European industrializing countries and finds that there was little difference or delay between Russian and West European legislation to regulate child labor. This is a significant finding. I still wish, however, that Gorshkov gave greater emphasis to how the child labor question was part of larger discussions within Russia of social reform (especially of the Great Reforms), popular morality, peasant economics, and even social health. Gorshkov argues that industrialists resisted the regulations and later their implementation. The economic downturn of the early 1880s gave factory owners the reason to fire many of the child laborers. Like many Russian regulations, the state did not allot enough resources to inspectors studying factories for violations. The First World War pushed more children into factories as the state needed bodies to run the country’s economy.

This is an overview of child labor in Russia, and Gorshkov favors meta analysis over detailed case studies. This makes the book accessible to both experts and students of Russian history. There are a few places where I selfishly wish that Gorshkov would have dwelled a bit longer, such as cottage industry and rural handicraft production that were so important in the transition to industrialization in Western Europe as well as the experience and understanding of child labor by the Russian Empire’s national and religious minorities. Likewise, Gorshkov raises a tantalizing question about when and how did childhood originate in Russia, but never fully answers it. Childhood was not just a question of public discourses on childhood, but also how underage workers experienced domestic life, time outside of work...