Worker Voices, Elite Representations: Rewriting the Labor History of Late Imperial Russia

Pointing out the difficulty of recovering authentic representations of worker voices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia, this review essay examines two recent books and their contribution to labor history. Reginald Zelnik's Law and Disorder on the Narova River (1995) tries to depend upon a brief worker memoir to retell an 1872 strike in a textile factory. But worker voices prove rare and elliptical, making difficult Zelnik's ambition to have workers tell their own story. The plot is arresting nonetheless. Contrary to stereotype, peasant textile workers at Kreenholm were among the first of Russia's radicalized workers. State officials, too, failed to fulfill their expected roles; instead of oppression and collusion with entrepreneurs, some local authorities extended sympathy and support to strikers. A second book, Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia (1999) reviewed here, considers "Realities, Representations, and Reflections" of the connection between Russia's proletariat and the intelligentsia. Although many of the authors attempt to demonstrate the vibrant dialog between these two social orders, the evidence adduced often leaves open how independent Russia's workers were, and to what extent their narratives may be used to reconstruct the labor history of the last decades of tsarism.