Russia's Factory Children: State, Society, and the Law, 1800-1917 (review)

This modestly titled monograph endeavors, and partially succeeds, in packing a sizeable punch, felt well beyond its nominal target. Arguing that the history of childhood in Imperial Russia has been largely neglected, Gorshkov sets out to describe the contours and dimensions of child factory labor in the long nineteenth century, beginning with the half century before the Emancipation of serfs in 1861, followed by the emergence of the "labor question" and intense public discussions in the 1860s and 1870s, and concluding with the reign of Nicholas II (1894-1917), marked by the industrial surge usually associated with the name of then Minister of Finance Sergei Witte. Gorshkov describes perceptions of child labor, its emergence as a "problem" in the 1860s, debate within government commissions and subsequent legislation restricting child labor (1845, 1882-1884, 1897) and the mixed impact of this legislation. He is interested in not only the motivations of legislators in promulgating such laws, the reactions of factory owners, but also the reasons parents sent their children to work in factories. He ably and carefully pieces together largely fragmentary studies to estimate the growth and relative weight of child labor in industry; investigates the diet, health, and incidence of work-related trauma among factory children; and in general sketches a picture of the lived experience of the youth workforce. Throughout the book, Gorshkov makes rather bold assertions about the implications of his study for the history of the Russian autocracy and of evolving Russian society as a whole.

Russia's Factory Children is a rigorously empirical study, anchored in quantitative studies, critically deploying both Soviet and pre-revolutionary Russian, as well as recent English-language scholarship. Gorshkov also makes limited use of Russian archives, especially the deliberations of governmental commissions found in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) in Moscow. He candidly acknowledges that "most of the sources used for this study do not come directly from children themselves, who all too often left no contemporary record of their outlook and experiences" (p. 7). Thus, "this is a study of child workers' experiences as seen through the eyes of adult contemporaries" (p. 7). What children themselves thought and felt "is an almost closed book" (p. 7). Perhaps he gives up too easily here: recent work by Alla Salnikova (Rossisskoe detstvo v. XX veke [Kazan, 2007]) and Evgenii Balashov (Shkola v. Rossiiskom obshchestve, 1917-1927 [St. Petersburg, 2003]) in Russia have interrogated "children's texts" and brought to bear both new sources and insights into the late Imperial and Soviet period. Yet Gorshkov should not be severely faulted here: subjectivity has been of keen interest to scholars in recent decades, but childhood subjectivity is a hard nut for historians to crack. The recent magisterial work of Catriona Kelly, Children's World (Cambridge, 2007), covering the late Imperial and Soviet periods, is also almost exclusively based upon "adult" texts (including memoirs of childhood). Likewise, Jane Humphries' Childhood and Child Labor in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) is based upon six hundred autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Somewhat less understandable is the absence in his bibliography of some standard studies of Russian industrialization (Von Laue, Gershchenkron) and of Dan Orlovsky's seminal study of the "deep structure" of the Ministry of Interior (The Limits of Reform [Harvard, 1981]) since this is where, in Gorshkov's interpretation, the concern about the exploitation of child labor originated in Russia. The source base is also think for his investigation of factory schools and children's literacy and education—this topic is rather central to his discussion.

Among the salient arguments put forth by Gorshkov are the following:

1. a. Child labor was treated as a social good, as apprenticeship rather than exploitation, until the era of the Great Reforms (1860s).

2. b. A steady increase in child...