Революция, государство, рабочий протест: формы, динамика и природа массовых выступлений рабочих в Советской России, 1917−1918 годы by Дмитрий Чураков (review)

The idea of studying workers’ political activity is not a new one for Western students of twentieth-century Russian and Soviet history. Nor has the topic been ignored in examinations of the Revolution. Indeed, the question of worker engagement in revolution—in the initial Revolution and through the Stalin era—has inspired works ranging from Alexander Rabinowich’s extensive histories of the revolution to Sheila Fitzpatrick’s efforts to understand the functioning of the later Stalinist society. But in Revoliutsiia, gosudarstvo, rabochii protest, Dmitrii Churakov does indeed do something new from a Russian-language perspective. His study of the Revolution, especially 1917–1918, keeps its eyes trained firmly on the perspective of the workers, asking what their organization was like, to what extent they were under central orders from the Bolsheviks, differences across the former tsarist empire, and whether the workers had any alternatives to the Bolshevik position. As a final offering, his work positions the Russian experience comparatively (across time, as well as across other societies’ experience of modernization.)

Churakov’s work is part of a series on social history in the twentieth century, published by the Russian Political Encyclopedia. The monograph (2004) proposes to discuss a less-publicized side of the working class. To do so, Churakov works with documentary sources from national archives (The State Archive of the Russian Federation, The Central Archive of the FSB) as well as regional ones. His aim is to offer a snapshot of protest movements at the start of Soviet power, the revolutionary years of 1917–1918. To do so, Churakov presents an argument across five chapters. The first opens with a sweeping question, asking whether democracy was to be a matter of civil law or proletariat power. He looks to 1917, asking if the moment of compromise had passed. His analysis starts with March 1917, observing what he refers to as the “first crisis of Sovnarkom,” and looking at the worker response, including use of the left-wing press (most obviously, Pravda, P. 31). The key to Bolshevik survival, he suggests, was their ability to build alliances with professional organizations, factories, and groups within the military (P. 41). Their ascendancy was also marked, however, by a clear drift to the side of the most radical socialist transformation. The participation of the Soviet workers in the rise of Bolshevik power, though, had a longer-running impact than their immediate connection with their government; it would shape the post-revolutionary state and its relationship with society. The second chapter (“Strikes and Street Destruction”) moves further into an examination of ground-level politics, specifically seeking, as Churakov notes, the view on the “side of the barricades.” The third chapter reveals his analysis of worker protests and organizations across Russia (including Tula and Nizhnii Novgorod, as well as Moscow), and their ultimate choice, to support the new government or revolution. Through this and subsequent chapters (including the fourth, his treatment of the 1918 All-Russian Workers’ Congress), Churakov emphasizes the workers’ power in politics. In the fifth chapter, he pulls back from the implied binary in his work (state power vs. worker power), to talk about what he calls the “zigzags”—the suggested third way presented by the 1918 uprisings in Izhevsk and Votkinsk, which turned against both the White Army and Bolsheviks in Kazan. Comparing these cities to events in Ekaterinburg, he considers the nature of industry, and the possibility of the return of former owners, to have an impact on the continuance of Soviet labor policies in these areas. Rather than ideology, it was therefore economics that shaped the response of the Izhevsk and Votkinsk workers to their condition. Euphoria from the cities’ short-term victories over the Soviets, for example, quickly gave way to a grim realization of of the economic situation (P. 326).

This chapter reveals one of the weaker aspects of the book. In reading about these workers, one will not find individual worker profiles or narratives to deeply personalize their cause. Instead, Churakov has focused heavily on the social science details to make only a...