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

Comprising fifteen percent of the industrial labor force in mid-nineteenth century Russia, children were integral to the economy of the late Imperial period. In his monograph, Boris Gorshkov examines both the reality of child factory labor and the way that the tsarist state and civil society approached questions of childhood and work. Challenging prevailing notions of Russia's singular path and "backwardness" (p. 145), Gorshkov contends that efforts to regulate the treatment of factory children place Russia on a par with its European counterparts. He also identifies another noteworthy phenomenon: "a distinctly interactive process among state officials at virtually all levels and [civil] society" (p. 6).

Gorshkov begins by describing childhood among the Russian peasantry in a favorable light, maintaining that children received indulgent attention from adults who sent them to work not "for the sake of profit" but "for the purpose of teaching and apprenticing them" (p. 25). Child labor was thus, according to Gorshkov, fundamentally instructive rather than productive. Although he provides much evidence for what could be considered child exploitation, he stresses that Russia's approach to child labor was in line with that of Western and Central Europe. Gorshkov next turns to a discussion of the numbers of children in Russian factories and the conditions under which they labored. He examines various industries and regions and chronicles the terrible conditions young workers encountered at the side of their family members or as independent laborers hired by factory foremen or skilled workers who needed cheap assistants. Twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-hour days awaited them, writes Gorshkov, as did low pay and unhygienic and dangerous conditions in crowded, unventilated factories and workshops. He attributes the high numbers of factory children at the turn of the twentieth century to traditions that took child labor for granted and to family economic needs, as well as to the circumvention of laws by children, adult workers, and employers.

A third chapter analyzes mid-nineteenth-century debates about child labor to show that civil society was making its mark, both in terms of articulating reformist ideas and industrial interests. Countering traditional narratives about the weakness of the Russian bourgeoisie, Gorshkov argues that factory owners and entrepreneurs lobbied hard to persuade government commissions of the inadvisability of state intervention. By the 1870s, broad social support for the regulation of child labor existed in Russia and, as he argues in a final chapter, gave rise to ambitious legislation that ultimately "limited the workday, legalized strikes and workers' unions, introduced health care and state-sponsored medical insurance for all workers, and established pensions for some categories of disabled and retired workers" (p. 128). Gorshkov acknowledges that enforcement of these laws was spotty—with each state inspector responsible for 1,440 enterprises (p. 133)—as well as the fact that nothing regulated agricultural, domestic, and artisanal child labor. Nevertheless, legislation had a positive impact, particularly when it came to improving literacy. Gorshkov concludes with a hagiographic note, extolling the participation of children and youth in the workers' movement, strikes, and revolutionary politics.

Although his ideas are intriguing, Gorshkov renders them questionable with sloppy citations, selective use of evidence, and gaps in his acquaintance with the primary and secondary literature. For example, two endnotes (numbers 38 and 39 on page 194) list non-existent pages from Clark Nardinelli's Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (Indiana University Press, 1990). When Gorshkov describes the Russian commissions that proposed labor laws from 1859-1864, his discussion is based less on the actual minutes of these commissions' workings than on secondary sources. Although he acknowledges Reginald Zelnik's analysis of these same commissions, Gorshkov does not engage in a meaningful way with Zelnik's conclusions. Gorshkov's rosy description of peasant families neither draws nor relies on publications by David L. Ransel, the leading Western historian of Russian-era childhood whose vision is both more pessimistic and more persuasive. While Gorshkov by no means glosses over the horrors...