Encyclopedia of Russian History
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
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WORKERS’ CONTROL
was a period of bloodshed, hunger, and, eventually, draconian measures such as the militarization of labor and the introduction of strict one-man management, inflicted by a relentless Bolshevik regime on recalcitrant workers. Though indispensable to the Reds in their struggle against the Whites in these years of civil war, workers emerged from the war demoralized and, in many cases, thanks to the damage suffered by Russian industry, declassed. Workers now ceased to be a significant independent force in the country’s political life. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; LABOR; OCTOBER GENERAL STRIKE OF 1905; OCTOBER REVOLUTION; REVOLUTION OF 1905; SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; UNION OF STRUGGLE FOR THE EMANCIPATION OF LABOR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bonnell, Victoria E. (1983). Roots of Rebellion: Workers’ Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900-14. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haimson, Leopold H. (1964-1965). “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1917.” Slavic Review 23 (4): 619-642; 24(1):1-22. Johnson, Robert E. (1979). Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wildman, Allan K. (1967). The Making of a Workers’ Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891-1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zelnik, Reginald E. (1971). Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855-1870. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zelnik, Reginald E., ed. and tr. (1986). A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zelnik, Reginald E., ed. (1999). Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections. Research Series, no. 101. Berkeley: International and Area Studies, University of California.
REGINALD E. ZELNIK
WORKERS’ CONTROL
The slogan “workers’ control,” popular among radical Russian workers during the 1917 Revolution and the early years of Bolshevik rule, designated a program that was supposed to lead directly to so1674 cialism. The program called for the proletariat to seize and operate the capitalists’ factories and to plan and manage production and distribution throughout Russian industry. The concept had its roots in nineteenth-century European socialism and especially in the syndicalist movement, which espoused economic units organized and run by workers.
Immediately after the February 1917 Revolution, demands for workers’ control began to spread among activist workers in large enterprises. The slogan attracted growing support in the summer and fall of 1917 as economic conditions worsened, real wages fell, and some factories closed, while workers were locked out of other plants. Several Bolshevik leaders espoused workers’ control as early as April 1917, and Lenin, recognizing the slogan’s broad appeal, adopted it as part of the Bolshevik platform in June, encouraging its use in Bolshevik propaganda.
In August, September, and October 1917, workers seized some factories, and more were taken over after the Bolsheviks came to power. But faced with shortages of basic supplies, chaotic markets, labor absenteeism, and inadequate technical and managerial know-how, proletarian owners had little success in getting factories back into production. Lenin soon soured on the practice of workers’ control, and beginning in early 1918 he started centralizing economic decision-making. He also called for unitary or one-man management (edi-nonachalie) in industries and individual enterprises as well as use of bourgeois specialists-former engineers, technicians, and managers-to help operate the factories and reenergize the economy. Although workers’ control was largely dropped, a faction within the Bolshevik party known as the Workers’ Opposition campaigned unsuccessfully during 1919 and 1920 for trade unions to have a greater role in running the Soviet economy. See also: EDINONACHALIE; FEBRUARY REVOLUTION; WORKERS’ OPPOSITION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Smith, Stephen A. (1983). Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wade, Rex. (2000). The Russian Revolution, 1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
JOHN M. THOMPSON
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
WORLD REVOLUTION
WORKERS’ OPPOSITION
The Workers’ Opposition (Rabochaya oppozitsia) was a group of trade union leaders and industrial administrators within the Russian Communist Party who opposed party leaders’ policy on workers and industry from 1919 to 1921. The group formed in the fall of 1919, when its leader, Alexander Shlyapnikov, called for trade unions to assume leadership of the highest party and state organs. Leading members of the Metalworkers’ Union supported Shlyapnikov, who criticized the growing bureaucratization of the Communist Party and Soviet government, which he feared would stifle worker initiative. The Workers’ Opposition advocated management of the economy by a hierarchy of elected worker assemblies, organized according to branches of the economy (metalworking, textiles, mining, etc.).
Shlyapnikov, the chairman of the All-Russian Metalworkers’ Union, was the most prominent leader of the Workers’ Opposition. Thirty-eight individuals signed the theses of the Workers’ Opposition in December 1920. Most of them had been metalworkers; they represented the Metalworkers’ Union, Mners’ Union, and the leading organs of heavy industry. Alexandra Kollontai advised the Workers’ Opposition and was a spokesperson for it. She wrote a pamphlet about the group (Rabochaya oppozitsia), which circulated among delegates to the Tenth Communist Party Congress in 1921.
Leaders of the Opposition used the resources and organizations of major trade unions (metalworkers, miners, textile workers) to mobilize support. Many meetings were arranged by personal letter or word of mouth. Metalworkers or former metalworkers composed the membership, all of whom were also Communists.
The Workers’ Opposition drew attention to a divide between Soviet industrial workers and the Communist Party, which claimed to rule in the name of the working class. Party leaders feared that the Workers’ Opposition would inspire opponents of the regime. At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, the party banned the Workers’ Opposition. See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; KOLLONTAI, ALEXANDRA MIKHAILOVNA; SHLYAPNIKOV, ALEXANDER GAV-RILOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Holmes, Larry E. (1990). For the Revolution Redeemed: The Workers Opposition in the Bolshevik Party, 1919-1921 (Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 802). Pittsburgh, PA : University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies. Kollontai, Alexandra. (1971). The Workers Opposition in Russia.. London: Solidarity.
BARBARA ALLEN
WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ INSPECTORATE
See RABKRIN.
WORLD REVOLUTION
When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels implored workers of the world to unite, they announced a new vision of international politics: world socialist revolution. Although central to Marxist thought, the importance of world revolution evoked little debate until World War I. It was Vladimir Lenin who revitalized it, made it central to Bolshevik political theory, and provided an institutional base for it. Although other Marxists, such as Nikolai Bukharin and Rosa Luxemburg, devoted serious attention to it, Lenin’s ideas had the most profound impact because they persuasively linked an analysis of imperialism with the struggle for world socialist revolution.
In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin argued that modern war was due to conflicts among imperialist powers and that any revolution within the imperialist world would weaken capitalism and hasten socialist revolution. The contradictions of capitalism and imperialism provided the soil that nourished world revolution. In the fall of 1917, when Lenin cajoled his comrades to seize power, he argued that the Russian Revolution was “one of the links in a chain of socialist revolutions” in Europe. He believed in the imminence of such revolutions, which he deemed essential to the Bolshevik revolution’s survival and success. His optimism was not unfounded, as revolutionary unrest engulfed Central and Eastern Europe in
1918-1920.
In 1919 Lenin helped to create the Communist International (Comintern) to guide the world revolution. As the revolutionary wave waned in the 1920s, Stalin claimed that world revolution was not essential to the USSR’s survival. Rather, he argued,
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WORLD WAR I
developing socialism in one country (the USSR) was essential to keeping the world revolutionary movement alive. Other Bolshevik leaders, notably Leon Trotsky, disagreed, but in vain. Nonetheless, until it adopted the Popular Front policy in 1935, the Comintern pursued tactics for world revolution. Unlike previous Comintern policies, which sought to spark revolution, the Popular Front was a defensive policy designed to stem the rise of fascism. It marked the end of Soviet efforts to foment world socialist revolution. See also: LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McDermott, Kevin, and Agnew, Jeremy. (1997). The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Nation, R. Craig. (1989). War on War: Lenin, the Zim-merwald Left, and the Origins of Communist Internationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
WILLIAM J. CHASE
WORLD WAR I
Imperial Russia entered World War I in the summer of 1914 along with allies England and France. It remained at war with Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey until the war effort collapsed during the revolutions of 1917.
In 1914 military theory taught that new technologies meant that future wars would be short, decided by initial, offensive battles waged by mass conscript armies on the frontiers. Trapped between two enemies, Germany planned to defeat France in the west before Russia, with its still sparse railway net, could mobilize. Using French loans to build up that net, Russia sought to speed up the process, rapidly invade East Prussia, and so relieve pressure on the French. Berlin therefore feared giving Russia a head start in mobilizing and, rightly or wrongly, most statesmen accepted that if mobilization began, war was inevitable.
On June 28, 1914, a nationalist Serbian student shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, at Sarajevo. To most statesmen’s surprise, this provoked a crisis when Austria, determined to punish the Serbs, issued an unacceptable ultimatum on July 23. Over the next six days, pressure mounted on Nicholas II but, rec1676 ognizing that mobilization meant war, he refused to order a general call-up that would force a German response. Then Vienna declared war on Serbia, Nicholas’s own efforts to negotiate with Kaiser William II collapsed, and on July 30 he finally approved a general mobilization. When St. Petersburg ignored Berlin’s demand for its cancellation within twelve hours, Germany declared war on August 1. Over the next three days Germany invaded Luxembourg, declared war on France on August 4, and by entering Belgium, added Britain to its enemies.
THE WAR OF MOVEMENT: SUMMER 1914-APRIL 1915
Some Social Democrats aside, Russia’s educated public rallied in a Sacred Union behind their ruler. Strikes and political debate ended, and on August 2, crowds in St. Petersburg cheered Nicholas II after he signed a declaration of war on Germany. Local problems apart, the mobilization proceeded apace as 3,115,000 reservists and 800,000 militiamen joined the 1,423,000-man army to provide troops for Russian offensives into Austrian Galicia and, as promised, France and East Prussia.
Although Nicholas II intended to command his troops in person, he was pressured into appointing instead his uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai Niko-layevich the Younger. Whatever its merits, this decision split the front administratively from the rear thanks to a new law that assigned the army control of the front zone. This caused few problems when the battle line moved forward in 1914 and early 1915. However, without the tsar as a civil-military lynchpin, it led to chaos during the later Great Retreat.
The Grand Duke established his skeleton Stavka (Supreme Commander-in-Chief’s General Headquarters) at Baranovichi to provide strategic direction to the Galician and East Prussian offensives. These were to open on August 18-19 under the direct supervision of the separate operational headquarters of the Northwest and Southwest Fronts. Yet on August 6 Austria-Hungary declared war and on the next day invaded Russian Poland. This forestalled the Southwest Front (Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Armies, with 52% of Russia’s strength) and it opened its own Galician offensive on August 18. Despite early enemy successes, the Front’s armies trounced the Austrians and captured the Galician capital of Lvov (Lemberg) on September 3. A week later the Russians won decisively at Rava Ruska, and by September 12 they had foiled an Austrian attempt to retake Lvov. By September
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
WORLD WAR I
16 they had besieged the major fortress of Prze-mysl and reached the San River. Resuming their offensive, they then pushed another 100 miles to the Carpathian passes into Hungary. Over seventeen days the Austrians lost 100,000 dead, 220,000 wounded, 100,000 prisoners, and 216 guns, or one-third of their effective strength.
The Northwest Front (First and Second Armies, with 33% of Russia’s forces) was less successful. Ordered forward to aid the desperate French on August 13, Pavel Rennenkampf’s First Army advanced slowly into East Prussia, was checked at Stallupo-nen, then defeated the Germans at Gumbinnen on August 20, and turned against Konigsberg. To the south, Alexander Samsonov’s Second Army occupied Neidenburg on August 22, and all East Prussia seemed open to the Russians. But by August 23, when the new German commander Paul von Hin-denburg arrived with Erich von Ludendorff as chief of staff, General Max von Hoffmann had implemented plans to defeat the Russians piecemeal. Accordingly, on August 23-24 the Germans checked Samsonov and, learning his deployments through radio intercepts, withdrew to concentrate on Tan-nenberg. When the Second Army again advanced on August 26, it was trapped, virtually surrounded, and then crushed. Samsonov shot himself, and by August 30 the Germans claimed more than 100,000 prisoners.
This forced Rennenkampf’s withdrawal, and during September 9-14, he too suffered defeat in the First Battle of the Mansurian Lakes. Despite German claims of a second Tannenberg and 125,000 prisoners, the First Army escaped and lost only 30,000 prisoners, as well as 70,000 dead and wounded. The Germans then advanced to the Niemen River before the front stabilized in mid-September. Again alerted by radio intercepts, they forestalled a Russian thrust at Silesia by a spoiling attack on September 30. Counterattacking in Gali-cia, the Austrians then cleared the Carpathian approaches and relieved Przemysl before being halted on the San in mid-October.
The Russians, repulsing a secondary attack in the north, finally held the Germans before Warsaw. As the latter withdrew, devastating the countryside, the Russians again drove the Austrians back to Kracow and reinvested Przemysl. This set the pattern for months of seesaw fighting all along the front. In the north, despite German use of poison gas in January 1915, the Russian Tenth Army withstood the bloody Winter Battles of Mansuria and held firm until April. In the south, by December they again were deep into the Carpathians, threatening Hungary, and holding positions 30 miles from Kracow. When relief efforts failed, Przemysl finally fell (with 117,000 men) in March 1915, leaving the Russians free to force the Carpathians.
Meanwhile, on October 29-30, 1914, two German-Turkish cruisers had raided Russia’s Black Sea coast. On declaring war, the tsar set up an autonomous Caucasian Front in which the talented chief of staff Nikolai Yudenich exercised real command. As he prepared the Caucasian Army to meet a Turkish invasion, the Turkish Sultan-Khalifa’s call for jihad (holy war) fueled pro-Turkish uprisings in the borderlands. Then on December 17 En-ver Pasha launched his Third Army, still in summer uniforms, on a crusade to recover lands ceded to Russia in 1878. By December 25 the Russians were fully engaged in the confused battles known as the Sarykamysh Operation. In twelve days of bitter winter combat Yudenich’s troops, despite heavy losses, decisively crushed the Turks, and in January 1915 they invaded Ottoman Turkey.
During this period, the Russians held their own against three enemies in two separate w
ar zones and showed that they had capable generals by routing two enemies and fighting a third, the Germans, to a draw. For most, the heavy losses at Tannenberg and other locations were overshadowed by the stunning victories elsewhere. Like other combatants, Russia was slow to recognize that it faced a long war, but it had avoided the trench warfare that gripped the French front. Yet Grand Duke Nikolai already had complained of shell shortages in September 1914. The government responded by reorganizing the Main Artillery Administration, and a special chief assumed responsibility for completely guaranteeing the army’s needs for arms and munitions by both state and private production. If this promise was illusory, and other ad hoc agencies proved equally ineffective, for the moment the Russian command remained confident of victory.
THE GREAT RETREAT: MAY-SEPTEMBER 1915
On May 2 the seesaw struggle in the East ended when the Austro-Germans, after a four-hour “hurricane of fire,” broke through the shallow Russian trenches at Gorlice-Tarnow. This local success quickly sparked the disastrous Great Retreat. As the Galician armies fell back, a secondary German strike in the north endangered the whole Russian