Law and Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872 [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520914605

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Law and Disorder on the Narova River

A CENTENNIAL

BOOK

O n e hundred books published between 1990 and 1995 bear this special imprint of the University of California Press. We have chosen each Centennial Book as an example of the Press's finest publishing and bookmaking traditions as we celebrate the beginning of our second century.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Founded in 1893

PRESS

Law and Disorder on the Narova River The Kreenholm Strike of 1872

Reginald E. Zelnik

U N I V E R S I T Y OF C A L I F O R N I A P R E S S Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press London, England © 1995 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zelnik, Reginald E. Law and disorder on the Narova River : the Kreenholm strike of 1872 / Reginald E. Zelnik. p. cm. "A Centennial book." Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08481-0 (alk. paper) 1. Kreenholmi Puuvillasaaduste Manufaktuur Strike, 1872. 2. Strikes and lockouts—Cotton manufacture—Estonia—Narva. 3. Narva (Estonia)—History—19th century. 4. Gerasimov, Vasilii, d. 1892. 5. Textile workers—Estonia—Narva—Biography. I. Title. HD5397.8.T42 1872.N379 1995 331.89'2877'0094741—dc20 93-44876 CIP

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

For Pamela and Michael

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xi

ABBREVIATIONS

xiii

MAPS

xiv

INTRODUCTION

PART

I:

THE

KREENHOLM

1

STRIKE

1 Before the Strike The Strike

2

3 September Battles

15 48 82

4 Order and Law

118

5 Outcome, Epilogue, Conclusion

177

PART

II:

GERASIMOV

6 Kreenholm Revisited: The Life and Memory of Vasilii Gerasimov

223

7 Foster Child of the Foundling Home, by Vasilii Gerasimov

270

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

297

INDEX

305

Illustrations follow page 176.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the individuals who did so much to help me prepare this book and to the institutions that provided me with support. My attention was first attracted to the Kreenholm strike when, in connection with my research on St. Petersburg workers who belonged to radical study circles in the 1870s, I encountered repeated references not only to that strike but also to a number o f politicized Petersburg workers who had taken part in it. (Among them was Vasilii Gerasimov, whose memoir is printed as chapter 7 of this study.) In 1982 I had the privilege o f serving as co-organizer o f an NEHsupported Berkeley conference on Russian labor history, where my own contribution was a somewhat truncated paper on the early stages of the Kreenholm strike, prepared at a time when I had not the slightest notion that I would one day expand my preliminary exploration of the strike into a book-length study. Because this would not have happened without the stimulus provided by panelists at the conference, I wish to express my thanks to all of them, but especially to Abraham Ascher, Victoria Bonnell (co-organizer o f the conference), Daniel Brower, Leopold Haimson, Robert Johnson, David Montgomery, William Rosenberg, and Ronald Suny. These and other participants all had valuable advice, much o f which I wisely took. (I am also grateful to Professors Ascher and Suny, as well as to my Berkeley colleague Nicholas Riasanovsky, for their more recent criticisms of the book manuscript.) Lynn Hunt and Thomas Laqueur both gave the original paper

xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

critical readings and encouraged me to carry out my research and my musings about Kreenholm at greater length, advice that I followed, though only after a series of delays. I returned to the project with particular intensity in 1989, when, thanks to the perfect atmosphere provided by the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), I was able to work on the manuscript steadily for several months and to complete a draft. I am very grateful to Laura Engelstein, who later provided me with a superb critical reading of that draft and who, in addition to giving me her wise counsel, encouraged me to devote as much attention as I did to the question of zakonnost' (rule of law). In this and in other related projects, thanks to the generosity of UC Berkeley's Center for Slavic and East European Studies, Institute of International Studies, and Committee on Research, I have been blessed over the years by some splendid assistants, including Barbara Allgaier, Kim Friedlander, Sarah Hepler, Jeff Rossman, Tony Swift, and Ted Weeks. I am also very grateful to the very professional staff of the University of California Press, including Sheila Levine (my sponsoring editor), Monica McCormick, Betsey Scheiner, and Anne Canright (whose copyediting was particularly thoughtful). As already noted, much of the writing of the first draft of the book took place while I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study, where I also had the support of a University of California President's Research Fellowship in the Humanities. I am grateful for financial support provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. My early research was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Study, and my translation of Gerasimov's memoir (chapter 7) concludes a series of translations initially supported by the NEH Translation Program. Some archival research incorporated into chapter 6 was supported by an early grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board. An abbreviated version of that chapter has been published as "Before Class: The Fostering of a Worker Revolutionary, the Construction of His Memoir," in Russian History/ Histoire Russe 20, nos. 1 - 4 (1993): 61-80. My greatest thanks and my love go to my wife and friend of nearly four decades, Elaine Zelnik, who has constandy heartened, aided, and abetted me, saving me from many a pitfall. She is my inspiration.

Abbreviations

In citing sources from Soviet archives (i.e., archives that were located in the USSR at the time of my research, but are now located in Estonia and Russia), I have retained the former names of the depositories. In these citations I follow the standard Russian system of abbreviation:/ for fond (collection); op. for opis'{inventory); eksp. for ekspeditsiia (department); d. for delo (file; pi. dd.); ed. khr. for edinitsa kbraneniia (storage unit, usually interchangeable with delo); ch. for chast' (part); and /. for list (sheet or page; pi. II.). I have omitted the designation ob. (oborot, verso) when the back of a sheet is cited, on the assumption that anyone wishing to consult these materials will understand that my citations may include the verso. Other abbreviations (* = Full reference is in the Bibliography): Dept. Med. KM KS LGIA MVD RD

TsGAOR TsGIAESSR TsGIASSSR

Departament Meditsiny (Medical Department of the MVD) * Krengol'mskaia manufaktura. 1857-1907. Istoricheskoe opisanie * Krengol'mskaia stachka 1872 g. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov Leningradskii Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del (Ministry of Internal Affairs) *Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke. Sbornik dokumentov (NB: In my notes, RD without a volume number always refers to volume 2, part 1) Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Oktiabrskoi Revoliutsii Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv Estonskoi SSR v Tartu Tsentral'nyi Gosudarstvennyi Istoricheskii Arkhiv SSSR v Leningrade.

1. The Estland/Livland region in the mid-nineteenth century. Adapted from Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians (Stanford, 1987), 58.

2. Narva, Kreenholm, and the immediate area. The factory-island is seen in the middle of the Narova River.

Introduction

A society or polity may be suffused with tensions and latent conflicts that, normally concealed, break into the open and reveal themselves at special times, under unusual circumstances. When those times are momentous and those circumstances extraordinary, we often refer to them as revolutions, and they then enter permanendy into the great master narratives of historians. When they are of lesser size and moment, as in the story about to be told, they are of course less likely to enter the canon of permanent historical reference points. Yet in making their own break into the open, they may be no less revealing, whether to contemporaries or to historians, of the social and political tensions that were buried beneath the surface before the eruption that laid them bare. Such was the case with the Kreenholm strike of August-September 1872, an event that attracted me both because of the theatrical quality of the narratives to which it lends itself and because of the larger political, social, and cultural crosscurrents with which it briefly but forcefully intersected. I approach the strike not as a case study, in which broad hypotheses are "scientifically" tested, but as a case history, in which a story is put together with attention to the larger but nonetheless specific historical context in which it occurs—its social geography, as it were— and to the various issues that it raises. As a case history, the Kreenholm strike touches on several such issues: the spontaneous character of Russia's early labor unrest before the exposure of workers to radical ideologies and prior to the development by the state of a fixed schema of classification for such events; the impact of the vicissitudes of economic 1

2

INTRODUCTION

growth on Russia's social stability; the range and limits of the powers of the autocratic state vis-a-vis private interests, particularly those of big industry; the relations among the empire's various nationalities, mainly Estonians, Russians, and Germans, each holding differing positions in Russia's structure of power in this corner of the empire; and, perhaps most important, the obstacles along Russia's tortuous, tortured, and never completed path toward genuine legality ( z a k o n n o s t ' ) . But the Kreenholm strike encounters these larger issues with all the drama and narrative force that can be found only in specific incidents of conflict, events evoking the lived experience of real human beings and involving particular if not peculiar institutions. In a longitudinal, comparative study of Russia's strike waves, or in a more restricted analysis of the factors governing the propensity to strike during a particular time of unrest (both areas in which important studies have appeared in recent years), one normally proceeds by abstracting from each strike the serial data needed—size of plant, number and characteristics of strikers, nature of demands, days lost—to array them alongside comparable data from other strikes in order to produce significant generalizations.1 In a case history, as I approach it here, some of the same data will be used, but they will be woven into a narrative tale, with the analysis of their significance (including their significance to the principal players) integrated whenever possible into the narrative itself. In such a narrative it is virtually inevitable—and, I would add, desirable—that elements of character and contingency should interface with broader structural conditions and constraints. Indeed, it is precisely these elements that make possible the dramatic tension that is essential to most historical writing if it is to capture and reflect the excitement, uncertainty, and improvised quality of the experience of the actors. At the same time, a "straightforward" narrative telling, if such a thing even exists, would have a mindless quality in the absence of questions of historical significance, questions that showcase the light that a given moment of contingency sheds on broader problems of society and politics. « » « »

The year 1872 was the last year in which a major episode of labor unrest took place in the Russian Empire that was completely untouched, 1. Recent examples are articles by Leopold Haimson, Eric Brian, Ronald Petrusha, Diane Koenker, William G. Rosenberg, V. I. Bovykin, L. I. Borodkin, and Iu. I. Kir'ianov in Strikes, Wars, and Revolution in an International Perspective: Strike Waves in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. Leopold H. Haimson and Charles Tilly (Cambridge, 1989).

INTRODUCTION

3

even indirectly, by the influence of the left intelligentsia. Although interaction between factory workers and intellectuals, mainly universitylevel students, was starting to take shape that year, it was still largely confined to the imperial capital and had yet to reach out to the empire's borderlands, even relatively close ones such as the Petersburg-Estland provincial frontier. 2 Nor had worker-intelligentsia interaction begun to affect the course of labor unrest, as it would do over the next few years and continue to do down to the end of the old regime, sometimes mediated by the characteristically though by no means exclusively Russian figure of the worker intellectual, or worker intelligent. Ever since Lenin's notorious assertion of the limits on what workers were able to think and do if "left to their own devices," a position that few came forth to challenge at the time (1902), it has been a commonplace of scholars and political activists alike that the development of a radical new vision of a just society must depend on the leavening provided by intellectuals from the outside. At a certain level of abstraction Lenin was no doubt right, as Barrington Moore has sadly and reluctantly conceded in reporting the results of his own investigation into the historical genesis of a "sense of injustice." 3 One may of course wish to question the value of the "outside" versus "inside" metaphor: the construction of any new social norm being by its very nature an interactive process, it is hard to conceive of the emergence of a new sense of anything as completely self-generated, autonomous, or "internal." Nevertheless, it is difficult to dispute the almost tautological assertion that universalistic ideologies develop first among those with both the leisure and the training to think, talk, and write discursively. With this in mind, Moore convincingly concludes that those working-class protest movements that do emerge without input from intellectuals are likely to remain parochial in vision, drawing upon (while transforming) their own traditional notions of justice to construct an ethical system too narrow in scope to transcend the original community, with its daily face-to-face contacts and solidarities. The system they construct is too bound to the terms of a preexisting social contract, as Moore would put it, to project any broad new horizons. Whatever the problems of Moore's analysis when applied to workers of the industrial neighborhoods of cosmopolitan centers like St. Peters2. On the first phase of student-worker interaction, see R. E. Zelnik, "Populists and Workers: The First Encounter Between Populist Students and Industrial Workers in St. Petersburg, 1871-74," Soviet Studies 24 (1972): 2 5 1 - 6 9 . 3. Barrington Moore, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, N.Y., 1978), esp. 474; see also R. E. Zelnik, "Passivity and Protest in Germany and Russia: Barrington Moore's Conception of Working-Class Responses to Injustice," Journal of Social History 15, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 485-512.

4

INTRODUCTION

burg or Berlin, the investigation of a relatively isolated factory settlement such as Kreenholm will perforce move this discussion in a somewhat different direction. Unlike the mines of the Ruhr Valley, to which Moore directs our attention as a quintessential example of the influence of traditional norms on both the outbreak and the limits of a spontaneous labor movement, Kreenholm was a new factory, barely fifteen years old at the time of its eruption into open conflict. Its young work force, only recently recruited and from diverse regions and ethnic and social groups, lacked any ancient, time-honored tradition of mutual respect and obligations between masters and men (still less between masters and women). To be sure, certain norms and expectations of managerial conduct had begun to develop among the more highly skilled weavers, enough so that anger at the violation of some earlier understandings became a relevant factor in the unfolding conflict. But these norms and expectations can hardly be said to have acquired the force of long tradition, let alone of "social contract," by 1872. And although the strikers demanded that some past practices be restored, they also called for the introduction of standards of managerial conduct that had never before been met at the factory or anywhere else within the workers' range of experience. In some respects these standards contained the notion of a new kind of labor-management relationship, even a new "factory constitution," and even, if only in an undeveloped way, an element of what later came to be known as "workers' control." It is not my intention to make sweeping claims in this regard, for the aspirations of the strikers and the compass of their group identification did remain limited, and, as will be seen in chapter 5, some of their most original themes were not reprised during Kreenholm's next major round of unrest (1882). Nevertheless, one of my purposes will be to trace the process whereby Kreenholm workers, none of whom had prior exposure to a labor movement, came to rebel so stubbornly against managerial authority and, though briefly, against state power, and came to formulate demands, however haltingly, that struck out inventively in new directions, among them a limited but determined groping for a notion of legality. The place of law in the political culture of the post-Emancipation period and the ultimate failure of normalized legal standards and procedures to sink deep roots into the soil of the autocratic regime have been thoughtfully examined by British and American scholars.4 Russia's failure to develop a flourishing culture of law—one in which justice is 4. An excellent example is the recent collection edited by Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, Civil Rights in Imperial Russia (Oxford, 1989).

INTRODUCTION

5

dispensed by an independent judiciary, administrative fiat is restricted by the separation of powers, and men with the physical power to impose their will restrain themselves even if it means losing something they value highly—is frequently noted by scholars, who invoke that failure to explain the pressures for a revolutionary solution to the problems of a regime that was unwilling to abide even by its own laws. If, notwithstanding the judicial reform of 1864 and the integrity of its authors and their predecessors, it is Russian monarchs and their more prominent officials, including scions of the upper nobility, who have shouldered the blame for this fragility of legal culture,5 working-class (not to mention peasant and intelligentsia) impatience with legalistic, formal solutions to problems of social justice has also come in for a share of the blame.6 The Kreenholm story, however, introduces us to two sets of historical actors whose conduct did not fully conform to the now conventional wisdom. On the one hand, as already suggested, we will see factory workers with no prior exposure to political discourse of any kind groping their way toward a rudimentary concept of legal norms and civil rights that arose from but stretched beyond their immediate material needs as a collectivity; on the other hand, we will meet a high government official of impeccable aristocratic, indeed princely, descent, the governor of Estland province, as well as a number of lesser officials, who, while never abandoning their primary commitment to their primary duty, maintaining order, in various ways contributed positively to the painful awakening of the Kreenholm workers' legal consciousness, supporting their aspirations as much as was possible within the framework of the system that they served. The outcome of these strained and not folly articulated efforts to change the factory constitution in Estland was not a very happy one, nor, in all probability, could it have been, under prevailing political conditions. But the story of these ventures and of their failure is, as I hope to show, instructive, among other reasons for the light it sheds on the parameters of possibility at an important moment of Russian history when the precise rules of engagement in social conflict of this kind had not been codified or ritualized. Ethnicity (or nationality) will figure in our story not as a leitmotif, but as a minor theme that surfaces here and there in what I believe are 5. Richard S. Wortman, The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness (Chicago, 1976). 6. For a balanced discussion of this topic, see S. A. Smith, "Workers and Civil Rights in Tsarist Russia, 1899-1917," in Crisp and Edmondson (eds.), Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, 145-69.

6

INTRODUCTION

significant ways. Although the major players in the Kreenholm drama include Estonians and ethnic Germans as well as Russians, I approach the story primarily as an episode in imperial Russian history. It was the imperial regime that provided the broad political framework in which the conflict unfolded, and it was Petersburg officials—at one point the emperor himself—who made the major decisions that decided its outcome. Almost all the relevant documents—the governor's files, the report of an investigating commission, the memoirs of a worker participant—are in Russian, and most of them reflect what might be called a Petersburg perspective on the Kreenholm events.7 Still, the Kreenholm management and staff, from the factory director down to the lowliest foreman, as well as all local police and judicial institutions, were heavily dominated by ethnic Germans, and at the highest levels by members of Esdand's German elite ("Baits," to follow the no longer current usage). And the majority of workers, including the most militant strike leaders, were not Russians but Estonians. Because these ethnic distinctions were related in important ways to the distribution of status and power at both the factory and regional levels, they cannot be abstracted from our social and political narrative. Awareness of their presence will allow us to visualize in microcosm the multinational reality of mid-nineteenthcentury Russia, shortly before the emergence of aggressive Russification began to accelerate the pace of interethnic conflict under Alexander III. The story of Kreenholm should help us to gauge how strongly some ethnogeographic units were integrated into the "absolutist" state, just as it will help us to see the limits to which that state could (or would) exert its will against a powerful segment of the business world. By now the reader will have noted my impenitent references to this study as a "story" and as the recounting of an historical "event." Without joining direcdy into current debates about narrative history, its "truth value," and the validity of its referential claims,8 I would like to suggest that the genesis, progression, and suppression of a strike, especially one that occurs at a young factory that has never before experienced such a phenomenon, lends itself nicely to a narrative mode of representation. This is especially true when many of the sources— 7. Though the governor's files include some correspondence in German with the Kreenholm management and local officials, there is also a Russian version of almost all these documents. See Note on Sources, below. 8. A recent article that is close to my own perspective on these matters is Andrew P. Norman, "Telling It Like It Was: Historical Narratives on Their Own Terms," History and Theory 30, no. 2 (1991): 119-35.

INTRODUCTION

7

reports, investigations, and memoirs—are themselves designed as narratives, testifying from the outset to the sense of the historical actors, both during and after the conflict, that an important event had taken place whose story line could be construed as having a beginning, a middle, and an (unhappy, for most of the parties concerned) end, punctuated by several peak moments of highly expressive social behavior. The perspective of historians, of course, is not that of the actors, much as we must strive to reconstruct their points of view. As historians we must, in a sense, start afresh, reworking the partly conflicting stories told by participants, witnesses, and investigators—some of whom viewed these events as dangerous "disorders" ( b e s p o r i c t d k i ) , others as a just and necessary struggle—into a new narrative, one that evaluates and reevaluates their varying points of view by seeking out sources and perspectives of which the actors were deprived. Not the least of our advantages is our knowledge of the post-1872 future, our ability to "foresee" what to the historical actors was still unknown, allowing us to fit the narrower story into a network of issues the significance of which becomes clear only when viewed within a larger chronological frame. How do these issues affect the selection process as we re-create and then retell the story of Kreenholm 1872? One is generally expected to begin such stories with historical "background," and this study is no exception. I do so in chapter 1, though rather narrowly, focusing almost entirely on the local background of the area where the factory was located and of the factory itself, including its owners, managers, and laboring population. Here in the introduction, however, rather than repeating in tedious detail what is already well known to historians, I will confine myself to a brief reminder of the abortive efforts under Catherine the Great and Alexander I to transform the country into a Rechtsstaat, a monarchial system in which monarch and bureaucracy are subject to the predictable restrictions of legality—even if the law is of their own making—and the citizens' (or perhaps more accurately, the subjects') rights are correspondingly protected, even if they lack any share in political sovereignty.9 The first major step in the direction of a genuine Rechtsstaat (a breakthrough by no means matched by the more modest achievements of codification in the 1830s) came only with the judicial reform of 1864, which included trial by jury with adversarial (as opposed to 9. For a concise discussion, see Marc Raeff, The Well-ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change Through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven, 1983), pt. 3; and idem, Understanding Imperial Russia: State and Society in the Old Regime (New York, 1984), chaps. 4 - 5 .

8

INTRODUCTION

inquisitorial) proceedings. Equally noteworthy, however, is the ambivalence of Tsar Alexander II and many of his officials about the implementation of that very important reform. Especially interesting for our purposes was the decision not to apply the reform in Estland and Russia's other Baltic provinces. Ironically, this exclusion was a demonstration of respect for those provinces' traditional institutions, which were heavily dominated by the region's German-speaking upper nobility (Ritterschafi) but which disregarded the vast majority of the nonprivileged, native—in this case Estonian—population. In chapters 2, 3, and 4, the narrative heart of the book, I turn to a detailed account of the Kreenholm unrest, introducing some of the strike leaders individually, presenting a somewhat sociologically oriented description of the strikers, and highlighting changes in the language they used as the conflict progressed. As the story unfolds, I take special note of the way in which the governor introduced legal categories into the discussion (asking workers to keep their protests within legal bounds; questioning the legality of management's actions; arguing to his superiors and others, by way of mitigation, that certain workers had not engaged in criminal conduct under existing law), thereby inadvertently insinuating notions of law into the workers' social imagination.10 In chapter 5,1 focus on the situation at Kreenholm in the aftermath of the strike, providing a kind of epilogue to the story by tracing the fate of some arrested strikers, the governor, and others. A sidelong glance at St. Petersburg, where a few of the Kreenholm strikers ended up, will begin to tie our Kreenholm story to that of the nascent Petersburg labor movement. Also included in chapter 5 is a look forward at Kreenholm in the post-strike decade, 1872-82, and particularly at the less wellknown "disorders" of 1882, which I briefly examine in an attempt to fit the earlier strike into the factory's longer-range trajectory. If stricdy conceived as the story of Kreenholm, this book really ends with chapter 5, for chapter 6, an analysis of the life and memoir of the Kreenholm worker Vasilii Gerasimov, is written in a different key and opens up a new though related set of questions. As indicated in my Note on Sources (below), one of my most important sources for the narrative sections is Gerasimov, a rank-and-file participant in the strike who later recorded his recollections of it and of his earlier life at the factory and in a Finnish village near St. Petersburg. The first known autobiographical 10. Clifford Geertz, in "Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective," Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York, 1983), discusses the concept of law as "a species of social imagination" (232).

INTRODUCTION

9

writing by a factory worker in Russian, the memoir, though short, is full of valuable social description. (My translation of it is included here as chapter 7.) But over and beyond its value as a source, it is an interesting psychological and even literary document, one that enables us to gain some insight into the mentality of a young worker engaged in the complex process of self-identification. Just as the Kreenholm strike took place before its participants were exposed to any well-honed notion of what a strike should be, and hence of what modes of behavior were appropriate to the occasion, so too was Gerasimov's memoir written well before the genre of worker's autobiography existed in Russia, indeed, even before the debate over what should constitute a worker's view of the world was fully joined.11 And the unusual circumstance (though less unusual than one might imagine) that Gerasimov, despite his solid Russian name, was of dubious ethnicity (his native language was Finnish) provides us with a unique opportunity to raise the important question of identity in the context of his autobiographical narrative.

A Note on Sources The major printed documentation for this study consists of two volumes of archival material published in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The more important of the two, Krenjjol'mskaia stachka- 1872 g. (hereafter KS), published by the Central State Historical Archive Administration of what was then the Estonian SSR, deals entirely with the strike and its aftermath.12 This valuable collection consists of 135 documents, most of them taken from the archive of the governor of Estland province (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29), whose office was located in the provincial capital, Reval (now Tallinn or Tallin). They include essential items such as the governor's correspondence, by mail and by telegram, with the factory administration, the vice governor, regional police and judicial officials, locally based officers of the Imperial Gendarmes, and, 11. It is true that such matters began to be discussed in St. Petersburg in the late 1870s, but by that time Gerasimov was already in prison or exile. O f course, this does not preclude the possibility that he was exposed to such discussion by his fellow prisoners. 12. Krengol'mskaia stachka 1872g. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Tallin, 1 9 5 2 ) (hereafter cited as KS. ) Although some of the original documents were in German, all items in this volume are in Russian. Those that are translations from German are the original translations made by officials at the time. The only items translated from Estonian, a language that was not then used for official transactions, are selections from newspapers.

10

INTRODUCTION

of course, high officials in St. Petersburg. KS also includes the strikers' various demand lists, the texts of agreements reached between strike leaders and the administration, summaries of the interrogations of striking workers, the findings of the Estland tribunal that tried numerous strike participants and leaders, and, extremely important, the detailed report of a special government commission appointed to investigate the causes of the strike. I am able to attest to the probity with which these documents—which at critical moments amount to a running chronological record of the strike—were selected and compiled by the editors, for, thanks to the kindness of the directors of TsGIA ESSR, I have on microfilm a full set of the pertinent files of the governor's office, which I have used to enrich this study, especially the part that covers the weeks following the suppression of the strike.13 The second volume of archival material is part of the more familiar Rabocbee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke, published by the Soviet Academy of Sciences (hereafter RD).1* In contrast to KS, this multivolume collection features documents held in the central archives of the empire, and the long section on the Kreenholm strike consists entirely of materials from the Third Section's thorough file on the case (TsGAOR, f. 109, 3 eksp., 1872 g., d. 150, in two parts). 15 Though written only a decade after the strike (in late 1881 or early 1882), Gerasimov's memoir was not published until 1906 (long after his death in 1892 ), when it appeared in the left-wing journal Byloe under the title "Pitomets vospitatel'nogo doma," a reference to the St. Petersburg Foundling Home, of which he was a ward. After the October Revolution the memoir was republished several times, both in whole and in part, with new tides that ignored the author's connection with the Foundling Home. Although Gerasimov's "Russianness" was problematic, these titles emphasized his identity as a "Russian worker" and, in one case, 13. TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, dd. 560, 561, and 562. Whenever possible my notes will cite the published collection, available in a few American research libraries; my archival citations are to documents not included in KS or included only in excerpted form. If there is any bias in the KS editors' selections, it lies in a tendency to omit materials that highlight the degree of conflict between factory administration and officialdom, especially the governor. 14. Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke. Sbornii dokumentov, vol. 2, pts. 1 ( 1 8 6 1 74) and 2 (1875-84), ed. A. M. Pankratova (Moscow, 1950). Part 1, the more pertinent volume, is cited below simply as RD. Other volumes of RD are cited with their volume and part numbers, e.g., RD 2:2. 15. Documents 111-36, RD, 3 1 7 - 4 0 6 . Some documents, e.g., the report of the investigating commission, are printed in both collections, in which case I cite from RD, which is much more widely available than KS in American libraries.

INTRODUCTION

11

though his revolutionary career lasted but a few months and is barely touched on in the memoir, as a "worker revolutionary." 16 Because, beginning at age twelve, Gerasimov spent a total of eight years as apprentice and worker at the Kreenholm factory, the memoir is a superb source of information about conditions there as well as about the strike in which he took part—though never as a leader and certainly not as a "revolutionary." 17 In addition to archival materials and Gerasimov's memoir, I have made extensive use of the Kreenholm company's own official history, published in 1907 on the occasion of the factory's fiftieth anniversary, especially for information on such matters as the physical layout of the plant, labor-force and production data, the structure and personnel of the plant's administrative hierarchy, and the names and good deeds (never misdeeds) of various administrators. 18 My information on Estland in general and on the Kreenholm/Narva region in particular has been gleaned from a variety of sources in Russian, English, and German, all listed in the bibliography, but I would like to make special mention here of the excellent—for my purposes indispensable—history of the area and its people by Toivo Raun. 19 Reportage in contemporary newspapers, most notably Golos (St. Petersburg) and Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow), has been useful as a supplementary source on certain details of the strike. A variety of other sources have been used in chapter 6 to compensate for the lack of detail in Gerasimov's memoir on his life in St. Petersburg after he left Kreenholm, including his brief career as a revolutionary. Particularly useful were materials in the archive of the Special Senate 16. The most important editions, published as separate booklets with introductions and annotations by prominent scholars, carried the titles Zhizn' russkogo rabochego polveka tomu nazad. Zapiski rabochego-sotsialista Vasiliia Gerasimova, annotated and with an introduction by R. M. Kantor (Moscow, 1923); and Zhizn' russkogo rabochego. Vospominaniia, annotated and with an introduction by B. S. Itenberg (Moscow, 1959). All my citations are from the 1923 edition. For shorter excerpts, see "Zhizn' russkogo rabochego polveka tomu nazad. Iz zapisok rabochego Vasiliia Gerasimova," in Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossiivopisaniisamikhrabochikh. (0t70-khdo 90-khgodov) (Moscow, 1933); and "Zhizn' russkogo rabochego polveka tomu nazad," in V nachale puti. Vospominaniia peterburgskikh rabochikh 1872-1897gg., comp. E. A. Korol'chuk (Leningrad, 1975). 17. We have no comparable account of life at a Russian factory covering a span of time as long as the period covered in Gerasimov's memoir for any period before the end of the nineteenth century. 18. Krengol'mskaia manufaktura. 1857-1907. Istoricheskoe opisanie, sostavlennoe po sluchaiu 50-ti-letiia ee sushchestvovaniia, ispolnivshegosia 30 aprelia 1907 go da (St. Petersburg, 1907) (hereafter cited as KM). The book is most detailed about the years beyond the scope of this study. 19. Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians (Stanford, 1987).

12

INTRODUCTION

Tribunal (the OPPS), which handled Gerasimov's case after his arrest in 1875, and some published documents of the Third Section.20 As to his long years in prison and exile (1875 to his death in 1892), and especially the years after he penned his memoir, the documentary record remains almost nil. Though rarely mentioned by Western historians, even historians of labor, the Kreenholm strike was ritually referred to, though briefly (usually in a single paragraph or at most one or two pages), in almost every Soviet survey of the history of the Russian labor movement. Such summary statements always followed a similar pattern, stressing the heroic quality of the workers' struggle and the solidarity between Russian and Estonian workers, and usually mentioning the Russians, though they were the "minority" group, first. A typical statement might read: "The Kreenholm strike had great significance. Proletarians not only made demands, but actively resisted the authorities. Russian and Estonian workers acted in common [sovmestno], demonstrating proletarian solidarity."21 The only extensive treatment of the strike in Russian is a short book by Pavel Kann, written as a celebration of the strike's hundredth anniversary.22 Although, as the title Heroic Exploit (Podvig) suggests, Kann's book is written in the spirit of the above quotation, it also contains valuable information. 20. TsGAOR, f. 112 (Osoboe Prisutstvie Pravitel'stvuiushchego Senata [OPPS]), op. 1, ed. khr. 107; Third Section documents in RD 2 : 2 , 4 8 - 6 0 . Another useful source is the documentary appendix to E. Korol'chuk, "Iz istorii propagandy sredi rabochikh Peterburga v seredine 70-kh godov," Katorga i ssylka, no. 1 / 3 8 (1928): 2 0 - 2 6 . For further details, see chapter 6, note 28, below. 21. Kratkaiaistoriia rabochegodvizheniiavRossii (!861-I917jjody) (Moscow, 1962), 76. 22. P. Ia. Kann, Podvig rabochikh Krengol'mskoi manufaktury. K stoletiiu stachki. Istoricheskii ocherk (Tallin, 1972). Kann is also the author of a useful book on Narva, a town that played a significant role in the story of the strike: Narva. Stranitsy istoriigoroda (Tallin, 1979).

ONE

Before the Strike There is no doubt that the entire population of the city of Narva will follow the development and progress of such an enormous enterprise with keen attention. Das Inland, 13 May 1857 1

In the late spring of 1870 a strike took place at the Nevskii cotton-spinning factory in St. Petersburg that startled Russian officialdom and stirred the souls of the liberal public.2 Though the world of industrial relations would never again be the same in the Russian capital, several years would pass before a strike of comparable magnitude again disturbed the peace of that city. Yet to the surprise of everyone concerned, it was only two years later, in 1872, that Russia experienced a second major textile strike, one of such proportions and cataclysmic character that it dwarfed its predecessor in the impact it produced on the public and the government alike. What was especially shocking about the Kreenholm strike, apart from its sheer force—a seven on the Richter scale of labor unrest to the Nevskii's four—was its location. An island settlement on the Narova (or Narva) River near the border that divided Petersburg province from Estland, the small indus1. From Russian translation in KM, 188. Das Inland was a weekly German-language paper published in Dorpat (Tartu), Livland province. 2. O n the Nevskii strike, see R. E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855-1870 (Stanford, 1 9 7 1 ) , chap. 9. 15

16

T H E K R E E N H O L M STRIKE

trial settlement of Kreenholm was close enough to the Russian capital— some eighty-five miles to the east3—for events at the factory to reverberate there quickly. At the same time, it was far enough away to leave the strike, at least in its initial phase, beyond the effective control of Petersburg officials, who read with alarm the detailed reports they received from their local agents. Although no unrest could strike more terror into the hearts of Russian officials than that occurring in the immediate vicinity of the capital, certain factors made the news from Kreenholm very frightening. Not the least of these was the evidence it offered that even an isolated border area, far removed from the influence of university students or other "outside agitators," was susceptible to menacing outbursts of labor unrest and stubborn resistance to authority, displays of militant struggle of a kind that Russia's rulers had usually equated with criminal acts of rebellion.4 Between 9 August and mid-September 1872, the most turbulent episode of labor unrest that had ever taken place in a Russian factory ran its course in Kreenholm. In the physical intensity of the workers' defiance, which included brief but daring physical resistance to armed troops, it would not be surpassed until the better-known "Obukhov defense" of 1901. In the number of workers involved—over five thousand at the peak of the strike—it would not be matched until the Morozov strike of 1885 (ca. eight thousand). In duration—though here we encounter some problems of measurement and definition—it would not find its equal until the citywide textile strike that rocked St. Petersburg in 1896. 5 And in its official reception, it was simply unprecedented: no previous incident of labor unrest—not even the Nevskii strike, widely viewed by contemporaries as the first "European" strike in Russian history—had sent as many tremors reverberating through government circles. Like all the incidents mentioned above except the Obukhov defense, indeed like all of Russia's most telling episodes of labor unrest before 3. To be precise, the direct distance from Narva to St. Petersburg was 84 statute miles. The distance to St. Petersburg by rail (starting in 1870) was 98.3 statute miles (via Gatchina). 4. On the criminality of strikes in the eyes of Russian officials in the mid-nineteenth century, see Zelnik, Labor and Society, 40, 149-50; and, for their perception of this issue in the context of the Nevskii strike, chap. 9. The criminality of strikes in Russia will be discussed in chapter 4, below. 5. For documentation on the strikes of1885 and 1 8 9 6 - 9 7 , see Morozovskaia stachka. Sbornik dokumentov i vospominanii (Moscow, 1935); RD 4:1, 192-337, 5 4 2 - 6 1 9 . For documents on the Obukhov defense, see Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v 1901-1904 gg. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1975), 23-34.

BEFORE T H E STRIKE

17

the turn of the century, the Kreenholm upheaval was launched by the ostensibly "backward," "gray," "dark," "ignorant," semirural workers of the textile industry, the much maligned fabrichnye.6 The unrest involved an entire community of workers, women and children as well as adult males, Russians as well as Estonians, barely skilled piecers as well as highly qualified weavers and spinners, illiterate and semiliterate Muscovite peasants as well as a handful of more educated town dwellers with ties to the nearby town of Narva or even to Estland's provincial capital, Reval. While, with some exceptions, the metalworking and machinebuilding factories of St. Petersburg and other regions continued to slumber, it was textile factories such as Nevskii, Kreenholm, and Morozov that first placed the challenge of labor militancy before the government and before society. "La France gréviste, c'est d'abord la France textile"; 7 the same could be said at the time of Russia. If as an embattled textile factory Kreenholm, far from proving unique, prefigured the series of strikes that would exemplify the Russian labor scene for nearly three more decades, there are also aspects of the Kreenholm story that set it apart from the rest, characteristics that will occupy us in the following pages. Since many of these features were the direct or indirect consequence of the factory's unusual setting and location, it is Kreenholm's geography, in particular its political and economic geography, that provides our point of departure.

The Setting In 1857 a small group of Moscow entrepreneurs joined forces with a German financier to found the Kreenholm cotton-spinning and weaving factory. The factory was to be built on a Narova River island situated between a pair of broad and powerful waterfalls, some twentysix to thirty-three feet in height, that overlooked the historic Hanseatic city of Narva, site of Tsar Peter I's famous defeat at the hands of Swe6. The word fabrichnye (masc. sing,,fabrichnyi) refers to workers from a fabrika, one of the basic words in Russian for "factory" or "plant" (the other basic word being zavod, though manufaktura was still encountered at this time). In common parlance fabrichnye was often used to designate textile workers specifically. The common practice in English of translating fabrika as "factory" and zavod as "plant" has no logic behind it beyond the desire to come up with two distinct words. 7. Michelle Perrot, Les ouvriers en ¿rive. France, 1871-1890, 2 vols. (Paris, 1974), 1:352.

18

THE KREENHOLM

STRIKE

den's King Charles XII in 1700. 8 Narva, which was captured from Sweden during Peter's Ingrian campaign of 1704 and formally ceded to Russia by treaty in 1721, was now a modest commercial-industrial town of some five thousand inhabitants. It was located (except for the suburb of Ivangorod) on the left (west) bank of the river, eight miles inland from the Finnish Gulf port that bore the same name and somewhat south of the point on the river where Estland and Petersburg provinces met. 9 Narva has been described by Erik Amburger, a leading historian of the region, as a "foreign body" in the province of Estland. 10 Although located on the Estland side of the river, the town contained few ethnic Estonians. It was still heavily German in both its core population and its governing elite, with Russians, Estonians, and Finns inhabiting its three suburbs and a rural Estonian population living mainly in its hinterland. Architecturally, the city still showed signs of its recent Swedish past. Administratively, it belonged not to Estland but to the Iamburg district ( uezd) of Petersburg province, in which it had been loosely incorporated after its acquisition by Russia. But if Narva was a foreign body in Esdand, it was a foreign body in Petersburg as well. Its Hanseatic German character was reinforced by the fact that Peter and his successors had continued to recognize its ancient corporate privileges, embodied in a municipal charter that distinguished it from other "Russian" towns. 11 In this sense, especially before the introduction in Narva in 1873 of the Russian municipal reform of 1870, 12 it was as different from the other Russian towns as was any town within the administrative frontiers of Esdand, Livland, or Kurland. For practical purposes, Narva was also remote from the city of St. Petersburg, which did double duty as provincial and imperial capital. Until the construction in 1870 of a railroad line between Narva and St. 8. My information on the geographical setting is from documents in KS; regional maps; and Erik Amburger, Jngermanland: Eine junjje Provinz Russlands im Wtrkunjjsbereich der Residenz und Weltstadt St. Petersburg-Leningrad, 2 vols. (Cologne and Vienna, 1980); Heinrich Johann Hansen, Geschichte der Stadt Narva (Dorpat, 1858); Ian M. Matley, " T h e Dispersal of the Ingrian Finns," Slavic Review 38, no. 1 (March 1979): 1-16; "Narva," in Karl Baedeker, Russia with Teheran, Port Arthur, and Peking: Handbook for Travelers (Leipzig, 1914), 8 1 - 8 3 ; and Raun, Estonia. 9. The figure five thousand is from Hansen, Geschichte, 393, who was writingin 1857. It encompasses Narva's three suburbs, including Ivangorod, the ancient Russian fortress settlement on the right bank, but does not include the military garrison. 10. Amburger, Ingermanland, 66. 11. Hansen, Geschichte, 394. 12. German merchants in Narva were able to postpone but not to prevent the introduction of the 1870 reform in their town. See Kann, Narva, 98.

BEFORE THE STRIKE

19

Petersburg, overland travel across the eighty-five-mile stretch that separated the two cities was both difficult and time-consuming, as was the trip between Narva and Reval,13 the equally remote capital of Estland. Although the steamboat ride between Narva and St. Petersburg, a voyage of six to seven hours, was probably more practical than the overland trip by horse-drawn carriage, the boat was not available on a daily basis.14 Thus, with the important exception of an electromagnetic telegraph line erected in 1855, 15 the pre-1870 Narva region had only tenuous ties to the two administrative centers, one to the east, one to the west, with which it would have to interact in times of crisis. Unlike Narva, though little more than a mile to its south, the islandtown ( mestechko) of Kreenholm, designated site for the new factory, belonged to Estland administratively. Yet in other respects Kreenholm too occupied an odd position between the two adjacent provinces. Esdand, for the most part, was still rural, an area of small-scale agriculture and dairy farming, with only a tiny number of factories, most of them clustered around Narva and along the northernmost banks of the river. Viewed from an economic standpoint, that small industrial cluster, together with a few factories on the Petersburg side of the river, might be usefully thought of as a remote but important outpost of industrial St. Petersburg, a frontier of the factory center that radiated outward from the capital, rather than an integrated part of the Estland economy.16 But Kreenholm's remoteness from St. Petersburg must be emphasized as much as its ties. Whatever its economic links to that city, Kreenholm, as my choice of the word outpost should suggest, was not just another point on a graduated continuum of factory locations stretching westward from St. Petersburg. Almost all the major factories of Petersburg province were concentrated near the capital, some in the city itself, others in its adjacent suburbs and villages. Except for a small border area of Iamburg, the westernmost district of Petersburg province (just to the east of Kreenholm), the entire area between the capital and Esdand was sparsely populated and rural, almost devoid of industry. At 1 3 . T h e distance between Narva and Reval is 1 0 7 statute miles; by rail, 1 2 3 . 9 miles. 1 4 . O n the eve o f the First World War the boat was available only twice a week. See Baedeker, Russia,

81.

1 5 . Hansen, Geschichte, 3 7 1 ; Kann, Narva, 9 4 . The line was completed at about the same time as the Western Union Company was founded in the United States ( 1 8 5 6 ) . As will be seen, the telegraph line connecting Narva with Reval and St. Petersburg would play an important role in the events o f 1 8 7 2 . 1 6 . See Erik Amburger, " D a s neuzeitliche Narva als Wirtschaftsfaktor zwischen Russland und Estland " Jahrbücher

für Geschichte Osteuropas 15, no. 2 (June 1 9 6 7 ) : 1 9 7 - 2 0 8 .

20

THE

KREENHOLM

STRIKE

least until 1870, when distances between Kreenholm and St. Petersburg to the east and Reval to the west were effectively reduced by the completion of the Petersburg-Narva-Reval railroad line, Kreenholm, like Narva, remained isolated. Kreenholm's isolation from St. Petersburg was reinforced by the fact that Estland, like the other Baltic provinces Livland and Kurland, though long since incorporated into the empire, still retained certain customary rights and privileges with respect to its judicial and police-administrative institutions—including exemption from the judicial reform of 1864. Estland's privileged status, when compared with the situation of a typical Russian province, gave it a considerable measure of autonomy from the imperial administration. Like other provinces, to be sure, it was "administered" by a provincial governor (residing in Reval), appointed by and responsible to the Imperial Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). But this partial centralization was balanced by the government's continued concessions to the region's corporate traditions, particularly to the timehonored prerogatives ofits German-speaking nobility (Ritterschaft), still virtually unchallenged as the local ruling elite, and to a lesser extent of the German-speaking merchant class, still the dominant group in the governing bodies of towns. Peter and his successors had allowed each Baltic province to retain a modified version ofits ancient "constitution" (Landesverfassung), which in turn was partially anchored in the region's customary law.17 It should therefore come as no surprise that, although most of these niceties of public administration and corporate privilege may have had little meaning to the people of Kreenholm and the neighboring villages in times of peace and tranquillity, they would become a source of confusion when the dormant police-judicial apparatus was awakened by the sounds of industrial conflict. Let us now observe the setting of Kreenholm through a narrower lens, examining the riverine site of the factory against its more immediate surroundings and using the opportunity to meet some of the entrepreneurs responsible for the area's economic development. As may be seen in map 2, the Narova River has its source in Lake Chudskoe (Peipus). From there it flows northward until it empties into the Gulf of Finland 1 7 . Despite a number o f important modifications over 1 5 0 years, the Baltic provinces were also allowed relatively independent status for their Lutheran churches. F o r further details on these matters, see Erik Amburger, Gescbichte der Behordenorganisation von Peter dem Grossen bis 1917(Leiden,

Russlands

1 9 6 6 ) , 1 7 4 - 7 9 , 3 8 6 - 8 7 ; for general background,

see Wilhelm von Wrangell and Georg von Krusenstjern, Die Estldndische Ritterschaft. Ritterschaftshauptmdnner

und Landrdte

Ihre

(Limburg an der Lahn, 1 9 6 7 ) , esp. 3 9 - 6 1 .

BEFORE THE STRIKE

21

(which, thanks to a large sandbank on the river's estuary, is not accessible from Narva by boat). About ten miles before completing its northward descent, some two miles south of Narva, the river becomes a series of rapids, after which it is suddenly divided, by the large island of Kreenholm, into two waterfalls, a wide one to the right (east), a somewhat narrower one to the left. Then the waters reunite beneath the island and continue their gentler course past Narva to the gulf.18 Although Peter the Great is said to have designated the island as an ideal location for a large water-powered factory, the only industry to appear there for many years to come was a sawmill belonging to a line of Narva merchants, a wealthy German family that possessed the island as its private property and used it as a vacation retreat. 19 In the 1820s a German merchant tried unsuccessfully to develop a small woolens factory on the island, but, plagued by fire and other mishaps, the enterprise went under in 1831. 20 It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that Peter's idea was taken up in earnest by one of Europe's leading entrepreneurs, Lev Gerasimovich Knop (1821-94), better known as Ludwig Knoop, sometimes called "the Moscow cotton king." 21 If the term international capitalist fit any nineteenth-century figure in Russia, surely it was Knoop, aptly described most recently as a "German-English-Russian" manufacturer. Born into a family of Bremen tradesmen, Ludwig was the nephew of Fredrich Knoop, who (like the father of Friedrich Engels) was a successful German textile manufacturer in Manchester but with important contacts in the burgeoning Moscow textile industry of the 1840s. In 1839 Fredrich sent his young nephew to Russia to act as his agent. This was a time when Russian textile plants were badly in need of foreign machinery, and English machine manufacturers, since 1842 no longer restricted by the old British ban on the export of spinning machines, were eager to open up the Russian market. An able and aggressive entrepreneur, the younger Knoop quickly established himself in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and, somewhat later, Reval, where his German language and contacts and English contacts and credits served him well. Before many years had passed his company offices had spread across two continents, reaching from Mos18. Baedeker, Russia, 83. 19. KM, 9 - 1 0 ; Ch. M. Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost' v proshlom i nastoiashchem, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1915), 207. 20. Kann, Narva, 103. 21. Walter Dehio, Erhard Dehio: Lebensbild eines baltischen Hanseaten, 1855-1940 (Stuttgart, 1970), 73.

22

THE KREENHOLM

STRIKE

cow to Bremen, with a branch in London and affiliates as far away as New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston. 22 According to one of Knoop's later business associates, it was Ernst Kolbe, the German mayor of Narva, who first alerted Knoop to the potential value of the nearby island on the Narova rapids as a site for industrial investment. Toward the end of 1856 Knoop and his corporate partners purchased the island from its owners, the Sutthoffs, a family of Narva merchants, for fifty thousand silver rubles, with the intention of constructing a cotton-spinning factory.23 Knoop was not the first entrepreneur of this period to grasp the importance of the Narova as a cheap source of power. By this time three other factories had already sprung up in the area. Two were on the river's right bank, in the Iamburg district of Petersburg province, and one was on the left bank, in Estland's Waiwara (German: Allentacken) district, on a large property (Gut) called Joala, owned by the family of Georg von Cramer, wealthy merchants with landholdings on both sides of the river. The first of the three factories, a woolens mill on the right bank, close to the waterfall, was founded around 1820 by Paul Momma, a Narva merchant. In 1836 Momma sold the mill, which by now had several hundred workers, to the Narova Manufacturing Company, a stock company organized by Cramer's father, Benedict, owner of the land where the factory stood. Cramer and the Narva merchants who joined him in this venture (including Momma himself) were well connected in St. Petersburg, as witness the presence among the owners of the company's million-ruble block of shares of such notables as Minister of Foreign Affairs Karl von Nesselrode and General Count Alexander von Benkendorff, a German nobleman from Estland who served simultaneously 22. Ibid., 35, 73; Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost', 2 0 4 - 5 ; Walther Kirchner, Die deutsche Industrie und die Industrialisierung Russlands, 1815-1914 (St. Katharinen, W. Ger., 1986), 147 (for the term German-English-Russian), 182, 2 7 8 - 7 9 ; Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Die Deutschen im Zarenreich. Zwei Jahrhunderte deutsch-russische Kulturgemeinschaft (Stuttgart, 1986), 264. The editors of KS err in describing Knoop simply as an English entrepreneur (213) and may overstate the role of British capital in the Kreenholm company (vi-vii). For an admiring, informative overview of Knoop's Russian career, including his international connections and his brilliant entrepreneurial mode of operation, see Gerhart von Schulze-Gävernitz, Volkswirtschaftliche Studien aus Russland (Leipzig, 1899), 9 0 - 1 0 6 ; the author refers to Knoop as "more than a Rockefeller," "the Arkwright of Russia," "a genius of capitalism" (90). For a more balanced though similarly appreciative view, see Stuart Thompstone, "Ludwig Knoop, 'The Arkwright of Russia,'" Textile History 15, no. 1 (1984): 4 5 - 7 3 . According to Thompstone ( 4 7 - 4 8 ) , Knoop went to Russia in 1839 as assistant to the representative of the De Jersey Company, a Manchester trading house. 23. Hansen, Geschichte, 385; Dehio, Erhard Dehio, 36.

BEFORE T H E STRIKE

23

as head of the Imperial Chancellery's Third Section, chief of gendarmes, and confidant to Nicholas I. 24 In 1845 the factory, which proved unprofitable, was again sold, this time to a prominent Russian entrepreneur of German extraction, the wealthy industrialist and court banker Baron Alexander Stieglitz, an educated man with excellent connections in both St. Petersburg and the Baltic provinces and a graduate of the German university in Dorpat (Tartu), Livland. Owner of St. Petersburg's largest cotton mill, the Nevskii factory (founded in 183 3 and scene of the 1870 strike mentioned earlier), Stieglitz later served as director of Russia's State Bank ( 1 8 6 0 66). The ambitious entrepreneur, whose Petersburg cotton factory was, for its time, highly mechanized and technically advanced, was unhappy with the condition of his newly acquired woolens mill. He soon resolved to dismantle it and replace it with a larger, more up-to-date structure, one whose imposing presence by the waterfall—a contemporary described it as "almost a city in itself"—would dominate the landscape of the right bank for years to come. In 1857, when the Kreenholm factory was still under construction, the work force of the reconstructed and now quite prosperous Stieglitz mill had grown in number to a thousand. 25 Between Stieglitz's acquisition of the woolens mill and Knoop's purchase of Kreenholm, two smaller, less imposing factories were erected in the area, one by the Cramer family, the other by Stieglitz himself. The former, also a woolens mill, was situated on Joala, the huge Cramer property on the Estland side, near the western waterfall. Construction of Stieglitz's second factory was begun in 1851 on the right bank, close to his woolens mill; this one (with a branch in St. Petersburg) specialized in the manufacture of sailcloth and sails. In 1857, shortly after Knoop and his partners purchased their island, Cramer sold them the nearby buildings of his woolens factory, together with the stretch of Joala land on which they stood. 26 Thus the Kreenholm factory, located on an island 24. KM, 10; Hansen, Geschichte, 3 3 1 , 3 3 5 ; Kann, Narva, 1 0 3 - 4 . O n the involvement of Benkendorff in numerous lucrative commercial ventures, see Sidney Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia Under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 9 8 - 9 9 . 25. KM, 10, Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaiapromyshlennost', 208; Kann, Narva, 104. O n Stieglitz and the "house of Stieglitz," see also William L. Blackwell, The Beginnimngs of Russian Industrialization, 1800-1860 (Princeton, 1968), 69, 2 5 5 - 6 0 ; Kirchner, Die deutsche Industrie, 360; Dehio, Erhard Dehio, 74. The reference ( 1 8 5 8 ) to "a city in itself" (fast eine Stadt für sich) is in Hansen, Geschichte, 339. N o t surprisingly, given his interests in both Petersburg and Estland, Stieglitz was a moving force behind the development of the Petersburg-Narva-Reval railroad, completed in 1870. 26. Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia 393; Kann, Narva, 1 0 5 - 6 .

promyshlennost',

208; Hansen, Geschichte, 351,

24

THE KREENHOLM

STRIKE

across the river from the two Stieglitz factories but with property extending to the river's left bank, occupied a central place in the oddly shaped configuration of factories that bridged the lower Narova beginning in the late 1850s. Before operations at the Kreenholm factory could begin in earnest a site had to be found for housing the thousands of workers slated to be brought there. Since the island, some thirty acres in area, was to be covered with factory buildings almost from end to end, much of the housing would have to be located on the left-bank shore land—the property purchased from Cramer and adjacent land still owned by him. In the 1850s the small area south of the Narva city wall (the wall of the ancient fortress, not removed until the fortress itself was demobilized in 1864) was still in use as pasturage. The area nearest the island, part of the old Cramer property, comprised the tiny village of Joala and a large farmstead of some eight thousand acres bearing the same name. The village itself was too small to house many workers, but the plentiful vacant lands still owned by Cramer in the immediate vicinity, between the river to the east and the newly constructed (1857) Narva "chaussée" to the west, provided a serviceable site for workers' barracks and auxiliary buildings. The Kreenholm company rented the additional land from Cramer and began to construct these buildings, all of them wooden (stone buildings would be added after 1864), at the same time as it was erecting the first structure on the island itself. Some Joala acreage was also preserved as farmland, for use by the company for the cultivation of grain and other produce for sale to workers. 27 Kreenholm island was connected to the housing area on the left bank by a 267-foot wooden bridge, designed to serve as a footpath to and from work and as a delivery route for those supplies and materials not brought to the island directly by boat. About thirty feet wide, suspended some thirty-five feet above the water, the bridge was buttressed by two piers at the island end and two on the shore. Serving both functionally and symbolically as the factory gate, the bridge, not unlike the gates of ordinary factories, would one day become an important site for dramatic confrontations between management and labor. 28 27. KM, 19-20, 23. In 1880 the company purchased the rented land from Cramer. There were no stone buildings before the vacating of the fortress in 1864 because stone structures located at 1.5 versts or less from a Russian fortress were forbidden by law. (On the demobilization of the fortress, officially decreed in May 1863, see also Kann, Narva, 96.) 28. The bridge is described in KM, 24. For the bridge's role in the coming conflicts, see chapter 3 below.

BEFORE T H E STRIKE

25

The Kreenholm company acquired no property on the more distant right bank of the river. To be sure, its operations were by no means independent of that area. The proximity of the Russian-speaking villages of the Iamburg district (especially agriculturally impoverished villages such as Iazvishchi) and of the Gdov district, just to the south, provided Kreenholm with a readily available source of semiskilled labor. 29 But since, for practical reasons, no bridge was built between the island and the eastern shore, many Iamburg and most Gdov peasants hired by the factory were housed on the opposite bank, crossing the river by boat when they returned to their villages for weekends and holidays. In other words, though they lived quite close to their homes, many workers from the Russian (that is, the Petersburg) side, unlike those from the Estland side, led their everyday lives apart from their families.

Ethnic Composition The location chosen for the Kreenholm factory contributed substantially to the ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity of its work force. From the bottom to the top, from the lowliest factory hand to the highest level of management, and to a degree never approached in the textile mills of Russia's Central Industrial Region (CIR) or even in the somewhat more ethnically mixed factories of urban and suburban St. Petersburg, ethnic and cultural diversity would dominate the Kreenholm scene. The workers, to begin at the bottom of the factory's social hierarchy, were recruited from two basic ethnolinguistic groups, Estonians and Russians, with the former generally outnumbering the latter by a high ratio—over 2.3 to 1 (3,244 Estonians, 1,400 Russians) in 1872. 30 With 29. On Iazvishchi, see I. I. Vlasov, Tkach Fedor Afanas'ev (1859-1905). Materials dlia biografii (Ivanovo-Voznesensk, 1925), 7. 30. The 1872 figures are from the report of the government commission that investigated the strike (RD, 3 6 8 - 6 9 ) . Despite seasonal and annual fluctuations, the proportions seem to have been fairly constant. Nine years after the commission report, a well-organized one-day regional census showed a ratio of Estonians to Russians of almost exactly 2:1; see Ergebnisse der baltischen Volkszählung vom 29. December 1881, Theil 2: Ergebnisse der ehstländischen Volkszählung, Band 3: Die Zählung auf dem flachen Lande, Lieferung 1 (Reval, 1884), 29. In September 1872 the Esdand governor mistakenly reported the proportions as 50-50; see "Zapiska o bezporiadkakh byvshikh v Avguste na Krengol'mskoi manufakture" (hereafter cited as "Zapiska o bezporiadkakh"), TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 27; and KS, 52n.

26

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some possible exceptions (caused by a wave of Estonian peasant conversions from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy in the 1840s), this division overlapped greatly with the workers' division into two religious communities, Lutheran and Russian Orthodox. 31 These parallel distinctions, ethnic and religious, were of paramount importance to the workers, determining to a great extent their social bonds outside the factory and shaping the nature and location of their leisure activities. The distinctions were clearly manifested in residential patterns, whether viewed in terms of the location of a locally recruited worker's home village (Russian/ Orthodox on the right bank, Estonian/Lutheran on the left) or the site of the workers' temporary barracks, which were segregated mainly by ethnicity. There are also strong if inconclusive indications that the Estonians were much more likely than the Russians to be employed in family units. Whereas among adult Estonian workers in 1872 there were seven females for every ten males (985 women, 1,351 men), among the Russians there were only four (333 women, 807 men). Moreover, children made up a higher proportion of the Estonian work force (28 percent) than of the Russian (18.5 percent). 32 The importance of these ethnic and religious divisions was consistently recognized and even reinforced by the factory management, which deliberately provided not only for separate housing but even for separate dining facilities. Predictably, separate religious instruction was provided for the children and adolescents of each group. Adding further to the ethnic and cultural diversity of the work force was the presence of a certain number of Finnish, German, and Swedish workers, most of them Lutheran. Unfortunately, their proportion among the rank-and-file workers (in contrast to foremen and other supervisors) is impossible to calculate with any precision.33 Official documents generated by the 1872 strike tended to designate all non-Russian workers as Estonians, though many of these bore German or Swedish surnames. Since there is never any reference in the documents to workers 31. The conversions, a form of protest against Lutheran German landlords, took place in northern Livland; see Raun, Estonia, 45, 4 8 - 4 9 , 53-54. 32. Based on figures in RD, 369. The 1872 figures are hard to compare with those from the 1881 census, which fail to distinguish between adults and children in enumerating the work force by sex. Including all ages, the Krccnholm work force had as many as nine Estonian females for every ten Estonian males in 1881, but only five Russian females for every ten Russian males (Ergebnisse, 29). 33. The 1881 census identifies only seventy-three workers as linguistically neither Estonian nor Russian; thirty-nine of these were Germans (Ergebnisse, 29). There are no comparable data for 1872.

BEFORE T H E STRIKE

27

actually speaking Swedish or German, it is fair to assume that almost all these workers were culturally Estonian, individuals whose family names happened to reflect the peculiarities of the region's historical legacy.34 Given the close similarity of Finnish and Estonian, however, identifying Finns among the Kreenholm workers, whether by name or by speech, is not possible. But as we shall see, the factory's use of children sponsored by the Petersburg Foundling Home makes it clear that a small but significant number of Kreenholm's workers were native speakers of Finnish (though to add to the confusion, some, like Vasilii Gerasimov, had patently Russian names and were officially registered as Russians). If we now move up to the next level of the Kreenholm social ladder, the lower supervisory positions—crew leaders, foremen and assistant foremen, low-level technicians—we find a somewhat different ethnic mix. Since the available data are never clear as to whether crew leaders were counted as "workers" (they probably were), we can only guess that, because these positions were often filled by direct promotion from the ranks, they more or less mirrored the ethnic mix of Estonians and Russians found in the work force. Among the foremen, overseers, and technical personnel, however, one encounters a plurality of Germans (both local and foreign), some Russians, some Englishmen (commonly found in such positions in European countries at an early stage of industrialization, and easily importable by Knoop), and no Estonians, clearly Kreenholm's ethnic underclass.35 Moving still higher up the ladder to the "responsible" managers who stood between the lower supervisory personnel and "the owners," as the corporate board of directors was often called, we note the virtual disappearance of all groups but Germans, the nationality that dominated the day-to-day administration of the factory from the outset of its operations. In due course, we will get to know certain of the German managers more intimately, especially Ernst Kolbe, whom we already know as the mayor of Narva who called the advantages of the Kreen34. Estonian and Latvian peasants formally freed from serfdom in 1816 (in Estland) and 1819 (in Livland) lacked official family names before that time. Once emancipated (without land or full freedom of movement) they often took on the German names of their former masters. There is a concise explanation of the 1 8 1 6 - 1 9 emancipation, including its narrow limits and phased implementation, in Raun, Estonia, 4 7 - 4 8 . 35. Our only specific data are from the 1881 census: of fifty-five office workers, technicians, and foremen/overseers (Beamte, Techniker, Meister—the term Aufseherin not used), all of them male, twenty-two were (linguistically) German, fourteen Russian, none Estonian (Ergebnisse, 29). The twenty-two may include some of the German managers discussed below. On Knoop's use of Englishmen in his Russian factories in the 1860s, see Schulze-Gävernitz, Volkswirtschaftliche Studien, 95.

28

THE KREENHOLM

STRIKE

holm site to Knoop's attention. It was perhaps in return for this favor that Kolbe was appointed by Knoop and his partners to the post of chief factory manager, a position he held until his authority was eroded by the events of 1872. Until that time he exercised—or aspired to exercise—almost unlimited control over the day-to-day life of the factory, a power enhanced by his dual role as its general manager and a founding member of the corporate board, the only member who was always on the scene. With the partial exception of Knoop (who held the title of director from 1857 until his death in 1894), the other major owners, all members of the board, functioned more as absentee landlords than as active business executives. Like Knoop, they were men with wide-ranging financial interests who spent much more of their time in Moscow, St. Petersburg, or abroad than they did in Estland. Like their lowest hirelings, the board members were ethnically varied, though the pattern was very different. As already noted, Knoop was a cosmopolitan German who had been raised in Russia, educated at the German university in Livland, and maintained both business and family ties with the English-speaking world. Among the other members were ethnic Russians whose names will be familiar to students of Russian entrepreneurship. Perhaps the best known was Koz'ma T. Soldatenkov, "Moscow merchant, cotton-textile manufacturer, Old-Believer leader, philanthropist and patron of art and literature." Grandson of a serf, son of a wholesale merchant, Soldatenkov was a barely educated man, pious and devoted to his "heretical" faith, and vastly successful as a trader of cotton yarn. Despite his heterodox religion he received much valued recognition from official Russia in the form of honorific titles and appointments. It was Knoop who, impressed by his talents, invited Soldatenkov to serve as a Kreenholm director, which he did for the rest of his life. 36 Almost as renowned in the world of business were the four Khludov brothers, especially Aleksei and Gerasim, sons of Ivan Khludov, an OldBeliever peasant turned Moscow entrepreneur. Like Soldatenkov, in whose Moscow business circles they traveled, the Khludovs were successful cotton magnates, proud patrons of the arts, and frequent participants in the work of official commissions, organs of local government, and civic organizations. Unlike Soldatenkov, they eventually forsook the faith of their fathers for the edinoverie, a "comfortable halfway house" 36. On Soldatenkov, see Thomas C. Owen, "Soldatenkov, Koz'ma Terent'evich," in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, vol. 36 (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1984), 1 3 5 - 3 8 (quotation from 135).

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29

to the established Orthodox church. 37 It was one of the Khludov brothers who first put the others in touch with Knoop, a contact that led to their participation in his venture. Like Knoop, the Khludovs later became heavily involved in business dealings in Germany, England, and the United States, thereby reinforcing the internadonal character of Kreenholm's corporate board. 38 Other founders of the company included several German businessmen (some of them registered in the Moscow or Petersburg merchants' guild) and an English entrepreneur named Richard Barlow. 39 Though Barlow, only a "candidate" director, was not very involved in the factory's operations (he owned his own textile plant in St. Petersburg), his presence added tone to the international color of the new undertaking, while underscoring one of the principal justifications for locating a factory near the Gulf of Finland and the mouth of the Narova: easy access (after the Crimean War) at relatively low transport costs to imported British machinery and American cotton, shipped to the Narva port via England. 40 Emblematic of the factory's absentee ownership was the location of the company's headquarters, site of Knoop's personal office, in Moscow, the primary residence of most members and candidate members of the board. (Until he moved to St. Petersburg in 1870, however, Kolbe resided in Kreenholm, and he continued to maintain a second home there.) At any given moment only three men bore the title of full director. From 1863 to 1873, more or less the boundary years of our study, they were Knoop, Soldatenkov, and Gerasim Khludov. 41

The Beginnings The Kreenholm factory was established at a time of great excitement and activity in the Russian textile industry, especially cottons. After a brief interruption during the Crimean War, the growth of cotton cloth production that had begun in the 18 30s and 1840s resumed as part of a short but powerful upsurge in entrepreneurial fever that gripped the 37. 1982) 38. 39. 40. 41.

Alfred J. Rieber, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Imperial Russia (Chapel Hill, 141; see also 1 6 7 - 6 8 . Ibid., 1 6 2 - 6 3 . For a full list, see Hansen, Geschichte, 387. Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost\ 2 0 7 . KM, 15; see also TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 5 6 2 , 1 . 117.

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country in 1856-57, much ofit concentrated in textiles.42 The founding of the Kreenholm factory was perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of this mood, with grandiose language about its future as the largest factory of its kind in Europe "if not on the face of the earth" figuring prominently in the rhetoric surrounding its construction. 43 This spirit of economic optimism, coupled with a cultivated sense of local (i.e., Narva) civic pride, was vividly conveyed in a Narva citizen's description (in a German-language newspaper) of the ceremony launching the construction of the first factory building: O n the island o f Kreenholm, located between t w o waterfalls o f the Narova River, the ceremonial laying [ o f the cornerstone] o f a cotton-spinning and weaving factory t o o k place o n 3 0 April 1 8 5 7 . Many guests journeyed to this celebration, s o m e from M o s c o w and St. Petersburg. A large crowd filled the square . . . and the beautiful spring weather favored the celebration, s o significant for our city.

Anticipating an image that the Kreenholm company would try to project in the years ahead, the celebration was invested with an ecumenical religious flavor, with Orthodox and Lutheran clergy from Narva sharing equally in the ceremonials. Just a hint of Orthodox preeminence might have been discerned in the order of ceremonial events, with the Russian priest, probably from the Cathedral of Transfiguration (Preobrazhenskii sobor), preceding the German Lutheran pastor of the Church of St. John (St. Johannis-Kirche) in the performance of their respective offices.44 After the St. John's choir had sung a German chorale from the 127th Psalm, "Except the Lord Build the House, They Labor in Vain that Build It," the pastor spoke to the same theme, asking the Lord to bless the ceremonies and calling for the protection of the area by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Then, while the choir chanted the chorale "Love the Lord God," the cornerstone was laid with three symbolic blows of a hammer. The symbolic importance of the occasion was also marked by the laying of the second stone by an official representative of the imperial gov42. For an overview, see G. S. Isaev, Rol' tekstil'noipromyshlennosti vgenesize i razvitii kafitalizma v Rossii, 1760-1860 (Leningrad, 1970), 1 5 3 - 6 6 . See also Blackwell, Beginnings, 44, 4 6 - 4 7 ; Zelnik, Labor and Society, 45, 75. 43. Das Inland, 15 May 1857, in KM, 187. 44. Counting the cathedral, there were three churches of "the Greek faith" (i.e., Russian Orthodox) in Narva and its suburbs at the time. There was also a "SwedishFinnish" Lutheran church, St. Michael's. The Estonian population had no church, only a simple prayer house. See Hansen, Geschicbte, 343, 345, 365, 395; KM, 99; Baedeker, Russia, 83. A pillar of Narva's German community, Georg Cramer had recently served (and may still have been serving) as a warden of St. John's; Hansen, Geschicbte, 347, 361.

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ernment, commander of the Narva garrison Major General Baron Wilhelm von Kriidener, and by the presence of members of Kreenholm's board of directors, among them Gerasim Khludov, Kolbe, and Soldatenkov, who placed a gilded nameplate displaying the names of the founders. The ceremonies were followed by a festive luncheon, with toasts proposed by Kolbe to the health of the emperor, Alexander II, and to that of Prince Aleksandr Suvorov, governor general of the Baltic provinces. The toasts were met by fervent cries of "Hoch!"—German apparently serving as the celebration's lingua franca. After lunch the participants were taken on a stroll to the spit of the island, an excellent vantage point from which to admire the natural beauty of the area before returning home. 45 The factory founders lost no time in developing and equipping the building whose cornerstone had been so ceremoniously laid. The basic factory complex was to consist of four large and sturdy buildings, constructed of stone and iron: a left and a right spinning building, or "corpus" (korpus), which together constituted "the spinning factory," and a left and a right weaving corpus, which combined to form "the weaving factory." But in the beginning there was only the spinning factory, or rather its left corpus—later known as the Old Half or Old Wing (Staraia polovina)—the first to be completed. Its walls and roof went up in the fall of 1857, just months after the ceremony, with floors, arches, and window casements finished by the following summer. By October 1858 it was in full operation, equipped with over eight thousand spindles powered by two water-driven wheels housed in the adjoining wheel room. Work on the left corpus of the adjacent weaving factory was finished by the end of the summer of 1859. This building contained its own wheel room, which contained the water-driven wheel that powered the factory's first 516 looms. The right corpus of the spinning factory, known as the New Half or New Wing (Novaia polovina), was finished in the fall of 1861 (year of the emancipation of Russia's serfs), and the corresponding half of the weaving factory was completed the following year. By the time the four structures were fully operational the spacious workshops of the rapidly expanding spinning factory boasted over sixtyfour thousand spindles, while the number of looms in the comparably capacious shops of the weaving factory approached one thousand. 46 45. Das Inland, 15 May 1857, in KM, 187. 46. To put these numbers in some perspective, according to official government figures for 1861 the entire cotton cloth industry of Petersburg province had 3,864

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Construction of water mains, bridges, and (in Joala) workers' housing proceeded in tandem with construction of the factory buildings, with most of the work completed by 1862 (though in response to the growth of the work force, housing continued to be built throughout the 1860s and beyond). By the end of 1862 seven two-story barracks (kazarmy) had been erected on the left: bank around a single large courtyard. Each wooden building measured roughly 2 1 0 by 35 feet and contained from 60 to 78 tiny, poorly ventilated one- or two-room units, for a total o f 504 "apartments," with one or more communal kitchens on each floor. Toilet facilities were located in separate outhouses. Other buildings erected in the area by 1862 included an apartment house for office workers (seven units), a house for foremen and other supervisory personnel (sixteen units), a small school building, a modest, understaffed, but sturdy little infirmary (with 150 beds by the end o f the decade), and a pharmacy. All these structures were built with logs. 47 The two large factories (four buildings), both made of high-quality limestone from a local quarry, closely resembled each other. The spinning buildings had four stories. Each " h a l f " (or "wing") of the building—observers sometimes identified a " h a l f " as a separate factory ( f a b rika)—faced the other, and together they formed a huge quadrangle, with a large interior courtyard. Though similarly designed, the weaving factory was only three stories high and occupied a much smaller area, 2 0 6 , 8 5 5 square feet on the ground as compared to the spinning factory's 360,650. The adjacent wings o f each building were joined together by two sets of "galleries," or enclosed walkways, which normally provided easy passage between them. 48

The Witness In the summer of 1864, two years after completion of the factory's construction, a twelve-year-old Finnish-speaking boy with a mechanical looms and just under 7 1 2 , 0 0 0 spindles (Isaev, Rol\ 190). Thus at this early stage Kreenholm alone already had the equivalent of 2 6 percent of the looms and 9 percent of the spindles in all the cotton factories of Petersburg province. 47. KM, 2 9 - 3 0 , 5 3 , 8 4 - 8 6 ; Ioksimovich, Manufakturnaia promyshlennost', 2 0 8 - 1 0 ; Zapiska No. 1 (memo appended to investigating commission's report, 15 Nov. 1872), RD, 3 7 5 - 7 6 , 3 8 2 - 8 3 . 48. KM, 30, 33.

BEFORE THE STRIKE

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Russian name, Vasilii Gerasimov, arrived in Narva in a horse-drawn cart with a large group of boys and girls of the same age. 49 From Narva this confused and sullen collection of ethnically mixed orphans and abandoned children, all of them wards of the Petersburg Foundling Home, was taken to the Kreenholm factory, far removed from the villages where many had been raised by Finnish foster parents. 50 At the factory they were assigned to the spinning section and billeted in Barrack No. 7, one of the recendy constructed dormitories, with girls on the top floor, boys on the bottom. About thirty boys, including Vasilii, were assigned to Apartment No. 3. For Vasilii this day marked the beginning of an eventful eight-year sojourn in Kreenholm during what were both his and the factory's formative years. He as well as the factory would come of age in 1872, when both the youth of twenty and the young enterprise of fifteen experienced a shock powerful enough to change their lives. For historians, the youngster's arrival at Kreenholm is important for another reason. From 1864 through the explosive events of 1872, a young man was on the spot who would later record in brief but vivid detail the story of his experiences—from the dull patterns of Kreenholm's humdrum daily routine to the colorful moments of unrest that beset the factory during his final year there. No memoir, of course, can be read as if it were a natural history, an unmediated recording of the events it purports to describe, and in chapter 6 we will have occasion to discuss the problems of interpretation posed by this particular document. For the moment, however, in our exploration of the factory's early years and the background to the events that troubled year fifteen, Gerasimov serves us well as an observant, if committed, informant, a conveyor of mood as well as information. His memoir is almost our only source of evidence generated by neither state nor company officials, and the only audible voice of a Kreenholm worker (unlike the written summaries of workers' post-strike testimony) not 49. Like Vasilii, many of the Finnish-speaking children were considered ethnic Russians. Their language came from having been the wards of Finnish foster parents. 50. O n the Imperial Foundling Home (vospitatel'nyi dom), see David L. Ransel, Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia (Princeton, 1988); idem, "Abandonment and Fosterage of Unwanted Children: The Women of the Foundling System," in The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, ed. David L. Ransel (Urbana, 111., 1978); Materialy dlia istorii S.-Peterburjjskojjo Vospitatel'nogo doma, comp. F. A. Tarapygin (St. Petersburg, 1878). On the initial contract of 1862, wherein the Foundling Home agreed to supply Kreenholm with young (age twelve or older) workers and the company agreed to maintain certain conditions of employment, see Materialy, 4 9 - 5 0 .

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filtered through an official. In short, he is our single most important witness to the strike, though we must resist the temptation to accept all his testimony at face value. Since he cannot be cross-examined, the evidence he presents must be carefully compared with other parts of the documentary record. As a witness, Gerasimov is especially useful for the light he sheds on the factory administration, as seen from the standpoint of a worker. With the exception of KM, the official company history whose often celebratory picture of management must be taken with a grain of salt, the only other major source of information about the pre-1872 regime at Kreenholm is the official inquiry of October-November 1872, when a special commission appointed by the MVD sought the causes of the upheaval in the previous practices of factory managers, practices painfully experienced by young Gerasimov for eight long years.51 Both Gerasimov's account and the government inquiry reveal the degree to which the island factory and the company's shoreside residential settlement were ruled by the directors like a state within a state, beyond the effective control of a supposedly centralized, autocratic imperial government.

The Factory Administration Several circumstances combined to endow the Kreenholm factory with the character of a quasi-autonomous political unit— most notably its physical isolation, the special rights and privileges of the local German elite (of which Ernst Kolbe, the factory manager, was a leading member), and the high prestige of some of the company's absentee owners. To this list might be added the ethos of serfdom, an institution that continued to exist in Russia (though not in Estonia) until the fifth year of the factory's life. Part company town and part preindustrial fiefdom or barony, Kreenholm managed to escape the usually watchful eyes of Russia's central police apparatus until its managers lost effective control over law and order. As an isolated factory island, Kreenholm was governed in its early years more like a moatencircled medieval castie than the modern industrial complex it other51. There is no evidence in the documentary record that Gerasimov himself was interrogated in the course of the commission's investigation.

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wise resembled. If the Herr im Haus paternalism of the factories of Central Europe was also prevalent in the textile mills of Russia, nowhere was it starker than in Kreenholm. Herr im Haus is, of course, the notorious phrase first used by Alfred Krupp in his antistrike proclamation of 1 8 7 2 5 2 —the very year that most concerns us. It is cited here not so much to underscore the German element in Kreenholm's administration (in the mid-nineteenth century, "paternalistic and heavy-handed regulation of workers' lives" was as characteristic of Russia's CIRas it was of Germany) 53 as to dramatize the extent to which Kreenholm, despite its "modern" articles of incorporation, stock-company financial structure, international commercial links, and advanced machinery, existed and operated as a sort of barony, in well near feudal isolation from central, regional, and even local public control. Until the explosive events of 1872 ended Kreenholm's insulation from the outside world, the de facto absence of external judicial or administrative constraints—let alone the scrutiny of public opinion— was extreme even by Russian standards. There were, to be sure, circumstances within the factory that placed some limits on management's readiness to act arbitrarily. Just as a feudal lord (or a pre-1861 Russian serf-owner) might feel constrained to tolerate the customary ways of his serfs as long as they fulfilled their labor 52. Versions of Krupp's statement may be found in Heinrich Herkner, Die Arbeiterfrage. Eine Einführung, 7th ed., vol. 1: Arbeiterfrage und Sozialreform (Berlin and Leipzig, 1921), 417; and (a much shorter excerpt) Werner Conze, "Arbeiter," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1972), 239 ("dass ich in meinem Hause wie auf meinem Boden Herr sein und bleiben will"). Note also the words of Louis Piette, a Saarland paper manufacturer (1840): "Eine Fabrik gleicht einem Staate, dessen Oberhaupt der Fabrikherr ist" (quoted in Conze, "Arbeiter," 239). For a thorough treatment of the Krupp firm's activities on the Russian market, including the reasons for Alfred's rejection of several proposals to locate a plant in Russia, see Kirchner, Die deutsche Industrie, 2 0 4 - 3 3 . 53. The quoted phrase is from Robert E. Johnson's apt characterization of the policies of Moscow industrialists (referring to the 1880s-1890s) in his Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), 81. For an example of strict policies of patriarchal control by an entrepreneur in another branch of Russian industry, see Theodore H. Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution, vol. 1: Life and Work in Russia's Donbass, 1869-1924 (Princeton, 1989), esp. 4 1 - 4 2 . A comparable if less authoritarian paternalism could be found even in the textile mills of the mid-nineteenth-century United States, such as the New York cotton works called Harmony Mills; see Daniel J. Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town-. Iron and CottonWorker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, New York, 1855-84 (Urbana, 1978), 57, 58. As to France, Perrot writes (re the period 1 8 7 0 - 9 0 ) of the "obstination d'un manufacturier arrogant, et, dans le textile, ce type surabonde" (Ouvriers engréve 1:356).

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obligations and paid their rents, 54 Kolbe and his associates hesitated before daring to tamper with certain practices that had begun to take root at the factory during its earlier years. Frail elements of an unwritten social contract between the Kreenholm management and certain groups of workers did emerge, understandings, as will be seen, that placed limits on the ability of the lord to rule his house with complete disregard for the feelings of his subjects. But with very few exceptions these constraints failed to prevent the administration in general, and Kolbe in particular, from exercising a degree of power that, when finally forced on the attention of government officials in 1872, would move them to expressions of shock and disapproval. Estland's acting provincial prosecutor, for example, an imperial official appointed by the Justice Ministry, expressed dismay that Kolbe had been running the factory without a trace of outside supervision or oversight (kontroF). "Local authorities," he complained in a report to his superiors, "have been able to exert almost no influence on Kreenholm." And that was not all: Beyond the reach of all supervision, taking advantage of his own power and also of the helpless condition of the workers, and counting on his personal connections, for many years Mr. Kolbe has run the factory completely despotically [samovlastno]\ he has been both judge in his own disputes with workers and implementer of his own decisions. Kolbe's unrestricted exercise of arbitrary power [proizvol] has weighed heavily on the working population. 5 5

The factory's unfortunate isolation from "local authorities" was also emphasized in 1872 by the Estland provincial governor, who pointed out that a combination of physical distance and other inhibiting factors had made it impractical for disputes between Kreenholm workers and their employers to be adjudicated within the structure of Estland's distinctive judicial system or mediated by local police. 56 Officially, as part of Estland's Allentacken (Waiwara) district, Kreenholm (along with Joala) came within the jurisdiction of the Allentacken Hakenrichter, a district official or magistrate elected from among the local (German) nobility for a three-year term, whose duties combined police and quasijudicial functions. But the Hakenrichter's office was located in Járva 54. See, for example, Michael Confino, Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe Steele. Etude de structures agraires et de mentalités économiques (Paris, 1963). 55. Report of Vladislas A. Zhelekhovskii to Ministry of Justice, 4 Oct. 1872, RD, 345-46. 56. "Zapiska o bezporiadkakh," TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 27-29.

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37

(Russian: leva), some thirty-five miles from Kreenholm, and the Hakenrichter himself was completely bereft of support staff. Moreover, his authority was limited by local law to minor disputes (with the disputed value not exceeding 15 rubles). 57 Similarly, the local parish court (prikhodnyi sud), though not as far away from Kreenholm (eighteen miles), had at best only a very limited jurisdiction as mediator of disputes between workers and their employers (it was designed primarily for agrarian disputes), while the next higher judicial instance, the Wesenberg district court, was eighty miles away and, except in times of emergency (usually peasant unrest), convened for only a few weeks each year. 58 To the governor's regret, all of this contributed to the factory administration's ability to exercise privately what were normally public police and judicial functions. In a similar vein, the MVD's investigating commission accused the Kreenholm administration of putting itself, from the earliest years of its existence, in "a position of complete independence, in which it could govern the workers as it saw fit." Kolbe, the commission complained, had held "the reins of administration in his own hands alone," while the factory's isolation from outside influence meant that "the germ of evil" had lingered there for its entire fifteen-year existence. 59 Comparable criticisms were voiced by Finance Minister Mikhail Reutern, then Russia's highest official responsible for the oversight of private industry, and by Deputy Chief of Gendarmes Nikolai Levashev, the empire's second highest police officer. And they were echoed quite emphatically in a report on Kreenholm jointly submitted to the tsar by the MVD, the Finance Ministry, and the Third Section, which regretted that, though "a private institution," the factory had been permitted to exercise "juridico-police powers." 6 0 What all these officials seemed to be saying, though the expression was not used, was that official neglect had permitted Kreenholm to become "a state within a state," with Kolbe—later 57. Svod mestnykh Uzakonenii Gubernii Ostzeiskikh, Part 1, art. 973, para. 39, reproduced in ibid., 33. See also RD, 333n. 58. The relevant law was part of the 1856 Estland agrarian reform: Polozhmie o krest'ianakh EstlianAskoigubernii, arts. 745, 7 5 3 - 5 4 , 760, 790, all reproduced in TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 11. 33-34. For art. 753 see also RD, 333n. 59. The commission's Zapiska No. 2, RD, 3 8 6 - 8 7 . 60. Letter from Reutern to Minister of Internal Affairs Timashev, 15 Dec. 1872 (commenting on the report of the commission), RD, 3 9 7 - 4 0 2 . An editors' note on 402, supported by a reference to archives of the Third Section, says that Levashev fully shared Reutern's views on these matters. For the report to the tsar (26 Jan. 1873) signed by Timashev, Reutern, and Levashev, see RD, 4 0 2 - 4 (quotation from 403).

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described in Gerasimov's memoir as "a despot in every sense of the word" (19)—its de facto lord and master.61 These assessments, made by high officials in the wake of the charged events of 1872, are confirmed in vivid detail by Gerasimov. The factory management's direct and arbitrary exercise of police and judicial power—for example, corporal punishment and solitary confinement as disciplinary means, the rendering of summary judgments for petty offenses—constitutes a leitmotif of his narrative. On the very day of his arrival in Kreenholm, Gerasimov recalls, draconian methods were employed to launch him on the path ofRussification (r^-Russification might be more apposite in his case) as Russian language and Orthodox religious exercise were forced on him and other Finnish-speaking children. Slaps on the face and threats of beating were used to teach them to pray "correctly." In the days ahead a teacher, using "the fist and the birch rod" as his pedagogic tools, would "torture" them every night from nine to eleven in the factory school—this after sixteen hours of "hellish" work. Even for relatively minor violations, factory police would beat them with sticks and straps and place them in a punishment cell on rations of bread and water (17-18). 62 If supreme power over the workers was held by Kolbe (who was not too aloof to exercise it personally on occasion), the day-to-day task of maintaining order fell to the factory police. While the use of a private factory police force was not unknown in the mid-nineteenth century, either in Russia or abroad, what was unusual at Kreenholm was the decision to create a police force that would have the appearance not simply of a body of private security guards but of a juridically constituted public institution, an official-looking entity occupying a private space in an empire where private right was at a premium. As early as 26 November 1857, the year the company was founded, the directors promulgated a formal "police statute" ( p o l i t s e i s k i i ustav).63 Though in substance little 61. Here and throughout the volume, in-text page references to Gerasimov's memoir are to the 1923 version, Zhizn' russkogo rabochego. 62. The factory school, divided into Estonian and Russian sections, had existed since the founding of the factory. We are told in the factory's official history (with reference to these early years) that there is "no information on the activity of the school or on the degree of success of the instruction there" (KM, 100). 63. The content of the statute is summarized in Raport, RD, 354; and Zapiska No. 2, RD, 386ff. N o copy has ever been located in the Estland archives, nor has a copy of a revised and apparently stricter version drafted in 1870 and almost certainly implemented, even though never confirmed ( K S , 81 n). For evidence that the 1870 draft was in operation, despite the absence of any legal basis, in late September 1872, see the relevant correspondence in TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 1 9 4 - 9 5 , 2 4 0 - 4 1 , 253-56.

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39

more than an internal company document (it was never submitted to appropriate authorities for the required "censorship"), the statute was intended to generate an aura of official certification. To this end, written approval of the document was sought and obtained from the then governor of Estland, Johan von Griinwald. If not exactly a treaty between sovereign powers, the company's early compact with the governor had the effect of blurring the distinction between private and public law. In approving the statute, for example, the governor was giving his tacit seal of approval to the exclusion of Kreenholm workers from the jurisdiction of the parish court. Of less practical but at least equal symbolic import, he was also granting the factory the right to correspond with government offices without postage, a privilege normally reserved to state institutions.64 Given the difficulties Estland officials would later face in endeavoring to extend their reach from Reval to Kreenholm, the governor may have welcomed the statute for no other reason than administrative convenience. From the point of view of the company directors, however, much more was at stake: a precedent had been set that could someday be invoked to justify its claim to what amounted to a small but locally effective form of sovereign power. For the moment, this little entente between Reval and Kreenholm went unnoticed by the higher authorities in St. Petersburg, or so it appears in light of their shock when they later confronted the statute's existence. But the net effect was that, on the very eve of the abolition of serfdom and the introduction of fundamental judicial reforms in Russia, a group of prominent entrepreneurs found themselves with the kind of personal and judicial authority over their workers that Alexander II now saw fit to remove from the hands of the Russian gentry, and this in a part of the empire bereft of serfdom for over forty years. Because a version of the 1857 statute was still in force in 1872, it is helpful to familiarize ourselves with some of its provisions. The statute provided for the creation of two distinct but complementary categories of police, designed to maximize the efficiency of management's disciplinary control over what was planned to be a large and heterogeneous work force. On the one hand there was the "factory police" ( fctbrichnaia politsiia), a permanent paid professional body, headed by a man appointed by and responsible to the factory manager. This group was to function as the real locus of police power in Kreenholm's day-to-day 64. Zapiska No. 2, RD, 386.

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operations. On the other hand there was a tiny unit called the "worker police" (mbochaia politsiia), in principle a rotating, irregular body elected by workers from among their own number. It consisted of four men: an "elder" (starshina), his assistant, and two overseers (nadzirateli). Notwithstanding the formalities of election, the worker police were in a predictably weak and tenuous position. Not only did the statute subordinate them to the factory police, but their election also had to be confirmed by management, which retained the right to reject any nominee who gave it pause. Moreover, their jurisdiction was strictly confined to minor cases—almost exclusively petty disputes among workers, never conflicts between workers and their supervisors—and their decisions were always subject to appeal to and reversal by the factory police. To be sure, within their confined area and subject to that appeal the worker police were granted the power to inflict some rather severe punishments, both financial and physical: fines as high as ten days' wages, up to fifty blows with the birch rod (the district magistrate was limited by law to thirty), and, with the prior approval of the factory police, up to two days' confinement in a punishment cell. Yet given their low position in the hierarchy of authority and the temporary nature of their office, it is doubtful that worker police would act very harshly on their own, a conjecture supported by the fact that none of the serious punishment situations mentioned in the sources was ever handled by worker police alone. Not that their caution would raise the esteem in which they were held by their fellow workers or increase the chance that those workers would view them as their genuine representatives. Although the directors were no doubt influenced by their awareness of Russian and perhaps Estonian peasant traditions—the traditional office of village elder (starosta) was an obvious model for the starshina—we do not know just why these offices were made elective. What we do know is that any notion of legitimate representation is belied by the contempt displayed toward the worker police by their "constituents" once the authority of the factory police, their superiors, began to wane. In contrast to the worker police, the factory police possessed genuine power, if not authority. The range of punishments available even to the otherwise powerless worker police should alert us to the kind of measures available to their superiors. Indeed, the factory police's use of fines, confinement, and beating was not subject to any specific limitation by the statute. Although they did not draft the factory regulations—that was left to higher authorities, mainly Kolbe—the factory police adju-

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41

dicated the more serious infractions and executed the punishments that followed. If Kolbe, in effect, was Kreenholm's legislator and executive authority, the chief of factory police combined the roles of executive assistant and judge, while always acting within his master's guidelines. Even this arrangement was too loose for Kolbe, who included in the regulations a sweeping provision that not only invested his office with virtually unlimited residual power, but also united his function of ruler with that of high priest: " I n all cases not cited in these regulations the director of the factory will decide the case in accordance with justice and his own conscience [po pravde i sovesti svoei}"65 Thus, though we may safely assume that outside authorities would be summoned in the event of a murder or some other grave felony, for most purposes the policejudicial structure at Kreenholm was a self-contained system under the overarching authority of Kolbe, with a nominal role reserved for an official, the Hakenrichter, who resided many miles away.

The Weavers

The men and women recruited to work at the Kreenholm factory in its early years were in a favorable market situation. In part because of the end of the British ban on the export of spinning machinery, the number and size of Russian cotton mills had grown rapidly in the 1840s and early 1850s, especially in the Petersburg area. Interrupted by the Crimean War, this expansion resumed in 1856, a year of record sales for some Petersburg mills, and, despite a brief period of recession, continued during an uneven boom period that lasted for two more years. Several large cotton mills were founded in this brief period. 66 When the Kreenholm factory opened in 1857, still in the midst of the industry's expansion, the owners found themselves without a large 65. This is the wording found in the regulations posted in the workers' living quarters in the 1860s. Another version, printed in their paybooks, was phrased less arrogantly, with the director deciding such cases "according to justice [spravedlivost'] and the mutual satisfaction of the factory and the workers." Both versions are in KS, 171. 66. See A. F. Iakovlev, Ekonomicheskie krizisyv Rossii (Moscow, 1955), 6 1 - 8 0 ; Zelnik, Labor and Society, 4 5 , 7 5 , 7 8 . For empirewide data on cotton mills for 1 8 5 0 - 6 0 (including value of output and number of workers), see K. A. Pazhitnov, Ocherki istorii tekstil'noi promyshlennosti dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii. Khlopchatobumazhnaia, I'no-pen'kovaia i shelkovaiapromyshlennost'(Moscow, 1958), 17. Pazhitnov (17-19) counts sixty cotton mills in 1859. Moscow province had the most factories, but Petersburg had more spindles.

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THE KREENHOLM

STRIKE

enough pool of qualified workers among the local population. The factory had a thousand positions to fill by the end of its first year, and double that number soon thereafter. Many of these openings were for qualified spinners and—especially—weavers. Such workers had to be attracted to the unlikely location of Kreenholm from Moscow, Vladimir, and other parts of the CIR, where much of the cotton industry was concentrated. 67 Their migration, which significandy changed the population structure of the area, was encouraged by the prospect of relatively decent wages and working conditions. That Kreenholm was forced to compete for their labor with Petersburg mills such as the Nevskii factory made these workers' prospects even brighter. 68 Because spinners were easier to come by and easier to train, 69 it was skilled weavers who became the chief beneficiaries of the favorable conjuncture of the late 1850s. This advantage was reflected not only in their wages and other material benefits, but also in the solicitude with which they were treated by their supervisors in the early years, and the caution with which the potentially oppressive weight of the 1857 statute was applied to them. 70 For example, weavers were exempted in these days from the stringent fines that were levied for breaking or damaging machinery. Like weavers elsewhere, they were also accorded a great degree of autonomy in carrying out their work and much discretionary control over the work process in their shops.71 Notwithstanding the nominal authority of their immediate supervisors, weavers were generally free to set their own pace, and the only penalty for slow work was self-inflicted: lower earnings at the prevailing piece rate. Although bonuses were used to stimulate productivity, it was up to the individual weaver to decide whether to take advantage of this opportunity. 67. Amburger, Ingermanland, 364; idem, "Das neuzeitliche Narva," 207. Some highly skilled workers, who probably served as foremen and instructors, were also brought in from abroad; see RD, 354. 68. At the time, Stieglitz's Nevskii factory was by far the largest textile mill in the Petersburg area. In 1859 it had 1,300 workers, 160,000 spindles, and steam-driven machinery with a total o f 4 6 0 hp (Pazhitnov, Ocherki, 18, 21); in 1 8 6 1 - 6 2 it had 2,000 workers and 550 hp (Isaev, Rol', 1 9 0 - 9 1 ) . But it would soon fall behind Kreenholm in every respect. 69. On the ease and routinized nature of operating a spinning machine compared to operating a mechanical loom, see Perrot, Ouvriers en greve l:362n (citing Charles Benoist). 70. My description of the weavers' work situation and their early relations with the Kreenholm management is based on Gerasimov, Zhizn' (1923), 27-28. 71. " I n spite of mechanization, the weaver maintains a greater margin of freedom and initiative than the spinner" (Perrot, Ouvriers engreve 1:362; see also the quotation from Benoist on 362n).

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43

In many respects the relative independence of a Kreenholm weaver was comparable to that of a handloom weaver in cottage industry. There was, however, one important difference, dictated by the mechanization of the work: the weavers were required, like all other Kreenholm workers, to be at their workplace at a specified hour, 5:30 a.m., when the water wheels that powered their mechanical looms were set in motion, and to stay at the factory until 8:30 p.m., when power was cut off. Like an independent craftsman, they could work slowly or rapidly, carefully or laxly, without the burden of direct supervision; but like semiskilled factory hands, they lacked control over the time and place of their labor, which were determined by management. Virtually autonomous within the shop and within the time frame of the workday, weavers were still required to be present at the factory for the full workday, six days a week, and were thus unable to alter the overall organization of their day, the proportion of their time spent at or away from the job. Under these circumstances, and especially with a bonus available, it made good economic sense for a weaver to try to maximize his or her (some were women) daily output, since on-the-job autonomy could not be translated into the nonfactory use of time, whether in income-producing activity or leisure. As long as management was satisfied that this combination of incentives and constraints was producing the desired quantity of good work, there was little reason to challenge the weavers' real if only partial autonomy. Hence, though there were some indications (to be noted shortly) in the early 1860s that the weavers' privileged position was beginning to come under attack, most signs pointed to a generally positive situation for them well into that decade. The weavers' relatively favorable position in the labor market also translated directly into relatively high social prestige within the local hierarchy of workers. Upon arriving at the factory in 1864, young Gerasimov was quickly alerted to the prevailing social distinctions when he was told that weavers who lived at the factory inhabited special quarters described as "white," while spinners were relegated to less comfortable dormitory rooms described as "black." He viewed the few members of his cohort who were assigned to the "white" rooms—that is, the children selected to become weavers—as particularly fortunate. (Gerasimov himself was assigned to black Room No. 107.) According to the common wisdom, these rooms were called "white" not because they were better, though better they were, but because the weavers, so we are told, kept them so clean (17).

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Their fastidious living habits, matched by a corresponding neatness of dress, strongly suggest that the special status granted the weavers was reflected in their own self-image. It also found expression in the esteem in which they were held by other workers, a point that struck some government officials nearly a decade later. On what must have been one of the first occasions on which the term was used in reference to a Russian factory, the commission that investigated the events of 1872 described Kreenholm's nine hundred weavers as a "labor aristocracy" ( rabochaia aristokmtiia) and concluded that they exerted "a very great influence on the remaining mass of workers." 72 Gerasimov tells us that the favorable position of the weavers started to decline as early as 1860, four years before his arrival, when management began to impose "one form of pressure after another" on them (28). His explanation is vague, however, and, though there is evidence of some difficulty in the cotton industry that year, 1860 appears to be too early. In fact, it was the cotton famine coincident with the American Civil War that caused a genuine if short-lived crisis in the cotton industry, and that crisis assumed serious proportions only in 1862, with recovery beginning in 1866. 7 3 If Kreenholm's management wished to respond to this challenge by means other than mass dismissals—a solution that would have forced the isolated factory to reprise the difficulties of its earlier recruitment efforts when recovery returned—the most obvious alternative was to lower its wage bill by gradually reducing piece rates, abolishing bonuses, and inflicting harsher fines. To introduce these and other tough measures around 1863, when the economic conjuncture 72. RD, 374. This is the earliest use of the term labor aristocracy I have seen in Russian (though I have not explored the question systematically). It may have been borrowed from the Russian translation of Marx's Das Kapital, which appeared in early 1872 (see chapter 4, note 160). Its use in Russian discussion of factory labor soon became rather common. See, for example, the report of an 1879 zemstvo-sponsored investigation of sanitary conditions in Petersburg factories, which refers to skilled, well paid, highly trained masterovye who "are separated from the mass of the working people by their way of life and constitute, as it were, its aristocracy" (Golos, no. 316 [15 Nov. 1879]: 2). The figure 900 is from Zapiska No. 1, RD, 370 ("over nine hundred men and women"), where we also learn that the full weaving section, including the skilled weavers' unskilled assistants, consisted of 1,470 persons. 73. Iakovlev, Ekonomicheskiekrizisy, 6 3 - 6 4 , 7 6 - 7 7 (on 1860); 8 8 - 9 2 (on 1862-66). To some extent the recovery was aided by the tariff of 1868, which, while unprotective of Russian manufacturers, kept a duty on imported cotton cloths that represented a very high percentage of their cost; see V. la. Laverychev, Krupnaia burzhuaziia v poreformennoi Rossii (1861-1900¿¡g.) (Moscow, 1974), 121. Thompstone refers to the disruption in Russia's cotton textile sector caused by the Civil War as "a hiccup in the industry's expansion" ("Ludwig Knoop," 50).

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45

was too unfavorable to the workers to allow them to fight back effectively, was a fairly safe course of action. At first, however, none of these emergency measures added up to a direct assault on the prerogatives of the skilled weavers, the workers whom the administration could least afford to lose or even alienate. If we now turn from the vague, incautious chronology in Gerasimov's memoir to the more specific, carefully weighed information in the report of the 1872 commission, we see that Kolbe's assault on the weavers' independence—or at least the harshest manifestation of that assault, the stepped-up imposition of fines for damage to machinery and for insufficient output (anomalous at a time of raw cotton shortage)—dated not to the first years of the decade but, " t o the best of our knowledge" (:naskol'ko izvestno), to "only four years ago," roughly 1868. 7 4 More broadly, the commission accused management of having pressed heavily on the workers around that time because the labor market had grown more favorable to the employer; in other words, management's original incentive to treat certain workers with solicitude and to protect their earnings "artificially" was no longer in play. In the rather bookish words of the commission (which included a professor): "When, in accordance with the laws of economics, the supply [of labor] began to exceed the demand, the directors of the company gradually began to curtail the privileges and advantages that were offered the workers when first they came to the factory." To be sure, the commission's foray into the realm of political economy was brief and its argument incomplete. Apart from its failure to address the particular situation of the weavers, it neglected to mention the cotton crisis of the Civil War years or to grapple with the fact that if by 1868 the demand for labor was indeed on the rise, the market should have favored the workers. Nevertheless, the clear implication of the report was that the privileged position of certain Kreenholm workers had deteriorated, victim of the factory's success in attracting a "steady influx" of qualified people, presumably more than enough to meet its growing need for weavers. 75 The factory had held on to its core workers at a time of contraction, and apparently no longer had serious difficulty attracting new ones at a time of expansion. Instead of rescinding his tougher policies of the past half decade, Kolbe now was confident enough to hold the line. And whether or not the workers affected were all weavers, it was the qualified 74. Zapiska No. 2, RD, 391-92. 75. Raport, RD, 354 (for the quote on "laws of economics"), 356; Zapiska No. 2, RD, 385.

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weavers, the most privileged of Kreenholm workers from the outset, who would take greatest offense at his hard-line attitude. As the most independent of the workers, they were also the most prone to resist an assault on past privileges, especially when the period of crisis in the industry had passed and the restoration of their former status seemed to be within their grasp. Under the circumstances, Kolbe was faced with two choices: prize and cajole the weavers, in recognition of the contribution they could make to Kreenholm's new market opportunities; or keep them down in their place, in hopes that the tougher policies of the early 1860s could be maintained and expanded even in the new market situation. He chose the latter. « » « »

With the illusory advantage of hindsight, while viewing the past from very different perspectives, both Gerasimov and the investigating commission described the cataclysm of 1872 as virtually unavoidable. According to Gerasimov, the administration's devious ploys had long been transparent to the workers, "who were just waiting for a suitable occasion to declare their protest" (28). The commission went even further: given management's policies, "these disorders were bound to manifest themselves." They were an "inevitable consequence" of fifteen years of bad administration. In view of the workers' lack of rights (bezpravnost') and the abusive system of fines, "one might have expected [such] disorders to arise sooner or later." 76 We may readily agree with some of the assumptions behind these assessments. Surely the continuous existence of an extremely one-sided structure of authority at the factory, untempered by any mediating influences other than the weavers' precarious and increasingly threatened customary rights, must serve as the point of departure for anyone wishing to understand the severity of the conflict that would soon unfold. Yet the fact remains that the underlying tensions, however long they had been simmering, did not boil over until the summer of 1872. As Gerasimov himself acknowledged, however many reasons there were for Kreenholm workers to hate their employers, "they continued to endure it all, . . . to see which way the wind would blow. So it went," he wrote, "until 1872, when the patience of the workers finally ran o u t " (27). The idea of patience running out, like tensions boiling over, may provide us with a useful metaphor, but it contributes litde of explanatory 76. Raport, RD, 356-57, 362, 364.

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47

value. While the enduring presence of oppressive practices does add to our understanding of the preconditions of the conflict, it yields only circular explanations of the actual outbreak of trouble and little insight into the new meanings the conflict took on as it ran its course. Surely the outbreak of sustained unrest in 1872 cannot be anticipated merely by reading barometers (or tea leaves) of oppression; even if reliable serial data on wages, fines, and punishments were preserved, the intensity of oppression would have to be viewed as an immeasurable quantum and evaluated against the preexisting pride and self-awareness of the particular group of workers. Similarly, even if we assumed that scholars could agree on such a gauge, degrees of hostility and resentment on the part of workers are registered on no scale that would help us to plot them over time; nor would we be justified in assuming that the outbreak of unrest would necessarily occur when the gauge was at its highest. That the focal point of the Kreenholm unrest, the locus of its strength for the duration of its existence, was situated among weavers, the least downtrodden (though not the best paid) workers at the factory, belies the existence of an algorithm for computing repression's contribution to protest; so too does the existence of moments when oppression was intense and resentment great, but resistance was absent. The general setting we are now familiar with and the modus operandi of the managers as they went about the daily task of exercising their authority—these must be the essential elements of any analysis of the speed and intensity with which a weaver-led movement would find resonance and response among broader strata of workers. Likewise, the special prerogatives of weavers as Kreenholm's "labor aristocracy," and, most important, management's repeated challenge to those privileges, will help us to account for the weavers' leadership role once the struggle was in train. But it is the peculiar circumstances of the summer of 1872 to which we turn now for an understanding of why "the patience of the workers finally ran o u t " just when and where it did.

TWO

The Strike

The Outside Agitator In the summer of 1872 events beyond the control of both the workers and the managers of Kreenholm opened a path to the coming conflict. The occasion appeared in the form of an uninvited guest, an outside agitator whose name was Cholera. Cholera had been a frequent visitor to St. Petersburg and its neighboring provinces since 1830-31, the time of Russia's first great pandemic. 1 It paid some brief but memorable visits to the region at the end of the 1840s, in the mid-1860s, in 1870 and 1871, and now again in 1872, never failing to pay a special call on St. Petersburg's factory population whenever it passed through. The years 1871 and 1872 were especially devastating, with a combined total of over six thousand known cholera deaths in St. Petersburg city alone. 2 In 1872, a frightening year of epidemics (smallpox as well as cholera) for the Russian Empire, 3 the 1. On Russia's first cholera epidemic, see Roderick E. McGrew, Russia and the Cholera, 1823-32 (Madison, Wis., 1965), esp. 107-28. 2. Report of St. Petersburg municipal police for 1872, TsGLA SSSR, f. 1263 (Komitet ministrov), op. 1, d. 3677, 11. 1 2 4 - 3 6 (1871-72 mortality figures on 1. 129). See also Zelnik, Labor and Society, chap. 7, esp. 2 4 1 , 2 4 4 - 4 7 , 4 1 2 n ; Arkhiv sudebnoi meditsiny i obshchestvennoi gigieny, No. 3, 1871, sec. 3, 82-83; Sbornik sochinenii po sudebnoi meditsine 1 (1873): 90, 9 4 - 9 6 , 134-35, 213-18. 3. See the mortality figures in Nikolai Ekk, Opyt obrabotki statisticheskikh dannykh o smertnosti v Rossii (St. Petersburg, 1888), 7 6 - 7 7 . 48

T H E STRIKE

49

cholera—which in 1871 had penetrated Reval and other parts of Estland but somehow avoided Kreenholm—was especially virulent in those Estland areas, Kreenholm among them, that bordered Petersburg province. Using the cholera epidemic that afflicted the Paris area in 1832 as an example, the historian Louis Chevalier has alerted us to the ways in which the differential impact of disease has augmented feelings of injustice and resentment among the poorer strata of a population. "The epidemic," he explained, "is a first and indisputable experience of social inequality"; it increases social tensions and hastens the movement of workers into the early stages of proletarian rebellion. 4 The same might be said of the cholera's impact on Russia, where as early as the summer of 1848 the disease had shown itself capable of rending the fabric of authority at one of St. Petersburg's largest machine-building factories. 5 And it now would play a similar role at Kreenholm, where it soon began to sap the strength not only of its human victims, but also of the already fragile foundations of the factory's system of governance. The first to suffer were construction workers, a large collection of perhaps eight hundred men, mainly masons and quarry workers, who already bore the scars of a less natural disaster that befell them the previous year. 6 In 1871 a new four-story building was under construction at the factory. One day, according to Gerasimov (our only source on this incident), the flimsy scaffolding that surrounded the nearly completed structure collapsed, hurling many of the workers to their death or permanent injury. Gerasimov recalls that the accident, and especially the administration's refusal to accept responsibility for it, was a source of "popular indignation" ( n a r o d n o e negodovanie) at the factory, presumably among the victimized masons more than others (22). Now, in 1872, when the advancing cholera invasion reached the vicinity of Kreenholm in late July, masons were victimized once again. Most frequently a summer disease (and the summer of 1872 was a particularly hot and dry one in the region), cholera often took its greatest toll among 4. Louis Chevalier, Classes laborieuses et classes dangereuses a Paris pendant la premiere moitié du XIXe Steele (Paris, 1958), xvii-xxii (quote from xviii); see also 178-80, 2 4 2 - 4 3 . By the early 1870s socially aware physicians in St. Petersburg were routinely calling attention to the class differental in the cholera's morbidity and fatality rates; see, for example, Dr. Iu. Giubner's discussion of the 1870-71 epidemics in Sbornik sochinenii po sudebnoi meditsine 1 (1873): 133-35, 213-16. 5. The Baird factory; see Zelnik, Labor and Society, 62. 6. For purposes of brevity I will refer to the entire group as "masons." The figure 800, which comes from the Third Section (RD, 319), could be too large; see note 20, below.

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people who toiled outdoors, especially construction workers, who were disposed to nap and rest on the bare earth. 7 The cholera struck the masons on 21 July and soon began to decimate their ranks. In the opinion of the provincial medical inspector, Dr. Johann-Eduard von Falk, who conducted an investigation of the effect of the epidemic on Kreenholm for Prince Mikhail Shakhovskoi-GlebovStreshnev, Estland's governor, the disease came to Kreenholm via workers from the Stieglitz factory, just across the river.8 A Stieglitz worker had been infected while visiting relatives in his native village (in Petersburg province)—where, in fact, he saw his brother perish from the disease. Soon after his return to his factory two of his fellow workers were infected and shortly died. Contact with Stieglitz workers brought the infection to Kreenholm workers, and once ensconced at Kreenholm the disease spread rapidly, especially in the workers' barracks and housing settlements of Joala, where sanitary conditions were particularly poor. Within less than three weeks, by 10 August, at least 112 persons—mainly masons, but also factory workers and their families—were infected, and some 35 had died. According to Governor Shakhovskoi, before the epidemic was over (Dr. Falk gave 21 September as the last day) a minimum of 430 persons were stricken and 189 were dead, including many children; a later report by Falk revised the figures upward to 503 and 220, respectively, while in a still later, more thorough report he placed the fatalities at 334. 9 Whatever the actual statistics, the governor evidently viewed the numbers supplied by the Kreenholm administration—the initial source of his raw data—with much suspicion. At various times he expressed his 7. Their particular vulnerability to cholera had been stressed in special instructions issued a few years earlier by the Petersburg municipal police chief, Birzhevye vedomosti, 17 Feb. and 5 July 1866. See also Chevalier's 1832 data on the Paris stonemasons' susceptibility to cholera, Classes laborieuses, 4 3 4 - 3 5 . 8. Falk made four visits to Kreenholm in the three months following the outbreak of cholera. His 10 October report to Shakhovskoi, our best source on the epidemic, is in TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 561,11. 3-8. See also Shakhovskoi's reports to the MVD's Medical Department (hereafter referred to as Med. Dept.), 7 Oct., and to the MVD, 21 Oct. (KS, 100 and 117-18, respectively), based mainly on information from Falk. During the epidemic Shakhovskoi first visited Kreenholm on 7 August (Shakhovskoi to MVD, undated but 19 Sept. 1872, RDy 330 [dated from editors' note]). Also useful is the account in the newspaper Nordische Presse, reprinted in Russian in Gdovsko-iamburffikii listok, no. 37, 19 Sept. 1872. (In the notes that follow, all dates not otherwise specified refer to 1872.) 9. Third Section to Alexander II, 17 Aug., RD, 319; Shakhovskoi to Med. Dept., 7 Oct., KS, 100; Falk report of 10 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 561,1. 6; Falk report of 12 Jan. 1873, ibid., d. 562,1. 413.

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view that management was understating both the number of cholera cases and the number of deaths. 10 Other contemporary estimates suggested considerably higher figures. Baron M. E. Girard, then acting Hakenrichter of the Allentacken district, 11 reported over one hundred new cases and forty-six deaths in a single five-day period (7-12 August). 12 And " G . K.," an angry Kreenholm worker, claimed in a letter to the editor of an Estonian paper that over five hundred people had perished in less than a month. 1 3 Recalling the epidemic a decade later, Gerasimov said there were forty-five to fifty deaths a day (28), but he failed to specify the number of days. However exaggerated the last two claims may have been, they suggest the fear that gripped the Kreenholm workers, initially the masons but soon many others, as they saw more and more friends and relatives succumb to the disease. If the cholera came to Kreenholm from the outside, in the eyes of many witnesses it was the factory administration that was to blame for its devastating impact. Gerasimov recalled that management behaved "without human decency" (beschelovechno) in its handling of the sick; he cited the case of a cholera victim who was suddenly discovered to be alive while his "corpse" was being transported by the administration to a mortuary. There were "many similar examples," Gerasimov continued, of actions by management that "fueled the workers' indignation" (28). Predictable though they may be, Gerasimov's words should not be dismissed out of hand as the retrospective fantasy of a distraught political prisoner. His indictment of Kreenholm's management was shared by as eminent a pillar of imperial authority as the governor himself, who after reading the on-the-spot reports of Falk was prepared to place much of the blame for the rapid spread of the disease at management's doorstep. Shakhovskoi roundly condemned the administration for having dammed off an arm of the river for use in the construction of a new 10. Shakhovskoi to Timashev, 21 Oct., KS, 118. Desperate for what he hoped would be an accurate fatality figure and suspicious of figures supplied by the factory hospital, Shakhovskoi, acting via Falk, tried to obtain better information from burial data in the records oflocal clergy (Shakhovskoi to Dmitrii Katarskii, acting chief of Kreenholm police, 19 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 561, 1. 73; and 14 Nov., ibid., d. 562, 1. 103; Shakhovskoi to Falk, 14 Nov., ibid., 1. 104). The figure 334 was the result of these efforts (ibid., 1. 413). 11. On the office of Hakenrichter, see chapter 1, p. 36. 12. Girard to Shakhovskoi, 12 Aug., KS, 5.(1 combine Girard's figures for Kreenholm island and for the barracks on the left bank.) It should be noted, however, that according to Falk the period 1 0 - 1 7 August was the most virulent phase of the epidemic in Kreenholm, with twenty to thirty-six persons infected daily; TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 561, 1. 3. 13. Letter in Esti postimes (Dorpat), 4 Oct., KS, 101 (Russian trans.).

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building. The dried-up river bed, the construction site where the masons had been toiling, had begun to accumulate large deposits of "organic matter" (meaning human excrement and organic garbage) that decomposed in the intense summer heat, producing, he believed, the miasmas that carried the disease. Shakhovskoi also cited the overcrowded and filthy condition of barrack housing, the shortage of outhouses, and the extreme exhaustion of Kreenholm's overworked and overschooled children as factors contributing to high morbidity. Contrasting Kreenholm to the Stieglitz factory, where, thanks to superior hygienic conditions, the cholera had taken a much smaller toll, 14 he concluded that the epidemic was so lethal in Kreenholm because the administration had ignored "the most fundamental rules of hygiene." He also deplored management's failure to provide adequate medical facilities and staff when the infection began to spread, though here the governor's observations differed markedly from those of Falk, who was generally less critical of the factory administration. 15 Shakhovskoi's lack of confidence in the administration, though only still nascent in early August, was intense enough to cause him to take certain matters into his own hands. Upon receiving Falk's report on conditions in Joala, he sent an urgent request to the Hakenrichter to remove all residents from the infected barracks pending the introduction of proper ventilation and disinfection of the filthy outhouses. (Vomiting and diarrhea are major cholera symptoms.) Although the Hakenrichter took immediate steps to comply, he was delayed by the need to move 14. Although the situation was far from ideal—for example, the barracks for unmarried workers were overcrowded—there is independent evidence that sanitation, housing, and medical facilities were at a fairly high level at the Stieglitz factory, which combined an authoritarian regime (fines or dismissal for failure to report to the factory hospital when so ordered) with an apparendy genuine paternalism, including paid postnatal leaves for (married) women. See A. A. Il'in, "Beseda" (26 May 1873), in "Deistviia Kommissii po tekhnicheskomu obrazovaniiu," Zapiski Imperatorskogo Russkqgo Tekhnicheskqgo Obshchestva (hereafter cited as Zapiski IRTO) 8, no. 2 (1874): 2 1 - 2 4 (report of commission member Il'in on his 1873 visit to the Stieglitz factory and other factories in the area). 15. Shakhovskoi to Med. Dept., 7 Oct., KS, 1 0 0 - 1 0 1 ; Shakhovskoi to MVD, 21 Oct., KS, 117-18 (quote on 117). In an earlier report Falk contrasted the barracks at the factory, which he commended for their cleanliness, and the housing in Joala (Cramer's property) and on a nearby island (owned by the company), which he deplored for its overcrowding and filth. H e described a twelve-bed room at Joala where he saw a dying woman mingling freely with the healthy, and a coffin containing a corpse. H e also gave a rather favorable picture of the factory hospital, citing the frequency with which patients were visited by medical personnel (Falk to Acting Gov. V. P. Polivanov, 12 Aug., KS, 5 - 7 ; TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2., d. 561, 11. 4, 7). For confirmation by the Hakenrichter of Falk's picture of the Kreenholm barracks and infirmary, see KS, 11.

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the residents in groups rather than all at once. By the third week of August not a single Joala habitation was without its victims. 16 While the two issues cannot be fully separated, our concern here is less with weighing management's responsibility for failing to protect the workers—it could hardly be blamed for the epidemic as such, or for the weather—than with interpreting the workers' reactions. If even Falk and other medical personnel were as yet unaware of the true nature of the cholera bacillus (Robert Koch's isolation of Vibrio choleme still lay a decade in the future, and fall acceptance of the contagionist viewpoint was not yet achieved in the West, let alone Russia), poorly educated workers can hardly be expected to have grasped their situation "scientifically." Much more relevant to their perceptions than scientific understanding was a volatile combination of experience, common sense, fear, and gullibility. Viewing the arrival of the mysterious disease as something that defied their normal powers of explanation, many workers were ready to embrace the burgeoning rumor that poison had been placed in their food and drink and to seek safety in flight. 17 An administration that at best had shown indifference to health and hygiene, insisting on exhausting hours, especially for youth, and tolerating terrible housing conditions, at least in the Joala barracks, would not be likely to inspire its workers' trust at a time of medical emergency. And the paucity and low quality of medical staff 18 —even if one accepts Falk's more sanguine evaluation, a single physician and three medical assistants (fel'dshery) were hardly adequate to the task at hand—would virtually guarantee that panicky workers, especially the recently aggrieved masons whose attachments to Kreenholm were in any event shallow, would seek assistance elsewhere. Nevertheless, before looking beyond Kreenholm for relief, the masons, with a very specific request in mind, attempted to gain the ear of 16. Shakhovskoi to K. Pilar, 16 Aug., KS, 7; Pilar to Shakhovskoi, 19 Aug., KS, 11. Pilar had recently succeeded Girard in the office of Hakenrichter, but on 22 August, under pressure from the governor, who accused him of "dereliction of duty" (upushchenie po sluzbbe) in his handling of the Kreenholm situation, Pilar was removed from office. Thereafter, despite his ill health, Girard carried out the duties of Hakenrichter at Shakhovskoi's request. See Shakhovskoi to Count A. D. Adlerberg, 30 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 234. 17. Gdovsko-iamburjjskii listok, no. 37 (19 Sept.): 14; Nedelia, no. 2 7 - 2 8 (1 Nov.): 785. 18. For Shakhovskoi's retrospective condemnation of the factory doctor, Dr. Brashe, and his chief assistant, both of whom he held responsible for Kreenholm's poor hygienic conditions, see Shakhovskoi to MVD, 27 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 11. 206-7.

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the factory administration. On 9 August, emboldened perhaps by the presence o f Falk (who paid his first visit to the factory on that day), they asked for back pay and permission to leave the area and return to their villages, where they planned to wait until the cholera subsided, after which, still in good standing with management, they would return to finish the construction work for which they had contracted. As soon as they learned their request was rejected, however, the determined masons decided to go above the administration's head. Breaking with Kreenholm's normal authority structure, they now sought help from the very body that was otherwise so conspicuously absent from the factory—the Russian government. 19

The Day of the Masons—9 August Without waiting for another day to pass, some 120 angry masons departed Kreenholm for the nearby town o f Narva, where they pressed for an audience with Major Nikolai Andreianov, head of the regional office o f Imperial Gendarmes. Their purpose was simple enough: to let the major know how frightened they were of the cholera and to convey their burning desire to leave Kreenholm, but to leave with some kind of official approval. The rest of the masons remained behind in Kreenholm, yet most refused to work while awaiting the outcome of their comrades' efforts. 20 Narva, it will be recalled, though west of the river, was officially in Petersburg province, the western part of which (the districts o f Iamburg and Gdov) had until very recently constituted Major Andreianov's jurisdiction. In March 1871, however, Kreenholm, while remaining part 19. My account of the events of 9 August is based on Girard's message to Shakhovskoi, 10 Aug., KS, 3; a Third Section report to the tsar, 17 Aug., RD, 319; and Raport, RD, 358. Girard, both here and in other relevant documents (e.g., reports of 11 and 12 Aug., KS, 3, 4), does not use precise terms such as masons when referring to "the workers" (rabochie, die Arbeiter), but their identity is clear from the other sources. 20. The investigating commission's report, written three months after the fact, mentions a delegation of only 2 0 (RD, 358). The figure 120 is in Girard's memo to Shakhovskoi (KS, 3), dated a day after the event, and is repeated in Shakhovskoi's draft "Zapiska o bezporiadkakh," TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 560, 1. 2 5 , and in the official version of that memo ( 1 9 Sept.) submitted to the MVD (RD, 330). The Third Section gave 4 5 0 as the number of masons involved (RD, 3 1 9 ) ; Girard's unclear dispatch suggests 4 0 0 . This would put the number of masons who stayed in Kreenholm while refusing to work at 2 8 0 - 3 3 0 . Of course, the number would be larger if there were actually 8 0 0 masons employed at Kreenholm (see note 6, above).

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of Estland in all other respects, had been transferred without much fanfare from the jurisdiction of the Estland office of gendarmes to that of the Petersburg office, a change of which Estland's governor had been ignorant (and to which he later objected). 21 If even the governor was unaware of the change, it is likely that the masons were unaware as well, and there is no reason to interpret their approach to Andreianov as a deliberate attempt to involve St. Petersburg, let alone the Third Section. 22 With Narva on the Estland side of the river, they may even have been unaware or, if aware, not attentive to the fact that as they walked along the short stretch of road to Narva they were entering another province. To cloud matters further, whereas Kreenholm, like Narva, was now within the orbit of the Petersburg gendarmes, Narva, like Kreenholm, remained within the boundaries of the Estland judicial system. 23 What surely weighed more heavily than these jurisdictional niceties in the masons' decision to approach Andreianov was that Narva was but a short walk from Kreenholm, where they had failed to find a sympathetic ear, and the Narva gendarme office was the only state institution in the region that was physically accessible. One cannot say with confidence that there never before was an instance of Kreenholm workers appealing to gendarmes for assistance, though Gerasimov's memoir, which includes accounts of the masons' deadly accident in 1871 and of another incident involving the death of seventy-five Kreenholm women in 1869, mentions no such appeal. But even if a precedent existed among the textile workers, the masons—an itinerant work gang or artel (artel'),2* seasonal transients who came in the summer and went in the fall, working and for the most part living apart from other Kreenholm workers—were unlikely to have acted with reference to local practice. They were, in a sense, acting as construction workers, who, as Michelle Perrot observes, by virtue of their "nomadic" mobility, freedom from supervision and 21. Letter from Shakhovskoi to Deputy Chief of Gendarmes N. V. Levashev, 18 Aug., KS, 1 0 - 1 1 . 22. The chief of the Corps of Gendarmes and the head of the Third Section were always the same person. 23. This kind of administrative confusion, wherein diverse jurisdictional criteria compete with one another in the demarcation of territorial boundaries, was not unusual in the borderland areas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. See, for example, Peter Sahlins, " T h e Nation in the Village: State Building and Communal Struggles in the Catalan Borderland During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Journal of Modern History 60 (June 1988): esp. 238-39. 24. The Third Section used the term to describe them in a report to the tsar, which refers to an artel'of 450 men ( R D , 319). This suggests that the figure 800 may refer to the combined membership of two artels.

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discipline, and close on-the-job cooperation, took initiatives and acted with an abandon less frequently seen among confined and restricted factory workers. 25 However narrowly conceived their original intent, once the masons made their walk to Narva in the late afternoon of 9 August—the date I use to mark the real beginning of the Kreenholm unrest—they unwittingly began a process whereby the tensions mounting among the textile workers would be opened up to the outside world. 26 An arena was being readied in which a larger, as yet unforeseen drama could be played out. This was the first of a series of fateful days, each one signaling an important phase in a progression of events that would tear down the walls protecting a state within a state and allow the workers of Kreenholm to breathe the fresh air of open conflict. When they arrived in Narva in the early evening the masons were in a state of extreme distress. Though their artel consisted of Russians and Estonians in almost equal parts, most of the delegates were Estonians, whose rate of cholera victimization was particularly high. If masons had been "dying quickly, one after another," Estonian masons had been dying at a faster pace still (a vulnerability attributed in a Third Section report to Estonian "slovenliness"!). 27 Determined to be heard, the delegates soon gained their audience with Major Andreianov; when the exchange proved as unproductive as their meeting with the factory officials, they held their ground. Efforts by the major to use "persuasion and admonition" to dissuade them from their course were in the end futile. 28 Disappointed but not disheartened, the masons returned to Kreenholm on the same night. There on the main island, wishing to draw attention to their desperate plight, hundreds of masons, Estonians and Russians alike, took part in a powerful and stirring demonstration: a slow and solemn march around the factory, later described by the Third Section as a "religious processional" (krestnyi khod). It is unfortunate that we know so little about this march, which is mentioned in only one source, and not an eyewitness account at that. 29 We are not even able 25. Perrot, Ouvriers en grève 1:112, 377-83. Kann (Podvig mbochikh, 3 4 - 3 6 ) recounts an incident of unrest among Estland stonemasons in 1870. 26. Perrot (Ouvriers en grève 1:112, 382) stresses the " m o t o r social role" of construction workers, their function as the "detonator" of the movements of other workers, whose strikes would sometimes follow in the wake of theirs. 27. Raport, RD, 358; Third Section to Alexander II, 17 Aug., RD, 319. 28. RD, 358. 29. RD, 319.

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to say exactly which workers took part. Were there masons who held themselves aloof from the demonstration? Was there active participation by textile workers? 30 All we can do is imagine the emotional power of the scene: a grave march of hundreds of workers, frightened but exalted, holding aloft crosses and religious banners, circling the factory in silence on a white and sultry northern summer night, with only the noise of the rapids in the background as they tried in vain to exorcise the demon cholera from their midst. 31 If textile workers refrained from taking part, as both their previous inaction and subsequent arousal would tend to suggest, they were surely spellbound witnesses to this spectacle. On the following day, 10 August, Andreianov received telegraphed instructions from his superior in St. Petersburg, Chief of Gendarmes Petr Shuvalov. Once it was ascertained that proper precautions against the cholera had been taken, Andreianov was to record the names of any workers who still insisted on departing and to dismiss them summarily. 32 In practice, this meant dismissal with prejudice, without pay or the return of their passports (presumably justified because they had broken their contract), and with no assurance of a job to return to when the cholera had passed. Although this was precisely the kind of choice the masons had been trying to avoid, so great was the fear of cholera that a very large number opted to leave—in effect, to be fired. To the warning that leaving Kreenholm would not help them—wherever they went, they were cautioned, they could not evade the epidemic—they countered with the simple wisdom that it was better to die at home, amid their families, than in a strange place. 33 Some 200 (out of 250) Estonian masons, the more devastated of the two ethnic groups, quickly departed; the Russian contingent proved less stubborn, with only 60 (out of 200) taking that option. Thus a total of only 190 out o f 4 5 0 artel members—140 Russians and 50 Estonians—heeded the pleas of Andreianov (and of the local 30. The Third Section claimed the processional was held "in accordance with the desire of the entire population" (ibid.), but it is not clear that this statement was meant to include textile workers, who as of this date had not yet been stirred to action. 31. In a pithy one-sentence description of the procession, Kann (Podvig rabochikh, 64) portrays it as being led by priests "in full vestments," with the marchers carrying icons and banners (khorugvi), circling the factory twice; but he gives no source for this colorful information. His details suggest the dominance of an Orthodox rather than a Lutheran presence. 32. Girard to Shakhovskoi, 10 Aug., KS, 3. 33. Girard to Shakhovskoi, 12 Aug., KS, 4 (reporting information conveyed to Girard by factory police).

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Lutheran pastor) to stay on, and some of these may have left in the days that followed.34 The cholera reached its apogee in Kreenholm on 16 August, less than a week after the masons' mass departure.35 As it slowly subsided in the days that followed, masons began to trickle back in small parties of three to five. The factory must have needed them as much as they needed their old jobs, for they were immediately rehired, and without penalty.36 As of 10 August they had ceased to play a role in the Kreenholm story. The stage was ceded to textile workers, especially to the main players, the weavers.

The Day of the Weavers—14 August On Monday, 14 August, the cholera was just about to peak. Corpses were still being carried along the streets of Kreenholm, in full view of the factory population. Echoes of the previous week's events still resounded; memories of the masons' defiant confrontation with authority were fresh. On that day, sometime during working hours, some five hundred of the factory's nine hundred weavers left their looms, gathered in the large hall in front of Director Kolbe's office, and announced their refusal to return to work under existing conditions. 37 Although contemporary commentators (plausibly, if vaguely— mainly by means of juxtaposition) have linked the weavers' growing 34. Girard to Shakhovskoi, 11 Aug., KS, 3; Third Section to Alexander II, 17 Aug., RD, 319; Raport, RD, 358. My figures on departures combine different pieces of information from each of these documents, some of it contradictory. My calculations discount the second artel, if such there was—that is, the rest of the 800 masons noted by the Third Section ( 3 5 0 - 4 0 0 men). Even those masons who remained are unlikely to have continued to work at this high point of the epidemic. 35. Pilar to Shakhovskoi, 19 Aug., KS, 12. 36. Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 24 and 25 Aug., KS, 21-22. I cannot tell from the documents whether or not the retention of the masons' passports influenced their decision to return. Nor is it clear if they ever received back pay. 37. My account of events from 14 to 21 August is based on two kinds of sources: official documents (telegrams, memos, etc., identified in the notes as needed) generated in Kreenholm, Reval, and St. Petersburg as events unfolded; and official summaries and assessments of those events, produced at various times from late August to mid-November. The latter include Petersburg Chief of Gendarmes Birin's report to Shuvalov, 23 Aug., RD, 324-28; Shakhovskoi's "Zapiska o besporiadkakh," TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 11.25-32; his memo of 19 Sept. to the MVD, RD, 330-34 (a revised version of the previous document); the summary of events to 21 Aug. in Raport, RD, 358-60. Of course I continue to consult Gerasimov.

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militancy to the passions generated by the cholera crisis, only one source has provided us with a specific way to connect the disease to the appearance of the crowd at Kolbe's office. Here is how Gerasimov, having completed his summary account of the epidemic, makes his transition from that story to the origins of the textile workers' strike: However, the actual stimulus for a strike, as is often the case, came from a relatively minor fact. It happened that the director [Kolbe], probably for hygienic reasons, ordered that all the windows at the factory remain open and declared that anyone who closed a window would be subject to a 5 ruble fine. It became so cold in the factory that it was completely impossible to work. So we gathered in a crowd and went to see the director. (28 ) 38

If Gerasimov's statement that the windows were opened for purposes of hygiene is phrased rather tentatively, it is because he was not aware, as we are, that for the past few days the medical inspector and other alarmed officials had been pressing the administration to institute stricter measures against the cholera, including improvements in ventilation. Kolbe had taken various steps to comply, among them the opening of the windows. Taken by itself, this measure would seem insufficient grounds for the weavers' first act of defiance.39 If we are looking for an explanation of what drove five hundred weavers toward Kolbe's office on that fateful August day, the place to seek it is not in open windows as such but in Kolbe's humiliating threat of yet another fine, a threat unleashed in the midst of an enervating, life-threatening contagion that continuously revealed the director's impotence. Everything that followed suggests that the fines and other pressures that had been building up were uppermost in the weavers' minds and closest to their hearts when they confronted Kolbe. As it turned out, Kolbe was a pushover with respect to the easily resolved window problem. Putting on his best face, he greeted the weavers in a "rather friendly manner" (dovol'no laskovo), heard their initial complaint about the windows, and (in the words of Gerasimov) "responded very politely that he wished us only the best." He insisted that he had ordered the ventilation of the factory "for our own good, b u t . . . if we found it disagreeable" he would "order the windows closed" (29). 38. Emphasis added. Gerasimov's full account of 14 August is on 28-29. 39. Even Gerasimov's reference to the extreme cold seems questionable, given what we know from other sources about the hot weather that summer. Workers were certainly exercised by the opening of the windows, but this may have been not because of cold but because of the harmful effects of humidity on their yarn. Kann's very dubious assumption is that the workers were bothered by the draught (Podvig mbochikh, 68).

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It is the reaction of the crowd to this easy victory over someone who was normally so tough an opponent that is particularly telling. As if more disappointed than pleased, and unprepared, having gone so far, to let such a fruitful moment of defiance slip through their fingers, the assembled weavers, much in the spirit of the masons (whose example, in a sense, they were following), held their ground. 4 0 They soon began to raise a series of new demands, among which the issue of fines figured prominently. In so doing they were practically admitting that the opening of the windows had been mainly a symbolic affront, evoking a broader spectrum of grievances. The summary accounts of this initial confrontation that traveled through the offices of the imperial bureaucracy in the ensuing weeks and months begin their narratives at this point, as if the weavers were equipped from the outset with a full range of demands. 41 In a narrow sense these accounts were wrong. Neither Gerasimov nor others provide us with any evidence that the presentation of a list of demands going beyond the issue of the windows had been planned in advance. In a deeper sense, though, these accounts do get to the truth, for, as Gerasimov would have been the first to admit, the protesting weavers had more on their minds than the temperature or humidity of their shops. The windows had provided them with a convenient pretext that, coupled with Kolbe's humiliating threat, served as a perfect link between the "emotional miasma" engendered by the cholera and their resentment of the fines and other pressures piled upon them in the recent past. As Gendarme Colonel Birin concluded a few days later, after an extensive interview with "one of the more influential weavers," a nine-year veteran of the factory: "displeasure with the factory authorities had already been building up . . . for a long time, and [only] a push was needed for the workers to express all their demands and complaints"; the masons' panicky reaction to the cholera had simply provided the "occasion" [povod] for the weavers' unrest. 42 Given the fear of Kolbe in which most of the workers lived, for the crowd of weavers to approach him so directly was an extraordinary act 40. The account in Nordische Presse stated directly that they were "following the example of the masons"; cited in Gdavsko-iamburgskii listok, no. 37 (19 Sept.): 14. 41. See, for example, the account of the investigating commission, RD, 358-59. In his introduction to KS (ix), G. M. Borisov says that the list of demands had been "drawn up in advance," referring his readers to document No. 8, Birin's report of 16 August (7-8). But that document is not at all clear on when the demands were drafted. 42. RD, 325 (Birin summarizing his 19 August interview with Zakhar Sokolov). The term "emotional miasma" is borrowed from McGrew, Russia and the Cholera, 107, who uses it in reference to popular behavior in Moscow during the 1831 epidemic.

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of boldness, something new in the factory's history—certainly unthinkable before the cholera, the specter of pervasive death, and above all before the masons' example had changed the contours of ordinary behavior at Kreenholm. Death alone would not have sufficed to drive them to action. Even rage over the drowning of Kreenholm women who, in 1869, fell into the rapids from the factory's old wooden bridge while waiting to be searched by guards—an event that bespoke management's culpable negligence—had failed to provoke a comparable reaction. 43 What was new at Kreenholm since the masons took their first defiant steps was the growing evidence of management's fragility, or at least its fading potency, an impression intensified by the recent entry of governor, gendarmes, and other state officials onto the factory grounds. Kreenholm workers in awe of Kolbe's power had now been exposed to alternative sources of authority, and the forbidding image of the factory's autarky had been marred. That Kolbe, exhausted and weakened by the events of recent weeks, was ready to comply so meekly with the weavers' initial demand could only magnify the impression that the company's freedom from external constraints was not immutable, that the Herr irn Herns could be challenged by appealing to the outside world. At the onset of their confrontation, however, it was not the weavers who looked to the outside for assistance, but Kolbe. Once it was clear that in spite (or perhaps because) of his initial concession the emboldened crowd would not disperse, Kolbe, as if in ironic imitation of the masons, betook himself to the gendarme office in Narva to ask for aid. Major Andreianov, who quickly grasped that the factory police would be no match for such a crowd, agreed to rush to the factory with the tiny contingent, only three men, at his disposal. 44 From this time forward, with Kolbe having implicidy conceded that he could no longer govern without assistance from the state, the triangular shape of the conflict first designed by the masons—workers-management-government—would be irreversible. In the presence of Andreianov there now began what amounted to an embryonic negotiation between Kolbe and the weavers. Kolbe's first move was to ask the large crowd outside his office to choose ten of their 43. The incident, in which some seventy-five women died, is recounted in Gerasimov, Zhizn' (1923), 21-22. 44. Birin to Third Section, 16 Aug., RD, 317-18 (Birin's summary of Andreianov's 14 August report). Although Birin claims there were no police at Kreenholm at the time, it is more likely that factory and local police were present but afraid to act. Gerasimov fails to mention Kolbe's turning to the gendarmes at this point, but does allude to their presence at the next major confrontation on 21 August. He blurs the two situations in other ways as well.

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number to carry on the discussions. On the one hand, acting on the advice of an experienced gendarme officer, he obviously made this request in order to disperse the crowd and create a less menacing atmosphere around his office. On the other hand, in asking for worker representatives he was to some degree implicitly recognizing the legitimacy of the weavers' right to engage in negotiations with management, if not as equal partners, then at least as coparticipants, with bona fide interest in some kind of equitable exchange, one that bypassed their previously "elected" spokesmen, the "worker police." Kolbe's maneuver was not unprecedented in the history of Russian labor unrest. During the 1870 strike at the Nevskii cotton mill, for example, the factory administration, rather than face an angry crowd of eight hundred spinners, had asked them to choose five delegates, a procedure subsequently repeated by the Petersburg police.45 But under the rigid conditions in which authority was exercised in Kreenholm, Kolbe's stratagem became one more obvious chink in management's weakening armor. Further, his call for representatives was a tacit, if temporary, admission that the worker police, which he had previously viewed as providing all the representation the workers needed or deserved, would no longer be an effective term in the equation of labormanagement relations. We know neither the names of the delegates chosen by the weavers nor, other than the fact that it was mixed, their ethnic composition. Were Russian and Estonian weavers acting as one at this early stage of the conflict? Our only evidence comes from Birin's summary of his conversation with the weaver Zakhar Sokolov ("a peasant from Moscow province," the "influential" worker mentioned above), who indicated that Estonians took the initiative. According to Sokolov, Russians had "joined up with" ( p r i s t a v a l i k ) the Estonians by declaring their readiness to unite with them in a work stoppage. They did so, he explained, because they "believed in the justice" of the Estonians' cause, "but also because they were frightened by the Estonians' threats." 46 It is conceivable that Sokolov—who, though he remained a leader of the weavers and was often at odds with the authorities, would later play a somewhat ambiguous role in the conflict—was simply shifting the blame to the Estonians to make things easier for himself and his fellow Russians. But 45. Zelnik, Labor and Society, 350-51. 46. RD, 325-26. In introducing KS (xiv), G. M. Borisov, wishing to stress the "fraternal class solidarity" of Russian and Estonian workers, cites these words without including the clause that begins "but also because they were frightened."

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seen in the light o f subsequent developments, a more likely hypothesis is that Estonian weavers, possibly influenced by bitter Estonian masons, were, as Sokolov claimed, the first to challenge the administration. Whatever the precise mixture of fear and solidarity, Russian weavers were now fully implicated in the Estonian weavers' action. Once the weavers had chosen their delegates (regrettably, we do not know the procedures they followed) and the latter had submitted their demands, the démystification o f the administration's power, and of Kolbe's in particular, proceeded apace. Hoping to turn what was still a delicate situation to his advantage, Kolbe, in the presence of the tiny contingent of gendarmes, now did what so many beleaguered administrators are tempted to do in extremis. He appealed to the protesters on the basis not of his strength but of his weakness: though some o f their demands were just, there were several that he was powerless to meet. He was not the owner (a half-truth, for he was a major stockholder), "only a subordinate like us," as Gerasimov put it (29). I f the weavers would just return to work, the owners, the only ones with the power to agree to their demands—the young goat was pleading with the old troll— would come from Moscow to hear their grievances. Taking him at his word, the weavers agreed to this proposal and "peacefully dispersed to their quarters, having promised to continue working under the old conditions until the arrival of the Moscow partners [kompan'ony]." 4 7

The Weavers' Wishes

The time has come to look more closely at the weavers' wishes—those that went beyond the initial flap over windows. However hastily concocted, the weavers' demands, nine in all, are the most revealing expression we have of their strongly felt grievances. Almost all 4 7 . Birin, in RD, 318. Although Gerasimov is our only source for Kolbe's self-effacing language, Birin and others confirm that his promise to summon the absentee owners was used to calm and disperse the crowd. In the early stages of European labor unrest it was not uncommon during a crisis for a manager, even a tough one, to insist on the limits of his authority and offer to refer workers' demands to his superiors. This gesture found its reflection in literature, as in this passage from part 4, chap. 2, of Emile Zola's Germinal ( 1 8 8 5 , action set in the late 1860s), which could easily have been about Kolbe: "—Moi, mon brave, s'écria le directeur, mais je ne repousse rien! . . . Je suis un salarié comme vous, je n'ai plus de volonté ici que le dernier de vos galibots. On me donne des ordres, et mon seul rôle est de veillir à leur bonne exécution. . . . Vous m'apporterez vos exigences, je les ferai connaître à la Régie, puis je vous transmettrai la réponse."

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these demands, moreover, would remain unaltered in their essentials throughout the coming weeks of conflict. 48 Both their content and their persistence speak unmistakably to their deep roots in the weavers' experience of the previous several years. As summarized in compressed form by Colonel Birin, they read as follows: (1) l j hours for lunch instead of 1 hour. (2) Begin work at 5:30 A.M., not 5:00. (3) Pay 4 0 kopecks per 50-arshin piece. 49 (4) Deduct [only] the [actual] cost of broken machine parts. (5) D o not fine [weavers] for [too] little output, but dismiss [them instead] from the factory. (6) Remove medical assistant [ fel'dsher] Palkin from [factory] hospital. (7) Remove Peeter Sekka from among the elders [starosty], (8) Make n o deductions from the books without [the weavers'] agreement. (9) Give the Kreenholm children more time to attend school. 5 0

For purposes of analysis, we may reduce the nine demands to four basic categories, all of them directly related to past developments at the factory (chapter 1): fines and deductions, pay rates, hours, and personnel. Fines and deductions (items 4, 5, 8). Within this category, the most crucial demand was for an end to the practice of fining weavers for failure to produce a sufficient quantity of woven cloth. Indeed, so repugnant was this practice to the weavers that they expressed their preference for outright dismissal to the imposidon of fines. Further, without objecting to deductions for machinery damaged owing to their own negligence, they insisted that such deductions be limited to the exact replacement costs of damaged parts. In other words, the assessment must not be punitive, and must not be used by the company to reduce its expenses in the repair and maintenance of machinery. In addition, in a provocative and portentous demand that cut across the entire issue of fines and deductions, the weavers asked that no deductions be made without their prior approval. The issue of fines was also linked with that of hours, since workers were being fined for even a few minutes' lateness if they came to work past 5:00 A.M. 48. Although the weavers' initial demands are presented in whole or in part in several documents, they are never given verbatim. They are most accessible in Birin's summary, RD, 318. Another key document, in which, although much had happened in the interim, seven of the original demands appear essentially unchanged (though new ones are added), is the 21 August agreement between the administration and the weavers' delegates (RD, 323-24), discussed below. 49. One arshin = 28 inches. 50. Birin to Third Section, 16 Aug., RD, 317-18 (the list of demands is on p. 318).

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Pay rates (item 3). The weavers called for the restoration of a piece rate of 40 kopecks per 50-arshin piece of cloth. If Gerasimov was accurate in recalling that the former piece rate (dating back to the early 1860s) was 50 kopecks for a 45-arshin piece (28), then we may calculate that as part of its effort to cut costs in the 1860s the administration had reduced the piece rate by nearly 28 percent (from 1.11 to .8 kopecks per arshin). The weavers' memory of the previous rate seems to have been long, though we cannot completely rule out a more recent reduction, part of the renewed pressures placed on the weavers between 1868 and 1872. Whether done openly or surreptitiously, changing the unit of measurement when reassigning piece rates was a common tactic of textile factory managers who wished to obscure the degree to which unit earnings were being reduced. 51 But as later developments would show, Kreenholm weavers were not so easily fooled. Hours (items 1 , 2 ) . The weavers demanded that the workday begin at 5:30 A.M., a half hour later than the current starting time, and that the lunch break be extended from sixty-five to ninety minutes, for a net reduction in the workday of nearly an hour. 5 2 Though these demands amounted to a restoration of earlier routines, we are again confronted with an absence of sources telling us when the company had introduced the disputed changes. By the same reasoning used in our treatment of pay rates, we may assign the changes to either the early 1860s or the more recent past. Somewhat vaguely, the weaver Sokolov told Birin that the change from 5:00 to 5:30 was introduced "a few years ago" (neskol'ko let tomu nazad) and that the longer lunch break was meant to compensate for the loss of an earlier twenty-minute breakfast break. He also linked the demand to restore a 5:30 starting time to the cholera crisis, pointing out that since it took many workers an hour to get to work, the need to rise at 4:00 A.M. was sapping their badly needed strength. 53 Personnel (items 6, 7). The weavers called for the dismissal of factory elder Peeter Sekka and fel'dsher Palkin, a medical aide at the factory hospital. 54 They also complained about several other "bosses" (nachal'niki), though they did not expressly include these men's dismissal among their demands. Since the complaints against Palkin centered on 51. For France, see Perrot, Ouvriers engreve 1:354. 52. Birin's summary assumes that the current lunch break was exactly an hour, but other documents, discussed below, give the weavers' lunch hour as sixty-five minutes, the spinners' as fifty-five (another minor indication of the weavers' higher status). 53. RD, 325. 54. Sekka's name appears in the documents in various other forms: Siakka, Seka, Sekki, Siak. His first name also appears in Russian—Petr.

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his abusive treatment of patients during the epidemic, the demand for his removal may be seen as another specific link between the strike and the experience of the cholera. 55 The case of Sekka was the more serious of the two, for it cut to the very core of the distribution of authority at the factory. Though once a weaver, Sekka had spent nine years as an elder, a position that put him in charge of the worker police. Though this was supposed to be an elected office, it will be recalled that the incumbent always acted under close supervision of Kolbe's factory police, deriving his authority from Kolbe rather than his own constituents. Sekka was despised by the weavers for acting as Kolbe's agent and for his ties to the factory police. As the investigating commission later learned, the weavers accused him and his men of "serving the interests of the administration more than those of the workers who had chosen them as their representatives." 56 Both Sekka's personal fate and the method of choosing elders would soon become major bones of contention. Strictly speaking, not all these demands should be seen as attempts to restore an earlier, happier status quo. Some items were thrown in, as Sokolov put it, because the weavers felt that once they were listing demands, it was best to include everything that was on their minds. The demand for participation in decisions about pay deductions, never practiced in the past, was certainly an attempt to conquer new ground. Nevertheless, if Sokolov is at all representative in this respect, the weavers clearly began with the notion that a return to better times was what they sought. After closely questioning Sokolov, Birin concluded that their demands "in no way required giving them any new privileges [/¿foiy]; they were asking only for that which, as they remembered it, existed at the factory earlier." 57

Waiting for the Owners—14-20 August Notwithstanding the weavers' resumption of work, the general mood at Kreenholm remained exceedingly tense throughout the 55. Palkin was the medical assistant who, together with Dr. Brashe, was later condemned by the governor (see note 18, above). 56. Zapiska N o . 2, RD, 388. 57. RD, 325.

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seven-day waiting period. Although the investigating commission would later conclude that the "week went by peacefully" (vsia nedelia proshla spokoino),58 this was true only in the limited sense that large crowds of agitated workers were no longer to be seen in the hall near Kolbe's office or in Kreenholm's open areas. The presence of the cholera, which peaked in the course of that week, continued to charge the atmosphere, and clergymen added to the excitement by conducting public prayer meetings on Kreenholm property and, in a futile gesture of exorcism, making the rounds of the Joala housing area carrying icons. Meanwhile, local police and medical personnel busily cleared residents from their rooms, emptied outhouses, and applied disinfectants.59 The temporary clearing of unsanitary living quarters meant that all the locally housed workers, weavers and spinners alike, saw their normal lives disrupted, while unusual opportunities were created for social interaction among workers whose work patterns and living arrangements were normally segregated by trade and ethnicity. Within this highly volatile context there were also some moments of high drama, initiated by impatient weavers, that could only have excited workers of all types and added to the overall tension. Some weavers had been distrustful of Kolbe's promises even at the time of the original agreement, which, much to their disappointment, he refused to reduce to writing. They grew even more skeptical and restless when, with every passing day, the owners failed to appear, and they were particularly impatient on Friday, 18 August, the day after the clergymen's tour of the housing area. By then Kolbe had left the factory to confer with officials in Reval, thereby making the power vacuum at the factory all the more palpable. In his absence, shortly after lunch hour—during which time they probably planned their action—twelve of the more impatient weavers took it upon themselves to announce their refusal to return to work if the owners failed to arrive by Saturday, two days before the original deadline. This proved to be an idle threat. Although there was still no sign of the owners on Saturday, work at Kreenholm seemed to resume its normal course. As it turned out, however, this lack of action was an indication not of the weavers' weakness but of their self-discipline; by containing their "hotheads" and delaying a showdown until the expiration of the one-week term, they in fact improved their strategic po58. RD, 359. 59. Ibid.; Pilar to Shakhovskoi, 19 Aug., KS, 11-12.

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sition. Despite the continuation of work on Saturday, Kolbe—now in St. Petersburg, but well aware of the danger of an impending confrontation—sent a wire to Reval requesting an audience with Governor Shakhovskoi in order to ask for "defense and aid." On the same day, Deputy Chief of Gendarmes N. V. Levashev wired Shakhovskoi from St. Petersburg that the "disorders" (besporiadki) at Kreenholm had not ended and that he was sending Colonel Birin to Estland to assist him. 60 That evening both Birin and Kolbe were back at the factory. Birin began a personal, informal investigation, including his questioning of the weaver Sokolov, who refused to give him the broad assurances he demanded. It was quickly made clear to Birin and Kolbe that the weavers, still purposeful and calm, were planning not to work on Monday if the owners had not materialized.

The Confrontation of 21 August

By Monday morning, though owners still were nowhere to be seen and all parties were tensely preparing for some kind of clash, Birin, Shakhovskoi, and Kolbe were aware that owners at last were on their way. Shakhovskoi arrived at Kreenholm at daybreak, accompanied by Birin, with the intention of assessing the workers' demands in the owners' presence. He was greeted by a large crowd of workers, in a state of "great ferment," who, having "burst into" the rooms next to Kolbe's office, roundly declared their refusal to work until their demands were met. 61 This time, however, an important change had taken place. In contrast to the crowd scene of 14 August, now many spinners were among the agitated workers. When five hundred weavers had gathered outside Kolbe's office a week earlier, not only had Kreenholm's four hundred remaining weavers been absent from the hall, but there was not a spinner to be seen. Even if we assume that the missing weavers were supportive of their comrades, nine hundred weavers represented only a minority, 60. Both telegrams are in ICS, 12. A slightly different version of Kolbe's wire is in TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 54. 61. RD, 331. Uncorrected versions of Shakhovskoi's memo have him coming to Kreenholm on 20 August (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 25), but one copy has a correction of the date (KS, 5 In). He arrived at Kreenholm on the 21st at daybreak, having left Reval on the 20th.

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albeit an important one, of the total work force. Without the support of the spinning division, or at least of its dominant minority of two hundred adult male mule spinners, the weavers' power to disrupt production by refusing to work was limited. Unlike spinners, weavers were incapable of creating a bottleneck in the production process: whereas weavers depended on the spinners for yarn, the spinning division could continue to produce yarn that was highly marketable on the outside even if the weaving section was closed down. It was therefore of immense tactical and psychological importance to the weavers, the "labor aristocrats," that their less privileged, less self-confident co-workers be drawn into the struggle. And to some extent they were. If weavers stood alone on the 14th, by the 21st they had new, if hesitant, allies. Although the spinners' participation was still of a lesser magnitude than the weavers', and was carried out in a much more cautious and deferential spirit, their adherence could only add to the mood of defiance that was beginning to pervade the factory. Looking back at the situation just before the 21st, Gerasimov, by then a weaver and a staunch supporter of the weavers' action, recaptured the mood of the moment when spinners first rallied to the weavers' cause: "Meanwhile our movement was growing larger and larger. Up until then only weavers had participated in the strike [stachka]. On this day, however, the spinners, when they heard of our demands, stopped their machines and joined with us" (29). Beyond his careless use of the word strike (in keeping with the 14 August agreement, no work stoppage occurred during the following week), 62 Gerasimov's highly condensed statement contains a number of questionable assertions: that spinners were for several days unaware of the existence of the weavers' demands; that simply hearing about those demands (days after they were made) launched the spinners into action; that spinners actually abandoned their machines at this time, a claim that is belied by all contemporary doc62. Gerasimov clearly intended to say there was a work stoppage during this period, and used the word stachka with that in mind. However, it should be noted that although stachka was becoming one of the two common Russian words for strike (the other was zabastovska), in the early 1870s its use was still unusual and its meaning imprecise. Because of its etymology stachka still suggested a preexisting compact or planned conspiracy more than an actual stoppage (see Zelnik, Labor and Society, 356). Thus Birin used it to refer to the weavers' prior agreement to stop work rather than to the stoppage as such: "tkachi, sostavivshie stachku ne rabotat' na fabrike" (RD, 324). At one point Shakhovskoi called the weavers' action a "compact together with a work stoppage" (stachka s pristanovkoi rabot, TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 26), but for reasons that should become clearer in chapter 4, when he revised this document for submission to the MVD he left out the word stachka and simply referred to a pristanovka rabot (RD, 331).

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umentation. Nevertheless, he is correct in recalling that sometime in the week of the 14th many spinners gathered up their courage and began to identify openly with the weavers' cause. Although we cannot re-create the process by which this coalescence came about or assess the possible extent of coercion, the seven days of tension and excitement just described surely provided an emotionally charged field of interaction between spinners and weavers, allowing the spirited mood of the latter to begin to infect the former, just as the mood of the masons had earlier infected the weavers. Ironically, it was the governor who inadvertently created the conditions that led to the institutionalization of the spinners' role. Like Kolbe before him, Shakhovskoi was wary of dealing with large and menacing crowds, preferring to negotiate with smaller, more manageable delegations. This time, seeing that spinners were now involved, it was he who called for elections, inviting them to choose their own representatives. Indeed, because the spinners, in contrast to the weavers, had not acted as an unruly mob or openly threatened to stop work, he actually decided to favor them (priadiPshchikam dan preferans), to reward them, in some manner, for their lesser militancy.63 According to Shakhovskoi's formula, the spinners were to elect twenty delegates. He also invited the weavers to elect an expanded delegation of forty instead of the previous ten, perhaps to show his respect for their growing numbers and militance, perhaps to keep the numbers in rough proportion to the respective sizes of the weavers' and spinners' divisions. In each case the delegation was supposed to be half Estonian, half Russian, a tacit recognition of the importance of ethnicity in the life of the factory (but possibly just a reflection of the governor's ignorance of the actual proportions). 64 Once elections had taken place, everyone was to return to work except the delegates. At once emboldened and confused, noisy and excited, workers had some difficulty deciding how to react to Shakhovskoi's proposal. Weavers, now assembled in large numbers in the hall, began by rejecting it. A week earlier, after all, they had elected delegates and returned to work as promised, but Kolbe had yet to produce the owners, his principal 63. RD, 326. Birin does not explain in what way Shakhovskoi gave the spinners "preference." It may simply be that he allowed them to present their grievances first. 64. It is noteworthy, given the initiating role of Estonian weavers and Kreenholm's 2-to-l ratio of Estonian to Russian adult workers (1.7 to 1 if we exclude females, as did the voters), that the assigning of equal numbers gave Russians a disproportionately high representation.

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promise. If the governor wished to negotiate with delegates, so be it, the weavers would elect them, but they stubbornly insisted that negotiations be conducted openly, under the eyes of the entire crowd. As Birin reported, "The words and exhortations of the governor had no effect on them; they loudly proclaimed that they would not go to work." 65 The spinners, characteristically, proved more docile. They held their elections and left behind their twenty delegates (for some unexplained reason, twelve Russians and eight Estonians). Work at the spinning division resumed; the weaving section remained idle. In effect, contrary to the words of Gerasimov, the weavers were now on strike while the spinners, though inching toward participation, were not. After an hour or so of enduring the "obstinacy and disobedience" of the weavers (according to Birin, many had been drinking heavily),66 Shakhovskoi adopted a tougher tone. Choosing words that came close to accusing the assembled crowd of insurrection, he declared his refusal to negotiate with "rioters" or "rebels" (buntovsbcbiki),67 implying that only by returning to work and leaving behind their elected delegates could the crowd transform an unacceptable mutiny into an orderly and hence legitimate negotiation. This language threatened to change the crisis from a private quarrel between workers and management to a public confrontation between rebels and the state. For a moment, government authority hung uneasily suspended between the role of impartial arbiter and absolute ruler. But Shakhovskoi's risky demarche proved successful. Faced with strong language on the one hand and the promise of further negotiation on the other—news of the imminent arrival of owners Knoop and Soldatenkov may also have contributed to their flexibility—the weavers began to back down. There was but one remaining obstacle: a rumor that their elected delegates, who by now had left the area of the hall, had been arrested and taken off to Narva. It turned out that the story was false, and when Shakhovskoi heard about it he promptly summoned back the delegates, who reassured the wary crowd that all was well. The weavers then dispersed to their work stations, leaving their delegates behind to deal with the authorities. It was still morning. 68 65. RD, 327. 66. Ibid. No other source mentions any drunkenness at this juncture. 67. RD, 359. 68. Curiously, except for Birin's 23 August report to Shuvalov (RD, 327), written two days after the event, the rumor is absent from contemporary accounts (including that of the investigating commission).

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At 2:00 P.M., when negotiations were already in train, the longawaited owners, Knoop and Soldatenkov, finally arrived from Moscow via St. Petersburg, where they had evidently consulted with government officials. Having just succeeded in bending the workers to their will only with the greatest effort, through a combination of threats of reprisal with hints of reward, both state and company officials now took the workers seriously indeed, grasping well enough that only palpable concessions could preserve the superficial calm that Shakhovskoi had managed to restore.

Demands and Requests Two major documents, lists of demands put together, respectively, by the weavers' and the spinners' delegations during the negotiations of 21 August, will help us access the state of mind of the protesting workers. The weavers made some additions and modifications to their original list of 14 August in the light of subsequent developments, but with one important exception these were not of a substantive nature. The spinners formulated their list of "requests" (spinners continued to be more polite and deferential) for the first time. Since each set of delegates spent the lunch hour that day with its constituents, and negotiations began in earnest shortly after lunch, it is safe to assume that the contents of each list were broadly representative. 69 T o begin with the weavers, seven of their eleven demands of 21 August were virtually identical to those of the 14th: a lunch break expanded to one and a half hours; a thirty-minute delay in the start of the workday; a higher piece rate (40 kopecks per 50-arshin piece); an end to deductions beyond replacement costs for damaged machinery; dismissal (or denial of use of the loom—a new, less extreme option) rather than fines as the penalty for low output; dismissal of fel'dsher Palkin and elder Sekka. An eighth demand, more free time for children to attend school, was now changed to a demand that tuition fees not be deducted from the wages of workers whose children did not attend school, sug69. The weavers' list is in "Akt No. 2," 21 Aug., the agreement negotiated by the delegates and the owners (RD, 323-24; KS, 15-17). The spinners' list is in "Akt No. 1," also 21 Aug. (RD, 321-22; KS, 13-15). Each "act" gives the owners' response to each demand and the names of all parties to the agreement, including the delegates. In what follows, all my citations of demands and responses refer to the above pages.

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gesting that some parents felt financially pressed to keep their children at work. Three demands were entirely new. The first, directly related to the cholera, echoed the experience of the masons: workers who were ill or were faced with other "compelling circumstances" (neobkhodimye obstoiatel'stva,) should be issued permits to return to their home villages temporarily, the point being that they not forfeit their jobs. Second was a request to end all deductions from wages for the purpose of supporting the factory hospital or church, especially in view of the fact that the church had not been functioning properly for years. Third was a call for the dismissal of three unpopular workers—Kaarel Sek (then serving as church elder) and spinners Gustav Bruns (an assistant foreman) and Kaarel Pikkamiagi (then employed as a clerk) 70 —whom the weavers distrusted and accused of "various illegal acts" (mznye protivozakonnye deistviia). These men were probably the unnamed "bosses" criticized by the weavers on 14 August. (We will be hearing a good deal more about Bruns and Pikkamiagi.) The most important change in the weavers' demands, the only one of real substance, concerned the thorny issue of their participation in decision making, which they now handled in a new and more radical way. The far-reaching but still narrowly formulated demand that no deductions be made without the workers' prior agreement was eliminated, and, instead of a separate item, a daring new clause was added to the paragraph on Peeter Sekka, one that amounted to a sweeping request for permanent, institutionalized representation. In the future, the factory administration was to permit the election of the factory elder by the workers, or, as the weavers put it in their more traditional peasant fashion, by their own "society" or "community" (mzreshit'na budushcbee vremia vybor starosty obshchestvom fabriki). Since, as we learned earlier, the office of elder had long been formally elective, the new clause amounted to an accusation that the administration had been controlling and manipulaung electoral proceedings (hence the unpopular choice of a man like Sekka) and a demand for the introduction of what today we would call genuine free elections. The spinners' list was shorter, with only six items, and, since it contained no demand for dismissals or for institutionalized representation, less ambitious. The first three items were almost identical with 70. Spelling of these names varies in the documents. Somewhat arbitrarily, I use the versions that appeared in later reports, after officials had enough time to try to determine the appropriate forms.

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demands of the weavers and must have reflected collaboration, or at least a friendly exchange of views, between the two groups: a 5:30 start of the work day, a ninety-minute lunch break, an end to deductions beyond replacement costs for damaged parts. Items 4 and 5 dealt with conditions specific to spinners: a 3-kopeck increase in the piece rate per unit of cotton yarn (a functional equivalent of the weavers' plea for higher rates per unit of cloth); and an end to certain deductions from the pay of the stackers of bobbins. The sixth and final item was more complex, and did not direcdy correspond to anything on the weavers' list: "When workers are dismissed, payment should first be calculated on the basis of time worked, and workers should not be dismissed without this [method of computation] if they are dissatisfied with any fine that has been imposed." What this somewhat opaque language boiled down to was a protest against the paymaster's practice, when settling the accounts of a fired worker, of deducting accumulated fines without full disclosure of his calculations. In short, the spinners claimed they were being cheated. In more general terms, what did the two sets of demands have in common, and in what ways did they differ? Let us return to the four basic categories used when we summarized the weavers' original demands. Fines and deductions. Both groups were very sensitive about this issue. They were particularly distressed by the company's practice of charging workers for damaged machine parts at rates, assigned after the fact, that gready exceeded their replacement costs, effectively passing the cost of maintaining and repairing machinery down to the workers themselves. Both groups were disturbed, though in somewhat different ways, by the arbitrary use of fines and deductions to reduce their earnings. The weavers, as befits a group with higher status and prestige, inserted a fundamental and dramatic change into what we will call the factory "constitution" as part of their solution to these (and other) problems, while the more diffident spinners confined themselves to calling for more accurate and open accounting. Pay rates and hours. In both these categories each group specifically called for a return to prior practices, just as the weavers had done on the 14th. This time, however, spinners made a special point of grounding their wishes in past practices, asserting that the "privileges" {I'goty) they requested had "existed at the factory earlier, and they were demanding nothing that was new." This was not, it should be noted, an accurate statement about all their demands, but only about those that related to pay rates and hours.

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Personnel. Only the weavers were daring enough to call for the dismissal of company personnel. In so doing, however, they implicitly spoke for the entire work force, including the spinners. In this respect two points are significant: the men whose dismissal they demanded—two of whom were spinners, not weavers—held positions of authority over the entire work force; and the voters in the new elections they called for were to include the spinners. Hence, for all practical purposes the weavers were asserting their leadership when it came to any matter of more than sectional importance. Beyond the specific content of the two sets of demands, it is possible to discern a difference in tone. Not only did the spinners place great emphasis on the "restorational" character of their aspirations, but they also couched their pleas in a more respectful, less demanding idiom. They had no wish to "lodge a claim" (zaiavit' pretenziiu) against the factory, they explained, only to "request" that these privileges be granted them "if possible" (esli vozmozhno). To be sure, though I have spoken of "demands" in both cases, no verb stronger than "request" appears in the weavers' language either, and the distinction between "request" (prosit') and "demand" (trebovat}) had also been cautiously advanced by the weaver Sokolov at the time of his interview with Birin.71 Indeed, for all we know the precise choice of words in both documents originated not with the workers but with Birin or Shakhovskoi, the officials who oversaw the negotiating process and the actual transcription of the delegates' words. Be that as it may, the salient contrast lay in the absence of any prudential denial in the weavers' document that they wished to press a claim, and in their eschewal of cautious formulations like "if possible."

Negotiation and Compromise

Under the governor's careful guidance the 21 August negotiations were brought to an apparently successful conclusion by the end of the day. Although Shakhovskoi asked the delegates to keep their demands as modest as possible (kak mozbno skromnee),72 the weavers, as we have seen, had proven hard to tame and were demanding an important innovation (a point that Shakhovskoi, wishing to protect them, 71. RDy 325. 72. TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 26.

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would later downplay) 73 as well as a return to some earlier norms. He did, however, convince their delegates to apologize "in behalf of their comrades" for their "insubordination" (nepovinovenie i oslushanie) earlier in the day, 74 a gesture that may have been a precondition for his cooperation. After studying the demands, Shakhovskoi presented them to Kolbe, Knoop, and Soldatenkov (apparently owners and workers did not engage face-to-face), 75 who agreed to make concessions, though just which ones remains unclear. Wishing to present the workers in a positive light, Shakhovskoi later told the MVD that the owners recognized that most of the "requests" (pros'by, a comforting term that was not in the governor's original draft) were "worthy of respect," especially insofar as they entailed no innovations (novovvedeniia), just the restoration of conditions that the workers "enjoyed in the past" (pol'zovalis' prezhde) but that were "gradually taken from them by the factory administration." 76 But this rosy picture, as Shakhovskoi had to know (as witness the less auspicious language of his earlier draft), 77 was skewed, revealing his belief in the special legitimacy of restorative demands. Using this reassuring argument, and of course the authority of his office, Shakhovskoi had little trouble convincing the owners to accede, at least formally, to certain of the "requests," either in whole or in part. But precisely to which requests did they agree? To what extent did they actually favor the ones that had a strong restorative slant? And how did they handle the few that did not? Let us once again examine the four basic categories of demands. Hours. We begin with issues common to both groups of workers, those related to time. Management agreed to move the start of the workday to 5:30. In Act No. 2, the accord with weavers, this concession was unqualified, but in Act No. 1, the accord with spinners—always the junior partners in the weaver-spinner alliance—the language was somewhat ambiguous. Spinners were alerted to the fact that the water wheels would be set in motion at 5:15 but were promised there would be no 73. RD, 331. The strong emphasis on the absence of new demands in the final version of Shakhovskoi's report to the MVD is not to be found in the corresponding section of the original draft (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 11. 2 6 - 2 7 ) . 74. RD, 327. 75. There were unfounded newpaper reports of negotiations between workers' deputies (deputaty) and a meeting of stockolders (sobranie aktsionerov). See GAovsko-iamburgskii listok, no. 37 (19 Sept.): 14. 76. RD, 331. 77. See note 73, above.

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fines for lateness up to 5:30. In other words, they were notified that the new starting time was 5:15, but they would also have a fifteen-minute grace period, a more grudging formula than the straightforward statement of agreement in the document drafted for weavers. Management also agreed to a lunch break of l j hours—an increase of twenty minutes for the spinners and ten for the weavers, though fifteen minutes short of the ninety minutes requested by both. Taken together, then, these concessions added up to a net reduction of the workday by some fortyfive minutes, amounting to a shift from a 14-hour day to the 135-hour day of earlier times. (Saturday workdays were 2 hours shorter.) Pay rates. Another set of demands that made specific reference to the past concerned the method of calculating the piece wage. Here, paradoxically, the administration came up with, and the workers agreed to, a novel and forward-looking compromise. While refusing to restore 3 kopecks to the spinners' unit piece rate or to raise the weavers' rate to 40 kopecks per 50 arshins, the owners agreed to set both rates "according to existing rates in Petersburg factories" (soglasno sushchestvuiushchikh fabrichnykh s. peterburgskikh tsen). It is impossible to establish how this solution was arrived at, except to say that while the workers accepted it, nothing in the record remotely suggests it was their idea. We can only speculate that Soldatenkov and Knoop, with their interregional, even international entrepreneurial ties and perspectives on such matters, brought along this suggestion from St. Petersburg (though it is noteworthy that the principle of comparability was not invoked with respect to time, an approach that might have further reduced the Kreenholm workday). 78 In any case, the plan provides us with the best symbolic evidence yet of how events were inadvertently thrusting a previously isolated and insulated factory into a broader regional, if not national, arena. In response to what might be called a "backward-looking" demand, Kreenholm workers were suddenly being authorized, if not to engage in regional, industrywide collective wage agreements, then at least to scrutinize and link themselves to the practices of the Petersburg textile industry. In effect, they were being invited to act as if they belonged to a broader class of workers with a common set of interests, a notion they themselves had never expressed. 78. A twelve-hour day (excluding breaks) was already the norm at two of St. Petersburg's dozen or so cotton mills (Samsonievskaia, Torshilov), though at this time most (e.g., Kenig, Novaia) still were close to the Kreenholm pattern. See RD, 373; D. G. Kutsentov, "Naselenie Peterburga. Polozhenie peterburgskikh rabochikh," in Ocherki istorii Leningradn, vol. 2, ed. B. M. Kochakov et al. (Moscow, 1957), 197.

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Fines and deductions. Apart from fines relating to lateness, the main issue here, it will be recalled, and one of the most inflammatory, was the company practice of deducting excessively for the breakage of machine parts, effectively charging workers for the cost of replacing damaged or worn-out machinery in toto. What the workers (both weavers and spinners) wanted instead was a fixed, detailed, published schedule or tariff (taksa) of prices for particular parts, based on the exact cost of replacement. 79 The owners conceded the principle by "taking cognizance" of the workers' wishes and agreeing to institute a schedule in consultation with the elected elders (the wording was the same in both accords), but they gave themselves forty days, until 1 October, to implement this promise. This was a clear victory in principle for the workers, but given the atmosphere of distrust, the built-in delay was sure to contribute to the tensions at Kreenholm in the days ahead. The spinners were also promised (in highly condensed language) that workers who were fired would henceforth be given a full accounting, at the time they were paid off, of all relevant pay calculations, including fines and deductions. This response to their sixth and final request was another victory for the spinners, but again it was one whose implementation, by its very nature, would have to await the future. Three other points, all in the weavers' accord, involved fines or deductions. (1) The company agreed to stop fining individuals for low output, but only with the proviso that each weaver must weave a daily minimum of cloth equivalent in value to 45 kopecks (or well over 50 arshins). (2) It agreed to end deductions for support of the hospital and church. (3) It denied out of hand and with no explanation the request to end tuition deductions for children who did not attend school. To summarize, management's response to demands regarding fines and deductions was a mixed one, ranging from stubborn resistance to full and immediate capitulation, but generally showing a willingness to compromise and make concessions. To what extent should we view this set of issues as "restorative"? Hardly at all, if we focus narrowly on the workers' language, for their desires in this area were never expressly justified with reference to bygone practices. Nevertheless, since the entire company program of increasing fines and deductions over the years was in fact a retreat from a considerably milder past regimen, one 79. In explaining the meaning of taksa, the legal scholar N. N. Polianskii (Stachki rabochikh i ugolovnyi zakon [St. Petersburg, 1907], 5) refers to the German Tarifvertrag, a table of rates, often but not necessarily wage rates, agreed on by workers and employers. The Russian taksa comes from the German Taxe.

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that many workers had been around long enough to have experienced, it is not farfetched to again link the apparent flexibility of both the owners and the governor in the area of fines and deductions to their sense that workers were not demanding "innovations," let alone a fundamental change in the factory constitution. Personnel. The same cannot be said of the demands for removal of personnel, all of which spoke directly or indirectly to what we are calling the constitutional question: the issue of the future role of workers in decision making. In examining management's responses to these demands, which came only from weavers, we would do well to distinguish between the demands for the dismissal of this or that individual—which, because they involved no structural change, were constitutional only by implication—and the more direct demand for worker control over the electoral process. As to individual dismissals, the response was mixed. The owners did agree in principle to fire Sekka, who clearly headed the list of the weavers' targeted foes. So great was the weavers' animosity toward him that it is hard to imagine the delegates signing the accord had the owners not appeared to yield on this demand. Fel'dsher Palkin, on the other hand, was kept on, but with a notation that weavers could lodge their complaints against him "through proper channels" (po prinadlezhnosti); that is, they could turn for redress to the remote, almost inaccessible, courts. 80 A similar tack was taken with respect to their three remaining adversaries: church elder Sek, assistant foreman Bruns, and the clerk Pikkamiagi. The directly "constitutional" demand for genuine, unimpeded elections of elders by the factory community (obshchestvom fabriki) of workers was accepted, but with an important restriction: under the new system the workers would choose not one but three candidates for the post, and the administration would decide which of them was to serve. That the weavers would go along with this obvious effort by Kolbe to retain some of his eroding influence over their choice of representatives is not surprising, for the modified version did accord them the right to initiate the nomination of Sekka's successor and of all future holders of his office. To be sure, viewed in combination with the owners' refusal to fire three of the weavers' adversaries, the agreement on elections contained the seeds of future conflict, depending of course on the degree 80. Apparently Palkin either quit or was fired sometime before December, for his name does not appear among the fel'dshers then listed by Falk as on the hospital staff on 1 December; TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 562, 1. 323.

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to which management would try to influence the outcome of the electoral process. But for the moment, at least, weavers could feel they had made a serious change in the factory's structure of authority. And they had done so in a new context, in which their own elected delegates had been able to negotiate as morally equal partners with the owners—each side signed the protocols 81 —using a representative of the state both as mediator and as witness to the legitimacy of their claims and aspirations. 82

All Quiet on the Narova The story of the labor unrest at Kreenholm in 1872 might have ended right here. Some thought it had, as Major Andreianov's daily reports to the governor over the next few days suggest. On 22 August, the day after the protocols were signed, a cheerful Andreianov was able to congratulate the governor that the "order" he had just established at the factory "was being broken by no one; all the workers, weavers as well as spinners, appeared at work on time." On the next day, the 23rd: "Everything is in good order at the Kreenholm factory; work continues right on schedule \ispravno\" On the 24th: "All is well at the Kreenholm factory." On the 25th: "All workers . . . are working normally [obychnym poriadkom]; discontent among the factory population is nowhere to be heard." 8 3 If the accords of 21 August had provided the basis for a permanent settlement, we would be at the conclusion of our story, which might have read something like this: By drawing the attention of the state to their plight at a time when epidemic disease had lifted the curtain on their fortress factory, the workers of Kreenholm, led by their most privileged stratum, the weavers, succeeded in breaking the factory administration's monopoly ofpower. Of course, they were unable to attain all their goals or fulfill all their aspirations. There were finite limits to the concessions that an autocratic government would help them extract from management, especially when it came to control over personnel and full recognition of the 81. Shakhovskoi used the term protokoly in his report o n the events of 2 1 August, t h o u g h only in his original draft; ibid., d. 5 6 0 , 1. 27. 82. T h e weavers' d e m a n d for temporary leaves of absence in case of illness, an immediate reaction t o the by n o w somewhat attenuated cholera threat (masons were already coming back t o Kreenholm), was granted. 83. KS, 17, 18, 2 1 , 22.

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principle of free, unmediated electoral representation. Yet by confining themselves mainly to demands that appeared to be anchored in the restoration of past practices, the workers gained a great deal of sympathy from the representatives of state power, who, after all, as members of Russia's gentry elite, harbored little sympathy for merchant entrepreneurs, some of them German, who had dared to lay claim to the exercise of political sovereignty over their island territory. The striking workers seemed to understand the reality of these limits, for they allowed their delegates to sign an accord that limited some of their gains and left others to an uncertain future. And the factory owners, equally pragmatic and aware of the need to restore the workers' faith in the integrity of their word, adhered very closely to the promises of 21 August, thereby guaranteeing the Kreenholm factory years of uninterrupted social peace. But that is not what happened.

THREE

September Battles

Anticipations

If the daily reports of Gendarme Major Andreianov remained sanguine in tone and content for the four days following the signing of the 21 August accords, his report of Saturday the 26th sounded an ominous note. Although he began in his usual positive voice—"Work at the Kreenholm factory continues to proceed completely properly"—the next sentence hinted at imminent disaster: "The workers are awaiting Monday, 28 August, impatiendy, and the word is out [pojjovarivaiut] that if the list of new privileges is not posted on Monday, they will resume their meetings [soveshchaniia]."1 As these words indicate, management had not yet openly acknowledged or publicized the accords, let alone implemented them (except for very minor aspects), and workers, who obviously knew of them from their delegates, were growing restive at the prospect of the company's reneging. The new regulations, after all, had been extracted from the owners under pressure, including pressure from the government. As Gerasimov recalled, the accords satisfied the workers, "but they did not please Kolbe" (31). Though unintentionally, Andreianov's next sentence warned of still more troubles to come. The rumor of new meetings, he reported, "reached my gendarmes through secret channels [chctstnym putem]." 1. Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 26 Aug., KS, 22. Unless otherwise indicated, all dates in the following notes continue to refer to the year 1872. 82

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What he meant by this expression was that workers who answered to management, in effect Kolbe's assistants and informers, now were mixing with the other workers, a situation sure to infuriate the protesters were they ever to get wind of it. Quick action by Kolbe, however—perhaps taken under pressure from Andreianov—provided a temporary solution. Toward the evening of the same Saturday on which Andreianov had voiced his premonitions, after the workweek had ended, Kolbe finally distributed handwritten copies of the accords, letting it be known that printed copies would soon be posted in the barracks and at other appropriate locations. Andreianov understood this to mean that when work resumed on Monday, it would be on the basis of the new regulations. Workers apparently interpreted Kolbe's gesture in the same way, for Andreianov now felt confident enough to resume his more positive voice: "The factory population is calm, and [since the distribution of the copies] no more rumors are heard." 2 And as he anticipated, the new workweek resumed without visible difficulty, enabling him to send the governor consoling messages on Monday and Tuesday and for several days thereafter. 3 But did Kolbe and his colleagues really accept the permanence of the new arrangements? Or was their acquiescence a ruse, a disingenuous effort to buy time, as Gerasimov implies in his memoirs? Gerasimov's position is supported by no less an authority than the investigating commission, which concluded in November that the administration, "having made a concession forced upon it by circumstances, could not feel satisfied with the new order of things." 4 The best way for us to evaluate Gerasimov's interpretation is to examine the actions that finally broke the surface calm that followed the accords.

The Delegates Our narrative thus far has not revealed the names and characteristics of particular workers, most of whom have appeared only 2. Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 27 Aug., KS, 23; also, his telegram of the same date, TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 49. 3. Messages of 28, 29, and 30 Aug., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 59-61. Though no daily reports are preserved for the period 1-10 September, a memo (undated, but 19 Sept.) from Shakhovskoi to the MVD confirms that Andreianov continued to report that "order" and a normal work routine prevailed at the factory during that period (RD, 331). 4. Raporr, RD, 360.

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in the context of broad professional or functional categories. Kolbe has been presented as the principal player in the early acts of the Kreenholm drama, and some government officials have begun to receive their due, but Gerasimov, the only worker referred to by name, has appeared as witness, not as player. In the September phase of our story, however, individual workers (all of them male) begin to come into greater prominence, both as leaders of the protest movement and as key figures among their adversaries—agents or informers for Kolbe, provocateurs, objects of the strikers' wrath. The time has come to get to know some of these men a little better. Since all identified worker leaders would be drawn from the ranks of delegates elected on 21 August, I begin with a brief and (of necessity) thin sociological sketch of those figures, distinguishing among them where possible by profession, ethnicity, and domicile. Then I identify and look more closely at the handful of workers, both strikers and their foes, who would play the more prominent roles. Because the names of all delegates appear on the August accords, and because almost all were questioned by investigators just a few weeks later, we are in a position to make certain observations about their social characteristics. 5 Of the sixty delegates (thirty-two Russians, twenty-eight Estonians), there is information on legal status (soslovie) for fifty-five, location of legal residence (what I call "permanent domicile," as distinct from temporary quarters) for forty-eight, and literacy (more accurately, ability to sign one's name, obviously a less revealing datum) for fortynine. 6 In addition, there is a smattering of information for a few of the delegates on matters such as age, years employed at Kreenholm (stazh), and religious affiliation (which in any case was usually predictable from ethnicity). Because each item of information is attached to a particular delegate, we can also make some minor observations about the relation between each of these characteristics and the individual's ethnicity and trade (either weaver or spinner). 7 5. The protocol of the interrogations, held on 13-15 September, is in KS, 3 4 - 4 7 (hereafter referred to as Protokol). I also draw on bits of data from other documents, including the 21 October verdict of the Estland court (Oberlandgerickt) that tried the strikers, KS, 108-17, esp. 108-11. 6. In most cases soslovie is stated, but in some I infer it from permanent domicile (village = peasant; town = townsman [meshchanin, pi. meshchane]). When only a partial description of the domicile is given (e.g., village, but no district) I supply the missing information if available. 7. What we cannot do, unfortunately, is draw conclusions from these data about the work force in general, since we have no way of knowing if voters favored men who shared

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SOSLOVIE

Of the fifty-five delegates whose legal status (or "estate") can be ascertained, forty-two were peasants (76 percent) and thirteen were townsmen (meshchane-, 24 percent). If we look at Russians and Estonians separately, the percentages are, respectively, 7 1 / 2 9 versus 8 1 / 1 9 . Although such soslovie designations must of course be used with caution, in this case they had more than a formal, "passport" significance. As we shall see, many of the men designated as peasants were also identified with a particular rural "township" (volost') and, in some cases, with a specific village;8 when the township or village was fairly near to Kreenholm, they sometimes spoke of residing there on holidays and weekends or of requesting permission to return to the village during illness. In other words, whereas a meshchanin had almost certainly resided in a city at some point in his life, there is reason to believe that a "peasant" who worked in the Kreenholm factory (in contrast, say, to one who worked in a Petersburg factory) had little or no significant experience of urban life. Further importance of the peasant-meshchanin distinction seems to be indicated if we look at soslovie in relation to trade and ethnicity. Ten of thirty-seven weavers were meshchane (27 percent), as compared to only three of eighteen spinners (less than 17 percent), a difference that appears to dovetail both with the weavers' higher status and with their militancy. What complicates the picture, however, is that the proportion of meshchane among weavers varies significantly with ethnicity. For it was Russians who accounted for most of them, with a total of seven meshchane out of eighteen Russian weavers (39 percent) versus only three out of nineteen Estonian weavers (under 16 percent), a lesser percentage than for any group but the Russian spinners, of whom only 10 percent were meshchane (versus 25 percent o f t h e Estonian spinners). This makes it difficult to postulate a real correlation between meshchanin status and militancy, for at the risk of running ahead of our story, we should note that almost all our evidence regarding the events of 21 August and September points to Estonian rather than Russian weavers as providing leadership to the workers, though all but three of these Estonians were "peasants." In this respect, being an Estonian weaver their social profile, thereby producing something like a random sample, or if they selected for attributes that were atypical, such as reading and writing skills. 8. Though conventionally translated as "township," a volost' was a rural administrative unit consisting of several adjacent villages.

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meant considerably more than simply being an Estonian, a weaver, or a member of either soslovie. PERMANENT

DOMICILE

What I mean by this is the location of a worker's home province, district, and village or town, as distinct from his actual residence during employment (e.g., the Kreenholm barracks, Joala housing, private apartments in Narva), though it must be kept in mind that these might overlap. A worker whose home village was very close to Kreenholm (or who was permanently domiciled in Narva) might reside there even during the workweek, and one whose village was moderately close would almost surely return there during the short weekend holidays. Of the forty-eight workers for whom this kind of information is available, exactly half had permanent addresses in Estonia (the contiguous areas of Estland and Northern Livland), while the next largest group (eighteen, including five from Narva) came from Petersburg province. Six others, all Russians, were each from a different province in or near central Russia (Moscow, Vladimir, Pskov, Tver, Riazan, Smolensk). Given thesefigures,one is tempted to conclude that the skilled workers who had been recruited from the CIR in the early years of the factory's life were a negligible element in the events of 1872, though a note of caution must be struck owing to lack of data on the permanent domiciles of the Russian spinners (available for only two of twelve). What is clear, however, is that among the twenty Russian weavers, for whom we have much more data (N= 18), the Petersburg region was heavily represented, being "home" to thirteen. Moreover, five of these men (meshchane, of course) were officially registered as residents of St. Petersburg city, which suggests some previous experience in that city's textile industry (a hypothesis, unfortunately, that cannot be proved). And of the six peasants hailing from Petersburg villages, five were from the adjacent border district of Iamburg (as was one spinner), and the other was from the district of Gdov, just to Iamburg's south. Three of the five Iamburgers hailed from the same volost' (the unit between village and district) and possibly the same village (in two cases the village name was omitted). Thus close local origins (and possibly residence in the same small region) may have been a factor uniting leaders of the Russian weavers. It was Estonian weavers, however, who provided dynamism and energy to the Kreenholm protests, for they made up the entire contingent of men later identified as "instigators" or "ringleaders." Not

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surprisingly, almost all (24) of the ethnic Estonians among the delegates whose permanent domiciles can be identified ( N = 28: all twenty weavers plus eight spinners) were natives of Estonia (Estland or Northern Livland), and of the four who were not, three were from nearby Narva (in certain respects, as we know, a part of Estland) and the fourth from Iamburg. If we look more closely at the twenty Estonian weavers, including two from Narva, something of a pattern begins to emerge. Of the sixteen Estonian weavers classified as peasants, the home districts (Kreise) of ten are known. Each came from one of four districts: Pernau (3), Wierland (3), Fellin (2), Dorpat (2). 9 Wierland, as we know, was Kreenholm's district; two of the weavers domiciled there were attached to Joala village, part of the Cramer estate, while a third was from Samokras, a property near Narva. (The two from Fellin also came from a single village.) If we add the two Estonian weavers from Narva and another whose permanent domicile is uncertain but who lived in Narva with his parents, we see that six of the delegates elected by Estonian weavers were very local people indeed. (There was also one Estonian from Joala and one from Narva in the spinners' delegation.) Dorpat (Tartu) was the district just to the south of Wierland, some eighty miles from Kreenholm at its closest point. Fellin was the district to the west of Dorpat, and Pernau, which extended to Estonia's western coast at the Gulf of Riga, was west of Fellin. Thus three of the districts, none connected to Narva by rail, were much too far from Kreenholm for the seven weavers domiciled in those districts to reside there, even on weekends, and still commute to the factory. It is more likely that these men lived more or less permanently in Joala housing, Kreenholm barracks, or private lodgings in Narva (an assumption confirmed independently in two cases) 10 and that they were mainly workers who had come to know one another either in their local living quarters or on the job. No preexisting sense of village solidarity or community could have been involved, only ties forged at or near the workplace. This is about as far as a general analysis of geographical origin and domicile can take us. A closer look at Estonian weaver-delegates who 9. Wierland was in Estland; the other three districts, in Northern Livland. The Estonian names of the districts (in the same order as they appear in the text) are Parnumaa, Virumaa, Viljandi, and Tartu (in Russian: Pernov, Virland, Fellin, Derpt). See Raun, Estonia, 227. A Kreis was the German equivalent of an uezd. 10. These were the Pernau peasant Tennis Jurgenson, who lived in "the city" (i.e., Narva), and the Dorpat peasant Joosif Nem, who lived in the factory barracks (KS, 44, 46).

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were later singled out as ringleaders will help us individualize our account.

Leaders

Seven Estonian weaver-delegates figured prominently enough in the September unrest to suffer arrest, indictment, and trial. No Russian delegate, whether spinner or weaver, met the same fate, and only very few Estonian spinners did. Indeed, from the outset of trouble on 14 August to the height of battle on 1 0 - 1 2 September, it was Estonian weavers who set the pace for other workers, prodding them into action, raising the most far-reaching demands, sometimes intimidating those who were faint of heart. When Colonel Birin interviewed the Russian weaver Zakhar Sokolov on 19 August, it will be recalled, Sokolov stressed the leading role of Estonian weavers. Russians supported them because they "recognized the justice of their comrades' demands" ( s p r a v e d l i v o s t ' trebovanii svoikh tovarishchei) but also, he admitted, because they feared their "threats" (ugrozy). 11 With Estonian weavers outnumbering Russians by nearly two to one, the Russians had ample reason to be fearful. Birin and other officials were quick to accept the idea of Estonianweaver leadership. Explicitly rejecting one of the conventional tropes of police explanation, "outside agitators" (podstrekateli izvne), Birin did not hesitate to inform his superiors that "among the workers of Estonian origin" there were weavers who "incited" (podbivali) their comrades to join in the disorders. 12 Whether he thought of Estonian workers as in some sense outsiders (from a Petersburg perspective) is hard to say, but Birin was able to name names, and the weavers he named were surely no strangers to the factory. The first one he mentioned, that of the man he identified as the "chief instigator" (¿lavnyi zachinshchik), was Willem Preisman. The second, described by Birin as Preisman's "accomplice" 11. Birin to Shuvalov, 23 Aug., RD, 325-26. See also chapter 2, p. 62. 12. Ibid., 327. The "outside agitator" explanation was solemnly memorialized in a circular issued by the MVD (with support from the Third Section) just two years earlier (6 July 1870), in the wake of the Nevskii strike: "The eruption of strikes among workers can without doubt be positively attributed to the influence of persons who are striving to transfer this form of expression of dissatisfaction, which is foreign to the Russian people, to our soil" (quoted in Zelnik, Labor and Society, 364).

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(posobsbchik), was Jakub Tamm. 13 In specifying these names, Birin was right on the mark. Preisman (like Gerasimov) was only twenty at the time of these events, which made him the youngest member of the Estonian leadership group. Born in Reval, Estland's capital and largest city, on 26 December 1851 to an Estonian or possibly Finnish peasant family of Lutheran faith, Preisman was identified in the records of the Estland Superior Court as a Reval meshchanin.14 How long and in what capacity he had lived in Reval before coming to Kreenholm in the fall of 1868 at age sixteen is not revealed in the records, but he was clearly a young man of great resourcefulness, well spoken, and accustomed to living and moving about in the city. Highly literate in Estonian, he was even able to write in Russian, though not without serious difficulty. His mother, Liza, also worked at the Kreenholm factory.15 Jakub Tamm, a twenty-four-year-old Estonian peasant, was born in 1847 in the Estland village of Tuddo, very close to Narva, and listed his permanent domicile as being in nearby Samokras. Truly a local product, he was popular enough among his fellow workers to be elected to the post of assistant elder ( p o m o s h c h n i k starosty) in the "free" (that is, not managed by Kolbe) and, from management's point of view, illegitimate election that followed the 21 August accords. (Maddis Tamm, 20, another Estonian weaver arrested for his militant acts in September, was 13. In Russian sources Preisman's name is usually given as Vil'gel'm (German: Wilhelm), Tamm's as Iakov. His friends called Preisman Villi (Willi). His last name is spelled Preisman» in some German documents (e.g., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 562, 1. 163, where he is also called William) as well as in his Kreenholm paybook, preserved in the governor's archive (ibid., 11. 252-57). In addition to documents cited, my biographical information is from "Preisman," in Deiateli revoliutsionnogo dvizheniia v Rossii. Biobibliograficheskii slovar', vol. 2, pt. 3 (Moscow, 1931), cols. 1261-62; and "Tamm, Iakov," in ibid., pt. 4 (Moscow, 1932), col. 1664. 14. The documentary record is contradictory on Preisman's domicile. In the papers of the court (21 Oct.) he is called a Reval meshchanin (KS, 111), a label accepted as fact in Deiateli. But when investigated during an 1874 probe of radical influences among Petersburg workers, he was listed (by the same Colonel Birin) both as a peasant and as a resident of another Estland town, Wesenberg, Wierland district (RD, 459, 463). Interrogated by police in 1874, Preisman described himself as a resident of a landed estate (pomest'e) in Wesenberg parish (TsGAOR, f. 112, op. 1, ed. khr. 209,1. 64; also ed. khr. 210,11. 2 1 , 4 1 ) . 15. TsGAOR, f. 112,op. 1, ed. khr. 209,1. 64. My main evidence of Preisman's ability to write in Russian is from a time when he lived in St. Petersburg, well over a year after the strike, and it is possible that he learned much of his Russian in the interval. But he did sign his name in Cyrillic letters to a receipt dated 27 November 1872 (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 562, 1. 240; for brief references to his mother, see ibid., 11. 175-76, 188, 224-25).

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Jakub's younger brother.) 1 6 Since Peeter Sekka, the elder whose dismissal had been promised by Kolbe, still held that post at the beginning of September, in violation of the accords, Tamm became his symbolic rival, the office of assistant elder having displaced that of elder as a locus of legitimate leadership. Besides Preisman and Tamm there were five more Estonians among the weaver delegates who would play significant if lesser leadership roles: Jaan Kitts was a peasant from the Fellin district of Livland, literacy unknown, whose distinguishing feature was his advanced age of fortyfive. (Age data are sparse, but we do have information for the seven Estonian leaders: mean age = 29.6, median = 24). Hans Maikallo, at thirty-eight the second oldest in the group, was also a Livland peasant and was at least minimally literate. Kristjan Jurna, 23, literate, was a peasant from Livland's Pernau district. Ado Adoson (or Adam Adamson, sometimes Adamso/m in German documents), 24, was a Narva meshchanin, the only member of the group of seven besides Preisman so designated, who joined the Kreenholm work force in 1867. There is only slight evidence on this score, but as a city-dwelling meshchanin it seems likely that Adoson was literate. 17 Finally there was Jakub Jallak (or Jallakas) of Livland, 33, the only member of the group whose soslovie remains a mystery, as does his literacy.

Adversaries

Having briefly introduced the leading protesters we turn now to an even briefer discussion of their chief worker-adversaries, three Estonians whose names we have already seen in the weavers' list of demands: Peeter Sekka, Gustav Bruns, and Kaarel Pikkamiagi. Sekka, a weaver who held the post of elder for nine years with the blessings of the administration, was, as we know, despised by the protesters. The promise of his dismissal from that post was one of the major concessions made to weavers on the 21st, but much to their chagrin he was not dismissed, and remained very much a favorite of management and the factory police. The election of Tamm to the post of assistant elder was the 16. For more information on Maddis Tamm, see Deiateli, vol. 2, pt. 4, col. 1664. 17. The only direct evidence of literacy is his signature, in Latin letters, on a receipt dated 27 November 1872, TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 562,1. 239. The date he was hired is taken from his paybook, ibid., 1. 244.

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rebellious workers' way of getting around the fact that Sekka remained in office. Bruns, 28, and Pikkamiagi, 30, had very similar, in some ways identical, backgrounds. Both were Estonians, peasants by soslovie, spinners by trade, and literate; both had fourteen years of service at Kreenholm, beginning in their teens. Most important, though often referred to as "workers" in the testimony of others, they both now had a foot firmly planted in the lower ranks of management and identified closely with the managers they served, Bruns in the capacity of assistant foreman in the spinning division, the more literate Pikkamiagi as a company clerk in Kolbe's office.18 Their names are virtually inseparable in most accounts of the September events, although Kolbe seems to have been particularly solicitous of Pikkamiagi, later described in a Third Section memorandum as an "intellectually developed person" ( c b e l o v e k ves'ma razvityi), in contrast to the more "undeveloped" ( n e m z v i t y i ) and "on his own, harmless" Bruns.19

Openers: One Petition, with Vodka

It should hardly come as a surprise that in a newly industrializing society, where popular literacy was still at a low level but the written word was taking on increasing importance, social conflicts would generate written documents that took on a symbolic significance. We already saw this happen in August, when lists of written demands— including demands that themselves alluded to other documents—signed or X'd by combative workers and countersigned, at the workers' insistence, by factory owners and government officials, became the centerpiece of a possible setdement. Similarly in September, a written document—but this time a "petition" generated and signed (or X'd) by opponents of the strikers—became a primary locus of tension and attention, helping to unravel that settlement and unleash the most explosive phase of the conflict. Let us begin with the text of that document (undated, but signed and submitted on 9 September) and then turn our attention first to its genesis and then to its meaning to the more militant 18. Their age, soslovie, and years o f service are from KS, 26, 111. 19. Unsigned Third Section memorandum to Shakhovskoi, 25 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 561, 1. 131.

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workers, a meaning that cannot be divorced from the way in which the document came into being. 20 We, the undersigned workers of the Kreenholm factory, in our own name and in the name of many other workers, take the liberty21 of presenting the following petition to the Factory Directors: We have already lived happily for several years here at the factory, and thanks to God and the factory directors, up to now we have provided for ourselves and our families with the money we earned and have still been able to save enough for our old age. But now our pleasant and profitable employment and life have been ruined by some senseless young workers, and the rioters [or rebels, buntovshchiki], not content with the fact that the court \snd\ has forgiven them their disturbances and the factory directors have complied with several of their requests, now intend to carry out new excesses; for this reason we take the liberty to ask most humbly that the Factory Directors fire from their jobs and expel from the factory the instigator-rebels [zachinsbchiki-buntovshchiki] named: Willem Preisman, Jakub Tamm . . . [followed by five more names of Estonian weavers, including four delegates, three of them listed in the earlier section entitled "Leaders"]; for as long as these people remain at the factory, the disturbances will not cease, and in the end it is the innocent who will be prosecuted and punished, who will be dismissed from their jobs at the factory and forced to tramp around with their families. We are in a position to prove that the above-named rebels often gather in taverns and other places where they confer about [starting] new disturbances and openly threaten to kick out anyone who does not agree with them, and also to remove from office our volost' elder, Peeter Sekka—who was elected elder by all the workers of the factory and has served honorably for nine years—[just] because he punished them a few times for their misconduct. The rebels have elected from their own midst as Assistant volost' elder Jakub Tamm, and, so we are told, he will be sworn in any day now. Even if the factory directors decide to ignore our petition, we humbly request that they not permit Jakub Tamm to be sworn in, for he was elected assistant elder not in accordance with the regulations of the factory but by the rioters alone, and as someone who has been taking people to inns and taverns for meetings, he is in our opinion unworthy to hold a responsible office and decide on [important] cases.

The petition was signed by nineteen men and X'd by four others. As a qualified and "intellectually developed" scribe ( p i s a r P i k k a m i a g i 20. The Russian version of the original Estonian text is in ibid., d. 560,1. 242; and KS, 25-26. The name of each signer, accompanied by the number of years he had worked at Kreenholm, with notations as to which ones were illiterate (i.e., signed with three X's), is on 1. 243 of d. 560 (also KS, 26). The original Estonian text, absent from Shakhovskoi's files (and not listed in the opis' of d. 560), was translated into Russian in his office. My English translation of the Russian uses Estonian spelling of Estonian names, not transliterations of the Russian, and follows the archival version in the use of capital letters. 21. "We . . . take the liberty": my translation of the Russian osmelivaemsia, which could also be rendered as "we dare" or " d e i g n . " The important point is that it conveys humility in a formulaic, conventional manner.

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himself was the one who composed and wrote out the Estonian text.22 His name appears at the top of the signers' list, immediately followed by Bruns. Judging by the names, fourteen of the twenty-three were Estonian and nine were Russian, though there was no Russian-language text for Russian signers, and few Russian workers could read Estonian. Unfortunately, the text gives no indication of which signers were weavers and which were spinners. Significantly, the only detail furnished about individuals is a figure next to each name indicating the person's tenure at the factory (stazh), a datum clearly meant to underline a theme already visible in the text: whereas the "rioters" were young, frivolous, and impetuous, the signers exemplified the sobriety, probity, and loyalty that come with long and stable employment.23 How did this petition come into being? What, if any, was the role of Kolbe? If one asks simply whose interests it seemed to serve, two aspects of the document immediately point to the factory administration: ( 1 ) its claim to be broadly representative ("in the name of many other workers"), which was designed to show that, in contrast to the August documents, it expressed the views of the majority (albeit with emphasis on the long tenure of the actual signers); and (2) its clear attempt to preserve at all costs, even if the signers' other wishes (the firing of Preisman et al.) were ignored, management's system of investing authority in its favorites, and to prevent the creation (exemplified by Tamm's election) of an alternative locus of authority, a dual power. But interests aside, were Kolbe and other administrators actually the force behind the petition? On this Gerasimov's account, as ever, is clear and simple. In his usual dramatic and condensed narrative style, he lays responsibility squarely at the feet of Kolbe, whom he depicts as bent on wrecking the August settlement: "In order to damage our cause he bought off ten of the spinners; he gave them each 10 rubles to get them to sign some kind of paper. Although this affair was of course carried out in the deepest secrecy, the weavers soon managed to get wind of it" (31). The accuracy of this account is best assessed by careful reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the petition's circulation, a task in which we are fortunate to be aided by the work of the investigating commission.24 2 2 . TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 5 6 1 , 1 . 131. 2 3 . The mean tenure of the twenty-three signers was l l j years, the median 13. Nine of them had a tenure of 14 years—that is, they had been with the factory virtually from its very beginning. 2 4 . The commission covers the circumstances surrounding the petition in Raport, RD, 3 6 0 - 6 6 ; other basic sources are Shakhovskoi's memo to Deputy Chief of Gendarmes

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Except for the 10 rubles and the ten spinners, Gerasimov was recalling and repeating essentially the same rumor that had swept the factory on 9 September. According to that story, Bruns and Pikkamiagi—seasoned villains in the eyes of many workers—had acted under the direct supervision not of Kolbe but of his underling, Chief of Factory Police Karl Focht. Bruns and Pikkamiagi, so it was said, circulated a petition addressed to the administration and invited some spinners to a local tavern to sign it. There was no talk of money, but potential signers were told they would be treated to vodka. In one version of the story Bruns and Pikkamiagi, Estonian spinners by background, targeted not merely spinners but Russian spinners as the most likely candidates for a liquid bribe. Inquiries by government officials would corroborate the essential elements of this story, though like Gerasimov they attributed initiative for the plan to Kolbe, with Focht playing a subordinate role, acting as Kolbe's agent. According to the Estland procurator, who conducted his own meticulous investigation, it was Kolbe, anxious to reverse what he saw as the unacceptable losses of 21 August, who commissioned Pikkamiagi to carry out the petition plan in order to set the stage for the recovery of his lost authority. This strategy seems to have been fermenting in Kolbe's mind at the end of August. Some ten days before the petition was drafted he met with Shakhovskoi in Reval and informed him that certain workers "wished" to petition the administration to "restore the old order at the factory." Later, the procurator would use this statement as evidence that Kolbe was the initiator.25 The choice of tavern as location and vodka as bribe was consistent with behavior patterns at Kreenholm. To return briefly to the events of 21 August, Birin had observed that many militant weavers appeared to be drunk, a condition he linked to their obduracy. 26 And if the petition itself is to be believed—and on this score we have no reason to doubt it—Preisman, Tamm, and other "rebels" had used the tavern as a gathering place for planning their actions (perhaps even for drafting their demands). Hence, by situating his first move toward restoring his authority in the tavern and making a petition the centerpiece of his strategy, Kolbe in effect was bringing the fight to enemy territory, much as the Levashev (undated, but 23 Sept.), RD, 334-40 (original draft, with alterations and some minor differences, in TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 279-90), and Acting Provincial Prosecutor Zhelekhovskii's report to the Justice Ministry, RD, 342-49. 25. RD, 347. The words in quotes are from the procurator's paraphrase of Kolbe's statement. "Old order," here, meant the order before the accords of 21 August. 26. See chapter 2, p. 71.

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weavers had begun their "rebellion" by challenging Kolbe on his own ground, the factory office. If vodka could raise the courage of rebellious weavers, perhaps it could also move the loyalties of others (especially Russian spinners) in the opposite direction, enabling Kolbe to capture their signatures. What more obvious field of battle to actuate this strategy than the tavern? In fact, however, this proved to be a fatal error, one that would cost Kolbe dearly. Had Kolbe's men succeeded in convincing a significant minority of the delegates to sign the petition, openly breaking ranks with their comrades, it would surely have been a severe blow to the "rebels'" morale. Among the sixty original delegates, however, only three, all spinners (two illiterate Russians and one Estonian capable of signing his name) were to be found among the signers. Two of the three were present at the tavern on 9 September when the first attempt was planned to gather signatures, and a few days later both recounted what they had seen and heard. Here is some of the testimony of Fedot Semenov, a Riazan peasant:27 Before the 9th of this month I didn't know anything about the written statement [petition]. . . . [Then] two spinners . . . invited me to the tavern to hear some legal document [zakon] read aloud by the workers Pikkamiagi and Bruns, so I headed straight from the factory to the tavern, where I found a large number of workers already gathered.

But the men who were gathered there were not listening to Pikkamiagi and Bruns, who were nowhere to be seen. Instead what Semenov found was a large throng of workers, agitated and angry about management's plan to restore "the old order" ( p r e z h n i e p o r i a d k i ) and "take back what it had already given." Semenov's account was corroborated by a group of five Russian spinner-delegates, including Foka Anisimov, one of those who signed the 9 September petition. They testified that they were invited—in this case directly by Bruns and Pikkamiagi—to meet in the tavern to attend the reading of a document. They arrived at 6:00 P.M. and waited for Bruns and Pikkamiagi until 9:00, by which time some 150 workers (in 27. Testimony in KS, 3 4 - 3 5 . All interrogations took place on 13, 14, or 15 September, in the presence of Shakhovskoi, Birin, and the Hakenrichter. The depositions combine first- and third-person statements, and the repetition of certain phrases suggests that even the first-person statements often contain the words of the questioner rather than words volunteered by the witness, who may have answered simply "yes" or "no." These are continual problems for historians who try to get at the mind-set of workers and peasants from the archival records of police interrogations.

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another account, 200), including many uninvited weavers, were on the scene. While they were waiting a youngster arrived with money that was meant to buy vodka for cooperative workers, but many refused the treat. Finally, one of the five spinners went looking for Bruns and Pikkamiagi, to no avail. Another spinner eventually located them and brought them to the tavern, but the frightened duo, who had counted on a meeting of only twenty men, refused to read aloud from the document in the presence of so many unfriendly faces. Instead they beat a quick retreat. 28 The tavern now belonged to the militant weavers. In sum, then, the administration, acting through the factory police chief and a handful of loyal spinners, was attempting very clumsily to bribe a somewhat larger circle of workers to assist it in its efforts to reverse the August settlement. The bribe—worthy of a scene in Zola's Germinal—was both modest and insulting: an evening of vodka, intended to loosen the inhibitions (or crank up the courage) of a couple of dozen spinners and induce them to sign a tendentious document they had not even read, let alone written, behind the backs of their fellow workers. Spinners, less independent than their weaver comrades, were targeted for this role in the naive belief that the ploy could be kept from the weavers. Potential for trouble was built into the strategy from the outset, for the location for the bribe, a tavern, was a likely locus for the spread of rumors and the presence of unwanted elements, especially weavers. Even the simple use of word of mouth to get twenty spinners to go there was sure to feed the rumor mill. As a result, though it was Saturday evening and many workers who resided in the area had already departed Kreenholm for a short weekend at home, large numbers of defiant men had staked out the tavern as their special territory long before management's agents began to show their faces. By the time a terrified Bruns and Pikkamiagi were at last compelled to make an appearance, weavers and their friends had asserted both physical and moral control over the space of the tavern, forcing their foes to seek refuge from the very batdefield they themselves had chosen for combat. Meanwhile the "petition," now a symbol of management's duplicity, remained unsigned. 28. Testimony of Anisimov and four others, KS, 37 (other testimony verifying the details is in KS, 4 0 - 4 2 , 4 6 ; RD, 335). Kolbe later told Shakhovskoi that "the instigators" crowded the courtyard of the workers' barracks to discourage would-be signers (KS, 26). N o other sources back that claim (which, though self-serving, may have been true). What Kolbe dared not tell Shakhovskoi is that the potential signers were gathering at the barracks to go to the tavern to sign the petition in return for vodka.

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Invading Enemy Turf The exercise of authority at Kreenholm had long been grounded in a special arrangement of territorial imperatives. On the one hand was the clear demarcation of the factory borders vis-á-vis the outside world, visually represented by the factory's island character. Only with the onset of the 1872 epidemic, and most notably with the masons' trek to Narva, did this demarcation line begin to bend, allowing the outside world to intrude on Kreenholm as never before. On the other hand were the traditional territorial arrangements within the Kreenholm borders, arrangements that, once the fortress barrier had been breached from without, began to bend as well. In the past, this internal territorial configuration had been firmly based on the administration's undisputed right to extend its reach to every nook and cranny of Kreenholm property, including not only workshops and barracks, but even neighboring village streets, as witness Kolbe's practice of admonishing and even hitting youngsters like Gerasimov for smoking in the open air (19-20). With the exception of the local tavern, the special sanctuary of adult male workers, there had been no clear barrier between the private and public domains, between the social territory of workers and the political space of managerial sovereignty— between, to put it another way, the state within a state and local society, which the management could penetrate almost at will. This absence of barriers, this permeability of the worker community, had entailed no reciprocity. The administration had exercised airtight control over its own special space, above all over the factory offices and of course the local residences of factory administrators, the inner sancta from which Kreenholm's rulers could look out upon their subjects without themselves being observed and from which they could emerge to affect the lives of others. Until the 1872 upheaval, their subjects could not penetrate these hallowed grounds; more accurately, they could do so only at the beckoning of authority itself, and then only individually, or else in the mediating person of management's trustees, and in accordance with rituals prescribed from above. But now militant weavers had defied this convention. They did so when they invaded factory office space on 14 August, and they did it again on the 21st, temporarily transforming that symbolically charged location into reluctantly shared territory, space they could now transgress without permission. As an unintended consequence of their action

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they had compelled the administration to make a choice: either cede control of the territory to a rebellious " m o b " or regain control by yielding more autonomy to the workers' private sphere, to the worker community, thereby opening the door to the eventual erosion of a heretofore untouchable principle, management's free access to the workers' space. Under external pressure from a government official—which in itself signified a breach of Kreenholm's territorial integrity relative to the outside world—Kolbe and his aides had chosen the latter course, ceding power and autonomy to the worker community. But they then attempted to reverse that decision, even daring to invade the workers' traditional sanctuary, their one oasis of privacy, the tavern, in the process. Now this litde invasion, a stealthy but awkward effort to penetrate that sanctuary with an ill-equipped two-man vanguard, had failed. Worse still, it had backfired, for it gave the injured but emboldened weavers the courage to launch a counterattack into forbidden territory, yet another piece of enemy turf: the private homes of their superiors. As we observe the events that followed on the heels of the bungled tavern scheme, we begin to discern the as yet amorphous outlines of a new territorial relationship between the parties to the conflict, with each side thrusting and parrying, trying to learn the limits of its control over the Kreenholm landscape. At this stage of the contest one administrator and two workers became personifications of the contesting sides. For a brief moment, the factory's usually tough though at times softhearted German business manager, Alexander Frey, came to stand for the administration,29 while Willem Preisman and Jakub Tamm personified its challengers. We will observe all three a bit more closely, as the sources permit, and observe as well the actions of other workers, still the vast majority, whose attachment to old territorial divisions of authority was just beginning to waver. As Kreenholm's business manager, Frey lived in a pleasant home that doubled as his private office. After Bruns and Pikkamiagi retreated from the tavern, word quickly spread that they had taken refuge with Frey. Workers who were gathered at the tavern—many of them by now quite drunk, some of them seething with rage at the two men—were determined to find them and teach them a lesson. Tamm was at the tavern, and it was he, together with Preisman, who began to organize the assembled men, some 100 to 150 strong, in a march on Frey's residence, 29. My portrayal of Frey is based on incidents described in Gerasimov, Zhizn' (1923), 18-20. Judging by these stories, Frey's responsibilities had extended to matters of discipline, at least with respect to apprentices.

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where they hoped to force a confrontation. 30 Denied the relative safety of their own special sanctuary, the weavers would no longer respect the sanctity of a manager's privacy, especially one who, it was widely believed, was harboring a pair of fugitives who had tried to reverse the workers' hard-earned gains. Although Tamm, Preisman, and their followers were now prepared to move the batde to these untested grounds, this should not be seen as a deliberate, well-thought-out decision to enter a new phase o f warfare. Rather, it was more an act o f hot pursuit, based on a solemn determination to confront their enemies wherever they might be and to extract from their possession the petition—its contents still obscure but its mere existence enough to charge it with negative meaning. When the word came down that that "wherever" was Frey's home, the momentum of their anger was strong enough to carry them in that perilous direction. I f the mass departure from the tavern was noisy and perhaps unruly, the march to Frey's, almost a procession, led by Preisman and Tamm, was calm and dignified. "We approached Frey's house without any noise or disorder," said one of the rare participants who later signed the petition o f 9 September. "We caused no violence, noise, or disturbance," others confirmed. 31 What they did do, however, in the person of their steadfast spokesman Preisman, was demand that Pikkamiagi and Bruns be handed over to the crowd and made to read aloud from the petition the words they had promised to read at the tavern. Shrewdly but not inaccurately, Preisman now represented himself and his comrades as upholders of order and legitimacy, respecters of a solemn agreement with the governor, while representing Bruns and Pikkamiagi as rabblerousers bent on stirring up a mob. 3 2 Although the documents are hazy on this score, the demand for Bruns and Pikkamiagi was apparently made outside the door o fFrey's residence. Some o f the crowd—probably Tamm, Preisman, and other leaders— were able to cross the threshold of the house and gain access to Frey's study, but for the moment this move seemed to exhaust their readiness to force their way onto forbidden terrain. Even the most militant among them, having stepped gingerly across another line o f demarcation, would linger only briefly there where they were not welcome. 30. Hakenrichter Girard to Shakhovskoi, 11 Sept., KS, 28. 31. Testimony of Fedot Semenov, KS, 35; testimony of Egor Ivanov and four others, KS, 37. 32. Zhelekhovskii's report to the Justice Ministry, 4 Oct., RD, 343; Shakhovskoi to Levashev, 24 Sept., RD, 335-36.

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Having grasped the intruders' reluctance to transform their outrage into a full siege of his home, Frey now took advantage of their hesitancy and faced them down. Summoning up a residue of inner strength from his past experience as a wielder of disciplinary authority, he addressed the assemblage and managed to persuade the tired workers (it was already well past 10:00 P.M.) to disperse to their homes. The only moment of defiance occurred when, while Frey was speaking, a worker (by one account a weaver named Vil'gel'ms, by another a spinner named Matveev) began to scream "like a cat." 3 3 But Frey had little trouble coaxing the cat to leave, after which the crowd, though hostile and deeply distrustful, apparently lost its nerve. This was only a temporary retreat, however, for, in the words of the investigating commission, the "mysterious content" of the petition and the apparent disappearance of Bruns and Pikkamiagi had only confirmed the workers' suspicions. 34 The angry but now disoriented protesters had not spoken their last word. The crowd scattered, but three Russian spinners, later joined by a fourth, stayed behind at the residence, where Bruns and Pikkamiagi had indeed been hiding. Although two of these spinners had served as delegates, and hence were parties to the 21 August accords, they were obviously not very dedicated to the cause, having numbered among the "twenty" who agreed to the abortive meeting with Bruns and Pikkamiagi at the tavern. Both of them readily joined with the other two in responding submissively to Frey's questions. Like Pierron, one of the miners' delegates in Germinal,35 they quickly reverted to former patterns of deference in the absence of the militant crowd. According to the spinners' accounts of the meeting, Frey began by questioning them in the presence of Bruns, Pikkamiagi, and Focht. He asked how many years they had been at the factory, whether they were family men (semeinye), and, most important, if they were pleased with the administration and its methods. All his questions referred to points stressed in the petition, points that were supposed to have been raised at the tavern. When the spinners responded to Frey's satisfaction ("We answered that we were pleased," " I answered that I was a family man and had lived at the factory for thirteen years," etc.) the petition was read aloud in Estonian, a language understood by none of the workers present, and they were asked to sign. All four acquiesced meekly. (One later testified that he thought he was simply attesting to his satisfaction 33. KS, 35, 37. 34. Raport, S D , 360. 35. Zola, Germinal, 198.

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with his employer; that is, he was not petitioning that anyone be fired.) Then Kolbe arrived on the scene—one account has him concealed in an adjacent room during the signing 36 —and examined the paper that had just been signed. Evidently pleased with the results, he dismissed the men from Frey's quarters. 37 We may safely assume that the remaining seventeen signatures (with Bruns and Pikkamiagi we have accounted for six thus far) were obtained in a similar manner. After the crowd dispersed, several more spinners showed up at Frey's and signed, hidden from the view of their more stubborn comrades. Like the spinner just cited, they may not have grasped the full import of what they were signing, especially the part that called for dismissals. In at least one case, and probably more, Bruns and Pikkamiagi visited a worker's private apartment—it was Sunday morning, the following day—and induced him to sign. This worker, a Russian spinner and a delegate, had been in the tavern the previous evening and even took part in the march to Frey's. He later asserted that the visitors had asked him ("since I was illiterate") to affix three crosses, but "without explaining what or why I was to sign; I carried out their request unquestioningly." 38 If Kolbe was aiming for large numbers, these efforts to obtain signatures by accosting workers individually yielded but meager results— seventeen names in a campaign lasting two days, for a total of only twenty-one (plus Bruns and Pikkamiagi). To be sure, the protesting workers could not have been happy with the day's events either, the angry crowd having been cowed into obedience by a vastly outnumbered, physically unprotected manager, without resort to a true show of force. But the fact remains that Kolbe's strategy of counterattack had failed to achieve its goals. In effect, he had accomplished nothing more than to secure some signatures on a statement of questionable worth, and this at the price of reviving the distrust of many workers and provoking new manifestations of their open defiance. Led by a militant corps of weavers, a large contingent of workers had flexed their muscles and displayed their potential strength by sabotaging Kolbe's plan to recruit supporters at the tavern and by parading provocatively to the residence 36. RD, 347. 37. Testimony of Fedot Semenov ( K S , 35) and Egor Ivanov (KS, 37). Semenov was one of the men who signed the petition with three X's; "Ivanov" signed as "Egor Ivanov Blinov" (KS, 26). There are minor discrepancies between their accounts of the events at Frey's. 38. Testimony of Foka Anisimov, KS, 37.

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o f a high-ranking manager, coming very close to a major violation o f the administration's territorial sanctity. Though the workers were unable to summon up courage to take the next step—a physical assault and occupation of the building—Kolbe's little victory that evening could only be a Pyrrhic one.

Calls for Assistance—10 September

The events that transpired in or near Frey's residence on Saturday evening had taken place between 10:00 P.M. and midnight. It is not hard to imagine the restiveness of the workers or the level o f tension of the frustrated administrators for the rest o f that night. Few on either side could have slept very peaceably as preparations were made for what was certain to be a week of renewed hostilities. I f by Sunday morning, 10 September, the conflict was at an uneasy standstill, each side was now busily preparing a new strategy that it hoped would transform stalemate into victory. T o the administration, victory—as the content o f the petition suggests—still meant the reaffirmation of its faltering authority by the removal o f the small group of weavers it correctly viewed as the embryonic leaders o f a burgeoning movement. T o the protesters, victory still meant the removal o f those men, especially Bruns and Pikkamiagi (by now the pair had stolen center stage from Sekka), whom they perceived as management's factotums in its conspiracy to roll back their gains. While it is true that the future of the August accords and o f the administration's damaged but as yet unbroken authority were the ultimate stakes in the game being played, the main struggle—and here the visions o f the two sides were remarkably parallel—was now over the fate of a handful o f men. I f the aims of the adversaries were symmetrical, so too were some o f their maneuvers. In order to break the stalemate, each side again saw a need to turn to the outside political world to lend the muscle it lacked on its own. T o the workers this was just a reversion to the lessons o f August, when the presence of the governor had produced the tenuous victory whose fruits they desperately wished to preserve. T o the managers, by contrast, the need to turn to the state for help again was a bitter pill to swallow. For there could be no more poignant expression of the new fragility o f the wall that once had shielded Kreenholm's proudly independent administration from the outside world than the

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adversaries' parallel efforts on the 10th to turn the possibility of outside intervention to their respective advantages. Though closely related and chronologically intertwined, each of these efforts will be scrutinized in turn.

THE

WORKERS

"On the next morning," writes Gerasimov, referring to 10 September, "we chose six people and dispatched them to the city of Narva to see the colonel [sic] of gendarmes." 39 The immediate aim of the delegation—which included two or three spinners but was led, predictably, by Preisman and Tamm40—was to persuade Gendarme Major Andreianov to arrange an audience for them with Shakhovskoi. Then the plan was to convince Shakhovskoi to order an inquiry into the conduct of Pikkamiagi and Bruns, an investigation that would presumably implicate Kolbe and vindicate the protesters. The governor, after all, had been fair to the strikers in the past. Why not assume he would be reasonable now? When the delegation arrived at Andreianov's headquarters it was granted an audience and allowed to state its business. With no apparent irony, the delegates reversed the conventional roles by accusing their enemies of having "fomented disorders [besporiadkiy and "provoked unrest [ volnenie]" among the workers. Perhaps anticipating the opportunity to play on the governor's amour propre, they charged Bruns and Pikkamiagi with concealing a piece of paper—the petition—that voided Shakhovskoi's instructions, that is, that nullified the accords he had both orchestrated and countersigned. Of their own aggressive actions on the previous night, including the near invasion of Frey's home, not a word was said.41 39. All references to Gerasimov's account of the events of 10 September are from p. 31. Though the "colonel" was actually a major, Gerasimov's memory is amazingly accurate in other respects, for example, that six was the number of members of the delegation, which is confirmed in contemporary documents (e.g., KS, 28; RJD, 360). 40. In addition to Preisman and Tamm, the delegates, all Estonian, included the weaver Ado Adoson (see above, p. 90); the spinners Mihkel Milber, 21, and Jaan Valdenbach, 24, both peasants; and Fritz Maler (or Mader), 24, a peasant, trade unknown. Like Preisman and Tamm, Adoson was one of the men named as "instigators" in the "petition" of 9 September. All but Maler had been delegates on 21 August. The six names are listed in the Hakenrichter's wire to Shakhovskoi, 11 Sept., KS, 28. 41. RD, 343, 3 6 0 - 6 1 . The quotations are from close summaries of the words of the delegation spokesmen, probably Tamm and Preisman, prepared by the Estland procurator and the investigating commission. Our main sources on the events of 1 0 - 1 2 September

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It is difficult to pin down the origins of this emphasis by the delegates on the illicit nature of their adversaries' conduct and the propriety and good order of their own. We have already noted this emphasis in Preisman's words to Frey on the previous evening, and—albeit much less pointedly, and without the same awareness of the issue of public order—in the weavers' earlier accusations against Kolbe. In the absence of any readily accessible legal discourse, and with Kreenholm previously so insulated from contact with a public legal system, it seems most likely that Preisman's bold stroke and the language of his comrades were an outgrowth of their experience of recent weeks, when they were repeatedly exposed to challenges about the questionable legality of their own actions and accused of fomenting disorder and unrest. Now the protesters were hoping to turn the tables on their employers by using the selfsame law-and-order challenges against the actions of Bruns and Pikkamiagi (and, by implication, Kolbe, Focht, and Frey), such as gathering a crowd, engaging in bribery, subverting a government-approved accord, and, whether intentionally or not, provoking disorder. None of this talk, of course, should be interpreted as a deeply held commitment to the rule of law, but unless we invest the protest leaders with an unlikely combination of deviousness and hypocrisy, or an even more unlikely dose of mischievous irony, their position may be seen as an authentic way of reweaving their commitment to the validity of older, customary practices into the context of their new, unprecedented experience of interaction with representatives of the state. After all, those government officials seemed to have been acting in good faith, they supported the protesters in many of their grievances, and up to this point, apparently on grounds that the grievances were just, they had arrested no one, not even participants in aggressive (if "legitimate") acts of defiance—and this despite the urgings of management. Now, in effect, the protesters, though in part by concealing aspects of their own behavior, were advertising their readiness to conform to officially sanctioned standards of conduct, at the same time stressing that the true violators of those standards were to be found in the enemy camp. To the disappointment of the delegates, however, representatives of the state were beginning to see these matters in a somewhat different light. Specifically, after receiving the delegates and hearing them out, Andreianov decided on the spot that there was "nothing positive" in are the relevant sections of the commission report ( RD, 360-62) and the chronology in Shakhovskoi's memo to Levashev (RD, 336-37).

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their statement, including the request for an audience with the governor. 4 2 T o be sure, we cannot know just what was going on in the major's mind at this crucial turning point in the Kreenholm story, really the first time since it all began that the wishes of the workers failed to receive a reasonably sympathetic hearing from imperial officials, including Andreianov himself. It may well be that his response reflected caution and uncertainty rather than outright hostility. After all, he knew there had been some turmoil at Kreenholm the previous night and he had yet to hear the management side of the story; at best he could have been but dimly aware of the confused and confusing events that had just transpired. U n d e r these circumstances, since he had n o t yet consulted with either the management or the local police, it was sensible for him to refuse to act precipitously in order to avoid risking an escalation of the conflict—a likely outcome of an interview between the highly agitated delegates and the governor. In support of this explanation it is noteworthy that Andreianov's cautious response to the delegates' demand was not to threaten them with arrest, but to mollify them by suggesting an alternative course of action: they should discuss their complaints with Hakenrichter Girard, in effect the district chief of police. Suppressing their obvious disappointment, the delegates—still without firm grounds to question the official's continued good faith—followed this counsel and agreed t o await Girard's return.

THE

MANAGERS

Unbeknownst t o the delegates, they were about to be overtaken by events that had been evolving over the past several hours. Much earlier that morning, well before their meeting with Andreianov, Hakenrichter Girard, the official to w h o m they had been referred for assistance, received an urgent wire from Factory Police Chief Focht. Acting, as usual, under Kolbe's direction, Focht had urged Girard to come to Kreenholm to investigate the previous night's events. As later summarized by the governor, the message claimed that Kreenholm workers had engaged in "nighttime disturbances" (nochnye besporiadki) and had "burst into Frey's h o m e by force [nasU'rio]."43 T h o u g h disaster had been averted on the previous night, obviously the factory managers could not rely indefinitely o n the persuasive powers 42. The words nothing positive were in the summary by the investigating commission (RD, 361), of which Andreianov himself was a member. 43. RD, 336.

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of Frey to keep angry workers under control. However reluctantly, Kolbe had chosen to solicit help from beyond the factory walls. But the administration had already suffered a humiliating setback at the hands of the governor and gendarme officers—that is, at the hands of imperial officials who, with their Petersburg perspective, had supported many of the workers' claims. So Kolbe, former mayor of Narva, turned to local officials like Girard, familiar figures from his own milieu whom he could trust to act as part of his smaller world of German notables. At the same time, Kolbe had to do his duty by the governor. Having summoned Girard, he wired Shakhovskoi requesting that, "in order to prevent further disorders," he instruct Girard (by then en route to Kreenholm) to detain ten of the weavers, including the "newly elected elder" (Tamm), and remove them to Reval. Because the men he singled out for detention were all among the weavers elected as delegates on 21 August, Kolbe—even in a short crisp telegram of some thirty-six words— could not resist reminding the governor that the delegates had been chosen in his presence (v prisutstvii vashem vybrannye), in other words, with his official sanction. And in a longer letter dispatched to Shakhovskoi on the same day, Kolbe pointedly claimed—perhaps quite accurately—that these delegates had been declaring "for all to hear" that, by dint of his actions on the 21st, the governor had entrusted them with personal responsibility for "supervision" (nadzor) of the other workers. In effect, though indirectly, Kolbe was accusing Shakhovskoi of having undermined his authority and provoked a dual-power situation. Not surprisingly, Kolbe's letter, which was the mirror image of the protesters' account to Andreianov, said nothing about bribes, drinks, or taverns, allusions that would have opened up an unseemly can of worms. Instead Kolbe focused on the weavers' riotous behavior, mentioning the 9 September petition, to be sure, but representing it as the spontaneous creation of the workers' hitherto silent majority, particularly of "our older workers and those with families" (nashi star ye i semeinye rabocbie).4* In a sense, the petition strategy was still on Kolbe's agenda. When the Hakenrichter arrived Kolbe had little trouble persuading him that the participants in the latest incidents had acted violently, causing an "uproar" or "riot" (buistvo), and that their leaders must be arrested forthwith. In Kolbe's version of these events, the leaders had "prevented the gathering of peaceful and well-meaning [blagomysliashcbie] workers who were seeking the dismissal of the fomenters of dis44. (26).

KS, 26-27.

The full text of the telegram is quoted within the body of the letter

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orders." 45 In Focht's telegram they were depicted as acting violently at Frey's home, though other accounts agree that, except for the "catlike" cry, the protesters had taken pains to maintain proper decorum after entering his quarters. Still, the nocturnal appearance of 150 excited workers at a manager's home was intimidating in and of itself. I f it hardly amounted to the tumultuous scene that Kolbe wished to convey, it was more than enough to swing Girard into action. He returned to Narva determined to arrest the leaders. By now both Kolbe and his adversaries had become self-conscious actors, playing to officialdom as if to an audience whose attention and approval must be attained at all costs. For Kolbe, the conflict was one between benign authority and its many loyal dependents, on the one hand, and a minority of rowdy, dangerous young troublemakers, on the other. For his adversaries it was a conflict between large numbers of law-abiding workers, reluctantly drawn into defensive action, and a devious, unscrupulous manager and his illegitimate subordinates. Because both sides claimed the allegiance o f the majority, it was important for each to impress upon officials that it spoke for a large constituency. O f course, since even to turn to the authorities for help was itself a tacit admission that the enemy was strong—too strong to be contained using only one's own resources (such as factory police)—Kolbe's best card for the moment was the highlighting of his adversary's rowdiness and potential for violence while carefully concealing his own actions from his official audience. Bordering on illegality, his actions were by the same token the best card o f his adversary. In this competition o f public display and dramatization, it was Kolbe who proved the more effective contestant, having finally succeeded in preparing the ground for the leadership's arrest. For the moment at least, he had carefully protected his vulnerable flank—his own flirtation with illegal, provocative behavior—lest his opponents turn it to their own advantage. Basing his account on more than a grain of truth, he had projected the notion that the protesters had engaged in riotous conduct, an essential ingredient o f his effort to bring the distrustful representatives of Petersburg officialdom closer to his side. I f he was to drive a wedge between the weavers and the government, which up to this point were still menacingly if precariously united, he badly needed to restructure what had been a rather inchoate lineup o f contesting forces into clearly delineated teams, one led by villains, the other by victims, with most 4 5 . KS, 26. Although Kolbe was addressing the governor, he surely gave the same account to Girard.

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workers, and certainly the most solid, represented as if ranged on the victims' side. He also needed to put the governor, local representative of the MVD, on the defensive, as witness his testy telegram and letter. And finally, he had to keep a wavering gendarme major, local representative of the Third Section, from identifying with the protesters, as Colonel Birin, the major's superior, had already done. This task he accomplished by dispatching Focht to Narva to expose Andreianov to management's version of the story. Thus, much to Kolbe's relief, by the time Girard returned to Narva to arrest Preisman, Tamm, and the others, the gendarme office was reconciled to a punitive approach, and Andreianov had apparently accepted the notion that the weavers were the aggressors—the villains as construed in Kolbe's narrative. By the same token, the delegates' hope to represent themselves to the authorities as the victims of Kolbe's aggression and the true bearers of the stamp of legitimacy was growing dim. When he arrived in Narva early that evening Girard, accompanied by local police, arrested four members of the workers' delegation, including Tamm and Preisman, in Andreianov's office. Unaware of their outlaw status, they had returned there after failing to locate Girard. Following a brief interrogation, Girard charged them with "willful behavior" (samoupmvstvo) and " r i o t " ( b u i s t v o ) . 4 6 He then brought all six delegates (when and where the other two were located remains obscure) before a local magistrate, who prompdy sentenced them to a week in the Narva jail. This was the first punitive act against a Kreenholm worker since the conflict had begun, and, though he was not in Narva at the time, it burned itself deeply into Gerasimov's memory. Significantly, given that it was not the gendarme officer but the Hakenrichter who made the arrests, Gerasimov attributed this act of betrayal to "Colonel" Andreianov, in whose office it took place. In this and in a few other details Gerasimov was again inaccurate, but his memory of Andreianov's treachery coincided with a broader truth: the major's willingness to defend the workers had, for the moment, run out of steam.

To Free the Prisoners—11 September When Kreenholm workers awoke early Monday morning they still had no inkling of Sunday night's arrests. Even the excitement 46. Raport, RI), 361.

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of Saturday night, o f which many workers who spent their weekends in their home villages were unaware, did not detract from the impression that a new workweek had begun its normal course. Power was on line. Workers were at their machines. "Everything was peaceful." 47 By now, however, Girard had returned to Kreenholm from Narva to hunt down protest leaders who were still at large. Operating from the presumed safety o f Kolbe's office, he began to order the detention of particular individuals, probably designated by Kolbe (who somehow came up with the figure ten). By midmorning the factory was abuzz with rumors o f actual and impending arrests. Even at the earliest stage of the conflict, it will be recalled, Kreenholm workers, weavers in particular, had displayed great sensitivity to any sign of danger that their delegates or spokesmen might be isolated and punished selectively. Now, having evidence for the first time that this was really happening, they lost no time in throwing off the inhibitions that two nights earlier had constrained them. Their first act was to reassert, but now more forcefully, their power to penetrate management's private space. At about 10:00 A.M. some two hundred weavers (including many of the elected delegates) left their machines and "burst into the [factory] office demanding the prisoners' release at the top of their lungs [i krikom].,,4li In the absence of Tamm and Preisman, the weavers were now led by two other Estonians, Kristjan Jurna and Hans Maikallo— both of whom were targeted for dismissal in the 9 September petition— who persuaded other weaver delegates, Russian as well as Estonian, to join the angry crowd. (Tamm's younger brother Maddis was also identified as a planner of this venture.) 49 At the office, in addition to the release o f prisoners, the crowd demanded that "informers" be delivered into its hands. When these demands were summarily rejected, the protesters showed that they were no longer as susceptible to verbal intimidation as they had been on Saturday. Although they left the office area, this time they departed to the brazen tune of a clear and powerful threat: if all prisoners were not released by noon, the weavers would not return to work; more ominous still, they would prevent other workers from 47. RD, 361. 48. Raport, RD, 361. In addition to the report of the investigating commission, protocols of interrogations, and various telegrams, my account of the events of 11-12 September draws on officialfindingsof the Estland Superior Court, 21 Oct. (hereafter cited as Prigovor), KS, 108-17 (Russian version). 49. For evidence of the importance of Jurna and Maikallo in the actions of 11 September (in both Narva and Kreenholm), see the testimony of the weaver delegates Konstantin Pirogovskii, Joosif Nem, and Alexander Riiutel (in Protokol, KS, 4 3 , 4 6 , 47).

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doing so. Girard wired Shakhovskoi: "Fear excesses today after lunch. Request instructions." 50 This time it really was war, with the defiant weavers—who returned to the office at noon to hear the expected news that the prisoners were still in custody—now prepared to use whatever force they could muster to besiege the enemy fortress. At 12:30 P.M., acting in the spirit of a military force though armed only with wooden cudgels and sticks, they occupied and blocked off the mainland side of the narrow bridge that connected the island with the river's western shore (the bridge that had collapsed three years earlier). Workers who attempted to return to the island from lunch were forcibly prevented from doing so. Some, like the weaver Vasilii Kirillov (originally a delegate), simply returned home when they saw the stick-swinging crowd barring the route. Others, like the spinner Fedot Semenov (now committed to the administration), managed somehow to break through and get to work. Still others, like the weaver Vasilii Matveev (also a delegate) and forty-seven of his coworkers, having remained in their workshops during the lunch hour, were able to stay there for the rest o f the day.51 Excerpts from a summary of interviews of Kreenholm weavers convey a sense o f the fearsome atmosphere attending the blockade of the bridge at the end o f the lunch hour: "After lunch [Anton Mikhailov] was afraid to go to work, fearing his comrades; sent his wife to work but went home himself." "After lunch [Levon Dement'ev] didn't go to work because he saw how people were crowding near the bridge." "Because of the crowd . . . [Dmitrii Egorov] was unable to force his way to the factory." "Having set out for the factory after lunch, [Aleksei Nosov] was held up near the bridge by the crowd." "[Mikhail Pavlov] headed to work after lunch, but the crowd of people near the bridge didn't let him through; they waved their caps and shouted that workers should turn back, so he went back to his barracks." "People gathered in a crowd, so [Nikolai Vasil'ev] went home." "[Platon Eduardov] worked until lunch, but after lunch the crowd wouldn't let him get back to the factory—stood at the back [of the crowd] undl three o'clock, when he went home, [while] people made noise and yelled." "[Konstantin Pirogovskii] started off to work after lunch but saw people near the bridge yelling and fighting, so he went to the store." "[Alexander Ruiitel] worked until lunch—after lunch could not go the factory because people kept him from getting 50. KS, 29. 51. Testimony in Protokol, KS, 38 (Kirillov), 35 (Semenov), 3 9 - 4 0 (Matveev).

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through." "[Maddis Treuberg] wanted to go back to factory together with his sisters but was prevented by a crowd." "[Joosif Nem] was late after lunch because of illness of his child, and when he saw a crowd near the gate he went back home." 52 Of course, some of this testimony may have been self-serving. As delegates, the witnesses risked facing serious charges unless they showed they had no choice but to stay away from work. Some even admitted that they had joined a militant march to Narva after their effort to cross the bridge was thwarted. But most of this testimony came from Russians, the less aggressive of the weavers, and each of the witnesses had a story sufficiently individualized to suggest that no clear party line had been contrived for the inquiry. The situation was plainly volatile, and workers were making choices on the spot, according to their particular circumstances. Whatever the precise combination of coercion, intimidation, and voluntary compliance, the most bellicose workers had clearly gained control of pedestrian access to the factory from the western shore. While Kolbe and Girard tried in vain to steer the militants from their course, their numbers continued to swell and their actions grew more aggressive. Soon there were several different groups, estimated at two hundred each, distributed both on the shore and on the bridge (perhaps a sign of some tactical planning). One large group of workers converged on Kolbe's home, located on the Cramer property, where some of them menacingly brandished birch rods, the device once used to punish wayward workers. Another group (Gerasimov among them) prepared to march to Narva with the goal of freeing Preisman and the others. Girard made the foolish mistake of trying to arrest some demonstrators without sufficient force behind him. Several arrests were made, but the net result was simply to generate more rage. Sometime in the early afternoon a large throng of "unruly" workers led by Jurna and Maikallo—by some accounts two hundred, by others several hundred strong—arrived in Narva.53 Accosting the city's mayorpolice chief, Bürgermeister Beck,54 they demanded the prisoners' release. Beck of course refused, threatening to use force if the crowd did not disperse immediately. After some debate most of the workers— 52. Protokol, KS, 3 9 - 4 3 , 4 5 - 4 6 (includes more examples of this kind). 53. "Unruly" (buinaia) was the term used by the judges in Prigovor, KS, 112. Although Shakhovskoi's official report placed the size of the crowd at two hundred (RD, 336), the original draft preserved in the archive of the governor's office says three hundred (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 283). 54. In some versions they went to the Narva city magistrate (Magistrat). They may have done both.

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unaware that Tamm had managed to throw a note from his prison window urging them on 5 5 —returned to Kreenholm to rejoin the batde, while a small group headed by Jurna and Maikallo made its way to the Narva telegraph station to wire Shakhovskoi. As the content of their wire reveals, even at this tense moment the protesters were not prepared to renounce their belief in the governor's goodwill, an act that would have amounted to acknowledgment of their total isolation: Jakub Tamm and Willem Preisman, elders of the Kreenholm factory [who were] elected in your excellency's presence, have been arrested because, under instruction from the community [ obshcbestvo, the collective body of Kreenholm workers], they wished to go to you. We ask you either to dispatch an official [ chinovnik] or have the kindness to come here yourself to investigate [ razobrat'\ the case on the spot. 56

Though the message was incorrect in its claim that Tamm and Preisman were elected to the post of elder in the governor's presence, the error simply underlines the degree to which the strikers conflated the new practice of electing delegates with the older one of electing elders. But what is particularly striking about the telegram's language is that—for different reasons, to be sure—it was making precisely the same point, using almost exactly the same language, that Kolbe had made in his wire to Shakhovskoi the previous day: because delegate-leaders of the weavers had been elected in the governor's presence, they were his responsibility—to free in the one case, to punish in the other. The war of words, of mirror-image pleas to Shakhovskoi to support one side or the other, was still proceeding even as the war of sticks and stones began to expand. But the war of words was reaching its limit. Even before the workers' plea to Shakhovskoi to intervene on their behalf, Girard had wired him for authorization to initiate criminal proceedings against the prisoners for acts of "incitement." Backing Kolbe to the hilt, Girard even echoed Kolbe's fiction that loyal workers, acting on their own, had initiated the 9 September petition. 57 Shakhovskoi in turn was now prepared to yield to the wishes of Girard (whose courageous conduct he respected) and, by extension, Kolbe. Not yet aware of the full extent of the escalating violence at Kreenholm, he wired a response to Girard that made no 55. Prigovor, KS, 109, 114. Tamm's note was found by the authorites before it could be discovered by the strikers. 56. Jurna and Maikallo to Shakhovskoi, 11 Sept., KS, 2 5 - 2 6 . The telegram was in Russian. 57. Girard to Shakhovskoi, 11 Sept., KS, 28.

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pretense to ambivalence: "Am in full accord and grateful for [your] sound and energetic actions. Institute criminal proceedings against these people for incitement [to riot]. Do not release prisoners until further notice from me. Send me record of criminal investigation right away." 58 A little later in the day, having heard by now from Girard that the weavers were growing bolder (but still, it seems, before any news of the stone throwing), Shakhovskoi took the further step of assigning a special guard to the six "instigators"—his vocabulary was now almost indistinguishable from Kolbe's or Girard's—and wiring Andreianov (copy to Girard): "Provide full assistance to Hakenrichter Baron Girard. Take all possible measures to prevent prisoners' escape." More ominous still, he authorized Girard, "should the situation get extremely urgent" (v krainem sluchae), to call on Colonel Reinwald, commander of the army's 94th Infantry Regiment (the "Enisei" Regiment), billeted in Narva, for assistance.59 As the situation at Kreenholm worsened, Girard was more than ready to take up the offer of military aid. 60 By now he was completely incapable of preventing the workers gathered on the Estland shore from hurling rocks at Kolbe's home, at Julius Andrée (Kolbe's deputy administrator), and even at Andreianov and his tiny team of gendarmes, now on the scene. The combination of Girard's arrest of demonstrators at the bridge and the return of the crowd from Narva with word of their failure had raised the ire of many workers, who in early evening shattered the windows of a building where some prisoners were held, smashed down the doors, and set them free. In Gerasimov's inflated language, workers had become "so deeply enraged that, in a blind fury, we began to smash everything that crossed our path" (32). Numbering close to one thousand, the largest figure mentioned for that day in official sources, 61 they raised some kind of banner (not described, but possibly religious) on a pole and systematically deployed themselves along the field near Kolbe's residence. Having accumulated a large supply of stones, they advanced 58. Ibid., 28-29. 59. Ibid., 29 (includes the text of the telegram to Andreianov). See also KS, 90. For evidence of Shakhovskoi's high regard for Girard's professional conduct, see TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 2 3 4 - 3 5 . 60. Telegram from Girard to Shakhovskoi, 11 Sept., KS, 30. Girard tried to give the impression he was in greater control of the situation than he was—for example, that he had managed to clear the bridge, allowing several hundred workers to get to work. N o other source confirms his claim. 61. Raport, RD, 362. Even Girard admitted to "about 7 0 0 " (wire to Shakhovskoi, 11 Sept., KS, 30). Gerasimov's figures, which add up to twelve thousand (32), cannot be taken seriously; this was double the number of workers employed at the factory.

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directly on the house and surrounded not only it, but also the powerless, terrified (and ailing) Hakenrichter, who had just rushed up to Kolbe's place with the welcome news that troops were on the way.62 Girard himself had been felled by a rock, which struck him on the forehead as he tried in vain to quiet the crowd, hoping to keep it at bay until the troops arrived. The injury was not serious, however, and he quickly recovered. Having literally felt the ferocity of the crowd, he then took refuge with Kolbe in the besieged building, where they anxiously awaited their rescuers. The soldiers, only at half-battalion strength (220 to 300 men—not, as Gerasimov would have it, an "entire regiment"), arrived as night was falling, none too soon for Kolbe or Girard. "We prepared to defend ourselves," writes Gerasimov (32), but, confronted for the first time with the unfamiliar reality of military force, the rebels, though some threw rocks at the troops, were not prepared to risk a bloody clash. When the regimental commander ordered his men to charge, this alone sufficed to scatter the crowd without a shot being fired. The workers hastily retreated in various directions, while Colonel Reinwald stationed patrols at strategic points. "Now," as the Hakenrichter put it with a sigh of relief, "thanks to the stationing of the troops, there are no [more] excesses." Then, in the not quite ironic words of the investigating commission, "the night passed peacefully." 63

The Last Battle—12 September If "the night passed peacefully," it was partly because workers were quietly busying themselves with the planning of a new assault come morning. Far from feeling cowed or subdued, they had taken the measure of the force that confronted them and, probably suspecting the colonel's reluctance to use his firepower, become confident—perhaps overconfident—of their ability to pursue the strike and face the soldiers down. A decade later it was still Gerasimov's belief that the unit had received no authorization to shoot, a view, as we shall see, 62. Gerasimov's recollection (32) that workers broke some windows of the house is confirmed by the procurator's report (RD, 344), but I know of no evidence corroborating his claim that they "busted up the furniture" (much as they may have wanted to). According to two eyewitnesses, some of the stone throwing was the work of young boys (Protokol, KS, 40, 45), but we have no reason to doubt that most was done by adults. 63. KS, 30; Raport, RD, 362.

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that was close to the truth, and was certainly consistent with the soldiers' restrained behavior in the face of provocation by stone throwers. The new day dawned with a series of skirmishes between groups of rock-wielding workers (still mainly weavers) and badly outnumbered army patrols that barely had the strength to protect the workers (mainly spinners) who wished to cross the bridge, let alone to force the militants back to work. 64 After some hesitation, by 7:00 A.M. Reinwald managed to clear the bridge of demonstrators, but not without provoking a hail of rocks from the retreating crowd. Though no one was seriously injured, in some instances the missiles hit their marks, striking several officers, enlisted men, and even Kolbe (now a preferred target). If Gerasimov can be believed, workers even got away with breaking some of the soldiers' guns. Nikolai Bogdanov, Gerasimov's comrade and fellow ward of the Petersburg Foundling Home, managed to punch a sentry in the face. 65 Unpunished acts of this kind could only embolden the heady demonstrators and contribute to the swelling of their ranks. Meanwhile, operations at the factory remained at a virtual standstill even after the bridge was cleared. By 10:00 A.M. those workers who were on the job were sent home by their overseers; by lunchtime the plant was effectively closed. 66 Although there was soon a temporary lull in the action—or in any case a suspension of the rock throwing—Colonel Reinwald, fearing a resumption of hostilities after dark, wired to Reval for reinforcements. With so few men at his disposal, he warned, and facing a hostile force of six thousand (the figures six and seven thousand, more than the full complement of Kreenholm workers, were now being used interchangeably), he was unable to answer for the security of the area. At about the same time a panicky Hakenrichter was again sending chilling messages to Shakhovskoi: there were "new huge mobs" (krupnye sborishcha); 64. For statements by workers who testified that they were forcibly prevented from crossing the bridge to the factory on the morning of 12 September (including two who claimed their wives had talked them out of taking the risk), see KS, 38, 4 0 - 4 1 , 42, 43, 44, 4 5 - 4 6 . 65. KS, 91, 109, 115; Gerasimov, Zhizn'(1923), 33. (Bogdanov may have hit the soldier on the previous day.) It should be noted that, as is often the case at times of riot or other turmoil, accounts of the day's events differed in their reporting of detail as to the degree of violence and injury. In this case the range varied from no injuries at all (clearly wrong) to reports of the injury of several soldiers and officers. There were no fatalities. 66. Testimony of weavers who worked all or part of the morning: Levon Dement'ev, was sent home by his supervisor at 10:00 A.M.; Trofim Shutenko, claimed that the people in his shop left for home at breakfast time (Frühstück)-, Tennis Jurgenson, stopped work at 10:00 A.M.; Tennis Kolts and Joosif Nem, worked until lunch hour, when the factory completely shut down (Protokol, KS, 39, 41, 44, 46).

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people were refusing to work, still demanding the release of prisoners; Reinwald feared he had too few troops for "decisive action"; Reinwald feared he would have to open fire but "doesn't expect much good to come of it." Raising the ante, and not without reason, Girard now described the strikers as "mutineers" or "rebels" (miatezhniki), his first recorded use of a word that, unlike the similar but more amorphous buntovshchiki (used, for example, in the September petition), 67 suggested a purposeful resistance to constituted authority beyond simple rioting. "The rebels," he told Shakhovskoi, "very much desire Your Excellency's presence." 68 By now, so did Girard. Faced with all this alarming news, and aware that his presence was urgently desired by all parties, including militant workers (a workers' delegation had finally met with him that morning), Shakhovskoi at last was ready to leave Reval and, for the first time since 21 August, to make his presence felt at Kreenholm. He wired Girard that he was arriving on the morning train {Morgmzug)f9 and, hoping to avoid bloodshed, he wired Reinwald an appeal (in effect an order) " n o t to fire before I arrive," while reassuring him that he was asking the commander of the 95 th "Krasnoiarsk" Infantry Regiment in Iamburg, Colonel Zass, to hasten to Narva with his men. He arranged for the reinforcements to travel to Narva by rail. 70 Shakhovskoi's wires to Zass and others reveal the gravity with which he viewed the situation, which (though he still used the word riot [bunt] rather than switching to Girard's new political idiom) he now depicted as a dangerous upheaval with thousands of participants. To Zass: "Request you go to Narva with Krasnoiarsk Regiment to give me help suppressing riot. Enisei Regiment is . . . not enough. Am leaving now [shortly before noon] for Narva and await your arrival with impatience." And to his own superior in St. Petersburg, Minister of Internal Affairs Timashev: "Order disintegrated at Kreenholm factory— big disturbance among 7,000 workers. Informed by telegram that rioting [buntuiushcbie] weavers broke windows with rocks, wounded Hakenrichter in head with rock, he asked help from troops. Am going 67. See the brief comment on the word bunt (the root of buntovshchik) in Daniel R. Brower, "Labor Violence in Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century," Slavic Review 41, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 423n. 68. ICS, 32; see also RD, 337. 69. TsGiA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 104. 70. KS, 32; RD, 337. The calling in of the Krasnoiarsk regiment was urged on Shakhovskoi by Girard.

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there now." 7 1 Thus, while still urging caution in the use of firepower, by this time Shakhovskoi was prepared to treat the "big disturbance"—by which, it should be noted, he meant concrete acts of violence rather than the work stoppage as such—as a revolt against state power, and he reluctantly set the stage to suppress it bloodily should that extreme prove necessary. It did not. The arrival at 6:00 P.M. of the Krasnoiarsk Regiment, at full regimental strength (over 1,700 men), 72 was sufficiently intimidating to break the workers' will. Under the direction of Shakhovskoi, who arrived around the same time, the soldiers forced most of the "rebels" back to the barracks, where they were confined under house arrest. (Shakhovskoi later bragged to his superiors that they obediendy dispersed to the barracks in direct response to his order, a claim repeated in no other source.) 73 All barrack courtyards and other key areas of the factory were occupied by Krasnoiarsk troops and saturated with armed guards, while the Enisei troops returned to Narva to arrest any strikers found wandering the streets and deter any efforts to free the prisoners. Not a single shot had been fired. By the next morning, having heard from Shakhovskoi by telegram, the Third Section could reassure a worried tsar that calm had been restored. "Calm," however, meant not that factory life was back to normal but that factory buildings were occupied militarily and all operations in the shops were suspended by order of the owners. 74 In the words of the investigating commission, such was "the fateful way in which the struggle between the workers and the factory directors came to an end." 7 5 For the moment the territory of Kreenholm belonged to neither workers nor managers, but to the imperial state. The tsar's personal response to the situation, laconic but apprehensive, was inscribed by hand on the Third Section's report: "Measures must be taken so that disorders do not resume." 7 6 71. Shakhovskoi to Zass and to Timashev, both 12 Sept., KS, 33. See also Shakhovskoi's panicky wire to Levashev of the same date, TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 103. 72. This would explain Gerasimov's mistaken reference to an "entire regiment" (32), though it is clear he was referring to the time before the arrival of the 95th. 73. RD, 337. 74. Third Section report to Alexander II, 13 Sept., RD, 329. 75. Raport, RD, 362. 76. RD, 329.

FOUR

Order and Law The notion of the regulation and reconciliation of conflicts through the rule of law . . . seems to me a cultural achievement of universal significance. . . . The rule of law itself, the imposing of effective inhibitions upon power and the defence of the citizen from power's all-inclusive claims, seems to me to be an unqualified human good. E. P. Thompson (British Marxist), Whigs and Hunters Gde rabochemu znat' zakony? Vpered!, 1875 1 Request you send my secretary... on the evening train. Request he bring laws on conducting of interrogations and investigations. Kindly indicate what [laws] we must follow. Wire from Shakhovskoi to Vice Governor Polivanov, Narva, 13 September 1872 1. The context is a report from St. Petersburg that police have been searching through the personal effects of factory workers without any regard for appropriate legal procedures. The sense of the quote, then, is: "Small wonder that the worker has no respect for the law!" The anonymous author concludes with the exclamation: " O h , you defenders of the law! oh, you rotten legalists!" See " C h t o delaetsia na rodine?" Vpered! no. 10 (1 June [20 May] 1875), col. 301. 118

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Restoring Order

On Wednesday morning, 13 September 1872, described by Gerasimov as the conflict's "third day" (33), the governor began to conduct a vigorous inquiry into its causes. Over a three-day period dozens of workers, some suspected of having played a leading part, others thought to be valuable eyewitnesses, were interrogated in the presence o f various officials, including Shakhovskoi, Colonel Birin, Major Andreianov, and Acting Hakenrichter Girard.2 Despite the governor's willingness to use the army to rescue the administration, however, factory officials, presumably because ffc'rconduct, like the workers', was under suspicion, were excluded from a role in the proceedings. That is, though not treated by Shakhovskoi as full-fledged candidates for criminal prosecution, neither were they accorded the privileged status o f authority figures, a decision that betrayed the tension between them and the governor. In addition to the investigation, Shakhovskoi took more obvious steps to regain control of the situation and prepare the factory to return to "normal." On 12 September soldiers had arrested or rearrested several "instigators" (now specifically defined by the Third Section as workers who prevented others from going to work), 3 a move that, if we add the prisoners already in Narva (hereafter "the Narva Six") and the twenty-two arrested in the course o f the investigation, saddled the authorities with a substantial group of prisoners. Arrests continued through Friday the 15th, and though we lack precise numbers (Gerasimov came up with sixty-three), we do know that at Shakhovskoi's request company funds were provided for the acquisition o f a special facility in Narva large enough to accommodate all the prisoners.4 Whatever the figure, by 14 September the arrests and the military presence gave Shakhovskoi sufficient confidence to wire his office in Reval that order was "fully restored": "Yesterday and today no more violence by 2 . Protokol, KS, 3 4 ; Shakhovskoi's undated m e m o to Levashev (ca. 2 3 Sept.), RD, 3 3 8 ; Gdovsko-iamburgskii

listok, no. 3 7 ( 1 9 Sept.), 8. In addition to the interrogations at

Kreenholm, on the night o f 1 2 - 1 3 September (until 2 : 0 0 A.M.!) Shakhovskoi personally interrogated the prisoners held in the Narva jail (ibid.). According to Shakhovskoi, Girard played an active and positive role in conducting the interrogations and assembling the protocols (TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2 , d. 560,11. 2 3 4 - 3 5 ) . Unless otherwise indicated, all dates in my notes continue to refer t o the year 1 8 7 2 . 3. Third Section report t o Alexander II, 1 3 Sept., RD,

329.

4 . Beck to Shakhovskoi and Shakhovskoi to Kolbe, both 1 8 Sept., KS, 4 9 .

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workers, and they have generally manifested complete submission and obedience." 5 But "order" meant more than the absence ofviolence. It also entailed a return to normal operations, a goal that could not be attained by military means alone. For reasons never explained, Shakhovskoi decided early on to make full resumption of a normal work routine one of his priorities, a decision that left him with little choice but to identify in some measure with the plans of management, even while seeking to convince workers that the promises of August still held. Thus, it was with evident if premature delight that he informed his Reval office (in the message just cited) that the company was about to "permit" spinners to return to work. Although little had been settled regarding the earlier disputes, he wanted management to reopen the spinning section as early as 15 September. Only the mood of the carders, the most contentious workers in that otherwise less than militant section, dissuaded management from pursuing that course. 6 The following day was Kreenholm's monthly payday. Shakhovskoi was particularly apprehensive about that day, apparently viewing the day as a test of the factory's ability to function normally. After all, this was to be the first attempt at a routine payday since the August accords had promised to change the method of assessing pay rates, deductions, and fines. Because the payments would encompass the time of the August unrest (paydays covered the last calendar month, thus excluding the tumultuous September days), thorny questions were sure to arise about deductions for lost time. In addition, the payday fell just days after the peak period of conflict, and tempers were frayed by provocative acts such as the removal of many weavers from the payroll pending completion of the investigation. One can imagine Shakhovskoi's relief, therefore, when the day went by without serious incident, a triumph he was quick to attribute to the continued presence of armed forces. 7 He might also have added that some of the workers' most spirited leaders were now in jail. It is revealing that Shakhovskoi's wire to Reval, while sanguine about resumption of work by the spinners, made no prediction about the weavers, whose cooperation was more in doubt. Having anxiously sur5. ICS, 48. T o assure the world that the worst was over, Shakhovskoi had the full text of his comforting message published in the official newspaper, Estliandskie gubernskie vedomosti. A handwritten version is in TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 127. 6. Shakhovskoi's undated memo to Levashev, RD, 338. 7. Ibid.

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vived the perils of payday, Shakhovskoi now riveted his attention on the start of a new workweek, when full operations were slated to resume— after which, if all went well, the Krasnoiarsk Regiment would return to Iamburg. (The Enisei troops were already back in Narva.) Perhaps to his surprise, the resumption of work, even by weavers, proceeded relatively well, and by Tuesday most workers were back on the job. 8 But this very success now mandated the troops' departure, a source of great anxiety for an already nervous governor who believed, and not without reason, that absent the timely arrival of soldiers, the disorders "would inevitably have assumed much larger proportions." 9 Fearful of what he would later call " t o o sudden a transition" from a strong military presence to the absence of government forces, 10 and pressed by Kolbe for more police, Shakhovskoi had sought new ways to shore up his position as guarantor of order. In anticipation of the troops' departure he turned to General F. F. Trepov, the prominent and influential chief of St. Petersburg municipal police (whose jurisdiction was normally confined to the capital and its suburbs), with a request for additional manpower. Mindful no doubt of Kreenholm's proximity to Petersburg by rail, Trepov readily complied. On 18 September he ordered a member of his staff, Vasilii Olenin, to Kreenholm with a detachment of four men. Shakhovskoi quickly invested Olenin with the tide of police chief, effectively usurping what little was left of the authority of Factory Police Chief Focht, a man he now held in contempt. Yet even the comforting presence of Olenin failed to prevent the governor from alerting St. Petersburg to the possibility of new disorders. 11 Whatever his misgivings, after assuring himself that full operations had resumed at the factory, Shakhovskoi ordered the withdrawal of troops and prepared to return to Reval. Before departing he issued a copious series of cautionary orders: Olenin must obey his instructions " t o the letter" (v tochnosti)—perhaps a sign of his fear that Kolbe would court Olenin's favor—and send him daily reports about "order" at the fac8. Ibid., 339; TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 431, 433. 9. Shakhovskoi to F. A. Opol'skii (local manager of the Baltic Railroad Co.), 23 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 165. 10. Shakhovskoi to MVD, 20 Sept., KS, 58. 11. Trepov to Shakhovskoi, 18 Sept., KS, 50; Shakhovskoi to MVD, 19 Sept., RD, 332; Shakhovskoi to Trepov, 21 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 11. 141-42. Kolbe's role in requesting the police is clear from Shakhovskoi to Kolbe, 19 Sept., ibid., 1. 131. None of these documents alludes direcdy to Kreenholm's proximity to the capital (by rail), but the point was emphasized by Shakhovskoi in a letter to the minister of the Imperial Court dated 30 Sept. (ibid., 1. 234). On the geographic borders of Trepov's authority and related matters, see Zelnik, Labor and Society, 3 6 4 - 6 7 .

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tory. 12 A new Hakenrichter district was to be carved out of the old one, whose seat was much too far from Kreenholm. (The new one, centered in Narva, would embrace only a small area around Narva and Kreenholm and deal almost exclusively with problems at the factory.) The troops in Narva must stay on alert in case of renewed unrest. Shakhovskoi also proposed that the Third Section turn Kreenholm into a permanent station (zhandarmskii punkt), manned by noncommissioned officers. Only when all these changes were in place, he told his superiors, "could police supervision o f the factory be considered adequate." 1 3 Shakhovskoi had ample reason to remain on edge. I f the recent payday had passed without incident thanks to the visible presence o f soldiers, the next full payday, 15 October, would take place in their absence. Once again the question of fines and pay rates, issues at the heart o f the conflict, would be on the table, but with only a token military presence. Under these circumstances, Shakhovskoi believed, " a recurrence of disorders" was "inescapable" ( neizbezhno), and this time " o n a larger scale." 1 4 He may even have anticipated an earlier showdown, since a special partial payday for some o f the unpaid weavers was scheduled for 23 September. 15 Shakhovskoi's dark mood was reinforced by reports from Andreianov and Olenin. In a message dated 21 September Andreianov, relying mainly on information from Julius Andrée (now the "hands-on" factory manager, but still under the sway of Kolbe, who retained the tide of manager until 25 September), provided him with a detailed account of some inventive new modes of defiance that workers had begun to deploy since the soldiers' withdrawal.16 Some workers were displaying open if prudendy conveyed disrespect for Andrée and his aide. When walking past a manager they no longer doffed their caps as a token o f deference, as had been their wont; instead, in a thinly veiled gesture o f disdain, they lightly raised the peaks of their caps while expressing "ill will" ( nedobrozhelatel'stvo) by their grimaces. 12. Shakhovskoi to Olenin, 19 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 132. 13. Shakhovskoi to Timashev, Pahlen, and Levashev, 19 Sept., KS, 55; Shakhovskoi to Reinwald, 20 Sept., KS, 56; Shakhovskoi to MVD, 19 and 20 Sept., RD, 332-34, and KS, 58 (source of the last quote). See also TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 137-38. 14. KS, 58-59. 15. Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 22 Sept., KS, 64. 16. Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 21 Sept., KS, 61. Evidence that Kolbe was still in charge includes Shakhovskoi's continued dealings with him on important matters such as the payment ofOlenin's men (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 131). I use the spelling of "Andrée" found in most of the German documents, though it occasionally appears there as "André," e.g., in ibid., d. 562, 1. 100.

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At times their conduct was more openly aggressive, even violent. Late in the afternoon of 19 September (shortly after the troops departed), in what easily passes for a scene in Germinal, several workers armed with sticks menacingly chased the "Peltzer girls" (two daughters of Napoleon Peltzer, manager of the Stieglitz factory), who had just made a social call on Andrée's wife. According to Andreianov, the girls were forced to scurry back to Andrée's home for refuge, and Peltzer had to send a carriage manned by factory guards to assure them safe passage home. In yet another incident, Frau Andrée herself nearly fell victim to a hail of stones hurled by factory children, 17 and on the same day one of Andrée's servants was thrown into a pit by workers when she went down to the river to fetch a pail of water. Despite the presence of Trepov's crack police (for whom Kolbe and Andrée by now had little use), none of the perpetrators of these "moral excesses" (beschinstva), as Andreianov called them, was apprehended. Olenin had been on the job barely a day when, in the first of his daily reports, he too was casting doubt on the prospect for stability. Although things "looked good" ( blagopoluchno) for the moment, he wrote, and everyone was back at work, the provincial procurator had warned him of the workers' "extreme agitation" and raised the specter of renewed unrest. To avert such an outcome, Olenin now introduced a new security plan, keeping factory barracks and (especially) local taverns—places where "workers can congregate"—under close observation and warning innkeepers that he would close any tavern that permitted workers to meet. 18 Hearing of these precautionary measures, Shakhovskoi, in a rare display of esprit de système, added a suggestion that Olenin divide the factory grounds, both the island and the shoreland, into four equal districts ( uchastki ), each under the aegis of one of his men, who would report to Olenin on the state of his quadrant every morning and evening and at times of emergency.19 The new security plan did little to stabilize a shaky situation. By the time of his daily report of 22 September Olenin was informing Shakhovskoi of some "alarming" rumors, including a new work stoppage 17. At first Andrée told Olenin that a stone had struck his wife on the shoulder (Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 21 Sept., ibid., d. 560, 1. 155), but Andreianov's investigation concluded that the stones had missed her (KS, 61 ). It is likely that Andrée was deliberately exaggerating. 18. Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 20 Sept., KS, 59. Olenin may have absorbed his view of the tavern as a dangerous gathering place for workers from his chief, General Trepov; see Zelnik, Labor and Society, 266-67. 19. Shakhovskoi to Olenin, 21 Sept., KS, 60.

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planned by weavers after the payments on the 23rd. Andrée was in a state of extreme agitation, Olenin reported, repeating the tale of the attack on the servant, and even expected the paymaster's office to be plundered. Whereas Andreianov upset Shakhovskoi with stories of rudeness to managers on the streets, Olenin prodded him with stories of defiance in the workshops, where workers expressed contempt for foremen by giving "specious" (blagovidnye) reasons for not participating in the inspection of machines. Far from exceptional, Olenin said, such behavior was exhibited by "almost everyone." 20 Fearing the worst, Olenin pondered his course of action. " I ask myself the question," he wrote in the same report, inviting the governor's counsel as he agonized, "if the disorders resume, and if, after my appeals and attempts at persuasion, the workers won't go back to work, should I compel them with force, i.e., call in the army?" 21 Even before submitting the report he asked Colonel Reinwald to prepare his troops. Unsettled by these accounts, Shakhovskoi took some new precautions. Because of the absence of the ailing Girard, the only Hakenrichter he trusted, he contacted the Ritterschaftshauptmann (marshal of nobility) of Estland, Baron Eduard von Maydell-Pastfer, with whom he enjoyed good relations, warning him to expect "serious disorders," bigger even than the last ones. A new Hakenrichter, Baron Alexander von Arpshowen (Arpsgofen), was named. 22 And Shakhovskoi again turned to Trepov for assistance. Already alerted to the gravity of the situation by his man Olenin, Trepov had recently come up with a plan that was quickly welcomed by both Olenin (who now spoke of an "extreme emergency") and Shakhovskoi: he would send two of his Estonian-speaking Petersburg policemen to augment Olenin's staff. Displaying what seems like excessive zeal, Trepov dispatched them even before receiving Shakhovskoi's official request, at the same time expressing readiness to provide even more help: "Immediately upon receiving word I will fulfill all your wishes in this regard with special pleasure." The Estonians arrived on 25 Sep20. Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 2 2 Sept., KS, 64. Olenin had also alerted Andreianov and the procurator to this alarming situation ( KS, 65). O n 2 2 September Shakhovskoi should have been happily celebrating his thirty-sixth birthday (birth date from Nicholas Ikonnikov, La Noblesse de Russie, 2d éd., vol. B-2 [Paris, 1957], 520). 21. KS, 65. 22. Shakhovskoi to Maydell, 2 2 and 2 3 Sept., KS, 6 5 , 66; Shakhovskoi to Jarva station master, 2 3 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 5 6 0 , 1. 161. Shakhovskoi's good relations with Maydell are noted in Wrangell and Krusenstjern, Estlandische Ritterschaft, 114.

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tember (at 2:00 A.M.), as did two more petty officers, including an Estonian speaker, from Andreianov's gendarme command. 23 Yet despite his growing alarm, Shakhovskoi did not wish to revert posthaste to military solutions. Instead he resumed a cautious mode, again displaying his inclination to distinguish between an overt act of violence and a simple refusal to work. On 23 September, the partial payday when he anticipated new troubles, he cautioned Olenin that military force should "absolutely not" (otniud' ne) be used to compel anyone to work. Military assistance could of course be requested, but only in the event of "acts of violence" or "manifest danger to property or persons." 24 In short, though committed to the resumption of operations, and while shunning the term strike, Shakhovskoi was implicitly conceding the legitimacy of a work stoppage as long as workers eschewed the use of force. Insofar as there was no serious incident on the 23rd, 25 Shakhovskoi's restraint was vindicated. Two days later, even in the wake of a potentially inflammatory incident—the arrest of some newly discovered participants in the earlier unrest—Olenin, bolstered by the presence of the Estonianspeaking police, was able to describe the situation as "peaceful." But it was not so peaceful as to dissuade Shakhovskoi from accepting Trepov's offer of more men or from wiring him for a more senior officer to take charge of the expanded unit. The ever eager Trepov promptly complied, and on the 27th a new police chief, St. Petersburg Detective Lieutenant Dmitrii Katarskii, arrived in the company of twelve more men. Katarskii retained Olenin as his deputy and kept his system of quadrants, but, able now to assign four men per district, he subdivided each quadrant into two precincts (okolodki), while maintaining round-the-clock vigilance at strategic points, including access to the bridge, in eight-hour shifts.26 In its organization of policing, Kreenholm was starting to resemble St. 23. Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 21 and 2 5 Sept., KS, 6 0 , 74; Shakhovskoi to Trepov and to Olenin, 2 3 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 560,11. 156, 1 6 2 - 6 3 ; Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 2 7 Sept., ibid., 1. 231; Trepov to Shakhovskoi, 2 5 Sept., KS, 7 4 (the sentence quoted). 24. KS, 66. 25. O n 2 3 and 2 4 September Shakhovskoi received assurances from Narva (wires from both Hakenrichters and from a member of his own staff) that all was calm; on the 24th he relayed these messages to the Third Section and M V D (TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 560,11. 1 6 8 - 7 2 ) . A 2 3 September message from Olenin confirmed that payment of the weavers took place without disorders (1. 185), though some workers complained of underpayment (1. 184). 26. Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 25 Sept., KS, 74; Shakhovskoi to Trepov and Trepov to Shakhovskoi, both 2 6 Sept., KS, 75; Trepov to Shakhovskoi, 2 6 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f.

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Petersburg, leaving a frustrated factory administration with a much diminished policing role.

Restoring Equity

Almost from the very moment Shakhovskoi began to take steps to restore order he and his aides found themselves in combat with the factory managers, who regularly accused them of favoring workers. Because he shared the managers' goal of returning Kreenholm to a normal work routine, to some degree the governor was constrained to act in harmony with them; and because the managers lacked the power to police five thousand workers alone (as witness Kolbc's request for outside help), it was hard for them to confront the governor directly. Nevertheless, thanks in large part to their contrasting notions of fairness and equity, both Shakhovskoi and Kreenholm's managers found grounds for conflict in each new situation. Much of the tension was related to the mode of policing. Far from just a matter of expedience, Shakhovskoi's request to Trepov for a senior officer was intended to help him cope with Kreenholm's managers, who had become riled by a series of conflicts with Olenin's police. Beneath these conflicts, in turn, lay the larger issue of defining an evenhanded way for police to address the needs of the contending sides, an issue that inevitably led back to the original controversy over worker representation (or what I called the factory "constitution"). If our evidence about these matters is spotty, there are enough allusions to them in the sources to allow us to piece together the outlines. EXPENSES

Simply put, the first specific source of friction, and the easiest to resolve, was money. Who should cover the extraordinary expenses incurred by officials in their efforts to police the factory and keep arrested workers securely under guard? Notwithstanding the Russian government's zealous devotion to preserving order throughout the realm, Shakhovskoi pressed the company to assume a fair share of the 2 9 , op. 2, d. 5 6 0 , 1 . 2 3 2 ; Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 27, 2 8 , and 2 9 Sept., ibid., ii. 2 0 0 , 222, 228, 246.

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burden of keeping the peace on what might be called a "pay-as-yougo" basis. The owners dawdled, resisting these exactions when they could, but being in a sense victims of their self-image as sovereigns over their own domain, they were unable to withstand the pressure to contribute to their own security. As Petersburg police chief, Trepov did not intend to carry the salary costs of the men he loaned to another jurisdiction. He expected them to be paid locally—officers at the generous monthly rate of 200 rubles, ordinary policemen at the rate of 50. By the time there were eighteen policemen and two officers posted at the factory, this amounted to a tidy sum. As far as Shakhovskoi was concerned, the money would come not from his own budget but from the company's. 27 He also insisted—and was able to get Kolbe's agreement—that the company advance the mayor of Narva 500 rubles to defray the costs of renting and furnishing a jailhouse for arrested workers.28 Perhaps because the post of Hakenrichter was filled by a local German baron, the company was less reluctant to spend its money in support of a new office in Narva devoted to Kreenholm's security. It agreed to allocate 1,500 rubles a year to cover salaries and other expenses.29 In addition, the owners, claiming to be grateful to Shakhovskoi for having gone beyond the call of duty in providing a "happy outcome" to the conflict, presented him with a symbolic gift of 10,000 rubles, with half the sum earmarked for the adornment of churches ("without regard to creed") and construction of schools, and the other half set aside for aid to needy government employees.30 27. Trepov to Shakhovskoi, 18 Sept., KS, 50; Shakhovskoi to Kolbe and to Olenin, both 19 Sept., and to Trepov, 2 3 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 560,11. 131, 132, 162; Trepov to Shakhovskoi, ibid., 1. 2 3 2 ; Shakhovskoi to M V D , 2 0 Sept., KS, 58; Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 21 Sept., KS, 60; Shakhovskoi to factory administration and to Katarskii, both 2 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2 , d. 560,11. 3 0 8 , 309. St. Petersburg city already spent a huge percentage of its budget o n its police force, proportionately much more, for example, than Berlin. See Peterburg ves' na ladoni, s planom Peterburga, ego panoramoi s ptich'iajjo poleta, 22 kartinkami i s pribavleniem kalendaria, comp. V. Mikhnevich (St. Petersburg, 1874), 3 4 4 - 4 6 . 28. Shakhovskoi to Kolbe, 18 Sept., KS, 49. See also TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 560,1. 202. 29. Shakhovskoi to M V D , 2 0 Sept., KS, 58. Polivanov later mentioned an agreement to endow the Hakenrichter with 2 , 5 0 0 rubles yearly (KS, 186). 30. Kolbe to Shakhovskoi, no date (reprinted in Estliandskie¿ubernskie vedomosti, 21 Sept.), KS, 6 3 - 6 4 . KS?s editors (who call the gift an attempted bribe) say that Shakhovskoi's superiors, viewing personal use of the money by state employees as "awkward" (neudobno), later ruled that all the money would g o to churches and "mainly Orthodox" schools (KS, 64n).

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A much greater source of trouble was management's perception of the one-sided attitude of Shakhovskoi and the police in their relations with workers. As the days went by, Andrée, more and more the company's most visible, if not its most powerful, player in this "chess game" (Andrée's expression), 31 increasingly resented the alien presence of Olenin, Katarskii, and their men, and came close to blaming them and Shakhovskoi, under whose aegis they acted, for failing to prevent the workers' repeated acts of defiance. By the same token Shakhovskoi and his officers—Andreianov as well as Olenin and Katarskii—strongly objected to Andrée's continued mistreatment of "untrustworthy" workers and even of the policemen themselves. As early as 21 September, only two days after its arrival, Andrée was devising a scheme to replace Olenin's unit with a special corps of private guards, men he trusted who would answer direcdy to him. Andrée professed to be angry at Olenin for exacting personal favors—special foods and fine wines—from the company. More to the point, he was furious that Olenin, despite these favors (which may well have been initiated by Andrée), was on a friendly footing with certain workers, particularly Zakhar Sokolov, the weaver delegate Colonel Birin had interviewed in August, a man whom Andrée viewed, perhaps with reason, as "two-faced." 3 2 Beyond Olenin, Andrée was angry to the point of "sarcasm" at all officials involved in the investigation, but especially Shakhovskoi, whom he accused (though not in his presence) of undermining his authority by holding discussions with workers from which he—now the factory's chief executive—was excluded. The effect, Andrée charged, was to keep management in a "passive role." 3 3 If true (and it was), this meant that Shakhovskoi was again consulting with the elected delegates (except for those in jail), including some who were under criminal investigation. Such consultation was a powerful symbolic expression of his continued respect for the August accords. Andrée and Kolbe were also dismayed 31. Andrée used this figure of speech on 11 October in a tense conversation with Lieutenant Katarskii, discussed below: " . . . there is a chess game taking place between us" (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 406). 32. Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 21 Sept., KS, 61. 33. Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 20 Sept. (misdated in KS, 59, which also omits the relevant paragraph), TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 149 (reports Olenin's discussion with Andrée); Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 21 Sept., KS, 61 (reports Andreianov's discussion with Andrée). Note that Andrée was criticizing Shakhovskoi to the governor's junior officers.

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by the mildness o f the measures Shakhovskoi was taking against unruly or defiant workers, a worry that could only have been magnified when, to the delight of many workers, the otherwise "lenient" governor ordered the arrest of management's favorite, elder Sekka, still on the scene despite Kolbe's solemn promise to dismiss him. 34 In order to redress what he perceived as an imbalance, Kolbe, still a power behind the scenes, attempted to use his influence in St. Petersburg, his residence, to undermine the governor. 35 This was the first of a series of moments when the conflict between local elite authority (Kolbe) and the representative of central state authority (Shakhovskoi) was complicated by the possibility of the latter's being overruled by a still higher authority in St. Petersburg. Preferring tough administrative measures to the formal legal process favored by Shakhovskoi, 36 Kolbe now petitioned the Third Section to exile those workers who could not be prosecuted because they were in jail at the time o f the gravest infractions. 37 Exploiting a hostility to Shakhovskoi that had simmered among Estland's German nobles ever since his recent dismissal of the incompetent Baron Pilar from the post o f Hakenrichter, Kolbe even tried to belitde the governor in the eyes of the tsar. 38 Finally, in late September, without requesting the governor's authorization, Andrée began to fire workers he disliked or distrusted. These included some whose sole offense was to walk past him without a proper show of deference, as well as some elected delegates for whom there had been no previous grounds for arrest. He also fired some o f their wives and children, as well as women workers who complained o f harassment by elders. 39 In effect Andrée was saying that since government officials chose to accord workers equal status with management, indeed were treating them with unseemly courtesy, even favoritism, the company would again take discipline into its own hands. 34. Shakhovskoi to Katarskii, 29 Sept., KS, 7 9 - 8 0 ; Andreianov to Levashev, 30 Sept., RD, 341; Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 30 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 306. 35. On 24 September Olenin informed Shakhovskoi that Kolbe had just returned to Petersburg, having spent two days in Kreenholm (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1.189). Shakhovskii continued to monitor Kolbe's movements between St. Petersburg and Kreenholm; see his letter to Katarskii, 6 Oct., ibid., 1. 354. 36. Zhelekhovskii report to Justice Ministry, 4 Oct., RD, 3 4 7 - 4 8 . 37. See below, p. 153. 38. Zhelekhovskii report, RD, 348. For Shakhovskoi's short explanation of his dismissal of Pilar, see TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 234. 39. Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 25 Sept., KS, 74; Shakhovskoi to Baron Gustav Manteuffel (an official in his office), 28 Sept., KS, 78; Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 2 Oct., KS, 86; Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 6 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 368.

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Deeply disturbed by these wholesale firings, Shakhovskoi monitored them as best he could, ordering Katarskii to provide him with the names of fired workers and the attendant details.40 During Katarskii's first two weeks at the factory he supplied Shakhovskoi with at least four lists, which recorded the names of at least seventy-five workers fired between 25 September and 11 October. 41 On the first list, in a column headed "Reason for dismissal," he wrote only one reason for each name: "untrustworthy according to Andrée." On the next list, under the same heading, he entered a single word: "undeclared" ( neob"iavlena)\ and on the next, "without mutual agreement between the workers and the factory administration." On the list for 10-11 October the column was simply left blank. In another column noting objections registered by the fired worker, all but one line on the first list—that of a man who declared his dismissal was "without any basis"—were blank. However, on the list for 10-11 October, when Katarskii interviewed the fired workers in their barracks, that column contained these words, pertaining to all entries: "They [all] declared they were fired without explanation." 42 Further evidence of the firings' selective nature may be gleaned from the names. Matching the names on the lists with those of elected worker delegates, we find that three of the men on the first list and one on the last were nonindicted weaver delegates.43 Judging by their names, the fired workers were mainly Estonian 44 —a further indication that Andrée was pursuing the defiant ones. The frequent repetition of the same family name on a single day's list suggests that if a worker was deemed untrustworthy his family was also fired—including, in one case, a father and his four adult children.45 Finally, given the absence of any indication that women had taken part in September's physical clashes or in subsequent overt acts of defiance, the inclusion On the lists of some female names 40. TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 2 1 6 - 2 0 (1. 218 is Shakhovskoi's order to Katarskii to provide him with lists of names of fired workers). 41. Ibid., 11. 340 (list of seventeen names covering 25 Sept.-3 Oct.), 363 (list of twenty-one names, 3 - 5 Oct.), 397 (fourteen names, 5 Oct.), 408 (twenty-three names, 1 0 - 1 1 Oct.). I have not seen any lists for the period 6 - 9 October, and it is possible that firings ceased during those days. If not, and if they occurred at the same pace, the total fired for the full seventeen-day period would be about one hundred. 42. Ibid., 11. 408 (the list), 407 (Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 11 Oct.). 43. For names of delegates, see KS, 13-15; for indicted workers, KS, 108-12. 44. E.g., eleven Estonians and six Russians on the first list (four female); eighteen Estonians (two female) and five Russians (two female) on the 1 0 - 1 1 October list. 45. See TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 217. Of course, one cannot rule out the possibility that the father and four sons were all deemed "untrustworthy" on the basis of their individual conduct.

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is farther evidence that Andrée was acting on the basis of collective family guilt. Some of this evidence of the prejudicial nature of the firings is corroborated by Katarskii's daily reports, which also convey the harshness of the atmosphere and the hostility on all sides. On 5 October, for example, Katarskii reported Andrée's attempt to implicate him in the firings by gaining his acquiescence to the dismissal of an uncooperative worker. Katarskii rebuffed him, maintaining (in the spirit of Shakhovskoi) that he could approve such firings only if he observed a worker in the act of "disturbing the peace" ( n a r u s h e n i e tishiny i spokoistviia); somewhat obscurely, he suggested to Andrée that the company follow its own rules in such cases.46 Then, on 6 and 7 October, Katarskii reported more broadly that Andrée and paymaster Frey were using the threat of firing to coerce the cooperation of recalcitrant workers on certain matters (see "The Tariff," below). Such coercion included Frey's demand that they not converse with the policemen, whom he tried to set the workers against. Frey even went so far as to punch and fine some fired workers when they came for their pay.47 These stories illustrate the degree to which Katarskii's police were coming to be viewed by all sides as friends of the workers and enemies of management. On the one hand, a wary Andrée was beginning to rely on his own guards and worker informers (Katarskii called them "secret police") 48 as a counterweight to the outsiders. On the other hand, as Frey's effort to cut off contacts between workers and police suggests, beleaguered workers were turning to these outsiders for aid and comfort. Among other things, it was only the policemen's presence that was inhibiting management from reinstating its system of fines, suspended after the "disorders." As some workers told Katarskii, "While you're here . . . they do not fine us." 49 A dramatic expression of these tensions took place one day when a child worker was violently attacked by one of Andrée's guards. The thirteen-year-old boy, fired on the previous day, was on his way to the barrack quarters of his parents when he was intercepted by the guard, a farloughed soldier, who smacked him and hurled him roughly into a 46. Ibid., 1. 345. (This part of the document is excluded from KS, with an annotation by the editors [96n] that it pertains to some "petty disagreements" between Andrée and Katarskii.) 47. Ibid., 11. 3 6 1 - 6 2 , 368. 48. Ibid., 1. 362. 49. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 28 Sept., and Manteuffel to Shakhovskoi, 2 9 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 560,11. 2 4 1 , 240.

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ditch. At that moment two of Katarskii's men accosted the guard and accused him of misconduct, at which point another guard told them to mind their own business ("eto ne vashe delo"). Katarskii, furious at this defiance of his authority, had the guards arrested, charging one with cruelty (zhestokoe obrashchenie) to the boy, the other with interfering with the police.50 According to Katarskii, "All the workers . . . rejoiced when they learned of the guards' arrest." And, in defiance of Frey, workers continued to get along well with Katarskii's police, whom they trusted enough to call upon for advice in settling their own minor squabbles.51 This incident, combined with other reports of the abuse of children, including their dismissal and separation from their parents, 52 pushed Shakhovskoi to swifter action. On 7 October he ordered Hakenrichter Arpshowen to Kreenholm for an on-the-spot investigation of Andrée's conduct. More important, he ordered him to "stricdy forbid" further firings. Henceforth the dismissal of workers was to take place only with Arpshowen's authorization and (another challenge to managerial authority) the workers' "mutual agreement." To ensure that this rule was followed, Shakhovskoi ordered Katarskii to add to his future reports confirmation that such agreement had been obtained. 53 Despite these measures the firings continued, an indication of Andrée's defiant mood. Thus the mother and sister of the beaten boy, though "excellent workers" (Andrée's words), were fired simply because they were his relatives, and Andrée vowed to continue firing the families of fired minors. 54 Shakhovskoi, for his part, continued to assert his authority. On 8 October, politely but pointedly, he asked Andrée to send Frey to Reval for "face-to-face explanations" (lichnye ob"iasneniia), a 50. Katarskii t o Shakhovskoi, 6 O c t . , ibid., 1. 3 6 7 (the boy's n a m e also appears o n the list of fired workers o n 1. 3 9 7 ) ; see also Birin t o Third Section, 8 Oct., KS, 103. Some d o c u m e n t s give the boy's age as fourteen. 51. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 7 O c t . , T s G I A ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 5 6 0 , 1. 3 6 2 . 52. Ibid., 11. 3 6 2 , 3 6 7 - 6 8 , 371. 53. Ibid., 11. 3 6 6 , 371, 3 7 2 (all three d o c u m e n t s dated 7 Oct.). 54. Arpshowen t o Shakhovskoi, 8 O c t . , ibid., 1. 3 9 4 . For evidence that g r o u p firings c o n t i n u e d in O c t o b e r , see the exchanges between Katarskii and Shakhovskoi of 16, 18, 19, and 2 6 O c t o b e r and 1 N o v e m b e r , and lists of workers fired o n 1 6 - 1 8 , 2 4 , 2 6 - 2 8 , and 31 O c t o b e r , ibid., d. 561,11. 67, 6 8 , 7 6 , 7 7 - 7 8 , 135, 137, and d. 562,11. 3 - 5 , 7. F o r evidence of such firings in N o v e m b e r and D e c e m b e r , see ibid., 11. 3 9 , 56, 5 7 , 8 9 , 9 0 , 1 1 5 , 125, 166, 191, 197, 2 6 5 , 2 7 3 , 2 8 3 , 2 8 8 , 3 3 5 , 3 4 3 , 3 7 3 - 7 5 (an unusually long list of ninety-seven dismissed workers, swollen by the annual levy of military recruits in midDecember). T h e vast majority of those fired continued t o be Estonian males; judging by names, the practice of firing relatives was eventually curtailed, b u t the firing of former delegates charged with n o crimes continued.

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move that led to joyful rumors among the workers of Frey's arrest. 55 Next, on 9 October the governor took steps to ensure that excessive wages not be withheld for days missed during the unrest. 56 But Andrée gave no quarter, and even devised a counterstrategy to confound his adversary. Andrée's moves in this ongoing chess game were both clever and bold. When challenged by Arpshowen about the "arbitrary" firings, he admitted that some were prompted by his wish to be rid of "lawless [ nedozvolennye] elements," but he said this was true of only eighteen of the workers fired (who at that time totaled approximately fifty-two). The rest, he claimed, were dismissed for routine causes—the kinds that were "unavoidable." At the same time, he brazenly warned Arpshowen of his plan to fire even more: the number, he said, "will grow still larger in the future" (a promise he soon kept). 57 Andrée was prepared to go even further. Justifying his use of guards to prevent "lawless elements" from repairing to their rooms after being fired, he spoke indelicately of the need for a " p u r g e " or "cleansing" (ochishchenie) of such people from the barracks. He used the beaten boy incident as evidence of the trouble the police were causing him: because guards had been punished for barring a fired worker (the boy) from the barracks, other guards were now unwilling to carry out such orders. The Hakenrichter must tell him if he had the authority to implement such "cleansings." 58 As Andrée may have anticipated, the confused Hakenrichter was without a clear response. He informed Andrée of his duty as factory manager to consult him in any such cases (of "cleansings"), but Arpshowen also felt a need for Shakhovskoi's counsel. Should all these conflicts be resolved in accord with local law? Should the company be told to bring the more serious cases, those that exceeded a Hakenrichter's authority, before the parish court? 59 Andrée had succeeded in putting his adversaries on the defensive. 55. Ibid., d. 560,11. 376 (governor's request to Andrée), 396 (on rumors of Frey's arrest); Frey left Narva for Reval on 9 October at 2:00 A.M. (1. 381). 56. Shakhovskoi to Arpshowen, ibid., 1. 376; see also ibid., d. 562,11. 1 8 5 - 8 6 . For more evidence of Shakhovskoi's continued efforts to contain the firings, see his memo to Katarskii, 18 Oct., ibid., d. 561, 1. 68. 57. Arpshowen to Shakhovskoi, 8 Oct., ibid., d. 560,1. 393. The practice continued of firing "lawless" workers—mainly men who had been delegates or who, tried for their role in the disorders, were either acquitted or convicted only of minor misdeeds and lightly sentenced. This can be seen by comparing the lists cited in note 54, above, with names of delegates and indicted workers. See also chapter 5, pp. 179-80. 58. Ibid., d. 560,1. 393. 59. Ibid., 11. 3 9 3 - 9 4 .

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Andrée's next act of defiance came in response to Shakhovskoi's effort to curtail the firings. Not only did he delay in providing Katarskii with the required information, 60 but when confronted by the Hakenrichter with Shakhovskoi's new orders he demanded to see them in writing. Arpshowen wired this demand to the governor, who rejected it, while weakly instructing the Hakenrichter to limit his pressure on Andrée to "moral influence" ( moralischer Einfluss)61—not a likely avenue of success. Andrée's successful little moves never amounted to a checkmate, but they inflated his confidence so much that he was prepared to brag about them to his nemesis Katarskii (while surely anticipating that Katarskii would repeat his words to Shakhovskoi). On 10 October Katarskii was authorized by Shakhovskoi to counter Andrée's delaying tactics by personally interviewing workers and registering the names of those who were fired, thereby bypassing Andrée. This stratagem was actually a tribute to Andrée's strength—as was Katarskii's reluctance to let his men be seen gathering information from workers, lest "innocent" persons be compromised. 62 Nevertheless, the decision to register names was a blow to Andrée's authority, one that produced "unfeigned joy" (nepritvornaia radost') among workers.63 Hence, when Katarskii (Shakhovskoi's surrogate) met Andrée (Kolbe's surrogate) on 11 October (the occasion of the chess metaphor), the stakes were high. Though they met in Katarskii's office, it was Andrée who set the tone, combining flattery, braggadocio, and light intimidation in what might have been a scene from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. While visiting St. Petersburg Andrée had heard that Katarskii was an "outstanding detective" (flattery); but Andrée, who also had "outstanding police" at his disposal (braggadocio), was privy to Katarskii's orders, having read his telegrams and his secret reports to Trepov (intimidation). He was, he explained, in a chess game with Katarskii and his "partner" ( kompan'on, meaning Shakhovskoi), and it was a game, he crowed, that he intended to win (sdelat' mat).64 An intimidated Katarskii found it hard to stand up to Andrée, or at least left no trace of his courage in his report. He simply recounted the incident to Shakhovskoi and assured him that whatever Andrée might 60. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 9 Oct., ibid., 1. 396. 61. Arpshowen to Shakhovskoi, 9 Oct., and Shakhovskoi to Arpshowen, 10 Oct., ibid., 11. 382, 383. 62. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 9 Oct., and Shakhovskoi to Katarskii, 10 Oct., ibid., 11. 396, 398. 63. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 11 Oct., ibid., 1 406. 64. Ibid. The words about chess and checkmate are underlined, probably by the governor.

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claim, he, Katarskii, had sent no secret reports to Trepov, no communications behind the governor's back. As to Andrée's access to his telegrams (to and from the governor), Katarskii surmised that it came from copies left lying about the Narva telegraph station, a circumstance that allowed Andrée's men simply to walk in and read them. Returning to the theme of food (first broached by Andrée when accusing Olenin of venality and gluttony), Katarskii also complained that management was providing him with dreadful fare, perhaps with malicious intent. (The chef, it turned out, was Frey's wife.)65 Immediately upon receipt of Katarskii's extraordinary report, the governor, by now campaigning to remove Andrée from his post, began to multiply his efforts. Demanding an explanation, he apprised company legal counsel Andrei Kutukov of Andrée's treatment of Katarskii; and he again ordered Arpshowen to conduct an investigation.66 Simply put, Shakhovskoi was now determined to purge the Kreenholm administration. These efforts, however, while thoroughly enmeshed in the controversies over firings and in the conflicts just discussed, played out in tandem with yet another issue, one that fueled the anger of both sides. THE

TARIFF

Shakhovskoi was well aware that important though they were, security measures alone could not put an end to Kreenholm's abiding tensions. Adding incrementally to what was still just a handful ofpolice—compared to the troops being replaced or the work force being policed—was unlikely to preserve the peace in the absence of positive measures. In this the governor proved astute. Consistent with his early recognition of the overall legitimacy of their demands, 67 he was resolved to show the workers that whatever the company's intent, the August accords, especially the provisions that promised a more equitable system of deductions and fines, would indeed be implemented when the smoke of battle had cleared. Apart from motives of principle (by no means negligible), Shakhovskoi still was haunted by the specter of renewed unrest, a prospect closely linked in his mind not only with Andrée's plans for mass firings, but also with the persistence of major unresolved issues. The result was a delicate batde of wits and nerves—another part of the chess game—between a governor who asked for generosity in victory and a manager who aimed to use the workers' defeat to recoup his losses. 65. Ibid., 11. 406-7. 66. Ibid., 11. 409-14; also, Shakhovskoi's marginal notes on Katarskii's report, 11. 406-7. 67. See especially his 19 September memo to the MVD, RD, 331.

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Within the context of the accords, by far the most contested issue, one that was closely linked to the unfulfilled promise of worker representation, was the establishment of a tariff (taksa), a published schedule of prices defining the maximum deduction allowable when a worker damaged a machine. Following the accords, this schedule was supposed to be set by management in consultation with worker representatives and then introduced no later than 1 October. 6 8 But with that date fast approaching, the company was yet to make good on the promise, in part because the tariff issue, like that of discipline itself, was so closely entangled with the "constitutional" question: the shape of authority at the post-strike factory. It was Shakhovskoi himself who took the initiative when, on 21 September, with the threat of disorder still looming large in his imagination, he directed Olenin to have fifty copies of each of the accords (Acts 1 and 2)—which included Kolbe's pledge to introduce tariffs— posted in the barracks. Noting the importance of the tariffs (and also of the promised dismissal of Bruns and Pikkamiagi), he ordered Olenin to monitor management's observance " t o the letter" of all provisions of the accords. Because management was yet to provide Olenin with printed copies for posting and dissemination, Olenin had been restricted to handing out single copies to individual workers (such as Sokolov) on request. Shakhovskoi's maneuver therefore amounted to a provocative directive to management to abet him in his efforts to remind the workers to hold their bosses to their word. 6 9 Following up on his orders, Olenin politely asked Andrée to arrange for copies of the acts to be printed up for posting. The "common people" (prostoliudiny), he cunningly explained, tend to believe what they see in print, and he was convinced that reading and rereading the words of the accords would mollify them. But Olenin met with not very artful resistance from Andrée, who simply said that he was too busy to carry out a request whose point he failed to see (nekogda i teper' ne do togo).70 68. See chapter 2, p. 78. A related though less consequential change scheduled for 1 October (para. 5 of Act 1) was the abolition of deductions from the spinners' earnings of wages paid to the carriers or stackers of yarn, another promise that management tried to circumvent and Shakhovskii tried to monitor (TsGLA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 305, 333-35; and KS, 76). 69. Shakhovskoi's notes, written on Olenin's report of 21 Sept., KS, 60; Shakhovskoi to Olenin, 21 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1.143 (includes the words v tochnosti); Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 21 Sept., KS, 62; Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 22 Sept., KS, 64. 70. KS, 65. Olenin recounted this exchange to Shakhovskoi in the same report in which he asked if he should call in troops.

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Prince Shakhovskoi, though the ranking surrogate for a presumably powerful autocrat, apparently did not feel empowered to issue a direct command to the directors of a private enterprise to comply with Olenin's request. Instead, his next step (initially proposed by Olenin) was to print the acts himself at his official press in Reval, while making the factory defray the costs (again the issue of who should pay! ). Fifty freshly printed copies of each document were then dispatched by train for posting at the factory. They arrived along with the governor's crisp instruction to Olenin to let him know if the company was complying with "everything prescribed in these documents," including, of course, the tariffs. The acts were promptly posted. 71 Three days later Shakhovskoi took the further step of sending Olenin forty more copies of Act 2 and twenty of Act 1, this time not for posting but for hand delivery to all the delegates (forty weavers, twenty spinners). 72 With this ploy Shakhovskoi was openly conjoining two highly inflammatory issues: worker representation and the tariff. Nor could it have escaped Kolbe's watchful eye that circulation of the acts to all delegates included, if only symbolically, the ones under arrest. Shakhovskoi's moves had to have been perceived by Kolbe and Andrée as a demagogic attempt to menace them with pressure from below, and at the renewed risk of revising the factory constitution. It is noteworthy that the wholesale firings, including those of delegates, began (still unbeknownst to Shakhovskoi) at just this time. By now Shakhovskoi's tactics were starting to bear fruit, or so it seemed. On 25 September a visibly subdued Andrée assured Olenin that a tariff would be posted (razvesbena.),73 and on the following day tariffs 74 were hanging in the barracks. However reluctandy, and, most important, without the consultation with workers foreseen in the accords, the company had drawn up schedules of deductions for a long list of damaged parts, including (in the spinning section) spindles, bobbins, babbits, and cogwheels and (in the weaving section) shutdes, looms, rackwheels, and cogs. Not surprisingly, the figures corresponded closely to the purchase price of a brand-new part (provocatively listed in a parallel 71. Ibid.; Shakhovskoi to Olenin (two messages), 2 3 Sept., KS, 66, 67; Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 23 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 185. 72. Shakhovskoi to Olenin, 26 Sept., KS, 75. 73. Olenin to Shakhovskoi, TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 216. (In KS, 74, mzveshena is erroneously rendered as razreshena, "permitted.") 74. The versions posted on 26 September were in Russian; Estonian versions were posted on the 27th; copies were posted in workshops as well as barracks (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 198, 199, 222, 228).

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column alongside the deduction figure) with no allowance made for age or condition, that is, for depreciation. By the same token, broken parts not listed by name, it was stated, would be assessed at their British factory prices (plus shipping costs and duties). The tariffs were signed by Andrée, who, though just named Kreenholm's chief manager, still signed as Kolbe's agent (po doverennosti. . . Kol'be).75 Although the company seemed to have conceded the principle of the tariff, neither Shakhovskoi nor the more militant workers would consider the issue closed in the absence of genuine consultations. Over the next few days Shakhovskoi continued his own consultations with a group of ten delegates that he convened in Narva in the presence of the mayor and the Hakenrichter. He ordered Arpshowen to meet with them again and to ask if they wanted any changes in the tariffs. Then, after adjusting the prices accordingly, he planned to prepare the revised schedules for posting. 76 As the October deadline neared, Andrée seemed to feel that he had yielded all the ground he could. Especially with regard to worker participation, he now resumed a combative posture, a portent of his contentiousness around the firings. Though the details of this moment are obscure, by 30 September Andrée's obstinacy had moved Shakhovskoi, already galled by news of the first firings, to wire him an ultimatum: 7 October was now the "firm" and "final" date for "strict implementation" of the tariff, by which he meant not just posting a proper schedule but gaining the approval of worker delegates. Should Andrée fail to comply by that date he would be held "personally responsible." Shakhovskoi also had the contents of the wire relayed to Arpshowen and to A. Gaberzang, a high-ranking MVD official due to arrive on 30 September (to help resolve the tariff" issue and to gather data); 77 and, his boldest stroke, he ordered Katarskii to convey the contents to the delegates, who were then expected to approve and sign the tariffs. He also sent a copy of the wire to Deputy Chief of Gendarmes Levashev, adding that implementation of the tariff provisions was "absolutely 75. Olenin to Shakhovskoi and Andrée to Olenin, both 2 6 Sept., KS, 76. Andrée's letter to Olenin was attached to Olenin's m e m o to Shakhovskoi, as were copies of the tariffs (reprinted in KS, 77). Andrée's assumption of Kolbe's tide was communicated to Shakhovskoi by Katarskii on 28 September (TsGLA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 5 6 0 , 1. 2 2 2 ) ; the change of leadership was noted in Estliandskie gubernskie vedomosti, 3 Oct., KS, 87. 76. Shakhovskoi to Arpshowen, 3 0 Sept., KS, 8 1 - 8 2 . 77. M V D to Shakhovskoi, 2 3 Sept., and Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 3 0 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 2 9 , op. 2, d. 560,11. 301, 306.

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necessary" if new unrest was to be averted.78 A little later, complaining to Levashev that management had ignored his "repeated reminders," he issued his first appeal for Andrée's dismissal (and that of other managers), a step, he claimed, he lacked authority to take on his own. 79 With Shakhovskoi pressing on him from both above (through Katarskii, who delivered the ultimatum) and below (through the delegates, about to be brought together by Katarskii), Andrée was on the defensive. Alarmed, perhaps desperate, he complained bitterly that Shakhovskoi had placed himself between him and the workers ( m e z b d u mnoiu i fabrichnymi), forcing him to acquiesce to their wishes. Assuming a posture of paternalism, he claimed illogically that whereas formerly he had fined workers who damaged machines with only trifling sums (pustiaki), strict compliance with the accords would force him to charge for full replacement costs, including shipping, repairs, and time lost. 80 While appearing to yield some ground, Andrée next made a last-ditch effort to modify the governor's stance. On 1 October, the day after he received the ultimatum (and the day of the original deadline), he paid an evening visit to Shakhovskoi in Reval.81 Affecting a flexible posture, he tried to shift the blame for their conflict from himself to his discredited police chief, Focht, whom he had just fired (under pressure, to be sure, from Shakhovskoi)82 for "repeated insubordination." Rather gracelessly, Andrée pleaded with the governor to reciprocate, to match his flexibility by backing off from the tariff issue:83 Well, I did everything, I implored the governor, to get him to agree to make some concessions. [He] . . . remained adamant [so I asked:] What is to be done? 78. Shakhovskoi to Katarskii (letter and wire) and Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, all 30 Sept., ibid., 11. 266, 297, 306; Shakhovskoi to Levashev, 30 Sept., KS, 82-83. 79. Shakhovskoi to Levashev, 1 Oct., KS, 84. Shakhovskoi's efforts to have Andrée and other managers dismissed are discussed below. 80. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 30 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 306-7. 81. At 3:00 P.M. a watchful Katarskii had wired the governor that Andrée was on his way; ibid., 1. 292. 82. When informing Focht of his dismissal, Andrée told him he was acting at Shakhovskoi's behest (Katarskii, reporting to Shakhovskoi on a conversation with Focht, ibid., 1. 307); there is more evidence of Shakhovskoi's efforts to secure the removal of Focht on 11. 295, 317. 83. Quoted from a talk between Andrée and Katarskii, who recorded Andrée's words and sent them to Shakhovskoi on the same day, 2 October (KS, 86). Other information on the Andrée-Shakhovskoi meeting is in Shakhovskoi to MVD, 2 Oct., KS, 85; also, Zhelekhovskii to Justice Ministry, 4 Oct., RD, 348.

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[ Chto delat '?] We must draw up a tariff. Fine, we'll draw up a tariff, I have all the materials at hand; but how do we get them to agree? . . . The delegates will view it as ifwe'd coerced them and done it our own way—a humiliation for them. What I need is a proviso giving the owners the right not to impose a fine.

Let us note some contradictions. A tariff will be drawn up? One was already drawn up, even posted; but without the participation of worker delegates it lacked legitimacy. H o w to get the delegates to agree? Andrée had stubbornly resisted any notion of giving them a voice. Will they feel humiliated if he announces a tariff unilaterally? N o doubt, but this had never stopped him from acting that way before, and in any case it was not Andrée but Shakhovskoi who rejected unilateral action and pressed for institutionalized consultation. But more to the point, why did Andrée, of all people, now want the owners to have the "right," at their own discretion, not to impose a fine (shtraf ) when machinery was damaged? 84 After all, what could have pleased workers more than an end to all such deductions? Of course, that is not what Andrée had in mind. What his words boiled down to was a desperate effort under duress to avoid future conflicts over deductions (or at least to give himself another option if his figures were disputed) while still recovering full replacement costs of damaged parts. Andrée understood that deductions made in consultation with workers would be low, certainly below the full replacement costs. If, as it now appeared, the principle of worker participation was inescapable, the practice could still be circumvented. Since the very process of conferring (haggling?) with delegates would provide them with a permanent negotiating role—management's bête noire—and would surely place a downward pressure on deductions, what Andrée wanted (as he later admitted to Katarskii) was a chance, if the situation deteriorated, to bypass deductions altogether. Hence his new approach: if deductions could no longer be arbitrarily imposed, they would be supplanted by direct procurement of new parts by the worker responsible for the damage, with the purchase to be made at the Narva customhouse (because machinery still came by sea from England). The company would see to it that the part was available there, but it would be up to the worker to acquire and deliver it. 85 You broke it, you replace it! Thus, despite the appearance of flexibility, the de facto cost to the worker would be fixed 84. The nature of past practices at the factory is betrayed by Andrée's choice of the word shtraf, with its punitive connotations, instead of the more neutral vychet (deduction), used in most of the relevant documents, including the tariffs themselves. 85. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 3 Oct., KS, 87.

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at 100 percent of the purchase price, a policy that allowed the company to maintain its inventory at no cost. What if the worker failed to deliver the part? That question was not addressed. As soon as Shakhovskoi grasped the import of this proposal he declared it unacceptable.86 This amounted to recognizing that not the deductions per se but the degree of worker participation was now the issue, a point already understood by Arpshowen, then engaged in discussions with the delegates. In a report dated 2 October, Arpshowen explained that the conflict between workers and management was now sharply focused on the definition of the term starshina (German: Alteste), as understood in the context of Kolbe's earlier pledge to set new deduction rates only in consultation with starshiny. Whereas to workers the term meant their new representatives, chosen by them from among the delegates, to management it meant an "elder" controlled by factory police, as defined in Kreenholm's 1857 police statute 87 —an interpretation that could not have been better calculated to eviscerate the notion of representation. With the 7 October deadline growing near, Arpshowen pressed the governor for counsel: which of these definitions should serve as his guide?88 To Shakhovskoi the choice was clear. Making the correct if rather exquisite point that whereas the police statute used the singular starshina., the August accords used the plural starshiny, he cautioned Arpshowen against any attempt by management to equate the elder* whose participation was anticipated in the accords with the elder who was controlled by the factory police. Consistent to a fault, he insisted that starshiny be elected from among the delegates, the only group with legitimacy in the workers' eyes. Should starshiny lack the knowledge to evaluate a machine part, they would be permitted to consult with outside experts.89 Given Shakhovskoi's resolve, Andrée had no choice but to open negotiations with workers, though he did so selectively and shrewdly. Even before he knew his plan was rejected, he was in touch with some delegates (among them the erratic Sokolov), soliciting proposals for lower deduction rates and working to conclude agreements that would 86. Shakhovskoi's marginal notes to Katarskii's report, KS, 88; Shakhovskoi to Arpshowen and to Katarskii, both 5 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 3 4 1 - 4 2 , 343. 87. See chapter 1, p. 39-40. 88. Arpshowen to Shakhovskoi, 2 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 11. 324 (German original), 3 2 5 - 2 6 (Russian translation). 89. Shakhovskoi to Arpshowen, 4 Oct., KS, 88.

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do the company minimal harm. Although workers of the spinning section (except carders) were normally easier to deal with than weavers, an agreement with weavers came first, on 3 October, followed after some maneuvering by an announcement two days later that spinners too were ready to sign a protocol. 90 This time, however, there was a significant difference between the two documents. 91 With minor exceptions, the weavers' tariff retained the high figures of the prior version (that is, original purchase prices), though a new concession was added by way of compensation: some liability for breakage would be shared by the weaver who manned the damaged loom and his supervisor, the subforeman (podmaster'e).92 Thus, of the nineteen parts listed by name, nine would be charged to the weaver alone, three to the supervisor, and seven to one or the other. Disputes, not surprisingly, would be adjudicated by management. In principle, the notion of shared liability was a major change in a system that had once encouraged supervisors to benefit from fines. But in practice, absent a reduction in actual assessments, the possible gain to workers was limited. Moreover, though without open reference to Andrée's direct procurement plan, the document contained a clause allowing management the option of no deduction at all—a clause that made sense only if Andrée intended to retain that presumably rejected plan. Nevertheless, despite its obvious limitations, the document was signed for the weavers by eight of the original delegates (four Estonians, four Russians, including Sokolov).93 Whether or not it was connected with their readiness to sign, it should be noted that seven of the eight were men who had managed to survive the investigation without being fired or charged with a crime. In striking contrast to the weavers' tariff, that of the spinners contained no provision for shared liability—possibly a sore point for their delegates. But in equally striking contrast, the spinners' tariff actually reduced the deductions for some items, thereby removing most traces 90. Ibid., 87; Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 4 and 5 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 333, 348; KS, 96. For dating of the agreement with weaver delegates, see editors' note, KS, 97n. 91. Copies of the new tariffs are in KS, 9 6 - 9 7 . 92. A subforeman in the weaving section usually supervised sixty-six looms (Zapiska No. 2, RD, 391). 93. Sokolov, who was illiterate and signed with three X's, was listed on the document simply as "Zakhar Vasil'ev," his name and patronymic (KS, 97), still a common practice at the time. But KS,s index of names has a superfluous entry for a (nonexistent) Zakhar Vasil'ev (212), keyed only to page 97.

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of the earlier notion of equivalence between deduction and cost. Instead, most deductions were set within a range of 10 to 30 percent of purchase price.94 As if to underline the importance of this revision, the document redundantly stated that future deductions would be based not on the full cost of the part but on the figures listed in the deduction column. As in the weavers' document, management retained the option of imposing no deduction at all (in other words, requiring full replacement in kind). The concessions offered the spinners may have been a tactical ploy, aimed at buying their neutrality while Andrée geared up for a showdown with weavers if the new agreement failed to hold. Since spinners had been relatively docile in the past, he might logically assume that higher deductions could be imposed on them later, when he was more firmly in control. But the concessions also reflected the spinners' change in mood. By now, in fact, spinner delegates were showing greater tenacity than the war-weary weavers, and they resisted Andrée's threats as well as his bribes. At one tense moment a frustrated Andrée, losing his self-control, desperately tried to convince them to renounce the act of 21 August, thereby removing the need for a tariff. Admonishing them crudely for their obduracy, he tried to echo the despotic sounds of his predecessor: "Whatever I want to do, I'll do [chto in khochu, to ia sdelaiu], despite the presence of the police. I'm the only boss [khoziain], and I'll do what I like." He threatened to fire any spinner who refused his terms—by now a credible threat. But sensing the delegates' determination, he also offered them both a money bribe and the more conventional carrot: free drinks at the tavern.95 None of this worked, however, and Andrée, who (as Andreianov put it) now "understood the need to be moderate," 96 was obliged to give the spinners a tariff to which he was hardly committed. The notion that Andrée conceived of the spinners' tariff, indeed of both tariffs, as temporary is supported by his own otherwise inexplicable resolve not to be a bona fide signatory to either document. True, he used his signature to authenticate the copies, but the actual 94. My calculations. Later the investigating commission gave the range as 1 0 - 5 0 percent (Zapiska No. 2, RD, 391). Still later the company attorney claimed without any basis that the range was only 5 - 1 0 percent (Kutukov to Vice Governor Polivanov, 12 Apr. 1873, KS, 184). 95. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, daily report of 7 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 361 (see also 11. 3 6 4 - 6 6 ) . 96. Ibid., 1. 350.

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signing of the originals he entrusted to Technical Director Shokross, 97 in an unusual procedure that became another sore point for the governor. If Andrée was engaged in a holding action, buying time in hopes that the pressure would recede, he soon received aid and comfort from one of the empire's most powerful officials, Shakhovskoi's superior, General Timashev, minister of internal affairs. A few months earlier, commenting on draft labor legislation recently proposed by a blue-ribbon interagency commission, Timashev had displayed his idiosyncratic vision of the relative strength in Russia of employers and workers: Given the vast expanse and low population density of our fatherland, the relation between the demand for labor and the supply is so lopsided . . . that employers' interests basically depend on the goodwill of workers; it is essential, therefore, to take measures to protect the former from the arbitrary actions [proizvol ] of the latter.

In the same commentary Timashev also expressed contempt for the notion that Russian workers were prepared to function effectively in the legal arena: "Education has penetrated the mass of our worker population [mbochee naselenie] so little that any notion of the juridical meaning of a contract leaves most of them completely in the dark." 9 8 Against this background, Timashev's aversion to Shakhovskoi's way of dealing with the Kreenholm situation was predictable. On 2 October the governor had asked the MVD for permission to deny the company the right to make any further deductions if it failed to meet his conditions by the 7th. 9 9 Three days later, on the very day the newly revised tariffs 97. In addition to the two documents, see the editors' note in KS, 97n, and Arpshowen's report to Shakhovskoi, 9 Oct., KS, 103-4. 98. "Izlozhenie zamechaniia [Ministra Vnutrennikh Del]," in Svod otzyvov na stati proekta Ustava o licbnom naime rabochikh i prislugi (n.p., n.d. [St. Petersburg, 1872]), 17 (each section of the Svod has its own pagination). Timashev, who had in mind both agricultural and industrial workers, was responding to proposals of the "[P. N.] Ignat'ev Commission." Ironically, in 1870 Timashev himself had launched this commission, which was to recommend new guidelines for relations between workers and employers. By 1872 its work was complete, but it bore no legislative fruit. For a brief summary, see V. Ia. Laverychev, Tsarizm i rabochii voprosv Rossii (1861-1917£¡0.) (Moscow, 1972), 32-33. For a convincing portrait of Timashev, emphasizing his narrowness of vision during his tenure as head of the MVD ( 1868-78 ), see Daniel T. Orlovsky, The Limits of Reform: The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Imperial Russia, 1802-1881 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 84-93. 99. TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 580. 11. 318-19.

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were forwarded to him for inspection, Shakhovskoi received a terse wire from Timashev instructing him to defer any action on them pending receipt of a letter he had just mailed. 100 Timashev's letter was a strange amalgam of traditional autocratic paternalism and a nascent, as yet undigested ideology of private property: 101 I have the honor to inform you that I am definitely unable to approve your proposal for complete abolition of these deductions. . . . While I fully share your view of the need to establish a table of deductions . . . on an equitable and moderate basis, as well as your view that this measure would make a favorable impression on the factory population and would to a great degree promote the full establishment of order at the factory, I nevertheless find that the aforementioned proposal could have consequences completely contrary to the ones you have in mind. Until the present time, the workers have been subjected to deductions that did not correspond to [i.e., that exceeded] the actual cost of the machines they damaged, and these inordinately high deductions were one of the reasons for their discontent. It is obvious that such a system should not continue. There are two ways it might be changed: either deductions should be completely abolished or, as you rightly insist, the schedule of deductions should be moderate and should be announced in advance to each . . . worker. But I would view the abolition of the tariff, even if only temporarily, as a dangerous step, capable of provoking new disorders. However equitable and moderate a new tariff might be, however modest the demands of the factory directors in this regard, it [a new tariff] would always seem unbearably harsh to workers once they had savored, if only for the shortest time, full freedom from deductions. Nor is it possible to ignore the fact that the Kreenholm factory is, above all, private property, and therefore the government should not view itself as entitled to impinge without limits on its rights. Surely you are not prepared, Your Highness, 102 to give your personal guarantee that during the period after the abolition [of deductions] the workers, enjoying absolute impunity, will not deliberately damage the machines and thereby do obvious harm to the factory's production. If that happens, the owners . . . will have solid grounds to bring a civil suit against the [government] directive that caused them to incur losses. Given these considerations, Your Highness, I would prefer it if, in view of Mr. Andrée's refusal to draw up a proper tariff, you would instruct the local Hakenrichter to draw one up with the aid of the police officer posted at the factory [Katarskii] and if you would begin discussions about a definitive implementation 100. Timashev to Shakhovskoi, 5 Oct., KS, 98. 101. T o follow Timashev's intent it must be understood that he wrote on the basis of what he knew on 2 October, hence was unaware of the contents of the recent drafts; his latest information was that Andrée refused to draw up a proper tariff and Shakhovskoi threatened to end the company's right to make deductions if it failed to comply by the 7th. 102. Vashe Siiatel'stvo or v.s., the proper tide for a prince.

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o f the n e w d e d u c t i o n rates with Mr. Andrée, w h o will thus be denied the opportunity for more excuses and evasions. 1 0 3

Despite its polite tone and surface agreement with Shakhovskoi's negative view ofAndrée, such a letter from so high an official had to have a demoralizing effect. It effectively ended any hope that Shakhovskoi would have the backing he needed to force the company's hand. Indeed, stripped of its courdy rhetoric (de rigueur when addressing a prince) the letter amounted to an order that he cease and desist from pursuing a tough approach. It defanged him by removing one of his most credible threats: the end of all deductions. And although Timashev may have been perceptive in predicting that once deductions were gone it would be hard to persuade workers to accept the reimposition of even a moderate tariff, this argument was partly based on a perception of the workers' psychology—their readiness to damage the very machines that provided them with a livelihood—that had no referential basis in Kreenholm experience and, in fact, would soon be challenged by Timashev's own commission.104 To be sure, the letter expressed a familiar kind of paternalism; Timashev wished to protect the workers from management's worst abuses. But even here he denied the governor his boldest innovation: worker representation (by extension, a denial as well of his proposal for "mutual agreement" in the firing process). Eschewing any mention of a role for workers (whose power he viewed as already excessive), Timashev proposed the negotiation ofa solution that would be left entirely to governor, police, and management. As a final irony (in light of the accusation that Kreenholm was run like a feudal barony, beyond the reach of the state), General Timashev, one of the police state's top policemen, invoked the still young and (in Russia) fragile notion of the prerogatives of private property to shield that barony from rigorous state intervention. Andrée was probably aware of the contents of this letter: he was in St. Petersburg on 6 October, and even in Kreenholm he had kept in touch with Gaberzang, the MVD official who, according to rumors that a Justice Ministry official found credible, had been sent at the request of Kolbe. 105 Moreover, on the morning of the 7th Gaberzang had an 103. Timashev to Shakhovskoi, 5 Oct., KS, 9 8 - 9 9 ; emphasis added. 104. Zapiska No. 2, RD, 391. 105. Katarskii informed Shakhovskoi that Andrée left for St. Petersburg on the evening of 5 October (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 345, 348). On Gaberzang's contacts with Andrée, see KS, 86; on rumors of Kolbe's role in urging his mission to Kreenholm, see KS, 95. Gaberzang held the rank of deistvitel'nyi statskii sovetnik, fourth highest on the Table of Ranks.

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apparently friendly meeting with company counsel Kutukov, who had just been in the capital talking with a high MVD official.106 In any case, even if unaware of all the details, Andrée did not take long to grasp that his adversary had been wounded. So it was that 7 October, once an "irrevocable" deadline, could come and go without his agreement to sign the tariffs. On 8 October Andrée again procrastinated, this time using the fact that it was Sunday (hence difficult to muster delegates) to put off the signing one more day; he did imply a readiness to sign on Monday, but with the stipulation that he would announce that anyone who rejected the tariff was free to leave (that is, be fired).107 But in a move particularly revealing of his self-assurance in attempting to secure the spinners' signatures without having to commit himself, he now had nerve enough to threaten to close the factory,108 a gesture he would have hesitated to make if faced with a secure antagonist who enjoyed the strong backing of his superiors. Andrée's tactics proved effective to the extent that, on 9 October, he was able to pressure the spinners to put their names to a document that he, despite prior hints to the contrary, did not sign.109 Neither workers nor governor could be content with this one-sided arrangement, but Andrée, so avowedly compliant a few days earlier that Shakhovskoi seemed to believe the issue resolved,110 now felt able to defy the governor with near impunity, as witness his insolent treatment of Katarskii described above (and there was more to follow). As time went by, Shakhovskoi was reduced to complaining feebly to St. Petersburg of Andrée's refusal to elucidate the grounds for his defiance. No longer master of the situation, though still determined to effect a purge of management, Shakhovskoi requested that Colonel Birin return to Kreenholm to use his "good offices" ( n r a v s t v e n n o e sodeistvie) with Andrée. 111 106. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 7 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 361 (the official was apparently Assistant Minister Lobanov-Rostovskii). 107. Arpshowen to Shakhovskoi, 8 Oct., ibid., 11. 388 (German original), 3 8 9 - 9 0 (Russian summary); Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 9 Oct., ibid., 1. 396. 108. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 9 Oct., 1. 396; Arpshowen to Shakhovskoi, 9 Oct., KS, 103-4. 109. KS, 103; Andrée to Shakhovskoi, Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 9 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 395, 396. Even Kutukov, Kreenholm's legal agent, admitted that Andrée was required by the acts to be a signatory to the tariffs (Shakhovskoi to Arpshowen [in German], 13 Oct., ibid. 1. 419 [the Russian version in KS, 104, is misdated]). 110. On 6 October Shakhovskoi wrote to Timashev that the workers were "very satisfied" with the new tariffs (ibid., 1. 353). 111. Shakhovskoi to Timashev, 17 Oct., KS, 106 (includes the text of a message to Levashev asking that Birin be ordered to Kreenholm).

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Andrée was apparently prepared to make good on his threat to close down the plant. In words that fairly echoed Timashev's appeal to the prerogatives of property, he defiantly reminded Shakhovskoi of the company's "absolute right to close the factory at any time," without notice and without severance pay. The convening of an urgent meeting of company stockholders to consider such a measure was announced in the press, while office staff made preparations for departure. 112 Nor could it have been lost on Andrée that closing the plant would allow him to solve the "reliability" problem by firing everyone and then hiring or rehiring only "trustworthy" (mainly Russian?) workers. 113 Shakhovskoi did what he could to preclude this eventuality. He warned Timashev that far from guaranteeing calm, a precipitous closure, especially if unaccompanied by compensation to workers whose one-year contracts would be voided, would have "serious consequences," provoking " h u g e " disorders. Deliberately contrasting his views to those of his adversary (and, indirectly, to those of Timashev as well), he denied the owners' absolute right to shut down the plant, particularly without severance pay. T o do so, he declared in his distinctive idiom, would violate the rule of law, a point he went on to justify with careful reference to Russia's (largely ignored) factory legislation. 114

Restoring Law

While Shakhovskoi and Andrée were playing out their multiple games of cat and mouse (or chess), they were also locked in a 112. Shakhovskoi's report to Timashev, 19 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 561, 1. 62. The quoted passage is from Shakhovskoi's close summary of Andrée's words, written as indirect discourse. 113. Rumors to the effect that the administration was looking for ethnic Russians to replace Estonians were apparently widespread; see Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 9 Oct., ibid., d. 560, 1. 396. 114. Ibid., d. 561,11. 6 2 - 6 5 . Specifically, Shakhovskoi cited the Ustav opromyshlennosti fabrichnoi i zavodskoi, art. 104, vol. 11, of the 1857 Svod zakonov, which set forth the two conditions under which a worker could be fired before his contract expired ("nonfulfillment" of "obligations" and "bad behavior" [durnoe povedenie]), and which stipulated that even under those conditions a worker was entitled to two weeks' notice or severance pay ( four weeks according to the Kreenholm paybooks, which Shakhovskoi claimed had the force of a contract). It followed, he argued, that workers were also entided to severance pay if dismissed owing to circumstances beyond their control (i.e., the closing

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less direct but equally earnest contest over the distribution of blame for the recent troubles and the meting out of punishment. In keeping with his emphasis on legality, Shakhovskoi acted on the premise that the use of force to maintain order and the pressuring of management to fulfill its August promises must be accompanied by evenhanded justice. We have already seen hints of this attitude when in his preliminary investigation he denied a privileged status to managers; but that limited inquiry was not a true judicial process, for it entailed no formal procedures, findings of guilt, or assigning of penalties. In defining the principles that would guide judicial procedures, the governor faced several problems, the most challenging of which was to decide the extent to which justice would be imposed administratively— that is, by his own office—or judicially, by Estland courts. Ironically, administrative justice, because it gave him more control over the outcome, would enhance the opportunity for fairness, but it would also violate the spirit of the fledgling judicial reform of 1864, intended to end the historical dependence of Russian justice on executive authority (especially that of governors) and to introduce and encourage, á la Montesquieu, the separation of judicial from executive power, a principle resisted by Russian rulers in the past. 115 The judicial reform, to be sure, had not yet been extended to the Baltic provinces; but this was in part because they (that is, their German elites) already enjoyed an autonomous system of elective judicial institutions, one that continued to operate quite independently of Russia after the annexation of the region by Peter. Yet to complicate matters, though these were indeed elected bodies, their basic character was that of a traditional class/estate tribunal (soslovnyi sud). They were dominated by "noble judges in white waistcoats," chosen by local notables (mainly the German Ritterschaft) who, like the Hakenrichters, were generally close in outlook and attachments to men like Kolbe and of the plant). H e also invoked a law of the Baltic provinces governing contractual arrangements with servants. 115. On the pre-Reform period, see Iu. Got'e, "Otdelenie sudebnoi vlasti ot administrativnoi," in Sudebnaia reforma, ed. N. V. Davydov and N. N. Polianskii (Moscow, 1915), 181-204, esp. 2 0 3 - 4 (on the role of provincial governors). On the problem of separation of powers in the years surrounding the introduction of the judicial reform, see V. M. Gessen, " O sudebnoi vlasti," in ibid., 1 - 1 5 (an essay emblematic of the devotion of liberal jurists to the still embattled principle of separation of powers a full half century after the reform). See also Samuel Kucherov, Courts, Lawyers, and Trials Under the Last Three Tsars (New York, 1953), 2 6 - 3 6 ; I. Blinov, Gubernatory. Istoriko-iuridicheskii ocherk (St. Petersburg, 1905), 252.

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Andrée and, far from being dispassionate, were often contemptuous of the non-German masses of their regions. 116 Hence, by deferring to the judgment of the Estland courts, Shakhovskoi, while respecting the new spirit of separation of powers, would also be relying on a pre-Reform, class-based judiciary, with the attendant risk of less fairness to the accused—a consideration that meant a great deal to him. Of course, this is not to say that he was always averse to the punishment of workers. Shakhovskoi was still enough of a law-and-order man (as witness his use of troops and police) to uphold the disciplining of those who had broken statutory law. But his emphasis was consistendy, even stubbornly, on specific acts of violence, not on the organization of a work stoppage as such. Here he trod another difficult path, however, for strikes, whether violent or not, were indeed illegal under Russian law. Therefore, since he could not change the law, if he wished to absolve the leaders of the nonviolent phase of the conflict from criminal liability, he had to claim that what had happened was not a strike (stacbka) at all, that it had no political or international significance (the Paris Commune was still fresh in Russia's bureaucratic consciousness), and that the prosecution of lawbreakers in the courts could thus proceed within a restricted criminal compass. In his words: "There was in these disorders neither a strike nor any link with factories abroad, and in general there was nothing political. It was therefore decided to continue the investigation of this case following the usual [judicial] procedures." 1 1 7 For Shakhovskoi to describe the Kreenholm events as nonpolitical in the normal sense of the term was fair enough. But for him to deny that they constituted a strike under existing law, though not entirely implausible given the ambiguity of that law, was to ignore recent precedents, at the same time revealing his continued commitment to and perhaps even compassion for the Kreenholm workers. Even a brief glance at the 1870 strike at St. Petersburg's Nevskii factory, the model then uppermost in people's minds, made it hard to deny that the Kreen116. A modified version of Russia's post-Reform judicial institutions was introduced in the Baltic provinces in 1889. On this and on the Baltic German judicial system in general, see Edward C. Thaden, "The Russian Government," in Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855-1914, ed. Edward C. Thaden (Princeton, 1981), 4 2 - 4 4 ; Toivo U. Raun, "The Estonians," in ibid., 3 0 8 - 9 ; Michael H . Haltzel, "The Baltic Germans," in ibid., 1 5 5 - 5 7 (the quoted words are from Haltzel, 155). 117. Shakhovskoi memo to Levashev, [23 Sept.], RD, 338-39. It is noteworthy that Shakhovskoi first drafted this memo on the events of 9 - 1 9 September without this vital passage, then decided to add it (to the margins of the draft); see TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,1. 288.

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holm events would almost surely constitute a strike in the eyes of a court. In the early 1870s statesmen and publicists alike still had a stake in believing that "European" strikes could not take place in Russia, at least not on a grand scale. Hence when something like a strike did occur, there was a tendency to regard it as an anomaly, a unique event, or else a strange and portentous monster that needed to be isolated and swiftly aborted. 118 In the precedent-setting Nevskii case the unrest had indeed been identified as a strike by Trepov and his deputy, who deemed the participants punishable under the law against strikes, and even read the law (article 1358 of the 1866 Criminal Code) to an assembly of the protesting workers.119 Initially, it is true, Trepov had seen no conflict between the nature of the crime and the prosecution of the strikers under the new judicial system, that is, before a panel of judges of the Petersburg Circuit Court. (Jury trials were reserved for more serious crimes.) Though he personally despised the new courts, Trepov had expected a rapid conviction and maximum jail terms (three months for "instigators," three weeks for others). But when the defendants, though convicted of organizing a strike, were given minimal sentences of three to seven days, he obtained the MVD's permission to extend those terms by imposing administrative exile. More important, the MVD, openly snubbing the judicial reform even while acting in the name of the tsar, issued a special circular ordering governors to deal with future strike leaders administratively—that is, by exiling them to a remote province without benefit of judicial process.120 This meant that as one of those governors Shakhovskoi found himself in the awkward position of being unable to describe the Kreenholm unrest as a strike without admitting his obligation to impose the 118. For examples, see Zelnik, Labor and Society, 3 4 0 - 4 1 , 364. 119. Ibid., 3 5 1 - 5 2 . Article 1358, the law criminalizing strikes, first appeared as article 1792 of the 1845 Criminal Code, Ulozhenie o nakazaniiakh ugolovnykh i ispravitel'nykh (Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, 2d series, vol. 20, part 1, No. 19283). A strike was said to exist when workers conspired to stop work before the expiration of their contract in order to compel their employers to raise wages. Strictly speaking, raising wages could be seen as irrelevant to Kreenholm, since the workers asked only for the restoration of earlier piece rates. But as far as I know this technical point was never raised by Shakhovskoi or anyone else involved in the proceedings. O n the antecedents and subsequent fate of article 1358, including evidence that it was intensely debated in government circles in 1 8 7 0 - 7 1 , see K. A. Pazhitnov, Polozhenie rabochego klassa v Rossii, vol. 2: Period svobodnogo dogovora v usloviiakh samoderzhavnogo rezhima (s 1861 po 1905JJ.), 3d ed., rev. (Leningrad, 1924), 1 8 3 - 8 7 . 120. Zelnik, Labor and Society, 3 6 3 - 6 4 .

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penalty of exile on the very workers—including those jailed before the violence—with whom he had cooperated. 121 Yet without invoking the actual word, he had shown by his deeds that he viewed the organization by workers of a peaceful "strike," a nonviolent work stoppage for the purpose of improving their lot, as morally legitimate and criminally untainted. And with the possible exception of the intrusion into Frey's house on the night of 9 - 1 0 September, such organizational activity was the only charge that could reasonably be brought against Preisman, Tamm, and the other members of the Narva Six, who, although heavily involved in the earlier actions, including work stoppage, had been saved by circumstance from participating in the ensuing clashes. Unless charged with instigating a strike, they stood to get off scot-free (a danger that would not go unnoticed by the Kreenholm management). Another related problem was, in a sense, a mirror image of the first: how to deal with Bruns and Pikkamiagi, who had acted provocatively, perhaps even illegally, but had done so at their bosses' bidding? And if Bruns and Pikkamiagi could be viewed as punishable under the law, what about the administrators who had encouraged their illicit conduct? Should they not be put on trial too? If so, should it be before a tribunal of their friends and peers? If not, should they be punished administratively, by the governor? And a final question: what to do if and when the culpable (in Shakhovskoi's eyes) administrators began to reassert their old prerogatives as Herren im Haus and tried to punish those worker leaders who had managed to evade the arm of the law? So Shakhovskoi's hands were more than full. Once again our attempt to unravel his efforts to resolve his problems is best pursued by following events as they unfolded chronologically. After the inquiry of 13-15 September Shakhovskoi's next step was to convene a special session of the Wier-Jerwen district criminal court, the Mangericht, in Narva. (It normally met in Reval.) The court consisted of a professional judge and two jurymen, German nobles elected by the local Ritterschaft. Shakhovskoi also arranged with the Justice Ministry for Acting Provincial Procurator V. Zhelekhovskii, an experienced appointee of the imperial government who also served as prosecutor on the Petersburg Circuit Court, to represent the state before the Mangericht. The Mangericht was to act as a court of inquiry, but only into the events 121. For a fairly similar situation the previous year at a cotton-spinning factory in Moscow province, including a related debate over just what constituted a strike, see

Pazhitnov, Period svoboinogo dojjovom, 186.

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of 11-12 September, a constraint consistent with Shakhovskoi's determination that only acts of violence and direct coercion, and not the organized protest as such, be treated as indictable offenses (but also a constraint that relieved the court of any obligation to probe into the deeper, long-term causes of unrest). Buoyed by this restriction, Shakhovskoi assured his superiors in St. Petersburg that he expected the work of the court to be swift and—an odd redundancy when speaking of a court of law, perhaps expressing his misgivings—"in full accord with legality" (sovershenno zakonnoe). He was especially pleased that its members (whom he accompanied by train from Reval to Narva) were fluent in Russian. 122 If Shakhovskoi began by trusting in the Mangericht, or at least by affecting to do so, this was somewhat less true of Kreenholm's managers, who reasonably feared that, even if well disposed to management, the court would not indict the Narva Six, a group that, though not a party to the "riots" of 11-12 September, included some of the weavers' initial leaders. These were men whom Kolbe and Andrée were yearning to punish without regard to finer points of law. The Mangericht began its hearings on 18 September (a day before the troops withdrew to Iamburg). 1 2 3 On the second day of the hearings Kolbe turned to St. Petersburg for assistance. Addressing himself to the high Third Section official Aleksandr Shul'ts, chief of staff of the Corps of Gendarmes, Kolbe called for action against Preisman, Tamm, Adoson, and four others, all but one of whom were elected weaver delegates and all but one of whom he had sought to dismiss on 9 September. Shakhovskoi's investigation had revealed, Kolbe explained (brazenly invoking the name of the very man whose authority he hoped to circumvent), that these were leaders of the first phase of unrest who, in jail during the violent phase, could not be brought to justice. Because they were "dangerous" (vrednye) and their presence would encourage new disorders, he requested their banishment from Kreenholm "by administrative means" and removal of their right to reside in the region. 124 Although he did not refer to and may not have known of the MVD circular of 1870, Kolbe was asking the government to act in its spirit, at least with regard to those workers who might succeed in evading the clutches of the law. It should be noted, however, that only three of the men he listed— 122. Shakhovskoi to Timashev, Levashev, and Palen, 17 and 19 Sept., KS, 4 8 - 4 9 (including editors' notes), 55; quote is from page 49. 123. TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 431, 433. 124. Kolbe to Shul'ts, 19 Sept., KS, 5 5 - 5 6 .

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Preisman, Tamm, and Adoson—actually belonged to the Narva Six, the group arrested on 10 September. Unless he acted out of ignorance, it would seem that Kolbe was pursuing a subterfuge in order to rid himself of those he feared the most. Workers too had serious misgivings about the Mangericht, though of a different nature from Kolbe's. If Kolbe feared that the court would allow some troublemakers to go unpunished, workers, believing the court to be under the sway of their bosses, feared a one-sided, punitive outcome. In the same report in which he described new signs of blatant disrespect for managerial authority, Andreianov told of a spinner, Jakub Lepik, who was inciting people with rumors that prisoners were being badly treated and, more to the point, that the Mangericht, "bought o f f " by the company, was drawing up charges without distinguishing between the guilty and the "innocent" (pmvye, with implications of "just" or "righteous"). On the next day Olenin, anticipating unrest on the special payday and the need for a renewed military presence, told both Shakhovskoi and the prosecutor of Lepik's efforts to impugn the court's integrity. This was too much for even Shakhovskoi, who had Lepik arrested. Lepik's vilification of the court had evidendy found a receptive enough audience to convince Shakhovskoi that the Mangericht's members were in physical danger. 125 During the days when the Mangericht was in session (18-28 September), and especially as its hearings drew to a close, Kreenholm's managers were able to act unilaterally against many of the workers they wished to be rid of. Almost every day, as was already noted, they managed to fire at least a few. This rankled Shakhovskoi, who complained that the court had not even completed its deliberations and the fired workers were not even indicted. But despite his efforts to monitor the firings, he was unable to prevent them. And as the court's investigation brought new facts to light, both Olenin and Arpshowen, apparently with Shakhovskoi's permission, proceeded to order new arrests, not of leaders or of delegates, but of workers who admitted to overt acts of violence.126 Whether firings or arrests, most signs in the last days of September boded ill for any worker under suspicion. 125. Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 21 Sept., KS, 62; Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 22 Sept., KS, 65; Shakhovskoi to Olenin and to Ritterschaftshauptmann Maidel, both 23 Sept., KS, 66. Olenin reported Lepik's arrest on 24 September (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 189). Lepik's wife was also detained (Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 25 Sept., KS, 74). 126. Olenin to Shakhovskoi, 25 Sept., KS, 74; Shakhovskoi to Manteuffel, 28 Sept., KS, 78.

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When the Mangericht completed its work it had examined 115 people—35 suspects and 80 witnesses (figures in the sources vary a bit)—and indicted 29. All were charged with specific acts, committed on 11-12 September, that violated specific sections of the Criminal Code (mainly articles 2 6 4 - 6 5 ) . By the same token, just as Kolbe had forewarned, members of the Narva Six, including Tamm and Preisman, were found to have committed no indictable offense within the scope of the charge to the court. Acting properly under the law, the court ordered their release. It also ordered the release of Kolbe's favorites, Bruns and Pikkamiagi, whose indictment Shakhovskoi had wished.127 Though fully consistent with his outlook, the judgment not to indict Preisman, Tamm, et al. now left Shakhovskoi with two equally unpalatable choices. Either he could release this handful of men, some of whom had played such important roles in the nonviolent phase of unrest, and hence remain true to his principles but almost certainly enrage his superiors (possibly even the tsar himself); or he could use his power as governor to keep them in jail, bring them to trial, and thereby betray the very principles—fairness, legality, and the legitimacy of peaceful protest—he had been trying, however ambivalently, to defend. Shakhovskoi decided—with what degree of pain we can only guess—to keep the men under guard and send them to Reval for trial with the others. Simply to release them, to allow them to return to work as if nothing had happened, was to risk provoking the factory directors, a minor consideration to be sure; but it was also to risk the affront of seeing his order rescinded in St. Petersburg, a much more serious matter. Shakhovskoi knew of Kolbe's appeal to the Third Section that some prisoners be exiled, a request that Shul'ts later forwarded to the governor for his "disposition," and he was surely affected by a fresh message from the Justice Ministry relaying a recent statement by the tsar: " I hope the disorders do not resume and the instigators [zachinshchiki] are punished under the law." 128 If released, after all, these "instigators," Preisman and Tamm in particular, might go on to embarrass the governor by resuming leadership roles at the factory, where the atmosphere was tense and important issues unresolved. With these considerations in mind, and in 127. Andreianov to Levashev, 30 Sept., RD, 341; Zhelekhovskoi report to Justice Ministry, 4 Oct., RD, 344. Slight discrepancies in the figures make it hard to say whether five or six of the Narva Six were to be freed. 128. Shul'ts to Shakhovskoi, 21 Sept., KS, 63; Assistant Justice Minister Otto von Essen to Shakhovskoi, 28 Sept., KS, 79. The tsar wrote his statement about "zachinshchiki" (also translatable as "ringleaders") on 19 September.

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view of "the harm that might come from the presence [in Kreenholm] of these men," 1 2 9 Shakhovskoi made a decision that had to have been very disturbing to prisoners who expected imminent release. Perhaps he consoled himself with the thought that his decision was only temporary, pending acquittals at the coming trial; but it is also possible that he counted on the second court to solve his problem by convicting. He may also have felt less remorse in light of the efforts he was making to use his power against his true adversaries. To begin with his least daring move, though one that had a soothing influence on workers while confounding managers, he solved the problem of management's refusal to keep its pledge to dismiss Peeter Sekka. On the advice of Katarskii, taking advantage of reports that Sekka was causing alarm at the factory by spreading rumors of imminent disorders, he had him removed from his post, arrested, and transported to Reval with the others, thereby pleasing many workers and demonstrating his evenhandedness. In the same spirit, despite the judgment of the Mangericht, he had Bruns and Pikkamiagi rearrested and sent to Reval for trial. 130 But Shakhovskoi had bigger fish to fry. By the end of September he was preparing nothing less than an all-out effort, first suggested by Andreianov, to bring about the removal of Kolbe and his chief associates. Though crippled by his involuntary resignation on 25 September, Kolbe was still very much the power behind Andrée's throne. Andreianov's sweeping proposal, which the governor made his own, was to achieve Kreenholm's "pacification" (umirotvorenie) by orchestrating the dismissal of almost the entire upper layer of management, including Andrée, Frey, Focht, and Shokross. 131 Addressing his superiors in St. Petersburg, Shakhovskoi asked for the replacement of this group "as soon as possible" by men who were "more suitable." He also took steps to obstruct a promotion he had previously endorsed for Dr. Brashe, the factory doctor. But his special animus was reserved for Kolbe, of whose efforts to do him in he was well aware, and for Factory Police Chief Focht. Shakhovskoi claimed to have the full support of the Mangericht 129. Andreianov to Levashev, 30 Sept., KS, 80. (Here Andreianov is summarizing Shakhovskoi's reasoning.) 130. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 29 and 30 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 11. 249, 3 0 6 - 7 ; Shakhovskoi to Katarskii, 29 Sept., KS, 7 9 - 8 0 ; Andreianov to Levashev, 30 Sept., KS, 80; Zhelekhovskii report of 4 Oct., KS, 91. (At the time he submitted this report, Zhelekhovskii thought that Tamm and Preisman would not be brought to trial.) For other evidence of Shakhovskoi's monitoring of Bruns and Pikkamiagi, see TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560,11. 191, 220, 240. 131. Andreianov to Shakhovskoi, 21 Sept., KS, 62.

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and the procurator in his designation of Kolbe as the "chief culprit" (ßlavnyi vinovnik, in legal jargon the "principal perpetrator") and in his wish to have the man banned from Kreenholm. Were it not for the absence of sufficient evidence to justify a formal indictment—a situation that Shakhovskoi attributed to Kolbe's "slyness" (uvertlivost')—Kolbe, Focht, and the others would have been brought to trial. 132 In sum, if a handful of powerless workers could be punished without a legal foundation, so too could a handful of much more powerful administrators. Equal justice—even if not before the law! The trial was set to take place in Reval before the superior court ( Oberlandßericht), Estland's highest judicial body. Like the Mangericht it was a traditional elite "class court." It consisted of three Landräte (sing.: Landrat), that is, members of the provincial governing council (.Landratskollegium) who were in turn prominent German nobles elected for life by the provincial diet (Landtag).133 Shakhovskoi's personal stake in the proceedings was symbolized by his decision to take the train to Narva on 29 September, the day after the Mangericht ended its work, in order to accompany the convoy of prisoners back to Reval. 134 The trial lasted for nearly three weeks. Of thirty-five defendants (31 Estonians, including Bruns and Pikkamiagi, and 4 Russians), twentyseven (24 Estonians, 3 Russians) were convicted on at least one count, while eight (7 Estonians, 1 Russian) were acquitted. Of the twenty-seven convicted, six (5 Estonians, 1 Russian) were adjudged to be principal perpetrators, the most serious category. Just over half ( 14) of the twentyseven were adults in the eyes of the law (age twenty-one or older for males), while thirteen were minors (nesovershennoletnie), including four 132. Shakhovskoi to Levashev, 1 Oct., KS, 84 (on Kolbe, Andrée, Focht, Shokross, and Frey), and to MVD, 2 Oct., ICS, 85 (on Focht, who, it will be recalled, was fired by Andrée on 30 September); see also Shakhovskoi to Levashev, 30 Sept., and to LobanovRostovskii, 4 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 11. 295, 323. Shakhovskoi began to collect detailed information on Kreenholm's managers via Olenin (and later Katarskii) on 26 September (ibid., 1. 193); on 7 October Katarskii informed him that Frey had a criminal record, having served time for theft (ibid., 1. 362). For Shakhovskoi's attempt to withdraw his earlier commendation of Dr. Brashe, see ibid., 11. 2 0 6 - 7 . 133. Editors' note, KS, 79n; Hans Kruus, Grundriss der Geschichte des estnischen Volkes (Tartu, 1932), 4 4 - 4 5 ; Raun, Estonia, 40. 134. Shakhovskoi to Reinwald, 29 Sept., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 248; Andreianov to Levashev, 30 Sept., KS, 80. Shakhovskoi also took it upon himself to make inquiries with their village priests not only as to the birth and baptismal records of individual defendants but also as to their previous behavior and religious knowledge, when they last took Holy Communion, etc. See, for example, TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 560, 1. 278.

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of the principal perpetrators. Among the few guilty whose trades can be teased from the record, six were Estonian weavers, one a Russian weaver, and one an Estonian spinner. From these data it is clear that despite the factory's substantial proportion of Russians (30 percent of the workers, 37 percent of adult males), its large contingent of spinners (62 percent of the entire spinning section, 26 percent if we count only qualified spinners and their helpers), and its huge preponderance of "adults" (75 percent), this was overwhelmingly a trial of Estonians, and very disproportionately of young Estonian weavers.135 The verdict came down on 21 October, at a time when the tariff issue was still unresolved and rumors were rife that the owners were closing the plant. It was based on the court's opinion that the crimes of 11-12 September, though linked by the defendants' resolve to free their arrested comrades, fell into two distinct phases, one nonviolent, the other violent. In the nonviolent phase (on the 11th only) the crimes did not entail "the taking of the law into one's own hands" ( s a m o u p r a v s t v o ) . This phase included such events as the work stoppage aimed at gaining the prisoners' release and the first march to Narva. Emblematic of the moderation of this stage, expressing the workers' lingering respect for constituted authority, was the telegram asking Shakhovskoi to come to Kreenholm. The violent phase (the 11th and 12th), which took place mainly at or near Kreenholm, entailed (on the 11th) assaults on the Hakenrichter and some policemen, riots and window breaking at Kolbe's home, the rescue of the prisoners held there, and (on the 12th) attacks on soldiers. Participants in phase 1 were convicted under article 265 of the Criminal Code and therefore, except for principal perpetrators, incurred lesser penalties. Participants in phase 2 were convicted under article 264, which, because it included violence as an element, subjected them to stiffer penalties. Much in the spirit of the governor, the court was careful to affirm that the criminal acts for which there was evidence, including acts of violence, did not involve a conspiracy (zajjovor) or prior agreement ( predvariteVnoe soglasie) as defined in articles 266 and 13. Rather, they were the spontaneous unplanned actions of workers who, already in a highly 135. The full verdict, on which I base my account, is in KS, 108-17 (findings and sentences on 108-12, explanation on 113-17), the court's official Russian translation of the German. A summary was printed in Estliandskiegubernskie vedomosti, no. 121 (KS, 176; TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 561,1. 80; see also Shakhovskoi to MVD, 21 Oct., ibid., 11. 9 4 - 9 5 ) . My figures on age and ethnicity are from data in the verdict; my much scantier data on trade are culled from documents already cited. The claim that all those convicted were adjudged principal perpetrators (Kann, Podvig rabochikh, 96) is wrong.

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inflammable mood, learned in quick succession o f a dubious petition to fire their comrades and then o f their subsequent arrest. For this reason the court refused to convict anyone of acting as ringleader or instigator (also as defined in article 266), the most serious criminal classification under the code. Instead, drawing on article 12, it divided defendants into three categories, according to degree o f guilt. The highest was "principal perpetrator" (glavnyi vinovnik, Shakhovskoi's term for Kolbe!). Not easily distinguishable from "instigat o r " or "ringleader," it was used for those who guided the criminal acts of others; began their own illegal acts early on, thereby inspiring imitators; or committed acts o f violence against agents of the state (vla-st'). Next came "special perpetrator" (osobenno vinovnyi), someone who actively aided a "principal" in his crimes. And finally there was "lesser perpetrator" ( menee vinovnyi), a rank-and-file participant who joined in the uprising ( vosstanie) as part of the broader mass but played no prominent role. Thus the gravity o f an offense depended on two factors: the category o f perpetrator and, as geared to the phase o f unrest, the specific act. (Being a "youth" was also a factor that produced a lighter sentence.) This resulted in complex findings that divided the defendants into several groups (two of which included only one person): ( 1 ) Tamm, in jail on 1 1 - 1 2 September and therefore tried against the Mangericht's advice, was treated as a special case. Apparently feeling constrained to convict this prominent leader of something, but having to work "outside the categories o f guilt set out for the other defendants" (mainly articles 2 6 4 - 6 5 ) , the court focused on the fact that he wrote a note and threw it from the window of his cell with the intent of inciting workers to resistance, an "independent crime" under the Criminal Code (article 274). But finding that the note was without practical effect, the court decided on what it saw as a lenient sentence (one without confinement at hard labor): exile to Siberia for an indefinite time and loss of civic rights and privileges ( prava sostoianiia).136 O f course, this was a much stiffer sentence than an ordinary prisoner would receive for an ineffectual note. 136. KS, 109, 114. (I reversed the order in which the court listed its first two sets of verdicts.) Denial of rights and privileges, part of the sentence of all adults convicted as principal or special perpetrators, will not be repeated below. In addition to their sentences, the convicted men were ordered to contribute collectively to expenses incurred by the governor and other officials (400 rubles, mainly for travel) in connection with the disorders, a sort of collective user's tax for criminals (KS, 112).

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(2) Hans Maikallo, at thirty-eight the third oldest defendant, a weaver delegate and, though not among the Narva Six, one of the men Kolbe had tried to have exiled, was convicted of provoking (he podal povod) the nonviolent phase. The court acknowledged that he was never armed and had committed no "blatantly violent" act; " o n the contrary," he was in the group that wired Shakhovskoi to come resolve the conflict. But it ruled him a principal perpetrator in that he "led and encouraged" phase 1. Sentence: four years hard labor in prison factories (na zavodakh).137 (3) Five rank-and-file workers of unnamed occupation (rank-and-file in that none had played a visible role before the 11th) were convicted as principals in phase 2. With the exception of a thirty-six-year-old Reval meshchanin, these were "minors" (ages eighteen through twenty), young men catapulted by impetuosity into conspicuous positions at the height of the turmoil. Four were Estonians, while the other, Nikolai Bogdanov (one of Gerasimov's fellow pitomtsy), was probably a Finnish speaker. 138 Two of the minors had been seen leading a boisterous crowd. The others had no leadership role but fit the category of "principal" owing to acts of violence such as rock throwing or punching a soldier (Bogdanov). Without intended irony, the court claimed to take into account the youth of three of these defendants, including Bogdanov (sentence: eight years hard labor in mines!). Because they admitted their crimes, the others were given hard labor in a less arduous setting, a fortress prison (krepost'), the older man for eight years, the younger one for six. 139 (4) Four Estonians—two weavers (one a delegate) from Kolbe's wish list of exiles and two men of unnamed occupation—though convicted of violent acts in phase 2 (brandishing sticks, speaking rudely, rioting at Kolbe's house), were put in the milder, "special perpetrator" class. The weaver Hans Sild, the only nondelegate marked for dismissal on 9 September, was singled out for taking part in "riotous scenes" and, by his own admission, wielding a rock. Though the court suspected Sild and the delegate Jakub Jallakas of being "principals," they were convicted merely as "specials." Nevertheless, they and one of the others were given harsh sentences: thirty months in a penal battalion, followed by four 137. KS, 1 0 8 - 9 , 115. 138. In a clemency petition later drawn up by twelve of the convicts, however, Bogdanov's is the only name in Russian. See editors' note, KS, 122n. 139. KS, 109, 115; Gerasimov, Zhizn' russkogo rabochego, 33. Gerasimov's recollection that three defendants, including Bogdanov, were sentenced to eight years hard labor is close to the truth, but his claim that the rest were exiled to Archangel for a year or six months is off the mark.

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years surveillance. A fourth defendant, age nineteen, was sentenced as a minor: sixteen months in prison, two years surveillance. If his health proved adequate, the prison term could be commuted to eighty blows of the birch rod. 1 4 0 (5) Five Estonians (one was of Orthodox faith)—two weaver delegates and three of unnamed occupation—were convicted as special perpetrators for engaging in "forceful but nonviolent actions" (nasil stvennye deistviia . . . proizvedennye odnako bez nasiliia—a curious phrase, especially in Russian) against soldiers and the Hakenrichter. Among them was the delegate Kristjan Jurna, whom we already know as a leader, especially in the brief period he remained at large after the arrest of Preisman and Tamm. Like Maikallo, he had been targeted in the petition of 9 September and (though not one of the Narva Six) in Kolbe's message to Shul'ts. Suspected of being a principal, he was tarred with a variety of crimes: slipping a note to arrested comrades, leading a crowd to the factory office, going on the march to Narva, warning the Hakenrichter that no one would work until prisoners were released, and joining in Maikallo's call for a work stoppage. The crimes of the others included blocking the bridge and attacking nonstrikers with sticks (violence, but not against vlasti). Curiously (perhaps because, like Maikallo, he was a drafter of the telegram to Shakhovskoi), Jurna's sentence was no stiffer than that of the two other adults in this cohort: a year in a penal battalion, four years surveillance. The two minors (one was Tamm's brother) were sentenced to eight months of prison (commutable to sixty blows) and two years surveillance. 141 (6) Eleven men (nine Estonians, two Russians; no delegates) convicted of violating either article 264 or 265 were merged into the "lesser" category as participants in "riotous scenes." One Russian was a weaver, one Estonian a spinner, the rest of unnamed occupation. Six members of the group, which included both the youngest and oldest defendants (fifteen and fifty-five, respectively), were minors. Sentences: adults—six months prison or fifty-five blows; minors—three months or forty-five blows. (One minor was a brother of Jallakas.) 140. KS, 109-10, 115. The rod was to be used "if there is not enough room in the prison" (same notation in paras. 5 and 6). Despite his sensitivity to the issue of corporal punishment, Gerasimov neglects to mention this aspect of the sentences. 141. KS, 110,115-16. The confusion about violence/nonviolence may simply mean that the transcription of the verdict was garbled, losing the distinction between violence against "vlasti" and violence against other workers, a less serious crime. There are also conflicting statements in the text as to whether these perpetrators were "principals" or "specials"; the context (especially the sentences) suggests the latter.

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(7) Of the eight men acquitted, five, belonging to the Narva Six, were in jail on 11-12 September. Two of the eight were weaver delegates, two were spinner delegates, and two (including the only Russian among them) had no leadership position. That the court acquitted anyone suggests its independence from the factory, certainly from Kolbe, and its ability to honor legal norms. But even more striking than acquittals as such, given his special identity in Kolbe's eyes as archvillain, was the acquittal of Preisman, whose central role in the conflict before his arrest was beyond dispute. Like Tamm, Preisman was targeted for retribution both in the September petition, where his name led the roll of "rebel instigators" or "ringleaders" ( z a c h i n s h c h i k i - b u n t o v s h c h i k i ) , and in Kolbe's message to the Third Section, where his name led the roll of men to be exiled. Yet Preisman, Adoson (also on both lists), and others, having already been cleared by the Mangericht, were, owing to "lack of evidence," "freed of suspicion of taking part in the disorders." 142 Also acquitted were Bruns and Pikkamiagi, whom the governor wished to see punished for their roles in promoting the petition that had set the stage for the disorders.143 Perhaps the court exonerated them as a show of judicial balance. (Could loyal trustees of management be punished and Preisman and Adoson freed?) But the court's reasoning, set forth in the verdict in labored, convoluted prose, seems to have been guided by another concern: that a guilty finding would logically point to the criminal liability of Kolbe and Focht. The notorious petition, as the court acknowledged, was fashioned by Bruns and Pikkamiagi in collusion with Focht and distributed with Kolbe's blessing. Under the tense conditions then prevailing at the factory, this stratagem was (as Shakhovskoi had said) "inappropriate." Nevertheless, it "did not entail a violation of criminal law, either in substance or in the way it was drawn up." Although the petition was the event that had launched the "regrettable disorders," there was no legal basis for convicting anyone for participation in its drafting; the factory police, after all, was a "private institution" ( c h a s t n o e uchrezbdenie), and a criminal court had no jurisdiction over the way such a body conducted its affairs.144 Beyond the plausible point that no law could be found under which to prosecute 142. KS, 111. 143. Peeter Sekka, another favorite of the Kreenholm management, may also have been among the eight who were acquitted. On this point there is a discrepancy in the documents, since his name does not appear among the acquitted (or anywhere else) in the official verdict, but he is named as an acquitted defendant in some of Shakhovskoi's post-trial correspondence (TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 561, 11. 120, 130, 134, 143). 144. KS, 1 1 6 - 1 7 .

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these acts, this judgment implied a partial recognition of the principle of Herr im Haus, or at least of the notion that an arm of management was entitled to special protection from the scrutiny of public law. It also implied that under such scrutiny the trail from the petition would lead right back to Kolbe. Whatever his reservations, Shakhovskoi confirmed the verdict on the day it was handed down, although, invoking legal technicalities, he did attempt to circumvent or at least delay the implementation of corporal punishment. 145 It is indicative of the Kreenholm workers' enduring trust in the governor that in the days that followed they continued to count on him to obtain a reduction in the sentences.146

The Government Commission

The end of judicial proceedings could not provide a solution to the as yet unsettled problems of the factory, nor could it cut the Gordian knot in which governor and manager were snarled. Instead, the analysis and resolution of those problems were in some measure removed from the hands of the principals and transferred to a special commission of the MVD, working in cooperation with the Third Section and the Finance Ministry, which was formed shortly before the trial ended. Its task: to examine Kreenholm's troubles and make suitable recommendations. The commission's long report, including both the main statement (Raport) and elaborate addenda (Zapiski Nos. 1 and 2), has already served us as a source of information. Now we will examine it in another light: not for its "truth value" about conditions at the factory, but as our window into how these matters were viewed in the capital.147 Timashev based his decision to order a wide-ranging inquiry on his belief that conflicts such as that at Kreenholm had broad significance for the future of Russia's social stability, a concern that had troubled him 145. KS, 117. For Shakhovskoi's attempt to delay corporal punishment by deferring the matter to the Governing Senate, see TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 561, 11. 1 0 3 - 4 . 146. Katarskii to Shakhovskoi, 29 Oct., TsGIA ESSR, f. 29, op. 2, d. 562,1. 8. On the subsequent fate of some of the defendants, see below, chapter 5. 147. For present purposes we need not distinguish in the notes between "Raport" and "Zapiski." The three documents comprise pp. 3 5 3 - 9 6 of RD\ my citations will simply refer to RD and the relevant pages.

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for the past two years.148 Disputes between workers and manufacturers, he wrote with foresight on 17 October, are "not only a local problem but one that has paramount importance in relation to the workers of the empire as a whole." For this reason, but also because of Kreenholm's still unstable condition, he decided to join with other agencies to create a commission to study the situation "in all its detail." In addition to its general charge, he assigned the commission a practical task: to seek an understanding (soglashenie) with the company for "easing and improving the workers' lives [ byt\"