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The two and a half years of discontent from 1905 to 1907 had
produced a wave of strikes, mutinies and disorders, unprecedented
in Russian and world history. Although the revolution failed to
achieve its ultimate objective - the overthrow of autocracy -
different sections of the Russian population made gains as a result
of their struggle. |
The
industrial working class in particular had wrested certain
improvements in its condition from the government and the employers
thanks to its discovery in a general strike of a powerful new means
of exerting political pressure. In some regions the workers
succeeded in securing significant wage rises compared to the
pre-revolutionary level, although in real terms the average wage
across the country remained approximately the same because of the
rise in the prices of some staple commodities.
In addition,
the workers compelled the bosses to reduce the number of minor
offences in the work-place punishable by fines and also to cut the
working hours. Most factories now operated 9 or 10-hour day, and
some had an 8-hour day. There was even a small number of companies
in which workers secured collective agreements with employers which
guaranteed such benefits, as annual paid leave and sick benefit.
However, there was still no national labor legislation which would
guarantee welfare provisions of this kind for the majority of
workers.
Certain
achievements had been made in widening political rights of the
workers. Those of them who worked in companies employing 50 workers
or more had now the right to participate in elections to the State
Duma. Economic strikes were legalized, and so too were trade-unions
which could now openly engage in their activities. The revolution
had tremendously raised the workers’ class consciousness, their
awareness of their political potency, the cohesion of their ranks
and their class solidarity. Because the workers bore the brunt of
the battle against the autocracy, the ups and downs of their
struggle affected all sections of the Russian society: from
government circles and business classes to the multi-million
peasantry. Their fighting spirit, courage and determination were an
example and a source of inspiration for other underprivileged social
strata in the struggle for the betterment of their conditions. The
labor movement was the backbone of the First Russian Revolution and
the backdrop against which all major events of the years of turmoil
unfolded.
The peculiar
circumstances of Russia’s backwardness, with her predominantly
peasant population downtrodden and illiterate, middle classes weak
and amorphous and bourgeoisie still in its infancy, had propelled
the relatively small proletariat to the forefront of political
struggle and the role of a chief agent of the anti-autocratic,
‘bourgeois’ revolution. This allowed Russian Marxists, such as
Plekhanov and Lenin, to advance the theoretical proposition about
the proletariat’s leading role, or
hegemony, during the
anti-autocratic stage of the revolution. Lenin and his Bolsheviks
came to interpret the idea of proletarian hegemony as meaning that
the politically active workers and Marxist revolutionaries held
ideological and organizational leadership over the nonproletarian
toiling masses and, above all, over the peasantry.