Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode—a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant—to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.
Semën Kanatchikov, born in a central Russian village in 1879, was one of the thousands of peasants who made the transition from traditional village life to the life of an urban factory worker in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the last years of the nineteenth century. Unlike the others, however, he recorded his personal and political experiences (up to the even of the 1905 Revolution) in an autobiography. First published in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, this memoir gives us the richest and most thoughtful firsthand account we have of life among the urban lower classes in Imperial Russia. We follow this shy but determined peasant youth's painful metamorphosis into a self-educated, skilled patternmaker, his politicization in the factories and workers' circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and his close but troubled relations with members of the liberal and radical intelligentsia. Kanatchikov was an exceptionally sensitive and honest observer, and we learn much from his memoirs about the day-to-day life of villagers and urban workers, including such personal matters as religious beliefs, family tensions, and male-female relationships. We also learn about conditions in the Russian prisons, exile life in the Russian Far North, and the Bolshevik-Menshevik split as seen from the workers' point of view.
Reginald Zelnik uses a single episode—a militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plant—to explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.
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