Chapter Three
Workers' Community

Most workers were an obstinate audience for employers' efforts to proselytize the ideal of a family of workers and employers and the values of discipline, sobriety, and gratitude. Although the public face of labor relations in the industry remained calm—until 1903, strikes and other labor disturbances by Russian printers were virtually unknown—the absence of a direct challenge to authority did not preclude more subtle forms of resistance. Rather, the everyday life of printing workers exemplified the routine sort of resistance that one often sees where domination seems secure.^[1] In effect, printing workers faced employers with a moral community of their own. It was less formal and explicit than the corporative ideal promoted by employers, but its practices were more deeply rooted in workers' everyday lives, in ordinary practices of sociability and comradeship. Drinking habits and rituals, manners of speech and demeanor, and attitudes toward work and leisure defined this workers' community and especially its difference and separation from those in authority.

This was an ambiguous community, however. First, it was divided within itself. The customs and rituals of sociability that created and sustained a sense of separate identity and solidarity among workers were overwhelmingly immediate, face-to-face interactions among workmates and were therefore tied to place and craft. The connection to

[1] See the discussions of "everyday forms of resistance" in James Scott, Weapons of the Weak; idem, Domination and the Arts of Resistance; Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life; Luedtke, "Cash, Coffee Breaks, Horseplay," pp. 65–95.

craft potentially widened the scope of worker community beyond a single workshop, but although there were moments when skilled printers viewed themselves as sharing a common identity, such perspective did not overcome the essential boundaries of a community demarcated by skill, occupation, and gender. Workers defined their identity not only in opposition to employers but also in contradistinction to other, different workers.

This workers' community also posed only an ambiguous challenge to authority. As in other situations where workers sustain values and behaviors largely resistant to elite efforts to guide them, these forms of resistance often do not lead to any more combative dissent.^[2] There was no intrinsically militant telos toward which this separate worker culture was heading. Yet the everyday solidarities of worker community did not preclude such a course and in fact offered workers both a potential foundation for collective protest and organization and a refuge within which they could satisfy their needs to feel connected with the lives of others without the dangers of directly challenging their subordination.

Apprenticeship as Socialization

In most of the printing crafts, a worker learned the ways of the worker community as a young apprentice. During these first years, a boy learned the techniques of his trade and was also inducted into a community of workers, taught its customs, and encouraged to conform to its mores. Apprenticeship was the medium through which workers reproduced their own community and culture. Appropriately, this socialization occurred in adolescence. At a time of life subject to emotional stress and role anxiety under any circumstances, working-class youths were compelled to spend most of their waking hours for six or seven days a week laboring in the company of unrelated but demanding adults. In this crucible were shaped many of the attitudes and expectations of the adult worker.^[3]

[2] Gareth Stedman Jones, "Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class," in his Languages of Class, ch. 4; and Luedtke, "Cash, Coffee Breaks, Horseplay," esp. pp. 80–89.

[3] The discussion that follows is based largely on workers' memoirs, cited below. In addition, valuable descriptions of apprenticeship in the Russian printing industry may be found in Trudy pervogo s"ezda, pp. 27–37, 53; Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 1, pp. 78–79; Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, pp. 59–63; and in the contemporary trade press, especially Naborshchik (1902–1916).

Most printing workers experienced some form of apprenticeship, though its structure and customs were best preserved in crafts where hand work was still predominant—engraving, lithographic transferring, bookbinding, and especially type composition, on which I focus. In a certain sense, the compositor was the "typical" printing worker. Although at one time most of the workers in the industry were pressmen-before mechanization a workshop typically employed two hand pressmen and two inkers for every type compositor—by the end of the nineteenth century, with press work largely mechanized but typesetting still mainly a hand craft, one-half to two-thirds of all typographic workers were compositors, and in the larger and more extensively mechanized plants the ratio might be as high as five to one.^[4] Compositors also tended to determine workers' collective life in the industry. They were the dominant presence in almost all organizations and collective actions among printers (and in 1905 and after, they were an important presence in general labor organizations).

Compositors often remembered their years of apprenticeship as distressing and even traumatic, and considered surviving apprenticeship to be their first rite of passage into the worker community. Upon entering into an apprenticeship in the 1890s in what he had imagined would be "a holy temple of thought, a printing house," one compositor recalled finding "not learning, but martyrdom" (ne uchen'ia, a muchen'ia ).^[5] Many apprentices felt similarly tortured during the first months. In the 1870s, Gerasim Grents "prayed to God to end [his] torment," crying at the sight of other children playing in the street outside the plant.^[6] Others also recalled tears.^[7] In crafts such as engraving and bookbinding, where apprentices lived with their new masters, the distress of beginning a new and difficult life was reinforced by the separation from parents. The engraver Ivan Pavlov recalled screaming for his mother and crying most of the first day of his apprenticeship after his father handed him over to the shop master.^[8] But even boys who could go home did not

[4] Orlov, Poligraficheskaia promyshlennost' Moskvy, pp. 57–58; Perepis' Moskvy 1902 goda, part 1, vypusk 2, table 6; Varzar, Statisticheskie svedeniia o fabrikakh i zavodakh, part 2, pp. 36–37; Kratkii ocherk izdatel'skoi deiatel'nosti A. S. Suvorina, pp. 11–15; Bakhtiarov, Slugi pechati, p. 49.

[5] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 56, p. 200.

[6] Naborshchik 1:12 (January 19, 1903), p. 201. This is a part of the memoir by "Shilo" (Gerasim Grents), "Istoriia moego ucheniia," Naborshchik 1:10, 12, 15, 18 (January–March 1903). Grents was an apprentice in Odessa in the 1870s, working in a type foundry, a pressroom, and a composition room, before moving to St. Petersburg.

[7] For example, Aleksei Kairovich in Leninskii zakaz, p. 29.

[8] Pavlov, Zhizn' russkogo gravera, p. 39. Pavlov was apprenticed in Moscow in the 1880s.

always find sympathy. When M. E. Egorov, an apprentice compositor, pleaded with his father not to be sent back to the printing shop but to be apprenticed in a metal factory, his father thrashed him.^[9]

These youths had reason to despair. In what many hoped would be a "temple of learning," apprentices found an environment that more resembled a "barracks" or a "prison."^[10] This oppressive atmosphere was partly the effect of the physical rigors of the job on boys starting work at the age of fourteen (and sometimes as young as ten or eleven, despite the child-labor legislation of 1882 and 1897).^[11] They worked from eight to fourteen hours a day,^[12] for little pay,^[13] in an environment that was often filthy and malodorous. Contributing greatly to the torments of this new world were the adults who inhabited it. The compositor Egorov recalled his first impressions of the Pantaleev press in St. Petersburg where he was apprenticed in the 1890s: "The smell of ink, kerosene, and soot, the pounding of machines, half-drunk compositors who permanently smelled of something foul, the slaps, the errands every minute, now for kvas, now for pirog or sausage, the crudity—all this made a strong impression on me."^[14]

Like artisanal apprentices in other crafts and other countries, a young compositor spent much of the time, especially in his first year, running errands. The employer or manager might require him to stop at a bakery for fresh rolls each morning, send him out during the day with packages for customers or deliveries to the censorship office, or have him sweep the floor or clean the toilets. But the largest number of demands came from the adult workers. An apprentice would often be sent to purchase vodka, tobacco, sausages, and pastries for the workers. Since most employers and managers forbade drinking at work,

[9] Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," p. 23. This work contains the memoir of Egorov, an apprentice in St. Petersburg in the 1890s.

[10] Naborshchik 1:10 (January 5, 1903), p. 169; Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," p. 22.

[11] Ekho, November 30, 1883, p. 3; Svavitskii and Sher, Ocherk polozheniia, pp. 10, 47; Protokoly pervoi vserossiiskoi konferentsii, p. 79.

[12] Mikhailovskii, Otchet za 1885 god glavnogo fabrichnogo inspektora, pp. 102-03, 137–38; Prodolzhitel'nost' rabochego dnia i zarabotnaia plata rabochikh, pp. 91–92, 215; Bernshtein-Kogan, Chislennost', pp. 130, 138, 141; Sher, Istoriia, pp. 47–52; TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 216, pp. 44–45; Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," p. 22.

[13] For the first three months an apprentice usually received no pay at all. He would get a few rubles a month during the remainder of the first year, which would increase to no more than ten rubles, about one-third the pay of a regular compositor, by the final year. Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 1, p. 78; Davydov, Otchet za 1885 god fabrichnogo inspektora, pp. 72–78.

[14] Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," p. 22.

vodka had to be smuggled in without their knowledge, though foremen, who were more directly involved in shop-floor life, were often coconspirators. For an apprentice to refuse to run errands or smuggle in vodka was to risk ostracism: adult compositors would shun the uncooperative apprentice, perhaps refuse to teach him, and slap him for the slightest error. To succeed in the smuggling and other assignments was to become known as an "artful dodger" (lovkach ) and to earn the respect of the adult workers.^[15] By pleasing one's teachers, these successes also hastened the time when running errands would end and real training in the skills of the trade would begin. But these social lessons were no less essential to a worker's education. Workers learned what it meant to be a comrade and also mastered the routine deceptions with which workers faced authority.

Other experiences in an apprentice's life offered additional moral lessons. Slaps and beatings (varied with ear pulling, nose twisting, and hair yanking) by both foreman and fellow workers were a pervasive fact of life for most apprentices, viewed by most adults as essential to a proper upbringing.^[16] Also common were more subtle forms of abuse. Like all artisans, compositors and other skilled printers had their own special craft humor, fool's errands for the uninitiated. An innocent apprentice might be sent to the plant's printing shop to ask the workers there for a "marashka "—a typographic term for a poorly locked-up space that spoils a page by showing up in print—only to get a goodnatured but still-painful and humiliating smack from a pressman.^[17] Or an apprentice might be sent to a nearby store and told to ask for two kopecks' worth of "pull" (taska ), to which request the knowing shopkeeper would pull the boy's hair and kick him out. When he returned in confusion to the workshop, the adult workers would laugh and then tell him, "That's exactly what we sent you for, stupid, now you'll be a little smarter."^[18]

[15] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 216, pp. 45–46. From the unpublished memoir of M. A. Popov, who was apprenticed in Moscow in the 1880s.

[16] Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe dvukh epokh, p. 11; Naborshchik 1:15 (February 9, 1903), p. 248; TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, p. 1 (unpublished memoir of an apprentice compositor in St. Petersburg in the 1890s).

[17] Leninskii zakas, pp. 29–30; also TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 216, p. 44. Such initiatory rites are still practiced among skilled printers in the United States. At the start of my own brief apprenticeship in a printing shop in New York, I was sent by the senior pressman to another shop in the building to ask for "a bucket of halftone dots," only to be laughed at for my ignorance when I requested this quite non-portable element of photographic offset lithography, and teased even more mercilessly when I returned to my own shop, red-faced and naturally empty-handed.

[18] Pavlov, Zhizn' russkogo gravera, p. 44.

Beatings and fool's errands served a complex function in apprenticeship. Partly, they were just what apprentices often felt them to be: the cruelty of ignorant men looking to have a good laugh or to take out their aggression on someone weaker. However, they were also part of the apprentice's education—his preparation to join the community and culture of adult workers. Fool's errands, rooted in the argot of the craft, taught new workers its secrets, and beatings punished an apprentice for his mistakes. Fool's errands were also practical lessons in "street smarts" (smekalka ), and beatings helped to ensure a certain tough resignation, both of which were needed to get by in the world.^[19] Finally, beatings and humiliating jokes were part of the customary culture of a craft community. This reproduction of custom had its simple side: they did this to us when we were apprentices, so we shall do the same to you. Yet even this simple repetition of treatment suggests a rite of passage. Like the willingness to run errands and smuggle in vodka, enduring beatings and humiliation were requirements for acceptance. And conformity, like street smarts and fortitude, was one of the moral rules on which this community was built.

Apprenticeship was also a forced march into adulthood. Although most adult workers disapproved of drinking, smoking, and swearing by apprentices—sometimes beating offenders when they were caught—they made no effort to shelter boys from such behavior. They drank heavily, swore bawdily, and openly bragged about sexual adventures. This exposure to the adult world could be disturbing to a young apprentice. One compositor recalled being "terribly shocked and astounded by all this sort of talk and drunkenness and decided that there were no worse people in the world than compositors."^[20] But workers would also recall being fascinated as apprentices by adult talk—which included discussions not only about sex but also about life in the world, distant places, and even literature. Of special interest were the tales of wanderers—a familiar group among compositors—who described the lives of peasants in different regions, the work of printers in the provinces, and assorted "scandals" they had witnessed.^[21]

Acculturation into this adult world was often aided by a separate youth culture among apprentices, which mimicked many of the standards of the adults. Especially in the larger enterprises, where a number

[19] A discussion by a sociologist of "socialization through insult" can be found in Flynn, Insult and Society, ch. 8.

[20] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, pp. 1–2.

[21] Ibid., d. 216, p. 48.

of apprentices were being trained at the same time, they often formed a community of their own. During the long midday break and after work, apprentices often spent time together—playing children's games like tag and leapfrog (piatnashki and chekharda ), and also taunting passers-by and picking fights with one another.^[22] Some apprentices even formed gangs that fought other gangs, imitating the sporting collective brawls that were common among both urban workers and peasants.^[23]

The solidarity of this youthful community was evident from the moment a new apprentice was hired: one compositor recalled the "extremely unfriendly looks" of the other apprentices on his first day at work.^[24] But a new apprentice would soon be initiated, much as an adult worker would be accepted into the larger workshop community. One compositor recalled that soon after he was hired as an apprentice at the age of twelve, the other apprentices approached him and "began to pester me, 'Let's have a smoke, got any cigarettes?' 'I don't smoke.' 'What! What sort of a comrade are you?! Here, take a puff, just so we won't think you're giving us the cold shoulder.' "When he received his first paycheck at the end of the fourth month, he was expected to treat his fellow apprentices to drinks at a local tavern.^[25] Generally, young workers learned to drink and smoke in the company of their peers. Drinking and smoking, of course, were attractive as symbols of adulthood. But they also served as rituals of comradeship and conformity among apprentices.

The psychological, moral, and social impact of apprenticeship was complex and varied. Some observers worried that the main effect was to demoralize workers: "The apprentice sees nothing good, nothing that might have a salutary effect on his young spirit and preserve him from a drunken, half-starved, itinerant life. His youth is broken and spoiled."^[26] But this same evidence can be read in other ways. Parents put a son into an apprenticeship with the hope of benefiting from his

[22] Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe, p. 9. Lunch breaks for apprentices often lasted two to four hours to comply with regulations limiting the actual working time of minors to eight hours a day.

[23] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, p. 4. On the general phenomenon, see V. Lebedev, "K istorii kulachnykh boev na Rusi"; Buiko, Put' rabochego, p. 15; Brower, "Labor Violence in Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century," pp. 425–26.

[24] Naborshchik 1:12 (January 19, 1903), p. 198.

[25] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, pp. 9–10.

[26] Vestnik graficheskogo dela 15 (August 13, 1897), p. 141. The author, Aleksei Filippov, was a supervisor who had himself been a compositor.

future earnings but also hoping to "make a man of him."^[27] Indeed, apprentices learned to drink, smoke, and swear, usually before they were fifteen. They also learned a measure of independence and personal responsibility. When an apprentice made mistakes, he suffered physically. If he was talented—even if only at smuggling vodka into the shop—he was rewarded. Adults complained that apprentices quickly became "inattentive and rude," finding ways to avoid doing what they were told, wasting time, sneaking away to smoke, and talking back. In a word, it was said, they began to "strut arrogantly about like adults."^[28] This coming of age was psychological and personal but also social. While an apprentice, a boy learned what it meant to be a "comrade"—to be street smart and tough, to drink and smoke with one's fellows, not to be aloof. Apprenticeship taught him the values and standards of the community of adult workers, and it taught him to conform to these, contributing both to a worker's sense of self and to his identity as a member of a collective that stood apart and distinct from others.

Communal Space

As apprentices learned, the workplace and working time were not entirely the domain of the employers. Workers expropriated portions of working time and space—the terrain that most symbolized their subordination to others—for their own uses, for being together with one another and apart from authority.^[29] They smuggled vodka into the shop talked, drank, and swore together—certainly undermining the efforts of employers to train obedient and well-behaved future workers but maintaining a significant light-heartedness, a playful and thus less threatening expression of collective solidarity and disobedience.

This mixture of playfulness and challenge was especially evident in practices associated with alcohol. Although drink pervaded the social lives of most male workers in Russia, compositors were particularly prodigious drinkers, a subject of persistent concern among employers.

[27] Naborshchik 1:27 (May 4, 1903), p. 444.

[28] Ibid. 1:17 (February 25, 1903), p. 286; 1:20 (March 16, 1903), pp. 339–40.

[29] Alf Luedtke has used the concept of Eigensinn to describe everyday practices in which workers "expressed a space of their own" during "expropriated bits of the time formally designated as working time." Eigensinn was "expressed and reaffirmed by walking around and talking, by momentarily slipping away or day-dreaming, but primarily by reciprocal body contact and horseplay." Luedtke, "Cash, Coffee Breaks, Horseplay," pp. 79–80. See also James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, ch. 2 ("Making Social Space for a Dissident Subculture"); Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, pp. xix, 34–39.

A letter to the trade journal Tipografskii zhurnal in 1867 complained that when compositors receive their wages on Saturday, "these people know no moderation" but spend the entire weekend drinking so much that they are often unable to work on Monday.^[30] Employers and managers, but also temperance advocates among the workers, focused on the excesses: drunken binges after payday, absenteeism on Mondays and even Tuesdays, the dissipation of a week's earnings or more on a single weekend, and the resultant suffering of their families.^[31] Periodic bouts of severe drunkenness were certainly common to most printing workers, but alcohol also held a more constant and measured place in their lives. Most compositors drank (usually surreptitiously) during their midday meal break, many drank occasionally throughout the day, and many spent at least a few weekday evenings at the local tavern.

Compositors drank for many reasons. They drank for their health, believing, as many contemporaries did, that alcohol was beneficial to good health, and specifically that it fortified the body against the ill effects of lead dust.^[32] They drank to escape—"to forget, not to think, not to feel."^[33] Finally, though not least in importance, they drank for the sake of sociability and community. Drink was so much a part of the customary life of the workshop that compositors had their own special vernacular to describe the many occasions on which they drank. Ordinary drinking, especially if heavy, was simply balda —a term suggesting stupefaction (literally, a heavy hammer or a stupid person). Khlopoty (sometimes khlopochi ) also referred to everyday drinking, but in a restricted sense more directly tied to the associational life of the workshop.

In normal usage, khlopoty refers to troubles and worries and also busy activity. Among printers, it described the daily, and illegal, process of collecting money from all the workers for the purchase of vodka and snacks, begging an advance from the owner or a loan from the foreman if cash was short (such loans were known as payment "by the hatchet"—vydacha "na topor" —since they required repayment at substantial interest), and dispatching an apprentice off to the local tavern. When an employer succeeded in effectively barring apprentices from

[30] Tipografskii zhurnal 1:8 (October 15, 1867), p. 34.

[31] Trudy pervogo s"ezda, p. 56; Naborshchik 1:20 (March 16, 1903), p. 326; 1:47 (September 21, 1903), pp. 702–04.

[32] Naborshchik 1:7 {December 15, 1902), p. 119.

[33] Ibid 1:27 (May 4, 1903), pp. 451–53. See also Obzor graficheskikh iskusstv 1879, no. 4 (February 15), pp. 26–27; Naborshchik 1:6 (December 8, 1902), pp. 104– 05; 1:18 (March 2, 1903), pp. 293–94; 1:23–24 (April 6, 1903), pp. 381–82; 1:25 (April 20, 1903), pp. 412–13.

leaving the shop, workers would appeal to the plant doorman, to workers delivering paper or supplies, even to passers-by on the street to purchase vodka for them. In some shops workers planned ahead and organized special drinking funds. All this was in preparation for the midday break, when compositors would drink, eat, talk, and play cards.^[34]

In addition to this everyday drinking, there were ritual occasions requiring organized and sponsored drinking, either at the workplace or at a local tavern. Drinking was essential to the rite by which an apprentice, after completing his training, was initiated into the community of adult workers. One does not find in Russia the elaborate ceremonies by which artisans in Western Europe initiated a new journeyman into their company—mock baptisms with water, wine, or beer, bestowing of "titles," speeches stylized according to familiar custom, which reflected well-established corporative structures not found among Russian craftsmen. Russian printers, in particular, possessed no equivalents to the "chapels" of English compositors and pressmen or the brotherhoods of journeymen printers in France, which had since "time out of mind" enforced order in the trade and facilitated fellowship, professional identity, and mutual assistance.^[35] In general, such corporative customs were little developed among Russian workers. However, at least among Russian printers—engravers, hand lithographers, typefounders, and especially type compositors—customs of solidarity, though less formal and rooted more in the workplace than in a larger craft community, nonetheless effectively expressed the existence and sense of collectivity.

Some compositors staged relatively elaborate initiation rituals. In shops where immigrant German compositors predominated, the traditional German Gautschfest was practiced as late as the early 1900s.^[36] Russian ceremonies may have been influenced by immigrants, though the forms suggest inventiveness as much as borrowing. For example, at the State press in St. Petersburg in the 1890s, on the first payday after an apprentice compositor completed his training, all the compositors

[34] See especially TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, pp. 2–3; Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," p. 23; Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, pp. 38–39.

[35] Howe, The London Compositor, pp. 23–32 (quotation, p. 23); Child, Industrial Relations in the British Printing Industry, pp. 35–39; Davis, "A Trade Union in Sixteenth-Century France," pp. 48–69; idem, "Strikes and Salvation at Lyon," in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, pp. 1–16; Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, pp. 42–47, 55–56.

[36] Naborsbcbik 1:36 (July 6, 1903), p. 562.

would gather together, someone would put an old top hat or paper fool's cap on the former apprentice's head, and the oldest worker would ceremoniously lead him around the composition room.^[37]

For most Russian compositors it was enough to mark the completion of apprenticeship with drink, for which the former apprentice would pay (sometimes, especially in smaller workshops, with the help of a contribution or a loan from the employer). This sponsored drinking had its share of ceremonial and even symbolic elements. To distinguish this rite from ordinary drinking, the event was named: an apprentice compositor was said to be "cleaning the heels" (chistit' kabluki ) of his new comrades (typefounders called it "milking the cow"). Humorous speeches would sometimes be made welcoming the former apprentice into the brotherhood of craftsmen. This ceremonial completion of apprenticeship also signified the passage into adulthood. As one compositor recalled, "I was consecrated [posviatili ] as a compositor with vodka, beer, and cigarettes, which for the first time I was allowed to smoke in the presence of the older comrades."^[38]

There were other occasions when a worker was expected to "clean the heels" of his comrades at the local tavern: when he was hired in a new shop (on the first day of work or after he received his first wages), on his name day, when he was married, and when his children were christened. These occasions of sponsored collective drinking were signs of the integration of a worker's whole life into the shop community and as such were treated as moral duties. The symbolic importance of these ceremonies was expressed in their enforced camaraderie. Although kabluki typically cost a worker from 1 to 3 rubles and could cost more (out of a typical monthly wage of 30 rubles for a compositor in 1900), to refuse was to knowingly stand outside the collectivity and invite ostracism. A worker who refused the often-expensive custom of treating his shopmates, one recalled, "would not be accepted as a comrade."^[39]

This everyday community among workers was in important respects a community of men. At the start of the twentieth century, women still comprised only about 5 percent of the total number of typographic

[37] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, p. 2.

[38] Ibid., d. 216, p. 50. See also ibid., d. 60, p. 2; Naborshchik 1:7 (December 15, 1902), pp. 118–19; Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," pp. 23–24; Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, pp. 38, 427.

[39] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, p. 2. See also Iuferovyi and Sokolovskii, Akademicheskaia tipografiia, p. 95; Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," p. 24; Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe, pp. 16, 18, 22–23; Galaktionov [Shponik], Lebedinaia pesn', p. 5; Naborshchik 1:12 (January 19, 1903), p. 206; Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, p. 38.

workers (5.7 percent in St. Petersburg in 1900, 4.2 percent in Moscow in 1902), almost all of whom worked either as proofreaders or in semiskilled jobs in binding departments, mainly folding and sewing signatures.^[40] Composition work, typefounding, and machine work remained male preserves. In the few instances when women were hired as compositors before 1906—when their numbers began to grow—they were put to work in separate rooms.^[41]

This circumstantial exclusion of women from the workplace facilitated the importance that gender came to occupy in the solidarity and identity of these worker communities.^[42] Workers' common sexual identity—at least its presumption—was one of the bonds that united them. For example, when work was slow, compositors might gather around a shop window "enjoying and rating the legs of the women passing by."^[43] Everyday talk also often had a certain locker-room quality. As one Petersburg compositor recalled:

Foul language . . . was used for almost everything, in every situation, without the slightest modesty before the young apprentices (there were still no women). Stories and talk to apprentices were always seasoned with streetcorner swearing. And when they swore, they swore strongly, with force, using triply compounded obscenities, facetious sayings, and proverbs all in the same breath. It was a kind of game. . . . For the most part, the talk among workers was about boozing and about various adventures with women and sexual encounters. All was spoken openly, shamelessly, down to the last detail.^[44]

This was indeed "a kind of game"—competitive, personal, rooted in stereotypically masculine behavior, and demanding conformity if one wished to be considered a "comrade." Sometimes this play went beyond talk. After a new worker received his first paycheck, and after the customary drinking party, he might be taken whoring: "Whoever did not wish to go along would be laughed at. It was necessary to conceal not debauchery but self-restraint, or one would be mocked."^[45] Heavy

[40] Perepis' Moskvy 1902, vypusk 2, tables 6–8; S.-Peterburg po perepisi 1900 goda, vypusk 2, table 2.

[41] For example, Levenson, Istoricheskii ocherk, pp. 20, 25, 49.

[42] For an important argument about the relevance of gender for interpreting expressions of collective identity, among men as well as women, see Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, esp. chs. 2–3.

[43] Naborshchik 1:51 (October 19, 1903), p. 768. As printing shops were often located in basements with high windows near the street, workers thus turned the physical disadvantages of their position to their own uses.

[44] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, pp. 1–2.

[45] Ibid., p. 2.

drinking, coarse swearing, physical roughness, and competitive sexuality were bonds that united these individuals as men as well as workers.^[46]

In a different way, female relatives also represented figures against whom this male worker community defined itself. On paydays, wives, sisters, and mothers were often seen standing outside of printing shops waiting to pull their husbands, brothers, or sons home before they could escape to the tavern, or at least to take part of their pay for household expenses. Workers habitually ridiculed these women "tugboats" (buksiry ) and sometimes ignored them. "If a 'tugboat' is late or the husband succeeds in slipping away unnoticed," an observer wrote in 1903, "it means grief for his unfortunate family—only a memory remains of a two-week wage."^[47] In the face of a definition of worker identity and community rooted in workplace and craft, female relatives represented competing identities of family, kin, and perhaps neighborhood, and were often spurned.

Death is a final rite of passage that can define a community and its self-image. In the more developed craft communities of Western Europe, the collective and ritualized response of a community to the death of a member was an important expression of its identity as a corporative body.^[48] Less formally, Russian compositors felt a similar communal obligation to help bury their own and to use this occasion to recall the ties between them. It was common for a widow to turn to her husband's former comrades for money in order to bury him, and it was expected that workers would pay. If the dead worker had been single, a friend or other relative might initiate the collection; sometimes the dying worker himself might turn to his comrades for help. Often this money would be collected as a "subscription" paid out by the plant office on credit against workers' future wages. Even after the establishment of assistance funds and burial societies, this custom, "the origins of which are lost in the distant past," persisted.^[49] Attendance at a

[46] Without accepting Lionel Tiger's biological determinism or the normative implications of his arguments about male social bonding (for which he has been criticized as a "theorist of patriarchy"), there is still value in his discussion of male-only social relationships as an important and distinctive form of collective solidarity. Tiger, Men in Groups . See also Stearns, Be a Man: Males in Modern Society .

[47] Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 2, p. 96.

[48] See, for example, Sewell, Work and Revolution in France, p. 36.

[49] Vestnik graficheskogo dela 28–29 (April 2, 1898), p. 52 (quotation); Graficheskie iskusstva i bumazhnaia promyshlennost' 1:11 (July 1896), p. 173; Naborshchik 1:17 (February 25, 1903), pp. 286–87; 1:48 (September 28, 1903), p. 720; Galaktionov [Shponik], Lebedinaia pesn', p. 8.

worker's funeral was more contingent on how well-known and liked a man was.

Behavior at funerals expressed how workers perceived and wished to represent their mutual relationships. Some funerals were solemn and dignified expressions of collective loss. These, naturally, were the ceremonies most often described in the professional press, which wished to encourage greater decorum. When a compositor at Suvorin's Novoe vremia press died in 1903, a large crowd of his fellow workers followed his coffin as it was drawn in a hearse to the cemetery. After prayers in the chapel, workers carried their late comrade's coffin to the grave. Following the burial, one compositor read a poem he had written for the occasion:

Our friend is buried, he is with us no more
One less comrade is among us . . .
Gathering to pay our last respects
We are comforted to see the circle in which the departed once lived.

Hymns were then sung and wreaths from his co-workers and his family were placed around the grave.^[50]

Other funerals presented a different face of the community of compositors. Half of the money collected for a worker's funeral would often be set aside for vodka.^[51] And "instead of speeches," one critic complained, "they sing obscene songs."^[52] It is not necessary to prettify workers' drunkenness and coarseness to recognize here too a contribution to their solidarity as a collectivity. It was only fitting that at the death of a compositor, as on his initiation into this community, drink should define the customs of observance.

This worker community should not be viewed as more harmonious than it was. The everyday solidarity of workers was a rough sort of community that did not erase the tenacious individualism that set workers apart not only from employers but also from one another. Many of the practices that brought workers together remained ambiguous. Collective drinking, for example, expressed not only comradeship but also, as drunkenness increased, the withdrawal of the individual into himself. Sexual bragging was a collaborative game but also a

[50] Naborshchik 1:21 (March 23, 1903), p. 356.

[51] Trudy pervogo s"ezda, p. 48.

[52] Vestnik graficheskogo dela 28–29 (April 2, 1898), p. 52. This may have been a reflection of peasant traditions in urban industry. On radunitsa, the traditional day of the dead in Russia, peasants customarily blended "funeral motifs, lamentations, wailings, and other kinds of expression of grief for the deceased, with outbursts of unrestrained merriment, gluttony, drunkenness and debauchery." Sokolov, Russian Folklore, p. 166.

competitive contest of egos. As has been suggested in a study of German machine workers, the everyday practices within the workshop by which workers defined time and space of their own simultaneously evoked "being-with-the-other" and "being-with-oneself."^[53]

This ambivalence was made stronger by the very structures of workers' lives, which similarly pushed them apart even as they brought them together. In the composition room, especially, personal interaction was encouraged by the absence of noisy and demanding machinery, by the uneven pace of work where "rushes" and overtime alternated with enforced idleness as workers waited for new manuscripts, and generally by a high level of direct control by compositors over the pace and process of their labor, facilitated by payment by the piece. These conditions gave compositors a high degree of natural autonomy at work, and thus the opportunity to create the customs and rituals of community.

Simultaneously, however, this autonomy reinforced the individual's isolation. The work process in type composition—as well as in type-founding, bookbinding, and much handpress work—was individualistic, requiring acts of separate labor before one's own type case. This fragmentation of the work process itself was reinforced by piece rates (which are only possible when work has this individual character). These work structures separated workers within a common craft by levels of skill, earnings, and prospects for advancement. But even among workers with identical skill and earnings, reliance on piece rates encouraged conflicts between workers. When, for example, a compositor had to search several type cases to find a needed typeface or more leading—spacing material of which one needed large quantities—he disturbed the work of other compositors as well as causing a loss of his own wages. On such occasions, annoyance might escalate into arguments and even fist fights.^[54] Even efforts to overcome the divisive effects of piece rates sometimes created new ones: when compositors formed "companies" to work collectively at a set price for a job, they became competitors of other "companies" of compositors, each trying to offer the lowest price.^[55]

These tensions and conflicts persisted beside the rituals of conformity and comradeship. For workers who viewed this ambiguous reality from the standpoint of the ideal, community seemed hardly to exist at

[53] Luedtke, "Cash, Coffee Breaks, Horseplay," pp. 80–82.

[54] Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, pp. 24–25; Naborshchik 1:3 (November 17, 1902), p. 53; Rossiiskaia sotsial-demokraticheskaia rabochaia partiia, Moskovskii komitet, Pis'mo k moskovskim naborshchikam (1899), p. 2; Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe, p. 16.

[55] Orlov, Poligraficheskaia promyshlennost' Moskvy, p. 274.

all. Memoirs recall "coolness and hostility" among workers and a lack of solidarity or "'comradeship' in the best and most sincere meaning of the word," but only a "splintered and motley" collection of individuals.^[56] In fact, solidarity and difference often coexisted.

Workers' sense of community often reached beyond the limitations of workplace and even craft. The immediate, face-to-face interactions among individuals with similar skills, which defined and sustained the workplace community, also implied a larger craft identity. And this often merged with a wider identification as "printer" (tipograf, tipografshchik, pechatnik ), as sharing an identity with all skilled crafts. This wider occupational community found its own structures to sustain it. The assistance funds provided one locale for wider association. In St. Petersburg and Moscow, several hundred compositors, pressmen, type-founders, and bookbinders joined the assistance funds and participated in their various organized activities.^[57] More commonly, the tavern served as a gathering place for printers from different shops and crafts. Two types of taverns can be distinguished: neighborhood bars where workers from nearby shops would gather regularly during the midday break and after work (and where they could usually drink on credit), and special taverns that brought together printers from throughout the city to socialize and also learn of job openings, such as the Gong and the Maidan in St. Petersburg, and the Golubiatnia ("Dovecote") and Tsarskoe selo in Moscow.^[58] Both kinds of drinking places brought together workers from diverse crafts.

We do not know the complex lines of fraternization that may have occurred within the walls of these taverns or at gatherings organized by the assistance funds. What is evident, however, is that perceptions of skill often determined association and thus the perceived boundaries of (and exclusions from) this larger community. Compositors, notably, were often openly contemptuous of less skilled printers. They referred to ordinary press workers, for example, simply as "workers" (rabochie or chernorabochie ) or even as "peasants" (muzhiki ). They would welcome a printing master into their company, drinking with him at the

[56] Naborshchik 1:34 (June 22, 1903), p. 534; Tipografiia Lenizdata: K 175-1etiiu so dnia osnovaniia tipografii imeni Volodarskogo Lenizdata, p. 21.

[57] Workers' involvement in these funds is discussed in Chapter 4.

[58] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 216, p. 46; Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe, pp. 13, 17, 20–21; Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," p. 23; Galaktionov [Shponik], Lebedinaia pesn', p. 6; Ekho, November 30, 1883, p. 3; Naborshchik 1:28 (May 11, 1903), p. 452.

tavern or even at work,^[59] but they avoided socializing with less skilled workers, including all women working in the industry, and generally treated them rudely.^[60]

I will not be guilty of excessive exaggeration if I say that most compositors consider it beneath them even to speak with a press feeder, to say nothing of the fact that when addressing them they always use the informal ty .^[61]

This haughtiness extended to workers in other industries. A Petersburg compositor recalled that if compositors "heard that there was a strike in some factory, they would say, 'the workers are demanding something,' and would show no further interest, since they did not consider themselves to be workers, but something in between workers and intellectuals."^[62]

Everyday Culture

As this last comment suggests, collective identity among printing workers, especially compositors, was defined not only by levels of skill, common craft, or place of work, all of which were nonetheless essential to workers' calculations as they drew the boundaries of community around themselves. Also important were the practices by which workers defined themselves when they were not at work.

The characteristics of this everyday worker culture, and its limits, can be seen by viewing its margins. At one extreme stood workers known in printers' jargon as "Italians"—homeless tramps who alternated between intense work and vagabondage. They were easily recognizable by their appearance: "pale and thin, with haggard faces, and a continual cough. Their clothing was filthy and torn: a cap made of paper; trousers so threadbare that they would stuff in paper and hold them up with cord; a shirt made of sackcloth, patched in several places; ragged footwear, and sometimes even bast shoes."^[63] They were also

[59] See, for example, Egorov's memoir in Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," p. 23.

[60] Obzor graficheskikh iskusstv 1878, no. 13 (July 15), p. 95; Naborshchik 1:8 (December 22, 1902), pp. 134–35; 1:23–24 (April 6, 1903), p. 382; TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, p. 5; Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, pp. 11–12; Iuforovyi and Sokolovskii, Akademicheskaia tipografiia, p. 94.

[61] Pechatnyi vestnik 1905, no. 8 (August 21), p. 8.

[62] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 60, p. 5.

[63] From the unpublished recollections of M. V. Levin, quoted in Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," p. 27.

distinguished by their habits. During the summer they would often travel about the country, sleeping in barns or open fields, taking temporary jobs in provincial towns, earning a little money and then quitting until destitute again. Most drank heavily. When in town, they slept on the floors of printing shops when they were employed, and when they were without work they slept in flophouses (nochlezhnye doma ) in city slums such as the "Viazemskaia lavra" in St. Petersburg or the Khitrov market in Moscow. They also sometimes begged at churches. When they worked, they accepted lower wages than average—even though some were quite skilled—and often did not leave the shop for days, working as many hours as they could and sleeping by their type frames. After a time, when enough money was saved, they would quit work and move on.^[64]

At the opposite end of the scale were "aristocrats," generally betterpaid compositors who, it was said, "liked to dress well, in the summertime arrived at work on a bicycle, always wore starched linens and worked in their own smocks, wore fancy hair styles, attended theaters and dances, went to the races, were interested in sports, frequented clubs, and generally maintained a bon ton ."^[65] They typically joined mutual assistance funds or burial societies in order to protect themselves and their families in the event of sickness, retirement, or death, and tended toward sobriety. Many also sought to improve themselves culturally. Ivan Galaktionov recalled being invited in the late 1880s to the apartment of an older compositor named Ivolgin, where "the walls of his two small rooms [a sizable apartment for a compositor] were positively covered by shelves filled with books," including many of the classics of Russian literature and criticism.^[66] Another compositor recalled a "respectable elder compositor" regularly reading poetry to apprentices after work.^[67] Occupying the margins of working-class life, such workers felt alienated from most of their fellow workers, who, they complained, were interested in nothing except "boozing and scandals" and sought "consolation and diversion only in vodka and the

[64] Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, pp. 15–16, 27; Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 1, pp. 96–97; TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 216, p. 47; Vechtomova, Zdes' pechatalas' "Pravda," pp. 26–27; Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe, pp. 20–21. There was an extended discussion from May 1902 through August 1903 of the problem of ital'ianshchina in Pechatnoe iskusstvo (1:8 and 9) and Naborshchik (1:13, 20, 21, 22, 30, 34, 38–39, and 41–42).

[65] Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, p. 15.

[66] Galaktionov, Besedy naborshchika, p. 7.

[67] Po povodu tridtsatiletiia VKT, pp. 5–6.

tavern."^[68] But their testimony may reveal more about their own high standards than about the actual interests of their fellows.

Most compositors, in various degrees, combined in their lives elements of both "aristocrats" and "Italians." The pattern of work of most compositors suggested, in a less exaggerated manner, the cycle of fitful work and extended unemployment of the "Italians." During rushes, piece-rate compositors might work several days of overtime, work during meals, and even sleep at the shop; on other occasions they might fail to return to work for days, especially after a particularly inebriated weekend.^[69] Similarly, the perpetual mobility of "Italians" was only an exaggerated form of the wanderlust of most compositors. A typical compositor, it was said, was "a common migrating bird," a "free Cossack" with an inherent "tendency for vagrancy."^[70] A survey conducted in Moscow in 1907 found that only one-quarter of all compositors had been working in the same enterprise for more than five years, and that nearly one-third had worked in two or three different cities.^[71] Piece rates and a high demand for labor facilitated this itinerancy. So did recurrent temporary unemployment: each summer, as business slowed, some workers would be laid off until the fall,^[72] and every decade or so—in 1867, 1878–1881, and 1902–1903—recessions put thousands of compositors out of work.^[73] But vagabondage was also a matter of inclination. It was, some said, "in the compositor's blood."^[74] M. A. Popov was not unusual in joining a "company" of traveling compositors that contracted for jobs in various cities, then

[68] Naborshchik 1:34 (January 22, 1903), p. 534; Galaktionov, Besedy naborshchika, p. 6; Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe, p. 32.

[69] For one example, TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 216, p. 47.

[70] Vestnik graficheskogo dela 17–18 (September 25, 1897), p. 176; Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 2, p. 95; Naborshchik 1:6 (December 8, 1902), p. 104; 1:14 (February 14, 1903), p. 233; Trudy pervogo s"ezda, p. 118.

[71] Svavitskii and Sher, Ocherk polozheniia, pp. 11–14.

[72] Orlov, Poligraficheskaia promyshlennost' Moskvy, p. 217; Obzor graficheskikh iskusstv 1878, no. 18 (October 1), p. 135.

[73] In 1867, 7% of compositors in St. Petersburg were unemployed and 10% were working part time, and unemployment was also reported in Moscow. In 1878, "thousands" of compositors were said to be out of work. In 1900–1903, unemployment among compositors may have been as high as 20%. These economic crises were made worse by an influx of workers from the provinces who believed that at least in Moscow and St. Petersburg there would be work. Tipografskii zhurnal 1:8 (October 15, 1867), p. 34; 1:9 (November 1, 1867), p. 37; Obzor graficheskikh iskusstv 1878, no. 18 (October 1), p. 135; 1881, no. 16 (August 15), p. 103; Pechatnoe iskusstvo 1:8 (May 1902), pp. 259– 60; Naborshchik 1:1 (October 20, 1902), pp. 6–7; 1:13 (January 26, 1903), p. 213; 1:36 (July 6, 1903), p. 561; 1:46 (September 14, 1903), pp. 685–86; Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 1, pp. 78, 81.

[74] Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, p. 33.

settling briefly in Samara, moving next to St. Petersburg, and then undertaking to walk to Moscow and observe country life along the way. "I was all the time searching for something," he wrote, "I could not sit still."^[75] Whether the "something" being searched for was transcendent or something as plain as higher pay, a better boss, more compatible workmates, or simply a change of pace, large numbers of compositors were on the move.^[76]

Also like the "Italians," most workers defied society's efforts to define and control workers' everyday behavior. Coarseness and profanity, we have seen, ruled in the shops. Workers occasionally joked about their defiant rowdiness: "Compositors are unmanageable," a foreman was said to have complained to a press owner, "abuse, abuse, and more abuse. You can't even walk through the composition room. One even just sent me to the devil!" "Then why," the owner responded, "are you coming to me?"^[77] Managers and employers discovered how deeply this unmanageability ran when they tried to "improve" workers—to make them drink less, become better mannered and knowledgeable, work more assiduously, and change jobs less often.

At the same time, many compositors did in fact share the desire of "aristocrats" to be more respectable and cultured. Middle-class observers, and many compositors themselves, frequently suggested that the work of the compositor led him naturally toward self-cultivation. As the "first reader" of every work, the compositor was said to have been made more cultured and educated through the very process of his work.^[78] A poem by Nikolai Nekrasov, set in the voice of a compositor, was often quoted as an expression of this belief:

Compositors are at times
Philosophers. . . .
They encounter essays
They encounter intellects—
Useful ideas
We are mastering.^[79]

[75] TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 216, pp. 50–52.

[76] Ibid., pp. 46–48; Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, pp. 32–33; Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 2, p. 95; Naborshchik 1:4 (November 24, 1902), p. 77; 1:57 (October 19, 1903), pp. 768–69; Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe, pp. 14–29.

[77] Naborshchik 1:1 (October 20, 1902), p. 22.

[78] Bakhtiarov, Slugi pechati, p. 3; Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 1, p. 77; Peterburgskii listok, January 20, 1868, p. 1; Ekho, November 30, 1883, p. 3; Obzor pervoi vserossiiskoi vystavki 4 (March 2, 1895), p. 7; Naborshchik 1:1 (October 20, 1902), p. 7; 1:3 (November 17, 1902), p. 54; 1:12 (January 19, 1903), p. 196; 1:17 (February 25, 1903), p. 280.

[79] From "Naborshchiki," a section of "Pesni o svobodnom slove" (1866), in N. A. Nekrasov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem, vol. 2 (Leningrad, 1981), p. 214.

Skeptics, including some compositors, viewed such notions as flattering but naive. The work of the compositor, they argued, was "mechanical." Most compositors lacked the education to understand much of what they set into type, and at any rate rarely did they have before them more than a fragment of a larger work. Even if a compositor could understand the sense of a text, trying to do so would have slowed his pace and thus reduced his earnings.^[80] Still, even critics often conceded that compositors acquired "scraps of knowledge" through their work.^[81] Just as important, the myth of the compositor as "philosopher" itself encouraged a self-image that many compositors sought to justify in practice.

For many workers, the obstacle to becoming a worker "aristocrat" was mainly money: "To attend theaters and dances regularly is beyond my means," one compositor wrote in 1903.^[82] Within this limitation, many compositors did all they could to cultivate a more mannered lifestyle. They sprinkled their vocabulary with intellectual-sounding phrases and referred to one another as "colleagues,"^[83] and they dressed on special occasions and sometimes even at work in starched shirts and neckties.^[84] Some workers attended free public literary readings, lectures, and concerts.^[85] Most of all, workers read. In almost every printing shop, compositors subscribed collectively, usually on credit, to an inexpensive popular newspaper, borrowed books from public libraries, or bought cheap used books. A compositor writing in 1903 estimated that half of all compositors read books or periodicals in their leisure time, though most preferred newspapers to the "thick journals" and preferred popular (lubochnaia ) literature, such as the tales of the bandit Churkin (serialized in Moskovskii listok in the 1880s), to belles lettres.^[86]

[80] Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, p. 14; Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 1, p. 78; TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 216, p. 49; Obzor pervoi vserossiiskoi vystavki 4 (March 2, 1895), pp. 7–8; Naborshchik 1:1 (October 20, 1902), p. 3; 1:13 (January 26, 1903), p. 213; 1:20 (March 16, 1903), pp. 328–29.

[81] Naborshchik 1:20 (March 16, 1903), p. 329. Of interest in this regard is the conclusion of two Soviet psychologists who studied compositors: "The fact of continual—though admittedly external—contact [obshchenie ] by compositors with diverse literary materials cannot but have an influence on the psycho-physical apparatus of the workman." Gellershtein and Ittin, Psikhologicheskii analiz professii naborshchika, pp. 16–17.

[82] Naborshchik 1:21 (March 23, 1903), p. 358.

[83] Ibid. 1:13 (January 26, 1903), p. 213.

[84] Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe, p. 30; Obzor pervoi vserossiiskoi vystavki 13 (April 3, 1895), p. 4; Naborshchik 1:7 (December 15, 1902), p. 128.

[85] Sher, "Moskovskie pechatniki v revoliutsii 1905 g.," in Moskovskie pechatniki v 1905 g., p. 12; Leninskii zakaz, p. 23; Naborshchik 1:34 (January 22, 1903), p. 535; Istoriia leningradskogo soiuza, pp. 91,429; Zinov'ev, Na rubezhe, p. 32.

[86] Obzor graficheskikh iskusstv 1880, no. 23 (December 1), p. 176; Naborshchik 1:13 (January 26, 1903), p. 213; Trotskii, "Ekonomicheskie i sanitarnye usloviia," part 2, p. 97; TsGAOR, f. 6864, op. 1, d. 216, p. 46; Galaktionov, Besedy naborshchika, p. 10. See Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read, on lubochnaia and street literature generally.

Common work and common subordination did not efface the persistent differences and tensions that kept workers apart. The culture of "boozing and scandals" coexisted with the pursuit of respectability partly as expressions of different workers. But these alternatives also reflected the ambivalent values and desires of most workers: the wish to be a good "comrade" but also to escape, if only privately, from the smells, filth, monotony, and coarseness of the workplace; the wish to live according to rules and norms not set down by those in authority, but also to be recognized as no worse than other people by adopting these same standards and manners. This ambivalence had its limits. As will be seen, even workers who sought to uplift themselves culturally and morally expressed perceptions of themselves and the world around them that challenged established structures of authority and subordination, that defined the starched shirt and necktie, the volume of Nekrasov's poetry beneath the workbench or typeframe, or even the refusal to get drunk, at least partly as defiant gestures.