Riotous Cities

Urban disorders had profound political and social implications for tsarist Russia. Many historians focus on the political dimensions of this unrest from the perspective of the revolutionary events of the early twentieth century. The social character of the disorders, however, points to issues that are central to the nature of Russian urbanism. The key problem for contemporaries was to diagnose the origins of the disorders. In the urban setting collective violence was a threat to all who had visions of progress, no matter what their political persuasion. Both educated Russians and revolutionary activists regarded rioting in the same way that they viewed fistfights, namely, as manifestations of a backward society. Like the French intellectual Gustave Le Bon, "by summoning up the nightmare of the crowd, [educated Russians could] reaffirm their own superiority and explain their impotence."^[44] They were deeply aware of the threat that urban disorders posed to their hopes of progress and their vision of a civilized city.

As in the 1870s, anti-Semitism remained the most potent force behind urban violence in the last two decades of the century. The level of hostility toward Jews appeared to grow as the century waned. The assassination of Alexander II in March 1881 triggered a wave of rioting. One study of the spread of violence concludes that it was "essentially an urban phenomenon," the work of workers and migrants. "As a rule the pogroms moved from large towns and townlets to nearby villages, and along railroad lines, major highways and rivers to towns and villages further away."^[45] That summer the Saratov governor was deluged with telegrams from the capital urging special measures to keep the city calm. He kept part of his troops quartered in their city barracks even though he was concerned not to arouse "potential rumors among the local population by taking unusual and exceptional measures of a preventive nature."^[46] Soldiers were his last line of

[44] Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, 1981), 192.

[45] I. Michael Aronson, "Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia," Russian Review 39 (January 1980): 26.

[46] "Politicheskii obzor Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 67 (1881), 8-9.

defense, and the population of Saratov itself represented in his eyes the principal source of rioting, which the slightest rumor could ignite. To such officials, the disorders presented dramatic confirmation of their fears that the police were unable to control the urban population.

As a rule, the reports that came from the provincial governors and gendarme officers in the following years had ready explanations for such violence. I have been cautious about relying on official judgments, however, because the authorities made use of their own social stereotypes when they diagnosed what they viewed as a collective pathology. They did have access to information on social conditions in the provincial cities and the district towns. Despite their own anti-Semitic prejudices, their authority was seriously weakened whenever riots occurred. Thus in explaining the disorders in their reports to the tsar, they had to attempt to give a comprehensive, dispassionate picture of events. If studied critically, their accounts provide clues to the character and origins of the violence.

The authorities never precisely identified the rioters. They tended to refer to an anti-Semitic laboring population that was thought to be liable at any time to mobilize for a pogrom. They tended to blame migrants, laborers, the unemployed, and poor townspeople in general. The migrants attracted the greatest attention perhaps because many lived in evident misery and tended to congregate in particular areas of the city. In 1883 the presence in Ekaterinoslav of fifteen hundred construction workers building the railroad bridge across the Dnepr river prompted the governor to conclude that this city confronted "a very dangerous situation for public order and peace." He considered the workers to be rootless migrants "from various parts of Russia." All were "inclined to violence and disorder." As evidence, he pointed to the anti-Jewish riots of that September, which had been started by rumors that Jews had ritually murdered a young Christian girl. A mob of over six hundred, fortified with vodka seized from a tavern, attacked Jews and burned and looted property until the governor called out troops and Cossacks. The mob action left "several victims" and extensive damage to property.^[47] From his perspective the very growth of the cities was the key to the outbreak of riots because it brought together crowds of laborers prone to violence and ready to form a mob when unpredictable rumors spread through taverns and workplaces. Official reports also noted that rioters usually looted stores, hinting that they were undertaking a crude sort of social retribution against traders and shopkeepers.

[47] "Politicheskii obzor Saratovskoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 185, ch. 11 (1883), 1-2, 20-21.

The authorities emphasized that the crowds emerged from a laboring population beyond the borders of educated, respectable urban society. At the end of the century the governor of Saratov province drew the attention of St. Petersburg to Tsaritsyn, whose summer river traffic attracted tens of thousands of "migrant laborers [who were] generally undisciplined and . . . extremely inclined to drunkenness and disorder." In his opinion a mere rumor about the "evil deeds" of Jews would immediately launch them on a riot.^[48] The fact that there were very few Jews in the Volga ports was an irrelevant consideration to the laborers. Jews were scapegoats no matter how few in number. The danger of a pogrom was great when unemployment spread hardship among the population. To the Rostov-on-Don gendarme officer the source of the disorders in his city during the early 1880s was the "mass of unemployed local and migrant workers wandering about the streets and filling the taverns." In his opinion they were responsible for attacks on both Jews and the police "in a sort of common occurrence."^[49] His account is noteworthy because he located this "mass" of unemployed workers in public places—streets and taverns—where they could form a crowd at any time. It is also revealing because the victims of mob action were police as well as Jews. The rioters were acting out a communal drama of ethnic hatred (Christians versus Jews), but they were also attacking the urban police, symbols of tsarist power.

Although officials often referred to the riotous public as strangers and outsiders, this explanation was facile. The association of uprootedness and disorder, like the implicit identification of the migrant with peasant, neatly fits the stereotype of the "dark people" of the villages. Observers, however, recognized the presence of townsmen among the rioters. In 1884 Maxim Gorky made this discovery when he watched the inhabitants of his hometown of Nizhny Novgorod participate in a pogrom. To him it seemed as if social identity lost all meaning when people became like animals whose uproar "merged into one heinous and gloating sound."^[50] Using less color and making a greater effort to fix the circumstances when the rioting might occur, a gendarme officer of the southern factory town of Bakhmut pinpointed the holiday gatherings of the men of the town. It seemed to him that "efforts to arouse the population against the Jews always occur during the holidays when the petty bourgeois, having become drunk, gathered at

[48] "Otchet Saratovskogo gubernatora za 1897," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3 (1898), d. 300, 21-22.

[49] "Politicheskii obzor za 1884," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 59 (1885), ch. 27, 20; and d. 89 (1888), ch. 12, 7-8.

[50] This short sketch, published at the time of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, is translated in Filia Holtzman, The Young Maxim Gorky, 1868-1902 (New York, 1968), 69-72.

the stream for fistfights."^[51] Vodka and holiday leisure were the setting for the organized mayhem of the fistfights. With the addition of anti-Semitic rumors the gatherings became the crucible for pogroms.

In the volatile atmosphere of ethnic and social antagonism, leadership was a scarcely visible but still essential factor in the origins of the riots. A sort of language of rioting was well known to the lower-class population as a whole. But the riot itself required voices to transform the anger triggered by the rumors into action and to select the targets of the mob. Rioters too needed leaders, as the governor of Nizhny Novgorod was convinced. In 1886 he punished the presumed riot leaders even before they could act, assuming that when his power was made manifest it would dissuade violence. He claimed to have learned by his mistakes in failing to act decisively in the 1884 riot (witnessed by Gorky). Two years later, he reacted immediately when the police informed him of new rumors of a pogrom. He had the ringleaders, whom the police identified, ruthlessly and illegally flogged. Claiming to have blocked the riot and receiving the tsar's approval, he had no reason to doubt the efficacy of repression.^[52]

When and how these lurid rumors appeared were questions no one could answer. They seemed to emerge as naturally from the cultural nexus of Christian popular mythology and the communal antagonism of Russians and Ukrainians toward Jews as did the rumors of land distribution that moved periodically through the countryside and ignited peasant disorders. These rumors found their audience among a poor population that lived in miserable, unstable social conditions, but social hardship could not explain what made the messages so credible that now and then they crystallized into mob action.

Prejudice was not the monopoly of the illiterate, and the elements of the print culture of the cities could become a new source of anti-Semitic rumor. The penny press appealed directly to a mass readership and its audience extended into the laboring population. "Creating a public" with an anti-Semitic coloring sold some newspapers and satisfied the prejudice of some journalists and editors. The Odessa police prefect warned that local papers that printed "sensationalist [and] often false information" could "arouse the population against the Jews" and provoke "major street disorders of crowds moving against the property and person of the Jews."^[53] The possibility of press-inspired rumors added a new and disturbing element to the official view of collective violence; it suggested that the "riotous classes" of

[51] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 9 (1887), ch. 21, 42.

[52] Richard Robbins, The Tsar's Viceroys (Ithaca, N. Y., 1987), 212.

[53] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1284, op. 223, d. 29 (1896), 4-5.

the cities consisted of more than just the ignorant, backward, rootless, and impoverished. Newspaper articles with their own claims to anti-Semitic "truth" multiplied the potential for pogroms and made the problem of policing the city even more complex.

In the drama of the pogrom the visage of the enemy strangers included traders and bosses, Jews and police, and even medical personnel. In times of epidemics this last group assumed the appearance of the police. The onslaught of cholera created the atmosphere for rioting, even at the end of the century when physicians could claim the authority of science. The authorities dealt with epidemics as "social diseases." The resulting measures of isolation and quarantine provoked an outburst of hostility among laborers in some towns that was comparable only to the pogroms—and produced a similar amount of bloodshed. In the cholera epidemic of the summer of 1892 a mob in Astrakhan destroyed the cholera hospital, crying "this is where they bury the living" before being dispersed when Cossacks and police opened fire.^[54] Seeking an explanation for the rioting that same year in the Volga town of Khvalynsk, the gendarme officer looked beyond "absurd rumors" and the "panicky fear" of the mob to underlying social conflicts in the town. In the previous years he claimed that the mayor had antagonized poor townspeople by raising rents on city land that they had farmed and that at the same time he and his supporters had enriched themselves at the town's expense. When the riot was over, he (and the district doctor) had lost their lives to the mob. Cholera panic had turned into a type of mob justice.^[55] What at first sight had been blind rage  on closer view assumed the dimensions of a social crime in which the victims were the representatives of a repressive authority and economic exploitation.

This mixture of wild destruction and social retribution also appeared in rioting in factory settlements. In 1892 in the Ukrainian mining center of Iuzovka the fears aroused by the isolation of cholera victims sparked widespread violence that took on the proportions of a revolt. The mob, which was called into being by the factory whistle, was estimated in the official report to number fifteen thousand. Before troops moved in the rioters had destroyed, by official count, one hundred eighty stores, twelve taverns, seven houses, and the Jewish synagogue. For all its irrationality and wild force the police did not believe that the disorder was an isolated, inexplicable incident. The victims all had a place in a diabolically twisted but still

[54] Moskovskii listok , 30 June 1892.

[55] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152, ch. 55 (1893), 1-2.

coherent cosmology of persecution that identified an array of enemies from doctors and foremen to traders and Jews. The official report noted that "disorders at Iuzovka settlement are repeated every year to a greater or lesser extent." It attributed the origins of the violence to "the exploitation in the broad sense of the word of workers by all mine owners without exception and by the Jewish traders and innkeepers."^[56] At this level of collective violence there was little distinction between cholera riots, pogroms, and labor protests. The report bears the mark of Russian officialdom, which was prone to blame capitalists and Jews when popular unrest broke out. Still, its glib reasoning points to popular attitudes, which turned riots into acts of social vengeance.

Police reports from the 1880s and 1890s suggest that disorders were increasing in scope and number. The question of the nature and incidence of urban collective violence is itself open to controversy both because of the absence of comprehensive, reliable data and because of the ideological assumptions that contemporaries and, subsequently, historians made about worker behavior. Officials tended to report events of importance but to omit those "disorders that were repeated every year." They associated disruptive behavior with the unsettled existence of the urban poor. For example, at the end of the century the Vladimir governor concluded that the unemployed and the migrants were "the two most dangerous elements of the population."^[57] The historical logic of the argument rested on the prescriptive judgment that social position determined the proclivity toward orderly or disorderly behavior.

Given a dialectical twist, a similar logic informed the opinions of the Marxist radicals. For them it was conceptually impossible to imagine that workers' riots were the affair of an industrial proletariat. A pamphlet issued in the mid 1890s by the Moscow Workers' Union admitted that "the period of 'riots' has still not ended" but reassured its readers that "the time has come in our country when strikes are emerging on a level with [naravne ] 'riots.'"^[58] This argument was self-serving because their theory of the rise of the working class required that mob action dwindle as strikes increased. Soviet historians repeat this assertion, and Western studies of the Russian

[56] "Politicheskii obzor Ekaterinoslavskoi gubernii," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152, ch. 11 (1893), 11-12; see also Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke (Moscow, 1961) vol. 3, pt. 2, 207-13. This massive riot is the subject of a special study by Theodore Friedgut, "Labor Violence and Regime Brutality in Tsarist Russia," Slavic Review 46 (Summer 1987): 245-65.

[57] "Otchet," TsGIA, f. 1263, op. 3, d. 5387 (1899), 790.

[58] "Stachki i ikh znachenie dlia rabochikh," Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 4, pt. 1, 78-79; the unease experienced by the authors in referring to collective violence is revealed in their use of quotes to bracket the term bunt (best translated in this context as "riot," although it can also refer to "rebellion").

laboring population have tended to ignore the issue by focusing instead on the organized working-class movement and strike action.^[59]

The spread of collective violence in Russian cities is understandable without recourse to deterministic social theories. The models of the worker of the future, which were created by officials and radicals, embodied their idealized views of social progress in a new city. Tsarist authorities searched for the qualities of sobriety, industriousness, and submissiveness; the radicals substituted class consciousness for submissiveness. Both confronted evidence that appeared to contradict their social program, and both explained the contradiction by constructing an "anticity" of uprooted migrants and Lumpenproletariat . It was not difficult to find supporting evidence, but certain events suggested that the actual practices of the laboring population of the cities did not follow either model. My view of the urban migrant community suggests that the violence found among the lower classes represented an adaptation of well-established customary behavior. The language and practices of protest indicate that the migrants brought a mode of violent behavior and an adversarial conception of society into the city. They identified new enemies and adopted new forms of action. Many workers, both among migrants and settled townspeople, rejected this mode of behavior, some to seek private rewards, others to take up the cause of social and political justice. Both were found principally among the educated and the relatively skilled laborers. Within the laboring population violence was a distinct and potent manifestation of social and cultural hostility that appeared to increase as the migrant cities expanded.

Increasingly, official reports and observers' accounts tended to focus on collective actions, rioting as well as strikes, that erupted in and around factories. The distinction between an anti-Semitic pogrom and an anticapitalist riot was often blurred. The prominence of factory disorders seems to have resulted in part from the ease with which officials could identify and respond to this type of unrest (as opposed to urban mobs) and in part from the zeal of labor militants in recording their experiences. However, context is also important because the factories frequently had a large labor force and were potentially the locus for massive disorders.

Southern Russia represented the area of greatest factory unrest. In the

[59] For example, Robert Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), whose table on labor unrest in Moscow province (126, table 7.1) provides one indication of the relative weights of "strikes" and "disturbances." His source is the Soviet documentary collection Rabochee dvizhenie , which may in a variety of ways understate worker collective violence (see Daniel Brower, "Labor Violence in Russia," Slavic Review 41 [September 1982]: 418-19, 450-51).

south living conditions around the factories were particularly harsh, and the concentration of migrants was higher there than in other urban settlements. The 1892 cholera riots at Iuzovka were one example of this unrest; so, too, were the disorders in Ekaterinoslav later in the decade. In 1898 rioting workers at the new Briansk metallurgical factory so frightened the provincial governor that he proclaimed the violence to be "the wild consequences of the awakened mob on the march." The rioting at Ekaterinoslav began when a plant guard killed a worker in a dispute over pilfering. An estimated two thousand rioters quickly gathered and burned factory buildings. Then, "in a nearby village, in one hour [they] destroyed twenty-four houses of people who had no ties to either the factory or the workers."^[60] On close examination, one finds in this riot the same nexus of ethnic hatred, economic hostility, and blind rage as in Iuzovka. The burning and looting included the stores, homes, and synagogue of the nearby Jewish community, whose livelihood came largely through trade with the workers. Eyewitness accounts suggest that the rioters were largely young workers; older workers, who were usually skilled, either stayed away or fought the rioters to protect their workplaces.^[61] The workers' community was not a unified group in such protests. Like the pogroms, worker protests expressed the complex, contradictory characteristics of a particular culture of violence and social antagonism as well as the grievances arising from working and living conditions. The worker riots were a product of both the factory and the migrant city.

Contemporary reports stressed that urbanized factory settlements and the industrial outskirts of towns were the major centers for unrest. Industrialization was a key ingredient in creating conditions for the disorders, but urbanization was also essential. Worker disturbances in rural manufacturing centers—the "settlements" of several thousand people and their factories—were far less frequent and massive than in the major industrial communities—for example, Iuzovka in the south and Orekhovo-Zuevo in the north, each of which was a large town by the 1890s—and around urban centers such as Ekaterinoslav or even Moscow. As the cities expanded and manufacturing centers multiplied, incidents of urban unrest and strikes also multiplied. A count of the use between the 1870s and 1890s of troops to repress civil disorders (including both strikes and riots) found a notable increase in military intervention, an indication that the specter of the ri-

[60] "Otchet o sostoianii," TsGIA, f. 1282, op. 3, d. 3255 (1899), 10-11.

[61] Charters Wynn, "Donbass Labor Unrest: General Strikes and Pogroms in the 1905 Revolution" (paper presented at the Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, 1984), 5-9.

otous city had concrete meaning to the authorities.^[62] My own incomplete study, which is based on a sampling of the available archival reports, indicates that in the 1880s and 1890s riots among the laboring population waxed and waned in phase with other protest actions. They were particularly frequent in the period 1887-88 and again in 1896-98. Riots were the most dramatic indication of the potential for disorder in the migrant cities. A careful examination of the origins and dynamics of these riots reveals the extent to which disorders had undermined public order in urban areas.

The origins of the disturbances were closely linked to employer-worker relations, the network of trade around the factories, and the actions of police forces. A poorly developed commercial network, particularly in the new urban centers of the south, placed workers at the mercy of the small traders. The workers' low pay—and customary drunken celebrations on paydays—led many to fall deeply in debt to the traders or to the managers of the company stores, which were more often found in the northern factory settlements. An investigation into the origins of the 1892 Iuzovka riot indicated that owners and traders collaborated to collect the workers' debts directly from the enterprise. As a result, the report noted that "most workers (many without passports) never receive their full wages, just a page of accounts, including purchase of goods (for example, tea and sugar) at very high prices."^[63] Stores offered a visible—and vulnerable—target for the workers' anger and frustrations, particularly if the traders were Jewish. The laboring population placed shopowners as much as employers in the category of enemy outsiders. Their attitude toward trading and traders rested on assumptions of a sort of "moral economy" in which high prices were the sign of the enemy.

The contrast between worker and boss did not appear as readily as that between worker and trader. The typical small enterprise in the city was a very different workplace compared with the large factory. In many respects manufacturing plants, large and small, reproduced within their walls the conditions of economic dependence and paternalism that the laborers experienced in their relations with the tsarist authorities. Wages were fixed according to the rule "as much as the master wishes." The economic power of the boss was reinforced by the frequently arbitrary fines deducted from workers' pay, the beatings at the hands of foremen or owners, the arrests that occurred at the whim of the owner, whose word was sufficient for the local police, and the sexual abuse of women workers. In these conditions the

[62] William Fuller, Civil-Military Conflict in Imperial Russia, 1881-1914 (Princeton, 1985), 89-90.

[63] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 152 (1893), ch. 11, 11-12.

potential for sudden outbursts of violence was great. Still, scattered reports suggest that patriarchal authority was a substantial barrier to resistance. Although the "exploitation of workers by manufacturers is very great," noted a gendarme officer from a northern industrial region, the workers would "easily support and kind of oppression from small manufacturers" if they had risen from the laboring class. In these circumstances the domination of the owner rested on the workers' conviction that "'He is one of us.'"^[64] Patriarchal authority in the factory manifested itself at its crudest in the physical beating of workers; yet one metalworker, writing in 1906, recalled that in the early years workers "respected a well-paying foreman even if he used his fists."^[65] His authority and power to control the work force resembled that of the authoritarian provincial official.

Where enterprises were large and factory relations more impersonal, this social connection was broken. The style of command, however, was not substantially different. In the mid 1890s one Moscow factory inspector drew up a list of abuses that he judged to be "common occurrences in our factory life." These included "crude, demeaning insults by foremen and even owners . . . who use their fists on workers of all ages and both sexes, [and] the rape of young and married women . . . and the dismissal of those women who do not submit." Despite laws against these "abusive powers [samoupravstvo ]," the inspector concluded that factory authorities persevered "without fear of legal action."^[66] Gendarme authorities, revealing their nostalgia for a vanishing past, lamented the inability of foremen and owners, especially in the foreign-owned enterprises with Westerners in charge, to establish the same moral authority over workers as that enjoyed by the Russian owners of smaller manufacturing establishments. In the late 1880s, when disorders were increasing in number and violence, the gendarme commander of Vladimir province regretted "the inability of the factory administration to communicate with the workers and to guide them."^[67] His complaint rested on the assumption that factory owners could exercise disciplinary power in the same manner that noble landlords dominated peasant villagers.

The weakness and lack of authority of the urban police were particularly apparent. In the capitals the very size of the forces of order, which included

[64] "Politicheskii obzor Dmitrovskogo uezda," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 88, ch. 35 (1885), 53.

[65] P. Timofeev, Chem zhivet zavodskii rabochii? (St. Petersburg, 1906), 97-98.

[66] Cited in V. F. Kut'ev, "Dokumental'nye materialy Moskovskih gosudarstvennykh arkhivov po istorii rabochego klassa goroda Moskvy v 90-kh gody XIX veka" (Kandidat dissertation, Moscow State University, 1955), 117-18.

[67] N. I. Voronov, Zapiski o sobytiiakh Vladimirskoi gubernii (Vladimir, 1907), 25. Voronov served in the province gendarmerie between 1886 and 1900.

large garrison forces and Cossacks as well as regular police, was a major deterrent to public disturbances. Even in the capitals, however, the police exercised little influence among the workers in the daily course of events. Their power protected the owners, and their activities were limited to enforcing certain laws and requiring conformity with the administrative regulations concerning passports. As the Moscow gendarme commander remarked in the late 1880s, "the local police cannot stop workers when disorders are beginning [because] the workers do not trust the police, considering them—and not without reason—to be in the pay of the factory owners and therefore always on the side of the owners."^[68] By implication, the officer claimed that enlightened officials like himself could act in the role of both mediator and repressive agent in the disorders. Many workers accepted this claim to special authority.

The socialist militants who sought to organize a working-class movement dismissed both rioting and worker reliance on the tsarist authorities as backward and misguided. In its pamphlet of 1896 on "Strikes and Their Meaning for Workers" the Moscow Workers' Union emphasized that the riots were senseless. In its opinion these disorders revealed that the workers "poorly [understood] the causes of their worsening condition; they blame the heartless owner or foreman for their bitter fate or think that their troubles are caused by machinery." The workers "poured out their pent-up rage on innocent machinery and smashed factory buildings to get even with the owner."^[69] Worker activists and socialist militants both did their utmost to build a disciplined working-class movement by promoting strike action. They sought to organize and lead orderly work stoppages, training the workers in the fundamentals of class solidarity and protest action. Sometimes their message found a receptive audience. During the 1896-97 textile strikes in St. Petersburg one militant overheard by a police spy explained to a workers' gathering "how to behave in the forthcoming strike: the intelligent recommended that the workers shun rowdiness [skandal ], breakage of machinery and windows, and so on."^[70] The message, however, was only effective on certain occasions and for reasons that suggest that the Moscow Marxists were giving a tendentious explanation of the role that riots played.

Laborers sometimes turned violent protest into a ritualized appeal for official intervention. Behind their animosity toward the factory management and the police rioters hid an unexpressed expectation that the tsarist

[68] "Iz politicheskogo obzora za 1888," Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 649-50.

[69] "Stachki i ikh znachenie dlia rabochikh," Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 4, pt. 1, 75-76.

[70] Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 4, pt. 1, 583.

authorities would right the wrongs. The hidden meaning of riots was apparent to the few militants present in factory settlements when strikes and rioting erupted. The socialist activists used a language of class struggle, but the workers understood it in their own way. Ivan Babushkin was agitating among the metallurgical workers in Ekaterinoslav shortly before the 1898 disorders at the Briansk factory. He noted later in his memoirs that the pamphlets he distributed made clear the "undesirability of riots," which "bring the workers nothing but harm." But the reaction of the workers was in "absolute contradiction" to this message; they concluded: "They're ordering us to organize a riot." He concluded that "the old traditions of struggle were so strong that the workers could not imagine the possibility of a strike without beating up a foreman or destroying the [factory] offices. . . . Talk of former riots always led to the urge to organize a 'good riot."'^[71] Babushkin found the answer to his contradiction in the traditions of the past, implicitly reassuring himself that strikes belonged in the future.

Ten years earlier Petr Moiseenko had discovered a more complex set of attitudes when he was organizing workers in 1884 at the Morozov textile factory in the settlement of Orekhovo-Zuevo. He attempted to stimulate discussion of class conflict in his audience by reading them the new novel The Bandit Churkin , which as mentioned earlier aroused images of plunder for the workers and led them to thoughts of rioting. One worker remarked that "the Morozov factory has a spell protecting it from riots. Morozov is a sorcerer; otherwise there would have been a riot long ago." Another announced that "we've got to have a riot; without that nothing will happen."^[72] Perhaps their reference to the "diabolical" boss was a figure of speech. Still, it brought a mythological sense of good and evil to matters of economic injustice and power, a sense not unlike the workers' attitude toward the Jews. If fear of sorcery had previously protected Morozov, it ceased to do so a few months after this incident. In 1885 a strike broke out in the factory, and within two days it turned into a riot. Tsarist authorities estimated the total damage at over three hundred thousand rubles. They also proclaimed that the workers' complaints of unjust treatment were correct and demanded rectification from the owners. Abusive fines by the owner were canceled and a foreman to whom the workers objected was dismissed.^[73] The violence resembled that at other factories. Workers without visible leadership responded to a provocative incident by a rampage of violence in which the targets included not only surrounding buildings and

[71] I. V. Babushkin, Vospominaniia (Leningrad, 1925), 86.

[72] P. Moiseenko, Vospominaniia starogo revoliutsionera (Moscow, 1966), 70.

[73] Voronov, Zapiski, 7; Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 25-26.

at times factory personnel and traders but also the very buildings and machines where they worked. What possible purpose could this violence have? Moiseenko pointed to one answer: the fear of retribution from the authorities, who were viewed at times in folk terms as "sorcerers," was broken by the violence itself.

The impulses behind such a workers' riot resembled those that propelled the mobs that cried, "They're burying the living," to burn the cholera infirmary or that incited pogroms in which the rioters proclaimed, "They killed a Christian child." In these cases crowds responded to a mythic world of mysterious and evil forces with violence and bloodshed, defying these powers and destroying their physical manifestations. In the villages sorcery might be conjured away by the community or families; in the urban areas the actions of mobs was a substitute act of conjuring. The results in the two locales were very different, because far more quickly than in the countryside urban crowd action turned into a riotous confrontation with the forces of order.

The targets of the violence were chosen from the visible adversaries of the laboring population in the migrant towns and settlements. Signs of rational calculation in the rioting appeared alongside the mythic elements. The destruction of factory records wiped out the administrative-police documents of the migrant workers. The burning and looting of stores revealed the anger of poor laborers at the practices of traders. The attacks on town leaders, doctors, foremen, and factory police released the hostility of the laboring population toward arbitrary and oppressive authority. We need not employ the discredited term "crowd psychology" to find in the actions of these urban mobs a form of violent social protest that laid bare the gulf of incomprehension and distrust that separated them from "society." This cultural chasm had long set the context for popular protest; it took on a new form in the cities and evolved into a more dangerous assault on the tsarist order as the century came to a close. The complaints of tsarist officials that both police and factory personnel lacked authority over the workers suggest that the institutional relations of power, embedded in culture as much as in the instruments of repression, were shifting in those decades. Despite increased police and garrison forces and new, augmented administrative powers, the laboring population of the migrant towns lived beyond the control of the state. Labor violence, like strikes, had a history of its own.

The riots followed a recognizable logical progression from their outbreak to their repression by the authorities. The records are most explicit for the 1890s and tell primarily of conflicts in textile factories, which were concentrated in northern Russia and staffed by workers who frequently moved

from one factory to another. The evidence is of limited significance, and we can only presume to extend the interpretation by analogy to the larger world of urban factory life. Often the conflict between workers and management began with public protest over harsh work conditions such as long hours, night work, unjustified and exaggerated fines, and abusive treatment of workers. Such was the case at the Khludov textile plant in Egorovsk. Twice in 1893 it was the center of rioting. The story itself is well known. What is important here are the clues it provides to the attitudes of workers toward the authorities. The immediate targets of the workers were the plant managers and the stores in the vicinity of the factory. Both times troops repressed the riots. After the first outbreak of violence the provincial governor personally intervened to demand that the factory owners rectify the worst abuses. The reluctance of the owners to respond was the crucial factor in the outbreak of the second riot several months later.^[74] Both times retribution and social antagonism played a part in the selection of targets. As important to the logic of the worker action, however, was the fact that the workers launched the second riot after official action to redress their grievances had failed.

Worker expectations of intervention by tsarist officials appeared in many other riots during the 1890s. Perhaps workers turned with similar intentions to violent protest and strikes. In the typical scenario a small conflict, usually coming after an accumulation of grievances, provoked a work stoppage in some part of a factory. In the hours that followed a crowd would gather, unorganized but with individuals formulating complaints and even negotiating with factory authorities. After the negotiations failed workers would begin the attack on the factory. Frequently, the rioters obtained vodka by threatening tavern owners or by looting. Drunkenness became the catalyst that turned the group of protesters into a violent crowd, welding the individuals together into a mob of terrifying force against which the police were powerless. So common was the connection between drunkenness and rioting that workers and radicals who sought to control a work stoppage invariably tried to close all taverns in the vicinity of the factories immediately following the outbreak of a strike. The destructive phase usually dissipated within a day, and the riot often had run its course before Cossack or army units arrived.

Repression, however, was not the end of the drama. Soldiers often beat protesters and arrested the presumed ringleaders. As a rule, a government investigation also occurred. In it government authorities—factory inspec-

[74] Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 2, 310-16.

tors, gendarme officers, and even the provincial vice governor or governor—requested the satisfaction of some of the workers' demands. At this point they became, to use Richard Robbins's term for describing the governor at the Egorevsk riot, "mediators in the dispute."^[75] This two-pronged policy of repression and appeasement had been in existence ever since the government first confronted large-scale worker protest in the 1860s.^[76] One provincial gendarme commander of the 1890s recalled, somewhat complacently, his method of pacifying rioters. "Most important," he noted, "everything depended on concessions and agreement from the factory owners, who rarely refused to cooperate; without their cooperation we could do nothing."^[77] The way in which he conceived of his role reveals a deeply rooted official paternalism. By pursuing this policy of concessions the tsarist authorities became, despite their repressive measures, party to the riotous protest.

The evidence suggests that the workers themselves were aware of a kind of official complicity. To the extent that they expected that their rioting would lead to an official investigation of their grievances, they were using violence as a form of communication. Although in a very chaotic manner, their actions were a sort of ritual whose meaning was clear to both them and the authorities.^[78] Such a message was conveyed to the Bakhmut district gendarme officer by the miners near Iuzovka who had rioted in May 1887. They complained of inhuman working conditions and exploitation by mine owners and traders. In the words of the officer, "Not knowing where to turn for help and protection, the workers decided to protest together, not separately . . . ; they presume that they will be punished for the disorders but at the very least others will understand their situation and improve it, even if just a little."^[79] If, as is likely, the source of the officer's information was the testimony of the worker delegates, they were implicitly calling on him for help.

The attitudes revealed in his account of the encounter were deeply embedded in customary relations between tsarist officials and their subjects. The workers had good reason to claim powerlessness and to admit guilt, thereby appealing implicitly to official clemency. Their attitude bears some resemblance to that of the peasants, whom Daniel Field has called "rebels in the name of the tsar." To revolt and then to appear as the tsar's repentant

[75] Robbins, The Tsar's Viceroys , 209.

[76] Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia , 164-68, 367.

[77] Voronov, Zapiski , 22.

[78] See Natalie Davis's work on sixteenth-century religious riots, "The Rite of Violence," in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), 152-87.

[79] Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 503.

subjects was a protest technique that the peasantry had learned earlier.^[80] For his part the officer assumed the flattering role of judge and mediator; he could appease the people while chastising the ruthless capitalists. In those years anticapitalism and anti-Semitism were prominent themes in many of the reports from gendarme officers, who took a populistlike stance in condemning the new industrial and commercial interests.^[81] The paternalism of the two-pronged policy linked workers and the state's emissaries: repentance after the fact sanctioned the workers' collective protest; the repression of the disorder entailed state intervention in defense of the workers. In this mutual dependence violent protest was the one sure signal for action.

Early in 1887 miners in an industrial settlement in Ekaterinoslav province, deprived of their wages for several months, had openly threatened to riot to obtain assistance. "A day was even set for the violence [razgrom ]," reported the gendarme provincial commander, "if the authorities did not help them in their 'rightful cause'." Help came quickly from "on high." It brought the miners their pay by means that were, if not quite legal, at least expeditious.^[82] The fact that the miners were migrants helps explain their capacity to organize their protest so effectively; like urban migrants, their action was shaped and their expectations set by the power they could exert in a new social setting in which crowd action had a dramatic impact and where the authorities could be expected to step in immediately. The rioting workers of the 1880s and 1890s wanted not only retribution or vengeance but sometimes also state intervention and the rectification of injustice. Therefore, the authorities had some reason to reassure themselves that, as one report on an 1887 textile factory riot remarked, the disorders had "no antigovernment aims."^[83]

Collective actions by workers were shaped partly by economic conditions and partly by the cultural symbols by which the laboring population gave meaning to their new lives. The destruction of property and even the very factory installations where the rioters worked suggested the blind fury and irrational nature of the mob. In the first period of Western European industrialization earlier in the century, the destruction of machinery had a different meaning. Even the Luddites in England had specific goals in mind:

[80] Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (New York, 1976).

[81] The most forceful of these attacks is found in the report of a Moscow province officer in the late 1880s; see "Politicheskii obzor Bogorodskogo uezda za 1886," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 9 (1887). This report is cited extensively in Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 717-35.

[82] Rabochee dvizhenie , vol. 3, pt. 1, 487-88.

[83] "Politicheskii obzor," TsGAOR, f. 102, d. 89, ch. 19 (1888), 9.

they attacked the weaving machinery that threatened their livelihood as hand weavers.^[84]

The studies of Western urban disorders offer an interpretation of collective violence that is applicable to the case of Russian worker riots. Eric Hobsbawm's picture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "city mob" in Western Europe bears a close resemblance to the urban and worker disorders in tsarist Russia. He argues that the mob used "direct action—riot or rebellion" to obtain the distribution of food supplies or other necessities in times of shortage. Although "inspired by no specific ideology," the mob expected that its violence would bring results because "the authorities would be sensitive" to the people's grievances and would "make some sort of immediate concession." Hobsbawm referred to such groups as "primitive rebels" because their violent protest was not directed against the existing social and political order.^[85]

By employing a form of ritualized violence the Russian workers were in effect adapting the techniques of a less complex age to the social conditions of industrialization and urbanization. The policies of the paternalistic, autocratic state contributed to the expectations of both retribution and redress and the state and its emissaries became thereby both hostile outsiders and agents of reform.

In the last years of the nineteenth century a new pattern began to appear in the workers' protests. The challenge to authority was becoming more openly political. Both the wave of strikes in the 1890s and the new character of worker collective violence, at least in the major urban centers, could be read in this light. The change was visible in the appearance of a new type of worker with a sense of "personal dignity," whom one Petersburg metalworker thought to be the activists responsible for the resistance to "insults to workers by foremen." He asserted that these conflicts were at the heart of "many of the strikes and riots of recent years."^[86] One young apprentice from that period later vividly recalled the "type of worker who . . . in every way protested against evil and the existing order of things." He remembered them to be "good workers and people of great willpower" who moved frequently in groups from factory to factory and as a matter of course "sought release in vodka." They resembled the typical migrant laborer in their respect for the person and authority of the tsar but were bitterly hostile to lesser officials: they would beat up a foreman who "tried

[84] See Malcolm Thomas, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Newton-Abbot, England, 1970), 75-78.

[85] Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York, 1965), 108, 110-11.

[86] Timofeev, Chem zhivet zavodskii rabochii? 98.

to abuse his power [pokazat' svoiu vlast ']."^[87] The readiness of such workers to act made them natural leaders of riots, but the anger they felt left no room for the ritual of repentance and redress by the authorities.

Official reports at the end of the century revealed an awareness of the decline of the old ritual of mob action and an increase in social hostility. Writing in the mid 1890s a Moscow factory inspector pointed to the explosive situation created by "the immunity from legal punishment factory authorities enjoy" and by the workers' "silent hatred, which gradually grows and spreads and ultimately erupts in terrible mass disorders that threaten the property and even the lives of the guilty authorities."^[88] In 1896 the Moscow police chief issued a warning to district police on the growing number of "disorders" (volneniia ) in manufacturing and factory enterprises in the city. He blamed "purely local conditions, primarily the discontent of the workers with one or another factory regime" and considered that the consequences of these conditions for public order in the city were ominous.^[89] Strikes and riots together posed an unprecedented challenge to the Moscow police. I would suggest that the implications for the authorities of the riots were far more serious than earlier riots because they challenged the social order as well as the public order. They introduced into the world of the workers a rebelliousness that undermined the power of the state itself.

The issue of social disorders became an issue of public concern at the end of the century for a different but closely related reason. In the major cities growing fears of crimes against persons and property shifted the locus of violence from city outskirts to the town center. Riots occurred infrequently and largely in outlying neighborhoods where the laboring population was concentrated. Official intervention came relatively quickly and kept the confrontation from moving outside the factory district. These disturbances involved the state and manufacturers on one side and laborers on the other. Only the Jews were seriously at risk and their insecurity was of little moment to most townspeople. Attacks on individuals, however, could not be so readily localized and their randomness threatened all areas of the city. Crime stories were first spread by the popular press in order to attract and to entertain readers. But by the turn of the century, crime assumed more menacing dimensions when reports of street disorders of a random character began to appear. As dramatized in the press, these incidents pitted aggressive "hooligans" against defenseless members of respectable society.

[87] K. Mironov, Iz vospominanii rabochego (Moscow, 1906), 4-5.

[88] Kut'ev, "Dokumental'nye materialy," 118.

[89] Ibid., 442.

It is difficult to separate fact from fancy in what quickly became a public cause célèbre. Statistics from various cities on crime rates in the 1890s did not indicate a significant worsening of serious crimes. Occasional reports in newspapers, however, decried indiscriminant attacks of laborers and youth on peaceable citizens. Moscow's tradesmen in the Okhotnyi Riad area, which was located near Moscow University, had long made demonstrating students targets for beatings. But these attacks were explainable in political terms of patriotic (or reactionary) traders versus radical youth. In the 1890s the violence witnessed by Maxim Gorky in the provincial town of Samara had no such easy explanation. In 1894 Gorky used his newspaper column to decry the beating of students in secondary schools by gangs of "toughs" (gorchichniki ). Their brutality toward the students suggested to Gorky that they hated "everything that in some way or other suggests culture."^[90] The violence was no longer an encounter between cohorts of laborers in mass fistfights; rather, it represented a very ominous invasion of the streets by hostile and aggressive gangs that were bent on attacking peaceful townspeople.

At the turn of the century Gorky's "toughs" reemerged in the press of the capitals as "hooligans." They were embellished with more lurid colors and fearsome garb but their activities appeared to express the same anticulturism that Gorky had perceived. The reports from the capitals emphasized that the target for indiscriminate attack were the upper classes (similar to the violence in England, where the press had popularized the term "hooligan" to identify the attackers). In 1903 the violence appeared sufficiently serious to the St. Petersburg police prefect that he issued regulations that banned "the carrying of knives, daggers, and other dangerous weapons" as well as "intentional gatherings of people on the streets of the city."^[91] Although the history of Russian "hooliganism" goes far beyond the scope of this study, the emergence of a public debate on this issue is evidence of a moment of transition from the urban conflicts of the late nineteenth century to the revolutionary events of the early twentieth century.

The extent to which the hooligan attacks represented a real public danger is debatable. The press and, presumably, its readers took the threat very seriously, as Joan Neuberger makes clear in her study of Russian hooliganism.^[92] The explanation for their fears lies in the threat that this

[90] M. O. Chechanovskii, ed. Gor'kii v Samare (Moscow, 1938), 199-200.

[91] "Otchet gradonachal'nika," TsGIA, f. 182, op. 3, d. 545 (1902), 105-6.

[92] Joan Neuberger, "Crime and Culture: Hooliganism in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1985); see also Joan Neuberger, "Stories of the Street: Hooliganism in the St. Petersburg Popular Press, 1900-1905," Slavic Review 48 (Summer 1989): 177-95.

violence posed to the widespread hopes that had emerged in previous decades for the creation of cities of orderliness and enlightenment. The vision of a civilized city, which educated Russians and officials had espoused, had made an obvious mark on urban life—in the new schooling, the public readings, and the civic improvements that the urban civic elite had promoted. The existence of dangerous places and social violence did not appear to threaten respectable society seriously because these things belonged to a barbaric past and were the product of a backward people. Although we can now see that this attitude was a sorry illusion, the urban elite shared a fundamental conviction that the future belonged to reason and orderliness.

The hooligan disrupted this mode of isolating urban violence. In his public persona he embodied familiar traits that had previously been used to characterize the dissolute and depraved individuals among the laboring population. He was drunken, not sober, preferred the company of prostitutes, and turned his leisure time into exploits of mayhem and violence. One Petersburg paper presented its ongoing accounts of street violence in the capital under the title of "savage customs." The most violent events were labeled "the law of the knife."^[93] These customs of "darkest Russia" were no longer restricted to the laboring sections of the city; they now reached into such eminently respectable areas as Nevsky Prospect. Violence among the laboring population was no longer limited to encounters with the police or other fistfighters but now involved peaceful townspeople. One Moscow writer warned that the hooligan acted with "systematic premeditation" in attacking upper-class townspeople.^[94] In other words, the hooligan was an updated, modern menace, not an urbanized version of the "dark masses." Thus, he was a perverse link between the migrant city and the images of modernity that had been associated in the previous decades with Russian urbanism. He was inseparable from the city, but his presence subverted the very ideals of orderliness, enlightenment, and civilization, of which the Russian city was to have been the embodiment.

[93] Joan Neuberger, "Crime and Culture," 48-53.

[94] A. Pazukhov, "Khuligany," Moskovskii Listok , 17 August 1903.