The October general strike in St Petersburg had been a major factor in forcing the Tsar to issue his Manifesto. During this great strike delegates had proclaimed that when work was resumed they, and their fellow workers, would never agree to return under the old conditions[57]. On 26 October, delegates from one of the St Petersburg districts, without the knowledge of the Soviet, decided to introduce the 8-hour working day at their factories by direct action. The following day the delegates’ proposal was adopted by overwhelming majorities at several workers’ meetings. At the Alexandrovsky engineering works the question was decided by secret ballot to avoid pressure; the results were 1,668 for, 14 against[58]. From 28 October, several major metalworking plants began to work the 8-hour day. On 29 October, it was reported to the Soviet, amid thunderous applause, that the 8-hour day had been introduced, “by take-over” means, at three large plants. The workers now used the same direct action methods in support of their own, specific demands, that they had previously adopted in support of the more general demands for freedom of assembly and of the press. Trotsky now asked the decisive question, “Were the rights of the factory owners, the capitalists, to be more protected than the privileges of the monarchy?”[59]. The answer was given by the thousands of workers who downed tools and left the plants and factories at the end of their 8-hours shift. These actions were an inspiration for the ToPR.
St Petersburg was probably the most militant city in the Russian empire throughout 1905. But the St Petersburg workers were trying to do too much, too soon. The revolutionary movement was strung out like a horse race with the St Petersburg proletariat way ahead of the proletariat in other towns and cities, and the proletariat as a whole, way ahead of the peasantry. The Soviet Executive Committee repeatedly tried to rein in the enthusiasm of the St Petersburg proletariat and, for example, argued against the immediate struggle for the introduction of the 8-hour day. But as Sverchkov said “… the demand for the 8-hour day was so precious to the workers that they did not listen to these arguments, did not think over the approaching consequences or the calamities of unemployment, and they could not give up the idea of the shortening of the working day to the desired length by direct action”. In individual plants where the employers offered to reduce the working day to ten or even nine hours “the workers’ response was a few dozen votes for the owners’ offer and a thousand votes for the 8-hour working day”[60].
However, the situation was becoming more and more confused and difficult. Towards the end of October the government proclaimed a state of siege in Poland, and almost immediately thereafter announced that those sailors in the important naval base of Kronstadt who had supported the October general strike, would be court-martialled. In response, the Soviet called a political strike demanding the end of courts martial and the death penalty, but the balance of forces meant it was compelled to accept a compromise, that the sailors would be tried by an ordinary military court and not a court-martial, and the strike was called off on 5 November. Trotsky was aware not only of the growing weariness of the strikers, but also of the difference in level of revolutionary spirit in St Petersburg and the provinces; “We must drag out the preparation for decisive action as much as we can, perhaps for a month or two, until we can come out as an army as cohesive and organised as possible”[61]. This would be a lesson well learned and would stand Trotsky in good stead to plan and lead the October 1917 Revolution.
To the employers, each in their own factory, it appeared that the Manifesto gained by the October strike went hand-in-hand with a strengthening of the workers’ stand against capital and, of course, the unilateral introduction of the 8-hour day by direct action was bound to provoke a strong reaction on their part. Now the government, the largest single employer in St Petersburg, took the lead, making an issue of the 8-hour working day, and began to close state plants while simultaneously clamping down on workers’ meetings, breaking them up by force, in order to demoralise the workers. Until November, the capitalists had tended to respond individually, but with the government taking the lead, collectively declared war on the revolutionary proletariat, beginning a lock-out by which to starve the workers into submission. The fact that they had not waited and linked up with other workers nation-wide, now left the St Petersburg proletariat exposed and isolated.
A number of private factories were closed down and tens of thousands of workers were thrown onto the streets. The factory owners were recovering their confidence and now adopted a hard-line. For the workers of St Petersburg retreat was unavoidable. On 6 November the Soviet adopted a compromise resolution declaring that the 8-hour demand was no longer universal, and calling for the continuation of the struggle only in those enterprises where there was some hope of success. Such a solution was clearly unsatisfactory because it failed to provide a co-ordinating slogan and meant the movement would fragment into a series of separate struggles – each of which would be much weaker for being isolated. Workers in a small number of factories did gain a reduction in the working day of a half or even one hour, but most had to accept their former conditions or even worse. At the giant Nevsky plant, for example, not only was there no reduction in the working day, but the workers had to agree to no wildcat strikes or meetings on factory premises[62].
Trotsky pointed out that the coalition between private capital in St Petersburg and the government, had transformed the question of an 8-hour working day into a question of the authority of the state, and that the workers of St Petersburg could not, therefore, achieve victory in isolation from those of the country at large:
“Of course the eight-hour working day can only be introduced with the co-operation of state power. But state power is precisely what the proletariat was fighting for at that moment. Had it won a political victory, the introduction of the eight-hour day would have been no more than a natural consequence of the ‘fantastic experiment’. But it failed to win; and therein, of course, lay its gravest ‘fault’”[63].
To carry out a retreat in an organised fashion was well-nigh impossible. On 12 November, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies passed a resolution on the temporary suspension of the struggle for the introduction of the 8-hour working day. The state-operated plants re-opened for work, but under the old conditions. The gates of thirteen more private factories and plants closed and the number of workers locked-out had risen to about 100,000. On 12 November, the Soviet decided to retreat in the most dramatic of all the meetings of the workers’ parliament. The vote was divided. Representatives of several textile, glassmaking, and tobacco factories wanted to continue the struggle, but Trotsky, supported by the metalworkers, won the vote[64].
Nevertheless, many workers chose to fight on. “Comrade workers from other factories and plants”, the workers of a large factory who had decided to continue the struggle wrote to the Soviet, “forgive us for doing this, but we have no strength left to suffer this gradual exhaustion of ourselves both physical and moral. We shall fight to the last drop of our blood …”[65]. These reactions of the workers were a direct source of the ideas that would, in the following year, be published as the ToPR.
On 14 November, Bolshevik delegates successfully proposed to the Soviet, a resolution drafted by Lenin on factory closure and unemployment, calling for all factories which had been closed to be re-opened, and all those dismissed to be re-instated. In the resolution Lenin called for the Soviet to appeal for a general strike if its demands were rejected. Whilst endorsing the sentiment, one can only wonder at the lack of appreciation of how the workers would respond to such a resolution, given that only one week before, the Soviet had to call off a political strike in support of the Kronstadt sailors, and only two days before had admitted defeat for the co-ordinated struggle for the 8-hour day[66]. Deutscher points out that during the existence of the Soviet, no alternative tactical or strategic line was ever proposed by the Bolshevik delegates (after their initial hiccup), and goes so far as to describe Trotsky’s leadership of the St Petersburg Soviet as “faultless”[67]. Any criticism of Trotsky’s role is noticeable by its absence from Lenin’s writings.
The defection of the bourgeois liberals had tipped the balance in favour of reaction. By 22 November, the regime felt strong enough to arrest Khrustalyov-Nosar on the premises of the Soviet Executive. Trotsky had been de-facto leader of the Soviet from the start and after the arrest of Khrustalev-Nosar, when he was elected temporary chairman, he was both de facto and de jure leader. However, the “heavy battalions” of labour were exhausted. The defeat of the attempt to introduce the 8-hour day by direct action, and the factory and plant closures that followed, weakened the St Petersburg proletariat and lowered its combativity, so that when, on 3 December (the day after the mutiny by the Rostov regiment in Moscow), the St Petersburg Soviet was closed down by government troops and the police, and the delegates present were arrested, there was no reaction. Now leaderless, and worn out, it was in no state to react to the December Moscow uprising.
It was the specific demand of the 8-hour day that led to the final split in the opposition to the Tsar, and turned capital into an openly counter-revolutionary force. From this, the Mensheviks drew the conclusion that in the struggle against Tsarism, the working class would have to rein in its demands to within limits acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For Trotsky, it would lead to his argument that the proletariat, as an independent revolutionary force at the head of the popular masses, could not restrict itself to limits set by the bourgeoisie.
-
Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p179-186
-
Trotsky, L.D., ibid 180
-
Trotsky, L.D., ibidp181
-
Sverchkov, D., op cit. p159
-
Trotsky, L.D., Izvestia No 7, 7 Nov 1905, quoted in Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p132 – 134
-
Glatter, P. and Ruff, P., op cit 161
-
Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p185
-
Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p135
-
Quoted in Trotsky, L.D., 1905 Vintage Books, New York, 1972, p184
-
Lenin, V.I., Resolution of the Executive Committee of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies on Measures for Counter-Acting the Lock-Out. Nov 1905, CW 10:50-51
-
Deutscher, I., The Prophet Armed, Oxford Paperbacks, 1954, p135