N. Farson, Way of the Transgressor. 1936
This was in the first eight days when nobody knew exactly what was happening in chaotic Petrograd. It was possible for instance to drive in perfect safety down the Nevskii and imagine, if one wanted to convince oneself of that, that the Revolution was already over. Then such reflections would be broken by the sound of shooting going on round the comer. It would be another regiment just mutinying, or, and I will have more to say about these heroic youths, the Corps de Pages having a foray from their armored car with the Revolutionists.
As the first frenzy of murder subsided another took its place. A new Republic was being born, and hundreds of new officials were being created overnight. The ones we first came into contact with were the self-appointed police. These were mostly university students who got themselves up in whatever uniforms they could collect. They tried to look as militaristic as they could. It was quite a’ la vzode to wind strips of cloth round their trouser legs to look like puttees. As every one of them had a rifle, and hardly any one of them knew how to use it, they were a dangerous crowd. It was dismaying to have one of them suddenly leap out and challenge you. You never knew if it was a policeman or one of those bands of guerilla robbers that wandered through Petrograd for months after the Kerenskii Revolution was officially over. A banker I knew, who had a palatial flat on the Neva quay, had his flat entered one night by a band of men posing as police. They forced him to show them where he kept whatever money he had in the house; then they demanded to be shown where he kept his wine and food; and for several days they kept him out of his own house. When he finally did get back into it the place had been wrecked.
Perhaps the thing that was most irritating was to have an eager young Russian dash up and say: “Now we are just like you. We are a Republic-like America!”
But the foreigners who had the most trying time of it during the aftermath of the first Revolution were the English mill owners and mill managers who were trying to keep their plants going through it all. The workers were like sheep who had been let out of their pen, and the English managers could not get them back. They had no idea what freedom meant, but most of them took it as an invitation not to work. There was a daily drama in every mill yard. In the one I was most acquainted with the 3,000 workers had immediately elected their own Soviet, which was insisting that it should now have a say as to how the mill should be run. It met and drew up a list of demands which, aside from the Orthodox stipulation of an eight-hour day, demanded an impossible increase in wages forthwith. There was no question that under the Tsar the workers had been forced to live under almost unlivable labor conditions. Out along the Schlusselberg road district, it was the custom for entire families of workers to occupy one badly ventilated room, and the dark, dirt and wet inside the mill, where they slaved out their days, were no better. But this was the opposite swing of the pendulum; and they were demanding things which the mill managers simply could not give. The English mill managers had no force to use against these demands of the Workers’ Soviets except ridicule and tact-and their policy soon turned from flat opposition or attempt at compromise to one of yielding as slowly and as gracefully as possible to each new demand.
The reason for this was that no one knew where this Revolution was going to lead the working class. The workers themselves had no knowledge of outside conditions and working hours; and the more cynical among their leaders thought that the only way to see how far they could get was by trying it on. As soon as the Englishmen thought they had come to some decent arrangement with a Workers’ Soviet, therefore, the extremists among the workers’ leaders were immediately demanding further concessions.
It was enough to drive a man mad.
I watched an Englishman go through this ordeal day after day, trying to reason with his workers in the mill yard. So that he could address them en masse he stood on a table and harangued the crowd. Using simple comparisons he tried to explain to them why they would have to be content with certain concessions he had just made. The price of labor, for instance, was just like the price of wool. He would begin by saying they were all running the mill together, and the mill wanted to make money so that they all could make a living from it. Now, they would not pay several thousand rubles a pood for their wool, would they? No, growled the workers, they certainly would not! Then, he demanded, why ask the mill to pay them such ridiculous prices for labor?
For a moment the mill crowd would look thoughtful, and some of the steadier hands among them would begin nodding their heads. Perhaps, for a moment, the Englishman would carry his point, and the Workers’ Soviet would be satisfied because it had just managed to get some concessions which increased its prestige in the workers’ eyes. But always, often before the Englishman had got down from the table, a wilder spirit would jump up.
“Fools!” he would yell at the crowd. “Why stand here and talk about it? The mill is ours. We will liquidate the situation and throw out these foreigners and run the mill ourselves. Daloi burzhuev!”
This last cry-“Down with the Bourgeois! “-was the prelude to the real Revolution of Lenin’s. It was not heard much at first, but to a careful observer these local committees of soldiers and workers’ deputies were the centers for the final explosion that was coming later on. It was the cry that the foreign mill owners and managers were most in dread of because they knew it was no longer aimed at the Tsar but at their class.
The Scottish and Lancashire mill foremen could afford to be more abrupt than the Englishmen higher up, who had responsibility for the mill. When a Russian department manager came to them and complained that a machine had broken down they would jeer at him.
“O-ho! So it’s broke, is it? Now ain’t that too bad! Tsit! Tsit! Well, Ivan Petrovich–you’re running the mill now. You fix the machine.”
Then, to me, they would add:
“And they can bloody well run ’em to hell as far as any help they’ll get from us is concerned.”
Even in the beginning the appalling lack of a foreman class among Russians was making itself felt.
Source: N. Farson, Way of the Transgressor (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), pp. 255-56.