New Labor History marks a first return to labor and workers' history in the Russian field after a decade when most historians turned to other issues. In this collection, established scholars join with younger researchers to bring new materials, innovative methods, and fresh interpretations to bear on the study of the workers' role in late tsarist and revolutionary history (1840-1918). The collection suggests the need to re-examine the experiences and aspirations of workers and, by implication, other groups in order to gain striking new insights into the pre-revolutionary era and the revolutionary process itself. The co-editors and participants hope to rekindle interest in an area of research that many have thought had exhausted its ability to intrigue, that is, to raise questions and promote hard thinking about late imperial Russia.
In the contents below, you may read the full text of the introduction, afterword, and the notes on the contributors to the volume by following the links at those points.
Michael Melancon and Alice K. Pate: Introduction
Boris B. Gorshkov: Factory Children: An Overview of Child
Industrial Labor and Laws in Imperial Russia, 1840-1914
Page Herrlinger: Orthodoxy and the Experience of Factory Life
in St. Petersburg, 1881-1905
S. L. Firsov: Workers and the Orthodox Church in Early
Twentieth-Century Russia
N. V. Mikhailov: The Collective Psychology of Russian Workers
and Workplace: Self-Organization in the Early Twentieth Century
Alice K. Pate: The Liquidationist Controversy: Russian Social
Democracy and the Quest for Unity
Mark D. Steinberg: Proletarian Knowledges of Self:
Worker-Poets in Fin-de-Siecle Russia
William G. Rosenberg: Some Observations on the Question of
"Hegemonic Discourse": Language and Experience in the Scripting of
Labor Roles
Michael Melancon: "Into the Hands of the Factory Committees":
The Petrograd Factory Committee Movement and Discourses, February to
June 1917
Michael C. Hickey: Big Strike in a Small City: The Smolensk
Metalworkers' Strike and Dynamics of Labor Conflict in 1917
Michael Melancon and Alice K. Pate: Afterword
Contributors