ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3 (especially Documents 2.4, 2.7 and 3.7), a combination of economic grievances—accelerating inflation, long hours of work in frequently appalling conditions, and growing food shortages—opposition to the war, and the often brutal repression of any protests, eventually provoked the workers to rise against the autocracy, first in Petrograd, then in the other cities of the Empire. However, as was the case with the peasantry, initial hopes that the February Revolution would usher in a new, more harmonious and economically secure future, for both industrialists and workers, rapidly faded. Disillusion and bitter conflict increasingly enveloped the factories and plants. The development of this conflict has been the subject of extensive research which has added considerably to our understanding of dynamics of the Revolution in urban Russia, especially in Petrograd and Moscow (few Western studies of the provincial towns exist). Yet there is no consensus on precisely what the dynamics of the urban revolution were. At one extreme, John Keep, while conceding that the material grounds for working-class dissatisfaction did grow during 1917, still emphasises the role of Bolshevik chicanery in mobilising the legitimate concerns of the workers for their own political ends. On the other hand, as we saw in Chapter 1, the studies of the recent school of social historians has concluded that the workers were not simply the pawns of the Bolsheviks. Rather their radicalisation in 1917 was in large part caused by a perceptibly worsening disintegration of industry, to which they elaborated their own economic and political solutions. Those who shaped these solutions, moreover, appear to have been drawn from the most skilled, most literate, most urbanised strata of the working class, not the displaced, recently recruited elements, arguably more vulnerable to Bolshevik manipulation and demagogy (Perrie 1987:433–45).
