ABSTRACT
The industrial workers were the fastest growing group of factory workers in St. Petersburg. At the same time individual factories increased their work force dramatically. Most factory owners granted only very reluctantly a minimum of better wages and working conditions. Their unyielding practices fostered a labor movement which they opposed with all their political power. They were divided into industrial workers, those people who worked in factories or at crafts in an urban area; and agricultural laborers who earned their living on the land in the rural communes. From the growing number of full time urban workers there developed a workers' elite. The characteristics which distinguished members of the workers' elite as a separate group from the rest of the urban working class were the degree of literacy, standard of living, social traits, economic and political positions, and finally and most important, a strong urge to discover the outside world.
