Page:Sergei Ilich Kaplun - The Protection of Labor in Soviet Russia (1920).pdf/7

 of the laws for the protection of labor. The direct agents of supervision were the factory inspectors—state officials who submissively carried out all the instructions of capital.

In accordance with the laws, instructions, and circulars, they were to work in the closest possible collaboration with the police and were even directly subordinated to the governor of the gubernia in question. One of their principal tasks was to prevent strikes and fight every strike that occurred. The leading local organ of factory supervision was the so-called gubernia board of administration for factories and mines. The composition this board is quite characteristic: the governor presides and the entire upper local hierarchy are members of this board: the vice-governor, the public prosecutor, the chief of police, the chief factory inspector, and the district engineer. To endow this constellation with greater authority, another element interested in protection of labor was introduced, namely: four members of the local manufacturers and factory proprietors. It is obvious, therefore, that under Czarism protection of labor was actually turned into protection of capital against labor.

When Russian Czarism gave place to that miserable miscarriage—the Coalition Government, representing a mixture of the big industrial bourgeoisie with the anaemic middle class personified by the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, protection of labor ceased to be a scarecrow. But it is plain enough that the vacillating Menshevik opportunist Ministry of Labor, ever apprehensive of encroaching upon the interests of the bourgeoisie, was not capable of serious work in this sphere. The result of this is that for the 8 months from February to October 1917, only pitiful attempts were made with regard to protection of labor, the most characteristic of which is the project of "labor inspection" consisting in the appointment of higher specialists and of workers who were to act only in the capacity of "assistants". In every other respect the old Czarist laws remained inviolate, and in