Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/309

 1899.] Bussia. — Strikes. [301

mills in the St. Petersburg district. The hours had been reduced after the last strike, and another took place in order to obtain a further reduction to a ten hours' day without loss of wages. The police attempted to arrest the leader of the agitation, but were received by the workmen in their barracks with showers of stones, upon which the Cossacks were called in, who fought their way from floor to floor and flogged men, women, and children with their whips. Some 200 men were arrested. Further labour riots of even a more serious kind took place at Eiga in May. The troops attacked the strikers in the streets and fired a volley by which eight people were killed, twenty- three wounded, and about fifty more or less injured. Ten factories in the town were closed in consequence of the strike. These riots seem to have been the outcome of the Socialist propaganda in Bussia, which was taken in hand by the Russian revolutionists as the most practical means of increasing the opposition to the Government. People who do not understand or will not make any sacrifices for the cause of liberty can easily be roused to action for so intelligible and immediate an object as a rise in wa^es, and in Bussia as in Germany those who aimed at upsetting the Government found ready allies in working men who were discontented only because their wages were low or their working hours long. According to a secret report from the Chief of the Police at Moscow the success of several of the strikes which had taken place in Bussia had " an extremely dangerous and prejudicial effect upon the State, inasmuch as they constitute an elementary school for the political education of the working class. They confirm the confidence of the masses in their own power, teach them more practical methods of combat, and train and give prominence to specially gifted individuals of greater initiative. They further convince the labourer of the possibility and advantage of com- bination, and of collective action in general. At the same time, they render him more accessible to Socialist ideas which he had previously regarded as idle dreams. The consciousness of a solidarity of interests with the labouring classes throughout the world is developed in these local struggles. This involves a recognition that political agitation in the social democratic sense is indispensable to victory. The present situation," concludes the report, "is so disquieting, and the activity of the revolu- tionary agitators is so intense, that the combined action of all the authorities affected will be necessary to counteract it." In February an encounter took place between the police and the students of the University of St. Petersburg, who were beaten with Cossack whips and otherwise ill-treated because they persisted in going to their homes through the streets, which were blocked by the police on the ground that they were suspected of intending to make a demonstration against the rector, who had threatened the students with police measures in the event of their misbehaviour. The consequence was that