Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/10

 All these societies, benefit funds and burial societies could only serve an insignificant section of the workers and in no case could they satisfy the need of the workers in a fighting organisation. As the whole machinery of the State was directed to crush the slightest attempt at organising a union in Russia, illegal trade unions began to arise which were part of illegal social-democratic organisations.

Strikes in Russia were prohibited and were regarded as crimes. As clause 318 of the Criminal C9de of 1874 declares: "Persons accused of belonging to societies having the aim of rousing hostility between employers and workers as well as provoking strikes are liable to imprisonment for 8 months with deprivation of rights and property and exile to Siberia." This law did not remain a mere dead letter; tsarism undeviatingly put it into force and severely persecuted every organised action of the workers and every attempt at improving their position. But repressions never could abolish the class struggle and since the seventies the strike movement in Russia has developed side by side with the development of capitalism. The sharp elemental, strikes of the seventies compelled the government to pass the law of the 1st of June, 1882, prohibiting the employment of children below 12 years of age and limiting the employment of children between 12 and 15 to 8 hours a day. In the eighties the central industrial districts were overwhelmed by a wave of strikes which took a particularly sharp form in Orechov-Zouev due to the imposition of fines. As a consequence of this a law was passed on June 3rd, 1886, referring to the hiring of workers in factories and one in 1885 prohibiting nightwork for women in several industries.

In spite of imprisonment, exile and savage persecution of strikers the strikes broke out in one centre after another. In 1896 a strike of 35 thousand textile workers broke out in Petrograd, which made a tremendous impression not only upon the Government but upon the working classes themselves. The Government, after a series of repressions, issued the law of 1897 which, for the first time in Russia, limited the working day for adult factory workers to 11½ hours for day work and 10 hours for night work. We see therefore that all our factory legislation is closely connected with the large strikes and that in order to avoid discontent, as Professor Tugan-Baranovsky points out, the Ministry of the Interior and the Police Department undertook the task of factory legislation.

The economic strikes were so obviously connected with politics that the first illegal socialist groups that arose in Russia after the defeat of the Narodniki devoted particular attention to the organisation of the economic struggle. The first strike funds were established as far back as 1888 in Vilna among stocking knitters, tailors and the workers in the paper and boot trades. In 1894 the Jewish workers' federation of Warsaw organised such funds in several trades. In Minsk 4 illegal