Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/73

 The regional organisations were necessary in the transitional stages toward a centralised union, but they became an obstacle in the path of the creation of such a union after the preliminary organising work had been carried out. The second All-Russian Conference of the Metal Workers' Union therefore dissolved all the regional organisations.

This question was a question of principle in those regions where national peculiarities created special conditions of work. Thus the question of the Ukrainian regional organisations was bound up with the Ukrainian national question. But the long years of joint struggle and identity of economic interests established such unbreakable ties between the Ukrainian metal workers and those of Central Russia, that the inclusion of the Ukrainian metal Workers in the All-Russian Union, after their liberation from Skoropadsky, and later 'from Denikin, was absolutely painless. There was never any tendency among the metal workers in the Ukraine or in the Don basin which necessitated the establishment of the federal principle in the trade union organisation. The Ukraine, like the whole of Russia is divided up into districts, all of which enter into a single centralised metal workers' union.

Finally, the third question of admittance of engineers to membership of the union was of considerable importance to our union as it was for all other unions in Russia.

Under the capitalist regime engineers in the main were outside the working class, and certain sections of them were even hostile. The engineers did not understand the constructive aims of the October Revolution; they only saw in the class which had just come to power, the ability to destroy the forces of production. The inevitable tension of relations in the factories helped to increase the estrangement, but the process of reconstructing the economic life of the country which is now going on, as well as the historical lessons in the Ural and the Ukraine, where capital assumed the most repulsive form of speculation, and plundered the productive wealth of the country, were an impetus to a change in the attitude on the part of the engineers toward the workers. The workers and the engineers first found common ground and one might say a common language in the metal workers' union.

The All-Russian Conference of Metal Engineers which took place in August, 1919, was the first conference in the world where the organised proletariat and the engineers met for the discussion of general questions of the economic revival of the country. Here we have the first step towards the co-operation between the physical and mental workers, and in this connection the Conference has an historical significance. As we have already stated, all engineers are included in the union, form separate sections and participate in the solution of all questions affecting the union.

These are the main features in the present organisation of the All-Russia Metal Workers' Union. Its main work was always determined by the more fundamental problems facing the proletariat as a class.