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Law and Disorder on the Narova River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872

University of California Press

There is no doubt that the entire population of the city of Narva will follow the development and progress of such an enormous enterprise with keen attention.
Das Inland, 13 May 18571

In the late spring of 1870 a strike took place at the Nevskii cotton-spinning factory in St. Petersburg that startled Russian officialdom and stirred the souls of the liberal public.2 Though the world of industrial relations would never again be the same in the Russian capital, several years would pass before a strike of comparable magnitude again disturbed the peace of that city. Yet to the surprise of everyone concerned, it was only two years later, in 1872, that Russia experienced a second major textile strike, one of such proportions and cataclysmic character that it dwarfed its predecessor in the impact it produced on the public and the government alike. What was especially shocking about the Kreenholm strike, apart from its sheer force—a seven on the Richter scale of labor unrest to the Nevskii's four—was its location. An island settlement on the Narova (or Narva) River near the border that divided Petersburg province from Estland, the small indus-

From Russian translation in KM , 188. Das Inland was a weekly German-language paper published in Dorpat (Tartu), Livland province.

On the Nevskii strike, see R. E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855–1870 (Stanford, 1971), chap. 9.

trial settlement of Kreenholm was close enough to the Russian capital—some eighty-five miles to the east3 —for events at the factory to reverberate there quickly. At the same time, it was far enough away to leave the strike, at least in its initial phase, beyond the effective control of Petersburg officials, who read with alarm the detailed reports they received from their local agents.

Although no unrest could strike more terror into the hearts of Russian officials than that occurring in the immediate vicinity of the capital, certain factors made the news from Kreenholm very frightening. Not the least of these was the evidence it offered that even an isolated border area, far removed from the influence of university students or other "outside agitators," was susceptible to menacing outbursts of labor unrest and stubborn resistance to authority, displays of militant struggle of a kind that Russia's rulers had usually equated with criminal acts of rebellion.4 Between 9 August and mid-September 1872, the most turbulent episode of labor unrest that had ever taken place in a Russian factory ran its course in Kreenholm. In the physical intensity of the workers' defiance, which included brief but daring physical resistance to armed troops, it would not be surpassed until the better-known "Obukhov defense" of 1901. In the number of workers involved—over five thousand at the peak of the strike—it would not be matched until the Morozov strike of 1885 (ca. eight thousand). In duration—though here we encounter some problems of measurement and definition—it would not find its equal until the citywide textile strike that rocked St. Petersburg in 1896.5 And in its official reception, it was simply unprecedented: no previous incident of labor unrest—not even the Nevskii strike, widely viewed by contemporaries as the first "European" strike in Russian history—had sent as many tremors reverberating through government circles.

Like all the incidents mentioned above except the Obukhov defense, indeed like all of Russia's most telling episodes of labor unrest before

To be precise, the direct distance from Narva to St. Petersburg was 84 statute miles. The distance to St. Petersburg by rail (starting in 1870) was 98.3 statute miles (via Gatchina).

On the criminality of strikes in the eyes of Russian officials in the mid–nineteenth century, see Zelnik, Labor and Society , 40, 149–50; and, for their perception of this issue in the context of the Nevskii strike, chap. 9. The criminality of strikes in Russia will be discussed in chapter 4, below.

For documentation on the strikes of 1885 and 1896–97, see Morozovskaia stachka. Sbornik dokumentov i vospominanii (Moscow, 1935); RD 4:1, 192–337, 542–619. For documents on the Obukhov defense, see Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v 1901–1904 gg. Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow, 1975), 23–34.

the turn of the century, the Kreenholm upheaval was launched by the ostensibly "backward," "gray," "dark," "ignorant," semirural workers of the textile industry, the much maligned fabrichnye .6 The unrest involved an entire community of workers, women and children as well as adult males, Russians as well as Estonians, barely skilled piecers as well as highly qualified weavers and spinners, illiterate and semiliterate Muscovite peasants as well as a handful of more educated town dwellers with ties to the nearby town of Narva or even to Estland's provincial capital, Reval. While, with some exceptions, the metalworking and machine-building factories of St. Petersburg and other regions continued to slumber, it was textile factories such as Nevskii, Kreenholm, and Morozov that first placed the challenge of labor militancy before the government and before society. "La France gréviste, c'est d'abord la France textile";7 the same could be said at the time of Russia.

If as an embattled textile factory Kreenholm, far from proving unique, prefigured the series of strikes that would exemplify the Russian labor scene for nearly three more decades, there are also aspects of the Kreenholm story that set it apart from the rest, characteristics that will occupy us in the following pages. Since many of these features were the direct or indirect consequence of the factory's unusual setting and location, it is Kreenholm's geography, in particular its political and economic geography, that provides our point of departure.

The Setting

In 1857 a small group of Moscow entrepreneurs joined forces with a German financier to found the Kreenholm cotton-spinning and weaving factory. The factory was to be built on a Narova River island situated between a pair of broad and powerful waterfalls, some twenty-six to thirty-three feet in height, that overlooked the historic Hanseatic city of Narva, site of Tsar Peter I's famous defeat at the hands of Swe-

The word fabrichnye (masc. sing., fabrichnyi ) refers to workers from a fabrika , one of the basic words in Russian for "factory" or "plant" (the other basic word being zavod , though manufaktura was still encountered at this time). In common parlance fabrichnye was often used to designate textile workers specifically. The common practice in English of translating fabrika as "factory" and zavod as "plant" has no logic behind it beyond the desire to come up with two distinct words.

Michelle Perrot, Les ouvriers en grève. France, 1871–1890 , 2 vols. (Paris, 1974), 1:352.

den's King Charles XII in 1700.8 Narva, which was captured from Sweden during Peter's Ingrian campaign of 1704 and formally ceded to Russia by treaty in 1721, was now a modest commercial-industrial town of some five thousand...