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Before the 1st Russian Revolution: Analysis of Data Base on Strikes in Russian Empire.
| Within many decades of the Soviet period so-called “working class history” was one of the most welcomed topics. But from the very beginning working-class movement of the first period (1895–1904) became the least studied as reflected the period of the Russian working class history without bolshevik party supervision. Some data of this early period of workers’ movement were involved only as the illustration of history of the bolshevik’s party. The number and a role of political strikes were deliberately exaggerated that served ideological concepts (including thesis about “proletariat hegemony” even at early stages of workers protest movement or about the revolutionary workers' party "supervising" and "providing" workers movement peaks – general strikes etc.) . After disintegration of the USSR, the rigid criticism of Marxist methodology and changes of research paradigms, the working class history has been forgotten for several years.
However the possibilities of more advanced approaches in this field have been extended from the beginning of 1990s. In many respects it is promoted by publication seria which was initiated by the Institute of Russian History (Russian Academy of Sciences) in 1992-2007. We mean ten-volumes edition of the documentary chronicle “Working-class movement in Russia” which embraces events happened in 1895-1904, the decade which preceded the 1st Russian Revolution of 1905. The edition gives the most detailed and full working-class movement picture in Russia. It includes data on all 73 provinces of the Russian empire.
This unique secondary source is based on several thousand hand-written cards which contain detailed description of each event of the class struggle made by a team of Russian historians on a basis of more, than 400 funds from 108 archives of the former USSR. Most of data are collected by various departments of the Russian Ministry of Interior, with Special Police department, the Ministry of Finance with department of trade and manufactories and factory inspection, Ministry of justice and also from local archives subordinated to them (archival funds of province governors, town governors, offices of local gendarmerie and local judicial authorities) giving extraordinary materials stored in local provincial archives; it includes data from hundreds personal archival funds of participants of revolutionary movement.
Information from this Chronicle is a main source for our database. In the paper we give the results of statistical analysis of more than 7000 strikes registered in our database. The results present different aspects of workers’ struggle in decade under consideration.
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