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InterrogatingWorking-Class Lives:Evidence in SocialHistory Sarah Badcock2017 год

Interrogating Working-Class Lives: Evidence in Social History
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Аннотация: Interrogating Working-Class LivesEvidence in Social History Sarah Badcock (bio) This short and provocative article claims to debunk Soviet mythologies of Russia's working class, but in so doing it perpetuates an alternative mythology of an undifferentiated, ill-educated, and violent working class that was effectively a group of marionettes dancing to the command of the political elite. Boris Mironov explains the prominence of the Bolsheviks among the urban working class as a triumph of the most radical and most aggressive rhetoric; in Mironov's vision, the working class was manipulated into massive sacrifice by the machinations of a professional revolutionary body. These conclusions disempower and dehumanize the urban working population. This response problematizes the methodologies and sources utilized by Mironov, looking in particular at the temporal frame of analysis and the choice of and engagement with primary sources. I argue that if we are to interrogate working-class motivations, stimuli, and reflexes, we need to do so in reference to specific individuals at specific times, and we need to frame our conclusions based on the constraints of the available primary sources. Given Mironov's stated determination to deconstruct old Soviet notions of class, I was surprised by his choice of terminology, and indeed by his failure to deconstruct class categories. The decision to refer to Russian workers collectively as "the proletariat" while simultaneously debunking Marxist conceptions of class strikes me as a little perverse. While the term "proletariat" has a long etymology, stretching back to its use in the Roman context, still for the modern reader the proletariat is usually a term used to describe a self-conscious and mobilized working class—in fact, the very thing that Mironov argues that Russia lacked in 1917. While acknowledging that workers were diverse, Mironov does not discriminate among different types of workers or give any indication of which particular groups within urban working society he is referring to. As Victoria [End Page 371] Bonnell expressed so elegantly way back in 1983, workers incorporated a diverse array of different occupations, all with a multitude of socioeconomic and cultural shapes.1 Are we to assume that the internal reflexes and motivations of a skilled metalworker were shared with those of a printer, domestic servant, shop assistant, prostitute, flower seller, or seamstress? Gender and generation, origins and occupation, all are elided in this analysis into a single undifferentiated mass. The internal life of any one individual is a place of deep uncertainty, but if we cast our assertions out toward a large and extremely diverse social group, any pretence of commonality or immediate comparability is lost. Mironov makes much of the Russian workers' links to the villages—he asserts that worker identity, behavior, and culture were defined by their peasant origins and heritage. He says that they had "one foot in the city and industry and the other very much in agriculture and the countryside" (354). This is a well-established position. The implications for the relationships between urban and rural space have been robustly contested, however.2 First, we need to disaggregate urban workers. Some workers were indeed newcomers with closer ties to rural than to urban life, but others were born of workers or were migrants who had assimilated fully into urban life. Second, other scholars have argued that the rural origins of many of Russia's workers in themselves facilitated self-organization and political activism in ways that directly contest Mironov's representation of "normal people" (356).3 Finally, one cannot make assumptions about the internal or indeed external life of an individual based on his or her ties to rural space. Mironov relates workers' political demands and proclivity toward violence to rural communes and samosud practices in the villages. Links of this nature are tenuous at best and can only be evaluated by close interrogation of specific cases at specific times. A range of scholars have compellingly argued that by the early 20th century there was increasing porosity between urban and rural spheres, and that the rural population was increasingly drawn into the public sphere.4 Young men were increasingly likely to have some degree of basic [End Page 372] literacy, and literacy rates were markedly higher in urban...
Год издания: 2017
Авторы: Sarah Badcock
Издательство: Slavica Publishers
Источник: Kritika
Ключевые слова: Soviet and Russian History, Eastern European Communism and Reforms, European history and politics
Другие ссылки: Kritika (HTML)
Repository@Nottingham (University of Nottingham) (PDF)
Repository@Nottingham (University of Nottingham) (HTML)