Sebezh Has a Railroad Station on the Moscow-Riga Line, 189 Kilometers South of Pskov

Sebezh has a railroad station on the Moscow-Riga line, 189 kilometers south of Pskov. In 1922 it was still part of Vitehsk province." Peter Kenez University of California, Santa Cruz William B. Husband. Revolution in the Factory: The Birth of the Soviet Textile Industry, 1917-1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. vii, 227 pp. $45.50 Cdn. Distributed in Canada by Oxford University Press, Don Mills, Ontario. The rank and file workers in the textile industry expressed precise and immanently concrete, if not altogether unpredictable, complaints. At a Nizhnii-Novgorod provincial conference, the workers at the Reshetekhin Factory reported a shortage of fuel and of skilled workers; the Trubanov Factory needed qualified specialists; the food crisis had reduced production significantly at the Molotov Factory and forced workers to desert the Nizhegorod Wool Factory in large numbers to search for food; a typhus epidemic reduced work at the Gorbatov Factory by half; and the Gorbatov and Rastiakin Rope Factories complained about the absence of cultural- educational work. Later reports indicated shortages of cotton had not yet affecf,ed the Medvedov and Danilov Factories, but the Shlikterman had just closed down; fuel shortages severely crippled the Tritskaia and Dubovits Factories, while the Strelkov and the former Tregubov Factories were forced to close their doors. But the problem with studying the working class from the local perspective, specifically the textile workers of the Central Industrial Region, is that this "agenda," with but slight variations, holds true for, say, the fall of 1915 and the spring of 1917; the fall of 1918 and mid-1919; and even for the fall of 1921! As Husband astutely points out in his conclusion, the same 'local interests continued to be identified in 1918-1920 much as they had been against the Imperial and Provisional governments in 1917" (p. 159). If there is such continuity during these years in the local working class agenda under conditions of war and revolutionary crisis - and if, during the first three to four years of the Soviet regime, local workers re- sisted central initiatives, sought means of confounding even their local representatives, and refused Party identifications with stubborn ideologi- cal indifference - what, then, can a "local dimension" tell us about the Bolshevik consolidation of the revolution? One clear and overwhelming conclusion provided in this exceptional study is that centrifugal forces, di- verse expectations, fragmentation, conflicting pressures, and local impro- visation must be considered to be more normative during these years than those historians who focus on better documented national policy fluctua- tions might imply, or admit. Does this "view [of the revolution] from below' handicap, even muzzle the interpretive task of the historian? Perhaps so. The overwhelming impact of the evidence presented in Husband's study indicates an extraordinary level of inconsistency and diversity among local textile factories that, for the historian, defies generalizations and interpretive insights. As a result, according to the author, there existed among local textile workers "an atmosphere in which no relationship or issue could be considered resolved with finality" (p. 48). Despite one's best efforts, the "weighty" issues that occupy the historian's attention during this period - the transformation of the textile industry, the transition to socialism, the experiment in building socialism, and even the evaluation of the accom- plishments of the Russian Revolution - possess no greater weight in de- termining the character of this period than the predominant concerns of the local workers about poor ventilation, dusty air, lack of temperature control, and food and fuel shortages. And Husband does succumb to the temptation confronting all historians of this period to drift into the national political and economic spheres where the jurisdictional and ideologi- cal forees play themselves out in more clearly identifiable stages and con- flict-resolutions - the formation of the Supreme Council of the National Economy, the nationalization process, the implementation of one-man management and labor discipline, and so on. Thus, while Husband's cover- age of the textile trade union's campaign against Centro-Textile illumi- nates interesting conundrums regarding the textile industry, it contributes little to the local perspective. Of much greater significance for this 1917-20 period is his spirited de- scription of the Ivanovo-Kineshma textile workers' strike of October 21- November 17, 1917. Likewise, because the textile industry remained Russia's largest industrial employer through these years and because women constituted two-thirds of that work force by 1917, Husband's doc- umentation of the role of women workers in the textile industry during all the twists and turns of this period stands by itself as a singularly impor- tant contribution. For example, women secured positions in the textile industry because the technology did not involve heavy physical labor and because it was assumed that they would be obedient and subservient (and, therefore, politically safe). Hence, the industry accelerated the hiring of women after the 1905 Revolution. But not until the crisis situation in 1917 did women begin to join the ranks of skilled workers in any significant numbers. But even in the year following, as reported at the First All- Russian Congress of Women Workers (16 November 1918) and in Mikhailova's article in the December, 1918, issue of Tekstil'shchik, political issues superseded women's issues because women represented only a small percentage of the total trade union membership. Political reliability from the point of view of the industrialist now shifted to unreliebility in the eyes of textile union activists. Even when women began to dominate local textile trade union membership in the fall and winter of 1919 (1,080 men to 1,463 women in the Nizhnii-Novgorod section), very few served in leadership positions, and the voices of a major segment of the local perspective remain unheard. But, if this reader's view of the accumulated evidence is correct, Husband has proved that the birth of the "Soviet" textile industry is a misnomer, that enumerating the "local perspective" in the textile industry and "testing" the consolidation of the Bolshevik Revolution are mutually exclusive tasks, and that the interpretative mandates of the historian's craft virtually dictate an urban, national focus during this tumultuous period. Local histories of this early Soviet period such as Husband's show us a "messier" Russia: a local and laterally oriented Russia, a confrontational Russia where confusion and hunger exercised more authority than ideolog- .

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