Marriage and Militance in a Working Class District of St. Petersburg, 1896-1913

Abstract

Sharp controversy still exists over whether the Russian proletariat on the eve of the 1917 revolution comprised an urbanized, class-conscious community or a mass of semi-urbanized peasants rebelling against an alien industrial regime. We use published and archival data (church marriage records, county council statistics, and St. Petersburg worker blacklists) to argue against the "peasant"school. Specifically, we demonstrate the existence of an urban, working class community by analyzing the association among (1) frequency of urban marriage with spouses coming from different geographical origins, (2) industrial militance, and (3) rural socioeconomic conditions that turned peasants into proletarians.How urbanized were St. Petersburg's industrial workers by the time the guns announced the outbreak of World War I? Historical opinion remains divided, with controversy centering on the militant strike wave of 1912-1914. Soviet historians and some western scholars maintain that striking workers were class-conscious