Exploring the Symbolism of Protest in Tsarist and Soviet Russia

On 2 June 1962, workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works marked out of their factory workshops and set off to the party headquarters. Protesting against cuts to their wages (a result of Khrushchev’s policy of wage reforms) and rises to food prices, theirs was one of the boldest and clearest examples of worker unrest in the USSR since the 1920s.

The story is vividly retold by Geoffrey Swain, in his excellent brief introduction to Khrushchev:

In the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works workers had already experienced an effective pay cut of 30–35% on 1 January 1962 because of adjustments to norms; the management had seen no need to fudge these changes as had happened elsewhere. Therefore, on the evening of 1 June workers were in an angry mood when they assembled in the main factory courtyard and demanded “meat, milk and higher wages”. No serious negotiations took place. The factory director commented crassly “never mind, you’ll have to go over to pies with liver sausage”, while the Rostov regional party secretary simply repeated the government’s decree. The two officials spoke from the balcony overlooking the courtyard and soon bottles were being thrown at them. The crowd then invaded the administrative building and the officials were briefly trapped, until KGB operatives succeeded in rescuing them.  

 

The next day the workers decided to march to the centre of town and a crowd of possibly 10,000 set off behind red banners and a large portrait of Lenin. They passed military roadblocks without trouble and arrived in Lenin Square outside party headquarters. A small group broke away from the main assembly to try to enter the police headquarters, in the same building, to free some workers already arrested the previous day. When they entered, troops fired in the air and after another warning shot, a worker grabbed a rifle and a soldier shot into the crowd. The workers fled back into a courtyard where more troops opened fire. Five died and 30 were arrested. Meanwhile, about noon, tanks and personnel carriers arrived and formed an arc in Lenin Square between the crowd and the party building. An officer called on the crowd to leave, and fired a warning volley in the air. Convinced that the troops only had blanks, some of the crowd tried to rush forward. Some reports say there was a second warning shot before the troops fired into the crowd; whether they fired with just one shot or in sustained shooting is also disputed by witnesses, but between 50 and 100 were killed. In the aftermath 300 were detained and 146 identified as ringleaders. 

There’s a great deal that is remarkable about this protest. Firstly, in a socialist state, it was not supposed to happen. The USSR, established as a “workers’ state” not only claimed to lead and represent the working class, but also paradoxically prohibited organised strikes and labour protests. Secondly, it further erodes the impression of the USSR – albeit partially reformed since Stalin’s death in 1953 – as a “totalitarian” state capable of controlling an atomised population.

It is the symbolism, however, of this protest which most interested me when I chose to include it in a lesson on Khrushchev’s impact on the standard of living in the USSR.

Demonstrations have been extensively analysed in Russian and Soviet History. Celebratory popular demonstrations allow movements and regimes to present themselves as they wish to be seen. By contrast, labour disputes of this kind are opportunities to mobilise symbols, often of the regime, against the regime (or at least its policies).

The most obvious point, of course, is that the 1962 Novocherkassk protest was held by workers, the social group the Communists and USSR had claimed to lead since 1917. Strikes and industrial labour protests of this kind struck at the heart of that claim.

Beyond that, it is striking that workers marched behind banners of Lenin and red flags. What are we to make of this? My Year 13 students made a number of very sensible suggestions. Perhaps it showed that they believed in the goals of socialism? Or perhaps they were covertly criticising the Communist Party by holding up its symbols in a way that could be construed as mocking?

Comparison with the symbols of previous lower-class protests, however, might offer a different explanation. I propose instead that the workers may have been attempting, by fronting the symbols of the regime in their protest, to validate their claims in the language of the regime and protect themselves from repercussions by acknowledging the core legitimacy of the Soviet regime and its goals. To see how this might work, I went back to 1905’s Bloody Sunday demonstration. Here, I’ll try to show how this and subsequent lower-class protests mobilised symbols recognised by the Russian and later Soviet regimes in order to protect, promote, and legitimise their claims.

 

January 1905: Bloody Sunday

Led by Father Gapon, the Russian Orthodox Priest-cum-labour organiser, a march (in fact a series of marches) set off to Tsar Nicholas II’s Winter Palace on 9^th January 1905. They carried portraits of the Tsar and sang patriotic songs and hymns (something that was better known amongst “patriotic” right-wing groups such as the notoriously antisemitic Black Hundreds, who would be established later in 1905). Their efforts were brutally shut down, as troops gunned down protestors, killing some 150 and wounding 800.

This (in nature, if not quite scale, not unlike the Novocherkassk workers’ protest 57 years later) was a moment of truth, exploding for many Russians the myth of a benevolent regime and Tsar. As historian Christopher Read puts it, “The spectacle of troops massacring peaceful, loyal protestors […] was too much. The event quickly became known as Bloody Sunday and, amongst the educated classes and workers of St. Petersburg and elsewhere, the prestige of the monarchy fell to its lowest point.”

1921: Kronstadt

By the end of the brutal Russian Civil War, following the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, Russia and its population was exhausted. Workers of large cities (those who remained, after many had drifted off to the countryside to find food) faced a collapsing economy and desperate shortages, while many soldiers and sailors longed for peace and stability. In the naval base of Kronstadt, a previous Bolshevik bastion lauded by Leon Trotsky as “the pride and glory of the revolution”, sailors seized power in defiance of Bolshevik rule, which they deliberately disaggregated from the rule of the soviets (local councils) on whose authority the Bolsheviks had claimed to seize power in October 1917.

A rapid overhaul of repressive single-party rule was carried out, in an effort to achieve “true communism” for the benefit of the naval base’s lower-class inhabitants. As historian Israel Getzler noted in his classic Kronstadt 1917-1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy: “Thus Kronstadt’s watchword ‘All Power to Soviets and not to Parties’ was realized.”

It was not to last. Kronstadt was stormed and seized by the Communist Red Army in March 1921. It has gone down in dissident left-wing folklore as a final brave attempt to enact a non-Bolshevik form of socialism in Russia.

 

Collectivisation, 1928-30: “We let the women do the talking”

In the Soviet countryside, Stalin’s rise to power by the end of the 1920s spelled disaster. Collectivisation of agriculture devastated villages, where peasants initially resisted by consuming, destroying, and hiding their produce and equipment. “Kulaks” (supposedly “wealthy” peasants) were arrested, deported, and shot en-masse. The opening stages of collectivisation, however, was also notable for the vast wave of peasant protest it produced, prompting a tactical retreat announced by Stalin in his astonishingly disingenuous Pravda article of 1930, “Dizzy with Success”.

As Lynne Viola has documented, in many villages it was women who led protests against Communist officials attempting to carry out collectivisation. Often carrying babies in arms and displaying a boldness that their menfolk could not (or would not), women became the face of these protests. In fact, as Sarah Badcock and Mark Baker have noted, women-fronted protests were commonly seen in the First World War and 1917 Revolution, with riotous unrest coming especially from soldiers’ wives dissatisfied with the low value of state support for military families.

These kinds of protests played directly into, and indeed from, the belief amongst educated elites that “backward” rural women were essentially apolitical and, being incapable of engaging in meaningful political opposition, posed no direct political threat to the Communist regime. Recognising this, and playing to the prejudices of political elites, provided a degree of cover for protests.

Further Reading

Sarah Badcock, "Women, Protest, and Revolution: Soldiers' Wives in Russia During 1917", International Review of Social History 49, 1 (2004): 47-70

Mark R. Baker, "War and Revolution in Ukraine: Kharkiv Province's Peasants' Experiences of War, Revolution, and Occupation, 1914-1918" in Sarah Badcock, Liudmila G. Novikova, Aaron B. Retish (eds.), Russia's Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914-22: Book 1. Russia's Revolution in Regional Perspective, Slavica (2015), 111-142

Israel Getzler, Kronstadt 1917-1921: Fate of a Soviet Democracy, Cambridge University Press (1983)

Christopher Read, From Tsar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917-21, Routledge (1996)

Geoffrey Swain, Khrushchev, Bloomsbury Academic (2015)

Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, online documentary website and resource: https://soviethistory.msu.edu/

Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance, Oxford University Press (1999)