THE UNION BUREAUCRACY IN THE FIRST RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: FROM THE ZUBATOV’S POLICE UNION TO THE GAPON ASSEMBLY

Abstract

The emergence and consolidation within the working class of a social stratum —the trade union bureaucracy— which, although it may originate in that class, eventually acquires privileges and interests that lead it to defend positions contrary to the political independence of the workers, disarticulating them politically and subordinating them to the bourgeois state, is a universal phenomenon of capitalism. In this article we will describe the attempts made by Russian Tsarism to artificially create a trade union bureaucracy under the aegis of the police between 1898 and 1905. The peculiarity of the Russian experience during the years immediately prior to the 1905 revolution resides in the fact that it did not take place, as was usually the case in other countries, by granting workers freedom of strike, assembly and association and through the gradual cooptation of their ruling stratum by the bourgeois state, but as a result of an initiative of the Ministry of the Interior, and within it of the Secret Police (Okhrana), as opposed to the official policy of Tsarism, which did not legalize the unions until 1906, as well as that of the Ministry of Finance, which controlled the factory inspectorate and was particularly sensitive to the pressures of the capitalists. The contradictions of that policy blew up with the massacre perpetrated by Tsarism during the “Bloody Sunday” of January 9, 1905, which began the first Russian revolution and led to the partial legalization of trade union activity.