The Worker Question in the Ideology and Practice of Early Twentieth-Century Russian Conservatives

Abstract

The views of Russian conservatives on the worker question and their attempts to resolve it have, to all intents and purposes, never been adequately covered by historians in this country. The writings of prerevolutionary historians on the rightist movement were frankly journalistic in nature, with the possible exception of works by D. Kol’tsov, V.O. Levitskii, N. Lukin, and P. Timofeev, which as contemporary scholar Dmitrii Viacheslavovich Karpukhin has observed, do show that members of the working class were involved in Black Hundred unions and organizations and also examine the ideological orientations of those institutions, focused as they were on drawing members of the proletariat into the ranks of the Black Hundreds. But the authors mentioned here also emphasized that the conservatives’ successes in that arena owed much to demagoguery, which targeted the benighted, undeveloped strata of the working population and the lumpen proletariat. By virtue of the ideological dogmas that weighed on them, Soviet historians all but ignored the problem of the workers’ involvement in the monarchist (Black Hundred) movement. Scholars in that period did, admittedly, look at the attempts of extreme rightists to bring the workers over to their side, but with the sole aim of proving their futility. Only Sergei Aleksandrovich Stepanov, in his study of the social composition of the Black Hundred unions and organizations, noted how active the proletariat was in them. The monarchists’ political practice on the worker question has been alluded to by contemporary Russian historians Sergei Stepanov and Andrei Mikhailovich Belov, while Aleksandr Vital’evich Repnikov has touched on their ideological constructs. Those constructs, however, have more often than not been viewed through the prism of Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov’s theoretical and ideological legacy. But despite the evident