From the History of the Struggle to Protect Workers’ Health in 1917

G. A. Beilikhes, Candidate of Medical Sciences (Moscow)

For many years, the Russian proletariat, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, waged a struggle against tsarism and capitalism. Alongside broad political objectives, this struggle also pursued specific aims. Economic issues occupied a prominent place among them, particularly the improvement of working and living conditions. During the tsarist era, the struggle to protect workers’ health was a constant part of the revolutionary struggle. Interrupted by the First World War, it resumed with renewed vigor after the February bourgeois-democratic revolution. The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, which had resumed publication, guided the struggle of the working class, devoting considerable attention to health protection. In one of its editorials, the paper wrote: “We cannot forget one thing—the revolution has taken place, and tomorrow we workers must still go off to capitalist penal servitude; we remain wage slaves who spend their entire lives in stuffy workshops.”¹ At rallies attended by thousands and during mass strikes, workers advanced not only political demands but also demands for an eight-hour working day, labor protection—above all for women and adolescents—laws providing full social insurance, and improved medical care.

These demands became especially widespread after V. I. Lenin published the pamphlet Materials for the Revision of the Party Programme.² The pamphlet included a draft of a new program prepared by the labor protection subsection established at the Seventh (April) Party Conference. Drawing on the experience of many years of struggle, this draft considerably expanded and refined the demands for the protection of workers’ health contained in the program approved by the Sixth Party Congress. Of the health protection section of the program approved by the Second Congress, only one point was incorporated unchanged into the draft of the new program; in many points the earlier demands were expanded, and a number of new points were formulated for the first time. Revolutionary workers and Party organizations, however, had begun to advance demands for health protection much earlier. Thus, the illegal leaflets issued by the Petrograd Committee of the Bolsheviks during the preparations for the revolution, calling for the mobilization of all forces in the struggle to overthrow tsarism (a later leaflet

¹ Pravda, 1917, no. 35.
² V. I. Lenin, Works, vol. 24, 4th ed., pp. 436–440.

14 February)¹ and calling for an open and decisive struggle to overthrow tsarism (issued on 25 February)² reminded workers of the principal slogan of the labor movement—the demand for an eight-hour working day. On 27 February an illegal leaflet brought to the attention of the masses a manifesto of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which called on the people to fight for a democratic republic and the establishment of a Provisional Revolutionary Government and defined the tasks of that government. These included the introduction of an eight-hour working day.³

On 7 March the Petrograd Committee of the Party adopted a resolution: “Having discussed the introduction of an eight-hour working day, the Petrograd Committee proposes that the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies immediately decree an eight-hour working day in all sectors of wage labor.”⁴ The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, who predominated in the Soviet, rejected this demand. But the Party’s calls were taken up by the masses. Thus, on 6 March, at a general meeting to discuss the resumption of work suspended during the days of the revolution, the workers of the Baltic Works in Petrograd resolved to demand that the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies introduce an eight-hour working day.⁵ Similar resolutions were adopted by the workers of the Baranovsky, Erlikh, Yakor, and other factories.⁶ On 6 March the workers of the Sevkabel factory made the introduction of an eight-hour working day one of their conditions for resuming work.⁷ Management refused to accept this demand, as it had not been legislatively approved. On learning of this, a meeting of three thousand workers resolved on 8 March to put the shorter working day into effect on their own authority.⁸ In Moscow, when the resumption of work was discussed on 5 March at a number of enterprises in the Rogozhsky district, workers resolved to demand that the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies put the eight-hour working day into effect on its own authority.⁹ The mass movement for the eight-hour working day was widespread. The revolutionary working class insistently demanded the rapid implementation of fundamental changes not only in the political but also in the economic sphere.

The Petrograd capitalists, who faced the greatest pressure from the revolutionary masses, very quickly realized that “... it was necessary first and foremost to satisfy those demands of the workers that could immediately bring calm to their ranks. Undoubtedly, one such demand was the introduction of an eight-hour working day, which had been put forward by the workers of almost all enterprises and had already been partially implemented by direct action.”¹⁰ This question was discussed at general meetings of the Petrograd Society of Mill and Factory Owners on 7, 8, and 9 March.

On 10 March the society sent the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies a formal invitation to a meeting for a final discussion of the question. Having considered the invitation, the Executive Committee resolved to send two members to the meeting (one of them was the well-known Menshevik K. A. Gvozdev, subsequently a minister

¹ The Petrograd Proletariat and the Bolshevik Organization during the Imperialist War of 1914–1917: A Collection of Materials and Documents, edited by V. A. Bystriansky. Leningrad, 1939, p. 199.

² Ibid., p. 200.

³ Ibid., p. 216.

⁴ Pravda, 1917, no. 3.

⁵ State Archive of the October Revolution and Socialist Construction of Leningrad Oblast (GAORSS LO), fond 7384, inventory 9, file 293, fol. 9.

⁶ Ibid., fols. 3, 10.

⁷ Ibid., fond 4600, inventory 1, file 6, fol. 4.

⁸ Ibid., file 4, fol. 12.

⁹ Sotsial-Demokrat, 1917, no. 1.

¹⁰ Central State Historical Archive in Leningrad (TsGIAL), fond 150, inventory 1, file 566, fol. 3.

labor of the Provisional Government).¹ The archives of the Society of Factory and Mill Owners have preserved the statements of these “representatives” of the working class. In defense of the eight-hour working day, they could find only the argument that they were “...extremely concerned with restoring the proper functioning of enterprises as quickly as possible, but are unable to influence the working masses by appeals alone, without pointing to tangible results achieved by the revolution that would afford workers some relief compared with their former condition of having no rights.”²

On the same day, the Petrograd Soviet and the Society of Factory and Mill Owners reached an agreement to introduce the eight-hour working day, factory committees, and conciliation boards in factories and mills. The agreement provided for the retention of overtime at double pay, which made it possible in practice to reduce the matter to a certain increase in wages rather than a shorter working day. Pravda (1918, no. 7) devoted an editorial entitled “The First Step” to the agreement. The article welcomed this important revolutionary achievement, noted the need to extend it throughout Russia, and emphasized the importance of keeping overtime to a minimum.

On March 15, 1917, an order of the War Department introduced the eight-hour working day at artillery plants, with the order deemed to have taken effect retroactively on March 7.³

Thus, the Petrograd proletariat won a major victory by wresting the eight-hour working day from the bourgeoisie. This had a wide resonance throughout the country. After preliminary discussion of the question of shortening the working day at well-attended workers’ meetings and in the district Soviets, the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies considered it at a session lasting three days—March 16, 17, and 18. The Soviet resolved to recognize the need to introduce the eight-hour working day throughout the country, to demand that the Provisional Government immediately issue a corresponding decree, and to call upon all Soviets of Workers’ Deputies to support this demand. In Moscow itself, it resolved to introduce a shorter working day beginning March 21, without waiting for such a decree.⁴

Reports of the full or partial introduction of the eight-hour working day came from everywhere—from Saratov, Kharkov, Odessa, Nikolaev, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Finland, and elsewhere.⁵ Soon after its forced concession, the bourgeoisie in power again raised its head. The signal came from the well-known capitalist Ryabushinsky. Opening the All-Russian Congress of Commerce and Industry on March 19, he said of the eight-hour working day: “From our point of view, this is not... a question of principle. We simply have to say whether or not we can bear such a luxury as the eight-hour working day. I think that... the introduction of the eight-hour working day everywhere is inadmissible....”⁶

The Mensheviks were in fact opposed to the struggle for the eight-hour working day. One of their leaders, F. Dan, wrote in a pamphlet, seeking to instill in workers doubts about the feasibility of their demands: “Today, without any great exertion, we can win the eight-hour working day and enshrine it in law. Even if we cannot benefit from it today, we shall benefit from it tomorrow. If not we, then our children....”⁷ But such a distant prospect was unacceptable to the revolutionary working class,

¹ GAORSS LO, fond 7384, inventory 9, file 9, 1917, fol. 1.

² Central State Archive of the October Revolution and Socialist Construction (TsGAORSS), fond 4100, inventory 1, file 95, fols. 106–108.

³ GAORSS LO, fond 4602, inventory 1, file 1, fol. 1.

⁴ Izvestia of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, 1917, nos. 13, 15.

⁵ “The Struggle for the Eight-Hour Working Day.” Insurance Questions, 1917, no. 3 (64).

⁶ Mining and Factory Affairs, 1917, nos. 15–16, p. 15657.

⁷ F. Dan (F. I. Gurvich). The Eight-Hour Working Day and the Army. Tula, 1917, p. 11.

…which continued the mass struggle for an eight-hour working day throughout nearly the entire period between February and October.

In many places, the demand for an eight-hour working day met with resistance from factory owners (Shuya,¹ Spas-Klepiki in Ryazan Province,² Bogorodsk district in Moscow Province,³ and elsewhere). At some enterprises where a shorter working day was introduced by direct action, factory owners resorted to lockouts.

Nevertheless, the demand for a shorter working day was pressed persistently and insistently at individual enterprises, at mass workers’ meetings, and at provincial congresses of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies. It was often included in the mandates given to representatives elected to the Soviets. Even after May 6, 1917, when Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries joined the Provisional Government and a Ministry of Labor headed by the Menshevik M. I. Skobelev was established, the government continued stubbornly to ignore this demand.

From its very first issues, Pravda also led the Russian proletariat’s struggle for comprehensive social insurance, at the capitalists’ expense, for all wage earners against every form of loss of working capacity; for the organization of citywide and district sickness funds, the introduction of full self-government in these funds, and the transfer of medical care to them; and so forth. In a series of articles (Nos. 5, 10, and others), the newspaper advocated demands shaped by the resolution of the Prague Party Conference and by the experience of the struggle to put those demands into effect in 1912–1914. The resolution had for the first time fully formulated the Communist Party’s social insurance demands: comprehensive insurance against all forms of loss of working capacity at the capitalists’ expense, the transfer of medical care to self-governing sickness funds, and so forth. The citywide insurance conferences held in Petrograd in March and August 1917 proceeded under Bolshevik slogans, despite the Mensheviks’ attempts to win the workers over to their side.

Everywhere the proletariat demanded fundamental reforms in social insurance and labor protection.

In July 1917, after making many sweeping promises, the Provisional Government finally issued a new law.⁴ Although the Mensheviks proclaimed it a major revolutionary achievement,⁵ the working masses greeted it with condemnation: it made only minor changes to the tsarist insurance law of 1912, somewhat expanding the categories of persons covered but doing nothing to ease the financial burden imposed on workers. The Bolshevik press subjected the law to severe criticism.

The Bolshevik physician A. N. Vinokurov, later one of the first organizers of Soviet public health and a prominent Communist Party figure, played a major role in the struggle for social insurance and labor protection. In April 1917, his article “The Revolution and Labor Protection” was published in the Party press.⁶ Having established that illness, disability, and mortality among workers had risen to unprecedented levels during the war as a result of the sharp deterioration in their working conditions, the author noted that the continued absence of legislation on occupational health protection, factory inspection, and capitalists’ liability for occupational diseases was intolerable. Conditions at industrial enterpri—

¹ State Historical Archive of Moscow Oblast (GIAMO), fond 738, inventory 11, file 1, fol. 38.
² Ibid., fol. 133.
³ Ibid., file 26, fols. 11, 121.
⁴ Collection of Government Decrees and Statutes, 1917, No. 208.
⁵ V. Ezhov (S. Tsederbaum), The New Law on Sickness Funds and What It Gives the Workers. Petrograd, 1917, p. 4.
⁶ Pravda, 1917, No. 25; Sotsial-Demokrat, 1917, No. 33; Voprosy Strakhovaniya, 1917, No. 4.

… the article characterizes conditions as follows: “The sanitary conditions of work in factories and plants are almost beyond belief: no measures are taken to remove harmful gases, vapors, or dust; workers are literally suffocating and exhausted in cramped, cold, dark, damp workshops, blackened by smoke and filled with dust and harmful fumes.... The working class can no longer tolerate such a state of affairs, which is leading to its physical degeneration. The question of comprehensive labor protection must be placed on the agenda.”

Recognizing that these questions could not quickly be resolved through legislation while state power remained in the hands of the capitalists, the party press urged the working class to take an active role and act on its own initiative: to demand better sanitary and hygienic working conditions, organize sanitary commissions at workplaces, and maintain constant “pressure” on employers. In the numerous strikes of 1917, workers consistently made demands for labor protection and in a number of cases secured concessions from the capitalists—improved sanitary and hygienic conditions, lighter work for women and children, better medical care, and so on.

To placate the working masses, who were demanding labor protection with increasing insistence, the Provisional Government’s Ministry of Labor convened a congress of the factory inspectorate in Moscow in June 1917. Its agenda included legislation on labor protection, the activities and reorganization of the inspectorate, and related questions. Pravda exposed the true character of the congress: “Former inspectors and former officials of the tsarist and now ‘coalition’ Ministry of Trade and Industry will gather, people of the twentieth rank, at best mediocre liberals, and will discuss and consider questions of workers’ labor protection. All workers know only too well what the factory inspectorate was and what it remains today.... The workers’ slogan is not the improvement and reform of the government factory inspectorate, but its fundamental transformation.... All workers’ organizations must immediately place on their agenda the task of organizing an elected workers’ inspectorate.”¹

The party press and the working masses gave priority to the need to protect the labor of women and children, whose situation was especially difficult because during the war the tsarist government had widely replaced male labor with that of women and children: under a law issued in 1915, “minors” were even permitted to work underground. The Provisional Government repealed this law only in July 1917.

In August and September, meetings were held at the Ministry of Labor to develop a bill on child labor drafted by the ministry. The chair, Deputy Minister Kolokolnikov, a Menshevik, declared that the bill’s principal purpose was “to create a healthy new generation of Russian workers” and that it was “the first step toward expanding the scope of labor protection.”² How was this “concern” for creating a healthy new generation manifested? In the repeal of the existing prohibition on the employment of children under the age of 12 and the raising of that age to 14.

Yet even this seemed excessive to the capitalists: at one meeting, representatives of the Ministry of Trade and Industry declared that the bill could “have a disastrous effect on the state of industry.” Seeking to conceal the true motives behind their position, they expressed concern that it “... might harm the very people being protected and their families: depriving families of supplementary earnings would necessarily affect the living conditions and nutrition of those same minors.”³

¹ Pravda, 1917, no. 82.
² TsGAOR SSSR, fond 4100, inventory 1, file 69, fols. 43–46.
³ Ibid.

Lindov, a representative of the Medical and Sanitary Section of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies—a Bolshevik physician, G. D. Leiteizen, who had carried out extensive Party work in the prerevolutionary years—argued unsuccessfully for raising the minimum age for wage employment to 16. He succeeded only in having a provision included in the bill requiring a medical certificate of fitness for work from “minors” entering employment. The Bolshevik press sharply criticized the bill and reiterated the Party program’s demand that the minimum age be raised to 16.¹

The protection of women workers also attracted the attention of the Party press. Rabotnitsa, the journal of the Party’s Central Committee, devoted a substantial article to the subject. It described the effects of factory labor under capitalist exploitation on women’s health and examined the occupational hazards of particular trades, as well as morbidity and mortality figures. “This must be brought to an end. Women workers must demand the establishment of full protection for women’s labor,”² the author concluded, going on to cite the provisions of the draft Party program concerning women’s labor: barring women from heavy and “harmful” work, providing paid maternity leave and time to nurse infants, and so forth.

Numerous reports from workplaces published in Rabotnitsa described women’s working conditions. At Thornton’s weaving mill, for example, “...if the woman worker’s situation has changed at all, it is only in that an eight-hour working day has been introduced..., but all working conditions as regards hygiene remain as before. In the washing room they still breathe acrid air saturated with poisonous substances and stand in water on a wet floor, and so on.”³ A cartridge factory, where women also made up the majority of the workforce, reported: “You stand on a wet floor; your clothes are soaked through to your underwear, causing colds and other illnesses.... Concerning the unhygienic working conditions, the factory committee has submitted a petition to the management.”⁴

The Provisional Government, however, neither wished nor was able to address the pressing problems of protecting workers’ health, particularly that of women. The “solution” adopted by the Ministry of Labor for women with infants was characteristic: in July 1917 it wrote to the Central Council of Trade Unions and the Petrograd Society of Mill and Factory Owners, stating: “...although under existing law the provision of breaks from work for women with infants is not mandatory, the labor protection department, nevertheless recognizing the urgent need for such breaks, considers that, pending enactment of the law on the protection of women’s labor now being drafted by the Ministry of Labor, such breaks could be arranged by agreement between workers and employers.”⁵ Such agreements were indeed frequently reached, but not as a result of this letter: they came about through successful strikes by workers. As for the law, the Provisional Government never enacted it.

Only the Great October Socialist Revolution, by abolishing capitalist relations in our country and transferring power to the working people, finally resolved the question of protecting their health as well.

Received March 4, 1957.

1. TsGAORSS, fund 4100, inventory 1, file 69, nos. 1–13.
2. “Women’s Labor.” Rabotnitsa, 1917, nos. 1–2.
3. Rabotnitsa, 1917, no. 4.
4. Ibid., no. 10.
5. TsGAORSS, fund 4100, inventory 1, file 69, fol. 5.