worker

n.

1. 1. One who works at a particular occupation or activity: an office worker.
   2. One who does manual or industrial labor.
2. A member of the working class.
3. A member of a colony of social insects such as ants, bees, wasps, or termites, usually a sterile female but often a sexually immature individual of either sex, that performs specialized work such as building the nest, collecting and storing food, and feeding other members of the colony.

noun

1. One who is employed by another: employee, hireling, jobholder. Informal hire, hired hand. See over/under, work/play.
2. One who labors: hand, laborer, operative, roustabout, working girl, workingman, workingwoman, workman, workwoman. See work/play.

n

Definition: person who is employed
Antonyms: unemployed

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In the general sense of the term, there have of course been workers present since the dawn of Russian history, including slave laborers and serfs. Viewed more narrowly to mean persons employed in industry and paid a wage, however, workers became important to the Russian economy only in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, especially during the reign of Peter the Great (1682 - 1725), who placed a high priority on Russia's industrial development. But even under Peter most workers employed in manufacturing and mining were unfree labor, forced to toil long hours either in privately owned enterprises or in factories owned by the government. The continued coexistence of free and forced labor at a time when forced labor, except for convicts, had virtually vanished from the European scene was a noteworthy and notorious characteristic of Russian society until as late as 1861, when serfdom was abolished and almost all labor was placed on a contractual footing.

With the abolition of serfdom, Russia began a new spurt of industrial development. In the 1890s Russian industry expanded rapidly, growing at an average rate of 8 percent per annum. The number of industrial workers, if viewed as a percentage of the overall population, was still small by the end of that decade; according to the 1897 census, the Empire's population was over 125 million, while the number of workers was roughly two million. However, their social and political importance became increasingly evident, in part because of their concentration in politically sensitive areas such as St. Petersburg (the capital), Moscow, the port city of Baku, and the industrial regions of Russian-occupied Poland.

The most dramatic manifestation of the workers' importance was their participation in strikes and demonstrations. If strike is loosely understood as any work stoppage in defiance of management, then strikes certainly took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they began to be taken seriously by Russian officials, publicists, and political activists only in the 1870s and especially the 1890s. By the early twentieth century a fierce and sometimes agonizing competition had begun between radicals of various persuasions (Social-Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, etc.), liberals, religious organizations, and the government for working-class political support. In the 1905 Revolution, radicals emerged as the clear winners in this competition, though with no single faction dominating. At least in major urban industrial centers, workers played the leading role in the revolutionary struggles of that year. Their moment of greatest triumph came with the October general strike and the creation of citywide workers' councils (soviets), one of which virtually became the governing body of the city of St. Petersburg. However, the bloody suppression of the armed uprising of Moscow workers in December 1905 marked the end of the workers' triumphant period. Although labor unrest continued in 1906, workers ceased to pose a serious threat to the Russian government until the labor movement revived in the period between 1912 and 1914.

Nevertheless, the 1905 Revolution did bear some fruit for Russia's workers, including the government's recognition for the first time of their right to form unions and engage in strikes (albeit within very tight restrictions) and the right to elect their own delegates to the new Russian Parliament, the Duma (albeit under a very restricted franchise). Russian industry soon began to recover from the setbacks it had undergone in the first few years of the century, and by 1910 was again experiencing a robust expansion. As the position of workers in the labor market became more favorable, workers grew less and less tolerant of management mis-conduct and government repression. A government massacre of Russian goldminers in the spring of 1912 resuscitated the dormant labor movement and ushered in a two-year period of militant strike activity and demonstrations in many parts of Russia, most dramatically in St. Petersburg and, in 1914, Baku. Politically, this worker militancy worked to the tactical advantage of the Bolsheviks and, to a lesser extent, the Socialist Revolutionaries, while working to the disadvantage of the more moderate Mensheviks, who feared that workers' passions had been aroused to a degree that could prove counterproductive. Some historians have argued that Russian industrial centers were on the cusp of a new revolution when the onset of World War I, in the summer of 1914, put a temporary damper on worker unrest. However, it must also be acknowledged that the labor movement was dying down before war was declared.

Be that as it may, once the war began to go badly for Russia, there were growing signs of a revival of the labor movement, especially in 1916. By late February 1917, St. Petersburg workers (women textile workers as well as the traditionally militant, mainly male, metal and munitions workers) were joining with other elements of the urban population, including the military garrison, in increasingly confrontational demonstrations. Workers now played a prominent role in the overthrow of the tsarist regime and, in cooperation with the radical intelligentsia and their party activists, resurrected an updated version of the soviets of 1905, this time with the crucial participation of soldiers. Over the next few months, worker militancy in the form of strikes, street demonstrations, factory occupations, and participation in the organizations of the revolutionary parties added enormously to the difficulties of the new Provisional Government, which was simply unable to satisfy worker demands under wartime conditions. Hence when the Bolsheviks succeeded in overthrowing the Provisional Government in October 1917 and dispersing the recently elected Constituent Assembly the following January, they would do so with a great deal of working-class support, though this support was not for Bolshevik single-party rule but for a soviet government consisting of a coalition of left parties and supportive of worker democracy within the factory. The ensuing Civil War of 1917 - 1921 was a period of bloodshed, hunger, and, eventually, draconian measures such as the militarization of labor and the introduction of strict one-man management, inflicted by a relentless Bolshevik regime on recalcitrant workers. Though indispensable to the Reds in their struggle against the Whites in these years of civil war, workers emerged from the war demoralized and, in many cases, thanks to the damage suffered by Russian industry, declassed. Workers now ceased to be a significant independent force in the country's political life.

Bibliography

Bonnell, Victoria E. (1983). Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900 - 14. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Haimson, Leopold H. (1964-1965). "The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905 - 1917." Slavic Review 23 (4): 619 - 642; 24 (1):1 - 22.

Johnson, Robert E. (1979). Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Wildman, Allan K. (1967). The Making of a Workers' Revolution: Russian Social Democracy, 1891 - 1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Zelnik, Reginald E. (1971). Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855 - 1870. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Zelnik, Reginald E., ed. and tr. (1986). A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Zelnik, Reginald E., ed. (1999). Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections. Research Series, no. 101. Berkeley: International and Area Studies, University of California.

—REGINALD E. ZELNIK

IN BRIEF: n. - A person who works at a specific occupation; A person who acts and gets things done.

The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker. — Helen Keller

Dansk (Danish)
n. - arbejder, arbejdsmand

Nederlands (Dutch)
arbeider, werkbij

Français (French)
n. - ouvrier, employé, prolétaire, (Zool) ouvrière

Deutsch (German)
n. - Arbeiter, Arbeiterin, tüchtiger Arbeiter

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - εργαζόμενος, εργάτης, υπάλληλος

Italiano (Italian)
lavoratore, operaio, ape operaia, sgobbone

Português (Portuguese)
n. - trabalhador (m), abelha (f)

Русский (Russian)
рабочий, работник, сотрудник, работяга

Español (Spanish)
n. - empleado, obrero, trabajador, operario, obrera

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - arbetare

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
工人, 劳工, 劳动者

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 工人, 勞工, 勞動者

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 노동자, 일벌

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 働く人, 勉強する人, 労働者, 働きバチ, 働きアリ, 働き蜂

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) العامل, الشغيل‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮פועל, עובד, פועל-כפיים, חרק פועל (דבורים, נמלים וכו')‬

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