Inside the Russian Revolution

by Rheta Childe Dorr

“You could discharge them, couldn’t you?” I countered.

“I certainly could not,” declared Mr. Cheshire. “Nobody can discharge an employé until the shop committee has sat on the case and decided that it does not want the man or woman in the mill. All I can do is to make my complaints to the committee and ask it to act.”

Mr. Cheshire was born in Russia, and has lived there all his life except for a few years spent in an English school. Yet he speaks the English of his grandfather, the same unmistakable little Lancashire burr. He has the Lancastrian’s sense of humor also and he laughed even when he told me of the demoralization and ruin in which the fantasies of the revolution had plunged his business. The utter absurdity of it was as present in his mind as the disaster.

“Look at that man,” he said, pointing to a machine at which a man sat and wound cotton cloth into huge round cylinders. “He and the others at his particular job have had their wages raised to sixteen rubles (about $5.25) a day. Yes, of course. The committee decides on the wage scale. I am not consulted. Even if I were, I should have nothing except a complimentary vote, one against hundreds. That chap gets sixteen rubles a day, and in addition I must hire a girl at four rubles a day to lift the roll of cloth off the machine.”

We passed into a print room still discussing the committee. I asked Mr. Cheshire if it was true that these workmen’s committees were highly paid men who performed no service to their employers and still received their regular pay.

“It is true,” he replied. Then he went on to tell me the following story: “The work we do in this room is something a little unusual in Russia. Few mills have these machines as yet, and our product is almost the only cotton goods of the kind possible to buy in Russian markets since the war. Before that a great deal of it was imported from England and Germany. Naturally it is scarce at present, and not long ago one of our men complained that he couldn’t buy it at all. ‘Of course you cannot,’ I told him, ‘because these mills are turning out very little of it. Go into the print room and see for yourself how many machines are idle for lack of workers.’ And then I made him this offer, for he was a member of the committee: ‘Let me have four men of your committee back to work on these machines, and I will guarantee that you will soon be able to buy the goods you want.’ Well, he agreed, and he got the rest of the committee to agree, and I got the men back. But what do you think those four men demanded? They said that they had been doing hard mental work on the committee for two months, and they thought before they went back to the machines they ought to have a month’s vacation with pay. I did draw the line there. I told them I’d close the works first. But since then I understand that the committee has begun to discuss the two months on and one month off as a future policy. They say that mental work—they call committee meetings mental work—is much harder than physical labor.”

“I’m glad they are finding it out,” I remarked. “Perhaps after a while they will discover that even you belong to the proletariat.”

“If they raise the wages again,” said Mr. Cheshire, “I mean to ask them to give me a job. I’ll have to. Then they’ll have some real mental work finding out how to pay me or themselves either. This factory and all the others in our name have been running farther and farther behind for months. Soon we shall have to close. We should have been closed before now except that we hoped that a strong government would be formed and industry as well as the army and navy would be placed under a dictatorship.”

The committees have created an eight-hour day in this particular industry. Some industries have a six-hour day, and I was told that numbers of working people claimed that a two-hour day was the ideal towards which they aspired. I heard also, on good authority, that certain groups favored a complete cessation of all factory work during the three hot months of summer.

Mr. Cheshire’s mills were supposed to run eight hours a day, but he declared that he would be satisfied, in present circumstances, to get a good, solid five hours’ work out of his people. If they would stay on the job and actually produce for five hours every working day he thought he might avert bankruptcy. “We close at five,” he told me. “But along about 4 o’clock you watch them begin to go home.”