Victoria E. Bonnell. Roots of Rebellion: Workers' Politics and Organizations in St. Petersburg and Moscow, 1900 1914. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
One of the great paradoxes of Marxism and Communism is that the first Communist revolution and the first regime constructed on Marxist principles appeared not, as Marx had assumed, in the most advanced industrial countries in Britain, Germany, or perhaps the United States but in the vast, backward, semifeudal, barely industrialized empire of Russia. Marx, like other early theorists of socialism, viewed Russia as a land of peasants, not industrial workers. They thought of it as the champion of the old order and the enemy of progress, never as the place where their own ideas would first be tried.
In Roots of Rebellion, Victoria Bonnell seeks to resolve this paradox, at least in part, by closely examining the nature of the industrial proletariat as it existed in the chief Russian cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and how this proletariat became a champion of radical socialist ideology during the turbulent years between the turn of the century and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. She suggests, in brief, that the radicalization of the workers' movement in these cities was precisely due to the backwardness of Russia as a whole, and the consequent weakness of liberal and reformist movements or parties that might have channeled the demands of workers into reformist socialism as happened, for the most part, in Western Europe rather than into radical Communism.
The book is divided into four main sections. The first defines what, in the context of turn of the century Russia, was the proletariat or "working class," and examines where these industrial workers came from, how they lived and worked, and how they came to regard themselves. The second section looks at the development of a labor movement before and during the abortive first revolution o...