Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
arguing that progress came about from the delib-
erate action of “critically thinking individuals,”
intellectuals who were morally obligated to pro-
mote progress until all social institutions were
based on truth and justice. Later, in part under
Marxist influence, he came to allot a greater role
to the supposed objective laws of social develop-
ment; however, he never became a full-fledged
historical determinist, and his rationalistic secular
progressivism rested on a suppressed ethical
impulse. His idea that the Russian intelligentsia
and the educated classes owed a moral debt to
Russia's oppressed classes and his reworking of
the Petrine idea of service to argue that the intel-
ligentsia's duty was service to the people were
crucial influences in the development of populist
thought of the 1870s.
an initial threat of fines and then partial conces-
sions failed to quell the strike, the administration
decided to suppress it with violence. On April 5,
as a crowd of about 2,500 gathered to protest the
arrest of strike committee members, a detach-
ment of soldiers and security guards was ordered
to open fire on the workers. When the shooting
was over, about 250 workers were killed and
more than 270 wounded. News of the massacre
and the ensuing outrage helped promote worker
solidarity and pressured the government to send
an investigative commission to the mines. An
independent commission of lawyers sympathetic
to the workers, including Aleksandr
KERENSKY
,
also traveled to the mines on a fact-finding mis-
sion. The strike continued until August 12, when
the final party of workingmen decided to leave
the mines. In all, about 9,000 men left the Lena
mines. Outrage over the massacre led to sympa-
thy strikes across Russia that involved over
700,000 workers.
Lena Goldfields massacre
(1912)
A massacre of miners in April 1912 that achieved
great notoriety in the Russian press and con-
tributed to the revitalization of worker activism
on the eve of World War I, after the wave of
repressions that had followed the 1905 Revolu-
tion. The Lena Goldfields, a complex of highly
profitable gold mines located almost 2,000 miles
to the northeast of Irkutsk in Siberia, belonged to
the Lena Gold-Producing Association, a joint
stock society dominated by English interests.
Count Sergei
WITTE
, the former prime minister,
and prominent members of the royal family were
among its shareholders. Although dividends
were high for its investors, worker conditions
were deplorable. Working days of 16 hours were
not uncommon and few provisions were made
for the safety of workers. The mines were run as
a typical company town; workers were paid low
wages, often in kind with shoddy goods from the
company shops. A spontaneous strike that began
on February 29, 1912, over the sale of rotten
horseflesh at the company store developed into a
full-fledged strike involving over 6,000 miners.
Organized into strike committees, the miners
demanded eight-hour workdays, pay raises, and
the abolition of fines paid to the employers. After
Lenin, Vladimir Ilich
(1870-1924)
revolutionary and Soviet leader
An important Marxist theorist, Lenin led his
Russian Communist (Bolshevik) Party to power
in October 1917 and was the first leader of the
new Soviet state until his death in January 1924.
He was born Vladimir Ilich Ulianov on April 24,
1870, in the
VOLGA RIVER
town of Simbirsk, later
renamed Ulianovsk in his honor, the third of six
children. His father was a school inspector
whose position gave him noble status, while his
mother was the daughter of an army doctor. The
execution in 1887 of Lenin's older brother, Alek-
sandr, after an unsuccessful attempt on the life
of Czar
ALEXANDER III
changed the family's for-
tunes and set Lenin on the path of becoming a
revolutionary. After completing his law studies
with distinction in 1892 as an external student,
he moved to St. Petersburg, where he briefly
practiced law but soon became involved in revo-
lutionary circles, gaining notoriety as a fierce
debater and defender of revolutionary Marxism.
After a brief trip to Switzerland in 1895, he
Search WWH ::
Custom Search