THE UNION BUREAUCRACY IN THE FIRST RUSSIAN REVOLUTION: FROM THE ZUBATOV’S POLICE UNION TO THE GAPON ASSEMBLY by Mignon, Carlos, Gaido, Daniel

“…In this article we will describe the attempts made by Russian Tsarism to artificially create a trade union bureaucracy under the aegis of the police between 1898 and 1905. The peculiarity of the Russian experience during the years immediately prior to the 1905 revolution resides in the fact that it did not take place, as was usually the case in other countries, by granting workers freedom of strike, assembly and association and through the gradual cooptation of their ruling stratum by the bourgeois state, but as a result of an initiative of the Ministry of the Interior, and within it of the Secret Police (Okhrana), as opposed to the official policy of Tsarism, which did not legalize the unions until 1906, as well as that of the Ministry of Finance, which controlled the factory inspectorate and was particularly sensitive to the pressures of the capitalists. …”
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