Trade unionism in Russia and other parts of eastern Europe developed in close relationship with political parties, usually revolutionary parties. Because the autocratic Russian state prohibited public organization of any sort, especially trade unions, autonomous workers’ movements often shared common interests with revolutionary parties and tended to cooperate with them. Moreover, revolutionary Marxist parties grew simultaneously with an industrialized, urban labour force, so that political ideas—especially revolution and Socialism—helped to give definition to workplace struggle. Russian and Polish labour movements will serve as examples here.

The earliest Russian labour organizations emerged among artisans in the form of legal guilds, which were not autonomous or spontaneous institutions but rather subject to close state supervision. Late in the 19th century, these were joined by mutual-aid societies, which spread among the more skilled and literate craftsmen in capital cities and among Jewish artisans in the western part of the empire. Particularly among the latter, such societies sometimes evolved into illegal organizations for struggle with employers, but by and large their function was to provide mutual support and cultural self-help. The earliest mutual-aid societies were begun by printers in Warsaw (1814), Riga (1816), and Odessa (1816), but their real expansion came in the late 1880s and the 1890s. Meanwhile, the population of factory workers grew outside of the artisanal tradition, finding recruits among peasants and children of hereditary factory workers in state-owned military enterprises. Traditions of solidarity among factory workers were based on ties with fellow countrymen and on informal collective living arrangements called artels.

The growth of industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries gave rise to a factory proletariat and to labour unrest, but government repression prevented intermittent strikes from leading to permanent forms of organization. Agitators from Marxist Social-Democratic groups attempted to organize strikers, but they were hampered by frequent arrest and imprisonment and by the reluctance of workers to entrust their struggle to the hands of outside intellectuals. In 1901, however, the Russian government embarked on a unique experiment and organized its own police-supervised unions to channel worker protest and preserve loyalty to the tsarist regime. Led by the chief of security police in Moscow, Sergey Vasilyevich Zubatov, such unions quickly emerged primarily among skilled factory workers in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa, Vilnius, and Minsk. While the experiment soon lost favour with the government, it gave workers new experience with collective bargaining and grievance procedures, and it led to their demands for the right to choose shop-floor representatives and to strike.

The unrest that led to the Russian Revolution of 1905 grew out of this movement among factory workers, and in October of that year the tsar conceded to workers the right to organize trade unions. From their foundations in mutual-aid societies, police unions, and the independent strike councils (soviets) that had emerged during the revolution, new trade unions multiplied in October and November of 1905. In St. Petersburg, 30,000 workers joined 41 unions in just six weeks. In Moscow, 56 unions were created in this period, embracing about 25,000 workers. In both cities, tradesmen employed by small shops were the first to organize; metalworkers and textile workers, employed primarily in large plants, were slower to join unions, in part because their individual factories were big enough to offer by themselves the advantages of organization and solidarity.

The wave of union organizing continued into 1906 and 1907 with the publication of the Temporary Laws of March 4, 1906, legalizing the formation of public organizations. Union activists attempted to organize nationally, but before an all-Russia trade-union congress could take place, the union movement succumbed to a wave of reaction set off by the dissolution of the second state Duma (parliament) in June 1907. Police found unions in violation of some regulation or another (organizing strikes remained illegal, for example) and ordered them closed. The resulting precarious legal status of unions frightened prospective members, and union fortunes waned. Between 1907 and 1909, police closed 350 unions and arrested many of the most important labour leaders. By 1910, union membership had fallen to 60,000, compared to 250,000 members in January 1907. Beyond these legal members, there remained, in the underground or in exile, dedicated cadres of Social-Democratic activists who would become important leaders when unions’ fortunes revived.

Economic recession and political repression combined to depress trade-union activity until 1912. Those unions that remained legal could offer little to their members besides cultural activities and fellowship; collective bargaining, strikes, political activity, and intercity contact were all forbidden. During this period, differences between the approaches of Menshevism and Bolshevism, the two wings of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party, became more pronounced. Mensheviks believed in service to the working class and focused on consumer cooperatives, schools, libraries, and clubs. Bolsheviks tended to engage in political and strike activity, trying to force a revolutionary situation. When union activism revived in 1912, unionists agitated for legal shop-floor representatives and collective labour contracts. Strikes increased in the period 1912–14 but remained outside the union sphere. Modest gains in labour legislation gave encouragement to a reformist wing of the union movement, but continued government harassment forced many activists to adopt a more revolutionary ideology.

World War I propelled hundreds of thousands of new workers—women, youths, and peasants—into Russian factories, diluting the old skilled cadres and creating new pressures on work culture. As a result, when the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought an immediate freedom to organize, trade unions had to compete as centres of organization with less cumbersome factory committees and urban soviets of workers’ deputies. The main concerns of factory committees were local grievances, representing their factory to larger bodies, and adjudicating disputes among workers themselves, but, as trade unions failed to organize quickly enough to deal with problems of wages, hours, control, and regulation, factory committees began to join in citywide conferences to deal with many of these problems. Simultaneously, unions formed administrative structures, recruited members, and began to coordinate economic bargaining with employers. By the end of 1917, more than 2,000 unions had formed in Russia, with a reported membership of 2.7 million workers.

When the Bolsheviks came to power in November 1917 (October 1917, Old Style), much of Russian industry was at a standstill. Workers in many idle factories assumed the responsibility of restarting the plants, usually through their factory committees, but gradually, between 1918 and 1920, central and local government agencies took over. Most trade-union leaders agreed that, under Socialism, the primary task of unions was to facilitate production and that workers’ interests were now identical to state employers’ interests. Trade unions assumed more state functions, serving as military recruiting offices, centres of supply, providers of social services, and judicial organs. A minority of independent union leaders argued that the interests of workers and managers would always conflict, even under socialized industry, and that the task of unions was to defend workers first. A syndicalist minority within the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were renamed in 1918) believed that independent trade unions should manage the state economy. By 1921 a compromise was reached, pressured by widespread factory discontent: trade unions were thenceforth to have a “dual function” of helping to raise productivity while guaranteeing workers’ legitimate rights against overbearing managers. As a “transmission belt” between the Party and the working rank and file, they would serve as a “school for Communism” and teach workers that their interests were identical with those of the state.

During the 1920s trade unions worked closely with state agencies in setting wages, providing unemployment relief and social services, and raising productivity. With the rapid industrialization drive of 1928–32, they became little more than administrative cogs of decreasing relevance to the interests of workers on the factory floor.