Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing Industry, 1867-1907.

Labor historians, especially in the past twenty years, have played a politicizing role in the historiography of the final decades of Russia's tsaris era, not unlike that of the laborers about whom they wrote. They provided a corrective to those who focused on political and intellectual movements, becaus the latter had privileged institutions and ideology, in general giving short shrift to the street fighters who actually made the revolution. Although social history, which makes extensive use of quantitative methods, did not "give faces to the gray blur of strikers, it nonetheless provided them with a collective political personality. This new worker was capable of making choices in his or her best political interests, no longer the mere dupe of demagogues. To suggest that workers behaved consciously in their support of the Bolsheviks in October implied a legitimization of the ensuing revolution. In the wake of the fall of Soviet communism, the labor history branch of the old "new social history" is regrouping to defend itself from the academic rightwing in the U.S., and the leftwing in Russia. Mark D. Steinberg, by studying printers according to the methodology more familiar in culturalist studies than in social history, offers new insights into the vexing problem of delineating working-class consciousness Instead of counting frequency of words, Steinberg deconstructs the language of printers to give them voice. The results of this nuanced analysis emphasize the workers' ambivalence about their identity. By leaving a number of questions open-ended, Steinberg makes them all the more engrossing.

This journey into the mental world of printers draws the reader into the--to us the author's favorite expression--"ambiguity" of experience. Steinberg begins b describing how changes in both technology and the business side of Russia's printing industry affected relations between labor and management. He pictures two separate "moral communities," with each group sensitive to the mutual obligations and responsibilities that kept them functioning together. Significantly, the moral foundation of these groupings offered a counterweight to the basis in class that eventually pitted them against each other. Paternalism was the modus operandi; employers, who came themselves from mixed social backgrounds, exercised their authority more by demonstrations of concern than through gross exploitation, at least by nineteenth-century standards. In the same vein, many workers understood the significance of their own behavior, and how cultural uplifting and proper deportment could help them attain respectability away from the shop floor. The two communities formalized their relations through such rituals as the annual Christmas party, where the two could intermingle in both religious and social space. These gatherings celebrated the ideal that as partners in enterprise, management and labor would perforce share the same goals.

Paternalism, however, privileges the parent. When alternative sources of both authority and reward compete for the loyalties of the children, the parent woul do well to examine the reasons for the new attraction instead of simply responding with a show of force. As Steinberg carefully demonstrates, employers in the printing industry by and large responded positively to what they considered legitimate demands for fairer treatment, but then cracked down when they felt politically threatened. This shift was essential to both sides' understanding of what happened in 1905: when the consensus on workplace moralit was driven apart by differing interpretations, cooperation turned to conflict. The differences, however, as Steinberg cogently argues, were by no means irreconcilable. But he ends his study on the ambiguous note of 1907, with the inability of unions to negotiate effectively on behalf of workers. Moral imperatives of basic human dignity and worth became increasingly conflated with issues of class when Russia's printers found themselves still marginalized and alienated, even after expending so much energy in support of political rights for all throughout the revolution.

Broadening the methodological horizons of labor history, at least as Russianist have practiced it, Steinberg has made an important contribution to our understanding of how Russian workers perceived of themselves and their world when so much of the latter was in flux. His discussion of their essentialist humanism helps to explain how many might have understood Marx's theory of their historical destiny in non-Marxist terms. Descriptions of workplace fraternity are vivid, and discussions of the rhetoric or morals, class, and revolution especially compelling. By virtue of the demands of the job, printers, especiall compositers, were better educated and more skilled than the average Russian worker, and a part of their moral identity derived from expectations that they serve as kind of proletarian Kulturtrager. Although Steinberg is careful not to expand his conclusions beyond his population control group, he has clearly raised issues which others should address. The standard measure of class consciousness, which separates actions according to "political" or "economic" motivations, must now include a pinch of ambivalence as well as a dash of moral awareness. Men and women took to the barricades for complex and at times contradictory reasons.

For all Steinberg's sensitivity to nineteenth-century debates about morals, I would still have preferred significantly greater discussion of one of the most influential moralists of the era, John Stuart Mill. Much of this work examines lexical distinctions and rhetoric, and in his analysis of how printers understood morality, Steinberg uses terms that ring far more of Mill than of Marx. A key element in the printers' development of a humanitarian ethos was their concurrently evolving appreciation of their worth as individuals. Should the "moral community" be defined more accurately as a collection of moral individuals? If so, their political objectives might be better understood as implicitly liberal rather than socialist. Certainly a number of printers enjoye the bourgeois values that connected remuneration for work with a more satisfyin consumer- and family-oriented personal life (84). The "moral vanguard" at Naborshchik (The Compositer), for example, rejected collective straggle; editor and publisher Andrei Filippov, originally from the shop floor, argued that unfair practices "reflected the personal moral failing of individuals (rather than) an inherently exploitative social relationship" (108). Western middle classes operated according to a very similar accepted moral economy.

Because it did not enjoy fixed meanings, the vocabulary of class, culture, and morals eluded the precision ostensibly imposed by ideology, at least before 1917. Steinberg's enlightening study, in addition to what it offers labor history, also sets the stage for the necessity of the post-1917 cultural revolution.

Louise McReynolds University of Hawaii