The Legal Activists Take the Lead

  • Geoffrey Swain
Chapter

Abstract

Skrypnik’s opinion that the legal activists were not ‘liquidators’ but militant Social Democrats was confirmed in the late summer of 1909, as preparations began for the Anti-alcohol or Temperance Congress. The alarming increase in alcoholism, a very real problem among Russian workers, had resulted in the formation of a powerful temperance movement in Russia, a movement that inevitably found itself crossing the threshold from social to political concerns because of the state’s dependence on the ‘wine monopoly’ for much of its indirect taxation. Permission to hold a congress of temperance societies presented the workers with an important political platform, and the Central Bureau was determined to present the congress with a detailed report on the extent of alcoholism among factory workers. In the past, when faced with a task of this magnitude, the Central Bureau had turned for support to sympathetic intellectuals, thus the ‘XII Department of the Imperial Technical Society’, whose members included S. N. Prokopovich, had helped the Bureau draw up its report into workers’ budgets. Relations between the Central Bureau and Prokopovich were so close that at one time the Bureau even met in his flat. However, when it came to drawing up its report on alcoholism, the majority of the Bureau’s members felt the time had come to break with such ‘advisers’. Worried by the success of meetings organised by the Imperial Technical Society on the question of insurance, the Bureau felt the time had come for the workers’ own voice to be heard. This clear rejection of ‘revisionism’ by the legal activists greeted the delegates from the Proletarian meeting as they returned from Paris.1

Keywords

Legal Activist Labour Movement Central Committee Central Bureau Social Democratic 
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Notes and References

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Copyright information

© Geoffrey Swain 1983

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  • Geoffrey Swain

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