V. I.

Lenin

Everyone knows that the famous strike movement of the
Russian workers in 1905 achieved very great successes not only in the
political, but in the economic sphere as well. The data furnished by the
reports of factory inspectors [1] now enable us to form a fairly accurate idea of the
magnitude of those successes.

According to those data, the average earnings of a factory worker were:

| in 1901 . . . | 201 rubles | in 1906... | 231 rubles |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| ” 1902 . . . | 202 ” | ” 1907 | 241 ” |
| ” 1903 . . . | 208 ” | ” 1908 | 242 ” |
| ” 1904 . . . | 213 ” | ” 1909 | 236 ” |
| ” 1905 . . . | 205 ” | ” 1910 | 242 ” |
| average for five years | 206 ” | average for five years | 238 ” |

This shows that the year 1905 was a turning-point. For it was after
1905 that wages rose abruptly from 205 to 231 rubles a year, i.e.,
by 26 rubles , or more than 10 per cent.

With regard to 1905, which shows a drop of 8 rubies in wages compared
with 1904, the following must be borne in mind: firstly, 1905 was a year of
economic depression, i.e., a slump in industry; secondly, according to data
of the Ministry of Trade, the workers that year lost, through not receiving
wages during strikes, 17,500,000 rubles , or over 10 rubles per
worker on the average.

Thus, we may assume that real wages in 1905 were 215 rubles a year, but
out of these 215 rubles the workers contributed 10 rubles each to the
strike movement, which in 1905 was distinguished by remarkable persistence
and breadth, unprecedented anywhere else in the world.

The result is that as we now examine the data for a whole decade,
1901–10, we clearly see a striking difference between the
pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary epoch.

Until 1905 the Russian factory worker’s wages averaged 206
rubles. After 1905, they averaged 238 rubles, i.e., 32 rubles more per year —an increase of 15.5 per cent.

Within one year wages experienced such an upward leap that no
subsequent efforts by the capitalists (who, it will be recalled, took away
all the gains of 1905 one by one) were able to reduce the worker to his
former low standard of living. The year 1905 improved the worker’s living
standard to a degree that normally is attained during several decades.

Through the strikes in 1905 the workers lost, according to official
statistics, 17,500,000 rubles by not being paid wages during the
strikes. According to the same source, the capitalists’ drop in output in
1905 was 127,300,000 rubles.

The rise in wages after 1905, however, brought the workers an average
gain of 32 rubles per worker in five years (1906–1910), i.e., a total of
57,600,000 rubles a year, or 286 million rubles in flue years ,
considering the number of workers to be 1,800,000.