Reginald Zelnik uses a single episodea militant strike at the Kreenholm factory, Europe's largest textile plantto explore the broad historical moment. In examining this crucial event of Russian history he sheds fresh light on local power relations, high politics in St. Petersburg, controversies over the rule of law, and the origins of the Russian labor movement. Zelnik sees this pivotal moment in Russian labor history as the beginning step in the series of conflicts that eventually led to the upheavals of the early twentieth century.
Reginald E. Zelnik is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia (1971) and the editor and translator of A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography of Semon Ivanovich Kanatchikov (1986).
