South Russian Workers Union

(SRWU; Iuzhno-russkii Rabochii Soiuz), a revolutionary workers’ organization in Kiev in 1880–81. The SRWU was founded in the spring of 1880 by E. N. Koval’skaia and N. P. Shchedrin, who were members of the Black Partition. A group of ten constituted the nucleus of the union and established contacts with workers—for example, in the Arsenal Plant, in railroad shops, and in printing establishments. Several hundred workers, including Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Jews, eventually joined the SRWU.

The union’s first program, written by Koval’skaia and Shchedrin in the spring of 1880, was essentially a repetition of the program of the Black Partition. It pointed out that the situation of the Russian workers “exceeds in severity the situation of the workers of all the countries of Europe.” The only way out “[is] the speediest possible revolution on the part of the people themselves”—a revolution whose chief goal was to be an “economic upheaval”; the ownership of land, factories, and plants would pass into the hands of all the people, and social production would be reorganized on the basis of associations. The results of the revolution would include the establishment of democratic liberties and the replacement of the army by local people’s militias. The chief forces of the revolution, according to the program, were the workers, the peasants, and “those factions of the social-revolutionary party whose activity is directed toward economic revolution.”

One of the chief methods of revolutionary struggle advocated by the SRWU in its program was “factory terror” (damaging factory equipment and beating up or killing foremen and factory owners). The union’s organizers hoped by such means to obtain concessions from the employers, including a shorter workday, higher wages, and recognition of the right to strike. Inspired by the activity of the People’s Will, the authors of the program accepted the use of individual terror as a means to rouse the masses to revolutionary action. The union had an illegal printing press; it published proclamations, held mass rallies outside the city, and tried to set up ties with revolutionaries in Rostov-on-Don, Odessa, and Kremenchug.

After the arrest of Shchedrin and Koval’skaia in October 1880, the leadership of the union was assumed by I. S. Kashintsev, S. N. Bogomolets, P. O. Ivanov, and A. I. Preobrazhenskii. Their new program gave greater emphasis to propaganda and agitation among the workers, and it opposed individual terror. On Mar. 2, 1881, after the assassination of Emperor Alexander II by members of the People’s Will, the SRWU issued a proclamation declaring that even a “dozen murdered tsars cannot alleviate the people’s misery unless the people themselves rise up together, as one man, and speak their will.”

The SRWU was completely broken up in early 1881, although its printing press, headed by P. O. Ivanov, continued to operate until April 28 of that year. Ten of the union’s leaders were tried in Kiev on May 26–29, 1881. The military district tribunal sentenced Shchedrin, Koval’skaia, Ivanov, Kashintsev, Bogomolets, and Preobrazhenskii to various terms at hard labor, and the rest to exile in Siberia.