their future wonderful power. By meeting the great issues of the revolution squarely, they won the hearts of the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers, and detroyed the foundations of all other important political parties. They had little difficulty later on in consolidating their power by completely capturing the trade unions, the peasants' organizations, the army, etc. When the Constituent Assembly, the cherished hope of the bourgeoisie, met in January, 1918, all the Bolsheviki had to do was to withdraw from it and the whole business collapsed. One lone sailor dispersed the remaining delegates and closed the hall. Thus perished the last remnant of the capitalist government. The Soviets stood supreme.
While these stirring events were happening in the political field the class war reigned also in the realm of industry. The February revolution merely did away with the political autocracy of Czardom. It did not end private property in the industries. On the contrary, the employers thought it was the beginning of a new era of prosperity for them, one in which they could soar to fresh heights of capitalistic exploitation, unhampered by the feudalistic hindrances of Czarism. But they soon saw their mistake: they found themselves confronted by a militant industrial proletariat determined to win economic emancipation.
Before the February revolution the workers had few trade unions (see chapter on Trade Unions for more complete history), but immediately thereafter they began to organize them rapidly. Especially speedy was the development of the shop committees. It was a very simple operation for all the workers in a given plant to meet and pick out their shop committee, which then took up the cudgels for them with the company. Such shop committees took shape in nearly every industrial concern in Russia in the first few weeks of the revolution. The trade unions, being a more elaborate form of organization, grew somewhat slower.
Immediately the workers achieved some degree of organization they went into an offensive against the employers. They demanded the right to organize, the eight-hour day, increases in wages, the right of control over the hiring and discharging of workers, the right of the shop committees to examine the books and general
12
