the hall would have to show their cards upon leaving, and that those who had none would be arrested.
Compare this surging Russian trade union congress, handling the nation's most vital problems and spectators braving jail to attend it; with our American Federation of Labor lack-lustre affairs, mustering only a baker's dozen or two of visitors, and wasting their time squabbling over ridiculous jurisdictional quarrels and passing resolutions which the powers-that-be do not care a snap about, and one gets a fair idea of the vitality of the two movements and their comparative importance in their respective countries. Of the world's labor leaders, those in America have least right to throw mud at the Russian trade union movement.
Although the Russian trade unions have a record of experience and achievement without a parallel in labor history they are for the most part of very recent origin; in fact the movement is hardly more than four years old. It dates back only to the February, 1917, revolution. It is true that there were unions before that date, but they had by then almost all disappeared.
The first traces of unionism in Russia began to develop toward the end of the Nineteenth Century. A few workers' benefit societies sneaked into life and led an unostentatious and precarious existence. Occasionally these primitive organizations ventured into strikes, but in such events the Czar's agents inflicted frightful persecutions upon them, often shooting the strikers and exiling their leaders wholesale. Under such hard conditions the movement naturally made little headway. It struggled along more dead than alive until the great revolutionary attempt of 1905. This uprising produced a tremendous development of trade union sentiment. Labor organizations sprang up like mushrooms all over Russia. But the revolution failed, and its failure brought with it bitter hardships for the workers. The Government outlawed their unions, and waged such war against them that within a couple of years the movement had practically disappeared. During the industrial boom of 1912–13 a trade union revival took place. Considerable headway was being made, but the world war came on and wiped out the organizations again.
All through the war the workers remained almost entirely destitute of organization and at the mercy of
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