Forging revolution

Led by a powerful group of entrepreneurs, financiers, and engineers who spearheaded the drive to industrialize Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, the metalworking industry in St. Petersburg, paradoxically, employed Imperial Russia's most militant workers.

Forging Revolution explores the competing interests and claims of labor, employers, and the state in an effort to understand why the metalworking industry became a principal site of urban unrest in the period from 1890 to 1914.

The book argues that changes in the administration, organization, and technology of heavy industry, initially designed by employers to augment the profitability of their industry, ultimately contributed in an important way to the extraordinary militance of metal-workers by the outbreak of World War I.