Conditions here were deplorable by any objective measure. And if you’ll recall, one of the hallmarks of early Russian industrialization was: the workforce was often transient. People moved back and forth between their home villages and jobs in the cities, and this flux meant that the places people lived and where they ate and bathed and got medical attention were only ever temporary expedients. It was a bit like you were going off to some particularly crappy summer camp. It was only meant to be temporarily endured, not lived in full time, and so conditions just never got better. People were not just renting rooms; they were renting corners of rooms. You could rent not just a bed, but part of a bed. Sanitation was, of course, practically non-existent, and the food was disgusting. The work itself, meanwhile, was long and grueling. There were no safety standards in the factories. There were hardly any rights for anybody at all. And pay was literally inadequate. The ministry of finance itself surveyed conditions and concluded that a family of four needed about fifty rubles a month to purchase basic necessities (that is, food and shelter and heat) and then they found that 75% of the workers were making less than 30 rubles a month. The economic and moral math was just not adding up.
The lower skilled, less educated, and still mentally “peasant” workers tended to remain culturally conservative. They were orthodox christian and believed strongly in the divine benevolence of the czar. And indeed one of the things reported by both social democrats and SRs back to their respective central committees was that they struggled to recruit among these workers because they were out there pitching “overthrowing the czar” and everyone was like “What? We… we love the czar, and he loves us too!”
To them, the czar was not a villain, but a hero. Not the devil, but their savior. It understandably made recruiting for a political revolution to overthrow their “hero and savior” very difficult.
Which is why the conservative mandate is to defund education and keep people as ignorant as possible.
I mean, to keep the common man as ignorant as possible – the children of the elites will always go to prohibitively expensive Montessori schools, which will better prepare them for critical thinking and bullshit detection so that they may better rule over and parasitize off the common man.
This might be relevant:
https://youtu.be/J_fZ9o6P0-A?si=-fl7rLryYZBDVgTN&t=194
https://youtu.be/J_fZ9o6P0-A?si=FtaiY47HVyXXBeAP&t=340
https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/2020/02/1033-bloody-sunday.html
Which is why the conservative mandate is to defund education and keep people as ignorant as possible.
I mean, to keep the common man as ignorant as possible – the children of the elites will always go to prohibitively expensive Montessori schools, which will better prepare them for critical thinking and bullshit detection so that they may better rule over and parasitize off the common man.