During the first Russian Revolution, the factory proletariat roused broad masses of the people, including workers and employees of commercial establishments, warehouses and offices, to fight against tsarism and the bourgeoisie. In Soviet historiography, which pays great attention to the revolution of 1905-1907, the struggle of this group of wage workers is almost not covered .1 This article examines how, under the influence of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, the movement of trade workers and employees developed in a number of centers of Russia, and how their organization and political consciousness gradually grew in the course of it. In bourgeois society, with its dominant commodity production, trade, constantly expanding, takes on a universal character and becomes the sphere of application of commercial capital - a separate part of industrial capital. As capitalist trade develops more and more widely, there is a process of forming merchant workers and employees as a special category of wage laborers who sell their labor power according to the same laws as factory workers. In this sense, K. Marx noted, "the merchant worker is just as much a wage worker as any other" 2. V. I. Lenin also referred the merchant worker and the industrial worker to the same class of wage workers, contrasting this class with capital as a whole .3However, there are also significant differences between these two categories of employees. Associated with industry, factory workers are concentrated in larger collectives, are more organized, and are therefore the most revolutionary element of capitalist society. Commercial workers and employees, carrying out 1 The participation of commercial employees in the revolution of 1905-1907 was considered in the following special works: Essay on the movement of employees in Russia, M. 1921; "From the history of the professional movement of employees in St. Petersburg", L. 1925;"Professional mo ... Читать далее