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In 1863 in European Russia (excluding Poland, Finlandand the Caucasus) out of an estimated population of61,000,000 perhaps rather over 6,000,000 were living intowns; in 1897, 12,000,000 out of 94,000,000. In 1863there were only three towns with a population of over100,000, in 1897 there were fifteen. 1 By then StPetersburg and Moscow were over a million, and theydoubled within the next twenty years. By 1914 therewere perhaps three million factory workers, nearly amillion miners and about eight hundred thousandrailwaymen. This industrial section of the populationwas certainly extremely small in comparison with thepeasantry. None the less it supplied the 1905 and 1917revolutions with a determined ' vanguard of theproletariat.'The relations of the industrial workers with the greatmass of the population, the peasantry, were diverse andfluctuating. On the one hand, many of the works werenot in towns, but in country districts at convenientpoints on railways or rivers. Here, and to a large extentin the mines, the men continued to have close ties withthe peasantry, from which they were drawn. The samestill held good of many of the unskilled workers in thetowns. Fluidity of labour was very marked in prerevolutionary,as in Soviet, Russia, and non-agricultural(as well as agricultural) seasonal labour was still regularamong many of the peasantry. This linking up of townwith country could help to disrupt the routine of isolationand to spread socialist ideas in the villages. But it alsohad the result that a large proportion of the industrial orsemi-industrial workers did not constitute an urbanizedproletariat, but remained strongly imbued with a peasantpsychology, very difficult to organize, and the raw materialfor anarchic, sporadic risings rather than for co-ordinatedrevolutionary action.On the other hand, already by 1905 a considerable1The corresponding approximate figures for the whole empire were8,000,000 out of 76,000,000 in the sixties; 16,750,000 out of 129,000,000in 1897; four towns with over a hundred thousand as contrasted withnineteen in 1897.that of 1897.The only official census taken for the empire wasCf. p. 386 for the figures for the Soviet Union.365