Analyzing the impact of 1917 on strikes in Russia is something like retrieving spilled mercury. Revolutionary change created such fluid circumstances that strikes and protests often changed their nature in the very course of occurring; and just as one is about to get an analytical grasp on events, their form shifts and they skitter from reach, changing size and shape even as they continue to remain the same elemental material.

Changes in Russia's political environment altered the meaning of strikes from the first. Largely illegal and hence explicitly political before the overthrow of the tsar, strikes in 1917 simultaneously became a “routine” element of democratic labor–management conflict and an implicit challenge to the ability of both soviet and government leaders to develop stable social relations and workable democratic institutions. As in other areas of life in 1917, the exercise of democratic rights weakened democratic structures, a paradox of political transformation common to most revolutionary situations. Thus, strikes in the spring, which had as their goal the consolidation of revolutionary gains through improving material welfare and eliminating arbitrary and authoritarian social relations in the workplace, became in the fall a central aspect of social polarization and the breakdown of democratic order, and an important social basis for the Bolsheviks' coming to power.

The same can be said about Russia's economic circumstances and the rapidly changing conditions of work that led in a brief time to fundamental changes in patterns of industrial management and management–worker relations.