The article discusses the features of the process of development of the Russian working class in the second half of XIX – early XX cent. The conclusion is that the workers of peasant origin remained in close ties with their villages and to the agricultural activities. They were tied to their rural communes and the householders. As a result, more than half of the industry was located outside towns, and the peasants leaving on earnings became the dominant type of workers. In the minds of the workers the traditional rural commune values were not superseded by the bourgeois ones and were not lost, but were transformed within the framework of new communities – labor collectives, taking a pronounced anti-bourgeois orientation. In the early twentieth century, with a decrease in the growth rate of the total number of the factory proletariat, there declined in the manufacturing industry the possibility of receiving labor force from villages and other regions, due to the fact that vacant jobs were increasingly occupied by those who came from the working-class families. This conduced to strengthening the socio-economic enclaveness of the working class, the gradual decay of the process of proletarianisation, as well as to the development of pauperisation.