Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

lewis h. siegelbaum

down of entire shops and partly due to heavy mobilisation for the Red Army

and food procurement detachments.

De-proletarianisation was not only demographic. Lenin could lament the

‘petty-proprietor outlook’ of the ‘newcomers’ who sought to escape the mil-

itary draft or increase their rations, but this was an all too convenient excuse

for the demoralisation of those workers who had not ﬂed or been enlisted and

the party’s loss of support among them.

In any case, the party – and at least

some workers – weathered this crisis, albeit just barely. The haemorrhaging

of the proletarian body was staunched within a few years of the introduction

of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Old blood ﬂowed back, but as new blood

poured in towards the end of the 1920s, a ‘crisis of proletarian identity’ could

be discerned among skilled workers.

Stalin’s ‘great turn’ towards industrialisation, accompanied by the collec-

tivisation of agriculture, provoked massive out-migration from the villages.

Between 1928 and 1932, approximately 12 million people departed, some to

swell the ranks of forced labourers in labour camps and special settlements,

and others to escape starvation or, at best, unremunerated labour in the

kolkhoz. Those who left voluntarily were mainly young males. Some were

consigned by their collective farms for a given period to industrial enter-

prises or construction sites, usually located in remote regions, under condi-

tions speciﬁed in ‘organised labour recruitment’ (orgnabor) contracts. Others

headed on their own or in groups to the cities which swelled in population

but not, for the most part, in accommodation, services and infrastructure.

Still others were absorbed by state farms (sovkhozy) whose employed popu-

lation increased from 663,000 in August 1929 to nearly 2.7 million three years

later.

These migration ﬂows were by no means one-way. Nor did migrants nec-

essarily settle in their ﬁrst place of residence. The demand for labour was such

that migrants frequently shopped around, ‘ﬂitting’ like ‘rolling stones’ from

one construction site or factory to another, clogging railroad stations and other

collection points, and otherwise disrupting the state’s attempts to gain control

21 Baevskii, Rabochii klass,pp.246–7, 254; V. B. Zhiromskaia, Sovetskii gorod v 1921–1925 gg.

(Moscow: Nauka, 1988), pp. 22–3; Diane Koenker, ‘Urbanization and Deurbanization

in the Russian Revolution and Civil War’, in Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg and

Ronald Suny (eds.), Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1989), pp. 81–104.

22 V. I. Lenin, PSS, 5th edn, 55 vols. (Moscow: Gosizdpolit, 1958–65), vol. xliii,pp.24, 42.

23 Hiroaki Kuromiya, ‘The Crisis of Proletarian Identity in the Soviet Factory, 1928–1929’,

Slavic Review 44 (1985): 280–97.

24 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after

Collectivisation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 80–90.

446

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Workers and industrialisation

over the labour market. Those attempts culminated in the introduction of

compulsory internal passports for every citizen, sixteen years and older, living

in towns and at construction sites or employed in transport and on state farms.

The law, issued on 27 December 1932, initially targeted ‘yesterday’s peasants’

who were ‘undigested by the proletarian cauldron’. Eventually, it was used as a

ﬁltering device to remove the itinerant population and all ‘people who are not

involved in socially useful labour’ from designated ‘regime cities’ (rezhimnye

goroda).

These measures worked, but only temporarily. During 1933, the number

of new migrants who settled in cities declined to three-quarters of a million

compared to 2.7 million in the previous year. Industry actually shed jobs,

and what new employment opportunities existed were taken up by the other

‘reserve army of labour’, namely, the wives and daughters of workers already

based in the towns.

By 1935, however, rural to urban migration was almost

back to pre-passportisation levels.

The huge numbers of peasants absorbed by industry in the 1930s utterly

transformed the factories where they worked and the cities in which they

resided. They too were transformed, although usually not as rapidly as,

or in ways that, party agitators would have liked and Soviet historians

later contended.

The shock worker heroes and especially the outstanding

Stakhanovites were represented in the Soviet media as embodying success sto-

ries from which the new Soviet workers could take instruction not only about

work but about other dimensions of life.

But even after they had entered the

‘proletarian cauldron’, peasant migrants chose selectively from what was on

offerby the party and state. Like more experienced workers, they learned when

it was necessary to express approval of or afﬁrmation for decisions made else-

where (to ‘speak Bolshevik’ in Stephen Kotkin’s inimitable phrase), but also

how to circumvent the limits of state provisioning.

They may even have

25 Trud, 29 Dec. 1932,p.2; Gijs Kessler, ‘The Passport System and State Control over

Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940’, Cahiers du monde russe et sovi

etique 42

(2001): 477–504.

26 Wendy Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002).

27 cf. David Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929–1941 (Ithaca,

N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Kenneth Straus, Factory and Community in Stalin’s

Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh

Press, 1997).

28 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 210–46.

29 Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press, 1995), pp. 198–237.

447

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

lewis h. siegelbaum

learned how to ‘think Soviet’, but this did not preclude them engaging in

practices frowned upon or proscribed by Soviet ofﬁcials.

The story of peasants’ transformation into workers during succeeding

decades is one of massive recruitment for defence industries, construction

and transport during the Great Patriotic War, followed by a renewal of the

stream of voluntary departures from the collective farms which continued to

deplete rural society of its younger, skilled and ambitious workforce.

Peasants

left to further their education or learn a trade. They joined construction crews

to build the high-rise apartment buildings that replaced the forests and ﬁelds

on the outskirts of cities and into which they hoped to move. Whatever their

intentions were and to whatever extent they were realised, these migrants did

not abandon the village entirely. As late as the mid-1980s, one could see them –

young and old, recently and not-so-recently arrived migrants – gathering in

urban parks on Saturdays to sing, dance, play the accordion or the spoons and

otherwise re-create a bit of village culture in the city.

Labour discipline and productivity

‘The Russian is a bad worker compared with the advanced peoples’, wrote

Lenin in 1918, echoing complaints that factory owners and managers had

made for decades before the October Revolution.

International comparisons

of output per worker in the main factory-based industries were very much to

Russia’s disadvantage in the pre-revolutionary era. Indeed, even small-scale and

artisan industry within Russia often enjoyed a competitive advantage thanks to

the relatively high ﬁxed costs and overheadexpenditures in metalwork factories

and employers’ reliance on unskilled, often seasonal forms of labour.

Lenin’s sobering observation was followed by an equally categorical

injunction: ‘The task the Soviet government must set the people in all its

scope is – learn to work.’ For the next seventy odd years, the Soviet state

would pursue this task, one that the bourgeoisie had performed in nineteenth-

century Europe and North America. It did so by a combination of vocational

30 Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Speaking Out: Languages of Afﬁrmation and Dissent’, Kritika: Explo-

rations in Russian and Eurasian History 1 (2000): 92.

31 John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945 (London: Longman,

1991), pp. 145–49; Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Postwar Soviet Society: The “Return to Normalcy”,

1945–1953’, in Susan J. Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union (Totawa,

N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), pp. 129–56.

32 A. Khaniutin, dir., Piatachok, documentary ﬁlm (1987).

33 Lenin, PSS, vol. xxxvi,p.189.

34 Crisp, ‘Labour and Industrialization in Russia’, pp. 401–4, 414.

448

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Workers and industrialisation

training programmes, political campaigns, legal compulsions and ﬁnancial

inducements. Some of the measures to which it resorted were adaptations of

techniques pioneered in capitalist countries; others were of its own devising.

All held out the promise of advancing the country along the path towards

socialism and then communism while improving the lot of its working popu-

lation.

Lenin repeatedly stressed the importance of ‘nationwide accounting and

control of production and the distribution of goods’, advocated use of

Taylorism (see below), piecework and other ‘up-to-date achievements of cap-

italism’, and excoriated violators of labour discipline as ‘responsible for the

sufferings caused by the famine and unemployment’.

He invoked labour dis-

cipline both as an ‘immediate task’ for combating anarchy and hunger and

as ‘the peg of the entire economic construction of socialism’.

Based on the

notion that workers were now collectively the ruling class and therefore were

working for themselves, labour discipline was an emblem of the new class

consciousness the Bolsheviks sought to promote.

During the civil war, the state demanded that workers remain at the bench,

but assumed responsibility for their ‘social maintenance’, providing employ-

ment and at least a caloric minimum in the form of rations. With little in

the way of material incentives to offer, the party appealed to workers’ ‘rev-

olutionary conscience’, and publicised examples of labour heroism such as

the unpaid ‘voluntary Saturdays’ (subbotniki). Violators of labour discipline

were punished via trade union-based comrades’ disciplinary courts and other

coercive mechanisms.

These and other initiatives were inﬂected by ideology, but they also were

driven by the emergency situation of civil war and economic collapse. Many

were phased out after the introduction of the New Economic Policy only to

return in more systematic fashion with the abandonment of NEP towards the

end of the decade. In the meantime, paralleling a European-wide trend, the

cult of man-the-machine took hold among Bolshevik intellectuals who mar-

velled at what Henry Ford had accomplished and Frederick Winslow Taylor’s

‘scientiﬁc management’ promised. Under the banner of ‘the scientiﬁc organ-

isation of labour’ (nauchnaia organizatsiia truda – NOT), they preached time-

consciousness, efﬁciency and rationalisation in not only industrial work but

35 Lenin, PSS, vol. xxxvi,pp.188–90, 197. On the Russian application of Taylorism before

1917, see Heather Hogan, Forging Revolution: Metalworkers, Managers, and the State in St.

Petersburg, 1890–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 187–93.

36 Lenin, PSS, vol. xl,pp.301–2.

37 William Chase, ‘Voluntarism, Mobilization and Coercion: Subbotniki 1919–1921’, Soviet

Studies, 41 (1989), 111–28.

449

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

lewis h. siegelbaum

the army, schools and other institutions.

However, the technocratic impli-

cations of NOT were not lost on the party, and most of the institutes and

laboratories promoting it did not survive the 1930s.

For workers there were more immediate concerns such as unemployment

which, despite the recovery of industry, grew throughout the 1920s. This was

due to a number of factors: the demobilisation of the army which threw sev-

eral million men onto the labour market, rural to urban migration, protective

legislation covering the conditions of employment for women and juveniles

and the cost-accounting basis (khozraschet) on which industry was compelled

to operate.

Between 1925 and 1928, the Commissariat of Labour recorded an

increase from approximately one million to 1.5 million unemployed, ﬁgures

that almost certainly understated the actual numbers. White-collar workers

comprised about one-third of the total, and women and youth were dispropor-

tionately represented.

The scourge of unemployment was mitigated for at

least some workers by a rudimentary system of unemployment insurance and

the maintenance of ties to the land, but many resorted to selling home brew

(samogon), and engaging in prostitution and thievery, petty and otherwise.

Workers with jobs in industry experienced a steady increase in their wages,

at least until 1927. Wage levels, based on collective agreements co-signed by

respective trade unions, were considerably higher in heavy industry where

the workforce was predominantly male than in textiles and other female-

dominated industries. Theyalso were some 80 per cent higher for technical and

ofﬁce personnel than for blue-collar workers. Overall, wage increases outpaced

productivity gains, notwithstanding campaigns to reduce expenditures and

rationalise production processes.

These campaigns and other measures to

raise productivity did bring output levels within striking distance of pre-war

indices. Intensiﬁed after the introduction of the seven-hour work-day in early

38 Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian

Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 145–59.

39 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918–1929 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 100–7.

40 L. S. Rogachevskaia, Likvidatsiia bezrabotitsy v SSSR, 1917–1930gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1973),

pp. 92, 147; E. H. Carr and R. W. Davies, Foundations of a Planned Economy, 1926–1929,

2 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971–4), vol. i,pp.486–90, 502–4.

41 Carr and Davies, Foundations, vol. i,pp.643–4; Chris Ward, Russia’s Cotton Workers and the

New Economic Policy: Shop-ﬂoor Cultureand State Policy, 1921–1929(Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1990), pp. 35–50; Jean-Paul Depretto, Les Ouvriers en U.R.S.S., 1928–

1941 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), pp. 59–67; Nataliia Lebina, Povsednevnaia

zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii, 1920/1930gody (St Petersburg: Letnii sad, 1999),

pp. 51–67, 86–94.

42 Carr and Davies, Foundations, vol. i,pp.516–36, 1013–14; William J. Chase, Workers, Society,

and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918–1929 (Urbana and Chicago: University

of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 217–43.

450

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Workers and industrialisation

1928, they were accompanied by an appallingly high rate of accidents on the

job – about twice that of Germany – and a good deal of conﬂict on the shop

ﬂoor.

The party, acknowledging that a breach had opened between itself and the

working class, made much of its policy of proletarian preference in access to

higher education and party membership.

But for all its rhetoric about the

proletarian dictatorship, the conditions under which Soviet industrial workers

laboured and lived in the 1920s did not differ appreciably from elsewhere in

Europe. This in itself was something of an achievement, for material conditions

had been immeasurably worse at the outset of the decade. Then again, work-

ing and living conditions for workers were far from fulﬁlling hopes engendered

by the 1917 Revolution that the world – or at least their world – would be made

anew. The ‘big bourgeoisie’ had been eliminated, but class enmity at the point

of production persisted. Fanned by workers’ insecurity, the ubiquity of the

language of class and the contradictoriness of a policy that involved building

socialism via capitalist techniques, it was manifested in strikes, ‘specialist bait-

ing’ (spetsedstvo) and altercations with foremen and other low-level supervisors

over job assignments, rate-setting and ﬁnes. Gender was also a fault-line on the

shop ﬂoor, as the intrusion of women into previously male-dominated trades

such as printing provoked some ugly incidents and much taunting by male

workers.

In Central Asia, Russian workers behaved similarly towards their

indigenous counterparts who were the beneﬁciaries of ‘afﬁrmative action’

policies.

Some of these tensions dissipated during the 1930s, but the force-paced

industrialisation of the First Five-Year Plan years (1928–32) intensiﬁed them and

fomented others. The utopianism of this ‘socialist offensive’ and its accom-

panying rhetoric of class war were matched by the harshness of repression

against ‘bourgeois specialists’ in industry, Rightists within the party, and other

43 Ibid., pp. 243–7; Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ‘Industrial Accidents and Their Prevention in the

Interwar Period’, in William O. McCagg and Lewis Siegelbaum (eds.), The Disabled in

the Soviet Union: Past and Present, Theory and Practice (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh

Press, 1989), pp. 92–5.

44 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934(Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1979); John Hatch, ‘The “Lenin Levy” and the Social Origins

of Stalinism: Workers and the Communist Party in Moscow, 1921–1928’, Slavic Review,

48 (1989): 558–77.

45 Chase, Workers,pp.235–9; Diane Koenker, ‘Men against Women on the Shop Floor in

Early Soviet Russia’, Americal Historical Review, 100 (1995): 1438–64.

46 Terry Martin, The Afﬁrmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union,

1923–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 146–54; Matthew Payne,

Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh

Press, 2001), pp. 146–52.

451

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

lewis h. siegelbaum

‘nay-sayers’. The ratcheting up of targets, shortages of all kinds, the depression

of living standards and the general coarsening of daily life created tremendous

stress, strain and, in some well-documented cases, strikes and other protests.

Through it all, the party ceaselessly beat the drum for raising productivity.

From the summer of 1929, factories and ofﬁces were put in continuous opera-

tion throughout the week with workers rotating daysoffevery four or ﬁve days.

This ‘continuous working week’ (nepreryvka) promised several advantages: an

increase in the number of working days from 300 to 360, a lessening of pressure

on workers’ clubs and other leisure and service facilities, a blow against reli-

gion (Sunday would become a normal working day) and, perhaps above all,

a rise in output of up to 20 per cent without infusions of additional working

capital. It turned out, however, that the nepreryvka put enormous strain on the

supply system, on equipment and on workers’ conjugal and family lives. It also

encouraged a lack of personal responsibility towards the tools of one’s trade.

Two years after its introduction, the nepreryvka was quietly abolished in most

industries, and work schedules reverted to the interrupted six-day week.

More long-lasting, indeed what would become a characteristic feature of

Soviet socialism, was socialist competition. This was the practice of workers

within an enterprise, shop or brigade setting goals for a period of time and

challenging their counterparts to better their performance. Those meeting or

exceeding the goals earned the title of shock workers (udarniki), with shock

work (udarnichestvo) and socialist competition proceeding in tandem. Assum-

ing mass proportions from 1929 onwards, these ‘movements’ were hailed (by

V. Kuibyshev) as representing ‘an historical breakthrough in the psychology

of the worker’, and (by Stalin) as ‘a fundamental revolution in the attitude

of people to labour’.

The trade unions, purged of their leading cadres and

mandated by the party to turn their ‘face to production’, assumed the main

responsibility for popularising, organising and recording the results of this

‘revolution’.

Many workers (and managers) were either indifferent to socialist compe-

tition or resented it for imposing additional burdens on them. Hence their

ironic reference to shock workers as ‘gladiators’, ‘Americans’ and ‘shock

47 Jeffrey Rossman, ‘The Teikovo Cotton Workers’ Strike of April 1932: Class, Gender, and

Identity Politics in Stalin’s Russia’, Russian Review 56 (1997): 44–69.

48 William Chase and Lewis Siegelbaum, ‘Worktime and Industrialization in the U.S.S.R.,

1917–1941’, in Gary Cross (ed.), Worktime and Industrialization: An International History

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), pp. 202–5;R.W.Davies,Crisis and Progress

in the Soviet Economy, 1931–1933 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 44–6, 89–90.

49 Quoted in R. W. Davies, The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–1930 (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 131, 257.

452

Workers and industrialisation

worker-idiots’ (chudaki-udarniki).

Still, notwithstanding its eventual routini-

sation and the exaggeration of its results, some, particularly younger, workers

responded enthusiastically to socialist competition. The opportunity to prove

oneself, participate in the grandiose project of socialist construction, and, not

incidentally, earn privileges associated with shock-worker status were only

some of the reasons.

Others were evident in the case of production collec-

tives and communes that pooled wages and divided them either equally or on

the basis of skill grades. They included the desire to practise self-management

and cushion the effects on output and wages of irregular supply and variations

in the quality of raw materials.

Production collectives and communes proliferated during 1929–31, espe-

cially in the metalworks and textile industries. But party leaders were

ambivalent, even hostile to them, and the party’s campaigns against collec-

tive piece-rates, ‘depersonalisation’ of responsibilities (obezlichka), and exces-

sive egalitarianism (uravnilovka) in wages led to their disbandment. When, in

1935, the Stakhanovite movement ignited a new wave of socialist competition,

circumstances were very different. Wage differentials had been widened sig-

niﬁcantly, nearly 70 per cent of industrial workers were paid on the basis of

individual piece-rates, and of them, 30 per cent were eligible for the progressivka

according to which rates would rise progressively above the level of output

norms.

At no time in Soviet history did raising labour productivity assume such

importance as during the heyday of the Stakhanovite movement in the mid-

1930s.

The production records set by outstanding Stakhanovites, the shower-

ing of goods and other rewards on them and the results of Stakhanovite ten-day

periods (dekady) and months received enormous coverage in the media. Proto-

types of the New Soviet Man and Woman, Stakhanovites were represented

both as living for their work and enjoying the fruits of their ‘cultured’ lives.

Yet, the objective of achieving a general breakthrough in productivityremained

as elusive as ever. Resistance on the part of workers was certainly a factor. Fear-

ing that Stakhanovites’ records would be used to raise output norms (as they

were in the spring of 1936), individuals engaged in acts of intimidation and

50 Ibid., pp. 260–1.

51 Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (New

York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 115–28.

52 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ‘Production Collectives and Communes and the “Imperatives” of

Soviet Industrialization, 1929–1931’, Slavic Review 45 (1986): 65–84.

53 Francesco Benvenuti, Fuoco sui sabotari! Stachanovismoe organizzazione industriale in URSS

1934–1938 (Rome: Valerio Levi, 1988); Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism; Robert Maier, Die

Stachanov-Bewegung, 1935–1938 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990).

54 Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism,pp.210–46.

453

lewis h. siegelbaum

assaults against Stakhanovites, simply refused to adjust to a new division of

labour, and otherwise sabotaged the movement.

Ironically, the Stakhanovite movement itself militated against sustained

increases in productivity. Whatever beneﬁts were derived from improvements

in work organisation and technique were counteracted by the intensiﬁca-

tion of problems in the delivery of supplies, the disproportionality between

different phases of the production process and the neglect of maintenance

and repair. Indeed, to the extent that it raised expectations of production

breakthroughs that were not fulﬁlled, Stakhanovism indirectly contributed

to accusations against enterprise directors and their staffs of sabotage and

wrecking that undermined managerial authority during the Great Purges of

1936–8. Although claims that workers were taking advantage of the situation

were probably exaggerated, the drawing of millions of men into the armed

forces in connection with the military build-up made cracking down on labour

turnover and absenteeism imperative. Such was the intent of the series of

decrees, typically characterised by historians as ‘draconian’, that were issued

between December 1938 and June 1940. These introduced labour books con-

taining information about workers’ past employment, called for the dismissal

and eviction from enterprise housing of workers who were repeatedly truant

or late to work, criminalised these violations of labour discipline and extended

the normal work-day from seven to eight hours.

What on paper amounted to the militarisation of labour in reality fell con-

siderably short of that thanks to massive non-compliance on the part of man-

agement. Eager to retain workers almost at any cost, managers, often with the

collusion of trade union committees, turned a blind eye towards truancy and

lateness, extracted ﬁctitious sick notes from physicians and issued retroactive

notes for unpaid leave.

With the Great Patriotic War, the stakes rose in this

and all other respects. Between 1940 and 1942 the Soviet industrial workforce

declined from 11 million to 7.2 million. Women’s share in industrial employ-

ment rose from 41 per cent to 52 per cent. The work-week was extended from

48 to 54 hours, and key workers (munitions workers from December 1941 and

railroad workers from April 1943) were conscripted and subject to military

tribunals for the slightest infraction of labour discipline. Elsewhere, workers

continued to respond to bad living and working conditions by leaving their

55 Ibid., pp. 91–6, 190–204; Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The

Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe,

1986), pp. 200–5.

56 Filtzer, Soviet Workers,pp.233–6. 57 Ibid., pp. 236–43.

454

Workers and industrialisation

jobs or not showing up, and an average of one million were taken to court

every year of the war for these ‘crimes’.

Compulsion, though, only went so far even in wartime, and the diversion

of resources to military production and the front made economic incentives

even less available than they had been before the war. Political campaigns and

moral appeals thus played a larger role. These included the expansion of the

‘two-hundreder’ movement that had appeared before the war but took on new

meaning with the slogan, ‘Work not just for yourself but also for your comrade

sent to the front’. By February 1942, individual workers were being celebrated

for having fulﬁlled two and three times their shift norms, and in the case of

D. F. Bosyi, a milling machine operator at the Nizhnii Tagil armaments plant

in the Urals, over fourteen times the norm. Much larger numbers of workers

were involved in Komsomol front-line youth brigades, whose slogan, ‘Work

in the factory as soldiers ﬁght at the front’, typiﬁed the patriotic appeals of

wartime socialist competition.

As for productivity, the picture was mixed. In the munitions industry, output

per worker more than doubled between 1940 and 1944. This was primarily due

to the replacement of small batch by ﬂow production on assembly lines, as

well as deferments for skilled workers. Civilian industry, which comprised

only 20.8 per cent of net national product in 1944 compared to 29.1 per cent in

1940, did not fare so well. Net output per worker dropped 11 per cent between

1940 and 1942 and barely recovered by 1944.

Given that average work time

had increased by six hours per week, output per hour remained well below

pre-war levels.

Wartime devastation followed by harvest failure and famine in 1946–7 con-

signed workers to a penurious existence in the immediate post-war years.

Despite the persistence of penalties which made ‘wilful’ job-changing a crimi-

nal offence, labour turnover remained high, threatening production plans. So

too did malnutrition, epidemic outbreaks of typhus, dysentery and tuberculo-

sis, and shortages of basic necessities such as clothing, vegetables and soap.

Increasing productivity, advertised as the formula for improving workers’ stan-

dard of living, was thus held hostage by the very conditions it was supposed

to overcome.

58 Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front,pp.164, 216; A. V. Mitrofanova, Rabochii klass

SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), pp. 434–6.

59 Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front,pp.174–6. 60 Ibid., pp. 177–8, 220.

61 Donald Filtzer, ‘The Standard of Living of Soviet Industrial Workers in the Immediate

Postwar Period, 1945–1948’, Europe–Asia Studies 51 (1999): 1013–38.

455