Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century
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lewis h. siegelbaum
This vicious cycle somewhat abated after 1948. Reconstruction, which
involved the extensive use of prisoner-of-war labour, was followed by nearly
two decades of sustained industrial growth. During the 1950s, electric power
generation and oil production increased fourfold, while natural gas production
rose by a factor of eight. While the production of consumer goods lagged as
usual, certain items such as refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners,
sewing machines and television sets were turned out in exponentially increas-
ing numbers and began to make their appearance in workers’ households.
62
Significant efficiencies were achieved in steel-making, machine-building and
other branches of heavy industry that received priority in supplies and other
resources, upgraded their equipment and were able to recruit skilled workers
and engineers. But even these privileged sectors exemplified certain phenom-
ena that limited productivity gains and can be regarded as endemic to the
Soviet system of production relations. They included the hoarding of work-
ers and supplies by enterprises; the overconsumption of materials; the dearth
of spare parts that resulted from the emphasis on producing heavier, more
expensive items; disincentives against technical innovation; and the largely
successful manoeuvring of workers to avoid speed-ups, de-skilling and other
attempts to reduce their control over the labour process.
63
Operating within these limits, the Khrushchev administration initiated
reforms through which it sought to invigorate workers’ commitment to ful-
filling production goals. Infractions of labour discipline were de-criminalised
in 1956 after having been in abeyance for several years. A major revision of the
wage structure was instituted beginning in 1956 with coal mining and some
metalworks enterprises and extending to all branches of industry by 1960.
It entailed increases in base rates and production quotas, a reduction in the
number of wage scales and the simplification of rates within each scale, the
elimination of progressive piece-rates and a modest shift of pieceworkers to
time-based wages. Finally, the education system was overhauled to combine
academic learning with vocational training for all students in their last three
years of secondary school.
64
The reforms should be seen as a partial response to the emergence of
a post-war generation that was more urbanised, better educated and more
62 Roger A. Clarke, Soviet Economic Facts, 1917–1970 (London: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 85–8,
91.
63 Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System
of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
pp. 13–34, 160–76; Paul R. Gregory and Robert C. Stuart, Soviet Economic Structure and
Performance (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 113–231.
64 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization,pp.38–41, 72–5, 92–9.
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demanding than its predecessors. That they proved inadequate was spectacu-
larly demonstrated by the tragic events in Novocherkassk in early June 1962.
Provoked by a Union-wide increase in the prices of meat and butter as well as
the insensitivity of the factory administration, workers at the Novocherkassk
Electric Locomotive Works walked off their jobs, marched on the city centre
and seized the party headquarters. Fired upon by troops, some twenty-four
were killed, eighteen of whom were under the age of thirty. Mass arrests fol-
lowed, and 114 persons – officially dubbed ‘hooligans’, ‘bandits’, ‘extremists’
and ‘anti-Soviet elements’, that is, anything but ‘workers’ – were tried, among
whom seven were sentenced to death and executed.
65
Official concern that the appeals to patriotism and self-sacrifice were no
longer adequate to inspire Soviet youth facilitated the establishment of soci-
ology as an academic discipline. Throughout the 1960s Soviet sociologists
conducted numerous studies, using questionnaires and other methods of ‘con-
crete’ sociological research, to chart young workers’ attitudes. Several found
alarmingly high levels of occupational dissatisfaction, low prestige of indus-
trial work and individualistic and material considerations as the main reason
for job-changing.
66
Other studies addressed the problem of the ‘double-shift’
for wage-earning women, which also was the subject of Natalia Baranskaia’s
story, ‘A Week Like Any Other’, that appeared in Novyi mir in 1969.
67
Identifying these problems was not the same as solving them. In any case, by
the 1970s the Brezhnev administration had effectively curbed industrial reform
efforts and the bolder forays of labour sociologists, preferring instead to tout
the ‘scientific-technological revolution’ (NTR – nauchno-tekhnicheskaia revoliut-
siia) as a panacea.
68
Clothed in Soviet Marxist ideological garb, the revolution
was to promote inter alia ‘the formation of a new type of worker who has mas-
tered scientific principles of production and can ensure that the functioning of
production and its future development will be based on the achievements
65 Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1 962 (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2001).
66 L. S. Bliakhman, A. G. Zdravomyslov and O. I. Shkaratan, Dvizhenie rabochei sily na
promyshlennykh predpriiatiiakh (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1965); and A. G. Zdravomyslov,
V.P.RozhinandV.A.Iadov,Man and His Work, trans. Stephen P. Dunn (White Plains,
N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1970).
67 E. Z. Danilova, Sotsial’nye problemy truda zhenshchiny-rabotnitsy (Moscow: Mysl’, 1968);
A. G. Kharchev and S. I. Golod, Professional’naia rabota zhenshchin i sem’ia (Leningrad:
Nauka, 1971); Natalia Baranskaya [Baranskaia], A Week Like Any Other and Other Stories
(Seattle: Seal Press, 1990).
68 Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Politics of Sociology in the Soviet Union (Boulder, Colo.: West-
view Press, 1987), pp. 49–84; Erik P. Hoffmann and Robbin F. Laird, Technocratic Socialism:
The Soviet Union in the Advanced Industrial Era (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
1985).
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of science and technique’. According to a post-Brezhnev-era assessment,
however, ‘CPSU leaders [had] yet to devise successful means of nurturing the
NTR or of enhancing ample creative rather than duplicative capabilities’.
69
It remained for Gorbachev to try to break through the ‘stagnation’, first by
emphasising the need for the ‘acceleration of productive processes’, and then
when that accomplished little, by adopting more radical measures.
Enterprise paternalism
Despite the centralised nature of resource appropriation and redistribution
imposed under Stalin and perpetuated by his successors, the day-to-day expe-
rience of workers was with enterprise administration, local party and trade
union officials and fellow workers. Whatever came down from above in the
way of plans, slogans, campaigns and resources, implementation ultimately
depended on production relations in the workplace. Thus, rather than inter-
preting workers as having entered into some sort of ‘social contract’ with the
state, it would be more appropriate to conceive of a mutuality of dependen-
cies between managers and workers structured around what has been called
enterprise paternalism.
Paternalism frequently crops up in both contemporary descriptions and
historians’ accounts of factory relations in pre-revolutionary Russia. While
some owners are said to have been ‘despotic’ and others ‘enlightened’, the
notion that their relationship with workers was more than purely contractual,
that it involved a moral obligation to provideforworkers’ educational, cultural,
spiritual and medical needs, seems to have been expected of them and, in
many cases, was internalised. This was famously true of the textile magnates
of the Central Industrial provinces, many of whom traced their ancestry to
humble, serf origins and were of Old Believer faith.
70
But Muscovite and St
Petersburg printing employers as well as southern mining and metallurgical
owners (who were neither Old Believers nor, in many cases, Russian) also
exhibited paternalism towards their workers.
71
In this respect, they were not
all that far removed from the welfare capitalism practised by American firms
during the Progressive Era.
69 Hoffmann and Laird, Technocratic Socialism,pp.9, 31.
70 Thomas Owen, Capitalism and Politics in Russia: A Social History of the Moscow Merchants,
1855–1905 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); T. P. Morozova and Irina
V. Plotkina, Savva Morozov (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1998).
71 Mark Steinberg, Moral Communities: The Culture of Class Relations in the Russian Printing
Industry, 1867–1907 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992),
pp. 12–20; Theodore Friedgut, Iuzovka and Revolution: Life and Work in Russia’s Donbass,
1869–1924, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989–94), vol. i,pp.41–2.
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Workers and industrialisation
Whether inspired by personal piety, civic responsibility or more calculating
motives, factory paternalism could raise expectations among workers that,
when unfulfilled, provoked strikes. In these as well as less volatile instances,
the image of the beneficent father could quicklygive way to less flattering ones.
In any event, even before the revolutionary thunderstorm of 1905–6, workers
were beginning to develop alternative conceptions of themselves which by
emphasising the dignity of the individual, fraternal ties and class affiliation (as
in ‘the proletarian family’) excluded owners and management.
72
Subsequent
legislation providing for trade unions, sick-benefit funds, and other forms of
worker representation further eroded the basis on which factory paternalism
rested, and, of course, the October Revolution would sweep away the entire
factory-owning class.
During the civil war years, enterprises experimented with a variety of col-
lective or ‘collegial’ forms of management, usually involving shared respon-
sibility among representatives of factory committees, trade unions and eco-
nomic associations. Though favoured by many within the party and the trade
unions, enterprise democracy could not withstand the economic collapse and
the needs of state institutions on the one hand and the dwindling number
of employees on the other. Lenin, who likened the harmoniously run fac-
tory to a symphony orchestra, emphasised strict accountability and ‘one-man
management’ (edinonachalie), and it was this model that eventually prevailed.
73
Directorships in industry were occupied throughout the 1920s by former
trade union or factory committee activists of working-class origin, ‘bour-
geois specialists’ whose social backgrounds and pre-revolutionary experience
often dictated their shadowing by party officials, and party trouble-shooters.
These Red Directors were cast by the party as ‘commanders of production’
and charged with reviving output, avoiding cost overruns and maintaining
proper relations with the trade union committee, the party cell and their
specialist assistants. Judging by a 1922 Pravda-sponsored contest for the best
and worst directors, workers appreciated personal qualities such as simplicity,
accessibility and energy. While some workers characterised a good director in
paternal terms (Korshunov ‘loves his workers, he takes pride in them, cares
about them as if he were their own father’), others employed images of friend-
ship and brotherhood.
74
As Diane Koenker concluded, the contest revealed
72 Steinberg, Moral Communities,pp.110–22, 212–14, 230–49.
73 E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, 1917–1923, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966),
vol. i,pp.190–4; Lenin, PSS, vol. xxxvi,p.200.
74 Diane Koenker, ‘Factory Tales: Narratives of Industrial Relations in the Transition to
NEP’, Russian Review 55 (1996): 384–411.
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a ‘fundamental ambivalence between the workers’ director and the workers’
state’s director’.
75
It would appear that with the launching of the ‘socialist offensive’ in the late
1920s that ambivalence was resolved in favour of directors’ accountability to
the state. The party’s public campaign for edinonachalie, which was intended
to eliminate the managerial parallelism of the director, party secretary and
the factory trade union committee, and which culminated in new ‘Model
Regulations of Production Enterprises’ of January 1930, certainly pointed in
that direction.
76
So too did several resolutions of the party’s CentralCommittee
that granted ownership of factories’ capital, the authority to plan production
and set quotas and organise supplies and sales to superordinate production
associations (trusts, ob”edineniia, glavki).
77
However, these rules and resolutions were routinely violated for the simple
reason that it was impossible for directors to abide by them and fulfil their pro-
duction plans. From Stalin’sstandpoint, they were acting like ‘conceited bigwig
bureaucrats’ who behaved as if ‘party decisions and Soviet laws are not written
for them, but for fools’. They had to be brought down a peg or two and be ‘put
in their proper place’, as he told the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934.
78
As
for labour policy, the same directors exhibited the opposite tendency, namely,
an unwillingness to exercise the punitive powers vested in them. Addressing
a meeting of economic executives in 1934, M. M. Kaganovich attacked direc-
tors who wanted ‘to play the “liberal” . . . The ground must shake when the
director goes around the factory,’ he asserted. ‘A director who has become a
liberal isn’t worth half a kopeck. Workers do not like such a director. They like
a powerful leader.’
79
Shake the ground though they might, directors were unlikely to obtain and
hold onto a sufficient number of workers or extract from them the necessary
co-operation without concessions. Successful managers down to the level of
foreman thus were those who learned how to combine acting like bigwigs
with playing the liberal, covering their sleights of hand and indulgence with
professions of loyalty to the party line and claims to have fulfilled their respon-
sibilities. This was both the cause and effect of the system of ‘taut’ planning and
the irregularity of supplies, the effects of which made a mockery of planning
and efforts to standardise production. In addition to features already cited as
75 Ibid., p. 408. 76 Kuromiya, Stalin’s Industrial Revolution,pp.52–77.
77 David Shearer, Industry, State,andSociety inStalin’sRussia,1926–1934(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1996), pp. 167–83.
78 J. V. Stalin, Wo rk s, 13 vols. (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952–5), vol.
xiii,p.378.
79 Cited in Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism,p.34.
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endemic to the Soviet system of production relations, mention should be made
of paying workers at grades higher than those outlined in wage handbooks,
granting bogus ‘bonuses’ that amounted to permanent additions to their basic
pay, paying for fictitious piecework during down time and defective output
during the (inevitable) storming sessions at the end of the month or quarterly
plan period, and building ‘family nests’ feathered by the mutual interests of
managers and party officials in perpetuating such practices.
80
Enterprise paternalism thus had little to do with the social backgrounds or
‘party-mindedness’ of managers. It also was not a vestige of pre-revolutionary
times, but rather emerged as a ‘neo-traditional’ response to an otherwise
unworkable set of systemic conditions. The degree to which it was exercised,
of course, varied according to the strategic significance of the enterprise, the
ingenuity of the enterprise administration in obtaining resources and other
factors. Generally, where local or municipal soviet budgets did not permit
supporting social infrastructure (and this was more often the case than not)
the enterprise assumed the role of community organiser not unlike Amer-
ican company towns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It provided accommodation (or the materials with which to build housing),
childcare, dining facilities, access to scarce food supplies, clothing and durable
household goods, and a host of other services.
In this context the well-known aphorism, ‘as long as the bosses pretend they
are paying us a decent wage, we will pretend that we are working’, becomes
fully comprehensible.
81
Wages and the buying power to which they are con-
nected in market-based societies had less significance in the Soviet economy
where the verb ‘to get’ or ‘obtain’ (dostat’) replaced ‘buy’ in common par-
lance. Workers who got on the wrong side of management or the trade union
committee jeopardised their opportunity to receive goods and services, but
management risked losing workers if it pushed them too hard. These unwrit-
ten rules of the game extended to promotion, time off for family emergencies,
pilferage (notoriously extensive in the Brezhnev era), use of enterprise materi-
als and facilities for production ‘on the side’ and other informal arrangements
based on personal ties.
82
As for pretending to work, it has been argued on the basis of observation
and interviews at a Samara factory in the early 1990s that ‘workers love their
80 Filtzer, Soviet Workers,pp.212–22; David Granick, Management of the Industrial Firm in the
USSR: A Study of Soviet Economic Planning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954),
pp. 74–5, 161–8.
81 Cited in Hedrick Smith, The Russians (London: Sphere, 1976), p. 265.
82 Walter D. Connor, The Accidental Proletariat: Workers, Politics, and Crisis in Gorbachev’s
Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 171–9.
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work, dedicate themselves to it completely, although in discussion they often
curse it’. This ‘particular kind of love’ stemmed not only from the workplace
having been a refuge from overcrowded housing conditions and the primary
site of sociability, but also because the ‘non-technological’ (i.e. unstandardised)
nature of production presented workers with opportunities for exercising their
ingenuity and creativity.
83
Or, as Michael Burawoy (drawing on his extensive
personal experience) has put it, ‘under state socialism uncertainties in materi-
als, machinery, and labor call for flexible autonomy on the shop floor’.
84
It is important here to distinguish between ‘work’, which included many
self-defined (and self-defining) tasks, and the job for which workers were hired.
It is also important to disaggregate workers. One distinction stressed by the
party was between the supposedly more reliable, politically ‘conscious’, core or
cadreworkers,and the rest of the labour force.Theformer could be expected to
contribute to rationalisation proposals to production conferences, participate
in socialist competition and serve on trade union committees. This distinction,
however, did not necessarily coincide with the status hierarchy among workers
themselves. Having internalised Soviet propaganda’s emphasis on the dignify-
ing, self-realising dimensions of material labour, industrial workers tended to
have greater respect for production than auxiliary workers regardless of skill
level.
85
Finally, gender stereotyping, deeply ingrained in both official and pop-
ular cultures, produced and perpetuated the segregation of occupations, and
the marginalisation of women as poorly paid, low-status auxiliary workers.
86
Female workers were therefore less likely to experience the ‘particular kind of
love’ than their male counterparts, although the affective relationships formed
with other workers in their brigade or kollektiv could be no less meaningful or
strong.
The end of the Soviet working class
The Gorbachev years were hardly kind to industrial labour. It is not that the last
Soviet leader set out to antagonise workers, although his early campaigns for
‘acceleration’ and a crackdown on alcoholic consumption and labour truancy
83 Sergei Alasheev, ‘On a Peculiar Kind of Love and the Specificity of Soviet Production’,
in Simon Clarke (ed.), Management and Industry in Russia: Formal and Informal Relations
in the Period of Transition (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995), pp. 69–98.
84 Michael Burawoy, ‘From Capitalism to Capitalism via Socialism: The Odyssey of a
Marxist Ethnographer, 1975–1995’, ILWCH 50 (1996): 85.
85 Simon Clarke, ‘Formal and Informal Relations in Soviet Industrial Production’, in Clarke,
Management and Industry,pp.7–13.
86 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization,pp.182–96.
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hardly won him many friends on the shop floor. Rather, the interests of labour
often appeared as an afterthought in the elaboration of glasnost’ and perestroika.
Even the Law on State Enterprises (1987), whose provisions for managerial
elections and expanded powers for councils of labour collectives (STKs) were
hailed as a great breakthrough for industrial democracy and self-management,
changed little. According to one estimate, over 90 per cent of managers retained
their positions in Soviet industry after elections, and, at least until 1989, the
STKs were stacked with directors’ favourites.
87
On a broader level, while perestroika rapidly eroded the centralised redis-
tributive powers of the ministries, it did not succeed in replacing the inte-
grative functions of the command economy or the disciplinary powers of the
party. In the resultant scramble for resources (raw materials, labour, consumer
goods, credits), debts piled up, rationing was reintroduced for the first time
since the end of the Second World War, inflation rose sharply and workers
and their unions became increasingly dependent on handouts from enter-
prise directors.
88
By 1991 when Gorbachev adopted a watered-down version
of the ‘500-day plan’ for the marketisation of the economy, it was too late. A
condition of lawlessness accompanied the frenzy of privatisation of industry,
two-thirds of whose capital stock was judged to be obsolete.
89
The ‘socialist
market economy’ turned out to be an oxymoron.
What has been termed ‘perestroika from below’ was best represented by the
coal miners’ strike of the summer of 1989.
90
Alarmed but at the same time
emboldened by the disintegration of the state, the miners’ strike committees
advanced two kinds of demands. One was for more from higher authorities –
more goods, more money for wages and pensions and more benefits. Another
category of demands was for the restructuring of their industry, namely, full
autonomy for enterprises to enable them to contract with both domestic and
foreign customers at ‘world’ prices that were considerably higher than what
the state paid and the right to retain the proceeds. Such ‘bread and butter
demands’ gave the strike its predominantly economic cast and, despite their
internal inconsistency, were not incompatible with the spirit of perestroika from
above. But other, more political demands soon surfaced, including the repeal
87 Paul T. Christensen, Russia’s Workers in Transition: Labor, Management, and the State under
Gorbachev and Yeltsin (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999), pp. 67–72.
88 Michael Burawoyand Kathryn Hendley, ‘Between Perestroika and Privatisation:Divided
Strategies and Political Crisis in a Soviet Enterprise’, Soviet Studies 44 (1992): 371–402.
89 Gertrude Schroeder, ‘Dimensions of Russia’s Industrial Transformation, 1992 to 1998:
An Overview’, Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 39, 5 (1998): 251.
90 Theodore H. Friedgut and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, ‘The Soviet Miners’ Strike, July 1989:
Perestroika from Below’, Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies,no.804
(Pittsburgh: Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1990).
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of Article 6 of the Soviet constitution that enshrined the Communist Party’s
‘leading role’, and the election of the Congress of People’s Deputies and its
president by universal suffrage.
91
During the remaining two-and-a-half years of the Soviet Union’s existence,
coal miners exhibited a militancy and degree of organisation unparalleled
among Soviet workers. Their strike/workers’ committees and Independent
Miners’ Union (NPG) spearheaded a second all-Union miners’ strike in March–
April 1991 which called for Gorbachev’s resignation. Reflecting miners’ bitter-
ness about the centralised allocation of resources (commonly referred to as
‘ministerial feudalism’), their organisations also advocated unrestricted free-
dom of prices and markets.
92
As their hostility to the ‘centre’ increased, so did
their support for alternative political arrangements – the complete sovereignty
of the RSFSR under Boris Yeltsin, and independence for Ukraine.
An analysis of the miners’ movement suggests at least two ironies. First,
as Stephen Crowley has argued, ‘Soviet coal miners fought against the Soviet
system and for liberal reforms, including the market, but for reasons that
were at odds with those of their liberal allies, reasons that at root were quite
socialist’.
93
Producers of material wealth, they felt cheated by a system in which
those who redistributed the wealth enriched themselves without doing real
work. ‘We don’t earn’, Crowley was told by a leader of the Kuzbass miners in
May 1991. ‘They give out, and they give out not according to labor but by how
much they figure you need.’ The market, understood as the means by which
‘I earn my own, I buy my own, having sold my labor power’, represented the
antithesis of this system. It was a key ingredient of the ‘normal’, ‘civilised’
society for which miners and other Soviet citizens yearned.
94
Second, although the movement threw its weight behind Democratic Rus-
sia in 1991 and continued to back Yeltsin and successive ‘parties of power’
after the Soviet Union’s collapse, neither in the 1991 and 1996 presidential elec-
tions nor in the intervening parliamentary elections of 1993 and 1995 did the
Kuzbass, Russia’s principal mining district, vote in favour of Yeltsin or the par-
ties supporting his administration.
95
As for Ukraine, the movement’s support
91 Simon Clarke, Peter Fairbrother and Vadim Borisov, The Workers’ Movement in Russia
(Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995), pp. 17–130; Stephen Crowley, Hot Coal, Cold Steel: Russian
and Ukrainian Workersfrom the End of the SovietUnion to the Post-Communist Transformations
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 25–45, 102–4.
92 Clarke, Fairbrother and Borisov, Workers’ Movement,pp.105–12; L. N. Lopatin (ed.),
Rabochee dvizhenie Kuzbassa: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Kemerovo: Sovremennaia
otechestvennaia kniga, 1993), pp. 373–468.
93 Crowley, Hot Coal, Cold Steel,p.130. 94 Ibid., p. 136.
95 Rob Ferguson, ‘Will Democracy Strike Back? Workers and Politics in the Kuzbass’,
Europe–Asia Studies 50 (1998): 445–68.
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Workers and industrialisation
for independence, as characterised by one of its leaders, was predicated on
the assumption that it would at last fulfil the Bolsheviks’ slogan of October
1917: land to the peasants, factories to the workers.
96
What happened instead,
according to another miner activist speaking in February 1992, was that ‘we
have changed from one political machine to another, with practically the same
people [in power]’.
97
Miners’ activism, which extended into the post-Soviet period, was neither
continuous nor universal. Nor were miners in this and other respects any more
typical of Soviet workers than those in other occupations who stolidly tried
to keep their heads above water in the rising tide of political and economic
disintegration. The articulation of class varied a great deal in the late Soviet
period, overlapping with occupation in some cases (e.g. the miners) and being
overshadowedbynationaland regional identities in others.What wascommon
across republic boundaries and branches of industry was that the collapse
of the administrative command system and the Communist Party did not
weaken but rather strengthened alliances between workers and management.
This was because managerial control of enterprises and managers’ role as the
personification of the labour collective increased and would continue to do so
in the post-Soviet era.
98
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union workers have been major losers.
Official statistics show that real wages indexed to 1985 (1985 = 100) declined
to 55 by 1995. Thereafter, wages rose slightly, but in the wake of the financial
crisis of 1998, fell again, and by the end of the century were approximately 50
per cent of their 1990 level. On top of this, workers in most if not all sectors of
the economy experienced delays or non-payment of wages, the shrinking of
benefits and a psycho-social disorientation which, though difficult to quantify,
was no less real and goes a long way towards explaining an unprecedented
rise in rates of alcoholism, suicide and mortality. Whatever else privatisation
and other ‘reforms’ accomplished, they did not reverse the downward spiral
in living standards that most workers experienced in the late Soviet period.
The first phase of privatisation (voucherisation and employee buy-outs)
was completed by June 1994, by which time only 20 per cent of the total
workforce remained within the state sector. Privatisation turned workers into
shareholders. As of December 1994, some 53 per cent of the shares in medium
96 Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Daniel J. Walkowitz, Workers of the Donbass Speak: Survival and
Identity in the New Ukraine, 1989–1 992 (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995), p. 120.
97 Ibid., p. 144.
98 Simon Clarke, ‘Privatisation and the Development of Capitalism in Russia’, in Clarke,
What About the Workers?,pp.216–19.
465