Table Of ContentMaking Workers Soviet
M A K IN G
WORKERS
SOVIET
Power, Class, and Identity
E D I T E D B Y
Lewis H. Siegelbaum and
Ronald Grigor Suny
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
I T H A C A AND L O N D O N
Copyright © 1994 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or
parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University
Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 1994 by Cornell University Press.
Printed in the United States of America
© The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Making workers Soviet : power, class, and identity / edited by Lewis
H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny.
p. cm.
“Originated in a conference held at Michigan State University in
November 1990”—Pref.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8014-3022-4 (cloth : alk. paper).—ISBN 0-8014-8211-9
(pbk. : alk. paper)
i. Working class—Soviet Union—Congresses. 2. Soviet Union—
Social conditions—Congresses. I. Siegelbaum, Lewis H. II. Suny,
Ronald Grigor.
HD8524.M35 1994
305.5'62'o947—dc20 94-21989
To Moshe Lewin,
y^apHHK Hamen npo<J>eccHH
is
Contents
Preface ix
Archives Cited in Text xiii
Class Backwards? In Search of the Soviet Working Class i
Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny
1 On the Eve: Life Histories and Identities of Some
Revolutionary Workers, 1870-1905 27
Reginald E. Zelnik
2 Vanguard Workers and the Morality of Class 66
Mark D. Steinberg
3 Class Formation in the St. Petersburg Metalworking
Industry: From the “Days of Freedom” to the Lena
Goldfields Massacre 8 5
Heather Hogan
4 Workers against Foremen in St. Petersburg, 1905-1917 113
S. A. Smith
5 Donbas Miners in War, Revolution, and Civil War 138
Hiroaki Kuromiya
6 Labor Relations in Socialist Russia: Class Values and
Production Values in the Printers’ Union, 1917-1921 159
Diane P. Koenker
7 Languages of Trade or a Language of Class? Work Culture
in Russian Cotton Mills in the 1920s 194
Chris Ward
vii
viii Contents
8 The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the Soviet
1920s 220
Daniel Orlovsky
9 From Working Class to Urban Laboring Mass: On Politics
and Social Categories in the Formative Years of the Soviet
System 253
Gábor T. Rittersporn
10 Coercion and Identity: Workers’ Lives in Stalin’s Showcase
City 274
Stephen Kotkin
i i Workers against Bosses: The Impact of the Great Purgeso n
Labor-Management Relations 311
Sheila Fitzpatrick
12 The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art 341
Victoria E. Bonnell
13 Concluding Remarks 376
Moshe Lewin
Contributors 391
Index 393
★
Preface
This book originated in a conference held at Michigan State University in
November 1990. The impetus was Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg’s
Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Eu
rope and the United States, which stimulated us to think along parallel
lines with respect to Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union.1 This theme
had long figured prominently in Soviet historiography, but only in quan
titative or statistical rather than analytical or interpretive terms. Typically,
historians have been more concerned with registering the growth of class
consciousness among the proletariat than with inquiring into how and
why such a consciousness crowded out others, and more oriented toward
demonstrating the preponderance of industrial workers in party and state
institutions and improvements in their material and cultural well-being
after 1917 than with interrogating the quality of such participation or the
persistence of relations of domination and subordination within the party
and state as well as on the shop floor.
In 1982, Reginald Zelnik and Victoria Bonnell convened a conference
at the University of California, Berkeley, on the social history of Russian
labor. For all its achievements and frustrations, that meeting was neces
sarily focused on Russia’s workers (one might say, more accurately, Rus
sian workers!) in the period from the 1870s through the revolution of
1917. With the single exception of Moshe Lewin, no participant at Berke
ley was working actively in the post-civil war Soviet period. The October
Revolution was the outside boundary of what then constituted Russian
1 Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg, eds., Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-
Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni
versity Press, 1986). Despite its inattention to identities of gender, race, ethnicity, and
religion, this collection stimulated reconsiderations of class formation. See especially the
introduction by Katznelson, pp. 3-41. This book extends the “cases and comparisons” Katz
nelson refers to.
X Preface
labor history. Thereafter, the boundary was crossed—in no small measure
because of the organizing efforts and intellectual example of Moshe
Lewin, particularly in the operation of the seminar “Twentieth-Century
Russian and Soviet Social History.” That extraordinary collective, better
known as the “Philadelphia Seminar,” provided a forum for those who
ventured into the uncharted territory of the 1920s and 1930s. As the turn
toward Soviet and social history accelerated, developing its own dia
logues—one thinks here of the pioneering work on social mobility and
Soviet culture of Sheila Fitzpatrick; the “revisionist” attack on the total
itarian model; the first forays into Soviet archives that led to a cascade of
monographs on Soviet society—the history of labor also benefited. Yet
the more we discovered, the less adequate the old categories (borrowed
from prerevolutionary labor history and the experience of an immature
capitalism) became.
Many of the questions (and often the answers) in Russian labor histo
riography had been set in arcane debates outside scholarship, in sectarian
discussions of political actors or the passionate polemics of opponents of
the Soviet regime. Ironically, for a country where workers had been so
central to political discourse, or perhaps because their centrality had been
taken for granted, other kinds of questions—for example, about the self
conceptions of workers, the survival and development of labor’s informal
institutions, and the boundaries of social class—remained largely unad
dressed. The Michigan State conference thus had two objectives: to en
courage researchers on workers in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
to place their specialty within a broader theoretical and conceptual realm
and, at the same time, to throw into relief the peculiarities of working-
class formation in a noncapitalist setting.
The participants engaged in spirited, sometimes heated discussions of
the problematic of class formation and displayed a willingness to employ
ideas of class, but there was no consensus about the meaning of class or
its boundaries or about whether class is constituted by structures, by
agents inside or outside the class, or by political and social discourses.
Though analytical approaches ranged from the most “materialist” to the
enthusiastically “discursive,” all recognized the importance of culture and
representations of class in the process of class formation.
We take this opportunity to thank all those who made this enterprise
possible and who contributed to its success. They include Michael Bura-
woy, Kathleen Canning, William Chase, Patrick Dale, Geoffrey Eley,
Laura Engelstein, John Hatch, David Hoffmann, William Husband, Rob
ert Johnson, David Montgomery, Sonya Rose, William Rosenberg, Mi
chael Paul Sacks, William Sewell Jr., David Shearer, and Kenneth Straus.
We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Russian and
