Table Of ContentBOLSHEVIK IDEOLOGY
AND THE ETHICS OF SOVIET LABOR
1917-1920: The Formative Years
BOLSHEVIK IDEOLOGY
AND THE
ETHICS OF SOVIET LABOR
1917-1920: The Formative Years
Frederick I. Kaplan
Michigan State University
Copyright, 1968, by Philosophical Library, Inc.
15 East 40 Street, New York, N.Y. 10016
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 67-17636
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Prospect ..................................................................... 1
Chapter I Bolshevik Ideology: Lenin’s Theory of Knowl-
edge and Lenin’s Theory of History ................... 9
II Labor Under the Provisional Government 43
III Labor and the Seizure of Power: Hunger, Cold
and the Dark Forces ........................................... 97
IV The Bolshevik Party, Workers’ Control and the
Factory Committees After the Seizure of Power 118
V Workers’ Control and Anarchism .......................... 142
VI The Factory Committees, Centralization and the
Trade Unions ........................................................ 172
VII The Trade Unions, the State, and the Party: 1918 195
VIII Labor and the Party: The Temper of the Post-
Revolutionary Situation 222
IX The Trade Unions, the State and the Party: 1919 254
X The Trade Unions, the State and the Party: 1920 282
XI From Workers’ Control to Workers’ Administra-
tion 310
XII Labor Discipline ........................................................ 335
XIII Retrospect ................................................................. 372
XIV The Ethics of Soviet Labor ....................................... 381
Appendix: Berkeleian Arguments Against the
Theory of Reflection ........................................... 395
Footnotes ................................................................... 398
Selected Bibliography ............................................... 462
Index .......................................................................... 504
Acknowledgments
Now that my book is about to appear in print, it is saddening to
remember that those to whom I owe most for their teaching are no
longer alive. My debt to them remains, however, and I wish to
acknowledge it. Professor George M. McCune was the first of my
teachers of history on the graduate level and it was from him that I
first learned the methods and uses of history. Professor Robert J.
Kerner, Sather Professor of History and Director of the Institute of
Slavic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, was my major
professor while I worked for the doctoral degree. He insisted upon
a discipline which was sometimes hard to render and even when we
sometimes differed in opinion. I profited from his training. Professor
George V. Lantzeff also taught me Russian history and demanded a
painstaking devotion to detail in my scholarly writing. I want to thank
Professor Else Frenkel-Brunswik with whom I studied psychology
for two years on the graduate level and whose teaching not only
enriched and deepened my insights within the field of history but also
broadened my knowledge of the social sciences in general. I wish
that all these scholars could see the book their teaching has influenced.
Professor Philip E. Mosely of Columbia University encouraged my
work and after the death of my professors kindly and generously
assisted me in ways they might have done. Some of the work for this
book was completed while I was a traveling research associate for the
Research Program on the History of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, which Professor Mosely headed. I want particularly
to acknowledge the kindness he showed me.
After the death of Professor Kerner, Professor Gregory Grossman
of the Department of Economics of the University of California,
Berkeley, was the most active member of the committee on the thesis
from which this work was drawn.
My friends George Harjan and Professor Evelyn Bristol helped
me in matters of translation, James Bogen in problems of epistem-
ology, and Professors Donald M. Lowe and Alexander Vucinich read
and discussed the manuscripts with me. Professor Daniel Freedman
vii
answered questions on matters of psychology. Norma Werdelin not
only typed the first manuscript carefully but was my first reader and
critic.
At the libraries at which I worked I was kindly assisted in their
use by Mrs. Uridge of the Inter-Library Borrowing Service at the
University of California, Berkeley, Mrs. Arlene Paul and her staff
at the Hoover Institution, Miss Elizabeth Tokoi at the University of
Helsinki and Professor Bruno Kalnins at the Slavic Institute of the
University of Stockholm.
Michigan State University assisted in the preparation of the manu-
script through its All-University Grants.
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Prefatory Notes
NOTE ON THE USE OF ITALICS, PARENTHESES
AND BRACKETS IN QUOTATIONS
All italics are those of the work cited except when otherwise stated.
All parentheses are of the work quoted. All brackets are mine.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
The system of transliteration used here is that of the Library of
Congress without diacritical marks or ligatures. Where certain spell-
ings are more common in English than the Library of Congress
system, they have been used: for example, Trotsky instead of
Trotskii.
NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY
From the year 1700 until the Gregorian calendar was adopted by
the Soviet government in February 1918, the Julian calendar, which
during the twentieth century was thirteen days behind the Gregorian,
was in use in Russia. Here, except for the dates of the factory com-
mittee conferences and meetings, where both dates are not given, the
new is used. The Bolshevik Revolution took place on 24 October-6
November 1917. It is therefore referred to as either the October or
November Revolution. Either designation is used here depending
upon the context.
NOTE ON SOVIET
The word “Soviet” as used here refers to the councils of the state,
or to what became the councils of the state in the center, or to all
the councils of the state inclusively. The word “soviet” is used here
to refer to the councils of the state on the various territorial-adminis-
trative levels.
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