The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State, 1917-1921
The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State, 1917-1921

Author: James Bunyan

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1421436612

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Originally published in 1967. Many documents essential for understanding the development of Soviet labor policies from 1917 to 1921 have been selected, translated, and presented in this volume. The Origin of Forced Labor in the Soviet State, 1917-1921 begins with the early months of the revolution, when the utopian slogans of workers' control of industry and the promise of trade-union management of industrial production were the controlling factors in shaping Soviet policy on labor. Chapter 2 traces the gradual introduction of measures of labor compulsion, first in relation to those the Bolsheviks classified as the bourgeoisie and afterwards in relation to the working class. Chapters 3 through 5, the core of the study, tell the story of labor militarization—the new formula that, for the Communists, held the key to solving all economic problems in a socialist state. Chapter 3 presents the theories used to justify the militarization of labor and outlines the institutional framework that kept the system in operation. Chapter 4 deals with the application of this system to different segments of the Russian population. Chapter 5 analyzes compulsory labor in transportation, in which the validity of labor militarization as an institution came most sharply into question. The last chapter reviews the general crisis of Russian Communism, the repudiation of some of the most oppressive features of that system, and the efforts to reconcile conflicting views within the Communist Party on the role of labor under socialism.

Performing Justice
Performing Justice

Author: Elizabeth A. Wood

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1501711474

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After seizing power in 1917, the Bolshevik regime faced the daunting task of educating and bringing culture to the vast and often illiterate mass of Soviet soldiers, workers, and peasants. As part of this campaign, civilian educators and political instructors in the military developed didactic theatrical fictions performed in workers' and soldiers' clubs in the years from 1919 to 1933. The subjects addressed included politics, religion, agronomy, health, sexuality, and literature. The trials were designed to permit staging by amateurs at low cost, thus engaging the citizenry in their own remaking. In reconstructing the history of the so-called agitation trials and placing them in a rich social context, Elizabeth A. Wood makes a major contribution to rethinking the first decade of Soviet history. Her book traces the arc by which a regime's campaign to educate the masses by entertaining and disciplining them culminated in a policy of brute shaming.Over the course of the 1920s, the nature of the trials changed, and this process is one of the main themes of the later chapters of Wood's book. Rather than humanizing difficult issues, the trials increasingly made their subjects (alcoholics, boys who smoked, truants) into objects of shame and dismissal. By the end of the decade and the early 1930s, the trials had become weapons for enforcing social and political conformity. Their texts were still fictional—indeed, fantastical—but the actors and the verdicts were now all too real.

Workers Control and Socialist Democracy
Workers Control and Socialist Democracy

Author: Carmen Sirianni

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 566

ISBN-13: 1789607272

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Recent scholarship has rediscovered the genuinely mass character of the Bolshevik-led revolution that toppled Russian absolutism in 1917. In this major study, Carmen Sirianni undertakes a comprehensive study of the forms of popular power that emerged in the course of the struggle against Tsarist, and their destiny in the formative years of the new Soviet state. He successively discusses the factory committee movement, the attitudes of the trade unions and the left parties towards workers control, the unfolding of dual power, the tole of the peasantry, and the organization of labour and industry in the civil war. The developing theme of these chapters - the unsettled, often antagonistic relationship between working-class and peasant initiatives and demands and Bolshevik political and economic conceptions - is subjected to theoretical examination in the second part of the book. Here Sirianni analyses the particular constitution of Lenin's Marxism, and discerns in it a 'productivist evolutionism' which, he maintains, adversely affected the Bolsheviks' appreciation of working-class self-organization both in industry and in the exercise of political power, and vitiated their perception of the rural masses. Finally, Sirianni sets Russian policy and experience in its international context, considering the different, but also limited, views of Gramsci and Pannekoek, and the 'councilist' movements of Western Europe. He concludes with a reflection on the subsequent course of the revolutionary state and the options available to its leaders, as the defeat of the Left Opposition and then of Bukharin prepared the triumph of Stalinism. Workers Control and Socialist Democracy unites historical, political and theoretical judgement to make a fundamental contribution to our understanding, both of the Russian Revolution and of central unresolved issues of socialism in the twentieth century.

Work, Employment and Unemployment in the Soviet Union
Work, Employment and Unemployment in the Soviet Union

Author: J.L. Porket

Publisher: Springer

Published: 1989-06-18

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1349109304

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A book distinguishing between the situation in the labour market and the utilization of the employed labour force in the Soviet Union. The author attempts to show that since the abolition of open registered unemployment in 1930 the economy has suffered from chronic and general overmanning.

The Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution

Author: Richard Pipes

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-07-13

Total Pages: 977

ISBN-13: 0307788571

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A groundbreaking, inclusive history of the Russian Revolution for "those who want to discover what really happened to Russia" (The New York Times Book Review) A "monumental study" (Wall Street Journal), enthralling in its narrative of a movement whose purpose, in the words of Leon Trotsky, was "to overthrow the world," The Russian Revolution draws conclusions that have aroused great controversy. Richard Pipes argues convincingly that the Russian Revolution was an intellectual, rather than a class, uprising; that it was steeped in terror from its very outset; and that it was not a revolution at all but a coup d'etat—"the capture of governmental power by a small minority."

The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24
The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24

Author: Simon Pirani

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-03-03

Total Pages: 584

ISBN-13: 1134075499

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The Russian revolution of 1917 was a defining event of the twentieth century, and its achievements and failures remain controversial in the twenty-first. This book focuses on the retreat from the revolution’s aims in 1920–24, after the civil war and at the start of the New Economic Policy – and specifically, on the turbulent relationship between the working class and the Communist Party in those years. It is based on extensive original research of the actions and reactions of the party leadership and ranks, of dissidents and members of other parties, and of trade union activists and ordinary factory workers. It discusses working-class collective action before, during and after the crisis of 1921, when the Bolsheviks were confronted by the revolt at the Kronshtadt naval base and other protest movements. This book argues that the working class was politically expropriated by the Bolshevik party, as democratic bodies such as soviets and factory committees were deprived of decision-making power; it examines how the new Soviet ruling class began to take shape. It shows how some worker activists concluded that the principles of 1917 had been betrayed, while others accepted a social contract, under which workers were assured of improvements in living standards in exchange for increased labour discipline and productivity, and a surrender of political power to the party.

States of Anxiety
States of Anxiety

Author: William G. Rosenberg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-10-20

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 0197610153

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Amidst the vast literature on the parties and politics of revolutionary Russia and its near constant appropriation for presentist purposes over the years, States of Anxiety assesses the effects of the great scarcities and enormous losses that Russia experienced between 1914 and 1921, a period of dramatic civil conflicts and Russia's "long World War." Scarcities meant not only the deficits of necessary goods like food, but also their accompanying anxieties and fears. Using archival documents and materials of the period almost exclusively, this study explores how the tsarist, democratic liberal, democratic socialist, and Bolshevik regimes all addressed the forms and effects of scarcity and loss in ways they hoped would assure the revolutionary outcomes of their own historical imaginations. Looking closely at their efforts, it suggests how and why each failed to do so. Approaching the Russian revolutionary period in these terms involves exploring a broad range of connected issues. Material scarcities involved problems with market exchange, prices, and inflation, as well as procurement, production, and distribution. They involved fiscal policies, monetary emissions, and the effects of escalating debt. But they also directly engaged cultural understandings of fairness, sacrifice, and social difference, and were accompanied by what today would be called today the anxieties of "food insecurity," the dangerous risks of unemployment, and a range of fears about family and community welfare. Officials and members of various state and public committees of various political orientations faced both the threats and actualities of market collapse, rampant speculation, black markets, increasingly visible social inequalities, and an array of emotional fields whose implications need to be understood. The statistical and other objective dimensions of scarcity and loss are generally described in ways that omit their complex emotional dimension, as the language of "food insecurity" obscures the actual effects of hunger. While taking into account important recent contributions to a large historiography, new efforts to decipher historical feelings and emotions, and attention to the languages through which events and feelings both were represented and given coherence, this book contributes to a broader understanding of the social and cultural foundations of uprisings and revolutionary upheavals.