Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization

Abstract

This 1992 book is a comprehensive study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Dr Filtzer examines the main features of labour policy, shop-floor relations between workers and managers, and the position of women workers. He argues that the main concern of labour policy was to remotivate an industrial population left demoralized by the Stalinist terror. This 'de-Stalinization' had to be carried out without undermining the power and property relations on which the Stalinist system had been built. The author convincingly demonstrates how labour policy was thus limited to superficial gestures of liberalization and tinkering with incentive schemes. Rather than achieving any lasting effects, the Khrushchev period saw the consolidation of a long-term decline into economic stagnation. The labour problems under Khrushchev are shown to be the same as those which confronted Mikhail Gorbachev and his ill-fated perestroika, thus helping to explain the failures of Gorbachev's policies.

An agenda for research on work and class in the postsocialist world

“…Elsewhere portraits of political atomized Soviet workers unequipped to take on a significant role in social or political transformation. Although labour historiography generally supported an atomization thesis, it added much in terms of trying to understand social change and the nature of control under socialism (Filtzer, , ; Kotkin, ; Siegelbaum, ; Siegelbaum & Suny, ; Straus, ) but was less confident in exploring social stratification beyond state‐centric understandings (Edele, : 350).…”

Unhomely Presents: Trauma and Values of Endurance Among Older People

“…For similar reasons, Lyova's case should not be been seen in isolation as a personal 'failing'; the question of the social role of alcohol in Russian workers' lives and its signifi cance in terms of refl ecting the positioning of labour in society, more generally, has featured in debates in labour history. Donald Filtzer has infl uentially argued that drunkenness served as a form of escape, or a 'rational response' (Filtzer 1986, in Kotkin 1995, for Russian workers in the Stalinist period and after, given the lack of any options for resisting labour exploitation (Filtzer 1992 , see also Ashwin 1999 : p. 4). Ashwin has described the inexhaustible 'patience' of the Russian workers after perestroika during the 1990s, but criticizes both undiff erentiated 'social contract' and 'atomization' theories of labour quiescence ( 1999 : 5; cf.…”

“…Piecework has traditionally been understood as an element of 'sweating' labour both in labour history scholarship generally on Russia(Ruane 2008 ), and in work on late socialist-era labour regimes(Haraszti 1977 ) Filtzer ( 1992 ). views Soviet labour relations through the prism of a lack of union representation and brutalizing discipline leading to a lack of solidarity and atomization, which led to a 'hyper-individualization of labour processes and incentives' ( 1992 : 224).…”

Russia's Postcolonial Identity

“…Their central position, both in the system of production and ideologically, gave them a lot of bargaining power, but 'translating it onto genuine proletarian politics was an extremely difficult task' (Derluguian 2005: 119). Consequently, class struggle mostly happened in the form of looking for ways to tacitly reduce labour inputs (Derluguian 2005: 119-20, 141-4, see also Burawoy 1985, Filtzer 1992. The intelligentsia, while still possessing a high standing, was similarly converted into a part of the Soviet system of production and control and, in this sense, proletarianised (Derluguian 2005: 144-8).…”