A Dream Deferred - New Studies in Russian and Soviet Labour History

This volume brings together the latest work in Russian labour history, based on exciting materials from previously closed archives and collections. Sixteen essays, focusing on peasants and workers, explore the lives and struggles of working people. Ranging over a century of dramatic upheaval, from the late 1800s to the present, the essays are organized around three broad themes: workers' politics, incentives and coercion within industrial and rural workplaces, and household strategies. The volume explores the relationship between the peasantry and the working class, a nexus that has been central to state policy, oppositional politics, economic development, and household configuration. It profiles a working class rent by divisions and defined not only by its relationship to the workplace or the state, but also by its household strategies for daily survival. The essays explore many topics accessible for the first time, including the motivations of women workers, roots of revolutionary activism, the revolutionary movement outside the great cities, socialist opposition to the Soviet regime, reactions of workers to Stalinist terror, socialist tourism, peasant families in forced exile, and work discipline on the collective farms.

Contents

Contents: Nikolai V. Mikhailov: Non-Party Workers' Organizations in St Petersburg and the Provinces before and during the First Russian Revolution - Christine Ruane: The 1906 Moscow Garment Workers' Strike - Sarah Badcock: Politics, Parties, and Power: Sormovo Workers in 1917 - Simon Pirani: Mass Mobilization versus Participatory Democracy: Moscow Workers and the Bolshevik Expropriation of Political Power - Barbara Allen: Transforming Factions into Blocs: Alexander Shliapnikov, Sergei Medvedev, and the CCC Investigation of the «Baku Affair» in 1926 - Aleksei Gusev: The «Bolshevik Leninist» Opposition and the Working Class, 1928-1929 - Kevin Murphy: Strikes during the Early Soviet Period, 1922 to 1932: From Working-Class Militancy to Working-Class Passivity? - Wendy Z. Goldman: Terror in the Factories - Lynne Viola: Taiga Conditions: Kulak Special Settlers, Commandants, and Soviet Industry - Jean Lévesque: Foremen in the Field: Collective Farm Chairmen and the Fate of Labour Discipline after Collectivization, 1932-1953 - Diane P. Koenker: Soviet Worker Leisure Travel in the 1930s - Barbara Alpern Engel: «Earning My Own Crust of Bread»: Labor in the Lives of Discontented Wives in Late Imperial Russia - Gijs Kessler: A Population under Pressure: Household Responses to Demographic and Economic Shock in the Interwar Soviet Union - Donald Filtzer: The 1947 Food Crisis and its Aftermath: Worker and Peasant Consumption in Non-Famine Regions of the RSFSR - Andrei Markevich: Finding Additional Income: Subsidiary Agriculture in Soviet Urban Households, 1941-1964 - Sergey A. Afontsev: The Choice of Income-Earning Activities: Russian Urban Households and the Challenges of Transition.