Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity

Drawing on such diverse sources as propaganda art, the trade union press, workers' memoirs, and materials in recently opened Soviet archives, this is the first book to examine the shifting identity of the "working class" in late tsarist and early Soviet societies. New essays by fifteen leading historians show how Russian workers responded to attempts to make them Soviet. Initial chapters consider power relations and working-class identity in imperial Russia. The effects of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 to 1921 on labor relations among printers and coal miners are then discussed. Addressing subsequent decades, other essays document the situation of cotton workers and white-collar workers embroiled within the ambiguities of the New Economic Policy or challenge the appropriateness of "class" analysis for the Stalin era. Additional chapters reconstruct workers' responses to the Great Purges and trace the significance of class in visual and verbal discourse. Making Workers Soviet will be central to the current rethinking of Soviet history and of class formation in noncapitalist settings.

Table of Contents:
Archives Cited in Text Class Backwards?: In Search of the Soviet Working Class by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny 1. On the Eve: Life Histories and Identities of Some Revolutionary Workers, 1870-1905 by Reginald E. Zelnik 2. Vanguard Workers and the Morality of Class by Mark D. Steinberg 3. Class Formation in the St. Petersburg Metalworking Industry: From the "Days of Freedom" to the Lena Goldfields Massacre by Heather Hogan 4. Workers against Foremen in St. Petersburg, 1905-1917 by S. A. Smith 5. Donbas Miners in War, Revolution, and Civil War by Hiroaki Kuromiya 6. Labor Relations in Socialist Russia: Class Values and Production Values in the Printers' Union, 1917-1921 by Diane P. Koenker 7. Languages of Trade or a Language of Class? Work Culture in Russian Cotton Mills in the 1920s by Chris Ward 8. The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the Soviet 1920s by Daniel Orlovsky 9. From Working Class to Urban Laboring Mass: On Politics and Social Categories in the Formative Years of the Soviet System by Gabor T. Rittersporn 10. Coercion and Identity: Workers' Lives in Stalin's Showcase City by Stephen Kotkin 11. Workers against Bosses: The Impact of the Great Purges on Labor-Management Relations by Sheila Fitzpatrick 12. The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art by Victoria E. Bonnell 13. Concluding Remarks by Moshe Lewin Contributors Index

About the Author :
Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of several books, including Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile and the editor of The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc, both from Cornell. Ronald Grigor Suny is William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished UniversityProfessor of History at the University of Michigan and the author most recently of "They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else:" A History of the Armenian Genocide.

Review :
"This volume represents a signal event in Russian/Soviet labor history by bringing together samplings of much of the most interesting current work in the field."-Gerald Smith, Russian Review (September 1998) "A very fine collection that explores intriguing aspects of the 'making of the Soviet working class.' Taken together, the essays define the contours of future work in Russian and Soviet labor history. This will be a benchmark volume."-William J. Chase, University of Pittsburgh