Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941

by Donald Filtzer

No

Genres: Soviet Union, History, Russia, Politics

338 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1986

Reviews

[sube · Rating 4 out of 5]

An overview of the process of Stalin era industrialization, it seeks to show how industrialization transformed the working class from one composed of old workers, skilled and experienced to a large working class that was atomized. Relying on a large influx from peasants with no traditions of struggle, alongside individualization of incentives and increased differentiation, Filtzer argues Stalin era was able to undermine any cohesion and thus ability of resistance by workers; however the individualization alongside bureaucratic planning coincided with workers' large share of power over the individual labor process, as managers came to rely on cooperation with individual workers to retain stability in the chaos of industrialization and later production relations.

A problem I find with the book is that it is under-theorised: it poses individual appropiation of labor as 'resistance' and 'power', yet often these were workers ensuring the survival of the firm - and likewise he is reliant upon a notion of workers as whole, counter-posed to a minority that joined the Stalinist efforts at division. Yet as Alf Lüdtke shows, this is actually premised on the individual everyday life that often is a mix of uniting and dividing practices and behaviors.

Lastly, I did not find the analysis of production relations itself to be too meaningful, honestly. E.g. it is very focused upon analysing Stalinism as governance by the 'bureaucracy' elite, yet it discusses repeated campaigns by the Stalin leadership that played off managers against workers and de-stabilised production relations. Also, the book is before Soviet Union collapsed and archives were opened, thus very reliant on Menshevik reporting, so misses some insights that would be interesting likely.