Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity

by Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Editor), Ronald Grigor Suny (Editor)

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.

Genres: Soviet Union, History

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 1994

About the author

Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Professor of History at Michigan State University.

Reviews

[Barry Smirnoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of essays that give a concise study of the rise and fall of the Soviet/Russian working class. These essays are the result of an international conference which was attended by the most prominent scholars in their fields. Not an easy read, but very interesting that the knowledge collected from the archives in the first post-Soviet era can be so quickly absorbed and explained by the best. This is is social history of the best kind as the theory of class is useful along with gender, nationality, and culture. Stephen Kotkin’s contribution on coercion is particularly interesting. Even the most rural recruits to the industrial environment must learn to speak Bolshevik!