Russia S Cotton Workers And The New Economic Policy

In Russia's Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy Chris Ward uses a wide range of published and unpublished Soviet sources to examine key aspects of life on the shop floor of the Russian cotton mill in the 1920s. He reveals the existence of a complex world of work which grew out of the interaction between the experience of industrialisation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia and the mechanisation of the cotton industry in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author explores the manner in which a 'mill culture' emerged from these developments and demonstrates that by the 1920s this culture was often very resistant to change. Russia's Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy provides a realistic understanding of the relationship between worker, state policy and technology in Russia in the 1920s.

A comparison between the tsarist economy on the eve of the revolution and the Soviet economy in the mid-1920s. Questions posed include, was the tsarist economy successful, but destroyed by World War I? And was the breakdown of the mixed economy of the 1920s an arbitary political act?

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.

" . . . a comprehensive look at an enigmatic era . . . " —Choice "This provocative collection of essays certainly takes some of the polish off Soviet socialism's golden age." —Journal of Interdisciplinary History "The authors and editors of this splendid volume deserve great praise. Their work moves the field of Soviet history several large steps forward." —Slavic Review Lenin's New Economic Policy of the 1920s, although a relatively free and open potential alternative to Soviet communism, was also a time of extreme tension, as Russian society and culture were rocked by the forces of resistance and change. These essays examine the social and cultural dimensions of NEP in urban and rural Russia in the years before Stalin and rapid industrialization.

Drawing on recently opened archival materials, leading American and European scholars provide an authoritative interpretation of Russian history and culture, ranging from the eighth century to the recent creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

In his reexamination of the origins of the Stalinist state during the formative period of rapid industrialization in the late 1920s and early 1930s, David R. Shearer argues that a centralized state-controlled economic system was the consciously conceived political creation of Stalinist leaders rather than the inevitable by-product of socialist industrialization. Focusing on the different economic and bureaucratic cultures within the industrial system, Shearer reconstructs the debates in 1928 and 1929 over administrative, financial, and commercial reform. He uses information from recently opened archives to show that attempts by the state's trading organizations to create a commercial economy enjoyed wide support, offering a model that combined planning and rapid industrialization with social democracy and economic prosperity. In an effort to crush the syndicate movement and establish tight political control over the economy, Stalinist leaders intervened with a program of radical reforms. Shearer demonstrates that professional engineers, planners and industrial administrators in many cases actively supported the creation of a powerful industrial state unhampered by domestic social and economic constraints. The paradoxical result, Shearer shows, was a loss of control. The overly centralized system that emerged during the first Five-Year Plan was rendered incoherent by periodic economic crises and the continuing influence of partially suppressed social and market forces.

This text has established itself as the best general introduction to Russian history, providing a forceful and highly readable survey from earliest times to the post-Soviet State. At the heart of the book is the changing relationship between the State and Russian society at large. The second edition has been substantially rewritten and updated and new material and fresh insights from recently accessible research have been incorporated into every chapter.