Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class, and Identity

New
Paperback
1994
$84.02

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.
Contributors: Victoria E. Bonnell; Sheila Fitzpatrick; Heather Hogan; Diane P. Koenker; Stephen Kotkin; Hiroaki Kuromiya; Moshe Lewin; Daniel Orlovsky; Gabor T. Rittersporn; Lewis H. Siegelbaum; S. A. Smith; Mark D. Steinberg; Ronald Grigor Suny; Chris Ward; Reginald E. Zelnik

Synopsis

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.

Contributors: Victoria E. Bonnell; Sheila Fitzpatrick; Heather Hogan; Diane P. Koenker; Stephen Kotkin; Hiroaki Kuromiya; Moshe Lewin; Daniel Orlovsky; Gabor T. Rittersporn; Lewis H. Siegelbaum; S. A. Smith; Mark D. Steinberg; Ronald Grigor Suny; Chris Ward; Reginald E. Zelnik

$84.02

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
Edition: First Edition
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 08 Dec 1994
ISBN 10: 0801482119
ISBN 13: 9780801482113

Media Reviews

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 *

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

Author Bio

Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Jack and Margaret Sweet Professor Emeritus of History at Michigan State University. His books include Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941, and the award-winning Cars for Comrades. He co-authored with Jim von Geldern the award-winning website Seventeen Moments in Soviet History, Stalinism as a Way of Life with Andrei Sokolov, and Broad is My Native Land: Repertoires and Regimes of Migration in Russia's Twentieth Century with Leslie Page Moch. Ronald Grigor Suny is William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor 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.