The Soviet Social Contract and why it Failed

The Soviet Social Contract and why it Failed
Author: Linda J. Cook
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1993
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780674828001

This book is the first critical assessment of the likelihood and implications of such a contract. Linda Cook pursues the idea from Brezhnev's day to our own, and considers the constraining effect it may have had on Gorbachev's attempts to liberalize the Soviet economy.

Worker Resistance under Stalin

Worker Resistance under Stalin
Author: Jeffrey J ROSSMAN
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674042905

Challenging the claim that workers supported Stalin's revolution "from above" as well as the assumption that working-class opposition to a workers' state was impossible, Jeffrey Rossman shows how a crucial segment of the Soviet population opposed the authorities during the critical industrializing period of the First Five-Year Plan.

Putin's Labor Dilemma

Putin's Labor Dilemma
Author: Stephen Crowley
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2021-07-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 150175629X

In Putin's Labor Dilemma, Stephen Crowley investigates how the fear of labor protest has inhibited substantial economic transformation in Russia. Putin boasts he has the backing of workers in the country's industrial heartland, but as economic growth slows in Russia, reviving the economy will require restructuring the country's industrial landscape. At the same time, doing so threatens to generate protest and instability from a key regime constituency. However, continuing to prop up Russia's Soviet-era workplaces, writes Crowley, could lead to declining wages and economic stagnation, threatening protest and instability. Crowley explores the dynamics of a Russian labor market that generally avoids mass unemployment, the potentially explosive role of Russia's monotowns, conflicts generated by massive downsizing in "Russia's Detroit" (Tol'yatti), and the rapid politicization of the truck drivers movement. Labor protests currently show little sign of threatening Putin's hold on power, but the manner in which they are being conducted point to substantial chronic problems that will be difficult to resolve. Putin's Labor Dilemma demonstrates that the Russian economy must either find new sources of economic growth or face stagnation. Either scenario—market reforms or economic stagnation—raises the possibility, even probability, of destabilizing social unrest.

The Soviet Worker

The Soviet Worker
Author: Leonard Schapiro
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 303
Release: 1982-06-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1349054380

Workers Control and Socialist Democracy

Workers Control and Socialist Democracy
Author: Carmen Sirianni
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 566
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1789607272

Recent scholarship has rediscovered the genuinely mass character of the Bolshevik-led revolution that toppled Russian absolutism in 1917. In this major study, Carmen Sirianni undertakes a comprehensive study of the forms of popular power that emerged in the course of the struggle against Tsarist, and their destiny in the formative years of the new Soviet state. He successively discusses the factory committee movement, the attitudes of the trade unions and the left parties towards workers control, the unfolding of dual power, the tole of the peasantry, and the organization of labour and industry in the civil war. The developing theme of these chapters - the unsettled, often antagonistic relationship between working-class and peasant initiatives and demands and Bolshevik political and economic conceptions - is subjected to theoretical examination in the second part of the book. Here Sirianni analyses the particular constitution of Lenin's Marxism, and discerns in it a 'productivist evolutionism' which, he maintains, adversely affected the Bolsheviks' appreciation of working-class self-organization both in industry and in the exercise of political power, and vitiated their perception of the rural masses. Finally, Sirianni sets Russian policy and experience in its international context, considering the different, but also limited, views of Gramsci and Pannekoek, and the 'councilist' movements of Western Europe. He concludes with a reflection on the subsequent course of the revolutionary state and the options available to its leaders, as the defeat of the Left Opposition and then of Bukharin prepared the triumph of Stalinism. Workers Control and Socialist Democracy unites historical, political and theoretical judgement to make a fundamental contribution to our understanding, both of the Russian Revolution and of central unresolved issues of socialism in the twentieth century.

Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918-1929

Soviet State and Society Between Revolutions, 1918-1929
Author: Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 1992-08-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521369879

The evolution of the ruling Communist Party and its New Economic Policy is explored in the first book to analyze the relationship between the Soviet state and society from 1917 through the early 1930s through the changing fortunes of its peoples.

Workers of the Donbass Speak

Workers of the Donbass Speak
Author: Lewis H. Siegelbaum
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 1995-07-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1438419961

In July 1989 coal miners throughout the Soviet Union engaged in a massive strike that briefly captured world headlines and inaugurated a movement of strike committees that persisted across the Soviet/post-Soviet divide. In this collection of interviews and essays based on encounters over a three-year period, the voices of industrial workers and their families in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, the coal capital of the Donbass, are heard. The stories collected here allow Western readers to "hear" these people describe their struggles for survival and identity in conditions of economic, political and social disintegration/transformation; and to analyze their testimonies and other kinds of texts in terms of changing meanings of work, gender, and national identity. Included are an examination of the "older generation" that came of age during the Stalin era; an analysis of the miners' movement and the trade union politics that emerged out of the strike of 1989; and a focus on the social crises and cultural disorientations accompanying Ukrainian independence.

The Revenge of the Past

The Revenge of the Past
Author: Ronald Suny
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1993-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780804779265

This timely work shows how and why the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union was caused in large part by nationalism. Unified in their hostility to the Kremlin's authority, the fifteen constituent Union Republics, including the Russian Republic, declared their sovereignty and began to build state institutions of their own. The book has a dual purpose. The first is to explore the formation of nations within the Soviet Union, the policies of the Soviet Union toward non-Russian peoples, and the ultimate contradictions between those policies and the development of nations. The second, more general, purpose is to show how nations have grown in the twentieth century. The principle of nationality that buried the Soviet Union and destroyed its empire in Eastern Europe continues to shape and reshape the configuration of states and political movements among the new independent countries of the vast East European-Eurasian region.

The Economics of Forced Labor

The Economics of Forced Labor
Author: Paul R. Gregory
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2013-09-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0817939431

Until now, there has been little scholarly analysis of the Soviet Gulag as an economic, social, and political institution, primarily owing to a lack of data. This collection presents the results of years of research by Western and Russian scholars. The authors provide both broad overviews and specific case studies.