Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (review)

In Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell presented Russia's laboring classes in the form of the tireless but credulous horse Boxer who willingly accepts the hardships and shortages associated with building the windmill of the animals' utopian dreams. Though few believed Russia's workers to have been as easily duped as Boxer, for years, historians of Stalinist industrialization have explained the relationship between Soviet workers and the state that demanded so much of them in terms that, in many respects, mirrored the image of Orwell's reliable workhorse. Those of the "totalitarian school" envisioned a proletariat bullied into submission by a zealous secret police, while revisionists looked for signs of "accommodation" between the regime and workers. Recent investigations have given greater subtlety and sophistication to these approaches, but by and large, the image of a working class that bore the strains of breakneck industrial growth with quiet, if resentful, fortitude had apparently stood the test of time. Now, comes Jeffrey J. Rossman with abundant evidence that Russia's workers were far from docile during the construction of their leaders' utopia. Rossman demonstrates that, in the textile-producing region surrounding Ivanovo, workers expressed their displeasure with the economic policies of the Stalinist state not only verbally, but, in some instances, in open rebellion.

From 1928 to 1932, heavy industry was the focus of Soviet investment, but it was the output of light industry, especially textiles, that was to provide the capital to fuel growth. Textiles alone were meant to supply over a quarter of the funds to reach the Five-Year Plan's ambitious targets, and textile mills were to achieve that goal by pushing productivity higher and ruthlessly cutting production costs. The mill operatives of the Ivanovo Industrial Region (IIR)—a territory northeast of Moscow three times the size of Belgium and home to an eighth of the Soviet Union's industrial proletariat—therefore bore some of the heaviest burdens of the industrialization program, working with hopelessly outdated equipment, raw materials of ever poorer quality, rising production norms, wages that could not keep pace with inflation, and frequent delays in wage payments. Added to the immense burdens of the workplace were chronic food shortages, inadequate housing, and rumors that party leaders suffered few of the privations of their "comrades" on the shop floor. Not surprisingly, repeated calls for sacrifice amid such unbearable conditions elicited hostile reactions from the purported beneficiaries of Soviet power.

Rossman bases his narrative almost entirely on archival records, many from the holdings of the regional security police. He, thus, provides a remarkably detailed glimpse of worker resistance to the insatiable demands of forced capital accumulation. He recognizes that the term "resistance" invites skepticism, especially since it has come to encompass all manner of dissatisfaction with a prevailing order, even such apparently minor acts as tardiness to work or lackluster participation in organized events. But, Rossman has no need for such nuanced interpretations. His evidence of active and overt confrontation of the Soviet authorities is so extensive that it leaves no doubt about the term's appropriateness. Mill operatives openly denounced party and union leaders at all levels, elected oppositionists as union delegates, circumvented local authorities to appeal to higher-ups, and, in the mill towns of Teikovo and Vichuga, organized hunger marches and the seizure of local offices until their demands for relief were met.

Far from reaching accommodation with the regime as many in the anti-totalitarian school had argued, Rossman shows convincingly that the workers of the Ivanovo region pushed back, speaking out against the injustices of industrial policy in ways that would have shocked historians who saw them as "atomized," or subdued by the repressive state. His evidence also challenges recent suggestions that Soviet workers had been rendered incapable of mounting serious resistance because the state had eliminated alternative frameworks for imagining opposition. Rossman agrees that workers shared the official values of the...