Abstract
Addressing the Eighth Congress of Trade Unions in December 1928, M. I. Tomskii, the soon-to-be-ousted chairman of the trade unions’ central council, referred to a recent incident at the Leningrad Skorokhod shoe factory. There, a foreman had been shot and killed by a worker. This act, he said, might be attributed to the ‘abnormal’ and ‘hooligan’ nature of the worker, but such an explanation was too simplistic and clichéd. In his view, what was responsible for this and similar ‘unhealthy and shameful’ occurrences of recent times was the ‘uncultured’ and ‘rude’ behavior of foremen and the unions’ failure to intervene in relations between foremen and workers.1
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Notes
See respectively K. Marx, Capital, vol. I (New York, 1967) p. 424
J. Melling, ‘ “Non-Commissioned Officers”: British Employers and Their Supervisory Workers, 1880–1920’, Social History (1980) No. 2, p. 193.
J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974) p. 227.
R. Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry (New York, 1963) pp. 206–211.
Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London, 1985).
For foremen’s role in pre-revolutionary factory life, see, inter alia, R. Zelnik, ed., A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia, the Autobiography of Semen Ivanovich Kantachikov (Stanford, 1986) pp. 18–19, 53, 55, 61, 63, 73–4, 88–9;
P. Timofeev, ‘What the Factory Worker Lives By’, in V. E. Bonnell (ed.), The Russian Worker, Life and Labor under the Tsarist Regime (Berkeley, 1983) pp. 85–90, 93–5, 98, 101–8;
R. Glickman, Russian Factory Women, Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (Berkeley, 1984) pp. 142–3, 211–12;
S. Smith, Red Petrograd (Cambridge, 1983) pp. 39–41, 64, 119, 136. The transition from the revolutionary upheaval of 1917–18 when many workers elected new foremen to the mid-1920s remains to be explored.
On the artel, see H. Kuromiya, ‘The Artel and Social Relations in Soviet Industry in the 1920s’, paper presented to NEP Conference at Indiana University (2–5 October, 1986).
S. Lieberstein, ‘Technology, Work and Sociology in the USSR: the NOT Movement’, Technology and Culture (1975) No. 1, p. 49.
A. K. Gastev, Trudovye ustanovki (Moscow, 1973) pp. 308–9; Trud, 4 March 1924, p. 2.
This was a modest claim, for according to the Commissar of Labour, 750,000 workers had been so trained by 1932. See S. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge, 1979) p. 200.
L. H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–41 (Cambridge, 1988) pp. 58–63. Foremen, who continued to assign workers at each shift’s nariad, remained oblivious to the issue, that is, until the advent of Stakhanovism, after which they had to pick up the pieces, so to speak. See also H. Kuromiya, ‘The Commander and the Rank and File: Managing the Soviet Coalmining Industry, 1928–1933’, pp. 17–19, paper presented to SSRC Seminar on Soviet Industrialization (Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 22–4, 1988).
Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility, p. 226; M. Anstett, La formation de la main d’oeuvre qualifiée en Union Soviétique de 1917 à 1954 (Paris, 1958) pp. 106–14; Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1933–1937 gg., Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow. 19711 pp. 434–6.
Granick, Management of the Industrial Firm in the USSR (New York, 1954) p. 119; Za promyshlennye kadry (1936) No. 2, pp. 7–8; J. Scott, Behind the Urals (Bloomington, Ind., 1972) p. 174.
M. Lazvin, ‘Kursy masterov sotsialisticheskogo truda’, Stakhanovets (1939) No. 8, p. 28, and Industrializatsiia SSSR, 1933–37 pp. 503–4.
E. G. Spencer, ‘Between Capital and Labor: Supervisory Personnel in Ruhr Heavy Industry Before 1914’, Journal of Social History (1975), p. 181.
E. S. Cowdrick, ‘Foreman Training in American Industry’, International Labour Review (1933) No. 2, pp. 207–19.
See L. H. Siegelbaum, ‘Soviet Norm Determination in Theory and Practice, 1917–1941’, Soviet Studies (1984) No. 1, pp. 49–50.
P. B. Zilbergleit, Proizvoditel’nost’ truda v kamennougol’noi promyshlennosti (Khar’kov, 1930) pp. 33, 39; Trud, 16 March 1928, p. 4. See Trud, 8 January 1929, p. 2 wherein it was reported that secret time study had provoked at least thirteen disturbances in 1928.
For evidence of such alliances, see D. Shearer, ‘From Functionalism to Shop Autonomy, Changes in the Structure of Work and Management in Soviet Machine Building Factories, 1926–1934’, paper presented to SSRC Seminar on Soviet Industrialization (Ann Arbor, Michigan, April 22–4, 1988).
L. H. Siegelbaum, ‘Production Collectives and Communes and the “Imperatives” of Industrialization in the USSR, 1929–1931’, Slavic Review (1986) No 1, p. 75. For the boast referred to above, see the epigraph of this article.
I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, R. McNeal (ed.), vol. I [XIV] (Stanford, 1967) pp. 56–64.
See V. Andrle, ‘How Backward Workers Became Soviet: Industrialization of Labour and the Politics of Efficiency under the Second Five-Year Plan, 1933–1937’, Social History (1985) No. 2, pp. 147–69.
For an excellent treatment of this legislation, see D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization (Armonk, N.Y. 1986) pp. 107–15, 233–53.
For the distinction between formal organisation governed by ‘logic’ and informal organisation based on ‘feeling and sentiment’, see the seminal article by F. J. Roethlisberger, ‘The Foreman: Master and Victim of Double Talk’, Harvard Business Review (1945) No. 3, pp. 290–2.
J. Barber, ‘Labour Discipline in Soviet Industry, 1928–1941’, paper presented to the Twelfth AAASS Convention (Philadelphia, November 1980) Table B.
Mashinostroenie, 2 November 1938; Pravda, 8 January 1939, p. 2. See also P. A. Morozov, Master, polnopravnyi rukovoditel’ uchastka, (Moscow, 1949).
D. Nelson, Managers and Workers (Madison, 1975) pp. 34–54;
D. Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor (Cambridge, 1987) pp. 115, 129–130, 204–5;
W. H. Lazonick, ‘Technological Change and the Control of Work: The Development of Capital-Labour Relations in US Mass Production Industries’, in H. F. Gospel and Craig R. Littler (ed), Managerial Strategies and Industrial Relations (London, 1983) pp. 125–9.
C. Littler, The Development of the Labor Process in Capitalist Societies (London, 1982) pp. 86–7.
Th. H. Patten, Jr., The Foreman: Forgotten Man of Management (New York, 1968);
L. Baritz, The Servants of Power (Middletown, Conn., 1960) pp. 182–4.
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© 1992 Nick Lampert and Gábor T. Rittersporn
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Siegelbaum, L.H. (1992). Masters of the Shop Floor: Foremen and Soviet Industrialisation. In: Lampert, N., Rittersporn, G.T. (eds) Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath. Studies in Soviet History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12260-8_7
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