Making workers Soviet: power, class, and identity

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

"Originated in a conference held at Michigan State University in November 1990"--Preface

Class backwards? In search of the Soviet working class / Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny -- On the eve : life histories and identities of some revolutionary workers, 1870-1905 / Reginald E. Zelnik -- Vanguard workers and the morality of class / Mark D. Steinberg -- Class formation in the St. Petersburg metalworking industry : from the "days of freedom" to the Lena Goldfields massacre / Heather Hogan -- Workers against foremen in St. Petersburg, 1905-1917 / S.A. Smith -- Donbas miners in war, revolution, and civil war / Hiroaki Kuromiya -- Labor relations in socialist Russia : class values and production values in the Printers' Union, 1917-1921 / Diane P. Koenker -- Languages of trade or a language of class? Work culture in Russian cotton mills in the 1920s / Chris Ward -- The hidden class : white-collar workers in the Soviet 1920s / Daniel Orlovsky -- From working class to urban laboring mass : on politics and social categories in the formative years of the Soviet system / Gábor T. Rittersporn -- Coercion and identity : workers' lives in Stalin's showcase city / Stephen Kotkin -- Workers against bosses : the impact of the Great Purges on labor-management relations / She…