Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization
The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations 1953–1964

This 1992 book is a comprehensive study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev years.

Donald Filtzer (Author)

9780521522410, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 8 August 2002

340 pages, 14 tables
23 x 15.3 x 2.6 cm, 0.564 kg

"...a valuable and worthwhile book." Walter D. Connor, Slavic Review

This 1992 book is a comprehensive study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Dr Filtzer examines the main features of labour policy, shop-floor relations between workers and managers, and the position of women workers. He argues that the main concern of labour policy was to remotivate an industrial population left demoralized by the Stalinist terror. This 'de-Stalinization' had to be carried out without undermining the power and property relations on which the Stalinist system had been built. The author convincingly demonstrates how labour policy was thus limited to superficial gestures of liberalization and tinkering with incentive schemes. Rather than achieving any lasting effects, the Khrushchev period saw the consolidation of a long-term decline into economic stagnation. The labour problems under Khrushchev are shown to be the same as those which confronted Mikhail Gorbachev and his ill-fated perestroika, thus helping to explain the failures of Gorbachev's policies.

1. Introduction: the contradiction of de-Stalinization
Part I. Labour Policy under Khrushchev: Issues and Results: 2. The worker and the work environment
3. The reform of labour legislation and the re-emergence of the labour market
4. The labour shortage
5. The wage reform
Part II. De-Stalinization and the Soviet Labour Process: 6. The historical genesis of the Soviet labour force
7. Limits of the extraction of the surplus
8. The position of women workers
9. Skill, de-skilling and control over the labour process
10. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], European history [HBJD]