Soviet workers and de-Stalinization
de Donald A. Filtzer · Publicada por primera vez en 1992
This is the first comprehensive study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Donald Filtzer examines the main features of Khrushchev's labour policy, shop-floor relations between workers and managers, the position of women workers and their specific role in the Soviet economy. Filtzer argues that the main concern of Khrushchev's labour policy was to remotivate an industrial population left demoralized by the Stalinist terror. This meant persuading workers to surrender defensive shop-floor tactics of lax discipline and poor-quality work. Yet this 'de-Stalinization' had to be carried out without undermining the essential power and property relations on which the Stalinist system had been built and Filtzer convincingly demonstrates that labour policy had to be limited to superficial gestures of liberalization and tinkering with incentive schemes. Rather than achieving any lasting effects, the Khrushchev period saw the consolidation of the long-term decline into economic stagnation that was to become associated with the Brezhnev years. In his conclusions, Filtzer shows how the labour problems under Khrushchev were the same as those which confronted Mikhail Gorbachev and his ill-fated perestroika. He argues that reform of the Soviet system is impossible within existing property relations. Current moves towards the market will bring with them new forms of instability which only the creation of a democratic, decentralized, but non-market socialism can overcome. This book is a sequel to Filtzer's well-received earlier study Soviet workers and Stalinist industrialization: the formation of modern Soviet production relations, 1928-1941. In addition to students and specialists of Soviet history and economics, it will be relevant to readers with a more general interest in labour-process analysis.
