Russia's Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy: Shop-Floor Culture and State Policy, 1921-1929: 69 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies, Series Number 69)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Revised ed., 6/20/2002
EAN 9780521894272, ISBN10: 0521894271
Paperback, 322 pages, 22.2 x 14.9 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
In Russia's Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy Chris Ward uses a wide range of published and unpublished Soviet sources to examine key aspects of life on the shop floor of the Russian cotton mill in the 1920s. He reveals the existence of a complex world of work which grew out of the interaction between the experience of industrialisation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia and the mechanisation of the cotton industry in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author explores the manner in which a 'mill culture' emerged from these developments and demonstrates that by the 1920s this culture was often very resistant to change. Russia's Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy provides a realistic understanding of the relationship between worker, state policy and technology in Russia in the 1920s.
List of plates
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Maps
Introduction
Part I. The New Economic Policy and Cotton
1. Industry
2. Workforce
Part II. The Mill
3. Field and factory
4. Machines and trades
5. Making an operative
6. Workers' institutional commitments
Part III. The Crisis of 1923 and its Consequences
7. The market collapses
8. Organizing Taylorism
production
9. Organizing Taylorism
wages
10. 1925
Part IV. The Crisis of 1927 and its Consequences
11. Confusion worse confounded
12. Shop-floor responses
13. The end of rationality
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index.
"...this book is well researched, innovative, and insightful. This is required reading for any serious student of Sovlet labor history." Labor History "Books on the New Economic Policy (NEP) abound, but this one by Chris Ward is probably one of the finest in the English language on labor during the Soviet 1920s...Ward has managed to present a very fine description and analysis of the behavior of the Russian textile workers during the 1920s. The coverage of topics is exhaustive, ranging from the role the textile industry played in NEP to the composition of the textile workforce, shop-floor culture, and the strike movement...his contribution is undoubtedly significant." Hiroaki Kuromiya, Slavic Review