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learned how to 'think Soviet', but this did not preclude them engaging in practices frowned upon or proscribed by Soviet officials.

The story of peasants' transformation into workers during succeeding decades is one of massive recruitment for defence industries, construction and transport during the Great Patriotic War, followed by a renewal of the stream of voluntary departures from the collective farms which continued to deplete rural society of its younger, skilled and ambitious workforce.[113] Peasants left to further their education or learn a trade. They joined construction crews to build the high-rise apartment buildings that replaced the forests and fields on the outskirts of cities and into which they hoped to move. Whatever their intentions were and to whatever extent they were realised, these migrants did not abandon the village entirely. As late as the mid-1980s, one could see them - young and old, recently and not-so-recently arrived migrants - gathering in urban parks on Saturdays to sing, dance, play the accordion or the spoons and otherwise re-create a bit of village culture in the city.[114]

Labour discipline and productivity

'The Russian is a bad worker compared with the advanced peoples', wrote Lenin in 1918, echoing complaints that factory owners and managers had made for decades before the October Revolution.[115] International comparisons of output per worker in the main factory-based industries were very much to Russia's disadvantage in the pre-revolutionary era. Indeed, even small-scale and artisan industry within Russia often enjoyed a competitive advantage thanks to the relatively high fixed costs and overhead expenditures in metalworkfactories and employers' reliance on unskilled, often seasonal forms of labour.[116]

Lenin's sobering observation was followed by an equally categorical injunction: 'The task the Soviet government must set the people in all its scope is - learn to work.' For the next seventy odd years, the Soviet state would pursue this task, one that the bourgeoisie had performed in nineteenth- century Europe and North America. It did so by a combination of vocational

training programmes, political campaigns, legal compulsions and financial inducements. Some of the measures to which it resorted were adaptations of techniques pioneered in capitalist countries; others were of its own devising. All held out the promise of advancing the country along the path towards socialism and then communism while improving the lot of its working population.

Lenin repeatedly stressed the importance of 'nationwide accounting and control of production and the distribution of goods', advocated use of Taylorism (see below), piecework and other 'up-to-date achievements of capitalism', and excoriated violators of labour discipline as 'responsible for the sufferings caused by the famine and unemployment'.[117] He invoked labour discipline both as an 'immediate task' for combating anarchy and hunger and as 'the peg of the entire economic construction of socialism'.[118] Based on the notion that workers were now collectively the ruling class and therefore were working for themselves, labour discipline was an emblem of the new class consciousness the Bolsheviks sought to promote.

During the civil war, the state demanded that workers remain at the bench, but assumed responsibility for their 'social maintenance', providing employment and at least a caloric minimum in the form of rations. With little in the way of material incentives to offer, the party appealed to workers' 'revolutionary conscience', and publicised examples of labour heroism such as the unpaid 'voluntary Saturdays' (subbotniki). Violators of labour discipline were punished via trade union-based comrades' disciplinary courts and other coercive mechanisms.[119]

These and other initiatives were inflected by ideology, but they also were driven by the emergency situation of civil war and economic collapse. Many were phased out after the introduction of the New Economic Policy only to return in more systematic fashion with the abandonment of NEP towards the end of the decade. In the meantime, paralleling a European-wide trend, the cult of man-the-machine took hold among Bolshevik intellectuals who marvelled at what Henry Ford had accomplished and Frederick Winslow Taylor's 'scientific management' promised. Under the banner of 'the scientific organisation of labour' (nauchnaia organizatsiia truda - NOT), they preached time- consciousness, efficiency and rationalisation in not only industrial work but the army, schools and other institutions.[120] However, the technocratic implications of NOT were not lost on the party, and most of the institutes and laboratories promoting it did not survive the 1930s.

For workers there were more immediate concerns such as unemployment which, despite the recovery of industry, grew throughout the 1920s. This was due to a number of factors: the demobilisation of the army which threw several million men onto the labour market, rural to urban migration, protective legislation covering the conditions of employment for women and juveniles and the cost-accounting basis (khozraschet) on which industry was compelled to operate.[121] Between 1925 and 1928, the Commissariat of Labour recorded an increase from approximately one million to 1.5 million unemployed, figures that almost certainly understated the actual numbers. White-collar workers comprised about one-third of the total, and women and youth were disproportionately represented.[122] The scourge of unemployment was mitigated for at least some workers by a rudimentary system of unemployment insurance and the maintenance of ties to the land, but many resorted to selling home brew (samogon), and engaging in prostitution and thievery, petty and otherwise.[123]

Workers with jobs in industry experienced a steady increase in their wages, at least until 1927. Wage levels, based on collective agreements co-signed by respective trade unions, were considerably higher in heavy industry where the workforce was predominantly male than in textiles and other female- dominated industries. They also were some 80 per cent higher for technical and office personnel than for blue-collar workers. Overall, wage increases outpaced productivity gains, notwithstanding campaigns to reduce expenditures and rationalise production processes.[124] These campaigns and other measures to raise productivity did bring output levels within striking distance of pre-war indices. Intensified after the introduction of the seven-hour work-day in early 1928, they were accompanied by an appallingly high rate of accidents on the job - about twice that of Germany - and a good deal of conflict on the shop

floor.[125]

The party, acknowledging that a breach had opened between itself and the working class, made much of its policy of proletarian preference in access to higher education and party membership.[126] But for all its rhetoric about the proletarian dictatorship, the conditions under which Soviet industrial workers laboured and lived in the 1920s did not differ appreciably from elsewhere in Europe. This in itselfwas something of an achievement, for material conditions had been immeasurably worse at the outset of the decade. Then again, working and living conditions for workers were far from fulfilling hopes engendered by the 1917 Revolution that the world - or at least their world - would be made anew. The 'big bourgeoisie' had been eliminated, but class enmity at the point of production persisted. Fanned by workers' insecurity, the ubiquity of the language of class and the contradictoriness of a policy that involved building socialism via capitalist techniques, it was manifested in strikes, 'specialist baiting' (spetsedstvo) and altercations with foremen and other low-level supervisors over job assignments, rate-setting and fines. Gender was also a fault-line on the shop floor, as the intrusion of women into previously male-dominated trades such as printing provoked some ugly incidents and much taunting by male workers.[127] In Central Asia, Russian workers behaved similarly towards their indigenous counterparts who were the beneficiaries of 'affirmative action' policies.[128]