Some of these tensions dissipated during the 1930s, but the force-paced industrialisation ofthe First Five-Year Plan years (1928-32) intensified them and fomented others. The utopianism of this 'socialist offensive' and its accompanying rhetoric of class war were matched by the harshness of repression against 'bourgeois specialists' in industry, Rightists within the party, and other 'nay-sayers'. The ratcheting up of targets, shortages of all kinds, the depression of living standards and the general coarsening of daily life created tremendous stress, strain and, in some well-documented cases, strikes and other protests.[129]
Through it all, the party ceaselessly beat the drum for raising productivity. From the summer of 1929, factories and offices were put in continuous operation throughout the week with workers rotating days off every four or five days. This 'continuous working week' (nepreryvka) promised several advantages: an increase in the number of working days from 300 to 360, a lessening of pressure on workers' clubs and other leisure and service facilities, a blow against religion (Sunday would become a normal working day) and, perhaps above all, a rise in output of up to 20 per cent without infusions of additional working capital. It turned out, however, that the nepreryvka put enormous strain on the supply system, on equipment and on workers' conjugal and family lives. It also encouraged a lack of personal responsibility towards the tools of one's trade.[130]Two years after its introduction, the nepreryvka was quietly abolished in most industries, and work schedules reverted to the interrupted six-day week.
More long-lasting, indeed what would become a characteristic feature of Soviet socialism, was socialist competition. This was the practice of workers within an enterprise, shop or brigade setting goals for a period of time and challenging their counterparts to better their performance. Those meeting or exceeding the goals earned the title of shock workers (udarniki), with shock work (udarnichestvo) and socialist competition proceeding in tandem. Assuming mass proportions from 1929 onwards, these 'movements' were hailed (by V Kuibyshev) as representing 'an historical breakthrough in the psychology of the worker', and (by Stalin) as 'a fundamental revolution in the attitude of people to labour'.[131] The trade unions, purged of their leading cadres and mandated by the party to turn their 'face to production', assumed the main responsibility for popularising, organising and recording the results of this 'revolution'.
Many workers (and managers) were either indifferent to socialist competition or resented it for imposing additional burdens on them. Hence their ironic reference to shock workers as 'gladiators', Americans' and 'shock worker-idiots' (chudaki-udarniki).50 Still, notwithstanding its eventual routini- sation and the exaggeration of its results, some, particularly younger, workers responded enthusiastically to socialist competition. The opportunity to prove oneself, participate in the grandiose project ofsocialist construction, and, not incidentally, earn privileges associated with shock-worker status were only some of the reasons.51 Others were evident in the case of production collectives and communes that pooled wages and divided them either equally or on the basis of skill grades. They included the desire to practise self-management and cushion the effects on output and wages of irregular supply and variations in the quality of raw materials.52
Production collectives and communes proliferated during 1929-31, especially in the metalworks and textile industries. But party leaders were ambivalent, even hostile to them, and the party's campaigns against collective piece-rates, 'depersonalisation' of responsibilities (obezlichka), and excessive egalitarianism (uravnilovka) in wages led to their disbandment. When, in 1935, the Stakhanovite movement ignited a new wave of socialist competition, circumstances were very different. Wage differentials had been widened significantly, nearly 70 per cent of industrial workers were paid on the basis of individual piece-rates, and of them, 30 per cent were eligible for the progressivka according to which rates would rise progressively above the level of output norms.
At no time in Soviet history did raising labour productivity assume such importance as during the heyday of the Stakhanovite movement in the mid- 1930s.53 The production records set by outstanding Stakhanovites, the showering of goods and other rewards on them and the results of Stakhanovite ten-day periods (dekady) and months received enormous coverage in the media. Prototypes of the New Soviet Man and Woman, Stakhanovites were represented both as living for their work and enjoying the fruits of their 'cultured' lives.54 Yet, the objective of achieving a generalbreakthrough in productivity remained as elusive as ever. Resistance on the part of workers was certainly a factor. Fearing that Stakhanovites' records would be used to raise output norms (as they were in the spring of 1936), individuals engaged in acts of intimidation and
50 Ibid., pp. 260-1.
51 Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 115-28.
52 Lewis H. Siegelbaum, 'Production Collectives and Communes and the "Imperatives" of Soviet Industrialization, 1929-1931', Slavic Review 45 (1986): 65-84.
53 Francesco Benvenuti, Fuoco sui sabotari! Stachanovismo e organizzazione industriale in URSS 1934-1938 (Rome: Valerio Levi, 1988); Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism; Robert Maier, Die Stachanov-Bewegung, 1935-1938 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990).
54 Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, pp. 210-46.
assaults against Stakhanovites, simply refused to adjust to a new division of labour, and otherwise sabotaged the movement.[132]
Ironically, the Stakhanovite movement itself militated against sustained increases in productivity. Whatever benefits were derived from improvements in work organisation and technique were counteracted by the intensification of problems in the delivery of supplies, the disproportionality between different phases of the production process and the neglect of maintenance and repair. Indeed, to the extent that it raised expectations of production breakthroughs that were not fulfilled, Stakhanovism indirectly contributed to accusations against enterprise directors and their staffs of sabotage and wrecking that undermined managerial authority during the Great Purges of 1936-8. Although claims that workers were taking advantage of the situation were probably exaggerated, the drawing of millions of men into the armed forces in connection with the military build-up made cracking down on labour turnover and absenteeism imperative. Such was the intent of the series of decrees, typically characterised by historians as 'draconian', that were issued between December 1938 and June 1940. These introduced labour books containing information about workers' past employment, called for the dismissal and eviction from enterprise housing of workers who were repeatedly truant or late to work, criminalised these violations of labour discipline and extended the normal work-day from seven to eight hours.[133]
129
Jeffrey Rossman, 'The Teikovo Cotton Workers' Strike of April 1932: Class, Gender, and Identity Politics in Stalin's Russia',
130
William Chase and Lewis Siegelbaum, 'Worktime and Industrialization in the U.S.S.R., 1917-1941', in Gary Cross (ed.),
131
Quoted in R. W. Davies,
132
Ibid., pp. 91-6,190-204; Donald Filtzer,