What on paper amounted to the militarisation of labour in reality fell considerably short of that thanks to massive non-compliance on the part of management. Eager to retain workers almost at any cost, managers, often with the collusion of trade union committees, turned a blind eye towards truancy and lateness, extracted fictitious sick notes from physicians and issued retroactive notes for unpaid leave.57 With the Great Patriotic War, the stakes rose in this and all other respects. Between 1940 and 1942 the Soviet industrial workforce declined from 11 million to 7.2 million. Women's share in industrial employment rose from 41 per cent to 52 per cent. The work-week was extended from 48 to 54 hours, and key workers (munitions workers from December 1941 and railroad workers from April 1943) were conscripted and subject to military tribunals for the slightest infraction of labour discipline. Elsewhere, workers continued to respond to bad living and working conditions by leaving their jobs or not showing up, and an average of one million were taken to court every year of the war for these 'crimes'.[134]
Compulsion, though, only went so far even in wartime, and the diversion of resources to military production and the front made economic incentives even less available than they had been before the war. Political campaigns and moral appeals thus played a larger role. These included the expansion of the 'two-hundreder' movement that had appeared before the war but took on new meaning with the slogan, 'Work not just for yourself but also for your comrade sent to the front'. By February 1942, individual workers were being celebrated for having fulfilled two and three times their shift norms, and in the case of D. F. Bosyi, a milling machine operator at the Nizhnii Tagil armaments plant in the Urals, over fourteen times the norm. Much larger numbers of workers were involved in Komsomol front-line youth brigades, whose slogan, 'Work in the factory as soldiers fight at the front', typified the patriotic appeals of wartime socialist competition.[135]
As for productivity, the picture was mixed. In the munitions industry, output per worker more than doubled between 1940 and 1944. This was primarily due to the replacement of small batch by flow production on assembly lines, as well as deferments for skilled workers. Civilian industry, which comprised only 20.8 per cent of net national product in 1944 compared to 29.1 per cent in 1940, did not fare so well. Net output per worker dropped 11 per cent between 1940 and 1942 and barely recovered by 1944.[136] Given that average work time had increased by six hours per week, output per hour remained well below pre-war levels.
Wartime devastation followed by harvest failure and famine in 1946-7 consigned workers to a penurious existence in the immediate post-war years. Despite the persistence of penalties which made 'wilful' job-changing a criminal offence, labour turnover remained high, threatening production plans. So too did malnutrition, epidemic outbreaks of typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis, and shortages of basic necessities such as clothing, vegetables and soap.[137]Increasing productivity, advertised as the formula for improving workers' standard of living, was thus held hostage by the very conditions it was supposed to overcome.
This vicious cycle somewhat abated after 1948. Reconstruction, which involved the extensive use of prisoner-of-war labour, was followed by nearly two decades of sustained industrial growth. During the 1950s, electric power generation and oil production increased fourfold, while natural gas production rose by a factor of eight. While the production of consumer goods lagged as usual, certain items such as refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, sewing machines and television sets were turned out in exponentially increasing numbers and began to make their appearance in workers' households.[138]Significant efficiencies were achieved in steel-making, machine-building and other branches of heavy industry that received priority in supplies and other resources, upgraded their equipment and were able to recruit skilled workers and engineers. But even these privileged sectors exemplified certain phenomena that limited productivity gains and can be regarded as endemic to the Soviet system of production relations. They included the hoarding of workers and supplies by enterprises; the overconsumption of materials; the dearth of spare parts that resulted from the emphasis on producing heavier, more expensive items; disincentives against technical innovation; and the largely successful manoeuvring of workers to avoid speed-ups, de-skilling and other attempts to reduce their control over the labour process.[139]
Operating within these limits, the Khrushchev administration initiated reforms through which it sought to invigorate workers' commitment to fulfilling production goals. Infractions of labour discipline were de-criminalised in 1956 after having been in abeyance for several years. A major revision of the wage structure was instituted beginning in 1956 with coal mining and some metalworks enterprises and extending to all branches of industry by 1960. It entailed increases in base rates and production quotas, a reduction in the number of wage scales and the simplification of rates within each scale, the elimination of progressive piece-rates and a modest shift of pieceworkers to time-based wages. Finally, the education system was overhauled to combine academic learning with vocational training for all students in their last three years of secondary school.[140]
The reforms should be seen as a partial response to the emergence of a post-war generation that was more urbanised, better educated and more demanding than its predecessors. That they proved inadequate was spectacularly demonstrated by the tragic events in Novocherkassk in early June 1962. Provoked by a Union-wide increase in the prices of meat and butter as well as the insensitivity of the factory administration, workers at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Works walked off their jobs, marched on the city centre and seized the party headquarters. Fired upon by troops, some twenty-four were killed, eighteen of whom were under the age of thirty. Mass arrests followed, and 114 persons - officially dubbed 'hooligans', 'bandits', 'extremists' and 'anti-Soviet elements', that is, anything but 'workers' - were tried, among whom seven were sentenced to death and executed.[141]
Official concern that the appeals to patriotism and self-sacrifice were no longer adequate to inspire Soviet youth facilitated the establishment of sociology as an academic discipline. Throughout the 1960s Soviet sociologists conducted numerous studies, using questionnaires and other methods of 'concrete' sociological research, to chart young workers' attitudes. Several found alarmingly high levels of occupational dissatisfaction, low prestige of industrial work and individualistic and material considerations as the main reason for job-changing.[142] Other studies addressed the problem of the 'double-shift' for wage-earning women, which also was the subject of Natalia Baranskaia's story, 'A Week Like Any Other', that appeared in Novyi mir in 1969.[143]
134
Barber and Harrison,
136
61 Donald Filtzer, 'The Standard of Living of Soviet Industrial Workers in the Immediate
138
Roger A. Clarke,
91.
139
Donald Filtzer,
141
Samuel H. Baron,
142
L. S. Bliakhman, A. G. Zdravomyslov and O. I. Shkaratan,
143
E. Z. Danilova,