Identifying these problems was not the same as solving them. In any case, by the 1970s the Brezhnev administration had effectively curbed industrial reform efforts and the bolder forays of labour sociologists, preferring instead to tout the 'scientific-technological revolution' (NTR- nauchno-tekhnicheskaia revoliut- siia) as a panacea.[144] Clothed in Soviet Marxist ideological garb, the revolution was to promote inter alia 'the formation of a new type of worker who has mastered scientific principles of production and can ensure that the functioning of production and its future development will be based on the achievements of science and technique'. According to a post-Brezhnev-era assessment, however, 'CPSU leaders [had] yet to devise successful means of nurturing the NTR or of enhancing ample creative rather than duplicative capabilities'.[145]It remained for Gorbachev to try to break through the 'stagnation', first by emphasising the need for the 'acceleration of productive processes', and then when that accomplished little, by adopting more radical measures.
Enterprise paternalism
Despite the centralised nature of resource appropriation and redistribution imposed under Stalin and perpetuated by his successors, the day-to-day experience of workers was with enterprise administration, local party and trade union officials and fellow workers. Whatever came down from above in the way of plans, slogans, campaigns and resources, implementation ultimately depended on production relations in the workplace. Thus, rather than interpreting workers as having entered into some sort of 'social contract' with the state, it would be more appropriate to conceive of a mutuality of dependencies between managers and workers structured around what has been called enterprise paternalism.
Paternalism frequently crops up in both contemporary descriptions and historians' accounts of factory relations in pre-revolutionary Russia. While some owners are said to have been 'despotic' and others 'enlightened', the notion that their relationship with workers was more than purely contractual, that it involved a moral obligation to provide for workers' educational, cultural, spiritual and medical needs, seems to have been expected of them and, in many cases, was internalised. This was famously true of the textile magnates of the Central Industrial provinces, many of whom traced their ancestry to humble, serf origins and were of Old Believer faith.[146] But Muscovite and St Petersburg printing employers as well as southern mining and metallurgical owners (who were neither Old Believers nor, in many cases, Russian) also exhibited paternalism towards their workers.[147] In this respect, they were not all that far removed from the welfare capitalism practised by American firms during the Progressive Era.
Whether inspired by personal piety, civic responsibility or more calculating motives, factory paternalism could raise expectations among workers that, when unfulfilled, provoked strikes. In these as well as less volatile instances, the image ofthe beneficent father could quickly give way to less flattering ones. In any event, even before the revolutionary thunderstorm of 1905-6, workers were beginning to develop alternative conceptions of themselves which by emphasising the dignity of the individual, fraternal ties and class affiliation (as in 'the proletarian family') excluded owners and management.[148] Subsequent legislation providing for trade unions, sick-benefit funds, and other forms of worker representation further eroded the basis on which factory paternalism rested, and, of course, the October Revolution would sweep away the entire factory-owning class.
During the civil war years, enterprises experimented with a variety of collective or 'collegial' forms of management, usually involving shared responsibility among representatives of factory committees, trade unions and economic associations. Though favoured by many within the party and the trade unions, enterprise democracy could not withstand the economic collapse and the needs of state institutions on the one hand and the dwindling number of employees on the other. Lenin, who likened the harmoniously run factory to a symphony orchestra, emphasised strict accountability and 'one-man management' (edinonachalie), and it was this model that eventually prevailed.[149]
Directorships in industry were occupied throughout the 1920s by former trade union or factory committee activists of working-class origin, 'bourgeois specialists' whose social backgrounds and pre-revolutionary experience often dictated their shadowing by party officials, and party trouble-shooters. These Red Directors were cast by the party as 'commanders of production' and charged with reviving output, avoiding cost overruns and maintaining proper relations with the trade union committee, the party cell and their specialist assistants. Judging by a 1922 Pravda-sponsored contest for the best and worst directors, workers appreciated personal qualities such as simplicity, accessibility and energy. While some workers characterised a good director in paternal terms (Korshunov 'loves his workers, he takes pride in them, cares about them as if he were their own father'), others employed images of friendship and brotherhood.[150] As Diane Koenker concluded, the contest revealed
lewis h. siegelbaum
a 'fundamental ambivalence between the workers' director and the workers' state's director'.[151]
It would appear that with the launching of the 'socialist offensive' in the late 1920s that ambivalence was resolved in favour of directors' accountability to the state. The party's public campaign for edinonachalie, which was intended to eliminate the managerial parallelism of the director, party secretary and the factory trade union committee, and which culminated in new 'Model Regulations of Production Enterprises' of January 1930, certainly pointed in that direction.[152] So too did several resolutions ofthe party's Central Committee that granted ownership of factories' capital, the authority to plan production and set quotas and organise supplies and sales to superordinate production associations (trusts, ob"edineniia, glavki).[153]
However, these rules and resolutions were routinely violated for the simple reason that it was impossible for directors to abide by them and fulfil their production plans. From Stalin's standpoint, they were acting like 'conceited bigwig bureaucrats' who behaved as if'party decisions and Soviet laws are not written for them, but for fools'. They had to be brought down a peg or two and be 'put in their proper place', as he told the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934.[154] As for labour policy, the same directors exhibited the opposite tendency, namely, an unwillingness to exercise the punitive powers vested in them. Addressing a meeting of economic executives in 1934, M. M. Kaganovich attacked directors who wanted 'to play the "liberal" . . . The ground must shake when the director goes around the factory,' he asserted. A director who has become a liberal isn't worth half a kopeck. Workers do not like such a director. They like a powerful leader.'[155]
144
Vladimir Shlapentokh,
146
Thomas Owen,
147
Mark Steinberg,
149
E. H. Carr,
150
Diane Koenker, 'Factory Tales: Narratives of Industrial Relations in the Transition to NEP',
152
77 David Shearer,
154
J. V Stalin,