Soviet workers and de-Stalinization

by Donald A. Filtzer

This is the first comprehensive study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Donald Filtzer examines the main features of Khrushchev's labour policy, shop-floor relations between workers and managers, the position of women workers and their specific role in the Soviet economy. Filtzer argues that the main concern of Khrushchev's labour policy was to remotivate an industrial population left demoralized by the Stalinist terror. This meant persuading workers to surrender defensive shop-floor tactics of lax discipline and poor-quality work. Yet this 'de-Stalinization' had to be carried out without undermining the essential power and property relations on which the Stalinist system had been built and Filtzer convincingly demonstrates that labour policy had to be limited to superficial gestures of liberalization and tinkering with incentive schemes. Rather than achieving any lasting effects, the Khrushchev period saw the consolidation of the long-term decl