Men against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia: Gender and Class in the Socialist Workplace

Abstract

RUSSIAN WORKERS have carried a heavy burden. Branded by conservative historians as uncultured, irrational, and manipulated by Machiavellian political actors, they were long portrayed by cruder spokespersons for Soviet dogma as men of marble, heroic fighters for proletarian independence, the repository of progress and virtue. Within the last twenty years, new generations of scholars in the West and in the USSR have combined to challenge these extreme stereotypes, and they have looked broadly at the experience of workers at work, at home, and in politics. Nonetheless, in rescuing workers from their enemies and their friends, in attempting to valorize Russian workers on their own terms, historians have tended to emphasize a new ideal type: the intelligent, autonomous skilled worker, a rational actor in a complicated world, a person who valued dignity and self-worth, oxne who prized solidarity and equality. These values and this image of workers underlay organized labor movements before 1917 and helped to shape the course of the and the building of socialism that followed. This focus on heroic and independent figures has tended to blur aspects of working-class culture and life that appear less heroic and less worthy. These model workers themselves condemned elements of worker behavior that did not conform to their image of true class consciousness, elements that are now receiving new attention by historians of Russian workers: drunkenness, violence, anti-Semitism, and misogyny.' It is time to reconsider the extent to which the working-class culture that made the revolution was an exclusively masculine

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