Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization

This is a detailed study of the position of Soviet industrial workers during the Khrushchev period. Dr Donald Filtzer examines the main features of 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 de-Stalinization had to be carried out without undermining the essential power and property relations on which the Stalinist system had been built. The author convincingly demonstrates how labour policy was thus limited to superficial gestures of liberalization and tinkering with incentive schemes. Rather than achieving any lasting effects, the Khrushchev period saw the consolidation of a long-term tendency towards economic stagnation. In his conclusions, Filtzer shows how the labour problems under Khrushchev were the same as those which confronted Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika, thus helping to explain the failures of Gorbachev's policies.