Kevin Murphy. Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory. International Studies in Social History Series. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. xi + 234 pp. Glossary, notes, index. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 1-57181-429-9.
Reviewed for H-Russia by Barbara C. Allen, History Department, La Salle University
From Hammer to Sickle and Back Again: Class Struggle Revisited
In this new work on early Soviet labor history, Kevin Murphy examines the behavior and attitudes of workers of the Hammer and Sickle Factory in Moscow from before the revolution through the First Five Year Plan, focusing on the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Murphy, who teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, based this study on his Ph.D. dissertation at Brandeis University. Grounded in prodigious archival research, Murphy's study illuminates workers' relationships with the Communist Party, Metalworkers' Union, and Soviet state during NEP. The author's interest in this topic grew out of his radical leftist political views and activities. Giving credit to Leon Trotsky and Tony Cliff (a British Trotskyist whose chief works were written in the 1950s-70s) for providing the theory on which he bases his research, the author challenges not only details but also basic assumptions of prior historiography on the period. Awarded the 2005 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize and lauded in the journal International Socialism, the book has been well received by some on the left. Murphy's "Cliff-style socialist" interpretation is not convincing, but the evidence he marshals reveals the myriad ways in which workers resisted and adapted to increasing state control over them and over production. The research represented in the book makes a valuable contribution to early Soviet labor history.[1]
The purported "class struggle" to which the title alludes is between workers and the Stalinist "state bureaucracy." This evolves from Tony Cliff's assessment of the USSR's political, social, and economic structure as "state capitalism." Murphy chooses the Hammer and Sickle Factory (prior to 1917 the "Guzhon Moscow Metalworks") as his subject because of its prominent role in early Soviet history. It was the largest metalworking factory in Moscow and served as an arena for debates among prominent revolutionaries and leaders of the Communist Party. The extensive source base for study of Hammer and Sickle includes newspapers; workers' memoirs; reports of the tsarist secret police, factory inspectors, and pre-revolutionary management; records of factory committees, union and party organizations; anonymous notes to speakers at factory assemblies during the 1920s and early 1930s; and informational reports (svodki) from soviets, unions, and party bodies. Murphy conducted much of his research in the Central Archive of Social Movements of Moscow (TsAODM), the Central Municipal Archive of Moscow, and the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF).
The book proceeds chronologically but treats NEP thematically. The author focuses on the NEP era to show how this period represented a transition from the "ideals of 1917" to "Stalinism." His goal is to understand and explain the transformations that occurred in the relationship of the workers with the state, party, and unions from 1917 to 1932. The strongest chapters are the three on NEP, which treat the themes of class conflict, everyday life, and dissent. The section on Civil War is somewhat weaker and underestimates the importance of political transformations at the top for later development of worker-state relations.
In chapter 1, "The Emerging Working Class Movement," Murphy surveys the Guzhon Factory from its establishment in 1883 through 1916. Iulii Petrovich Guzhon, the founder, was born in France and came to Moscow in 1871; he had a reputation as a paternalistic, "enlightened industrialist" and tried to defuse unrest among workers by dispensing charity, opening schools for workers' children, and various other measures. He firmly resisted making concessions to workers who went on strike. During World War I, Guzhon workers initially displayed patriotic, anti-German sentiments, but with time this transmuted into anti-Tsarism. The Socialist Revolutionary (SR) party, the prevailing political party among Guzhon workers, led strikes in the factory during World War I.[2] There appear to have been very few Bolsheviks among Guzhon workers. Murphy's strong affinity for the Bolsheviks does not prevent him from allowing his sources to show that the SR had far greater influence among workers, but he attributes this to tsarist repression of Bolsheviks rather than to worker receptivity to the SR program.
Chapter 2, "Revolution and Collective Action, Civil War and Personal Survival," finds Guzhon workers turning out to express support for the February Revolution in Petrograd (apparently with management approval) and forming a factory committee. As in other factories, workers sought supervision over management and fairer wage distribution. The SRs were militant leaders in this campaign. In the early months of the revolution, workers gave overwhelming support to the SRs and showed hostility to Bolsheviks. Murphy distinguishes workers' support for SR economic demands from what he sees as increasing worker support for Bolsheviks on politics. Nevertheless, his numbers show that as worker support for Bolsheviks grew in summer 1917, support for SRs grew as well. In fact, as Murphy's numbers show, SR supporters far outnumbered Bolsheviks in the factory (one hundred eighty SRs to twenty Bolsheviks in June 1917). Murphy does show cooperation among Bolsheviks and SR in everyday factory operations.
Murphy's research findings on an SR majority in the factory contradict his ideological mentor Tony Cliff's assertion of support for Bolsheviks across Russia. Unwilling to revise Cliff's version, Murphy assumes that Guzhon Factory is an exception to the general rule and concludes that the Bolshevik cell in Guzhon factory must have been weaker than Bolshevik cells in other factories. In line with Cliff, Murphy sees a Bolshevik-SR dichotomy on the radical left, whereas a recent analytical survey of 1917 by Rex Wade marshals much evidence from recent research to demonstrate that the dichotomy was actually between moderate socialists and a radical left consisting of Left SRs, Bolsheviks and Menshevik-Internationalists.[3] Where Cliff perceives Bolshevik hegemony, Wade discerns Bolshevik leadership of a radical left coalition. Murphy would have done better to rely for background information on Wade's 2000 study rather than Cliff's sectarian studies, which were published thirty to fifty years ago and are hardly classics in the field of Russian historical studies.
The Metalworkers' Union appears to have been far more successful than either Bolsheviks or SRs in attracting workers as members. By mid-September 1917, the Metalworkers' Union had three thousand dues-paying members at Guzhon Factory, whereas the leftist political parties had only a few hundred supporters. Clearly, workers were more easily convinced of the union's ability and willingness to defend their interests than they were of the political parties' devotion to this goal.
Murphy's brief treatment of the Russian Civil War demonstrates that the roles of management, the factory committee, and Communist Party cell in the Moscow Metalworks (formerly Guzhon) often intersected, and these bodies generally cooperated with one another. His sources show that the Metalworkers' Union played a prominent role in running the factory. In 1918-19 the factory committee was dominated by the Metalworkers' Union. While five hundred to eight hundred workers regularly attended factory-wide meetings to discuss factory committee decisions, only a couple of dozen attended Bolshevik cell meetings in 1920-21. Thus, the union's strength at the factory level far surpassed that of the party.
Murphy asserts that conviction rather than opportunity drove party members during the Civil War, noting that members were punished for breaches of discipline. Another example of conviction, in his eyes, was that several hundred workers from Moscow Metalworks volunteered for the Red Army (he attributes low attendance at party meetings partly to their departure). Despite the conviction displayed by party members, Murphy argues that "class consciousness" rapidly deteriorated during the Civil War, as workers sought "personal survival" during times of low wages and lack of food. Due to the fuel crisis, production at Moscow Metalworks dropped in 1920 to 2 percent of the 1914 figures. The number of workers at the factory fell from 2805 in 1917 to 772 in June 1920; many simply remained in the countryside after leaving for holidays (pp. 66-70).
Despite workers' extremely difficult material conditions, they appear not to have blamed the revolution or the Communist Party for their problems. Meetings showed little sign of "open anti-Soviet agitation" in 1920; rather, there prevailed the tendency to discuss practical measures to resolve problems with food and fuel supply. Work stoppages due to lack of supplies or exhaustion were not accompanied by political demands. A strike wave in late 1920 and early 1921 did not give rise to counterrevolutionary moods.[4] Nevertheless, Soviet secret police reports advised that the Communist Party insufficiently influenced workers.
The number of workers in Moscow Metalworks started rising as the Civil War neared an end; by the end of 1921, there were 1412 workers. Insisting that workers were not crushed by a repressive state (he cites responses of flight, work stoppages, lax work discipline, and theft as individualistic responses to low wages and short supplies), Murphy nevertheless describes the economic crisis of the Civil War as having atomized factory workers' class solidarity. It bears emphasizing, however, that Workers' Opposition leader Alexander Shliapnikov did not share Murphy's point of view when he joked at the Eleventh Party Congress that the Bolsheviks were the vanguard of a nonexistent class (p. 73). Rather, Shliapnikov, a Marxist with a well-developed sense of irony, was mocking Bolshevik leaders' overly hasty attempt (in his opinion) to abandon the cause of worker initiative and self-organization. Shliapnikov, correctly or not, was confident that a kernel of proletarian consciousness and solidarity remained among Russian workers and that to flourish it only needed the trust and support of Soviet leaders.
The Civil War was a crucial period in the transformation of the political relationship between higher Party, state, and union organs. Murphy, focusing on developments on the factory floor and intent on proving that mid to late NEP was when the "bureaucracy" began to prevail over revolutionary ideals, fails to see how the much earlier institution of Party controls over trade unions laid the groundwork for elimination of local autonomy and initiative and for the harnessing of the population to achieving the goals of the state and Party leadership. Party leaders deprived workers of institutional channels for expressing major grievances and achieving resolution of them. The semblance of such channels remained at the factory level, but workers' true leadership had been decapitated and replaced with leaders willing to submit to Politburo directives. Although political changes at the top did not force workers into complete submission, Murphy's contention that independent political networks among workers were still viable during NEP is not entirely convincing.
In following chapters, the author explores more deeply workers' expression of grievances and hopes for reform. In 1922, the Moscow Metalworks (formerly Guzhon) was renamed the Hammer and Sickle Factory. The size of the workforce grew rapidly, until by 1924 more workers were employed than in 1914. Production had recovered by 1927. Unions and trusts agreed on contracts regulating wages, while rates conflict commissions seemed successful in arbitrating many disputes over wages not set by contract. Murphy's third chapter, "Class Conflict during the N.E.P," portrays a nuanced relationship between workers and factory-level management, trade union and Communist Party organizations. According to Murphy, workers believed until too late that factory-level party and union organizations and leaders would defend them, thus failing to seek alternative representative structures that would openly challenge the regime. Murphy skillfully demonstrates how, during NEP, factory-level Party and trade union structures that initially advocated workers became weaker in their ability to defend them and were pushed ever more into the role of cajoling, pressuring, and intimidating workers into increasing productivity. This process apparently began earlier in the party cell than in the Metalworkers' Union.
The argument regarding the "class" nature of the conflict between workers and the state remains somewhat unclear and insufficiently supported, but chapter 3 holds fascinating detail about party meetings at the shop level. At general factory assemblies, workers in early and mid-NEP were vocal and outspoken. They expressed, for example, some interesting nuances in workers' attitudes toward "international solidarity." While they did not support "international solidarity organizations" set up by the party, they did respond sympathetically in specific cases involving international solidarity. Hammer and Sickle workers donated money to help British workers during their 1926 strike and attended large mass education meetings where they expressed curiosity about the lives and behavior of English workers. Some skeptical workers pointed out the disparities between Soviet leaders' concern for English workers but apparent lack of it in regard to Soviet workers. Murphy thinks Hammer and Sickle workers were truly discouraged and demoralized by the USSR's failure to spread revolution elsewhere, but he finds only one area of state policy that attracted significant worker criticism: the tax on peasants, which workers with rural ties criticized. As the number of workers grew at the factory, with many of them coming from the countryside, sympathy toward peasant grievances was strong. In 1928, anonymous notes to speakers expressed concern about the peasants' plight.
Communist Party membership at the factory grew from 60 in 1921 to 690 in 1926, but dropped in 1927-28 so drastically that the party started rejecting requests to leave and refusing to expel workers for not paying dues (p. 86). Murphy attributes the drop to the party's increasingly "productivist" role. The union appears to have attracted far more support than the party. Even though union membership became voluntary after 1922, 97 percent of over four thousand workers were union members in January 1927 (p. 95). Murphy reports that during early NEP meetings of the Metalworkers' Union, where a majority of delegates were not Communist Party members, meetings were "volatile," indicating lively debate within the union. In 1925-26, the union successfully protected working hours and limited overtime, but in late NEP, workers began to find fault with unions' work on their behalf; still, unions were relegated to "productivist" roles only in the First Five Year Plan.
By late NEP, wage cuts were regularly inserted into collective agreements, which were no longer being discussed openly and were being foisted on workers, who submitted to them out of fear of unemployment. Yet, Murphy's data shows that workers were by no means quiet and submissive during 1928, the final year of NEP. Workers at Hammer and Sickle conducted two brief strikes that year protesting the lowering of wages; still, this was evidence that demands had become defensive rather than offensive (during early NEP, workers had struck for higher wages).
Worker dissent by 1928 could not be expressed openly at meetings, but was confined to anonymous notes to speakers. Such evidence should be used with reservations, since it cannot be determined how representative these anonymous authors were of the general workforce. Nevertheless, such evidence does show that there was neither universal terrorization of workers nor universal admiration of "evolving Stalinism" among workers. Murphy might be overly optimistic in asserting that a specific "galvanizing" event could have rallied workers to openly challenge the regime.
Murphy discusses workers' everyday life at Hammer and Sickle under NEP. In chapter 4, he focuses on women, religion, and alcoholism. His findings are not surprising, but they serve to illustrate known trends with interesting examples at the factory level and they introduce instructive nuances and variants. We see women workers during early NEP as activists in trying to improve the situation of women within the factory; women blame peasants for taking their jobs in 1928. Reports show workers' concern over whether to celebrate Christmas according to the new or old calendars. A factory assembly supported the 1922 campaign to seize church valuables, but attendance was lower than usual, which might have indicated indecision or passive nonsupport. In 1928, many workers continued to observe Christmas, contrary to management's decision to treat Christmas holidays as regular working days. Hammer and Sickle workers preferred sports and film to politics. More than three times as many workers attended factory club soccer matches as attended factory general meetings; films attracted far larger audiences than did political meetings.
Nevertheless, some workers showed consistent interest and participation in politics. Hammer and Sickle is a useful arena for studying oppositionists' interactions with workers. As the largest metalworking factory in Moscow, it attracted high profile oppositionists and attention from party leaders. All the usual mechanisms for undermining the opposition could be witnessed there. Murphy writes that oppositionists found workers more responsive to economic demands on issues that directly affected them than to matters of ideology. He very aptly notes the importance of studying dissent at the local level, as issues there often did vary from discussions at "the heights." Chapter 5 discusses the role political opposition groups played within the factory from the Civil War into the First Five Year Plan, focusing on the NEP years.Much worker support for the Left SRs remained through the Civil War years, despite the vicissitudes in their fortunes. The Left SR (LSR) party won an important election for the factory committee in May 1919, but the Bolshevik-controlled Metalworkers' Union cancelled the results. In spring 1921, LSR sympathizers again took over the factory committee from the Bolsheviks and delegated two LSRs as representatives to soviets. There were still signs of LSR support in the factory in January 1922. In May 1922 workers voted their support for the trial of LSR leaders, but workers apparently expected and wanted light sentences. December 1922 elections in the factory showed some support for LSRs and for Shliapnikov of the former Workers' Opposition. LSRs continued to have significant support in Hammer and Sickle into 1923 (pp. 160-163). Murphy's sympathy for the Bolsheviks does not prevent him from revealing the depth of workers' support for the Left SRs, but he regards this as an exception. The exceptionality of Hammer and Sickle workers in this area, however, might not withstand scrutiny if other factory archives are studied.
The factory Communist Party organization supported the Workers' Opposition in 1921, which is not surprising given the strength of the Metalworkers' Union in the factory (p. 156). Unfortunately, documents do not exist for discussion of the Workers' Opposition's program within the factory. Likewise, documents do not prove the presence of supporters of Gavril Miasnikov's Workers' Group in the factory, but Murphy thinks it likely, and his intuition is probably correct on this count. He appropriately notes that there is no evidence that Hammer and Sickle workers denounced the Workers' Opposition after the Tenth Party Congress. Specialists and archivists who work with trade union archival materials from the early 1920s suspect that some of those who supported the Workers' Opposition in 1921 and who were not removed from their posts within party and trade union organizations culled the records to remove evidence of their old oppositionist stances. This no doubt applies to the records at Hammer and Sickle as well as elsewhere.
Murphy spends far more space in his book discussing the Trotskyist (or Left) Opposition than earlier ones. This is to be expected, since the Trotskyists' activity falls squarely within the period he sees as crucial for the birth of Stalinism and since Murphy is an admirer of Trotsky. In 1923, Trotskyists came close to capturing the Hammer and Sickle Communist Party cell. Murphy suspects the vote was manipulated to prevent a Trotskyist victory. Murphy notes that Evgeny Preobrazhensky, well-known economist, RCP(b) Central Committee member, and prominent Left Oppositionist, spoke at Hammer and Sickle. He alludes to Preobrazhensky's statement in the Politburo in December 1923 that "wherever I speak at a meeting, a resolution on my report was adopted almost always" to support his contention that Trotskyists were cheated out of victory at Hammer and Sickle (p. 165). Although Murphy's evidence for fraud is skimpy and circumstantial, this is a plausible scenario and deserves mention. In my research on the Workers' Opposition, I found that at least in one case in 1921, a party organization voted for the Leninist Platform of the Ten, but then composed and passed a resolution that was far more similar to the platform of the Workers' Opposition. It is not inconceivable that the Trotskyists of the Hammer and Sickle factory underwent a similar experience in 1923.
Factional struggle was renewed in a more intense form in 1926 and 1927 when Trotsky joined with Zinoviev and Kamenev in the United Opposition. Murphy finds that Stalin supporters whipped up both war fears and anti-Semitism in the factory as weapons against the United Opposition but subsequently took measures to defuse the latter, expelling a member of the Hammer and Sickle Party cell for anti-Semitism. Here, it should be pointed out that Stalin was not the only key figure complicit in spreading hysteria; Bukharin and others were equally culpable. Hammer and Sickle workers expressed criticism of official policies as well as "qualified support for the [United] Opposition" in shop-level meetings. At general factory meetings, workers gave formal support to the Politburo majority, but anonymous written questions from workers to speakers revealed criticism of party leaders and support for the right of Oppositionists to speak and criticize. Again, the representative nature of such notes is questionable, yet their existence is a notable testament to the existence of dissent and to some workers' determination to express it rather than suppress it. Perhaps such workers hoped to sway some in the country's leadership. Murphy's account is valuable because it shows that behind the late 1927 general meetings' expressions of support for the anti-Oppositionist campaign there was genuine disagreement.
Murphy attributes the United Opposition's failure to several factors. Supporters of the Stalin-Bukharin majority used "humiliation and intimidation to try to break the opposition," including ridicule as "freaks and clowns" (p. 172). These methods were not as new as Murphy thinks; they were certainly applied in 1921-22 against the Workers' Opposition and earlier against non-Bolsheviks. Trotsky and his supporters were among those who used dirty tricks to suppress the Workers' Opposition; this makes it all the more difficult to regard them as advocates of democracy within the party. Murphy only mildly faults United Opposition leaders for "advances and retreats" that "caused confusion in their ranks" (p. 169). In fact, however, these men abjectly submitted to the Politburo majority in October 1926 and denounced other Opposition figures, leaving many of their supporters and associates in the lurch until the next rally forward in spring of 1927. Although anonymous notes expressed opposition to slander of the Oppositionists, most politically unaffiliated workers at Hammer and Sickle were indifferent to the political struggles within the party and a majority of party members were unwilling to align with either side.
The last opposition Murphy discusses is the Trade Union Opposition of 1928. It is questionable if this should even be called an opposition since its alleged leaders did not attempt to harness support among workers or rank-and-file party members. Nevertheless, they did receive support from factory level leaders who probably felt their fates inextricably bound to those of top union leaders.[5]
Murphy's final chapter explores the effects of the First Five Year Plan on the Hammer and Sickle workforce, which grew 300 percent from 1929 to 1932, with most of the new workers coming from the countryside. Wages were cut and hours lengthened; new workers were housed in hastily constructed barracks around Moscow; labor turnover was high, due largely to poor housing. Hammer and Sickle had its share of outstanding shock workers, but many workers resisted shock work for fear that short-term success in raising productivity would lower wages for the majority of workers in the long term. Hammer and Sickle workers, according to Murphy, were also resistant to regime calls to go to the countryside to carry out collectivization.[6] Religious sentiment among workers remained strong; at the end of 1930, two-thirds of worker marriages still took place in church. This chapter would have benefited through greater engagement with David Hoffmann's findings on the massive peasant in-migration to Moscow. Unfortunately, Murphy dismisses Hoffmann's innovative study because he disagrees with the author's flexible approach toward the question of identity formation. Murphy doggedly pursues class as the highest analytical category.[7]
Murphy found no organized oppositional movements at Hammer and Sickle during the First Five Year Plan. Nevertheless, workers expressed their frustrations with the regime through graffiti and anonymous notes to speakers.[8] The workforce, he argues, was neither swayed by propaganda into supporting Stalinism nor whipped into submission through repression and terror. Rather, the threat of hunger played the chief role in workers' lack of active resistance to infringements on their rights and privileges. Finally, Murphy asserts, workers were plagued by "lack of confidence in their own collective power" (p. 226). Murphy sees a subordination of the working class to state "productivist" goals as "firmly entrenched" by 1932.
Revolution and Counterrevolution is a very good account of how workers at one important factory in Moscow experienced the many economic and political transformations in early Soviet history, but the interpretation is flawed because it is based on the insufficiently supported assumption that there existed a bureaucratic "class" with which workers struggled. Certainly, Murphy's account confirms that at Hammer and Sickle, as throughout much of the rest of Soviet society, dissent and criticism at the factory level were never completely eradicated, although they were stifled and denied public expression by the end of the 1920s.[9] Workers resented the privileges they perceived Soviet leaders to have and the hypocrisy they thought existed at the top, but there were no obvious signs of "class struggle." Murphy's rigid and dualistic approach to NEP-era social relations is problematic, considering the rapid social transformations occurring in Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s. The social origins of the urban workforce and of the administrative elite, among other groups, were remade. Therefore, standard class analysis is inadequate in interpreting new archival evidence. Murphy would do better to consider more seriously Hoffmann's and others' findings showing how workers newly arrived from the countryside sustained informal networks that provided mutual aid and means of resisting control from above. Such informal networks, encompassing ties of kinship and friendship, must have played as important a role as class in workers' lives.
NEP should rightly be regarded as a transitional period, but Murphy is incorrect that it was more significant than the era of the Civil War in accounting for the emergence of controlling tendencies from above and the suppression of initiative from below. Emasculation of trade unions in 1921-22 (of which the 1928 move against unions was a pale copy) was a major step on the path to dictatorship. The Communist Party's unwillingness to allow the existence of rival centers of power in the early 1920s and the exclusion of some social and political categories of people from full rights as citizens during the Civil War were far more serious steps toward dictatorship and exploitation than the questionable formation of a so-called state bureaucracy in the mid to late 1920s.
The printing and copyediting are of high quality, with minimal typographical errors. Citations are presented as endnotes to each chapter; unfortunately, there is no bibliography. Perhaps a few expressions in the text could have been rephrased more smoothly. While an accurate translation from Russian, the expression "nonparty workers" sounds awkward in English and not quite comprehensible to those who do not speak Russian. Perhaps "politically unaffiliated workers" would be better. Other odd phrases, such as the "reformist logic of Western social democracy," apparently spring from the author's sectarian past, but are bewildering to a reader poorly versed in radical leftist politics. Nevertheless, the book contributes to expanding our understanding of early Soviet labor history.
Notes
[1]. The substantial work that has been done on early Soviet labor history is too extensive to list here, but selected studies pertaining largely to Moscow are: William Chase, Workers, Society and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918-1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Kenneth M. Straus studied Hammer and Sickle, among other factories in the same district (Proletarskii) of Moscow, in his Factory and Community in Stalin's Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), but Murphy's source base is more extensive than that of Straus. Simon Pirani of Essex University is writing a dissertation on Moscow workers from 1920 to 1924, which is based largely on archival files that were not accessible before the mid-1990s. His study promises to shed new light on the lives of workers and their attitudes toward the Communist Party, Soviet state, and trade unions and will offer a more nuanced approach than that of Murphy.
[2]. For the role of the state in this violence, see Eric Lohr, "Patriotic Violence and the State: The Moscow Riots of May 1915," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 3 (Summer 2003): pp. 607-626. For more on the SRs during World War I, see Michael Melancon, The Socialist Revolutionaries and the Russian Anti-War Movement, 1914-1917 (CITY: Ohio State University Press, 1991).
[3]. Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
[4]. Sergei Viktorovich Iarov observes that workers in Petrograd, like those in Moscow, did not voice counterrevolutionary sentiments when they demonstrated, went on strike, or voiced grievances. See his Proletarii kak politik: politicheskaia psikhologiia rabochikh Petrograda v 1917-1923 gg. (St. Petersburg: Dimitrii Bulanin, 1999).
[5]. Charters Wynn's biography of trade union leader Mikhail Tomsky (in progress) might offer significant new findings on the 1928 Trade Union Opposition.
[6]. Here Murphy takes issue with the findings of Lynne Viola in Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Murphy's finding that many workers were not enthusiastic about collectivization, however, does not necessarily mean that none were. Hoffmann discovered that young workers of urban origins and those from the countryside often came into conflict. Murphy's account does not mention whether workers' views on collectivization might have been tied to their social origins.
[7]. Murphy rejects Sheila Fitzpatrick's and Stephen Kotkin's 1990s work that reinterpreted class and de-emphasized it as a category of analysis. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia," Journal of Modern History 65, no. 4 (1993): pp. 745-770; and Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
[8]. The workers of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, in contrast, were far more militant in their resistance to Stalinist policies. See Jeffrey Rossman, Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
[9]. Sarah Davies has published a notable work that discusses the attitudes of ordinary people toward the Soviet regime after the First Five-Year Plan. See Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia : Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Copyright (c) 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: [mailto]hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.[/mailto]