Russian Workers and the Politics of Social Identity

Abstract

L ewis Siegelbaum and Ronald Suny recently charted the shift in labor history from a materialist approach, which views social as a position within the relations of production, that has determinative consequences for consciousness, to a one, which treats as a set of ways of constructing reality by and for interested parties.1 The discursive approach to social looks not so much to the structured reordering of social relationships engendered by industrial capitalism and urbanization, as to the dissemination of discourses of understood as symbolically articulated social practices, which reorder the experience of social actors and mobilize support behind particular projects. This approach seems potentially well suited to Russian history, since was already writ large on the political and social landscape of late Imperial Russia at a time when the transition to industrial capitalism and urbanization was only just underway. In Soviet Russia, too, was integral to official ideology, yet social disintegration and the abolition of private property in the means of production had radically undermined classes as objective socioeconomic relationships. A discursive approach draws attention to the importance of political mechanisms in promoting identities. Down to 1917 the Tsarist government constructed social reality according to soslovie, that is, in terms of the rights and obligations of particular social groups to the state. The language of social by contrast, was a nonofficial idiom, and the category of working class, which became so influential after 1905, derived much of its force from the fact that it expressed opposition to the autocracy and its modernizing project. In Soviet Russia, too, as Sheila Fitzpatrick has pointed out, was constructed largely through political discourse. The Soviet regime undertook a reinvention of class that involved the ascription of identities to citizens so that the new regime (a self-defined dictatorship of the proletariat) could know its allies from its enemies.2