Toward an Understanding of Soviet Labor: A Review Essay

Abstract

From the moment that the workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk went on strike and the depth and power of the Solidarity movement in Poland became ob vious, political analysts and other interested observers have been asking: can it happen in the U.S.S.R., will Soviet workers follow the path of their Polish breth ren? That few people had any plausible answers to such questions should not be surprising given the paucity of western scholarship on Soviet labor and workers. Only recently have westerners begun to conduct serious research in this area. Gaps in the literature remain significant, but with the appearance of the three volumes under review the direction of future research has been charted more clearly and the questions to which answers may be found now can be formulated with more preci sion. Much work remains to be done, but some of the studies presented in these three collections provide sound foundation. volume edited by Kahan and Ruble is collection of papers from 1977 conference on Industrial Labor in the USSR held at the Keenan Institute. As Kahan states in the Introduction, the volume represents a first attempt to end the West's benign neglect of Soviet industrial labor . . . This is, in many respects, 'state-of-the-art' book. As such it is quite successful. work is divided into five topical sections. Part I, entitled The Soviet Industrial Labor Force: A Por trait, consists of essays by M. Feshbach on the structure and composition of the