Work and Soviet Society after Stalin: Discourses of ‘Labour Discipline’ and the Law in the USSR, 1956–1991

Abstract

Perestroika in the USSR began in earnest with the attempt to democratize the workplace and ‘activize’ worker participation in political and economic life. This new approach, however, also owed much to debates and ideas in Soviet academic institutions over at least a decade before Gorbachev became General Secretary, and was itself an outcome of the turns in and the failures of earlier policies and experiments in improving Soviet economic performance and state functioning after Stalin's death. Much of this debate pivoted on the question of realizing high ‘labour discipline’, generally seen as the qualitative advantage the Soviet system possessed over its rivals. Soviet sociologists, but also legal theorists, analysed and debated the effects of different approaches and posited alternatives in opaque arguments presented in journals such as Soviet State and Law. By 1980, a set of ideas had crystallized in the liberal ‘official intelligentsia’ that was to have a great influence during the Soviet state's final decade. This article consequently takes in the discussion and presentation of major policy initiatives on increasing worker discipline in the Soviet legal press, from the public pressure campaign under Khrushchev to the Kosygin reform during the late 1960s, and the strengthening of the socio-economic controls of the ‘work collective’ under Brezhnev into the 1970s. It tracks the shifts from the 1960s in certain ideological assumptions on the nature of individual motivation, crime, citizenship, the influence of objective and social conditions, and the role of the state that prefigured the transformative changes that began from the mid-1980s.