Andrew rothstein

In the course of 1926-27, also, new forms of participation by the workers in the planning of their industry began to appear. One was the holding of special meetings to discuss the calculation of costs of production, which attracted much greater attendances than the general production conferences. At Kostroma the Department for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection formed “investigation teams” of volunteers from among the workers, jointly with representatives of trade unions, the Communist League of Youth, etc., to visit the factories and discuss their successes and shortcomings with the workers concerned. At Tver the local paper invited a number of workers to constitute a provincial “control commission” to act as a centre for stimulating the workers’ interest in production problems. This example was followed at Saratov and Rostov. “Production courts” were organised in a number of factories, to “judge” examples of bad output or bad work in front of a mass meeting of the workers, who were invited to discuss the reasons for these bad results. Yet another form developed in 1926-27 was “production excursions” to neighbouring works or shops in the same industry, usually for the purpose of learning how they managed to get better results than the excursionists, but occasionally for the opposite purpose. A remarkable result attended a “public inspection” organised by the Tver Pravda at the big Proletarka textile factory in that city. In the course of six weeks the workers made 2242 proposals concerning the industry—almost ten times more than the number made at production conferences in the course of a year. An indication of the method adopted, and of the response to it, is given by the fact that from 25% to 30% of the workers became “worker correspondents” of the Tver Pravda during the inspection.⁵

At the XV Congress of the C.P.S.U. in December, 1927—known in Soviet history as “the congress of collectivisation”, because by its far-reaching decisions on this question, and its final defeat of the internal Trotsky opposition within the Party, it prepared the way for the first Five Year Plan—the tale of results was very striking. The report given on behalf of the Central Committee stated that there was not the slightest doubt about the growth of the production conferences during the last two years. They had “struck root” in the shops, they were held more regularly, there was an increase in the number of workers participating. At Leningrad the numbers had gone up by 35%, in the Moscow metal industry by 40%, at Nizhni-Novgorod by 64%. The Central Council of Trade Unions now considered that about 15% of all workers in industry were directly participating (i.e., about 450,000, as against the 260,000 one year before). The main interest at the production conferences now centred on the improvement of the planned work of the enterprise—particularly on questions of repair and re-equipment, rationalisation and mechanisation. Thousands of proposals were being made by the workers, of which some four-fifths were being accepted, and the proportion being put into practice was also increasing: both at Moscow and at Leningrad it had risen to over 6o%.¹

The Congress once again declared the “most important and decisive condition” for the rationalisation of industry to be the drawing of the workers themselves into active co-operation. By “unleashing the initiative of the masses”, the trade unions would be playing a particularly important part. It called on them to “help backward sections of the proletariat to realise to the full that it is just the proletariat as a class that is the master of industry, that before it there open up vast prospects, provided there is tireless and unswerving progress in the industrialisation of the country, the rationalisation of its economy, the building of Socialism”.² This reference to the backward sections of the workers did not come by chance. The industrialisation of the country made it necessary not only to absorb completely the one-and-a-half million unemployed who were still registered at that time, but also to bring millions of new workers into industry, chiefly from the countryside. And in the countryside the vast majority of the peasants were still engaged in petty production, and far from Socialist in their outlook.

It is also relevant to remember that at this time relations with a number of countries had taken a sharp turn for the worse, following the raid on Arcos, Ltd., and the rupture of Anglo-Soviet diplomatic relations in the spring.

The seriousness with which the leading authorities of the U.S.S.R.—unlike many foreign economists—regarded the role of the Soviet workers in management is indicated by the sharp criticism made of the whole position a few months later, when the first case of planned wrecking had been discovered at the Shakhty collieries in the Donetz Basin. The positive achievements reported at the December Congress had been only a beginning. A joint resolution on the Shakhty case adopted by the Central Committee and Central Control Commission of the C.P.S.U., on 11th April, 1928, declared its dissatisfaction with the degree to which the masses were being drawn into the management of production.

“Information given to the workers as to the plan and progress of production is often of a formal character; questions of production, of its rationalisation, of capital works, etc., are not discussed at production meetings, while in some cases there is even persecution of workers for criticising defects in the work of managements. Trade unions do not work systematically at raising the importance of production meetings: meetings are badly organised, called irregularly, ignored by technicians and sometimes by Communist managers, and there is inadequate supervision of fulfilment of their decisions.”

The resolution demanded drastic changes in all these respects.³

This example of condemning complacent satisfaction at results already achieved, and of drawing attention to the amount of work ahead rather than to what had been done already, proved of considerable value in stimulating the work of the production conferences. No less important was the part played throughout 1928 by the campaign against the Right opposition in the Party: because it turned precisely upon the issue of whether Russia, with its working class as leader of all other classes, was capable of building a Socialist society unaided. And towards the end of the year there were signs that a new stage in Socialist emulation was approaching.

3. The Shock Brigades

At the Ravenstvo (“Equality”) textile factory at Leningrad a group of young workers in the ring-spinning department formed a “shock brigade” for the purpose of setting an example of good production, attendance to problems of costs and so forth. They secured an increase in speed of output of 8% on their own group of machines, and lowered costs by 4%. The movement gradually spread through the factory, and three months later 30% of its workers were in shock brigades. The initiative of these young workers aroused considerable interest, and a number of youth brigades were formed at factories in Zlatoust, in the Urals.⁴ At the end of 1927 a group of young workers at the “Communist Vanguard” textile factory at Sobinka (Vladimir province) had formed a “rationalisers’ group”. It began by discussing such questions as idle ventilating machinery, automatic switches, etc., and only gradually succeeded in enlisting the interest of some of the technicians of the factory. Overcoming a good deal of initial resistance on the part of the management, the Party organisation in the factory and adult workers, the group managed in the course of 1928 to extend its numbers to about 200, and to form further groups in various shops of the factory. This undertaking, too, aroused much attention.¹

In the meantime the production conferences also were showing a big advance. In the economic year from October, 1927, to September, 1928, the 135,000 workers of the great textile province of Ivanovo-Voznessensk made over 8000 proposals for improving industry. In the mining and engineering area of Lugansk during the same period 9500 proposals were made by 125,000 workers. In the mining district of Artemovsk, where there were about 120,000 workers, 8000 suggestions were made. In all, over fifteen industrial areas of the country the number of suggestions exceeded 62,000.² Quantity here was reaching such dimensions as to become quality. A new period in the development of Socialist emulation was opening.

The turning-point came like one of those decisive changes in physics or chemistry which occur when the “critical point” is reached in a gradual process. The occasion was the beginning of discussions on the first draft of the Five Year Plan, which was ultimately to be adopted at the XVI Conference of the C.P.S.U. in April, 1929. In January of that year the daily newspaper of Soviet youth, Komsomolskaya Pravda, suggested that the example of the youth shock brigades should be taken up nationally in the form of an “All-Union Socialist Emulation”. Pravda, the organ of the Communist Party, organised a “public inspection” of production conferences that lasted two months: about 300,000 suggestions were made by the workers during this period.³ The response to these initiatives was so great as to show that some development of the forms of emulation was overdue. Mines, factories, railway depots, ports, workers throughout the country from Leningrad to Siberia, and from Moscow to the southern Ukraine, responded with the formation of shock brigades, with challenges from works to works, and with agreements between shops, factories and entire industries pledging concrete and definite achievements in various spheres.

There can be no doubt about the nature of this movement. During the Pravda inspection of production conferences the number of workers’ suggestions at Ivanovo- Voznessensk rose to 60,000, i.e., one for every two or three workers, as against one for seventeen workers in the previous year. In the fifteen industrial areas of the country mentioned above the number of suggestions was 321,600—more than five times as many as in the previous year.⁴ Nor were these, and many other suggestions made during the inspection, merely idle chatter. During the economic year 1928-29 they brought down costs of production by 1.2% in the first quarter (October-December, 1928), 3.4% in the second, 6.3% in the third and 7.8% in the fourth. Productivity of labour throughout industry grew by 7% in the first quarter of the year and by 24% in the fourth quarter.⁵ This was the direct consequence of Socialist emulation, and it brought about the over-fulfilment of the plans for the first year of the Five Year Plan. A report given at the XVII Moscow provincial Party Conference (28th February, 1929) showed that at ninety-nine production conferences organised in January and February by the Moscow Committee of the C.P.S.U. tens of thousands of delegates had been present, representing over half a million factory workers and employees. In six textile trusts alone the result was a net economy, following upon workers’ suggestions, of 6 million roubles.⁶

On 8th April, 1929, at Tver (now Kalinin), a formal agreement was signed between the Proletarka factory, already mentioned, the Moscow Trekhgornaya Manufactura, which had challenged it, and by representatives of eight other factories: in all, the factory delegates of 58,000 workers signed the agreement. Its general aim was to lower costs and raise output, but the detailed discussions in the different factories had produced much more precise obligations. The Moscow factory was to lower costs by 7.7%—signifying a total economy of 3 million roubles. Its workers promised totally to eliminate bad output, which in 1928 had averaged 3½%. The general obligation undertaken by the factory meant correspondingly precise undertakings in the various departments. The net gain to individual workers by success in this emulation agreement would mean wages averaging 3.14 roubles per day, instead of 2.75 roubles at the beginning.⁷

A town conference of workers of Ivanovo-Voznessensk was held on 15th April, at which the delegates who had gone to Tver to sign the agreement made their report. Some characteristic extracts are worth quoting:

“I am afraid that by May 1st the Proletarka will attain such results as mil make it difficult for us to catch up with them. In March bad work was already reduced below the usual rate. The Tver workers are at present behind us in the individual output of each machine, but without doubt they will reach their objective.... We observed a unity among the workers which can only be compared with that witnessed during the days of the November Revolution.... We saw the enthusiasm which had taken hold of the workers. We saw absentees who swore to wipe out the ill-fame which they had earned.... We were particularly astonished by the cleanliness in the mechanical shop. It is something that cannot be paralleled in our factory....”

The factory should by then have been producing, according to plan, 618,000 metres a day.

“The workers in their agreement undertook to produce 680,000 metres: but right from the beginning of the emulation production reached the astounding figure of 940,000 metres per day. The spinning-mill, according to plan, should have produced 40,644 kilos of yarn per day. By the agreement the Proletarka workers undertook to produce 41,170 kilos, and they have already achieved this.”¹

If this detailed picture be multiplied some thousands of times in the mind’s eye of the reader, it will give a very rough outline sketch of what went on in the factories—and later the offices and villages—of the U.S.S.R. during 1929. From now on, the principles of workers’ emulation and of the planning of national economy in a Socialist State were bound up for good: and the problem became one of organisation, example and constant widening of the horizons of emulation, not of efforts to persuade.

The new stage was described in a manifesto “to all workers and working peasants of the Soviet Union”, adopted by the XVI Conference of the C.P.S.U. (29th April, 1929) on the subject of Socialist emulation. It was a stirring echo of the manifesto of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of February, 1920. It recalled to their memories the days of the first Subbotniks, and of the declaration of the IX Party Congress that “in capitalist society emulation bore the character of competition, and led to the exploitation of man by man. In society where the means of production have been nationalised, emulation in work does not infringe solidarity but must only increase the total sum of products of labour.” It urged the workers to develop their creative energies and their own education (particularly of the new workers coming from the villages and petty-bourgeoisie in the towns) by means of Socialist emulation. For this there was ample encouragement:²

“The Socialist emulation which has developed this year, on the initiative of the Lenin Communist League of Youth and of the Press, is more and more becoming a mighty mass movement. As a result of the first steps in emulation, the miners of the Donbass (Lugansk, Shakhty) in March exceeded the output programme for coal; the textile workers of Ivanovo, Tver and Moscow have concluded an economic and political agreement among themselves for the fulfilment of the industrial and financial plans of the present economic year; workers of the Urals, Leningrad, Dnepropetrovsk, Moscow and Rostov have set up hundreds of shock brigades and shock shifts; every day fresh groups of workers enter into emulation; already the collective farms and State farms of Ukraine are in emulation among themselves, and with them Siberia, North Caucasus, the Lower and Middle Volga have begun the campaign for the harvest and for collectivising agriculture.

“Labour heroism and devotion of the workers are also expressing themselves in voluntary increases in the quotas of output, in working on holidays, in the gigantic increase of suggestions at production conferences, in. the boycotting of idlers and absentees, in struggle to raise the productivity of labour....

“The shock brigades which are being set up in the factories and offices represent the continuation of the best traditions of the Communist Subbotniks. Inspections of production, challenges, examinations, etc., connected with the growing scope of the work of production meetings and conferences, are becoming of enormous importance for the whole cause of the building of Socialism. A new type of Socialist workman is growing in the Soviet works and factories. The role and the share taken by the masses of working people in the management of the State is growing….

“Emulation and the Five Year Flan are indissolubly interconnected.”

The following month Communists working in all spheres of business activity, and in the trade unions and factories, were given precise indications ³ of what the practical aims of Socialist emulation in the new conditions, as put before the workers for discussion, should be. They included the fulfilment and over-fulfilment of industrial and financial plans and of planned standards of reduced costs and increased productivity; improvement of the quality of output; the struggle against bad work and reduction of overhead charges; the struggle against absenteeism and for model labour discipline; the active effort to secure technically more perfect equipment, the rationalisation of production and the encouragement of workers’ inventiveness on the largest possible scale.