Labour After Communism

"Yes. It’s too little known and is by far the best book on the subject. It’s really about the labour movement, the workers’ movement – specifically the autoworkers in Russia – though it includes some research from Ukraine and Belarus. It answers what, for me, is one of the biggest enigmas about Russia in the 90s and the Putin years. Namely, that this country – which has such a big history of revolt and a workers’ movement going back even long before the revolution to peasant revolts and rebellions – has been extremely quiet both during the 90s, when it suffered an enormous slump, a catastrophe in terms of their living standards, and also in the 2000s when living standards have been improving but not equally. Some of these inequalities that emerged so starkly in the 90s have widened in Putin’s Russia. This book is, first of all, a great account of trade unionism in the car industry, but it goes much deeper into why the labour movement has suffered under the dead weight of communism, and the inertia and fear it produced in a whole generation of Russian workers, even though it was supposed to be a workers’ paradise. The author was deported from the Soviet Union for trying to interview workers who participated in the workers’ uprising in Novocherkassk in 1963. He is the foremost expert on the Russian workers’ movement. His main point is that those years and years of dictatorship were very thorough in the workplace, producing workplace relationships completely unlike anything that people think of in typical capitalist industrial societies. Here the trade union was literally part of the management, and worked not just hand in glove with management but was also a cog in the management wheel. Anyone who tried to have a voice in the workplace was severely dealt with. The shadow of that has lingered, and it’s only now with new generations coming into the workplace that it has begun to change. There are now good news stories about people organising themselves and finding a collective voice, but those stories often concern a younger generation who don’t know the fear of Soviet times."