Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika

"During the time of perestroika, there was a lot of discussion about whether or not perestroika had always been inevitable, whether the collapse of the USSR was inevitable from the beginning, and, also, what Gorbachev had been trying to achieve with perestroika. People looked at this from a legal point of view, and from a macro-economic point of view, or from a global political view. Filtzer had already been writing about the legislation relating to the Soviet worker, with his first two volumes on labour law covering the Stalin and Khruschev periods respectively. He’d written Soviet Workers and De-Stalinisation and this book completes the third in his trilogy. The reason why it’s absolutely brilliant is basically because he analyses what it was like to be a worker in the Soviet Union in 1985. At that time Soviet workers had virtual security of employment, there was little labour mobility, workers were guaranteed a job, you didn’t do any work, you got very little pay and you had no stake in the running or success of the business. “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” went the joke at the time. Filtzer gives you a picture of a legal regime that provided the backdrop and incentives for this type of behaviour. You ask why the Soviet Union had problems! You don’t need to look at the macro-economics. You just need to look at the Soviet work and the so-called “job” they were doing. Filtzer goes through and looks at the legislation of the perestroika period as a way of trying to get round the problems in the labour market, trying to incentivise workers to do, basically, what we do anyway – work hard and have the right to receive a salary that is linked to performance – while at the same time struggling with the encroachment of “capitalist” principles of “unemployment” and “unequal pay”. People ask what perestroika was about – glasnost, political freedom, openness, independence for Eastern European states? But at its most basic level, in the economic sphere, it was arguably just about getting the workers motivised and incentivised – democratizing the workplace by giving back to the worker the economic freedom (and rewards that go with it) that was seized by the state in the late 1920s with the nationalisation of the industrial economy and state planning – ideally without the whole system collapsing. He looks at the period 1985-1991 and goes through each attempt to create labour markets, the attempts to democratise the workplace with labour collectives, the end of price controls, self-financing companies with their own budget, and how it all ultimately failed and how it continued to fail, in essence because in 1991 the state still owned all the major enterprises and stepped back from more radical solutions. Unless you can give full ownership back to the worker and give him a stake in the economic success of the company, how are you going to incentivise the factory manager to skip the holiday he feels he’s entitled to in order to finish off that critical summer project? Well, maybe on the barricades in 1917 it was. Indeed the Soviets did believe that they were creating, through law and their political environment, a “new type of man” – homo sovieticus – a collectivist working for the common good. But after you’ve watched all your friends die in wars and famines you might think differently. And by 1970, obviously, you’ve just had enough. Inertia creeps in. You’d ask someone what kind of place they lived in and they’d say either a one- or two-bedroom apartment and you knew exactly what it looked like because all one-bedroom apartments were absolutely identical, as was the case for the two-bedroom variety – there was in fact a comedy film made about this in Soviet times. You might not intuitively read a book about Soviet workers and labour law, but this book is compelling for anyone who is interested in why the Soviet economy was in such a a dire situation, and how the political leaders struggled to change things within the limits of the prevailing Soviet ideology. Why are there problems in the economy? Why are we in this mess? Because individuals are acting in a particular way. A fixed salary, targets you pretend to meet, no incentive – no wonder!"