LABOR AND POLITICS IN NEP RUSSIA: WORKERS, TRADE UNIONS, AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY IN MOSCOW, 1921-1926 (WORKING CLASS, MANAGEMENT, INDUSTRY, STALINISM, LENINISM)

This dissertation is a study of Party-worker relations in Moscow during 1921-1926. Western historiography has traditionally stressed the Communist Party's long-term isolation from the working class and its reliance on repressive and administrative means to maintain its rule. But although the Party's isolation from the working class was substantial, it was neither total nor permanent. Rather, it was undergoing a process of redefinition while organizational arrangements within the Party were being settled and the working class itself reconstituted. Factory and trade union archives in the holdings of the Central State Archive of the October Revolution are used in conjunction with official publications, the daily press, statistical compilations, and Menshevik sources as this study's major sources of information.; By 1923 it was clear that a revitalized workers' movement worked at cross purposes to the Party's industrial policies. Fueled by economic grievances and characterized by resilient traditions of collective action and incipient politicization, the workers' movement was a force that the Party could ignore only at the risk of seriously jeopardizing its economic plans. The Party's solution to this problem can be found in the emergence, in 1924, of an embryonic Stalinist socio-political formation consisting of a peculiar mixture of bureaucratic centralism and worker activism and involving the tacit recognition of workers' right to express their class, sectional, and individual interests and to have those interests served in some fashion or another. This was achieved through the mass recruitment of workers into the Party, the Party-directed mobilization of workers in production and trade union life, and the promotion of workers into administrative and control apparatuses.; Resurgent worker activism in 1923 and the Party's need to legitimize its authority unleashed a dynamic that ultimately provided a social basis for the reassertion of revolutionary-heroic voluntarism. Thus, this period marks an important juncture in the evolution of the Leninism of an embattled cadre to the Stalinism of a firmly entrenched and confident Party machine, for it prefigured the eventual demise of the NEP's peculiar brand of socio-institutional pluralism.