Republic of Labor - by Diane P Koenker (Hardcover)

About the Book

The long decade from the October Revolution to 1930 was the beginning of a great experiment to create a socialist society. Throughout these years, socialist trade unions attempted to transform the Russian worker into a productive and enthusiastic...

Book Synopsis

The long decade from the October Revolution to 1930 was the beginning of a great experiment to create a socialist society. Throughout these years, socialist trade unions attempted to transform the Russian worker into a productive and enthusiastic participant in this new order. How did the workers themselves react to these efforts? To what extent were they and their culture transformed into the ideal forms proclaimed in the official ideology?

In Republic of Labor, Diane P. Koenker illuminates the lived experience of Russia's printers, workers who differed from their comrades because of their skill and higher wages, but who shared the same challenges of economic hardship and dangerous conditions. Paying close attention to the links between work, politics, and the everyday, the author focuses on workers' efforts to define their place in socialist society. Gender issues are also emphasized, and here we see the persistence of a masculinist working-class culture counterposed to an official culture promoting gender equality. Through this engaging narrative, Koenker develops a highly original discourse about class in Soviet society that will interest all students of Russian history as well as those readers who wish to reinvigorate class as a historical and sociological tool of analysis.

Review Quotes

"Diane P. Koenker applies the categories of labor history, classical and post-modern, to life under socialism in the Soviet 1920s. Through the experience of printers, Koenker explores working-class organizations, identities, cultures, and relationships to authority. Koenker proves that the printers managed to maintain a sense of class identity in the face of mounting state claims that often denied them the fruits of their own proletarian revolution."

"In a compelling and erudite exploration of the multiplicity of printers' voices and identities, Diane P. Koenker examines the ways in which printers fashioned a masculine working-class culture that co-opted some elements of the proletarian ideal but rejected others as they sought to preserve their individualism, boisterous behavior, and quest for material security. The focus on workers' everyday resistance to and negotiation with the regime challenges traditional understandings of NEP and the so-called 'Great Turn' in significant ways."

"In this beautifully crafted and deeply researched book, Diane P. Koenker explores with characteristic subtlety the social world of Soviet printers, reconstructing their responses to the drama of revolution and socialist modernization. In the richest study to date of the meanings of class in the Soviet Union, she reveals the complexity of printers' identities, engaging with issues of production, consumption, 'participatory dictatorship, ' gender, generation, language and culture. It is a wonderful achievement."

About the Author

Diane P. Koenker is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Editor of the Slavic Review. She is the author of Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, coauthor of Strikes in Revolution, Russia 1917, and coeditor and translator of Notes of a Red Guard.