Jessen & Richter (Eds.) (42 page)

investigate occupational safety and health, and check that managers ob-

served labor laws on overtime, rest days, and holidays. The unions were to

stop managers from withholding workers’ wages to meet other pressing

expenses and to ensure that workers were paid on time. Finally, permanent

committees of union volunteers were to be attached to soviets at every

level of government to guarantee that workers’ issues, including housing,

consumption, and working conditions, were at the forefront of local and

regional policies.29

Taken together, the resolutions promised workers real, albeit limited,

power over the unions. Multi-candidate, secret-ballot elections offered the

possibility of new leadership. Workers’ control over social insurance funds

encouraged fairer and prompter distribution. And the new emphasis on

occupational safety and health promised elimination of the more flagrant

violations. The campaign fell considerably short of workers’ control of the

factories, but it offered the possibility of genuine improvement. For mid-

level officials, the campaign portended no good. Blamed for poor working

and living conditions, and faced with the possibility of dismissal, they

scrambled to retain their posts. The impulse to shift blame intensified,

creating new turmoil at every level of the union hierarchy.

——————

29 GARF, f. 5451, o. 21, d. 1, ll. 130–7, 62–4. See also f. 5451, o. 21, d. 114, ll. 69–82.

T H E G R E A T S O V I E T P A R A D O X

161

Purging the Unions

Over the next two years, the unions went through a major shake up. Im-

mediately following the VI plenum, the VTsSPS and
Trud
, the labor news-

paper, sent investigators into factories and unions throughout the country

to expose abuses, publicly shame officials, and jumpstart change. These

investigators reported that the factory committees, once the soul of the

revolution, had become little more than purveyors of a vast pyramid

scheme, enrolling new members in an organization that did nothing but

enroll members.30 Two workers in a Moscow gas factory summed up the

role of union officials, “They sit in the factory committee like some kind of

clerks, they never go to the shops, and they don’t work with the active

workers [
aktiv
].”31

Union leaders, now held responsible for accidents and safety violations,

were charged with “wrecking” and arrested by the NKVD. Leaders of the

Union of Metallurgical Workers of the East became embroiled in fright-

ening accusations when the managers and factory committee of a Cheliab-

insk factory were accused of constructing a ferrous-molybdenum shop

without regard for technical safety and spending 400,000 rubles over

budget on equipment. After numerous accidents, the shop was shut down,

and several officials arrested and charged with “wrecking”.32 The Union of

Cement Workers sent a labor inspector to the Amvrosievskii factory in

Briansk to investigate conditions after the director and the main engineer

were accused of wrecking in a series of accidents they attributed to techni-

cal defects. The inspector found “mass accidents”, “ruinous housing”, no

clean drinking water in either the factory or the nearby workers’ settlement,

——————

30 GARF, f. 5451, op. 21, d. 103, ll. 48–51. The membership process was cumbersome and time consuming. A new worker would write an application and submit it to the union group (
profgrup
), the primary organization in the plant. After a cursory background check, the
profgrup
would make a recommendation and pass the application to the shop committee, which would in turn make its decision, and send it to the factory committee for final approval. In most cases, these reviews were
pro forma
; yet the large size of factories coupled with high labor turnover and poor records meant that many shop and factory committees did little more than process applications. In the metal factory, Proletarian Labor, for example, the factory committee plenum discussed thirty or more applications every time they met. Turnover in the factory was so great that the number of workers quitting exceeded the number hired in certain months. The factory committee kept no records of its meetings, but it appeared to be occupied solely with membership.

31 GARF, f. 5451, o. 22, d. 11, l. 12.

32 GARF, f. 5451, o. 21, d. 114, l. 1.

162

W E N D Y Z . G O L D M A N

temperatures over 125 degrees in some shops, and constant fires in the

factory and the settlement. The factory committee had done nothing. The

union sent the inspector’s report to the procurator, urging him to bring

criminal charges against the director if the problems were not fixed within

one month.33 The Party’s single minded emphasis on production coupled

with newly imported technologies and a young, untrained work force was

sufficient to explain most accidents. Yet accusations of “wrecking” rapidly

replaced any rational assessment of fault.

The concentrated attention of VTsSPS and NKVD investigators jolted

union officials out of their long torpor. Terrified of public censure and

arrest, they began to address conditions. The Union of Metallurgical

Workers of the South discussed and drafted new safety rules for the in-

dustry to be disseminated in all factories by September.34 The Union of

Machine Instrument Workers addressed the large number of accidents and

eye injuries in the Stankolit factory, ordered management to provide safety

goggles, special boots, work clothes, and other items in short supply, and

pledged to investigate every accident in the future.35 Factory committees

everywhere began taking minutes and forwarding their records to VTsSPS

headquarters. The days of fiddling with membership applications seemed

to be over.36 The accusations of “wrecking” were patently false, but they

did concentrate attention on health and safety issues that had long been

overlooked.

Multi-candidate, Secret-Ballot Elections

Throughout the summer of 1937, the unions held multi-candidate, secret-

ballot elections at every level from the factory to the central committees.

The workers took up the campaign for union democracy and swept out the

old staff in one election after another. A report from the Union of Woolen

Workers to the VTsSPS optimistically noted, “Work in the factories has

——————

33 GARF, f. 5451, o. 21, d. 114, ll. 1–3.

34 GARF, f. 5451, o. 21, d. 114, l. 3.

35 GARF, f. 5451, o. 21, d. 114, l. 9.

36 The unions also launched investigations in the barracks and dormitories that housed hundreds of thousands of new workers who had migrated to the cities during the

industrialization drive. See GARF, f. 5451, o. 21, d. 114, l. 22.

T H E G R E A T S O V I E T P A R A D O X

163

completely changed its face.” For the first time in years, woolen workers

actively participated in large, noisy “accountability” meetings. Of the more

than 1,300 people elected to 195 factory committees in the woolen indus-

try, 65 per cent were new, and 43 per cent had never participated in union

activities. They voted out about half of the old factory committee chair-

men, elected over 1,000 people to shop committees, and another 1,000 as

shop organizers. The sheer numbers of new participants pointed to a ma-

jor overhaul of the union. Paid officials on the shop committees were

eliminated and replaced with volunteers. In the Red Weaving Factory,

about one-sixth of the 4,400 workers were elected to shop committees, an

unprecedented level of voluntary participation. The factory committee

began meeting regularly to discuss living conditions. In August, the Union

of Woolen Workers held its first congress with 245 delegates. After sharply

criticizing the union’s central committee for its phony performances, poor

leadership, and “deep violations of union democracy”, the delegates voted

it out of office. Only four previous members were reelected. Stakhanovite

workers from the shop floor composed almost half of the new forty-one-

member central committee. It promptly created labor protection commis-

sions to improve ventilation, record accidents, provide work clothes, and

monitor overtime work.37

The electoral shake up in the Union of Woolen Workers was replicated

in other unions. Through the fall of 1937 and into the winter, 116 unions

held congresses attended by over 23,300 delegates. They were turbulent

affairs. Using the language of democracy and purge, the delegates strongly

criticized the existing central committees and “unmasked an entire series of

individuals in leadership positions, who were politically blind and careless,

as well as a number of corrupt elements, idlers, and bureaucrats”. The

blame game spread like wild fire. At the congresses, each layer of leader-

ship criticized the one above it: delegates from the Union of Railroad Con-

struction Workers criticized their central committee; the central committee

of the Union of Central Cooperative Employees criticized its presidium.

Union members from elektrostations, peat bogs, schools, and dining halls

denounced their officials for “bureaucracy, separation from the masses,

and ignoring the needs of their members”.38

——————

37 GARF, f. 5451, o. 22, d. 64, ll. 211–24. Of the people elected to the factory committees, 40 per cent were Party members, and 17 per cent, engineering or technical employees.

38 GARF, f. 5451, o. 22, d. 64, ll. 12–3.

164

W E N D Y Z . G O L D M A N

Workers embraced the campaign for union democracy, but they did not