Roots of Soviet Industrial Management 1917 - 1941

This article describes the authoritarian system of industrial management established in the USSR during the 1920s and 1930s. It argues that the powers industrial managers had over workers in the Stalinist order of the thirties continued on a larger scale the powers they had already achieved under the Leninist order of the twenties. An assumption of the article is that if we wish to formulate a theory of class structure in the Soviet Union today, we need to look at social relations at the point of production and we must examine how these relationships were shaped during the earliest years of Soviet history. An appendix discusses a famous Soviet novel about a cement factory. *