The Soviet Union differed from the United States not only in its ideology but also in its level of economic development. Before the 1917 revolution, Russia had been an overwhelmingly agricultural society. What industry it did have was severely disrupted by the revolution and the civil war that followed. Could large, technically advanced industrial facilities successfully operate in such an environment, short-cutting the long process of economic development that had occurred in Western Europe and the United States? Could a heroic effort to leap directly to large-scale industrialization stimulate broad economic growth, or would chaos ensue from the lack of needed material inputs, logistics, and worker and managerial skills?
Questions about the role of the giant factory in economic development and social structure remain alive today, both in the few remaining countries that call themselves communist—most importantly China and Vietnam—and in the capitalist world. With much of the world’s population still living in poverty, the issue of how to raise living standards remains a central economic, political, and moral concern. What role should the giant factory play in the effort to achieve broad material and social well-being? What price should industrial workers pay for social abundance?
Some of the answers to these knotty questions began to emerge during the 1930s, from the muddy fields on the outskirts of Stalingrad and from other sites like it across the Soviet Union. The experience with the American-style giant factory proved crucial not only in shaping the history of the Soviet Union but also in defining a path for development for much of the world in the decades after World War II. Stalinist industrial giantism, for better and for worse, became one of the main paths for trying to achieve prosperity and modernity, a Promethean utopianism that mixed huge social ambitions with enormous human suffering.
“Marxism Plus Americanism”
In the twentieth century, American production techniques and managerial methods—what came to be called “Americanism”—commanded considerable interest in Europe. Some of it was technical, in high-speed machining and the high-strength metals it required, the standardization of products, the use of various kinds of conveyance devices, and the mass-production system that these developments made possible. But interest was at least as great in the ideology associated with advanced manufacturing, the promise that with productivity gains the income of workers could go up even as profits rose, thereby dissipating class conflict and social unrest.6
As avatars of scientific management and mass production, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford became well-known and well-regarded figures in Europe. By the early twentieth century, Taylor’s writings had been translated into French, German, and Russian. In the early 1920s, Ford displaced Taylor as the icon of Americanism, as worker criticism of Taylorist management grew and the wonders of the assembly line and the Model T became better known abroad. In Germany, Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Work, translated in 1923, sold more than two hundred thousand copies.
Though Americanism as a technical and ideological system had considerable influence all across Europe, perhaps surprisingly its greatest impact occurred in the Soviet Union. The groundwork was laid before the revolution. What industry Russia had tended to be highly concentrated, with quite a few large factories, some foreign-owned and operated with the help of foreign experts who were aware of the latest trends in management thinking, including those associated with Americanism. In addition, at least a few Russian socialists, most importantly Lenin, knew about scientific management and thought about its implications.
In his first comments about scientific management, while in exile in 1913, Lenin echoed critiques common among American and European unionists and leftists, seeing its “purpose . . . to squeeze out of the worker” more labor in the same amount of time. “Advances in the sphere of technology and science in capitalist society are but advances in the extortion of sweat.” Three years later, he plunged deeper into scientific management in preparation for writing Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, reading a German translation of Taylor’s book Shop Management, a book on the application of the Taylor system, and an article by Frank Gilbreth on how motion studies could increase national wealth. In the end, he never discussed management techniques in Imperialism, but his notes from the time indicate a view of scientific management in keeping with the general tenor of the book, in which capitalist advances, whatever their motives, were portrayed as laying the basis for a socialist transformation, in line with Marx’s portrayal of capitalism as an antechamber to a socialist economy.7
The 1917 revolution radically changed the context for Russian thinking about scientific management. Instead of critiquing existing social arrangements and defending workers, Russian communists and their allies now found themselves facing the almost overwhelming challenge of restoring the economy of a country depleted and disrupted by war and revolution to the point of famine, even as they fought a civil war and tried to consolidate their power. For Lenin, scientific management became a necessary tool to increase productivity and overcome economic backwardness, a prelude to establishing a socialist society:
The Russian is a bad worker compared with workers of the advanced countries. Nor could it be otherwise under the tsarist regime and in view of the tenacity of the remnants of serfdom. The task that the Soviet government must set the people in all its scope is—learn to work. The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this respect, like all capitalist progress, is a combination of the subtle brutality of bourgeois exploitation and a number of its greatest scientific achievements in the field of analyzing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the working out of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in the achievements of science and technology in this field. . . . We must organize in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system and systematically try it out and adapt it to our purposes.
Lenin even suggested bringing in American engineers to implement the Taylor system.8
Lenin’s backing helped legitimize scientific management as a practice and ideology in the new Soviet Republic. Exigency accelerated its adoption. One of its earliest adoptions came in railroad shops and armaments factories during the civil war, when keeping train engines operating and producing arms were literally matters of life and death for the revolution. As Commissar of War, Leon Trotsky embraced Taylorism as a “merciless” form of labor exploitation but also “a wise expenditure of human strength participating in production,” the “side of Taylorism the socialist manager ought to make his own.” Desperate to increase production, the Soviet government adopted piecework as a general practice and set up a Central Labor Institute to promote means of increasing labor productivity, including time and motion studies and other forms of scientific management.9
The embrace of Taylorism did not go unchallenged. As in the West, many workers and trade unionists opposed the imposition of more stringent work norms through piecework and so-called scientific methods, especially if workers themselves did not play a role in establishing and administrating them. And there were more sweeping ideological objections, too, centered on the relationship between building a new kind of society and using capitalist methods.
On the one side were trade unionists, “Left Communists,” and, later, members of the “Workers Opposition” within the Communist Party, who believed that a socialist society required different social structures of production than had developed under capitalism, with greater worker participation and authority on the shop floor, in managing enterprises, and in determining methods of production. These critics of scientific management wanted to devise ways to increase productivity without further exploiting workers, opposing the extreme division of labor that transformed “the living person into an unreasoning and stupid instrument.” To simply adopt methods workers had long criticized under capitalism would negate the meaning of the revolution.
On the other s
ide were those who viewed capitalist production methods as simply techniques that could be used to any end, including the creation of wealth that would be the property of the whole society under a socialist regime. Alexei Gastev, a one-time worker-poet who became the secretary of the All-Russia Metal Workers’ Union, the head of the Central Labor Institute, and the leading Soviet proponent of scientific management, wrote in 1919, “Whether we live in the age of super-imperialism or of world socialism, the structure of the new industry will, in essence, be one and the same.” Like other Soviet supporters of scientific management, Gastev saw in Russian culture, especially among peasants and former peasants who had entered industry, an inability to work hard at a steady pace, instead alternating spurts of intense labor with periods of little if any work (the same complaint early English and American factory owners had about their workers). American methods and an American sense of speed would provide a cure. Trotsky gave intellectual and political weight to the case for adopting capitalist methods, advocating the use of the most advanced production techniques, regardless of their origin. Labor compulsion, necessary during the transition to socialism, he contended, had different significance when used in the service of a workers’ state than for a capitalist enterprise (an argument that made little headway with many Soviet trade unionists).10
The dispute over scientific management was largely resolved at the Second All-Union Conference on Scientific Management, held in March 1924. The participation by top communist leaders in the extensive public debate that preceded it was a measure of the importance of the question of the use of capitalist management methods in the Soviet Union. By and large, the conference came out in support of Gastev and the wide application of scientific management, reflecting the demographic and economic circumstances of the period. The prerevolutionary and revolutionary-era skilled working class, the natural center for opposition to Taylorism, had been all but decimated by war, revolution, and civil war, with many of its survivors co-opted into leadership positions in the government and the party. The main challenge in trying to raise Soviet productivity was not squeezing more labor out of experienced, skilled workers but getting useful labor out of new workers with little or no industrial experience, for which scientific management, with its stress on the simplification of tasks and detailed instructions to workers, seemed well suited.11
It is not clear how much actual impact the endorsement of scientific management had on Soviet industry, at least in the short run. The Soviet Union lacked the experts, equipment, and experience to implement the methods advocated by Taylor and his disciples. Gastev’s institute, the center of scientific management, did not have even basic equipment, conducting simplistic experiments of little practical significance. Much of its work consisted of exhorting workers: “Sharp eye, keen ear, alertness, exact reports!” Gastev urged. “Mighty stroke! Calculated pressure, measured rest!” Many Soviet managers adopted piecework pay, but unless accompanied by detailed studies and reorganization that did nothing to increase efficiency, instead simply inducing workers to work harder using existing methods. Some scientific management techniques did become common, like the use of Gantt charts for production planning, as over time Soviet management journals and training institutes spread the Taylorist gospel. But the immediate importance of the endorsement of scientific management lay not in the field but in opening the door to a broader embrace of Western methods and technologies, which would soon lead to a crash program to re-create the American-style giant factory.12
An early experiment came in the textile industry, in cooperation with an American labor union. In 1921, Sidney Hillman, the president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW), after meeting with top Bolshevik leaders and Soviet trade unionists, signed an agreement to set up the Russian-American Industrial Corporation (RAIC), a joint enterprise with the Russian Clothing Workers syndicate, which ended up controlling twenty-five garment and textile factories that employed fifteen thousand workers. The deal came just as the Soviet Union was abandoning “War Communism,” the direct state control and partial militarization of the economy during the civil war, turning to a partial restoration of private ownership and market relations under the “New Economic Policy (NEP).”
The ACW proved a perfect partner for what in effect was a state-sponsored cooperative enterprise, meant to deploy the most advanced American equipment and management techniques in the restoration of the Russian garment industry. Many members and leaders of the heavily Jewish ACW, including Hillman, had emigrated from the Russian Empire, infected with the same radicalism that culminated in the revolution. Under Hillman’s leadership, though, the ACW had become increasingly practical in its policies, seeing in scientific management a way to improve productivity in a fragmented, often technologically primitive industry, creating the basis for upgrading worker living standards. The trade-off the ACW insisted on was union involvement in setting production norms and piecework rates and a system of neutral arbitration to resolve grievances. But the union affinity with scientific management was not strictly pragmatic; as Hillman’s biographer Steve Fraser wrote, “the ACW elite was firmly implanted in those socialist traditions that affixed the tempo and timing of socialism to the inexorable rhythms of industrial and social developments under capitalism.”
Through RAIC, the ACW brought to the Soviet garment industry not only Western capital but more importantly advanced equipment and expertise, including leading proponents of scientific management, factory managers the union had dealings with in the United States, and skilled workers familiar with joint union-management efforts at Taylorization. In short order, RAIC could boast of factories that matched the most advanced plants in the United States in their equipment, productivity, and progressive labor relations.13
Flirting with Ford
The NEP, which RAIC was part of, reanimated the Soviet economy. But it failed to fully restore Soviet industry to prerevolutionary levels of production, let alone fulfill the promise of the revolution to improve life for tens of millions of workers and peasants. In October 1925, Soviet industry still produced only 71 percent of pre–World War I Russian output. Fairly small investments under NEP were able to boost industrial output because there was considerable unused capacity. But by the mid-1920s, with utilization much higher, fewer possibilities remained for quick gains and possible reversals loomed; little capital investment for a decade meant that much of the industrial machinery in the country had reached or exceeded its expected service life. Further advances would require heavy investment in plant renovation, construction, and equipment.14
For most Soviet planners and political leaders, that meant staking the future of the revolution on large-scale industrial and infrastructure projects, though they disagreed sharply about the means and pace of investment. The Marxist tradition had long associated progress and modernity with the concentration of capital and mechanization. The prerevolutionary Russian industrial experience also influenced the Soviet sense of scale. In 1914, over half of Russian factory workers were employed in plants with more than five hundred workers, compared to less than a third in the United States. On the eve of the revolution, Petrograd had a cluster of very big government-controlled armament factories, some with well over ten thousand workers, as well as a few giant private plants, including the Putilov metalworking complex, with around thirty thousand workers (where a strike helped kick off the revolt against the Tsar).15
Many Soviets credited the success of the United States, which they saw as an exemplar, to its adoption of standardized products and large industrial complexes. As in Western Europe, Henry Ford was well known in the Soviet Union, seen as a living embodiment of the most advanced social, technical, and economic developments. By 1925, the Russian translation of My Life and Work had gone through four printings. But even more important in spreading Ford’s fame was his tractor, the Fordson.
Before World War I, there were only about six hundred tractors spread across the vast domains of Russia. Believing the upgrading of agricultural prod
uctivity central to the revolution, starting in 1923 the Soviet Union began importing tractors in growing numbers, largely Fordsons. By 1926, 24,600 orders for Ford tractors had been placed. The Soviet Union also imported some Model Ts. A pipeline from River Rouge to the Russian steppes and cities had been opened.
In 1926, the Soviet government asked Ford to send a team to see how it could improve the maintenance of tractors, a large percentage of which, at any given time, were inoperable because of poor servicing, a lack of quality replacement parts, and inefficient labor. Also, the Soviets wanted to explore the possibility of Ford setting up a tractor factory in Russia. Already, they were trying, not very successfully, to produce knock-offs of the Fordson on their own. After spending four months touring the Soviet Union, a Ford delegation recommended against building a factory, fearful of political interference in operations and possible future expropriation. Undeterred, Soviet officials still hoped for Ford-style factories to make much-needed agricultural equipment and motor vehicles.16
By then, Ford methods did not evoke great controversy in the Soviet Union. The debate over Taylorism already had led to the endorsement of the use of capitalist methods. Also, Fordism less directly challenged the small but influential cadre of skilled metalworkers than scientific management, since, even with assembly lines, craftsmen would be needed to make tools and dies and maintain machinery. After touring the Soviet Union in 1926, William Z. Foster reported “revolutionary workers are . . . . taking as their model the American industries. In Russian factories and mills . . . . It is all America, and especially Ford, whose plants are generally considered as the very symbol of advanced industrial technique.” “Fordizatsia”—Fordisation—became a favorite Soviet neolism.17
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