by James Millar
DAVID PRETTY
LABOR BOOKS
Labor Books were issued to all officially employed persons in the Soviet Union and were used to keep a written record of the daily work behavior of each worker. These labor books were introduced in the Soviet Union in late 1938. Labor books are of historical interest as one of several drastic changes in labor regulations implemented in the late 1930s in an effort to develop and to sustain labor discipline. Moreover, these regulations, which included the requirement of internal passports, limitations on mobility, and the organized and controlled placement of labor, were significant elements of the general process of labor allocation reducing the influence of market-type forces and incentives and were more generally important as restrictions on the freedom of the population.
Throughout the Soviet era, the mix of mechanisms used for labor allocation changed considerably. Beginning in the 1930s, the system of controls was expanded in many directions. These controls, including the widespread use of forced labor, were a fundamental systemic component of the Soviet economic system. However, during the post-Stalin era, the use of direct controls over labor allocation was reduced and began to be replaced by market-type forces and direct incentive arrangements. These incentives were increasingly used to allocate labor in a variety of dimensions, for example by sector and region of the economy.
The use of labor books in the Soviet Union is an important component of the more general process of replacing market mechanisms with state directed nonmarket mechanisms during the command era. The impact of these controls on labor al814
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location and labor productivity in an economy artificially characterized as a full employment economy (an economy with a “job right constraint”) remain controversial in the overall judgement of labor allocation procedures and results during the Soviet era. See also: LABOR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Nove, Alec. (1982). An Economic History of the USSR. New York: Penguin Books.
ROBERT C. STUART
ant rewarded in kind (for example, grain) or in money (rubles). With the magnitude of compulsory deliveries at low fixed prices set by the state, the state wielded significant power by extracting products from the farm. Moreover, even though changes in the frequency and form of payment were made over time, the labor day system was a very crude mechanism of payment, with severe limitations as an incentive system. See also: COLLECTIVE FARM; PEASANTRY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davies, R. W. (1980). The Soviet Collective Farm, 1929-1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stuart, Robert C. (1972). The Collective Farm in Soviet Agriculture. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
ROBERT C. STUART
LABOR CAMPS See GULAG.
LABOR DAY
The labor day (trudoden) was a mechanism for calculating the labor payment of peasants belonging to collective farms. In theory the collective farm was a cooperative form of organization, and thus peasants divided among themselves a residual payment for work rather than a contractual wage. The latter was reserved for the payment of state workers (rabochii) in industrial enterprises and on state farms.
Each daily task on a collective farm was assigned a number of labor days, according to the nature of the task, its duration, difficulty, and so forth. Peasants accumulated labor days, which were recorded in a labor book. Although a peasant might have some sense of the value of a labor day from past experience, the value of a labor day in terms of money or product would not be known until the end of the agricultural season. Valuation would be determined by the following general formula: To calculate the value of a labor day, the compulsory deliveries to the state would be subtracted from the farm output, and the result divided by the total number of labor days.
After the completion of the harvest, the value of each labor day could be known, and each peasLABOR THEORY OF VALUE The labor theory of value may be traced to the writings of John Locke, an English philosopher of the late 1600s. While Locke assumed that all the resources that were found in nature had been provided by God and therefore were common property, he argued that when people took things that had been present in a natural state and reshaped them into products of use for human beings, they mixed their labor with the raw materials, and thus had the right to personal ownership of the resulting products. Indeed, the products that a worker produced became an extension of that worker. Locke employed the labor theory of value to justify private ownership of property, the cornerstone principle of capitalism. He planted the seeds of the ideas that human labor is the unique factor that creates value in commodities, and that the value of any product is approximately determined by the amount of labor that is necessary to produce it.
Karl Marx became familiar with the labor theory of value through his extensive reading of the works of British economists, including Adam Smith and David Ricardo, whose works reflected the pervasive influence of Locke’s ideas and accepted the labor theory of value. Ironically, in Marx’s hands, the Lockean premises became the basis for an radical critique of capitalism and an implicit justification of socialism. In Marx’s theoretical model of a
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capitalist economy, the workers or proletarians labor with means of production, such as industrial plant and machinery, which are owned by a capitalist. Since the workers own no share of the means of production, they are driven by necessity to work for someone who does own productive property. During the hours of each worker’s labor, the worker produces commodities, or products that are bought and sold in the market. The capitalist sells those commodities in order to receive income. The price for which each commodity is sold is called “exchange value” in Marxist terminology. The capitalist must return some of that value to the worker in the form of wages, since workers will not work without some material reward. It is axiomatic in Marx’s theory that the value that is returned to the worker is less than that which has been created by the worker’s labor. That portion of the value that has been created by the labor of the proletarian, but is not returned to the proletarian, obviously flows to the capitalist, and constitutes “surplus value” in Marx’s words.
In Marx’s view, surplus value is the excess of the value the proletarian has produced above what it takes to keep the proletarian working, and surplus value is the source of profit for the capitalist. Marx argued that with the development of capitalism, competition would force capitalists to strive relentlessly to extract as much surplus value as possible from their workers. Initially the capitalists would simply increase the hours of labor of their workers and decrease the workers’ pay, but that kind of simple intensification of exploitation would soon reach physical limits. The capitalists would then adopt the strategy of increasing the mechanization of production, substituting machine power for human muscle power to an ever-growing degree, with the objective of getting more products out of fewer laborers. Mechanization, by throwing ever larger numbers of workers out of the factories, would ensure the growth of unemployment, which would guarantee that the wages of those who continued to work would be driven down to the subsistence level. Marx believed that he was describing the inexorable tendency of the increasing misery of the proletariat, which would give rise to a progressively sharpening struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which, with the final crisis of capitalism, would result in proletarian revolution and the elimination of capitalism.
In the first volume of Capital, which he published in 1867, Marx clearly suggested that the exchange value or market price of a commodity was determined, at least on the average, by the labor which had gone into producing it. Until the end of his intellectual career, Marx continually struggled with the attempt to reconcile the conception of the intrinsic value of a product, which supposedly represented the amount of
labor embodied in it, and its exchange value, which in actuality reflected supply and demand. It could be argued that in the third volume of Capital, edited by Friedrich Engels and published after Marx’s death, that problem was still unresolved, as indeed it could not be resolved on the basis of Marx’s fundamental assumptions.
The labor theory of value was wholly accepted by Soviet Marxist-Leninst ideology as a fundamental theoretical assumption. The premises of that theory explain why Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev were extremely suspicious of the practice of hiring laborers for wages in private enterprises, since any employment of workers on privately owned property was automatically considered exploitation, the essential source of class struggle. In fact, with the proclamation by Stalin that the foundations of socialism had been constructed in the Soviet Union by 1936, hiring people to work for private employers was prohibited by law. In socialist society, the payment of wages to workers and peasants in collective enterprises was not thought to present any problem, since in theory the means of production in the Soviet Union belonged to those same workers and peasants. In light of the labor theory of value, it is not difficult to understand why, in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev finally began to allow limited, small-scale private enterprises, such endeavors were officially termed “individual labor activity” and “cooperatives,” avoiding the admission of a relationship between employers and employees in the private sector. See also: MARXISM; SOCIALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baradat, Leon P. (1984). Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact, 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Evans, Alfred B., Jr. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Westport, CT: Praeger. McClellan, David. (1980). The Thought of Karl Marx, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan.
ALFRED B. EVANS JR.
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LAKE BAIKAL
Known as the “Pearl of Siberia,” Lake Baikal is the oldest and deepest lake on earth. Home to more than one thousand endemic species of aquatic life, it is a focal point for environmental activism and Siberian national pride.
Located in south central Siberia, Baikal is 636 kilometers (395.2 miles) long, 80 kilometers (49.71 miles) wide, and 1,637 meters (5,371 feet) deep. A watershed of 55,000 hectares (212.4 square miles) feeds the lake through more than three hundred rivers. Only the Angara River drains Baikal, flowing northwest from the southern tip of the lake. The lake probably began to form about 25 million years ago, at the site of a tectonic rift. The fault continues to widen and there are thermal vents in the lake’s depths.
Baikal’s zooplankton, called epishura, is at the base of a unique food chain, with the prized Omul salmon and the nerpa, the world’s only freshwater seal, at its top. Epishura is also a biological filter, contributing to the lake’s extraordinary clarity and purity. The Baikal Ridge along the northwest shore of the lake is heavily populated by birds and animals and contains deposits of titanium, lead, and zinc. The Khamardaban range, lying to the south of the lake, contains gold, tungsten, and coal.
Humans have inhabited the area around Baikal at least since the Mesolithic period (ten to twelve thousand years ago). The dominant native peoples in the area since the twelfth to fourteenth centuries C.E. are Buryat Mongols. Another local tribe is the Evenks, a Tungus clan of traditional reindeer nomads of the taiga. Many native peoples consider Baikal sacred, and some believe that Olkhon Island, the largest on the lake, was the birthplace of Genghis Khan.
Russian explorers first came to the shores of Baikal in 1643, and by 1650 Russia had completed its annexation of the area around the lake. Russians met little resistance from indigenous peoples in the area, and Russian populations gradually increased over the following centuries, attracted by the fur trade and mining. The city of Irkutsk, on the Angara River, was a destination for convicts, including political exiles, during the nineteenth century. The Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs around the south tip of the lake, brought more settlers and more rapid economic development to the area during the 1890s. A Circum-Baikal Railway opened in 1900. Construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a second trans-Siberian rail line that passes just north of the lake, took place from 1943 to 1951 and resumed in the 1974.
The fragile ecology of Lake Baikal faces many threats. The two large rail lines at either end of the lake have compromised the watersheds through logging and erosion. Lumber mills and factories near Ulan-Ude send thousands of tons of contaminants annually into the lake. The Baikalsk cellulose combine has altered the ecology of the southern part of the lake, killing off epishura and accounting for high concentrations of PCBs and other toxins. Large die-offs of nerpa seals have been attributed to dioxin contamination. Environmental activists have vigorously opposed industrial development, and have focused international attention on the lake. Two nature reserves (zapovedniks) and two national parks protect portions of the lake-shore. The entire lake and its coastal protection zone became a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site in 1996. See also: BURYATS; ENVIRONMENTALISM; EVENKI
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Matthiessen, Peter. (1992). Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia: Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC). (1996). “Protected Areas Programme: Lake Baikal.” «http:// www.unep-wcmc.org/sites/wh/baikal.htm».
RACHEL MAY
LAND AND FREEDOM PARTY
There were two revolutionary groups named “Land and Freedom” (Zemlya i Volya). The first was a phenomenon of the early 1860s, with a membership largely of intellectuals in Moscow and the Russian provinces. It maintained contacts with ?migr?s living abroad (most notably Alexander Herzen) and was supported in Russia by the anarchists Prince Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. Repressed by the government, it ceased to exist by 1863 or 1864.
The second and better-known Land and Freedom group emerged after the failure of the “Going to the People” experiments in the early 1870s.
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LAND CAPTAIN
Forced to review their strategy and activities, Russian populists realized that the peasants were hostile to intellectuals and that the state would not change of its own accord. In 1876, in St. Petersburg, they organized a new Land and Freedom group as a secret political organization. The leaders of the group, whose members included Mark Natanson, Alexander Mikhailov, and Lev Tikomirov, reasoned that revolutionaries would have to go among and work through the Russian people (narod). They were well aware, however, that many Russian activists had idealized the peasants and overestimated their willingness to revolt. Thus, if Land and Freedom was to achieve its goals of giving peasants collective ownership of the land through the obshchina, promoting freedom of the individual so that the peasants would be able to regulate their own affairs, and bringing about the abolition of private property, it would have to be better organized (through a more centralized structure) and, above all, would have to use agitprop (agitation and propaganda) in both word and deed to win the people over.
To this end, members of Land and Freedom went out in the Russian countryside, concentrating on the Volga region, where there had been peasant uprisings in the past. They also agitated among rebellious students in the winter of 1877 to 1878. In the late 1870s, Land and Freedom decided to disrupt the Russian state by carrying out terrorist acts targeting landowners, the police, and government officials. When the state responded by restricting its activities and arresting many of its members, Land and Freedom split into two other groups, Nar-odnaia Volya (People’s Will) and Chernyi Peredel (Black Petition), both of which left a mark on Russian history when Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. See also: AGITPROP; ANARCHISM; PEASANTRY; PEASANT UPRISINGS; TERRORISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hardy, Deborah. (1987). Land and Freedom: The Origins of Russian Terrorism, 1876-1879. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Kelly, Aileen. (1982). Mikhail Bakunin: A Study in the Psychology and Politics of Utopianism. New
York: Oxford University Press. Offord, Derek. (1987). The Russian Revolutionary Movement in the 1880s. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
LAND CAPTAIN
Land captains were representatives of the administrative and judicial authority in Russian villages from 1889 to 1917.
The Statute Concerning Land Captains was passed on July 12, 1889, and was one of the counter-reforms made during the rule of Emperor Alexander III. The purpose of this law was the partial restoration of the control of provincial nobility over the peasants. In 40 provinces, 2,200 land districts, headed by land captains, were formed. Land captains were appointed by the Minister of Interior, usually from local hereditary nobles at the recommendation of governors and provincial marshals of nobility. They had extensive administrative and judicial power, controlled the activity of peasant communities, and formed the primary judicial authority for peasants and other taxpayers. A land captain had to have a higher education and three years of experience in serving as a peace mediator (mirovoy posrednik), a mirian (mir-peasant commune) judge, or member of a provincial council of peasant affairs. Moreover, he had to possess at least 200 desiatinas (approximately 540 acres of land) or real estate worth at least 7.5 thousand rubles. When candidates with records sufficient for the position were unavailable, local hereditary nobles with primary and secondary education were eligible. In special cases any local noble could be appointed. A land captain had the right to cancel any decision made by the village or the volost gathering (skhod) of the district, order the physical punishment of a taxpayer for minor misdemeanors, and order a three-day arrest or a six-ruble fine. The land captain appointed volost courts, which had been previously elected by the peasants, from a number of candidates selected by village communities (the volost was the smallest administrative unit in tsarist Russia). He could cancel any decision of a volost court, remove a judge, arrest, fine, or order physical punishment. The decisions of a land captain were considered final and did not allow for revision or complaints. In accordance with the reform of 1889, District (Uyezd) Bureaus of Peasant Affairs and mir (communal) courts were cancelled. The mir courts were reinstalled in 1912. The post of a land captain was cancelled by a decision of the Provisional Government on October 14, 1917.