38
In the months preceding and following the 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks’ promises of
a new era of “socialist labor” were greeted increasingly favorably by urban workers not because
of their devotion to Marxist doctrines but because some of the new public proclamations
resonated with familiar notions of collective labor and distributive justice once associated with
the mir. While Lenin’s concern for party unity and discipline would soon become evident once
the new regime consolidated its power, the Bolsheviks initially created expectations of a more
inclusive, egalitarian, participatory system of work and authority by evoking such principles as
collegial decision-making (kollegial’nost), spontaneous action by the masses, workers’ self-
management in factories, and the reduction of wage inequalities across different strata of
employees and administrators. Taking the idea of “workers’ control” seriously, workers eagerly
joined in the formation of factory committees, setting up conferences, organizing procedures for
making joint management decisions, creating “comrades’ disciplinary courts” to collectively
enforce labor discipline, and drawing up detailed instructions on the methods and scope of
workers’ control.
110
The Bolsheviks also unwittingly created expectations of some movement in
the direction of reduced wage differentials when they adopted a new labor code in 1918 that,
while establishing productivity norms as the basis for material rewards, explicitly sought to limit
differentiation and stratification by imposing upward limits on output-related wages and
bonuses.
111
In addition, in 1919, the All-Russian Trade Union Council introduced a proposal that
would have established a unified national wage-scales for each industry, featuring sharp
reductions in wage differentials across four categories of employees, and instituting an eight-
hour workday and benefits related to unemployment and illness.
112
While such proposals would
not survive, the attention they received at the highest levels gave cause to think that income-
leveling was an important goal of the new regime.
Thus, whatever the Bolsheviks’ “true” views on workers’ control and socialist equality,
given the revolutionary rhetoric most workers encountered during 1917, it was not unreasonable
These contending views are discussed eloquently in Stephen Kotkin, “‘One Hand Clapping’: Russian Workers and
1917,” Labor History 32, 4 (Fall 1991): 604-20.
110
Carmen Sirianni, Workers’ Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experiment (London: New Left Books,
1982), 95-111; and Paul Avrich, “The Bolshevik Revolution and Workers Control in Russian Industry,” Slavic
Review 27 (1963): 47-63.
111
In reality, these limits were probably aimed at discouraging turnover among workers who would have otherwise
sought to speedily accumulate earnings before returning to their villages; see Frederick Kaplan, Bolshevik Ideology
and the Ethics of Soviet Labor (1917-1920) (New York: Philosophical Library, 1968), 337-8.
112
On the steepness of the new wage scales, see Sirianni, 223.
Convention