Archives Cited in TextClass Backwards?: In Search of the Soviet Working Class
by Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny1. On the Eve: Life Histories and Identities of Some Revolutionary Workers, 1870-1905
by Reginald E. Zelnik2. Vanguard Workers and the Morality of Class
by Mark D. Steinberg3. Class Formation in the St. Petersburg Metalworking Industry: From the "Days of Freedom" to the Lena Goldfields Massacre
by Heather Hogan4. Workers against Foremen in St. Petersburg, 1905-1917
by S. A. Smith5. Donbas Miners in War, Revolution, and Civil War
by Hiroaki Kuromiya6. Labor Relations in Socialist Russia: Class Values and Production Values in the Printers' Union, 1917-1921
by Diane P. Koenker7. Languages of Trade or a Language of Class? Work Culture in Russian Cotton Mills in the 1920s
by Chris Ward8. The Hidden Class: White-Collar Workers in the Soviet 1920s
by Daniel Orlovsky9. From Working Class to Urban Laboring Mass: On Politics and Social Categories in the Formative Years of the Soviet System
by Gabor T. Rittersporn10. Coercion and Identity: Workers' Lives in Stalin's Showcase City
by Stephen Kotkin11. Workers against Bosses: The Impact of the Great Purges on Labor-Management Relations
by Sheila Fitzpatrick12. The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art
by Victoria E. Bonnell13. Concluding Remarks
by Moshe LewinContributors
Index

Drawing on such diverse sources as propaganda art, the trade union press, workers' memoirs, and materials in recently opened Soviet archives, this is the first book to examine the shifting identity of the "working class" in late tsarist and early Soviet societies. New essays by fifteen leading historians show how Russian workers responded to attempts to make them Soviet.

Initial chapters consider power relations and working-class identity in imperial Russia. The effects of the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 to 1921 on labor relations among printers and coal miners are then discussed. Addressing subsequent decades, other essays document the situation of cotton workers and white-collar workers embroiled within the ambiguities of the New Economic Policy or challenge the appropriateness of "class" analysis for the Stalin era. Additional chapters reconstruct workers' responses to the Great Purges and trace the significance of class in visual and verbal discourse. Making Workers Soviet will be central to the current rethinking of Soviet history and of class formation in noncapitalist settings.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum is Professor of History at Michigan State University. His previous books include Soviet State and Society between Revolutions, 1918-1929. Ronald Grigor Suny is Alex Manoogian Professor of Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of several books, most recently, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union.