The Labor Ideology in the Russian Civil War : Production Agitation

Abstract

Rwcwntly historians of the Russian revolution have begun to show much interest in the significant role played by the ideals of the Bolshevik government; but there is still little research on 1)the interrelation between those ideals and the structure of the regime, and 2) in what way and what kind of the ideals were transmitted to the people in their daily lives.This article searches for a point of view for integrating these two problems, looking into agitation by the government in a place of contact between the administration machine and daily life, the poin of production.Concretely, the article analyzes agitation over production (production agitation) in Moscow in 1920.From the biginning of 1920, the government applied three types of production agitation in succession.They were subbotniki (Saturday labor), "labor protection week", and production propaganda.In the process of the transformation between the three methods there existed noticeably two tendencies.First, in terms of ideals, propagation of the worker ideals proper to the government, especially, the creation of the "production commune" held up sturdily.Second, to the method of organization, one different from mass mobilization had consistently sought.Finally, these two tendencies were combined in production propaganda, by which the government tried to represent every day to each worker the idea of creating the production commune at the point of production.On the other hand, the fact that the Bolsheviks actively sought the creation of the production commune reflected their unrest about the state of their regime in 1920, since the government could not make much contact with workers except through methods of mass mobilizaiton via the administration machine.So,at the end 1920, the government found itself at an impasse between its own ideal of the production commune and the reality of its regime, that is, hypertrophy of the administration machine.