Russia’s Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy: Shop-Floor Culture and State Policy, 1921-1929

In Russia’s Cotton Workers and the New Economic Policy Chris Ward uses a wide range of published and unpublished Soviet sources to examine key aspects of life on the shop floor of the Russian cotton mill in the 1920s. He reveals the existence of a complex world of work which grew out of the interaction between the experience of industrialisation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia and the mechanisation of the cotton industry in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author explores the manner in which a ‘mill culture’ emerged from these developments and demonstrates that by the 1920s this culture was often very resistant to change. Russia’s cotton workers and the New Economic Policy provides for the first time a realistic understanding of the relationship between worker, state Policy and technology in Russia in the 1920s.