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REVIEWS
| Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–1930. By Diane P. Koenker (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. xii plus 343 pp.).
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| If the past isn't what it used to be, as wags have sometimes suggested, this is nowhere more true than in the history of the Russian working class. What was a dominant focus of Soviet historiography has reduced significantly in volume since the fall of Communism, even as Russian scholars have produced some notable recent studies. In the West, analytical categories other than class have become important vehicles for illuminating the lives of Russian workers. Scholars such as Stephen Kotkin and David L. Hoffmann, whose careers began after the Cold War, have situated the early Soviet and Stalinist experience within a pan-European process of state interventionism rooted in the Enlightenment. Focusing on culture and comprehensive understandings of civilization, they have provided novel insights into the lives of Soviet citizens of multiple strata, including but not limited to workers. In a different vein, veteran practitioners of Soviet history such as Sheila Fitzpatrick, and the historian of Europe William Reddy, have found class simply inadequate as an analytical tool. Fitzpatrick has argued that the applications of class in Soviet political discourse have corrupted it as a scholarly category, a view to which the present reviewer subscribes, and she has suggested that Soviet ascriptive uses of Marxist class categories possibly inhibited class formation during the Soviet 1920s and 1930s. Diane P. Koenker forcefully disagrees. Her Republic of Labor argues that class was a historically rooted source of identity for Russian printers and, as such, must stand at the center of any understanding of the construction of a socialist working class culture in the USSR. In Koenker's view, what socialism meant to printers during the early Soviet period is indecipherable without taking into full account the language of class that dominated political discourse. |
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