Nicole Seibert wrote:
> Hi Mark,
> Question: Have you seen or heard of any stats that would give me the average
> number of working hours per gender anytime prior to 1990? Neither the ILO or
> GSS have these stats.
> Thanks,
More on this, Nico.
A good and scholarly website is
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/Mark.Harrison/sovietarchives/
Research in former Soviet archives on issues of historical political economy
I have just been reading, from this archive: Filtzer, Don, "Labour Discipline
and Criminal Law in Soviet Industry, 1945-1953," paper presented to VI World
Congress of the International Council for Central & East European Studies,
Tampere, Finland (August 2000)
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/Mark.Harrison/sovietarchives/filtzer-tampere.pd
f
This is a very interesting analysis of social relations and the reality of
labour in the early postwar Soviet Union. The fact that the author is highly
antagonistic to what he everywhere calls 'the Stalinist system', altho it was
both much more and much less than this implies, does not detract from the
vivid insight. According to Filtzer, around a quarter of the Soviet workforce
in 1945-53 should be classified as 'slave labour' and another quarter what he
calls 'indentured' labour, leaving half or less of the workforce at least
nominally 'free'.
This depiction of the barracks-socialism of the USSR in the early 1950s has to
be contextualised, of course, and the context was the massive haemorrhaging of
manpower during the war (an entire cohort of male workers was wiped out) and
the fact of continuing encirclement and containment + the US atomic-bomb
monopoly. A terrible price was paid for construction of an urban, industrial
society.
Mark
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