Trade unions in the Soviet Union
[2] They did, however, challenge aspects of mismanagement more successfully than they had under Stalin, and they played important parts in the fabric of daily life, such as using a sports club, obtaining theatre tickets, booking vacation stays, and more.
Simultaneously, however, the founding of trade unions in the Russian Empire at this time was salted with influence by the Okhrana, which sought to co-opt this movement from its beginning in order to keep it under control.
[4] It is not easy today to know how much influence the police had in controlling the budding popular movement, as Soviet historiography mostly overwrote any pre-revolution historical traces that remained.
A strong factory committee movement had sprung up, from workers occupying workplaces or forcing their bosses into compliance with demands as the government would no longer protect them.
Because of the course that was determined as the Bolsheviks defeated other models of socialism, Soviet trade unions ended up, in fact, actually governmental organizations whose chief aim was not to represent workers but to further the goals of management, government, and the CPSU and primarily promoted production interests.
The head of the trade union council during the 1920s, Mikhail Tomsky, first was deposed and some years later committed suicide to avoid the false persecution of the purges.
[7] Illiteracy was a common problem at the time; it had only been within a single lifetime that serfdom had ended, and much of the population were just coming out of traditional peasant backgrounds and lifestyles that involved minimal education.
Unlike the 1980s when very few were left who believed enthusiastically in the bureaucratic system, there was still esprit de corps among many members of the public whereby they were willing to work hard and endure hardships for the sake of building a society that would continue to develop increasing levels of education and standard of living.
Before the worst of the Terror and in the decades after Stalin, Soviet trade unions did have some input regarding production plans, capital improvements in factories, local housing construction, and remuneration agreements with management.
After Stalin, unions also were empowered to protect workers against bureaucratic and managerial arbitrariness, to ensure that management adhered to collective agreements, and to protest unsafe working conditions.
They also distributed welfare benefits, operated cultural and sports facilities (Palaces of Culture), issued passes to health centers (such as spa towns and seaside resorts) for subsidized vacations [11] (a popular idea conceived in the 1920s, which even the Nazi regime had coopted, although mostly unrealized for Soviets until after the war), oversaw factory and local housing construction, provided catering services, and awarded bonus payments.
[12][5] David K. Willis analyzed the de facto Soviet class system, including the trade unions' important role in it, in a 1985 monograph.
However, the reality of class that emerged by the 1940s and persisted through the 1980s was quite different in that there were many nuanced social strata, anthropologically with more in common with imperial, aristocratic cultures (such as that of the Russian Empire) than could ever be officially admitted.
[3] People who wished to contend in the widespread competitive social climbing between the strata needed their trade union membership as one of the leverage tools.
[13] On the surface, it might seem that this contradicts a statement by Willis elsewhere that "Soviet labor unions have little power" and that "they are merely conveyor belts on which Party discipline and rewards reach the work force, and which carry back reports on workers' mood and complaints.
It was precisely by controlling the comfort of members, or lack thereof, that the unions helped the party and government to rule, and this constituted a real, and thoroughly political, socioeconomic force, not merely an apolitical doling out of treats.
As Willis pointed out, the Soviet economic system was unlike Western ones in that organizations—party, state, government, unions—controlled whether it was even possible to obtain the tools and materials to do one's vocation or avocation.
The security organs (e.g., OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB, KGB) often used VTsSPS job titles and duties as non-official cover for their officers visiting other countries or escorting foreign visitors on (carefully staged) tours of the USSR and its enterprises.
Many Soviet people actively participated in the trade union system and were able to criticize up to certain levels in certain safe ways, except during the heights of purges, such as during 1937 itself.
[9] Willis's study,[5] discussed above, confirms this aspect, showing that the people who "won" in the effort to achieve Klass were by no means the "victims" of the system: quite the opposite, they were its active supporters.
