British Trade Unionists and the Soviet Union:
the visit of Walter Citrine in 1925. Part One.
by Dr J.G. Moher
Introduction
“In the years following 1917, the aftershocks of the Russian Revolution fundamentally reshaped the politics of the British left. Amidst the turmoil that extended from the end of the First World War in 1918 to the General Strike in 1926, events in Russia seemed, in the eyes of many, to offer new possibilities for political, social and economic change.”[1]
First, the sheer scale of things, (quite apart from their global reach in the decades to follow). In their classic, Soviet Communism – a New Civilisation? the famous Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, mapped and described this dimension well: – ‘nearly one-sixth of the entire land-surface of the globe’. It was over five thousand miles across – 11 time-zones containing hundreds of nationalities, with Russia at its centre. The Russian Communist Party (RCP), as it was then called, had taken control of a socially backward and economically primitive, semi-feudal country, with massive problems of illiteracy, poverty, disease and debt. With a population of c125million in 1920, it had ‘a sea of peasants’ (c90 million) and a relatively small (c 9-10million) number of other classes.[2] The entire country had been ravaged by civil war (in which Britain, France and the United States had backed the ‘White’ side), up to 1919. The triumphant Bolshevik government, which had given most of the land to individual peasants, (still State-owned), also retreated from their initial period of War Communism to a New Economic Policy (NEP) – a form of State capitalism from 1921 until 1928, which encouraged private capital to set up enterprises, were endeavouring to reconstruct its basic transport infrastructure and industries.
I. Visitors
Here we recall the very different experiences and thoughts of an earlier visitor, one of the most perceptive contemporary observers of the early Soviet Union. Walter Citrine,(1887-1983), was the newly appointed Assistant General Secretary of the TUC in 1924.[3] He was invited to visit the Soviet Union by the President of the Russian TUC, Mikhail Tomsky.[4] The willingness of that thinly-resourced union office in Victoria to spare their recently appointed officer for a month in September/October 1925, signifies their keenness to assist the Soviet unions, part of a wider effort to bring them into the recently re-established international family of unions, the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). Ostensibly, this visit was for Citrine to advise the unions there on more advanced western union administration, of which he was the recognised union expert from his ETU days. Citrine and his colleague, George Hicks (1870-1954), General Secretary of the Building Trades Union (AUBTW) and a member of the General Council, were accompanied throughout their trip by the most senior officials of the Russian TUC (the All-Russian Central Council Trades Union – ARCCTU). They had access to most places and key figures of the Revolution and so were in a particularly good position to observe and comment on what they saw there. Citrine produced a one volume report [5]
They travelled by train with Tomsky and his trade delegation, via Berlin and Riga to Moscow, from 19th September. They were struck by what they saw in passing through war-torn Germany, Latvia and Estonia. Also by the fact that ‘a good deal of the hard manual work in Russia is done by women’ [6] Generally, with the peasants they saw along the way in the countryside, ‘the standard of life seemed lamentably low’. On 24th September, they arrived in Moscow to stay in the ‘splendid’ National Hotel. However as they toured around, they found the old Czarist-era tenement housing and other buildings, quite dilapidated. They were ‘indignant’ at the seemingly callous attitude of their Russian union colleagues to the fate of the many orphaned children (from the Civil War and famine years), sleeping rough in the cold with very scant clothing.[7]
Their union interpreter, a Mr Yarotsky, sought to explain this backwardness as, ‘we have not got Communism now, we have had to adopt State capitalism’.[8] They went on to enjoy the ‘magnificent’ ballet performance at the Bolshoi Theatre, ‘sitting where the Grand Dukes of Russia had formerly sat’. They boated on the river and enjoyed Tomsky’s hospitality at his big house outside the city, meeting his wife and friends – ‘it was strange to me to remember that these were dreadful revolutionaries. They were about as good-hearted a crowd of people as one could wish to meet.’[9] Another day they visited the huge ‘Palace of Labour’, ‘full of trade union offices’ (twenty-three). He ‘did not think much of the general system of administration here. Everything seemed to be confusion and very little efficiency.’ Their equipment, typewriters, calculating machines and phones, seemed antediluvian. They had a long detailed description of the Building Workers Union’s administrative system from their General Secretary, Aleksander Bogdanov, which Hicks (AUBTW) was particularly interested in. The benefits system was explained (unemployment and strike pay only was paid by the union, the State paying sickness and superannuation benefits). Every firm paid c1% of its wages bill to the unions for educational purposes and a certain amount was allocated for crèches. Another 1% went for union administration. There was ‘a State minimum wage based on the cost of living in the various districts’.[10]
They also met the Secretary of the large Moscow Trades Council, Mikhailoff, who acknowledged that ‘their methods of administration showed them to be a long way behind those of British Trade Union practice’.[11] He told them they had approximately 1 million members in Moscow district and over 8,000 union representatives (about one permanent official, including typists and clerks, to every 300 members). Mikhailoff told them that strikes were mainly in the private sector and he could not envisage them in any state organisation.[12] No doubt Citrine gave them the benefit of his experience on comparable British union administrative practices informally, but he does not say whether he gave any written advice. They also went to see Mikhail Kalinin (1875-1946), the Soviet President, a former turner at the huge Putilov Works in Leningrad, but of peasant background. They didn’t get to talk with him as he was taken up hearing the grievances of a large number of workers and peasants in a surgery. They were struck by how approachable such an important person was, but were told that his office was largely ceremonial. Another day, they visited a Dutch aeroplane factory, quite up to the standards ‘of what I had seen in our best factories’, with permanent union officials.[13] They were taken for an aeroplane trip over Moscow.
Off to Leningrad on 30th September, they visited a Rubber works which employed 14,000, outside the city and inspected a power station above a dam on the Volga. In the city they saw the Cultural Hall, inspected housing schemes and toured around the city by motor. They didn’t spend much time there, but returned to Moscow before setting off by [very slow] train to the Crimea (Sebastopol and Balaclava). After a few days touring there, they had to return suddenly to Moscow on Sunday 4th October to be told that his boss, General Secretary, Fred Bramley, had died suddenly at an IFTU meeting in Amsterdam and that he, Citrine, was to be acting General Secretary. They attended a Moscow Trades Council gathering of shop stewards and members of the workshop committees, to greet them and to honour Fred Bramley’s passing. His photo, ‘a life-size bust photograph [was] mounted on the platform draped in red and black’. A band played a funeral march and sounded the last post. He was clearly regarded as a great friend of the Russian unions. They addressed the meeting after Tomsky, but few questions were allowed. They also had an interview with Gregoriy Zinoviev, the Head of the Communist International or Comintern before they left Moscow. Finally they were given a rousing farewell function in the Kremlin ‘organised by Schmidt (the Commissar of Labour).[14] Citrine, his mind elsewhere now no doubt, wanted to fly back immediately, but was strongly cautioned against that form of transport by his hosts – they were worried about the safety record of some of those early Soviet aeroplanes. So, they left by a specially-arranged train to Riga and travelled home via Berlin and Brussels, arriving on October 19th. So, this curtailed visit was unremarkable for what they saw in those early post-Revolution reconstruction days. The published TUC/Labour Party delegation book contains far more detailed accounts, though as a very partisan report, it was viewed with caution.[15] By comparison, Citrine’s frank record of their intimate discussions with the senior Russian TUC officials who accompanied them everywhere – Mikhail Tomsky, the ARCCTU President, the Secretary Aleksander Dogodov, the Organizing Secretary, Gregoriy Mel’nichansky and their interpreter V. Yarotsky – is often more revealing of the state of affairs there in 1925.
II. Trade unions in Russia
These had not developed strongly in backward Czarist Russia where they had to operate in conditions of illegality and weak industrial development. However, as the mass base of the new ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, they grew enormously in numbers, to 4-6million, when legalised after the February Revolution (membership was in practice compulsory, as a vote of the majority in a factory ensured it through the influence of the communist party fraction, with subscriptions stopped from wages). With their all-Soviet Union spread, concentrated in twenty-three unions after 1917 with the headquarters accommodated together in the grand Palace of Labour in Moscow, these organisations became of central importance for the rulers of the new order.[16] Before the October Revolution, most unions were under Menshevik social-democratic leadership, though the Bolsheviks (Leninist and syndicalist), were strongest in the factories and heavy industrial works, where a factory-unit branch structure prevailed. So, a highly politicised form of trade unionism emerged in that climate, though they soon developed a tradition of independence on behalf of their members’ interests. They were strongest in the main centres of industry – Moscow and the area around it to as far as Yaroslavl and Nizhniy-Novgorod; from Odessa to Kharkov in the Black Sea area; Minsk and Kiev in the Ukraine and fifteen other cities.
The Organising Secretary, Grigory Mel’nichansky (who spoke English well), gave Citrine and Hicks a history of this development. They had reduced the numbers of unions drastically from over a thousand to twenty-three in 1917.[17] Members’ subscriptions were collected by appointed lay representatives. Citrine estimated there were about six and a half million union members there by 1925 and he reckoned that as unions, they were fairly vigorous, and independent of employers, (especially in the still significant private sector). In the expanding public sector, their relationship with the new Communist “workers’ state” was far less clear and difficult even for Citrine to evaluate entirely at that time. Mel’nichansky said there was a major difference in the psychology of Russian workers than that of British workers. Their strikes ‘were always of a whole Shop and not of a particular trade’, with more of ‘a class than a craft basis.’[18] The entire union structure was quite complex, and somewhat confusing, even for Citrine, as there was a factory-provincial-national structure as well as a city one. They were all linked through Trades Councils, which elected representatives to the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (ARCCTU), in which Tomsky was the key figure.
Mikhail Tomsky, then aged forty-five, was by trade a skilled craftsman (compositor/engraver) from Petrograd. He had become a Bolshevik revolutionary and union activist from the time of the 1905 Revolution in his early days in Petrograd and Estonia. He had been exiled to France in 1908. On his return in 1909, he was again arrested and spent a number of years in Czarist jails, only being released finally in February 1917. With such a distinguished revolutionary record, he was elected as chairman of the Russian TUC and to the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1919, on behalf of the unions. He had been elevated to the Politburo of the CPSU’s Central Committee Party, in 1922, alongside Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Stalin and Zinoviev. Although his main role was with the Soviet and international union matters, it seems certain that he was a ‘player’ in the Bolshevik ruling group for much of the 1920s. So, he had a dual responsibility as a key member of the Politburo and as head of the trade unions. On the one hand, he was responsible for improving conditions of his members but was also committed to the government’s desire to increase labour productivity and build a modern industrial economy.[19] Aleksander Dogodov, the Secretary of ARCCTU, attended the Politburo on a non-voting basis as his substitute, during Tomsky’s frequent absences on union and State business.[20] Citrine and Hicks had many deep discussions with them all on how they were performing this balancing act. Union leaders who emerged from this environment tended to be the most determined and more politicized, so they commanded great respect, having risked arrest, deportation and death for their beliefs. Although they had superseded most of the more orthodox Menshevik union leaders from July 1917, these union leaders clearly had Hick’s and Citrine’s admiration and respect as genuine union people.
There had been considerable controversy about what should be the role of the trade unions in the new socialist state from the start.[21] In the first flush of the revolution, the CPSU Congress Programme of 1919 declared that the unions were ‘to concentrate in their hands all the administration of the entire national economy’. Such ‘undefined supervision over the function of management…gave rise to much indiscipline and strengthened syndicalist tendencies’.[22] The trade unions were also strongly represented on the Supreme Economic Council of the State and all other key economic bodies and so a ‘confusion of powers and responsibilities’ was inevitable.[23] But when it was proposed ‘that the trade unions should view their tasks in a ‘productionist’ and not ‘consumptionist’ spirit, it was ‘Tomsky [who] insisted on the need for the trade unions to resume, in some measure, the defence of the interests of their members’. [24] In 1921, the issue became more acute, when a group of CPSU militants, known as the Workers Opposition[25] ‘argued in fact against the dictatorship of the party when it demanded that the entire management of the national economy be transferred to an All-Russian Congress of Producers.’[26]
Lenin strongly opposed these ‘dangerous slogans’, while the then other leading figure, Leon Trotsky strongly argued that the Party should assert its dictatorship ‘even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy’.[27] He and Bukharin wanted to militarise (‘statify’) the unions for productionist objectives, a policy in which the unions’ task would be mainly to ‘educate’ their members to raise productivity.[28] Unsurprisingly, Tomsky and his colleagues opposed this line vigorously.[29] Lenin realised that they needed the unions with their factory and all-Soviet Union reach to persuade the workers (many former peasants), to help restore stability to the economy after the War Communism period, when productivity and labour discipline practically collapsed. So, he and Stalin sided with the unions in a compromise whereby the unions could ‘support claims of labour in private and leased enterprises and also in such socialized concerns where workers suffered from bureaucratic encroachments.’[30] The unions were decreed ‘independent of government machinery and control’.[31]
Strikes were not banned, but the eleventh Party Congress appealed to the unions ‘to refrain from calling them’. However, the unions had to accept piece-work to raise productivity, as part of the deal. At the same time the Party reasserted the primacy of individual management control and resolved ‘that the Trade Unions should not assume directly any functions of control over production’ in the private sector, as part of the New Economic Policy. The CPSU Congress decided that in the State sector, ‘industrial managers alone should be responsible for fixing wages and rations’ but ‘in accordance with collective agreements concluded with trade unions.’ [32]
Many trade unionists were now being encouraged to become managers while still retaining union membership, and so many of the brightest young workers were absorbed into the new state. The Central Council of Trade Unions (ARCCTU) split and Tomsky was temporarily removed as Chairman. These tensions continued throughout the 1920s as the union leaders sought to balance their often-conflicting roles. Their organisation remained relatively autonomous, with Tomsky back as their leader while still a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee, CPSU.[33] By 1925, ‘the debate on the whole revealed how great relatively was still the strength of the trade unions’.[34] A more recent study by modern researchers, even described the 1920s as ‘a golden age for the trade unions’, with wages rising by 12 % in 1926/7, while productivity also rose by 9%.[35]
III. Tomsky.
A central topic of Citrine
and Hicks’ discussions with Tomsky and his colleagues was about ‘the role and position of unions in Soviet politics’ and ‘the connection between the Communist Party and the Trade Union Movement’.[36] As a good Bolshevik, Tomsky stuck to the Party line. He argued that they had no need of the independence which unions everywhere else insisted upon in capitalist societies (‘we are the State’ and ‘Every one of the members of the All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions is Communist’). He and his colleagues on the Central Council of Trade Unions had to balance their members’ sectional interests with those of the general interest of the country, which they strongly supported also. He added that because the Soviet unions were endowed with social welfare and health functions that in other [non-socialist] countries are carried on by unfriendly State departments, they were in an entirely different situation. Citrine however, argued from their experience with the 1924 Labour government in Britain, saying, ‘I do not believe it is a good thing for the trade unions in any State to sacrifice their independence to the State’.[37]
In 1927, the Soviet Publishing House, produced a pamphlet by Tomsky entitled, ‘The Trade Unions, The Party and the State’ which elaborated Tomsky’s orthodox Leninist views for the English-speaking labour movement. This was after their fall-out with the TUC over the General Strike. What was novel about it though, was his argument that the unions were ‘co-partners in State power’, that there was a ‘mutual dependence’ with the Peoples Commissaries (the Soviet government) and with the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets.[38] This view would soon be tested. The following year, Tomsky was again removed (this time permanently) from his position by the Party caucus (fraksya).[39] It is not entirely clear why this came about. It is usually attributed to his controversial address to the 8th Congress of the AUCCTU in December 1928, in which he urged the opposite line to that they had argued with Citrine. He urged ‘complete freedom of unions to press for improvements in the material conditions of their members.’ He was also said to have, ‘maintained that it was not the duty of the unions to work for improvements in factory techniques, even though such improvements would lead to increased productivity.’[40] At that Congress, he and his colleagues in the leadership of the AUCCTU were attacked bitterly by delegates from the Komsomol (young communists), over differential payments and generally inferior conditions of young general workers which the craft-dominated union hierarchy were said to be unconcerned about. This had been a regular complaint for some years, but most delegates still supported the ‘old guard’ around Tomsky. However, after the conference, the CPSU fraction within the Central Council voted narrowly to remove Tomsky. [41]
Tomsky’s address may well have reflected arguments within the Politburo about the proposed rapid pace of industrialisation (the First Five-Year Plan) and collectivisation of farms, which Tomsky and his colleagues worried would undermine the unions’ position. If so, it was probably not so much what he said so much as the fact of exposing these inner leadership differences to obtain the backing of the unions, which drew down the Party leadership’s ire. Then again, it may have reflected criticism of the failure of Tomsky’s softer approach to the social democratic-run European unions than that of the Comintern and Profintern under Zinoviev and Lozovsky, after the General Strike. Stalin, in a 1927 CPSU Congress speech denied that they had ‘banked’ on the TUC in any way, as Zinoviev charged.[42] The Central Committee then installed Lazarus Kaganovich and four other senior Party nominees on the Presidium of the AUCCTU, who over the next two years carried out a far-reaching purge and ‘re-organisation of trade union executives in personnel as well as in policy’.[43] Tomsky was replaced by a Nicolai Shvernik, who was still there when Citrine visited again in 1935![44] In the official history of the CPSU, Tomsky, was denounced as one of the ‘high bureaucrats in the trade unions’ (along with Mel’nichansky and Dogodov), and was removed from the Politburo in 1929 (though not the CPSU Central Committee).[45] He became a Deputy Chairman of the industrial ministry (Chemicals), and in 1930 Head of the State Publishing House until 1936.[46] At Citrine’s insistence when he visited again in 1935, they met and he reassured the TUC leader that he was most happy. A year later, however, Citrine learned that ‘he was publicly denounced and shot himself rather than face arrest’ as one of the leading ‘Right Oppositionists’.[47] More recently, Sheila Fitzpatrick, a respected Soviet era scholar who has extensively accessed the archives there, referred to Tomsky as having been ‘named by the former Left Oppositionist Grigory Zinoviev in his testimony at the first of the Moscow show trials … that he killed himself and left a note to Stalin declaring his innocence’, which was ignored.[48]
So, Citrine got a good flavour of what was happening at the heart of the Soviet Union in a period where there was an autonomous union movement. It seems that this dramatic change in the leadership of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions from 1928, ended their period of autonomy, emphasising instead a role of fully supporting the Five-Year Plans under Communist Party direction. Much more work needs to be done to confirm this account, which the writer will attempt around Citrine’s next visit in 1935.
Note: Part Two of Dr Moher’s article appeared in the February 2018 Labour Affairs. It is now on-line.
References
[1][1] [1] TUC Library Collections exhibition 2017. This well-presented collection of original documents and photographs, including the 1924 TUC delegation visit, commemorates the close ties then existing between the British and Russian trade union centres.
[2] [2] Report of 1920 TUC/Labour delegation visit, TUC Library Collections, Bramley Papers, C4/12.
[3] [3] For a detailed account of Citrine’s background as an ETU union official on Merseyside and Manchester from about 1906 to 1923, see my chapter, Walter Citrine- A Union Pioneer of Industrial Cooperation, in Alternatives to State- Socialism in Britain, (editors, P.Ackers & Alastair J.Reid), 2016, 179-209. Also ‘Leaders in the heyday of Britain’s unions: Walter Citrine and Ernest Bevin, in Labour Affairs, Part 1 (pp.9-13) and 2 (pp.9-13), February & March 2017
[4] [4] W.Citrine, Men and Work, (1964), 95, vol 1 of his autobiography.
[5] [5] W.Citrine, Visit to Russia 1925 (BLPES Citrine Archive, Section 1/4), has not been much noticed. It was probably overshadowed by the 250-page Report of the official TUC/LP delegation of the previous year, which was published as a book by the TUC in 1925. His report is reproduced in the first volume of his autobiography, Men and Work (1964). There is an extensive account of it in Jonathan Davis’ An Outsider Looks In: Walter Citrine’s First Visit to the Soviet Union, 1925, (University of Cambridge), (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09546545.2013.855405).
[6] [6] Citrine, Visit to Russia 1925, 32-3. Professor S. Smith’s Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890-1928, identifies the emancipation of women there as one of the Bolsheviks’ key achievements.
[7] [7] ibid.,119. Yarotsky, their interpreter who described himself as ‘a proletarian Professor’ “simply shrugged his shoulders and said: ‘Well, this is one of Russia’s problems, comrade. We can do nothing about it.’”
[8] [8] ibid.49. A reference to Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which signaled a retreat from the ‘War Communism’ of the Civil War 1918-21 period to a form of State capitalism.
[9] [9] ibid.,100-1.
[10] [10] ibid.,105-7
[11] [11] ibid.171,
[12] [12] ibid.,172.
[13] [13] At that time, the Bolshevik government was making strenuous efforts to attract such capital works and a number of German and American firms also ventured to set up plant in the Soviet Union during the NEP period (1922-8).
[14] [14] Citrine, Men and Work, 118-120.
[15] [15] Report of the British Labour delegation to Russia 1924, (TUC Library Collections at the London Metropolitan University), November 1925, DK 266.
[16] [16] The Webbs listed 154 unions ‘among which the Membership of 47 Trade Unions of 1931 was distributed in 1934’. Soviet Communism, Appendix IX, 492-495.
[17] [17] Citrine, Visit to Russia, 59-69. See also, S & B. Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? (1935), 163-72; Harry W. Laidler, History of Socialism: an historical comparative study of Socialism, (2013), 438-40.
[18] [18] Citrine, Visit to Russia report, 66.
[19] [19] ‘From the Factory to the Kremlin: Mikhail Tomsky and the Russian Worker’ by Charters Wynn, University of Texas, for the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, 1996. Just after the collapse of the Soviet economy in 1991, Wynn compared with Tomsky’s and the NEP period. Wikipedia https://www. Ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1996-809-09-Wynn.pdf
[20] [20] Citrine, Men and Work, 96.
[21] [21] Webbs, Soviet Communism, A New Civilisation, 166-7. A more recent, succinct account was Professor Alec Nove’s An Economic History of the Soviet Union, (Penguin edn, 1969),71-3.
[22] [22] Nove, An Economic History of the Soviet Union, 71
[23] [23] Webbs, Soviet Communism, A New Civilization? 167.
[24] [24] I. Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions, (1950), 41, Royal Institute of International Affairs
[25] [25] Wikipedia, The Workers Opposition. led by Alexander Shlyapnikov (1885- 1937), leader of the Metalworkers union and a former Commissar of Labour, and Alexandra Kollontoi, (1872-1952. She was also a former Commissar for Social Welfare and champion of women’s equality.
[26] [26] Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions, 54.
[27] [27] ibid., 55. This from Trotsky’s biographer and champion.
[28] [28] ibid., 55-6.
[29] [29] Citrine was shocked to learn this as he assumed that Trotsky was the logical one to succeed Lenin. Ironically, Tomsky was later said to have become associated with Bukharin and Rykov in what was described as ‘the Bloc of Rights’ in the Moscow Trials, though what precisely happened has not been explored fully.
[30] [30] Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions, 61.
[31] [31] Webbs, Soviet Communism, A New Civilisation? 168.
[32] [32] Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions, 62.
[33] [33] ibid., 70. Deutscher compares them with the TUC attitude to the radical reforming Labour Government of 1945-9, which does capture the ‘corporatist’ spirit of those times.
[34] [34] ibid., 73.
[35] [35] C. Wynn, ‘From the Factory to the Kremlin: Mikhail Tomsky and the Russian Worker’,8.
[36] [36] Davis, An Outsider Looks In, 9.
[37] [37] Citrine, Men and Work, 97.
[38] [38] Mikhail Tomsky, The Trade Unions, the Party and the State (1927), 18-20. Mikhail Tomsky Archive (https://www.marxists.org/archive/tomsky/index.htm)
[39] [39] Deutscher’s version is 76-81, ‘Transition to Planned Economy’.
[40] [40] Harry W. Laidler, History of Socialism: an historical comparative study of socialism.(2013), 440 This largely follows the Webbs’ 1935 account in Soviet Communism, A New Civilisation, 169-70, but it doesn’t explain Tomsky’s new line?
[41] [41] Wynn concluded that ‘Stalin does not appear to have played a significant role in the Komsomol campaign against the Trade Unions’ and even had dismissed those attacks as ‘a whole series of impermissible caricatures’. C.Wynn, ‘From the Factory to the Kremlin: Mikhail Tomsky and the Russian Worker’, 11.
[42] [42] J.V. Stalin, On the Opposition, (1974 compilation of Stalin’s speeches by the Chinese CP), 765-6, 797-802.
[43] [43] Webbs, Soviet Communism, A New Civilisation, 170-1. A more recent study is C.Wynn’s, ‘From the Factory to the Kremlin…’ 17. For Kaganovich, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, (2015, Princeton U.P.), 320.
[44] [44] Citrine, Men and Work, 94. Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team, 327. Shvervnik headed the trade unions from 1929-’44 and again from 1956-’66. Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team, 327.
[45] [45] The official Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), London, 1938, 269.
[46] [46] Wikipedia, Mikhail Tomsky (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tomsky ); Fitzpatrick, 328.
[47] [47] Citrine, Men and Work, 94. He was ‘rehabilitated’ in 1962.
[48] [48] S. Fitzpatrick in a book review about suicides in London Review of Books, Vol.33 no. 4 – February 2011. Her book, On Stalin’s Team, The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (2015) is one of the more balanced productions.
Labour Affairs Magazine 