Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-13T10:00:19.047Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Workers and Communist Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

S. A. Smith
S. A. Smith
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Get access

Summary

Revolutions in the Chinese phrase ‘turn heaven and earth upside down’ (tianfan difu). They are moments of rupture that release fresh energies and set in train all manner of new developments. Yet the course of revolutionary regimes is also powerfully constrained by the legacies of the past. In the preceding four chapters it has been argued that in the decades leading up to the Communist revolutions in Russia and China, the onset of capitalist modernity led to migrants undergoing complex transformations of social identities as they mutated into urban workers, some of which proved compatible with the Communist project, others of which did not. The purpose of this chapter is to explore some of the positive and negative relationships between these pre-revolutionary transformations of social identity and the subsequent evolution of Communist regimes (looking, chronologically, at the period up to 1941, the onset of the Second World War, in the case of the Soviet Union, and up to 1976, the end of the Mao era, in the case of the PRC). It is not intended to provide a comprehensive discussion of the fate of workers under Communism, still less a synoptic account of the development of Communist societies; nor is it intended to suggest that pre-revolutionary transformations in workers' social identities were a major factor determining the course of post-revolutionary regimes.

Type
Chapter
Information
Revolution and the People in Russia and China
A Comparative History
 , pp. 192 - 235
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bianco, Lucien (with the collaboration of Hua Chang-Ming), Jacqueries et révolution dans la China du XXe siècle (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2005), ch. 17.Google Scholar
Benton, Gregor, New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999), p. 708.Google Scholar
Koenker, Diane P. and Rosenberg, William G., Strikes and Revolution in Russia, 1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 68, 4–5.Google Scholar
Perry, Elizabeth J., Patrolling the Revolution: Worker Militias, Citizenship, and the Modern Chinese State (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).Google Scholar
Rabochaia Gazeta, 21 March 1917, p. 3;
Izvestiia, 21 March 1917.
Stites, Richard, Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 306–7.Google Scholar
Smith, S. A., Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, S. A., Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002), ch. 11;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hai, Tang, Zhongguo laodong wenti [Chinese Labour Problems] (Shanghai: Guanghua shuju, 1926), pp. 511–20.Google Scholar
Brower, Daniel J., ‘Labor Violence in Russia in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Slavic Review, 41, 3 (1982), 417–31;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wynn, Charters, Workers, Strikes and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ascher, Abraham, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 218.Google Scholar
Pei, Zou and Zhen, Liu (eds.), Zhongguo gongren yundong shihua [History of the Chinese Labour Movement], vol. 3 (Beijing, Zhongguo gongren chubanshe, 1993), p. 244.
Znamenskii, O. N., Vserossiiskoe uchreditel′noe sobranie (Leningrad: Nauka, 1976), appendix 1.Google Scholar
Bangxing, Zhu, Linge, Hu and Sheng, Xu, Shanghai chanye yu Shanghai zhigong [Shanghai Industry and Shanghai Labour] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1984; orig. 1939), p. 663.Google Scholar
Churakov, D. O., ‘Dinamika rabochego protesta v SSSR i Rossiiskoi Federatsii (1917–2001 gody)’, in Buzgalin, A. V., Churakov, D. O., Shul′tse, P. (eds.), Rabochii klass i rabochee dvizhenie Rossii: istoriia i sovremennost′ (Moscow: RIG-IZDAT, 2002), p. 65.Google Scholar
Smith, S. A., ‘The Comintern, the Chinese Communist Party and the three armed uprisings in Shanghai, 1926–27’, in Rees, Tim and Thorpe, Andrew (eds.), International Communism and the Communist International, 1919–43 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 260.Google Scholar
Lenin, V. I., ‘Tasks of the Revolutionary Army Contingents’, in Lenin, V. I., Collected Works, 4th edn, vol. 9 (Moscow: Progress, 1972), p. 423.Google Scholar
Esherick, Joseph W., ‘Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution’, Modern China, 21, 1 (1995), 55;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Westad, Odd Arne, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–50 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003);Google Scholar
Ven, Hans J., War and Nationalism in China, 1925–45 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).Google Scholar
Clermont, Pierre, Le communisme à contre-modernité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1993).Google Scholar
Kotsonis, Yanni, ‘Introduction’, and Hoffmann, David L., ‘European Modernity and Soviet Socialism’, in Hoffmann, David L. and Kotsonis, Yanni (eds.), Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), pp. 1–18 and 245–60.Google Scholar
Brooks, Jeffrey, ‘Revolutionary Lives: Public Identities in Pravda during the 1920s’, in White, Stephen (ed.), New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 33.Google Scholar
Naiman, Eric, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 93.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hellbeck, Jochen, ‘Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia’, Kritika 1, 1 (2000), 71–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kharkhordin, Oleg, The Collective and the Individual in Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 2Google Scholar
Kelly, Catriona, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine the Great to Yeltsin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 260.Google Scholar
Sandle, Mark, A Short History of Soviet Socialism (London: UCL Press, 1999), p. 247.Google Scholar
Osokina, E., Za fasadom ‘stalinskogo izobiliia’: raspredelenie i rynok v snabzhenii naseleniia v gody industrializatsii, 1927–1941 (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998), p. 5.Google Scholar
Hessler, Julie, A Social History of Soviet Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 5–6.Google Scholar
Koenker, Diane P., Republic of Labour: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918–1930 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 310.Google Scholar
Schwarcz, Vera, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 231.Google Scholar
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 31–33.
Wang, Ban, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 220.Google Scholar
Wakeman, Frederic, Jr, History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung's Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 43.Google Scholar
Jiwei, Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 125, 126.Google Scholar
Binyan, Liu, A Higher Kind of Loyalty (New York: Pantheon, 1990), p. 201.Google Scholar
Townsend, James R., ‘Revolutionizing Chinese Youth: A Study of Chung-kuo Ch'ing-nien’, in Barnett, A. Doak (ed.), Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), pp. 455–6.Google Scholar
Shaoguang, Wang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 54.Google Scholar
Madsen, Richard, ‘The Countryside under Communism’, in MacFarquhar, Roderick and Fairbank, John K. (eds.), Cambridge History of China, vol. 15 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 651.Google Scholar
Zhongguo qingnianbao, 12 May 1962.
Survey of the China Mainland Press, 2756, 12 June 1962.
Smith, S. A., A Road is Made: Communism in Shanghai, 1920–1927 (Richmond: Curzon, 2000), pp. 122–6.Google Scholar
Goldman, Wendy, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engel, Barbara Alpern, ‘Engendering Russian History’, Slavic Review, 51, 2 (1992), 309–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonnell, Victoria E., ‘The Representation of Women in Early Soviet Political Art’, Russian Review, 50 (1991), 267–288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petrone, Karen, ‘Masculinity and Heroism in Imperial and Soviet Military-Patriotic Cultures’, in Clements, Barbara Evans, Friedman, Rebecca and Healey, Dan (eds.), Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 172–93;Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 231–5;Google Scholar
Neary, Rebecca, ‘Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists’ Movement and Soviet Culture of Daily Life, 1934–41', Russian Review, 58 (1999), 396–412.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krylova, Anna, ‘Identity, Agency and the “First Soviet Generation”,’ in Lovell, Stephen (ed.), Generations in Twentieth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 100–20.Google Scholar
Davin, Delia, Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 177.Google Scholar
Wolf, Margery, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), pp. 83–5.Google Scholar
Johnson, Kay Ann, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), p. 215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diamant, Neil, Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949–1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).Google Scholar
Yan, Yunxiang, Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–99 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).Google Scholar
Louie, Kam, Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 107.Google Scholar
Honig, Emily, ‘Maoist Mappings of Gender: Reassessing the Red Guards’, in Brownell, Susan and Wasserstrom, Jeffrey (eds.), Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 255–68.Google Scholar
Perry, Elizabeth J. and Dillon, Nara, ‘“Little Brothers” in the Cultural Revolution: The Worker Rebels of Shanghai’, in Brownell, Susan and Wasserstrom, Jeffrey (eds.), Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 269–86.Google Scholar
Rofel, Lisa ‘Liberation Nostalgia and a Yearning for Modernity’, in Gilmartin, Christina K. et al. (eds), Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 225–49;Google Scholar
Hershatter, Gail, ‘The Gender of Memory: Rural Chinese Women and the 1950s’, Signs, 28, 1 (2002), 43–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 96.Google Scholar
Wu, Harry Xiaoying, ‘Rural to Urban Migration in the People's Republic of China’, China Quarterly, 139 (1994), 686–7, 694.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Il′ina, I. N., Obshchestvennye organizatsii Rossii v 1920-e gody (Moscow: RAN Institut rossiiskoi istorii, 2000), p. 94.Google Scholar
Kotkin, Stephen, ‘Coercion and Identity: Workers’ Lives in Stalin's Showcase City', in Seigelbaum, Lewis and Suny, Ronald G. (eds), Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) p. 300.Google Scholar
Soskin, V. L., Obshchee obrazovanie v sovetskoi Rossii: pervoe desiatiletie, Part 2, (1923–1927gg.) (Novosibirsk: Novosibirskii gosudarstevennyi universitet, 1998), p. 81.Google Scholar
Vdovin, A. I., Rossiiskaia natsiia: natsional′no-politicheskie problemy XX veka i obshchenatsional′naia rossiiskaia ideia (Moscow: Libris, 1995), p. 101.Google Scholar
Hosking, Geoffrey, ‘The Second World War and Russian Nationalist Consciousness’, Past and Present, 175 (2002), 162–87;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirschenbaum, Lisa A., ‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families: Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War Two Propaganda’, Slavic Review, 59, 4 (2000), 825–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chang, Tiejun and Selden, Mark, ‘The Origins and Social Consequences of China's Hukou System’, China Quarterly, 139 (1994), 644–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tse-tung, Mao, ‘Criticism of Liang Shu-ming's Reactionary Ideas’, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 5 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), pp. 121–30.Google Scholar
China Daily, 24 September 2003.
Walder, Andrew, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 181–4.Google Scholar
Sargeson, Sally, Reworking China's Proletariat (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 42, 44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 116–17.Google Scholar
Suny, Ronald Gregor, ‘Constructing Primordialism: Old Histories for New Nations’, Journal of Modern History, 73 (2001), 862–96;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martin, Terry, An Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–39 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Slezkine, Yuri, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist System Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic Review, 53, 2 (1994), 450.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stalin, V. I., Works, vol. 13 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955), pp. 31–44.Google Scholar
Lenin, V. I., ‘The Chief Task of Our Day’, Collected Works, 4th edn (Moscow: Progress, 1972), pp. 159–63.Google Scholar
Townsend, James, ‘Chinese Nationalism’, in Unger, Jonathan (ed.), Chinese Nationalism (Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 1–30;Google Scholar
Kim, Samuel S. and Dittmer, Lowell, ‘Whither China's Quest for National Identity?’, in Kim, Samuel S. and Dittmer, Lowell (eds.), China's Quest for National Identity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 237–90.Google Scholar
Mackerras, Colin, China's Minorities: Integration and Modernization in the Twentieth Century (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 8Google Scholar
Gladney, Dru C., ‘Representing Nationality in China: Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities’, Journal of Asian Studies, 53, 1 (1994), 92–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laue, Theodore, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966). For a trenchant argument that the GMD and Communist regimes were both ‘developmental states’ pledged to the planned, centralized development of a reunified China, seeGoogle Scholar
Kirby, William C., ‘The Nationalist Regime and the Chinese Party-State, 1928–1958’, in Goldman, Merle and Gordon, Andrew (eds.), Contemporary East Asia in Historical Perspective (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 211–37.Google Scholar
Filtzer, Donald A., Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: the Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–41 (London: Pluto, 1986);Google Scholar
Andrle, Vladimir, Workers in Stalin's Russia: Industrialization and Social Change in a Planned Economy (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987).Google Scholar
Silver, Brian D., ‘Political Beliefs of the Soviet Citizen: Sources of Support for Regime Norms’, in Millar, James R., Politics, Work and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 100–41.Google Scholar
Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Kotkin, Stephen, review of Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934–1941, Europe-Asia Studies 50, 4 (1998), 741;
Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rossman, Jeffrey J., Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 13;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, Sarah, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verdery, Katherine, What Was Socialism, And What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blecher, Marc, ‘Hegemony and Workers’ Politics in China', China Quarterly, 170 (2002), 283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walder, Andrew G., ‘The Remaking of the Chinese Working Class, 1949–1981’, Modern China, 10, 1 (1984), 22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frazier, Mark W., The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution and Labour Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 213;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perry, Elizabeth J., ‘Shanghai's Strike Wave of 1957’, China Quarterly, 137 (1994), 1–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Perry, Elizabeth J. and Xun, Li, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 97–117.Google Scholar
U, Eddy, ‘Leninist Reforms, Workplace Cleavages, and Teachers in the Chinese Cultural Revolution’, Comparative Studies of Society and History 47 (2005), 106–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, S. A., ‘Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of “Superstitious” Rumors in the PRC, 1961–65’, American Historical Review, 111, 2 (2006), 411.Google Scholar
Lee, Ching Kwan ‘From the Spectre of Mao to the Spirit of the Law: Labour Insurgency in China’, Theory and Society 31 (2002), 213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×