Kenneth M. Straus, Factory and Community in Stalin's Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. ix + 355 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Abstract

It is ironic that in their pique over the Soviet regime's failure to live up to its name as a true dictatorship of the proletariat, historians have given short shrift to workers in the USSR. In his monograph Kenneth Straus wants to bring us back to the Soviet working class, to see the stuff it was made of, and to examine its relationship with the state. How refreshing to see a historian of Soviet Russia who is still willing to use unfashionable terms like class consciousness! Straus integrates elements from the theories of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, and Thompson to draw his picture of the Soviet working class, explaining not only why it indeed needs to be regarded as a class but why it would define itself neither in opposition to management nor to the Soviet regime.