Labor
Studying labor and social relations within the context of a specific period helps us to understand the formative historical, social, and political influences that shaped industry and business. Factories, enterprises, and organizations that play an important role in modern urban life were often shaped by complex conditions, dependent on their environment and surroundings. Market forces, individual emotions, managerial strategies, organized labor, constitutional and legal issues, ethical challenges, etc. also affected labor relations. For historians who are interested in the history of labor and the lived experience of workers, this theme offers an engaging subject for thinking about the world of work. Our materials refer to histories of professions and practices of remuneration, while focusing on important issues of urban modernization, trade unions, and leisure. This theme considers questions about what, historically, people wanted to gain from work, how people outlined objectives within their workplace relationships, and how the wellbeing of the labor force was measured. We are interested in how employment was structured, who had a formative influence in shaping labor rights, and which forces defined the public values that greatly affected the type of societies people used to live in.
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Primary Sources
Reaction of the USSR workers to the Soviet-Chinese conflict in July-December, 1929
The presented report shows the reaction of population in the USSR to the Soviet-Chinese conflict in July-December, 1929 over the control on Chinese Eastern Railway. The text includes opinions expressed by workers from Ukrainian industrial plants and mines in their private conversations, and in the work teams. They illustrate a wide range of opinions dominating in society: from ardent support of the Soviet Union in the conflict, and calls to go to the front, to denying the need for confrontation. It must be highlighted that discussions of the condition and provisions in the Soviet Army would often end up in reflections about the causes of internal economic problems in the country. Many workers...
Response from workers of the USSR to Stalin’s article “Dizzy with Success,” 1930
This report was drafted by the political special service authority of the USSR named the State Political Board (SPD, functioned in 1922-1934) for the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CC CP(b)U). It records the reactions of the population of the then Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) to the article by Stalin “Dizziness From Success (Concerning Questions of the Collective-Farm Movement)” published in the Pravda newspaper on March, 2, 1930. The text includes opinions expressed by workers from Ukrainian industrial plants and mines in their private conversations, and in the work teams. They are mostly quite skeptical and critical about collectivization, the activities of the party, and about Stalin in particular....
Excerpt from a 2012 interview with a female theater director: from Lviv to Moscow and back again
This is an excerpt from an interview with a theater director, one of the only women to work her way up through a male-dominated cultural sphere. She worked at several theaters in Lviv and became well-known in late Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine. This source tells us about late Soviet theater, and the cultural world in general, and the different circulations and pathways between Lviv and Moscow. She mentions Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” (actually at the 20th, not 22nd Party Congress) and the cultural opening that happened in the 1950s and 1960s. Note that she applied to theater school in Kyiv, but was not accepted - because she auditioned with verse by dissident poet Lina...
Lviv Regional Department for Public Education About Recreation for children and teenagers in the summer of 1968
The document describes the recreation for children and teenagers in the summer of 1968. Еhe report on the vacation of school children was drafted by the Lviv Regional Department of Public education. According to Soviet hierarchy of power in education, they initially drafted the order of the Ministry of Education of the Ukrainian Soviet socialist Republic “On the recreation of children for summer 1968.” It was followed by the local decisions of the regional and municipal departments for education, off party and Komsomol cells. They replicated the ministerial order, and used it as the guidance for the plan for summer vacations. When organizing and conducting events related to school education or recreation, Soviet...
Polish émigré song, 1918-1939
The socialist movement actively tried to attract emigrant workers. The theme of the hard labour of workers in factories or sweatshops appears in the works of socialists, who were often emigrants themselves. Some songs were anthems, and were created for that collective singing. An example of this is the Polish émigré song. There, emigrants leave their native land because of social injustice. Landlords, magnates, and priests are opposed to oppressed workers or soldiers who returned from the war and did not receive the expected guarantees. At the same time, the song emphasizes the temporary nature of emigration, because emigrants will return to their native land to make a revolution.
“My Mummy Is Back Home, When I’m In America”, song about emigration
The song is built on the emigration-home dichotomy. It reflects the popular strategy of rural families who sent some of their children to emigration, so that they could help support the household with money transfers. In the song, a daughter who has a hard job in the factory and suffers as a “green”, that is, an inexperienced migrant, from not speaking the language, unfair wages, and difficult work conditions. Women were often migrant workers, but they worked in worse and less paid jobs. She reproaches the mother who sent her to earn money and does not know about the hardships of labour. The experience of young migrants who went through numerous trials, but...
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A worker from the Lviv Confectionery Factory “Bilshovyk,” T.M. Etinger, at work, 1956
The photo is part of the collection of press photos from the State Archives of Lviv Region showing different economic areas: industry, agriculture, culture, and sports. The photo shows a worker of Lviv Confectionery Factory, T.M.Etinger. According to the accompanying inscription, she is “one of the best” workers, a labour veteran). She is captured at making a Kremlin’s Savior Tower. The nature of this photo and of the entire collection implies the genre of press photos that had to accompanied by a text (newspaper publication). The photo was meant to illustrate the message, to make it sound more convincing, to encourage and inspire the reading workers to accomplish more in their labour. In...
Members of the Communist Labor Brigade and the presentation of Komsomol tickets at the Mariupol Heavy Machinery Plant
The photo shows the moment of the ceremonial presentation of a Komsomol ticket to an employee of the Mariupol heavy engineering plant. In addition to the ticket, a party or Komsomol functionary hands an unknown woman a pennant, which may indicate that this new Komsomol member has already achived significant results in the performance of the party’s labor tasks. Most likely, she is a representative of the leaders of the plant, and it was important for the Soviet system that the leaders of the production were part of the Komsomol-party asset. If we follow the name of this source, then the young worker is part of the “communist labor brigade”, which was an...
“Screen of Pryazovia” (Pryazovskyi Ekran) № 1
This newsreel is a valuable source on the history of the development of the Mariupol industry. It was produced by the city club of film amateurs. Following the example of the Ukrkinochronika studio in the capital city which published the main newsreels in the republic, the authors of this piece created a short film report with 4 stories that tell about the deputies, the introduction of innovations in blast furnace steelmaking, about the winners of the socialist competition, and about the meeting of workers with a Soviet cosmonaut.
Collective of Communist Labor at Shoe Factory
Television news of the Lviv Television Studio followed the operators of Ukrkinochronika who chose shoe factory No. 3 as a model enterprise of the city’s light industry. The television camera shows to the audience Kateryna Lysak, an exemplary employee of the enterprise that was granted a status of a “communist labor enterprise”. At such enterprises, the example of the pioneers was to be followed by other workers, and a television clip told the people of Lviv about leaders of production and how the shoe factory was developing.
For the Family Hearth, a 1970 film
The film is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ivan Franko, written in 1892. In his story, the problem of sexual slavery (or “white slavery” in the terms of those times) and women’s engagement as its victims and enablers. The author’s choice of topic must have been influenced by the lawsuits against human traffickers that were actively taking place in Galicia at this time. One of the most high-profile cases was the Lviv trial in 1892 against 27 traffickers (men and women) accused of organizing sexual traffic abroad. The investigation confirmed 29 cases of selling girls from Galicia to brothels in Constantinople, Egypt, and India. The “white slavery” usually...
Song of the Communist Labor Brigades
"Song of Communist Labor Brigades" was written in 1956 by the composer Arkady Filipenko (1912-1983), who, in addition to academic music, wrote works for operettas and films. The verses to the song were written by another outstanding figure of Soviet culture of the Ukrainian SSR, Oleksa Novitsky (1914-1992), who was a military correspondent during the war, and later became a Shevchenko scholar. Both authors had the "right" biographies for writing the anthem of the communist labor brigades, which was performed at official events in the Ukrainian SSR, and was also published in large numbers for performance by professional and amateur groups. The song has a solemn mood and asserts that the communist labor...
The end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century is known as the period of mass migration from Europe to other continents, when more than 55 million people changed their place of residence. In particular, this process captured the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, where a difficult economic situation, job shortages, and persecutions stirred various groups of the population to leave. Such groups included both Ukrainian and Polish peasants, and Jews from urban centers who were small-scale craftsmen or workers. Most often, they moved to the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, where labor was needed at factories or farms.
The socialist competition in the USSR went through several stages in its development: the shock work [udarniki] of the turn of the 1920-30s, self-supporting brigades [khozrastchetnyie brigady], the Stakhanov movement of the mid-1930s, the thousanders [tysiachniki], etc. of the period of the Second World War, the Stakhanovism-shockwork of the period of “restoration of the national economy” (1950s), then, from the end of 1950s – the movement for a communist attitude to work [kommunisticheskoie otnosheniie k trudu]. Since the 1970s, when the Soviet economy was already depending solely on natural resources, the socialist competition turned into a painful obligatory fiction, although it officially ended only in the second half of the 1980s.
У 1950–1960-х роках на підприємствах Радянської України поширилися практики, скеровані на удосконалення праці. Двигуном цього процесу були так звані передовики – учасники руху трудящих СРСР за комуністичне ставлення до праці та за виховання людини комуністичного суспільства.