Workers’ Control of the Factories?

The Workers’ Opposition and Pre-revolutionary Managers in the New Soviet State

The Socialist Studies Seminar Presents:

Professor Barbara Allen

Department of History, LaSalle University
Author of Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1885-1937. Life of an Old Bolshevik

Friday, February 23rd, 2018

3:30- 5:00pm

History Conference Room
Baker Hall 246-A

The Workers’ Opposition, composed of communist workers and trade union leaders, fought in 1919-1922 to ensure that workers themselves would control and manage the factories. They put forward an alternative vision of socialism for the new Soviet state. Yet their program was not adopted. The state maintained an uncomfortable dependency on prerevolutionary technical and managerial specialists through the 1920s. Under Stalin, these specialists were vilified, persecuted, and replaced by new personnel trained in Soviet educational institutions. This talk examines the complex and oft-misunderstood attitudes of the Workers’ Opposition toward the prerevolutionary specialists.

For more information, contact Professor Wendy Goldman.

Photo: Worker Oppositionists Sergei Medvedev, Mikhail Chelyshev, and Alexander Shlyapnikov, 1926