Work and Leisure among Textile Workers in Soviet Russia

Abstract

This chapter is related to previous studies, which I wrote in the 1980s, on work and workers’ culture in the former Soviet Union, using the example of workers’ clubs: their goals, organisation and practical activities, and the relationship between what they claimed to do and what they actually did.¹ Whereas these studies concerned either Russia in general or the urban centres of Moscow and St. Petersburg in particular and concentrated on the post-revolutionary phase of the 1920s, the present study directs its attention to the Russian provinces: to Iaroslavl’, where, because of its commercially advantageous position on the Volga, textile factories had been sited in the first half of the eighteenth century, to be joined later by metal-working factories, thus giving the town a long industrial worker tradition. The chronological focus of the study is the 1930s, the phase when Stalinist power structures were established in Russian society.