Workers' Involvement in the Soviet Union

Abstract

This article discusses the evolution of Soviet attitudes toward workers' participation. The major emphasis is on developments of the last two decades, especially the most recent period. I suggest that Brezhnev was the first Soviet leader to raise the issue of workers' participation—at, however, only a mythological level. Mikhail Gorbachev, however, includes workers' participation as a genuine element in his program for workplace reform in the Soviet Union. Soviet managers and apparatchiks have reacted with open hostility to this innovation, while the majority of Soviet workers are skeptical about the implementation of this idea. The first year of Gorbachev's reforms bears witness to some modest progress along the lines of workers' participation, mostly in the movement to establish cooperatives in which workers, encouraged by the government, are able to create free cooperatives with the right to select their managers and make decisions about the distribution of the cooperative's income. However, there is a serious danger that workers' participation in the Soviet Union can degenerate into yet another ritualistic activity.