Description:
The long decade from the October Revolution to 1930 was the beginning of a great experiment to create a socialist society. Throughout these years, socialist trade unions attempted to transform the Russian worker into a productive and enthusiastic...
Brief description: Diane P. Koenker is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Editor of Slavic Review. She is the author of several books including Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, coauthor of Strikes in Revolution, Russia 1917, and coeditor and translator of Notes of a Red Guard. From Cornell, she authored Republic of Labor: Russian Printers and Soviet Socialism, 1918-1930, and coedited Turizm: The Russian and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism with Anne E. Gorsuch.
Review Quotes:
"Diane P. Koenker applies the categories of labor history, classical and post-modern, to life under socialism in the Soviet 1920s. Through the experience of printers, Koenker explores working-class organizations, identities, cultures, and relationships to authority. Koenker proves that the printers managed to maintain a sense of class identity in the face of mounting state claims that often denied them the fruits of their own proletarian revolution."
--Daniel Orlovsky, Southern Methodist University