![]() This meant that the factories were open day and night and that many had to work at highly undesirable hours. Typically though, the state took away more than it gave, for this was part of a scheme to increase production by establishing a three-shift system. Workers were also to have an extra hour off on the eve of Sundays and holidays. In January 1929, all Indus-tries were ordered to adopt the shorter day by the end of the Plan. One major step in that direction was the sudden announcement in 1927 that reduced the working day from eight to seven hours. Yet this was Communism whose goals had always included improving the lives of the proletariat. All this culminated in the Plan, which has been characterized as the triumph of the machine, where workers would become supremely efficient robot-like creatures. Emulating and surpassing such capitalist models formed part of the training of the new Soviet Man, a heroic figure whose unlimited capacity for work would benefit everyone in the dynamic new society. ![]() ![]() The engineers who came with them to train their users helped spread what became a real cult of Ford. The Bolsheviks were also great admirers of Henry Ford’s assembly line mass production and of his Fordson tractors that were imported by the thousands. Lenin had already been intrigued by the ideas of the American Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), whose time-motion studies had discovered ways of stream-lining effort so that every worker could produce the maximum. Unlimited enthusiasm was the mood of the day, with the Communists believing that iron will and hard-working manpower alone would bring about a new world.Įnthusiasm spread to time itself, in the desire to make the state a huge efficient machine, where not a moment would be wasted, especially in the workplace. Private enterprise disappeared in city and country, leaving the State supreme under the dictatorship of Stalin. ![]() Everyone’s life was affected, as collectivised farming drove millions from the land to swell the industrial proletariat. ![]() Between 19, production of coal, iron and steel increased at a fantastic rate, and new industrial cities sprang up, along with the world’s biggest dam. With these words, Stalin expressed the dynamic self-confidence of the Soviet Union’s Five Year Plan: weak and backward Russia was to turn overnight into a powerful modern industrial country. “There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot storm”. ![]()
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