One of the earliest of the innovative mass movements pioneered by the Soviet working class was the practice of subbotniks, or "Communist Saturdays." The first was organized on their own initiative by the workers at the chief repair shop of the Moscow-Kazan railway in May 1919. Working voluntarily and without pay after the regular shift had ended, the workers toiled out of political inspiration alone, in order to save and to strengthen the Soviet power against its foes during the Civil War. Despite end-of-the-week fatigue, the workers' productivity during the subbotniks regularly was two or three times higher than during regular hours.

소비에트 노동계급이 선도한 대중 운동의 시발점 중 하나는 스보트닉스, 또는 "공산주의 토요일"의 실행이었다. 전자는 1919년 5월에 모스크바-카잔 선로의 주요 수리공들에 의해 조직됐다. 정헌신적으로 일하면서,

    "Communist subbotniks are extraordinarily valuable as the actual beginning of communism," Lenin wrote, identifying the subbotniks as one of the "new shoots" pointing ahead of the then existing stage of social development toward the ultimate goal of a classless society. Following the first local initiatives, the party organized nationwide subbotniks with excellent results throughout the Civil War period, and the practice was revived again and again. In the late 1920s, a new form of the subbotnik arose, the voskresnik -- voluntary overtime work to raise funds for the great industrialization drive projected by the first five-year plan. Like the subbotniks, these initiatives also were quickly popularized by the party and government press, and mobilized millions of workers.

    The "shock-work team" movement, initiated in 1926 by the same railway workshop that had begun the subbotniks, was in part a drive to bring the subbotnik spirit into

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regular working hours. It laid emphasis at the same time on reorganizing the work, discarding the old patterns of division of labor inherited from capitalism and inventing new ones that promoted greater productivity. Led by the Komsomol (Communist youth league) activist Nikolai Nekrasov, the movement produced not only higher production but far greater enthusiasm by workers in participating in production meetings, where all aspects of the existing work methods were criticized and reshaped to bring out the workers' initiative. (Borisova et al., Outline History of the Soviet Working Class, pp. 121-124.)

    The Stakhanovite movement, beginning in 1935, was the successor of the shock-work teams. Like the latter, it emphasized reorganizing the division of labor, and developing teamwork to achieve higher output. But it contributed also a stress on quality output, and, above all, on improved work technique and technology. The redesign and innovation of machinery and machine processes by the workers themselves -- frequently, as Stalin pointed out in his "Economic Problems of Socialism" (1952, p. 28), over the ions of conservative engineers and technicians -- was the keynote of the movement. A bourgeois U.S. scholar, David Granick, in his study "The Red Executive" (1960), defended the movement against Western charges that it was mainly a form of speedup. "Primarily, it was aimed at motivating workers to use improved techniques on the job," he wrote, "and to innovate new ones. Its emphasis was thoroughly modern, being on rationalization rather than on sweating." (p. 213.) It too was popularized by the party, not without opposition from engineers and managers, and spread to large proportions of industry, mining and transport.

    Such mass initiative brought about extremely rapid increases in labor productivity. During the first five-year plan, beginning in 1929, labor productivity had risen 41 percent; during the second plan, when the Stakhanovite movement began, it leaped 82 percent; and it grew by another 33 percent on top of this higher base during the third plan period. (Borisova, p. 206.) By this time unemployment, the chief spur to greater worker effort (speedup) under capitalism, and also the chief result under

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capitalism of technological "rationalization," had ceased to exist in the USSR.