Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour Policy. Isaac Deutscher 1950
The controversy at the Tenth Congress was based on the assumption of a totally state-owned and state-managed industry. The problem whether the trade unions should or should not form part of the state was so acute precisely in this context. Yet at the same congress Lenin initiated the New Economic Policy (NEP) which introduced a mixed, socialist–capitalist economy. Soon afterwards, private capital, Russian and foreign, was readmitted into industry and commerce, while the state retained its ‘commanding posts’ in large-scale industry. This change was bound to create a new situation for the trade unions. Yet by the time of the Tenth Congress the implications of NEP had apparently not yet been worked out by the Bolshevik leaders.
The first consequences of NEP for the unions became apparent when their Fourth Congress was convened in May 1921. Curiously enough, only the faintest echo of the recent stormy debates was heard at this national gathering of trade unionists. The Bolsheviks, having decided the issue at the congress of the party, did not reopen it before the trade-union forum. For them the matter had been settled; all members of the party, whatever their private views, had now to vote unanimously for the official resolutions. This circumstance again indicated to what extent matters of vital importance to the trade unions were now settled outside the unions. The non-Bolshevik groups at the Fourth Trade-Union Congress tried to provoke discussion, but with little effect. The Left Social Revolutionaries, who as a party had been banned but were still allowed to act as a group at the Trade-Union Congress, demanded, like the Workers’ Opposition in the Bolshevik ranks, complete trade-union control over industry. The Mensheviks, on the other hand, denounced the extent to which the statification of the trade unions had, regardless of Bolshevik resolutions to the contrary, already taken place; and they pressed for complete separation between trade unions and state, on the ground that under the NEP the workers would be compelled to defend themselves against private and state capitalism. The Menshevik motion also demanded free elections, freedom of speech and freedom of action for all socialist parties in and outside the trade unions. [1] All these motions were, of course, voted down by the Bolshevik majority.
Meanwhile the scale of the revival of capitalism in industry was unknown. The congress was confused by contradictory news and rumours about the prevailing economic chaos and the proposed readmission of private capital into industry. The spokesmen of the ruling party made conflicting forecasts. Lozovsky, who had in the meantime rejoined the Bolsheviks, spoke about the reinfiltration of foreign capitalism as compelling the trade unions to resume a militant attitude towards employers. The spokesman of the Supreme Council of National Economy, Miliutin, denied rumours about wholesale readmission of private capital into industry, but stated that factories which the government was unable to put into operation would have to be handed over to private entrepreneurs. ‘We cannot behave’, said Miliutin, ‘like the dog that lies on the hay, himself does not eat it and does not let others eat it’. [2] A motion submitted by the Central Council of the Trade Unions anticipated not only the defence of workers against small capitalists but also the formation of special organs through which the trade unions would exercise control over privately-owned industry, a reminiscence of the ‘workers’ control’ of 1917. [3] The prevailing attitude seems to have been that the trade unions would adopt a dual attitude, a productionist one in state-owned industry and a consumptionist one towards private employers. But it was already pointed out by delegates that such a dual attitude might be untenable: if the trade unions succeeded in raising wages and improving conditions in private industry, workers would rush from governmental to privately-owned factories.
The implications of NEP became much clearer the following year, at the Eleventh Congress of the party, in March 1922, and at the Fifth Congress of the Trade Unions in September. The Eleventh Congress of the party reasserted the main principles of the Leninist resolution passed by the Tenth Congress. But it also introduced a few essential correctives, which further curtailed the influence of the trade unions. True enough, it was now re-emphasised that the unions ought to support the claims of labour in private and leased enterprises and also in such socialised concerns where workers suffered from bureaucratic encroachments. [4] The congress did not ban strikes, but appealed to the trade unions to refrain from calling them:
Neither the Communist Party, nor the Soviet government, nor the trade unions can forget and conceal from the workers... that strike action in a state with a proletarian government can be explained and justified exclusively by bureaucratic deformations of that state and by remnants of capitalism... [5]
If mistakes of the economic administration, backwardness of certain groups of workers, provocation by counter-revolutionary elements, or imprudence on the part of the trade unions led to labour conflicts in state-owned enterprises, the unions were obliged to do their utmost to liquidate such conflicts. In private industry they were apparently to allow labour conflicts to run their spontaneous course. But contrary to what the previous congress had said on the matter, the party now resolved that ‘the trade unions should not assume directly any functions of control over production in private businesses and in businesses leased to private hands’. [6] This was in striking contrast to the Bolshevik attitude of 1917-18, when the trade unions were entrusted with controlling privately-owned industry. The contrast was explained on the ground that in 1917-18 the machinery of the proletarian state had not yet been set up — the working class therefore had to establish control over industry mainly through the trade unions. At present the working class was in possession of its own state and controlled the entire economy through it, and not through the unions.
More important still was the decision of the Eleventh Congress to eliminate the trade unions from participation in actual industrial management. Individual management instead of management by committee was now to be firmly established:
The main... task of the proletariat after it has conquered power... is to increase the volume of output and to raise... the productive forces of society... [This]... demands that the managements of the factories should concentrate full power in their hands... Any direct interference of the trade unions with the management of enterprises must in such circumstances be regarded as absolutely harmful and inadmissible. [7]
The congress dealt another blow at the trade unions when it decided that industrial managers alone should be responsible for fixing wages and rations and for the distribution of working clothes to workers, though they should do this in accordance with collective agreements concluded with trade unions. The Leninist resolution adopted by the previous congress had made all these the joint responsibility of trade unions, food offices and industrial managements. [8]
These reforms deepened a split in the Central Council of Trade Unions. Tomsky, opposed to the reforms, was temporarily removed from work at the council and ostensibly sent on a ‘mission’ to Turkestan. Andreev, who had backed Trotsky in the trade-union debate and consistently represented the productionist viewpoint, took Tomsky’s place. When Tomsky and his adherents protested that the trade unions had been reduced to impotence, the productionists replied that this was not so, because the trade unions were expected to supply an ever-growing contingent of industrial managers from their members. [9] This was true enough. But those who shared Tomsky’s viewpoint argued that, although many individual trade unionists had become industrial managers, the trade unions as bodies were losing influence, especially as the workers promoted to managers tended to lose touch with their original unions. The party then urged the new worker-managers to remain good trade unionists. This was no more than a pium desideratum. The worker promoted to manager gradually became accustomed to approach his problems from the managerial and not the trade-unionist angle. The trade unions were once again offered the consolation that they would participate in over-all economic planning and advise the government which factories should and which should not be handed over to private capital. The pill was hardly sweetened.
The new economic course was justified on grounds of expediency. But there was more to it than that. The party was now engaged in building up, on the basis of its monopoly of power, the monolithic state. [10] The subordination of the trade unions was a prerequisite as well as one of the results of that process. Yet this whole development was still in one of its initial phases. Nominally, the party still insisted on the need for the trade unions to keep the balance, so subtly drawn by Lenin, between the various aspects of their activity: persuasion and coercion; defence of the material interests of the workers and pressure on the workers for higher productivity; the need to take into account the moods of the rank and file and the need to resist those moods, when from an economic viewpoint they were not sound. ‘These contradictions’, stated the Eleventh Congress, ‘are not accidental and they cannot be removed in the course even of a number of decades.’ [11]
The aforementioned contradictions will inevitably give rise to conflicts, lack of harmony, friction, etc. A higher authority... is necessary to settle such conflicts at once. Such an authority is the Communist Party and the international association of the Communist Parties of all countries, the Comintern. [12]
This curious phrase meant that the trade unions had the right to appeal from the Soviet government to the Russian Communist Party and from the latter to the Communist International. They have never made use of this right. In later years, after Stalin had firmly established himself in power, the very idea of such an appeal would have seemed wild, not only because the Comintern was completely in the hands of the Russian party, but because the mere thought of such an appeal smacked of treason. [13] Meanwhile it was significant that the Bolshevik leaders still anticipated that within the framework of the single-party state, now taking shape, the trade unions would for a long time to come (for a ‘number of decades’) maintain their relative autonomy and consequently their dual attitude towards the state.
Nevertheless, the Eleventh Congress made another long step towards the complete destruction of the democratic constitution of the trade unions. It resolved that the secretaries and chairmen of the central committees of the unions must be members of the party of long standing, men who had belonged to it before the revolution. Similarly, the chairmen, secretaries and members of the leading regional trade-union bodies had also to be party members of at least three years’ standing. [14] The congress at the same time adopted one more of a series of resolutions in favour of normal elections in trade unions; but it did not say what should happen if in normal elections other than party members were elected. In practice, elections were already rigged to such an extent that the dilemma could hardly arise.
The productionist viewpoint found eloquent expression in the resolutions of the Twelfth Congress of the party (April 1923), the first congress in which Lenin did not participate:
Aiming by all means at an improvement in the condition of the working class, the state authorities and the trade unions ought to remember that a prolonged and all-round improvement is possible only on the basis of an expanding, that is profit-bearing industry... To keep in operation businesses with low employment or to keep employed in any factory a number of workers which does not correspond with the actual productivity of that factory is a wasteful and irrational form of social security and is therefore detrimental to the working-class interests of tomorrow. The saddling of industrial enterprises with all sorts of overhead costs... disrupts the possibility of correct calculation and imposes upon the state expenses which it is not at present in a position to bear. Arbitrary... ‘grants’ by trusts represent nothing else but wastage of governmental property and should be punished by law...
The appointment, transfer and replacement of the economic personnel is the responsibility of the leading economic authorities — a necessary condition for the genuine management of industry... The recommendations and testimonials of the trade unions should be attentively taken into account, but they can in no case lift the responsibility [for taking decisions] from the corresponding economic authorities, to whom the existing legislation leaves complete freedom of choice and appointment.
The economic administrator is always confronted with two dangers: (a) the danger that his exacting demands may antagonise the workers, their representative bodies, the local branches of the party and Soviet institutions; and (b) the danger of taking in matters of production, wages, etc, the line of least resistance and of sacrificing thereby the profitability of the business, and consequently its future. It goes without saying that the manager of a Soviet factory ought to show the greatest attentiveness to the material and spiritual needs of the workers, to their feelings and moods. But at the same time he must not lose sight of his supreme duty towards the working class, as a whole, a duty which consists in raising productivity of labour, lowering costs of production and increasing the volume of material goods available to the proletarian state. Trade unionists and party members ought to cooperate in every way with the Soviet manager for this purpose. Attentiveness, determination and discrimination are the indispensable qualities of the Soviet manager. But his best testimonial is the favourable balance sheet of the business. [15]
The further evolution of the trade unions was bound up with two factors: (a) the general economic situation and the changing social structure of Russia; and (b) the political evolution of the regime, that is, the progressive crystallisation of the single-party system.
The mixed economy of NEP existed from 1921 till roughly the end of 1928, when the First Five-Year Plan was initiated. The effect upon the trade unions of the partial readmission of capitalism was not as far-reaching as had been expected. In industry, capitalist enterprise regained relatively little ground. Foreign concessionaires were less interested in investment in Russia than Lenin and his colleagues had hoped. Private enterprise was strong only in trade and, of course, in farming. At the height of NEP only 18.8 per cent (1.6 out of 9.6 million) of the total number of wage and salary earners were employed in the private sector of the economy. However, although the state employed four-fifths of the mass of wage earners, the circumstance that a fraction of the working class was again employed by private capital could not but affect in some degree the outlook of the trade unions as a whole. In relation to private employers the trade unions preserved their independence and made demands on behalf of the workers. This alone tended to give them some independence in relation to the state as well, altogether apart from the fact that, in virtue of the resolutions of the last three party congresses, the state was committed to respect their relative autonomy. The trade unions could not adopt a totally productionist attitude in governmental factories and a totally consumptionist one in private industry. Throughout the years of NEP their policy was the resultant of the two attitudes.
One of the dominant economic features of this period was mass unemployment. Due to a combination of industrial underemployment and agricultural overpopulation, it persisted throughout the NEP. At the height of NEP about two million people were without jobs, a very large number for a country in which total industrial employment was only 1.2 million in 1920 and 2.1 million in 1925. [16] The problem with which Russia had to contend in the next decade — that of securing, under conditions of full employment, a steady supply of fresh labour to an expanding industry — did not yet exist.
Direction of labour which had been part and parcel of military communism was no longer needed — it was in fact abandoned in February 1922. The ‘reserve army of unemployed’, to use the Marxian term, performed in the Russian economy of the 1920s the same function which it performs in any capitalist economy: it pressed upon the wages and living conditions of the employed workers. Throughout most of this period real wages were considerably below the pre-1914 level, which was understandable in view of the disastrous impoverishment of the country. Fear of unemployment prevented workers from demanding higher wages and from pressing the trade unions to stake out claims on their behalf, claims that might have brought the unions into conflict with the employer state. In 1924 only 24,000 workers went on strike in state-owned industry; in 1925 — 34,000, in 1926 — 33,000; in 1927 — 20,000; and in 1928 even fewer than 20,000. This is not to say that labour conflicts in milder form were not widespread. By the end of NEP, at the Eighth Congress of the Trade Unions (December 1928) Schmidt, the Commissar for Labour, stated that in the previous few years industrial conflicts had involved nearly 2.5 million workers annually. But as the workers were weary of resorting to strikes, most conflicts were settled by arbitration.
The attitude of the trade unions towards private industry fluctuated and was ambiguous. At the beginning of NEP and up to the middle 1920s, private employers were often able to offer better conditions of labour than those prevailing in state-owned industry. Private capital re-entrenched itself in consumers’ industries, the produce of which was in very heavy demand. The profits of private industry were sufficiently high to make it worthwhile for employers to raise wages. [17] The trade unions witnessed the paradox that small capitalist businesses compelled the proletarian state to compete with them in the improvement of labour conditions. [18] But this could not, of course, last very long. In the middle 1920s state-owned industry was rehabilitated and reached the prewar level of output; and so private industry was quickly losing the advantages it had enjoyed. The normal antagonism between employer and trade union returned. However, the government, determined to speed up economic recovery, did not want to see the working of private industry interrupted by strikes. The private employers certainly worked for their profit, but the output of their factories, it was pointed out, was essential to the economic balance of the proletarian state. The trade unions, therefore, often adopted the ‘productionist’ attitude even in private industry. [19] But equally often, compelled to tread warily in state-owned industry, they compensated themselves by excessive militancy towards private employers, until they (that is, trade unions) were curbed by the government. Between these two extremes the trade unions wavered.
The NEP period saw the introduction of a mass of progressive labour legislation. But the trade unions did not regain real freedom of action, in spite of the relative liberalism in the government’s economic policy. This became striking after the recovery of industry was more or less complete. In March 1927 the Central Committee of the party ordered a large-scale release of redundant labour from state-owned industry. [20] The release was explained on the ground that industry was already fully utilising its old plant and that expansion was now possible only through technical rationalisation, higher efficiency, and construction of new plant. The trade unions were asked not only to agree to the release of redundant labour, but also to work out higher norms of output and to cooperate with the economic administration in the processes of rationalisation. The Commissariat of Labour was to shift the released workers to new places of employment. This, of course, implied a degree of direction of labour. But for some time yet this implication was to be devoid of practical significance, because industry was still developing too slowly to require and absorb the redundant labour. The resolution of the Central Committee brought forth a vehement protest from the opposition led by Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. One of the charges levelled against the economic administration and the trade unions was that in the scheme for rationalisation the emphasis was not on higher technical efficiency but on exacting more physical exertion from the workers. [21] The trade unions, nevertheless, responded to the appeal of the Central Committee, although they did so half-heartedly and not without provoking protests from the ranks.
In their attempt to balance between the state and the workers, between the economic administration and their own rank and file, the trade unions most often inclined towards the state and the economic administration. [22] Nevertheless, they were in almost constant conflict with everybody: the state, the economic administration, the party, and their own rank and file. At the Fifth Congress of the Trade Unions Tomsky related with melancholy irony how:
... at every congress, conference, meeting, wherever four people assembled, the first and the most important point on the agenda is the problem of our mutual relations... If you ask any branch, sub-branch or responsible official for a report or an organisational plan, you may rest assured that three-quarters, or at best a good half of that report will be devoted to the problem of our mutual relations. [23]
The Fourteenth Congress of the party (December 1925) thus rebuked the trade unions:
It is necessary to fight against that deviation which takes the form of a strange bloc of some trade unionists and trade unions with the economic authorities, a bloc based on uncritical wholesale approval and defence... before the workers of all measures and proposals emanating from the economic administration. This transforms the trade unions into an appendage and political department of the economic administration and leads them to forget what is their main function. [24]
At the same time the congress rebuked the unions for meddling with the business of the economic administration; it also remonstrated with the economic administration for dealing with the workers behind the back of the trade unions. At a congress of the trade unions Dogadov charged the Supreme Council of National Economy with trying to decree industrial wages without any reference to the unions. At the same congress other delegates stated that collective bargaining had become a mere sham. [25]
The extent to which the trade unions’ influence was diminishing can be seen in their changing attitudes towards governmental arbitration in labour conflicts. In the opening years of NEP it was thought almost impossible that compulsory arbitration should be imposed upon the unions. At the Fifth Trade-Union Congress (1922) Schmidt, the Commissar for Labour, reported on a governmental decision investing power of arbitration in his commissariat. The commissar himself, as we know, was appointed on the proposal of the Central Council of Trade Unions and could in principle be dismissed by that council. Even so, the idea that he should act as an arbiter, independently of the unions, still shocked many trade unionists. And so Schmidt told the congress that the decree on compulsory arbitration had been passed by the government against his opinion and that he would in practice interpret it in favour of the unions. [26] Compulsory arbitration, he stated, would be applied in individual conflicts only, where no collective agreement was involved, and in cases of flagrant violation of labour legislation. If there must be arbitration, then it should be carried out not by a branch of the administration but by a special chamber, and in no case should the trade unions be denied the right to call strikes. [27] On behalf of the trade unions, Tomsky then spoke in favour of local arbitration commissions, composed of trade unionists and representatives of factory managements, and of the advisability of their referring conflicts to the local branches of the Commissariat of Labour. The trade unions, he added, would call strikes only in extreme cases. [28] Another leading trade unionist, Rudzutak, the future vice-premier, declared that the unions would suppress unauthorised strikes, but they would insist that in all strikes backed by themselves the demands of the workers must be met, and that the administrative organs that provoked strikes must be held responsible for this and the guilty officials must be dismissed, as a matter of principle. Some speakers at the congress demanded that full powers of arbitration should be vested exclusively in the trade unions, but this was resisted by the government. The debate on the whole revealed how great relatively was still the strength of the trade unions.
Three years later, in December 1925, the Fourteenth Congress of the party adopted another resolution on compulsory arbitration which showed to what an extent the position of the trade unions had in the meantime changed. [29] The resolution asserted that it had become customary for the party committees, instead of the branches of the Commissariat of Labour, to arbitrate in labour conflicts. The congress urged that this practice be discontinued. Yet the habit of those concerned to refer their conflicts to the party committees, and not to the trade unions or the Commissariat of Labour, reflected the real relationship between the respective institutions. The congress further gave the economic administration the right to ask for compulsory arbitration and it strengthened the influence of the industrial managements in local arbitration committees. This was a far cry from Schmidt’s assurance that compulsory arbitration would not be used against trade unions. The Trotsky–Zinoviev opposition commented on this reform that it ‘... reduced to nothing the collective contract itself, changing it from a two-sided act of agreement into an administrative organ... The past years have been characterised by a sharp increase in labour conflicts, most of them being settled by compulsory rather than by conciliatory measures.’ [30] The opposition pressed for the annulment of the rights just given to the industrial managements. The trade-union leaders, including Tomsky, still endorsed the extension of the prerogatives of the industrial managers, but two or three years later Tomsky and his adherents were to repeat almost literally Trotsky’s and Zinoviev’s criticisms and demands.
1. IV Vserossiiskii Syezd Profsoyuzov (Fourth All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1921), pp 69ff.
2. IV Vserossiiskii Syezd Profsoyuzov (Fourth All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1921), p 77.
3. IV Vserossiiskii Syezd Profsoyuzov (Fourth All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1921), pp 66ff.
4. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), p 165.
5. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), p 165.
6. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), p 168.
7. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), pp 167-68.
8. Hitherto the trade unions had been in charge of the distribution of some consumers’ goods. Since wages were often still paid in kind and not in money, it was a matter of some importance who fixed rations for various categories of workers. At the Fourth Congress of the Trade Unions it was stated that seven categories of rations were in existence and that the differences between them were very considerable.
9. ‘(a) The trade unions take part in the formation of all economic and state authorities... putting forward their own candidates... [but]... the power of decision belongs exclusively to the economic authorities... These take into account the opinions on all candidates expressed by the corresponding trade unions. (b) One of the most important tasks of any trade union is the promotion and training of administrators from among workers... if at present we have only tens of really competent industrial administrators [drafted from trade unions] and hundreds of more or less competent ones, we shall very soon need hundreds of the former category and thousands of the latter.’ (VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), p 168)
10. It was not pure coincidence that on the day after the conclusion of the Eleventh Congress of the party, which adopted these resolutions, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the Central Committee.
11. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), p 171.
12. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), p 172.
13. This was how the appeals of the Trotskyist Opposition from the Russian party to the Comintern were in fact treated.
14. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), p 173.
15. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), pp 186-87. The author of this resolution was Trotsky.
16. Latent agricultural overpopulation was reflected in the steady growth of seasonal employment of peasants outside farming. Peasants seasonally employed in industry: 1923-24: 1.7 million; 1926-27: 3.2 million; 1927-28: 4.0 million; 1928-29 4.3 million (Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya, SSSR (Moscow, 1948), p 1124).
17. This caused the Fifth Congress of the Trade Unions to complain that heavy industry was at a disadvantage in its competition with light industry and to ask the government to protect heavy industry against unfair competition.
18. In 1922 wages in state-owned industry were increased by 100 per cent, but the increase was soon swallowed up by monetary inflation.
19. At the Seventh Congress of the Trade Unions (December 1926) Dogadov, one of the prominent leaders of that period, complained about a ‘deviation’ in the trade unions which consisted in the treatment of private businesses on an equal footing with the socialist ones (VII Vserossiiskii Syezd Profsoyuzov (Seventh All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1927), p 84).
20. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), p 310.
21. LD Trotsky, The Real Situation in Russia (London, 1928), p 44.
22. Some parallel might perhaps be drawn between the position of the Soviet trade unions in those years and the attitude of the TUC towards Mr Attlee’s government in 1945-49, but it would be wrong to overlook the differences in the economic and social background, since even under the NEP 80 per cent of the Soviet workers were employed in the socialist sector of the economy.
23. V Vserossiiskii Syezd Profsoyuzov (Fifth All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1922), p 118.
24. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), pp 271-73.
25. VII Vserossiiskii Syezd Profsoyuzov (Seventh All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1927), p 86 and passim.
26. In later years no member of the Soviet government would have dared to reveal his disagreement with the government. Schmidt remained Commissar for Labour for six years longer.
27. V Vserossiiskii Syezd Profsoyuzov (Fifth All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1922), p 87.
28. V Vserossiiskii Syezd Profsoyuzov (Fifth All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Moscow, 1922), p 105 and passim.
29. VKP (b) o Profsoyuzakh (All-Union Communist Party on Trade Unions, second edition, Moscow, 1940), pp 272 ff.
30. LD Trotsky, The Real Situation in Russia (London, 1928), p 49.