Quatrième de couverture

In Russia today, the formal term for "workers'" is seldom used. The word rabochii, once trumpeted by every government agency, has been replaced on the street by the informal, disparaging slang term rabotyagi.

Rabotyagi : Perestroika and After Viewed from Below presents interviews with ordinary men and women who speak of life inside and outside the factories of Gorbachev's USSR and Yeltsin's Russia, as well as newly independent Ukraine and Belarus. These workers and union activists in auto, communications, mining, rail, and other industries describe work relations, union organization, and the everyday struggle to survive.

Through a series of nineteen interviews conducted between July 1988 and July 1993, their narratives shed important new light on the evolution of the economic and political situation in the final years of the Soviet Union and the first years of the "transition to the market." The voices of Rabotyagi reveal a vision of democracy and equality that has endured into the post-Soviet period.

David Mandel teaches in the Department of Political Science at the University of Quebec at Montreal. He has made numerous extensive visits to the former USSR since 1976, and is fluent in Russian. He is the author of Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime (1983), Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (1984), and Perestroika and the Soviet People (1991).

Monthly Review Press
122 West 27th Street
New York NY 10001
ISBN : 0-85345-878-2

Front cover photo : A machine operator in a Moscow auto parts factory. Photo : Christa Schnepf, courtesy of Transnationals Information Exchange, Amsterdam Design : Martin Moskof • Printed in U.S.A.