A. Stolyarenko's The Psychology of Management of Labour Collectives is a handbook for the socialist boss. It teaches the Soviet manager how to read the moods of his workforce, how to build his standing among the people he directs, how to run a meeting, resolve a quarrel, and raise output without leaning too hard on threats. It is, in other words, the Soviet counterpart to the Western literature of industrial and organisational psychology — the same genre of advice book that filled American management shelves after the Second World War, translated into the vocabulary of Marxism-Leninism and printed for export by Progress. It is also, read against the country that produced it, one of the more quietly revealing documents in this catalogue, because everything it recommends assumes a thing the Soviet worker did not have.
For once the date on the spine is close to the date of the text. The English translation carries 1983, and the internal evidence agrees: the book's supreme political authority is the 26th Congress of the CPSU, which met in February 1981, and it treats "the 25th and 26th congresses" together as the last word on economic management. It speaks throughout the language of "developed" or "mature socialism" — the late-Brezhnev doctrine that the Soviet Union had left its improvised, transitional phase behind and settled into a stable, lasting order. Its footnote citations run out around 1977–78. This is a book of the very end of the Brezhnev years — composed as the old leader was dying (he died in November 1982) and issued in English in the first year of his successors' interregnum.
Its author gives us almost nothing about himself; the volume carries no biographical apparatus beyond the name. What the book makes plain is the world he wrote from: the Soviet "science of management" (nauka upravleniya), a fashionable applied discipline of the 1970s that borrowed systems theory, cybernetics and social psychology and bent them to the running of the socialist enterprise. Stolyarenko writes as a practitioner of that discipline for an audience of rukovoditeli — executives, directors, heads of departments — and, on the export side, for the foreign reader curious about how the other superpower proposed to manage people.
The commission behind the book is legible in its historical moment. The Soviet economy of the early 1980s was slowing to a crawl. The extensive growth of the postwar decades — more workers, more plants, more steel — had exhausted itself, and the regime's answer, repeated at congress after congress, was that future growth would have to come from efficiency: from better organisation, tighter discipline, and fuller use of "the human factor." A whole vogue grew up around the "moral-psychological climate" (moral'no-psikhologicheskii klimat) of the workplace — the idea that the mood, cohesion and morale of a work team were measurable assets that a trained manager could cultivate for output. This book is a product of that vogue. It arrives, too, in the same years as the USSR's 1983 Law on Work Collectives, the regime's attempt to give the labour collective a statutory shape. Stolyarenko is writing to arm the socialist manager for the productivity battle the plan had assigned him.
The book's frame is set out in its long first chapter, and it is worth stating precisely, because the whole structure rests on a single proposition. Management, for Stolyarenko, has a class nature. Under capitalism it is inherently double: the manager both coordinates production and, as the owner's agent, drives the exploited to work "against their own basic interests, for the exploiter." The greater the gulf between worker and owner, the more of management becomes naked supervision. Socialism, having abolished private ownership of the means of production, is said to abolish that gulf — and with it the coercive half of management. What remains is pure coordination, exercised in a setting where manager and managed want the same thing.
Stolyarenko states this repeatedly and without hedging. "The essence of Soviet management," he writes, "does not lie in coercing some individuals to obey others but in organising meaningful joint productive work based on mutual understanding and common interest." Under the principle of "democratic centralism" applied to the enterprise, he argues, "the contrast is eliminated between the goals of the upper and lower echelons which exists in other social systems." This is the harmony-of-interests premise, and it is the load-bearing wall of the book. Because the Soviet worker owns the enterprise in common with every other citizen, the manager who directs him is not an antagonist but a fellow-owner with a coordinating job to do; the interests of the two cannot, in principle, diverge.
From that premise the practical doctrine follows. Because interests coincide, the socialist manager's task is chiefly educational and psychological rather than coercive. He is to cultivate the "moral and psychological climate," to nurture the cohesion of the collective, to run "socialist emulation" — the organised competition between workers and brigades that was meant to substitute, under socialism, for the spur of the market. He is to understand motivation, and here Stolyarenko is careful to say that once a worker's material needs are decently met, it is "spiritual" or social needs — recognition, creative scope, good relations, the respect of the collective — that come to drive behaviour. Personnel leave jobs, he notes, not usually over pay but over "dissatisfaction with the socio-psychological climate in the collective, lack of opportunity for applying their creative abilities... lack of rapport with the manager."
On leadership he offers a typology of styles: the directive (which he glosses as "imperative, administrative, and authoritarian"), the liberal (minimal intervention, reliance on self-management), and the collective (a blend of the two, and the recommended one). A reader who knows the Western literature will recognise this instantly as the authoritarian / democratic / laissez-faire triad that the social psychologist Kurt Lewin and his collaborators established in their famous experiments of the late 1930s — the same three-way scheme, relabelled and given a socialist gloss. And on the manager's standing Stolyarenko draws his sharpest distinction. Authority — legal power, the command that comes attached to the office — is one thing; prestige — the "psychological, inner, and sincere recognition of the executive's merits by the subordinates" — is another and higher thing. Power, he writes, "is a legal category, prestige, a socio-psychological one": the office can exact "subordination by coercion," but prestige "is obeyed voluntarily." The good socialist manager governs by prestige, won "in joint work," not by the power his post confers. It is a genuinely humane emphasis, and it is the emotional centre of the book.
Now set the doctrine beside the country. The trouble with a psychology of managing workers built on the coincidence of interests is that it has to be imported into a system in which the workers being managed had no independent means of asserting an interest of their own at all. They had no union that was theirs — the Soviet trade unions were arms of the state and the enterprise, charged with raising output as much as defending their members. They had no legal right to strike. They had no say in appointing the manager who directed them; he was named from above, through the apparatus, and answered upward to the ministry and the Party, not downward to the collective. "The collective" that Stolyarenko's manager is forever cultivating is a body managed from above, not one that manages anything. The book is a manual for governing people who have been relieved of every instrument by which they might have registered a divergent interest — and it then declares, as its founding axiom, that no divergent interest exists.
The mechanism at the heart of Soviet enterprise governance was edinonachalie — "one-man management," the doctrine, in force since the early 1920s, that a single appointed director held undivided authority over the plant and bore personal responsibility for it. It is the thing Stolyarenko's whole discussion of the "executive's personality" is about; his manager is the one-man boss, the man of whom he writes that "the executive personifies and implements power." Yet the book never names the doctrine, never sets it beside its talk of self-management and the initiative of the masses, and so never has to explain how undivided personal command squares with a workplace supposedly free of the subordination of some to others. The word "prestige" does the concealing work: the manager's power is real and one-man, but the book asks us to attend only to the affection he ought to earn while wielding it.
The book is at its most inadvertently candid where it turns on its Western rivals. Stolyarenko devotes a careful section to the "human relations" school — Elton Mayo, Roethlisberger, the Hawthorne experiments — the very Western tradition his own book most closely resembles. His verdict is severe. The human-relations doctrine, he writes, sought only to "camouflage class contradictions by humane declarations"; where the classical managers "preferred the stick," its supporters "relied more on the carrot." Its cardinal sin is that its psychological techniques try to make "the hired worker regard the employer's interests as the worker's own, work with enthusiasm in the name of goals alien to him, and feel gratitude and loyalty to the employer for the opportunity for self-expression and self-assertion." That is an exact and damning description — of Stolyarenko's own project. His book, too, is a set of psychological techniques for making the worker regard the enterprise's targets as his own and work at them with enthusiasm and gratitude. The only difference he can point to is the founding axiom: under socialism the goals are not alien, because the workers own everything in common. Strike out that axiom and the two books are the same book. Everything therefore rests on the axiom — and the axiom was being refuted, in the plainest possible way, next door.
For while Stolyarenko was writing, the workers of Poland had just spent sixteen months demonstrating that a working class inside a "socialist" state could discover an interest sharply opposed to its managers and its Party, and could organise around it. Solidarity — the independent, self-governing trade union born in the Gdańsk shipyard strike of August 1980 — grew to something near ten million members before it was crushed under martial law in December 1981. It was the single largest working-class self-organisation in the history of the Soviet bloc, and its entire existence was a practical proof that the harmony of interests was a doctrine and not a fact: that where the state monopolised the union, the strike and the appointment of managers, workers experienced their bosses precisely as an opposed power, and would build their own institutions the instant the lid lifted. A Soviet book of 1983 on the psychology of managing the labour collective is, whatever its intentions, a book written in the shadow of Gdańsk, and its serene assumption that manager and worker cannot be antagonists reads very differently for having been printed in the year after the tanks went in.
The anti-Stalinist left had answered this argument almost half a century before Stolyarenko made it, and answered it on exactly the ground he chose — the relation between the worker and the man who runs his factory. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky described what the transfer of industry to the state had actually done to the worker's position. "The transfer of the factories to the state," he wrote, "changed the situation of the worker only juridically." In practice the new state had "resorted to the old methods of pressure upon the muscles and nerves of the worker"; management had become "superbureaucratic"; and — the sentence that Stolyarenko's entire book is built to deny — "the workers lost all influence whatever upon the management of the factory." The worker, Trotsky concluded, does not experience the coincidence of interests the doctrine promises: "In the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state, the employer."
On the unions the answer is as direct. Stolyarenko's picture assumes trade unions that fuse the collective with its management in a common purpose. Trotsky had already named what such unions were. Reading the Stalin Constitution of 1936, he saw that the "social organizations" it enumerated — the unions among them — had been reduced to "subordinate branches of the bureaucratic firm." A union that is a branch of the firm cannot represent the collective against the firm; that is what Poland's workers understood in 1980, and what the doctrine could not admit.
There is even a small, exact answer to Stolyarenko's chapter on the manager's relations with his subordinates — his counsel of tact, respect and the "science of not inflicting hurt." Trotsky quotes a Moscow factory director boasting in Pravda of his enterprise's cultured tone: a mechanic telephones — "'What is your order, sir, check the furnace immediately or wait?'" — and the director records that the worker addresses him in the deferential second-person plural while he answers in the second-person singular used to inferiors. Trotsky's comment is that this "disgraceful dialogue," printed as something normal, revived precisely the servility that a popular pre-revolutionary demand had sought to abolish — the use of the familiar form by bosses to their subordinates. Stolyarenko's whole apparatus of manager-worker etiquette is an attempt to manage, psychologically, the strains of a hierarchy that his doctrine says does not exist; Trotsky had shown, forty-seven years earlier, that the hierarchy was real and that its manners gave it away.
The reader who wants this argument at length will find it in The Revolution Betrayed, above all chapter 9, "What is the Soviet Union?", and in the two siblings of this volume already in the series — L. B. Moskvin's The Working Class and Its Allies (1980) and Timur Timofeyev's Workers in Society (1981). Both of those books perform the same revealing manoeuvre as this one, and it is worth naming because it recurs across the catalogue: when they write of the capitalist worker, his vitality is proved by the strike, the wildcat stoppage, the union independent of the state; when they turn to the socialist worker, all of that vanishes, replaced by "emulation," "cohesion" and a healthy climate. The strike is the sign of health abroad and unmentionable at home. Stolyarenko's version is milder only because his genre is narrower: a manual does not have to praise foreign strikes. But the asymmetry is the same, and it points at the same buried fact — that the socialist worker had been relieved of the weapons the doctrine celebrated in his Western brother.
None of this makes the book worthless, and the series does its readers no service by pretending it is. Strip away the founding axiom and a good deal of The Psychology of Management of Labour Collectives is competent applied psychology that would not be out of place in any management library of its decade — which is, of course, part of the point, since much of it came from there.
Stolyarenko's survey of Western management theory in the first chapter is genuinely informed. He has read Taylor and Fayol, March and Simon, the Hawthorne studies, the "situational" leadership theory of Fred Fiedler, the systems and "empirical" schools of Drucker and the rest, and he characterises them accurately before he condemns them; a student could learn the shape of twentieth-century organisational thought from his account. His treatment of engineering psychology and ergonomics — the fit between the worker, the machine and the workplace — is sober and practical. His chapter on managerial decision-making, and his long, concrete advice on how to chair a working meeting so that a collective genuinely pools its knowledge rather than deferring to the chair, is the kind of thing that is useful in any workplace under any system; so is his catalogue of the ways a manager can poison a team by favouritism, by "false prestige," by criticism used to settle scores. His insistence that a workforce neglected — where "interpersonal relations are neglected" — will show it in instability, low attainment, high turnover and a "tense" climate is simply true, and observed with some care.
And there is one register in which the book is better than the system it serves. When Stolyarenko condemns what he calls "quasi-collective leadership" — the boss who consults for show and decides alone — he writes that under developed socialism such conduct "is regarded as tyranny and abuse of power incompatible with the requirements imposed on a Soviet leader, causing the people to resist these management practices." Set against the actual powerlessness of the Soviet worker, the sentence is an aspiration dressed as a description. But it is a real aspiration, and a decent one, and it belongs to the better tradition inside Soviet life — the strand that kept insisting, against all the evidence the same system supplied, that management ought to rest on the freely given respect of the managed. The tragedy the book cannot see is that it was describing the one thing its own state had made structurally impossible: a manager the collective could have refused.