Description
Book SynopsisDuring the 1930's, 23 million peasants left their villages and moved to Soviet cities, where they comprised almost half the urban population and more than half the nation's industrial workers. Drawing on previously inaccessible archival materials...
Trade ReviewHoffmann develops a clear argument from beginning to end, he presents strong supporting evidence, and he writes well. His subject is the massive migration of Soviet peasants from village to city during the 1930s.... His book is a major contribution to our understanding of the creation of Soviet society and of Soviet industry.
-- John Bushnell * The Journal of Economic History *
Just as the subjects of his study span the village and the city, Hoffmann has bridged the chasms between the literature on workers and on peasants. He also places his study in the context of literature on migration, class, and identity formation.
* Journal of Social History *
In his engrossing study of the social, political, and economic effects of the peasant influx into Moscow, David Hoffmann demonstrates from a vast array of evidence how on the one hand the long-standing tradition of migration assisted industrialization by directing peasant labor to factories and construction work but on the other the shape of that workforce was in the hands of village networks rather than official recruitment programs.... With scholarship as penetrating as it is original, Hoffmann shows quite dramatically that... the Soviet industrial system... never achieved 'rationalized and routinized production.'
-- John Erickson * The Times Higher Education Supplement *
It is the first study to place the Soviet experience of peasant in-migration during the 1930s into a European and even global context.
* International Labor and Working-Class History *
