Even though both American Fordism and Taylorism were a tool of modern capital, these systems were highly attractive to Soviet leaders as a modern scientifically-vindicated means to efficiently organize production. In a famous 1914 article "The Taylor System—Man’s Enslavement by the Machine" by Lenin encapsulated this mixture of repulsion and attraction to American methods. Although Lenin held that Taylorism was a means to chain the workers to their machines, he averred that:

The Taylor system—without its initiators knowing or wishing it—is preparing the time when the proletariat will take over all social production and appoint its own workers’ committees for the purpose of properly distributing and rationalizing all social labor. Large-scale production, machinery, railways, telephone—all provide thousands of opportunities to cut by three-fourths the working time of the organized workers and make them four times better off than they are today.

And these workers’ committees, assisted by the workers’ unions, will be able to apply these principles of rational distribution of social labor when the latter is freed from its enslavement by capital.

Lenin would carry through this embrace of Taylorism through the Bolshevik's seizure of power with the foundation of the Central Institute of Labor (TsIT) in 1920.

In both its agitprop and own studies of labor management, TsIT stressed at kind of socialist Taylorism in which shopfloor planning, once unfettered from the needs of capitalism, would allow for workers to be more productive and have more leisure time. TsIT's chief Alexei Gastev placed Ford alongside Marx as heralds of an age of scientific rationalization. While Gastev obviously did not celebrate Ford the capitalist, he did portray Ford as a visionary who could step out of his halo and see the reality of the scientific age. Both the Trotsky left opposition and the Soviet shopfloor were less enamored with Taylorism of the like championed by TsIT. For workers, the resistance to Taylorism was somewhat obvious; rather than treating workers as human, Taylorism often made them biological components of a machine. Scientific management often meant cutting into workers' autonomy on the shopfloor and undercut labor leaders' power as masters of their own domain. The Trotskyite left tended to view Taylorism as contrary to the wider call for a permanent revolution and radicalization of the proletariat. Trotsky's own version of TsIT, the Time League emphasized spontaneous self-discipline and shock labor action in lieu of mechanistic planning. The divide between TsIT and the Time League was settled with the ascent of Stalin.

At first glance, the type of socialist Taylorism championed by Gastev and TsIT seemed to have triumphed with Stalinism and the gargantuan Five Yea Plans. Certainly Trotsky thought so as he consistently argued that the mechanization and coordination of the Soviet economy led to a new managerial class and over-bureaucratization. But a more nuanced reading of Stalinism is that the FYP had, in true Marxist fashion, harmonized the thesis and antithesis of TsIT and the Time League into synthesis of sorts. Although Taylorism was central for Gosplan and the wider schema of the FYP, the Stalinist shopfloor was in many ways dependent upon shock action and enthusiasm. The Stakhanovite movement was the Time League's idea of worker management writ large as Stakhanovites were not only exceeding production goals, they were supposed to inspire their fellow workers towards true socialist behavior. The very idea of a Stakhanov was antithetical to classical Taylorism as it scientific management was predicated upon rational and quantifiable data. Outliers like Stakhanov had little place in standard Taylorism. Ironically, Soviet workers often hated both methods of labor organization. The FYP workers often loathed the Stakhanovs as sycophants, or worse, expedients to drive and justify higher production targets. By the same token, extreme Taylorism still worked opposite modes of proletarian culture and the ideals of 1917 in which workers seized control of their means of oppression.

The hybrid management culture that straddled the divide between shock and rationalization continued after the war and through the end of the USSR, albeit no longer as sharply divided as during the Stalin period. Soviet Taylorism and TsIT continued to produce studies on correct management and rationalization of work. Similarly, shock action still characterized a good deal of Soviet labor experience and great stock as still placed upon exceeding target goals. As deadlines for production loomed, Soviet factories often burst into a frenzy of activity that did not characterize other periods in the production time-table. Scientific management appeared to have a false renaissance under Khrushchev's tenure. The Thaw period saw a renewed interest in planning and modern rationalization, especially since computers now enabled a much more thorough analysis of the system. In the early Thaw period there was considerable alarm in the US that there was a cybernetics "gap" between the US and USSR and that Soviet scientific management, freed from the private market, would make the most of the USSR's resources.

But this "gap", like other alarmist gaps proved to be overblown. Soviet cybernetics never gained much traction within the Soviet system. A good part of the problem for the Soviet planned economy was that the hybrid Taylorism pioneered during the 1930s remained the orthodoxy in Soviet management. Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet Nobel for economics, actually came up with linear programming before RAND, but the potentially revolutionary application of linear programming (which was much more flexible than Taylorism) were largely lost in the Soviet system. Soviet management culture remained wedded to its own version of Taylorism through the end of the Soviet system.

The net result of the persistence of scientific management was that the stagnation of Soviet industry during the 1970s and 80s was not just material, but intellectual. Not only did Soviet planners in this period champion Taylorism, they assumed it still was the bedrock of Western planning as well, when in reality linear programming and other forms of organization had rendered Taylorism somewhat passe in Western management. Somewhat ironically, Soviet Taylorism promised to unleash the worker from exploitation, but its most visible legacy was that it placed the Soviet economy in another set of fetters.

Sources

Beissinger, Mark R. Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites. Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

Hanson, Stephen E. Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism As a Civilization. Berkeley, Calif: Univ. of California Press, 1995.