The Subbotnik is Born

April 12, 1919

On a Friday night, April 11, 1919, rather than quitting at the end of the day, fifteen workers at a railway maintenance depot known as Moskva-Sortirovochnaya (Moscow Classification Yard) returned to their stations and labored through the wee hours of Saturday morning repairing locomotives. The organizer of this effort, the chairman of the depot's Communist Party cell, recorded the following account: “We worked without stopping until six in the morning (ten hours) and performed maintenance on three locomotives, Nos. 358, 4, and 7024. We all worked together and our work went more smoothly than ever before. At six we gathered in a service car where, after resting and drinking tea, we began to discuss the times and decided to make our nighttime work – over Saturday night to Sunday morning – a weekly event ‘until complete victory over Kolchak.' We then sang The International and went our separate ways.”

Such was the origin of what Lenin later described in his article “The Great Initiative,” an institution that subsequently took on the name subbotnik (based on the Russian word for Saturday, subbota, and often translated into English as “Communist Saturdays”).

The workers were not paid for their nocturnal work and apparently no one was forcing them to do it. In any event, based on the account of the depot's party chairman, most of the workers went home as usual at quitting time and only thirteen communists and two sympathizers worked through the night before going “their separate ways.” (Whether or not they returned to their jobs later that day, since Saturday was a work day back then, albeit an abbreviated one, is unclear.)

The idea of extra, unpaid work was quickly taken up and promoted by the engine of mass propaganda, and subbotniks began to be organized in various parts of the country. May 1, 1920, saw the first All-Russian subbotnik, during which Lenin was photographed carrying some sort of log on the grounds of the Kremlin.

Lenin's enthusiasm for this “Great Initiative” is hardly surprising. After all, it must have seemed like the realization of a dream central to everything the Bolsheviks were striving toward. They were convinced that all you had to do was abolish private property and the exploitation of man by man and people would change, since, according to Marxist theory, “being defines consciousness.” The conditions under which people were living had changed, so they themselves would surely be transformed. They were bound to understand that, since everything around them belonged to the people, they should work much harder than before. They were, after all, working for themselves now. In the subbotnik, the vision of countless socialist dreamers seemed to be coming true. Soon all social problems, crime, and other evils would disappear, people would be reborn, and paradise on earth would come to pass.

As we now know, paradise on earth did not come to pass. Instead, Russia raced full steam ahead toward a Stalinist hell, toward the Gulag archipelago, toward a life where work, rather than setting people free, increasingly enslaved them. Nevertheless, the subbotnik endured. During the era of the first Five Year Plans they became a part of ordinary life and were not even always compulsory. People from that generation recall that, among the more enthusiastic participants of the first Five Year Plans' construction projects, it was considered shameful to skip a subbotnik or voskresnik (voskresenie = Sunday), much more shameful than simply being late to one's regular (paid) job.

In fact, the difference between subbotniks and paid work was not as great as one might think. For those who took part in the first subbotnik back in 1919 there was barely any difference at all: 1919 was the time of War Communism, when money had almost no significance and people used ration cards to get food. So whether you worked more or less had no impact on your standard of living.

During the decades that followed, people were paid salaries (whether or not you could buy anything with the money you earned was another matter), but by the late 1920s the idea that there was any relationship between your job performance and earnings had been successfully eradicated by the Bolsheviks. Tacking an unpaid Saturday onto the end of a week of barely compensated labor was therefore not such a logical leap.

By the Brezhnev era, half a century later, subbotniks had shed their last vestiges of ideological meaning. Nobody was urgently making locomotives ready for victory over Kolchak anymore or running off to perform volunteer work in the name of great initiatives. Under Brezhnev, subbotniks were almost always devoted to cleaning up after the effects of the Russian winter. Actually, judging by the famous photograph of Lenin, the 1920 subbotnik at the Kremlin might have had a similar purpose. Apparently it did not occur to anyone that sending university professors, civil servants, doctors, and teachers to sweep courtyards on their day off did not put their talents to best use. It was assumed that the very act of unpaid labor would elevate and edify the Soviet people.

The Soviet people, for their part, took a philosophical view of this social engineering. In the springtime, it was pleasant to spend time outside in the fresh air. People would give their brooms a few sweeps before taking some comradely swigs with their buddies and retelling the inevitable joke about how Lenin claimed he couldn't go to the subbotnik because “that prostitute Trotsky” had again stuck a pin in his inflatable log.

Another common joke from the Brezhnev era: “The government pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.” But on Saturdays nobody even pretended, not the people and not the government.