In the Years of Perestroika: Workers’ Actions, Workers’ Politics in the USSR

“Hitherto, it was on the periphery of the Empire that conflicts and explosions had occurred; and it must be admitted that they had not really come as a surprise. But now, it is against the very center of our system that the large-scale workers’ strikes are directed, the power of the Party,” which presumably represented “the future and the aspirations of the working class. . . . This did come as a complete surprise to everyone: our Marxist theoreticians, our bureaucrats, our technocrats and to us, the intellectual democrats. How often, in our Moscow kitchens, have we scoffed at the passivity and ignorance of the working class!”

These lines, quoted from an editorial in the Literaturnaia Gazeta at...