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Keywords Taylorism, Scientific management, Russia
Abstract Lenin advocated "Taylorization" (i.e. scientific management), to rebuild post-revolutionary Russia's economy. The evidence, however, indicates that Lenin's advocacy caused conflict within the communist party, and scientific management was rarely implemented successfully. Noting a rhetoric-reality gap, the paper explains the difference between Lenin's advocacy and actual practice. Lenin wished to convey the message that his regime was progressive, using the latest management techniques. Rather than following scientific management precepts, pressure was placed on Soviet workers to increase productivity without improving work methods. The paper's conclusion is that Lenin's advocacy of scientific management was a leader's rhetoric, a political expediency, and it would be misleading to connect scientific management with the practice of management in post-revolutionary Russia.
Introduction
The transfer of technology across national boundaries can be traced through licensing agreements, patent records, and other devices, but documenting the diffusion of ideas is more problematical. In the early twentieth century the ideas of Frederick W. Taylor captured the attention of much of the industrial world (Thompson, 1940). Taylor's scientific management was put forth as a means to greater productivity through improved efficiency while paying higher wages and lowering product costs to consumers. Russia, just emerging from the 1917 revolution, faced myriad economic problems and a need to reorganize its industrial system along modern lines. Merkle (1980, pp. 134-5) is among those who Taylorize Lenin: "... the post revolutionary introduction of Taylorism, with its powerful arguments for the dominance of a technocratic class, finished the work that Lenin had begun when he advocated the direction of the 'spontaneous' sentiments of the proletariat by a more enlightened and systematic vanguard". Gvishiani (1972, p. 6) credited Lenin's leadership for placing Russia on its correct socialist path because he "analyzed every step in socialist construction, drew general conclusions from the experience of management acquired by various branches of the national economy, and worked out and formulated the socialist principles of scientific management". Scoville (2001, p. 625) has suggested that the Bolshevik ruler, V.I. Lenin, was "Taylorized" and viewed scientific management as the solution to the soon-to-be Soviet Union's economic problems and "in fact a necessary feature of such a state". Was scientific management a necessary feature of the emerging Soviet socialist state? Were the...