CREECA Lecture: “Making Socialism Work: The Shchekino Method and the Drive to Modernize Soviet Industry” with James Nealy

Based on Dr. Nealy’s book manuscript of the same name, “Making Socialism Work: The Shchekino Method and the Drive to Modernize Soviet Industry” will discuss factory-level efforts to improve socioeconomic conditions in the Soviet Union during the late twentieth century. It does so to understand Soviet socialism’s capacity to evolve. Drawing on national and regional archival documents and newspapers, it contests the argument that the Soviet system was too rigid to survive in the world of computerized, post-Fordist production. By focusing on labor in the enterprise, it reveals that many of the characteristics typically associated with capitalist flexible production were present in the Soviet Union by the mid-1960s. To the extent that flexible production represents the social corollary of neoliberal political theory, “Making Socialism Work” helps to explain continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet political economies.

About the Speaker: James Nealy earned his PhD in history at Duke University in May of 2022. His research and writing have been funded by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA, the Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the Kennan Institute, and the American Historical Association, among others. His dissertation, “Making Socialism Work: The Shchekino Method and the Drive to Modernize Soviet Industry,” recently won the Southern Historical Association’s Parker-Schmitt Award for best dissertation in European history defended in 2021 or 2022. James is currently working as an Assistant Lecturer in Modern Global and European History at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.