Chapter 2 demonstrates how the recognition of the societal value of domestic service affected some aspects of domestic workers’ rights but not others. It analyzes debates around the 1926 law on domestic service and the effects it had on the domestic workers’ ability to resolve conflicts with employers in court or mediation. Domestic workers’ labor rights were limited by the new law to make their labor more accessible to employers: written labor agreements were no longer mandatory and there was no compensation for overtime work. Yet, the state was reluctant to limit domestic workers’ access to their employers housing after termination of contract because female homelessness was closely associated with prostitution. The new law put domestic workers at a disadvantage compared to other workers, which, together with continuing valorization of “productive” labor, made domestics seek employment opportunities outside domestic service. This chapter contributes to our understanding of the effects labor laws have on paid domestic labor and testifies to the importance of government regulations and protection.

Chapter 1 analyzes the shift in the understanding of domestic service from a problematic institution intrinsically connected to inequality and exploitation to an acceptable practice in the 1920s. These early conversations revealed the two main tensions in the understanding of paid domestic labor after the revolution. The first involved class. While quick to reimagine domestic servants as domestic workers, the Bolsheviks struggled to articulate a coherent position on the class affiliation of their employers. Even though employment of household workers did not constitute exploitation in the strictly Marxist sense, the practice had a distinctly petty-bourgeois character in the eyes of many Soviet citizens. The second tension had to do with gender. The Bolsheviks had no resources to fulfil their vision of socialized housework but still sought to mobilize urban women for work outside the home and for political life. Rather than encouraging redistribution of labor in the home, the state saw employment of female migrant peasants with no professional qualifications in Soviet homes as an acceptable solution to the problem of housework.

The new contours of Bolshevik politics determined the tactics available not only to the Left but to all factions that would emerge to challenge the CC majority after Lenin’s passing. Crucially, the decision to open the party’s doors to a new cohort of rank-and-file communists introduced a new variable to internal politics. The Lenin enrolment had transformed primary party organisations from isolated, demoralised groups of communists to mass institutions tightly woven into the fabric of factory life. Both oppositionists and the centre tried to manoeuvre this new dynamic to their advantage. The following pages will examine this process as it unfolded during the bitter factional struggles against the so-called New and United Oppositions, the last major challenges to the NEP consensus.

Part III tells how, after the building of the wall, economists arranged themselves with the regime and developed an ethos of continuous reform. This chapter describes the first major reform of this period: Ulbricht’s attempt to modernize socialism through his New Economic Policy including the so-called third university reform. While economists have gained prominence, and also freedom, in developing new methods such as in economic cybernetics, political stability and the logic of class conflict put limits on their effectiveness. Thus, the Prague Spring, at the latest, marked the end to the heyday of the East German economists.

In the mid-1980s, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi attempted to lower India's tariffs and open the country's economy to global competition. Gandhi's trade policy proposals led India's protectionist labor unions to launch a series of general strikes that helped to block these reforms; Gandhi left office in 1989 with India's average tariff still above 80 percent. This chapter continues this story into the 1990s, when Prime Minister Narasimha Rao launched a new attempt at trade liberalization. By 1996, Rao managed to lower India’s average tariffs to 37 percent - a major success compared to Gandhi's efforts, but relatively gradual liberalization compared to many other democratic developing countries. This chapter draws on archival research to illustrate how Rao used labor repression to weaken union opposition to his economic reforms.