Chris Ward uses a wide range of sources to examine key aspects of life on the shop floor of the Russian cotton mill. He reveals the existence of a complex world of work that grew out of the interaction between the experience of the industrialization in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia and the mechanization of the cotton industry in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. The book provides for the first time a realistic understanding of the relationship among worker, management and technology in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.