Time Bandits: Soviet Calendars and the Quest for Industrial Efficiency

The Julian and Gregorian Calendars

The Gregorian calendar, which in the 20th century became the common civil calendar of all humankind, was not an overnight success. In fact, it took four centuries for it to gain universal acceptance. Under the aegis of Pope Gregory XIII, predominately catholic countries promptly adopted the new calendar in 1583.

The change from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar was as simple as it was necessary. The Julian calendar inserted a leap day every four years, making the average calendar year 365.25 days. However, the astronomical year measured from one vernal equinox to another is only 365.2424 days. As a result, the Julian year was slightly too long, and the calendar lost a day every 132 years. In the twelve and a half centuries since the Council of Nicea had formulated the rules for calculating the date of Easter Sunday (based on the vernal equinox) in 325, the Julian calendar had slipped ten full days. To correct this error, ten days had to be immediately dropped from the new Gregorian calendar. Additionally, a slightly more complicated intercalation scheme was instituted to bring the average calendar year more in line with astronomical reality. In the Gregorian calendar, all years divisible by 100 (which, also being divisible by 4, were leap years according to the Julian calendar) are common years, except that years divisible by 400 are leap years. Thus the year 1900 was a common year, but 2000 was a leap year. This intercalation scheme results in an average calendar year of 365.2425 days. Theoretically, 10,000 years will have to pass before the Gregorian calendar is off by a day. In fact, however, the orbit of the Earth around the sun changes over long periods of time, and the length of the vernal equinox year is slowly changing. Given this, the Gregorian calendar is as accurate a calendar as can be devised for the foreseeable future (Steel 1999).

In the era that the Calabrian astronomer Aloigi Giglio (Latinized as Aloisius Lilius) devised what would become known as the Gregorian calendar, Europe was being torn apart by the Reformation, and predominately Protestant countries were in no hurry to adopt the new calendar being promulgated by the Catholic Church, regardless of its obvious merits (Catholic Encyclopedia 2003). Various German states adopted the new calendar during the course of the 17th century. The British Empire did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until the 18th century, by which time the Julian calendar had lost eleven days. Until the advent of Presidents Day, Americans used to celebrate George Washington’s birthday on February 22; however, had one asked Washington, he would have said that he was born on February 11.

The various Orthodox Churches of Eastern Europe were even more loath to adopt the Catholic calendar than were the Protestants. As a result, at the time of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Russia was still on the Julian calendar, now 13 days out of synch with Earth’s orbit. One of Vladimir Lenin’s first acts after coming to power was to abolish the Julian calendar and institute the Gregorian calendar, with the result that Red October actually occurred in early November according to the new calendar.

The Eternal Calendar

In 1929, however, the Soviet Union replaced the Gregorian calendar with yet another. The new calendar contained 12 months of 30 days each, with six weeks of five days each in every month. Another five days (six in leap years), celebrated as national holidays, were outside of the week and month scheme. This meant that the Eternal calendar began on the first day of the week, year after year, in contrast with either the Julian or Gregorian calendar, whose years can begin on any of the seven days of the week. In this respect, the Eternal calendar was more rational than either of the traditional calendars, and reflected the calendar reform ideas of the International Fixed calendar and the World calendar being promoted in the West during the same era (Achelis 1954, McCarty n.d.).

The Eternal calendar had two objectives. The first was cultural. The structure of the new calendar was radically different in that the traditional seven-day week was replaced by a five-day week. This made the traditional Orthodox feasts and holy days, especially those that were always celebrated on a Sunday, entirely out of joint with the new scheme. This made it difficult for people to continue these religious observances. In their place, five national public holidays associated with the Revolution were inserted into the new calendar.

The second purpose of the Eternal calendar was to increase production. How could it achieve this? Taken by itself, without considering any capital improvements to increase the efficiency of production, the most obvious answer is that the Eternal calendar was meant to extract more labor from workers. The rationale is as follows: the new calendar rearranged production schedules so that instead of workers having five days on and two days off in a seven-day week, they now had four days on and one day off on the new five-day scheme. On the old schedule, in a 35-day period (five seven-day weeks), workers would have had 25 days on and 10 days off, but on the new schedule (seven five-day weeks), they now worked 28 days and had only seven days off. One can even theorize that workers were paid the same amount for working 28 days under the new scheme as the received for working 25 days under the old scheme. The extra three days of labor, in essence without pay, would constitute surplus labor value extracted from the worker, above and beyond whatever surplus labor value was expropriated by the state enterprise under the former seven-day week. In his analysis of capitalism, Marx identified this expropriation of surplus labor value as the source of profit, but in the Soviet Union, the concept of profit was anathema (Sackrey and others 2002). By any other name, however, this surplus labor value would be available to the state to invest in capital improvements, military spending, perks for top Party members, or whatever. According to this analysis, the Eternal calendar was a monumental scheme to rip off the workers.

There is just one problem with this idea. The premise that the Soviet Union (and formerly Tsarist Russia) had a five-day work week, as Western industrialized countries have long had, is completely fallacious. In fact, it was the norm in early 20th century Russia for workers to have only one day off out of seven. The six-day work week was also not uncommon in the West, although over time there was a steady transition to the five-day work week in these more affluent societies. The Soviet Union, however, was struggling to industrialize, and the idea of a five-day work week with two days off was never on the table. Accordingly, to suggest that Soviet calendar reform efforts were aimed at exploiting the workers and extracting more surplus labor value, is a bum rap.

With this perspective, then, the Eternal calendar was intended to be a good deal for Soviet workers, for instead of working 30 days and getting five days off out of every 35, they now worked only 28 days and got seven days off. But if the Eternal calendar was intended to increase production, how could it achieve this while giving workers more leisure time?

The generosity of the Eternal calendar was not without a societal price. The one day off per five-day week was not the same for all workers. Instead, the rest-days were staggered. The workforce was divided into five groups, with each group being issued a color-coded card: yellow, pink, red, purple, and green. The color of the card determined which day of the week the worker received as a day of rest. It was hoped that this would increase the efficiency of industrial production. Factory machinery would run constantly, with 80% of the workforce on the job on any given day, rather than having to shut down for a day and then start up again. The Russian term for this concept was nepreryvka (non-interruption).

Another advantage of the Eternal calendar was that it significantly simplified accounting by regularizing all reporting periods. Not only did each year begin on the first day of the week, but every month did as well. Plus or minus one day, each reporting period had the same number of work days and off days. Three years before the implementation of the Eternal calendar, Kodak founder George Eastman made a convincing business case for similar calendar reforms in the capitalist world (Eastman 1926).

It was not realized at the time that the Eternal calendar was put into effect that the staggered day off would cause real hardship to family life as well as make meeting with friends difficult. The Eternal calendar was extremely unpopular with workers, but of course Josef Stalin was hardly a populist. In the end, the overriding concern was that the anticipated higher efficiencies of the shorter week and the staggered days off did not materialize. The Eternal calendar turned out to be considerably more ephemeral than its hopeful name advertised, and after several years of trial, the five-day week and staggered rest-days were replaced by another system.

A Final Attempt

Starting on December 1, 1931, the Gregorian schedule of month lengths was restored, but with six-day weeks rather than the traditional seven or the Eternal calendar’s five. The new calendar instituted common days of rest on the 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th and 30th of every month. The 31st of the month was kept outside this six-day week cycle, sometimes being a holiday, sometimes a work day (Wikipedia 2003).

Even so, there was resistance to the new scheme, which is remarkable given the tyranny of Stalin’s regime. Many workers still wanted to take Sunday off, and although the Sabbath was nonexistent on the new civil calendar, the Julian calendar was still being kept for religious purposes by the Orthodox Church. As a result, workers often took an impromptu “sick day” that just happened to coincide with Sunday on the seven-day calendar, in addition to taking their regular day off according to the official six-day calendar. In the end, even Stalin had to bow to the passive resistance of the workers, and in 1940 the Soviet Union returned to the Gregorian calendar and its seven-day week, with all its religious implications. Even though workers now got slightly fewer days off, they were happier, there was less absenteeism, and production was more efficient.

References

Achelis, Elisabeth. 1954. Russia’s difficulties. Journal of calendar reform. Internet. Available from http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/Russia.html; accessed 19 April 2003.

Catholic Encyclopedia. 2003. Aloisius Lilius. Internet. Available from http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09247c.htm; accessed 22 May 2003.

Eastman, George. 1926. The importance of calendar reform to the business world. Nation’s business, May. Internet. Available from http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/world-calendar.html; accessed 22 May 2003.

McCarty, Rick. n.d. The World calendar. Internet. Available from http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/world-calendar.html; accessed 22 May 2003.

Sackrey, Charles, and Geoffrey Schneider with Janet Knoedler. 2002. Introduction to political economy. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Economic Affairs Bureau, Inc.

Steel, Duncan. 1999. Marking time: The epic quest to invent the perfect calendar. New York. John Wiley & Sons.

Wikipedia. 2003. Soviet revolutionary calendar. Internet. Available from http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_revolutionary_calendar; accessed 22 May 2003.