This was the context in which Yuri Larin, a Bolshevik economist, began agitating for a plan that would allow factories to operate every day of the year. At the Fifth Congress of Soviets in May 1929, he advocated for what became known as the nepreryvka, the “continuous working week.”1 This entailed dividing the workforce into groups and allocating each different rest days. In effect, the plan proposed to transfer the concept of a shift system to the days of the week. At first, Larin’s colleagues were unenthusiastic—especially the Commissariat of Labor, which was dubious about the logistics of running so many factories continuously. (It was hard enough getting supplies and workers for them to run at all: bottlenecks were a constant curse of the Soviet economy, and rates of absenteeism were especially high in the early stages of the industrialization drive.)2 But Larin apparently managed to get Stalin’s ear, and by June, a proposal that weeks before had barely been discussed was being hailed in the press as “the great socialist idea.”

Larin’s plan involved more than a shift to a continuous workweek, however; it also meant switching the workforce from a seven-day to a five-day pattern. Until 1929, Soviet citizens worked for six days and rested on Sundays; from now on everyone would work for four days with one day off. Everyone would be getting more time off, but Larin clearly convinced the planners that the gains made from running factories continuously would more than compensate for the lost working hours. The workforce would be divided into five groups, each with a different rest day. The five shifts were often numbered. In many cases, they were color coded—red for 1, green for 2, and so on—and sometimes even symbols, such as hammer, sickle, red flag, airplane, and party membership card, were used to represent the different groups. The particular color scheme or symbols used varied from one workplace to another. Though the Soviet economy was centrally planned, many of the details of day-to-day life in the USSR depended on the individual enterprise where one worked; the same was true of the nepreryvka calendars, which could look quite dissimilar even for people employed in the same sector. Although the underlying principle was the same, the profusion of schedules must have been pretty disorienting. The benefits for industry of Larin’s new arrangement were obvious enough, but the workers themselves were less enthused. Even though it actually meant that everyone’s day off came around more quickly, family members and friends could not be guaranteed to have the same rest days, and as early as October 1929, Pravda was publishing letters of complaint from disgruntled (or bored?) workers:

What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children at school, and nobody can visit us, so that there is nothing left but to go to a State tearoom? What sort of a life is it if we are to rest in shifts and not together as a whole proletariat? It is no holiday if you have to have it alone.3

Larin’s scheme did allow for some days when the entire workforce could take a break—five, to be precise (which is why one of the pamphlets he published to explain how the nepreryvka would expand the number of workdays was titled 360 instead of 300). The new holidays everyone would share were 22 January, commemorating both Lenin’s death and the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when czarist troops gunned down participants in a peaceful workers’ march in 1905; 1 and 2 May, to mark International Workers’ Day; and 7 and 8 November, to celebrate the October Revolution. But these aside, there was to be little opportunity for collective rest—the new Soviet calendar was decidedly short on mass festivities, with nothing like the stream of civic ceremonies the French Revolutionary calendar had envisaged.