Featured Poster of the Week
“All-Russian Subbotnik-The Way to Revival of Water Transport”. This poster highlights subbotniki (Saturday Volunteers) of the transportation workers. The word subbotnik is a combination of the Russian subbota (Saturday) and nik, a suffix used for a person associated with something, in this case it was labor without pay for the betterment of society. Subbotniki worked on Saturdays for free in the period just after the October Revolution to help speed public improvement projects. The first subbotnik event occurred when rail workers of the Sortirovochnaya Depot in Moscow held a subbotnik on April 12, 1919 to repair Soviet trains during the Russian Civil War. The first subbotnik (with Lenin in attendance) was held in Moscow on May 1, 1920 with over 400,000 participants. Additional subbotniks were held for decades to follow. During World War II they boosted morale and aided the war effort, but in peacetime, demanding workers to labor on Saturday without pay only served to erode the original subbotnik ideal.