Some stories are too strange to stay in a drawer. This one abolished the weekend.
In the autumn of 1929, the Soviet Union decided that Sunday was a waste of machinery. Factories would never stop again. Every worker would still get a day of rest, just not the same day as anyone else. For almost two years, a whole country lived on a calendar where your day off was a color. This is the true story behind Plate XV of the Femage archive, See you on your day off.
Why did the Soviet Union get rid of the weekend?
The first Five-Year Plan wanted steel, coal and tractors, fast. Idle factories on a shared day of rest looked like lost production. In May 1929 an economist, Yuri Larin, proposed a solution: the nepreryvka, the continuous working week. By June he had Stalin's approval.
The switch began in the autumn, with 1 October 1929 usually given as the start. It had a second use as well. With Sundays and religious holidays turned into working days, the calendar did quiet work for the campaign against religion.
How did the five-day week work?
The week shrank to five days. Every worker was assigned one of them as a day of rest, and worked the other four. Each day had its own color or a Roman numeral from I to V. One 1930 calendar ran purple, blue, yellow, red and green. On any given day, four fifths of the country was at work and one fifth was off, so the machines never had to stop.
On paper it was tidy. In an apartment it was something else.
What did it do to families?
Days off were assigned by workplace, not by household. A husband could rest on day II and his wife on day IV. Friends drifted apart simply because their colors never met. A family dinner, a walk in the park, a visit to a mother across town: all of it now needed a coincidence.
The factories had problems of their own. Machines broke down more often, partly because they were run by workers who did not know them, and partly because a machine that never stops can never be repaired.
When did the Soviet Union bring the weekend back?
In stages, and never quite admitting it was a retreat. On 23 June 1931 Stalin criticized the continuous week as it was being practiced. From 1 December 1931 most of the country moved to a six-day week with a shared day of rest on the 6th, 12th, 18th, 24th and 30th of each month. The ordinary seven-day week, with Sunday off, only returned on 27 June 1940.
Then Sunday came back, as if it had simply been away on holiday.
The story is printed on a sepia card that comes with every shirt, like a page torn from an old newspaper, with space for its number written by hand.
If you have ever tried to find a free evening with someone you love, the shirt is here: Plate XV, See you on your day off. Each plate is made in a numbered edition of 100, and you can reserve your number on the page. The other editions are in the Editions, and the first story in the archive is the Emu War of 1932.
Sources: the history of the Soviet continuous working week as summarized in the Wikipedia article Soviet calendar. The colors of the days varied between calendars; the ones given here come from one calendar of 1930.
