Innovations that might break the hold of religion on people’s minds, therefore, were met with enthusiasm. Without a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Christians alike would not be able to attend services, and that was considered a winning outcome, two years into the Soviet government’s campaign against religion. The continuous week, the theory went, would make religious adherence near-impossible. It became common, however, for people to color-code their friends and acquaintances in their address books according to which day they had off. There are few actual accounts of the family problems the continuous week likely caused. Finally, he wrote, its primary function seemed simply to generate the illusion of a culture of intense work. In one diary entry dated shortly before the changeover, the historian Ivan Ivanovich Shitz wrote disparagingly about how the nepreryvkawould kill off Sundays and all Christian holidays, he wrote, and make it impossible for people to meet in groups, whether union-based or political, or as a family. Its accidental social consequences, like families being unable to come together, or religious practice made more challenging, seem to have been seen as a bonus. The ostensible reasons for the shift were economic. Letters published in Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, complained that staggered rest days defeated the purpose of time off: “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? It is no holiday if you have to have it alone.” Another griped: “How are we to work now, if mother is free on one day, father on another, brother on a third and I myself on a fourth?” Yet from the very beginning, there were rumblings of dissent from workers.
(Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images) A 1930 Soviet calendar with five-day work week found in the Russian State Library in Moscow.
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