For the urban workforce of the Soviet Union, September 29, 1929, was a Sunday like any other—a day of rest after six days of labor. Sunday was the prize at the finish line: a day’s holiday, where people might see family, attend church or clean their homes. But in the eyes of the Soviet government led by Joseph Stalin, Sundays represented a genuine threat to the whirr and hum of industrial progress. For one day in seven, after all, machines sat silent, productivity slumped to zero and people retreated to comforts thought to be contrary to the revolutionary ideal, like family life or religious practice.

On the following Sunday, no such collective pause for breath took place. Eighty percent of the workforce were told to go to work; 20 percent to stay home. The ordinary seven-day week now had a new bedfellow: the nepreryvka, or “continuous working week.” It was five days long, with days of rest staggered across the week. Now, the Soviet economist and politician Yuri Larin proposed, the machines need never be idle.

The nepreryvka was supposed to revolutionize the concept of labor, set a match to productivity and make religious worship too troublesome to be worth the effort. But it failed on virtually every count. Adjustments were made and in 1931, the cycle was extended to last six days. After 11 years of trial and error, the project was axed in June, 1940.

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Unlike the ordinary seven-day week, the continuous week began as a five-day cycle, with each day color-coded and marked with a symbol. The population would be carved up into as many groups, each with its own rest day. The days of the week, as familiar as family members, would gradually be stripped of meaning. Instead, each of the five new days was marked by a symbolic, politically appropriate item: wheatsheaf; red star; hammer and sickle; book; and, finally, budenovka, or woolen military cap. Calendars from the time show the days marked out in colored circles like beads on a string: yellow, peach, red, purple, green. These circles indicated when you worked and when you rested. This was shift work, on the most enormous scale in human history.

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