latex thesis page headers

LaTeX/Customizing Page Headers and Footers

Page styles in Latex terms refers not to page dimensions, but to the running headers and footers of a document. These headers typically contain document titles, chapter or section numbers/names, and page numbers.

• 1.1 Plain pages issue
• 2.1 Style customization
• 2.2 Plain pages
• 2.3 Examples
• 3.1 How can one move the page number to the center of the footer and remove the capitalization of the header?
• 3.2 How can I have my name and title of my thesis in the inner foot?
• 3.3 How to change to font style in headers and footers?
• 4 Page n of m
• 5 Customizing with titleps

Standard page styles [ edit | edit source ]

The possibilities of changing the headers in plain Latex are actually quite limited. There are two commands available: \pagestyle { ''style'' } will apply the specified style to the current and all subsequent pages, and \thispagestyle { ''style'' } will only affect the current page. The possible styles are:

The commands \markright and \markboth can be used to set the content of the headings by hand. The following commands placed at the beginning of an article document will set the header of all pages (one-sided) to contain "John Smith" top left, "On page styles" centered and the page number top right:

There are special commands containing details on the running page of the document.

Note that \leftmark and \rightmark convert the names to uppercase, whichever was the formatting of the text. If you want them to print the actual name of the chapter without converting it to uppercase use the following command:

Now \leftmark and \rightmark will just print the name of the chapter and section, without number and without affecting the formatting. Note that these redefinitions must be inserted after the first call of \pagestyle { fancy } . The standard book formatting of the \chaptermark is:

Watch out: if you provide long text in two different "parts" only in the footer or only in the header, you might see overlapping text.

Moreover, with the following commands you can define the thickness of the decorative lines on both the header and the footer:

The first line for the header, the second for the footer. Setting it to zero means that there will be no line.

Plain pages issue [ edit | edit source ]

An issue to look out for is that the major sectioning commands ( \part , \chapter or \maketitle ) specify a \thispagestyle { plain } . So, if you wish to suppress all styles by inserting a \pagestyle { empty } at the beginning of your document, then the style command at each section will override your initial rule, for those pages only. To achieve the intended result one can follow the new section commands with \thispagestyle { empty } . The \part command, however, cannot be fixed this way, because it sets the page style, but also advances to the next page, so that \thispagestyle {} cannot be applied to that page. Two solutions:

• simply write \usepackage { nopageno } in the preamble. This package will make \pagestyle { plain } have the same effect as \pagestyle { empty } , effectively suppressing page numbering when it is used.
• Use fancyhdr as described below.

The tricky problem when customizing headers and footers is to get things like running section and chapter names in there. Standard LaTeX accomplishes this with a two-stage approach. In the header and footer definition, you use the commands \rightmark and \leftmark to represent the current section and chapter heading, respectively. The values of these two commands are overwritten whenever a chapter or section command is processed. For ultimate flexibility, the \chapter command and its friends do not redefine \rightmark and \leftmark themselves. They call yet another command ( \chaptermark , \sectionmark , or \subsectionmark ) that is responsible for redefining \rightmark and \leftmark , except if they are starred -- in such a case, \markboth { Chapter/Section name }{} must be used inside the sectioning command if header and footer lines are to be updated.

Again, several packages provide a solution:

• an alternative one-stage mechanism is provided by the package titleps );
• fancyhdr will handle the process its own way.

Customizing with fancyhdr [ edit | edit source ]

To get better control over the headers, one can use the package fancyhdr written by Piet van Oostrum. It provides several commands that allow you to customize the header and footer lines of your document. For a more complete guide, the author of the package produced this documentation .

To begin, add the following lines to your preamble:

You can now observe a new style in your document.

The \headheight needs to be 13.6pt or more, otherwise you will get a warning and possibly formatting issues. Both the header and footer comprise three elements each according to its horizontal position (left, centre or right).

The styles supported by fancyhdr :

• the four LaTeX styles;
• fancy defines a new header for all pages but plain-style pages such as chapters and titlepage;
• fancyplain is the same, but for absolutely all pages (this page style is deprecated, for new documents a combination of fancy and \fancypagestyle should be used instead, see section 26 of the manual).

Style customization [ edit | edit source ]

The styles can be customized with fancyhdr specific commands. Those two styles may be configured directly, whereas for LaTeX styles you need to make a call to the \fancypagestyle command.

To set header and footer style, fancyhdr provides three interfaces. They all provide the same features, you just use them differently. Choose the one you like most.

• You can use the following six commands (these commands are deprecated, use the new ones defined below).

Hopefully, the behaviour of the above commands is fairly intuitive: if it has head in it, it affects the head etc, and obviously, l , c and r means l eft, c entre and r ight respectively.

• You can also use the command \fancyhead for header and \fancyfoot for footer. They work in the same way, so we'll explain only the first one. The syntax is:

You can use multiple selectors optionally separated by a comma. The selectors are the following:

so CE,RO will refer to the center of the even pages and to the right side of the odd pages.

• \fancyhf is a merge of \fancyhead and \fancyfoot , hence the name. There are two additional selectors H and F to specify the header or the footer, respectively. If you omit the H and the F , it will set the fields for both.

These commands will only work for fancy and fancyplain . To customize LaTeX default style you need the \fancyplainstyle command. See below for examples.

For a clean customization, we recommend you start from scratch. To do so you should erase the current pagestyle. Providing empty values will make the field blank. So

will just delete the current heading/footer configuration, so you can make your own.

Plain pages [ edit | edit source ]

There are two ways to change the style of plain pages like chapters and titlepage.

First you can use the fancyplain style. If you do so, you can use the command \fancyplain { ... }{ ... } inside fancyhdr commands like \lhead { ... } , etc.

When LaTeX wants to create a page with an empty style, it will insert the first argument of \fancyplain , in all the other cases it will use the second argument. For instance:

It has the same behavior of the previous code, but you will get empty header and footer in the title and at the beginning of chapters.

Alternatively you could redefine the plain style, for example to have a really plain page when you want. The command to use is \fancypagestyle { plain }{ ... } and the argument can contain all the commands explained before. An example is the following:

In that case you can use any style but fancyplain because it would override your redefinition.

Examples [ edit | edit source ]

For two-sided, it's common to mirror the style of opposite pages, you tend to think in terms of inner and outer . So, the same example as above for two-sided is:

This is effectively saying author name is top outer, today's date is top inner, and current page number is bottom outer. Using \fancyhf can make it shorter:

Here is the complete code of a possible style you could use for a two-sided document:

Using \fancypagestyle one can additionally define multiple styles for one's document that are easy to switch between. Here's a somewhat complicated example for a two-sided book style:

Customizing with scrlayer-scrpage [ edit | edit source ]

Package scrlayer-scrpage is part of the KOMA-script bundle. Using this package to customize the headers and footers is recommended with every KOMA-script class. The package can be used with the standard classes as well.

Just loading the package doesn't change the default behavior. Chapter titles are on left hand pages, the section titles on right hand pages. The page number appears in the outer head.

Now, what can we do to customize the headers and footers?

We can use the commands that are available with the package, they are described in more detail in the package documentation.

Following a few examples that may be needed in real documents.

How can one move the page number to the center of the footer and remove the capitalization of the header? [ edit | edit source ]

Both, header and footer are separated in an inner, center, and outer part, which can be set independently. The asterisk defines the same content to be on plain pages as well. Usually, pages on which a chapter starts, use the plain style.

How can I have my name and title of my thesis in the inner foot? [ edit | edit source ]

How to change to font style in headers and footers [ edit | edit source ].

The package provides an interface similar to the KOMA-script classes. You can add font attribute to the header and footer. The page number can be set independently.

Page n of m [ edit | edit source ]

Some people like to put the current page number in context with the whole document. LaTeX only provides access to the current page number. However, you can use the lastpage package to find the total number of pages, like this:

Note the capital letters . Also, add a backslash after \thepage to ensure adequate space between the page number and 'of'. And recall, when using references, that you have to run LaTeX an extra time to resolve the cross-references.

Customizing with titleps [ edit | edit source ]

titleps takes a one-stage approach, without having to use \leftmark or \rightmark .

For example:

defines a pagestyle named main with the page at the left on even pages and at the right on odd pages, the chapter title at the center of even pages, and so on.

With titleps all the format is done in the page style, and not partly when the mark is emitted and partly when the mark is retrieved. The following example is similar to the previous one, but elements are coloured:

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Basic thesis template

This Thesis LaTeX template is an ideal starting point for writing your PhD thesis, masters dissertation or final year project. The style is appropriate for most universities, and can be easily customised. This LaTeX template includes a title page, a declaration, an abstract, acknowledgements, table of contents, list of figures/tables, a dedication, and example chapters and sections.

This template was originally published on ShareLaTeX and subsequently moved to Overleaf in November 2019.

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LaTeX Your Thesis

General thesis tips, about the thesis template, changing headers, using and modifying sections, handling images and tables, landscape orientation, managing paragraph spacing, uploading the thesis template to overleaf, add a collaborator, managing your bibliography, choosing a bibliography style, how to cite a reed thesis, changing the title of your bibliography, fragment your thesis with \include, using labels and references, adding appendices, including full page pdfs.

• Additional Resources - LaTeX Cheat Sheet
• BACK UP YOUR THESIS. Often you will not realize for days or weeks that important paragraph or page is missing. Make recovery as easy as possible by keeping a dated backup of each writing session. Then copy those backups to at least two locations other than your hard drive: your home server, Gmail account, thumb drive, the options are wide and numerous. There is no excuse for not backing up the most important document of your Reed career.
• Start your bibliographic database the day you start reading. Keep it up to date and annotate it, so you know where it came from (library, Summit, ILL, public library, professor), whether you've read it, and where you want to cite it. This will make the writing process less frustrating and creating the bibliography seamless.
• Think of thesis formatting as a form of productive procrastination. Please don't put it off until the last week.
• BACK UP. No, seriously. It's not "if" your hard drive fails, it's "when." Not to scare you or anything, but it's a good habit, like buckling your seat belt or not leaving your laptop unattended. You really don't want to wish you had taken that small precaution.
• Keep the editable original of each graphic you want to include in your thesis in one folder. Later you may need to change a graphic quickly and having the editable original makes it easy. For graphs, keep the original Excel/JMP/Stata document, not a PDF. For photographs, keep a high resolution copy (such as a tiff). For drawings and illustrations, keep the original Illustrator document.
• Use the timesaving benefits of LaTeX from the first day. Cross references can refer to tables, graphics, and chapters so you do not have to update references as your thesis changes. Use comments to make notes about what needs to added or changed.
• Enjoy the experience! And get some sleep, food and relaxation on occasion. Hundreds of people did this before you; you can do this too.

The thesis template, available for download here , contains two main files of importance: Reedthesis.cls and Thesis.tex . (As you noticed, there are many other files in the folder. For more information about all the files LaTeX creates, see our article on the subject. ) Reedthesis.cls is a document class like article or book, and so must be defined in the preamble (see the section about document classes for more info ). Additionally, since the average installation (even Reed's) does not include Reedthesis.cls, you will have to bring the file wherever you want to work on your thesis.

The thesis template folder also contains bonus materials you may find helpful, such as an array of bibliography style files (.bst) that can support an undergraduate thesis citation and files already modified to work with a psychology major's specific needs. So make sure that you have the latest version of the thesis template and read through the thesis.tex file for more complete overview of the template's contents.

Common Queries

While the content of your thesis is certainly much more important than the appearance, a nicely typeset thesis will be more pleasant to look upon ten years from now. We have collected nearly every query for the last few years so you can make the changes you want and get back to revising your latest chapter. That typo on the first page will bug you even more than the headers once the thesis is bound and in the library. Most of these answers are links that lead to other pages in our LaTeX documentation because they fit well elsewhere and this page would be much too long if we decided to be redundant.

If you don't like how your headers appear, you can change them. That is, they are modifiable in LaTeX, but your adviser or the library might not like the change. But people change how they look all the time (usually to have the name of the chapter in small caps and without the title of the current \section), so the advanced LaTeX page has a few ways to go about tweaking the headers .

When using Reedthesis.cls, you will use \chapter{ optional title here } to denote the beginning of a new chapter (obviously) while \section{ title } and \subsection{ title } will subdivide those chapters. You do not need to use \subsection if you don't wish to, but \section will probably prove very useful to break up your chapters.

If you don't like the automatic numbering of \chapter, \section and \subsection, you can easily eliminate the numbering by adding an asterix to the command ( \chapter*{ title }, \section*{ title } , etc.), but then the section won't show up in the Table of Contents. To learn how to make sure these show up in the ToC, and to learn more about sectioning commands in general, check out the advanced LaTeX page .

In order to add an image in LaTeX, you must use the package graphicx and place the image ( \includegraphics{ imagename } ) inside the figure environment. Be sure to give a caption if necessary, but remember that LaTeX will add the "Figure x.x" to your caption on the typeset document. For more information on handling images, including the answers to our most common questions, see our graphics documentation . To make your life easier, I highly suggest that you read the section on using references and labels .

Like figures, tables also need to be in a float environment such as tabular or longtable . For an introduction to tables or to learn how to do more complex table formatting, see our documentation on tables . To learn how to change their position, numbering or presentation, the graphics documentation covers the same material. You may have to replace figure with table wherever appropriate, but the commands are basically the same. Feel free to stop by the CUS desk or try Google if you get lost!

When you have a table or figure that is too wide for your page, you will need to rotate your page to be in landscape rather than portrait orientation. To avoid rotating your headers and footers as well, use the package lscape (for more information on packages, see the advanced LaTeX section ) and enclose whatever needs to be rotated in the landscape environment:

\begin{landscape} \begin{figure}[htbp] \caption{A Really Wide Figure} \includegraphics{panoramicimage} \label{pan} \end{figure} \end{landscape}

This will keep the headers and page numbers in the portrait orientation, but rotate your figure or table as well as the appropriate caption. You do not want to use the package Portland ; this rotates the headers and footers as well, and the registrar will probably not accept such a setup.

The line breaking and spacing algorithms of LaTeX are not always successful. Sometimes the space between paragraphs is inconsistent from page to page, or even within the same page. If this happens to you, try ignoring it for a bit and continue to write your paper. Often the addition of a new subsection or just more words will be reorganized into a more pleasing arrangement.

But don't add unnecessary bulk to your thesis just to make it look good. Try putting this in the preamble: \setlength{\parskip}{0pt} . This sets the inter-paragraph spacing to 0 pts. You could also tell LaTeX that it can be more permissive when placing page breaks by putting \allowdisplaybreaks or \raggedbottom in the preamble. If none of these solutions work and you don't want to add more content to your finished chapter, bring your .tex file to the CUS desk and we shall see what we can do.

Using Overleaf

Overleaf is an online LaTeX editor that allows one to use LaTeX software without downloading or configuring. It has a variety of templates, but can also be used to make changes on our thesis template. 

• Download the LaTeX template .zip file from the Thesis Templates section at downloads.reed.edu
• Go to overleaf.com and create an account. We recommend using personal credentials so you don’t lose any data after graduation. Note: If you have a subscription through Reed you’ll have to use your Reed credentials instead

• Select template .zip file from your computer and click Upload  if prompted.
• Using the template is the same as with any LaTeX compiler  
• Thesis edits should be made to thesis.tex, and a live version can be viewed by clicking Recompile . You can also upload your own .bib file to your project instead of using the example prelim.bib .

You can add your adviser as a collaborator so they may leave comments on your work as you go. Without a subscription you can have a single collaborator, with a student subscription you can have up to 6. If you are interested in joining our pilot subscription program, inquire by emailing [email protected] .

• Open your project.

Bibliographies

Unless you are doing a creative writing thesis, you will read way too much for your thesis. As a result, your bibliography will be ridiculously long. Thankfully, there is this great program called BibTeX that will typeset your bibliography for you. For more general information on using BibTeX to create your bibliography, as well as choosing a bibliography format and using a bibliography manager, see our BibTeX documentation .

While it is possible to create a bibliography manually , and there are reasons to do so, your senior year will be made a bit easier if you take advantage of BibTeX's automation . We strongly suggest that you use an application such as JabRef or BibDesk , both of which have documentation on the BibTex page. 

The BibTeX page has the following advice for creating your bibliography in BibTeX, but I thought it was worth repeating here:

• Like with thesis formatting, the sooner you start compiling your bibliography for something as large as thesis, the better. Typing in source after source is mind-numbing enough; do you really want to do it for hours on end in late April? Think of it as procrastination.
• When you have more than one author or editor, you need to separate each author's name by the word and .
• The cite key (a citation's label) needs to be unique from the other entries.
• Bibliographies made using BibTeX (whether manually or using a manager) accept LaTeX markup, so you can italicize and add symbols as necessary.
• To force capitalization in an article title or where all lowercase is generally used, bracket the capital letter in curly braces.
• You can add a Reed Thesis citation option. In fact, your bibliography style (.bst) may already have the option. See the thesis template for more details.

If you know what bibliography style you need to be using (Chicago or MLA, for example), then you should check out the available bibliography styles on the page about BibTeX styles . If your discipline varies with regard to preferred bibliography style, ask your adviser which format or journal you should use, then check out the BibTeX style page for a Reed edition, or CTAN.org for most other styles. 

A normal bibliography style (.bst) has formats for a PhD thesis and a Master's thesis, but no preset format for an undergraduate thesis. In your .bib file, use the Phd. thesis entry type, and in the optional type field, enter "Reed thesis" or "Undergraduate thesis" and that will be displayed instead of "Phd.thesis".

The default bibliography title is just "Bibliography," but if you want to change this, LaTeX gives you an easy way to do so. Here is an example of a bibliography renamed to "Works Cited." Note the placement after the command \backmatter and before the commands that make the bibliography ( \bibliographystyle and \bibliography ).

\backmatter \renewcommand{\bibname}{ Works Cited } \bibliographystyle{plain} \bibliography{thesis}

Special Topics In Thesis: Tricks to Make Life Easier

Thesis may be scary, but putting it together doesn't have to be. A number of recent alumni answered a call for recommendations to the next crop of seniors; here are the computer related gems.

Your thesis is big, or at least it will be soon enough. Instead of typing everything into the thesis template, you can have separate files for each chapter and then include them in the thesis template. To learn more about using the commands \include and \input , see the appropriate section in the advanced LaTeX documentation.

If you've made a table or figure, you have probably noticed the command \label{default} . If you want to refer to that table or figure elsewhere in your document, you need only to write \ref{default} and your typeset document will replace that ref with the number of the item. But you can refer to more than just tables and figures with ease:

• For figures and tables, the label command should be inserted right after the \caption .
• For equations or lists, the label command should be within the environment as a whole.
• For chapters or sections, it will refer to the first preceding section title, whether it is a subsection, section, or chapter.
• If you want the page number of the reference, use the \pageref{ marker } command. If you want just the reference, use the \ref{ marker } command. For correct spacing, you may wish to precede the reference commands with a tilde (~) if you are using the reference in a sentence or text.
• You will need to typeset your document at least twice to see cross-references reflect any changes. You will know that you need to typeset again if you see question marks where there should be references.

To add an appendix to your thesis, find \appendix towards the end of your thesis template. Right after the \appendix , it should have another \chapter command, in which you can specify the name of your appendix. This is what the template has:

\appendix \chapter{The First Appendix} \chapter{The Second Appendix, For Fun}

You can either write directly in the template as if the appendix is just another chapter, or stick an external document in using \input (for .tex documents only, see the documentation on this ) or \includegraphics (for PDFs and other formats, see below). Your appendices will appear in the Table of Contents as Appendix A: Appendix Name (the second appendix will be Appendix B, and so on). The appendix itself will have both Appendix A and the appendix title on separate lines.

If you want to remove the "appendix" part of your appendix title or otherwise modify how that part of the title is displayed, remove \appendix from your thesis, thus making your appendices into normal chapters. You then need to keep the appendix from being numbered as "Chapter # ", so make the following modifications to your document:

Original: \appendix \chapter{The First Appendix} To make the appendix named Appendix: The First Appendix, change the above to: \chapter*{Appendix: The First Appendix} \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Appendix: The First Appendix} \chaptermark{Appendix} \markboth{Appendix}{Appendix}

The \chapter* creates an unnumbered chapter and \addcontentsline adds the chapter to the Table of Contents with the title you specify. The commands \chaptermark and \markboth handle the headers. For more on modifying chapter names, look at the documentation on sectioning . To learn more about changing headers, read the Headers In a Thesis section.

Music Majors: There are two LaTeX related routes to typesetting music, MusicTeX and LilyPond. However, past music seniors have struggled to incorporate the files from both programs into their theses. The official CUS recommendation is to use Finale to typeset your music, then export the sheet music to PDF. (See this page to learn how to create pdfs in a program such as Finale.) Using \includepdf (with the package PDFPages ) is a great way to add them. PDFPages is a powerful and flexible way to include multi-page PDF files in your LaTeX document. Example: \includepdf[pages=1-8 offset=15 -15,scale=.80, frame=true,pagecommand={\thispagestyle{plain}}]{Orlando.pdf}

Additional Resources

For a quick LaTeX Cheat Sheet, please visit http://www.stdout.org/~winston/latex/ .

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The fascinating story of Moscow’s chocolate factory, which survived the Revolution and WWII

The A. I. Abrikosov & Sons Company

The A. I. Abrikosov & Sons Company is an important candy company with a long history and one of the largest factories in Moscow. Other large factories include Einem (the current Red October), the Lenovykh trading house (RotFront) and Siu and К° (the Bolshevik Factory). However, few people know that this company’s story began with small simple treats that the owner prepared for his landlady.

A serf by the name of Stepan from a little village in the Penza Governorate used to make sweets from fruits and berries for his landlady. He would use items growing in his peasant garden to make the treats. The apricot jam and candy came out particularly well. As was generally the case with serfs, Stepan did not have a last name, but for his skill in preparing apricot desserts he was named Abrikosov, which his descendants officially took on as a last name.

Some time later, the landlady let him go to Moscow, where he opened his own business in order to pay her quitrent in annual installments. His business was successful, and after several years he was able to save up enough money to buy freedom for himself and his family. In 1804, Abrikosov and his family moved to Moscow for good in order to develop and perfect his business and invest new recipes.

Penza in the early 20th century

A family business

The Abrikosovs worked together as a whole family, which consisted of Stepan, his wife Fekla Ivanovna and their children Ivan, Vasily and Daria. They provided catering at important receptions and merchants’ weddings. The family’s fame and fortune grew, and soon Stepan opened a grocery store that sold fruit and candy.

After Stepan’s death, his son Ivan Stepanovich took control of the business and then, after him, Stepan’s grandson, Alexei Ivanovich Abrikosov. The family continues to prosper, and production has expanded and been mechanized. The factory first used machines to grate almonds and press montpensier . At this point, 24 people work at the company. Alexei Ivanovich personally purchases the berries and fruits used in his sweets.

Abrikosov's candies

The volume of production has also increased. In 1871, the factory’s annual production was 445 tons, and by 1872 it was 512 tons. The A. I. Abrikosov enterprise became one of the largest candy producers in Russia, along with Einem (Red October after the Revolution), Siu and К° (the Bolshevik Factory after the Revolution) and others.

Competition in the candy market forced the Abrikosovs to continue to improve on production.

In 1873, the company acquired a steam machine, which divided production up into factory sections.

Pictured L-R: Alexei Abrikosov, brothers Alexei and Nikolai Abrikosov, Ivan Abrikosov (son of Alexei)

The Abrikosovs were a big happy family. In total, Alexei Ivanovich and Agrippina Alexandrovna had 22 children: 10 sons and 12 daughters. In 1874, Alexei Ivanovich transferred control of the company to his sons, Nikolai and Ivan.

In the 1880s, the Abrikosov company became the largest candy enterprise in Moscow and one of the five leading companies in Russia, producing 50 percent of all candy in the country. Besides Moscow and St. Petersburg, the company had stores in Kiev, Odessa, Rostov-on-Don and Nizhny Novgorod. A branch of the factory opened in Simferopol, Crimea. It produced jam, compote, chestnuts in sugar, marzipan and candied nuts.

The secrets of success

To increase sales, the Abrikosovs advertised actively, placing ads in newspapers, hanging vivid posters on building facades and distributing pocket calendars with the company logo. Significant attention was paid to the relationship between the salesperson and the customer. But the company’s biggest pride was the packaging.

The multi-form metallic, cardboard and wooden boxes and cans with original drawings outlived the sweets inside. Not wanting to discard these beautiful objects, the customer often held on to them as a jar for collecting coins or simply to embellishing their home.

In 1899, the A. I. Abrikosov & Sons Company, having won first place at the All-Russian Artistic-Industrial Exhibition for the third time and was awarded the honorary title of Supplier of His Imperial Majesty, allowing them to depict the House of Romanov coat of arms on its packages. To obtain this right the company had to produce for the state for ten years straight and not once “fall with its face in the mud.” For the customers, the Abrikosov sign became an original symbol of quality.

The factory’s organization

The factory is composed of several brick buildings on the corner of Bolshoi and Malyi Uspensky Lanes. In the three-story brick edifice, chocolate and apple workshops are on the first floor, a pastila workshop is on the second and a candy and caramel workshop is on the third. Next-door is where they pack and package the products, as well as a dormitory for the workers. In the beginning of the 1900s, almost 2,000 people worked at the factory. They make candy, jam, gingerbread and other types of confectionary.

Abrikosov's factory

The factory after the Revolution

The 1917 October Revolution and the Civil War both disrupted the activities of the A. I. Abrikosov & Sons Company. Production volumes declined substantially, and in 1918 the factory was nationalized and its name changed to State Confectionary Factory No. 2. In 1922, the factory became affiliated with the name Petr Akimovich Babaev, the chairman of the executive committee of the Sokolniki district, and was called the P.A. Babaev Worker Factory. However, “former Abrikosov” was added to the packaging. This old trademark, which guaranteed quality, helped keep the customers.

In 1928, the Moscow confectionary factories began dividing up the company’s product range. Chocolate was made at the Red October plant, cookies at the Bolshevik plant and the Babaev factory made only caramel. Special apparatuses were ordered from Germany to brew caramel syrup.

This avant-garde mansion for Abrikosov's factory in Moscow was built by architect Boris Shnaubert, now the building hosts the Babaev factory.

World War II

When the war began, many workers and experts at the factory went off to the front. Production itself adapted to the needs of the army, and the factory produced various types of porridges in briquettes, including millet, buckwheat and rice. The factory resumed the production of sweets only after the war.

As reparations for the war, Germany sent industrial equipment from its factories, including confectionary operations, to the Soviet Union. Some of this equipment was given to the Babaev factory for its chocolate production. Gradually, the chocolate division grew, and by the beginning of the 1970s it became one of the best in the country. The factory produced a range of confectionary, with the volume and type determined by the state.

Legendary 'Montpensier' pastille

The factory today

The beginning of the 1990s was a difficult time for the confectionary factory. Due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the established agricultural relationships between businesses and the former Soviet republics—which supplied raw materials—fell apart. Production volumes fell, but despite everything the factory continued working and by the end of the 1990s the Babaevsky Confectionary Corporation had made a comeback by churning out candy with the Soviet brand names Alenka, Vdokhnovenie, Radii and others.

In 1993, the descendants of Alexei Ivanovich Abrikosov brought back the family business and created a new A. I. Abrikosov & Sons Company.

Read more: What street food looked like in Moscow 100 years ago

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V. I. Lenin

Report on subbotniks, delivered to a moscow city conference of the r.c.p. (b.) [1], december 20, 1919.

Delivered: 20 December, 1919 First Published: Brief report published in Izvestia No. 287; December 21, 1919; First published in full in 1927; Published according to the verbatim report Source: Lenin’s Collected Works , 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, page 283-288 Translated: George Hanna Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters & Robert Cymbala Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Comrades, the organisers of the conference inform me that you have arranged for a report on subbotniks and divided it into two parts so that it would be possible to discuss the main thing in this field in detail; first, the organisation of subbotniks in Moscow and results achieved, and secondly, practical conclusions for their further organisation. I should like to confine myself to general propositions, to the ideas born of the organisation of subbotniks as a new phenomenon in our Party and governmental development. I shall, therefore, dwell only briefly on the practical aspect.

When the first communist subbotniks had just been organised it was difficult to judge to what extent such a phenomenon deserved attention and whether anything big would come of it. I remember that when the first news of them began to appear in the Party press, the appraisals of comrades close to trade union organisational affairs and the Commissariat of Labour were at first extremely restrained, if riot pessimistic. They did not think there were any grounds for regarding them as important. Since then subbotniks have become so widespread that their importance to our development cannot be disputed by anyone.

We have actually been using the adjective “communist” very frequently, so frequently that we have even included it in the name of our Party. But when you give this matter some thought, you arrive at the idea that together with the good that has followed from this, a certain danger for us may have been created. Our chief reason for changing the name of the Party was the desire to draw a clear line of distinction between us and the dominant socialism of the Second International. After the overwhelming majority of the official socialist parties, through their leaders, had gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie of their own countries or of their own governments during the imperialist war, the tremendous crisis, the collapse of the old socialism, became obvious to us. And in order to stress as sharply as possible that we could not consider socialists those who took sides with their governments during the imperialist war, in order to show that the old socialism had gone rotten, had died—mainly for that reason the idea of changing the Party's name was put forward. This the more so, since the name of “Social-Democratic” has from the theoretical point of view long ceased to be correct. As far back as the forties, when it was first widely used politically in France, it was applied to a party professing petty-bourgeois socialist reformism and not to a party of the revolutionary proletariat. The main reason, the motive for changing the name of our Party which has given its new name to the new International was the desire to cut ourselves off decisively from the old socialism.

If we were to ask ourselves in what way communism differs from socialism, we should have to say that socialism is the society that grows directly out of capitalism, it is the first form of the new society. Communism is a higher form of society, and can only develop when socialism has become firmly established, Socialism implies work without the aid of the capitalists, socialised labour with strict accounting, control and supervision by the organised vanguard, the advanced section of the working people; the measure of labour and remuneration for it must be fixed. It is necessary to fix them because capitalist society has left behind such survivals and such habits as the fragmentation of labour, no confidence in social economy, and the old habits of the petty proprietor that dominate in all peasant countries. All this is contrary to real communist economy. We give the name of communism to the system under which people form the habit of performing their social duties without any special apparatus for coercion, and when unpaid work for the public good becomes a general phenomenon. It stands to reason that the concept of “communism” is a far too distant one for those who are taking the first steps towards complete victory over capitalism. No matter how correct it may have been to change the name of the Party, no matter how great the benefit the change has brought us, no matter how great the accomplishments of our cause and the scale on which it has developed—Communist Parties now exist throughout the world and although less than a year has passed since the foundation of the Communist International , from the point of view of the labour movement it is incomparably stronger than the old, dying Second International —if the name “Communist Party” were interpreted to mean that the communist system is being introduced immediately, that would be a great distortion and would do practical harm since it would be nothing more than empty boasting.

That is why the word “communist” must be treated with great caution, and that is why communist subbotniks that have begun to enter into our life are of particular value, because it is only in this extremely tiny phenomenon that something communist has begun to make its appearance. The expropriation of the landowners and capitalists enabled us to organise only the most primitive forms of socialism, and there is not yet anything communist in it. If we take our present-day economy we see that the germs of socialism in it are still very weak and that the old economic forms dominate overwhelmingly; these are expressed either as the domination of petty proprietorship or as wild, uncontrolled profiteering. When our adversaries, the petty-bourgeois democrats, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, assert in their objections to us that we have smashed large-scale capitalism but that the worst kind of profiteering, usury capitalism, persists in its place, we tell them that if they imagine that we can go straight from large-scale capitalism to communism they are not revolutionaries but reformists and utopians.

Large-scale capitalism has been seriously undermined everywhere, even in those countries where no steps towards socialism have yet been taken. From this point of view, none of the criticisms or the objections levelled against us by our opponents are serious. Obviously the beginnings of a new, petty, profiteering capitalism began to make their appearance after large-scale capitalism had been crushed. We are living through a savage battle against the survivals of large-scale capitalism which grasps at every kind of petty speculation where it is difficult to counteract it and where it takes on the worst and most unorganised form of trading.

The struggle has become much fiercer under war conditions and has led to the most brutal forms of profiteering, especially in places where capitalism was organised on a larger scale, and it would be quite incorrect to imagine that the revolutionary transition could have any other form. That is how matters stand in respect of our present-day economy. If we were to ask ourselves what the present economic system of Soviet Russia is, we should have to say that it consists in laying the foundations of socialism in large-scale industry, in reorganising the old capitalist economy with the capitalists putting up a stubborn resistance in millions and millions of different ways. The countries of Western Europe that have emerged from the war as badly off as we are—Austria, for instance—differ from us only in that the disintegration of capitalism and speculation are more pronounced there than in our country and that there are no germs of socialist organisation to offer resistance to capitalism. There is, however, not yet anything communist in our economic system. The “communist” begins when subbotniks (i. e., unpaid labour with no quota set by any authority or any state) make their appearance; they constitute the labour of individuals on an extensive scale for the public good. This is not helping one's neighbour in the way that has always been customary in the countryside; it is work done to meet the needs of the country as a whole, and it is organised on a broad scale and is unpaid. It would, therefore, be more correct if the word “communist” were applied not only to the name of the Party but also to those economic manifestations in our reality that are actually communist in character. If there is anything communist at all in the prevailing system in Russia, it is only the subbotniks , and everything else is nothing but the struggle against capitalism for the consolidation of socialism out of which, after the full victory of socialism, there should grow that communism that we see at subbotniks , not with the aid of a book, but in living reality.

Such is the theoretical significance of subbotniks ; they demonstrate that here something quite new is beginning to emerge in the form of unpaid labour, extensively organised to meet the needs of he entire state, something that is contrary to all the old capitalist rules, something that is much more lofty than the socialist society that is conquering capitalism. When the workers on the Moscow-Kazan Railway, people who were living under conditions of the worst famine and the greatest need, first responded to the appeal of the Central Committee of the Party to come to the aid of the country, [2] and when there appeared signs that communist subbotniks were no longer a matter of single cases but were spreading and meeting with the sympathy of the masses, we were able to say that they were a phenomenon of tremendous theoretical importance and that we really should afford them all-round support if we wanted to be Communists in more than mere theory, in more than the struggle against capitalism. From the point of view of the practical construction of a socialist society that is not enough. It must be said that the movement can really be developed on a mass scale. I do not undertake to say whether we have proved this since no general summaries of the extent of the movement we call communist subbotniks have yet been prepared. I have only fragmentary information and have read in the Party press that these subbotniks are developing more and more widely in a number of towns. Petrograd comrades say that subbotniks are far more widespread in their city than in Moscow. As far as the provinces are concerned many of the comrades who have a practical knowledge of this movement have told me that they are collecting a huge amount of material on this new form of social labour. However, we shall only be able to obtain summarised data after the question has been discussed many times in the press and at Party conferences in different cities; on the basis of those data we shall be able to say whether the subbotniks have really become a mass phenomenon, and whether we have really achieved important successes in this sphere. Whatever may be the case, whether or not we shall soon obtain that sort of complete and verified data, we should not doubt that from the theoretical point of view the subbotniks are the only manifestation we have to show that we do not only call ourselves Communists, that we do not merely want to he Communists, but are actually doing something that is communist and not merely socialist. Every Communist, therefore, everyone who wants to be true to the principles of communism should devote all his attention and all his efforts to the explanation of this phenomenon and to its practical implementation. That is the theoretical significance of the subbotniks . At every Party conference, therefore, we must persistently raise this question and discuss both its theoretical and its practical aspect. We must not limit this phenomenon to its theoretical significance. Communist subbotniks are of tremendous importance to us not only because they are the practical implementation of communism. Apart from this, subbotniks have a double significance—from the standpoint of the state they are purely practical aid to the state, and from the standpoint of the Party—and for us, members of the Party, this must not remain in the shade—they have the significance of purging the Party of undesirable elements and are of importance in the struggle against the influences experienced by the Party at a time when capitalism is decaying.

[1] The Moscow City Conference of the R,C.P.(B.) was held December 20-21, 1919. The Conference discussed the convocation of an All-Russia Party Conference, the fuel problem, subbotniks , measures of combating typhus epidemics, the food situation in Moscow, universal military training, and special detachments.

A resolution on subbotniks underscored their tremendous significance as the first practical steps in building communism. The Party Conference recognised the great importance of subbotniks in achieving tangible results in raising labour productivity and in alleviating the transport, fuel, food and other crises of the Soviet Republic, and made it incumbent upon all Party members to take part in subbotniks and make their work the most productive.

After Lenin's report the Conference heard the report on the organisation of subbotniks and approved an instruction. The Moscow Party Committee worked out and approved the “Statute on Subbotniks” published in Pravda on December 27, 1919. A special department was formed at the Moscow Committee of the R.C.P.(B.) for their supervision.

[2] Lenin refers to the “Theses of the CC., R.C.P.(B.) in Connection with the Situation on the Eastern Front” written on April 11, 1919, in which the Central Committee appealed to all Party organisations and all trade unions “to set to work in a revolutionary way” (see present edition, Vol. 29).

Collected Works Volume 30 Collected Works Table of Contents Lenin Works Archive