In "Workers Before and After Lenin" Gordon made use of Soviet sources of economic data in arguing that under the Communist regime the standard of living of the working class had deteriorated substantially. The point of using Soviet-issued data was that even the government's own rosy numbers showed a deteriorated reality, precluding any specious rebuttal by Soviet officials or their supporters along the lines that the analysis would be wrong for having used flawed data. Gordon showed that the purchasing power of wages in the late 1930s stood at only about 75% of the food value purchasable by Russian workers in the years immediately preceding World War I. Nominal wage gains (which the government boasted about) had been more than offset by large price increases, including of staple goods, while consumer goods were shoddy and in poor supply, Gordon argued. She also made the point that it would have been historically realistic to expect economic growth in the decades since the prewar years, meaning that Soviet performance needed to be judged not just on comparison with 1910 standards but also on comparison with the opportunity cost of forgoing a more February-oriented existence between 1917 and 1941, which October forestalled. She then pointed out that meanwhile political freedom had degraded to virtually zero, and although the very point of the existence of trade unions is to protect workers' interests from undue exploitation by their employers, the trade unions in the Soviet Union had become totally unable to do that, as they were completely controlled by the abusive employer, namely, the state. A strikingly poignant epigraph on the title page of the book showed the depth of irony in what the Soviet regime had become by 1941; Gordon silently held up Lenin's own words alone, which formed an indictment: