Andrey Ivanovich Savin,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Pivovarov Nikita Yuryevich,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Institute of World History of the Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia; I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Moscow, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
“Two Plus Two Equals Five?”: Socialist Competition as an Ideological Concept in the Post-War USSR (1945–1964)
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2021-6-13
This article reconstructs the concept of socialist competition in the post-war period, that is, how the highest party and state leadership of the USSR understood in 1945–1964 the role and place of social competition in the Soviet economy and in the Soviet project as a whole, as well as how the forms and content of social competition were transformed in accordance with these ideas. A special place in the article is occupied by the issues of moral and material encouragement of participants of competitions and the deficiencies of social competition. The main sources for writing the article were the materials of the Central Committee of the CPSU(b)/CPSU, identified by the authors in the Russian State Archive of Modern History. The authors came to the following conclusions. The development of the concept of socialist competition began to be carried out in the USSR after 1945 along the extensive path of maximizing the number of competitors due to the increase in the number of competitions in each individual branch of the economy. Such an order led to the maximum bureaucratization and formalization of socialist competition, reduced any potential activity of workers to a minimum. The forms of representation of socialist competition remained just as formalized, especially in the mass media. After Stalin’s death, an attempt was made to transform the concept of socialist competition. The main idée fix of the Khrushchev period in this area was the maximum increase in the initiative of the entire mass of workers. Khrushchev believed that workers and collective farmers on the eve of building communism would work with maximum efficiency in their own interests, primarily in industries that played a key role in improving the living standards and material well-being of the population. However, in practice, the changes turned out to be minimal: social competitions were still used as a mandatory tool for solving problem areas in the economy. The activity and initiative of the workers remained at a low level, and Khrushchev never managed in its mobilization effect as to create anything similar to the Stakhanov movement. In addition, the lack of focus on personalization in social competitions discredited this institution as one of the effective social elevators. Finally, neither Stalin nor Khrushchev managed to cope with the fundamental defect of the concept of socialist competition – to solve the problem of low quality of products.
Publishing: 28/12/2021
The article has been received by the editor on 16/11/2021
How to cite: Savin A.I., Pivovarov N.Yu. “Two Plus Two Equals Five?”: Socialist Competition as an Ideological Concept in the Post-War USSR (1945–1964) // Historical Courier, 2021, No. 6 (20), pp. 149–169. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2021/ISTKURIER-2021-6-13.pdf]
Links: Issue 6 2021
Keywords: socialist competition; Soviet economy; social mobility; Soviet award system; Central Committee of the CPSU(b)/CPSU
The study was carried out with the financial support of the RFBR in the framework of scientific project No. 20‑09-00218.