Roman Evgenievich Romanov,
Candidate of Historical Sciences, Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Many-Faced Fighters of the Rear: Socio-Cultural Types of Motivation of Workers during the Great Patriotic War
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-6-7
The article is devoted to the identification of the socio-cultural diversity of the fighters of the rear by analyzing the processes of formation of five types of motivation for the work of workers of the Siberian defense industry during the Great Patriotic War. The purpose of the research is realized with the help of the author’s concept, within which the analysis of “end-to-end” social and labor cases of world history, used by the Bolsheviks as atypical elements for the construction of the Red Project, is carried out. It is established that in order to consolidate the working personnel in the military industry, the Soviet state introduced both repressive and socio-consumer attitudes to employment in production into new factory collectives, consisting mainly of women and youth with peasant roots. These attitudes were laid in the minds of the personnel of the defense enterprises of Siberia through criminal penalties for official misconduct and the social security system. It is shown that the task of increasing labor productivity was solved by cultivating quasi-monetary, vital and heroic motivation among the defense workers of the region to exceed production standards. These guidelines were formed by them due to an increase in the nominal salary, additional supplies of Stakhanovites and drummers, and the widespread use of moral incentives. It is concluded that in 1941–1945, workers of the leading branches of the military economy acted as carriers of moral imperatives of labor behavior rooted in the archetype, tradition and modernity. The key mental specificity of the fighters of the rear, who became the main personification of the many-faced Sovietism during the period under review, was due to an increased tilt within the Red Project towards both negative (fear of repression) and positive (the desire for survival and glory) archaic, interacting with industrial modernity.
Publishing: 28/12/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 30/09/2022
How to cite: Romanov R.E. The Many-Faced Fighters of the Rear: Socio-Cultural Types of Motivation of Workers during the Great Patriotic War // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 6 (26), pp. 98–109. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-6-07.pdf]
Links: Issue 6 2022
Keywords: Great Patriotic War; Second World Warworkers; socio-cultural types of labor motivation; social and labor cases; home front fighters