“Partisanship” at the Late Soviet Factory through the Prism of Andrey Alekseev's Dramatic Sociology.

Abstract

The article attempts to analyze informal practices at a late Soviet factory through the prism of the factory ethnographic project of the Soviet sociologist Andrei Alekseev, who in the 1980s. worked in the workshop of the Lenpoligraphmash plant. Based on the materials published as a result of the research project, a number of questions are raised: What is remarkable about the experience of the sociologist Andrey Alekseev? How does participant observation research help to study the organization of labor in a Soviet factory? Is it possible to say that informal practices in the work of workers were aimed only at “escaping” from the control of the factory administration, and autonomy at the workplace served solely to satisfy personal needs? The focus of the article is an informal practice, which the workshop workers called "partisanism" — the informal production of spare parts that are subsequently used not for personal purposes, but for the needs of production. It is argued that, firstly, contrary to the belief of researchers of Soviet labor, the ability of workers to act outside the field of view of the administration can be aimed not only at shirking and avoiding work, but also at building new ways of organizing labor, aimed, among other things, at management of collective planning obligations; secondly, Alekseev’s research project itself became “partisan”, since, on the one hand, it made it possible to explore and capture in detail the informal life of a Soviet enterprise shop in the 1980s, on the other hand, it became an alternative way to study Soviet society, a methodological and empirical initiative, an invention , but at the same time a contribution to the history of Soviet industrial sociology.

Keywords

• soviet labor
• ethnography of work
• participant observation
• soviet sociology
• organization of work
• industrial labor
• late soviet period