“Workers’ Complaints” in Late Soviet Latvia: “Moral Economy” or “Civil Society”?

Abstract

The traditional researcher’s view of Russian history is based on the metropolitan point of view even if the object of study is one of the country’s regions. This is the case because all the main decisions are made in the capital, and therefore it is the state institutions that not only produce but also store the bulk of the documents. But if we turn to regional materials, we can see that the Soviet homogeneity was in fact replaced by heterogeneity. On this basis, the question can be raised to what extent the spatial and geographical factors should be taken into account in the study of the Soviet experience. The formation of a new Soviet subject was an important aspect of the Soviet system. In addition to labor activity, this new Soviet man had to be an active subject in social life as well, contributing to the maintenance of normative order. Letters to the authorities were a form of such struggle for norm and morality. The Soviet system presupposed the possibility of criticizing individual shortcomings in the field as long as the order itself was not questioned. But in the late-Soviet period, moral norms began to be actively extended to the entire Soviet population, not just the high-ranking party officials. This was largely due to the ideas of expanded state management during the transition from socialism to communism and the involvement of the broad masses in this process. The late-Soviet period was marked by the replacement of organized mass violence by various forms of soft control and by building a system of social control. This approach largely coincides with the concept of the moral economy, which was formulated by Edward Palmer Thompson. Even if we do not consider the mass protests that were not uncommon in the USSR, a significant number of appeals and complaints from citizens can be seen as a manifestation of the moral economy. That is, citizens did not seek to break the existing rules of the game but, on the contrary, tried to bring the reality around them to the ideas of morality and justice that were common in various groups of Soviet society.

Keywords

• moral economy
• latvian ssr
• complaints
• soviet society