Paper short abstract:

The sociality of Soviet collectives was ambivalent in nature, balancing between conflict and comradeship. This paper explores labour conflicts as spaces for such situational play where seemingly coherent sociality of labour collectives depends not on social but on bureaucratic and technical agenda.

Paper long abstract:

Soviet ideology is generally considered effective in terms of introducing communal practices in all areas of life. According to its discursive logic, comradeship was conceived as the main type of personal bonds in socialist society. In contrast, the historiographic tradition insists that Soviet society was atomized. But what were the actual practices of the social? This project is concerned with the study of labor disputes in Soviet industrial enterprises, in particular the ways in which the parties argued and the forms of their interaction in resolving these conflicts. The object of my research is defined by the specific environment of interaction – production and the labor situation, which were thought to be seminal and socially constitutive in the Soviet project. I study workers in various enterprises from a situational perspective, not attributing them in advance to any group, but rather examining to what extent the latter are situationally determined and what operations the participants in the comrade discussion perform with these groups. In labor conflicts they insist on their unity, exclude, support, dismiss, but these operations assume a short-lived character of cooperation set by various forms of interaction – bureaucratic procedures, technological processes, the activity of obschestvennik’s – and constitute temporary associations. Thus, sociality is not an initial premise, but, firstly, the result of the complex interaction of various agents, and, secondly, one of the effective arguments for the substantiation of justice in labor conflict.