Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2020 number

The article is devoted to studying the national historiography of the problem of workers’ labor incentives in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War in the context of ideological conflict between opponents and supporters of the “Soviet project” in the late XX - early XXI centuries. It shows the evolution of the methodological and source base, research subject field devoted to the desired topic analysis within framework of perestroika, post-Soviet and modern stages. The “totalitarian” approach prevailed in scientific and historical literature at the background of Marxist-Leninist canons’ collapse and the archival “revolution” in the late 1980s - late 1990s. Based on sources of “critical” content, totalitarian historians sought to prove the leading role of non-economic coercion in stimulating military industry workers. At the same time, a “historical and psychological” direction was born, which tried to show the moral and motivational basis of this process. In the late 1990s-2010s, in connection with the end of the “totalitarian” school’s domination, studying incentives of workers in the rear developed along the lines of three-factor, “totalitarian” and historical-psychological approaches. Using a wide range of different sources, the followers of the concept of three factors of the labor motivation analyzed the phenomenon of “turning to compulsion” in the sphere of relations between the state-employer and employees at the war’s eve and during the war. Totalitarian historians continued to investigate the coercive strategies and practices of stimulating the personnel of Soviet enterprises. Historians-mentalists reconstructed the cultural and psychological roots of nationwide labor selfless devotion in 1941-1945, which caused the high value of moral incentives to industrial activity. The author concludes that in the late 1980s-2010s Russian historiography has gone from a heroic and epic interpretation of the labor feat of the victorious Soviet people to forming three explanatory models of the stimulating labor process in the wartime. The “totalitarian” and three-factor approaches correspond to the discourse of “anti-Sovietism”, while the historical and psychological approach corresponds to “neo-Sovietism”. The analysis of historiographical situation confirms the author’s thesis about the historical memory sense split in modern Russia.