Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2021 number

The article explores the campaign to develop the movement of the tysyachniks (record-breaking workers) in the defense industry of Novosibirsk in March, 16 - June, 10, 1942. This event is studied based on the original author’s concept of social and labor communication. According to it, the information exchange between the communicator (power) and the recipient (working class) was carried out on the basis of incentive-type communication strategies in this case. Within the framework of the stated methodology the author considers the process of glorification of the production records’ initiators in the press as the main mechanism of social and labor communication between the Soviet state and the working class in the context of an unsuccessful attempt by the USSR top leadership to switch from a defensive to an offensive war. The article analyzes three stages of propaganda support of the new Stakhanov initiative in the leading military-industrial megalopolis of Siberia; shows the dynamics of its agitation support by the press organ of Novosibirsk Regional Committee of All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) included five cycles of information activity. The paper reveals discursive practices of newspaper agitprop that linked efficient labor with the idea of the most rapid defeat of Nazi Germany. The author concludes that the wave-like repeating of the new heroic cult led to the rapid rise of the innovators’ movement who fought for higher output. However, tysyachniks could not completely solve the issue to increase labor productivity, which required an integrated approach to problems of the defense production intensification. A fundamental turning point in its formation came in autumn of 1942, when the labor heroism of the workers was again identified with strategic defense.