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ADAPTIVE PRACTICES OF RUSSIAN WORKERS IN THE URALS AT THE TURN OF THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES
Abstract
In the 1990s post-Soviet countries had to face an immensely unstable economic situation and were bound to cope with all difficulties of social adaptation to the new reality. Proceeded from the fact that an adaptive process often takes long and its fixation in the collective consciousness appears only after two of three generations, the problem of adaptation is worth investigating and thinking over. Moreover, this kind of radical transformation has had a lot of precedents in Russian history that is why the authors chose to scrutinise this matter. The paper represents research on the socio-economic conditions of the workers occupied in the Ural mining and metallurgical plants in the late 19th century. In those times, they could be called yesterdays peasants and, for this reason, their adjustment to the new economic reality and way of life ought to be regarded as a serious challenge. The knowledge in this field is still limited and much remains to be done. The work on the base of the documents extracted from federal and local archives let us classify all adaptive practices into two groups: active and passive. The former is various attempts to improve productivity by the introduction of workers control over the enterprises. To survive people also kept being active in cottage industry and secondarily occupied in agricultural works. As for passive adaptation, it included retrospective thinking, preservation of binding relationships and retaining paternalistic values. It should be remarked that, in real life, all above-mentioned forms of behaviour appeared in blended forms. Ascertainment of the factors determining the Uralian workers adaptation led to the conclusion that there are two of them: the regional specificity of mining and metallurgical industry and workers archaic thinking. Summing up, the authors estimate the process of workers adaptation in the Tsarist Russia as complicated and unsuccessful.
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