Scholarly record

INDUSTRIAL DISCOURSE IN RUSSIA IN THE FIRST THIRD OF THE XX CENTURY: PRODUCTION, CONTEXT, STRUCTURE

S.B. Ulyanova, A.N. Michurin, N.V. Ofitserova, T.N. Krepkaya

Abstract

The article presents a comparative analysis of the official industrial discourse in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods on the basis of "new political history" methodological approaches. There are different points of view in the historiography on the problem of genetic continuity of the "old" and "new" Russia. The study of production processes of the industrial discourse, its structures and context makes it possible to reveal the continuity of pre-revolutionary and Soviet industrial projects. The external breach with the past that took place after the revolution, did not in fact mean a complete renunciation of the state industrial policy principles, employment relationship specificity, etc. In the process of industrialization, the imperative of RussiaВ’s industrial development priority was formed. This imperative was constructed, fixed and legitimized through the public discourse. The sources of a corpus of verbal and written texts comprising it were mainly the political elite representatives. The industrial discourse was manifested in speeches, articles, official documents, slogans and so on, created on different information occasions. By the beginning of the 1930s, a certain "industrial consensus" had been formed in USSR. In contrast to the early XX century, when the need for rapid industrialization was rejected by many social groups, the idea of forced conversion of the Soviet Union into an industrial power during the first five-year industrial periods was not objectionable, despite the extremely high price of this modernization.

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