The processes of the development of Russian society in the 1930s-1980s

Dimoni Tatiana Mikhailovna ORCID: 0000-0002-9049-1469 Doctor of History Professor, Department of National History, Vologda State University 160001, Russia, Vologda region, Vologda, Prospekt Pobedy str., 37, office 53 dimonitm@yandex.ru

Beznin Mikhail Alekseevich ORCID: 0000-0001-5152-796X Doctor of History Professor, Department of National History, Vologda State University 160001, Russia, Vologda region, Vologda, Prospekt Pobedy str., 37, office 53 bezninma@vogu35.ru

The study of the processes of labor in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods

One of the key phenomena in Russia of the twentieth century was the social revolution. In the course of this global transformation, the "old" classes of society died and experienced the formation of "new" classes of society. Among them, the leading role was played by the emerging class of owners (proto-bourgeoisie), the class of managers (managers) ^[4]. A significant process was the formation of a class in Soviet society-the owner of intellectual capital (intellectuals) ^[3]. However, the most widespread process, noted by almost all Soviet social scientists, was the raskrestyanivanie.

In the course of the unbridling of Russia, the peasant population almost completely lost all the basic socio-class characteristics of the peasantry and acquired the characteristics of other classes and class groups, mainly converging and merging into the working class. But if the process of decapitation in recent decades has constantly attracted the attention of researchers, the process of labor in post-Soviet historiography often remained on the periphery of the interest of historians.

In Soviet times, the study of the working class was one of the dominant topics of social sciences. The logic here was to recognize for him: a). dominant positions in society (based on the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat) and b). the main class pillar of Soviet power. However, many factors of the process of the enslavement and proletarization of society remained behind the scenes for ideological reasons.

The study of the processes of the development of Soviet society was started immediately after the revolution of 1917 . Based on the materials published on this subject, it can be concluded that most researchers of the social structure of society recognized the process of labor already in the late 1930s. it took place and completed. Among such works, it is necessary to note studies written on the basis of industrial and professional censuses or censuses that partially took into account these issues and were conducted from 1918 to 1955. ^[1]

The development of issues of the genesis of the working class already in the 1920s and 1930s was put on quite professional rails. In 1929, a section for the study of the history of the proletariat was established at the Institute of History of the Comacademy. In 1958, this line was continued by the creation of a group for the study of the history of the Soviet working class (Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences), this organizational line developed during the Soviet period and beyond. 

The first methodological question that researchers have always faced is the definition of the category "worker" ("proletarian").

In the late 1920s - early 1930s, farms without working cattle (horseless) and, as a rule, without a peasant farm (land) were considered proletarian ^{[44, p. XXX]}. In the documents of the regional authorities of that time, for example, it was indicated: "We have about 2 thousand in the district. the so-called "polletarized farms" … These are farms that have abandoned the land, some even from the estate, have retained only one house" ^[8] (Kotlas district of the Northern Territory, 1934). Modern social science, when defining the proletariat, focuses on the mandatory hiring (sale of workers) as the main source of existence. In modern English and American dictionaries, the term "proletariat" is interpreted as "a class of industrial wage earners who, having neither capital nor means of production, must earn their living by selling their labor; the poorest class of working people" ^{[23, p. 467]}. I. Wallerstein interprets proletarization as a process of increasing percentage dependence on cash receipts for hired labor ^[6]. Japanese researcher Matsushita Keiichi believes that the process of proletarization is associated with an increase in the number of employees, separation from traditional means of production ^[16]. In our opinion, the key characteristics of a "worker" are a place in property relations (lack of ownership of the means of production) and employment. At the same time, the proletarian class can be both industrial and agricultural, as well as work in infrastructure industries (construction, transport, etc.).

In the USSR of the mid-1930s, the term "proletariat" practically fell out of use in connection with the installation outlined by I.V. Stalin. In his opinion, the pre-revolutionary working class was the proletariat (since it was deprived of tools and means of production). Under the Soviet regime, the tools and means of production were transferred to the people, so the proletariat turned into a new class – the worker ^[41]. Since that time, the term "working class" has become commonly used, and the term "proletariat" in relation to the USSR has fallen out of use.

Criteria for attribution to the proletarian class were actively developed by Soviet scientists. In addition to employment, as a classifying feature, at the end of the 1920s - 1930s, three more criteria for the quality of the working class were methodologically formulated: social origin, connection with the land, work experience ^[44]. Later, these characteristics were added to the features of consciousness (B.L. Markus) and the industrialization of everyday life (S.G. Strumilin).

Let's move on to the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the process of the development of Soviet society.

Quantitative characteristics of the process of the development of Soviet society

According to official Soviet data at the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of workers in the Russian Empire was about 14 million people, of which slightly less than 3 million people worked at large enterprises, 1.4 million in construction, 2.8 million in small handicraft industry (towns and villages), about 2.5 million people were laborers, agricultural workers were 4.5 million people ^{[40, p. 9-11]}.

The dynamics of the rise of workers in Soviet society looked like this.

In the initial period of industrialization, the number of employees in the USSR (with a fairly large difference in the calculation method compared to the previous period) remained approximately at the level of the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1927-28, the number of employees was 11.4 million people (without agriculture and forestry – 9.2 million people) ^{[28, pp. 16-17]}.

According to labor accounting data, the number of workers in the USSR in 1940 was 24 million, in 1960 – 46 million, in 1987 – 82 million. Thus, from 1940 to 1987 it grew 4 times, while the fastest growth rates were observed in the period of the 1940s-1960s. In general, the share of workers in the total number of employed in the public economy of the USSR increased from 38% in 1940 to 63% in 1987. ^{[35, p. 26]} The bifurcation fracture characterizing the social revolution, when the share of workers among the working people of Soviet society exceeded 50%, occurred in the 1950s.

The main part of the proletariat were industrial workers: in the 1940s and 1980s, their share among workers was 38-46% (in the 1960s and 1980s, there was a decrease in the share of industrial workers). 6-10% of workers were employed in construction during this period, 7-13% were agricultural workers ^{[43, p. 26,71]}.

What were the channels of labor? Simple statistical observations of the dynamics of the social structure of Soviet society show that the increase in the number of workers was not directly correlated, for example, with the reduction in the number of collective farmers, which proceeded at a slower pace (from 1940 to 1987, a reduction of 2.5 times). The process of forming the working class was a complex channel, and the ratio of channels changed seriously over time.

Initially, the main source of the formation of the working class was the "old core" of workers who started working in the late XIX – early XX century, recovered after the First World War, Civil War and declassification of the 1920s. The data of the sample census of the All-Russian Central Committee in April-May 1929 showed that there were half of 382 thousand workers in three industries persons (50.7%) who came to production before October 1917, and over 21% - before 1905. Half of the industrial workers came to production after 1917, of which 9% - during the Civil War, 20% - in the period 1922-1925, and 20% in the period 1926-1929. The "old core" of industrial workers was especially large in the metal industry (metal processing) – 50.8% came to this industry before 1917, in the cotton industry 59.3% of workers also belonged to the old cadres of the industrial proletariat. But in the coal industry of Donbass already in 1929, "old workers" accounted for only 33% ^{[44, p. 4-5]}. Another striking feature of the "old core" of workers was their hereditary status. More than half of such workers (52% were second-generation workers) ^{[44, p. 5]}. The old core of workers was revealed during the census of the Central Committee of the Ussr in September 1929 and in agriculture. It consisted of state farm workers who began to work for hire even before the revolution of 1917. Such cadres among permanent workers of state farms made up 60% ^{[44, p. 22-23]}.

Since the mid-1920s, the share of working through new channels has been increasing. In 1926, during the survey, it was revealed that the cadres of the proletariat, who had re-joined Soviet industry, consisted not only of a stratum of workers and their children (which was 47%), but also of a significant mass of the peasantry (45%), a stratum of immigrants from employees who replenished the working class (5.8%) was also identified.) and immigrants from the "petty bourgeoisie" (artisans, merchants, etc.) – about 2% ^{[44, p. 5]}. In 1931-1932, the share of immigrants from the countryside in the replenishment of the urban workforce prevailed and amounted to 65% ^{[34, p. 313]}.

Since the end of the 1920s, the peasantry, which emerged from its class status during the mass process of disestablishment ^[2], has become the most massive source of replenishment of the working class. After a small stage of mass free (as they wrote in the documents of those years – "spontaneous") movement from the village to the city at the expense of otkhodnichestvo (in 1928/29 this process affected 4.3 million people) ^{[15, p. 123]}, the main channels for the transition of villagers (mainly collective farmers) to workers are being formed. Of these channels, three were the main ones. The first was represented by the system of organizational recruitment (organized recruitment of labor) - a method of regulated attraction to enterprises of industry, construction, transport, etc. as opposed to free hiring. Initially, the organ set was quite close in form to waste management, since 1931, contracts of organizations with collective farms and collective farmers began to be concluded to attract labor resources ^[26], the final legislative formalization of the organ set was received in 1938 ^[22] and was quite actively used until the early 1960s. According to M.Ya. Sonin's calculations, from 1931 to 1940, 28.7 million people were attracted to various industries by organ recruitment, of which 22 million from 1931 to 1937 and 6.7 million from 1938 to 1940 ^{[39, p. 182]}. As a form of attracting labor, the organ set, although on completely different legal grounds, persisted in a later period. In the RSFSR, over the years of the 8th five–year plan (1966 – 1970), about 600 thousand workers were attracted, of which 262 thousand – in construction, more than 164 thousand – in the forestry industry, more than 74 thousand - in the fishing industry ^[11].

         The second channel of transition to the workers was "flight" from the village (unauthorized departure) and employment at an industrial enterprise. According to N.S. Ivanov, in 1946-1958 about a quarter of the villagers left the village, bypassing all administrative obstacles and restrictions ^{[14, p. 423]}. Some data show an even greater scale of unauthorized movements in the workforce. According to the information given by S.L. Senyavsky, in 1950 in the USSR 14% of newly enrolled workers were accepted by enterprises, from colleges and schools of labor reserves – 7%, individually for free employment – 79%; in 1959, respectively, 4%, 4% and 92% ^[36].

The third way of transition from collective farmers to workers was connected with the transition to work in state-owned enterprises in rural areas (or by reorganizing collective farms into state farms). Already in the early 1930s, collective farmers became the main source of replenishment of the number of workers of state farms. In 1932, 53% of workers on state farms came from peasants ^{[42, p. 28]}. A part of the workers of machine and tractor stations (MTS) passed into the social status of workers. Initially, in 1935, it concerned combine harvesters, and since 1953, tractor drivers. During the period of large–scale state farmization in Russia (1958 - 1965), the number of workers of state farms and state farms increased almost 2 times from 2.6 million people to 4.9 million people. At the same time, the number of collective farmers decreased by 4 million people (from 11.6 million to 7.5 million) ^{[17, p. 344]}.

An important, though not as large-scale, channel of replenishment of the proletariat, especially in the 1930s, was the "placement" of the urban environment. The fairways of the labor process included the involvement in industrial (and very little – in agricultural) labor of urban unemployed, housewives, teenagers, urban artisans, merchants. By the spring of 1930 in the USSR, the number of unemployed on the labor exchange was about 1 million people ^{[34, p. 149]}, among them there were many peasants who came from the village to the city, about 16% were industrial workers, more than 50% were women ^{[45, p. 7; 44, p. 36]}. Since the late 1920s, industrial retraining of the unemployed has been organized at special courses at labor exchanges and directly at enterprises. By the end of the first five-year plan, this resource for the formation of the working class had almost completely disappeared.

The "working out" of women from the petty-bourgeois urban environment has reached a special intensity since 1930. During 1930-1931, approximately 850 thousand women were "drawn" into the industry. The proportion of women in the factory industry increased from 1928 to 1939 from 29% to 43% ^{[29, p. 59]}. The Great Patriotic War affected the growth of the proportion of women among workers even more seriously, the share of women among industrial workers in 1945 was 51% ^{[29, p. 66]}. If in 1940 there were 4.5 million women workers in the industrial and production personnel of the USSR (together with employees), in 1958 there were 8.8 million people ^{[29, p. 65]} In the early 1970s (according to data for 1972) 29 million women (workers) were employed in Russian industry and employees), female workers accounted for 60% of all those employed in the main jobs of industrial enterprises ^[10].

An important source of recruitment of skilled labor was the younger generation of proletarian families. The main mass of teenagers in the 1930s flowed into production through factory apprenticeship schools (FZU). The number of students in the large factory industry of the USSR was 133.3 thousand people in 1928, and 582.6 thousand people in 1932 ^{[24, p. 31]}. In 1931, the proportion of cadres trained through this channel was about 5% of all those who joined the industrial working class. In 1940, the Federal Law was transformed into the Federal Law system, and in 1958 – vocational training. This resource of working in the future became the leading one in the formation of the working class of the city and the countryside. The number of people trained in the USSR's industrial training system was 1.2 million in 1940, 6.6 million in 1960, 13.5 million in 1970, and 33.5 million in 1980 ^{[48, p. 53]}.

"Placement" also involved urban artisans in the working environment. The number of independent artisan producers in cities decreased in 1931 compared to 1927/28 by 1.2 million people, who almost entirely moved to large-scale industry ^[25]. The last bursts of attracting artisans to industrial enterprises were associated with the liquidation of the fishing cooperation system: in 1956, a number of fishing cooperation enterprises were transferred to the Soviet state along with 0.5 million members of artels. In 1960, another 1.4 million workers of the industrial cooperation of the USSR transferred to state industry, transport, construction and housing and communal services ^{[19, p. 50; 21, p. 637]}.

The way to work also lay through such a specific mechanism as the repressive system of the USSR (GULAG). He played a special role in the country's economy in the 1930s, supplying labor to the largest construction sites (canals, hydroelectric power plants, metallurgical plants, urban construction in the Far North and Far East, etc.). However, the discussion that took place in the 1990s and early 2000s led historians to conclude that, in general, the role of the Gulag labor force in the development of the USSR economy was insignificant (according to L.I. Borodkin, the total contribution of the Gulag to the economy did not exceed 4% of GDP) ^[12].

Thus, the enslavement of society was a total process, capturing in one form or another almost 60% of the country's population involved in social production during the 1940s-1980s. No social group of Soviet society has experienced such a large-scale increase. The ratio of the sources of labor varied: if in the middle and second half of the 1920s urban resources were significantly involved, then from the 1930s until the early 1960s there was an emphasis on the involvement of resources from the countryside. In the 1970s and 1980s. basically, both the processes of social self-reproduction of workers and various kinds of processes of social mobility were involved. A new phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s was the replenishment of the working class at the expense of social groups of higher status. For example, according to surveys conducted in Leningrad, the share of immigrants from the intelligentsia among highly skilled workers in 1965 – 1970 increased from 16 to 29% ^{[47, p. 10]}. A number of studies have also recorded a slowdown in social mobility. For example, a one-time sample survey of the Russian population in 1982 showed that 74% (2/3) of workers had never changed their social status during their working life ^[9], i.e., in fact, the proletarian class looked formed and acquired the features of a "closed" social group.

Qualitative characteristics of the development process

The second big problem of considering the social process of working is its qualitative characteristics. Initially, Soviet researchers identified "connection with the earth" or its absence as a criterion of proletarianism as the most important among them. It should be noted that for the workers of the "old", pre-revolutionary generation, who were not outsiders and were part of the philistinism, the connection with agriculture was not at all characteristic. The workers of the new draft, who came to production from the villages, as a rule, did not completely interrupt their connection with agriculture. According to a survey conducted in 1929-1930, among the workers of a large plant "Hammer and Sickle" (Moscow), 34% had land, including with crops and working cattle – 22%; among the workers of a large plant AMO (Moscow) – 19%, including with crops and working cattle – 10%. As a rule, in 1929-1930 the share of industrial workers with land did not exceed 25% of their composition. The higher level of workers "with land" was in the ore industry – 41%, the woodworking industry (95%) ^{[42, pp. 84-85]}.

Agricultural workers (workers of state farms) were also monitored for connection with the land. According to sample surveys conducted in 1929, most of the permanent workers of state farms were "landless". So, permanent workers of state farms were "landless" by 71%, among those who had a land plot about 20% were without working cattle and only 9% of those who had a land allotment kept working cattle ^{[44, p. 78]}. It should be noted that along with the replenishment of state farm workers at the expense of former collective farmers (this process has been going on massively since the early 1930s), interest in household farming increased, and by the end of the 1930s, state farm workers, like collective farmers, were almost all endowed with household land for a vegetable garden.

With the beginning of the forced process of de-breeding in the late 1920s – 1930s, the situation is changing. The dispossession of the peasantry during the period of collectivization, the transfer of a significant part of the property of peasant households to the indivisible fund of collective farms and into state ownership itself proletarized the village. Finding himself in the city (especially in the state farm), such a newly arrived worker kept the peasant idea of the structure of economic life for a long time. And it was far from proletarian. The presence of a vegetable garden among residents of small and medium-sized cities, the maintenance of livestock in the household was not uncommon at all. In 1955, in the RSFSR, household plots in the use of collective farmers amounted to 3.3 million hectares, in the use of workers and employees – 0.8 million hectares ^{[19, p. 127]}. The number of cows in the personal household farms of Russian collective farmers was 7.3 million heads in 1941, 5 million heads in 1953; in the personal subsidiary farms of workers and employees, respectively, 2.1 million heads and 2.6 million heads ^{[19, p. 137]}. Russian workers have been growing potatoes on their own plots for quite a long time. The share of potatoes of own production was 60% in 1950, and 47% of all potato receipts to the working family in 1960 ^{[31; 32]}. In the RSFSR, industrial workers received 20% of vegetables, 11% of meat, meat products and lard, 5% of milk, 30% of eggs from the household in 1954 ^[33]. It was only in the 1960s that interest in a personal vegetable garden as a source of food began to fade in the working environment. However, even after all the blows to personal farmsteads, especially active during the Khrushchev period, in 1976 in the RSFSR, about 3.7 million hectares of farmland and 5.8 million cows remained in use in the RSFSR ^{[18, pp. 132, 147]}.The image of the "dacha" among urban workers remained very popular both as a symbol of well-being, prosperity, and as a status element of life.

From the point of view of assessing the level of work, it is not only the connection with agriculture itself that is important. It is much more important to assess the level of denaturalization of the budget, since it is this indicator that indicates the proletarian social status, when the bulk of income is generated through the sale of labor (employment).  Among industrial workers, according to surveys of the early 1930s, wages from employment occupied the main place in family income. In the first half of 1931, the wages of family members of an industrial worker in Russia amounted to about 87% of all family income, while "income from the sale of products of their farm" was about 0.4% ^{[42, p. 154]}. The state also tried to bring state farm workers to the principle of forming the main income from employment. According to surveys of state farms of the USSR in 1929/30, the salary of the head of the family and family members from primary and secondary occupations amounted to about 85% of all income, and income "from their own farms and independent crafts" was less than 1% ^{[42, p. 165]}. It should be noted, however, that with regard to the principles of remuneration of state farm workers, the state policy was adjusted towards increasing the share of income from household farming. So, in 1933, the issue of allotment of state farmers with a personal plot and providing them with livestock was resolved ^[37]. The inhibition of the process of proletarization of agricultural workers was caused by a change in the attitude of the state to the individual economy as a whole, which, as it quickly turned out, was a very important source of replenishment of food resources and the receipt of natural and monetary taxes. However, the role of wages in the budget of the state farm family has always been leading. Even during the years of forced state farmization, when collective farmers with their traditions of household management passed into the status of state farm workers, the share of income from their own farms in state farm families was not leading. In the families of state farm workers of the RSFSR in 1958, the share of income from wages was 58%, in 1961 – 62.6%, and income from personal household farming – 29% and 23%, respectively ^{[38, p. 18]}. The difference between agricultural and industrial workers in the role of income from personal farming remained almost until the end of the Soviet era, but the principle of the leading role of wages in the incomes of workers' families remained unchanged. In 1979, in the families of industrial workers in Russia, the income from employment was 87%, in the families of state farm workers 73%; income from personal household farming was 0.01% and 15%, respectively ^{[5, pp. 22-23]}.

The collective farmers were the slowest to become proletarianized in terms of working out the budget. However, this process was also gaining momentum. Since 1956, monthly advance payments for collective farmers have been introduced, and since 1966 – guaranteed wages in collective farms, based on the tariff rates of the corresponding categories of state farm workers. The period of the second half of the twentieth century became a stage of reducing the role of household farming in the budget of the collective farm family. In 1953, the income from the collective farm, state and cooperative organizations in the structure of the total income of the families of collective farmers of the RSFSR was 52%, income from personal household farming – 46% ^{[38, p. 25]}. In 1979, the level of income from work on a collective farm and work for hire in the families of collective farmers in Russia was 63%, and income from personal household farming was 25% ^{[5, p. 91]}. Thus, the proletarization of the collective farmers' budget has been clearly observed since the early 1950s and has been a constant, albeit the slowest-flowing trend in the evolution of this part of the workers.

The development of society's way of life, as S.G. Strumilin put it, consisted in the "industrialization" of life. In this case, we were talking about the use of an industrial type of comfort – ideally a separate dwelling with central heating, electric lighting, etc. According to the housing questionnaires of 1928, factories and factories sought to provide workers with housing of this level. According to surveys of the life of urban workers, it was revealed that the average living area per family is 4.98 square meters, the number of people living in one room is 3 people. 16% of urban workers' households were equipped with central heating, 67% with electricity, and 20% with sewerage ^{[42, p. 159]}. During the period of industrial construction in the 1930s, the situation worsened - the massive influx of rural population into the cities required the rapid construction of housing of the most primitive quality. The barrack type of living in cities was predominant until the end of the 1950s, when mass construction of residential buildings with individual apartments was launched.  In 1940, in the RSFSR, the housing stock of cities and urban-type settlements was 230.8 million square meters, and in 1967 – 769 million square meters.meters. During this period, the share of dwellings equipped with water supply increased 5.2 times, sewerage – 5.8 times, central heating – 11.9 times, gas – 51.9 times ^{[35, p. 163]}. Demographic characteristics of working life (the desire to minimize the number of dependents in the family) should be added to the plot of the industrialization of everyday life, including through collective forms of caring for children (kindergartens, boarding schools, clubs, etc.). Demographic and budgetary surveys showed a convergence of all groups of workers in terms of the composition of families and the number of children. By the beginning of the 1970s, they were almost the same: in 1970, the average family composition of an industrial worker of the RSFSR was 3.07 people, of whom there were 1.8 employees on average, 1.03 dependents; in the families of workers of state farms in Russia, the family consisted of an average of 4.04 people, of whom 1.8 people were employed, 1.8 dependents. The demographic indicators of collective farm families were also close to them ^{[5, p. 19-20]}.

In general, working ideas about the required number of household, transport, medical, etc. services, the desire to purchase certain goods (as shown by opinion polls) testified to the folding of aspirations inherent in the "middle class" of society. Even rural residents in the mid-1980s were concerned, first of all, about household problems, showing a desire for a higher standard of living: in 1985, 48% of rural residents said they were concerned about water supply problems, 40% - housing conditions, 24% - income level, 21% - sanatorium treatment, 9% - placement of children in kindergartens. Among the priority items planned for purchase, both urban and rural workers named a color TV, fashionable clothes, tape recorders, furniture, a washing machine, books ^{[13, p. 23]}.

The folding of consciousness inherent in the working class also did not happen simultaneously. In fiction, the image of Plato's "pit", which leveled the multivariate remnants of class representations, is most suitable for this plot. In historiography, this plot has been studied less ^[46]. However, a number of researchers pay serious attention to the departure of the "old" professional working culture (although its formation in the early twentieth century was in its infancy) and the formation of a new one in the 1930s. The departure of the "workshop" culture of the old working world was primarily associated with the mass arrival of yesterday's peasants and representatives of other estates to industrial enterprises, as well as with the formation of new production systems. For example, the use of the conveyor method since the early 1930s has seriously reduced the industrial worker's idea of individual responsibility for the final result in the manufacture of products. The Stakhanov movement, the shock movement, became an attack on the high status of "old" industrial workers and transferred the initiative to young and often inexperienced, but active workers. Accelerated industrial training through the Federal Labor Code system reduced the requirements for working skills and devalued the qualifications obtained at the old factory production.

The most important part of the process of working was the loss of the status of the owner. It was lost among urban industrial workers even before the revolution, and this process continued during the Soviet period. Some indirect data from sociological studies allow us to clearly see this feature. For example, in the mid-1960s, one of the directions of economic reforms was the deployment of the so-called "industrial democracy", according to which it was planned to actively involve workers in production management, including through participation in production meetings, distribution of production funds, etc. However, a sociological survey conducted in 1969 at 6 of the largest enterprises in the Urals (Uralmash, Mechanical plant No. 2 of Sverdlovsk, Giprometpribor plant, Uralelectrotyazhmash, State Bearing Plant No. 6, Chelyabinsk Tool Plant) showed that 46% of workers never spoke at production meetings. In their responses, the workers explained that there was no point in speaking out – comments and suggestions were not being implemented. In response to the question about participation in the distribution of production funds, 77% of workers replied that they do not participate in the distribution of the material incentive fund, 82% - that they do not participate in the distribution of the production development fund, 88% - that they do not participate in the distribution of the socio-cultural and housing construction fund ^{[7, p. 27, 31, 59]}. The process of alienation from property also developed in the working environment of rural proletarians, however, much more slowly. The final blow to the title of the owner was the deprivation of collective farmers of the status of a share owner of collective farm property. Already in 1955, according to statistical data, the share contributions of collective farmers in the value of collective farms of the RSFSR were extremely small and did not exceed 2% of their value ^[33]. During the transfer of collective farm property to state farms in the 1950s and 1960s, their resources were transferred to the state without any additional reservations, which allows us to conclude about the prevailing state perception of the absence of the cooperative nature of collective farm property. Legislatively, the title of the owner of collective farm property disappeared from collective farmers in 1969, when, when adopting the Approximate Charter of the collective farm, the concept of collective farm unit funds was simply absent in the document ^{[27, p. 384]}.

Unfortunately, no total studies of the value orientations of the working class have been conducted, partly because since the late 1970s the connotation of a homogeneous socialist society has been formed in the USSR. However, some sociological data can still be cited. In 1984 The Institute of Sociological Research of the USSR Academy of Sciences presented to the Central Committee of the CPSU "sov. secret" report on the study of persons over the age of 18 on the territory of 8 Union republics. The study was called "Problems of development and improvement of the Soviet way of life" ^[30]. The first thing that sociologists revealed was social optimism – three–quarters of respondents said that they began to live better, 54% of respondents said that their life was going well, 63% of workers said that they always work to the best of their abilities, 88% felt a sense of responsibility for things in the team. Sociologists noted collectivism as the main social feature of the population. At the same time, sociologists noted an increase in consumer sentiment, materialism (46% of the adult population replied that they live among people interested mainly in buying things). Sociologists also noted the decline in the prestige of low-skilled working professions, the desire for "clean" work as an element of status. Historians have yet to comprehend all these conclusions, supplementing them, of course, with already known and newly revealed material.

Thus, the processes of working in the 1930s-1980s look like a complete trend. The turning point in this process was the 1950s, when the share of workers among those employed in the social production of the USSR exceeded half, the bulk of the population moved to the cities. By the 1960s, the process of de-breeding was completed. The main source of livelihood for almost all social categories of the country is income from employment (monetized wages). The development of the consciousness of the Soviet society looked specific in this process, which, apparently, seriously lagged behind economic changes, but still reached the level of the proletarian, deprived of the status of an owner, an individual.