Reflection on the Problems of Labor Motivation in the Letters of the Oil Industry Workers of the Ural-Volga Region in 1956 (Content Analysis of the Territorial-Branch Newspapers "Neftyanik of Tataria" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria")

The post-war period is of great importance in the history of the USSR oil industry. It was at this time that the movement of the main oil production area from the old oil-bearing regions of the Caucasus (Baku, Grozny, etc.) to the Ural-Volga region began. In the 1940s-1950s, large deposits were discovered in Tatarstan (Bavlinskoye (1946), Romashkinskoye (1948)) and Bashkiria (Shkapovskoye (1953), Arlanskoye (1955)), in addition, the intensity of work on previously discovered deposits of the Bashkir ASSR increased. By 1950, the Bashkir ASSR took the second place in oil production in the USSR, and in 1955 it took the leading position, displacing the Azerbaijani SSR from its positions ^{[12, p.337],[26, p. 10]}. However , already in 1956 The Tatar ASSR secured the status of the leader in oil production in the USSR and maintained it for almost 20 years ^{[11, p. 100],[13, p. 8-9]}. The active policy of expanding the oil-bearing areas of the "Second Baku" was accompanied by the creation of new industrial centers, which previously lacked the necessary industrial and social infrastructure. The new oil regions were also characterized by such problems as a shortage of equipment, qualified personnel and workers. Despite all the difficulties, workers came en masse to the new oil region and stayed there. What motivated the oilmen of the Ural-Volga region? This question formed the basis of the article.

It should be noted that there is a certain tradition in the interpretation of the concept of "motive", which means what motivates a person to work qualitatively. This indicator is quite difficult to identify in sources on the history of labor relations, because it is often immaterial. ^{[5, p.5]}.

Earlier, as part of the study of the topic of motivation of workers in the oil industry of the Ural-Volga region, the author considered the problems of housing and wages on the example of the Tatneft production association ^[3],[4]. The study of these issues was carried out on the basis of archival and published materials: statistical data, regulatory sources.In this paper, the motivation of the oil workers of the two leading regions of the Ural-Volga region for oil production is considered on the basis of materials from local territorial-branch newspapers, which naturally continues the study of various aspects of labor motivation at the enterprises of the oil industry in this region. Thus, the purpose of the study is to study the system of motivation of workers in the oil industry of the Ural–Volga region in 1956 by letters to the newspapers "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria" and compare the results obtained to identify the most acute problems of oil workers in the leading republics of the region. The relevance of the study is due to the attention paid today to the issues of labor motivation in the modern oil industry and the poor knowledge of this problem in relation to the second half of the XX century. The choice of 1956 as the key point of the study was due to the entry at that time into the leading positions of the production associations "Bashneft" and "Tatneft" for oil production in the USSR. There are no works in historiography that study the motivation of Soviet oil workers using their letters to newspapers. The novelty of the research is also due to the introduction of new sources into scientific circulation – the newspapers "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria".

Source studies and methodological aspects of the studyThe main source of the research is the newspapers of oil workers of the Tatar and Bashkir ASSR, currently stored in the newspaper fund of the Branch of the Russian State Library in Khimki.

The condition of the files is satisfactory and allows them to be digitized by photographing and further recognition with learning elements in the ABBYY FineReader 15 program.

The newspaper "Neftyanik Tatariya" has been published since 1949, i.e. since the establishment of the trust "Tatarneft", transformed in 1950 into "Tatneft". Until 1956, the newspaper was published by the management body of the Tatneft Association in Bugulma, where the Tatneft management was originally located. It was released twice a week – on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The price of the newspaper was 20 kopecks . The circulation ranged from 1800 to 2000 copies. The newspaper consisted of 4 pages. The newspaper's content consisted of government reports, articles about ideological work at enterprises, achievements and shortcomings of labor collectives, social and cultural life of oil workers. Editorial materials often contained such headings as "Review of wall newspapers", "Assistance to the agitator", "Technical page", "International Review", "On crafts and construction sites", etc. Among other things, some issues published letters from employees of enterprises telling about their problems at work and at home, cases of social injustice. The target audience of the newspaper is various categories of workers associated with the oil industry of the Tatar ASSR.

 On July 1, 1956, the newspaper was taken over by the Tatar Regional Committee of the CPSU and began to be published in Kazan, but a year later the publication was discontinued ^{[8, p.561]}. The new newspaper was now published three times a week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The circulation was no longer indicated. However, the structure of the newspaper has not undergone significant changes, the headings have been preserved.

The newspaper "Neftyanik Bashkiria" was published in Ufa by the body of the Bashkir Regional Committee of the CPSU from March 1956 to 1958 three times a week (Wednesday, Friday, Sunday). The first issue of the newspaper was sold for 20 kopecks, all subsequent ones – for 15 kopecks. The circulation significantly exceeded the indicator for the Tatar ASSR and amounted to 15,000 copies. The newspaper also consisted of 4 pages, including both editorial materials and letters from readers, and differed little in content from the "Oilman of Tatarstan". It is noteworthy that the first issue of this newspaper does not contain an appeal to readers specifying the target audience and purpose of this publication.

This article analyzes the entire array of letters presented in the newspapers "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria" in 1956 (see Table 1).

Table 1.Research source base

Table 1 shows the number of studied numbers for 1956 and the number of letters identified in them. For the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan", data on the number of issues and letters published in them from July to December inclusive, when the Tatar Regional Committee of the CPSU became the publisher of the newspaper, are indicated in parentheses. The total volume of the analyzed text was 313,061 characters (without spaces). The volume of the text for 1956 according to the "Oilman of Bashkiria" - 125,871 characters, according to the newspaper "Oilman of Tatarstan", published by the management body of the Association "Tatneft" - 75,581 characters, published by the Tatar Regional Committee of the CPSU – 111,609 characters.

Since the publisher of the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" has changed since July, the question arises as to how much the subject matter of the letters sent has changed. Before proceeding to the main topic of the study, it is necessary to solve this source question, which will be done below.

At the end of a brief description of the press studied in this paper, it is necessary to say a few words about its administrative affiliation as one of the main factors for species classification ^{[7, pp.431–437]}. Since, by their properties, the newspapers selected for the study contain signs of both local (published by the regional committee) and large-circulation printing (the articles described important events at oil enterprises, technical innovations in drilling and oil production, as well as elements of criticism of the management of enterprises, colleagues, etc.), the author decided to highlight them in a separate group of territorial-branch printing.

The method of content analysis combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of periodicals was used as a tool for the study of newspaper materials ^{[6, pp. 11-12]}. It should be noted that the use of content analysis in the study of the press is a fairly popular area of research. Most often, the object of such research was editorial articles or materials of the factory press as a whole ^{[17],[18],[19],[20],[23],[24],[25]}. This study was conducted on the basis of the well-established MAXQDA program. An additional analysis tool that allows you to visualize the interrelationships of labor motivation factors was the UCINET program.

The analysis of newspapers consisted of several stages. The first stage was the digitization of paper issues of newspapers by photographing. The second is image processing in a graphic editor and converting the image to black and white format to prepare files for the next stages of work. The third stage was the translation of texts into machine-readable form. It is important to note that the quality of newsprint and text printing were quite low, which created difficulties with automatic recognition. The percentage of errors in some cases exceeded 70%. Since the state of the files is hardly good, to improve the recognition quality in ABBYY FineReader in such cases, the "Learning to recognize new characters and ligatures" mode is used and special user standards are created ^[1]. When using this tool, the volume of recognized text increased significantly, and errors were about 15%, which greatly facilitated the work of editing the received texts. The fourth stage included the formation of the studied array of materials. Since the section "Letters of oilmen" was not presented in every issue, a full study of the numbers was carried out.  The final stage of the study was the study of newspaper materials using the MAXQDA program to identify the analysis of the frequency of occurrence of semantic categories in the section "Letters of oilmen" and compare the texts of letters based on the selected categories. Based on the obtained tables of the frequency of joint occurrence of categories in the texts of letters in the UCINET program, graphs of category relationships are constructed within several sentences of the text of letters for annual data arrays for the Tatar and Bashkir ASSR. This technique allowed us to identify the main issues of concern to the oilmen of the Ural-Volga region.

Development of a system of categories and indicatorsAn important element of preparation for computerized text analysis is the development of a system of categories and indicators.

After reading the text of the letters, 13 categories were identified that allow analyzing the motivation of employees (see Table 2).

Table 2.Semantic categories for the analysis of labor motivation

As can be seen from Table 2, the semantic categories of labor motivation analysis cover both social and industrial problems. Almost every letter includes several categories at the same time: a fragment of the category content was limited to one or several sentences.

Then a list of indicator words was compiled that occur in the text and most fully reflect the content of each of the previously formulated categories. So, the following indicators were selected for the category "Transport": "watch", "bus", "transport", "on foot", and it is important to note that, for example, the word "watch" most often in the texts of letters means shift transport. All those cases when "watch" is defined as "the organization of the labor process outside the permanent place of residence of the employee and on a periodic basis" were identified when checking the results of marking the text with indicators and excluded from them. Thus, the list of indicators of semantic categories became the basis for conducting queries to determine the frequency of occurrence of categories. Table 3 contains a complete list of indicators selected by the author.

Table 3.Indicators of semantic categories of oil workers' letters in the editorial office

 territorial-branch newspapers

As can be seen from Table 3, a set of indicators was selected for each category, according to which the MAXQDA program carried out autocoding of the texts of letters. When using the program's "% code coverage" function, an array of text material encoded by indicators was analyzed. For each of the three collections of letters, it varied in the range of 73-78%, and averaged 75%, which showed significant coverage of the text and allowed us to move on to the next stages of analyzing newspaper materials.

Analysis of the frequency of occurrence of categories in letters from employees of oil companies to territorial-branch newspapersBefore proceeding directly to the analysis of the texts of the letters, it is necessary to return to an important source study issue related to the change of the publisher of the newspaper "Neftyanik Tatariya" in July 1956.

The hypothesis of dependence on the administrative affiliation of the thematic structure of letters of the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" was tested using the tool "Browser of code links" (see Table 4).

Table 4.

Matrix of frequency of occurrence of semantic categories of letters to the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan"

It follows from Table 4 that the number of mentions of each category for a newspaper issued by the body of the Tatar Regional Committee of the CPSU is higher, which is logically associated with the large volume of letters identified in this group. However, when analyzing the relative indicators, it can be seen that the distribution of categories for letters published by different administrative bodies has minor discrepancies. The category "Production management" is widely represented in the collections of letters. As for the more noticeable discrepancies, they are observed only in two categories: in the first half of 1956, the newspaper wrote relatively more often about "Nutrition" and less often about "Housing Problems" than in the second half of the year, when the newspaper was taken over by the Tatar Regional Committee of the CPSU.

Thus, the change of the publisher of the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" in 1956 did not actually change the structure of the material published in letters. Based on this fact, it can be assumed that during the period when the newspaper was published by the management body of the Tatneft association, the party committee of the Association controlled the content of the newspaper. Thus, the absence of a noticeable dependence of the content of letters to newspapers on the administrative affiliation of the publication makes it possible to use the entire array of selected data on the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" when comparing with the materials of letters to the "Neftyanik of Bashkiria".

***

When performing content analysis in the MAXQDA 2022 program, the texts of letters were divided into two arrays by the place of publication of newspapers to characterize the studied year as a whole. Then the collections were marked up into categories using indicators, after which matrices of the frequency of occurrence of semantic categories in the arrays of letters of territorial-branch newspapers of the Ural-Volga region in 1956 were obtained (see Table 5).

Table 5.Table of frequencies of occurrence of semantic categories in arrays of letters of territorial-branch newspapers of the Ural-Volga region in 1956

It should be recalled that the volumes of the compared texts were different – in 1956, 192 letters were published in the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan", while in the newspaper "Neftyanik of Bashkiria" – only 105. To conduct a comparative analysis, we will compare the frequencies of occurrence for the eight most common indicators for newspapers. (see Table 6).

Table 6.Comparison of the eight most pressing problems (by frequency of occurrence) in the array of letters of the newspapers "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria" for 1956

As follows from Table 6, the three most exciting problems for readers are the same categories, although the indicators "Labor and issues of labor organization" and "Supply of workers" change positions:

1) "Production management". Often, employees wrote about problems arising within the work processes. Thus, in the letter "Promises instead of materials", published in the newspaper "Neftyanik Bashkiria" No. 37, the actions of the heads of the oilfield management, leading to the appearance of downtime, are criticized:

"... Drillers also rightly complain about poor supplies. In response to their numerous requests for the delivery of necessary goods, the head of the construction materials department of the office of Comrade. Zaripov answers in monosyllables: "It will be soon... We ship... We expect ... There is no approach..." Or simply remains silent. When the customer is particularly demanding, comrade. Zaripov helplessly throws up his hands: "What can I do when the Bashtekhsnabneft trust does not worry about us at all?" The heads of the trust really forgot about the existence of the Belebeevskaya office. In any case, they do not take any effective measures to improve the situation" ^[16].

Similar critical letters were sent to the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan":

"In the electrical installation office of the Tatburneft trust due to the connivance of its director T. Fedina intolerable things are happening. I will give only some examples.During the preparation for winter, it was necessary to build shelters for drilling rigs on the territory of the workshop, mount a crane for loading and unloading electrical equipment.

However, no one followed this, the work was carried out by gravity. As a result, nothing has been done. Loading and unloading of parts is done manually. … Drunken parties are often arranged in the office.

The instigator is the economist Sinegribov. At the end of August, during working hours, he got drunk to the point that he could barely move. The workers had to take him home by car. And this is not the first time. However , T. Fedin does not take measures against him… All these facts speak for themselves. The director of the office covers drunks and violators of Soviet legality. The question is, why? Yes, because he is not clean. He drinks no less than Sinegribov, and the alcohol comes from the warehouse, i.e. from the same Vlasova. As they say, the hand washes the hand ..." ^[22].

2) "Supply of workers". Criticism was expressed regarding the work of the Working Supply Departments (ORS). The situation with the supply of retail outlets is eloquently shown in the following letter from the "Oilman of Tatarstan"

"Employees of the Aznakaevsky branch of the ORSA trust "Tatburneft"poorly take into account and satisfy the requests of buyers… ...There are no tea, cereals, pasta in stores.

Bakery products do not arrive at all. Bread is often sold half-baked. The heads of the ORSA department do not impose demands on the director of the bakery, T. Ershov, he does not respond to the critical comments of workers, does not take effective measures to eliminate the marriage.There is no organized sale of spare parts for bicycles and motorcycles, radios, sewing machines, phonograph records.

You won't find any furniture. The head of the department T. Matveev offers customers to go to Bugulma for her.In industrial stores, you rarely see a ready-made dress and outerwear ..." ^[15].

3) "Labor and issues of labor organization" – the collection of letters includes materials of letters containing references to the phases of the workflow and the reasons for its interruption. An example of such a letter is presented below:

 "Of the 19 enterprises of Tuymazanefti, 13 are subsidiary. However, their work is not given due attention by the management of the oilfield management. Meanwhile, most of them carry out their plans erratically, with the expenditure of huge additional funds, and some workshops even disrupt state tasks. For a number of years, for example, the planned volumes of water injection into the formations by the reservoir pressure maintenance workshop have not been fulfilled…...Take, for example, the work of the well overhaul shop.

It has a rich technical base equipped with the latest mechanisms and equipment. The purpose of the workshop is to repair wells efficiently and in a timely manner and to help the fields in increasing the rate of oil production. But in reality, crews, instead of repairing, sometimes commit complex accidents and spend months "sitting" on their elimination. As a result, the fields are suffering heavy losses in oil production...

...Hundreds of thousands of rubles are spent on the elimination of such accidents. For example, only in 1955, which was considered a "happy" year, 400 thousand rubles and 300 thousand hours were spent in the repair shop to eliminate accidents. In other words, out of the nine brigades of the workshop, one worked unproductively for a whole year, with a great loss for the state. Worse, due to accidents and downtime, the plan for putting wells out of repair was not fulfilled in the fourth quarter of 1955, in January and February 1956, and only one well was commissioned in the first half of March.Such an ugly attitude has led to the fact that the technical managers of the overhaul shop have lost their sense of responsibility and continue to make accidents.

For example, at well No. 520, pipes were cemented only because the master comrade. Kirichenko lowered them under the filling without measuring, i.e. 30 meters above the design depth, and chief engineer Comrade. Krupnov made the filling without checking the pipes. In addition, they grossly violated the technology — after pumping 5 tons of cement into the well, the filling pipes were not fully lifted from the cement mortar and as a result were cemented.The case for the elimination of committed accidents is also poorly set.

So, at the same 520th well, in the process of eliminating the main accident, an additional five were allowed.The leadership of the oilfield management of Tuymazaneft is well aware of this, but it covers emergency workers and brakemen, does not take decisive measures.

Although accidents at well No. 520 have been liquidated for more than three months, at well No. 133 — for more than two months, but their causes have not yet been established, the perpetrators have not been punished. Is it really the leadership of the oilfield management — the head of Comrade. Zhdanov, chief engineer Comrade. To Krivosheev and the secretary of the party committee, Comrade. Is it unknown to Samigullin that every day for the elimination of an accident at one well costs the state 3,160 rubles? The silence on the part of the Bashneft association is also incomprehensible ^[2].

Despite the fact that workers often criticize production issues, special attention should be paid to social factors and their relevance.

Housing in both cases is in fifth place (see Table 6). In letters, oil workers often noted the unsatisfactory quality of housing put into operation:

"Almetyevsk is a city under construction. Multi-storey stone buildings are being erected here.However, designers and builders often do not think about the needs of the population, about creating all the amenities for residents.

There are no bathrooms in the new houses. The apartments are very cramped in size: there is nowhere to arrange an entrance hall, a hanger for outerwear, a refrigerator, a washing machine. There are no closets, deep closets. The kitchens are extremely small. Narrow rooms are inconvenient, they are difficult to furnish. The authors of the projects did not take care of all these "little things", and construction organizations showed even greater negligence by agreeing to such a design.A few words about the quality of construction.

As a rule, residential facilities are put into operation with major defects. Not to mention the cracks in the walls, which are detected and expanded from the very first days of operation, there is no water and gas in the houses, and in the yards there are water collecting columns ..." ^[9].

In the Tatar ASSR, the most pressing social problems are related to the "Organization of recreation and leisure". The topic of recreation and leisure most often concerns the organization of events or various leisure centers, but the topic of sanatorium recreation is also reflected in the array of texts of letters:

"The oilmen of Leninogorsk do not always have the opportunity to spend their leisure time wisely. The two clubs available in the city (Mayakovsky and Neftyanik) do not provide for the increased cultural demands of the population.For several years now, the clubs have not had back rooms for club work.

All requests of the clubs' boards to the management of the Bugulmaneft oilfield management to allocate additional premises for organizing amateur performances are ignored" ^[14].

It can be assumed that the problems of housing and leisure and recreation were more often encountered in the letters of workers from the Tatar ASSR, since it was a younger industrial region: oil production began here almost 15 years later than in the neighboring Bashkir ASSR, and the region needed time to create the necessary residential and social and cultural infrastructure that would satisfy the primary needs of residents of the oil regions.

As for the letters published in the newspaper "Neftyanik Bashkiria", the most acute problem in their content is "Transport". The main problem of transport in letters is the ordering of its movement.

"I work as a foreman of fitters at Tuymazaneft NPU at the 4th field. Every day, like many others, I have to travel 18 kilometers to my place of work on shift buses of the Oktyabrsky automobile farm of Bashtrest. They go through Tuymazy and Iprik according to the schedule. On normal days, this suits us. On Saturday and on holidays, we finish work two hours earlier, and the bus schedule remains the same. We applied to the office of the automobile company, asked to streamline this issue, but everything remains the same" ^[27].

The categories "Household and communal services issues" and "Socialist competition" are relatively more common in the letters of workers from Bashkiria, while the problem of "Nutrition" is given a little more attention in Tatarstan, although all these indicators fall into the list of the most significant.

"The staff of the gas compressor department of the oilfield management "Tuymazaneft" exceeded the quarterly plan, reduced the cost of production, significantly increased labor productivity.Progress is evident.

However, there are a lot of disadvantages here. The workshop is poorly supplied with tools and gas protection equipment. Young specialists are cut off from production sites, rarely on the ground.If the shortcomings are eliminated, the gas compressor shop team will finish the second quarter with even better results." ^[7].

It should be noted that for the oilmen of Bashkiria, the importance of the factors of "wages", "transport problems" was of greater importance than for the oilmen of Tatarstan. We emphasize that the factors of housing, recreation and leisure were also important for residents of the Bashkir ASSR, however, in terms of relative values, the proportion of mentions of these categories in the texts of letters was lower than at the enterprises of the oil industry of the Tatar ASSR.

Thus, based on the analysis of the frequency of occurrence of categories, it can be concluded that in 1956, in letters sent to territorial-branch newspapers of the Ural-Volga region, priority was given to such issues as "production management", "supply of workers" and "labor and issues of labor organization". The peculiarities inherent in the subject of the letters of each of the newspapers were noted.

***

When marking up the texts of letters, it turned out that a certain segment of the text could relate to several different categories. The MAXQDA program allows you to calculate the frequency of joint occurrence of categories within a certain segment of text, several sentences of a paragraph or a document as a whole, characterized by logical completeness. Since the definition of the interrelationships of categories is one of the main points of the study, then the matrices of the joint occurrence of categories in the arrays of letters to the newspapers "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria" will be presented. The sentence was chosen as the unit of analysis (see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2).

Let us turn to the results of the analysis of the frequency of joint occurrence of categories based on the materials of the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan".

Fig. 1. Matrix of frequencies of joint occurrence of categories in the array of letters of the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" for 1956.As follows from Fig. 1, the greatest total frequencies of joint occurrence for the array of letters published in the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" arise for pairs of categories "production management" - "supply of workers" (frequency is 64), "production management" - "labor and issues of labor organization" (47), "production management" - "recreation and leisure organization" (35), "production management" - "household and communal services issues" (35), "production management" - "nutrition" (27), "supply of workers" - "labor and labor organization issues" (27), "supply of workers" - "nutrition" (26), "production management" - "socialist competition" (22).

Based on the identified relationships, you can specify the category "production management", which is characterized by the maximum number of relationships with other categories. I would also like to draw attention to the lack of joint occurrence of the categories "wages" and "socialist competition", although cash prizes to the winners of social competitions were a motivating factor for participating in it ^{[21, l. 136]}.

Now let's turn to the results of the analysis of the frequency of joint occurrence of categories based on the materials of the newspaper "Neftyanik Bashkiria".

Fig. 2. Matrix of frequencies of joint occurrence of categories in the array of letters of the newspaper "Neftyanik Bashkiria" for 1956.According to Fig. 2, for a set of letters compiled based on the materials of the newspaper "Neftyanik Bashkiria", the most stable connections were formed between the categories: "production management" - "labor and issues of labor organization" (46), "production management" - "supply of workers" (19), "production management" - "the problem of housing" (17), "labor and issues of labor organization" - "socialist competition" (17), "production management" - "issues of life and communal services" (16), "production management" - "socialist competition" (16), "supply of workers" - "nutrition" (12), "labor and issues of labor organization" - "supply of workers", "production management" - "remuneration" (11).

As well as for letters from the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan", in this edition it is the category "production management" that has the maximum number of links with other categories.

Based on the data of the tables presented in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, it can be concluded that the category "production management" was the "core" of the structure of category relationships in the letters of oil workers, the basis for the formation of close internal links. The closest links in two sets of letter texts are between the categories "production management" - "labor and issues of labor organization", i.e. the main production factors represented in the system. According to the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan", the categories of "remuneration", "medical care", "transport" and "education for workers" are the least common in letters, according to the "Oilman of Bashkiria" — "medical care", "education for workers" and "children's issue".

***

Visual visualization of the constructed matrices of category relationships is provided by network analysis programs. The UCINET program allows you to build relationship graphs based on the frequency matrices of the common occurrence of categories. Figures 3 and 4 show the graphs of the links of the categories of letters to the newspapers "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria", respectively. All connections are depicted.

Fig. 3. Results of visualization of frequencies of joint occurrence of categories in letters of the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" for 1956 without a threshold for the strength of the connection.Fig. 4. Results of visualization of frequencies of joint occurrence of categories in letters of the newspaper "Neftyanik Bashkiria" for 1956 without a threshold for the strength of the connection.

The thickness of the lines in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 reflects the closeness of the relationship between the categories of analysis.

Due to the large number of categories, the resulting graphs have links with different frequency values (including those with a low correlation index), which makes them look overloaded. Since the totality of letters from the newspapers "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria" have different volumes, and the frequency of occurrence of their categories differ, a threshold value of frequency of occurrence was determined for each of them, so that connections below the threshold are not displayed on the graph. We can say that Figures 5 and 6 show graphs of strong connections.

Fig. 5. Results of visualization of frequencies of joint occurrence of categories in letters of the newspaper "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" for 1956, selection threshold >15.Fig. 6. Results of visualization of frequencies of joint occurrence of categories in letters of the newspaper "Neftyanik Bashkiria" for 1956, selection threshold >8.

The network analysis presented in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 confirms the earlier conclusion about the central role of the "production management" factor in almost all the problems raised in the letters of oil workers.

The second node in the frequency of occurrence in letters was the labor factor, which shows the special importance of industrial topics in letters to the newspapers of oilmen of the Ural-Volga region.

ConclusionThis article has become a natural continuation of the study of the motivation of workers in the oil industry of the Ural-Volga region.

The materials of the newspapers "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria" were introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.

The study showed that territorial-branch newspapers are a source with a sufficiently high information potential for studying the motivation of oil workers in the two largest regions of the Ural-Volga region.

The letters section in newspapers becomes an important voice of oil industry workers, identifying the most acute problems.

The content analysis of the letters showed that for the oilmen of the Ural-Volga region, the most urgent problems were those related to the management of enterprises and organizations, since the solution of other industrial and social problems that received preferential coverage in the letters depended on this factor. The category of "production management" is one of the main factors of motivation of employees: discussion of industrial and social policies carried out at enterprises, non-acceptance of individual decisions encourages employees to reflect these cases in letters. In the studied newspapers there was a heading "In the wake of unpublished letters" and "Based on the materials of the "Oilman of Tatarstan" (there was no such heading in the newspaper "Oilman of Bashkiria" in the period under review), in which the management reacted to the reported problems and sometimes reported on the results of work to correct them. The conclusions of the study are based on the results of calculating the frequency of occurrence of categories, as well as the structure of graphs with visualization of these frequencies.

Thus, the use of MAXQDA 2022 and UCINET programs for content analysis of the materials of the newspapers "Neftyanik of Tatarstan" and "Neftyanik of Bashkiria" confirms their effectiveness in revealing the information potential of territorial-branch newspapers of the mid-1950s. The results of the study complement the idea of the system of motivation of employees of the production associations "Tatneft" and "Bashneft".