Development of public forms of cooperation of engineering and technical workers and innovators in industry in the USSR in the 1950s-1960s (on the materials of the Tatar ASSR)

The aim of the study is to analyze the structural and functional transformations of scientific and technical societies during technical modernization of industry in the 1950s and 1960s and to identify trends and contradictions in their development. The research is based on published normative legal documents, documents of the State Archives of the Russian Federation, as well as on materials from the archives of the Republic of Tatarstan. The results of the study show that there were significant structural and functional transformations in scientific and technical societies in the late 1950s - early 1960s. Scientific and technical societies had a wide network of regional and primary organizations and had to become corporate structures in industry. However, scientific and technical societies were not autonomous organizations and could not independently define the trajectory of their development. They were completely subordinated to the party-state structures, therefore, many transformations were contrived and sometimes even contradictory. Carrying out the mobilization function, which is not in their nature, scientific and technical societies were compelled to report on the increase in the participants in socialist competition, on carrying out a huge number of events, on the constant increase in the number of their members. Being involved in the realization of ideas about the democratization of production and the erasure of the boundary between intellectual and physical labor, scientific and technical societies have created contrived associations, such as institutes of workers-researches, public constructions bureaus, public bureaus of economic analysis, etc. In fact, the number of workers in these associations did not exceed 15%. At the same time, very valuable initiatives were born in the depths of scientific and technical societies, such as institutes of innovators, integrated creative teams, teams of quality, etc. In general, a large number of scientific and technical associations lead to formalism, the pursuit of quantity at the expense of quality, many scientific and technical associations actually only declared their activities in reports. The peculiarities of the command and administrative system itself, which is weakly susceptible to innovations, as well as a number of subjective factors, have reduced the effectiveness of the activities of scientific and technical associations.

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