Late soviet subbotniks from the productivist utopia to the rituals of political loyalty

The article examines the phenomenon of Late Soviet Subbotniks. The purpose of the article is to examine such a combination of the practice of political control over labor and the ritual of expressing political loyalty to the Soviet state in the late Soviet Subbotniks, actually revived in 1969. The authors of the article propose to analyze this problem on a diverse corpus of historical sources, including propaganda materials dedicated to the Subbotniks, publications in the party and Soviet press about Subbotniks, documents of the primary party organizations of Tyumen enterprises and diary entries of contemporaries reflecting the conduct of Subbotniks and its perception by the participants. A wide body of materials allowed the authors to come to the following conclusions. The revival of the Subbotniks in 1969 pursued the goal of introducing another instrument to raise labor productivity and increase its efficiency. We can say that Subbotniks did not achieve their main economic goals, degenerating into another ritual of displaying loyalty to the political regime. The revived Subbotniks were initially aimed mainly at Soviet citizens of working age, who were supposed to provide the country with one day of free labor in their places. But it was precisely in this capacity that Subbotniks never actually touched the majority of Soviet workers. Exactly why we cannot say, we can only assume that for the most part, the matter turned out to be in the institutional complexity of the Soviet economy of the 1960s-70s, to which the form of labor from 1919 turned out to be difficult to apply. Born in the crucible of the Civil War with its degenerating economy and the predominance of manual labor in industry, the Subbotniks did not fit well in the highly developed industrial coal and electricity economy of 1919. Let us emphasize that the Subbotniks was badly combined with the economy precisely as a holiday of productivity, which Soviet propaganda of the 1970s made it to. In practice, different types of socially useful, but not productive, manual work became the dominant forms of labor during the communist Subbotniks: clearing territories, planting green spaces, and dragging small loads and equipment. These forms of labor were intended for peripheral groups of the Soviet citizens who did not have a permanent job - schoolchildren, students, pensioners - but gradually spilled over into the factory workshops. It turned out to be easier for the industry to carry out manual cleaning of territories than to independently provide for a complex production process. At the same time, it is likely that for most Soviet citizens Lenin’s Subbotniks and the need for an additional (albeit shorte ned) working day did not cause political protest or rejection, but rather harmoniously fit into the spring series of Soviet holidays of political loyalty.

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