Educational Institutions of the System of State Labor Reserves of the USSR in 1941—1954: Adaptation to Migration Impact (Materials from the Sverdlovsk Region)

Abstract

The experience of adaptation of educational institutions of the regional system of stationary training of qualified workers in the context of the migration impact in the 1940s — the first half of the 1950s is considered. A number of approaches in modern domestic and foreign historiography, postulating the existence, along with punitive and coercive mechanisms of ensuring the loyalty of the Soviet working class, a number of administrative practices that provided significant support for state policy “from below,” from the working masses, are highlighted. It is shown that the awareness of the impossibility of widespread use of compulsory punitive mechanisms without restriction was formed directly during the implementation of state policy in the 1940s — mid 1950s, it was also represented among the leaders of the system for training young skilled workers — the State Labor Reserves. It is noted that such an understanding leads already at the beginning of the 1940s, in the most difficult conditions of the initial period of the Great Patriotic War, to the development among the leadership of educational institutions and the regional administration of the State Labor Reserves mechanisms for adapting educational institutions and students to a complex of problems caused by the powerful migration impact. The authors identified four groups of such mechanisms that ensured the minimum sufficient level of student loyalty to solving educational and production problems: agitation and information; organizational; economic and material and household; sociocultural.