The ‘mobile proletariat’: the production of proletariat labor on a Soviet construction site

Abstract

This article discusses the Soviet conceptualization of labor and its importance for state building and modernization in the USSR. The article helps to explicate the ways in which labor migration was an integral part of the socialist development project in regions such as Tajikistan. Through the case study of the Nurek Dam, it considers the processes by which the Soviet proletariat was produced through work, mobility, and socialization. It ultimately presents an argument about the mutual constitution of the Soviet state and Soviet citizens, whose labor embodied the state’s idealized ‘mobile proletariat.’ Finally, it also outlines what the development of the ‘mobile proletariat’ and other ideals of labor came to mean for groups of peripheral subjects in the USSR – as well as what such boundaries may say about the limits of the Soviet modernization project in practice.