Fathers against Sons / Sons against Fathers: The Problem of Generations in the Early Soviet Workplace
Author(s)
Koenker, Diana P.
Abstract
The problem of generations in the Soviet workplace lends itself to constructing multiple stories. The theme of generational conflict involves oedipal assumptions of endemic generational competition. A second generational story contextualizes biological generations and attends analytically to concerns about the role played by generational cohorts, generational units, and particular generational experience. The economic story of the 1920s emphasizes issues of productivism and unemployment and highlights themes of planning, regulation, and labor market relations. The narrative of cultural revolution explores utopian dreaming, the mobilization of new strata of society, and conflicts between the old and the new. The story of the creation of the new socialist personality links generational issues to the identification of good and bad social types, the upright Komsomol activists and the hooligan delinquents. An approach from the perspective of gender calls attention to the construction of masculinity as a corollary of the experience of maturation. The narrative of everyday life presumes not only that the work-place is an important site of power relations between employer and employee but also that the labor process as it is enacted on the shop floor, shaped by everyday cultural practices and social interactions, is a key constituent of identity formation. Above all, it is important to emphasize the multiple and ambivalent social relations that characterized this society, as class, kin, gender, cultural, political, and national identities each provided to the subjects in this study competing, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting sets of values.
