SOCIAL AND DOMESTIC FACTORS MOTIVATING WORKERS AT DEFENSE ENTERPRISES ON THE WEST SIBERIAN HOME FRONT (1941-1945): A SYNTHESIS OF THE ARCHAIC AND THE MODERN

Using the example of enterprises of the leading military-industrial center of the West Siberian home front (Novosibirsk), the article shows the essence and effectiveness of social incentives for workers to labor during the Great Patriotic War. The study proposes a hypothesis about the Soviet life support distribution system for factory teams in 1941–1945 as one of the unique forms of synthesis of archaisms and modernity generated by the extraordinary conditions of the period under review. Within the framework of a combination of economic institutional theory, a modernization approach and microhistory, the practices of providing food, housing, utilities, and manufactured goods to defense workers at their place of work are identified. It is established that the food supply by cards typologically referred to the phenomenon of archaic redistribution, housing and communal services — to modern social security. At the same time, the redistribution incentive mechanism, being a historical anachronism, permeated the entire sphere of distribution of vital goods and functioned in new industrial forms. The prevailing trend towards the archaization of the motivational system was conditioned by subordination of traditional and modern life support practices to the imperative of survival of home front workers. The inability to improve their quality of life significantly limited the effectiveness of social and domestic factors of labor motivation in terms of securing personnel and increasing production at defense enterprises in one of the largest rear cities of the USSR.