The Soviet Factory in an Era of Change: The Labor Collective of the Vyborg Pulp and Paper Mill between State and Civil Society

This dissertation examines the socioeconomic dimensions of the Soviet factory at the end of the Soviet era and during the accelerated market reforms of the final decade of the twentieth century. It is an extended study of conditions and relationships at the Vyborg pulp and paper mill over almost two decades. This enterprise attracted researchers’ attention because, in 1998–2000, its workers, acting in the name of the “labor collective,” took control of the mill, expelled its owner, and defended their privileged right to determine the enterprise’s future. A small number of studies were written about the mill in the immediate aftermath, interpreting this “revolt” rather simplistically or, at best, as a “symptom” of something else. The author believes that a detailed examination of the mill’s history reveals an everyday world that can illuminate many of the “big” questions of recent Russian history: the fate of classes in contemporary Russia, forms of social organization, and the relationship between state and society in the Soviet Union. This dissertation attempts to write a social history of the crisis of the USSR and subsequent Russian privatization through the study of the factory as a basic “cell” of late Soviet society.