Recreating the technical intelligentsia: The politics of recruiting and training Soviet industrial specialists, 1945-1950

This study details the social position of the technical intelligentsia in the years of Soviet post-war reconstruction. Specifically, this project explores the post-war relationship between the Soviet state and its industrial specialists and initiates the process of identifying and interpreting the mechanisms and politics that actuated the technical intelligentsia's elevation to a privileged position in soviet industry and society.;The dissertation is divided into three general sections. The first reviews social and economic factors affecting labor force composition during the war and the eighteen months following the war. The second section analyzes the training and shop floor duties of post-war engineers and technicians, and the third section focuses on the principle groups to lose prominence after the war, praktiki and Stakhanovites. Materials for this study were drawn primarily from minsterial archives, technical journals, and national, local, and factory newspapers.;It is found that during reconstruction the state reshaped the technical intelligentsia into a body of experts whom it then empowered to supervise shop floor production. The use of praktiki was curtailed by making advanced education the single most important criteria for entry into the ranks of industrial supervisory personnel. It was also a matter of state policy to curtail voluntaristic worker movements and subordinate Stakhanovites and other workers to their formally trained supervisors.;These findings speak to the political struggle in the leadership between rationalizers and voluntarists. In regards to industrial labor policy, materials show that rationalizers were ascendant in the reconstruction era, for the state and party consistantly pursued a rationalizing program. Even after many leading rationalizers were purged in 1949, the policies they had advocated remained in place.