Perestroyka and industrial democracy in the USSR: the labor collective of Vyborg pulp and paper plant in 1987-1989

The paper is devoted to the perestroika labour self-management. The author studied the sources of the party organization of the Vyborg Pulp and Paper Plant (the VPPP) to test the skeptical historiographical position on the Soviet industrial democracy in 1987-1989. Using Harry Braverman approach, the author considers production as a space of permanent micro-political clashes between workers, managers and owners (or the state). This approach leads to the study of industrial democracy not only at the factory and factory elections, but in the entire system of institutions and social mobilizations of the Soviet plants during perestroika. The author analyzes the elections at the VPPP, confrontation between the old and new leaders in its party organization and the environmental protest of the workers in 1989. The perestroika politics softened previous authoritarian regime of the party management. New complicated and pluralistic forms appeared instead of the authoritarian old ones. Although new elected positions within the plant staff were still controlled by the party committee, in the case of the conflict between the collective and the managers, this industrial democracy could express independent workers' activity. But this phenomenon was contrary to self-financing and further market tendencies in the Soviet economy. More market relationships meant more senior management and more director's power. By 1990, weak forms of the Soviet industrial democracy became inadequate to market conditions.