Social order on Murmansk railway. Part 1. Ethnic groups - social system actors

Construction of the Murmansk Railway connecting the capital of the Russian Empire with the Arctic Ocean is considered as a process of creating regional communities. The key problem is the question of social actions compliance with the expectations of the construction participants. The object of the study is the guards recruited to protect and monitor the workers. This object was chosen due to the intermediate position of the lower rank groups in the “subordination - management” system. The purpose of the first part of the publication is to identify the consequences of the management decisions aimed at changing the social structure, which eventually changed the general functionality of the social system. The author concludes that the social structure of Murmanstroika (the construction of the Murmansk Railway) was formed mainly on the basis of the management’s ideas about the professional qualities of ethnic groups. The relevance of the research lies in the use of the sociological approach for the study of a historical phenomenon - the construction of a strategic military object. The novelty of the study is that it considers the Murmansk Railway for the first time not as an object of construction involving numerous groups of workers, but as a social system in a situation of “mobile equilibrium”. Relying on certain elements of Talcott Parsons’ social system concept enabled the author to identify some features of the impact of the social structure on the emergence of the stable types of interaction between ethnic groups.