Social order on Murmansk railway part 2. Ethnocultural models and social deviations

The purpose of the article is to show through the study of archival documents how the urgent problems of ethnosocial contradictions were resolved during the process of creating a vast multiethnic working collective in various, often conflicting, everyday interactions. The object of the study is the “Caucasian” guards - an ethnically- based group of workers, which was perceived by other construction participants as a collective actor. Their behavior was different in that they systematically violated the established norms and rules during the construction of the Murmansk Railway in 1915-1916. The review of the job description for the guards, which established their functions and acceptable patterns of behavior when interacting with the local population, their direct supervisors, groups of war prisoners, and other construction participants, demonstrated the impact of the consequences of the “Caucasian” guards' deviant group behavior. It is concluded that the situational deviations of the guards were welcomed by the management as an intermediate stage of ethno-cultural adaptation. The author also identified the motives for the cooperation between individual groups of employees and revealed the influence of ethnic groups’ cultural models on the choice of ways to restore the social order. Specific inter- and intragroup communications built by the guards were influenced by a common system of values, the similarity of traditional ideas about power and subordination, and group responsibility to the working collective.