Контроль спецслужб в коммунальном хозяйстве Ленинграда и борьба за дисциплину (1918 - первая половина 1930-х гг.)
Control by the Special Services in the Communal Services of Leningrad and the Labor Discipline (1918 - beginning of the 1930s)

Summary/Abstract: The article examines tense relations between the state, managers, and employees of industrial enterprises, concretely at the Vodokanalizatsiya Trust. The trust was engaged in the design, construction, and operation of water supply and sewage systems, the most important systems for modernizing urban space in the whole of Europe. Technological innovations were to be followed by social changes that could have their own specific traits in relation to other enterprises, since the trust did not belong to any of the most important branches of Soviet industry. Materials from the Central State Archives of St. Petersburg regarding activities of this department in the “Vodokanalizatsiya” trust show that a so-called Secret Department (Sekretnaya chast) or Secret Police, a branch of the OGPU — NKVD, gradually began to play an increasingly important role in managing these enterprises. Through these Secret Departments, new principles of hiring and dismissal from work, as well as imposing disciplinary sanctions, were introduced in the late 1920s. The special attention of the Secret Department was received by so-called “former people,” as well as by representatives of peoples. All this took place under conditions of an acute shortage of skilled labor in Leningrad. Thus, the state’s interests in economic development came into conflict with other interests, which in state literature are labelled as “ideological” and are rarely analyzed in detail. The article discusses the real case of anti-Soviet agitation, of which the central figure was a worker in the communal services of Leningrad. Thus, the role of the OGPU — NKVD in the development of the Soviet industry in the 1930s is studied using the example of the Vodokanalizatsiya Trust.

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