| Popis: |
The article analyses the Russian work collective from the perspective of internal migration, a hitherto neglected yet important aspect of studies of the work collective, given that the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia may be considered as ‘societies of migrants’. Drawing on structured network questionnaires and thematic interviews with 38 male workers in the famous Kirov factory, St. Petersburg, we examine the extent to which the respondent turn to their co-workers for socialising, help and support in daily life. Despite the sweeping institutional changes brought by the transformation, the work collective continues to have an important impact in the daily life of workers, and migrant workers in particular. This is explained by an analysis of the Soviet-era migration process. Lacking other channels for adapting to the new life in the metropolis, the new ties that the migrants formed in the city were mostly related to their workplace. The importance of workplace-related ties may seem to be a trivial and inevitable finding, but we argue this is not so at least in two respects. First, the migrants’ networks, even after decades of residence in the city, are still marked by the migratory background, but there is nothing obvious in that they should remain so. Second, migration per se does not inevitably lead to co-workers being important, as is illustrated by the fact that the networks of Finnish migrant workers are not built around work. What matters then is not migration as an abstraction but the circumstances of the type of migration. |
