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Мотивация участия советской молодежи в комсомольских стройках в период хрущевской оттепели (на примере Красноярской ГЭС)
In this article, the authors analyze the Soviet youth’s motivation to participate in Komsomol construc-
tion projects in the 1960s on the example of the construction of the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station. The
aim of the article was to identify groups of motivational attitudes of the Soviet youth during the Khrushchev Thaw,
which encouraged young people to leave their homes and go to the sparsely populated areas of the country for Kom-
somol construction sites. Primary data were collected using the method of in-depth semi-structured interviews. The
study involved 17 respondents – builders and pioneer builders of the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station and
the city of Divnogorsk, who arrived for construction between 1956 and 1972. In addition, a significant part of work-
ing with data was the qualitative analysis of the media on the example of the texts of the printed edition – the Soviet
newspaper Pravda. The sample of materials included articles printed at the first stages of the construction of the
Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station and containing information about the construction itself. Their analysis re-
vealed the specifics of the context of construction in Krasnoyarsk and its features that contributed to its popularity
among young people and effectiveness in terms of youth policy. As a result of qualitative processing of interview
scripts with the participants in the construction of the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station by coding, two main
groups of motivating factors were identified: material and non-material; the latter, in turn, were divided into personal,
that is, significant directly for the respondent themselves, and ideological, significant for society. With a pronounced
ideological background of the events that took place and, as a result, clearly identified and significant ideological in-
centives, the group of material factors also influenced the decision-making process to join the construction of the
Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station. Consequently, we can see the balance of economic and ideological aspects
in stimulating the Soviet youth to participate in the construction of the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station, as
well as a significant impact of the media on the formation and actualization of motivational attitudes. However, the
qualitative methodology chosen by the authors for the study does not allow to give answers to several questions about
the ratio of groups of motivational attitudes, as well as to conclude that the importance of certain groups of attitudes
is paramount. At the same time, the grounded theory that the research has been based on allows the authors to contin-
ue working in the field to correct the model, saturating it with new empirical material.