Social Reactions toward Foreigners during the Vyborg Pulp and Paper Plant Reconstruction (1985-1987)

Abstract

Over 1,500 Finnish workers arrived to the Sovietsky settlement (Vyborg district, Leningrad region) in 1985 to reconstruct the Vyborg Pulp and Paper Plant (VPPP). The local party and state authorities connected their presence with the profiteering of western goods, prostitution, mendicancy and religious literature distribution in the settlement. To oppose these tendencies they tried to mobilize workers’ “consciousness”. This event is considered very useful for historians from the point of view of a psychoanalytical collision that could help a subject to manifest and construct itself. The author studied curiosity tactics of local workers and control tactics of local authorities, concluding that the described tendencies were mostly a product of the authorities’ imagination, as a means to control the population. The locals reacted differently to both the presence of foreigners and control attempts of the authorities. The nature of individuals’ reactions depended on their social position within the relations of production of the Soviet plant. For example, workers from the production workshops of the VPPP participated in the volunteer auxiliary police unit more actively than their other colleagues. This was obviously a political move, as these volunteers prevented close communication between Soviet and Finnish citizens. Workers from the production workshops were more privileged and therefore had to perform their informal political duties - whether they agreed with them or not. The general conclusion is that historians could use the notion of a “civil society” based on the events during the last years of the Soviet Union for further research. The author considers a “civil society” to be a social non-state complexity that consists of several groups, each with their own interests and behaviors. Future studies could provide a more concrete structure of that Soviet civil complexity.