Performing Inventiveness: Industrial and Technical Creativity in the USSR, 1950s–1980s

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon of Soviet industrial and technical creativity (promyshlennoe i tekhnicheskoe tvorchestvo) from the late 1950s to the 1980s. It particularly focuses on the invention and rationalization movement at industrial enterprises through the lens of Soviet industrial policy. It emphasizes creativity as a labor resource and incentive developed into the oversized system and shows its structural elements and encouragements. The paper argues that from the 1950s onwards, the Soviet state placed labor creativity at the center of industrial development and homegrown vision of progress seeing it as a resource for technological competitiveness from Khrushchev’s aim to reach communism to perestroika. The Soviet leadership, however, overemphasized creativity as workers’ ability to come up with new ideas and find rapid technical solutions to industrial problems in addition to their main duties to show the creative nature of socialist labor. As a result, it developed a formalized branched system constituted by numerous institutions and nominal awards which made creativity not only an industrial necessity but to a large extent a performative product.