Abstrakt
The belated industrialization of Belarus occuring after the second world war gave birth to the Minsk phenomenon. The capital city expanded rapidly throughout the 1950s-1960s due to the construction of several key enterprises of heavy industry, accompanied by an extensive increase in working places teaming with rural migrants.
The largest construction was the Tractor factory along with the socialist settlement attached directly to it, where life ran under the care and control of the plant-party structures. This landscape is of unique interest as a whole, and in particular, its formation and greyzones.
Furthermore, of sociological interest are the groups of young workers of village origin and specialists who arrived from other soviet republics. Economic policy and mechanisms of spatial control underpinned the transformation of social identity and this premise delimits the spheres of my research: relationships on the shop-floor, housing conditions, and cultural consumption.
The aim is to follow the interplay of traditional village habitus with urban culture to see how this resulted in a very specific form of soviet Belarusian identity. At stake is also the possibility of discerning the sources of people's identification with the soviet project with regard to the paternalist policy of the factory.