Discourse of Industrial Modernization in the Late Soviet Forest Economy

The article discusses main developments of the forest economy in the late Soviet Union with a particular focus on the role of technology and machinery as two edges of industrial progress. With the end of the Second World War, the forest industry, which was one of the key industries in the late Soviet economy, became the object of constant administrative transformations. This fact reflected new trends in how the state and forestry specialists saw its future development. The article goes through a few key concepts that characterize the views of coordination and evolution of this critical industry featuring main forestry discourses. It, particularly, demonstrates that industrial forest management was viewed through the discourse of rationality and economization of natural and other material resources through the complexity of their consumption. Technology and new machinery, according to many specialists and industry officials, were supposed to play a fairway role in these processes. They were associated with the concept of technological and - broader - economic progress, which, in turn, meant the movement toward a modern type of socio-economic development and referred to the ideological tasks of building the material base of communism. In practice, this included such initiatives as projects for the construction of so called forest industrial complexes (LPK) and the launch of zero-waste production, as well as automation of forestry operations, and automated management of the industry. Despite rather clearly formulated objectives for the development of the industry, they generally remained on paper due to insufficiently developed infrastructure and material capabilities. Specialists and workers were often skeptical about new technologies, putting the human factor in production at the forefront. The progressive-like picture of the forestry industry was part of the vision of the future and reflected forthcoming, rather than realized, objectives, even though they were far going in terms of making more efficient forestry economy.