"Soviet concepts and practices of class and hierarchy: hegemony, privileges, and formal and informal patterns of remuneration in Armenian Soviet industry"

This presentation is focusing on the paradoxical position of the working class in Armenian Soviet socialist society, within its officially defined tripartite structure of workers, peasants, and intelligentsia. While the socialist working class was ideologically constructed as the hegemonic force, it was also largely a product of rapid and expansive industrialization, which generated acute labour shortages across the Soviet Union and in Armenia, in particular. To address this, the state implemented a reversed salary hierarchy, introducing the piece-rate system and granting industrial workers the possibility to get far higher wages than engineers and some managerial staff, which can be called “social inversion”.

The presentation explores the apparent paradox that, despite these financial disincentives, workers and their children still continued to pursue professional training, higher education and transition into lower-paid professional roles. It argues that this phenomenon can be explained by several factors, in particular, the limited significance of monetary income in a Soviet system of consumption marked by chronic shortages of consumer goods, unequal access to these goods, and the importance of non-monetary forms of reward. While workers earned higher wages, engineers and administrative staff benefited from greater social prestige, career mobility, and access to informal privileges and resources. Moreover, belonging to the intelligentsia conferred significant symbolic capital, often outweighing purely economic considerations.

Rather than interpreting this reversed salary structure as a dysfunction or contradiction, the presentation conceptualizes it as a constitutive feature of the Soviet system. It highlights the coexistence of ideological claims that devalued material incentives with practical economic mechanisms that also had local Armenian specifics. This tension is understood not as inconsistency, but as a layered and dynamic relationship between ideology, material constraints, and symbolic hierarchies, through which the Soviet social order was both structured and sustained.

Yulia Antonyan is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of History, Yerevan State University (since 2008). Her professional interests are in the anthropology of religion and the anthropology of social structures, with a special focus on the Soviet and post-Soviet periods.