The paper dwells on the problem of personal support of the Soviet industrial project in the 1920s – early 1930s. The author analyzes the process of industrial transformation in the structure of employment and corresponding changes in the composition of the working class. The author draws attention to the adaptation of “old” and “new” workers to specialized, equipped, mechanized work places, to new – ranked and regulated – industrial work style. The author concludes that during the period under review newcomers began to play a key role in factory communities because of successful adaptation to a more intensive mode of labour and a certain destruction of traditional workshop culture.