Abstract: The article examines the large-circulation newspapers of the oil industry enterprises of the Ural-Volga region in the 1960s-1980s as sources for the study of labor motivation. For the first time, newspapers produced at the oil enterprises of Bashneft, Permneft and Tatneft are being introduced into scientific circulation. Initially, an assessment of the information potential of the sources was carried out. Based on the selected materials, a content analysis of letters from oil workers to the newspaper of one of the divisions of the Permneft production association "Neftyanik Polazny" in 1973 - 1985 was performed. Descriptive methods of source analysis are also used in this study. Content analysis was provided by MAXQDA 2022 and UCINET software and consisted in analyzing the frequency of occurrence of selected categories and their visualization to assess the degree of significance of social and industrial topics related to labor motivation for oil workers. The study proved that for the employees of NGDU "Polaznaneft" the most urgent problems were related to "bottlenecks" in the social sphere and in the organization of production processes. In addition, it is noted that the category of "production management" was a key factor in solving various problems. The results of calculating the frequency of occurrence of categories and visualizing these frequencies can be useful for further research in the field of labor motivation.

Keywords: Ural-Volga region, USSR, content-analysis, letters of oil industry workers, large-circulation newspaper, soviet periodicals, labor motivation, oil industry, oil-and-gas production department, Polazna