Peasants, the state and the languages of NEP: The rural correspondents movement in the Soviet Union, 1924-1928.

The Soviet rural correspondents movement grew out of the circumstances facing the Bolshevik regime after the October Revolution of 1917. Peasants were invited and encouraged to write letters to newspapers about their villages and their efforts to make them new and Soviet. This study analyzes the movement (using an archive containing several thousand letters sent to the newspaper Krest'ianskaia Gazeta from 1924 to 1928) as: (1) one aspect of relations between the party-state and peasants as subjects of the workers' and peasants' state; (2) one aspect of the development of the Soviet press in these years incorporating unique and problematic elements of public participation and criticism; (3) an experimental attempt to narrow the long-standing cultural gap between Russia's urban, educated elite and the menacing and backward peasantry; and as (4) a unique source for peasants' self-representation in relation to the state, and their attempts to meet what they perceived to be the state's expectations or use these expectations for their own ends. The rural correspondents (or sel'kor) movement, which flourished beginning in 1924, was one part of the party-state's broad effort to build socialism in the countryside in the relatively tolerant framework of the New Economic Policy after 1921. It was also partly conceived as a way of fostering a new kind of civic activism among peasants and was to operate independently of party control but under party leadership. Working out this distinction proved to be extremely contentious, and also involved debates over correspondents' demands for authority (in the form of special documents) and security from attacks by the subjects of their notes. The failure of civic activism to develop in the form the party wanted led to its abandonment as a goal and to a more concerted effort to use sel'kors exclusively for agitation and propaganda. The movement represented, for an ambitious few, an opportunity to leave rural life entirely, and many took advantage of this opportunity. Others adopted the Bolshevik discourse of heroic struggle and revolutionary transformation, but sometimes in inappropriate and self-destructive ways.PhDEuropean historyModern historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129117/2/9332036.pd