People's correspondent
Encyclopedia
People's Correspondents, are a kind of amateur proletarian journalists who have filed reports from the frontlines about the march toward communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

 since the early years of the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. Originally initiated by Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...

 as a tool for exposing mismanagement and corruption, several million people worked as people's correspondents in their heyday. At the 17th Party Congress in 1934, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

 said there were more than 3 million worker and agriculture correspondents.

History

The tradition of people's correspondents - including worker correspondents, known as rabkors (for "rabochy korrespondent"), and agriculture correspondents (sometimes called village correspondents), known as selkors (for "selskokhozyaistvenny or selsky korrespondent") - began shortly after the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....

s seized power. In his 1918 article, On the character of our newspapers, Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...

 urged newspapermen to "expose the unfit" and unmask the "actual malefactors" who disrupted production and political work.

The 8th Party Congress, meeting in March 1919, endorsed the use of worker and agriculture correspondents to monitor the bureaucracy
Bureaucracy
A bureaucracy is an organization of non-elected officials of a governmental or organization who implement the rules, laws, and functions of their institution, and are occasionally characterized by officialism and red tape.-Weberian bureaucracy:...

 and expose abuse of power
Abuse of Power
Abuse of Power is a novel written by radio talk show host Michael Savage.- Plot :Jack Hatfield is a hardened former war correspondent who rose to national prominence for his insightful, provocative commentary...

. In 1919, Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...

 instructed the Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....

editorial board to organize a network of regular worker and village correspondents, and by 1926, Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....

 was addressing 580 delegates representing around 500,000 rabkory and selkory at the Third All-Union Congress of Rabkory.

Main goals

In the years 1923-1924, all high circulation Soviet newspapers were organizing a regular body of worker and agriculture correspondents. These were supposed to be ordinary working people who would write into the newspapers regularly. Officials in the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...

 hoped that the correspondents would expose corrupt local officials, provide information on popular moods, and help to mobilize opinion behind the Bolshevik regime. They also hoped to use the worker and agriculture correspondents movement as a tool to educate a new worker/peasant intelligentsia
Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...

. In pursuit of all of these goals Soviet newspaper editors and journalists during the 1920s and 1930s instructed their worker and village correspondents on appropriate themes and language for their letters.

The typical correspondent

A high proportion of correspondents were low level Party officials, trade union activists, or representatives of factory management. An ordinary worker correspondent might e.g. also a member of a local Party committee. Other worker correspondents belonged to trade union factory committees, provincial trade union Departments of Labor, or cooperative administration. Some of the letters by the correspondents were typed - indicating that the author probably had access to a typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...

 at a government office.

Instruction

Newspapers used a number of channels to instruct worker and village correspondents in the 1920s. The lessons themselves were haphazard and of uneven quality, but instructional materials were distributed widely. According to a Central Committee Press Department survey done in late 1923, Soviet trade union and so called mass worker newspapers used articles, conferences, individual letters, circulars, and roving instructors to inform worker and village correspondents what and how to write. In addition, newspapers published regular instructional journals for the correspondents. One of the instructional journals were the Pravda's Raboche-krest’ianskii korrespondent.

Party leaders pushed newspapers and local Party organizations to instruct correspondents in part because they saw the movement as a tool for the education of a new Soviet intelligentsia of workers and peasants. As a number of scholars have noted, the worker and village correspondents movement served as a kind of "university" where young activists from the laboring masses learned to speak the official language of the Soviet state. Both the organizers of the correspondents movement and the participants were aware of this function. Newspapers instructed correspondents in the use of the new Bolshevik vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...

, while would-be Party members and activists imitated official discourse in their letters and expressed their desire to learn it thoroughly.

Ideological supervision

Party authorities solicited letters from worker correspondents in order to instruct them in Bolshevik language and ideology. Through written and oral interaction with newspaper editors, instructors, and Party agitators, activists would master the language of the Soviet state. The Bolshevik leaders conceived of the correspondents movement as a classroom in which rank-and-file members of the Party or the Komsomol would learn Marxism-Leninism
Marxism-Leninism
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology, officially based upon the theories of Marxism and Vladimir Lenin, that promotes the development and creation of a international communist society through the leadership of a vanguard party over a revolutionary socialist state that represents a dictatorship...

. Indeed, not just activists eager to learn official language, but even denouncers attempting to put the state apparatus to their own uses were forced to use official rhetoric and socio-political categories to achieve their goals. Those who wished to manipulate the Bolshevik state had to speak its language.

After 1930, greater fear of Stalinist repression and Party activists’ increased efforts to use worker and agriculture correspondents to organize rather than register "public opinion" trammeled letter-writers’ frank expression of their opinions. The sphere wherein one could express one’s own political opinions without fear of persecution had narrowed to circles of personal friends. Very few people could be expected to express themselves openly to authority.

To get even approximately accurate intelligence on the mood and attitudes of the population, the Soviet leaders would have had to resort to sources which tapped private communications, by perlustrating personal letters and building networks of informers.

Reporting style

People's correspondents were never known for their critical stances on the government, but they did have a certain degree of freedom to go after petty bureaucrat
Bureaucrat
A bureaucrat is a member of a bureaucracy and can comprise the administration of any organization of any size, though the term usually connotes someone within an institution of a government or corporation...

s and bosses. Since many of the articles from people's correspondents that were published over the decades were essentially letters to the editor, they were comically banal because only ideologically sound articles made it to print.

For example, one 1958 letter to a Yugra
Yugra
Yugra was the name of the lands between the Pechora River and Northern Urals in the Russian annals of the 12th–17th centuries, as well as the name of the Khanty and partly Mansi tribes inhabiting these territories, later known as VogulsThe Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug of Russia is also...

 newspaper sent in by an agriculture correspondent named T. Patrakova informed readers that members of the Repolovskoye collective farm "warmly" said goodbye to Ivan Mikhailov, who worked "honestly" for 25 years as a blacksmith
Blacksmith
A blacksmith is a person who creates objects from wrought iron or steel by forging the metal; that is, by using tools to hammer, bend, and cut...

. "Thank you to our party and government, Ivan Yakovlevich says. I will be secure in my old age: I will get a 730-ruble monthly pension," Patrakova wrote..

Later development

The number of people's correspondents began to recede in the 1980s with the onset of Perestroika
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...

, and it is unclear how many remain today. In an ironic historical twist, they have now become vehement opponents of the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin served as the second President of the Russian Federation and is the current Prime Minister of Russia, as well as chairman of United Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus. He became acting President on 31 December 1999, when...

 - whose own father worked as a worker correspondent.

The tradition of the people's correspondent has survived the Soviet collapse thanks largely to Soviet stalwarts such as the Sovietskaya Rossia
Soviet Russia (newspaper)
Sovetskaya Rossiya is a political newspaper in Russia. It kept its name after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and presently presents itself as a left independent newspaper. Current editor — MP Valentin Chikin....

 and the Pravda
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....

, which welcome letters, essays and poetry from the amateur scribes. For example, around half of the Sovietskaya Rossia's content is penned by readers and people's correspondents. The newspaper's circulation is 300,000, down from 4.5 million at the end of the 1980s, and it currently has only six people on its editorial staff.
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