Struggles for authority in the NEP village: The early rural correspondents movement, 1923–1927

Abstract

UPON THE CONCLUSION OF THE CIVIL WAR, one of the most pressing political problems facing the victorious Bolsheviks consisted in establishing their authority as a government in the conditions of relative economic freedom granted by their New Economic Policy. The countryside in particular stretched away from the Bolsheviks' immediate control into a distance that was as much conceptual as it was geographical. 'The village'-derevnya-contained over 80% of the country's population; at the same time the party had practically no presence there, little influence, and virtually no social or political support.1 To help fill this vacuum, to encourage support for the party (and thus promote its authority) and perhaps even create it, to find and organise the regime's supporters in the countryside, the party-state initiated an experimental, quasi-civic phenomenon eventually called the 'rural correspondents movement' (sel'korovskoe dvizhenie). Workers had been organised into the worker correspondents movement in 1921-1922,2 and a similar, parallel but much larger movement for peasants and other rural dwellers emerged in 1923 and 1924. (Subsequently, the two groups were conflated into the rabsel'kor movement.) This 'movement', initiated and 'guided' by the party but made up of only loosely controlled volunteer writers, was one of several attempts by the party to establish itself in the 1920s as the guiding and organising force of the revolution in the countryside, as the head of the selfproclaimed 'workers' and peasants' state'.3 The party initiated the movement in order to satisfy different and sometimes contradictory requirements. Rural correspondents were expected first of all to support the party's general goals of revolutionary transformation and help carry out these