Worker-Peasant Correspondent Movement
라브코르·셀코르 운동
A Soviet press participation movement (from 1919) that organized workers (rabkors) and peasants (selkors) as unpaid newspaper correspondents to expose bureaucratic corruption and transmit the Party's message to the masses. By 1925 it encompassed 190,000 participants and expanded into wall newspapers, living newspapers, and inspection brigades, playing a major role in literacy campaigns and the dissemination of Bolshevik language. For young Party members it functioned as a social ladder, though under Stalin the network was increasingly instrumentalized for surveillance and denunciation.
Related people
Sources
- Wikipedia (RU) Russian Wikipedia: overview of the rabselkor movement, its forms (wall newspapers, living newspapers, raids, public tug), growth from 57,000 (1924) to 190,000 (1925), and its role in literacy and social mobility.
- Wikipedia (EN) English Wikipedia: history of people's correspondents from Lenin's 1918 article through the 3 million participants Stalin cited in 1934; describes rabkors and selkors as agents of exposure, language education, and ideological supervision.
- Marxists Internet Archive Stalin's 1924 interview with Rabochy Korrespondent magazine: defines worker-peasant correspondents as 'exposers of defects in Soviet public life' and 'commanders of proletarian public opinion,' and calls persecution of correspondents 'barbarous.'
- Matthew E. Lenoe, 'Letter-writing and the State: Reader correspondence with newspapers as a source for early Soviet history,' Cahiers du Monde Russe 40, no. 1–2 (1999): 139–170 — scholarly analysis of the rabselkor movement as a literacy and surveillance institution.