Worker-Peasant Correspondent Movement

Origins and aims

The practice of drawing workers and peasants into the revolutionary press existed already in the Russian Empire, but the movement spread widely only after the October Revolution of 1917[P2]. In his 1918 article "On the character of our newspapers", Lenin urged newspapermen to "expose the unfit" and unmask the "actual malefactors" who disrupted production and political work[P21]. The 8th Party Congress, meeting in March 1919, endorsed the use of worker and peasant correspondents to monitor the bureaucracy and expose abuse of power, and that same year Lenin instructed the Pravda editorial board to organize a network of regular worker and village correspondents[P22].

By 1923–1924 all high-circulation Soviet newspapers were organizing a regular body of worker and peasant correspondents. Party officials hoped the correspondents would expose corrupt local officials, provide information on popular moods, and help mobilize opinion behind the Bolshevik regime. The movement was also conceived as a tool to educate a new worker and peasant intelligentsia[P24].

Scale and forms of activity

In March 1924 the movement numbered about 57,000 people, and by August 1925 it had grown to 190,000[P2]. Other counts exist. At the Third All-Union Congress of Rabkory in 1926, Trotsky addressed 580 delegates representing around 500,000 rabkory and selkory[P22], and at the 17th Party Congress in 1934 Stalin said there were more than 3 million worker and peasant correspondents[P19].

In the journalism of the 1920s and 1930s, new forms of mass work with the population arose on the initiative of the rabselkory: raids, shock brigades, the public tug, rationalization accounts, roll-calls, living newspapers, and wall newspapers[P2]. Wall newspapers were at first small-circulation papers combining the visual force of a poster with the text of a newspaper, usually mounted on stands and printed in typographies, but from the late 1920s handwritten papers spread everywhere[P3]. "Living newspapers" were themed theatrical performances in which a text was spoken, accompanied by symbolic figures or skits illustrating the message. Raids and public tugs involved work with the population, above all with work collectives whose production figures failed to satisfy the managements of industrialization construction sites[P4].

Activity went beyond writing letters and extended into intervention at the workplace. In 1930 the Novosibirsk newspaper Sovetskaya Sibir reported on the work of the Kombainstroi rabkors: the rabkors of the paper Dayesh Kombain joined the all-Union "rabkor campaign" marking the third year of the five-year plan; a staff for the campaign was organized; and on 7 September a "rabkor alarm" drew more than a hundred people. The rabkors discussed the causes of breakdowns at Kombainstroi together with the workers and submitted several dozen proposals, declared themselves mobilized for the duration of clearing the breakdowns, took the Komsomol cell, the most passive and backward on the site, under public tow, and organized shock brigades to check the fulfilment of plans on schedule and the quality of work[P5][P6][P7][P8][P9][P10][P11].

Who the correspondents were

A high proportion of correspondents were low-level Party officials, trade union activists, or representatives of factory management. An ordinary worker correspondent might also be a member of a local Party committee, while others belonged to trade union factory committees, provincial trade union Departments of Labor, or cooperative administration. Some letters were typed, indicating that the author probably had access to a typewriter at a government office[P26].

Participation was a common channel of social ascent, especially for young people. A significant share of correspondents, particularly in the countryside (more than 40 per cent), were young people, including Pioneers, Komsomol members and young members of the VKP(b), some under the age of 15[P13].

A school of language and ideology

The movement was seen as a tool for educating a new Soviet intelligentsia of workers and peasants. As scholars have noted, it served as a kind of "university" where young activists from the labouring masses learned to speak the official language of the Soviet state. Newspapers instructed correspondents in the use of the new Bolshevik vocabulary, while would-be Party members and activists imitated official discourse in their letters and expressed their desire to learn it thoroughly[P29].

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 mastered the language of the Soviet state. Bolshevik leaders conceived of the movement as a classroom in which rank-and-file members of the Party or the Komsomol would learn Marxism-Leninism. Not only 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[P31].

Contradictions and limits

The movement worked in two directions at once: exposure and mobilization. The press addressed semi-literate people with only vague notions of Marxism and of the aims of Bolshevik power, and the task was to carry the views and aims of the new power to the widest possible audience; in this the rabselkor movement played a significant role in the campaign against illiteracy[P12]. At the same time the correspondent institution was a channel that supplied the Party with information about popular moods[P24].

The central and higher bodies institutionalized guidance of the correspondents. In a 1924 interview with the magazine Rabochy Korrespondent, Stalin stated that direct ideological guidance of worker and peasant correspondents must be exercised by newspaper editors linked with the Party, and that censorship of articles must be concentrated in their hands. At the same time he called persecution of correspondents "barbarous", a survival of bourgeois customs, and insisted that the newspaper must protect its correspondent from persecution[P55][P56]. In the same interview he considered selection of correspondents by the editors more advisable than election, on the principle that the correspondent must be independent of the institutions and persons he comes in contact with in his work, though not independent of "proletarian public opinion"[P52].

Political responsibility does not end there. Stalin defined the correspondents not merely as future journalists or factory social workers in the narrow sense, but primarily as exposers of the defects in Soviet public life, fighters for their removal, and commanders of proletarian public opinion[P53]. As an organized force they played the part of mouthpiece of proletarian public opinion, exposer of defects in Soviet public life, and tireless fighter for the improvement of construction work[P51]. Workers' participation in running a newspaper was described as transforming the paper from a weapon for the enslavement of the people into a weapon for their emancipation[P50]. Accordingly, the main content of the correspondents' education was not the acquisition of journalistic technique but the acquisition, through their own work, of the intuition of the journalist-public worker[P54].

Newspapers instructed their worker and village correspondents on appropriate themes and language[P24], and in the 1920s they published regular instructional journals for them; one of these was Pravda's Raboche-krest'ianskii korrespondent[P28].