Bridging the Russian Cultural Gap: Language and Culture Wars in the Creation of a Soviet Peasant Press

Abstract

This study explores the effort of the Bolshevik state during the 1920s to establish a means of communicating with the peasantry through an examination of the two centrally produced nationwide party newspapers directed during the New Economic Policy at a peasant audience and the most influential periodical dealing with press issues in the 1920s. It specifically examines the effort to create a language that would facilitate communication with the peasantry and the attempt to develop a new type of journalist, the rural peasant correspondent, who would be able to command the new language and address the issues that most concerned the peasantry while translating to the village the goals of the revolution. On the eve of collectivization the Soviet regime had at the very least opened a wedge into the village via the newspaper. In turn, the peasants were incorporating the newspaper into their weapons of the weak. A newspaper culture was beginning to emerge in rural Russia upon which a shared national vision might have been created.