Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s

Abstract

“Which one of us had never written letters to the supreme powers…If they are preserved, these mountains of letters will be a veritable treasure trove for historians.” So wrote Nadezhda Mandelstam, always a sharp-eyed anthropologist of Soviet everyday life. Historians who have encountered this treasure trove in Soviet archives newly opened over the past few years are likely to agree. The great volume of public letter-writing–the “mountains” of complaints, denunciations, statements of opinion, appeals, threats and confessional outpourings that ordinary Russians sent to Soviet political leaders, party and government agencies, public figures, and newspapers–constitutes one of the major discoveries associated with the opening of the archives.