Reflection of social and political thought in soviet society: a dialogue with the party magazine "Kommunist" (1947–1957)

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between government bodies and society, and particularly the complex set of relations with ethnic communities. It focuses on the mentality of society within the framework of the highly complex social structure that was the Soviet political system. The article also draws on a little-studied, almost forgotten, valuable historical source: the correspondence between the magazine "Kommunist" and its readers on socio-political, social issues, and matters of state nationality policy during one of the country's most difficult periods – a decade after the end of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. The typology of the selected source is readers' letters and the magazine's editorial responses. They reflect the psychological state of citizens who experienced military hardships both during the war and subsequently, and their motivations for appealing to government bodies. Some of the questions often seem politically naive, for example, the question of the timing of the USSR's entry "into the communist stage of social development with the principle of distribution according to needs; We request clarification of the provisions of I.V. Stalin's works on Marxist issues, as well as the meaning of certain concepts: people, nation, nationality, and others. In our opinion, the presented source is important primarily for understanding the very essence of the civilizational phenomenon of the USSR. Indeed, it reflects, albeit conditionally, a dialogue among the peoples inhabiting the country's territory. Sources. In writing this article, documents from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) from collection 599, inventory 1, were studied. This collection contains the materials of the editorial board of the magazine "Kommunist" (1924–1991); (1946–1980). The collection contains 1,075 files, a significant portion of which remain unstudied. Many texts are already difficult to read due to the decline of typewriting. In this article, the authors examine only a small portion of the readers' correspondence, which was primarily socio-political in nature. For example, collection 599, file 19, contains 53 sheets of correspondence from the magazine's editorial board on the national question, from December 1949 to May 1957; file 35 contains answers to questions about the sources of the development of communist society and the revolutionary activities of A.M. Gorky, on Malthusianism, the origin of wars, and the person of F. Roosevelt (1951, 116 pages); file 350 (1956–1958, 134 pages) contains responses to readers' letters addressed to Kommunist magazine about Lenin's April Theses, the prerequisites for the transition from socialism to communism, tsarist foreign policy, the nature of the Murid movement and Shamil, the disarmament slogan in 1915–1916, and other historical issues. Files 759 and 390 contain thematic materials that were used in the editorial board's responses to readers.

Methods. The study primarily utilized content analysis, selecting from among the substantial volume of correspondence available in the archive, in combination with the principles of systematization and historicism in relation to the characteristics of the period of origin of the documents under consideration.