Abstract

This article examines citizens’ letters to newspapers as a mechanism of dialogue between the authorities and society. It analyzes a range of regional periodicals from the 1950s to the 1960s. Publishing readers’ letters in periodical print was a customary practice in this period. The large number of such publications was driven by editorial boards’ need to rely on non-professional contributors, given the limited professional staff of district newspapers. Taken as a whole, the examined issues of the regional press suggest that a considerable number of published letters were complaints concerning various aspects of everyday and workplace life. These may be treated as a source for the history of Soviet everyday life. They reveal the uneven, mosaic character of urbanization in the regions and the persistence of many unresolved domestic and workplace problems. The author stresses that any analysis of periodicals must take into account party control over mass media in the Soviet Union. Particular importance is attached to understanding the purpose of publishing large numbers of complaint letters in newspapers. The analysis leads to the conclusion that letters were used as an instrument for shaping public consciousness: undesirable behavior was publicly censured, while broader social problems were reframed, through the epistolary lens, as isolated and private shortcomings. Typical themes included everyday problems of various kinds: a poorly functioning club, a non-operational shop, bad roads, and repair issues. The authorities required newspaper editorial boards to process citizens’ appeals and to publish official responses from local institutions. This created the illusion that appealing to the newspaper provided an effective solution to the problem. In practice, however, the situation has not always been like this. An analysis of the state’s response to published letters, viewed through documents of executive and party authorities, shows that in reality resolution was often delayed for many years, while some issues proved unsolvable because of systemic deficiencies in the state apparatus. Only a portion of everyday issues were effectively resolved through the newspaper.