Заслужить, оправдать и вернуть доверие партии: советское «я» в письмах во власть в ранней советской России
Earning, Vindicating and Returning the Party’s Trust: The Soviet «I» in Public Letter-Writing to Party-State Authorities in Early Soviet Russia

Summary/Abstract: One of the Bolsheviks’ central tasks was to create a New Man equipped with a new consciousness, a new soul and a new body. Forming an ideal subjectivity was supposed be the key to achieving communism. Using citizens’ letters to party-state institutions, the author analyzes the emergence of Soviet subjectivity after the Bolsheviks seized power by asking two crucial questions. On one hand, how did people remake themselves into Soviet subjects? On the other hand, how did the party and state monitor «correct» identities through their policy of social engineering? In examining the genesis of the modern Soviet subject and his / her role in building the Soviet state and society, the focus is first on how the categories of «trust» and «distrust» established the moral bonds between the individual and the party; second, how these categories operated both in social disciplining and creating inequality; and third, how they impacted historical agents’ self-construction of representations of their reliability and trustworthiness as they strove to earn, vindicate and return the «party’s trust.» Finally, the article analyzes suicide among the Bolsheviks, treating it as the subject’s most radical way of self-removal from the Soviet order, which indicates a clear-cut limit to ideology’s intervention into the non-liberal subject’s consciousness.

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