Shaping Peasant Political Discourse during the New Economic Policy: The Newspaper Krestianskaia Gazeta and the Case of "Vladimir Ia."

The problem of the character and function of a "peasant" newspaper bedeviled the Bolsheviks. The party determined to create local journalistic/political agents to establish contact with the villages and set the boundaries of discourse, thereby insinuating itself into peasant society by forming the poorest peasants into a force to destroy the remnants of the old order, in effect Russian peasant society. The sel 'kory were to be crusaders, indoctrinated in most cases through their experience in the Red Army, crusading in the name of socialism to bring alien western values to the countryside, values that the Communist party believed would no longer be alien to these particular peasants. In April 1926, however, the question of the boundaries of discourse exploded in a series of angry exchanges between a sel 'kor, "Vladimir Ia.", and Mikhail Kalinin, nominal head of state. The party had desired that the peasants organize around concepts and ideas, but those of the party. Such ideas failed when they hit the traditional Russian peasant social structure. The attempt to break the traditional society through mobilizing the sel'kory, the "outs," to destroy the "ins" of kulaks and kulak-influenced local party and government agents appeared to Kalinin as instead threatening to strengthen the traditional society. Vladimir Ia. had to be unmasked as a counterrevolutionary.