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Access to Communication Tools in Stalin’s Soviet Union*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Larissa Zakharova
Larissa Zakharova*
Affiliation:
Centre d’études des mondes russe, caucasien et centre-européen, EHESS
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Abstract

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This article examines the status and the place of such means of interpersonal communication as mail, the telegraph, and the telephone in Soviet society under Stalin. Access to tools of communication created a certain hierarchy in the Soviet Union: the telephone was only accessible in large cities, whereas postal services remained limited across the countryside. As it was being implemented, the Soviet project of a communicating society proved to be full of disparities, ultimately centered on the city-dwelling elite. While the radial scheme of communications networks favored contact between the capital and the provinces, the geographical proximity of the regions did not facilitate communications between their inhabitants. The construction of long-distance networks of sociability was affected by the territorial dimensions of the country, varying access to tools of communication, weak technological development, and bureaucratic malfunctioning.

Type
Inequalities and Justice
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 357 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2013

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Grégory Dufaud, Catherine Gousseff, Aleksandra Majstorac-Kobiljski, Nathalie Moine, and Sophie Tournon for carefully reading this article and for their invaluable advice.

References

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8. In this respect, the Stalinist regime did not greatly differ from European countries, which—like France when it nationalized its postal service—modeled their networks on their administrative and political structures. Bertho, Catherine, ed., Histoire des télécommunications en France (Toulouse: Érès, 1984), 63–64 Google Scholar.

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24. Ibid., p. 260.

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29. F. 1220, op. 1, d. 4, ll. 2-4, and 47, National Archives of the Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan (Natsional’nyi Arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstan, hereafter “NART”).

30. Ibid., ll. 5, 11, 14, 57, and 61.

31. Ibid., l. 48.

32. F. 1220, op. 1, d. 59, ll. 3v-4, NART, Kazan.

33. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 116, l. 5, RGAE, Moscow.

34. Ibid., l. 6.

35. Ibid., l. 6.

36. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 166, ll. 1 and 6, RGAE, Moscow.

37. Ibid., ll. 7-8.

38. F. 3527, op. 2, d. 160a, l. 37, RGAE, Moscow.

39. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 166, l. 1, RGAE, Moscow.

40. While 51% of the population over the age of ten was illiterate in 1926, by 1939, 89.7% of the RSFSR could read and write: see Clark, Uprooting Otherness, 72-73 and 109.

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42. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 722, l. 8, RGAE, Moscow.

43. Ibid., l. 10a.

44. Ibid., l. 11.

45. Ibid., l. 1.

46. Ibid., l. 4.

47. On the development of mail-order commerce in France, see Munck, Philippe, Manufrance, nous accusons (Paris: Éditions de La Vie ouvrière, 1993)Google Scholar.

48. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 116, l. 5 and d. 722, l. 10a, RGAE, Moscow. See note 33 in this article.

49. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 722, l. 3, RGAE, Moscow.

50. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 711, l. 115, RGAE, Moscow.

51. F. 3527, op. 8, d. 55, l. 2, RGAE, Moscow.

52. Ibid., ll. 2 and 59. On telephone density in the United States and Europe during the interwar period, see Griset, Pascal, Les révolutions de la communication, XIXe-XXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1991), 20 Google Scholar. He gives the following numbers for the eve of World War II: 15.8 for the United States and 2.7 for the entire European continent (13.6 for Sweden, 5.3 for Germany, 7 for Great Britain, and 3.8 for France). Catherine Bertho and Patrice Carré note that telephone density between French cities was very uneven in 1938: 15 in Paris, 9 in Lille and Bordeaux, and 7 in Nice. “In fact, interwar telephone density follows the map of the French economy rather faithfully: infrastructure is superior in the wealthier and more industrialized north and east, whereas telephones are scarcer in the rural south and west. The only exceptions were several resort towns: Nice, Biarritz, and Saint-Malo—Dinard, for example, were among the first regions to be automated.” Bertho, Catherine and Carré, Patrice A., “Le téléphone de Clémenceau à Mistinguett, 1914-1939,” in Bertho, , Histoire des télécommunications, 134 Google Scholar.

53. By comparison, the number of telephone subscribers in the United States multiplied by two and a half between 1911 and 1928, whereas it tripled in Europe over the same period. In 1933, the 1929 crisis led to a 13.5% decline in the number of subscribers in the United States (some 16.7 million). On the eve of World War I, the United States crossed the threshold of twenty million subscribers. Griset, Les révolutions de la communication, 19-20.

54. F. 3527, op. 8, d. 55, l. 58, RGAE, Moscow.

55. Ibid., ll. 32 and 58.

56. Spatial and social inequalities were a fundamental characteristic of the Soviet model of development: this can be witnessed in the realm of food supplies and, more broadly, distribution, as well as in the policies of control and repression carried out through the passport system. See: Osokina, Elena, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia, 1927-1941 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001)Google Scholar; Hessler, Julie, A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Moine, , “Le système des passeports à l’époque stalinienne. De la purge des grandes villes au morcellement du territoire, 1932-1953,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 50, no. 1 (2003): 145–69 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. F. 3527, op. 8, d. 55, l. 6, RGAE, Moscow.

58. Ibid., ll. 4-5. On the disparities between Moscow neighborhoods in the thirties, see Essaïan, Élisabeth, “ Kvartal : création d’une nouvelle forme urbaine et d’un nouvel usage d’habitat collectif,” in Comment vivre ensemble. Prototypes of Idiorrhythmical Conglomerates and Shared Spaces, eds. Viganò, Paola and Pellegrini, Paola (Venice: Officina edizioni, 2006), 37–55 Google Scholar; and Moine, Nathalie, “Pouvoir bolchevique et classes populaires : la mesure de privation de droits civiques à Moscou au tournant des années 1930,” Cahiers de l’IHTP 35 (1996): 141–59 Google Scholar.

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60. On the plan to rebuild Moscow, see Essaïan, Élisabeth and Pozner, Valérie, “La reconstruction de Moscou, 1935-1940,” Le Moniteur architecture 162 (2006): 98–103 Google Scholar.

61. F. 3527, op. 8, d. 55, ll. 3-4, RGAE, Moscow.

62. Ibid., l. 12.

63. On actants, see Akrich, Madeleine, Callon, Michel, and Latour, Bruno, Sociologie de la traduction. Textes fondateurs (Paris: École des Mines, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64. F. 3527, op. 8, d. 55, l. 5, RGAE, Moscow.

65. Ibid., l. 6.

66. See the various documents relating to the wiretapping of elites in the archives of the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii): f. 89, per. 18, d. 27, l. 1; d. 42, ll. 1-17; d. 49, l. 1; d. 114, ll. 1-13; per. 37, d. 44, ll. 1-3; d. 42, ll. 1-5; f. 5, op. 30, d. 412, ll. 18-21.

67. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 1576, l. 3, RGAE, Moscow.

68. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 722, l. 3, RGAE, Moscow.

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70. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 1576, ll. 27-28, RGAE, Moscow.

71. Ibid., ll. 4-6.

72. Ibid., l. 29.

73. On evacuees and their social relations, see Manley, Rebecca, To the Tashkent Station: Evacuation and Survival in the Soviet Union at War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

74. F. 3527, op. 7, d. 849, l. 38, RGAE, Moscow.

75. On the 1946-1947 famine in the Soviet Union, which was caused by cereal exports (among other reasons), see Zima, Veniamin F., Golod v SSSR 1946-1947 godov: proiskhozhdenie i posledstviia (Moscow: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1996)Google Scholar.

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77. Ibid., ll. 2-3.

78. Ibid., l. 3. The purpose of the reform was to reduce the sums of money the Soviets had accumulated during World War II. As a result they were divided by three, falling from 43.6 to 14 billion rubles: see Popov, Vasily P., Èkonomicheskaia politika Sovetskogo gosudarstva. 1946-1953 gg. (Moscow/Tambov: TGTU, 2000)Google Scholar.

79. F. 3527, op. 7, d. 849, l. 9, RGAE, Moscow.

80. Ibid., ll. 29-30.

81. Ibid., l. 35.

82. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 2050, l. 34, RGAE, Moscow.

83. Ibid., ll. 196-197.

84. Ibid., ll. 24, 33, and 196.

85. On worksites, free workers crossed paths with Gulag prisoners, among whom critical opinions were often widespread: see Werth, Nicolas, “Déplacés spéciaux et ‘colons de travail’ dans la société stalinienne,” Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 54, no. 2 (1997): 34–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

86. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 2050, ll. 196-197, RGAE, Moscow.

87. Ibid., l. 149.

88. Ibid., l. 148.

89. Ibid., ll. 1-3, 6, 10 and 143-146.

90. Ibid., l. 148.

91. V. Eristov (chief engineer of the Sredasgidrostroi), “Stalinskii plan pokoreniia Karakumov—v deistvii,” Izvestiia, September 12, 1951; F. 3527, op. 4, d. 2050, ll. 1-3, 6, 10, and 143-146, RGAE, Moscow.

92. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 711, l. 2, RGAE, Moscow.

93. Ibid., l. 40.

94. Ibid., ll. 35, 37 and 40-41.

95. Ibid., l. 42.

96. Ibid., l. 41.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid., l. 42.

99. Ibid., l. 43.

100. Ibid., l. 41.

101. Ibid., l. 42.

102. Ibid., l. 37.

103. Ibid., ll. 36-38.

104. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 757, ll. 2-3, RGAE, Moscow.

105. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 711, ll. 111v and 112v, RGAE, Moscow.

106. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 943, l. 18, RGAE, Moscow.

107. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 2497a, l. 53, RGAE, Moscow.

108. Ibid.

109. Ibid., l. 54.

110. F. 3527, op. 4, d. 2497a, l. 55, RGAE, Moscow.

111. Ibid.

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