ABSTRACT

Official representations of workers’ relations with the Communist Party in the 1920s portray unity, optimism, and revolutionary elan. The Bolsheviks’ claim to legitimacy was based on their assumed role as the workers’ vanguard, leading the country to socialism. Anything that failed to conform to the ideal was labeled counterrevolutionary agitation by definition. This led to interesting semantic games. Since there was not supposed to be labor unrest in a country of the victorious proletariat, strikes had to be represented as something else, most often as “counterrevolutionary provocations” of “hidden Mensheviks,” White Guards, or class enemies. In confidential discourse, however, a different story emerges of workers’ attitudes to NEP, the party, and socialism. The CC sent special teams to investigate troublesome situations. More steady and outspoken was the GPU. It systematically recorded protests and referred to social phenomena with surprising frankness. Strikes were referred to as strikes. Top Bolshevik leaders had to live bipolar lives between their two realities-the one represented in the official media, and the other presented in top-secret reports. Communication between the CC and the provinces, and between the CC and the GPU, is a multilayered discourse on workers’ lives, attitudes, and responses to party policy. The incongruity between propaganda representation and social reality highlights the evolution of Bolshevik labeling, the process of workers’ estrangement from the party, and the causes for the demise of NEP in industry.