ABSTRACT
20In the shadow of long traditions of petition-writing and the Bolsheviks’ “liquidation of illiteracy” among women, letter-writing was means of manifesting the New Soviet Woman’s historical self. This was critical by 1936, as the intensification of social and political control reached a crescendo. Based on extensive archival research conducted in Russian State Archives and a sample of approximately 650 hitherto unpublished letters to Soviet officials and newspapers, this chapter argues that Soviet women’s sense of civic belonging and emotional “security” was increasingly contingent upon the emotional agency of letters, constituting vessels for the “productive entanglements” by which Soviet people negotiated selves, feelings, and belonging in remote dialogue with Soviet power. Though citizen correspondences have been considered problematic for studies of Soviet experience, this chapter argues that letter-writing was carefully crafted material proof of membership in the Soviet “emotional community,” allowing selves, memories, and feelings to traverse time, space, and status. In the context of practices of communist autobiography, Soviet citizens could textually mediate and convey their emotions, historical memories, and personal histories by adopting the collective experience of liberation through the October Revolution – the Soviet Union’s shared foundational motif – as their own.
