Experiencing Russia's Civil War by Donald J. Raleigh

Author:Donald J. Raleigh [Raleigh, Donald J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-05-11T07:00:00+00:00

The Revolutionary Press Weapon

The soviet’s Izvestiia remained the most important means for disseminating the party’s public face and its master fiction. Yet paper shortages affected Izvestiia’s format and kept its press run woefully small – approximately 10,000 –throughout the Civil War. Posting the paper at 100 places in the city, the Soviet canceled personal subscriptions in order to send copies to volost soviets and army units. There was another reason for the paper’s deterioration: the number of skilled printers in Saratov had declined precipitously, and young, poorly trained workers replaced them.70 In an effort to win over the peasantry in late 1920, the party launched a new paper, Sovetskaia derevnia (The Soviet Village), featuring articles on the reconstruction of the rural economy and cultural change.

By mid-1918 Izvestiia had already become transformed into a sanitized publication depicting with hostility anyone that did not back Soviet power. Seeking to promote class identity, and struggle, in accessible language, Izvestiia’s utopian vision provided readers a heretical subversion of the social world to counter the ordinary one, thereby helping to bring about what it depicted.71 News about the transactions of the soviet disappeared from its pages, mirroring the plenum’s loss of power, which shifted to the executive committee. Reflecting party initiatives and priorities, “campaigns” were showcased. Izvestiia experimented with many rhetorical devices that would become standard features of the Soviet press such as depicting the party’s interests as shared by the working class, peasantry, and Red Army soldiers as a whole.

The Bolsheviks quickly learned that it costs money to establish hegemony. In 1919, when there were no resources to put out both Izvestiia and the party paper, Sotsial-demokrat, renamed Krasnaia gazeta in 1918, the latter was “temporarily” dropped; it never appeared again for the duration of the Civil War. This decision also reflected the political realities of an emerging party-state, as the newspaper set the parameters of public discussion – and criticism –of Soviet power. For instance, an editorial in July 1919 complained that the paper carried virtually nothing about “that which is going on under our noses,” and acknowledged that party newspapers were unpopular. To compensate for this, Soviet leaders instituted a flawed program of “everyone a correspondent” whereby “the worker himself and the peasant himself must be both reader and writer.”72 In early 1921, Izvestiia gave no indication that serious troubles lay ahead, except for the concern it now lavished on the working class. Following disturbances against Soviet power, the anxious paper spotlighted world revolution and steps taken to improve the lot of workers and to restore agriculture. No longer distributed free of charge, it went only to paid subscribers.

Similar metamorphoses came to the uezd papers, which changed titles frequently, mirroring the decline of the soviets and rise of the executive committees, and later, the party’s growing solicitousness toward the peasantry. In 1919 the papers began to publish decrees, but provided little coverage of local government, feeding readers a monotonous diet of international revolution. The papers also printed “conversion” tales, such as the

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