Uprooting Otherness: Bolshevik Attempts to Refashion Rural Russia via the Reading Rooms of the 1920s

negramotnost'! ), most commonly known by its initials, ODN.2 Once the literacy campaign moved into the countryside, Kurskaia and her workers and volunteers enlisted the aid of rural reading rooms (izbachital'nia) and their directors, known as izbachi. This essay focuses on the goals established for the reading rooms, and on how the rooms' clientele, the Russian peasantry, used the reading rooms for its own ends. A pattern of peasant adaptation and accommodation, of resistance or acceptance, depending on the utility of the proposed institution, program, or policy has a long tradition in Russian history.3 The peasantry before and after the revolutions of 1917 accepted or rejected education on their own terms.4 The peasantry repeated this obstruction of other Bolshevik institutions and goals such as the military and the deflation of religion's influence, as well as adapting Orthodoxy to popular religious beliefs.5 Recently Sheila Fitzpatrick has shown that peasant resistance to change did not end with the New Economic Policy (NEP) era.6 The fundamental purpose of the reading room was to introduce the Russian peasantry to the principles of the Bolshevik party, to the governing methods of the Soviet state, and to modern methods of agriculture. Much as there was a "soft line" taken toward intellectuals during most of the 1920s, the institution of the reading room can be seen as a benign-but not passive-attempt on the part of the Communist Party to impose its values and programs on the rural population.7 The Bolsheviks wanted to eradicate the peasantry's otherness; that is, the party wanted to refashion the rural population of Russia to reflect the world view of the new ruling body in Russia.8 At times, the goals of Cheka likbez and the goals of the peasantry dovetailed; at other times, those goals diverged. The Russian peasantry was very adept at accepting a Bolshevik institution on the peasantry's terms and adapting it to its own agenda. This peasant ability to adapt an institution, in this case the reading room, to its own uses effectively thwarted, at least during the 1920s, the Bolshevik attempt to create a "propaganda state. " I. BOLSHEVIK ASPIRATIONS AND FRUSTRATIONS: Bolshevik aspirations for the reading rooms naturally played an important role in forming the party's perceptions of how the reading room experiment was working. At the Twelfth Party Congress Stalin stated that the loss to Poland was a "turning point" at which time "our policy became not offensive, but defensive. " The Soviet Union, Stalin believed, now had to present to the outside world a population that was firmly behind the policies of the Bolshevik party. Stalin maintained that it was therefore necessary "to make contact with the peasant home front," that is, with the majority of the Russian people; a little more than a year later, Zinoviev exhorted the party to turn its attention to rural Russia.9 The reading room would be a focal point of this contact, of this attention. In a report presented to the Thirteenth Party Congress, Nadezhda Krupskaia, head of Glavpolitprosvet, laid out the goals of the reading rooms, which focused on agricultural reference work, discussion circles, political education, and the elimination of illiteracy.10 Central to the party's task of establishing a link between itself and the Russian peasantry was the village party cell, which Moscow expected to be the "center of social-political life" at the local level.11 The party cell had the duty of carrying out directives from higher up and of maintaining continuity between center and locality. Frequently, though, local party cells ignored decrees or were simply not aware of them. The loose ties that the political education (politprosvet) workers maintained with the cells at the village level further exacerbated the problem of poor party control. For example, if the party cell members were cognizant of the latest decree, the politprosvet worker still stood a good chance of not knowing about it. …