Authors

Discussion

The ‘Priemnaia’ or Reception Office of Mikhail Kalinin, official head of state of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946 was a crucial central department for the receipt of petitions to the Soviet government. Over the course of 25 years, Kalinin’s Priemnaia received millions of written petitions and was inundated on a daily basis with ‘khodoki’, petitioners in person. The mechanism of petitioning represented by the ‘Priemnaia’ was as a central pillar of Soviet democracy, inherited across the revolutionary divide from paternalistic tsarist political culture but reimagined as a ‘living link’ to public concerns. The practice of sending individual petitions of request or complaint was embraced by Soviet citizens as a major avenue of engagement with the authorities and was the lifeblood of relations between government and governed, a way in which communication and accountability was seen to occur in the absence of multiparty elections and other outlets for expression of popular mood. Indeed, petitions served as a barometer of popular mood for a government eager to gather this kind of information in order to ‘manage’ it. The government's display of responsiveness to requests and complaints was also a means of cultivating a sense of legitimacy and a tool to police the functioning of the system at the local level in this vast and under-administered state where a large proportion of petitions concerned abuses of local officials.