Authors

Discussion

Soviet authorities and citizens established public letter writing as a cornerstone of statecraft shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, as scholars have detailed. This paper examines letter writing in the late Soviet period during Gorbachev’s Perestroika. It looks specifically at how public letter writing from citizens to delegates functioned during the First USSR Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989. The archival materials for this project include the thousands of letters sent to Andrei Sakharov, whose collection was particularly well preserved, and other delegates, as well as the archive of the Congress itself. In contrast to scholarship that sees Gorbachev’s reforms and the Congress system as a departure from Soviet politics, this paper suggests that certain Soviet political traditions profoundly shaped the concept and practice of late Soviet democracy.