Слухи и настроения среди населения Мурманского округа в конце 1920-х — первой половине 1930-х годов
The Rumors and Moods of the Murmansk Region’s Population in the Late 1920s and the First Half of the 1930s

Summary/Abstract: The process of industrial development of the Kola Peninsula at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s often appears as a collective and conscious desire of the population of the Murmansk District to implement tasks of a national nature. Within the framework of the established concept, researchers of the Soviet period, partly guided by ideological dogmas and censorship restrictions, left out of the equation the problem of citizens’ attitudes to the policies pursued by the USSR leadership. The article attempts for the first time to address the rumors and sentiments of residents of the Murmansk District as an object of historical research based on a regional source base. Rumors circulating among workers and employees, special settlers and the intelligentsia who were engaged in the construction of industrial enterprises and the construction of new settlements in the tundra appear to be a communicative phenomenon deserving separate analysis. The apparent monolithic nature of public sentiment among the majority of Soviet citizens at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, as reflected in the official position of the state of that period, often turns out to be a much more complex phenomenon. Under the conditions of comprehensive control by the Soviet state and its agencies, rumors, being a separate phenomenon, acted as a significant channel for transmitting information among the population. Regional features associated with the border location of the district and the memory of the events of the intervention could be superimposed on allUnion rumors, as in the case of expectations of the “quick end of Soviet power” due to the supposed international conflict. The flows of hired workers arriving in the region, special settlers being moved, the presence of a seaport that served as a source for the penetration of information from abroad, formed a specific communicative space.

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