Новая экономическая политика в Сибири и письма во власть
New Economic Policy in Siberia and Letters to Authorities

Summary/Abstract: The article describes the collection of documents “Letters to the Authorities in the Years of the New Economic Policy”, prepared by Novosibirsk historians and dedicated to the New Economic Policy in Siberia. Researchers extracted from various archives letters, statements, complaints, and petitions from residents of cities and villages sent to various government structures. These documents make it possible to more fully and adequately characterize the state of society and the authorities in Siberia, to seek the presence or absence of dialogue between them, and to assess the degree of political adaptation of various social strata to the Soviet regime in the 1920s. At the same time, the documents make it possible to identify problems that the population regularly faced and to see reactions of the authorities to the changing mood of society. The new documents provide an opportunity for an in-depth study of a number of problems facing the country as a whole and its individual regions. These include labor desertion, which intensified at the time of the transition of Soviet Russia from war communism to the new economic policy; the “Chinese question”, which for a number of reasons had its own specificity precisely on the territory of Siberia; party purges; and the authorities’ methods for dealing with political opponents. The inner-party struggle of the 1920s, which is simplified in the literature, deserves special elaboration. Research in this direction will make it possible to determine the internal structure of opposition groups, their numbers, and forms of political struggle.

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