LETTERS TO THE EDITORIAL BOARD TO THE SOVIET REGIONAL PRESS IN 1985–1991 AS A FORM OF HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL ACTIVISM (ON THE MATERIALS OF THE PERM REGION)

Abstract

The article considers “letters to the editors” addressed to the regional Soviet newspapers in 1985–1991as a kind of “letters to the authorities” and an important channel for this type of social and political communication. In the second half of the 1980s, the scale of the epistolary activities of Soviet citizens increased significantly. The departments of letters in central and local newspapers and magazines “drowned” in the flow of letters written on a wide range of issues – from the current political agenda to personal biographies of newspaper readers. History, the past, historical and cultural heritage have become a distinctive feature of the “letters to the editor” during perestroika. The paper focuses on a complex of unpublished written sources – letters from readers to the editorial office of the popular newspapers Molodaya Gvardiya and Vechernyaya Perm, published in the capital of the Perm region. The data of the local press are supplemented by the archival files of the all-Union weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta. The study shows that letters to the editor of the period under research represent the hierarchical nature of communication between readers and the editors from the bottom up, demonstrate the inequality of the potentials of the sender and recipient of letters. Letters to the editor often were often written according to the formats that had developed in the previous decades of Soviet history. On the other hand, the sources make it possible to reveal the discursive features of the letters of the perestroika era in terms of composition, rhetorical devices and themes. Letters to the editor are interpreted as one of the channels for promoting local historical and cultural initiatives, activism on issues of local identity, etc.