@inbook{536642e3b27241bb91b690fac6f089bf,
title = "Petitioning the Soviet {\textquoteleft}President{\textquoteright}: Mikhail Kalinin{\textquoteright}s Reception Office, 1919–1946",
abstract = "The {\textquoteleft}Priemnaia{\textquoteright} of Mikhail Kalinin, the Soviet Union{\textquoteright}s official head of state (1919–46), was the most important central department for receiving petitions to the government. It received millions of written petitions and was inundated with khodoki – petitioners in person. The Priemnaia{\textquoteright}s petitioning mechanism was central to {\textquoteleft}Soviet democracy{\textquoteright}, inherited from tsarist political culture but reimagined as a {\textquoteleft}living link{\textquoteright} to public concerns. Citizens embraced the sending of individual petitions as a major avenue of engagement with authorities – the lifeblood of relations between government and governed. Petitions were crucial to communication and accountability being seen to occur without multiparty elections and other outlets to express the popular mood; they represented a mood barometer for a government eager to gather and {\textquoteleft}manage{\textquoteright} such information. Its display of responsiveness also cultivated a sense of legitimacy and was a tool to police the system{\textquoteright}s functioning at the local level in this vast state, where many petitions concerned abuses by local officials. Altogether, petitioning was crucial in consolidating Soviet power and was a pressure valve for the system over the longer term. Petitions were important in legitimating new and, as here, revolutionary regimes, providing a mechanism, albeit constrained, for the political expression of citizens in polities without democratic elections.",
author = "Lara Douds",
year = "2024",
month = jun,
day = "20",
doi = "10.5871/bacad/9780197267721.003.0019",
language = "English",
isbn = "9780197267721",
series = "Proceedings of the British Academy",
publisher = "Oxford University Press",
pages = "284–302",
editor = "Richard Huzzey and Maartje Janse and Henry Miller and Joris Oddens and Brodie Waddell",
booktitle = "Petitions and Petitioning in Europe and North America",
address = "United Kingdom",
}