Petitioning the Soviet ‘President’: Mikhail Kalinin’s Reception Office, 1919–1946

The ‘Priemnaia’ of Mikhail Kalinin, the Soviet Union’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’s petitioning mechanism was central to ‘Soviet democracy’, inherited from tsarist political culture but reimagined as a ‘living link’ 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 ‘manage’ such information. Its display of responsiveness also cultivated a sense of legitimacy and was a tool to police the system’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.