Abstract

The article attempts to interpret an important type of mass sources — letters “to the authorities” — from the standpoint of the new institutional history, based on the assumption that prospects for society’s development depend on the quality of the institutional system. Several concepts of neo-institutionalism, such as information asymmetry, the propensity of individual subjects for opportunistic behavior, the principal-agent problem, are used to analyze public attitudes toward the Soviet bureaucracy in the 1920s — early 1930s. The information asymmetry was dual, as each participant in the interaction within the “authorities–people” system tried to use it to promote their interests and achieve their goals. The article analyzes the patterns of behavior of the Soviet officials and of ordinary citizens on the basis of letters “to the authorities”. Those patterns were generated by the desire to benefit from the asymmetry of information. The opportunism of the subjects of social interactions is viewed from different angles, inter alia the negative attitude of citizens towards the opportunism of grassroots nomenclature figures who supposedly sabotaged the “proper” party policy in general. The principal-agent problem is considered in the context of the evolution of the Soviet political system. The state, due to the specifics of its political organization, strove for all-encompassing control and the dismantling of social compromises. This was most clearly manifested in the process of the curtailment of the NEP, which in itself was a model whose functioning was based on numerous compromises: between the city and the country, the Communist Party and the “specialists”, the wealthy peasants, NEPmen, and other population groups. Society responded to the breakdown of the system of compromises with high incidence of opportunistic behavior: overt and covert religious practices, hiding their property and income from taxation, violation of prescribed norms of behavior, low labor discipline, direct resistance to acts of violence by the authorities, etc. Opportunism (both malicious and non-malicious) in the Soviet system of relations of domination and subordination manifested itself everywhere, and citizens recorded its manifestations in letters.

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