Abstract
In January 1928, L. N. Bondarenko, a village correspondent from the village of Yuzhnyi, Kharkov okrug, described in a letter to Kres’tianskaia Gazeta his pessimism toward the construction of socialism: ‘Our building of socialism is similar to the construction of the Great Wall of China, which took a lot of energy, but made little sense.’ He explained the failure of socialism:
Either socialist theory is utopian and inapplicable to real life, or those people who are preaching about building socialism are unable to put their ideas into action (as I think), or the number of saboteurs and wreckers has multiplied…. Ten years’ experience has demonstrated: socialism is unattainable if it is built by such violent politics by uneducated and corrupt bureaucrats…. People are exploited now not by capitalists and landlords, but by the government, which grabbed all the national resources and mismanaged them without accountability. Incapable of running the country, they blame circumstances allegedly beyond their control.1
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Notes
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© 2013 Olga Velikanova
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Velikanova, O. (2013). The Crisis of Faith: Popular Reaction to the Tenth Anniversary of the October Revolution. In: Popular Perceptions of Soviet Politics in the 1920s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030757_6
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