Gleb Tsipursky: "As a Citizen, I Cannot Ignore These Facts"

“As a Citizen, I Cannot Ignore These Facts”. Whistleblowing in the Khrushchev Era

This article investigates the Soviet political practice of whistleblowing in which the federal government called on the populace to inform on instances of local corruption, and considers to what extent this phenomenon belongs within the category of “weapon of the weak.” Soviet newspapers frequently published articles depicting how honest, ordinary citizens selflessly informed the authorities in Moscow of abuses of power in the periphery, resulting in the state intervening to remove all corruption. Utilizing archival documents from the post-Stalin years, my essay complicates this idealized image. It makes the argument that letter-authors strove to write themselves into the press depiction of model whistleblowers, while in reality many sent their missives for private reasons, and often used deceptive techniques, illustrating how individuals utilized official rhetoric to achieve personal goals that contradicted state interests. Moreover, officials wrote a large proportion of the whistleblowing letters – which were meant as “weapons of the weak” for subaltern, ordinary citizens – in their pursuit of bureaucratic disputes, or “Soviet office politics.” This article suggests that these bureaucrats, possessing in-depth knowledge of the workings of Soviet officialdom, wrote more effective letters than ordinary citizens. This aspect of whistleblowing complicates the depiction of such denunciations of corruption as “weapons of the weak” in the scholarship on Soviet complaint practices, and, more broadly, illuminates certain weaknesses in the concept of such “weapons,” indicating the need to examine more thoroughly who exactly used these tools and for what purposes. Finally, the article examines the substantive gap between newspaper claims on the frequency and extent of government investigations into whistleblowing and the reality on the ground, which suggests that whistleblowing served the purposes of propaganda as much as removing corruption.

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