The Rhetorical Construction of Social Classes in the Reports of Stalin's Secret Police

Abstract

Stalin's government received information about the political and economic situation in the countryside through the reports prepared by the security service VChK-OGPU-NKVD. This article reveals that these reports (svodkas in Russian) strain to rhetorically construct a social classification of the peasantry by dividing it into the kulaks (wealthy peasants hostile to Soviet power), the bednyaks (poor peasants supporting Soviet power), and the serednyaks (peasants of average means with uncertain attitudes to the regime). The svodkas persuaded their audience-the secret police and the governments-of the reality of this tripartite classification. This persuasion derived from their massiveness, secretiveness, and mixture of ideological and technical language. Since these conditions inhere in modern governmental, technical, and scientific discourse, the writers for these fields should be aware that when they engage in constructing order through classification, they face temptations of what Kenneth Burke calls rhetoric of hierarchy with its scapegoat principle.Following the October revolution of 1917, the newly founded Soviet Russia's secret police VChK (later to become OGPU, then NKVD, and still later KGB) instituted a department for collecting information about political moods and actions all over the country. This information trickled up from local informers, to regional ChK agents, then to the central VChK office, and finally to the political 261 Ó 2013, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.