People's correspondent

People's correspondents are a kind of amateur proletarian journalists who have filed reports from the frontlines about the march toward communism since the early years of the Soviet Union. Originally initiated by Vladimir Lenin as a tool for exposing mismanagement and corruption, several million people worked as people's correspondents in their heyday. At the 17th Party Congress in 1934, Joseph Stalin said there were more than 3 million worker and agriculture correspondents.

The tradition of people's correspondents—including worker correspondents, known as rabkors (for "rabochy korrespondent"), and agriculture correspondents (sometimes called village correspondents), known as selkors (for "selskokhozyaistvenny or selsky korrespondent")—began shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power. In his 1918 article, On the character of our newspapers, Vladimir Lenin urged newspapermen to "expose the unfit" and unmask the "actual malefactors" who disrupted production and political work.

The 8th Party Congress, meeting in March 1919, endorsed the use of worker and agriculture correspondents to monitor the bureaucracy and expose abuse of power. In 1919, Vladimir Lenin instructed the Pravda editorial board to organize a network of regular worker and village correspondents, and by 1926, Leon Trotsky was addressing 580 delegates representing around 500,000 rabkory and selkory at the Third All-Union Congress of Rabkory.

In the years 1923–1924, all high circulation Soviet newspapers were organizing a regular body of worker and agriculture correspondents. These were supposed to be ordinary working people who would write into the newspapers regularly. Officials in the Communist Party hoped that the correspondents would expose corrupt local officials, provide information on popular moods, and help to mobilize opinion behind the Bolshevik regime. They also hoped to use the worker and agriculture correspondents movement as a tool to educate a new worker/peasant intelligentsia. In pursuit of all of these goals Soviet newspaper editors and journalists during the 1920s and 1930s instructed their worker and village correspondents on appropriate themes and language for their letters.

...
Wikipedia