ABSTRACT
The popular discussion of the draft Constitution was supposed to unite the country in the pursuit of a common goal: the construction of socialism. What it succeeded in doing, however, was highlighting fractures in Soviet society and the dissonance between the central leadership’s state-building goals and the citizens’ local and personal focus. In the Kirov region, the popular responses reflected the socioeconomic divisions of the region, with most of the suggestions coming from rural inhabitants and focusing on issues that concerned them. Their suggestions demonstrated both the continuity between rural concerns in the pre-revolutionary period and under Soviet rule and served to highlight the changes in the mentality that 20 years of Soviet power had wrought. However, the goals of Kirov’s primarily rural inhabitants stand in sharp contrast with the more publicized suggestions made by the better-educated and more-integrated urban dwellers who were much more likely to embrace the central leadership’s state-building narrative than their rural counterparts. The popular discussion of the draft Constitution revealed that the heavily promoted and publicized state-building goals of the central party and state leadership were internalized by only a small stratum of citizens, most of whom were members of the urban and working elite, while the vast, rural majority of the population co-opted and used official language to promote their own local and personal aims.
