Mass sentiment in the Urals during the NEP years (1922-1928)

The study of mass sentiment is relevant to understand the mentality of different social strata in the post-revolutionary period. The sentiments of the population of the Ural region during the NEP period has not received a comprehensive historiographical investigation to date. Recently published sources from the 1920s allows us to obtain new results in its study. This paper studies the political and socio-economic sentiments of workers, peasants, Red Army soldiers, civil servants, intellectuals, clergymen, students, and representatives of anti-Soviet parties and groups of the Urals in the period 1922-1928. The source of the study is OGPU information materials published from 2001 to 2017. The interdisciplinary concept of a new social history is the theoretical basis of the work. Due to the formalization of the source materials, content analysis was applied. The results are a quantitative and qualitative description of the mass sentiments of eight social groups. Of the 1,554 utterances were identified, 199 were positive, 1,327 were negative, and 28 were neutral. Changes in sentiment over the years is shown, the predominance of socio-economic moods (859 units) over political ones (404) is established.