Another cliche.
Patronage, which arose at the height of the Soviet Republic’s struggle for survival, initially took the form of proletarian care by the working class for its protector—the Red Army. In order to feed the Red Army, the Bolsheviks assigned entire regiments and divisions to various factories, which were considered the “patrons” of their regiments and were obliged to supply them with food. With the transition to peaceful construction, it grew into the workers’ concern for the countryside, which lagged behind in cultural development, and as the revolutionary conflagration around the world intensified, it expanded to an international scale.
In one of his last articles, “Pages from a Diary,” V. I. Lenin turned to the question of patronage, highly appraised its significance, emphasizing that “we can and must use our power to truly make the urban worker a conduit of communist ideas among the rural proletariat.”
V. I. Lenin’s article was published in Pravda on January 4, 1923, and just a few days later, on January 10, Pravda reported on the initiative of the workers of the AMO plant, who took patronage over two volosts of the Mozhaisk and Serpukhov uyezds. On January 16, the first patronage society emerged in the Moscow-Narva district of Petrograd. From Moscow and Petrograd the movement spread to all the country’s major industrial centers.
By the end of the recovery period, the activity of patronage societies had assumed a broad scope. Work collectives patronizing villages and volosts not only carried out extensive organizational-economic and political-educational work, but also acted as initiators of the creation of cooperatives, artels, and machine associations; they helped electrify the countryside, acquire tractors and other agricultural machinery. Over three years (1923–1925) the patrons collected among workers and spent on aid to the countryside no less than 5 million rubles. They repaired, equipped, and opened in the countryside hundreds of schools, reading huts, and peasant houses, and at their own expense supported many rural personnel (political education workers, agronomists, feldshers, etc.).