I’m sorry to interrupt your flight of fancy there, but the word "proletariat" came from me and not the people writing letters to Tarkovsky (as someone from Eastern Europe of a certain generation, I’m as likely to reach for that word to describe people in highly menial jobs as, say, “working class”, but then again nearly everyone in the USSR was working class).
I would suggest watching the film before furthering speculating about it. That newsreel footage and the nonlinear way it is presented is far more likely to challenge viewers than arouse any patriotic or otherwise enthusiastic sentiments.
> nearly everyone in the USSR was working class
For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat and not communist.
> I would suggest watching the film
The first few paragraphs on how the movie is about a person remembering important episodes of his life got me curious and gave me Butterfly Effect vibes (good), but reading further down I started getting Mulholland Drives vibes (not good).
"For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin but I haven’t checked this thoroughly, divided the proletariat into rural proletarians (in Russian селские пролетарии) and urban proletarians (городские пролетарии). In any event, in colloquial contexts the word serves handily to refer to a life of rather menial trudging wherever it’s lived.
Of course Lenin had an interest in selling the idea that everyone is actually proletariat. In reality by Marx's definition, proletariat are those who don't own the means of production (and are therefore stuck in earning by selling their labour), whereas farmers at least until the NEP died, mostly owned their own farms which means they did own the means of their production, which is also why farmers, or virtually everyone in the USSR outside the cities hated the communists.
But I got your point.
Your comment is incredibly uninformed (and the third such in a row). Whole rural areas of European Russia went over to the Bolsheviks, and this has been thoroughly documented in countless diaries, letters, memoirs, and literature – it’s something that anyone familiar with, say, Volga–Kama areal studies is well aware of (just as one is well aware that, alas, many of the same rural people ecstatic at new opportunities in the wake of 1917, were shot under Stalin in 1933–1937). In spite of serfdom having been abolished under Alexander II, or having never been enforced at all in some areas, smallholders regularly found themselves falling into debt to powerful rural magnates, and exploited through those magnates’ “company stores”. The Bolsheviks’ depiction of a “rural proletariat” oppressed by a “rural bourgeoisie”, however unorthodox it might have been compared to Marx, proved easy for rural people to sympathize with.
> nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat and not communist
This statement has a number of flaws.
> nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer
True during the early years, but after WW2 changed rapidly (in line with the West). [1] shows rural population percentage dropped from 67% in 1939 to 56% in 1956, and it rapidly decreased after that. [2] is female specific but by 1975 under 1/3 were working in agriculture.
In addition, everyone other than the actual owner of the land was considered "The Agricultural Proletariat". Engels wrote [3] about this in 1845 well before the establishment of the Soviet Union.
> so not proletariat
As seen above, this doesn't follow especially after the establishment of collective farming where everyone were considered workers.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/1233891
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_working_class#Women
[3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-w...