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RésuméAprès leur arrivée au pouvoir en octobre 1917, les bolcheviks durent décider des usages à faire des outils de communication, tels que la poste, le télégraphe et le téléphone. Malgré la mise en scène de la vision sociale du progrès technique, la quête des outils de communications par les bolcheviks fut soumise avant tout à l’objectif de conserver le pouvoir et de garder le territoire sous contrôle. Les premières années du régime soviétique se distinguèrent par l’accaparement des instruments de télécommunication. La nécessité de communiquer chez les individus ne fut reconnue que dans la mesure où elle pouvait garantir la victoire des bolcheviks dans la guerre civile. Lors du passage du communisme de guerre à la nouvelle politique économique, les changements dans les conditions d’accès des administrations et des individus aux services de communication modifièrent les priorités d’usage de ces outils. Les dirigeants locaux éprouvèrent des difficultés pour accepter un horizon d’égalité avec les citoyens ordinaires, pour céder leurs prérogatives dans le droit d’accès au téléphone et pour envisager celui-ci comme un instrument de communication sociale.

Bolsheviks inherited from the Tsarist empire not only communication technologies and lines, but also the procedures of conquering territories that consisted in extending and reconstructing postal, telephone and telegraph networks. Their efforts to establish communication network that spread out from the center to the peripheries indicate the tendency for centralization of power that appeared from the very beginning of the regime.Despite the discursive promotion of social utility of technological progress, Bolsheviks needed communication tools first of all to keep power in their hands and to establish control over the country. The first years of the Soviet regime were characterized by the complete usurpation of telecommunications by the authorities. The social needs to communicate were recognized as far as they helped Bolsheviks to win a victory in the civil war. The decree authorizing free mailing services was followed by the restrictions concerning ordinary individuals’ access to telegraph and telephone. The differential access to telecommunications contributed to the construction of the hierarchical relationships inside the power apparatus.The implementation of the services for a fee produced a certain impact on the local leaders that felt their authority to fall down. In result, they reinforced their intimidation techniques directed against communication services’ employees in order to maintain their dominant position. The material tools of communication were perceived as instruments to exercise power, to affirm one’s position in the administrative pyramid. The local leaders had some difficulties to concede their prerogatives as for the access to telephone and to think this communication tool as a mean to constitute a communicating society.Disaccords appeared between the actors who were placed in an unequal situation determined by the professional functions they exercised. At first glance, these were the communication services’ employees who, in the name of the rules of access to communication services, contested the privileges that the local leaders misappropriated. But after all, these employees defended the principles of justice such as defined by the central authorities. In this way they contributed to preserve vertical relations of domination, to guarantee the obedience of the local leaders vis-à-vis the central power. Though indirectly they took part in applying the techniques of power that were aimed to control the territory and population.