‘I am so anxiously sorry that I cannot show you in any way my gratitude, my desire to be of any use to you’, closed one letter from E.V. Krasnova in Southern Ukraine, in response to Molotov’s intervention in her pension application due to her late husband’s revolutionary merits. Krasnova’s letter can be read as an attempt to substantiate her gratitude, mitigating her distance from Molotov by traversing distance and rank. Critical to Soviet women’s sense of emotional ‘security’, (Tikhomirov, 2013), this paper contends that letters constituted vessels for the ‘productive entanglements’ by which Soviet people negotiated the self, feeling, belonging in dialogue with Soviet power, as the intensification of social and political control reached crescendo. These negotiations were deeply gendered, as women formulated and concretized their history and memory through discursive forms of women’s emancipation, education, and revolution.