The article examines the process of changing the semantic field of the units of borrowed political vocabulary in peasant environment in the 1920s. The pair "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" sets the example of transforming the ideological component of political concepts under the influence of extralinguistic factors. Peasants’ "letters to power" are of particular interest for studying the flexibility of the semantics of political vocabulary in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia, since the peasants were the most illiterate and politically unaware group of the population. The way the peasants used the new borrowed political vocabulary is viewed as the basic model of how the common people acquired the essentials of the Soviet "newspeak".