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Party and Purge in Smolensk: 1933–1937

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

J. Arch Getty
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Slavic Review , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , Spring 1983 , pp. 60 - 79
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1983

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References

1. The memoir literature is vast. Representatives include Alexander, Weissberg, The Accused (New York, 1951)Google Scholar; Alexander, Barmine, One Who Survived (New York, 1945)Google Scholar; Eugenia, Ginzburg, Into the Whirlwind (London, 1967)Google Scholar; and Gorbatov, A. V., Years Off My Life (London, 1964)Google Scholar. The three most important works on the Great Purge period are based almost entirely on literary sources: Robert, Conquest, The Great Terror (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; and Roy, Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1971 Google Scholar). From the point of view of historical source criticism, memoir sources have certain inherent limitations regardless of the period they describe. Notwithstanding such standard questions as authenticity, bias, and point of view, we should note that few Soviet memoir writers were so highly placed as to be able to describe the circle of high politics with its rivalries and intrigues. Aside from the occasional prison rumor or corridor whisper, memoir writers offer little in the way of empirical data on the political infighting of the time. These writers were caught up as victims of the horrible process and saw the cataclysm from below. Among those in a position to know more, problems of reliability and contradiction make evaluation and judgment of sources difficult. For example, NKVD defector Alexander Orlov assures us that Stalin procured the murder of Kirov, while a memoir by an underground oppositionist in Leningrad claims that the killing was indeed the work of the opposition. Orlov also asserts that Stalin framed Tukhachevskii and the generals, while A. Svetlanin (who was serving in the Far Eastern Red Army) describes an actual anti-Stalin military conspiracy. See Alexander, Orlov, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes (London, 1954)Google Scholar; Grigori, Tokaev, Betrayal of an Ideal (Bloomington, Ind., 1955 Google Scholar); A., Svetlanin, Dal'nevostochnyi zagovor (Frankfurt/Main, 1953 Google Scholar). It is easy to mistake repetition of stories for confirmation and nearly impossible to separate hearsay from fact and firsthand knowledge from gossip in a field with no tradition of source criticism. The memoir literature provides precious insight into the subjective aspects of being purged but ultimately cannot explain the politics of terror.

2. The Smolensk Archives were captured from the Soviets by the German army in 1941, and seized by the U.S. army in 1945. They contain the records of the party organizations of the Western Region (oblast’) from 1917 to 1939 and comprise the only available archival source for the study of party history. The Archives are available as National Archives Microfilm Publication #T87. There is a Guide to the Records of the Smolensk Oblast of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1917-1941, National Archives and Record Service (Washington, D.C., 1980). Fainsod, Merle wrote the classic Smolensk Under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, Mass., 1958 Google Scholar) using the Smolensk files. Smolensk Archive files carry the prefixes WKP, RS, or a number. Below, numbered files will be preceded by the word “File.” *s^

3. Merle, Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (Cambridge, Mass., 1953 Google Scholar), and Smolensk, pp. 12, 85, 448-51. It is interesting that, for their own reasons, Stalinist works on party history agree that (he party was monolithic.

4. The conflict between the center and the provinces was first noted by Fainsod, but like other political and social conflicts of the 1930s it has received little attention in recent decades. See Fainsod, Smolensk, especially chapters 2-3.

5. Fainsod, Smolensk, pp. 263, 278.

6. WKP313, pp. 130-31; WKP 385, pp. 352-68.

7. In 1928, there was one peasant party member for each 125 rural households and one party cell for every four villages. Davies, R. W., The Socialist Offensive: The Collectivization of Soviet Agriculture, 1929-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Fainsod, Smolensk, pp. 284, 288. Information for 1937-38 is in Savinov, M, “Likvidatsiia posledstvii trotskistsko-bukharinskogo vreditel'stva” Partiinoe stroitel'stvo, no. 14, July 15, 1938, p. 23Google Scholar (hereafter PS).

9. WKP 101, passim; WKP 323, p. 156; WKP 324, pp. 1-2. Party membership today comprises about 9 percent of the population. Hough, Jerry and Fainsod, Merle, How the Soviet Union is Governed (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 303 Google Scholar.

10. See Fainsod, Smolensk, chapter 10, for examples.

11. XVII s“ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b) 26 ianvaria-10 fevralia 1934 g.: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), p. 555.

12. Ibid., p. 288.

13. T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the USSR, 1917-1967 (Princeton, N.J., 1968), p. 204.

14. Ibid., p. 52.

15. See KPSS v rezoliutsiakh i resheniiakh s“ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, 1898- 1970 gg., 8th ed. (Moscow, 1970-), 5:89.

16. A. Shil'man, “Tekushchie voprosy partiinoi raboty,” PS, nos. 19-20, November 1935, pp. 50-51 discussed this question. Shil'man was an obkom secretary in Smolensk.

17. File 116ll54e, pp. 53-54. The information was contained in an informational letter from the Central Committee dated July 11, 1935.

18. Ibid., p. 24.

19. WKP 385, pp. 185-88, WKP 89, pp. 63-64. For hundreds of examples see File 116/154e, pp. 46-49 and 79-84.

20. The texture of the Smolensk Archive hardly suggests strong bureaucratic “controls.“ Important records were kept on torn bits of paper, minutes were taken on slips resembling paper bags — when they were taken at all. Papers are jammed into files at random and some files consist of chance collections of records and notes unrelated to one another in any way. Few party organizations used typewriters and important records were scrawled in longhand.

21. File 1161154e, p. 45.

22. Ibid., p. 52.

23. In 1935, many party secretaries in the Smolensk city party organization did not know the identities of party workers under them. See, for example, WKP 384, pp. 28, 46, 54, 69.

24. File 116/154e, pp. 51-52.

25. For examples see WKP 361.

26. Fainsod regarded this activity as a political witch hunt for oppositionists. The archives show, however, that the party was interested in checking references for previous infractions of all kinds: former criminal convictions, drunkenness, and disciplinary infractions as well as oppositional activity which had previously resulted in expulsion were checked.

27. Personnel disputes between lower and higher party bodies were common in the 1930s. They became even more frequent in 1937 when, as part of a campaign initiated by Stalin, lower party committees rebelled against their superiors and asserted their right to choose their own leaders. See Fainsod, Smolensk, pp. 134-37 for an example of a personnel dispute between a lower and higher party body. Fainsod recognized that local committees often proposed their own leaders subject only to confirmation (rather than selection) by the Central Committee. See also Shil'man's letter to Belyi in WKP 40, p. 3. The Central Committee personnel department intervened only to block the appointment of inexperienced or unreliable candidates. •

28. File 116/154e, p. 88. N. I. Ezhov was Central Committee Secretary in charge of the Department of Leading Party Organs (ORPO), which was formerly known as the Cadres Department. Malenkov was his deputy (and successor in 1936). Of course, the presence and activity of the political police (NKVD) allowed the regime to suppress dissent and political deviation. However, the functions of the police were punitive and coercive rather than administrative or managerial. As T. H. Rigby has noted, “the prime criterion for judging the worth of most officials is not their success in achieving compliance with the rules, but their success in fulfilling their tasks.” See “A Conceptual Approach to Authority, Power, and Policy in the Soviet Union” in Rigby, T. H., Brown, Archie, and Reddaway, Peter, eds., Authority, Power, and Policy in the USSR: Essays Dedicated to Leonard Schapiro (New York, 1980), p. 1980 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We should be careful not to equate an omnipotent “totalitarian“ police with an efficient, or even functional, bureaucracy. In fact, the weakness of the latter may have contributed to the growth of the former.

29. Fainsod, Smolensk, pp. 57-58,222-30. These passages have had an overwhelming influence on subsequent accounts of the events of the 1930s.

30. Jerry Hough has noted the differences between the two kinds of operations. See Hough and Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed, pp. 328-29.

31. Robert H. McNeal, “The Decisions of the CPSU in the Great Purges,” Soviet Studies, 23, no. 2 (October, 1971): 177-85.

32. See Pravda, March 17,1936, for a Control Commission statement on this. Pravda, May 28 and 31 followed up on the theme, and Stalin's remarks and accompanying material appeared in Pravda on June 5, 7, 9, 1936. Pravda, January 19, 1938 quoted from the 1936 order. See also PS, no. 11, June 1936, and WKP 384, pp. 277-78 for Smolensk readmissions on appeal. Throughout the month of August 1936, Pravda reiterated the campaign, even interrupting its covera'ge of the Seventh Comintern Congress which was then adopting the Popular Front strategy.

33. Stalin's speech to the February-March 1937 meeting of the Central Committee: Pravda, April 1, 1937.

34. Editorials and articles in Pravda appeared on March 6, 11, 30, 31 and April 6, 1937. The latter was comprehensive and quite explicit.

35. Pravda, January 19, 1938; KPSS v rezoliutsiakh, 5:303-12. The decision was entitled “On Errors of Party Organizations in Expelling Communists from the Party, on Formal Bureaucratic Attitudes Toward the Appeals of Those Expelled from the VKP(b), and on Measures to Eliminate these Shortcomings.” The first two phrases were paraphrases of the June 1936 Central Committee decision.

36. It is interesting that more expulsions were reversed in and near Moscow and fewer in the provinces farther from the center. See D., Bakhshiev, Partiinoe stroitel'stvo v usloviiakh pobedy sotsializma v SSSR (Moscow, 1954), p. 65 Google Scholar; John, Armstrong, The Politics of Totalitarianism (New York, 1961), p. 1961 Google Scholar. Also see E. Shvarts, “Otmena massovykh chistok partii,” PS, no. 5, March 1939. While it is sometimes thought that Stalin was seeking post facto to shift blame for purge excesses from himself to the party secretaries, we should note that his secretariat had repeatedly warned against indiscriminate mass expulsions as far back as July 1935 (see note 52 below). Rather than an example of Stalin's usual duplicity, this was a case of two separate issues.

37. Chistki were conducted after 1933 by local party secretaries under orders from the Central Committee personnel department (ORPO). Appeals of expulsions were heard and considered by the Party Control Commission (KPK) which had the right to reverse expulsions and readmit members. The police (NKVD) were not involved unless the other agencies uncovered evidence of conspiratorial political activity. The NKVD was in charge of the later Ezhovshchina, in which local party secretaries were often the targets.

38. XVIII s“ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b) 10-21 marta 1939 g.: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1939), p. 28. To my knowledge, no Soviet source or account has ever referred to the Ezhovshchina arrests as a chistka or purge.

39. Rigby, Membership, describes the dynamics of party membership policy in which purges inevitably followed periods of rapid influx of new members.

40. Pravda, October 19 and November 4, 1918. See also Rigby, Membership, p. 70.

41. E. M. Iaroslavskii, Kak provodit’ chistku partii (Moscow and Leningrad, 1929), pp. 21, 26, and passim.

42. Reversals of purge expulsions were common. In the 1929 purge, 22 percent of those expelled were subsequently reinstated (43 percent in Smolensk). WKP 296, p. 115. See also “Ob obratnom prieme v chleny i kandidaty partii perevedennykh po chistke v 1933 g. v kandidaty i sochuvstvuiushchie,” PS, no. 9, May 1935, and Pospelov, P. N. et al., Istoriia kommunisticheskoi partii sovetskogo soiuza, vol. 4, pt. 2 (Moscow, 1971), pp. 285–86 Google Scholar.

43. An instructional pamphlet on how to fill out the 1936 party cards (in File 116ll54e) shows this clearly.

44. For scores of examples see WKP 89, pp. 63-64, and WKP 85, pp. 185-86.

45. XVII s“ezd vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b) 26 ianvaria-10 fevralia 1934 g.: stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), pp. 287, 299, and WKP 384, p. 151.

46. WKP 384, p. 70. For a 1936 admonition see WKP 54, p. 203. In fact, Stalin's secretariat publicly sacked several Smolensk officials for excessive zeal in purging members. See the Central Committee order in PS, no. 13, July 1935, and Pravda, July 7, 1935.

47. It is sometimes thought that there must have been police agents planted in the crowds. There is no evidence, archival or otherwise, for this.

48. WKP384, pp. 71, 73, 188, and WKP 385, p. 154.

49. A. P. Pavlov, Kommunisticheskaia partiia v bor'be za zavershenie sotsialisticheskoi rekonstruktsii narodnogo khoziaistva. Pobeda sotsializma v SSSR 1933-1937 gg. (Moscow, 1959), p. 51.

50. WKP 384, pp. 63-65.

51. WKP 499, pp. 308-309.

52. PS, no. 13, July 1935, and Pravda, July 7, 1935.

53. Pravda, December 26, 1935; also KPSS v rezoliutsiakh, 5:231-52.

54. It is hard to tell the difference between foot-dragging and deliberate bureaucratic sabotage. The archives do not show the distinction; to Stalin there was none.

55. I. V. Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 11th ed. (Moscow, 1952), pp. 644-46

56. Space permits only a sample of the highlights of this campaign: see “Eshche o bezotvetstvennom otnoshenii k partiinym dokumentam,” in PS, nos. 1-2, January 1935; the closed letter from the Central Committee in WKP 499, pp. 308-309 and accompanying Pravda articles on May 14,16, 26, 1935. A closed Central Committee letter of June 27, 1935 (PS, no. 13, July 1935, and Pravda, July 7, 1935) strongly denounced local Smolensk leaders for their ineptitude and expelled a local secretary from the party. Another secret report of July 11, 1935 (a svodka found in File 116ll54e, p. 44) castigated local officials for entrusting important work to subordinates “to get out of doing it.“ Another circular from the Central Committee on August 8 reiterated the charges (ibid., pp. 85-88). See also Pravda, March 17, May 28, 31,1936. A Pravda editorial on June 8,1936 denounced local party leaders as “heartless chinovniks.“

57. Zhdanov's speech, “Uroki politicheskikh oshibok Saratovskogo kraikoma,” was published in Pravda, July 12,1935 and immediately issued as a pamphlet, Partizdat Ts.K. VKP(b) (Moscow, 1935). The other secretary was N. I. Ezhov in Pravda, December 26, 1935. Both Zhdanov and Ezhov frequently criticized the regional leadership in these months.

58. For examples of antibureaucratic meetings of party activists see WKP 103, pp. 59-60, 78; WKP 110, pp. 221-24, 387-90. At some district party meetings the rank and file actually removed their immediate superiors. Fainsod noted with surprise the “abuse” heaped on local secretaries by their subordinates. See WKP 111, p. 2-66 for a violent meeting at which the presiding official was sacked.

59. The abusive press campaign against local officials was so widespread that only a few highlights can be mentioned here. Aside from speeches by Stalin and Zhdanov, see Pravda, January 4, 7, February 4, 6,13 (editorial), 23, 25, 27,1937. See articles by Stetskii in PS, nos. 1-2, January 1937 and by Lenin's widow Krupskaia (“Lenin i Stalin o bor'be s biurokratizmom“) in PS, no. 3,1937. Also, Partiinyi organizator (the Leningrad party organizational journal) no. 3, February 1937 (“Partiinyi komitet ignorirovaet partiinye sobraniia“) and no. 9, May 1937 (“Proverka raboty raikoma snizu“). There was also a celebrated article by E. M., Iaroslavskii, “Ob otvetstvennosti rukovoditelei pered massami” in Bolshevik, no. 7, April 1, 1937Google Scholar.

60. Pravda, March 6, 1937. Pravda published the official announcement of the elections on March 21, 1937. PS republished the order (no. 6, 1937) along with three strongly antibureaucratic editorials and several articles. It is interesting that both Stalinist and Khrushchev-era histories of the Great Purge period have omitted much discussion of the police terror and have rather characterized the period as one of increased “party democracy.” See, for example, A., Gavrilov, Vnutripartttnaia demokratiia v bol'shevistskoi partii (Moscow, 1951), pp. 103–106 Google Scholar; D., Bakhshiev, Tsentralizm i demokratizm bol'shevistskoi partii (Moscow, 1948), pp. 23–24 Google Scholar; Ponomarev, B. et al., History of the C.P.S.U. (Moscow, 1960), p. 511 Google Scholar; and A. P. Pavlov, Kommunisticheskaia partita v bor'be, pp. 95-97.

61. Of 54,000 party committees surveyed nationally, 55 percent of the old leaders were not reelected. In some places the proportion reached two-thirds. See PS, no. 10, May 15, 1937, and Pravda, May 23,1937. Brzezinski ﹛Permanent Purge, pp. 92-93) doubts that any elections were held and confuses those not reelected with persons arrested by the NKVD.

62. Minutes of the electoral nominating and balloting sessions, in some cases complete with the actual secret ballots, can be found in WKP 105; WKP106; WKP 322, pp. 52-57; and WKP110, pp. 258-59, 262-79. The 1937 elections, which have not been studied, appear to be unique in party history.

63. WKP 238, pp. 87-88.

64. See, for example, Partiinyi organizator, no. 9, May 1937, p. 62.

65. Seweryn Bialer, Stalin's Successors (London, 1980), p. 88.

66. Pravda, June 12, 1937 had announced the execution of Marshal Tukhachevskii and seven other high commanders. Rumiantsev and his staff were arrested on or about June 19. See WKP 440, pp. 156-60, WKP 324, pp. 69-70, and WKP 103, pp. 126, 139. My calculations suggest that all obkom secretaries except three were removed in the period immediately following June 1937.

67. Malenkov, Shkiriatov, Iakovlev, and others performed the same functions in other provinces. See speeches to the Twenty-second Congress in 1961 by Mazurov, Shelepin, and others in Pravda, October 20, 26, 27, and 31, 1961.

68. Robert Daniels has recently shown how Central Committee members in the Stalin period seem to have been selected from various bureaucratic constituencies. Robert V. Daniels, “Evolution of Leadership Selection in the Central Committee 1917-1927” in Pintner, Walter and Rowney, Don, Russian Officialdom: The Bureaucratization of Russian Society from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69. Author's count based on known bureaucratic position of Central Committee members at the time of their selection.

70. All of the 23 members of the 1934 Central Committee from regional constituencies were shot or imprisoned in the Ezhovshchina

71. Medvedev, Let History Judge, pp. 155-56. See Hough and Fainsod, How the Soviet Union is Governed, pp. 159-60 for another view.

72. One is struck by the parallels between Stalin's tactics and those of Mao Zedong in launching the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

73. The “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” for example, notes that the sudden trial of Zinov'ev and Kamenev in 1936 was a bolt from the blue which came after a period of “calm and confidence” for the opposition. Boris, Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite: “The Letter of an Old Bolshevik” and Other Essays (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1965), pp. 26–27 Google Scholar.

74. The repression of the opposition did not necessarily, threaten the party secretaries or imply their future destruction. In fact, at the February 1937 plenum of the Central Committee, Stalin asked for (and received) permission to proceed against the opposition. (See his speeches in Pravda, April 1, 1937). Gabor Rittersporn has argued that the regional officials may have welcomed repression of the opposition because it would divert the heat of criticism away from them. See Rittersporn's “Stalin in 1938: Political Defeat Behind the Rhetorical Apotheosis,” Telos, 46 (Winter 1980-81):6-42.

75. Scholars have used the press and published sources to identify issues, factions, interest groups, and bureaucratic strongholds (other than Stalin's) for the 1920s and 1940s, but not for the 1930s. See Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Robert, Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR (New York, 1961)Google Scholar; Jonathan, Harris, “The Origins of the Conflict Between Malenkov and Zhdanov” Slavic Review, 35 (1976): 287-303Google Scholar; McCagg, William O., Stalin Embattled, 1943-1948 (Detroit, Mich., 1978 Google Scholar).