Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  By the time of the Sixteenth Party Conference in April 1929, the Soviet political scene had changed sharply again. Stalin had defeated the Right Opposition led by Bukharin, government chairman Alexei Rykov, and trade-union chief Mikhail Tom-sky, and was initiating his five-year plans and forced collectivization. The main task of the conference was to legitimize the First Five-Year Plan (already approved by the Central Committee), backdating its inception to the beginning of the annual economic plan that had already been in force since October 1928. A new party purge, in the older sense of weeding out undesirables from the membership, was also authorized by the conference.

  The Sixteenth Party Congress, held in June and July 1930, could hardly keep up with events. Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky had been condemned and had recanted, although the congress allowed them to keep their Central Committee seats for the time being. The congress unanimously acclaimed the program of the Stalin Revolution in industry and agriculture. The industrialization theme was echoed by the Seventeenth Party Conference of January-February 1932; it approved the formulation of the Second Five-Year Plan, to commence in January 1933 (even though by that time the First Five-Year Plan would have been formally in effect for only three years and eight months).

  When the Seventeenth Party Congress convened in January-February 1934, collectivization had been substantially accomplished despite the catastrophic though unacknowledged famine in the Ukraine and the southern regions of the Russian Republic. Following the accelerated termination of the First Five-Year Plan, the Second had begun. The congress was dubbed “the Congress of Victors,” while Stalin addressed the body to reject the philosophy of egalitarianism and emphasize the au1140

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  CONGRESSES AND CONFERENCES

  thority of individual managers and party leaders. Yet there was surreptitious opposition over the harshness of Stalin’s program, and behind-the-scenes talk of replacing him with Leningrad party secretary Sergei Kirov. In the end, nearly three hundred delegates out of 1,225 voted against Stalin in the slate of candidates for the Central Committee. Stalin got his revenge in the purges of 1936 through 1938, when the party apparatus was decimated and more than half of the people who had been congress delegates in 1934 were arrested and executed.

  The Eighteenth Party Congress came only after a lapse of over five years, in March 1939. An almost entirely new Central Committee was installed, Nikita Khrushchev achieved membership in the Politburo, and the Third Five-Year Plan was belatedly approved. Stalin further revised Marxist ideology by emphasizing the historical role of the state and the new intelligentsia. A follow-up party conference, the Eighteenth, was held in February 1941; it endorsed measures of industrial discipline, but was mainly significant for the emergence of Georgy Malenkov into the top leadership. The institution of the party conference then fell into abeyance, until Mikhail Gorbachev revived it in 1988.

  FROM WORLD WAR II TO THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNIST PARTY RULE

  After the Eighteenth Party Congress, none was held for thirteen years, during the time of war and postwar recovery. When the Nineteenth Party Congress finally convened in October 1952, the question of succession to the aging Stalin was already impending. Stalin implicitly anointed Malenkov as his replacement by designating him to deliver the political report of the Central Committee. At the same time, the party’s leading organs were overhauled: the Politburo was renamed the Party Presidium, with an expanded membership of twenty-five (including Leonid Brezhnev), and the Orgburo was dissolved. The congress also officially changed the party’s name from All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) to Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

  By the time of the Twentieth Party Congress, convened in February 1956, Stalin was dead, Khrushchev had prevailed in the contest to succeed him, and the Thaw, the abatement of Stalinist terror, was underway. Nevertheless, Khrushchev proceeded to astound the party and ultimately the world with his Secret Speech to the congress, denouncing Stalin’s purges and the cult of personality. To this, he added a call, in his open report to the congress, for peaceful coexistence with the noncommunist world. The congress also established a special bureau of the Central Committee to superintend the business of the party in the Russian Republic, which, unlike the other union republics, had no distinct Communist Party organization of its own.

  In January-February 1959 Khrushchev convened the Extraordinary Twenty-First Party Congress, mainly for the purpose of endorsing his new seven-year economic plan in lieu of the suspended Sixth Five-Year Plan. As an extraordinary assembly, the congress did not conduct any elections to renew the leadership.

  At the Twenty-Second Party Congress of October 1961, with its numbers vastly increased to 4,408 voting and 405 nonvoting delegates, Khrushchev introduced more sensations. Along with renewed denunciation of the Anti-Party Group that had tried to depose Khrushchev in 1957, and condemnation of the ideological errors of communist China, the congress approved the removal of Stalin’s body from the Lenin mausoleum on Red Square. The congress also issued a new party program, the first to be formally adopted since 1919, with emphasis on Khrushchev’s notions of egali-tarianism and of overtaking capitalism economically.

  Four party congresses were held under Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership, all routine affairs with little change in the aging party leadership. The Twenty-Third Party Congress in March-April 1966 emphasized political stabilization. It reversed Khrushchev’s innovations by changing the name of the party presidium back to Politburo and by abolishing the party bureau for the Russian Republic, but took no new initiatives regarding either Stalinism or the economy. The Twenty-Fourth Party Congress convened in March-April 1971, a year later than originally planned; further economic growth was stressed, but the issue of decentralist reforms was straddled. The Twenty-Fifth Party Congress in February-March 1976 was distinguished only by more blatant glorification of General Secretary Brezhnev, as the 4,998 delegates (no nonvoting delegates from this time on) heard him stress tighter administrative and ideological controls in the service of further economic growth. Continuity still marked the Twenty-Sixth Party Congress in February-March 1981: Brezhnev was in his dotage

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  and his entourage was dying off, and economic inefficiency and inertia, especially in agriculture, remained at the center of attention. The years spanned by the Twenty-Third through the Twenty-Sixth Congresses were aptly known afterwards as the era of stagnation.

  With the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, attended by approximately five thousand delegates in February-March 1986, the dissolution of the Communist Party dictatorship in the Soviet Union had begun. Gorbachev had taken over as General Secretary after Brezhnev’s death and the brief administrations of Yury Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, and had undertaken a sweeping renovation of the aging leadership. At the congress itself, more than three-fourths of the delegates were participating for the first time, and the new Central Committee elected by the congress had more new members than any since 1961. Gorbachev’s main themes of socialist self-government and acceleration in the economy were dutifully echoed by the congress, without intimating the extent of changes soon to come.

  An even more significant meeting was Gorbachev’s convocation in June 1988 of the Nineteenth Party Conference, the first one since 1941, and a far larger gathering than under the old practice, with 4,976 delegates. Faced with growing opposition by conservatives in the party organization, Gorbachev could not rely on the circular flow of power, but had to campaign for the election of pro-reform delegates-without much success. He had hoped to give the conference the authority of a party congress to shake up the Central Committee, but had to defer this step. Nevertheless, as Gorbachev himself noted, debate at the conference was more frank than anything heard since the 1920s. The outcome was endorsement of sweeping constitutional changes that shifted real power from the party organization to the government, with a strong president (Gorbachev himself) and the elected Congress of People’s Deputies.

&nb
sp; In July 1990, as Gorbachev’s reform program was peaking, the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress convened with 4,863 delegates. It proved to be the last party congress before the collapse of Communist rule and the breakup of the Soviet Union. In the freer political space allowed by Gorbachev’s steps toward democratization, including surrender of the party’s political monopoly, the party had broken into factions: the conservatives led by Party Second Secretary Yegor Ligachev, the radical reformers led by the deposed Moscow Party Secretary Boris Yeltsin, and the center around Gorbachev. At the congress, the conservatives submitted to Gorbachev in the spirit of party discipline, but Yeltsin demonstratively walked out and quit the party. Nonetheless, calling for a new civil society in place of Stalinism, Gorbachev presided over the most open, no-holds-barred debate since the communists took power in 1917. He radically shook up the Communist Party leadership, restaffed the Politburo as a group of union republic leaders, and terminated party control of governmental and managerial appointments maintained under the old “nomenklatura” system. For the first time, congress resolutions were confined to the internal organizational business of the party, and steered clear of national political issues. Barely more than a year later, in August 1991, the conservatives’ attempted coup d’?tat against Gorbachev discredited what was left of Communist Party authority and set the stage for the demise of the Soviet Union. See also: BOLSHEVISM; BREZHNEV, LEONID ILICH; COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; FIVE-YEAR PLANS; GORBACHEV, MIKHAIL SERGEYEVICH; KAMENEV, LEV BORISOVICH; KHRUSHCHEV, NIKITA SERGEYEVICH; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; MENSHEVIKS; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON; ZINOVIEV, GRIG-ORY YEVSEYEVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Armstrong, John A. (1961). The Politics of Totalitarianism: The Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1934 to the Present. New York: Random House. Brown, Archie. (1996). The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Current Soviet Policies: The Documentary Record of the Communist Party, eds. Leo Gruliow et al. 11 vols. Columbus, OH: Current Digest of the Soviet Press. Dan, Fyodor. (1964). The Origins of Bolshevism. New York: Harper and Row. Daniels, Robert V. (1960, 1988). The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and Boulder, CO: Westview. Daniels, Robert V. (1966). “Stalin’s Rise to Dictatorship.” In Politics in the Soviet Union: Seven Cases, eds. Alexander Dallin and Alan F. Westin. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Daniels, Robert V. (1993). The End of the Communist Revolution. London: Routledge. Keep, John H. L. (1963). The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia. Oxford: Clarendon.

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  Mawdsley, Evan, and White, Stephan. (2000). The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and its Members, 1917-1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McNeal, Robert H., ed. (1974). Resolutions and Decisions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 4 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Meissner, Boris. (1975). The Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Party Leadership, Organization, and Ideology. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Ponomaryov, Boris N., et al. (1960). History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. Rigby, T. H. (1990). The Changing Soviet System: Mono-Organizational Society from Its Origins to Gorbachev’s Restructuring. Aldershot, UK: E. Elgar. Schapiro, Leonard B. (1960). The Communist Party of the Soviet Union. New York: Random House. Schapiro, Leonard B. (1977). Origin of the Communist Autocracy: Political Opposition in the Soviet State, First Phase, 1917-1922, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stalin, Joseph V. (1947). Problems of Leninism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

  ROBERT V. DANIELS

  others. The list received 3.6 million votes (6.7%, seventh place), mainly in the national republics, and eighteen mandates; four PRES candidates in single-mandate districts were elected. The PRES fraction started out with thirty Duma delegates and ended with twelve, due to disagreement over the Chechnya question as well as interfractional maneuvering. During the 1995 campaign, PRES first joined with Our Home Is Russia (NDR), but then made its own list with Shakhrai at the head and registered twenty-three candidates in the districts. However, Shakhrai’s political stardom was already on the decline, and when he left the State Committee on Federal and Nationalist Issues, he lost his base in the provinces. The list received 246,000 votes (0.4%), and in the majority districts only Shakhrai won, joining with the group Russian Regions. In the 1999 elections, the PRES did not participate independently. Shakhrai, joining with Yuri Luzhkov, was included in the original version of the Fatherland-All Russia (OVR) list, but excluded at the bloc’s congress. In May 2000 the PRES merged into Unity when the latter was restructured from a movement into a party. See also: SHAKHRAI, SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH; UNITY (MEDVED) PARTY

  PARTY OF RUSSIAN UNITY AND ACCORD

  The Party of Russian Unity and Accord (Partiya Rossiyskogo Yedinstva i Soglasiya, or PRES) was founded for the 1993 elections as a regional variant of the ruling party. Its founder, a visible politician of the early Boris Yeltsin period, deputy prime minister Sergei Shakhrai, was at the time the head of the State Committee on Federal and Nationalist Issues, whose apparatus was used in the provinces as a base for party construction. Even the constituent assembly of the PRES in October 1993 took place not in Moscow but in Novgorod. The party proclaimed as its goal the preservation of Russia’s unity through securing equal rights of the subjects of the Russian Federation. The PRES list at the 1993 elections was headed by Shakhrai; Alexander Shokhin, deputy prime minister and an economist; and Konstantin Zatulin, chair of the association Entrepreneurs for a New Russia. Two federal ministers were included on it as well: Yuri Kalmykov and Gennady Melikian, and also the future public figures Valery Kirpichnikov (minister of regional politics in 1998-1999), Vladimir Tumanov (chair of the Constitutional Court in 1995-1996), and

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press. Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

  NIKOLAI PETROV

  PASSPORT SYSTEM

  For the first time since the revolution, the Soviet regime introduced an internal passport system in December 1932. Most rural residents were not given passports, and peasants acquired the automatic right to a passport only during the 1970s. The OGPU/NKVD (Soviet military intelligence service and secret police), which administered the passport system, initially issued these documents to

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  persons over sixteen years of age who lived in towns, workers’ settlements, state farms, and construction sites. They were required to obtain and register their passport with the police, who would then issue the necessary residence permit.

  People who did not qualify for a passport were evicted from their apartments and denied the right to live and work within city limits. The categories of people who were denied a passport and urban residence permit included: the disenfranchised, kulaks or the dekulakized, all persons with a criminal record, persons not engaged in socially useful work, and family members of the aforementioned categories. The stated purpose of the new passport system was to relieve the urban population of persons not engaged in socially useful labor, as well as hidden kulak, criminal, and other antisocietal elements.

  Some scholars note that the passport law emerged in response to the massive urban migration that followed the 1932 famine. The resulting movement of peasants from the countryside into the cities strained the urban rationing and supply systems. The selective distribution of passports offered a solution to this crisis by restricting urban residency and limiting access to city services and goods. Other scholars emphasize that the passport system was established to manage the urban
population. Passports emerged as an instrument of repression and police control. By issuing passports, the state could more precisely identify, order, and purge the urban population. Nonetheless, scholars agree that the system of internal passports and urban residence permits sought to remove unreliable elements from strategic cities, limit the flow of people into these cities, and relieve the pressure on the urban rationing and supply systems.

  Passports categorized the Soviet population into distinct groups with varying rights and privileges. The internal passport recorded citizens’ social position or class, occupation, nationality, age, sex, and place of residence. The identity fixed on a person’s passport determined where that individual could work, travel, and live. Only those with certain social, ethnic, and occupational identities were allowed residency in privileged cities, industrial sites, and strategic border and military areas. The passport also tied individuals to geographic areas and restricted their movements.

  In the process of assigning passports, Soviet police removed dangerous, marginal, and anti-Soviet elements from the major cities. Many people fled the cities as passports were being introduced, fearful that they would arrested by the police as socially harmful elements. Passportization operations were also used to purge the western borderlands of Polish, German, Finnish, and other anti-Soviet groups.

  In the initial phases, the internal passport and urban registration system often functioned in an irregular and erratic manner. Many people circumvented the system by forging passports, and others lived in towns without a valid passport. See also: FAMINE OF 1932-1933; KULAKS; MIGRATION; STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF