CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE SECRETARIAL BEFORE STALIN. Contains: Bolsheviks taking control of the empire, Sverdlov and Lenin, Sverdlov/s death, bureaucracy, the privilege of being in the party, loyalty, party departments.

1. HISTORY CAMBRIDGE A2 (PAPER 4)
PRESENTATION 4 - HOMEWORK
STALIN MODULE
2. STALIN AND THE PARTY
THE CENTRAL
COMMITTEE
SECRETARIAT
BEFORE STALIN

2. POWERPOINT BASED ON
Harris, Stalin - a new history
Lynch, Stalin’s Russia 1924-53
Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed
Deutscher, Stalin
T. H. Rigby, Communist Party Membership in the U.S.S.R., 1917–1967
Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution: A Study in Organisational
Change, 1917–1923
N. N. Krestinskii, L. P. Serebriakov, E. A. Preobrazhenskii, and V. M. Molotov

3. BOLSHEVIKS TAKING CONTROL OF THE EMPIRE
Following the October coup in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks faced the colossal task of
taking control of, and governing the vast territories of the Russian Empire. They
had to shut down, or take over, existing bureaucratic structures from the central
ministries down to the local land councils.
They had to do battle with other groups competing for power, including
Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and national minorities seeking to create
independent states.
By the spring of 1918, they also had to mobilise for civil war. They had long
understood that they were undermanned. On the eve of the February Revolution,
there were approximately twenty-four thousand members in the Bolshevik
underground. By the end of the Civil War, over seven hundred thousand new
members had joined the now ruling Party.

4. SVERDLOV AND LENIN
• Registering, assigning, and directing the inflow of new recruits were
colossal tasks in themselves.
• Iakov Sverdlov, a close associate of Lenin, was the first ‘secretary’ of the
Central Committee in charge of personnel questions. With a staff of only
six, Sverdlov could only monitor the spontaneous growth of Party
membership and issue general directives assigning cadres en masse.
• Though Lenin prized Sverdlov for his organisational skills, it would appear
that his Secretariat kept few written records of its activities. Pressures to
improve record-keeping came from state and Party organisations in the
centre and regions that were frustrated by the inability of the Secretariat
to meet their specific cadre needs.

5. SVERDLOV’S DEATH
• After Sverdlov’s death in March 1919, the responsibility for Party
appointments was formally invested in the Secretariat and Sverdlov’s
successors undertook to expand the staff in order to meet the ever-
growing need for cadres throughout the Soviet Union.
• By 1921, the Secretariat employed over 600 officials, but it still could not
meet the needs of organisations.

6. BUREAUCRACY
• The Civil War had placed considerable extra burdens on the personnel
apparatus. The Secretariat worked closely with the Political Administration of
the Red Army leadership (Politicheskoe Upravlenie Revvoensoveta, or PUR) to
mobilise Party members to various fronts.
• While the Soviet state was under threat, the needs of civilian government had
not been a top priority, but when victory seemed assured the Secretariat
could demobilise and assign tens of thousands of Party cadres. Again, any
more than the most rudimentary record keeping was impossible.
• Organisations from the top to the bottom of the new bureaucratic apparatus
registered their demands for personnel with specific skills for work in specific
organisations: factory administrations, banks, agricultural co-operatives.

7. THE PRIVILEGE OF BEING IN THE PARTY
• With rare exceptions, all the Secretariat could do was collect and collate
these demands and attempt to meet them in purely quantitative terms.
• The low level of any accounting for personal qualities and administrative
skills exacerbated existing weaknesses of Party and state structures in
two fundamental ways. First, the general quality of officialdom was
extremely low in terms of basic literacy, administrative skills, and even
loyalty to the Party. In the process of the exponential growth of the
Party, the standards for membership had fallen correspondingly.
• Particularly in the immediate aftermath of the October seizure of power,
many had joined the Bolshevik Party in order to take advantage of the
privileged access to food, housing, and jobs accorded to members.

8. LOYALTY TO THE PARTY
• At the very height of the Civil War, the Party leadership had felt compelled
to initiate a purge of corrupt and ‘morally dissolute’ members.
• The long struggle against the White Armies, combined with political
training in the army, did reinforce loyalty to the Party, and literacy
campaigns raised educational levels, but corruption and incompetence
remained serious problems in administration.

9. THE DRIVE TO CAPTURE THE RESPONSIBLE POSITIONS
• Though competent and principled Party members were in short supply,
that did not mean that there was any shortage of ambitious ones, and the
conflict of ambitions presented another, and perhaps more troubling,
problem for the Bolsheviks.
• Not everyone could be a provincial Party committee secretary, a
department head in a commissariat, even a district Party committee
secretary or village soviet chairman. Throughout the growing Party and
state bureaucracy, officials wanted to give orders, not to take them.
• As the bureaucracy absorbed new cadres, struggles for power erupted at
all levels in the drive to capture the ‘responsible positions’ within and
among organisations.

10. The struggle
• Local officials were locked in struggle with cadres sent in from Moscow.
New recruits to the Party refused to accept the seniority of members with
underground experience.
• Soviet executive committee chairmen refused to follow the directives of
the Party committee secretaries, local economic councils (sovnarkhozy)
fought with local trade unions.
• No senior official could be sure that one of his colleagues was not
conspiring to take his place. The struggles (skloki) paralysed the entire
organisations throughout the country.

11. Various party departments
• The task of dealing with these problems fell to the Secretariat.
• In the fall of 1920, several new departments were created to deal with them. The
establishment of the ‘Record-Assignment’ department was intended to make possible a
shift from mass assignments to planned assignments on the basis of the specific needs
of organisations.
• The ‘Agitation-Propaganda’ department was supposed to raise their ideological
awareness. The ‘Organisation-Instruction’ department was directed to bring a measure
of consistency to the structure of the apparatus and to fight corruption and raise the
efficiency of administration. It was given an ‘Information’ sub-department to process
the great mass of information received from local organisations, and particularly, to
summarise their monthly reports on their activities , and a ‘Conflicts’ sub-department to
bring an end to power struggles that pervaded the apparatus.

12. New responsibilities and more complains
• None of these departments was able to cope with its new responsibilities .
Even after demobilisation, mass assignments continued to be the order of
the day, making any sort of accounting of cadres impossible.
• In the process of demobilisation, the Record-Assignment department was
assigning 5,000 cadres a month, but even after that process had been
largely completed, the numbers remained high.
• In 1923, the department assigned 14,000 cadres, including 4,000 leading
workers. Despite the sheer numbers of those assigned, organisations
continued to complain about shortages of skilled officials.

13. The paralysis of the party and power struggle
• The work of the Secretariat was regularly criticised at Central Committee
plena and Party congresses and conferences. The creation of new
departments and the expansion of its staff had done little to improve
matters and something had to be done.
• In his speech on ‘intra-Party matters’ to the Eleventh Party Congress in
April 1922, Grigorii Zinoviev emphasised the ‘paralysis’ of Party work
caused by the power struggles. He claimed that they had ‘become the
scourge and calamity [bich I bedstvie] of the whole Party’.
• Immediately after the Congress had concluded its work, the Central
Committee approved Lenin’s draft resolution that assigned Stalin to head
the Secretariat and created the position of ‘General Secretary’.

14. Stalin appointed by lenin
• In assigning a Politburo member to the post, Lenin hoped to lend the
Secretariat new authority, though he knew that was not enough.
• His resolution warned Stalin and the department heads not to get lost in
the vastness of the Secretariat’s responsibilities, but to stick to questions
of a ‘genuinely principal importance’.

15. Homework - choose at least one
• Was this a fateful decision, one that fundamentally changed the course of
Soviet history, as so many scholars have contended?
• Was Stalin able to use his position as General Secretary to build a personal
following in the apparatus, to stifle Party democracy and defeat his
political rivals?
• Did the members of the Politburo unwittingly place a powerful weapon in
Stalin’s hands with this decision, or were they burdening him with a
bureaucratic millstone?