CAMBRIDGE A2 HISTORY: THE SECRETARIAT UNDER STALIN. Contains: Stalin and first changes, Nomenklatura no 1, Party Congress, assigning party members blindly, strengthening the organisation and accounting, responsibilities for the appointments, guberniia, the local party secretary, settling for conflicts, Georgian Affair, Democratic Centralists, Workers Opposition, struggle for power, conspiracies.

1. HISTORY CAMBRIDGE A2 (PAPER 4)
PRESENTATION 5 - HOMEWORK
STALIN MODULE
2. STALIN AND THE PARTY
THE SECRETARIAT
UNDER STALIN

2. POWERPOINT BASED ON
Harris, Stalin - a new history
Lynch, Stalin’s Russia 1924-53
Pravda, 2 April 1922
Deutscher, Stalin
D. I. Kurskii’s report of the Central Revision Commission
to the Thirteenth Party Congress, p. 132.
Kurskii’s speech to the Fifteenth Congress, p. 164.
Kosior, Rakovsky, and Krasin comments to the Twelfth
Party Congress.

3. Stalin and first changes
When Stalin took over the Secretariat in 1922, he introduced several changes to
improve its efficiency.
The changes he introduced were in keeping with Lenin’s instructions not to get
lost in the details.
One of his first moves was to reduce the responsibilities of the Secretariat in the
assignment of cadres.
His predecessors had taken responsibility for assignments from the top to the
bottom of the apparatus.
Stalin encouraged Party and state organisations to promote their own cadres, and
mapped a limited hierarchy of positions to be staffed under the direction of the
Central Committee.

4. Nomenklatura no. 1 and party congresses
The resulting list, known as ‘Nomenklatura no. 1’, included 4,000 senior
positions from the Presidiums of the Peoples’ Commissariats down to the
department and section heads, and from the ‘bureaus’ of regional Party
committees down to the secretaries of Party organisations.
The total number of cadres assigned from Moscow was reduced from
approximately 22,500 in the period between the Tenth and the Eleventh
Party Congresses to barely over 6,000 between the Twelfth and the
Thirteenth.

5. THE congress OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
The Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the gathering of
the delegates of the Communist Party and its predecessors. According to the
party statute, it was the supreme ruling body of the entire Communist Party.
Between the congresses the party was ruled by the Central Committee. Over the
course of the party's history, the name was changed in accordance with the
current name of the party at the time.
The frequency of party congresses varied with the meetings being annual events
in the 1920s while no congress was held at all between 1939 to 1952. After the
death of Joseph Stalin, the congresses were held every five years.

6. A badge, depicting Vladimir Lenin, issued to
the delegates of the 27th Congress

7. ASSIGNING PARTY MEMBERS BLINDLY
In theory, this allowed the Record-Assignment department to keep more
detailed personnel records and to improve its ability to match cadres’ skills
to the needs of organisations. In practice, the department continued to be
swamped with demands for new officials and had little knowledge of the
cadres it was passing to the Secretariat for approval.
At a meeting of the leading officials of the Organisation-Assignment
department in early 1927, the poor state of Party records was a central
topic of discussion. Department officials admitted that in the vast majority
of cases, they were assigning Party members blindly (sovershenno
sluchaino).

8. Strengthening the organisation and accounting
The consensus of the meeting was that the Organisation-Assignment
departments of Party and state bodies had to be strengthened and
accounting improved.
As it was, unemployed Party members tended to head to Moscow to get
‘Party’ jobs and the department was being turned into an employment
agency. These concerns were related largely to the great mass of lesser
posts, but even in the case of appointments to the key positions in the
Party and state bureaucracies similar issues arose.
By 1926, the number of nomenklatura posts had expanded again by 50 per
cent. As that number expanded and the burdens of the assignments
process increased, the consideration given to each appointment decreased.

9. Responsibilities for the appointments
The Organisation-Assignment department took no part in appointments at
or below the guberniia level. It only kept records of decisions that were
taken by the local organisations.
In the case of more senior positions, the organisations that were to receive
the appointees were aggressively drawn into the appointments process.
Seven standing commissions, specialised according to branches of the state
and Party apparatus, were created within the Organisation-Assignment
department in order to parcel responsibilities for the appointments.

10. GUBERNIIA
The Organisation-Assignment department took no part in appointments at or below the
guberniia level. It only kept records of decisions that were taken by the local organisations. In
the case of more senior positions, the organisations that were to receive the appointees were
aggressively drawn into the appointments process. Seven standing commissions, specialised
according to branches of the state and Party apparatus, were created within the
Organisation-Assignment department in order to parcel responsibilities for the
appointments.
NEW WORD: GUBERNIIA - A governorate, or a guberniya was a major and principal
administrative subdivision of the Russian Empire and the early Russian SFSR. The term is
usually translated as government, governorate, or province. A governorate was ruled by a
governor, a word borrowed from Latin gubernator. Sometimes the term guberniya was
informally used to refer to the office of a governor.

11. CONCERNS
The Organisation-Assignment department was concerned that appointees had the
appropriate training, experience, and skills necessary to perform effectively.
Appointees who were incompetent could be, and were, rejected and sent back to
the Organisation-Assignment department. Almost a third of appointees were fired
within a year.
The high rate of turnover was a consequence not only of the low skill levels of
appointees. The experience of the group struggles in the early 1920s had shown
leading officials the importance of surrounding them selves with people whom they
could trust. New appointees who ‘did not fit in’ (ne srabotali) to an organisation
were also rejected. In order to ensure such a ‘fit’, some organisations preferred to
assign officials on the nomenklatura lists without the ‘interference’ of the centre.

12. PROMOTION FROM WITHIN
The rapid expansion of the bureaucracy in the 1920s had created terrible shortages
of cadres with appropriate administrative skills, such that when faced with a
position to fill, the department often had no one to recommend. A leading
Organisation-Assignment department official observed in early 1927 that ‘the
system [khoziaistvo nashe] is growing, and we don’t have new people [to staff it]’.
Promotion from within (vydvyzhenie) was the preferred method for staffing leading
positions, and in encouraging it, the department further strengthened the influence
of Party and state organisations over the appointments process. If appointees had
personal loyalties, they were more likely to be to the organisation to which he or
she was assigned, rather than to Stalin.

13. THE LOCAL PARTY SECRETARIES
Stalin encouraged the resolution of conflicts locally. The simplest way to do
so was to strengthen the hierarchy of existing Party and state organisations,
and reinforce the powers of the current ‘bosses’, most notably, the network
of local Party secretaries.
Following Stalin’s speech on organisational matters, the resolutions of the
Twelfth Party Congress (April 1923) strengthened the role of Party
secretaries in selecting ‘responsible workers of the soviet, economic, co-
operative and professional organisations’ in their regions. In effect, the Party
secretaries became the main arbiters of the struggles, with the power to
remove officials who refused to submit to their decisions.

14. SETTLING THE CONFLICTS
Not all struggles could be resolved so easily. Many organisations were
unable to settle conflicts on their own, and they continued to appeal to the
Secretariat for intervention.
In such cases, the Secretariat despatched one of its instructors, who would
call an extraordinary conference of the local Party committee and attempt
to win the censure or expulsion of the weaker of the groups. In cases of truly
intractable conflicts, the Secretariat reassigned all parties to the conflict and
replaced them. For most leading officials unable to work in the face of
constant challenges to their leadership, the risk was worth taking. Generally,
the worst outcome they could expect was to be assigned to a different
institution or region.

15. GEORGIAN AFFAIR
The best-known case is the so-called ‘Georgian Affair’. Stalin had sent Sergo Ordzhonikidze
(then an instructor of the Secretariat) to remove two members of the Georgian Party
organisation accused of ‘local nationalism’ in the hotly contested issue of Georgia’s
participation in the recently established Transcaucasus federation. They were removed in
the autumn of 1922 by a decision of the Georgian Party, but not without controversy.
Stalin’s tactics and Ordzhonikidze’s actions – including a physical assault on one of the
participants – provoked a great deal of animosity in the process of settling the larger
conflict. The case is often cited not because it was typical, but because it incensed Lenin.
Less than a year after he had recommended him to the post, Lenin expressed profound
reservations about Stalin’s ‘hastiness and bureaucratic impulsiveness’. Privately, he
considered recommending that he be replaced by someone ‘more patient, more loyal,
more polite and more attentive to comrades’.

16. Anastas
Mikoyan,
Joseph Stalin
and Grigol
Ordzhonikidze
in Tiflis (now
Tbilisi), in 1925.

17. DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISTS AND WORKERS OPPOSITION
‘Bureaucratic impulsiveness’ was not the only charge levelled against Stalin
in his role as General Secretary. Some Party leaders were also concerned
that the Secretariat was stifling ‘intra-Party democracy’. Intra-Party
democracy, meaning not only the election of officials, but also the open
discussion of policy issues, had been a subject of considerable debate and
controversy since the civil war had come to a close.
Lenin had promoted the ban on factionalism specifically to deal with groups
such as the ‘Democratic Centralists’ and the ‘Workers’ Opposition’ which
demanded a more participatory political system. Those ‘factions’ were
crushed, but as the immediate threats to the survival of the Soviet state
receded, the question of intra-Party democracy returned to the political
agenda.

18. STRUGGLE FOR POWER AND CONSPIRACIES
At the time Stalin was named General Secretary, the main subject of
correspondence between the Secretariat and Party organisations was the
struggles for power (skloki), rather than conflicts over political principles or
policy platforms. Letter after letter referred to the conflicts among
individuals and institutions as rooted in ‘personal antagonisms’, and ‘lacking
any ideological content’.
Party secretaries were always on the lookout for conspiracies against their
leadership, and there was no more dangerous time for them than the
regular local Party conferences, at which key posts were filled by election. It
was at these meetings that such ‘oppositions’ often came out into the open
and challenged the authority of existing leaders.

19. HOMEWORK
Exam Type Essay:
• To what extent was the Party the dominant force in Russia in the years 1922 to
1926?
Extra Homework:
• Identify the role of the Bolshevik Party in the period 1914-1924 and the part it
played in those years.
• Explain the structure of the Party and identify the centre/s of power in it
• Identify Stalin’s role in the party to 1924
• Identify the way in which Stalin utilised his role in the Party to acquire power.